But at least the archeologists are happy. “It’s a bit like kids in a candy shop,” Robert Bewley, an aerial archeologist at the University of Oxford, told me, a few days ago. The freak conditions have made this summer one of the best in living memory for what archeologists call “parch marks”—ghostly, pale outlines of vanished castles, settlements, and burial sites that materialize on the land when it dries out and grass and crops die off. In recent weeks, archeologists in light aircraft, hobbyists with drones, and even people walking through their local parks have discovered Iron Age farms in South Wales, a Roman road passing near Basingstoke, burial mounds in Ireland, and the outline of Second World War bomb shelters on the lawns of Cambridge. Seen from above, the parch marks have a magical quality, as if a giant had doodled them from memory, but they are also disconcertingly real. They are only there because something else was.
Everyone wants to ask Dick Cavett the same question, and it is a question that he never wants to answer: Of all today’s talk-show hosts, who is the “next Dick Cavett”?
“Well, that’s an awkward subject matter for me, because I know all of them,” Mr. Cavett, 81, said on a recent sunny Thursday afternoon at his sprawling country house in Connecticut. “I’m not addicted to talk shows. God knows, I’ve spent enough time on them.”
As in Mr. Cavett’s 1960s and ’70s heyday, the country is in a period of turbulence, with racial tensions flaring, protests in the streets, and a fundamental ideological fissure. The hosts who have emphasized substance, who have “gone political,” have been praised and nominated for Emmys.
But “the next Cavett”? Is such a thing possible?
If only.
In the early 20th century, Americans were hungry for a quick bite. Yet long hours and late nights made going home to eat difficult. Through that, entrepreneurs saw an opportunity. It might come as a surprise to know that all aspiring restaurateurs had to do to fill this demand was to order a pre-made diner, modular and modern, often looking rather like a train car. It would even likely arrive by train.
The ballpoint pen’s creation story reminds you of the fact that it was once considered an exciting piece of technology.
Unlike the smartphone, which still shows glimmers of innovation despite being everywhere, the ballpoint pen has fallen into the tableau of everyday life, never really standing out unless you really spend time thinking about it.
But as an analog device, it solved a lot of problems, and it took a few tries to get right. The man to first patent the object, John J. Loud, did so about 60 years before the average person saw one in person, in part because the design was imperfect and it needed more work before it was ready for prime time.
Do you remember when you learned to read? Like most of us, I don’t. Still, many people can take comfort in knowing that this event, beyond memory, involved our parents. The parents who took us to school, who read books to us at home, who could speak to us in a shared language. But in my case, one of the things I lost as a refugee, without even knowing it at the time, was a childhood where my parents would have read to me.