The Who2 Blog

Harvard formally installs its first female president today. She is Drew Gilpin Faust — Civil War historian, former dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and thrillseeker.

Al Gore is going to Oslo.The former vice-president has been awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize for Peace. He shares the prize with the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.The Nobel committee calls Gore “probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding” of climate change and the measures needed to combat it.

October 16th is the 40th anniversary of the Vietnam war protest in which 67 American draft resisters burned their Selective Service cards at Boston’s Arlington Street Church (Unitarian). 214 more protesters placed their draft cards on offering plates held by ministers, including Yale chaplain William Sloane Coffin.

Quirky (but Oscar-winning!) director Errol Morris has an irregular feature in The New York Times titled Zoom, in which he muses about photographs and their power to inspire or mislead.

The mysterious case of Steve Fossett has us looking through our Who2 case files of oddities: missing rafters, nutty hypnosis subjects, elusive mountain critters, and the like.Which bring us to the Boy in the Box, otherwise known as the Fox Chase Boy and certainly one of the oddest unsolved crime mysteries of 20th century America.

Aviator Steve Fossett remains missing in Nevada. It’s now been one month since he disappeared after leaving on a three hour tour from an airstrip near Reno.

It’s the 50th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik, the event that excitable physicist Edward Teller called “A greater defeat for our country than Pearl Harbor.”

A sugar maple tree that gave shade to poet Robert Frost has been cut down. The tree was rotting from the inside, alas. Frost and the tree cohabited on his farm in Derry, New Hampshire from 1900-1911. The sugar maple may (or may not) have inspired one of Frost’s more ethereal poems, Tree At My Window.

Larry Craig isn’t leaving the Senate after all. Not yet, anyway.The Idaho senator said three weeks ago that he intended to resign on September 30th, after stories leaked out about his quiet guilty plea to a June arrest for soliciting sex in a Minneapolis airport restroom. But Craig later backtracked, saying he would try to take back his guilty plea and might stay in the Senate if he succeeded in doing so.

The official search for adventurer Steve Fossett has been suspended.His friends still hold out hope — though as one put it, “‘It certainly doesn’t look promising’ is an understatement.”

Hooray! The New York Times will now stop charging for access to much of its content.The change takes effect Tuesday night — two years after The Times started its ‘Times Select’ subscription service. Regular stories used to go behind the subscription wall after a week of availability online.Money quote from the article: “The business model for advertising revenue, versus subscriber revenue, [has become] so much more attractive.”

Adventurer Steve Fossett is still missing. And the Amelia Earhart comparisons have started.

What is the true birth name of Nelson Mandela?Hint: It’s not Nelson.[[wysiwyg_imageupload:1308:]]

The Toronto Star’s colorful remembrance of First Ex Jane Wyman ends this way: “In person, Wyman sported the earthy language of a longshoreman. She carried her pack of Kent cigarettes with her everywhere.”

Oscar-winning actress Jane Wyman has died at age 93.Wyman was the first wife of actor Ronald Reagan, who went on to become America’s first divorced president. Reagan and Wyman were married from 1940-48. Reagan married another actress, Nancy Davis, in 1952.

The Amazon Mechanical Turk page is asking Internet users to help scan satellite photos for Steve Fossett’s plane.Welcome to the 21st century.Fossett’s official site also has updates on the search.

Aviator Steve Fossett is still missing in Nevada, and the headlines are getting grimmer.

The BBC has transcript excerpts from the latest Osama Bin Laden video.

The headlines are turning grimmer for Steve Fossett, the adventurer and pilot who’s been missing in the Nevada desert since Monday.

Luciano Pavarotti has died of pancreatic cancer at age 71.Bloomberg calls him the “most famous opera tenor since Caruso,” and that sums things up pretty well.That Bloomberg obit is full of good quotes, including his former manager calling him “a rock star for people over 30,” and rock star Bono saying “Some can sing opera; Luciano Pavarotti was an opera.”