My colleagues and I drove 2,428 miles and remained in the same place.
We gathered a team, rented a car, checked the batteries in our recorders and cameras. We moved from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean. We crossed deserts, plains and mountains. But all the while, we were living in Borderland — zigzagging across the frontier between Mexico and the United States.
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The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.
Author and late night TV staple Kevin Trudeau was sentenced to a decade in prison for violating a 2004 court order that barred him from making deceptive infomercials about his book, The Weight Loss Cure 'They' Don't Want You to Know About. At Monday's sentencing, U.S. District Court Judge Ronald Guzman called Trudeau" deceitful to the very core," and said that "since his 20s, he has steadfastly attempted to cheat others for his own gain." Over the years, Trudeau has hawked "free money," weight loss solutions and cures for cancer and other diseases. At the hearing, Trudeau claimed that he had undergone a "personal transformation" and said that if he does another infomercial, there will be "no embellishments, no puffery, no lies." Reuters reports that the courtroom was packed with Trudeau supporters. One of them, was 80-year-old Ed Foreman, a motivational speaker and former congressman for Texas and New Mexico, the news service says. It adds that Foreman "tried twice to make a statement in Trudeau's support during the hearing. When Foreman failed to respond to the judge's order to be quiet, he was lifted up by his arms and legs and carried out of the courtroom by federal marshals."
HarperCollins has bought the rights to J.R.R. Tolkien's translation of the Old English epic poem Beowulf, edited by his son, Christopher Tolkien. The Bookseller notes that the book will include a series of lectures that J.R.R. Tolkien gave at Oxford in the 1930s, of which Christopher Tolkien says: "From his creative attention to detail in these lectures there arises a sense of the immediacy and clarity of his vision. It is as if he entered into the imagined past: standing beside Beowulf and his men shaking out their mail-shirts as they beached their ship on the coast of Denmark, listening to the rising anger of Beowulf at the taunting of Unferth, or looking up in amazement at Grendel's terrible hand set under the roof of Heorot."
Novelist Zadie Smith writes an "Elegy for a Country's Seasons," about the small losses that come with climate change: "The weather has changed, is changing, and with it so many seemingly small things — quite apart from train tracks and houses, livelihoods and actual lives — are being lost. It was easy to assume, for example, that we would always be able to easily find a hedgehog in some corner of a London garden, pick it up in cupped hands, and unfurl it for our children — or go on a picnic and watch fat bumblebees crawling over the mouth of an open jam jar. Every country has its own version of this local sadness."
Poet Bill Knott, who once faked his own death, has died for the final time, according to The New Yorker: "When word came again, last week, that Knott had died, no one knew quite whether to believe it. Death makes deniers of us all, but in Knott's case we had good reason to trust our instinctive disbelief. This time, unfortunately, the facts were unrelenting: on Wednesday, Knott died of complications from heart surgery. He was seventy-four."
Twelve days into the mystery of what happened to Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 and the 239 people on board, more clues seem to only raise more questions.
The latest news about the investigation and search for the plane includes:
— An NBC News report that sources familiar with the investigation say data from the plane's communications systems indicate someone manually programmed a turn into the Boeing 777's navigation system 12 minutes before a voice from the cockpit said "all right, good night," to Malaysian air traffic controllers.
If that is what happened, it could mean that whoever was at the controls had already planned a sharp turn to the west — well off the jet's planned Kuala Lumpur-to-Beijing route — before the seemingly routine sign-off.
That turn is why the search for the jet has extended thousands of miles south across the Indian Ocean and thousands of miles north into Central Asia.
Authorities have said they believe the voice heard saying good night was that of co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid.
Whether he, pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah or someone else programmed a course change into the navigation system is not known.
Accounts have varied as to exactly when, but also in the minutes around that good night message is when most of the plane's communications and tracking systems went dark. The lack of data from those systems is why the search area is so vast — authorities aren't sure which direction the plane went after it headed west.
— Word from Malaysian officials that some files were recently deleted — perhaps in early February — from a flight simulator in the home of Flight 370 pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah. Investigators are attempting to restore the files to see if they have any connection to the missing jet.
— A narrowing of the search by Australian authorities. According to The New York Times, "the initial search area that Australian officials announced Tuesday has been reduced by half, using new data analysis of the plane's likely fuel consumption, John Young, general manager for the agency's emergency response division, said Wednesday. The new area of focus in the Australian-led part of the search covers 89,000 square nautical miles, roughly 1,200 nautical miles southwest of Perth, Mr. Young said."
The Times says that search zone is roughly the size of Italy.
— Word from Thai officials that on March 8 their military's radar detected an unidentified plane that may have been Flight 370. Malaysian officials had earlier said that their military spotted a plane that might have been Flight 370 crossing the peninsula near the border with Thailand. So, as The Associated Press writes, "Thailand's failure to quickly share that information may not substantially change what Malaysian officials now know, but it raises questions about the degree to which some countries are sharing their defense data."
But like I said, the book isn't perfect. For one, it is MASSIVE. We're talking almost a thousand pages, which is seriously Bible-big and unwieldy and chunky like carrying around a paving stone.
I get it. This is necessary for a book stuffed with so many stories, which serves as a kind of overview of ten million years of time travel stories. But it makes the thing rough reading in small doses. It's the kind of book that makes you commit to reading it. And maybe wearing a back brace.
Second disappointment? In all of its 900-some pages, it didn't include my favorite time travel story ever, "The Albertine Notes" by Rick Moody. I know it's totally not fair to knock an anthology for the things it doesn't include, but I'm doing it anyway, and mostly to make a point, which is this:
In all of its 900-some pages, the only time travel story I love that didn't get included in The Time Traveler's Almanac is "The Albertine Notes." And that is truly remarkable. I mean, I'm no sci-fi dilettante. And I certainly know my way around a (fictional) time machine. I've been reading and nerding-out over this stuff for longer than is probably healthy, and the stories that truly moved me have burrowed in deep. They gunked up my brain with their time machines, dinosaurs and melancholy and all of them (save that one) are now all together, all in one place, just waiting to gunk up yours.
Read an excerpt of The Time Traveler's Almanac