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A Parable on Immortality The Reality-Based Community Skip to content
Some years ago (it might be as many as fifty) I read anarticle in a scientific journal (it might have been Science, The AmericanScientist, or Scientific American), which I believe was written by a Nobellaureate in physics from Asia (perhaps India) as you can see, at my agedetails get obscured. It was the scientists acceptance speech.
The author wrote of a conversation between two dragonflyeggs, attached to a reed below the surface of a lake. They noticed that eggs onother reeds floated to the surface and then disappeared, and they told eachother that, when they rise to the surface they would get back to the other andtell it what lies above them.
And then, of course, one of them floats to the surface,shedding its egg sac, its wings unfurl, and it flies off, never to return tomake good on its promise. That is, it is basically a parable about ones mortalityand hope for immortality.
Is there anyone who has heard of this, or how I might goabout finding it? Google failed me in this search.
Michael D. Maltz is Emeritus Professor of Criminal Justice and of Information and Decision Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is currently an adjunct professor of sociology at the Ohio State University His formal training is in electrical engineering (BEE, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 1959; MS & PhD Stanford University, 1961, 1963), and he spent seven years in that field. He then joined the National Institute of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice (now National Institute of Justice), where he became a criminologist of sorts. After three years with NIJ, he spent thirty years at the University of Illinois at Chicago, during which time he was a part-time Visiting Fellow at the US Bureau of Justice Statistics. Maltz is the author of Recidivism, coauthor of Mapping Crime in Its Community Setting, and coeditor of Envisioning Criminology.View all posts by Mike Maltz
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A Parable on Immortality - The Reality-Based Community
How to quantify this one? Rugbys greatest series, to quote Sky Sport NZs advertising campaign and that hyperbole doesnt seem excessive has reached its first series-deciding showdown since 1993. Viewed in that light, its possibly the biggest game of the professional era outside of World Cups.
For the back-to-back world champions, its an opportunity for a somewhat remodelled, younger team, captained by Kieran Read in his 100th test, and marshalled by the world player of the year, Beauden Barrett, and his brothers, to emulate illustrious names of the All Blacks past in the post-Richie McCaw and Dan Carter era and cement their own status.
For the Lions its an even rarer chance to grasp a slice of rugby-playing immortality, and emulate something only one Lions squad has ever achieved before. Then it was the sepia-tinged class of Willie John, Gibson, an array of Welsh legends and others, back in 1971.
Thats all then. Truly, its a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, never to be experienced again.
The very nature of the tour and the series so far has set up the climax perfectly. The Lions were largely written off before this suicidal tour and from the outset. Gradually the quality of their players was honed into two strong teams, albeit one stronger than the other.
Even then, in the first test, they left opportunities behind, whereas the All Blacks clinically took theirs, whereupon the Lions defied expectations as 5/1 outsiders a week ago with a drama-filled comeback, admittedly against 14 men for 45 of the last 55 minutes on a raucous night in a rain-sodden Westpac Stadium. They were the clinical ones, with two nicely created and strongly finished tries. The Red Army were in raptures and are liable to be buttressed by further re-enforcements here. The All Blacks fans have been provoked into finding their voice. Another filthy forecast will only add to the drama.
Whod have thought, at the outset, that coming into this climactic third test, the Lions would not only have the momentum, but would have an unchanged side in a test for the first time since 1993? And meanwhile, that the All Blacks would be making three changes in personnel, including a 20-year-old (Jordan Barrett) and 24-year-old (Ngani Laumpape) making their first test starts in an untried back three and new midfield?
Revenge is a powerful spur in rugby, not least when the matches come close together. Wounded pride, and a whiff of cordite and all that, and therell plenty in the Auckland air. The Lions had it last week, the All Blacks this, and Ireland felt the full, brutal force of this blacklash in November.
Yet Warren Gatland is adamant, as is Johnny Sexton, that this Lions team can be even better again.
We also still dont think were at our best, we still think we can improve. Obviously theres going to be an improvement in the All Blacks but its something we dont think is going to be a shock to us. Rory Best spoke earlier in the week about how the Irish felt they didnt handle the physicality that the All Blacks brought in the game two weeks after the Chicago game, even though theyd spoken about it. Were ready for it.
I think theyre going to try to dominate us up front, particularly in the tight five, and try and give some of their inexperienced backs some go-forward. If they dont get that advantage up front and were aware of making sure we try and negate the threat of their tight five it should make the game interesting.
Despite their Queenstown time-out, and satisfaction from last week, theres no sense that the Lions players are content with their lot, according to Gatland.
I havent witnessed that. I hope I dont see it on Saturday night because that would be pretty disappointing. Theres a group of players there who are incredibly competitive and realise this is a massive opportunity to win a series in NZ. It doesnt come round very often. These Irish players who played in Chicago know what it was like two weeks later; theyve another chance to make sure they dont get caught with their pants down.
As in the previous two tests, the lines in the sand are liable to again be drawn close in along the gain line. The All Blacks won the collisions in round one, the Lions with some tampering in personnel in round two. The personnel now largely remains the same, with Laumape on from the start after being the All Blacks most potent runner, but also their weakest defender, a week ago.
Sean OBriens availability is a game changer, or at any rate his nonavailability would have been. If the Lions can reproduce the same strength and accuracy in the tackle close in, and if OBrien, Sam Warburton and co can slow down the All Blacks customary high-tempo game in other words, if they can stifle Beauden Barrett, they have every chance.
With yet more biblical rain forecast, the scrums could be a significant factor, as again will the referee, in this instance Romain Poite. He showed in the series decider four years ago that, as ever, he is both a strong, thick-skinned personality and favours the scrum going forward, whatever the means. The All Blacks will assuredly go after the Lions at scrum time.
The Lions have lost the penalty count by a combined 24-15 in the tests to date, and Gatland clearly feels the Lions havent been given a fair deal yet, and particularly in this series. He will meet with Poite, his assistants Jerome Garces and the hitherto unsatisfactory Jaco Peyper, a description that could also apply to the TMO George Ayoub.
All Gatland wants is that they have an open mind.
Thats the message I will hopefully give to the officials tomorrow night when I meet them. Weve got the confidence and self-belief to win this Saturday and win the series, so all we ask of them is to be open-minded, not to be surprised by us being in front and good enough to win. Thats an important message I am trying to deliver. I am not questioning their integrity or anything. Its just that sometimes its a mindset. The message is just, if there are some 50-50 calls, to be open-minded.
To support Gatlands theory that there is more in this team, the Sexton-Farrell combo was at the heartbeat of the two tries that turned the game on its head and has given the lie to Warrenball while giving them a cutting edge, which has been sharpened by a brand-new back three who have only played two games together. They also have a core of proven Lions. They wont be fazed.
The All Blacks havent lost at Eden Park since France won 23-20 in 1994, and have won 37 tests in a row there. They are hot favourites, and could win well, but if opportunity knocks, these Lions have tries in them.
After all the verbal sparring up until this point a week ago, both Gatland and Steve Hansen assumed a more restrained, balanced mindset, culminating in them both being quite philosophical on Thursday. Indeed, both had the exact same choice of wordswhen maintaining this game will not define these players.
Nor should it. They all have or will achieve plenty more.
Nevertheless, immortality beckons, and all that.
NEW ZEALAND: Jordan Barrett (Hurricanes); Israel Dagg (Crusaders), Anton Lienert-Brown (Chiefs), Ngane Laumape (Hurricanes), Julien Savea (Hurricanes); Beauden Barrett (Hurricanes), Aaron Smith (Highlanders); Joe Moody (Crusaders), Codie Taylor (Crusaders), Owen Franks (Crusaders), Brodie Retallick (Chiefs) Samuel Whitelock (Crusaders), Jerome Kaino (Blues), Sam Cane (Chiefs), Kieran Read (Crusaders, captain).
Replacements: Nathan Harris (Chiefs), Wyatt Crockett (Crusaders),
Charlie Faumuina (Blues), Scott Barrett (Crusaders), Ardie Savea (Hurricanes), TJ Perenara (Hurricanes), Aaron Cruden (Chiefs) or Lima Sopoaga (Highalnders), Malakai Fekitoa (Highlanders).
BRITISH AND IRISH LIONS: Liam Williams (Scarlets, Wales); Anthony Watson (Bath Rugby, England), Jonathan Davies (Scarlets, Wales), Owen Farrell (Saracens, England), Elliot Daly (Wasps, England); Johnny Sexton (Leinster, Ireland), Conor Murray (Munster, Ireland); Mako Vunipola (Saracens, England,) Jamie George (Saracens, England), Tadhg Furlong (Leinster, Ireland), Maro Itoje (Saracens, England), Alun Wyn Jones (Ospreys, Wales), Sam Warburton (Cardiff Blues, Wales, capt), Sean OBrien (Leinster, Ireland), Taulupe Faletau (Bath Rugby, Wales).
Replacements: Ken Owens (Scarlets, Wales), Jack McGrath (Leinster, Ireland), Kyle Sinckler (Harlequins, England), Courtney Lawes (Northampton, England), CJ Stander (Munster, Ireland), Rhys Webb (Ospreys, Wales), Ben Teo (Worcester Warriors, England), Jack Nowell (Exeter, England).
Referee: Romain Poite (France).
Previous meetings: Played 40. New Zealand 30 wins, 3 draws, Lions 7 wins.
Betting (Paddy Powers): 2/7 New Zealand, 22/1 Draw, 7/2 Lions. Handicap betting (Lions +11 pts): evens New Zealand, 19/1 draw, evens Lions.
Forecast: The Lions to win.
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Lions have what it takes to claim immortality against All Blacks - Irish Times
Credit: DC Comics
Immortality lies at the center of Dark Nights: Metal. Not only is immortality the driving force behind the investigations being conducted by both Hawkman and Batman, but the event will feature a set of immortal characters in its cast - including one aptly named The Immortal Man.
In Dark Days: The Forge #1, readers discovered that Hawkman has been investigating Nth Metal for years, trying to unlock its abilities. During his studies, he comes to understand that its conducting powerful energy from somewhere beyond his understanding.
That powerful energy is also being investigated by Batman, and the story of its discovery - and the Dark Multiverse it reveals - is at the center of DCs summer event series Dark Nights: Metal, which launches in August and reunites writer Scott Snyder and his Batman co-creator Greg Capullo.
