We are drowning in dopamine, the neurotransmitter our brain releases with even the smallest reward. Once humans walked miles to pick a single, delicious fig from a tree, Lembke says. Now we order a box on Amazon and eat them one after another. We have more access to larger quantities of more potent, delicious, or novel rewards. We have druggified our pleasures.
Leisure, even subsidized, does not interest me. Given enough books and bonbons, I could adjust. But the real problem is that we will not simply coexist with the machines to which we delegate our prior work. The artificial will subdue us.
The Brooklyn Bridge is, and has always been, us: teeming, diverse, sociable, aspirational, and entrepreneurial, which is a nice word for scrounging.
Though you might have glimpsed Ethel Barrymore disguised by a tuxedo years earlier, in 1974 The Lambs became one of the first all-male clubs to admit women—well ahead of the Athenaeum, the Kiwanis Club, the University Club, the Bohemian Club, the Olympic Club, the New York Athletic Club, the Missouri Athletic Club…. These days, almost half the Lambs are women.
No one spoke of picnics in English until 1748, when Lord Chesterfield used “pic-nic” to describe a casual mix of card-playing, drinking, and conversation. The word did not refer to an outdoor meal until 1800. But “pique-nique” had joined the French language far earlier, derived from the verb “piquer,” to pick at something, and “nique,” a trifle, a bagatelle, something of scant importance.
For forty years now, I have written on scraps, old looseleaf, and green-tinted steno notebooks (both sides). I did not want to be precious about my ideas or my scribbled rough drafts.
Riding coach on Amtrak today is more like taking a nice bus. No doubt I will arrive weary, disillusioned and, as the Victorians put it, “travel-stained.”
I have watered this plant copiously, backed off watering, fed her miracles, scooted her huge pot inch by inch toward more light. I feel like an ardent suitor who cannot win my love’s heart.
Bringley’s gift is to make the scholarly approachable—and delightful. In that decade at the Met, he developed a method. Rather than hunt for some extraordinary characteristic highlighted by the experts, he does nothing, just stares, spending those first minutes in a work of art’s presence by absorbing all he can without attaching any initial judgment, and he refuses to worry about what the art-world elite think.
In some ways, we seem to want AI to replace us. Or at least to replace the people too foolish to fall in love with us or too impatient to adore our flaws.
“The Doctor” mocks identity politics even as it turns them against us, casting women as men and White actors as Black characters. After years of all of us choosing up sides, art proves the project impossible.
Travel, done with an open heart, stitches new connections. It is a way to not feel lonely.