How Stupid and Old Are You? Directions: You have two minutes to answer the following questions.
If you do not have a timer, start counting. What Is Your Mental Age? 1. What’s the word for the stuff you sprinkle on your food but it’s not pepper? No, not salt, but like salt but supposedly better for you because it doesn’t have salt in it. Depressed? Try Therapy Without the Therapist. Fixes looks at solutions to social problems and why they work.
Elle is a mess. She’s actually talented, attractive and good at her job, but she feels like a fraud — convinced that today’s the day she’ll flunk a test, lose a job, mess up a relationship. Her colleague Moody also sabotages himself. Remember Roger Mortimer - The New Yorker. This essay originally appeared in the Canadian magazine The Montrealler in 1962, several years before Munro’s first book was published.
It was never reprinted. In it, Munro describes “the first real book” she ever read: Charles Dickens’s “A Child’s History of England,” whose tales of melodrama and morbidity provided, Munro writes, “the first glimpse I ever had of history, before I knew what history was.” When I was at home last summer I came across an old book, the first book I ever read, and thinking it might interest my own children some day I put it away in my suitcase and brought it back to Vancouver with me. Stanford: Day 8 (Aaron Swartz: The Weblog) Now came the big decision.
What classes to take? Since looking for classes in topics I was interested in didn’t work too well, I decided to try a different tack. I went to the bookstore, looked for books that looked interesting, and wrote down what courses they were for. After investigating these and paring them down, I ended up with: Accelerated Computer Programming (CS106x) American Sign Language Introduction to Sociology Introduction to the Humanities: Freedom Equality Difference (required) Noam Chomsky: The Drama of Dissent. Jeffrey Kluger. On Ideals of Feminine Accomplishment. “A woman must have a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages, to deserve the word [“accomplished”]; and besides all this, she must possess a certain something in her air and manner of walking, the tone of her voice, her address and expressions.”
—Caroline Bingley, in “Pride and Prejudice.” Appearance and Grooming Proper Hygiene is of the Upmost Importance for a Lady who wishes to be considered “Accomplished.” Acting French. I spent the majority of this summer at Middlebury College, studying at l’École Française.
I had never been to Vermont. I have not been many places at all. I did not have an adult passport until I was 37 years old. Sometimes I regret this. And then sometimes not. Aurora Shooting - We’ve Seen This Before. James Holmes must also have been insane, and his inner terror expressed itself, as it often does these days, in a link between pop culture and firearms.
There was nothing bigger happening in his world right now than the new Batman movie, and in preparation for this day, or another like it, he was purchasing firearms and booby-trapping his apartment. When he was arrested after the shootings, he made no attempt at resistance. His mission was accomplished. I’m not sure there is an easy link between movies and gun violence. The Scam Wall Street Learned From the Mafia. Robin Williams and the Game of Golf - The New Yorker. Of all the tributes to the late Robin Williams that have poured in during the past twenty-four hours, a couple of tweets in particular caught my eye, both of them by prominent golfers.
The first was by Rory McIlroy, the Northern Irish boy wonder who just won his fourth major championship, and the tweet read like it may have been composed by a P.R. person: “RIP Robin Williams…. He brought joy to so many people all over the world, will be fondly remembered and sadly missed.” The second, from Gary Player, the legendary South African who won nine majors, was a bit more personal, and it included a couple of famous lines from “Dead Poets Society”: “RIP.
Stepping Out - The New Yorker. I was at an Italian restaurant in Melbourne, listening as a woman named Lesley talked about her housekeeper, an immigrant to Australia who earlier that day had cleaned the bathroom countertops with a bottle of very expensive acne medication: “She’s afraid of the vacuum cleaner and can’t read or write a word of English, but other than that she’s marvellous.”
Lesley works for a company that goes into developing countries and trains doctors to remove cataracts. “It’s incredibly rewarding,” she said as our antipasto plate arrived.