February 2007

She was perhaps the most beautiful ocean liner ever built. Her three funnels (the aftmost a dummy) were raked and diminished in size from fore to aft. This gave her the sleek, powerful, forward-driving look that was the essence of the art deco style that so inspired her interior design. And in her time she was both the largest and the fastest ship afloat, the only French liner to hold the Blue Riband for the fastest Atlantic crossing. But less than seven years after her maiden voyage, the Normandie suffered a horrible death at her berth on Manhattan’s West Side, 65 years ago today.

Built at St. Nazaire, where the Loire River reaches the Atlantic, she was launched in 1932, the wife of the President of the Third French Republic breaking one of the world’s largest bottles of champagne across her bow at the ceremony. At 1,030 feet, she was the first ocean liner to exceed 1,000 feet in length. With a beam of 118 feet, she was too wide for the Panama Canal. Her four screws, powered by turbo-electric engines, drove her at over 30 knots.

On October 3, 2005, communities at the mouth of the Columbia River, near Astoria, Oregon, were getting ready to mark the bicentennial of Lewis and Clark’s 1805 arrival at the Pacific Ocean, with the festivities just weeks away, when an accidental fire destroyed the 1955 replica of the expedition’s encampment, Fort Clatsop.

Eleven years ago today, on February 8, 1996, 150 photojournalists across the globe joined to document the vast and vaguely defined new thing called “cyberspace.” Over 24 hours, they photographed Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn working on a website, lanky-haired Dutch twentysomethings smoking hashish in Internet cafes, and a robed Coptic monk clutching a laptop in an Egyptian desert to write e-mails to schoolchildren in Michigan.

It has all the hallmarks of an urban legend. A Midwestern state (which one varies with the telling) was so unsophisticated that its legislature once passed a law declaring the value of the mathematical constant pi to be 4 (or 3, or 3.2, or some other simple, exact number) instead of, as every urban sophisticate knows (not!), 3.14159. Unlike some urban legends, there is a kernel of truth to this tale—wrapped in a whole lot of condescension.

Pi is a very simple concept, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. It is crucial to determining most mathematical relationships involving circles and other curves. It is also crucial to solving the ancient problem of “squaring the circle,” constructing with only a compass and a straightedge a square whose area is exactly equal to that of a given circle. What is fascinating about pi is its propensity for suddenly showing up in the solution to problems that have nothing (apparently) to do with curves, such as problems in statistics and probability.

Twenty-eight years ago today, on February 1, 1979, four million people surged onto the streets of Tehran to celebrate a momentous homecoming. After 15 years in exile, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned to Iran that day to lead a revolution that sent tremors around the globe.

The average Iranian had good reason to celebrate, despite what the subsequent decades have taught the world about the returning hero. Khomeini’s flight from Paris landed just days after Iran’s longtime head of state, Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, fled his brutal monarchy. Life under the shah’s government, a police state with a Western veneer, had offered most Iranians little hope, and the exiled ayatollah had become the center of almost messianic expectations. Poets predicted, “When the Imam returns, Iran—this broken, wounded mother—will forever be liberated.” Of course, Khomeini hardly brought the people of Iran the liberation they so badly needed.