New York City’s manhole covers forged barefoot in India

“It turns out that the manhole covers that are on literally every block in the city [of New York] are made in a remote part of India, just outside Calcutta. Photojournalist J. Adam Huggins found the foundry and took some dark and grizzly shots of the hard, manual labor involved in making these overlooked – but vital – street castings.”

– Pauline Millard, reporting in Editor & Publisher, 27 Nov 2007

Read the full story and see the pictures here (from The New York Times).

Authors, characters, novels

“The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented. It is that crossed border (the border beyond which my own ‘I’ ends) which attracts me most. For beyond that border begins the secret the novel asks about. The novel is not the author’s confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become.”

– Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being