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The poem "To the Cuckoo Paper Wasp" by Robyn Schiff is presented. First Line: The first crisp tool in a small set of; Last Line: choice.

The article captures moments before Molly's suicide, detailing a visit to the High Museum, recounting emotional experiences, expressions and a significant photograph taken at the museum. It reflects on feelings, interactions and a sense of regret after her death, leaving the writer in a state of profound sadness and longing.

I am an academic call girl. I write college kids' papers for a living. Term papers, book reports, senior theses, take-home exams. My 'specialties': art history and sociology, international relations [...]

Paleontology, the study of old things, can have the whole world for subject matter. In PAPER BEFORE PRINT: THE HISTORY AND IMPACT OF PAPER IN THE ISLAMIC WORLD (Yale University [...]

Paper moons If the physical environment is the earth, the world of ideas corresponds to the heavens. We sleep under the light of stars that have long since ceased to [...]

For many Native American tribes, the success of their gambling operations ends a run of misfortune and dispossession that dates back to when white men first dubbed them Indians. Since [...]

Excerpts are presented from the memoir "The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict," by Austin Reed, "Living on Paper," a collection of Iris Murdoch's letters and posts on online social networks NextDoor and Glenfriends by residents of Oakland, California on Christmas presents.

By Ron Carlson. Carlson read this story at San Francisco State University in April. He is the author of four works of fiction,including Plan B for the Middle Class, a [...]

From lines overheard at the Intelligent Printing & Packaging Conference, held last October in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, posted to the blog of science fiction author Bruce Sterling at Wired.com. [...]

Presents information on several memos that were exchanged among British doctors and civil servants on the subject of government-issue toilet paper. Request of a patient to change the paper; Classification of the paper; Revision of the British Standard Guidance for Large-Scale Purchasing of Toilet Paper.

We might have expected it in France, in Germany, or in japan. But is America, the land built and sustained by immigrants, also becoming intolerant of them? Is that the [...]

The article explores Almost every day Grandma gets a call about someone she knows being dead. You can tell because she pours herself an extra schluck of wine to watch the Raptors and she stares at me for long stretches and quotes poetry at me even though I'm not doing anything, just sitting there watching the game with her. Dead men naked they shall be one/With the man in the wind and the west moon.

The article presents an excerpt from the book "Paper Empire: William Gaddis and the World System," edited by Joseph Tabbi and Rone Shavers.

The poem "Paper Moon" by Jana Prikryl is presented. First Line: A question of whether I'd stick with the plan; Last Line: times I rewrote it in the dressing room.

The article focuses on paper terrorism, described by Anti-Defamation League senior research fellow Mark Pitcavage as the use of bogus legal documents and filings to intimidate or harass public officials, law enforcement officers, or private citizens. It is inferred that most paper terrorists are sovereign citizens and members of organized anti-government movement. It discusses the growth of the sovereign citizen movement, legislations that combat paper terrorism, and the threat it poses.

The author lists items in her father's study after his death, including an article about the artist Vincent Van Gogh, various writings and artwork, a photograph of the author's mother, and a hollow book with an envelope for emergency money.

Relates the author's experience with different kinds of papers. Types of paper used; Collection of paper.

Reprints a letter sent by authors to colleagues on the subject of paper conservation. Printing of scripts on both sides of the page; Savings on mailing costs; Less trees cut down for paper; Creative Artists Agency as leaders in this move.

As a child and teenager, I had little to do with money. I was educated on scholarships and state handouts and the kindness of strange adults, and this money passed [...]

An excerpt from the article "Servants of the State" in the February 1972 issue of "Harper's Magazine" is presented which focuses on the Pentagon Papers.

A letter to the editor is presented in response to the article "The Only Game in Town" by David Sirota in the September 2012 issue, which considers whether the "Denver Post" newspaper has a monopoly in Denver, Colorado after the 2009 closure of the "Rocky Mountain News" paper.