The Forge and its this week's upcoming counterpart Dark Days: The Casting are written by Snyder and James Tynion IV, serving as prequels to Metal and introducing concepts that will form the backbone of the events story.
The Forges Clues
Hawkmans investigation not only leads him to an understanding of energy, but it reveals a link to the Earths past. Hawkman says he got a glimpse of a historic clue - and by glimpse, he was probably referring to one of the visions that he says occur in his reincarnation process, like dreams during his time between lives.
He describes the glimpse as a story that began with the first men to walk the Earth - three tribes. Hes shown to also have some type of artifacts that represent what he discovered about these tribes, as readers are shown what appear to be the sign of a hawk, a bear, and a wolf.
In the same issue, readers were also introduced to the Immortal Man, a modern version of the character from DC Comics history. The character was first introduced in 1965 in Strange Adventures #177, in a story titled I Lived a Hundred Lives.
Immortal Origin
In various stories in Strange Adventures, the character's portrayed ase a modern man who has strange powers he doesnt understand. Raised as an orphan, his only clue to his past lies in an amulet he finds that was left with him when he was a baby. When he looks into the amulet, he remembers that he has lived hundreds of lives, from his time as a caveman until present day, and his body and mind have retained the knowledge they gained during those lives.
There it was before me in the amulet reflection, the character said in his debut. The explanation to all the mystery that plagued my present life! For then and there I realized I had lived not one life, but a multitude of lives.
Originally, the character was only shown to be from a race of powerful cavemen, but in later stories, the Immortal Man was given a more DC-centric origin.
He was Klarn Arg, the caveman leader of the Bear Tribe and archenemy of Vandar Arg of the Wolf Clan (better known as Vandal Savage).
In this origin story, Vandal and the Immortal Mans pre-historic origins were linked - they were battling each other when a meteorite hit the Earth 50,000 years ago.
The meteorite made Vandal immortal, but the Immortal Mans powers lie in an amulet he fashioned from the meteorite. Each time he is resurrected - sometimes as a baby and sometimes as an adult - he is an enemy of Vandal Savage.
Because of this connection between the two characters, and the use of the Bear Tribe and Wolf Clan in their past stories, its likely that the Dark Days: The Forge reference to tribes with the signs of a bear and a wolf refers to these two characters. The hawk that represents the third tribe is probably a sign of Hawkman himself, although its possible it could relate to other DC characters, including the Blackhawks, who are also in The Forge.
Team Player
In post-Crisis continuity, the Immortal Man worked with a team of heroes to stop the evil machinations of Vandal Savage. His team was called the Forgotten Heroes. Although none of those heroes seem to be involved in the current story of The Forge and Metal, a similar idea might be behind the formation of the Immortal Men." This team, also mentioned in The Forge, has been given their own DC title beginning in the fall. Among the team members announced by DC is Immortal Man.
Image from Dark Days: The Forge #1
The description of Immortal Men indicates that five siblings have eternal life, fighting foes in an eternal war. Its not clear whether the Immortal Man is one of these five siblings or not. But in The Forge, as hes discussing the Immortal Men, there are two people talking and four other individuals shown - a total of six. So Immortal Man, whos described in the issue as the great and powerful Immortal Man, may be more of a leader of the five siblings.
In this incarnation, Immortal Man is an older man, with a streak of white in his hair. He works in secret in a lair located a mile beneath Philadelphia. He reveals that he offered Elaine Thomas (mother of Bat-family teen hero Duke Thomas) the opportunity to become immortal somehow. Whether Elaine is one of the Immortal Men, reincarnated without realizing it, or whether the offer was a new one, is not clear.
One of the heroes shown in the Immortal Men scene in The Forge appears to be Native American, and her origin might be tied to the DC hero of the past known as Super Chief. This character, in his original incarnation, was also part of the Wolf Clan and was imbued with powers by a meteorite.
Crisis Tie
Another Bear Tribe member was Anthro, the first boy on Earth who played a key role in Grant Morrisons Final Crisis. Morrison also included the Immortal Man in his Mutiversity mini-series, although the hero was part of a group on Earth-20 and was there revealed to be Anthro, a hero imbued with powers from a meteorite.
Its possible all these meteorites and the energy within them can now be linked to Nth Metal and to the dark energy that will lead Batman to the Dark Multiverse.
Its also obvious, reading through Immortal Mans history, that his powers of reincarnation and flight can be easily connected to Hawkman and Hawkgirl, which seems to be the direction Snyder is heading with Metal.
In the three tribes scene in The Forge, Hawkman adds a fourth tribe - one with the symbol of a bat. This symbol can also be connected to Anthro and Final Crisis, as Batman was tossed back in time by the events in that story and its Morrison-penned follow-up, Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne.
Struck by the space-bending Omega Beams of Darkseid, Bruce Wayne becomes stranded in time, jumping into different eras - beginning with the paleolithic era. During his time as a caveman, he fights against the tribe led by Vandal Savage.
The word Crisis is also used by Immortal Man himself in the issue, although it refers to future possibilities. He says the "world of public heroes is careening toward a crisis unlike anything they've seen before."
Looking at Immortal Mans history and the Metal possibilities for his Immortal Men and Hawkmans tribes, its pretty clear that Snyder is connecting many different dots in the history of the DCU. And although the entire picture wont become clear until readers get their hands on Augusts first issue of Metal, there are definitely some obvious lines being drawn related to immortality in the DCU.
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DARK NIGHTS: METAL 101: The Immortal Man & The Four Tribes - Newsarama
A burgeoning industry promises to help the wealthy defeat the ultimate equaliser: Death.
In the year 42 I.E. (Inequality Era, post-Piketty), mankind built its first hibernation machine. This allowed some to jump to the future. A brighter future, a better future. More precisely, hibernation machines became an actualisation of a powerful idea that tomorrow is better than today. A tomorrow that has a cure for cancer and diabetes, where strokes, respiratory diseases and heart attacks are a hazy remembrance (much as we think of typhoid and tuberculosis today), where longevity spans centuries, and Ray Kurzweil's Singularity, in which humans merge with A.I. to transcend biological limitations, is within reach. The end of Death and a future everlasting beckon.
But only a select few can afford hibernation machines and jump to the future: The rich and the powerful, the rentiers and the capitalists, the titans of industry and the masters of finance. Those who can afford it skip to a future paradise, while those who cannot remain in what they now perceive as a dark and depressing present, whilst building the paradise for the few.
This is a short chapter in Death's End, the culmination of Liu Cixin's stunning trilogy, Remembrance of Earth's Past. Former U.S. President Barack Obama recommended it, in a bygone era when leaders used to read, reflect, and write, rather than rant in 140 characters. It is fascinating to think systematically about . Are we willing to tolerate inequality in income and wealth as long as our basic needs in Maslow's hierarchy are satisfied? Or will we have a revolution in our hands when inequality is literally a matter of life and death?1 Hollywood which gave us Elysium which certainly sees revolution as the most probable outcome.
This is not some abstract sci-fi scenario. Today, there are four major companies that provide cryogenic or cryonic services Alcor in Arizona, Cryonics Institute in Michigan, American Cryonics Society in California and KrioRus in Russia. Alcor seems the most developed and well-funded. Morbid as it sounds, this could be you in the future, vitrified and then stored in a thermos. Their pricing policy has a weird two-part tariff structure an annual membership fee of US$525 and then an additional US$200,000 for Whole Body Cryopreservation. There is a discount if you only cryogenically freeze your brain; and a US$10,000 premium if you live outside the United States and Canada which rises to US$50,000 if you live in China. A topic for another day is whether this is price discrimination or whether the price differences reflect cost differences.
Interestingly, only 5 percent of the U.S. population has an annual income exceeding the US$200,000 charged by Alcor. But since the amount can be paid out of retirement savings, slightly more than 10 percent of U.S. households theoretically could afford to freeze at least one person (see below). Ironically, most would be bankrupted in the process, meaning they would thaw out to penury. Theyd have to hope that the utopian future awaiting them would be free of the sort of inequality that enabled them to cheat death in the first place.
Meanwhile in Silicon Valley...
Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the co-founders of Google, are reading Homo Deus, by Yuval Harari. On page 28, the book predicts that they are going to die. Death, after all, is the ultimate equaliser. Steve Jobs was unable to beat pancreatic cancer. Harari is sceptical whether Googles Calico, short for the California Life Company and founded in 2013 with a billion dollars in funding, will solve death in time to make Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin immortal. This is immensely frustrating to the likes of Brin, Page, Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel, all billionaires eager to stretch lives, or, at least their own, to forever in Thiel's words.
Many believe that aging is encoded in our DNA and if anything is encoded it can be cracked. If something can be cracked, then it can be hacked. Cue applause! And cue billions of dollars for aging research with Bill Maris, the founder and CEO of Google Ventures, leading the way. In the fall of 2016, the life extension start-up Unity Biotechnology raised an enormous round of funding from Silicon Valley billionaires interested in the prospect of humans living much longer lives.
Others are bringing big data and machine learning tools to bear. BioAge Labs, whose tagline is faster drug discovery for aging, has been using machine learning and crunching genomics data to search for biomarkers that predict mortality.
Venture Vampire Capital
In 1615, a German doctor suggested that the hot and spirituous blood of a young man will pour into the old one as if it were from a fountain of youth. In 1924, the physician and Bolshevik Alexander Bogdanov performed young-blood transfusions on himself. He claimed that his eyesight improved, that he stopped balding and a fellow-revolutionary wrote that he seems to have become seven, no, ten years younger. Ironically, Bogdanov injected himself with blood from a student who had both malaria and tuberculosis, and subsequently died. Today, this procedure goes by the innocuous-sounding name parabiosis a surgical union of two organisms sharing the circulation of blood. And the search for the fountain of youth continues.
Of mice and men
Researchers at Stanford University showed in a 2014 study that infusions of blood from young mice reversed cognitive and neurological impairments seen in older mice. These reinvigorated mice performed like ones half their age in memory based tests. Immediately, emails flooded the inbox of the lead researcher, Tony Wyss-Coray. Numerous billionaires, some of whom were experiencing onset of Alzheimers, wanted infusions of young blood. Some had even arranged for what the HBO show Silicon Valley termed blood boys.
