PAKET UMROH BULAN FEBRUARI MARET APRIL MEI 2017

BERFIKIR OUT OF THE BOX

Jika dikatakan kepada Anda hanya sebuah kata, apa saja boleh, ambillah misalnya kata “air”. apa yang langsung hadir dipikiran Anda?akan ada beribu-ribu jawaban yang muncul, cair, minum, haus, segar, larutan, Aqua, dll. Dari 100 orang yang berbeda akan memberikan lebih dari 1000 jawaban berbeda. Kata yang hadir dipikran anda disebut logical sequence, atau kata populernya  asosiasi. Kenapa disebut logical sequence..? karena kata tersebut dapat dengan mudah dihubungkan dengan kata kunci utama. Contoh air dan minu memiliki hubungan logika “digunakan”, yaitu Air digunakan untuk Minum. Air dengan Cair memiliki hubungan “logika jenis”, dan seterusnya.

Berbagai macam asosiasi yang digunakan untuk suatu kata kunci muncul karena adanya koneksi antara sel saraf (neuron) tertentu dimana tempat informasi kata kunci berada dengan neuron lainnya yang berisi info mengenai kata asosiasi. Namun jika dalam berpikir selalu menggunakan logical sequence yang simple, akan terperangkap pada zona pola pikir yang biasa, dan sudah banyak dipikirkan orang lain. Disinilah yang harus dilakukan untuk berani berfikir keluar, thinking ut of the box, berpikir kreatif, seharusnya menggunakan pola pikir yang berbeda, keluar dari zona yang biasa, yaitu pola pikir lateral.
tentang pola pikir lateral sudah dijelaskan dalam artikel sebelumnya di http://saco- indonesia.com/?backlink=222&idd=208

Pola pikir lateral digunakan untuk mencari ide baru bisa dilakukan dengan  4 tahap dibawah ini :
1. Pilih Fokus Anda,
2. Ambil salah satu Logical Sequence,
3. Buat Lateral Displacement,
4. Ciptakan Koneksi.

Yang harus dilakukan pertama kali dan paling penting adalah memilih fokus pikiran apa yang akan dilakukan. Apakah ingin mencari ide pengembangan untuk air, maka fokusnya pada air. Setelah Mendapat fokus, seperti paragraf pertama, ambil kata yang paling cepat muncul di benak Anda. Ingin melakukan percobaan Terhadap Api?, maka fokusnya adalah suatu proses spesifik dalam api. Kita lanjut ke tahap ke 3. Carilah kata apa saja yang tidak berhubungan. Seperti Api Diatas Air Atau Api Dibawah Air. Disinilah yang disebut thinking out of the box. Tahap berikutnya adalah mencari hubungan dengan otak kiri rasional kita. Kalau begitu, apakah mungkin Api berada diatas air??..?

Contoh yang nyata di dunia ini adalah magma yang berada dibawah laut. Namun bisa dikembangkan menjadi sesuatu yang dapat digunakan manusia dalam kehidupan. Bisa di buat sebuah box yang berisi air bercahaya karena didalamnya ada api.

Sekali kita menemukan kata yang lateral dengan fokus kita, akan muncul banyak pertanyaan yang memaksa otak logis untuk menjawab. Elaborasi jawaban dari berbagai pertanyaan logis terkait hubungan ini akan membawa kita pada sebuah ide kreatif.

Ternyata Minyak ikan terbukti ampuh cegah otak mengecil

Saco-Indonesia.com - Sejak dulu sampai kini minyak ikan sudah diketahui baik untuk kesehatan otak. Namun penelitian terbaru yang dipublikasikan Januari 2014 kemarin mengungkap bahwa minyak ikan tak hanya menyehatkan otak tetapi juga mencegah terjadinya penciutan volume otak.

Ketika usia bertambah, volume otak biasanya akan menciut. Namun penciutan otak juga bisa menandakan penyakit yang berkaitan dengan kesehatan mental, atau penyakit otak seperti Alzheimer dan lainnya. Dengan begitu hasil penelitian ini menunjukkan harapan bahwa minyak ikan bisa mencegah penciutan otak terkait penyakit tersebut.

Hasil ini didapatkan peneliti setelah melakukan penelitian selama delapan tahun. Mereka melakukan scan MRI pada 1.111 wanita yang sudah lanjut usia. Selain itu peneliti juga mengukur jumlah asam lemak omega-3 pada sel darah merah mereka. Setelah delapan tahun, peneliti kemudian mengukur volume otak partisipan yang sudah berusia 78 tahun.

Mereka menemukan bahwa wanita yang memiliki tingkat omega-3 tinggi juga memiliki volume otak yang lebih besar setelah delapan tahun. Tingkat asam lemak omega-3 yang tinggi bisa didapatkan melalui diet atau suplemen. Efeknya dalam beberapa waktu bisa mencegah kematian beberapa sel otak yang disebabkan usia, ungkap ketua peneliti James V Pottala, seperti dilansir oleh Daily Health Post (07/03).

Selain itu, penelitian lain juga menunjukkan bahwa mengonsumsi banyak asam lemak omega tiga berkaitan dengan volume hippocampus otak yang lebih besar hingga 2,7 persen. Bagian otak tersebut berkaitan dengan kemampuan seseorang mengingat.

Asam lemak omega-3 banyak didapatkan dari minyak ikan. Jadi jangan ragu untuk mengonsumsi suplemen atau minyak ikan untuk memenuhi asupan omega-3 dan mencegah penciutan pada otak Anda.

Sumber :Kompas.com

Editor : Maula Lee

MASA PENAHANAN MARIA ELIZABETH TELAH DIPERPANJANG KPK

saco-indonesia.com, Masa penahanan terhadap Direktur Utama PT Indoguna Utama Maria Elizabeth Liman telah diperpanjang. Maria yang telah menjadi tersangka dalam suap pengurusan kuota impor daging sapi di Kementerian Pertanian itu telah diperpanjang penahanannya 40 hari ke depan.

"Iya, ibu tadi telah menandatangani masa perpanjangan penahanannya untuk 40 hari ke depan, per tanggal 5 Januari hingga 14 Februari mendatang," ujar penasihat hukum tersangka, Denny Kailimang di Gedung KPK, Jakarta, Jumat (3/1).

Maria telah ditahan oleh KPK pada Selasa (17/12) lalu, usai diperiksa sebagai tersangka. Saat itu, Maria telah mengungkapkan dirinya adalah korban penipuan Elda Devianne Adiningrat dan Ahmad Fathanah.

Pengacaranya, Denny Kailimang juga mengatakan inisiatif pengajuan kouta impor datang dari Elda dan Fathanah.

"Memang awalnya itu adalah atas dasar inisiatif Elda. Elda juga bisa membantu. Tapi kenyataannya, tak bisa bantu. Setelah itu tak ada hubungan antara Maria dan Elda," ungkap Denny.

