You don’t move to New York from Ohio at 18, go to countless thanks-but-no-thanks auditions, dust yourself off again and again, or practice tap dance nightly on your small apartment bathroom floor in case a spot in the ensemble for “42nd Street” or the Rockettes opens because you think you are best suited to a life of quiet anonymity.
But she didn’t anticipate the way she’d get there. “It’s such a juxtaposition, it’s such a weird state” to realize your professional dreams because of a huge, public loss, Ms. Kloots, 39, said.
Carl Schoonover and Andrew Fink are confused. As neuroscientists, they know that the brain must be flexible but not too flexible. It must rewire itself in the face of new experiences, but must also consistently represent the features of the external world. How? The relatively simple explanation found in neuroscience textbooks is that specific groups of neurons reliably fire when their owner smells a rose, sees a sunset, or hears a bell. These representations—these patterns of neural firing—presumably stay the same from one moment to the next. But as Schoonover, Fink, and others have found, they sometimes don’t. They change—and to a confusing and unexpected extent.
In its pre-pandemic heyday, we very narrowly thought of the commute as doing one job: getting us to and from our place of work. But clearly, the commute was doing something more, something that we failed to appreciate. What was it?
By unashamedly spinning yarns to ourselves and our communities — either familial, social or political — we're able to protect ourselves from harsh truths simultaneously while harming those who feel duped when those harsh truths are discovered. She's pointing fingers, for sure, but she's not categorically condemning any one group of people — unless, of course, you count those individuals who willingly pervert not only the stories that inform our civic discourse, but the very sacred and essential human need for storytelling itself. "The strength of myths is not in facts, but in the narrative," Malik sums up. "It's important that we also stake our claim to stories." In her measured yet passionate voice, these statements aren't simply observations. They're rallying cries.
Sometimes, in the dark, a book will talk to you. The words stop crawling on the page and become music. Its voices whisper in your ear.