PAKET UMROH BULAN FEBRUARI MARET APRIL MEI 2018

Langsing dengan Makan Siang yang Sama Tiap Hari

INDIKATOR ASAM BASA

saco-indonesia.com,

indikator Asam Basa

Telah disebutkan bahwa asam telah mempunyai rasa asam, sedangkan basa telah mempunyai rasa pahit. Namun begitu, tidak dianjurkan untuk dapat mengenali asam dan basa dengan, cara mencicipinya, sebab banyak diantaranya yang dapat merusak kulit (korosif) atau bahkan bersifat racun. Asam dan basa juga dapat dikenali dengan menggunakan zat indikator, yaitu zat yang telah meniberi warna berbeda dahlia) lingkungan asam dan lingkungan basa (zat yang warnanya dapat berubah saat berinteraksi atau bereaksi dengan senyawa asam maupun senyawa basa).

Dalam laboratorium kimia, indikator asam-basa yang biasa di gunakan adalah indikator buatan dan indikator alami, Berikut ini penjelasan tentang indikator asam-basa buatan dan indikator asam-basa alami.
Derajat keasaman (pH)

Indikator Tingkat Keasaman Suatu zat asam yang di masukkan ke dalam air akan dapat mengakibatkan bertambahnya ion hidrogen (H+) dalam air dan berkurangnya ion hidroksida (OH- ). Sedangkan pada basa, akan dapat terjadi sebaliknya. Zat basa yang dimasukkan ke dalam air akan dapat mengakibatkan bertambahnya ion hidroksida (OH- ) dan berkurangnya ion hidrogen (H+).

Jumlah ion H+ dan OH- di dalam air dapat di gunakan untuk dapat menentukan derajat keasaman atau kebasaan suatu zat. Semakin asam suatu zat, semakin banyak ion H+ dan semakin sedikit jumlah ion OH- di dalam air. Sebaliknya semakin basa suatu zat, semakin sedikit jumlah ion H+ dan semakin banyak ion OH- di dalam air.
Proses netralisasi

Apabila suatu larutan asam dengan larutan basa akan dicampurkan dalam suatu bejana, maka ion H+ (dari asam) akan bereaksi dengan ion OH- (dari 311 basa) membentuk air. Reaksi antara ion H+ dengan OH- tersebut juga dapat di tuliskan sebagai berikut. H+ + OH- air

ini karena selain air, basil reaksi antara asam dan basa adalah suatu zat yang bersifat netral, yaitu zat yang tidak bersifat asam maupun basa. Zat netral yang di maksudkan di sini adalah garam. Mengingat reaksi netralisasi juga dapat menghasilkan garam, maka reaksi ini juga di kenal dengan istilah reaksi penggaraman. Secara sederhana, reaksi netralisasi atau reaksi penggaraman juga dapat di tuliskan sebagai berikut.

Contoh sederhana dari reaksi penggaraman adalah reaksi antara asam klorida (HC1) dengan natrium hidroksida (NaOH), yang akan dapat membentuk natrium klorida NaCl (garam dapur) dan air. Pada dasarnya, reaksi penggaraman (netralisasi) juga sangat berguna bagi kehidupan manusia.

Reaksi netralisasi tidak hanya terbatas pada pembentukkan garam dan air. Dalam kehidupan sehari-hari banyak dijumpai prinsip atau reaksi netralisasi, termasuk dalam bidang kesehatan dan pertanian. Perhatikan contoh berikut ini : gas-gas sisa, baik yang berasal dari kendaraan bermotor atau pabrik, mengandung gas belerang dioksida dan nitrogen oksida.

Gas-gas ini akan dilepas ke udara sehingga menimbulkan polusi. Gas-gas tersebut juga akan larut dalam titik-titik air di awan sehingga membentuk larutan asam sulfat dan asam nitrat. Ketika terjadi hujan, larutan-larutan ini akan bercampur dan turun bersama hujan. Inilah yang dinamakan dengan hujan asam.

