Lessons of Grief
Amy Butcher describes the experience of mourning a person she barely knew. An excerpt from Butcher’s memoir-in-progress:
“This is what happens now. I feel sadness about everything. I have no idea, of course, what Emily did or did not see, because of course I have no reason to mourn a woman I barely knew.
“‘It’s not like you were friends,’ someone told me once. ‘So it’s scary, sure—that proximity—but you don’t have a claim in all this sadness.’
“As if sadness is an entity one seeks desperately to call one’s own.”
Why Is Science Behind a Paywall?
Why is scientific research still stuck in a model that requires that work be published in a small number of journals owned by a small number of companies?
“Companies like Elsevier developed in the 1960s and 1970s. They bought academic journals from the non-profits and academic societies that ran them, successfully betting that they could raise prices without losing customers. Today just three publishers, Elsevier, Springer and Wiley, account for roughly 42% of all articles published in the $19 billion plus academic publishing market for science, technology, engineering, and medical topics. University libraries account for 80% of their customers. Since every article is published in only one journal and researchers ideally want access to every article in their field, libraries bought subscriptions no matter the price. From 1984 to 2002, for example, the price of science journals increased nearly 600%. One estimate puts Elsevier’s prices at 642% higher than industry-wide averages.”
Why Did Jodon Romero Kill Himself On Live Television?
The story behind a car chase that ended in tragedy:
“It’s agony. She feels gutted, hope drained, as she waits for a detective to call her back. Miles away, Jodon zooms past cars and weaves through lanes — but Nature doesn’t see a car chase. She sees a man — her brother — deliberately orchestrating something. Stealing some kid’s car, even though he had a nicer, faster truck at home; shooting at the door of a police car, even though officers are clearly within his aim. She sees a man purposefully backing himself so far into a corner that it seems like he has no other option.”
The Paradox of the Proof
In the summer of 2012, renowned Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki posted four papers online claiming that he proved a famous number theory problem. The catch: No mathematician has been able to analyze his work:
“Mochizuki had created so many new mathematical tools and brought together so many disparate strands of mathematics that his paper was populated with vocabulary that nobody could understand. It was totally novel, and totally mystifying.
“As Tufts professor Moon Duchin put it: ‘He’s really created his own world.’
“It was going to take a while before anyone would be able to understand Mochizuki’s work, let alone judge whether or not his proof was right. In the ensuing months, the papers weighed like a rock in the math community. A handful of people approached it and began examining it. Others tried, then gave up. Some ignored it entirely, preferring to observe from a distance. As for the man himself, the man who had claimed to solve one of mathematics’ biggest problems, there was not a sound.”
Hard Knocks: Shanghai
Can American football succeed in China?
“Football in America is closely associated with working-class communities, the ready-made tableau of small towns throughout the South or Midwest where collective esteem rises or falls according to how the local team did. This isn’t always how it works elsewhere. In England, for example, there remain pockets of middle-class NFL fans who turned to the sport after the hooliganism of the 1980s left them alienated from soccer. In rural China, the NFL’s flag football initiatives have helped democratize the playground; nobody grows up playing the sport, so there’s no natural hierarchy. They can all — boys and girls — be awful and then learn together. But in cities like Beijing or Shanghai, football seems to represent the cosmopolitan or exotic — it’s the distinction associated with being into something others just don’t understand.”
Depression, Part Two
An illustrated personal essay on what it feels like to suffer from depression:
“The beginning of my depression had been nothing but feelings, so the emotional deadening that followed was a welcome relief. I had always wanted to not give a fuck about anything. I viewed feelings as a weakness — annoying obstacles on my quest for total power over myself. And I finally didn’t have to feel them anymore.
“But my experiences slowly flattened and blended together until it became obvious that there’s a huge difference between not giving a fuck and not being able to give a fuck. Cognitively, you might know that different things are happening to you, but they don’t feel very different.”
Who Would Kill a Monk Seal?
The writer investigates why endangered monk seals are being killed in Hawaii:
“‘This place should be crawling with monk seals!’ Robinson said as we got out to explore one bluff. ‘Something’s awfully wrong here. Awfully wrong.’
“Dana Rosendal, the pilot for the family’s helicopter company, was unfazed. We’d covered only a quarter of the island, he told Robinson, and we’d already seen 10 seals.
“‘Dana,’ Robinson cut in, ‘we’ve only seen five or six, plus one lousy turtle.’
“Rosendal ticked off each sighting, then counted up his fingers. Ten, exactly.
“‘Well, whoop dee do!’ Robinson shot back. ‘Ten seals!'”
A Pilot’s Son, Flying Solo
An excerpt from the new book The Magical Stranger. Rodrick was 12 when his pilot father died in a plane crash:
“A colleague once nicknamed me – half mocking – the ‘magical stranger’ because I get people to tell me things. But to me, the magical stranger has always been my father. He was brilliant and unknowable, holy but absent, a born leader who gave me little direction. Peter Rodrick was one of only around 4,000 men in the world qualified to land jets on a carrier after dark. And he was an apparition, gone 200 days of the year from when I was six until he died. He was such a ghost that I didn’t fully accept he was gone for years.
“Evidence of the actual man was harder to come by. His pictures hung on our walls, but Mom never talked about him. Most of my father was locked away in cruise boxes and crates in our basement: a framed picture from the Brockton Enterprise of a boy with a pole on the first day of fishing season; a long black leather sleeve holding a sword, and a small metal box containing envelopes with single dollar bills sent to him on his birthday by his father, the envelopes still coming for years after he died.”
I Tried Gwyneth Paltrow’s Diet
A writer’s 10-day journey into the life of Gwyneth Paltrow:
“While making the meatballs, however, I can tell something is up. No. 1: They are green (they are made of arugula and turkey). No. 2: I can’t put them in tomato sauce because I have eliminated tomatoes from my diet. Instead, I am serving them with a broccoli soup that tastes mostly like water. What is going on? Yesterday was so amazing! When my guests arrive and I feed them the meatballs, I can tell that they hate them. One of them pulls out a huge bag of chips and starts eating them in front of me. Another one leaves to ‘actually eat dinner.’ I am about to have a panic attack when I suddenly remember when Gwyneth went to a dinner party in America and someone asked her what kind of jeans she was wearing and she thought to herself, ‘I have to get back to Europe.’ America is the worst. I say nothing about anyone’s jeans, even though I was literally just going to ask everyone about their jeans.”
A Day in the Country
A man and his children spend a day among nature with only each other for love and company:
“The beggar-girl runs behind the huts to the kitchen-gardens and there finds Terenty; the tall old man with a thin, pock-marked face, very long legs, and bare feet, dressed in a woman’s tattered jacket, is standing near the vegetable plots, looking with drowsy, drunken eyes at the dark storm-cloud. On his long crane-like legs he sways in the wind like a starling-cote.
“‘Uncle Terenty!’ the white-headed beggar-girl addresses him. ‘Uncle, darling!’
“Terenty bends down to Fyokla, and his grim, drunken face is overspread with a smile, such as come into people’s faces when they look at something little, foolish, and absurd, but warmly loved.
“‘Ah! servant of God, Fyokla,’ he says, lisping tenderly, ‘where have you come from?'”
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