An excerpt from the book "Pushkin: Documents Toward a Biography 1799-1829," translated by Simona Schneider, is presented.

An excerpt is presented from a report filed by the Inspector General of the U.S. Air Force regarding the alleged inappropriate behavior of Major General Stephen D. Schmidt towards his subordinates.

A response from the author is presented to letters to the editor regarding the article "The Only Game in Town" by David Sirota in the September 2012 issue, wherein Sirota discusses the ability of bloggers to compete with newspapers in reporting the news.

Reprints an essay from `Illegal Immigrants: Prophets of a Borderless World,' by Richard Rodriguez, published in `New Perspectives Quarterly.' California's support to Proposition 187, the measure which denies government services to illegal immigrants; Status of immigrants in the United States.

An essay is presented on the impacts of bidirectional digital media on the printed literary novel. The author argues that literary novel is in the process of becoming a conservatory form and explains how it competes with all computer-generated entertainments. Of particular interest is given to the academic papers coauthored by education researcher Professor Anne Mangen, which compared screen reading and paper reading.

The article presents focus group comments to the redesigned Canadian five dollar bill and also describes what the bill looks like.

An excerpt from the book "The Killing Hills" by Chris Offutt is presented.

In this article, the author, the government official who leaked the Pentagon Papers, reports revealing U.S. government lies about the war in Vietnam, expresses regret at not having exposed the papers earlier, thus avoiding the war altogether. He compares the grounds for the Iraq War to those of the Vietnam conflict, noting that in both cases government claims were spurious. He states that timely leaks of government untruths would have prevented the war in Iraq.

The article discusses how reading opinions that differ from our own, are challenged to articulate our own experiences, and through the articulation we live more deeply. It mentions imprint of ink upon paper; the dignity and intimacy of the individual letter, written for a particular addressee without thought of other readers.

A personal narrative is presented which explores the author's experience of TERMS OF ENDEARMENT.

The article offers information on several housewares from Tiffany and Co. including paper cups, sterling silver straw, and sterling silver holder with Tiffany Blue chalk.

The author of the article discusses the idea that adults are reading less books, and uses a research paper published by the National Endowment for the Arts, "To Read or Not to Read," as a factual basis. The author makes the point that before the middle of the twentieth century, strangers on a train might discuss the book "The Old Curiosity Shop," but in the 21st century they are more likely to discuss television Mafia shows.

The article presents an excerpt from "Eating Your Friends," a paper presented by Roger Scruton in a debate at Princeton University in New Jersey in November 2005 with philosopher and animal-rights advocate Peter Singer. The treatment of animals has become a matter of ordinary morality. Eating animals has become a test case for moral theory in Western countries. Pets are considered as honorary members of the human community. The eating of animals will be like the ritual sacrifices described in the Bible.

Describes the school newspaper "New Trier News," by New Trier High School, Winnetka, Illinois and its staff. Mission of the paper; News and stories it published.

