Serendipitous flea-market pickup last week: "Rhyme's Reason," by John Hollander. He was one of the first English poets to write what Agha Shahid Ali calls "real" ghazals--not just a series of couplets, but preserving a repeated word and rhyme scheme. This book is full of similar self-illustrating examples of various poetic forms.

One that was new to me and I'd like to try experimenting with is Hollander's take on the pantun, a Malay form that influenced the French pantoum (the latter being a series of quatrains linked by repeated lines.)

 I glimpsed this list of "75 Best Sci-Fi Books of All Time" by Esquire magazine on Reddit (it was published two years ago as Top 50, since expanded). Then @hamsterwoman linked a meme version so now I have motivation to write it up, and wow do I have thoughts. If nothing else, bingo has been good for broad exposure/note-taking so I remember things!

This is a book about some of the main characters in the scientific revolution era--Copernicus, Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo--and their social circles/connections. Copernicus predates the others and didn't have much contact with any of them. Likewise, Brahe and Galileo didn't overlap. Brahe and Kepler were mentor and protege and worked closely together, and Kepler and Galileo were pen pals, so that counts, but otherwise, the "social connections" theme is kind of limited.

The unimpressed reviews on [large review aggregator site] are pretty accurate. One, the aforementioned issue with "they didn't really all know each other." Two, the proportions dedicated to each person are kind of skewed. The author seems to have been interested primarily in Galileo, and secondarily, in Brahe. Really, in Brahe's sister, Sophia, who was an intelligent and hard-working astrologer in her own right. (Tycho considered publishing some of her writings with the disclaimer "I tried to talk her out of it because astrology is kind of laborious for women's brains, but she wasn't going to listen to me." Good guy Brahe supports women in STEM!) So, "the life and times of Galileo and his circle" is certainly enough material for a book in its own right, but it just feels weird to be like "fast forward through Copernicus so we can get to the good stuff."

In general, Fauber is too much in love with the sound of her own voice and literary allusions. There is a lot of material relegated to the footnotes, and a lot of it is stuff like "heehee I couldn't resist a quote from T.S. Eliot here" and...like...you should have resisted. (One of the things that got brought up in history of science class is that as a field of history, it's still very young; a lot of the previous "history" stuff was written by scientists, not necessarily historians. But in this case, the pendulum has swung too far over to the literature people.)

She also had a lot of fun, maybe too much fun, translating/paraphrasing Latin somewhat liberally and showing it off. For instance, on a couple occasions, Galileo published a gibberish anagram claiming priority for his discoveries, so everybody could try to unscramble the letters and guess (a somewhat poetic phrasing of) his result, but only he knew the actual intended solution. Kepler kept trying and failing to solve the anagram. Now, I don't read Latin, so even if I could see the Latin phrases and go "oh, look, same letters, it's an anagram," I would need a translation of both the guesses and the actual discoveries. That's the kind of handholding I want authors to do for me. But instead, Fauber tries to reproduce both (very verbose and over-the-top-flowery) versions in English only, and relegates the actual anagrams to the footnotes! Who is the target audience here?

Then there's a long tangent about Kepler's computations, and I guess what happened is that the editor said "too long, too much math, either cut it shorter or move it to an appendix" and Fauber said "okay, I will cut it shorter and move it to an appendix," so the appendix is just like a longer version of the abridged section, featuring several paragraphs copy-and-pasted, with corresponding exhaustive footnotes.

"I do not mean to construct a world of hysterical suicidal gay nuns" <- one of the asides that got relegated to the footnotes. Feels like a classic case of "this is raising a lot of questions already answered by the footnote."

Anyway, as someone who is much more sympathetic to Kepler than Fauber appears to be, a more engaging book I would recommend that touches on some of the same ground is "The Grapes of Math" by Alex Bellos. The other reviews also pointed to Dava Sobel ("Galileo's Daughter,") which, ditto.

Edit to add: I'd forgotten/hadn't known that some of the characters in Galileo's "Dialogues" were named after his RL friends. I understand that you don't want to name the ignorant Ptolemaic character after anyone you know and like, but I feel like if it were me, I would come up with a better name for that character than "Simplicius."

This book, man, this fricking book.

Important: this is a reread. I'm pretty sure the first time I read it was over a decade ago and I was an undergrad at the time. I think it is, on some levels, amazing and mind-blowing and very well-done. I have a lot of high praise for it. Again, this post is going to probably be disproportionately focused on things that didn't work for me, then and/or now, but that's more about my emotions and less a fair assessment of its literary merits.

