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The archive
Technology · Infrastructure
At 11:47 on the night of Thursday, September 24, a program called PEN0417 stopped running, and a small green square on the operations…
Politics · Local government
At 12:20 on a Tuesday morning in October, the first high-visibility jacket of the night went over the back of a chair in the public gallery of Gillmouth’s Old Custom House. By 12:28 there were 19 of…
Ideas · Work
For most of my childhood, my mother said good night at eight in the morning. She was a nurse on the night shift at Halbridge Infirmary—first on the surgical wards,…
Culture · Night shift
…minutes to come up to 460 degrees. While it does, Wyn turns on the radio, low, to an overnight station that plays dance-band records and, at three, takes calls from insomniacs about their gardens. She lifts…
Culture · Archives
Every keeper remembers the last night of the lamp. For Edda Marrow it was a Tuesday in February, and she will tell you about it eventually, in order,…
Science · Astronomy
…squeal from the last meter that nobody has managed to oil away since the 1950s. On a clear night in late September, Fen Albright stood at the control panel, waited for the squeal, then pressed a second button…
Technology · Hospitals
…seconds later. The patient, a man in his seventies whose heart had stopped, survived the night. The smartphone, which was supposed to have received the same alert, buzzed with it at 2:54, by which time she…
Technology · Forecasting
At eleven o’clock on a Friday night last August, Marta Fyfe had an email in her drafts folder that would have canceled the second day of the Tamsell…
Technology · Engineering
…because the deck grows and shrinks with temperature, by about 30 centimeters between a January night and a July afternoon. On Calloway’s plots it had always traced a neat daily wave, opening in the cold of the night…
Ideas · Essay
…keep coming back to is the last one. More than an inch of rain fell on Halbridge that Friday night. The gutters on two nearby streets overflowed, and a basement on the next block flooded to the depth of a hand.…
Science · Biodiversity
…Point. One. Lindell, who is 46 and keeps his work pants folded over the chair by the bed for nights like this one, was in the car by 3:20. It had been snowing since midnight. The road up the Knock, the bald granite…
Politics · Government
…writes about. For the past year the department let me sit in on its planning meetings, its night shifts, and its negotiations with the finance ministry. What I found was not a story of heroes and villains, though…
Politics · Public works
…finds the cracks, and in the north, where the temperature crosses freezing on perhaps 80 nights a winter, water that enters a crack in November will have levered it open by March. A hairline becomes a crazed…
Culture · Repair
…shopping bag, carried by a man who had plainly been told to bring it. Ian, who is 58 and works nights as a security guard at one of the distribution warehouses on the edge of town, set it down on the folding table…
Technology · Right to repair
…fine. He ordered a genuine replacement from Stannard’s parts counter, which sent it by overnight courier, and on Thursday afternoon he fitted it in a little under half an hour. Then he turned the key. The screen…
Ideas · Essay
…the classical world complained that the carts, banned from the streets by day, rumbled all night beneath his window, so that only the rich, in their houses set back from the road, ever got any sleep. I like…
Culture · Film
…labeled, in grease pencil, SR 23, and the air filled with the sour tang of a salad left out overnight. Inside, 400 feet of 16mm film had shrunk hard around its core and gone as stiff as a roof tile. Its edges had…
Politics · Water
…council has not decided by summer, they will hire one contractor to do all 14 in a single fortnight and argue about refunds afterward. The joint quote came in at 3,900 crowns a house, a little over half what Lisle…
Science · Oceans
…field station, and 14 fixed hydrophones that have recorded two minutes in every 10, day and night, since 2017. We are over the atoll’s north rim, in 11 meters of water. Moses Lalanne, who skippers the station’s…
Politics · Housing
…describe. If it passes, about 31 percent of Halbridge’s residential land would be rezoned overnight, and the planning department estimates that somewhere between 21,000 and 38,000 more homes would be built over…
Ideas · Memory
…What exactly is the public interest in making sure his granddaughter reads about the worst night of his life before she reads about anything else?” Against Neil’s request I want to set the story of a woman who…
Politics · Borders
…meters from where he now sits. “All week I asked people for their papers,” he said, moving a knight. “Then on Tuesday I came here, and nobody asked for mine. I thought it was the most civilized room on the continent.”…
Culture · Small towns
…cream that costs the trust less than a crown sells for three, and the hire of the hall on nights without films: a yoga class, the brass band, a wedding reception that ended, Alan says, with an incident involving…
Technology · Language
…beneath the station’s collection of folk records, each wearing headphones, each typing. On the night I visited, a 17-year-old named Tam Leith was transcribing a funeral notice from March 1979, read in a clear, unhurried…
Ideas · Language
…working into almost any other language for one word that does what sheepish does, or fortnight, or wistful, and watch them reach for a phrase. Whether a language packs an idea into one word or spreads it across…
Science · Climate
…If you stop measuring, you don’t stop losing it. You just lose the record as well.” That night in the hut, with the stove ticking and the windows black, they did the arithmetic. Rask read out the stake values.…
Science · Evolution
…December 1997 with a ruled line across the page, after the incubator’s thermostat failed overnight and cooked the flasks at 49°C. The next entry reads, in Marrack’s hand: Day 3,520. All lines restarted from day…