Tribe of Tiger, Cherub Cat
A Siberian photographer’s award-winning photograph of a Siberian tiger.
Eero Saarinen’s Bell Labs complex in Holmdel, New Jersey is empty.
I wrote a post about the ways that online scolds and cops may be helping us to rediscover privacy; and I also write about Jill Lepore’s magnificent new book If Then and why I wish I had written it.
Speaking of scolds, a number of times over the years I have received emails from people scolding me for the prices of my books. I used to reply that authors don’t set the prices of their books, but they would always write back to tell me that I should have refused to allow the book to be published unless the publisher met my pricing demands. So I stopped replying to such emails. I mention this because neither I nor my friend Tim Larsen are to blame for the price of the utterly delightful and deeply informative book he has edited, The Oxford Handbook of Christmas. Ask your local library to purchase a copy.
The English philosopher John Gray has written Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life. No one learned more philosophy from cats than the sometimes mad and always peculiar 18th-century poet Christopher Smart, about whom I wrote one of my first scholarly articles. People who know nothing else about Smart may know his poem in praise of his cat Jeoffry.
For he is the quickest to his mark of any creature.
For he is tenacious of his point.
For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery.
For he knows that God is his Saviour.
For there is nothing sweeter than his peace when at rest.
For there is nothing brisker than his life when in motion.
Larger image here. St. Matthew Island, in the middle of the Bering Sea, may be the most remote place in Alaska.