Hujan asam sangat merugikan manusia dan lingkungan. Berikut adalah dampak yang ditimbulkan oleh hujan asam:

    Hujan asam dapat menyebabkan matinya tumbuhan dan ikan. Asam yang telah terdapat dalam air hujan juga dapat bereaksi dengan mineral dalam tanah. Tumbuhan akan menjadi kekurangan mineral sehingga mati atau tidak tumbuh dengan baik. Hujan asam juga dapat melarutkan aluminium dari mineral dalam tanah dan bebatuan, kemudian menghanyutkannya ke sungai sehingga dapat meracuni ikan dan mahluk air lainnya.
    Hujan asam yang bereaksi dengan logam juga dapat merusak jembatan, mobil, kapal laut, dan rangka bangunan. Hujan asam juga dapat merusak bangunan (gedung/ rumah) yang terbuat dari batu kapur.

Editor : Dian Sukmawati

GOOGLE BAYAR PICHAI USD 50 JUTA UNTUK TOLAK MICROSOFT?

saco-indonesia.com, Beberapa saat lalu telah dikabarkan bahwa Microsoft tengah membicarakan dengan pihak Google untuk dapat menarik Sundar Pichai menjadi CEO baru menggantikan Ballmer. Kontan saja, pemberitaan ini telah ramai diperbincangkan.

Sundar Pichai sendiri adalah orang yang kini telah menjabat sebagai eksekutif kepala Google Chrome dan Apps. Tentu bukan hal yang mustahil jika Microsoft telah menginginkannya sebagai pengganti Steve Ballmer yang menduduki kursi CEO.

Meski masih dalam tahap perundingan antara dua belah pihak, banyak orang yang mengatakan bahwa itu benar-benar akan terjadi. Akan tetapi jelas tidak mudah seperti membalikkan telapak tangan.

Menurut kabar dari orang yang terdekat dengan kasus ini, Google juga akan membayar Sundar Pichai sejumlah USD 50 juta atau setara dengan Rp 604 miliar agar menolak tawaran Microsoft dan tetap tinggal di Google.

Namun pihak Google belum mengonfirmasi terkait aksi suap yang telah melibatkan Sundar Pichai ini.

Editor : Dian Sukmawati

anang hermansyah biarkanlah

Biarkanlah kutentukan jalanku
Biarkanlah kutentukan sikapku
Kini kuingin menikmati duniaku
Mungkinkah kau mengerti akan aku

Lebih baik tinggalkan ku sendiri
Bosan diriku meredam emosi
Jalan hidup yang engkau tawarkan
Kurasakan itu bukan jalanku

Biarkanlah kubegini ini hidupku
Biarkanlah kubegini ini mauku
Biarkanlah kubegini ini jalanku

Kau datang lagi mencoba untuk merubah
Jalan hidupku yang tengah kutempuh
Lupakan saja kutak mungkin mengalah
Simpanlah semua mimpi padamu

Takkan menyerah aku arungi hidup ini
Walau kau datang sejuta prahara
Kuyakin hidup kan berganti cerita
Lupakan kisah cinta kita Oh

Bila Kondisi Tubuh Cepat Lelah Saat Bekerja, Apa Sih Penyebabnya?

Saco-Indonesia.com - Di waktu seseorang dituntut bekerja terlalu keras, kondisi fisik dan mental cenderung rentan mengalami kelelahan. Pada gilirannya, tingkat konsentrasi akan menurun, sehingga mengurangi efisiensi dalam bekerja.
Kelelahan merupakan salah satu biang keladi menurunnya produktivitas di tempat kerja. 

Faktanya, banyak faktor yang menyebabkan seseorang menjadi gampang kelelahan. Berbagai penelitian telah dilakukan untuk menggali masalah kelelahan saat bekerja. Beragam faktor juga ditemukan yang menjadi pemicu problem kelelahan saat bekerja.

Dalam sebuah makalah berisi kesimpulan dari berbagai penelitian mengenai kelelahan terkait pekerjaan (2006) oleh Department of Employment and Workplace Relations - Australian Safety and Compensation Council (ASCC), disebutkan sejumlah faktor yang memengaruhi kelelahan saat bekerja.
Faktor tersebut di antaranya: tuntutan pekerjaan, jam kerja, tuntutan secara fisik dan psikis dalam bekerja, psikososial, lingkungan, hubungan interpersonal, kondisi lingkungan kerja seperti suara bising, suhu, serta stres dalam bekerja, tak terkecuali pola tidur.

Di luar berbagai faktor tersebut, dalam pernyataan terpisah, Dr Jill Dorrian dari Centre for Sleep Research University of South Australia mengungkapkan kualitas tidur turut mempengaruhi kinerja dan berdampak pada kelelahan saat bekerja. Asupan air dan kafein juga turut menentukan faktor kebugaran seseorang dalam beraktivitas sehari-hari.

