De laatste twee etappes van de Giro d’Italia vielen tegen — of althans, na vrijdag was er nog gerede hoop dat de klassementsrenners echt wilden strijden om de eerste plaats, maar bij die hoop bleef het;

Luc Sante schreef over de boekcollectie die zijn leven overnam:

Many books are screwy, a great many are dull, some are irredeemable, and there are way too many of them, probably, in the world. I hate all the fetishistic twaddle about books promoted by the chain stores and the book clubs, which make books seem as cozy and unthreatening as teacups, instead of the often disputatious and sometimes frightening things they are. I recognize that we now have many ways to convey, store, and reproduce the sorts of matter that formerly were monopolized by books. I like to think that I’m no bookworm, egghead, four-eyed paleface library rat. I often engage in activities that have no reference to the printed words. I realize that books are not the entire world, even if they sometimes seem to contain it. But I need the stupid things.

Steve Jones schrijft dat Darwin’s gevaarlijke idee over de evolutie misschien aan tafel ontstond:

He scarcely noticed the finches and lumped their corpses together into a jumbled mass. In fact, the local tortoises were more important. On the island of James he “lived entirely on tortoise meat . . . the young tortoises make excellent soup.” In those lumbering creatures, Darwin saw, without realizing it at the time, his first hint of evolution, for animals from James were subtly distinct from those on Indefatigable and Albemarle nearby. In a rare conjunction of taxonomy with gastronomy, he noted that the James specimens were “rounder, blacker, and had a better taste when cooked” — which at the time seemed little more than a curiosity but was in fact his introduction to the biology of change.

Steve Jones,en Darwin, op boeklog;

The Atlantic heeft zijn schrijversinterviews vrij online gezet, en ontsloten;