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The archive
Technology · Machines
…fished the lake for char for 52 years, can see it from his kitchen window: a dark oval of open water at the southern end, covering about 18 hectares, with a low mist standing over it on cold mornings and, most days…
Politics · Water
…magnet shaped like a tractor. It is dated June 2019, printed on the letterhead of Corran Water, the capital’s publicly owned utility, and its second paragraph says that “our records indicate that your property…
Technology · Infrastructure
…63,000 public employees, the pensions of 208,000 retired ones and their survivors, and the water bills of roughly 430,000 households, a third of the country’s total, billed in rotation. The run begins at 7 p.m.…
Science · Oceans
Forty minutes before sunrise, the engine is switched off and the noise begins. Not above the water, where there is only the slap of a low swell against the hull and a tern complaining somewhere to the east, but…
Science · Climate
…the hut the glacier lay gray and ribbed under a skin of new snow. Somewhere beneath it, meltwater that had been running since June was still running, faintly, like a tap left on in another room. Holm is 57, a…
Science · Measurement
High water at Westmere on the first Tuesday in March was due at 6:41 a.m., and Bernard Lusk was on the quay by 6:30, because…
Culture · Books
…follows three generations of the Orrin family, who keep a weir on the Lanne and so control the water for six mills downstream, and who are much better at holding things back than at letting them go. In English it…
Culture · Night shift
…under in Halbridge gave him a cupful wrapped in a tea towel. A starter is only flour and water, left long enough for wild yeasts and bacteria to move in; fed every day, it can outlive the people feeding it,…
Science · Biodiversity
…involving oxygen, nick away at the fats in its cell membranes, at its proteins, at its DNA. Water speeds all of this up, because water lets molecules move and meet. Dry a seed far enough, though, and something…
Ideas · Essay
…to be enjoyed with a faint sense of guilt, into something more like a public good: clean water, a lit street, a day off that belongs to everyone because everyone, like the ox, is a creature. Learning to sit…
Politics · Public works
…gets expensive.” Asphalt oxidizes in sunlight and turns brittle. Brittle asphalt cracks. Water finds the cracks, and in the north, where the temperature crosses freezing on perhaps 80 nights a winter, water…
Politics · Government
…dams, the coastal flood barriers at Halbridge and Port Ellery, and the trunk mains that carry water from the upland reservoirs to the capital’s own utility. When it does its job, nothing happens. It is very hard…
Culture · Film
…brick furnace houses on the marsh east of the town, where salt had been boiled out of seawater for three centuries, and the old cart road along which that salt traveled inland to the dye works at Asterby.…
Technology · Forecasting
…national service. We are smaller. Vardy spent 30 years as a hydrologist for the national water authority, and she started the collective after a summer evening in July 2014, when 66 millimeters of rain fell…
Culture · Archives
…flashes and a long dark, two flashes and a long dark, and the beam laying itself out across the water toward Port Ellery, where, as far as she knew, nobody was looking. At 7:29 a.m. she put out the light and wrote…
Ideas · Essay
…riveting gangs of the shipyards, whose racket carried, according to one letter, “across the water and into the Sabbath.” Yet the most passionate complaints in the archive from that era are not about industry…
Science · Ecology
…fruiting—soil cooling after the summer, together with enough rain to swell mushrooms that are mostly water—and that the cue now arrives later. The species that partner with tree roots, trading minerals for the sugar the…
Ideas · Language
…as no words of its own at all: a paragraph about the wake, the gulls, and the light on the water, with the feeling left for the reader to supply. None of those is the word. All of them are its meaning, carried…
Politics · Local government
…salting the cycle path to the terminal before the 6 a.m. shift change, a public restroom and water fountain at the terminal gate, and a new collection schedule so that garbage trucks stopped grinding through the…