Tag: airline

The Velvet Underground in Gerard Malanga’s famous photograph:
Sterling Morrison, Maureen Tucker, Lou Reed and John Cale

October 27, 2013

LOU REED, founding member of the Velvet Underground and one of rock’s most influential musicians, died Sunday on Long Island at age 71. Reed had been ill for some time, and had undergone a liver transplant earlier this year.

This is the saddest news in music since the death of the great Joe Strummer in 2002.

Lou Reed’s career spanned close to five decades. Debating what was or wasn’t his most important work is of course a subjective and perhaps pointless exercise, but in my opinion Reed was responsible for three of the best rock songs of all time. Those would be “Sweet Jane,” “Rock & Roll,” and the seven-minute ode, “Oh! Sweet Nuthin!”

Remarkably, all three of these songs appear on the same album, 1970’s Loaded. The first

March 14, 2022

I WAS AT A WINERY outside Porto, Portugal, when the phone rang. I took the call and walked out front to the parking lot. It was a Sunday afternoon, March 9th, 2014. The sun was out.

It was a woman from the BBC. A Malaysia Airlines plane had gone missing, she explained. It had vanished the night before, somewhere over the ocean near Vietnam. That’s all anyone knew, really.

With almost nothing to go on, I didn’t know what to say. “I’m sure they’ll find it within a day or two,” I told her. Other accidents came to mind — planes that had fallen into the ocean. Just a few years earlier had been the Air France crash off Brazil, for instance. It took a little while, but they found it.

But then a day became two days, became three days, became a week. The possibility struck

June 18, 2019

WILLIAM LANGWEISCHE, long one of the country’s preeminent journalists, has hit one out of the park with his story in the most recent Atlantic about the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight 370. It’s by far the best-written, best-researched, and all-around most compelling piece one can read on the topic. It also has brought me to terms as to what most likely happened on the night of March 8, 2014.

From the beginning I’ve been afraid of the rogue pilot theory — the idea that one of the pilots, presumably Captain Zaharie Shah, was responsible for the flight’s disappearance. I suppose this is partly out of pride. I don’t want it to have been Zaharie, because the idea of the captain hijacking his own aircraft and killing over two-hundred people shames the entire profession.

I’ve instead been noncommittal, usually taking the “two main possibilities” route. After acknowledging at