Not long ago, I started an experiment in self-binding: intentionally creating an obstacle to behavior I was helpless to control, much the way Ulysses lashed himself to his ship’s mast to avoid succumbing to the Sirens’ song. In my case, though, the irresistible temptation was the Internet. But before I began, I wondered about the genesis of the term “self-binding.” So I hopped online and found Jon Elster, a professor of political science at Columbia University, whose book “Ulysses Unbound” explores whether voluntarily restricting your choices enhances or curtails freedom.
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Book Review - 'Chronic City,' by Jonathan Lethem
By now, Jonathan Lethem is so identified with his native Brooklyn that when he chose Los Angeles as the setting for his last novel — the modest “You Don’t Love Me Yet,” in 2007 — it felt like a vacation or a willful act of misdirection. In fact, though, Lethem’s reputation as a hometown booster rests on the strength of just two books, “Motherless Brooklyn” and “The Fortress of Solitude,” each of which applied a cartographer’s loving attention to the borough. But in four earlier novels and two story collections, Lethem has traipsed all over creation, from Wyoming to the San Francisco Bay Area to the distant Planet of the Archbuilders. Now, in his bravura eighth novel, “Chronic City,” he visits what may be his strangest destination yet: the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
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Slow Down, Sign Off, Tune Out
On a recent weekday, 126 messages made it to my e-mail in-box. Twenty-five were directed to me and me alone: 14 from friends or family, nine business-related and the other two conveying timely information about commercial accounts of mine. The rest were mass mailings or “cc’s,” including 17 messages from a Listserv, eight dispatches from news media I subscribe to, seven “Google alerts” on a subject I’m interested in, four political rants and five pieces of spam, four of them in Cyrillic characters. I had been getting this odd Cyrillic e-mail for some time, and 25 of my incoming messages on this particular day were responses to a query I had sent to my colleagues asking if Russians had been spamming them, too.
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Are They Laughing? Are They Moved?
NEIL SIMON is nervous. For all the success of his 82 years — a Pulitzer Prize for drama, three Tony Awards, many commercial hits on Broadway — a part of him still judges his self-worth by how much audiences laugh during his plays. Now the most personal of his works, the autobiographical “Brighton Beach Memoirs” and “Broadway Bound,” are being revived in repertory on Broadway for the first time since the original productions ran for a total of five years during the 1980s. And they are being directed by David Cromer, whose minimalist Off Broadway mounting of “Our Town” makes clear that he is not in this business for the yuks.
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The New World on the Two Coasts
WHEN a music director takes the helm of a major American orchestra, the inaugural concert should be not just a musical celebration but a statement of artistic mission. The recent debuts of Alan Gilbert at the New York Philharmonic and Gustavo Dudamel at the Los Angeles Philharmonic both showed how this can be done.
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Man's World at White House? No Harm, No Foul, Aides Say
The suspicion flared in recent weeks — and not for the first time — after President Obama was criticized by women’s advocates and liberal bloggers for hosting a high-level basketball game with no female players.
The president, after all, is an unabashed First Guy’s Guy. Since being elected, he has demonstrated an encyclopedic knowledge of college hoops on ESPN, indulged a craving for weekend golf, expressed a preference for adopting a “big rambunctious dog” over a “girlie dog” and hoisted beer in a peacemaking effort.
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Historians Reassess Battle of Agincourt
The heavy clay-laced mud behind the cattle pen on Antoine Renault’s farm looks as treacherous as it must have been nearly 600 years ago, when King Henry V rode from a spot near here to lead a sodden and exhausted English Army against a French force that was said to outnumber his by as much as five to one.
No one can ever take away the shocking victory by Henry and his “band of brothers,” as Shakespeare would famously call them, on St. Crispin’s Day, Oct. 25, 1415. They devastated a force of heavily armored French nobles who had gotten bogged down in the region’s sucking mud, riddled by thousands of arrows from English longbowmen and outmaneuvered by common soldiers with much lighter gear. It would become known as the Battle of Agincourt.
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How High Will Real-Time Search Fly?
WHEN a US Airways plane landed in the Hudson River in January, the first picture appeared on Twitter. In June, Twitter users were mourning Michael Jackson before major news outlets reported his death. And, this month, as much of the nation was riveted by images of a balloon believed to be carrying a 6-year-old boy, every twist and turn was tweeted and retweeted instantaneously, drowning out just about everything else on the site.
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The Wiseguy, the Spy and the Ponzi Prince
What do they have in common, these notorious jailbirds?
Something, apparently. Legal papers filed by a lawyer representing victims of Bernard L. Madoff’s vast Ponzi scheme single out two inmates of the Butner Federal Correctional Complex near Raleigh, N.C., whom Mr. Madoff spends quality hard time with: Carmine Persico, boss of the Colombo crime family, and Jonathan Pollard, intelligence analyst turned spy for Israel.
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The Nuns’ Story
Once, in the first grade, I was late for class. I started crying in the schoolyard, terrified to go in and face the formidable Sister Hiltruda.
Father Montgomery, who looked like a handsome young priest out of a 1930s movie, found me cowering and took my hand, leading me into the classroom.
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Slaughterhouse Live
TO celebrate their 30th birthdays, Christian Rusby, a sustainability consultant in Seattle, and his twin brother, Jake, a college student, decided to get blood on their hands.
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