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Tag Archives: tragic

Polyphony fading out

Polyphony is a short story anthology series, in the direction of “interstitial” or “slipstream” writing (“literary with a genre sensibility” being the “least elegant but most descriptive” phrase according to the introduction to volume 4). I own two volumes (3 and 4) and they have good stuff by good people inside. It turns out that [...]

Scott and scurvy

Idlewords has a fascinating essay on the history of scurvy: Scott’s Antarctic expedition in 1911 was plagued by the disease, despite its having been “conquered in 1747, when the Scottish physician James Lind proved in one of the first controlled medical experiments that citrus fruits were an effective cure for the disease.” How it all [...]