• I hope to write more on Burkhard Bilger's New Yorker profile of David Eagleman and the mysteries of time and the brain, but in the meantime, please read it. Seriously. If you've wondered why time seems to slow down in life-threatening situations, or why time seems slower when you're a kid, Eagleman has answers.
• My friend Jake, drummer for Semisonic, has been big on Jennifer Egan's rock 'n' roll novel, “A Vist from the Goon Squad,” for some time. Now it's won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. I'll have to read it. Here's an excerpt.
• Mayor Koch lives! A second baseman at St. Cloud State in Minnesota, Kent Koch, all of 23 years old, is also his small town's mayor. He's the younget mayor in the U.S. I wonder who's the oldest?
• Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite suggests, in the wake of Paul Ryan's budget proposal, that the Christian right “have some soul searching to do.” Amen.
• A measured piece by Salon's Andrew Leonard on what's wrong with Obama's left critics. Including especially Paul Krugman.
• A nice post from David Schonauer on Tim Hetherington, Chris Hondros, and the bravery and authenticity of war correspondent photographers.
• A Roger Angell piece about Mariano Rivera blowing a save: that's like finding ice cream inside your ice cream.
• Explanding the baseball playoffs? I've always been against it but not this time. Not if they add a wild card team to play the other wild card team in a one-game playoff at the end of the season. It'll give that much more meaning to winning the division. Plus the one-game format, in both leagues, will be exciting. Plus, since it's only one game, it won't push us more deeply into October. (But if they make it a three-game playoffs, I'll be pissed.) Here, ESPN's Jayson Stark, a proponent, delves into the standings since 1995 to see who that extra team would've been. Guess what? Four times it would've been your Seattle Mariners. My oh my.
• Sarah Rimer waxes nostalgic, with sometimes too much wax, on the high school years of Manny Ramirez: “Before Manny Became Manny.” Those 400-foot homeruns in high-school settings must've been cool to watch.
• Schwarzenegger is back and “The Terminator” is in rights packaging again. But see this Josh Karp article, please. BTW: Terminator with a face lift? Won't that look odd?
• Here's a nice bit of journalism from Jeff Wells, who noticed that the reds and blues seemed oversaturated in Warner Bros. Bluray version of “All the President's Men,” one of my favorite films, and went to the voice of God for an opinion: DP Gordon Willis himself. Here are some of Willis' comments: “It's all fucked up ... All the medium tones [are wrong] and contrast is way higher than it oughta be.” Wells asked him if he'd called anyone at Warner Home Video since the Bluray came out. “And what are they gonna say? 'We're sorry and we'll do it all over again?' You call these guys, it's like talking to a head on a stick.” Bummer. And I was excited for the BluRay of “President's Men.”
• Finally, a birth certificate. Will it stop all the noise and blather and distraction? Of course not. Americans think we faked the moon landing (we can't travel through space...), there are aliens in Nevada (...but they can), and 9/11 was an inside job. But maybe it'll stop some of the noise and blather and distraction. Until next week.

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