KPK juga telah menetapkan tersangka kepada Maria Elizabeth Liman pada Jumat, (19/4). Penetapan tersangka itu setelah KPK mengembangkan penyidikan kasus yang sebelumnya juga sudah menjerat mantan Presiden PKS Luthfi Hasan Ishaaq, Ahmad Fathanah dan dua Direktur PT Indoguna Utama, Juard Effendi dan Arya Abdi Effendi.

Maria disangkakan telah melanggar Pasal 5 ayat 1 huruf a atau b atau Pasal 13 Undang-undang (UU) Nomor 31 Tahun 1999 yang telah diubah dengan UU Nomor 20 Tahun 2001 juncto Pasal 5 ayat ke-1 KUHP. Diduga Maria turut inisiatif memberi uang suap dalam kasus tersebut.

Editor : Dian sukmawati

Menjalin Kedekatan dengan Anak Walaupun Kita Sibuk Bekerja

Saco-Indonesia.com - Setiap ibu tentu ingin selalu bersama dengan buah hatinya. Tetapi bagi para ibu bekerja di luar rumah hal itu tak bisa dipenuhi. Menyewa tenaga pengasuh anak adalah solusi alternatif untuk mengurus si kecil. Meski waktu yang Anda miliki terbatas saat di rumah, Anda tetap bisa menjalin kedekatan dengan anak agar ia tak terlalu "lengket" dengan pengasuhnya.

Menurut Rini Hildayani, psikolog Anak dari Fakultas Psikologi Universitas Indonesia, secara alamiah anak akan lebih mengenali orang yang berinteraksi lebih baik dengannya. Kedekatan dengan anak ini disebut dengan istilah attachment.

Rini memaparkan, pada usia baru lahir hingga 6 minggu merupakan fase preattachment yaitu anak belum dapat mengetahui siapa orang yang dekat dengannya. Usia 6 minggu hingga 6 atau 8 bulan merupakan fase attachment in the making yaitu anak sudah mulai dapat membedakan orang yang dekat dengannya.

Sedangkan usia 6 atau 8 bulan hingga 18 atau 24 bulan merupakan fase clear-cut attachment yaitu dimana anak sudah dapat membedakan dengan jelas orang yang dekat dengannya. Dan usia 18 atau 24 bulan ke atas, fase formation of reciprocal relationship, anak sudah dapat memberikan aksi timbal balik dari kedekatannya dengan seseorang.

Kesibukan seringkali menjadi halangan untuk bisa dekat dengan anak Anda. Namun untuk dapat menjadi orang yang dekat dengan anak, Anda perlu menyiasati waktu pertemuan Anda yang singkat dengannya secara optimal.

"Meskipun secara kuantitas pertemuan Anda dengan anak sedikit, namun jika kualitasnya baik, anak Anda akan merasa dekat dengan Anda," tutur Rini.

Lalu bagaimana cara mendekatkan diri dengan anak meski jarang bertemu? Simak kiat dari Rini berikut ini.

1. Sediakan waktu selama mungkin untuk dihabiskan dengan si kecil. Jika Anda harus bekerja dari pagi hingga malam, pastikan setidaknya Anda memberikan setengah jam untuk bermain dengannya.

2. Jangan sibuk dengan yang lain saat bersamanya. Secara fisik dekatnya saja tidak cukup untuk membuat Anda benar-benar menciptakan kedekatan dengan anak. Upayakan untuk benar-benar fokus pada si kecil dan tinggalkan urusan di luar itu.

3. Optimalkan untuk bermain. Permainan-permainan kecil seperti bernyanyi bersama, atau merespon kata-katanya akan semakin mendekatkan Anda dengan si buah hati.

4. Hargai dia. Ingat, anak Anda bukan barang. Saat akan menggendongnya, mengganti popoknya, atau memberinya makan, pastikan Anda mengajaknya bicara dan meminta "izin" padanya saat akan melakukannya. Selain mengajari kata-kata baru padanya, ini juga akan membantu menciptakan kedekatan.

CARA KERJA MESIN GENSET

saco-indonesia.com,

Cara Kerja Generator Set

Generator adalah mesin yang dapat mengubah tenaga mekanis untuk menjadi tenaga listrik dengan melalui proses induksi elektromagnetik. Generator ini telah memperoleh energi mekanis dari prime mover. Generator arus bolak-balik (AC) telah dikenal dengan sebutan alternator. Generator ini diharapkan dapat mensuplai tenaga listrik pada saat terjadi gangguan, dimana suplai tersebut akan digunakan untuk beban prioritas.

Sedangkan genset (generator set) merupakan bagian dari generator. Genset juga merupakan suatu alat yang dapat mengubah energi mekanik menjadi energi listrik. Genset atau sistem generator penyaluran adalah suatu generator listrik yang telah terdiri dari panel, berenergi solar dan terdapat kincir angin yang telah ditempatkan pada suatu tempat. Genset juga dapat digunakan sebagai sistem cadangan listrik atau “off-grid” (sumber daya yang tergantung atas kebutuhan pemakai). Genset juga sering digunakan oleh rumah sakit dan industri yang mempercayakan sumber daya yang mantap, seperti halnya area pedesaan yang tidak ada akses untuk secara komersial menghasilkan listrik. Generator telah terpasang satu poros dengan motor diesel, yang biasanya dengan menggunakan generator sinkron (alternator) pada pembangkitan. Generator sinkron ini terdiri dari dua bagian utama yaitu: sistem medan magnet dan jangkar. Generator ini kapasitasnya besar, medan magnetnya berputar karena terletak pada rotor.

Konstruksi generator AC adalah sebagai berikut:

1. Rangka stator
Terbuat dari besi tuang, rangka stator juga merupakan rumah dari bagian-bagian generator yang lain.

2. Stator
Stator telah memiliki alur-alur sebagai tempat untuk meletakkan lilitan stator. Lilitan stator telah berfungsi sebagai tempat GGL induksi.

3. Rotor
Rotor adalah bagian yang berputar, pada bagian ini juga terdapat kutub-kutub magnet dengan lilitannya yang dialiri arus searah, melewati cincin geser dan sikat-sikat.

4. Cincin geser
Terbuat dari bahan kuningan atau tembaga yang yang dipasang pada poros dengan memakai bahan isolasi. Slip ring ini akan berputar bersama-sama dengan poros dan rotor.

5. Generator penguat
Generator penguat juga merupakan generator arus searah yang dipakai sebagai sumber arus.

Pada umumnya generator AC ini akan dibuat sedemikian rupa, sehingga lilitan tempat terjadinya GGL induksi tidak akan bergerak, sedangkan kutub-kutub akan menimbulkan medan magnet berputar. Generator itu disebut dengan generator berkutub dalam, dapat dilihat pada gambar berikut.

Keuntungan generator kutub dalam bahwa untuk dapat mengambil arus tidak dibutuhkan cincin geser dan sikat arang. Karena lilitan-lilitan tempat terjadinya GGL itu tidak akan berputar. Generator sinkron juga sangat cocok untuk mesin-mesin dengan tegangan tinggi danarus yang besar.