Dr Dorrian menyarankan, agar tetap bugar, seseorang perlu minum banyak air karena cairan bisa mencegah kekeringan pada otak. "Ketika otak terhidrasi, oksigen dan nutrien yang esensial untuk tubuh bisa berfungsi optimal," terangnya.

Selain menjaga asupan cairan, tidur juga mempunyai peran penting mengatasi kelelahan saat bekerja.

"Tidur berkualitas selama 20 menit atau kurang akan lebih baik ketimbang tidur dalam waktu lama namun saat bangun justru merasa lebih buruk," ungkap dr Dorrian.

Beragam penyebab

Penyebab kelelahan dalam bekerja menurut menurut Lifestyle Observer dan Pengajar Biologi Fisiologi Tubuh dari Shape Up Indonesia, dr Grace Judio-Kahl, MSc, MH, CHt bisa sangat beragam.  Dalam penanganannya, seseorang perlu terlebih dulu mencermati sumber masalah kelelahan tersebut.

Grace menjelaskan, bisa saja kelelahan terjadi karena seseorang memang secara fisik lelah misalnya karena kurang istirahat atau melakukan pekerjaan yang membutuhkan aktivitas fisik yang besar. Kelelahan juga bisa terjadi karena penyakit kronis atau penyakit akut.

Penyakit akut bisa disebabkan beberapa virus, termasuk virus fourth disease, fifth disease, roseola, atau hepatitis. Sementara penyakit kronis misalnya pada orang yang memiliki masalah tiroid atau diabetes.

Rasa lelah juga bisa muncul karena orang itu secara emosional punya masalah yang memicu stres. Kurang makan juga bisa menjadi penyebab kelelahan saat bekerja.

Terkait makanan dan asupan nutrisi, Grace mengatakan faktor nutrisi mungkin saja memberikan kontribusi terhadap kelelahan.

"Nutrisi memungkinkan saja ada kontribusi pada kelelahan. Misalnya untuk penyakit kronis, asupan nutrisi yang salah membuat orang itu diabetes dan penyakit itulah yang membuat dia kelelahan. Atau orang itu sedang diet, karena diet terjadi hipoglikemi, itu memungkinkan menyebabkan kelelahan," ungkapnya kepada Kompas Health melalui email.

Karenanya, lanjut Grace, dalam mengatasi problem kelelahan harus diperhatikan akar masalahnya. Jika terjadi hipoglikemi akibat diet, asupan gula tepung dan karbohidrat harus cukup.

Solusi lain dalam mengatasi kelelahan juga bisa dilakukan dengan cara mengonsumsi kafein atau makanan yang sifatnya meningkatkan metabolisme. Selain itu bisa dengan mengonsumsi vitamin B atau multivitamin, serta buah dan sayur, namun ini sifatnya hanya sementara.

"Mengatasi kelelahan secara temporer bisa saja, tapi tetap saja harus dilihat akar masalahnya. Kalau lelahnya karena stres, mau dikasih makanan apa pun tetap saja stresnya tidak sembuh dan lelahnya tidak hilang," terangnya.

Nah, jika sumber masalah kelelahan karena kekurangan gizi atau mikronutrien, dan menyebabkan kelelahan berkepanjangan, lain lagi penanganannya.
"Kelelahan berkepanjangan karena kekurangan zat gizi bisa diatasi dengan mengasup zat gizi tertentu. Misalnya, kurang darah, HB turun, mungkin kekurangan zat besi, selenium, atau  seng," ungkapnya.

Lain halnya jika kelelahan terjadi karena kerja otot berlebihan. Jadi, saat otot bergerak, seseorang bisa merasa lelah karena muncul sampah metabolisme akibat pemakaian otot. Masalah ini bisa diatasi dengan asupan zat gizi tertentu seperti asam amino.

"Banyak hal yang harus dirujuk untuk mengatasi kelelahan bekerja. Lihat dulu penyebab kelelahan, untuk menentukan lalu cari obatnya," saran Grace.

Terkait masalah asupan gizi untuk membantu kelelahan, sebuah riset di Jepang menunjukkan bahwa konsumsi saripati ayam (essence of chicken) dapat membantu memulihkan stres dan kelelahan mental.