We were not your typical Concorde crowd. Mark LeBoeuf was a bail bondsman and bounty hunter from New Orleans. Glenn Cozens was a cook at Casey's Bar and Grill in Skillman, New Jersey. We stood on the tarmac at JFK and stared at the Air France plane on which we would be passengers during an attempt to break the world speed record for suborbital circumnavigation of the planet. Glenn and Mark and forty-six other people had won seats on the plane in a contest. Our Concorde had the slightly dingy, souped-up look of a fast car a few years beyond bank financing. It was a '78 model, and smaller than you would think. A guy with slick hair and a double-breasted, reflective suit walked by us, scratching his ear with a walkie-talkie. The airport was under a security alert. The newspapers were filled with foreboding. The angry buzzing of Arab extremists had been detected close by. A hurricane hovered over the Atlantic as if deciding something. The security guy's suit changed colors in the light. Now workmen pulled the AIR FRANCE gangway up to the plane. A sign featuring the logo for Coors Light beer had been stuck incongruously onto the plane's fuselage near its sharp nose. The French airline, the American brewery, and Don Pevsner, a Miami attorney who has set a number of aviation records (some obscure) with chartered Concordes, had joined in temporary alliance. In early press releases, the plane had been referred to as the Silver Bullet, a Coors trademark that apparently did not fly with Air France. By the day of the flight the plane had become the Coors Light Concorde. The original flight plan had called for it to make its first refueling stop in Lisbon, but at the terminal we found out we were landing instead in Toulouse, where the Concorde had been built. You could sense the great weight of seas recently parted; the air was sweet with the freshly faxed smell of detente. I said to Mark, 'Laissez les bons temps rouler.' 'Damn right,' he answered. 'We going to fly around the world.' NEW YORK--TOULOUSE 3:20:02 Don Pevsner seemed too big for the airplane. His head brushed the ceiling of the cabin when he stood up straight. His shoulders reached from overhead compartment to overhead compartment. He produced a declaration every time he opened his mouth; he expelled hyperbole like carbon dioxide. 'I am the leading consumer advocate in aviation there is,' he said. 'Period. I personally eliminated the forty-four-pound baggage limit for overseas travel.' In the itinerary he had mailed to all the passengers before the flight, he called it 'the most exciting aviation event since Lindbergh crossed the North Atlantic.' On board, he was the biggest bear in the forest. 'This plane only discriminates against two classes of people,' he said. 'The poor and the tall.' The Concorde is considered luxurious because it is fast, not because it is comfortable. I had to stand up in order to raise my tray table without hitting my knees. It was difficult to place my arm on the armrest without touching my seatmate, Laura, whom I had just met. She was a reporter for a newspaper features syndicate. The five journalists on board were seated like acolytes immediately behind Pevsner. Retired Apollo astronaut Tom Stafford and his wife, Linda, shared Row 1 with Pevsner and his fiancee, Roz. Stafford had earned their seats on the flight with pull: he had convinced the United States Air Force to allow an Air France plane chartered by a brewery to land on its base at Guam. Stafford still looked like an astronaut. He was thin the way a cable holding up a bridge is thin. His blue eyes seemed to reflect the sky; they beamed out at the world his astronaut's confidence. If the entire flight crew of the Concorde mysteriously dropped dead, Tom Stafford looked like a man who could hunch down into the pilot's seat and bring that baby home. Mrs. Stafford gazed up at him adoringly. Kyle Petty and Felix Sabates sat behind the Staffords in Row 2. Petty drives the 'Coors Light/Team SABCO Pontiac' for Sabates's NASCAR racing team. He boarded the plane as if it were a bus taking him to a job he didn't much like. The attitude of the Concorde in flight is slightly nose-up, a fact of geography that means everyone seated behind you is also seated beneath you. Only Row 2 separated Laura and me from the best address on the plane. The rear compartment, where the contest winners were seated, seemed to be at the bottom of a long hill. After ten or twelve hours together in the thin, exclusive air of the forward compartment, Laura and I began to feel married. We shared cologne-scented, moist towelettes and clinked our champagne glasses together and rooted around under the seats for each other's shoes. We stayed home most of the time and