There is currently a clinical trial called Young Donor Plasma Transfusion and Age-Related Biomarkers looking for participants. The trial, run by a start-up called Ambrosia, injects young people's blood into older people. Healthy participants aged 35 and older, pay US$8000 for a transfusion of blood plasma from donors under 25, and researchers monitor their blood over the next two years for indicators (biomarkers) of health and aging. Thiel (yes, him again) is looking seriously into parabiosis.
Today, most reporting on these advances takes one of two perspectives: weary scepticism or unadulterated wonder. In either case, my grim forecast is that a world where such miracles of longevity are confined to billionaires will see socio-political upheaval, the likes of which will make the current hand-wringing and brow-furrowing on the rise of inequality seem quaint in comparison. In the meantime, expect a lot of books and articles and blog posts, targeted at the thought-leader industrial complex, that will at the least, make for stimulating conversation.
Pushan Dutt is the Shell Fellow of Economic Transformation and a Professor of Economics and Political Science at INSEAD. Professor Dutt directs the Asian International Executive Programme.
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1Of course, with unequal access to health care in many countries, with direct consequences for differential mortality rates among the rich and the poor, we already live in such a world.
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From Inequality to Immortality - INSEAD Knowledge (blog)
HuffPost India A still from Kaamyaab
In the cut-throat world of the film industry, the hierarchies of power are well-established. Unlike some other Western film industries, India is all about its stars. Then, perhaps the producer, um, no, the stars managers, the director and so on. In this social scale that determines your importance on a movie set, the role of an extra (yours truly has had the pleasure of being one in a Netflix ad) is exactly what it says it is: required but not essential. And yet for every extra, every bit role is another chance at potential stardom, a stab at cinematic glory, a shot at artistic immortality.
Hardik Mehtas Kaamyaab exists to illuminate these faces, often eclipsed by the spotlight that shines solely on the stars. Sanjay Mishra plays Sudheer, a retired side actor whos had some degree of success and what one would call, a cult following. When a TV interviewer points out that as per IMDB hes done 499 films, Sudheer excavates his dusty wig, polishes his boots, tightens his belt and embarks on a mission to turn that figure to 500.
Mishras Sudheer, much like his existence on movie sets, has a lonely life. By his own choice, he lives alone, refusing to stay with his concerned daughter and her family. He adores his granddaughter but its evident that he has a fractured relationship with her mother. Evenings are spent drinking with his old friend, reflecting on the abyss that stares in front and a past that could never honour his true potential. So when his old friend, Dinesh Gulati, who runs a casting company with the tagline, No Couch, Only Casting, gets him the role of the father in a Baahubali-type epic historical, Sudheer jumps at the chance.
But things dont go as per plan.
Recreating melodramatic scenes from 80s movies, from the doctor who declares inko dawa ki nahi, dua ki zaroorat hai or the shattered lawyer or the philosophical henchman, Mehta creates a world soaked in nostalgia and melancholy, while examining the broken dreams of someone whos observed the world from a periphery. In a heart wrenching scene, Sudheers daughter, frustrated with his fathers whims, asks, What will happen after your 500th film? Youll still remain an extra. Sudheer has no answers because shes probably right. But what she doesnt realise is that the record hes seeking isnt for the world, its for his own validation, to tell himself that he still has it in him.
Another scene that stands apart is the one where Sudheer auditions for the part. In his original takes, Sudheer is atrociously hammy, over-the-top and what millennials would call extra. Its only after Gulatis direction that he delivers a more understated, quiet performance. That scene singularly captures the generational shift, not just between artist and director but between cinema and audience, and how far weve travelled from what we used to be. Sudheer, though, is still a victim of his times, a prisoner of a past thats no longer relevant.
Because so much of Kaamyaab is about the quest for relevance, a desire to see and to be seen. While it loses its heft in certain scenes, which go against its grain, Mehta has remarkable control over his story and crafts a terrific climax. While Deepak Dobriyal is delightful as the casting director (lowkey inspired by a popular Bollywood casting director), Mehta has an assorted bunch of peculiar faces of yore populating his narrative, adding a meta touch to his drama.
From Avtar Gill, Manmauji to Guddi Maruti and Lilliput, the film honours the contribution of these actors by putting a spotlight on them, one that has forever eluded them. However, the real star of this film is Sanjay Mishra, who delivers a heartbreaking and pitch perfect performance. Whether its projecting an air of self-importance or crushing vulnerability, you get the full spectrum of Mishras astounding talent. In one terrific scene that encapsulates how the lines between fiction and reality have blurred, Mishras Sudheer takes a moment to realise when hes called by his actual name:Babulal Chandola.
Because, ultimately, Kaamyaab is a story about stories that have disappeared in the relics of the past, broken and forgotten in their quest for acknowledgement. And in what could happen only in a cinema hall, just when the film ended, and the audience was still enraptured, and when Mishra, an actor whos only now getting his due, was finally getting his big moment, in walked the films co-producer, Shah Rukh Khan.
And yet again, as he had been so many times in reel, Sudheer was once again relegated to the backdrop, eclipsed by the great superstar. Just another day in showbiz.
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'Kaamyaab' Movie Review: A Moving Tribute To The Unsung Heroes Of Cinema - HuffPost India
Love will help us get through this period of self-quarantine and social distancing. So will laughter. Thats why romantic comedies are a good choice for pausing pandemic anxiety for a few hours. Here are five that fit the times in their own special ways.
The Holiday (2006)
Youre in safe hands for a cinematic getaway when director Nancy Meyers is in charge. She makes movies that are funny, sophisticated images of a dream life. Her films also provide ideas for dream date, dream best friends and dream kitchens.
Meyers achieved cable-rerun immortality with The Holiday, a rom-com too good to limit to December. The house-swap escapade sends a high-powered Hollywood exec (Cameron Diaz) off to vacation in a cozy English cottage, while its usual resident, a British columnist (Kate Winslet), borrows the execs luxurious Los Angeles trophy home.
Whats the best part of a film thats as comfortable as fuzzy socks and flannel pajamas? Is it Jude Laws take on a humble, awkward widower? Jack Blacks sexy side? Winslets friendship with an elderly screenwriter played by the great Eli Wallach? Yes, all that, plus Diazs endless supply of off-white winter knitwear. Keep watching over and until you feel much better about life.
The Big Sick (2017)
Its a counterintuitive pick, maybe, but star and co-screenwriter Kumail Nanjianis tender comedy about a man who breaks up with his true love, then sticks by her through a medically induced coma makes a hopeful statement about surviving a medical crisis.
Nanjiani is wonderful in a plot based on his real-life courtship of his wife, co-screenwriter Emily V. Gordon. Whether dealing with his strict Pakistani parents (Anupam Kher and Zenobia Shroff), who are pushing an arranged marriage, or facing the skepticism of his girlfriends mom and dad (Holly Hunter and Ray Romano), he depicts the learning curve that anyone goes through when love is tested by uncontrollable outside forces.
Same goes for Zoe Kazan, who is superb as a woman who realizes that perfection in a relationship is unattainable, but extreme loyalty might be even better. If you think its impossible to laugh in a time of viral peril, the funny human moments here will correct that impression.
Youve Got Mail (1998)
Oh, the simple days of AOL email accounts. This classic Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan reboot of 1940s Shop Around the Corner directed and co-written by the great Nora Ephron is set in the dinosaur age of technology, yet its just the thing for coping with 2020.
What better way to conduct a flirtation right now than through online chatting and never actually meeting? And what more charming conflict than a feud between an indie bookstore owner (Ryan) and the scion of a mega-bookstore chain (Hanks)? It almost (but not quite) makes you forget your library is closed and your local bookstore is taking a big financial hit.
And given how much we all need a cathartic cry, the moment where Hanks wipes away Ryans tears Dont cry, shopgirl is one of the most exquisite weeping inducers of the last 30 years.
Jumping the Broom (2011)
Paula Patton and Laz Alonso star as the gorgeous young couple whose lavish wedding on Marthas Vineyard seems destined to be disrupted. But its still a reminder that family gatherings with dozens of testy relatives may not be the worst thing to endure.
As Patton and Alonso see their plans begin to unravel, a strong supporting cast finds comedy gold in the tensions of clashing relatives and in-laws. With Angela Bassett and Brian Stokes Mitchell as Pattons snooty parents, Loretta DeVine as Alonsos clingy mother, and Meagan Good and Gary Dourdain as the maid of honor and reception chef who send sparks flying, youll be saying I do to this comedy of misunderstandings, unearthed secrets and, eventually, blessed reconciliation.
The American President (1995)
The biggest problem faced by President Andrew Shepherd, at least for much of this politically themed rom-com, is convincing a florist he is not prank-calling when he tries to order flowers for the lobbyist who has stolen his heart.
Sure, there is some agonizing over an environmental bill and a mini-scandal involving the lobbyists youthful involvement in the protest movement. But rest assured, the ride in this star vehicle driven by Michael Douglas and Annette Bening is a smooth fantasy version of high-profile love affairs, not to mention government in action.
And if the ballroom scene in Beauty and the Beast animated or live action is your ultimate in swoon-level dances, check out Douglas and Benings twirl at a White House state dinner. As they used to say in 1995 (or maybe it was 1935?), yowza!
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Boost your spirits with fun rom-coms - Boston Herald
Each night, when I go to sleep, I die. And the next morning, when I wake up, I am reborn.Mahatma Gandhi
Happy New Year! Happy New Decade! Early January and the holidays are over and most of us are getting back into Real Life. For many of us, weve burned the candle at both ends and perhaps are feeling the exhaustion of the culmination of doing too much and not getting enough sleep. Ive heard so many women in the last month or so tiredly grin, (or grimace) and say No rest for the weary. As though we all must blithely accept exhaustion.
But No We cannot accept this lying down . . . or more likely running around! Sleep is essential and has been described by sleep expert Matthew Walker, as our life-support system and Mother Natures best effort yet at immortality.
The decimation of sleep throughout industrialized nationsis having a catastrophic impact on our health, our wellness,even the safety and the education of our children.Its a silent sleep loss epidemic,and its fast becoming one of the greatest public health challengesthat we face in the 21st century.
