Wes Phillips

In the 1920s and '30s, fliers would race their home-built and "suicidally overpowered" single engine aircraft—sometimes in front of 60,000 spectators. The Granville Brothers' Gee Bee Model Z was little more than a massive motor with stubby little wings attached, but it paved the way for the fast fighters the Air Corps put aloft in WWII.

I've been reading Chet Raymo's Walking Zero, a meditation on the history of science focussed through a walk along the prime meridian in the UK. It's a lovely book, one I tend to linger over, reading a chapter and then mulling over it for a few days. Highly recommended.

Eugene O'Neill is currently having a resurgence everywhere from prisons to Broadway (John Atkinson ranks the Old Vic production of Moon For the Misbegotten as one of his most intense theatrical experiences). John Patrick Diggens argues that O'Neill's themes of deceit and desire are particularly timely for 'Muricans today.

aka The Lucifer Effect—an excerpt from Philip Zimbardo's new book.

The secret life of the F word. Now that you know what it's about, you know not to click the link if that sort of thing offends you. Me? I live in Brooklyn—we use it because "uh" sounds so inexpressive.

The OC Register's Timothy Morgan writes about the increasing tendency of classical audiences to applaud between movements. His response? "I don't care."

"The classic beginner's mistake in Argentina is to neglect the first steak of the day."