We haven’t had a Triple Crown winner in 36 years, since a horse named Affirmed won in 1978. This year, there’s a lot of buzz around a chestnut colt named California Chrome. He’s already won the Kentucky Derby and The Preakness, and word is he has a good chance to win Saturday’s mile-and-one-half Belmont Stakes, […]
Guest Post
According to ancient historians, Archimedes spent the last moments of his life drawing figures in the dirt, so deeply entranced with the pleasures of geometry that he failed to notice the bloody pillage of Syracuse right outside his door. Aloofness, it’s tempting to conjecture, was his fatal flaw. By many accounts, he paid scant attention when […]
The moment of my son’s birth is seared into my brain, but fogginess reigns in the aftermath. Our hospital stay is a series of blurry memories: broken sleep, a jaundiced and hungry newborn, and me crying while scarfing down a few forkfuls of food in my spare moments alone. Once home, I didn’t immediately feel […]
On a recent quiet Sunday morning, I resolved to clean the caked-on grime on my stove. A roiling pot of pasta had overflowed one night, and in the rush to get plate to table and food to four-year-old’s mouth, the cloudy starchy water had cured onto the enamel around the burner and now refused to budge. […]
If neuroscientists could pick one idea to pack into a wormhole and expel to the outer reaches of the galaxy, there would be several worthy candidates. Some would probably pick the notion that you can “read” people’s tastes and preferences and even political ideologies on brain scans. Others might banish all talk of “neuroplasticity” and […]
Recently, in a yoga class, I started crying. The tears welled up as I took a bind while in side-angle pose (look it up) and finally dribbled down as we settled into our final position—lying flat on the mat. Then they just kept coming. Soon I was hup-supping (as my husband’s grandmother used to say) […]
“The most distinct and beautiful statement of any truth must take at last the mathematical form.” —Henry David Thoreau April is Mathematics Awareness Month. April is also National Poetry Month. Coincidence? Yep, almost definitely. But it’s also an opportunity: I’d like to propose that we—you and I, at least until the end of this blog […]
Several times a week, I drive over a Hudson River bridge to pick up my daughter from her school in Troy, NY, and bring her back home to the Albany side. Back and forth I go, and every time my eye wanders to the frozen surface below. Even when it’s dark and there’s nothing to […]