The concept: Erasmas is a young "fraa" or "avout" in a "concent" on the planet of "Arbre." The concent is where all the intellectual sorts in Arbre hang out. They go in and take vows that separate them from the "Sæcular" world, so they can focus their attentions on philosophy, math, science, that kind of thing. They spend a lot of time talking about eponymous concepts like Plato's Cave or Ockham's Razor or the Pythagorean Theorem, except Arbre isn't Earth, so they don't have a Plato or an Ockham or a Pythagoras, everything has different names. Depending on how deeply they're embedded within the concent, avout can only emerge for a period of ten days every year, decade, century, or millennium. As our story begins, Erasmas ("Raz") is eighteen, and it's the end of the year 3689; when the (enormous, brilliantly complex, work of art) clock strikes 3690, it will be a new decade, and he'll get to go outside and see his family and the world for the first time in ten years. Which he does. Then things get weird.

Okay, so. Some of the words, you will recognize as being familiar to but not exactly words in our world. "Fraa" ~ "friar," "avout" ~ "devout" or "avowed," "concent" ~ "convent" or "concentric." Even the title: "anathem" ~ "anthem," "anathema." This is all on purpose. People who don't like neologisms in their books probably won't like this book, and that's okay. This is not a criticism I have.

The first chunk of this book is, from a worldbuilding perspective, very fun and cool because MATH MONKS. The concept of the centenarian and millenarian communities remaining in seclusion and pushing forward the boundaries of knowledge is fascinating. The elaborate descriptions of the gothic architecture, the bells, the clockwork, the rituals, the music...it's the kind of place I want to visit, even if I wouldn't necessarily want to live there. A little like Ender's Game, sometimes the jargon can throw you into the world a little abruptly, but once I'm in, I like it, and sometimes resent when the plot moves on and drags me away from the cool concent stuff.

A couple subtweets: if you're a math and change ringing nerd and somehow haven't read this book yet, I highly recommend at least the first chunk. Because change ringing!!! If you're a river rafting guide, I can't recommend this book just for the person of Yulassetar Crade, because it's a very long book and Yul is a very minor character. I can, however, tell you that Yul is the kind of wonderful, self-reliant, adventurous character who has an exciting job where every day is a new challenge that brings the potential for a new story. Yul is great.

So.

( Spoilers and rants about many things )

The most important thing I would have wanted to know when I read this the first time is that change ringing with mathematical patterns is real, you can do it in this universe! I didn't discover my college's tower until almost too late, but now I'm slowly picking it up again, and handbells/online ringing give the opportunity to learn the math without the coordination. :D

One of the fundamental genre constraints to historical fiction is that, if you're describing large-scale historical events with famous people, your readers often know how it will turn out. So if you want to create tension or suspense, you have to do it some other way, maybe smaller and more personal stakes. A great example, which I'll come back to, is "Ninety-Three" by Victor Hugo. I think everybody who sits down to pick up a book with Robespierre, Marat, and Danton, knows what's going to happen in the general "republicans versus monarchists" battles. Even on the specific scale of the Vendée war, the republicans have a huge advantage both in numbers and technology. We're not in suspense about the campaign. But we are in suspense over the fate of three young children who have been kidnapped and taken hostage by the monarchists.

"The Celebrant" is a book I'd heard of a long time ago because it's been excerpted/quoted in a couple of my (many) anthologies of baseball literature. I knew it was a work of historical fiction, dealing with a Jewish-American immigrant family's assimilation to New York City in the early 1900s, against the backdrop of Christy Mathewson, a brilliant pitcher for the New York Giants. (Mathewson and all the baseball people in the book are real.) What I hadn't remembered/osmosed is that it was written in the 1970s/80s, not contemporaneously to the events it describes.

A celebrant is a person who celebrates. Giants fans are celebrants when the team wins a big game, but Mathewson, despite his book-learning and occasional otherworldliness, is also one of the guys; after a hard-fought poker game or checkers match, he can be a celebrant, too. But--in another "extremely on-brand for me" moment--one of the reasons I keep remembering to put this on my TBR and then go "eh, maybe after bingo" is the other context of the word "celebrant"; in Christian denominations like Episcopalianism, the pastor who says the blessing over Communion is the "celebrant." (In the Lutheran churches where I grew up, we would usually say "presiding minister.") It's a sacred act of emulating Jesus' sacrifice. So week in, week out, I keep seeing that in the bulletin and being like "yeah, I have to track down that Mathewson book, don't I..."