Secara umum kutub magnet generator sinkron dibedakan atas 2 yaitu :

1. Kutub magnet dengan bagian kutub yang menonjol (salient pole).
Konstruksi seperti ini akan digunakan untuk putaran rendah, dengan jumlah kutub yang banyak. Diameter rotornya besar dan berporos pendek.

2. Kutub magnet dengan bagian kutub yang tidak menonjol (non salient pole).
Konstruksi seperti ini digunakan untuk putaran tinggi (1500 rpm atau 3000 rpm), dengan jumlah kutub yang sedikit. Kira-kira 2/3 dari seluruh permukaan rotor dibuat alur-alur untuk tempat lilitan penguat. Yang 1/3 bagian lagi juga merupakan bagian yang utuh, yang berfungsi sebagai inti kutub.

MESIN DIESEL

Mesin diesel termasuk mesin dengan pembakaran dalam atau disebut dengan motor bakar ditinjau dari cara memperoleh energi termalnya. Untuk dapat membangkikan listrik sebuah mesin diesel menggunakan generator dengan sistem penggerak tenaga disel atauyang biasa dikenal dengan sebutan Genset (Generator Set).

Keuntungan pemakaian mesin diesel sebagai Prime Mover
- Design dan instalasi sederhana
- Auxilary equipment sederhana
- Waktu pembebanan relatif singkat
- Konsumsi bahan bakar relatif murah dan hemat

Kerugian pemakaian mesin diesel sebagai Prime Mover
- Berat mesin yang sangat berat karena harus dapat menahan getaran serta kompresi yang tinggi.
- Starting awal berat, karena kompresinya tinggi yaitu sekitar 200 bar.
- Semakin besar daya maka mesin diesel tersebut dimensinya akan semakin besar pula, hal tersebut telah menyebabkan kesulitan jika daya mesinnya sangat besar.

Ada 2 komponen utama dalam genset yaitu:
1. Prime mover atau pengerak mula, dalam hal ini mesin diesel/engine
2. Generator.

Cara Kerja Mesin Diesel
Prime mover juga merupakan peralatan yang telah mempunyai fungsi menghasilkan energi mekanis yang diperlukan untuk dapat memutar rotor generator. Pada mesin diesel/engine telah terjadi penyalaan sendiri, karena proses kerjanya telah berdasarkan udara murni yang telah dimampatkan di dalam silinder pada tekanan yang tinggi (± 30 arm), sehingga temperatur di dalam silinder naik. Dan pada saat itu bahan bakar disemprotkan dalam silinder yang bertemperatur dan bertekanan tinggi melebihi titik nyala bahan bakar sehingga akan menyala secara otomatis.

Pada mesin diesel penambahan panas atau energi senantiasa dilakukan pada tekanan yang konstan. Pada mesin diesel, piston melakukan 2 langkah pendek menuju kepala silinder pada setiap langkah daya.

1. Langkah ke atas yang pertama merupakan angkah pemasukan dan penghisapan, di sini udara dan bahan bakar masuk sedangkan poros engkol berputar ke bawah.

2. Langkah kedua merupakan langkah kompresi, poros engkol terus berputar dapat menyebabkan torak naik dan menekan bahan bakar sehingga terjadi pembakaran. Kedua proses ini (1 dan 2) juga termasuk proses pembakaran.

3. Langkah ketiga merupakan langkah ekspansi dan kerja, di sini kedua katup yaitu katup isap dan buang tertutup sedangkan poros engkol terus berputar dan menarik kembali torak ke bawah.

4. Langkah keempat merupakan langkah pembuangan, disini katup buang terbuka dan dapat menyebabkan gas akibat sisa pembakaran terbuang keluar. Gas dapat keluar karena padaproses keempat ini torak kembali bergerak naik keatas dan menyebabkan gas dapat keluar. Kedua proses terakhir ini (3 dan 4) juga termasuk proses pembuangan.

5. Setelah keempat proses tersebut, maka proses berikutnya akan mengulang kembali proses yang pertama, dimana udara dan bahan bakar masuk kembali.

Editor : Dian Sukmawati
Sumber : jualgenset.co.id

Jozef Paczynski, Inmate Barber to Auschwitz Commandant, Dies at 95

Mr. Paczynski was one of the concentration camp’s longest surviving inmates and served as the personal barber to its Nazi commandant Rudolf Höss.

Gene Fullmer, a Brawling Middleweight Champion, Dies at 83

Fullmer, who reigned when fight clubs abounded and Friday night fights were a television staple, was known for his title bouts with Sugar Ray Robinson and Carmen Basilio.

Negative View of U.S. Race Relations Grows, Poll Finds

Public perceptions of race relations in America have grown substantially more negative in the aftermath of the death of a young black man who was injured while in police custody in Baltimore and the subsequent unrest, far eclipsing the sentiment recorded in the wake of turmoil in Ferguson, Mo., last summer.

Americans are also increasingly likely to say that the police are more apt to use deadly force against a black person, the latest New York Times/CBS News poll finds.

The poll findings highlight the challenges for local leaders and police officials in trying to maintain order while sustaining faith in the criminal justice system in a racially polarized nation.

Sixty-one percent of Americans now say race relations in this country are generally bad. That figure is up sharply from 44 percent after the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown and the unrest that followed in Ferguson in August, and 43 percent in December. In a CBS News poll just two months ago, 38 percent said race relations were generally bad. Current views are by far the worst of Barack Obama’s presidency.

The negative sentiment is echoed by broad majorities of blacks and whites alike, a stark change from earlier this year, when 58 percent of blacks thought race relations were bad, but just 35 percent of whites agreed. In August, 48 percent of blacks and 41 percent of whites said they felt that way.

Looking ahead, 44 percent of Americans think race relations are worsening, up from 36 percent in December. Forty-one percent of blacks and 46 percent of whites think so. Pessimism among whites has increased 10 points since December.

Continue reading the main story

Do you think race relations in the United States are generally good or generally bad?

60

40

20

0

White

Black

May '14

May '15

Generally bad

 

 

Continue reading the main story

Do you think race relations in the United States are getting better, getting worse or staying about the same?

Getting worse

Staying the same

Getting better

Don't know/No answer

All adults

Whites

Blacks

44%

37

17

46

36

16

41

42

15

 

 

The poll finds that profound racial divisions in views of how the police use deadly force remain. Blacks are more than twice as likely to say police in most communities are more apt to use deadly force against a black person — 79 percent of blacks say so compared with 37 percent of whites. A slim majority of whites say race is not a factor in a police officer’s decision to use deadly force.

Overall, 44 percent of Americans say deadly force is more likely to be used against a black person, up from 37 percent in August and 40 percent in December.

Blacks also remain far more likely than whites to say they feel mostly anxious about the police in their community. Forty-two percent say so, while 51 percent feel mostly safe. Among whites, 8 in 10 feel mostly safe.

One proposal to address the matter — having on-duty police officers wear body cameras — receives overwhelming support. More than 9 in 10 whites and blacks alike favor it.

