LITERARY NARRATIVE: This passage is from the short story “Long Distance” by Alejandro Zambra.

Portillo was a good boss, a generous guy; I rarely saw him, sometimes only on the twenty-ninth, when I waited, with some stupendous circles under my eyes, to pick up my paycheck. What I remember most about him is his voice, so high-pitched, like a teenager’s—a common enough tone among Chileans but, for me, a disconcerting one to hear from a Spaniard. He would call me very early, at six or seven in the morning, so I could give him a report on what had happened the previous night, which was pretty much pointless because nothing ever happened, or almost nothing: maybe some call or other from Rome or Paris, simple cases from people who weren’t really sick but who wanted to make the most of the medical insurance they had bought in Santiago. My job was to listen to them, take down their information, make sure the policy was valid, and connect them to my counterparts in Europe.

Portillo lets me read or write, or even doze off, on the condition that I always answer the phone in good time. That’s why he called at six or seven—although, when he was out partying, he might call earlier. “The phone should never ring more than three times,” he would tell me if I took too long picking up. But he didn’t usually scold me; on the contrary, he was quite friendly. Sometimes he asked me what I was reading. I would say Paul Celan, or Emily Dickinson, or Emmanuel Bove, or Humberto Díaz Casanueva, and he always burst out laughing, as if he had just heard a very good and very unexpected joke.

One night, around four in the morning, I received a call from someone whose voice sounded mock-serious, or disguised, and I thought it was my boss pretending to be someone else. “I’m calling from Paris,” said the voice. The man was calling directly, which increased my feeling that it was a prank of Portillo’s, because clients usually reversed the charges when they called. Portillo and I had a certain level of trust between us, so I told him not to mess with me, that I was very busy reading. “I don’t understand, I’m calling from Paris,” the man responded. “Is this the number of the travel insurance?”

I apologized and asked him for his number so I could call him back. When we talked again I’d become the nicest phone operator on the planet, which wasn’t really necessary, because I’ve never been impolite, and because the man with the unrealistic voice was also unrealistically nice, which was not usual in that job: it was more common for clients to show their bad manners, their high-handedness, their habit of treating phone operators badly, and surely also laborers, cooks, salespeople, or any other of the many groups made up of their supposed inferiors.

Juan Emilio’s voice, on the other hand, suggested the possibility of a reasonable conversation, although I don’t know if reasonable is the word, because as I was taking down his information (fifty-five years old, home address in Lo Curro, no preexisting conditions) and checking his policy (his insurance had the best coverage available on the market), something in his voice made me think that, more than a doctor, he just needed someone to talk to, someone who would listen.

He told me he’d been in Europe for five months, most of that time in Paris, where his daughter—whom he called la Moño—was working on her doctorate and living with her husband—el Mati—and the kids. None of this was in response to my questions, but he was talking so enthusiastically that it was impossible for me to break in. He told me how the kids spoke French with charmingly correct accents, and he also threw in a few commonplace observations about Paris. By the time he started talking to me about the difficulties la Moño had been having lately meeting her academic obligations, about the complexity of the doctoral programs, and about what kind of sense parenthood made in a world like this one (“a world that sometimes seems so strange nowadays, so different,” he told me), I realized we’d been talking for almost forty minutes. I had to interrupt him and respectfully ask him to tell me why he was calling. He told me he was a little under the weather, and he’d had a fever. I typed up the fax and sent it to the office in Paris so they could coordinate the case, and then I started the long process of saying good-bye to Juan Emilio, who fell all over himself in apologies and politeness before finally accepting that the conversation had ended.

Back then I’d picked up a few evening hours teaching at the technical training institute. The schedule fit perfectly.

SOCIAL SCIENCE: This passage is from the book On the Map: A Mind-Expanding Exploration of the Way the World Looks by Simon Garfield.

We are now sure—because we have seen it on maps—that California is firmly attached to Oregon, Arizona and Nevada. Even south of San Diego, when it eventually becomes the Mexican state of Baja California,  it is firmly hitched to the mainland.  But in  1622, something untoward happened. After eighty-one years officially attached to a huge landmass, California drifted free. It wasn’t a radical act of political will, nor a single mistake (a slip of an engraver, perhaps), but a sustained act of cartographic misjudgment. Stranger still, the error continued to appear on maps long after navigators had tried to sail entirely around it and—with what must have been a sense of utter bafflement— failed.

The name California first appeared on a map in 1541. It was drawn as part of Mexico by Domingo del Castillo—a pilot on an expedition by Hernando de Álarcón—and it is shown as a peninsula and labeled. Its first appearance on a printed map occurred in 1562,  when the Spanish pilot and instrument maker Diego Gutierrez again wrote its name at the tip of a peninsula, a very minor detail on a busy and very beautiful engraving of the New World. The map, the largest then made of the region at 107 x 104 cm, may have been engraved after Gutierrez’s death by Hieronymus Cock, an artist who clearly took great delight in imaginative trappings: huge ships and legends populate its seas, with Poseidon driving horses on a seaworthy chariot, and a huge gorilla-type creature breaking the waves while it dines on a fish.