The main timespan of the book covers seasons from 1901 through 1919. Here are some of the names you will find in this book: John McGraw, "Iron" Joe McGinnity, Jake Stahl, Connie Mack, Johnny Evers, Hank O'Day, Honus Wagner, "Smoky" Joe Wood, Tris Speaker, Hal Chase, Joe Jackson, Harry Frazee. If any of these names mean anything to you, you already have some sense of what the baseball-related sections are going to cover.

If none of those names mean anything to you, you probably are not going to enjoy this book, because there is a lot of baseball. Diligently-researched box scores and replays. Sometimes, when the narrator is summarizing a season or two, it can almost read like nonfiction, and those parts weren't as engaging for me, maybe because I've read so much baseball nonfiction before. (Although, when people try to "spice up" their nonfiction by throwing in a bunch of fun facts about who was president or what was going on in pop culture or other trends to set the stage, that annoys me even more.)

If none of those names mean anything to you, but you're confident you would love reading 280 pages of baseball minutiae (there's been a lot of baseball since Greenberg's day, it's entirely possible there are avid fans who don't care about anything that happened in the segregated era!): for the sake of my own curiosity, I would love to hear about your reading experience if you skip the biographical note at the beginning and the line scores/game summaries at the beginning of chapters, and go in completely blind except for stuff like "in 1901, the National League that we currently know exists; the New York Giants are the team that will later play in San Francisco; the American League has just been founded but the NL doesn't recognize it as legit yet."

But yeah, I think for most of us, asking "will McGraw win a World Series?" is about as moot as "will the revolution triumph?" What we care about boils down to something much more personal, which is, "what will happen to Jackie and his relationship with Mathewson?"

The narrator, Jackie Kapp | Yakov Kapinski, is almost the same age as Mathewson, and an avid fan. As a kid, he could pitch a little himself; as a teenager, he gets to shake hands with a big-leaguer who has some life advice for him: "At the dinner, his eyes never leaving the page, he delivered a speech analogizing baseball and life. Practice, dedication, clean living, and fair play—these guaranteed success on and off the field."
But it's not that simple. Jackie isn't a ballplayer, but his dedication and passion for his art (his family runs a jewelry business that grows slowly over the course of the decades) is a reflection of Mathewson's brilliance. All his best pieces are spontaneous tributes to Mathewson, but he can't replicate that kind of art on demand. In his own way, he's a Quester, too. And while he tells himself that being a Family Person is worth the tradeoffs, it comes across as very perfunctory to the reader. It's just, like, "timeskip, that girlfriend I have? We're engaged now. Timeskip. Oh by the way she's pregnant. Timeskip. Yeah we had another kid." In an American intergenerational baseball story, like, of course the child has to grow into manhood to have a son and pass down the game to the next generation, that's on the bingo card. But, spoilers, the daughter doesn't exist to do anything except get fridged and give Jackie manpain. Sigh.

Jackie adores Mathewson; his business-minded brothers, and almost everyone else, are like, "that's great, let's find a way for you to get into the clubhouse and shake his hand, it'll make you happy and be good for business."

There's the old trope about "the only person worthy of power is the humble person who believes they're unworthy of it." Well, that's kind of what happens here, except instead of power it's Mathewson's admiration and friendship, and Jackie keeps shying away and sending gifts indirectly instead. The one time they do talk, of course, there's mutual respect and camaraderie, and Mathewson deconstructs the "baseball is like life" cliches:
Towards the end, the character of Hugh Fullerton (a baseball journalist, also from RL but not someone I was very familiar with), emerges as sort of a reader stand-in, incredulously going "what do you mean you barely spoke to him." You (or at least I, maybe not Fullerton) want to shake Jackie by the shoulders and go "he's made it perfectly clear he understands your art as well as you understand his, go be his friend! Now! Before it's too late!"

In "Ninety-Three," Cimourdain is Gauvain's mentor, best friend, father-figure, etc. They're incredibly close. Gauvain would never do anything with the purpose of harming Cimourdain, just like Jackie would never do anything with the purpose of harming his brother or family. And yet, Gauvain's ultimate loyalty has to be to the visionary republic ideals, even if it brings Cimourdain grief. In the end, Jackie's ultimate dilemma is much the same;

There are a couple names that I did not include in that big list of characters, that you might expect to show up if you know a lot about early-1900s New York Giants folklore. Spoilers: they do show up. But baseball is a complicated game, and for every dramatic, headline-making play that alters the path of a pennant race or postseason series, there are a dozen others that have just as much influence on the final standings, but don't get the press. In recollections after the fact, people will often say, "yeah, [foo] got a bad rap for how things played out, but you really also have to credit the decisive brilliance of [bar], it's not fair that we're still talking about foo." Except, in that sentence, you've already mentioned "foo" twice. People's brains are weird, especially when you're trying to debunk things! How do you reframe, or retell, that history, to put the emphasis on bar where it should be, rather than foo? A century later, baseball fans would still love to know this. (So would many other people, for that matter.)