Continue reading the main story

How would you describe your feelings about the police in your community? Would you say they make you feel mostly safe or mostly anxious?

Mostly safe

Mostly anxious

Don't know/No answer

All adults

Whites

Blacks

75%

21

3

81

16

3

51

42

7

 

 

Continue reading the main story

In general, do you think the police in most communities are more likely to use deadly force against a black person, or more likely to use it against a white person, or don’t you think race affects police use of deadly force?

Police more likely to use deadly force against a black person

Police more likely to use deadly force against a white person

Race DOES NOT affect police use of deadly force

Don't know/No answer

All adults

Whites

Blacks

44%

37%

79%

2%

2%

1%

46%

53%

16%

9%

8%

4%

 

 

Continue reading the main story

Do you favor or oppose on-duty police officers wearing video cameras that would record events and actions as they occur?

Favor

Oppose

Don't know/No answer

All adults

Whites

Blacks

92%

93%

93%

6%

5%

5%

2%

2%

2%

 

 

Asked specifically about the situation in Baltimore, most Americans expressed at least some confidence that the investigation by local authorities would be conducted fairly. But while nearly two-thirds of whites think so, fewer than half of blacks agree. Still, more blacks are confident now than were in August regarding the investigation in Ferguson. On Friday, six members of the police force involved in the arrest of Mr. Gray were charged with serious offenses, including manslaughter. The poll was conducted Thursday through Sunday; results from before charges were announced are similar to those from after.

Reaction to the recent turmoil in Baltimore, however, is similar among blacks and whites. Most Americans, 61 percent, say the unrest after Mr. Gray’s death was not justified. That includes 64 percent of whites and 57 percent of blacks.

Continue reading the main story

As you may know, a Baltimore man, Freddie Gray, recently died after being in the custody of the Baltimore police. How much confidence do you have that the investigation by local authorities into this matter will be conducted fairly?

A lot

Some

Not much

None at all

Don't know/No answer

All adults

Whites

Blacks

29%

31

22

14

5

31

33

20

11

5

20

26

30

22

 

 

In general, do you think the unrest in Baltimore after the death of Freddie Gray was justified, or do you think the unrest was not justified?

Justified

Not justified

Don't know/No answer

All adults

Whites

Blacks

28%

61

11

26

64

11

37

57

6

 

 

Dan Walker, 92, Dies; Illinois Governor and Later a U.S. Prisoner

As governor, Mr. Walker alienated Republicans and his fellow Democrats, particularly the Democratic powerhouse Richard J. Daley, the mayor of Chicago.

Finding Scandal in New York and New Jersey, but No Shame

From sea to shining sea, or at least from one side of the Hudson to the other, politicians you have barely heard of are being accused of wrongdoing. There were so many court proceedings involving public officials on Monday that it was hard to keep up.

In Newark, two underlings of Gov. Chris Christie were arraigned on charges that they were in on the truly deranged plot to block traffic leading onto the George Washington Bridge.

Ten miles away, in Lower Manhattan, Dean G. Skelos, the leader of the New York State Senate, and his son, Adam B. Skelos, were arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation on accusations of far more conventional political larceny, involving a job with a sewer company for the son and commissions on title insurance and bond work.

The younger man managed to receive a 150 percent pay increase from the sewer company even though, as he said on tape, he “literally knew nothing about water or, you know, any of that stuff,” according to a criminal complaint the United States attorney’s office filed.

The success of Adam Skelos, 32, was attributed by prosecutors to his father’s influence as the leader of the Senate and as a potentate among state Republicans. The indictment can also be read as one of those unfailingly sad tales of a father who cannot stop indulging a grown son. The senator himself is not alleged to have profited from the schemes, except by being relieved of the burden of underwriting Adam.

The bridge traffic caper is its own species of crazy; what distinguishes the charges against the two Skeloses is the apparent absence of a survival instinct. It is one thing not to know anything about water or that stuff. More remarkable, if true, is the fact that the sewer machinations continued even after the former New York Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, was charged in January with taking bribes disguised as fees.

It was by then common gossip in political and news media circles that Senator Skelos, a Republican, the counterpart in the Senate to Mr. Silver, a Democrat, in the Assembly, could be next in line for the criminal dock. “Stay tuned,” the United States attorney, Preet Bharara said, leaving not much to the imagination.

Even though the cat had been unmistakably belled, Skelos father and son continued to talk about how to advance the interests of the sewer company, though the son did begin to use a burner cellphone, the kind people pay for in cash, with no traceable contracts.

That was indeed prudent, as prosecutors had been wiretapping the cellphones of both men. But it would seem that the burner was of limited value, because by then the prosecutors had managed to secure the help of a business executive who agreed to record calls with the Skeloses. It would further seem that the business executive was more attentive to the perils of pending investigations than the politician.

Through the end of the New York State budget negotiations in March, the hopes of the younger Skelos rested on his father’s ability to devise legislation that would benefit the sewer company. That did not pan out. But Senator Skelos did boast that he had haggled with Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, a Democrat, in a successful effort to raise a $150 million allocation for Long Island to $550 million, for what the budget called “transformative economic development projects.” It included money for the kind of work done by the sewer company.

The lawyer for Adam Skelos said he was not guilty and would win in court. Senator Skelos issued a ringing declaration that he was unequivocally innocent.

THIS was also the approach taken in New Jersey by Bill Baroni, a man of great presence and eloquence who stopped outside the federal courthouse to note that he had taken risks as a Republican by bucking his party to support paid family leave, medical marijuana and marriage equality. “I would never risk my career, my job, my reputation for something like this,” Mr. Baroni said. “I am an innocent man.”

The lawyer for his co-defendant, Bridget Anne Kelly, the former deputy chief of staff to Mr. Christie, a Republican, said that she would strongly rebut the charges.

Perhaps they had nothing to do with the lane closings. But neither Mr. Baroni nor Ms. Kelly addressed the question of why they did not return repeated calls from the mayor of Fort Lee, N.J., begging them to stop the traffic tie-ups, over three days.

That silence was a low moment. But perhaps New York hit bottom faster. Senator Skelos, the prosecutors charged, arranged to meet Long Island politicians at the wake of Wenjian Liu, a New York City police officer shot dead in December, to press for payments to the company employing his son.

Sometimes it seems as though for some people, the only thing to be ashamed of is shame itself.

Elizabeth Brown Pryor, Biographer of Clara Barton and Robert E. Lee, Dies at 64

Ms. Pryor, who served more than two decades in the State Department, was the author of well-regarded biographies of the founder of the American Red Cross and the Confederate commander.

Jim Fanning, 87, Dies; Lifted Baseball in Canada With Expos

Hired in 1968, a year before their first season, Mr. Fanning spent 25 years with the team, managing them to their only playoff appearance in Canada.

Edward Chambers, Early Leader in Community Organizing, Dies at 85

A lapsed seminarian, Mr. Chambers succeeded Saul Alinsky as leader of the social justice umbrella group Industrial Areas Foundation.