California subsequently appeared attached to the mainland for sixty years. And then off it floated into the Pacific, where it remained a cartographic island for more than two centuries.

Its first known insular appearance occurred in 1622, on an inset on a title page of a Spanish volume entitled Historia General. Two years later it was drifting free, bounded by the Mar Vermeio and Mar Del Zur on a Dutch map by Abraham Goos. But it received its  most prominent currency on a London map of 1625 entitled “The North Part of America.” This accompanied an article about the search for the Northwest Passage by the mathematician Henry Briggs. He supplemented the great untracked northerly spaces toward the Arctic with text describing the wonders of his map, “Containing Newfoundland, New England, Virginia, Florida, New Spain and upon West the large and goodly land of California.” On the eastern seaboard both Plymouth and Cape Cod are placed in Massachusetts, but not yet Boston.

The misconception persisted for decades. It was the seventeenth century’s forerunner to a mistake on Wikipedia—doomed to be repeated in a thousand school essays until a bright spark noticed it and dared 55 to make amends. Compiling a paper for the California Map Society in 1995, Glen McLaughlin and Nancy H. Mayo cataloged 249 separate maps (not including world maps) which cast the Golden State adrift. Their names carry bold assertions, with no wiggle room: “A New and Most Exact map of America” claimed one, while another promised “America drawn from the latest and best Observations.” Between 1650 and 1657, the French historian Nicolas Sanson published several maps that showed California as an island, and their translations into Dutch and German ensured that they superseded Briggs as the most influential myth-makers for half a century. But they also promoted newer, truer discoveries, including the first cartographic depiction of all five Great Lakes.

Even when new maps were published showing California attached to the mainland, the island kept on appearing. In the end, though, it was killed off by a royal decree issued by Ferdinand VII of Spain in 1747, which denied the possibility of this Northwest Passage with the reasonably   clear   statement:   “California   is not an Island.” Yet news traveled slowly. California appeared as an island on a map made in Japan as late as 1865.

And how did it all begin? The cartographical point zero has been tracked to a Carmelite friar named Antonio de la Acensión who sailed with Sebastian Vizcaino along the West Coast in 1602–3 and kept a journal. Two decades later he is believed to have mapped his trip on paper, which featured California as an island nation. The map was sent to Spain, but the ship on which it traveled was captured by the Dutch, and it ended its journey in Amsterdam. In 1622, Henry Briggs wrote of seeing this map of California in London. And shortly afterward, the map drawn from the one “taken by Hollanders' was set in copper and began its journey through the world.

HUMANITIES: This passage is from the book Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet by Jennifer Homans.

I never thought of ballet as anything but contemporary, a here-and-now art. Even the oldest of ballets are of necessity performed by young people and take on the look of their generation. Besides, unlike theater or music, ballet has no texts and no standardized notation, no scripts or scores, and only the most scattered written records; it is unconstrained by tradition and the past. Choreographer George Balanchine encouraged this idea. In countless interviews, he explained that ballets are here and gone, like flowers or butterflies, and that dance is an ephemeral art of the present; carpe diem. The point, he seemed to be saying, was not to bring back old musty dances such as Swan Lake: it was to “make it new.” For the dancers, however, this was a paradoxical injunction: history was all around us—in our teachers and the dances, but also in Balanchine’s own ballets, many of which were suffused with memories and a Romantic ethos. But we nonetheless made a cult of never looking back, of setting our sights resolutely on the present.

And yet it is because ballet has no fixed texts because it is an oral and physical tradition, a story-telling art passed on, like Homer’s epics, from person to person, that it is more and not less rooted in the past. For it does have texts, even if these are not written down: dancers are required to master steps and variations, rituals and practices. These may change or shift over time, but the process of learning, performing and passing them on remains deeply conservative. When an older dancer shows a step or a variation to a younger dancer, the ethics of the profession mandate strict obedience and respect: both parties rightly believe that a form of superior knowledge is passing between them. I never for a moment, for example, questioned the steps or style Alexandra Danilova conveyed when she taught us variations from The Sleeping Beauty: we clung to her every movement. The teachings of the master are revered for their beauty and logic, but also because they are the only connection the younger dancer has to the past—and she knows it. It is these relationships, the bonds between master and student that bridge the centuries and give ballet its foothold in the past.

Ballet, then, is an art of memory, not history. No wonder dancers obsessively memorize everything: steps, gestures, combinations, variations, whole ballets. It is difficult to overstate this. Memory is central to the art, and dancers are trained, as the ballerina Natalia Makarova once put it, to “eat” dances—to ingest them and make them part of who they are. These are physical memories; when dancers know a dance, they know it in their muscles and bones. Recall is sensual and brings back not just the steps but also the gestures and feel of the movement, the “perfume,” as Danilova said, of the dance—and the older dancer. Thus ballet repertory is not recorded in books or libraries: it is held instead in the bodies of dancers. Most ballet companies even appoint special “memorizers”—dancers whose prodigious recall sets them apart from their peers—to store its works: they are ballet’s scribes (and pedants) and they keep whole oeuvres in their limbs, synchronized (usually) to music that triggers the muscles and helps to bring back the dance. But even dancers with superlative memories are mortal, and with each passing generation, ballet loses a piece of its past.

