Each Friday we compile a list of interesting links and articles our editors find from across the web. Here’s what’s catching our eye this week.
A pocket bible lost during World War II has now made it home to its rightful owner:
It was a special delivery more than 70 years in the making — from the battlefields of North Africa and a series of Prisoner of War camps to a village social club in Hampshire. When Margaret Boanas handed over a small leather-bound wartime copy of the New Testament to Paddy Douglas last month, it marked the fulfilment of an undertaking linking both of their fathers since 1943.
Now we know more about Super Mario than ever before:
Press the Buttons (via Blake J. Harris, author of Console Wars) got their hands on an official Nintendo Character Manual from 1993. In it, the company sets guidelines for Pantone coloring, character size, feature details, and more. The internal and “confidential” guide also gives some in-depth info about Mario, his world, and its varied cast of creatures.
A review of Oliver Kamm’s Accidence Will Happen: The Non-Pedantic Guide to English Usage:
In a cheeringly Dickensian fashion, the names of our supposed experts on grammar imply they want to bind writers (Lynne Truss); send them awry (Kingsley Amis); besmirch their prose (H.W. Fowler); deafen them with moos (Simon Heffer); or snort at their legitimate constructions (John Humphrys). At first glance, Oliver Kamm appears happy to keep them company. A leader-writer for the Times and its resident authority on style, Kamm is the most small ‘c’ conservative man I know. If he has ever left home without cleaning his shoes — and I doubt that he has — he would have realised his mistake before reaching the end of his road, and rushed back to apply the polish. Instead of joining the pedants, however, Kamm batters them. Accidence Will Happen is a joyous and joyously liberating assault on ‘rules’ of grammar which are little more than a hodgepodge of contradictory superstitions.
Amy Frykholm, previous TOJ contributor, on Central American women seeking asylum:
A tiny girl about ten years old, with a ponytail and gold loop earrings, was sitting in the defendant’s chair in Judge Mimi Tsankov’s Denver courtroom. Tsankov is a U.S. immigration judge in one of the nation’s 59 immigration courts.
A review of Rough Country: How Texas Became America’s Most Powerful Bible-Belt State by Robert Wuthnow:
I grew up in Texas in the 1970s and 1980s. During my childhood, Texas was a purple state. Both major parties represented us in the Senate, and the governorship oscillated between Democrats and Republicans. Things have changed quite a bit. In November 2014, Republicans swept the mid-term elections throughout the United States. In Texas, the margin of victory was surreal, with Republican Governor-Elect Greg Abbott defeating Democratic Candidate Wendy Davis by more than 20 points. Yet how did Texas, which in the 100 years between the end of Reconstruction (1877) and the inauguration of Jimmy Carter (1977) sent only one Republican to the Senate and none to the governor’s mansion, become the geographic locus of the Republican Party? In Rough Country: How Texas Became America’s Most Powerful Bible-Belt State, Princeton Sociologist Robert Wuthnow contends that religion played a major role in that transformation, reaching all the way back to the founding of the Republic of Texas (1836) in order to investigate the grassroots causes of the shift in voter alignment in the Lone Star State.
A cool video of the Himalayas:
The Himalayas from 20,000 ft. from Teton Gravity Research on Vimeo.