Ghostly Voices From Thomas Edison’s Dolls Can Now Be Heard

Though Robin and Joan Rolfs owned two rare talking dolls manufactured by Thomas Edison’s phonograph company in 1890, they did not dare play the wax cylinder records tucked inside each one.

The Rolfses, longtime collectors of Edison phonographs, knew that if they turned the cranks on the dolls’ backs, the steel phonograph needle might damage or destroy the grooves of the hollow, ring-shaped cylinder. And so for years, the dolls sat side by side inside a display cabinet, bearers of a message from the dawn of sound recording that nobody could hear.

In 1890, Edison’s dolls were a flop; production lasted only six weeks. Children found them difficult to operate and more scary than cuddly. The recordings inside, which featured snippets of nursery rhymes, wore out quickly.

Yet sound historians say the cylinders were the first entertainment records ever made, and the young girls hired to recite the rhymes were the world’s first recording artists.

Year after year, the Rolfses asked experts if there might be a safe way to play the recordings. Then a government laboratory developed a method to play fragile records without touching them.

The technique relies on a microscope to create images of the grooves in exquisite detail. A computer approximates — with great accuracy — the sounds that would have been created by a needle moving through those grooves.

In 2014, the technology was made available for the first time outside the laboratory.

“The fear all along is that we don’t want to damage these records. We don’t want to put a stylus on them,” said Jerry Fabris, the curator of the Thomas Edison Historical Park in West Orange, N.J. “Now we have the technology to play them safely.”

Last month, the Historical Park posted online three never-before-heard Edison doll recordings, including the two from the Rolfses’ collection. “There are probably more out there, and we’re hoping people will now get them digitized,” Mr. Fabris said.

The technology, which is known as Irene (Image, Reconstruct, Erase Noise, Etc.), was developed by the particle physicist Carl Haber and the engineer Earl Cornell at Lawrence Berkeley. Irene extracts sound from cylinder and disk records. It can also reconstruct audio from recordings so badly damaged they were deemed unplayable.

“We are now hearing sounds from history that I did not expect to hear in my lifetime,” Mr. Fabris said.

The Rolfses said they were not sure what to expect in August when they carefully packed their two Edison doll cylinders, still attached to their motors, and drove from their home in Hortonville, Wis., to the National Document Conservation Center in Andover, Mass. The center had recently acquired Irene technology.

Cylinders carry sound in a spiral groove cut by a phonograph recording needle that vibrates up and down, creating a surface made of tiny hills and valleys. In the Irene set-up, a microscope perched above the shaft takes thousands of high-resolution images of small sections of the grooves.

Stitched together, the images provide a topographic map of the cylinder’s surface, charting changes in depth as small as one five-hundredth the thickness of a human hair. Pitch, volume and timbre are all encoded in the hills and valleys and the speed at which the record is played.

At the conservation center, the preservation specialist Mason Vander Lugt attached one of the cylinders to the end of a rotating shaft. Huddled around a computer screen, the Rolfses first saw the wiggly waveform generated by Irene. Then came the digital audio. The words were at first indistinct, but as Mr. Lugt filtered out more of the noise, the rhyme became clearer.

“That was the Eureka moment,” Mr. Rolfs said.

In 1890, a girl in Edison’s laboratory had recited:

There was a little girl,

And she had a little curl

Right in the middle of her forehead.

When she was good,

She was very, very good.

But when she was bad, she was horrid.

Recently, the conservation center turned up another surprise.

In 2010, the Woody Guthrie Foundation received 18 oversize phonograph disks from an anonymous donor. No one knew if any of the dirt-stained recordings featured Guthrie, but Tiffany Colannino, then the foundation’s archivist, had stored them unplayed until she heard about Irene.

Last fall, the center extracted audio from one of the records, labeled “Jam Session 9” and emailed the digital file to Ms. Colannino.

“I was just sitting in my dining room, and the next thing I know, I’m hearing Woody,” she said. In between solo performances of “Ladies Auxiliary,” “Jesus Christ,” and “Dead or Alive,” Guthrie tells jokes, offers some back story, and makes the audience laugh. “It is quintessential Guthrie,” Ms. Colannino said.

The Rolfses’ dolls are back in the display cabinet in Wisconsin. But with audio stored on several computers, they now have a permanent voice.

Hard but Hopeful Home to ‘Lot of Freddies’

Todd Heisler/The New York Times

Children playing last week in Sandtown-Winchester, the Baltimore neighborhood where Freddie Gray was raised. One young resident called it “a tough community.”

Hard but Hopeful Home to ‘Lot of Freddies’

The neighborhood where Freddie Gray came of age has survived harrowing rates of unemployment, poor health, violent crime and incarceration.

Cher and Marc Jacobs

François Michelin, Head of Tire Company, Dies at 88

Under Mr. Michelin’s leadership, which ended when he left the company in 2002, the Michelin Group became the world’s biggest tire maker, establishing a big presence in the United States and other major markets overseas.

From T Magazine: Street Lit’s Power Couple

THE WRITERS ASHLEY AND JAQUAVIS COLEMAN know the value of a good curtain-raiser. The couple have co-authored dozens of novels, and they like to start them with a bang: a headlong action sequence, a blast of violence or sex that rocks readers back on their heels. But the Colemans concede they would be hard-pressed to dream up anything more gripping than their own real-life opening scene.

In the summer of 2001, JaQuavis Coleman was a 16-year-old foster child in Flint, Mich., the former auto-manufacturing mecca that had devolved, in the wake of General Motors’ plant closures, into one of the country’s most dangerous cities, with a decimated economy and a violent crime rate more than three times the national average. When JaQuavis was 8, social services had removed him from his mother’s home. He spent years bouncing between foster families. At 16, JaQuavis was also a businessman: a crack dealer with a network of street-corner peddlers in his employ.

One day that summer, JaQuavis met a fellow dealer in a parking lot on Flint’s west side. He was there to make a bulk sale of a quarter-brick, or “nine-piece” — a nine-ounce parcel of cocaine, with a street value of about $11,000. In the middle of the transaction, JaQuavis heard the telltale chirp of a walkie-talkie. His customer, he now realized, was an undercover policeman. JaQuavis jumped into his car and spun out onto the road, with two unmarked police cars in pursuit. He didn’t want to get into a high-speed chase, so he whipped his car into a church parking lot and made a run for it, darting into an alleyway behind a row of small houses, where he tossed the quarter-brick into some bushes. When JaQuavis reached the small residential street on the other side of the houses, he was greeted by the police, who handcuffed him and went to search behind the houses where, they told him, they were certain he had ditched the drugs. JaQuavis had been dealing since he was 12, had amassed more than $100,000 and had never been arrested. Now, he thought: It’s over.

But when the police looked in the bushes, they couldn’t find any cocaine. They interrogated JaQuavis, who denied having ever possessed or sold drugs. They combed the backyard alley some more. After an hour of fruitless efforts, the police were forced to unlock the handcuffs and release their suspect.

