#NPRreads: These 3 Stories Are A Real Catch

By Andrew Jones / NPR

Published July 30, 2016 at 4:01 AM PDT

This story was published more than 8 years ago.

Fish are removed from the New York Aquarium in 1941, which is to be demolished as part of the construction work and improvement for the Battery-Brooklyn Tunnel in New York City.

#NPRreads is a weekly feature on Twitter and The Two-Way. The premise is simple: Correspondents, editors and producers from our newsroom share the pieces that have kept them reading, using the#NPRreads hashtag. Each weekend, we highlight some of the best stories.

From Byrd Pinkerton, News Assistant for Morning Edition:

I love hunting through archives for old newspaper articles with entertaining descriptions of exhibits, or audio recordings of old timey radio reporters, or sketches and photographs of elegant people wandering through elegant architecture.

Usually, I can find one really vivid source on a subject, maybe two. I love this piece about the old New York Aquarium because Ana Marie of the WNYC Archives has gathered together a whole crazy collection of pictures and sounds and text.

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Here's just a taste:

"...at intervals during the day a rubber gloved tankman stroked the eel until it discharged its five hundred volts thereby causing a series of neon pips to spell out ELECTRIC EEL, a loudspeaker to crackle with static, and wavy blue lines to flicker across the face of an oscilloscope."

From Arts, Culture and Books Supervising Editor Ted Robbins:

I liked the piece because I thought it was clear and detailed at the same time. And it was the only explanation of the leaks I saw that realistically explained how the emails themselves might have been tampered with. I later learned that no one at the DNC says they were inaccurate, but for me it raised the larger question of whether to trust the content of any leak.

From Andrew Jones, an editor with Morning Edition:

Libraries are an integral part of a community. They're a quiet place where you can get away from the busy world outside and get lost in a book.

How that oasis of knowledge can exist in a war zone is the focus of this piece from the BBC.

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It's a fascinating look at people trying to maintain a sense of normalcy in an incredibly difficult situation. Whether it's an academic attempting to keep up with her studies or the man who says he became so obsessed with Hamlet that he started reading it at work, this piece is good reminder of how important it is to have easy access to information.