What's in a name? Quite a bit, when you stop and think about it. Would you rather have prostate surgery by Dr. Steadyhand or Dr. Whoops? Names imply a lot, even if we don't consciously make the connection; that's why your Polo shirt was made by Ralph Lauren instead of Ralph Lipshitz.
Freida Hughes is less than reverent about a Robert Service poem. She's right—the callow lad got bent out of shape when his booty call wasn't the idyll he had imagined.
"Housed in the Agency's Headquarters Building in McLean, Virginia, this unique collection illustrates the history of US intelligence—which effectively began when this country was still 13 separate colonies—by showing some of the artifacts and tools used by men and women serving in various aspects of espionage."
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.