JaQuavis was baffled by the turn of events until the next day, when he received a phone call. The previous afternoon, a 15-year-old girl had been sitting in her home on the west side of Flint when she heard sirens. She looked out of the window of her bedroom, and watched a young man throw a package in the bushes behind her house. She recognized him. He was a high school classmate — a handsome, charismatic boy whom she had admired from afar. The girl crept outside and grabbed the bundle, which she hid in her basement. “I have something that belongs to you,” Ashley Snell told JaQuavis Coleman when she reached him by phone. “You wanna come over here and pick it up?”

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In the Colemans’ first novel, “Dirty Money” (2005), they told a version of this story. The outline was the same: the drug deal gone bad, the dope chucked in the bushes, the fateful phone call. To the extent that the authors took poetic license, it was to tone down the meet-cute improbability of the true-life events. In “Dirty Money,” the girl, Anari, and the crack dealer, Maurice, circle each other warily for a year or so before coupling up. But the facts of Ashley and JaQuavis’s romance outstripped pulp fiction. They fell in love more or less at first sight, moved into their own apartment while still in high school and were married in 2008. “We were together from the day we met,” Ashley says. “I don’t think we’ve spent more than a week apart in total over the past 14 years.”

That partnership turned out to be creative and entrepreneurial as well as romantic. Over the past decade, the Colemans have published nearly 50 books, sometimes as solo writers, sometimes under pseudonyms, but usually as collaborators with a byline that has become a trusted brand: “Ashley & JaQuavis.” They are marquee stars of urban fiction, or street lit, a genre whose inner-city settings and lurid mix of crime, sex and sensationalism have earned it comparisons to gangsta rap. The emergence of street lit is one of the big stories in recent American publishing, a juggernaut that has generated huge sales by catering to a readership — young, black and, for the most part, female — that historically has been ill-served by the book business. But the genre is also widely maligned. Street lit is subject to a kind of triple snobbery: scorned by literati who look down on genre fiction generally, ignored by a white publishing establishment that remains largely indifferent to black books and disparaged by African-American intellectuals for poor writing, coarse values and trafficking in racial stereotypes.

But if a certain kind of cultural prestige is shut off to the Colemans, they have reaped other rewards. They’ve built a large and loyal fan base, which gobbles up the new Ashley & JaQuavis titles that arrive every few months. Many of those books are sold at street-corner stands and other off-the-grid venues in African-American neighborhoods, a literary gray market that doesn’t register a blip on best-seller tallies. Yet the Colemans’ most popular series now regularly crack the trade fiction best-seller lists of The New York Times and Publishers Weekly. For years, the pair had no literary agent; they sold hundreds of thousands of books without banking a penny in royalties. Still, they have earned millions of dollars, almost exclusively from cash-for-manuscript deals negotiated directly with independent publishing houses. In short, though little known outside of the world of urban fiction, the Colemans are one of America’s most successful literary couples, a distinction they’ve achieved, they insist, because of their work’s gritty authenticity and their devotion to a primal literary virtue: the power of the ripping yarn.

“When you read our books, you’re gonna realize: ‘Ashley & JaQuavis are storytellers,’ ” says Ashley. “Our tales will get your heart pounding.”

THE COLEMANS’ HOME BASE — the cottage from which they operate their cottage industry — is a spacious four-bedroom house in a genteel suburb about 35 miles north of downtown Detroit. The house is plush, but when I visited this past winter, it was sparsely appointed. The couple had just recently moved in, and had only had time to fully furnish the bedroom of their 4-year-old son, Quaye.

In conversation, Ashley and JaQuavis exude both modesty and bravado: gratitude for their good fortune and bootstrappers’ pride in having made their own luck. They talk a lot about their time in the trenches, the years they spent as a drug dealer and “ride-or-die girl” tandem. In Flint they learned to “grind hard.” Writing, they say, is merely a more elevated kind of grind.

“Instead of hitting the block like we used to, we hit the laptops,” says Ashley. “I know what every word is worth. So while I’m writing, I’m like: ‘Okay, there’s a hundred dollars. There’s a thousand dollars. There’s five thousand dollars.’ ”

They maintain a rigorous regimen. They each try to write 5,000 words per day, five days a week. The writers stagger their shifts: JaQuavis goes to bed at 7 p.m. and wakes up early, around 3 or 4 in the morning, to work while his wife and child sleep. Ashley writes during the day, often in libraries or at Starbucks.

They divide the labor in other ways. Chapters are divvied up more or less equally, with tasks assigned according to individual strengths. (JaQuavis typically handles character development. Ashley loves writing murder scenes.) The results are stitched together, with no editorial interference from one author in the other’s text. The real work, they contend, is the brainstorming. The Colemans spend weeks mapping out their plot-driven books — long conversations that turn into elaborate diagrams on dry-erase boards. “JaQuavis and I are so close, it makes the process real easy,” says Ashley. “Sometimes when I’m thinking of something, a plot point, he’ll say it out loud, and I’m like: ‘Wait — did I say that?’ ”

Their collaboration developed by accident, and on the fly. Both were bookish teenagers. Ashley read lots of Judy Blume and John Grisham; JaQuavis liked Shakespeare, Richard Wright and “Atlas Shrugged.” (Their first official date was at a Borders bookstore, where Ashley bought “The Coldest Winter Ever,” the Sister Souljah novel often credited with kick-starting the contemporary street-lit movement.) In 2003, Ashley, then 17, was forced to terminate an ectopic pregnancy. She was bedridden for three weeks, and to provide distraction and boost her spirits, JaQuavis challenged his girlfriend to a writing contest. “She just wasn’t talking. She was laying in bed. I said, ‘You know what? I bet you I could write a better book than you.’ My wife is real competitive. So I said, ‘Yo, all right, $500 bet.’ And I saw her eyes spark, like, ‘What?! You can’t write no better book than me!’ So I wrote about three chapters. She wrote about three chapters. Two days later, we switched.”

The result, hammered out in a few days, would become “Dirty Money.” Two years later, when Ashley and JaQuavis were students at Ferris State University in Western Michigan, they sold the manuscript to Urban Books, a street-lit imprint founded by the best-selling author Carl Weber. At the time, JaQuavis was still making his living selling drugs. When Ashley got the phone call informing her that their book had been bought, she assumed they’d hit it big, and flushed more than $10,000 worth of cocaine down the toilet. Their advance was a mere $4,000.