So why do we needsleep? What difference does a good nights sleep actually make? I think we allknow the obvious answers to that lack of sleep makes us tired, grumpy and notquite able to think properly. But research shows that its much more seriousthan that. Not enough sleep or poor quality sleep impacts our immune system,hormones, heart, learning, memory and even impacts mens testicles and womensreproductive organs. Interestinglyenough, it also impacts our genetic code.
Lack of sleep hugelyimpacts our ability to heal as well. Inour body we have cells that protect us, sometimes called naturalkiller cells.You can think ofnatural killer cells almost like the secret service agentsof your immunesystem.They are very good at identifying dangerous, unwantedelementsand eliminating them.In fact, what theyre doing here isdestroying a cancerous tumor mass.So what you wish for is a virile set ofthese immune assassinsat all times,and tragically, thats what youdont have if youre not sleeping enough.
And as we age, and our memory seems to faderapidly, all of us over 50 can certainly attest to that, sleep is even moreessential. Researchis showing that the disruption of deep sleepis anunderappreciated factorthat is contributing to cognitive decline ormemory declinein aging, and most recently discoveredin Alzheimersdisease as well.
Basically in anutshell there is nothing positive about not getting enough sleep.
A good laugh and a long sleep are the best cures for anything.
Old Irish Proverb
On the other hand,getting enough sleep positively impacts us in almost every way. We have a stronger immune system, betterfocus, better memory, and a more optimistic outlook on life.
Walkerdescribes recent research done at UC Berkeley on sleep and learning:
By placing electrodes all over the head,what weve discovered is that there are big, powerful brainwavesthat happen during the very deepest stages of sleepthat have riding on top of themthese spectacular bursts of electrical activitythat we call sleep spindles.And its the combined quality of these deep-sleep brainwavesthat acts like a file-transfer mechanism at night,shifting memories from a short-term vulnerable reservoirto a more permanent long-term storage site within the brain,and therefore protecting them, making them safe.And it is important that we understandthat during sleep actually transacts these memory benefits,because there are real medical and societal implications.
Sleep provides time for our brains to tidy up and make space; this action is called synapticpruning.
Sleepprovides a time when the brainssynapses theconnections among neuronsshrink back by nearly 20percent.Duringthis time, thesynapsesrest and preparefor the next day, when they will grow stronger while receiving new input tolearn new things.
Without this reset, knownas synaptic homeostasis, synapses could become overloaded andburned out, unable to function at an optimal level. Scientists call this use-dependent corticalreorganization, meaning that we strengthen whichever neural pathways we usemost often, and lose the ones we use the least.
I am totally in favorof pruning those unused pathways. Iusually feel like my brain can use a little Marie Kondo action!
I think we all canagree that getting more and better quality sleep is essential. But what is the best way to do that? Fortunately, Walker does have a fewsuggestions:
The first is regularity.Go to bed at the same time, wake up at the same time,no matter whether its the weekday or the weekend.Regularity is king,and it will anchor your sleepand improve the quantity and the quality of that sleep.The second is keep it cool.Your body needs to drop its core temperatureby about two to three degrees Fahrenheit to initiate sleepand then to stay asleep,and its the reason you will always find it easierto fall asleep in a room thats too coldthan too hot.So aim for a bedroom temperature of around 65 degrees,or about 18 degrees Celsius.Thats going to be optimal for the sleep of most people.
One of my New Years Resolutions this year is to meditate more often, and the Dalai Lama declares that sleep is the best meditation. And who am I to disagree with the Dalai Lama? So I think Ill close here and go take a nap. Happy New Year to all of you, and may you have a restful 2020 filled with wonderful deep healing sleep.
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Rest for the Weary . . . - Thrive Global
Harold Carmichael wasn't even in consideration for the Pro Football Hall of Fame the first time around, never becoming a semifinalist when he was eligible for the modern-era ballot. The centennial class of 2020 gave Carmichael a second chance at football immortality, and the Philadelphia Eagles all-time leading receiver was inducted into the Hall of Fame Wednesday.
Getting the call from Pro Football Hall of Fame President and CEO David Baker was a dream come true for Carmichael, one that didn't seem possible until the past year.
"This is so much of an honor, oh gosh. Never thought this would happen. But thank you, God," Carmichael said to Baker when he received the call. "Thank you for telling me this, David. Appreciate you. I feel like I'm dreaming. I don't know what to feel. I feel so numb."
Carmichael owns every major receiving record in Eagles franchise history -- quite the impressive feat since he hasn't put on an Eagles uniform in 36 years. He is the Eagles all-time leader in receptions (589), receiving yards (8,978), and touchdowns (75). He also caught a pass in 127 consecutive games from 1972 to 1982, which was a NFL record until Steve Largent broke it in 1986.
Carmichael is 28th all-time in receiving touchdowns to go with his two All-Pro selections. He also was member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame 1970s all-decade team (second team) and the 1980 Walter Payton NFL Man of the Year. Only four wide receivers were in the Hall when Carmichael retired and five when he was up for induction in 1989, which explains why he was overlooked in the first place.
When Carmichael's NFL career ended, he was fifth all-time in catches, seventh all-time in yards, and tied for sixth in touchdowns. Carmichael led all NFL wide receivers in receptions (549), receiving yards (8,414), and receiving touchdowns (77) from 1973 to 1983.
"I just had a flashback from 60-some years ago and thinking about the guys that helped me to get here," Carmichael said on Good Morning Football. "Seventh-round draft choice, nobody expected me to make it. To be a part of the 2020 centennial class, is just...I'll tell every kid, be prepared to do this. This is the ultimate, ultimate honor you can get in the National Football League."
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Eagles great Harold Carmichael on making the Hall of Fame: 'I feel like I'm dreaming' - CBS Sports
Author photo by Emily Tobey
If you are not already experiencing "climate dread," the feeling that you're living in a slow-mo ecological apocalypse that you're powerless to stop, then Jenny Offill's latest novel, Weather, will fill you to the brim with it.
Granted, your capacity to care about "climate dread" may be reduced if you're currently suffering from rent-hike dread, hospital-bill dread, getting-shot-by-the-cops dread, and inability-to- retire dread, and that diminished capacity may prevent you from diving into Offill's sustained meditation on the subject. However, if you are a little curious about it, her black humor and occasionally deep insights will keep your eyeballs glued to the page in search of a cure.
Weather has much in common with Offill's last book, Dept. of Speculation. Both enjoyed lots of pre-publication love on social media from the New York publishing industry's tastemakers. Both present a domestic fiction using literary collage, a technique popularized most recently by nonfiction writers/poets such as Maggie Nelson and Claudia Rankine. And both are overhyped but still very much worth a read.
In Weather, Offill places the reader in the mind of Lizzie, a librarian in the big city with a supportive partner and a "gifted and talented" kid in school. In short, diaristic, pithy but breezy paragraphs, we learn that Lizzie spends a lot of time caring for her brother as he struggles with addiction, worrying about her child's future on a doomed planet, and reflecting on the pleasures and temptations of married life. When she takes a side gig answering e-mails for her former writing teacher's doomsday podcast, her focus on climate dread and prepping for the end-times begins to consume her, and the narrative gains steam.
Fans of NYC dinner-party zingers and stumbled-upon profundities will appreciate Offill's contributions to the field. Some of the funnier moments in the book come at the expense of wide-eyed businessmen whose devotion to technology allows them to escape the cold reality of a warming planet. "These people long for immortality but can't wait ten minutes for a cup of coffee," Lizzie's mentor quips at one point. The more profound moments arrive in Lizzie's fervent search for new perspectives to combat her growing dread, though these new perspectives aren't always comforting:
"Young person worry: What if nothing I do matters?
Old person worry: What if everything I do does?"
Though some of Offill's jokes and profundities can feel a bit pat, the overall structure of the book is greater than the sum of its parts, offering readers the pleasure of looking back through a diary and realizing that all our apparently disparate anxieties may fall under the umbrella of the larger one: fear of extinction.
Weather suggests that climate dread is its own crisis, a collective psychological block preventing us from taking the action necessary to stave off ecological collapse or, at the very least, to manage it more effectively.
Though fiction can allow us to diagnose this problem in all its messy human nuance, Offill knows it can never give us the cure. To that end, she concludes her story with an obligatory note of hope that lies outside the book itself, literally a website URL: http://www.obligatorynoteofhope.com. The site appears to be a place where climate-dreaders, or people who caught the disease from the book, can connect and take collective action to dig each other out of the doldrums.
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Jenny Offill's Novel Weather Looks at "Climate Dread" with Humor and Plenty of Gloom - TheStranger.com
Kobe Bryant has never been one to shy away from being the villain. Over the course of his 20-year career, there were many times that people were rooting against him and even now, there are villain-like narratives being thrown around about his career.
Kobe has always embraced that role as another challenge for him to overcome. Despite the narratives being thrown his way, Kobe has always found a way to win and succeed, both during his career and his life after it.
Ironically, even the internet seems to recognize this fact.
In a filter dedicated to finding his Harry Potter wizard house, he wasnt named with the famous and prestigious Gryffindor, Ravenclaw, or Hufflepuff groups. Instead, Kobe bean was put with the Slytherins: the bad guys. A group of the worst and most powerful wizards.
Sam Quinn of CBS Sports shared the most glaring similarities between Bryant and Slytherins most powerful member, Voldemort:
Albus Dumbledore once claimed that Voldemort never had a friend, nor did he want one. Bryant literally told GQ that he was incapable of high-level friendship.
Both were prodigies. Bryant entered the NBA Draft as a teenager. Voldemort was already capable of controlling his magic before attending Hogwarts.
Voldemort took extreme and unnatural steps towards immortality by creating Horcruxes. Bryant undertook a number of unusual treatments in the name of prolonging his career, including traveling all the way to Germany for plasma rich platelet therapy not allowed by the FDA.
There you have it. The similarities are quite stunning.
And though that type of classification might seem disappointing to some, Bryant seemed thrilled. And why shouldnt he be? Its nothing new for him and something he has embraced his whole life.
Its just who he is.