did not visit much. A gang of Floridian marketing guys filled the seats behind Petty and Sabates. They wore Rolexes the size of sundials and polo shirts with the names of golf courses stitched above their hearts. They called Pevsner 'Big Don' and used the word 'party' as a verb. They laughed and sang and shouted, like pirates in a movie musical. We boomed east over the Atlantic at 11:49:10 on a Tuesday morning. If we landed in New York by 8:30:12 Wednesday evening we would be able to say that only astronauts had traveled faster around the earth. The standing record had been set by the same airplane flying westbound in 1992, on a Pevsner-led dash to commemorate the 500th anniversary of Columbus's landing in the New World. 'There were two records, and I already had one,' Pevsner said. 'What else could I do?' We broke the sound barrier at 12:03 with no perceptible change in the way the plane flew. The Machmeter on the forward wall of the cabin simply went from .99 to 1.0. The moment was greeted by a smattering of tentative applause from the rear compartment and an ironic cheer from the marketing guys. The director of the documentary film crew hired by Pevsner was not satisfied with our enthusiasm and goaded us into reliving the moment once more, this time with feeling. On his cue the Coors guys waved their Coors baseball caps and held cans of Coors Light above their heads. We went to Mach 2 with less fanfare at 12:23. We were traveling faster than a bullet shot from a .45 automatic, twice the speed of a spoken word, more than ten miles above the ocean. I realized that I would probably never travel farther above the earth, or with greater velocity, than I was at that moment. I imagined the feeling to be not unlike having God tell me the exact second I reached middle age. I watched the Machmeter after that as if it were a heart monitor. Eventually our speed would drop below that of even the most carefully chosen word, and the ordinary sounds of our lives would catch up and find us and buzz around our heads. Outside the window I could clearly see the curvature of the earth. The sky was a delicate, pale blue; immediately above us it began to curve and darken into the violet of space. The Machmeter read 2.02. I felt absolutely, perfectly safe. Lunch began with canapes and champagne, followed by lobster salad with a julienne of mango pear, tournedos in peppercorn sauce, a potato croquette with truffles, slivered almonds, assorted cheeses and fruit, and petits fours. The flight attendants wore blinking, battery-powered buttons shaped like Coors Light bottle caps. The chief steward's button blinked beneath his white tuxedo like a visible heart. By the time the attendants cleared our trays, we were only twenty-three minutes away from landing in Toulouse. Although without the Machmeter I could not have guessed the moment we broke the sound barrier, slowing to subsonic speed produced in me a vague physiological sense of disappointment, as if velocity were a euphoria from which my body was only unwillingly withdrawn. France spread suddenly out below us, a flat, melancholy grid of green and brown fields beneath a nondescript sky. Toulouse from the air looked like a planned community outside Atlanta or Charlotte. The houses were stuccoed and roofed with red tile; the small yards were dabbed with the suburban blue of swimming pools. The narrow roads outside the airport were lined with parked cars. Hundreds of people clutched the wire of the hurricane fences surrounding the airport, waiting, I realized, for us. Many of them had probably worked on the Concorde during headier times. When we passed overhead, they waved their arms as if we had come to rescue them. Pevsner commandeered the plane's P.A. system. 'Ladies and gentlemen,' he announced, 'if you want to know why I do it, this is why I do it.' The crowd cheered as we descended to the tarmac; we waved back. At the bottom of the gangway Pevsner addressed a mob of reporters in French. Tom Stafford stood beside Pevsner, squinting into the television lights. He had commanded Apollo 10 and the Apollo-Soyuz mission and retired from the Air Force a three-star general, but nobody asked him anything. We did not go through customs, in France or anywhere else. (When we arrived back in New York, our passports would bear no evidence of our journey.) We were led into an empty terminal and upstairs into a private lounge. The passengers gathered around and took pictures with Kyle Petty. He had read most of Elmore Leonard's Riding the Rap on the way over from New York and was worried because he had brought along only two books for the trip. Thursday he would fly from New York to New Orleans for another promotional appearance. Friday he would