Seperti dimuat Journal of Physiological Anthropology (Applied Human Science), Dr. Nagai dan Harada dari Institute of Fundamental Research Suntory, Jepang, melakukan penelitian melibatkan dua kelompok mahasiswa pria sehat yang diberikan tes beban kerja.  

Kelompok pertama diberi minuman saripati setiap pagi selama satu pekan, sedangkan kelompok yang lain diberikan plasebo. Pada hari ke tujuh, kedua kelompok mahasiswa ini menjalani tes kemampuan dan pengukuran kadar stres.   Tes mental untuk mahasiswa ini berupa ujian artimatika dan kemampuan daya ingat jangka pendek, yang keduanya berkaitan dengan hormon stres atau kortisol

Hasil penelitian menunjukkan, tingkat kesalahan pada kelompok pertama yang diberi minuman saripati lebih rendah dibanding kelompok plasebo. Kelompok pertama juga mengaku lebih aktif dan tidak mudah lelah selama mengikuti ujian.  Peneliti menyimpulkan, kandungan gizi dalam saripati membantu memetabolisme kortisol dalam darah dan memulihkan tubuh dari kelelahan mental.

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.

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.

Don Mankiewicz, Screenwriter in a Family Film Tradition, Dies at 93

Mr. Mankiewicz, an Oscar-nominated screenwriter for “I Want to Live!,” also wrote episodes of television shows such as “Star Trek” and “Marcus Welby, M.D.”

Jean Nidetch, 91, Dies; Pounds Came Off, and Weight Watchers Was Born

A 214-pound Queens housewife struggled with a lifelong addiction to food until she shed 72 pounds and became the public face of the worldwide weight-control empire Weight Watchers.

Jayne Meadows, Actress and Steve Allen’s Wife and Co-Star, Dies at 95

Ms. Meadows was the older sister of Audrey Meadows, who played Alice Kramden on “The Honeymooners.”

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

Nepal’s Young Men, Lost to Migration, Then a Quake

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KATHMANDU, Nepal — When the dense pillar of smoke from cremations by the Bagmati River was thinning late last week, the bodies were all coming from Gongabu, a common stopover for Nepali migrant workers headed overseas, and they were all of young men.

Hindu custom dictates that funeral pyres should be lighted by the oldest son of the deceased, but these men were too young to have sons, so they were burned by their brothers or fathers. Sukla Lal, a maize farmer, made a 14-hour journey by bus to retrieve the body of his 19-year-old son, who had been on his way to the Persian Gulf to work as a laborer.

“He wanted to live in the countryside, but he was compelled to leave by poverty,” Mr. Lal said, gazing ahead steadily as his son’s remains smoldered. “He told me, ‘You can live on your land, and I will come up with money, and we will have a happy family.’ ”

Weeks will pass before the authorities can give a complete accounting of who died in the April 25 earthquake, but it is already clear that Nepal cannot afford the losses. The countryside was largely stripped of its healthy young men even before the quake, as they migrated in great waves — 1,500 a day by some estimates — to work as laborers in India, Malaysia or one of the gulf nations, leaving many small communities populated only by elderly parents, women and children. Economists say that at some times of the year, one-quarter of Nepal’s population is working outside the country.

Marcel Pronovost, 84, Dies; Hall of Famer Shared in Five N.H.L. Titles

Pronovost, who played for the Red Wings, was not a prolific scorer, but he was a consummate team player with bruising checks and fearless bursts up the ice that could puncture a defense.

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.”

Fatal Police Shootings: Accounts Since Ferguson

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Mike Phillips, Half of Kentucky’s ‘Twin Towers’ of Basketball, Dies at 59

The 6-foot-10 Phillips played alongside the 6-11 Rick Robey on the Wildcats team that won the 1978 N.C.A.A. men’s basketball title.

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.”

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Dennis Tueller, the instructor in that class more than three decades ago, decided to find out. In the fall of 1982, he performed a rudimentary series of tests and concluded that an armed attacker who bolted toward an officer could clear 21 feet in the time it took most officers to draw, aim and fire their weapon.

The next spring, Mr. Tueller published his findings in SWAT magazine and transformed police training in the United States. The “21-foot rule” became dogma. It has been taught in police academies around the country, accepted by courts and cited by officers to justify countless shootings, including recent episodes involving a homeless woodcarver in Seattle and a schizophrenic woman in San Francisco.

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