LATEST ADDITIONS

Sam Leith gets the spa treatment.

Flowers, it seems, have secrets that the honeybee's ultraviolet vision reveals.

The New York Times is ending its TimesSelect program, which charged subscribers $50/year for access to "premium" content, meaning most of their regular columnists. We're going to hear a lot of piffle about how the Times only had about 250,000 subscribers because the content was so widely pirated, but I think that's horse-hockey.

S. L. Price writes about his initiation into the newspaper business. "I was, as everybody there can attest, an instant master—at overwriting, at missing deadlines, at trying to invest my stories with an importance they didn’t deserve. But with another daily paper in town, I had to hustle or lose, and fear of humiliation was only one reason I got better. The fact is, battling on a beat is one of life’s few, clear-cut, post-athletic competitive venues. Each morning, readers open up a newspaper to see who won the game. Each morning, sportswriters open up a newspaper to see which writers won the battle for the best lead, best quotes, best information, best kicker, best assessment of that game. I lost often and won some, too, and spent a bit of each day wondering if I’d be fired."