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The archive
Science · Ecology
…regards as unreasonable, and one she cannot account for and which bothers her. Forty notebooks The notebooks, ruled into columns by hand, the early ones with pressed moss still between the pages, fill most…
Culture · Books
…monastic. She does not reread her predecessors until she has a full draft of her own; their books live on a shelf in the hallway, “where they can’t hear me.” She translates the last chapter first, so that she…
Culture · Film
…like cotton candy. To grade it back the archive had two references. One was Haskett’s notebooks, which describe the sky as “dishwater” with dispiriting regularity. The other was Lorna Penhale, Joss’s granddaughter,…
Science · Measurement
…you weren’t sure, you write ‘not sure.’ Then whoever comes after you can decide.” The logbooks are full of doubts: swell confused, glasses misted, staff fouled with weed, reading poor. As far as anyone has…
Science · Climate
…red. “I didn’t make the connection until much later,” Malm said, “but I set up the field books the same way. Winter on the left, summer on the right, a line under the year.” She talks about the glacier in…
Ideas · Reading
…modern eye, like a small square island in a sea of commentary. In the most heavily worked books the gloss outweighs the text by three or four to one. A student did not read the text and then the notes. The…
Culture · Archives
…a job that no longer exists, done by people who are still here to explain it, recorded in books that are mostly about something else. The journals are full of wind and ships and the exact minute the lamp was…
Ideas · Memory
…information they hold, who owned which dog on which street, is either duplicated in the rate books or, frankly, nobody’s business. For a long run of routine records the usual answer is to keep one year in ten,…
Science · Biodiversity
…Tolland’s version is blunter: “We’re not a library. A library doesn’t have to keep reprinting its books.” The comparison she prefers is a lighthouse, or a bridge—something valuable precisely because someone keeps turning…
Ideas · Essay
…for the hours, and for reasons of their own, and from the 1700s onward the city’s letter books fill up with polite and less polite requests that they ring less. The petitioners were often ill, or said they…
Ideas · Essay
…second concerns honors. We give prizes for new buildings, new bridges, new software, and new books. We could give them for duration. Since 2019 the Halbridge Civic Trust has awarded a small and slightly eccentric…
Culture · Repair
…parcels back. Most of what those buildings did has moved into apps. The clinic by the bypass books appointments by text message; the electricity meter is topped up by phone. “If Dot’s phone breaks,” Nico says,…
Technology · Right to repair
…a second. If you sit and listen long enough, you learn the language.” He filled nine notebooks with what he heard. Most of it was routine chatter: temperatures, pressures, the controller asking each sensor…
Culture · Music
…deconsecrated church is more resonant than it ever was in use. With the pews, the kneelers, the hymn books, and the people gone, Providence Chapel rings for 3.4 seconds. Calloway estimates that on a full Sunday in 1900…
Culture · Museums
…leave the building in 2079. “Every museum wants a book,” Mayhew said. “No museum wants 600 books.” Why the pencil, then? Mayhew’s answer is children. The survey puts the average spend of a family in a small…
Politics · Borders
…in Lannet. Its reading room, a double-height space with green-shaded lamps and some 40,000 books, lies entirely in Ostrava Mill. Getting from one to the other means passing from one country into another, which…
Politics · Water
…the national drinking-water regulator—were wrong for roughly one older home in four. Its books listed 9,412 lead service lines. The real number, by the utility’s own central estimate, is about 24,300. Replacing…
Technology · Language
…the parish newsletter; the bilingual minutes of the island council; a shelf of children’s books; and a 1904 translation of the Gospels, which for a while accounted for a fifth of the whole. Every sentence in…
Technology · Forecasting
…at nine every morning since 1987, and in 2017 volunteers typed up her 30 handwritten notebooks to give the model a long memory of the upper valley. Ellison is not especially impressed by the servers. “They’re…
Culture · Night shift
…says, pays for the tins. She has one son, an accountant in Corran, who has been through the books and suggested, kindly, that she stop. “He’s right,” she says. “He’s an accountant. They’re always right. That’s…