Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I think about Peter Tripp. In 1959, the 32-year-old disc jockey stayed awake for 201 hours, broadcasting updates and spinning records from a storefront in Times Square. Newspapers tracked his progress (“Stay-Awake Man Half Way to Goal,” read headline in The Times) and onlookers pressed against the window to catch [...]
Archive for April, 2010
The Stay-Awake Men
Posted in Living on April 25, 2010 | Comments Off
How the Marriage Proposal Became a Negotiation
Posted in Living on April 25, 2010 | Comments Off
The question, like the ring, used to be a surprise. In 1972, on a park bench in Birmingham, Ala., Garner Lee Green’s father proposed to her mother. The proposal came out of the blue. She said yes. “That doesn’t happen to people anymore,” says Ms. Green, who is 30. And it certainly wasn’t the way [...]
What Is Sleep?
Posted in Living on April 25, 2010 | Comments Off
I am convinced that during bouts of insomnia I have sometimes slept without knowing it. The thoughts of waking seem to mingle with thoughts that may be part of sleep. Has the clock moved too quickly? Did I doze off? Some years ago in a rented house in Vermont, I couldn’t sleep and lay awake [...]
Volterra’s Battle for Authenticity
Posted in Arts and Entertainment on April 25, 2010 | Comments Off
The Twilight saga, a best-selling series of vampire books, has drawn tens of thousands of vampire-loving, mostly teenage-girl tourists from around the world to converge on the small Italian city of Volterra. Instead of merely conforming to its description in the books, Volterra has found a balance between staying true to itself and cashing in [...]
Sameness and ‘Diversity’ on Campus
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Law, Supreme Court decisions on April 25, 2010 | Comments Off
Why a California dean would force a black group to admit white supremacists. If ever you wonder why those thumping loudest for tolerance and diversity produce so much sameness, look no further than this little exchange on public television about an important case now before the Supreme Court. The dean is Leo Martinez of the [...]
Sleeping (or Not) by the Wrong Clock
Posted in Living on April 25, 2010 | Comments Off
Despite his best efforts, Cliff, 28, could not get to sleep until about 7 a.m. It had been this way since he was a teenager. He was a healthy and successful young scientist — except that he didn’t arrive at the lab until 5 p.m., just as his co-workers were preparing to leave. Although he [...]
Studying Sea Life for a Glue That Mends People
Posted in Natural sciences on April 25, 2010 | Comments Off
STICK-TO-IT-IVENESS Clockwise from top left, the sandcastle worm builds its home by using tentacles to grab sand and shell bits and glues them with adhesive from an organ on its head; its tube-shaped dwelling; two beads of a worm’s home, microscopically enlarged; a section of a sandcastle worm colony. Along one wall of Russell J. [...]
Cilantro Haters, It’s Not Your Fault
Posted in Living on April 25, 2010 | Comments Off
FOOD partisanship doesn’t usually reach the same heights of animosity as the political variety, except in the case of the anti-cilantro party. The green parts of the plant that gives us coriander seeds seem to inspire a primal revulsion among an outspoken minority of eaters. Culinary sophistication is no guarantee of immunity from cilantrophobia. In [...]
It Slices, It Dices
Posted in Mathematics on April 25, 2010 | Comments Off
Mathematical signs and symbols are often cryptic, but the best of them offer visual clues to their own meaning. The symbols for zero, one and infinity aptly resemble an empty hole, a single mark and an endless loop: 0, 1, ∞. And the equals sign, =, is formed by two parallel lines because, in the [...]
Scenes From the Night Shift
Posted in Living on April 25, 2010 | Comments Off
As a photographer, I work the night shift — when daylight gives way to moonlight, neon, and street light. In cities, especially New York, the darkness awakens me in a way the light of day never can. Gradually, my insomniac wanderings have taken me to the more ambiguous, transitional zones of the city. And I [...]
Night Moves, 2:19 A.M.
Posted in Living on April 25, 2010 | Comments Off
For the sleep deprived, the early hours of morning can seem like an endless expanse of boredom, blankness and unchartable territory. In his series of illustrations, “Insomniflows,” the artist Paul Davis maps the dark and desperate movements of an insomniac night. Paul Davis, an artist living in London, is the author of “Us [...]
The Anatomy of Desire
Posted in Living on April 25, 2010 | Comments Off
The two mannequins stood side by side in the back of the white van. Johan Karremans, a psychologist at Radboud University in the Netherlands, along with his student and collaborator, Sander Arons, clothed the plastic women identically in tight black tops and dark skirts. Arons then drove the van around the country to the homes [...]
Requiem for a Nice Person
Posted in Living on April 25, 2010 | Comments Off
I wish you knew me before I was an insomniac because I used to be a really nice person. I liked people and was genuinely interested in what they had to say. Now I’m just nuts. I’ve been seeing my doctor about my insomnia for almost 10 years, but since 2005 my sleep problems have [...]
Copyright and wrong
Posted in Law, tagged Copyright on April 25, 2010 | Comments Off
Why the rules on copyright need to return to their roots WHEN Parliament decided, in 1709, to create a law that would protect books from piracy, the London-based publishers and booksellers who had been pushing for such protection were overjoyed. When Queen Anne gave her assent on April 10th the following year—300 years ago this [...]
Our Fill-in-the-Blank Constitution
Posted in Law, Supreme Court decisions on April 25, 2010 | Comments Off
AS the Senate awaits the nomination of a new Supreme Court justice, a frank discussion is needed on the proper role of judges in our constitutional system. For 30 years, conservative commentators have persuaded the public that conservative judges apply the law, whereas liberal judges make up the law. According to Chief Justice John Roberts, [...]
