The physicality of pinball, like that of all arcade games, is the tech's blessing on shared social spaces. Its glorious heft unapologetically loud and bright, a cabinet demands due accommodation for spacious human joy and creativity.
As Smith says, it's a "meshing of physics, bringing it into technology, using it to tell stories and bring them into a physical space."
The first Batman felt like a long-fought victory for a cultural underdog, one you could partake in no matter how recently you’d joined the fight. But what do you celebrate when you’ve already won—when, like Bruce Wayne, you’ve been so effective you’ve wiped out the reason for your own existence? All that’s left is the victory lap, and the search for worlds still left to conquer.
Displaying our problems to visitors has made me think how Los Angeles — even with its history of civil unrest and corruption, poverty and racism, earthquakes and fires — often gets measured against a tradition of cheery propaganda promoting a West Coast paradise. Nineteenth century travel writers likened L.A. to the Holy Land, and the cliché of the California dream persists, despite those who say the promise of abundance and fresh starts is dead, and the dream, a nightmare.
Over the past few years, I’ve been researching and writing a book called The Long View, about why our sense of time is malleable – how it can be foreshortened without us realising and how to lengthen our perspectives. Unlike the vast majority of other animals, we have a remarkable ability to manipulate time in our minds. Scientists call it “mental time travel”: as you read these words, you can transport your perspective into the past and stitch together those memories into a tapestry of possible futures.
However, that does not mean our timeviews cannot be coloured, swayed or even diminished. Every day, we are exposed to a barrage of temporal stresses: shortsighted targets, salient distractions and near-term temptations. When these combine with the psychological habits we inherited from our ancestors, a longer perspective can recede from view.
In the 19 years since my book “The Island at the Center of the World,” about the Dutch settlement that preceded New York, came out, I’ve changed the way I think about the history and geography of New Amsterdam, which occupied the southern tip of Manhattan Island in the 1600s.
The Chicago-born poet, novelist, short-story writer and sometime professor of creative writing has developed a small, strange, acclaimed body of work over the past quarter-century, featuring two novels, two collections of poetry marked by jazz-solo plays with language and a book of short stories. Now he’s adding a new story collection to that catalog: “Fat Time and Other Stories.” In Allen’s fashioning, Black experience is never subject to conventional parameters of time and space, and his magic realism, instead of being performatively exuberant or purposefully provocative, is plainly unsettling and disturbing.
This is a hard act to follow, but Key bravely chimes in again: “Plenty will read this book and say, ‘Lo, this is why I choose to remain single.’” Key hopes you’ll walk away with another message, a trite but true one — that relationships are hard work, and that imagining your divorce is an important step in staying married. Also, maintaining a sense of humor.
Ultimately, through this deft and engaging recounting of OK’s rise to utility, stability, and ubiquity in the English language (and, in many ways, across the globe), McSweeney tells of the insuperable human spark for linguistic creativity, one that technology both drives and fosters. And yet, with the rise of AI-powered writing tools such as Chat-GPT heralding, it seems, a new era of communication, we are right to wonder in what ways that spark might evolve and endure. No doubt new words will continue to appear daily in our languages as OK first did in English one Saturday in 1839. But will these new words all be human, or do the machines want to play, too?
This sort of aimless strolling is conducive to savoring, to finding joy in the moment, a practice that some social scientists have found can be cultivated and may help lead to a more fulfilling life. In “Savoring: A New Model of Positive Experience,” the scholars Fred B. Bryant and Joseph Veroff describe savoring not as mere pleasure, but as an active process that requires presence and mindfulness. It’s “a search for the delectable, delicious, almost gustatory delights of the moment,” as they put it.
Legal marijuana notwithstanding, true New Yorkers have long prided themselves on resisting certain Californish things. Malls. Cars. Cults.
Maybe that’s why the astounding story that pours forth from Alexander Stille’s new book “The Sullivanians,” about hundreds of people who got sucked into a very peculiar live-work situation on the Upper West Side of Manhattan for decades, isn’t better known.
was the same summer he met my mother.
He and Uncle Max, home from college,