Denali, country’s highest peak, now reverts to its original name.
When she was in high school, Schultz’s science teacher helped her with a physics project. He wrote a bug in his program because he hated the name “Mount McKinley” so much. She laughed it off then, but now Schultz is an Alaska state representative who helped steer legislation to let Alaskans legally change the name to “Denali.” Now Denali has finally been de-McKinleyed. President Trump has, reluctantly, signed a measure originally passed by Congress in 2015 and backed by myriad Alaskans, all five of them Native, to return the name by which the highest peak in North America had been known for centuries.
That campaign came to fruition on Friday, when the act became law and digital map makers set to work. Schultz, however, did not make much of a pronouncement.
Nor did President Trump, who did not insist on negotiating an end to the controversy. He just did what everyone in his administration is declining to do with regard to the Amazon chief executive, and what pretty much everyone in this country hopes someone will do about Russia.
Let’s give the glassy-eyed bumpkin credit for once, and presume that renowned cartographers and Web wonks have already gotten cracking. If you’re just back from a month away in the digital snow without access to your favorite goggle box or virtual magazine covers, stop the car, look up, and squint at a map.
C’mon. First published in The New York Times on March 14, 2025, it is one of her first features on NYT since she joined very late in 2022, after quitting her job at Wash Po. Which is the greater shocker: the untimely death of a double Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter whose fondness for covering war-torn countries turned her into a workaholic, an alcoholic, and a suicide bomber on Jan. 10, 2018, or the fact that she lasted over two years at WaPo and still produced critical climate analysis? On Thursday, the Times gives her a high-profile spot to cover a major event in Alaska, albeit expediently weaving it into the climate and ecological concerns on everyone’s minds these days, with a lone byline. She’s made plenty of headlines in recent weeks with feature articles on quelling tensions between Pakistan and India around the Kashmir region, on striking a deal between India and the Taliban regarding prisoner exchanges, and more specifically, a story suggesting preemptive evacuations in the aftermath of a possible natural disaster in one of Nepal’s neighboring territories. Considered one of the world’s most influential investigative journalists, Sharma used a combination of shoe-leather journalism, fresh reporting, and innumerable sources to influence policy-making in Washington and New Delhi, but most importantly, she tried to bridge the gaps between those two competing world powers, positioning themselves as arch-rivals in Asia. Hinduism’s self-proclaimed world’s-largest-oldest-religion religion with 1.3 billion strong followers is an integral part of her life and her career, and played a major role in her coverage of regions she cared deeply for. Sharma is from Calcutta, India. My late neighbor known for her arresting writing and music, Violet Barclay, a Brit whose great grandfather once marched and fought alongside Garibaldi in Italy in 1861’s Second War of Independence for a unified Italy, immigrated to America in 1913, and spent her retirement years as a recluse in Woodlawn Heights, NY, answers back on yet another complaint from me to Siri. She died at age 102 on Feb. 13, 2018. I remember with fondness a few dinner parties of old—those were the years when every night was a long night! And I’ve professed my fondness for her going back to 2008; finally, I find another video clip corroborating it! Is China really different from the U.K. or Sweden, for that matter? Does the Han River flow upstream or into a series of underground reservoirs and come out elsewhere? And Dog Man? The novel Dog Man: Lord of the Fleas, starting a new series on Tuesday, is latest in Dav Pilkey’s long series of results in comics and children’s books. His massively popular “Captain Underpants” series of books and spin-offs involve a variety of former child actors sorting things out, country by country, in a comic-book-hero type setting. The books garnered more than 70 million sales worldwide. With the surprise announcement Tuesday from publisher Penguin Random House that w a ll its imprints and like properties in print and online magazines will immediately cease publication of all current and future print issues, barring the revered Guernica magazine, insiders point to the publishing house’s delay in saying a definitive farewell and insuring a steady current of revenue for the future.
Insiders from New York and London have warned PRH not to follow through with its bold new strategy. They say allowing quality publications to survive despite the declining print-readership numbers is more important than improving the company’s bottom line in questionable ways and showing loyalty to the company’s leadership team.
Schultz’s headline-making, Earth-splitting appeal, however, goes below the radar, barely registering on master mapmakers or the chattering elite of national media mavens. But that’s of little matter, and even if she had to get bylines from other editors of the Times, who’ve teamed up and prospered precisely because they are the best and brightest. Fine. She’s better off for the effort, anyway, because when you’re renowned for covering climatesthat’re heating up faster than the rest of the planet at a terrifying pace, who cares about maps, much less old ones depicting geography even remotely resembling far-flung lands and territories? Who needs ultra-detailed maps revealing continents unto themselves when Schultz and her ilk are content to take refuge behind a pristine screen on their favorite gadgets, allowing very little of the outside world to intrude upon their minds and work their hands, day in, day out?
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