Obama’s disregard for media reaches new heights at nuclear summit
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on April 25, 2010 | Comments Off
World leaders arriving in Washington for President Obama’s Nuclear Security Summit must have felt for a moment that they had instead been transported to Soviet-era Moscow. They entered a capital that had become a military encampment, with camo-wearing military police in Humvees and enough Army vehicles to make it look like a May Day parade [...]
A Time to Remember
Posted in Other on April 24, 2010 | Comments Off
How Henry Luce founded a magazine empire that became his bully pulpit Impossible today is it to imagine the power and the glory that hard-striving, messianic magazine mogul Henry Robinson Luce enjoyed in the midst of his self-proclaimed American Century. Indeed, Luce the media tycoon seems as quaint now as the infamous backward-running, adjective-crammed Timestyle [...]
Celebrity Recipes in Wartime
Posted in Living on April 24, 2010 | Comments Off
You can learn a lot about a historical moment from the small social artifacts of the time. Flipping through a 1902 Sears Roebuck catalog will tell you more about how ordinary Americans furnished their homes at the dawn of the 20th century, for instance, than any scholarly treatise can. Should your interests lie in the [...]
Altered States
Posted in History, Politics on April 24, 2010 | Comments Off
The state of Long Island would be bigger than Rhode Island, while the official bird of West Kansas would be the pheasant. Frustrated citizens are trying to redraw borders, add new states and lower taxes. Michael J. Trinklein on how to succeed at seceding. Long Island’s latest quest to split from New York and become [...]
A Donkey, a Monkey And a World of Evil
Posted in Literature on April 24, 2010 | Comments Off
Henry, the protagonist of Yann Martel’s “Beatrice and Virgil,” is a writer, and like most writers he finds himself thrown into confusion whenever people ask what his latest book is about. “An obvious question, perhaps,” Henry reflects, “but not one that he could answer so easily. That’s why people write books, after all, to give [...]
Plotting the Next Mideast War
Posted in Politics on April 24, 2010 | Comments Off
Syria’s alleged transfer of Scuds to Hezbollah could spark an uncontrollable chain reaction In the matter of Syria’s alleged shipments of Scud missiles to Hezbollah, it bears noting how often the fate of the Middle East has turned on seemingly trivial or nearly imperceptible events. There’s a simple explanation for this: That which cannot be [...]
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Hacker
Posted in Computers on April 24, 2010 | Comments Off
The Internet was designed for easy communication. Security? Not so much. Worrying about threats to the electric grid is all the rage these days, with anxious planners troubled by electromagnetic pulse attacks or even solar superflares that could melt down the power net for months or even years, bringing civilization to a halt. But Richard [...]
More than just a phunny phellow
Posted in Literature on April 24, 2010 | Comments Off
A man who never let anything stand in the way of a joke Mark Twain: The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens. By Jerome Loving. University of California Press; 511 pages; $34.95 and £24.95. “ALL modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called ‘Huckleberry Finn’.” So wrote Ernest Hemingway, no slouch himself in [...]
Paying Russia’s respects
Posted in Politics on April 24, 2010 | Comments Off
The dignified response to Poland’s loss has a wider significance A reason not to feel shame NOT since the attacks on New York on September 11th 2001 has Russia, and particularly its leaders, responded with such respect for another country as they did after the crash that killed Poland’s president, Lech Kaczynski, and his entourage. [...]
Hu, Wen—what, why and how
Posted in Politics, tagged China on April 24, 2010 | Comments Off
China’s prime minister Wen Jiabao praises Hu Yaobang, a former Communist Party chief ON APRIL 15th the arcane and neglected art of reading China’s political tea leaves suddenly surged back into fashion. The Communist Party’s turgid broadsheet, the People’s Daily, published an article on the top of its second page by the prime minister, Wen [...]
Ending the Slavery Blame-Game
Posted in History on April 24, 2010 | Comments Off
THANKS to an unlikely confluence of history and genetics — the fact that he is African-American and president — Barack Obama has a unique opportunity to reshape the debate over one of the most contentious issues of America’s racial legacy: reparations, the idea that the descendants of American slaves should receive compensation for their ancestors’ [...]
If they were crooks, wouldn’t they be richer?
Posted in Living on April 24, 2010 | Comments Off
Millions of poor Indians are considered criminal by tradition. Most are nothing of the sort. Badshah, not bad man INSIDE his hovel of branches and rags, a grizzled pauper called Badshah Kale keeps a precious object. It is a note, scrawled by a policeman and framed by Mr Kale, proclaiming that he “is not a [...]
The Imitation Economy
Posted in Other on April 24, 2010 | Comments Off
Innovation is overrated. It’s time to appreciate the power of the copycat. Two weeks after it went on sale, the iPad is still the toast of the tech world, with its image gracing magazine covers, market analysts speculating about whether it will transform the worlds of publishing and entertainment, and consumers buying the gadget at [...]
The charge is murder
Posted in History on April 24, 2010 | Comments Off
The Boston Massacre wasn’t what you might think. A historian argues for a new interpretation of an iconic American event. One of the most celebrated events in the story of American independence unfolded in Boston on a wintry March night in 1770, when a small contingent of British soldiers fired on a boisterous crowd. Their [...]
A Unique Meeting Of Two Masterpieces
Posted in Arts and Entertainment on April 24, 2010 | Comments Off
Have you ever cringed with embarrassment at encountering a group of shrill and raucous American schoolgirls abroad? Well, four exceptionally well-behaved young Bostonians currently visiting Madrid would make you feel very proud. Despite their Boston family roots, they are actually Paris-bred girls, but for many years they have resided on a seminal canvas by John [...]
