More Noted Things

Before the wheel, there was the ski. Bruce Barcott,"Cold Mountains," NYT, 5 December, reviews Roland Huntford's Two Planks and a Passion: The Dramatic History of Skiing.

Conspiracy theorists made you skeptical of everything said of the Illuminati? Try Jan Swafford's"Beethoven and the Illuminati," Slate, 8 December.

Dan Cohen's"Leave the Blogging to Us" is a manifesto for"slow blogging." Cliopatria's most accomplished (i.e., slowest) practitioner, Rob MacDougall, has a fascinating piece,"Are Whales Fish?" Old is the New New, 8 December.

Anne Applebaum,"Russia's Usable Past," Slate, 8 December, reviews Jonathan Brent's Inside the Stalin Archives: Discovering the New Russia.

The British Library has released two three disc sets: The Spoken Word: British Writers*, reviewed by Robert Fulford,"Who's Ever Heard Virginia Woolf?" National Post, 2 December; and The Spoken Word: American Writers**, reviewed by Gregory Cowles,"Everybody Has Their Own English," Paper Cuts, 8 December.
*At the link, you can sample: Arthur Conan Doyle and Virginia Woolf.
**At the link, you can sample: Eugene O'Neill, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thornton Wilder, John Steinbeck, Lillian Hellman, Ralph Ellison, and Arthur Miller.

Finally,"Staten Island Historians Piece Together Genealogy Of Wu-Tang Clan," The Onion, 8 December, reports on a milestone in hip-hop genealogy, tracking the Wu-Tang Clan back to 1993.