fly from New Orleans to Michigan, where he would race on Sunday, blow an engine, and finish last in a field of thirty-nine cars. We spent an hour and sixteen minutes on the ground. We sniffed at hors d'oeuvres and sipped orange juice. The urinals in the men's room were visible from the door of the women's room. We accepted this as evidence of Gallic culture. At 4:25 P.M. New York time we took off into the French twilight. At 5:10 the marketing guys began to sing, 'If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands.' TOULOUSE-DUBAI 3:13:52 An hour and fifteen minutes out of Toulouse, Pevsner announced that the United Arab Emirates had withdrawn its permission for us to fly at supersonic speed through its airspace. The projected drop in velocity would add forty-four minutes to our flight time and probably cost us the record. He did not take the news well. 'The United Arab Emirates is essentially a sand-pile consisting of a bunch of countries none of us would want to live in if we had a choice,' he said over the P.A. 'I basically want to get out of Arab air-space as fast as we can and not deal with these bastards again.' The marketing guys hooted and slapped each other high fives. They yelled, 'All right, Big Don.' 'In other words,' Pevsner said, 'they're feudal savages with too much oil money to spend.' A flight attendant appeared, like a U.N. envoy, bearing a tray of hot towels. It is a fact of nature that setting or not setting speed records does not seem so important once you drape a hot towel over your face. The steward followed. Several courses later, Saudi Arabian officials miraculously approved a course and speed change that would allow us to cross the kingdom at Mach 2. Supersonic travel is usually permitted only over oceans. 'Boy,' Pevsner said, 'this is suspense city.' I looked down and realized I had champagne, Diet Coke, red wine, Coors Light, bottled water, and hot tea on my tray all at once. The temperature in the cabin increased noticeably over Saudi Arabia, even though we were 58,000 feet above the desert. The hull temperature of a Concorde can reach 240 degrees during flight. I cupped my hands against the glass and stared out the tiny window into the most profound darkness I had ever seen. I hoped there was someone down there to hear the shock wave chasing us through the middle of the night. Part of the thrill of going really fast, I suppose, is having someone else know you are going really fast. Dubai flared on the horizon, bright as a fire. There had been no gathering up of lights and highways and houses. A city simply appeared in the void. The wide, deserted boulevards ran out into the desert and stopped. We landed at 3:40 A.M. local time, dinnertime the day before in New York. The temperature was 96 degrees, down from a high of 120 the previous afternoon. On the tarmac the plane was surrounded by mustachioed soldiers carrying automatic weapons. A pair of airport officials covered the Coors Light logo with a cloth. Islamic law forbids the advertisement of alcohol, although the duty-free shops in Dubai are the cheapest place on earth to buy liquor. Good scotch costs three dollars a quart. Rolexes, real ones, can be had for five hundred bucks. The billboards on the side of the bus we boarded for the short ride to the terminal advertised Ferraris. 'Man,' Kyle Petty said, 'you ain't going to see that back home.' The terminal looked brand new, as ornate as the cake at a bad wedding. It was the gift, we were told, of a generous prince. Once inside, we weren't allowed near the duty-free shops. An outbreak of shopping fever might have endangered the record. We were hustled instead through a maze of gleaming corridors to another private lounge. Armed guards were posted at the doors. In the men's room a small crowd gathered to study the urinal. It was a hole in the floor, with footpads on either side. The stonework around the hole was delicate and ornate. 'It's so you don't have to lift your robes,' Kyle Petty said. We nodded and lined up. DUBAI--BANGKOK 3:37:51 The sun blinked on over the Indian Ocean at 9:30 P.M. New York time as if operated by motion detector. It was darkest night one minute and bright morning the next. We saw three sunrises and sunsets in two days. 'Boy,' said Pevsner, 'this is a hell of a lot of fun.' We were forty-four minutes ahead of the pace that promised to land us in The Guinness Book of World Records. Pevsner was more excited about breaking the official eastbound record of 36:08:34, held by Allen Paulson, then the CEO of Gulfstream Aerospace. 'I remember watching the Queen Mary and the Queen Elizabeth sail out of New York, and everyone on the dock wished they were the ones leaving,' he said. 