Around 2 a.m. on February 8, 1587, Mary Queen of Scots penned a letter to her brother-in-law, King Henri III of France. It would be her last. Six hours later, she was beheaded for treason by order of her cousin, Elizabeth I of England. The letter has since become one of Scotland’s most beloved artifacts, the handwritten pages offering a poignant glimpse of a monarch grappling with her impending execution.
But it’s not the words that fascinate Jana Dambrogio, the Thomas F. Peterson conservator at MIT Libraries. For more than a decade, Dambrogio has been studying “letterlocking,” the various systems of folds, slits, and wax seals that protected written communication before the invention of the mass-produced envelope. To guard her final missive from prying eyes, the queen used a “butterfly lock”—one of hundreds of techniques catalogued by Dambrogio, collaborator Daniel Starza Smith, and their research team in a fast-growing dictionary of letterlocking.
Gary Cantrell clanged a bell at 6:40 a.m. on Saturday, Oct. 20, signaling 70 runners to jog off into the woods on his farm in Tennessee. They had an hour to complete a 4.1667-mile loop trail. Easy. Most of the group finished with 15 minutes to spare. The bell clanged again at 7:40 a.m., and they ran it again. And at 8:40 a.m., and 9:40 a.m., and every hour after that until, one by one, they quit. There was no known finish line. The race went on, day and night, until the bell clanged and only one runner answered.
“I compare it to being punched in the face—light punches,” Cantrell said. “After awhile you just don’t want to get up for it any more.”
For years afterward, I thought our experience was unique. We were smart; we had access to pornography (mostly pilfered from the Brentano’s at the Bridgewater Mall), but we didn’t want to keep the radioactive material in our houses, so we improvised, without any influence from other kids. As I later learned, everyone — woods nearby or not — did this. It turns out that the woman who spent half a million on a mid-century colonial in Basking Ridge would have run into this situation anywhere in America.
Woods porn is ubiquitous. The concealment of spank mags isn’t limited to the Northeast, straight men, or as I came to learn over the course of my reporting, the U.S. For men of a certain age, generally those who grew up before modems were fast enough to show pubescent kids the pornography that they so craved, hiding porn mags in the woods shaped their early sexuality. Woods porn was a pre-internet, worldwide practice, like singing “The Diarrhea Song” and believing that Marilyn Manson removed a rib so he could suck his own dick. It was a magical outlet for horny teens with crustaches and body odor around the world before DVDs and Pornhub made paper porno irrelevant. What we thought was ingenious had been practiced for decades, by nerds and jocks and burnouts and whatever Rob and I were, and now it’s gone.
But should we lament its death? Or is having a full buffet of internet pornography at your fingertips a better way to embrace a young man’s blossoming sexuality?
This book has a simple premise: “Unregulated capitalism is bad for women,” Kristen Ghodsee argues, “and if we adopt some ideas from socialism, women will have better lives.” Ghodsee is an ethnographer who has researched the transition from communism to capitalism in eastern Europe, with a particular focus on gender-specific consequences. “The collapse of state socialism in 1989 created a perfect laboratory to investigate the effects of capitalism on women’s lives,” she writes.
“Thin Air” highlights how depictions of Mars have evolved over time: the planet had indigenous life in the turn-of-the-last-century writings of H.G. Wells and Edgar Rice Burroughs; Ray Bradbury’s “The Martian Chronicles,” published in 1950, told of escape from Earth to the Red Planet; and the “hard-science” depiction of colonization in “Red Mars,” “Green Mars” and “Blue Mars” (1992-1996) by Kim Stanley Robinson.
“Thin Air” is the natural extension of this journey, blending the hard science of Robinson with the dreams of Dick — we have not only colonized Mars but have reached the point where it’s just another place where people live. It’s closer than ever to our own lives, and perhaps a glimpse into a possible future. It’s also an exploration on the march of technology and just how far we may go to change our ourselves in the pursuit of progress.