PicoBlog

I stood on the sideline of my son’s soccer game on a Saturday morning, as I do a lot with three boys. The familiar cadre of parents huddled together, chatting as we did, readying ourselves to cheer on our team of boys. I caught up with one of the men about all the stuff of dad life and work and his latest home repair. And right mid-conversation he cracked a sex joke about his wife.

I don’t intentionally seek out Mr. Beast videos, but the algorithm knows that I’m interested in them and gives them to me. On the cool Monday morning of September 26th 2022, before I went to my real job, I was laying on my apartment floor under my weighted blanket doing my anthropology. TikTok’s algorithm delivered me a 1.5x speed reupload of Mr. Beast’s most recent YouTube video titled “Survive 100 Days in Circle, Win $500000”.

I believe in signs. That makes me sound woo-woo, but as my late aunt Roz used to say, “It is what it is.” Often the signs connect to tell a story, and telling stories has always been my way of making sense of my life. On March 29, when my husband, David, and I were fortunate enough see Noah Kahan in concert, another story came full circle. It was my son, also named Noah, who introduced me to Kahan’s music, probably while we were in the car, which is where he usually introduces me to artists he figures I’ll like.

By Alisha Mughal Twenty years ago, when Mark Romanek’s psychological thriller One Hour Photo was released, Roger Ebert, in a review, described its protagonist Seymour “Sy” Parrish (Robin Williams) as being similar to the murderer Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm) in Michael Powell’s 1960 horror-thriller Peeping Tom. Where Mark Lewis uses a knife, “a stiletto,” concealed within his camera to kill his victims, Ebert describes Sy as using a “psychological stiletto.” Despite their differences in choice of weapon, Ebert notes that Sy is “the same kind of character, the sort of man you don't much notice, who blends in, accepted, overlooked, left alone so that his rich secret life can flower.

I first read Pindar in a rather unsatisfactory university reading class with an elderly academic. We sat around a table in a side room of the library, drearily reading out our prepared translations one after another. The main thing I recall was the frustration engendered by the teacher’s significant deafness, to which he didn’t want to admit. I prepared very carefully for these classes, but he obviously found the higher pitch of my voice (and that of the one other girl) difficult to hear and would regularly ask one of the boys in the small group to “have another go” at the passage I had just translated, regardless of what I had said.

If the plagiarism war has indeed begun, as Ian Bogost has argued, it is likely to be over in short order. The tools for detecting copied language are already widespread and inexpensive, and it won’t be long before the entire corpus of material indexed in Google Scholar has been scrutinized. The incentives—both offensive and defensive—are certainly in place for doing so. It might be worth thinking about the kinds of transgressions that might be revealed in the process.

I've always avoided Ingmar Bergman—I've seen lots of old movies because I was part of my university's film club and they aired weekly, including silent films like Metropolis and Dr Caligari's Cabinet with live piano music. Bergman seemed too intense, too dark. I preferred more light-hearted works like classic screwball comedy. During my convalescence, slow as it is, of major surgery to remove a malignant tumor I thought of giving his Seventh Seal a chance.

Alright, here we go! Another one! If you’re feeling brave, you can google what ballerina’s feet look like, but I won’t put it here. You can imagine that putting your whole body weight on the very tips of your toes would leave some bruises, some calluses, and even some black toenails. Dancing on your toes is a pretty painful experience, to say the least. And yet. The ballet shoe, by and large, has stayed intact since its invention in the 1830’s.

Ravichandran Ashwin once told my friend Subash Jayaraman that “six well-constructed bad balls could be the way to go forward in T20 cricket”. No modern bowler has examined the line between a good ball and a bad ball more closely in cricket than Ashwin has. No modern bowler has invented so many different types of good balls in Test cricket as Ashwin has. Ashwin attacks all the time, and find new ways to attack all the time.