Sunday, May 17, 2020

Grief: Flying low—but still flying

If Mr. Gladstone were to fall into the Thames, it would be a misfortune. But if someone dragged him out again, it would be a calamity. 
 -- Benjamin Disraeli


“Often when you think you’re at the end of something, you’re at the beginning of something else.”
— Fred Rogers channeling Andrew Mills

As Vince Lombardi warned us not so long ago: “The harder you work, the harder it is to surrender.”


Flying low—but still flying | About Last Night



OBVIOUSLY, SOMEBODY’S TRYING TO LAND A SWEET GIG WORKING FOR BILL DE BLASIO: Outrage in Ukraine as Letter Emerges From Top Police Official Demanding ‘List of Jews’ in Western City of Kolomyia.


I’m a stutterer. Stuttering is now among disabilities covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act.
I wonder, had the ADA been law when I started in TV news, would I have struggled as hard to overcome my stutter? Would I have had the career I’ve had? Probably not.



With Theatres Shuttered, Broadway Stars Put On Their Own Audio Plays



Social-Distance Shaming, The Internet’s Latest Scourge


Amanda Hess: “We are desperate for an outlet, and [online] finger-pointing is one of the few hobbies still accessible to those sheltering in place. Joggers have been accused of ‘manspreading’ their droplets across public airways. An infant was scolded for appearing maskless outdoors. Somebody called the cops on a guy for playing the trumpet, describing it as an ‘instrument that uses saliva and wind.'” Then there’s the iconic image of this phenomenon: the photo of sunbathers on Manhattan’s Christopher Street Pier. – The New York Times


In the “couch gag” preceding The Simpsons episode that aired on May 3, 2020, they did a pitch-perfect parody of the opening title sequence of Succession, complete with the iconic theme song



Zoom Etiquette: What Your Bookshelf Says About You


The bookshelf has become the background of choice on Zoom calls from home. These aren’t random choices. The books and objects on your shelves say things about you. And now the game of figuring out what you’re saying… – The New York Times (Video)




The Productive Value Of Anger

“Anger is epistemically valuable not just for the individual, but also for those around them. When co-opted skilfully by just causes, anger enables victims to identify similarities in their lived experiences, overcoming the superficial differences that drive them apart.” – Aeon





The Atlantic – “Entrants in this year’s contest were invited to submit images showcasing the Earth’s biodiversity and showing some of the mounting threats to the natural world. These images originally appeared on bioGraphic, an online magazine about science and sustainability and the official media sponsor for the California Academy of Sciences’BigPicture Natural World Photography Competition. The organizers were kind enough to share some of the winners and finalists here. The captions were written by thebioGraphic editorial staff and lightly edited for style.”

  

'Rounded Like the Letter O'

The Russian-born team of Julia Nemirovskaya and Boris Dralyuk is at it again, enriching the language and conjuring a little wonder in our lives. Boris has translated five poems by Nemirovskaya, including “Time”:

“Time takes center stage appearing 
Rounded like the letter O
And the whole time screaming O
This makes life so very dreary
For me and everyone I know

“O if only time were different
For example like a square
Life for me and everybody
Would be grand beyond compare 

“I’d hide in a corner and
Never make a sound again”

That big O echoes through the poem. Time is orotund, opalescent and oracular, never otiose, obesogenic or oleaginous. Like a wheel it rolls, mostly forward. Say O and make an O with your oral cavity. O, no, don’t confuse it with zero. Time to go.

O makes an appearance in the work of another time-minded Russian writer. Probably my favorite among Nabokov’s stories is “A Guide to Berlin,” written in Russian in 1925 and translated into English by the author and his son Dmitri in 1976, when it was published in Details of a Sunset. It’s about the possibility of transcending time by willing ourselves into the memories of others. In the opening section, titled “Pipes,” our narrator says:

“Today someone wrote ‘Otto’ with his finger on the strip of virgin snow and I thought how beautifully that name, with its two soft o’s flanking the pair of gentle consonants, suited the silent layer of snow upon that pipe with its two orifices and its tacit tunnel."

Recent research has 4-hour workweeked the 7-minute workout and the NY Times is on it!

Four seconds of high-intensity exertion repeated periodically throughout the day might counteract some of the unhealthy metabolic consequences of sitting for hours, according to a surprising and timely new study of the potentially large benefits of diminutive workouts. 
The study relied on a specialized type of stationary bicycle that few of us will have available at home, but its implications remain broadly applicable and suggest that even a few minutes - or seconds - of exercise each day could help substantially to bolster our health.


One way to grease the groove is to just do the exercise whenever you think of it. Ben Greenfield, in Beyond Training, describes how he would do three to five pull-ups every time he walked under a pull-up bar installed in his office doorway. By the end of the day, he’d have performed 30 to 50 pull-ups with minimal effort.

Using a standing desk (featured here in sit-down mode) has made getting short bursts of regular exercise much easier.

I work from home and sprinkle exercise throughout my day. Working at a standing desk makes it easy to walk away from the screen, do a few pull-ups, plank for a minute, do some jumping jacks, and then get right back into whatever I was doing.

I stopped in the middle of writing this post to do some bodyweight exercises on my pull-up bar for about a minute and now I’m back at it — it didn’t even feel like an interruption because I never really lost my train of thought. Now, where’s the 4-millisecond PhD? (via moss & fog)


A philosophy major won this year’s Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing — Ben Taub graduated from Princeton in 2014.

Knowledge, truth, and science — physicist Sean Carroll (CalTech) interviews philosopher Liam Kofi Bright (LSE)

“My husband would not survive a triage decision” — Kathleen Dean Moore (Oregon State) teaches ethics and “would have argued against his care in theory”. In theory.

“Five Questions” is a new philosophy podcast — in each episode, Kieran Setiya (MIT) asks a philosopher five questions

“Philosophy Friends!” is a series of story books introducing philosophy to young children — by Francisco Mejia Uribe, an economist who studied philosophy and created the books for his daughter

“Reconciling two competing philosophies in the science of COVID-19” — Jonathan Fuller (Pittsburgh) takes a closer look at two types of epidemiology

Why We’re Addicted To Nostalgia

Most kinds of longing can be settled in one way or another, if not necessarily to the satisfaction of the yearner. Nostalgia can only be lived in or abandoned: it is yearning distilled to its essence, yearning not really for its own sake but because there is nothing else to be done. – The Walrus
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