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If you start your day reading Crime and Punishment, Dorothy Parker’s book reviews and Scientific American, you could be mistaken for apt. This is not apt. Unless we mean apt to confusion, interiority and the gasping need for another cup of coffee.
It was the Scientific American that really socked me. Quantum physics—the rules governing the very small, where a particle can be in several states at once until someone looks, behaves like a wave when it feels like it, and seems to know what its distant twin is doing—is confusing and not well explained.
I once interviewed Carlo Rovelli, the physicist about one of his books and I felt like I had become a kind of physics experiment measuring the smallest unit of understanding in a conversation by a person who by all external observations seems to be participating in the conversation.
The U.S. economy produced more jobs in August than expected. Economist Jason Furman pointed out on the Gabfest yesterday that we don’t talk about the unemployment picture because it’s quite good. Instead we talk about gas prices.
