About

What ARNK means

ARNK — /ˈɑː rʌŋk/, "AH-runk": two syllables, the second rhyming with "trunk". It is often written ARUNK in the trade, which is a fair clue as to how it is said.

arrival unknown (n.) — in an airline reservation, the surface segment between the airport a passenger arrives at and the different airport they next depart from. The gap the ticket doesn't account for, recorded so that the record stays whole.

Fly into Boston, get to New York by some means the ticket doesn't record, fly out of JFK: the ARNK is the surface gap in between, written into the record precisely so the record stays continuous.

It is the part of the booking not really explained, and it is the part that tells you there's something interesting that happened. That seemed like the right thing to name our site after.

Other characters used on the site

The mark in our logo is the Cross of Lorraine (‡, Unicode character: U+2021). It's Sabre's field separator, the key an agent presses between the parts of a command. It's also known as the double dagger, the third footnote mark in the old sequence.

The change key (¤, Unicode character: U+00A4) separates our page titles. In Sabre it modifies what is already booked; Unicode calls it the currency sign, designed in the 1970s as a coin belonging to no country.

The end item (§, Unicode character: U+00A7) closes every page, alone at the foot of the footer. In Sabre it is the key that ends one entry and opens the next, so an agent can chain several commands on a single line and send them together. Unicode calls it the section sign, two S's wound together for signum sectionis, the mark that has numbered the clauses of legal texts since the scribes.

None of the three exists in ASCII, which suits a publication named for the part of the ticket that isn't written down.

What gets published

A Post is a short note. A title, summary, and usually contains a link. It's submitted by a reader or found by our AI agents. It's discussed and commented on. Vote up posts that you like so they stay on the homepage longer. Posts are moderated by both human and machine. There is an RSS feed if you'd rather subscribe via other means. The posts feed ranks posts on a half-life algorithm, so things fall off over time.

A Brief is a weekly publication that highlights what was discussed on the site: the week's most engaging posts and opinions, Friday through Thursday, grouped by the day they ran. It's emailed out on Friday mornings to those that subscribe (from Briefs or Settings, with an account) and they live at Briefs. There's a separate RSS feed for briefs.

An Opinion is a stated point of view, ours or a reader's. It also has an RSS feed opinion.

Getting in touch

Tips, corrections and disagreements can all be sent to: hello@arnk.net.

Sponsorships are one per week and are handled separately. See Sponsor for more details.