I’ve been thinking about time recently. Not the fact that I’m running out of it, or how I’m wasting it, or what to do with it. No. Time itself, or our sense of time. Once you start thinking about time, you come across a real paradox. When I did a little investigating, I discovered that the problem that struck me…
Ever since I was young, I’ve been interested in memory. As a child, I remember reading in Ripley’s Believe It or Not about children who had memorized the Bible at age eight and other astounding feats, and I wondered whether I could match such accomplishments of memory. At Boston Latin School, one of the arcane requirements was “recitation”: we had…
I remember hearing it all the time when I was growing up in West Roxbury, a suburb of Boston—“Why don’t you go out and play?” The fact is, I never really wanted to. I wanted to stay in my room and read. Or watch TV. When I was old enough to take the T into Boston to go to the…
