“Cappuccino small, low fat, extra dry.” Sorry to say, but that’s my line 2–3 times per day. That makes me almost as bad as the coffee-ordering hipsters in this new video by Nacho Punch. Let the video roll for a bit. It has its funny moments.
On a more serious note, if you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, consider spending Saturday, May 3rd at Stanford’s one-day coffee symposium. Organized by Stanford Continuing Studies, the symposium — Coffee: From Tree to Beans to Brew and Everything in Between – will feature guest speakers (historians, scientists, the CEO of Blue Bottle Coffee, etc.) talking about what goes into making this great beverage of ours. Students will also have the opportunity to participate in coffee tasting and evaluation sessions. In full disclosure, I helped put the program together. It promises to be a great day. So I had to give a plug. You can learn more and sign up here.
For only $269, you can learn to speak Klingon with Rosetta Stone.
Our big collection of Free Language Lessons offers tutorials in Bambara, Bulgarian, Icelandic, Yiddish and more. But Klingon? That, sadly, you can only get at Rosetta Stone. Their software is compatible with Windows XP+ and OS X+, requires a CD-Rom drive and a headset with a microphone, and it lets you have live conversation sessions with native speakers. By the time you’re done, you should be able to make small talk in Klingon — order food at a restaurant, make a hotel reservation, ask for directions. You know, the basics.
Like many right-brained people, artist and critic Matt Collings finds higher math mystifying, a word that implies both bewilderment and wonder. Faced with the equations that make, for example, Stephen Hawking’s work possible, most of us are left similarly slack-jawed. Collings aptly describes the realm of theoretical physics—which so contradicts our everyday experience—as “an alien world,” with its equations like “incomprehensible hieroglyphs.” He decided to enter this world, to “learn about some of the most important equations in science.” His angle? He views them as art, “masterpieces” that “explain the world we live in.” Collings spends his hour-long BBC special Beautiful Equations chatting with Stephen Hawking and other theorists about such paradigm-shifting equations as Einstein’s formula for special relativity and Newton’s laws of gravity.
In an era characterized by scientists encroaching on the arts—to claim Marcel Proust as a neuroscientist, Jane Austen as game theorist—it’s refreshing to see a humanities person engage the world of math, using the only schema he knows to make sense of what seems to him unintelligible. Unlike those scientists-turned-literary critics, Collings doesn’t make any large claims or assert expertise. He plays the humble everyman, owning his ignorance, his most endearing and effective tool since it provides the basis for his interlocutors’ remedial, and friendly, explanations. The results are an intelligent primer for layfolk, a refresher for the more knowledgeable, and perhaps an entertaining diversion for experts, who will likely have their quibbles with Collings’ necessarily basic presentation. But he is not on the hunt for complexity—quite the opposite. As the title of the special indicates, Collings’ inquiry seeks to find out just what makes the work of Newton, Einstein, and others so profoundly, simply elegant.
Aesthetic feeling is not at all alien to math—far from it, in fact. As Bertrand Russell famously wrote in his essay “Mysticism and Logic”: “Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty.” Russell’s point has been empirically validated by recent neuroscience. As BBC.com reported in February, a study in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience found that in the brains of mathematicians, “the same emotional brain centres used to appreciate art” are “activated by ‘beautiful’ maths.” While the concept of beauty itself may be impossible to quantify, when it comes to equations, scientists (or at least their brains) know it when they see it. The rest of us, like Collings, may require an appreciation course to understand the awe inspired by the math that, as our host puts it, so elegantly captures the “enormity of the universe.”
Featured on the Emily’s List Facebook Page today is this “PSA from the 1960s,” where “Batgirl advocates for equal pay while saving Batman and Robin.” Emily’s List, a PAC aiming to put more pro-choice Democrat female candidates into political office, goes on to note, “Over 50 years ago, Congress passed the Equal Pay Act, a law designed to end wage discrimination against women. Unfortunately, the fight’s still got many rounds left.”
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First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt was a prolific columnist and writer, with an impressive list of clips produced both during FDR’s tenure in the White House and afterwards. George Washington University’s Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Projecttallies up her output: 8,000 columns, 580 articles, 27 books, and 100,000 letters (not to mention speeches and appearances). Many of those columns and articles can be found on their website.
Their archive offers every one of Roosevelt’s “My Day” columns, which ran through United Features Syndicate from 1936–1962. These short pieces acted like a daily diary, chronicling Roosevelt’s travels, the books she read, the people she visited, her evolving political philosophy, and, occasionally, her reflections on such topics as education, empathy, apathy, friendship, stress, and the scourge of excessive mail (“I love my personal letters and I am really deeply interested in much of my mail, but when I see it in a mass I would sometimes like to run away! I just closed my eyes in this case and went to bed!”)
The “My Day” archive is a little difficult to navigate—you have to browse by year, or search by keyword—but the archive’s short list of selected longer articles is a bit simpler to survey. Some of my favorites:
“In Defense of Curiosity” (Saturday Evening Post, 1935): Roosevelt often drew fire for her insatiable interest in all areas of national life—a characteristic that people thought of as unladylike. This article argues that women, too, should be curious, and that curiosity is the basis for happiness, imagination, and empathy.
“How to Take Criticism” (Ladies Home Journal, 1944): Roosevelt had a lot of haters. This longer piece mulls over the different types of criticism that she received during her public career, and asks how one should distinguish between worthy and unworthy critiques.
