In case you missed it, a half-dozen of you wrote me to say that last week's 4-star article about Antarctic trekking was incredible. (Which it was.) ----- 3 stars ----- The Final, Terrible Voyage of the Nautilus / Wired Kim Wall went for a ride on a submarine, hoping to write a story about a maker of "extreme machines." She never did. I needed to know what happened. [...] Madsen christened the vessel the UC3 Nautilus, after the fictional submarine in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Jules Verne’s antihero Captain Nemo was a figure who lived outside social laws, sailing the seven seas in search of total freedom. Unlike Nemo, Madsen had stayed close to home in Denmark, but he had devoted his life to building audacious vehicles of his own design, ones that might venture high above the atmosphere or down into the depths of the ocean. [...] By most public accounts, Madsen was a charismatic rebel. He had a weathered face with the prominent features of a toy troll. His habitual uniform was coveralls and hiking boots. Fox, the filmmaker, calls him a “modern-day Clumsy Hans,” for the seemingly dimwitted suitor in the Hans Christian Andersen fairy-tale who wins the princess’s favor over his more intelligent brothers. Wall was in the early stages of her reporting, and she would not have known much more about Madsen than what had already been published. It was only later, after everything that happened, that the details of his private life would become important.
Links
Links
Links
In case you missed it, a half-dozen of you wrote me to say that last week's 4-star article about Antarctic trekking was incredible. (Which it was.) ----- 3 stars ----- The Final, Terrible Voyage of the Nautilus / Wired Kim Wall went for a ride on a submarine, hoping to write a story about a maker of "extreme machines." She never did. I needed to know what happened. [...] Madsen christened the vessel the UC3 Nautilus, after the fictional submarine in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Jules Verne’s antihero Captain Nemo was a figure who lived outside social laws, sailing the seven seas in search of total freedom. Unlike Nemo, Madsen had stayed close to home in Denmark, but he had devoted his life to building audacious vehicles of his own design, ones that might venture high above the atmosphere or down into the depths of the ocean. [...] By most public accounts, Madsen was a charismatic rebel. He had a weathered face with the prominent features of a toy troll. His habitual uniform was coveralls and hiking boots. Fox, the filmmaker, calls him a “modern-day Clumsy Hans,” for the seemingly dimwitted suitor in the Hans Christian Andersen fairy-tale who wins the princess’s favor over his more intelligent brothers. Wall was in the early stages of her reporting, and she would not have known much more about Madsen than what had already been published. It was only later, after everything that happened, that the details of his private life would become important.