Bohemian Antipodean Snowies Heritage: Frank Prihoda
Only 83% of Australians identify as influencers, new census data shows
Kate Bush - Running Up That Hill - Official Music Video
What a queer gamble our existence is. We decide to do A instead of B and then the two roads diverge utterly and may lead in the end to heaven and to hell. Only later one sees how much and how awfully the fates differ. Yet what were the reasons for the choice? They may have been forgotten. Did one know what one was choosing? Certainly not.
According to Mary Gaitskill, writing is a rational process. But great writing comes from a stranger place strange place
Tourist hordes, basic bellinis, no warm welcome: is Venice worth it?
Since becoming popular with tourists in the 17th century, Venice has seduced us. But the city’s reputation precedes it, and maybe this is the problem. Our Culinary & Travel issue is out on June 24.
Do you live close enough to a small US airport to have lead exposure? Check our maps
Quartz – At in the heart of Silicon Valley filled up their tanks with a heavy metal most Americans assumed was banished long ago: lead. Reid-Hillview was not unusual in this respect. Virtually every small airplane in the US burns fuel containing tetraethyl lead (TEL), an additive introduced in the 1920s to boost octane levels. It’s so toxic, a splash on the skin can be lethal. But in January, Santa Clara County, which owns Reid-Hillview, imposed the first ban in the US on refueling with leaded aviation gas, sparking a fight with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and forcing some plane owners to refuel their airplanes elsewhere.
County officials have since reaffirmed the ban, and now other airports are considering following suit. Prompted by scientific research showing higher than average lead levels in children living near Reid-Hillview, Quartz has done the first investigation combining lead emissions data at the country’s top civil aviation airports with flight paths for small, piston-engine aircraft over affected neighborhoods.
The analysis of over 350 million aircraft locations from planes taking off and landing in the US shows the extent to which lead-fuel burning aircraft regularly expose homes, parks, schools, and playgrounds across the country. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates 16 million people—and 3 million children—live within a kilometer of these airports…”
Rebecca Solnit on Writing, Gardening, and the Life of the Mind
“As a writer, you withdraw and disconnect yourself from the world in order to connect to it in the far-reaching way that is other people elsewhere reading the words that came together in this contemplative state.”
Writing is a murky business: you are never entirely sure what you are doing or when it will be finished and whether you got it right and how it will be received months or years or decades after you finish. What it does, if it does anything, is a largely imperceptible business that takes place in the minds of people you will mostly never see and never hear from (unless they want to argue with you). As a writer, you withdraw and disconnect yourself from the world in order to connect to it in the far-reaching way that is other people elsewhere reading the words that came together in this contemplative state. What is vivid in the writing is not in how it hits the senses but what it does in the imagination; you can describe a battlefield, a birth, a muddy road, or a smell.