Greenberg notes that one of his main sources was "The Glory of Their Times," by Lawrence Ritter, which is a classic (1966) oral history from many of the contemporaries. This was a book I didn't read until I'd read many other, more recent, baseball books, but as soon as I read it it's like, "oh, this is what they're all using as a source, in particular, when the players say 'we talk a lot about foo but we should talk about bar also,' the successors/ripoffs are just like 'foo! okay, moving on now.'"  One thing about baseball is that it is extremely allusive, and reading one story like this will bring up several others. Smoky Joe Wood, a Red Sox star and hero of the 1912 World Series, gets interviewed in "Glory of Their Times." In 1981, Roger Angell--inspired in part by reading that book--tracked him down and talked with him at an epic college playoff game where Ron Darling pitched against Frank Viola, which got turned into a news article. Darling and Viola both become major league pitchers, won the World Series in different years, and played together on the Mets. Angell lived to be 101, and when he died just a couple years ago, there were lots of tributes quoting that story and the 1975 World Series and many others...

And it reminded me of another Mathewson story, originally written by Ring Lardner, collected in a humor anthology. An intro to that chapter/section mentions that "Lardner's tongue-in-cheek elegy has been quoted frequently as a solemn eulogy." But, okay, that blurb is several pages before the excerpt itself. And "elegy" and "eulogy" mean basically the same thing. And yes, there is some over-the-top verse with the "news article," but a lot of actual attempts at serious news in those days also featured over-the-top verse. And the anthology was put together long, long after the fact, once a lot of context had been lost, and I was too young to pick up on a lot of sarcasm in those days. And--spoilers--Mathewson did die prematurely, but not because of the circumstances described in the article. (Well, Greenberg's fictionalized version may have had a more explicit death wish.) Anyway, this is the opening paragraph:
Get it? It's a joke that the Reds are very bad. That's it, that's the joke. I think I understand the joke now a lot better than I did when I first read the anthology.

Speaking of humor, "The Celebrant" has a couple uproariously funny scenes--Jackie's businessminded brother, Arthur, accompanies him and their older brother on a trip to Wanamaker's in Philadelphia and tries to improve their company's data collection, and they are...not ready for that mindblowing level of data science. Then there's also an argument between John McGraw and an umpire that is not at all safe for work but very amusing. (McGraw was a small, belligerent, manager from Baltimore who loved small ball, hit-and-run, bunting type stuff, and fighting with everybody all the time. Mathewson was a cerebral college man. Despite Jackie's skepticism, opposites attract and they were an intense bromance, because they were both consummate competitors. Joe Posnanski points this odd couple dynamic out in his "Baseball 100"--Greenberg really didn't need to do any fictionalizing here, except maybe to lean into some of the "oh yes we're ~very close, we lived together with both our wives, wink wink" aspects.)

Okay, so: does "The Celebrant" stick the landing? I don't know--does "Ninety-Three"? Cathartic, in some sense of the word, sure. (I'm good at the "getting filled up with emotions" part but not "and then dumping them out" part.) Bittersweet, yes. Number of sympathetic adult main characters left standing? No comment.

But the real Mathewson, despite the tragedies in his life (his two RL brothers don't make the fictional version, Jackie's family gets the tragedy instead), seems to have been somewhat more hinged in the timeframe of the last chapters than the fictional one. Maybe I can be grateful that, at least, he took the game seriously and was devoted to truth all through his life, or relieved that he never actually had to deploy intermediaries to track down a doppelganger who was too shy to be his friend. Or maybe this is all something I tell myself to keep from having too many emotions about fictional characters.

This book is better than I'm making it sound. I have a small quibble with it, but it's one of those quibbles that I can't be concise about so I have to spend a lot of words on a digression or two before getting to the nitpicky point.

