Новости за 07.07.2016

“Terminology to know when buying at auction” — but also good for generally showing off in other people’s houses. Back splat: “The vertical piece of wood running from the frame of a chair to the base of the backrest.”Escutcheon: “The plate of metal that surrounds a keyhole, often decorative. From scutum, the Latin for shield.” Hassock: “An upholstered footstool or short bench.” Shoe: “The horizontal section of the back seat rail of a chair that supports the bottom of the splat”

Memoir. “My Irish generation is the last one to have experienced that period of revolution and civil war not as history but through the memories of our parents, and the stories they told us as children. As young nationalists my mother and father joined Sinn Féin and the Gaelic League in their village under the guidance of the local priest. In 1917 a unit of the IRA was formed in the area and my father became its commanding officer. Both were involved in the violent campaign that followed”

“A small woman with greying braids sits under a tree in front of Khartoum’s Ombada prison in the stifling afternoon heat. It’s hard to imagine she is the princess of a territory the size of France. Or rather, she would have been, if her great-grandfather, Sultan Ali Dinar, hadn’t been killed by the British army 100 years ago. Suad Fadul has spent the past 20 years selling tea and dumplings outside the prison, and sharing a home with her eight children and grandchildren”

A short history of modern Iraq’s ethnic minorities. From the outset of the coutry’s independence in 1932 the new Sunni-led government “crushed uprisings led by Kurds, Yezidis, and Shi’a tribes”. In 1933, “three thousand Assyrians were massacred in a series of rampages as the nascent Iraqi army slaughtered their way through villages in the north”. National ideology held that Iraq was an Arab state, and that its citizens “should either become Arab or be punished for not being so”

Things we will see when driverless cars become commonplace. Gated communities will use captcha street furniture to filter for unknown vehicles. New defences will be needed against autonomous car bombs. Rich people will hire ringer-drivers — dringers — to sit up front where local laws demand a human at the wheel. Cities will have to legislate “autonomous ad-free zones” to stop convoys of cars being used in marketing campaigns

After seventeen years “quietly developing under the soil”, three species of periodical cicadas have surfaced this summer south of Lake Erie. Periodical cicadas “appear in coordinated bursts every thirteen or seventeen years — always a prime number”. Their life-cycle presents “a sort of evolutionary puzzle” for biologists. Most cicadas “emerge in staggered batches year by year”. What makes periodical cicadas coordinate across entire geographic regions? And why the prime numbers?

Gripping, often unsettling discussion of Italian noir. “Traditionally, the police novel has worked towards a resolution in which good triumphs over evil, the state triumphs over criminality. We don’t believe in this any more. Our analysis of society is different: we say that in this moment it’s the criminal cultures that are winning in Italy. We’ve arrived at a system in which there’s no need to murder people and commit the other acts that the mafia used to because criminality has legitimized itself”