Just noticed a glaring typo on the front page of the printed edition of the 11 Oct. @NYTimes
http://www.nytimes.com/images/2016/10/11/nytfrontpage/scan.pdf Can you spot it?
https://goo.gl/photos/pEjKzJb9UJ6RAw669
https://twitter.com/markgerstein/status/787716340891148289
Before I Go: A Stanford neurosurgeon’s parting wisdom https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2015/03/12/before-i-go-a-stanford-neurosurgeons-parting-wisdom-about-life-and-time/ Eloquent writing on the passing of time, in one’s final hours
QT:{{"
there are two strategies to cutting the time short, like the tortoise and the hare. The hare moves as fast as possible, hands a blur, instruments clattering, falling to the floor; the skin slips open like a curtain, the skull flap is on the tray before the bone dust settles. But the opening might need to be expanded a centimeter here or there because it’s not optimally placed. The tortoise proceeds deliberately, with no wasted movements, measuring twice, cutting once. No step of the operation needs revisiting; everything proceeds in orderly fashion. If the hare makes too many minor missteps and has to keep adjusting, the tortoise wins. If the tortoise spends too much time planning each step, the hare wins.
…
The funny thing about time in the OR, whether you frenetically race or steadily proceed, is that you have no sense of it passing. If boredom is, as Heidegger argued, the awareness of time passing, this is the opposite: The intense focus makes the arms of the clock seem arbitrarily placed. Two hours can feel like a minute.
…
But the years did, as promised, fly by. Six years passed in a flash, but then, heading into chief residency, I developed a classic constellation of symptoms — weight loss, fevers, night sweats, unremitting back pain, cough — indicating a diagnosis quickly confirmed: metastatic lung cancer. The gears of time ground down.
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QT:{{”
“Against this Barnum-like theatricality, spontaneous gestures stand out. There’s a poignant scene in which Durst is found not guilty of his neighbor’s murder: he turns to his lawyer and says, uncertain, “Did they say ‘not’?” The most unsettling example comes in the fourth episode, when Jarecki suggests that he and Durst take a break from discussing his testimony in Texas. Durst has confirmed that his lawyers hinted that he could answer specific questions about the dismemberment with “I don’t know”; that way, he’d sound less coldhearted. As soon as the filmmaker leaves the room, Durst, who is still wired for audio, lowers his head and mutters a sentence to himself. “I did not knowingly, purposely lie,” he says, and then pauses, considering, to add a word: “I did not knowingly, purposely, intentionally lie. I did make mistakes.”
Durst was rehearsing the interview, the way one might rehearse one’s testimony—but does that make him seem more guilty or just more realistic about documentaries? His lawyer tells him that his microphone is hot. Durst is fascinatingly unconcerned. He says again, “I never intentionally, purposefully lied. I made mistakes.” Then, with the shrug of an honest man, he adds what might be the tagline for the series: “I did not tell the whole truth. Nobody tells the whole truth.”
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Robert Durst’s New Trial
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/23/what-about-bob
Related to the Jinx