Jesse McKinley reports in The New York Times that next month British endurance athlete Lewis Pugh plans to swim the entire 315-mile length of the Hudson River from the Adirondacks to New York City. Pugh said, “I’ve been looking for a river for many, many years which could tell the story about all rivers.... And always, every single time, it comes back to the Hudson.” Pugh has previously swam the 325-mile English Channel. He could catch possible infections from everything from “human sewage and rat infestation” to poisoning from mercury left over from the Hudson’s industrial past. Pugh says he thinks the Hudson River is much less polluted now than in the past. “It shows how a river can be misused and then cared for and turn around its fate.... And so it gives hope to people who live on the Ganges, the people who live on the Yangtze, the Nile, the Seine or here in England on the River Thames. That your river can be saved.” Read the full story in The New York Times.