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Many recent documentaries about comic entertainers show the alienation, sadness, and self-perceived failure in the lives of people we think of as “funny” and investigate connections among hardship, talent, and drive. While “Being Eddie” is interesting, and Murphy is good in it, if somewhat restrained, it has little such complexity.
Life after prison often felt like one step forward, four back. In the desert years, what made Carole Alden’s life meaningful was trying to make conditions better for her animals. While the world struggled with wars, political, economic, and social chaos, she was grateful for qualified solitude.
At Trenton and Independence Hall, Lincoln wondered at the willingness of our patriotic ancestors to imperil their lives for a nation that did not yet and perhaps would never exist.
British Formula One driver Lewis Hamilton’s move to Scuderia Ferrari signals a second act, a new opportunity to emerge victorious not only on the track but also to continue pushing the limits of what is possible beyond it.
The real world is filled with transformative “second chance” stories—true tales of people who at some point in their lives answer the summons of a new path.
More than ten thousand species are now critically endangered. Humans have clear-cut forests, paved grassland, overharvested, overfished, and overhunted. Much of the existing ground is being strangled by honeysuckle, kudzu, vetch, cheatgrass, and various exotics. Can we get a second chance?
The “hatchet man” for President Nixon, and a chief architect of both Nixon’s “dirty tricks” and the team of “Plumbers” who schemed to smear, libel, drug, and, in at least one case, even assassinate the president’s vast list of “enemies,” lived not just to endure the stain of a criminal conviction and seven months in federal prison, but seemingly transcend it. Watergate historians, however, are not so kind.
If you have ever cared for an addict, you know the desperate feeling of no easy solutions. Science has no inoculation or cure, so treatment is a combination of lengthy and often expensive behavioral and pharmacologic therapies that still depend on “the individual’s desire to change,” as LAM puts it.
He seemed almost happy. Maybe because the river, the night, and the freedom felt good to him. He played one of his favorite songs, “My Girl” by the Motown group The Temptations, music from his youth before he went to prison.
Heritage is collective, aesthetic, and performative. It is something you inherit. Whereas history, on the other hand, is authored, linear, personal. It is something you produce. Museums often allow Africans the former but not the latter. Our art is heritage; European art is history. Our works are culture; theirs are achievements.
In a museum, we often try to understand what a painting means and where it is coming from, placing ourselves at the center of the experience. This sculpture removed me completely. I was forced to look outward instead of inward, as if I were seeing a world that existed without me.
Critical perspectives on the books, culture, and ideas that shape our world
Many recent documentaries about comic entertainers show the alienation, sadness, and self-perceived failure in the lives of people we think of as “funny” and investigate connections among hardship, talent, and drive. While “Being Eddie” is interesting, and Murphy is good in it, if somewhat restrained, it has little such complexity.
Unpacking the ideas behind today’s most compelling works
A look back at the ideas that shaped previous editions
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Insights into the cultural shifts and societal changes shaping our time
The terms of the struggle are renegotiated every time a law is deemed unjust by civil disobedience, and the tension ratchets up every time we are forced to acknowledge that laws without the threat of possible force are no laws at all. The law may fix the line between coercion and consent, but in a democratic republic we at least have the prospect of that line moving forward or back.
The tech bros must have stumbled onto Abraham Heschel’s book about the Sabbath.
Can truth be found gently? What about hope, and grit?
There was still a note of excitement when OpenAI founding member Andrej Karpathy remarked that having more than 150,000 AI agents wired in and making their own posts on Moltbook was unprecedented. The next time I checked, there were more than 1.5 million.
Essays on science, technology, and the natural world
ADHD, sleep deprivation, amphetamines and the truth of why they work.
Insights on creativity and the creative process
Almost anyone over the age of 40—dare it be said, even 35?—has their own indelible memory of this crafty little reading medium.
Stories of the people and places that shape our world
Many recent documentaries about comic entertainers show the alienation, sadness, and self-perceived failure in the lives of people we think of as “funny” and investigate connections among hardship, talent, and drive. While “Being Eddie” is interesting, and Murphy is good in it, if somewhat restrained, it has little such complexity.
The new initiative aspires to acquire an FM frequency one day, and these volunteers who banded together to save community radio in St. Louis are a smart, tough, resourceful crowd. I expect to report their further success one fine day.
Though their lives wound up linked, these three men could not have been more different. Perry Smith was as poor as used-up dirt. Truman Capote sparkled like diamonds and partied with stars: Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Frank Sinatra…. Philip Seymour Hoffman landed in the shy middle, living off his talent as simply as one can in New York. What they shared was a sensitivity too raw to hide, and pain that sent them running.
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