As a result, the ballet repertory is notoriously thin. The “classics” are few and the canon is small. We have only a handful of past ballets, most of which originated in nineteenth-century France or late Imperial Russia. The rest are relatively new: twentieth- and twenty-first-century works. There is some record of seventeenth-century court dances, but the notation system recording these dances died out in the eighteenth century and has never been fully replaced. These court dances are thus an isolated snapshot; the before and after are missing. The rest is spotty and full of holes. One might suppose that French ballet would be well preserved: the fundamental precepts of classical ballet were codified in seventeenth-century France and the art form has enjoyed an unbroken tradition there to the present day. But we have almost nothing. La Sylphide premiered in Paris in 1832, but that version was soon forgotten: the version we know today originated in Denmark in 1836. Coppélia, from 1870, is in fact the only nineteenth-century French ballet still widely performed in its (more or less) original form.

NATURAL SCIENCE: Passage A is from the article “Just Add Water” by Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams. Passage B is from the article “Plate Tectonics Spotted on Europa” by Thomas Sumner.

Passage A by Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams

A look at our neighbors Mars and Venus shows how lucky Earth has been. They too had surface water in the early days, perhaps even large oceans. On frozen Mars today we see ancient shorelines more than 3 billion years old, and detect clays formed in water. Soon, though, Mars lost most of its atmosphere and protective magnetic field, and its water vapor leaked away. Venus is an inferno surrounded by suffocating clouds of sulphuric acid now, but probe measurements show it too once had abundant liquid water, until rising levels of water vapor and carbon dioxide led to a runaway greenhouse effect that boiled it off.

What made Earth different? The key is probably plate tectonics. The movement of segments of Earth’s uppermost layer is unique, we think, among the rocky planets of the solar system. They crash against each other, buckling, rising or driving down into the planet’s hot mantle. There is some evidence such tectonics tried to start up on Mars, but if so it didn’t last long. On Earth, it has created natural depressions: ocean basins, underlain by dense newly forming crust, that hold deeper waters; and shallow seas on the lighter, more ancient crust of the continents. The bottom of these containers is cracked at the subduction zones where water-soaked plates slide down into the mantle. That water is mostly wrung back out to emerge as volcanic steam in mountain ranges.

This constant cycling of water, and the unlikely coexistence of wet and dry surfaces is, it turns out, crucial. Water evaporating from the oceans condenses as rain and chemically attacks the land, modulating atmospheric composition and global temperature. The atmosphere thus formed has a lid—a “cold trap” made by the chill of the stratosphere—that freezes water vapor out and stops it escaping into space. Below this lid, almost uncannily, all three phases of water—solid, liquid and gas—coexist almost all of the time: the only planetary surface known where this has been sustained for any long period.

To complete this remarkable planetary machine, plate tectonics itself needs water to function: water lubricates descending tectonic plates and softens mantle minerals so they melt more easily. Geochemist Francis Albarède of the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Lyon, France, thinks that water’s arrival from outer space kick-started the plate-tectonic motor 3 billion   years ago.

Passage B by Thomas Sumner

Plate tectonics churns the icy exterior of Jupiter’s moon Europa, researchers reported in 2014. The finding marks the first evidence of plate tectonics beyond  Earth.

“Earth is not unique—we’ve found another body in the solar system with plate tectonics,” says planetary scientist Simon Kattenhorn of the University of Idaho in Moscow. “This tells us that this process can happen on more than just rocky planets like Earth.”

Previous observations have seen surface reshaping, such as volcanic activity, on other planetary bodies including Saturn’s moon Titan. However, Kattenhorn says, Europa is the first found with a patchwork of drifting tectonic plates.

The rising and sinking ice slabs on Europa’s surface may provide a mechanism for nutrients to move from the moon’s surface to its subsurface ocean, Kattenhorn argues. Such transport would bolster the likelihood that this ocean hosts life. Astrobiologist Britney Schmidt of Georgia Tech in Atlanta says the mechanism is “very exciting for Europa’s chances for supporting life.”

Though the moon formed over 4 billion years ago, at the same time as the rest of the solar system, Europa’s icy surface is surprisingly young. Based on the moon’s small number of impact craters, scientists estimate Europa’s surface to be just 40 million to 90 million years old. Dark bands crisscross the moon where warm, fresh ice wells up to the frigid surface, but a mystery remains: Where is the old material?

Two years ago, Kattenhorn and coauthor Louise Prockter of Johns Hopkins University spotted something odd as they scoured a Louisiana-sized portion of Europa mapped by NASA’s Galileo spacecraft in 1998. In the moon’s northern hemisphere, a 20,000-square- kilometer chunk of landscape was missing. Like a torn photograph placed so that the pieces overlap, Europa’s crisscrossing surface fractures didn’t properly line up.

The researchers propose that this discrepancy marks where two massive ice slabs smashed together, with one sinking under the other and blending into the moon’s warmer interior ice. The action resembles a subduction zone on Earth, where one slab of crust—or tectonic plate—slides beneath another.