Many modern editions of classic novels have an introduction before the text written by a critic or scholar. I don’t read these introductions until completing the book. I recently read Beware of Pity by Stefan Zweig in a New York Review of Books edition. It had a thirteen-page introduction by Joan Acocella. Half her introduction gave me biographical information about Zweig and useful context for the novel. All of that might have been helpful before reading Beware the Pity, but the other half of the introduction summarized the novel with quotations of key paragraphs from the book. If I had read this introduction before reading the novel, I would have known much of what I was later to read, which would have undermined the power of Zweig’s creation. I don’t understand these prefatory essays It’s why I only read them after I finish the book.

Does sleeping under a weighted blanket make you taller in the morning?

Is there a difference between a “price point” and a “price”?

The stakes are high in the Georgia Senatorial runoff election. Many in the House and Senate from Lauren Boebert to Tommy Tuberville are desperate for Herschel Walker to win. If he does, then they can finally be confident that they are not the most ignorant politicians in Congress.

A wise person said: “Remain silent and others suspect that you are ignorant; talk and you remove all doubt of it.”

Elizabeth Holmes was just sentenced. As a young woman, she claimed to have developed a revolutionary medical test where one drop of blood would be enough for a wide range of diagnostics. Using family connections, an imitation of Steve Jobs, and a wonderful publicity machine, she was able to get many famous and important people to be on the board of and investors in her company Theranos. She became a rich person and a feminist icon until it became clear that she and her company were frauds. She then dropped the strong woman persona and adopted the little girl one. She was not responsible for the blatant lies and cheating, she said, since she was suffering from the emotional and sexual abuse from her decade-long partner who also was a head of Theranos. Even so, a jury convicted her. What most struck me about her sentencing last week was that she quoted Rumi. It may (perhaps) not always be gag worthy to quote the mystic thirteenth century Sufi poet, scholar, and mystic, but it should be natural for the sentencing judge to add a few months onto the planned sentence for such a performance.

Against my better judgment, I watched a few minutes of a Green Bay Packer game, and I wondered if there are studies confirming that a vaccinated quarterback is more capable of throwing a ball to a receiver than an unvaccinated one.

A student of human nature said: “It seems perfectly natural to attribute our failures to luck, our success to good judgment.”