I ♥ The NYer

April 27, 2008

Write now (ha ha, I made a literary joke!) i’m totally into my New Yorkers.

Especially at the gym, which i’ve mentioned before. The elliptical… you know what I mean.

This last week I read the article A Dip in the Cold, by Lynne Cox, about her latest long distance swim through the Northwest Passage near Greenland. It was so completely entralling, gripping, intriguing.

It was featured in the Travel issue (called “Journeys”)– always one of my favorites from the magazine. This is the issue where various writers contribute stories/essays about travel and geography both physical and emotional. This is where I found the essays by Mary Gordon and Nicole Krauss that I teach in my Creative Writing classes.

I love how Cox weaves the amazing history about some of our most notorious explorers, like William Perry, John Ross, and especially Norwegian Roald Amundsen, throughout her own story of swimming through these freezing waters, bumping against jelly fish and with the fear and knowledge that she is the prey of other deadly animals. The last few pages had me completely in their grip:

I paused mid-stroke when I noticed a scarlet jellyfish the size of an apple moving towards me. The tentacles, fire read and thick as spaghetti strands, trailed behind;they were six or seven feet long and I knew that they would hurt if I touched them. As I swerved right, my left hand grazed the dome and I recoiled. Staring down into the sea, I saw hundreds of these red jellyfish. They were beautiful–like flowers blossoming in an underwater garden–and terrifying. I pulled my hands in tight under my body, trying to get higher in the water so that I wouldn’t get stung.

Eeesh!

Today, while doing my 25 minutes on the elliptical, I read about the Penny– the article from the March 31 issue of NYer, titled Penny Dreadful, by David Owen. Such a great essay about, what else, the penny (as the subtitle states: America’s Most Annoying and Useless Coin).

I loved this piece. Come on–the history of the Penny! What’s not to love? It also introduced me to the term–

Seigniorage:  The difference between the value of money and the cost to produce it - in other words, the economic cost of producing a currency within a given economy or country. If the seigniorage is positive, then the government will make an economic profit; a negative seigniorage will result in an economic loss.

Seigniorage may be counted as revenue for a government when the money that is created is worth more than it costs to produce it. This revenue is often used by governments to finance a portion of their expenditures without having to collect taxes. If, for example, it costs the U.S. government $0.05 to produce a $1 bill, the seigniorage is $0.95, or the difference between the two amounts.

Brilliant!