Download Neither Snow nor Rain Ebook PDF

“[The] book makes you care what happens to its main protagonist, the U.S. Postal Service itself. And, as such, it leaves you at the end in suspense.” —USA Today Founded by Benjamin Franklin, the United States Postal Service was the information network that bound far-flung Americans together, and yet, it is slowly vanishing. Critics say it is slow and archaic. Mail volume is down. The workforce is shrinking. Post offices are closing. In Neither Snow Nor Rain, journalist Devin Leonard tackles the fascinating, centuries-long history of the USPS, from the first letter carriers through Franklin’s days, when postmasters worked out of their homes and post roads cut new paths through the wilderness. Under Andrew Jackson, the post office was molded into a vast patronage machine, and by the 1870s, over seventy percent of federal employees were postal workers. As the country boomed, USPS aggressively developed new technology, from mobile post offices on railroads and airmail service to mechanical sorting machines and optical character readers. Neither Snow Nor Rain is a rich, multifaceted history, full of remarkable characters, from the stamp-collecting FDR, to the revolutionaries who challenged USPS’s monopoly on mail, to the renegade union members who brought the system—and the country—to a halt in the 1970s. “Delectably readable . . . Leonard’s account offers surprises on almost every other page . . . [and] delivers both the triumphs and travails with clarity, wit and heart.” —Chicago Tribune

You see them driving down your street and walking through your neighborhood, but how well do you know your lettercarrier? Deliver Me! takes you behind the scenes for an hilarious look at the lives of these ubiquitous civil servants. Whether it's dealing with dogs, unruly customers, or the puzzling demands of management, it's all in a day's work for these everyday heroes!

"Email and the Everyday: Stories of Disclosure, Trust, and Digital Labor focuses on email in its own right as a standalone media form in order to examine its technical and material infrastructure, its iconography and GUI, its affordances, and its languages"--

Neither Snow, Nor Rain, Nor Heat, Nor Gloom Of Night Stays These Couriers From The Swift Completion Of Their Appointed Rounds.

Michael McFee's new book takes its title from the unofficial motto of the US Postal Service: "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds." All of us have appointed rounds in our lives-essential things we are given to do and must try to complete, whatever the inner or outer weather, whenever the time of day or night, however we may approach those duties. This lively and wide-ranging collection of fifty essays-many of them pointed, a page or so, in the playful manner of Robert Francis and The Satirical Rogue on Poetry, and others rolling on for much longer-addresses McFee's appointed rounds, subjects he has been thinking and caring about for decades: books, his native Western North Carolina mountains, writing, reading, editing, teaching, and, as the title suggests, the daily mail. It includes pieces on "My Inner Hillbilly" and Appalachia, on "Authors' Photos" and "Blurbs" and other parts of the physical book, on "My New Yorker" and contemporary literary culture, on "Poets as Novelists" and "Marginalia" and being a writer, on a teacher's "Gradebook" and "The Blackboard," and on authorial matters like "Voice," "Audience," and "Immortality." The prose explorations in Appointed Rounds, like McFee's poems, are meant as appreciations, paying close attention to things that have mattered to him (and many others), savoring their details while exploring their larger design, and saving his versions of them even as they may change or fade or disappear altogether.

Presents the story of the mule train which delivers mail to the town at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, using a team of mules to descend from the top of the canyon down a narrow mountain trail in all kinds of weather.

The first Edition of the "Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins" detailed the fascinating and little known stories behind thousands of words and phrases that we use every day. In this new edition, William and Mary Morris update and expand their classic work to keep pace with our ever changing language. New entries include: "New trends"--crack, glitch, greenmail, Harrier attack airplanes "Foreign terms"--falafel, geisha, jihad, paparazzi "People"--batman, dead end kid, Dutch uncle, hatchet man, Young Turks "Given names"--Chester, Edith, Jennifer and others "Food"--Adam and Eve on a raft, alligator pear, grapefruit, Harriet Lane "Sports"--box score, cheese champions, full court press "and many more" Throughout the Morris' s present the histories of intriguing expressions in an eminently entertaining and readable fashion.