LATEST ADDITIONS

Conventional wisdom has it that the perfect sculpture is present, but hidden within the raw material. And the same conventional wisdom similarly applies to magazine editing: all it needs is careful chipping away at the extraneous material in the raw text files we receive from our authors—sometimes the barest degree of reshaping, repointing, and restructuring—and you have a finished product that both maximally communicates the writer's message and makes the anonymous artisan-editor proud of a job well done.

I was once in a sushi bar in Osaka; sitting next to me was a live abalone, stoically awaiting its fate. It stuck its siphon out of its shell, the waiter tapped the tip with a spoon, the siphon withdrew. Again the siphon appeared, again the waiter tapped it with a spoon, again it withdrew.

Yesterday was the anniversary of Frank Zappa's death in 1993. The good news is that the Zappa estate is releasing tapes of <I>The Grand Wazoo</I> tour and that Zappa Radio is back online. Wowie zowie.

The PATH train ride from Grove Street in downtown Jersey City to Church Street in lower Manhattan takes about seven minutes, maybe less, and offers a chilling tour of Ground Zero. For just a dollar-fifty, you get a Disney-like theme park stroll through a chalky gray wasteland that'll have you wondering why no real memorial exists.

Scott Glover set out to find his birth parents. The truth doesn't set you free, it turns out. It entangles you.

<I>Sigh</I>, <I>The Golden Compass</I> opens this week and the kooks are out denouncing it as "atheist propaganda." I read&mdash;and greatly enjoyed&mdash;Pullman's trilogy and I thought it was more an argument with Milton than with God himself.

PBS has posted a site dedicated to Nikola Tesla, my candidate for coolest scientist ever. Among other things, it includes a virtual tour o the Niagara Falls electrical generating plant and a fascinating hint that Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) was created out of fear that the USSR had perfected his charged-particle beam weapon (you see, there's this huge controversy over what happened to his papers after his death).