'I love being a guy in a home office doing what the CEO of a major corporation can't do with unlimited resources.' Tom Stafford slept across the aisle behind a black blindfold. Lost Moon, Jim Lovell's account of the Apollo 13 mission, lay open in his lap. Stafford himself had lost the moon. The lunar landing module hadn't been ready by the time Apollo 10 flew. Neil Armstrong, the commander of Apollo 11, became the astronaut whose name everyone remembers. The flight attendants began lowering the shades against the midmorning sun. It was bedtime back home. For a time even the marketing guys were subdued. Kyle Petty tore through a borrowed Sports Illustrated. Mark prowled the rear compartment, looking for somebody to talk to. We were going too fast for him to sleep. 'You get to do more in this life if you're going fast,' he said. 'If you don't get there first, the other bail bondsmen get the money.' A low field of cumulus clouds floated over Thailand as if tethered there. The shadow of each cloud lay distinct and motionless and cool on the ground beneath it. It was almost noon, local time. Steep, thickly forested mountains sprouted from rich valleys, which were terraced with rice paddies. A four-lane, unfinished highway ran in a straight line to the horizon, through a wide swath of jungle, as if the horizon itself were a destination. A golf course was crammed between the runways of the Bangkok airport. A foursome stood beside their carts in the middle of a fairway. The shadow of the Concorde slid quickly over them, like that of a prehistoric bird, and then they were gone, just like that. Women draped garlands of flowers around our necks when we entered the terminal. They led us to a private waiting room. An announcer over a tinny loudspeaker said, 'Welcome to Thailand. Land of Smile.' In the waiting room six teenage girls in native costume performed a traditional Thai dance. The music sounded like an AM radio being tuned. On a television set behind the dancers, an American weather report played on the BBC. We were about as far from home as we could get without leaving the planet. The people I cared about were as distant as they ever would be. My heart filled with acute, generic longing. I called my wife back home to tell her I loved her. It was one o'clock in the morning back home; my wife was asleep and never quite understood who I was. I hung up and wrote her a sentimental postcard that embarrassed us both when it arrived at our house two weeks later. Mark grew impatient waiting to board the plane. He thought screwing around in airport waiting rooms was going to cost us the record. He stood beside the gate and scolded us for boarding so slowly. 'Let's go, let's go,' he said. 'We got the need for speed. We got the attitude for altitude. Let's do it. Let's do it.' Rice paddies and golf courses soon spread out beneath us. A wide, brown river snaked its way into a brown harbor filled with boats. The brown of the harbor lightened and disappeared into the blue of the sea. We banked left and went to Mach 1. BANGKOK--GUAM 3:01:29 I was no longer sure what day it was. Almost everyone on the plane slept. The shades were pulled tight. The cabin lights glowed faintly. A few miserable-looking passengers stared up with the secret faces insomniacs rarely have to present to the world. The flight attendants moved silently up and down the aisle, touching the back of each seat as they passed. They smiled down on us, like parents, whenever we opened our eyes. The sun set at 5:00 A.M. In the Pacific twilight our bodies began to rouse themselves for a morning breaking on the other side of the world. Some of the passengers stretched and stirred and ordered coffee. A man from the rear compartment appeared beside Tom Stafford with about a dozen photos sealed in plastic sleeves. The photos were of the general in space suits, holding under his arm helmets shaped like fishbowls. He stood with the comrades with whom he had rocketed away from the earth, in front of Saturn V rockets or crisp, American flags. Stafford dutifully inscribed and signed each photo. The man frowned closely at each picture and blew away any dust that might have alighted during its brief exposure to air; he carefully replaced each picture in its plastic sleeve and then disappeared as quietly as he had come. As we neared Guam a flight attendant asked me to hand over my flowers. They were from Thailand. The attendant was politely adamant. It is illegal to bring plants from a foreign country into a territory of the United States. When I surrendered the garland, she dropped it into a plastic trash bag. A second attendant moved quickly toward the rear of the plane, spraying side to side with a sweet-smelling pesticide. On Guam, a small crowd of Air