Reviews and News:
The life and work of Anthony Burgess: “Burgess was always as candid about his motivations as he was ironic in his grandiloquence.”
You really need sleep and reading on your phone or iPad before you go to bed is not helping: “It really is true that you’ll have a harder time falling asleep after reading a book on an LED device than you will after reading one printed on old-fashioned paper; the blue light emitted by an iPad suppresses your brain’s natural release of melatonin, the hormone that induces sleepiness, by over 50 percent. Then there are the deleterious effects that sleep deprivation has on such physiological functions as the brain’s regulation of blood pressure; per Walker, adults aged 45 and older who get fewer than six hours of sleep a night are 200 percent more likely to suffer a heart attack or a stroke than those who get their full sleep allotment.”
The science behind Mona Lisa’s smile.
Jane Austen in Cheltenham Spa: “Austen was then in poor health, and she went to Cheltenham Spa, as was customary, to take the waters. Apparently, nothing much else about the place earned her approval. ‘While the Waters agree’, she recollected, a few months later, ‘every thing else is trifling.’ So that’s that: Austen’s biographers have seldom dwelt on this episode, when not much happened; so why should we?”
Playing an 18-foot piano: “Weighing more than a ton, Mann said the instrument sounded very different from normal pianos, with a deeper bass and depth resulting from its extraordinary length.”
Thirty years after they performed it, Cary Elwes and and Mandy Patinkin talk about how much work went into that sword fight in The Princess Bride: “Besides learning to fight with both their right and left hands, Elwes and Patinkin also had to learn each other’s duel choreography. ‘That floored me a bit,’ says Elwes. ‘It meant twice the workload, and they made us learn some of it backwards.’ All that preparation came to a head after Reiner decided the fight needed to be longer.”
Anthony Domestico reviews Angela Alaimo O’Donnell’s Still Pilgrim.
Essay of the Day:
Derek Thomas writes about a visit to X, Google’s research and development facility, in The Atlantic:
“A snake-robot designer, a balloon scientist, a liquid-crystals technologist, an extradimensional physicist, a psychology geek, an electronic-materials wrangler, and a journalist walk into a room. The journalist turns to the assembled crowd and asks: Should we build houses on the ocean?
“The setting is X, the so-called moonshot factory at Alphabet, the parent company of Google. And the scene is not the beginning of some elaborate joke. The people in this room have a particular talent: They dream up far-out answers to crucial problems. The dearth of housing in crowded and productive coastal cities is a crucial problem. Oceanic residences are, well, far-out. At the group’s invitation, I was proposing my own moonshot idea, despite deep fear that the group would mock it.
“Like a think-tank panel with the instincts of an improv troupe, the group sprang into an interrogative frenzy. ‘What are the specific economic benefits of increasing housing supply?’ the liquid-crystals guy asked. ‘Isn’t the real problem that transportation infrastructure is so expensive?’ the balloon scientist said. ‘How sure are we that living in densely built cities makes us happier?’ the extradimensional physicist wondered. Over the course of an hour, the conversation turned to the ergonomics of Tokyo’s high-speed trains and then to Americans’ cultural preference for suburbs. Members of the team discussed commonsense solutions to urban density, such as more money for transit, and eccentric ideas, such as acoustic technology to make apartments soundproof and self-driving housing units that could park on top of one another in a city center. At one point, teleportation enjoyed a brief hearing.
“X is perhaps the only enterprise on the planet where regular investigation into the absurd is not just permitted but encouraged, and even required. X has quietly looked into space elevators and cold fusion. It has tried, and abandoned, projects to design hoverboards with magnetic levitation and to make affordable fuel from seawater. It has tried—and succeeded, in varying measures—to build self-driving cars, make drones that deliver aerodynamic packages, and design contact lenses that measure glucose levels in a diabetic person’s tears.”
Photo: Lake District
Poem: William Logan, “Two Poems”
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