( racism? bad. sexism? also bad. )

 

For posterity's sake: I wrote up a longish piece about why I take an optimistic interpretation of "Death's End" on Reddit here. These are all thoughts I've been turning around in my head for a while but I can be a bit insecure about posting my optimistic takes amid the Reddit dudebros, hopefully they are all too busy getting drunk for New Year's Eve to downvote it ;) But I had a comment to someone else's post with a tl;dr version of this that got a good response, so I finally got around to it.

Includes discussion of Douglas Hofstadter's analysis of the prisoner's dilemma, as previously seen here.

This is what I was afraid "Tress" was going to be.

Tress of the Emerald Sea: Sanderson pastiche of "The Princess Bride" (the movie at least, not necessarily the book)
The Frugal Wizard's Guide to Surviving Medieval England: Sanderson pastiche of "Project Hail Mary"
Yumi and the Nightmare Painter: Sanderson pastiche of "Your Name"
The Sunlit Man: Sanderson pastiche of a Brandon Sanderson book.

Guy running away from a group of people who want to kill him comes to tiny planet that has never known war because everyone is too busy running away from the sun to go pro at killing each other. A few people would like to become pros at killing each other. Unfortunately, the guy who has seized power because he loves the idea of having power proves to have all the flaws of people who love power.

The main character ("Nomad") mentions stuff like "storms" enough that we can figure he's from Roshar, the world of the Stormlight Archives. I figured it out, yay! He also frequently uses "tens" as a unit, where other people might say "dozens" or "twenty to thirty." Does he really not have a word for numbers bigger than ten? No, it's just that "ten" is the arc number from Roshar (the same way sixteen is in Mistborn), the magic-users come in ten classes, etc. Okay, fine.

He is a lot more scientifically literate than the locals, and spends a lot of time trying to figure out what's going on with their planet both in scientific and Cosmere terms. He's a decent enough person that he wants to do the right thing and protect them both from their tyrant and the planet itself, but he is also operating under some constraints because he once held a powerful weapon and it warped him, and also, he's...failed at his oaths?...so he's kind of given up on being a hero.

There is a lot of backstory involving "Auxiliary," the shardblade who he's magically bonded to, as well as the weapon he used to have, which he temporarily borrowed from Hoid (yes, again), and the people who are chasing him. All of this is hinted at in such a way that, because it was billed as "this is one for the Cosmere nerds, here's where it all comes together!" that I was spending the whole time going "okay, should I know who this is? Who was Auxiliary before he became a shardblade? Is this a name I recognize? I know who Kaladin, Dalinar, Adolin, a bunch of the main characters are, but...is Nomad someone I've met?"

The answers: Nomad is a character significantly more minor than these; the other stuff is not covered in Stormlight, so I'm not a dunce for not recognizing it. But to some extent, it feels like, it's too late, I've already formed that impression? Like, it's normal (although sometimes a cheap method) to hide/obscure characters' backstory until later on. But when you're Brandon Sanderson and juggling a gazillion intertextual Easter eggs and callbacks, it doesn't really feel fair to be like "oh haha never mind, Aux isn't someone you've met so far, don't worry about it."

The good news is, while Hoid shows up for like two chapters, he doesn't narrate.

tl;dr if you are on the fence about Sanderson (for some reason) and want to try a single-volume book to see if you like it, start with Tress. Don't start with this one.

Nonfiction book about the changes in writing, standardizing, and digitizing Mandarin Chinese over the 20th century. Occasionally dry but a lot of stuff I didn't know.

Excerpt from an 1875 report on telegraph wires (which were mostly foreign- owned and operated at that point): "The foreigners bury their telegraphic wires in the ground, burrowing through and forcing their way across in all four directions until the earth's veins are all but severed, making the burial sites vulnerable to wind and flood. How can this sit well on our conscience?"

Morse Code was designed for alphabetic writing systems; a letter in the Latin alphabet (without diacritics) can be represented as one to four dots and dashes, and an Arabic numeral gets a five-symbol code. To represent a character-based language like Chinese, telegraphers had to look up a character in a table that would represent it as four to six numerals, then reverse the process on the other end, which was much more laborious and expensive to send and receive.

Western-language telegraphy also involved a lot of codes and ciphers, both for classified military purposes and trying to get around telegraph pay-by-the-symbol pricing. An example of a historically known but very weak system would be the Caesar shift (ROT-n). If both parties have a matching codebook beforehand, then you can just send a short numerical code to express a precomposed sentence from the book. 214: "Composed and entirely resigned to the will of God." 7571: "You will rue the day if you do."

In 1875, Zhang Deyi became the first Chinese person to design a telegraphic table for Chinese, with a codebook consisting of 80 ten-by-ten grids, encoding 8000 characters. This allowed for quick Caesar-type encryption; you can shift every character by a predetermined amount.

