Word: weightlessness
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...first thing you notice when your plane suddenly begins to drop is that you're becoming weightless. For those who like roller coasters, the sensation may not be too bad. Quickly, however, zero-G can become negative-G, meaning anything not fastened or seat-belted down will slam into the ceiling. Food trays get tossed, cutlery gets flung, carry-ons fly up as tray tables bang down. After a few seconds the plane stabilizes, and anything--or anyone--stuck to the ceiling crashes to the floor. Another case of midair turbulence is quickly over...
...note the Beatles reference) sold more than 2 million copies around the globe. Yet none of his earlier books prepare one for his massive new The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Knopf; 611 pages; $25.95), which digs relentlessly into the buried secrets of Japan's recent past to explain the weightless, desultory disconnections of a virtual society where nothing feels real and nobody really feels...
Across the Atlantic, the FBI waited. In Philadelphia a low-level bureaucrat named Richard DiBenedetto dangled, weightless with anticipation. For 16 years, across five countries, the Philadelphia district attorney's fugitive-and-extradition chief had hunted the man called Mallon with an obsession that would have impressed Captain Ahab. His name was not Eugene Mallon, as he had conned the French villagers into believing. Nor was he a British writer who had settled in remotest France for quiet inspiration. He was an American fugitive named Ira Einhorn, a man who had risen to fame during the late 1960s and early...
DIED. JACQUES-YVES COUSTEAU, 87, prophet of the depths; in Paris. Cousteau co-invented the Aqua-Lung, the first scuba-diving device, in 1943. Weightless and wide-eyed, he recorded the watery wilderness he encountered in The Silent World, a 1953 best seller and Oscar-winning documentary. He aspired higher than the earthly titles he collected over the years (author, filmmaker, environmentalist), writing "Under water, man becomes an archangel." (See Eulogy below...
...only to rise in bleary frustration when the detonator fizzled. Finally, they blew themselves to kingdom come. For them that would be the star Sirius, in the constellation Canis Major, nine light-years from Quebec. According to the doctrines of the Solar Temple, they will reign there forever, weightless and serene...