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Those advances would soon increase, eventually reaching five and six figures. The Colemans built their career, JaQuavis says, in a manner that made sense to him as a veteran dope peddler: by flooding the street with product. From the start, they were prolific, churning out books at a rate of four or five a year. Their novels made their way into stores; the now-defunct chain Waldenbooks, which had stores in urban areas typically bypassed by booksellers, was a major engine of the street-lit market. But Ashley and JaQuavis took advantage of distribution channels established by pioneering urban fiction authors such as Teri Woods and Vickie Stringer, and a network of street-corner tables, magazine stands, corner shops and bodegas. Like rappers who establish their bona fides with gray-market mixtapes, street-lit authors use this system to circumnavigate industry gatekeepers, bringing their work straight to the genre’s core readership. But urban fiction has other aficionados, in less likely places. “Our books are so popular in the prison system,” JaQuavis says. “We’re banned in certain penitentiaries. Inmates fight over the books — there are incidents, you know? I have loved ones in jail, and they’re like: ‘Yo, your books can’t come in here. It’s against the rules.’ ”

The appeal of the Colemans’ work is not hard to fathom. The books are formulaic and taut; they deliver the expected goods efficiently and exuberantly. The titles telegraph the contents: “Diary of a Street Diva,” “Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang,” “Murderville.” The novels serve up a stream of explicit sex and violence in a slangy, tangy, profane voice. In Ashley & JaQuavis’s books people don’t get killed: they get “popped,” “laid out,” get their “cap twisted back.” The smut is constant, with emphasis on the earthy, sticky, olfactory particulars. Romance novel clichés — shuddering orgasms, heroic carnal feats, superlative sexual skill sets — are rendered in the Colemans’ punchy patois.

Subtlety, in other words, isn’t Ashley & JaQuavis’s forte. But their books do have a grainy specificity. In “The Cartel” (2008), the first novel in the Colemans’ best-selling saga of a Miami drug syndicate, they catch the sights and smells of a crack workshop in a housing project: the nostril-stinging scent of cocaine and baking soda bubbling on stovetops; the teams of women, stripped naked except for hospital masks so they can’t pilfer the merchandise, “cutting up the cooked coke on the round wood table.” The subject matter is dark, but the Colemans’ tone is not quite noir. Even in the grimmest scenes, the mood is high-spirited, with the writers palpably relishing the lewd and gory details: the bodies writhing in boudoirs and crumpling under volleys of bullets, the geysers of blood and other bodily fluids.

The luridness of street lit has made it a flashpoint, inciting controversy reminiscent of the hip-hop culture wars of the 1980s and ’90s. But the street-lit debate touches deeper historical roots, reviving decades-old arguments in black literary circles about the mandate to uplift the race and present wholesome images of African-Americans. In 1928, W. E. B. Du Bois slammed the “licentiousness” of “Home to Harlem,” Claude McKay’s rollicking novel of Harlem nightlife. McKay’s book, Du Bois wrote, “for the most part nauseates me, and after the dirtier parts of its filth I feel distinctly like taking a bath.” Similar sentiments have greeted 21st-century street lit. In a 2006 New York Times Op-Ed essay, the journalist and author Nick Chiles decried “the sexualization and degradation of black fiction.” African-American bookstores, Chiles complained, are “overrun with novels that . . . appeal exclusively to our most prurient natures — as if these nasty books were pairing off back in the stockrooms like little paperback rabbits and churning out even more graphic offspring that make Ralph Ellison books cringe into a dusty corner.”

Copulating paperbacks aside, it’s clear that the street-lit debate is about more than literature, touching on questions of paternalism versus populism, and on middle-class anxieties about the black underclass. “It’s part and parcel of black elites’ efforts to define not only a literary tradition, but a racial politics,” said Kinohi Nishikawa, an assistant professor of English and African-American Studies at Princeton University. “There has always been a sense that because African-Americans’ opportunities to represent themselves are so limited in the first place, any hint of criminality or salaciousness would necessarily be a knock on the entire racial politics. One of the pressing debates about African-American literature today is: If we can’t include writers like Ashley & JaQuavis, to what extent is the foundation of our thinking about black literature faulty? Is it just a literature for elites? Or can it be inclusive, bringing urban fiction under the purview of our umbrella term ‘African-American literature’?”

Defenders of street lit note that the genre has a pedigree: a tradition of black pulp fiction that stretches from Chester Himes, the midcentury author of hardboiled Harlem detective stories, to the 1960s and ’70s “ghetto fiction” of Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines, to the current wave of urban fiction authors. Others argue for street lit as a social good, noting that it attracts a large audience that might otherwise never read at all. Scholars like Nishikawa link street lit to recent studies showing increased reading among African-Americans. A 2014 Pew Research Center report found that a greater percentage of black Americans are book readers than whites or Latinos.

For their part, the Colemans place their work in the broader black literary tradition. “You have Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, James Baldwin — all of these traditional black writers, who wrote about the struggles of racism, injustice, inequality,” says Ashley. “We’re writing about the struggle as it happens now. It’s just a different struggle. I’m telling my story. I’m telling the struggle of a black girl from Flint, Michigan, who grew up on welfare.”

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Perhaps there is a high-minded case to be made for street lit. But the virtues of Ashley & JaQuavis’s work are more basic. Their novels do lack literary polish. The writing is not graceful; there are passages of clunky exposition and sex scenes that induce guffaws and eye rolls. But the pleasure quotient is high. The books flaunt a garish brand of feminism, with women characters cast not just as vixens, but also as gangsters — cold-blooded killers, “murder mamas.” The stories are exceptionally well-plotted. “The Cartel” opens by introducing its hero, the crime boss Carter Diamond; on page 9, a gunshot spatters Diamond’s brain across the interior of a police cruiser. The book then flashes back seven years and begins to hurtle forward again — a bullet train, whizzing readers through shifting alliances, romantic entanglements and betrayals, kidnappings, shootouts with Haitian and Dominican gangsters, and a cliffhanger closing scene that leaves the novel’s heroine tied to a chair in a basement, gruesomely tortured to the edge of death. Ashley & JaQuavis’s books are not Ralph Ellison, certainly, but they build up quite a head of steam. They move.

The Colemans are moving themselves these days. They recently signed a deal with St. Martin’s Press, which will bring out the next installment in the “Cartel” series as well as new solo series by both writers. The St. Martin’s deal is both lucrative and legitimizing — a validation of Ashley and JaQuavis’s work by one of publishing’s most venerable houses. The Colemans’ ambitions have grown, as well. A recent trilogy, “Murderville,” tackles human trafficking and the blood-diamond industry in West Africa, with storylines that sweep from Sierra Leone to Mexico to Los Angeles. Increasingly, Ashley & JaQuavis are leaning on research — traveling to far-flung settings and hitting the books in the libraries — and spending less time mining their own rough-and-tumble past.

But Flint remains a source of inspiration. One evening not long ago, JaQuavis led me on a tour of his hometown: a popular roadside bar; the parking lot where he met the undercover cop for the ill-fated drug deal; Ashley’s old house, the site of his almost-arrest. He took me to a ramshackle vehicle repair shop on Flint’s west side, where he worked as a kid, washing cars. He showed me a bathroom at the rear of the garage, where, at age 12, he sneaked away to inspect the first “boulder” of crack that he ever sold. A spray-painted sign on the garage wall, which JaQuavis remembered from his time at the car wash, offered words of warning:

WHAT EVERY YOUNG MAN SHOULD KNOW
ABOUT USING A GUN:
MURDER . . . 30 Years
ARMED ROBBERY . . . 15 Years
ASSAULT . . . 15 Years
RAPE . . . 20 Years
POSSESSION . . . 5 Years
JACKING . . . 20 YEARS

“We still love Flint, Michigan,” JaQuavis says. “It’s so seedy, so treacherous. But there’s some heart in this city. This is where it all started, selling books out the box. In the days when we would get those little $40,000 advances, they’d send us a couple boxes of books for free. We would hit the streets to sell our books, right out of the car trunk. It was a hustle. It still is.”

