I used to scuba dive way more than I should. I pretty much did everything: open-water dives, technical dives, spearfishing, and cave diving. It's a fun sport that allows you to see some incredible things, but there’s also tons of science that goes into the process of safely putting a human underwater. So let’s discover what scuba diving can teach us about physics.
We all know the central role that great food had always played in Greek culture throughout the previous centuries.
But Sparta, despite its great prominence in the Greek cultural landscape, appears to be an exception to this rule. How can Sparta, the city and land of legends, of heroes, of timeless and immortal myths, have declined because of its food and the customs behind sharing it?
It isn’t uncommon in my line of work as an emergency physician to attend to the so-called frequent flier. Frequent fliers, also known as “high utilizers” to the hospital administration, are patients who are well-known to everyone in the emergency department. Some will show up as often as several times a week with predictable complaints—chest pain, lower-back pain, anxiety, alcohol intoxication, depression, suicidal ideation. Some have a substance-abuse problem; some are homeless; many suffer from schizophrenia or other forms of psychotic or disorganized thinking. But there is only one thing I can think of that binds them all together. They are all lonely.
A few weeks ago, two separate artists, each a giant in his respective field, both published a new nonfiction book. Each book features free-flowing, stream-of-consciousness musings, a series of essays both personal and historical on the medium they’ve mastered and about the works that have inspired them, informed their worldviews, and continued to influence them. Each book tells us something about these celebrated artists: their foundational texts, their preferences and peccadillos, and how their contributions have moved their respective art forms forward. But read together, and in conversation with each other, they tell us even more.
At the outset of the Covid-19 lockdown, Michael Kimmelman, the New York Times architecture critic, invited various architects, urban planners, writers and other experts to suggest walking tours of New York City, hoping that the itineraries would offer “examples of how the city remains beautiful, inspiring, uplifting.” Within days, the first account of what would ultimately be 17 walks was published, a conversation between a critic and a thinker, set within a particular area of the city. Now those walks, plus three more, have been assembled into a collection, “The Intimate City,” each chapter a geographic memoir: streetscape-jogged annotations on history, infrastructure, planning and combinations thereof, complemented by photos, many from the original series. “I was on the lookout,” Kimmelman says in his introduction, “for stories, both intimate and about the city, that I thought seasoned, savvy New Yorkers might find surprising — tidbits of history, law, technology or gossip I hadn’t heard myself, or that revealed something about the people who were telling the stories.”