found distractions

Jōyō kanji variants: The curious case of 叱 and [censored]

Just try! It doesn’t matter if it’s not perfect.

We scanned data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2014 American Community Survey—which covers 3.5 million households—to find out how people are pairing up. Some of the matches seemed practical (the most common marriage is between grade-school teachers), and others had us questioning Cupid’s aim (why do female dancers have a thing for male welders?). High-earning women (doctors, lawyers) tend to pair up with their economic equals, while middle- and lower-tier women often marry up. In other words, female CEOs tend to marry other CEOs; male CEOs are OK marrying their secretaries.

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Asano: Right to the very end, I wasn’t sure how to go about doing the last chapter. Among the possibilities I’d considered, I’d thought up an ending in which Punpun dies. –How? Asano: Satchan’s child falls off a train station platform, Punpun goes down to save him, dies instead. It’s a very clean way to end. But I wasn’t sure if I wanted to end on such a clean note. –What do you mean, “clean”? Asano: It’s too clear-cut an ending for the story. It wraps it all up a little too well. Living is harder than dying, see, so I thought this was the most painful, worst possible ending for Punpun, and that’s why in the end I went with this final chapter. –The worst ending is the truest ending for this manga, you’re saying.

I was around Richard Feynman – the Nobel prize winning physicist – one time when he was on acid. Before he started to come on I asked him, "What do you really think about the mind-body problem? Now come on, don't just shove it under the rug. You probably experience yourself existing on the inside; how do you think that reconciles with the matter of the brain? Do you think there's any problem there?" He said, "I've thought about that a lot, and I really just don't understand it." That was just an example of the immense honesty and integrity that he had. Rebecca: It was proof that he'd really thought about it.(laughter) Jaron: Exactly. I asked him again when he was on acid and he said, with this most wonderful smile and this effervescent glee, "I don't understand it." That sort of glee at the fundamental mysteriousness of the universe is just the motivational core of science and you always run into that with a great scientist. Just to be clear, though, Feynman didn't state any mystical ideas, he just was rigorous about what he did and didn't know, which I think is one of the hardest mental disciplines.

The last stop of this meditation is Zagorsk, Russia, where, troubled by the anti-Semitism he encountered there, my friend Andrew Solomon asked a local peasant why, in his estimation, there was such antipathy everywhere against Jews. Without a moment’s hesitation, the peasant answered, in Russian: “It is because the Jews have a secret vegetable they eat so they don’t become alcoholics like the rest of us. And they refuse to share that vegetable with anyone else.”

This office, of a media app with millions in VC funding but no revenue model, is particularly sexy. This is something that an office shouldn’t be, and it jerks my heart rate way, way up. There are views of the city in every direction, fat leather loveseats, electric guitars plugged into amps, teak credenzas with white hardware. It looks like the loft apartment of the famous musician boyfriend I thought I’d have at 22 but somehow never met. I want to take off my dress and my shoes and lie on the voluminous sheepskin rug and eat fistfuls of MDMA, curl my naked body into the Eero Aarnio Ball Chair, never leave.