One old neighborhood asset that the Colemans have not shaken off is swagger. “My wife is the best female writer in the game,” JaQuavis told me. “I believe I’m the best male writer in the game. I’m sleeping next to the best writer in the world. And she’s doing the same.”

Rhapsody, a Lofty Literary Journal, Perused at 39,000 Feet

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Last summer at a writers’ workshop in Oregon, the novelists Anthony Doerr, Karen Russell and Elissa Schappell were chatting over cocktails when they realized they had all published work in the same magazine. It wasn’t one of the usual literary outlets, like Tin House, The Paris Review or The New Yorker. It was Rhapsody, an in-flight magazine for United Airlines.

It seemed like a weird coincidence. Then again, considering Rhapsody’s growing roster of A-list fiction writers, maybe not. Since its first issue hit plane cabins a year and a half ago, Rhapsody has published original works by literary stars like Joyce Carol Oates, Rick Moody, Amy Bloom, Emma Straub and Mr. Doerr, who won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction two weeks ago.

As airlines try to distinguish their high-end service with luxuries like private sleeping chambers, showers, butler service and meals from five-star chefs, United Airlines is offering a loftier, more cerebral amenity to its first-class and business-class passengers: elegant prose by prominent novelists. There are no airport maps or disheartening lists of in-flight meal and entertainment options in Rhapsody. Instead, the magazine has published ruminative first-person travel accounts, cultural dispatches and probing essays about flight by more than 30 literary fiction writers.

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An airline might seem like an odd literary patron. But as publishers and writers look for new ways to reach readers in a shaky retail climate, many have formed corporate alliances with transit companies, including American Airlines, JetBlue and Amtrak, that provide a captive audience.

Mark Krolick, United Airlines’ managing director of marketing and product development, said the quality of the writing in Rhapsody brings a patina of sophistication to its first-class service, along with other opulent touches like mood lighting, soft music and a branded scent.

“The high-end leisure or business-class traveler has higher expectations, even in the entertainment we provide,” he said.

Some of Rhapsody’s contributing writers say they were lured by the promise of free airfare and luxury accommodations provided by United, as well as exposure to an elite audience of some two million first-class and business-class travelers.

“It’s not your normal Park Slope Community Bookstore types who read Rhapsody,” Mr. Moody, author of the 1994 novel “The Ice Storm,” who wrote an introspective, philosophical piece about traveling to the Aran Islands of Ireland for Rhapsody, said in an email. “I’m not sure I myself am in that Rhapsody demographic, but I would like them to buy my books one day.”

In addition to offering travel perks, the magazine pays well and gives writers freedom, within reason, to choose their subject matter and write with style. Certain genres of flight stories are off limits, naturally: no plane crashes or woeful tales of lost luggage or rude flight attendants, and nothing too risqué.

“We’re not going to have someone write about joining the mile-high club,” said Jordan Heller, the editor in chief of Rhapsody. “Despite those restrictions, we’ve managed to come up with a lot of high-minded literary content.”

Guiding writers toward the right idea occasionally requires some gentle prodding. When Rhapsody’s executive editor asked Ms. Russell to contribute an essay about a memorable flight experience, she first pitched a story about the time she was chaperoning a group of teenagers on a trip to Europe, and their delayed plane sat at the airport in New York for several hours while other passengers got progressively drunker.

“He pointed out that disaster flights are not what people want to read about when they’re in transit, and very diplomatically suggested that maybe people want to read something that casts air travel in a more positive light,” said Ms. Russell, whose novel “Swamplandia!” was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize.

She turned in a nostalgia-tinged essay about her first flight on a trip to Disney World when she was 6. “The Magic Kingdom was an anticlimax,” she wrote. “What ride could compare to that first flight?”

Ms. Oates also wrote about her first flight, in a tiny yellow propeller plane piloted by her father. The novelist Joyce Maynard told of the constant disappointment of never seeing her books in airport bookstores and the thrill of finally spotting a fellow plane passenger reading her novel “Labor Day.” Emily St. John Mandel, who was a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction last year, wrote about agonizing over which books to bring on a long flight.

“There’s nobody that’s looked down their noses at us as an in-flight magazine,” said Sean Manning, the magazine’s executive editor. “As big as these people are in the literary world, there’s still this untapped audience for them of luxury travelers.”

United is one of a handful of companies showcasing work by literary writers as a way to elevate their brands and engage customers. Chipotle has printed original work from writers like Toni Morrison, Jeffrey Eugenides and Barbara Kingsolver on its disposable cups and paper bags. The eyeglass company Warby Parker hosts parties for authors and sells books from 14 independent publishers in its stores.

JetBlue offers around 40 e-books from HarperCollins and Penguin Random House on its free wireless network, allowing passengers to read free samples and buy and download books. JetBlue will start offering 11 digital titles from Simon & Schuster soon. Amtrak recently forged an alliance with Penguin Random House to provide free digital samples from 28 popular titles, which passengers can buy and download over Amtrak’s admittedly spotty wireless service.

Amtrak is becoming an incubator for literary talent in its own right. Last year, it started a residency program, offering writers a free long-distance train trip and complimentary food. More than 16,000 writers applied and 24 made the cut.

Like Amtrak, Rhapsody has found that writers are eager to get onboard. On a rainy spring afternoon, Rhapsody’s editorial staff sat around a conference table discussing the June issue, which will feature an essay by the novelist Hannah Pittard and an unpublished short story by the late Elmore Leonard.

“Do you have that photo of Elmore Leonard? Can I see it?” Mr. Heller, the editor in chief, asked Rhapsody’s design director, Christos Hannides. Mr. Hannides slid it across the table and noted that they also had a photograph of cowboy spurs. “It’s very simple; it won’t take away from the literature,” he said.

Rhapsody’s office, an open space with exposed pipes and a vaulted brick ceiling, sits in Dumbo at the epicenter of literary Brooklyn, in the same converted tea warehouse as the literary journal N+1 and the digital publisher Atavist. Two of the magazine’s seven staff members hold graduate degrees in creative writing. Mr. Manning, the executive editor, has published a memoir and edited five literary anthologies.

Mr. Manning said Rhapsody was conceived from the start as a place for literary novelists to write with voice and style, and nobody had been put off that their work would live in plane cabins and airport lounges.

Still, some contributors say they wish the magazine were more widely circulated.

“I would love it if I could read it,” said Ms. Schappell, a Brooklyn-based novelist who wrote a feature story for Rhapsody’s inaugural issue. “But I never fly first class.”

Richard Suzman, 72, Dies; Researcher Influenced Global Surveys on Aging

At the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Suzman’s signature accomplishment was the central role he played in creating a global network of surveys on aging.