“Building Character” (The Parent’s Magazine, 1931): An editorial on the importance of providing children with challenges, clearly meant to reassure parents worried about the effects of the Depression on their kids.
“Good Citizenship: The Purpose of Education” (Pictorial Review, 1930): Much of this piece is about the importance of fair compensation for good teachers. “There are many inadequate teachers today,” Roosevelt wrote. “Perhaps our standards should be higher, but they cannot be until we learn to value and understand the function of the teacher in our midst. While we have put much money in buildings and laboratories and gymnasiums, we have forgotten that they are but the shell, and will never live and create a vital spark in the minds and hearts of our youth unless some teacher furnishes the inspiration. A child responds naturally to high ideals, and we are all of us creatures of habit.”
Rebecca Onion is a writer and academic living in Philadelphia. She runs Slate.com’s history blog, The Vault. Follow her on Twitter: @rebeccaonion.
I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.
— James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?
— Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
There is nothing more atrociously cruel than an adored child.
— Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
You’ve almost certainly read all three of these sentences before, or even if you don’t remember the lines in particular, you’ve probably read the famous novels they come from. TheAmerican Scholar highlights them as three of the ten finest in English-language literature, alongside other sentences composed by the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Hersey, and Ernest Hemingway. Writing at Poynter.org, Roy Peter Clark explains just what makes these sentences so great, from Joyce’s use of “forge” (“For the narrator it means to strengthen metal in fire. But it also means to fake, to counterfeit, perhaps a gentle tug at [the protagonist’s] hubris”) to Austen’s structural elegance (“Who could not admire a sentence with such a clear demarcation beginning, middle, and end?”) to Nabokov’s reflection of his narrator’s self-delusion.
— Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, chosen by Jonathan Santofler
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.
— James Joyce, Ulysses, chosen by Lydia Davis
I have never seen anything like it: two little discs of glass suspended in front of his eyes in loops of wire.
— J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians, chosen by Anthony Marra
If all these don’t satiate your appetite for well-wrought sentences, the American Book Review has not just its own rundown of the 100 best first lines from novels, but of the 100 best last lines as well, a list that features Coetzee’s grim colonial fable as well as the work of Franzen himself:
This is not the scene I dreamed of. Like much else nowadays I leave it feeling stupid, like a man who lost his way long ago but presses on along a road that may lead nowhere.
— J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians
She was seventy-five and she was going to make some changes in her life.
— Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections
“You can trust me,” R.V. says, watching her hand.” “I’m a man of my
— David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System
Before you leave a comment pointing out that apparent fragment of Wallace’s sentence just above, let me reassure you that it appears exactly like that in The Broom of the System — the novel just stops there — and that, if you read all the way to that point, you’ll find it a pretty brilliant choice. This just goes to show that the sentence, though undoubtedly the fundamental unit for any writer (“All you have to do is write one true sentence,” Hemingway would say), always needs a context. This meta-list of best-sentence lists at Metafilter has many more high-quality sentences for you to admire, and a fair few intriguing enough to send you right out to go read them in context.
You can find some of the great books mentioned above in our collection of 575 Free eBooks.
Lucy Lawless (Star of Xena the Warrior Princess and notable contributor to such shows as Spartica, Battlestar Galactica, and Parks & Recreation) previously appeared on the Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast in Fall 2012. And, in Spring 2013, she sang with me (under my musician moniker Mark Lint) on an original song called “Things We Should Do Before We Die.” Now she’s joined fellow PEL host Wes Alwan (“The Valet”) and me to create an audioplay of Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1944 play “No Exit,” where she plays the working class, hostile lesbian Inès Serrano with a pretty hilarious off-the-cuff generically European accent against my relatively deadpan Joseph Garcin.
The third damned soul in our one-room hell was played by a delightfully shrieky Jaime Murray, friend and Spartacus co-star of Lucy’s. You likely know Jaime for her role as Lila, the psychotic main guest star in Season 2 of Dexter, and right now she appears in the sci-fi shows Defiance and Warehouse 13.
The play is about three dead people stuck in a room together, any two of which would probably reach some equilibrium. But, as a threesome, they enter into a toxic dynamic where none can get what he or she needs out of the others.
The recording was made in support of the Partially Examined Life episode discussing Sartre, covering this play as well as his essays “Existentialism is a Humanism” (1946), and “Bad Faith,” (which constitutes part 1, chapter 2 of Being & Nothingness, 1943). These convey the essence of Sartre’s existentialism and give a picture of his view of man’s radical freedom (we’re condemned to be free!) and what for him serves as some semblance of an ethics.
On Sunday evening, Fox aired the latest episode of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Cosmos series. This episode, called “A Sky Full of Ghosts,” explored some more out-of-this-world subjects — the speed of light and how it helps us undertand the Big Bang; the scientific work of Isaac Newton, William Herschel, James Clerk Maxwell; Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity; dark stars; black holes; and more. US viewers can watch the entirety of Episode 4 online (above), along with previous episodes in the series below (or on Hulu). For viewers outside the US, we have something perhaps better for you: Carl Sagan’s Original Cosmos Series on YouTube. Plus, we have a bunch of Free Online Astronomy Courses in our collection of 875 Free Online Courses. Enjoy.
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