In 1912, the international telegraphic community introduced delayed telegrams, as an alternative to the sneaky shortcuts people were taking to get around the pay-by-the-word rates. Delayed telegrams were sent up to 48 hours late, but at half price. However, users were required to use "plain language" rather than any codes or secret text. This created a problem for Chinese-language users, who were required to use numeric symbols, already costly and slow, to communicate. At an International Telegraphic Union conference in the 1920s, Wang Jingchun successfully advocated to make an exception in this case.

Where there's no alphabetical system, there's also no such thing as alphabetical order, so library science was also subject to subjectivity. "Bibliographic classification in China properly began in the first century B.C.E., and it was based on a perceived moral order. A Confucian scholar devised an elaborate scheme of seven main subject divisions--with thirty-eight subdivisions--prioritizing the Confucian classics first, with science and medicine--astronomy, geomancy, pharmacology, sexology, etc.--occupying the last two categories." (Compare Borges' Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge.)

The Wade-Giles Romanization system, which has mostly been replaced by modern pinyin (at least in mainland China), was based in part on a system used by a British officer named...Thomas Wade. (If you've read "Death's End," part 3 of the Three-Body Problem trilogy, you know why this is funny.) This brings us to the adventures of the famous Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den.

In jail during the Cultural Revolution, Zhi Bingyi started experimenting with different methods of character input in a computerized context; he had to write on the lid of his teacup because he didn't even have toilet paper. Hardcore.

Because there are so many characters, in the early days of computers, they couldn't be saved as raster/bitmap images because that would take too much memory. So they needed to be saved as vector images, and compressed/decompressed; Wang Xuan worked on this problem. Then there's the issue of standardizing character sets; ASCII only took seven bits (later eight), but was useful for American English and not much else (it's the telegraphy problem all over again!) So then Unicode came along, and rapidly became a big deal...

If you enjoy technology and/or linguistics, I think you'll get a lot out of this!

This is a recent release about two simultaneous and intertwined rivalries. In 1908-09, the US explorers Frederick Cook of "Belgica" fame, and Robert Peary, both journeyed in the Arctic, and returned--within a week of each other--claiming to have reached the North Pole. Cook's claim put him as the first, but Peary threw shade at him, drama ensued.

Meanwhile, among the many newspapers in New York City, the Herald and the Times were competing for market dominance. The more populist Herald had financially backed Cook, the more sedate/elitist Times supported Peary, and these newspaper battles inflamed the precedence battle.

The "alternating narratives" makes more sense here than it did for something like, say, Erik Larson's "Thunderstruck," which tries to interweave the decades-long story of Marconi's radio development with the much more zoomed-in story of a murder investigation--the timescales don't really mesh. But here, we can go back and forth between "the history of Arctic exploration" and "the history of newspapers in New York City" reasonably well.

-Fridtjof Nansen is definitely the greatest; as Hartman notes, "Tarnishing a great polar achievement by failing to record it properly was literally the stuff of Nansen's nightmares." From his diary:

-We spend plenty of time berating explorers themselves for being dumb, but sometimes their financial backers are actually the worst. James Gordon Bennett Jr., the Herald publisher, helped fund the Jeannette expedition, but deliberately misled that captain to believe that the Vega expedition was in more danger than it actually was, so he could heroically rescue them for The News. The Jeannette fell behind schedule and disaster ensued. Then the Greely expedition set out, in part to search for the Jeannette? (This is less clear, not every search result mentions a connection, but the book sort of implied one.) Anyway GUESS WHAT.

-Robert Bartlett, the hero of the Karluk, was Peary's ship captain and trekked with him to the 88th parallel.
-In the early years of New York City, most of the action was clustered at the southern tip of Manhattan Island (Wall Street, Trinity Church, etc.) A bunch of the newspapers were clustered here, in the so-called "Park Row"/"Newspaper Row" area. As newspapers and the city got bigger, they expanded north. In 1894, the Herald moved to Broadway and 34th Street, and that location became known as "Herald Square," as in, "give my regards to Broadway, remember me to Herald Square." Eleven years later, the Times moved six blocks north of the Herald, also on Broadway, and you can guess what they called their new neighborhood. This is one of those things I'm sure I heard at some point but didn't necessarily know know. Like, I visited New York a couple months ago, I zigzagged through all these train stations, so...yeah. Context.

-The end of Hartman's notes in the bibliography: