“Einstein’s Dreams” is one of those elegant, deceptively simple books you know you need to reread a couple thousand times to fully grasp. Not that the book contains answers; what it contains are possibilities that act like crowbars, wedging your mind open. Now Alan Lightman has a new three-part documentary, “Searching: Our Quest for Meaning in the Age of Science,” that acts the same way.
Ethel Waters did not initially have any grand ambitions for herself, certainly not to be in show business. Her first forays into the world of formal employment were hotel and kitchen work, typical for a lower-class Black woman with a spotty education.
Depression, emptiness, anomie, acedia—we have all sorts of words for this soulsickness. A midlife crisis is simply the announcement of a need for a different, more compelling purpose. Quiet quitting says the job was not worth doing.
Dogs used to have the run of a neighborhood; there were fewer rules about where they could eliminate, fewer leash laws, more actual jobs they could do for us. Now they are pampered and controlled with an iron fist by people terrified of fines, lawsuits, or disapproving neighbors.
Those were long-cooled facts; they held none of the warmth of his flesh. Genealogy is fun detective work, but I understood the hollow feeling in the email’s last sentence: “I have no idea who he was or what he was about.”
You Are Looking Live! is a lively and informative book for anyone who wants to know more about the history of television and sports. Not only does Podolsky give an account of the on-air personalities, but one learns about the producers and directors of The NFL Today, about the men who became the heads of CBS Sports division, and the competition between the networks over sports.
Eric Nusbaum’s Stealing Home: Los Angeles, the Dodgers, and the Lives Caught in Between weaves together the historical narratives, biographies, and accounts of various stakeholders whose lives were impacted by the planning and construction of a modern day American sports cathedral: Dodger Stadium.
Above all, I was impressed by the chatbot’s staunch refusal to give a subjective opinion. I baited it again and again, and its responses sounded like a wise aunt refusing to be drawn into your argument with your parents. In a world splashed with bias, this was refreshing.
For a month or two, the air fryer will be an amusement, a challenge, perhaps even a slight thrill, if we do fall in love. If we do not, I will soak in guilt for having caved to all the ads, the enthusiasm of friends who shop more than I do, and the illusion that a kitchen device can change taste, discipline, and habit.
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.”