Back in 1976, the incomparable drama critic Kenneth Tynan wondered in his diary when someone was going to take a deep breath and declare that, at some time in the thirties, the serious music tradition finally withered, curled up and died of sterility and malnutrition; and that the greatest composers of the twentieth century are Berlin, Rodgers, Porter, Kern, Gershwin, et al. This view, bold enough at the time to be fit only for a diary, has by now become commonplace. In the mid-nineteen-seventies, you had to haunt London record shops to find Ella Fitzgeralds Gershwin or Cole Porter albums. Now those recordings, and the songs they illuminate, are everywhere. Prompted, perhaps, by the publication, in the early seventies, of Alec Wilders groundbreaking study, American Popular Song: The Great Innovators 1900-1950, the old songwriters have come to have a new presence, and their songs even a collective brand name: the American Songbook. Their music is now taken up routinely by the same rock singers who once seemed to have overshadowed them, with some (Van Morrison singing A Foggy Day) oddly good, some (Rod Stewart singing Someone to Watch Over Me) oddly bad, and some (Bob Dylan singing The Night We Called It a Day) just odd.
Like all victories in art, this one has a double-edged result. On the one hand, the music is, mostly, out there. On the other, the essential work of discrimination is lost in a blanketing cloud of nostalgia. Embattled memory takes things apart; complacent nostalgia squashes them back together. The first wave of rediscovery had ukases and prohibitionsAlec Wilder wrote off essentially all of Rodgers and Hammerstein, and almost everything self-consciously jazzy in Gershwin. (He preferred Harold Arlen, who knew jazz inside out, to Gershwina shocking view then.) These days, a smiling, everyone-together spirit inflects the appreciative albums and Lincoln Center celebrations; Tynans et al. covers a lot of talents, big and small. When you are in the middle of a battle, as Wilder was, it is important to sort out the fighters from the freeloaders. Once it has been won, everybody gets a medal.
So, with squads of scholars arriving on the field after the battle, to tend the wounded and bury the dead, we have a renewed chance not just to get the story right but to get the stature right, to figure out who ranks where and why. Certainly, Porters ghost could not ask for better care than he has been given in The Letters of Cole Porter (Yale), edited by Cliff Eisen, a professor of music history at Kings College London, and Dominic McHugh, a musicologist at the University of Sheffield (and the editor of Alan Jay Lerners letters). Laid out with a meticulous scholarly apparatus, as though this were the correspondence of Grover Cleveland, every turn in the songwriters story is deep-dived for exact chronology, and every name casually dropped by Porter gets a worried, explicatory footnote. The editors have also included some secondary material that is not, strictly speaking, correspondence at all, such as a hair-raising journal of the mid-thirties M-G-M movie project that became the Eleanor Powell vehicle Born to Dance.
As an artists letters, they are, truth be told, disappointing. There are few flights of fancy or spontaneous improvisations in Porters writings to friendsfor such a famous wit, there is remarkably little wit. The most arresting passages of writing and thinking arrive less often in letters-from than in letters-to. Abe Burrows, the great musical book writerwhat others call a libretto Broadway people call a book, and what others call a book they usually call revengecontributes several good things. He offers Porter definitive wisdom about making musicals: Doing a show is not unlike bringing up a child. The child develops a life of its own. The parents do their best but certain things remain immutable, and the child is what he is. Porter, a great appreciator, tells Burrows that he liked those words enough to paste them in his scrapbook.
Yet a reader, without learning much directly about Porters art, comes away from the book with an even higher opinion of him as an artist than might have been held before. Though he was born into genuine if provincial affluence, with second-tier European royalty filling out the familys dance card on vacation, he chose to become a working stiff. Reversing the usual American ascent from labor to leisure makes for a more strenuous, and more moving, story. The labor produced a new kind of American lyric, and language.
Porters personal tale was well known even when other songwriters were not. To get a bio-pic, peers among the great songwriters had to die young, like Gershwin (who got a pretty good movie in Rhapsody in Blue) or Lorenz Hart (who got a terrible one in Words and Music). But Porter was the subject of two movies, including one, Night and Day (1946), made in his lifetime and with his reluctant collaboration, despite the unsayable but far from secret truth that he was gay. In his own social world, he was about as out as a man could be in those days, with a rich repertory of lovers and assignations.
Porters story was appealing because it was seemingly so generationalso Fitzgerald-like in its ascension from Midwestern beginnings to East Coast fame. Born in Peru, Indiana, in 1891 to the wealthiest family in townperhaps the wealthiest in all of Indianahe went to Yale right before the Great War. (Fitzgerald, four years behind him, at Princeton, regarded Porters commercial career a little enviously, as a path not taken.) A precocious though largely untrained musician, Porter wrote what are still among the schools fight songs. Then came a short period of service in the war, followed by a long holiday in Europe through the early twenties, with a loving but mostly sexless marriage of convenience to Linda Lee Thomas, of the Virginia Lees. It was a perfect Gerald Murphy-style Jazz Age life, disrupted only by Porters determination to get to New York and become a successful Broadway songwritera very strange, and very Jewish, ambition for a young socialite.
Beneath his smooth, genial, almost inhumanly productive and evasive surface, there were turbulent waters. His very name, for all its air of Ivy League ease, represents a burdened legacy. The Porters were his difficult, scapegrace fathers family; the Coles were his mothers rich and ambitious Indiana family. He was a Porter by birth but, if his mother had anything to do with it, would be a Cole for life.
Privilege has its privileges, and Porters queerness, evident in the countless letters in this volume to kindred souls, like Monty Woolleythe once famous character actor, whom hed met at Yale, the original star of The Man Who Came to Dinnerseems never to have tormented him, as it did Hart. Porter, by temperament and entitlement, came of age among the openly bisexual European upper crust. Everyone knew that he was a gay man with a marriage of convenience; everyone agreed to maintain the pretense that he wasnt. Far from a drama of either repression or subversion, the situation seems like an oddly happy social concord.
His letters to his lovers are in the same register as those of the Oscar WildeRobbie Ross circle in London a few decades earlier: chummy more than erotic, with a transparent language of concealment, a more or less open code of intrigue. Way out here one gets that wicked city idea about New York & all those purlieus, he writes to the dancer Nelson Barclift, from his cottage in Williamstown. Have you been in a purlieu tonight? Confess. Say, Guilty. But do write me soon that you have reported it all to Ben & Olliegay friendsfor, for some intangible reason, they cleanse the impurity out of what they touch. And they touch plenty.
It might be argued, and has been, most notably in William McBriens 1998 biography, that Porters sexuality shaped his sentiments, which burst out in happy one-night-stand songs like Just One of Those Things and Ive Got You Under My Skin, with their note of sexual infatuation, cherished but not easily transmuted into domesticity. Id sacrifice anything come what might/For the sake of having you near/In spite of a warning voice that comes in the night/And repeats, repeats in my ear does not lead us neatly to become the folks who live on the hill.
But Frank Sinatra had no trouble applying the songs, or their emotions, to Ava Gardner or her successors. At a time when everyone was chafing against the constraints of bourgeois morality, a sex song like Lets Misbehave spoke as clearly to straying straights as it did to cruising gays. The sport of writing in a tightly organized genre like popular song is not to smuggle in specifically subversive subtext when the censors arent looking but to make the subversive emotions universal enough not to need a subtext. Porter was to straight sex in his affair songs as his best friend, Irving Berlin, was to Christianity in writing White Christmasthe outsiders triumph was to own the insiders material. It may be, as some have suggested, that the climactic lines But if, baby, Im the bottom/Youre the top in Porters Youre the Top already meant in 1936 what they mean in erotic slang now; the point is that, post-Porter, they no longer had to mean only that.
Porter is so famous for his gifts as a lyricist that it might seem mischievous to the point of perversity to suggest that his real greatness resides in his skills as a composer. Yet how many other popular composers have had more hits with instrumental, unsung versions of their work? Artie Shaws version of Begin the Beguine is the best known, but the Dave Brubeck Quartets album of Porter songs, from the mid-sixties, with Paul Desmonds peerless sax, is just as good. Though rarely overtly jazz in the Arlen-Gershwin manner, his melodies have so much mysterious inner propulsion that, asked to swing, they practically swing themselves.
For all Porters aristocratic mien, his tastes were rather plain, as those of the American upper classes usually arehigh taste is typically simple taste, as anyone who has eaten at a Wasp club knows. His list of requirements for a hotel room in Philadelphia during a tryout included sliced liverwurst, salami, and bologna, and twenty-four cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. Another small but striking social trait that runs through the letters is the preponderance of presents that were incumbent on people in show business then; Porter gives and gets flowers, paintings, wine, books for the smallest of reasons, and then writes at length to thank the present-giver, or to thank the present-recipient for his thanks. People who came of age in Porters time took gift-giving as seriously as the Kwakiutls took their potlatches, and for the same reason: coming of age in a culture of surplus, they believed in constant exchanges of the signs of prosperity.
Porter, high-Wasp tastes and all, had to navigate a Broadway and Hollywood world that was astoundingly uniform in its Jewishness. A famous story has Porter confiding in a friend that he was going to write Jewish tunes, meaning minor-key pentatonic croonings of the kind that Berlin had mastered in Blue Skies. In Mary Martins first showstopper song, My Heart Belongs to Daddy, the melisma in the middle section is self-consciously, even uncomfortably, Eastern European-sounding in order to indicate that Daddy is Jewish.
The degree of reverse cultural assimilation that this Gentile from the Midwest had to undertake is captured in one of the funniest letters Porter ever wrote, to his (Jewish) agent, Irving Lazar:
Thank you for your letter of Dec. 28 1955. I am not an idiot child. I do not call Sol Saul nor do I call Saul Sol. These are two different people. There is a producer named Sol Siegeland an assistant producer named Saul Chaplin. Sol sent Saul to be with me here for ten days while I wrote new material.... Since Saul (not Sol) returned to Culver City, I have received charming telephone calls from Sol, and a most enthusiastic letter from Saul.
Its a Porter lyric in miniature (Sol Sent Saul to Tell Me All), and shows what a forest of alien manners, or at least names, a boy from Indiana had to make his way through at a time when all the other great show-tune innovatorsKern, Gershwin, Rodgers, Arlenwere Jewish. What other kind of tunes could you write?
