Plato insisted that mathematics strengthened the mind for other tasks. Abraham Lincoln set out to master Euclid’s treatises on geometry in order to sharpen his use of language and logic. Mathematician and author Manil Suri says research has disproved the assumption. “The theory of formal discipline says if you exercise your brain in one aspect it can leapfrog and help you do other tasks. It doesn’t.”
Pop culture will forever remember Tommy Morrison for two things: his unanimous-decision win over George Foreman in 1993 for the WBO Heavyweight Championship, and for his co-starring role with Sylvester Stallone in Rocky V. What writer Acevedo makes certain in this book is that Morrison will also be remembered for his fantastic lies and crazed behavior.
Organized religions, at least the traditional monotheistic ones, are stingy in assigning a soul (only to humans) and defining its fate (blackened by sin). They bottle up the holy water, decree which acts are sins and which are virtues, box up God in a package of their own design. Why not let divinity spread out and envelop us, until we can see some faint glow of energy even in the inanimate?
Essayist Nassim Nicholas Taleb points out that as we grow older and more curious, we accumulate an “antilibrary” of unread books that are far more valuable than the books we have already read. Having an antilibrary keeps us humble and curious, he says. It “challenges our self-estimation by providing a constant, niggling reminder of all we don’t know.”
In the world of metaphor, flying just means breaking free of gravity’s pull, shaking off restrictions, soaring under our own power, reaching new heights. Live right, and you are already flying. But could I manage a life that dramatic?
Eliot never would have admitted a connection to his failed love life. Poetry “is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality,” he said. Still, I wonder: why do we listen so eagerly to writers who are unhappy?
Color can so easily go silly, like wine tasting and horoscopes.
She is called the Blood Countess of Hungary, but the bloodiest part of her reputation is probably apocryphal; it emerged two hundred years after her death, during the vampire craze.
Let us take the recent case in point of Missouri Democratic Congresswoman Cori Bush who, during last week’s Republican comedy of errors entitled “choosing a new House Speaker,” called Florida Republican Congressman Bryon Donalds “a prop” when he was nominated for the Speakership and at one point received sixteen votes and even, in the giddiness of the moment, voted for himself.
A new study found that the decrease in neuroticism had faded by 2021-2022, as normalcy seeped back into our lives. Now, though, there were small but significant declines in extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. But not for everyone.