Random Precision

Stephen Fry meditates on the subject of writing (and writes about it, of course):

I began writing seriously when I was about thirteen. Out streamed poetry, stories and novels, the latter of which were always aborted early, usually half way through the second chapter. It took my friend Douglas Adams to encourage me to go further and he did this by pointing out that the reason I had never managed to finish a novel was that I had never properly understood how difficult, how ragingly and absurdly difficult, it is to do. “It is almost impossibly hard,” he told me. It is supposed to be. But once you truly understand how difficult it is,” he added, with signature paradoxicality, “it all becomes a lot easier.” It was many years later that Clive James quoted to me Thomas Mann’s superb crystallisation of this “A writer,” said Mann, “is a person for whom writing is more difficult than for other people.”

via Emerging into the Light « The New Adventures of Stephen Fry.

One of the greatest men of our time, a man who saved more lives than Hitler or even Stalin destroyed, has passed away.

Borlaug solved that challenge by developing genetically unique strains of “semidwarf” wheat, and later rice, that raised food yields as much as sixfold. The result was that a country like India was able to feed its own people as its population grew from 500 million in the mid-1960s, when Borlaug’s “Green Revolution” began to take effect, to the current 1.16 billion. Today, famines—whether in Zimbabwe, Darfur or North Korea—are politically induced events, not true natural disasters.

via Norman Borlaug: The Man Who Fed the World – WSJ.com.

An in-depth story about the man by Penn & Teller.

Edit: Andrew Steele at the Globe And Mail contributes his thoughts on Borlaug’s passing.