Happy Birthday to The New Yorker

 The 100th anniversary issue of The New Yorker is now out. The cover date is “Feb. 17 & 24, 2025.” Excepted for the cover price (15¢ instead of $9.99) and date (“February 21, 1925¨) the cover seen on the newsstands duplicates that of the first issue. The anniversary issue also carries a stylized and centered “100” below the masthead. The current issue, we are informed is “VOLUME CI, NO. 1.”

I discovered The New Yorker in my college days and have been a subscriber for most of the time since then. Once my son married, my annual anniversary gift has been a subscription to the magazine.

I must confess that, upon receiving the magazine, whether electronically or physically, I first search out the cartoons. In doing so, however, I sometimes pause to read an article I cannot pass up before completing my cartoon-reading first pass through the issue.

Appropriately, current editor David Remnick has written “Comment” at the top of “The Talk of the Town” titled “Onward and Upward.” I recommend reading Remnick’s brief history of the magazine. It is both informative and occasionally quite humorous. Samples:

• “At home, [Harold] Ross [first editor of the magazine] and [wife Jane] Grant looked for inspiration by riffling through piles of magazines both defunct and funct … .” (This sent me to the dictionary. “Funct” is not really an English word, but it is a reasonable back-formation from “defunct.”)
  
• “Ross implored Dorothy Parker to come to the office and write something. Parker replied that she had dropped by, but ‘somebody was using the pencil.’”

Oxalis Flowers

I have been raising oxalis for 50 years. I have often taken photos of complete plants. Such pictures usually look like an explosion of leaves (green or purple) and flowers (white or lavender). Only today did I think of taking a close-up of oxalis flowers. The result can be seen below. I’m pleased with the result.

Multiple flowers branch off from a single stalk. The flowers are about an inch wide.

Software

Increasingly, I am encountering advertisements describing a particular computer program (or, more commonly, a phone program) as a software. One might hear of  “a powerful software” or “a convenient software.” This is not the traditional use of the word “software,” and it is an unfortunate neologism. I have been dealing with software for six decades, and I find this new way of using the word jarring.

What is software? Software is the stuff used with hardware to make computing devices work. Software is the collection of instructions that tell computers and computer-like devices what to do. Hardware, on the other hand, is the physical machinery that carries out software instructions. To be useful, those instructions are collected into programs for a particular purpose.

Traditionally, programs for computers are either applications or operating systems. Applications (“apps” on phones and, increasingly on computers) do useful work for users. Examples are Chrome, Word, Acrobat Reader, etc. Operating systems control the hardware, making it easy to control applications. Examples are Windows, iOS, Android, etc. (The earliest computers lacked operating systems and were exceedingly difficult to use.)

Applications are the entities sometimes being called softwares. But applications are made from software. Calling an application a software is like calling a short bridge a “concrete.” Perhaps a more useful analogy is to be found in underwear. People put on their underwear; they don’t don their underwears. If I buy T-shirts or briefs, I am buying underwear, not underwears.

Please don’t try to expand the meaning of “software.” Doing so is not useful.

Existential Dread

I signed up for the Clifton Springs Library book club the other day. We meet Thursday to discuss this month’s book, The Booklover’s Library by Madeline Martin. The early chapters of the book are set in Nottingham, England, in 1939, where residents are preparing their houses and persons for a war they hope will not come. In Chapter 5, however, England declares war on Germany, and the prospect of wartime catastrophe is suddenly no longer theoretical.

I had never thought about England’s domestic actions before entering World War II, a disaster that was both anticipated and prepared for. On this day when President Donald Trump imposed tariffs on our nearest neighbors and biggest trading partners to extort actions from them he deems desirable, it was difficult not to feel the sort of dread felt by Ms. Martin’s characters. Like them, I was fearing a second Trump administration before January 20,  but that catastrophe is now upon us and will be for some time to come. Without reading the rest of the book, of course, I know that England survives. I am less certain about the the United States.