Recent reads  One advantage of a long flight is the chance to catch up on reading material. The flight from Atlanta to Zurich was over 9 hours. Since it's an overnight flight, there isn't much time for reading. The goal is to get as much sleep as possible, as it will be morning in Zurich, and the best way to fight jet lag is to remain awake during the day and go to bed at a normal time, albeit in a new time zone that is 6 hours earlier.

However, on the return flight there was plenty of time to read. I happened to have a copy of the June 5, 2006 New Yorker. Nora Ephron writes about her love affair her rent-controlled life at the Apthorp, a beautiful residential building in New York. While the article isn't online, here's a comment about it on Curbed.

There's a profile of Howard Stringer, the new CEO of Sony Corp which provides an interesting look at this once dominant technology company that has floundered recently.

The previous year, in conjunction with the companyÂ?s sixtieth anniversary, Stringer explained, there had been plans to launch a campaign promoting sixty great Sony products. “And I just sort of collapsed at a meeting,” he said. “I said, ‘We canÂ?t talk about sixty products just because it happens to be the sixtieth anniversary! We donÂ?t have sixty fantastic products.’

In Life and Letters: The Agitator, there's a discussion of Oriana Fallaci's crusade against Islam. She has become more conservative with age, but she makes some excellent points about the West has dealt with Islam and Islamic immigrants.

There were other good articles as well. The 25¢ I paid the library for the used copy (or was it from the free magazine bin at the used book store?) was well worth it.

I also packed along the October 2006 Wired magazine that contained a brief article on the computer mapping that goes into producing the base maps for navigation systems. Gizmondo's spectacular crack-up tells the sordid story of the people behind the game device of the same name that crashed and burned a few years ago. The articles in Wired are consistently good, which is why it is about the only magazine to which I now subscribe, for about $14/year.
posted by Bruce Wright at 10:12 PM #