Multiple links (not necessarily of a bookish sort) to stories that I found interesting:
From BLDGBLOG, the lost rivers of Manhattan:
But how much would I love to find myself in New York City for a weekend, perhaps sent there by work to cover a story – when the phone rings in my hotel room. It's 11pm. I'm tired, but I answer. An old man is on the other end, and he clears his throat and he says: "I think this is something you'd like to see." I doubt, I delay, I debate with myself – but I soon take a cab, and, as the clock strikes 12am, I'm led down into the basement of a red brick tenement building on E. 13th Street.
I step into a large room, that smells vaguely of water – and six men are sitting around an opening in the floor, holding fishing poles in the darkness.
For those of you wondering how to save the world, consider urban gardening:
All this has not quenched Ms. Washington’s agricultural ambitions. In April she took a six-month leave from her job and headed to the Center for Agroecology with two other city growers. She said she hoped to take notes and start an urban farm school in New York.
With that in place, Ms. Washington said, the possibilities could be endless.
“So that the next time we ask a kid where a tomato comes from,� she said, “he won’t have to say a supermarket. He can say, Here’s an urban farm, and here is where I’m growing that tomato that you’re talking about. How great is that?�
A lifetime (and three generations) spent studying Lake Baikal:
Marianne V. Moore, an ecologist at Wellesley College and another researcher on the project, said she learned about the data in 2001 when she took students in her class, “Baikal and the Soul of Siberia,� to the lake. Dr. Izmesteva spoke to the group and showed a few slides, which the translator said had been drawn from a 60-year record. “I thought he had made a mistake,� Dr. Moore recalled. “So I basically ignored it.�
When she returned with another class two years later and another scientist mentioned the data, “my jaw dropped to the floor,� she said. “I realized this is just extraordinary.�
From the Natural History Museums Antarctica blog, "Near Enough is Not Good Enough":
Shackleton and his men didn’t cross the continent as planned. Before reaching land the Endurance became wedged in ice and had to be abandoned by the crew. [Frank] Hurley argued with Shackleton to go back to the sinking ship to rescue his precious glass plate negatives. Diving below the icy waters of the sunken ship he found these jewels that he’d soldered shut in a tin. The legendary story follows how he and Shackleton went through the hundreds of negatives, smashing those that could not be taken in their harrowing journey to be rescued. Imagine the images nobody has yet seen, in an icy grave at the bottom of the Weddell Sea.
Finally, Jenny D. pines for the new bicycle novel (which she should write!) and links to Guy Dammann's article at The Guardian on the subject:
Obvious sources from the cycling's first golden age range from HG Wells's follow-up to the Time Machine, The Wheels of Chance to Flann O'Brien's anarchic surrealisation of the Irish countryside, The Third Policeman. Somerset Maugham's long short story, Cakes and Ale, indexes the cycling habits of Hugh Walpole and, more famously, Thomas Hardy, and Jerome K Jerome's sequel to Three Men on a Boat, sees the three companions regroup for some bicycle action in Three Men on a Bummel.
[Images from Lake Baikal including Mikhail M. Kozhov and his granddaughter Lyubov who along with Lyubov's mother conducted the ongoing Lake Baikal study.]