Force wives and children watched us land from a small, grassy area across the tarmac. We filed down the gangway and onto a pair of ancient school buses. A heroically clean-cut airman bounded aboard my bus and shouted, 'Welcome to Andersen Air Force Base, Guam, USA.' We had traveled around the world until we reached the suburbs of America from the other side. Patriotism filled the bus like nerve gas. The hair on the back of my neck stood for the national anthem. We were in the tiny waiting room less than five minutes before a lieutenant with red hair ordered us back on the bus. We milled around while the ground crew finished refueling the plane, and then the lieutenant ordered us on board. The United States Air Force got us back into the air faster than anyone else. They were seventeen seconds faster than the French. GUAM-HONOLULU 3:20:02 The stars lit the dome of the sky; the sky defined the black curve of the earth. Laura and I took turns looking out the window. When we reached Hawaii a single, dim strand of streetlights marked the black edge of the ocean; a jagged, dark outcropping of volcanic rock loomed like a bone behind the lights, which glowed like foolish ideas between the mountain and the sea. Approaching Honolulu, the streetlights ran together into sparkling, amber grids. The grids swept away from the ocean toward the mountains that surrounded the city. At the mountains they unraveled into solitary threads that twisted and climbed upward like vines. We landed at 4:04 in the morning Honolulu time, 10:04 the same morning in New York. We now lived inside the same day as our bodies. We were catching up with ourselves. The guy in charge of directing the plane into the terminal waved it to a stop in the wrong place. The jetway coming out from the terminal did not line up with the door of the plane. We could not get off the plane and the caterers could not get on. The air on board quickly grew hot and close. 'We can't sit here for an hour waiting for these bloody idiots to screw things up,' Pevsner said angrily. 'All we need is gas. We don't need food and pineapple.' HONOLULU-ACAPULCO 3:24:21 The one hour and forty-seven minutes on the ground in Honolulu had been our longest stop. Despite the delay, we were still ahead of schedule. 'If the Mexicans don't screw up,' Pevsner announced, 'we've got it made.' Acapulco was surrounded by a furrowed range of steep, green mountains. Large, white villas perched on the sides of the mountains peered out toward the sea. The runway lay on a narrow strip of land between a still bay and the open Pacific. It did not seem long enough to entice even the smallest plane into landing. We banked hard and I looked straight down into the white lines of the surf. It ran up onto a beach strewn with people laid out on bright squares of cloth, like casualties in an exploded Matisse. In the lowlands around the airport, thousands of palm trees had been planted in rows as precise as the lines on graph paper. We came in steeply and braked hard. The runway turned out to be long enough. We walked off the plane and into a party. An eight-piece mariachi band awaited us in our private lounge. Paper lanterns and streamers hung from the ceiling. The band played trumpets and strummed big guitars and sang romantic Mexican folk songs in quavering voices. Six teenage girls in native costume performed a traditional Mexican dance. They might have been the same girls who had danced on the strewn flower petals in Thailand. When we returned to the plane we found it guarded by mustachioed soldiers carrying automatic weapons. Mark draped his arm over the shoulder of one of the soldiers while Glenn took his picture. Then Glenn stood beside the soldier and Mark took Glenn's picture. The soldier tried to glower fiercely. ACAPULCO-NEW YORK 2:42:04 Shortly after takeoff Pevsner announced that we had the record sewed up. Ours would be the fastest time recorded for a trip around the world, eastbound or westbound, by well over an hour. Tom Stafford stood in the aisle at the news and did a creditable version of the twist. He kissed his wife several times. She was as pretty and blond as you would expect the wife of an astronaut to be. Pevsner was fond of saying that no human being has ever traveled faster, in anything, than Stafford. During re-entry into the earth's atmosphere, Apollo X reached a velocity of 24,791.4 miles per hour. Stafford clicked the numbers off without having to think about them. He is writing his autobiography, titled Higher and Faster. 'I've always loved to break records and achieve things,' he said. 