Porters story does have a dramatic climax. In the fall of 1937, when he was forty-six, he endured a horrific accident, in which the horse he was riding fell on him and crushed one of his legs. The injuries led to more than thirty operations in the course of his life, all excruciatingly painful, and a legacy of permanent suffering. Just how agonizing his condition must have been, and what consequences it had for his work, has been a source of much speculation. Wilder, among others, insists that there was minimal good work after the accident. Eisen and McHugh dispute that verdict; certainly, his most successful Broadway shows, including Kiss Me, Kate, all happened well afterward. Still more certainly, the letters are heroic in their avoidance of self-pity, though they also reveal for the first time just how bad his injuries were. When the cast was removed, I shall never forget the first sight of my leg, he wrote to Monty Woolley from his hospital bed. I asked What is the jelly its covered with? And the reply was, Thats not jelly, thats blebsblisters. It was hard to believe for the whole leg looked like a flowing mass of lava and it sorta made me sick. Heavily drugged, he managed to write down some of his craziest illusions: My right leg stretches, slanting upwards before me, like the side of the hill, the summit of which is my toes. From the ankle downand approaching meany number of small, finely sharply toothed rakes are at work.
The rakes got only more sharply toothed over time. He managed to persevere, it seems, by a mixture of champagne and stiff-upper-lipness. But not a day of it could have been easy for him. There are long, relatively unrevealing diaries from later trips to the Greek islands and Naples and beyond, and the extent of his activity doesnt sound at all like that of a crippled man. On the other hand, one of his companions says that he was inhuman on these voyages, a comment that seems to refer to the prodigious gifts of concentration necessary to keep out the pain and focus on the pleasures.
Porter writes engagingly, as an artisan, about the business of putting on a show. It is pretty clear that he measured a shows success simply by the number of hit songs it produced, and he had savvy theories about how long it takes a song to become a hit once its out in the world. He writes minimally about his own creative process for the same upper-crust reason that he writes minimally about his sufferingonly second-rate people go on and on about their inner lives. Analyzing is the same as complaining, and self-analysis is the twin of self-promotion.
Clues about his creativity shine through the workmanlike surface, though. Porter still wrote in a revue style where the characters were hardly worth dramatizing. The producer Cy Feuer, who put on two late Porter shows, says in his memoir that Porter didnt really care where the songs fit within the story; he was blithely composing numbers for Can-Can (1953) while the book writer and the director struggled bitterly with the plotline, and though he threw in new ones as needed, he seems to have stood mostly aside, amused and productive, as the rest of the creative team raged and yelled. In fact, Abe Burrows wrote a couple of deft, diplomatic letters asking Porter to please wait to write the songs until they knew what the story was. Told that the integrity of the show demanded that there must not be any ooh-la-la songs about Paris, Porter airily wrote the most obvious of all such songs, I Love Paris. It was too irresistible not to include.
He didnt need the shows to write drama. The songs were the stories. Brush Up Your Shakespeare and So in Love, though situated in the plot of Kiss Me, Kate, are hardly situational. He constructed songs so that each one is a drama in itself, with an allusive, erudite verse leading to a simpler storytelling refrain. In perhaps his greatest song, Just One of Those Things, from 1935its a song that Holden Caulfield, who likes nothing, likesthe verse is an offhand sequence of references that were not quite commonplace then: Dorothy Parker, Heloise and Abelard. The chorus becomes slyly dynamic (Just one of those crazy flings/One of those bells that now and then rings), building from kiss-off to remembered kissing. The movement is minimal but emotionally exact (Our love affair/Was too hot not to cool down), and describes a journey from mere ruefulness to actual regret, a small but significant emotional arc that requires a great singer to convey.
List songs are anathema to the post-Sondheim sensibility, trained as it is on Oscar Hammersteins heightened dramatic style, but Porters lists are his poetry. Ring Lardner, in these pages, made fun of the overwrought imagery in Porters romantic lyrics; where Porter had Under the hide of me/Theres an, oh, such a hungry yearning/Burning inside of me, he offered as an alternative Night and day, under the rind of me/Theres an Oh, such a zeal for spooning, running the mind of me. But Porter is never the least bit off when it comes to Americana. He takes pleasure in rhyme for rhymes sake, in the play of language, and does so in a way that is, oddly, far more in tune with the main lines of the American avant-garde of his time than operetta style could ever be.
In Youre the Top, the collisions of high and low, the mixed vernacular that expects his audience to be equally comfortable at the movies and in the museums, is the purest kind of E.E. CummingsStuart Davis thirties pop avant-garde: Youre the top!/Youre the Colosseum./Youre the top!/Youre the Louvre Museum./Youre a melody from a symphony by Strauss./Youre a Bendel bonnet,/A Shakespeare sonnet,/Youre Mickey Mouse. The beautiful chaos of similesCellophane! Botticelli! A Waldorf salad!captures the hyperkinetic collisions of New York experience as perfectly as Mondrians Broadway Boogie Woogie. The wit of the build, leading past Rome and Paris and culminating in high Americana, is complemented by a brilliantly quiet bit of rhyminghad Mickey Mouse and Strauss been rhymed before? When George and Ira Gershwin wrote their own Strauss tribute, a couple of years later, the waltz By Strauss, Ira had to cheat a little and make all the rhymes German, including rhyming Strauss with Fledermausthe difference between Fledermaus as a rhyme and Mickey Mouse being the difference between talent and genius.
While still a very young man, Porter coined the phrase See America First (it was the title of his dbut musical, a GeorgeM. Cohan spoof), and that gift for creating idioms may be a clue to the quiddity of his genius. Porter is one of the three great lyricists of invented American speech, with only Chuck Berry in the fifties and Robert Hunter of the Grateful Dead in the seventies his equal in this respect. Berry constructed a world of fast cars and fried chicken and teen-age back-seat fumblings, with the right jive to cover it all; Hunter, in songs like Uncle Johns Band and Friend of the Devil, invented a lost nineteenth-century world of runaway trains and pursuing sheriffs and brass bands playing by the riverside which somehow resonated as an available American reservoir of myth. (Of course, people had written songs about cars before Chuck did, but he was the one who had the specific wit to put Maybellenes Coup de Ville in a contest with his own V-8 Ford. Just as, where the Band wrote about Dixie in the winter of 65, only Hunter made up Uncle John, who could have been equally at home playing during the Civil War or at Woodstock.)
Hart heard a world; Porter made one upa New York of penthouses and night clubs and hangovers which still resonates as another kind of American myth. Even phrases now as familiar as Ive got you under my skin and I get a kick out of you are not precisely idioms taken directly from American talk, the way that Harts I could write a book and Ive got five dollars are. No doubt people had long said that a thing got under your skin or that we got a kick out of something else, but no one said exactly those formal sentences; Porters special work was in elevating the smallest of small talk into comic poetry. It gave him license to invent a vernacular. Down in the depths of the ninetieth floor, But in the morning, no!, Im always true to you, darling, in my fashion, even Youre the topnone of these things were idiomatic before Porter transformed them from little acorns into mighty jokes. When, in Blazing Saddles, the villain quotes You Do Something to Me (Now go do that voodoo that you do so well!), we know at once that he is quoting Cole Porter.
Porters condition worsenedin 1958, the crushed leg would have to be amputatedand though his energy didnt slacken, the quality of the work did decline. The letters trace his work on one good movie score (High Society), a couple of so-so shows (Silk Stockings and Can-Can), and a promising but too-late-in-the-day collaboration with S.J. Perelman on an Aladdin musical for television. Whats odd is that Porter writes voluminously in the nineteen-fifties without ever mentioning the recordings of his work that would do more than anything to assure his immortality: the Nelson Riddle arrangements of his greatest songs, which Sinatra recorded in the decade beginning in 1953. Ive Got You Under My Skin, I Get a Kick Out of You, Just One of Those Things, Easy to Love, Anything Goesthese are the high points of Porter interpretation. (Sinatras sadly obscure live recording of Night and Day, with the Red Norvo vibraphone trio in Australia, is perhaps the best of all.)
As Will Friedwald and James Kaplan have both pointed out, the Riddle-Sinatra Ive Got You Under My Skin was as pivotal a recording in American music as Like a Rolling Stone would be a decade later. Before that, Porter is Astaire and elegance; after that, he swings and can become anything more. Although Porters biographer Robert Kimball recently assured an audience that Porter had admired Sinatra and befriended himhis slightly dubious evidence being that Sinatra took over Porters apartment in the Waldorf after his death, in 1964that doesnt show up in the letters, and one wonders if Porter was even fully aware of the Riddle-Sinatra records, beyond the royalties he collected. Yet Porter lives on in such recordings of single songs more than in the spasmodic revival of shows that often need heavy rewriting to exist onstage at all. His dramatic songs are all the dramatic revival we need.
All art aspires to the condition of music, Walter Pater wrote; within music itself, all music dreams of becoming another kind of music. Art songs dream of becoming pop songs and pop songs dream of becoming folk songs, too familiar to need an author. We hear Porter now without knowing that its Porter were hearing. Like Stephen Foster, he sublimated his suffering into his songs, until the songs are all we have, thereby achieving every artists dream, to cease to be a suffering self and become just one of those things we share.
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The Pleasure and Pain of Being Cole Porter - The New Yorker
THIS adaptation of Stephen Kings 2013 continuation of The Shining, while not actually being very scary, is still terrific nonetheless.
Ewan McGregor is Danny Torrance (the young son on the tricycle in The Shining) a hard-drinking man still suffering the effects of the traumatic events up at the Overlook Hotel all those years ago.
5
He is struggling to keep the demons at bay and doing his best to remove himself from society.
But hes dragged back into the supernatural clutches when Abra a girl with the same telepathic gift he has (the waffly named shine) needs his help to escape from Rose The Hat (Rebecca Ferguson).
Along with her band of pretty unmerry men, Rose needs to feed off the powers of these gifted people in her quest for immortality.
In order to fend these lot off, Danny must revisit the past figuratively and literally.
5
Director Mike Flanagan had an unenviable task, adapting the sequel of a Stanley Kubrick classic, which was hated by its author. Yet he manages to navigate through this particular maze well.
Kubricks 1980 adaptation of The Shining famously veered off course from the source material, leaving this version of Doctor Sleep with no choice but to shoehorn in a lot of stuff that is missing from the book.
These constraints work in Flanagans favour allowing him to intelligently straddle nostalgia and modernisation.
Clever use of lookalikes and replica sets threw me straight back to the original.
5
First up, its a relief to find Ewan McGregor on good form here. He can often go either way and this is a film solely reliant on its lead.
His lonely, recovering alcoholic is believable and the weary resignation as he accepts his fate works very well indeed. But the same cant quite be said for Rebecca Fergusons Rose The Hat.
