January 21, 2013: Afternoon
By The Morning News
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- Fifty percent of Americans are happy to see Obama sworn in, down from nearly 7 out of 10 in 2009.
- The first and scariest inaugural address, John Winthrop's "city on a hill" speech, was actually about encouraging charity.
- Brief history of inaugural poems.
- Ezra Stoller's architectural photographs of post-war America at work.
- A one-percent fall in economic output increases infant mortality by 7.4 deaths per 1,000 girls against 1.5 for boys.
- Twenty-first century doping includes microdoses of enhancers, magnetic fields, and bioengineering.
- Nathaniel Rich on the very dangerous business of commercial diving.
- In our fragmented pop-culture universe, it's getting more difficult to catch the references.
- Bill Cosby, speed reader, offers three strategies for reading faster: preview, skim, and cluster.
- Ode to a dying laptop.
- See also: "With typewriters you’re creating something that, however terrible, lives in the world."
- Vote for your favorite 2012 fiction among our finalists in the 2013 Tournament of Books Zombie Poll.
- Related: TMN seeks a new intern.
- World's largest natural sound archive now available to hear online.
- More than one old person ordered me, “Do not get old.” They did not appear to be kidding.