'I want to do the impossible, do what hasn't been done before.' All this seemed particularly important as we rocketed through the low outskirts of space toward aviation history. We flew politely across Mexico, blasted out over the Gulf, rounded the southern tip of Florida, turned northeast, and headed up the eastern seaboard toward home. To starboard, Florida was obscured by thunderheads, but Grand Bahama Island spread out to port like a wide, green slick on the blue Caribbean sea. Somewhere off the coast of North Carolina, the Coors guys began trying, with a belated, corporate delirium, to claim the flight for their company. They huddled together like athletes and chanted, 'Coors! Coors! Coors!' One of them seized control of the P.A. system and tried without success to lead us in a sing-along of the jingle from the Coors Light 'Tap the Rockies' ad campaign. 'Tap your feet!' he bellowed to his indifferent audience. 'That's the spirit!' During the flight the eighty passengers on board had consumed 286 cans of Coors Light and 82 bottles of champagne. One of the marketing guys staggered tenderly down the aisle of the forward compartment and addressed each of his comrades in the slurred, loving tongue that men deep in their cups reserve for expressing deepest brotherhood to other men. At 6:35, Pevsner squeezed himself into the tiny rest room and emerged several minutes later wearing a clean shirt. The sun burned like a new star in the violet sky just off our wing tip. It rose above us in a spectacular false morning when the plane began to descend. We dropped below the speed of sound for the last time at 6:57. We were lost for a moment in a bank of clouds, and then Manhattan floated up out of the haze in the distance to the west, connected to the world we had just circled by the Brooklyn Bridge. The Statue of Liberty pointed up at us when we passed overhead. The flight attendants shooed the documentary film crew back into their seats for the landing. We touched down at 7:17 P.M. We had traveled around the planet in thirty-one hours, twenty-seven minutes, and forty-nine seconds. We beat the old record by one hour, twenty-one minutes. Only astronauts had traveled faster around the earth. Outside the terminal, the director of the documentary film crew had us re-enact the moment of landing. The Coors guys waved their Coors baseball caps above their heads and held cans of Coors Light up in the air. Once through customs, we were met by a large crowd, which I thought at first was waiting on us. Instead, I found out, the crowd was simply waiting. We were in the main international arrivals terminal at JFK. Hundreds of people pressed forward against the barricades and looked at us simply because there was nothing else to look at. Outside the terminal we boarded a pair of buses for the short trip back to our hotel. I leaned forward and told the driver that we had just set a speed record for traveling around the world. I could see he didn't care. 'This is New York,' he said. 'You got to tell me something.' Back at the hotel I watched CNN until I couldn't stay awake, without seeing a story about the flight. The next morning, Pevsner was ebullient. 'This is huge,' he said. 'Reuters is bannering us all over Europe.' I called my mother in North Carolina. She had been watching CNN for two days. She had not seen the flight mentioned. I bought a USA Today, which gave it six lines in a news briefs column on page three. Nobody in America seemed to care very much. Maybe it was because the whole adventure seemed bathed in an antiquated 1970s light. We had set out after a spot in The Guinness Book of World Records in an airplane that was seventeen years old. Or maybe nobody cared very much because the record was not a triumph of daring or will but of logistics. The outcome was never really in doubt. The six three-and-a-half-hour flights made by the Coors Light Concorde were not an unreasonable request to make of a commercial airliner; the only envelopes pushed in this story went across Pevsner's desk long before the plane ever left the ground. By the time I got to the farewell breakfast, most of the contest winners had gone back to their rooms. The hotel staff was clearing the tables. Kyle Petty had left for New Orleans. There wasn't a Coors guy in sight. Tom Stafford sat at a table autographing photos of himself in a space suit. Pevsner soaked up what little glow was left in the almost empty room. 'It's been a kick doing this thing single-handedly,' he said. 'It just shows what you can do out of a home office.' Now that his charters hold both the eastbound and westbound speed records, Pevsner said he wants to take a Concorde around the world north-south, over both poles. All he needs to do is figure out how to get permission to land and refuel in Antarctica. The runway there was long enough, he said, but the paperwork would be tough.