Salon.com > letters

Ricin: The KGB and white supremacists’ favorite toxin

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 19:21:00 +0000

While it’s never been as popular among evildoers as anthrax or other biological agents, ricin, the toxin believed to be contained in at least three letters sent to officials in Washington this week, including the president, is nasty and lethal in its own right. There’s no known antidote, it’s relatively easy to manufacture, and it's deadly in small quantities, rapidly destroying the functioning of the nervous system, with effects similar to those of sarin.

The U.S. government first investigated potential offensive uses of ricin, which can be rendered from a byproduct of castor oil, during World War I as a coating for bullets, and then during World War II for deployment in cluster bombs, but it was never weaponized on a mass scale as the military found other agents more effective. And while doses the size of a grain of salt can kill you, that’s still far bigger than the lethal dosage of agents like anthrax or the toxin that causes botulism.

J: The sexiest letter

Sun, 07 Apr 2013 18:59:00 +0000

Less than 1 percent of English words start with J, a minor letter with an odd shape and few other distinctions. Except when it comes to sex. Then J is jumping, one might even say jolly and juicy.

Leadbelly sang about Jumping Judy:

Well, jumping Little Judy, she was a mighty fine girl.
Judy brought jumping to this whole round world

Dylan Thomas liked to get juiced and tell the prettiest girl at the party, "I want to jump your bones."

J has some weird sexual je-ne-sais-quoi mojo, some humor (jests, jibes, jokes, jocularity), some sweetness (jams and jellies, Jujubes and Jujifruit) and some heat (joules).

Mick Jagger just sounds randy. And mint julep just sounds debauched, as The Clovers revealed in the 1952 hit "One Mint Julep":

I didn't know what I was doin'
I had to marry all day screwing ...
One mint julep was the cause of it all.

Love letters from Georgia O’Keeffe

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 16:08:00 +0000

The love letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz number upwards of 25,000. It’s such a prolific amount, it makes you marvel that they had any time at all to live the lives they did. The first published volume of their correspondence is some 700 pages, and it captures all the intimacies and intangibles one suffers for, because of, or in spite of love. It is also a valuable source of art history, self-help, bad spelling, and indulgent use of the em dash.

My Faraway One, as the volume is called, titled after an oft-used sobriquet of theirs, encapsulates a way of looking at the world that speaks directly to the art O’Keeffe and Stieglitz produced. The book is an expression of the indelible influence they had upon each other, and upon modern art.