The Beauty in Lying to Yourself |
I hugged my father goodbye for the last time in a hospital room in March 2014. He was a seven-year survivor of pancreatic cancer. No one thought he'd make it much longer. He was laboring to breathe, and I was due on book tour. It was, he said to me, now or never, kid. Pride insisted he climb from the bed on his own. He had to negotiate around half a dozen tubes. But then he opened his arms to me and I fell into them as I had been doing for forty years. He whispered that he loved me and we wept and shook in each other's embrace, the profoundest love and the profoundest loss expressed in one gesture. Over our grief, neither of us could hear the cosmic laughter For it is never two sad jerks in a hospital room who decide the when and where of a last goodbye. He hung on for four more months, by which time the book tour was over and I was back at his bedside in the fresh hell of enlightenment: Final embraces do not get scheduled. Death toyed with him until he could no longer stand, or open his eyes, or speak. Our final final goodbye was a one-sided affair, uttered into the void. That I had any control over death was the first illusion to crumble. |
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| Inside Daniel: The Most Influential Kitchen in NYC |
Daniel, chef Daniel Boulud's flagship restaurant on the Upper East Side, is turning thirty years old this month and I wanted to write something nice about it. Thirty is a big number, especially for a restaurant. After three decades, a restaurant is definitely not new—hell, a two year old restaurant is quasi-geriatric—but it's not old enough, like Peter Luger (1887) or Russ & Daughters (1914), that its age has an enduring momentum of its own. Most restaurants are like lowland tapirs: they begin to peter out at around thirty. This is not the case for Daniel, either the restaurant or the man. Both are in fine fettle. One sporting a year-round tan; the other a newly refreshed dining room. There are many ways to quantify the importance of a restaurant. Age seems like a good one because it's straightforward and we like that. Longevity, in a market economy, seems at least loosely correlated with quality. Then there are other accolades like Michelin stars, of which Daniel has two at the moment, or stars from the New York Times, of which it has three. There's the number of diners who have moved through the lushly carpeted dining room, peering at Daniel's notoriously intricate cuisine like it's a Faberge egg cracked open. Those measures are useful, kinda, but only up to a point. Most importantly, what makes Daniel so extraordinary isn't so much the people who have moved through the dining room but those who have moved through the kitchen. "The joke is," says Lior Lev Sercaz, the spice impresario who worked with Daniel from 2002 to 2007, "is that everyone has worked for Daniel, even if you think you've never worked for Daniel." |
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Are We Ready for AI to Raise the Dead? |
Eleven years ago, Tupac came back to life. So did Michael Jackson two years later. Okay, they still weren't breathing. But there they were, gracing the stage, digitally reincarnated as "holograms." They caused a commotion the moment they materialized. Some people who saw them thought they were pretty sweet—a nice tribute. Others got queasy. Did the shows' producers have the families' approval? Would the King of Pop even want to be resurrected as a collection of light beams? Could we really make that choice for him? It was one thing for the hologrammers to go to a famous artist's estate and ask for permission to create a projection of him for a four-minute performance. It was primitively lifelike, but it was essentially a movie in three dimensions. Here in the present, there's already chatter that people might want to begin saving voice recordings and videos of their loved ones, compiling their writings and texts, so that after they pass on, these data points can be put into a machine-learning model to create a digital facsimile of the person who has died. An MIT project on "Augmented Eternity and Swappable Identities" is already working on it. At minimum, it could be what Michael Sandel, the influential ethicist and political philosopher at Harvard University, calls a "virtual-immortality chatbot," with which—with whom?—you could text back and forth. Call it UndeadGPT. You can see wonderful possibilities here. Some might find comfort in hearing their mom's voice, particularly if she sounds like she really sounded and gives the kind of advice she really gave. But Sandel told me that when he presents the choice to students in his ethics classes, the reaction is split. |
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The Improbable Story of How the Savannah Bananas Changed Baseball |
The Savannah Bananas are one of the greatest—and most improbable—stories in sports. They throw out a first banana rather than a ball. Their first-base coach does "Thriller" dance moves between innings. Players run into the crowd to hand out roses. The team sings "Stand by Me" after every game. They have two cheer squads: the "Dancing Nanas" (age 70-plus) and the Man-ananas (all Dad Bods). The team has a 600,000-plus waiting list for tickets. In every game, the Bananas put on their show with a cast of 110. (The Harlem Globetrotters use 30.) But the team's popularity exploded when the team's founder, Jesse Cole, decided to remix the rules of baseball. This is the story of how Banana Ball was born, told by the inventor himself. What are the best moments in baseball? Many say walk-offs, bat flips, triples, home runs, circus catches, and plays at home plate. We asked ourselves: how do we do more of those? What are the worst moments in baseball? Let's say walks, guys constantly stepping out of the batter's box, pitchers taking forever and the interminable games that stretch to four hours. How do we get rid of those? Then we thought about the fans. What would be the most fans-first rule to make people really feel like they were involved in the game? It was a ton of experimentation, innovation and evolution—the way we've always lived, really—to invent the structure of our Banana Ball. |
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Is It Time to Quit Coffee for Good? |
There is perhaps no mind-altering substance as tightly woven into the fabric of daily life than caffeine. Nearly 80 percent of adults in the U.S. consume caffeine, in some form, every day. Coffee is the primary caffeine-delivery mechanism for many people—two thirds of American adults drink it every day—and many consider it an indispensable part of daily life. T-shirts and, naturally, coffee mugs exclaim, "Not before I've had my coffee" or "But first, coffee," as if the travails of everyday living are impossible without a morning cup of joe. For some, coffee even serves as a handy substitute for having a personality. Entire human interactions—the coffee date, the coffee break at work, the post-dinner mug—revolve around its ingestion. So ubiquitous is caffeine in our culture that it doesn't even register to people as a drug. Step out of the office for a midafternoon cigarette and people might look at you askance. Get caught doing a bump of coke in the office bathroom as a midday pick-me-up and it's grounds for immediate termination. But slam a Monster or a quad-shot Americano at work and people will think you're a go-getter. That perception is increasingly being challenged by a small but growing choir of laypeople and experts making a concerted effort to raise awareness about the potential downsides of caffeine dependence. |
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Every Fast and Furious Movie, Ranked |
The horsepower behind the Fast and Furious franchise is undeniable: It ranks as the biggest movie franchise that doesn't involve wizards, superheroes, or space. At least not yet on the latter; there is much Internet chatter that subsequent features won't take place on terra firma. Not implausible for a series where cars have the ability to jump over submarines, out of planes, and across city skylines. In the Fast and Furious universe, gravity is merely a suggestion. You may disagree with this ranking. And that's OK. If you are a fan of Fast and Furious movies, chances are you like them all. They contain this wonderful misfit energy that's hard to hate even when there's campy, meme-like lines like "I live my life a quarter mile at a time," or "I'll have the tuna. No crust," or there's terrible CGI—as in the dirt tunnel race in Fast 6. To me, there are no bad Fast and Furious movies, just misunderstood ones whose true value may not be understood until years later. |
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