The Patch

A personal history by the incomparable John McPhee. (New Yorker)

Monday coffee break: What's the recipe?

Our hunger for cookbooks. (Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker)

New Yorker screws up! URMA has contest! [Mary Beth] wins prize(s)!

WE HAVE A WINNER. For providing the correct answer (missing word on
page 53), Mary Beth will receive TWO (count 'em) fabulous prizes:

1) A Commie self-adhesive mustache and beard set

B) A "Diagnose Your Neurosis" Wheel o' Wisdom

Congratulations to Mary Beth. If you get hit by a bread truck tomorrow, at least you will have died happy. (As for Mary Beth's "that" versus "than" guess: the New Yorker is technically in the right here; they're reporting the quote as it was stated. That's my excuse, anyway. It's Monday morning and I'm too groggy to delve into the several thousand words that Fowler's Modern English Usage devotes to "that" and "than.") Regardless, huzzah for Mary Beth. Two prizes for a job well done.

(Confidential to J. Worley in Lexington, KY: next time, send a bribe.)

New Yorker screws up! URMA has contest! You win prize!

It's a dark, dark day in magazine-land, and somewhere, Eustace Tilley is rending his morning coat and striped trousers (if not rolling over in his grave): there is a copy-editing mistake in the latest issue of the New Yorker (Aug. 24, 2009).

The first URMAn to find the mistake wins a fabulous* prize. Here are the official rules:

1. Yes, this is a real contest.
2. The first person to find the error and email it to the URMAlist (listing the page number, the sentence, and the error) wins.
3. Endeavors people are ineligible, but for all I know, they might be bribed to give you clues.

*Prize may or may not be fabulous.

Monday coffee break: to Kindle or not?

A New Page: Can the Kindle really improve on the book?
by Nicholson Baker, The New Yorker

"The Kindle edition of 'Selected Nuclear Materials and Engineering Systems,' an e-book for people who design nuclear power plants, sells for more than eight thousand dollars. Figure 2 is an elaborate chart of a reaction scheme, with many call-outs and chemical equations. It’s totally illegible. 'You Save: $1,607.80 (20%),' the Kindle page says. 'I’m not going to buy this book until the price comes down,' one stern Amazoner wrote."

An eradicated killer

The Demon in the Freezer: How smallpox, a disease of officially eradicated twenty years ago, became the biggest bioterrorist threat we now face.

Winner, American Society of Magazine Editors' Best American Magazine Writing, 2000. (Richard Preston, The New Yorker)