Frank Jacobs:

Over the centuries, the high seas have served as blank canvas for cartographers’ worst nightmares. They have dotted the globe’s oceans with a whole crypto-zoo of island-sized whales, deadly seductive mermaids, giant sea serpents, and many more heraldic horrors. As varied as this marine bestiary is, mapmakers have settled on a single species as their favourite for land-based beastliness: the octopus.
Real octopi are sea creatures, of course. But the Cartographic Land Octopus – CLO for short – need not worry about being in the right ecosphere. Being fictional, it is not restrained to any biosphere, and has only one iconic function: instilling readers with fear and revulsion. The CLO does have a link to the ocean, though. It is clearly descended from an older fictional monstrosity: the Kraken, a sea-bound giant squid whose enormous tentacles dragged whole ships down to their watery graves.

David Feith:

Ahmed Altaie and Bowe Bergdahl—one born 1965 in Baghdad, the other two decades later in Hailey, Idaho—wouldn’t seem to have much in common. But this weekend, as Americans take to beaches and barbeques to celebrate our independence, Messrs. Altaie and Bergdahl share a unique, practically unknown bond: They are the only two U.S. soldiers currently held captive as prisoners of war.

Over the past decade, the U.S. has deployed more than two million troops abroad, with hundreds of thousands in war zones at any one time. Yet in a sign of how much warfare has changed since the time of Thucydides, Grant or even Westmoreland, prisoners of war in Afghanistan and Iraq have been few in number and low in profile. Today there is one in each theater, an unusual symmetry that seems to magnify the solitude and difficulty of their plights.

Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl has been a captive of the Taliban for two years, since June 30, 2009. He was a 23-year-old private at the time, about a half-year into his first deployment. The circumstances of his capture remain murky, but one way or another he fell into enemy hands in rural Paktika province, a mountainous region along Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan.

Frank Rich:

“SOMETHING ROTTEN: Obama’s failure to right the wrongs of the crash has haunted his presidency, and could undo it”: “What haunts the Obama administration is what still haunts the country: the stunning lack of accountability for the greed and misdeeds that brought America to its gravest financial crisis since the Great Depression. There has been no legal, moral, or financial reckoning for the most powerful wrongdoers. Nor have there been meaningful reforms that might prevent a repeat catastrophe. … Chronic unemployment remains a constant, painful reminder of the havoc inflicted on the bust’s innocent victims. … For all the lurid fantasies of the birthers, … the values of Harvard, not of Kenya or Indonesia or Bill Ayers, have most colored his governing style. He falls hard for the best and the brightest white guys.”

Insider dealing continues, unabated.

Leander Kahney:

As my colleague Mike Elgan points out, the iPhone has changed the world in profound ways.

Now an ex-colleague, Brian Chen of Wired.com, has just published one of the first books to take an in-depth look at how, exactly, the smartphone world is shaping up.

Always On: How the iPhone Unlocked the Anything-Anytime-Anywhere Future — and Locked Us In is an excellent overview of how the iPhone is changing the computing landscape.

I follow Apple closely, yet I was surprised at how much I learned about the world of mobile from Chen’s well-reported book (Full disclosure: I provided a blurb).