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The archive
Technology · Engineering
…the south shore, is fitted with 1,400 sensors. Between them they record about 60 million readings a day. Calloway, a structural engineer with the Department of Public Works, looks at 40 of them. She chose the…
Ideas · Reading
…follow without flipping, a citation that delivered its source to your screen. I remember reading long essays in the late 1990s in which every third phrase was underlined in blue, and feeling that I had been…
Science · Climate
…measures how much of each stake the summer has uncovered. The difference between this year’s reading and last year’s is the year’s loss, written in ice. Last September the team was four people: Holm; Aino Rask,…
Politics · Borders
…The library’s front door, under a stone portico, opens onto Market Street in Lannet. Its reading room, a double-height space with green-shaded lamps and some 40,000 books, lies entirely in Ostrava Mill. Getting…
Culture · Archives
…the harbor where grain was once auctioned by the sack. They bring flasks, ginger cake and reading glasses on cords. Mira Toft, the project archivist, has been there since eight, laying out what she calls the…
Technology · Infrastructure
…on run nights she no longer bothers going home. She came down the corridor in her socks, reading glasses swinging on a cord around her neck, and she did not look at Teague’s screen first. She went to a steel…
Science · Measurement
…the post. The gauge would have stopped there, except that the Westmere Seamen’s Mission, a reading room and boardinghouse for sailors at the top of Fish Street, offered to keep it going with volunteers. The mission…
Culture · Repair
…Repair Café, which has met every Saturday morning since May 2014 and which now meets in the reading room of the old Asterby Free Library, where most of the shelves are empty and the clock works. By one o’clock…
Ideas · Memory
…Westmere, and I have spent more hours than I could defend in the Corn Exchange search room, reading the borrowing ledgers of a nineteenth-century subscription library for a book about what the town’s shopkeepers…
Politics · Water
…district, two years later, and the letter came with the conveyancing papers. She remembers reading it with the particular satisfaction of a first-time buyer who has found one thing, at least, that she will never…
Technology · Forecasting
…died. Vardy, who had watched the storm sit on the ridge all afternoon, went home and started reading about weather models. “I was annoyed,” she said, “which is how most useful things start.” A crease in the bedsheet…
Science · Evolution
…was Noor Hadid, a 26-year-old doctoral student with a pencil behind one ear and a habit of reading each flask’s label aloud before she touches it. The flasks were cloudy, as they always are. Each held 10 milliliters…
Ideas · Essay
…the medal goes not to the architect but to whoever kept the place up. Imagine the habit spreading: an award for the bridge still sound at 80, the program still running at 40, the hospital ward whose infection…
Politics · Government
…control room on the top floor of its building on Mason Street, where a wall of screens shows readings from 214 pressure points on the trunk network, each one a small green square. A pump at the Ledwell works cycled…
Science · Astronomy
…exposures. Downstairs, the volunteers have moved the plates in the worst condition—fungus spreading across the gelatin, cracked glass taped at the corners sometime in the 1960s—to the front of the queue. Pye now…
Technology · Right to repair
…to a customer diagnostic tool that reads every fault code on the tractor and displays live readings from its sensors. Ostrander has heard this argument before. “It reads every code,” he said. “It just can’t do…
Culture · Music
…on the tape. Calloway set the recorder running on a pair of microphones where the pulpit’s reading desk had been, and Ojukwu gave the note. Remain rose out of its hum the way it always does, a little rough for…
Ideas · Essay
…committee in 1928 and has reconstituted it, under various names, roughly once a generation since. Reading its reports in sequence is a peculiar experience. Every one begins by observing that the present age is noisier…
Technology · Machines
…I’ve got that works in an afternoon.” After the heatwave, she put the outlet buoy’s live readings on a public webpage. Heat in the wrong season The district heating scheme is the part of Hesk One that nearly…
Culture · Small towns
…chooses something old enough to exist on film. Then he is busy in the way he remembers: threading, checking the loop, watching for the cue dots that flicker in the corner of the frame to tell him to switch from…
Politics · Local government
…unplugged the urn. Outside, the N7 idled at the curb with its interior lights on and the driver reading a paperback propped against the steering wheel. Lomax, who had spoken on a housing item, climbed aboard with a…
Ideas · Work
…stubborn pagers, and with a port town whose council now meets after midnight. What strikes me, reading their stories, is how little of the night’s infrastructure was ever designed. Nearly all of it is improvised,…