She is a brilliant actress, but where we needed real malevolence and wickedness, we get camp Jack Sparrow theatrics. This is mainly down to the material.
The Shinings terror came from the unseen supernatural force building dread and fear in the viewer.
5
Here we are spoonfed a baddie-chasing-goodie storyline, which made it feel too much like an episode of Preacher.
But its smart straddling of nostalgia is what saves and elevates Doctor Sleep.
As The Shinings greatest hits start getting wheeled out (all the favourites are there), youre reminded of just how creepy that damned hotel is.
5
Tagging itself as a psychological thriller rather than a horror, its failure to properly get under your skin is a bit of a problem.
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This is largely due to the gap left by Jack Nicholsons truly malicious performance in The Shining. It also lacks the Eighties kitsch of the recent It reboots.
In spite of this, Doctor Sleep is a solid, entertaining follow-up to one of the scariest ever films.
GOT a story? RING The Sun on 0207 782 4104 or WHATSAPP on 07423720250 or EMAIL exclusive@the-sun.co.uk
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Doctor Sleep is a Shining example of how to adapt a classic sequel, without losing any of the nostalgia - The Sun
Happy bye week greetings, Sooner Nation. Its likely most of you are still stinging from last week like I am. You also know nothing makes a regular-season, upset loss for the Oklahoma Sooners worse than an excruciatingly long extra week through which to ruminate about the disappointing game that just passed.
Alas, here we are, Sooner friends and fam. A season that seemed on its way to possible immortality has lost a significant chunk of luster following the perplexing performance against K-State, as Oklahoma once entrenched in position for a third-consecutive trip to the College Football Playoff is now 7-1 and ranked 10th in the inaugural CFP rankings. There are so many things to unpack from last weeks loss, but this is neither the time nor place to rehash old wounds.
Nonetheless, the all-too-familiar, underperforming loss aside, seeing this edition of the Sooner offense, led by Jalen Hurts, sustain a comeback on the road and look every bit as poised to reel off a dominant finish to the season is reassuring. I honestly dont know if winning out the rest of the way could still lead to a CFP berth (with a host of teams that need to stumble along with the overall outlook for OUs strength of schedule), but this is college football, where crazy happens on the regular. All of the Sooners preseason goals are still attainable.
Its time to root for chaos, and chaos we shall have. Pretty familiar, right? Boomer.
Head on down to the comments section for the game thread, where well be asking questions, making predictions and discussing the days action with yall. We also have a college football TV schedule (with streaming links) down at the bottom of the post.
K-State deals first setback to Grinchs defense
A quick look at potential CFP scenarios
OUs CFP chances, the lack of carries for RBs, and more
ICYMI, heres the latest episode of Oklahoma Breakdown, where Jack and Kam discuss OUs loss to K-State, the programs big picture moving forward, talk about College Football Playoff scenarios, along with answering plenty of Twitter questions.
Also, be sure to check out this weeks edition of Blatant Homerism Podcast, where you can hear Allen and The Skinny make their picks for the biggest games from around the country on this wretched bye week.
College Football Week 10 Viewing Guide:
Continued here:
Oklahoma Football: Week 10 College Thread, Live Stream & TV Schedule - Crimson And Cream Machine
We are well on our way to the sci-fi staple of a world inhabited by both people and androids. A startup from Russia is launching mass production of robotic clones of humans.
"Promobot" is offering autonomous service androids that can be made to look like anyone on Earth. The company says their creations are "robot companions," while its Robo-C android is the first of its kind, not only looking like a human but being useful in "business processes".
Aleksei Luzhakov, Promobot's Chairman of the Board of Directors said in a press release that "Everyone will now be able to order a robot with any appearance for professional or personal use."
Furthermore, he thinks that their new line of bots will spearhead an entirely fresh market in education, entertainment and service industries, adding "Imagine a replica of Michael Jordan selling basketball uniforms and William Shakespeare reading his own texts in a museum?"
Where else can such a robot be useful? As a consultant, behaving like a regular employee by answering questions, or as an administrator, performing such tasks as booking meetings. They can also work in offices or the government, greeting people and relaying information.
And, of course, if you're in the market for a home robot, you should keep in mind that Robo-Cs can be made to look like any family member. In a way, they can also offer "digital immortality," as Promobot co-founder Oleg Kivokurtsev expressed to CNBC.
Robo-C on CNBC | Promobot
With its AI endowed by 100,000 speech modules, the Promobot's android is able to reproduce the way any person talks by building linguistic models based on the way the speech and other knowledge of the subject. The bot's face has 18 moving parts, giving it the ability to make 600 micro-expressions.
One limitation - it currently can't walk but its upper body has three degrees of free movement.
Promobot is now taking orders for the Robo-C, claiming to already be the biggest manufacturer of autonomous service robots in Northern and Eastern Europe, whose machines can be found in 35 counties in a variety of professions. The android can run you from $20,000 to $50,000, based on various customization options.
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Androids that offer "digital immortality" begin mass production in Russia - Big Think
File photo of Nusrat Jahan Rafi, an Alim examinee and student of Sonagazi Madrasa in Feni, who died on April 10, after being set on fire on April 6 Dhaka Tribune
Feni's Women and Children Repression Prevention Tribunal Judge Mamunur Rashid sentenced 16 people to death on Thursday
While delivering the verdict of Nusrat Jahan Rafi murder case, the court in its observation said that the 'shining sacrifice' of the young woman will always remain a source of inspiration for the preservation of women's dignity.
Feni's Women and Children Repression Prevention Tribunal Judge Mamunur Rashid sentenced 16 people to death on Thursday.
On April 6, 18-year-old Nusrat Jahan, an alim examinee of Sonagazi Islamia Senior Fazil Madrasa, was set on fire in broad daylight on the roof of the institution by people loyal to principal Sirajuddaula, when she refused to withdraw a sexual harassment case her family filed against him on May 27.
She succumbed to her critical burn injuries at the Dhaka Medical College Hospital on April 10, which sparked nationwide outrage, and a public demand for swift justice against the perpetrators.
This incident has tarnished the luminous role of Sonagazi Islamia Senior Fazil Madrasa in escalating education in the area as well as shaken the conscience of the world. Victim Nusrat's brilliant sacrifice in preserving the status of womanhood has given her immortality already," the judge said.
Her immortality will remain as an inspiration forever. As well, the arrogance of the accused will surely be the cause of shame to humanity over time. Therefore, the culprits deserve the most severe punishment, the court observed.
Earlier, the court handed death penalty to madrasa principal Md Sirajuddaula, Nur Uddin, Shahadat Hossain Shamim, councilor Maksud Alam, Saifur Rahman Mohammad Zobair, Shakhawat Hossain Jabed, Hafez Abdul Kader, Absar Uddin, Kamrun Nahar Moni, Umme Sultana Poppy, Abdur Rahim Sharif, Iftekhar Uddin Rana, Imran Hossain Mamun, Mohammad Shamim, Ruhul Amin, and Mohiuddin Shakil.
Each of the convicts has also been slapped with a fine of Tk100,000 each.
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Judge: Nusrat's shining sacrifice will remain a source of inspiration to women - Dhaka Tribune
HERE we go then. After last weekend served up a thoroughly enjoyable appetiser, it is time for the main course. The biggest game in English rugby since Paris in 2007; the biggest moment in English sport since Jofra Archers super over earlier this summer. Another World Cup final, this time on the rugby field. It is time for Jonny Wilkinsons successor to write his name into the record books.
In some ways, Englands task on Saturdaymorning is easier than the one they completed seven days ago. South Africa are not the All Blacks. They do not have the same aura or carefully-cultivated sense of invincibility. They do not have a Beauden Barrett, all silky handling skills and counter-attacking punch, or an Ardie Savea, effortlessly offloading in the tackle. Their game plan is far more rigid, their running lines far easier to predict. In terms of a running threat from the backs, England would almost certainly have faced a more difficult challenge if they had been taking on Wales.
And yet, in one hugely-significant aspect, this will still be the ultimate test of Eddie Jones side. The Springboks want to fight power with power. Having watched Englands players tackle the All Blacks into submission last weekend, they want to skittle them over like pins. So what if Tom Curry and Sam Underhill stopped everything that moved? The South Africans will back themselves to be that little bit stronger, that little bit more durable as the bones begin to shake.
It can be decried as a one-dimensional game plan, but who cares if the dimension in question is so destructive? The All Blacks just about withstood the South African onslaught in their opening group game, but since then, the Springboks have obliterated everything in their wake. Even the Welsh, with their much-vaunted defensive resilience, were unable to hold out.
Will Englands players fare any better? Lets hope so. Neither Australia nor New Zealand were able to outmuscle them, and while the return of flying winger Cheslin Kolbe adds another dimension to South Africas play with ball in hand, Jones side know exactly what will be asked of them on Saturday.
Curry and Underhill will have to match their heroics against the All Blacks, Billy Vunipola will have to make yards of his own at what is sure to be a ferocious battle at the breakdown, Manu Tuilagi will have to punch holes in a South African defence that was pretty much watertight against Wales.
As was the case ninedays ago, Maro Itoje will have to be a titan at the line-out, securing English ball and disrupting the South African throw. The scrum is bound to be something the Springboks will target, so the English front row will have to stand firm. Maku Vunipola, with all his experience and strength, will be crucial.
The first priority has to be matching the Springboks physicality. Then, and only then, England can begin to play. The more Saturdays game is played in the loose, the more it will suit England. That does not mean running for the sake of it George Fords astute kicking game will still be crucial in terms of dictating territory and turning the South African defence but if Ford and Owen Farrell can get the ball into the hands of Jonny May and Anthony Watson in even the tiniest pocket of space, South Africa will be worried.
Englands superiority lies in the versatility of their attack. As their knockout games have proved, they can play in a variety of ways. Their rolling maul is a formidable weapon, and their forwards are comfortable picking and carrying, inching over the gain line. When the time is right, though, Ford and Farrell know when to switch play to the backs. Whether from pre-rehearsed set-piece moves or the hubbub of open play, Englands finishers are clinical.
