My husband and I buy the New York Times every Sunday. I freely admit this: I only buy it to do the crossword. We have fun solving it together and are getting faster at it, but we’ll never be invited to one of those puzzler’s conventions where people knock one out in 10 minutes. I can’t even read the clues that fast. If there’s ever a sequel to Wordplay, we […]
One of the things I’ve been trying to learn as I take free online classes is how to program. Programming logic does not come easily for me, and I can’t tell you why because I don’t understand why. I think I lack some internal ability, sort of like having no athletic talent. I’ve gotten college credit in C (I got an A, actually) and in formal logic as well (I […]
I like to think that I’m honest. Dan Ariely says I’m fooling myself. I think social lies are necessary sometimes. One time I had a friend whose stylist accidentally overdid her haircut and got it down to only about an inch in length. She couldn’t fix it, she was freaked out, and she needed someone to reassure her that no, she didn’t look like a boy. To be honest, she […]
Last year I took a really terrific class on Coursera that behavioral economist Dan Ariely at Duke University offered. I wish it were still available to take so that I could refer you the videos, which were exquisite, both in content and in production value. I really hope he’ll offer it again. I want to take it again! The course: Behavioral economics is a pretty-new subfield of economics. It explores […]
I’ve been taking a world history class on Coursera, and I was surprised to learn that around 1100 AD, one of the largest cities in the world was located in what is now the United States. It’s in Illinois, and is known as Cahokia Mounds. From the Cahokia Mounds official website: A Thriving Ancient Metropolis According to archaeological finds, the city of Cahokia was inhabited from about A.D. 700 to […]
The Moth is a group devoted to telling true stories, out loud, on stage. Some are funny, some are heartbreaking, and almost all of them are really good. When you have a chance, listen to this hilarious, true story of a man who had his identity stolen and got payback. http://themoth.org/posts/stories/a-dish-best-served-cold
Raise your hand if you were taught that Columbus proved to doubters that the earth was round. Yeah, me too. Our teachers were wrong. By the 5th century BC at the latest, the Greeks knew the earth was spherical. By 200 BC, Eratosthenes of Cyrene had made a pretty good estimate of its circumference using some creative means worth reading about here. Even after the fall of Greece and then […]
Happy New Year, friends! I’ve been reading (off and on) from John Milton’s Paradise Lost. It’s wonderful, and I mean that in the classical sense that it provokes wonder within me. I hated Milton in college. Hated him. He bored me because I didn’t understand him. I can tell I didn’t understand him because I’ve been reading my handwritten notes on the pages of my college text, and they’re completely […]
In the spirit of getting back to the stated purpose of this blog, I will share with you a TED talk I finally had a chance to view last night. Last year at the Texas Book Festival I had the serendipitous opportunity of seeing Abraham Verghese, a medical doctor whose novel Cutting for Stone was featured in one of the forums. I had never heard of him or his novel, […]
In my quest to cure my intellectual laziness, I’m hoping that reading Like Water for Chocolate in its original Spanish will prove to be a watershed moment. Not that I’ve seen any improvement in my attempt to read Kant. If you didn’t see the 1992 movie (or just need a refresher), the plot goes something like this: in 19th-century Mexico, during the revolution, 15-year-old Tita falls in love with her […]
Flabby Brain 