After three-and-a-half years of tinkering, it feels as though Jones has finally got the balance just right. A remarkable thing happened when Englands head coach selected his team for the final this morning he selected an unchanged starting XV. It is the first time that has happened in the whole of his reign, emphasising both the extent to which he has experimented ahead of the World Cup finals and the depth of his satisfaction at his sides semi-final display.
Given South Africas brute strength, there must have been a temptation to move Farrell to fly-half and pair Henry Slade with Tuilagi in midfield. Defensively, that would have been the safest call.
The fact Jones has stuck with Ford at ten and Farrell in the centre confirms two things. First, that Fords performance last weekend made him impossible to drop. You dont pull the All Blacks around as if you have the ball tied to a string, only to be dumped back on the replacements bench. Second though, by sticking with Ford as his conductor-in-chief, Jones has also sent out a powerful message about English intent. This is not a team that wants to sit back soaking up pressure; this is a team that wants to attack.
Jones final message as he wrapped up his pre-match press conference earlier todaywas that he wanted his players to seize the occasion. He didnt want them to feel constrained or restricted. Be bold, take risks. South Africa will stick rigidly to their tactical template. England need to make the most of their ability to adapt.
When Jones replaced Stuart Lancaster in the wake of 2015s World Cup debacle, he spoke of embarking on a journey that would reach its climax in Japan. There have been twists and turns on the way, with an explosive start to Jones reign being followed by a trickier spell when some of the old guard were jettisoned and many of the players that will start on Saturdaywere bedded in.
Gradually, though, momentum has built. The World Cup started with low-key displays against Tonga and the United States, and even when Argentina were dispatched, it was hard to tell where England stood because their opponents were playing with 14 men. Australia was a big step forward, New Zealand a leap to an entirely new plane.
Now, there is just one more game to go. One last challenge between Jones team and sporting immortality. One golden opportunity to stand on top of the world.
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England can beat South Africa in the World Cup final - The Northern Echo
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Investigations into the biology, philosophy, and theology of immortality
In the Greek myth of Tithonus, the goddess of the dawn falls in love with a Trojan prince and asks Zeus to render him immortal so that the lovers could spend eternity together. However, she neglects to request that Tithonus be granted eternal youth in addition to eternal life. As a result, the immortal Tithonus suffers from the painful decay and degradation of his body over time, eventually shriveling down into a cricket.
The prospect of living forever has fascinated human beings for millennia, but it is not a concept without its challenges: the physical body breaks down, the soul is mysterious, and the prospect of infinite time raise philosophical puzzles about what it would be like to exist eternally and whether it would even be pleasant to do so.
Questions of the plausibility, nature, desirability and implications of various possible versions of immortality were at the forefront of the recently completed Immortality Project, a three-year, $5.1 million research initiative headed by University of California, Riverside philosopher John Martin Fischer and funded by the John Templeton Foundation. Using a competitive international evaluation system, the project funded 34 projects related to scientific, philosophical, and theological questions that touch on immortality, enabling the production of books and articles by scientists and humanists, popular writings, documentary films, and even works of science fiction. As a follow-up to the project, the Templeton Foundation recently commissioned a research review summarizing the current state of thinking on the scientific, philosophical, and theological intricacies of immortality, showing where the Immortality Project has moved the discussion forward and highlighting areas ripe for future work.
Much of the Immortality Projects research addresses the chances of technological or medical breakthroughs that might greatly extend human lifespan and investigating non-human species that have atypical lifespans or aging. This research is directly relevant to the physiological or staying alive conception of immortality. Project grantee Jon Cohen published Deathdefying experiments, an article in Science cataloguing recent experiments in non-human species, including cases where mice and insects have achieved impressive ages. One particular mouse, GHR-KO 11C, lived nearly five years (about twice the normal mouse lifespan) thanks to the removal of a gene for a growth hormone receptor. Other insects and worms, such as the Caenorhabditis elegans, can have extended lives because of gene mutations. The biological champion of non-aging is the freshwater hydra, Hydra vulgaris, a tiny relative of corals and jellyfish that is the only species that doesnt seem to age. In one case hydras were observed for ten years without signs of decay. Such studies suggest how anti-aging technologies might be developed for humans, although the journey from a hydra to a human would likely be a long one.
Other grants under the Immortality Project looked at the scientific evidence stemming from near-death and out-of-body experiences and what it tells us both about the possibility that human existence might continue independent of our physical bodies and about the psychological importance of near-death experiences. Under the grant, physician Sam Parnia published the book-length Erasing Death, focusing on the biology of near-death experiences in specific patients, and ending with a call for greater investment in resuscitation science.
In a separate book, Near Death Experiences: Understanding Visions of the Afterlife, Fischer and Immortality Project postdoc Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin examine how supernaturalists have used near death experiences to bolster their arguments, although the authors conclude that such experiences do not provide particularly strong evidence that an immaterial soul that can become immortal.
Why is the idea of immortality so fascinating across so many human cultures? One common explanation for the prevalence of belief in some form of immortality is that it offers an alternative to the existential terror engendered by contemplating potential non-existence after death for ourselves or other people. Several grantees under the project took up the contention of the Epicurean philosopher Lucretius that it is no more rational to worry about ones non-existence after death than to worry about ones non-existence prior to birth. Ben Bradley of Syracuse University examines several potential defenses of the idea that not existing is categorically bad for instance, because it may deprive us of potential good we might have experienced by living longer but finds them them unconvincing. As part of a multi-part subgrant examining Time Bias and Immortality, Notre Dame philosopher Meghan Sullivan suggests that Lucretius was not correct to argue that rationality requires we have symmetrical feelings about pre-life and post-life non-existence.
Sullivans work on this so-called time bias also touched on another set of common philosophical questions on whether individual immortality could be either possible or good: for instance, would an immortal afterlife entail abrupt or gradual changes such that at some point an individual would fully cease to be themselves? And if they have ceased to be themselves, do they truly live on?
Another classic objection to the desirability of immortality is that over infinite time it would eventually become tedious. In Fischer and Mitchell-Yellins Immortality and Boredom, the project leaders argue that this objection is not well founded. Even if an immortal person were to exhaust all previously known experiences, new ones might still be created, and familiar ones could still be enjoyed.
Not all conceptions of immortality need to involve the persistence of a physical body or even a soul one can talk about achieving immortality by having ones work or values persist after death. In one grant-funded article, The Immortals in Our Midst, political philosophers Ajume Wingo and Dan Demetriou suggest that leaders who establish legacies of democratic values achieve a kind of civic immortality that may be the best method for bringing democratic values to countries that are not comfortable with western approaches to politics.
The Immortality Project also provided funding for U.C. Riverside philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel to publish several works of short fiction that used narrative to elaborate on the sort of spare thought experiments more typical in the philosophy of immortality. In Reinstalling Eden: Happiness on a Hard Drive and Out of the Jar, Schwitzgebel explores the ideas of simulated universes, full-body replication and pervasive artificial intelligence relate to the possible natures of immortality.
Many religions, and Christianity in particular, hold that believers will come experience some form of eternal life. This is usually understood in terms of living on forever after death often in the bliss of heaven or the torments of hell. However, Mikel Burley, a professor of religion and philosophy at the University of Leeds, argues that the eternal life promised to Christians need not exist only in the hereafter. Instead, eternal life may be realized during a believers lifetime on earth. Burley proposes that eternal life may be enjoyed as a present possession, appealing to four-dimensionalist metaphysics, which understands time as a fourth dimension akin to the three spatial dimensions. According to four-dimensionalism, parts of time are as real as parts of space, so that all times past, present, and future are equally real and exist eternally, just as all locations defined by the three spatial dimensions (height, width, and depth) also coexist. On Burleys model, partaking of eternal life requires more than us simply existing eternally within time slices of our own past, present, and future: it requires that believers undergo a moral transformation wherein they come to participate in the life of God.
Christina Van Dyke of Calvin College used an Immortality Project subgrant to investigate the concept of sempiternity a state of changeless duration without end as described by Thomas Aquinas. She examines whether shifting to such a radically different temporal framework would necessarily change what it means to be human or whether it would be an extension of already-known types of human experience, including the timelessness aspect of some mystical experiences, or the way perception of time changes for people engaged in creative flow.
Whatever temporal form eternity takes, should believers expect to spend it all in one (very good or very bad) place? Two grant-funded articles take up the belief in the intermediate and temporary eternal states of limbo or purgatory, which are most famously expounded in Catholic theology. Kevin Timpes An Argument for Limbo explores the concept as a state as an opportunity for individuals never given sufficient opportunity to accept Gods offer of redemption during their terrestrial life, including the cognitively disabled lacking the intellectual capacities, to be reconciled to God. Meanwhile, Joshua Thurows Atoning in Purgatory suggests that an omnibenevolent being such as God would want to bring about the most good and thus save the most amount of people; so giving people a chance in purgatory to right their wrongs so that they could enter heaven is in keeping with that goal.
Befitting a subject that touches on the neverending, the aggregate work produced by the Immortality Project identified many questions ripe for future exploration. Biological investigations quickly turn up profound ethical questions about how and to whom life-extending treatments might be made available and how society might be altered if death became optional for some of its members. These ethical discussions involve the contemplation of thought experiments and imagined scenarios, raising additional meta-questions for investigation: Are such methods reliable ways to attain knowledge about immortality? Might fiction be more effective in this regard than abstract philosophizing, as Schwitzgebel suggests? What role do non-physical sciences such as psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics, or history have in helping us understand immortality?
One of the important collective outputs of the Immortality Project has been as a model of ways that interdisciplinary approaches can serve as a case study in scientific and scholarly communication. With a topic as emotionally and ethically vexatious as immortality, the chances of immortality research being misunderstood or misappropriated seem high, making it a perennial challenge for scholars and scholarly communities to better communicate their conclusions for a fascinated public.
Read the research paper here.
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Immortality - John Templeton Foundation
2 : an immoral act or practice
Synonyms
corruption, debauchery, depravity, iniquitousness, iniquity, libertinage, libertinism, licentiousness, profligacy, sin, vice
Antonyms
morality, virtue
religious denominations that regard drinking, smoking, and even dancing as examples of immorality a sermon about modern society's casual acceptance of or indifference to immorality
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These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'immorality.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.
circa 1566, in the meaning defined at sense 1
Last Updated
18 Sep 2019
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: the quality or state of being without principles of right and wrong
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Immorality | Definition of Immorality by Merriam-Webster