“Most of us have trouble juggling. The woman who says that she doesn’t is someone whom I admire but have never met.” — Barbara Walters
The legendary host, interviewer and anchor Barbara Walters made this comment in The Successful Woman, a book by Joyce Brothers that was published in the 1980s. Four decades later, both Walters and Brothers have both died, and the “having it all” narrative still seems to be constructed in a way that many women are made to feel guilty for wanting a career and a family.
It happens all the time: the moment when someone realizes they don’t know what they’re talking about — and they know everyone else is realizing it, too.
It could be in a presentation in a boardroom or a conference, or a meeting, or an awkward exchange in a classroom.
In journalism, I saw it during news conferences or official events, and an ordinary question would yield an extraordinary moment: the politician at the podium didn’t know what to say. They don’t call it the hot seat for nothing.
They had a speech, they had memorized their well-honed remarks, but they just didn’t know the material and they were caught with nothing on how to answer it.
Many experienced or bold politicians will find an exit ramp — a joke, a self-deprecating remark or enlisting someone who does know to answer the question — but even then it can be a revelatory moment, a bit like The Emperor’s New Clothes. It’s the the instant when credibility can vanish into thin air.
“It should not be forgotten that art is not a science where the latest ‘correct’ theory declares the old to be false and erases it.” — Wassily Kandinsky
A lawyer before he made the later-in-life decision to paint, Wassily Kadinsky likely had synesthesia — that is, he experienced colours as sounds and vice versa. He began painting in Russia in the 19th century; his work, which evolved continuously, still seems so contemporary all these decades later.
Imagine earning supper money from playing a game that you’d play anyway … tempting, no?
That in a nutshell is the pitch from companies like Freecash, which work in an area of the online economy known as GPT, or “get paid to” do something for whoever is footing the bill.
Freecash is a legitimate company, although there are some buyer-beware caveats.
What’s had my eye lately are the shadier players in this world, and things are definitely not legitimate there. More on that in a moment.
“I was going to sue her for defamation of character, but then I realized that I have no character.” — Charles Barkley
Basketball superstar Charles Barkley has always been mindful of publicity — and he’s also self-aware when it comes to taking himself down a peg, too.
He uttered this quote just before the Lillehammer Olympics in the winter of 1994, when the whole planet was talking about Tonya Harding and the attack on rival Nancy Kerrigan, and Barkley — always a controversy magnet anyway — found himself part of the narrative.
“The world of fantasy fills the gaps in people’s knowledge.” — Fred Vargas
The French archaeologist Frédérique Audoin-Rouzeau is better known to the world as the crime writer Fred Vargas. My father loved her novels and introduced them to us. Reading them all is still on my list of things to do. I must get on that.
This quote comes from her novel This Night’s Foul Work (or at least that’s the title of the English translation). It speaks to storytelling and our imaginations, and I think to the limitations of cold, hard facts.
“Grief is a cruel kind of education. You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger. You learn how glib condolences can feel. You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language.” — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
I heartily recommend Adichie’s recent book Notes on Grief, which she wrote in response to the death of her father in the spring of 2020, when the world was shutting down amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. Her dad died of kidney failure, not the virus, but the pandemic complicated things dramatically: Adichie could not travel at that time, and was trying to absorb the shock while isolated.
The book, which began as an essay Adichie wrote for The New Yorker later that year, is powerful. Having lost my own dad a couple of years ago, it resonated deeply; when she talks about how grief can affect the body, she was putting words to something I too have felt.
There’s been a mature wave of television shows that grapple deeply with mental health and its complexities (I’m thinking of The Bear and even supposedly light fare like Fleabag), but nothing is like HBO’s The Pitt for exploring multiple storylines about challenging characters and their struggles, all at once.
Many people who watch The Pitt have found Dr. Santos to unpleasant, if not offensive. She doesn’t bother me; as the show continues, it’s clear that her character has always been very carefully constructed, and as layer upon layer is revealed, we see a very human story.
[This post, by the way, is going to be up to date with the series, which is now nearing the completion of its second season. If you don’t want spoilers, feel free to click away.]
“Imagination is the highest kite that can fly.” — Lauren Bacall
Lauren Bacall wrote these words for her memoir, which was published first as By Myself in 1978, and then revised and published in 2005 as By Myself and Then Some. The original version won a National Book Award, which speaks to how it resonated on publication.
Bacall certainly had an incredible life. The former Betty Joan Perske reinvented herself with a new name (she added an L to her mother’s surname) and an attitude that continued through the rest of her life.
She was was not yet 20 when Howard Hawks cast her with costar Humphrey Bogart, who became her husband and best-known costar over several films. Decades before Brangelina, etc., there was Bogey & Bacall. “He gave me a life, and changed my life,” she said decades later, when she accepted an honorary Oscar.
“Canada is a collection of 10 provinces with strong governments loosely connected by fear.” — Dave Broadfoot
As a good Canadian kid in the Seventies, I grew up on Dave Broadfoot (not to mention Sgt. Renfrew and Big Bobby Clobber) and the gentle poking political humour of the Royal Canadian Air Farce.
I would of course encounter and enjoy a much more caustic style of humour later (hey, CODCO!). All the same, I think Broadfoot was of the generation that taught us that holding politicians and leaders accountable was part of their job, and why not do it with a punchline, too?
About a dozen years ago, I went out one evening to buy a simple counter-top radio — and I wound up picking up a lesson in changing consumer tastes.
The anecdote has been on my mind lately for a few reasons, including some reading that car manufacturers want to phase out AM radios from their consoles. More on all that in a moment.
Back to the anecdote. I wanted something similar and affordable for the kitchen counter: better than a clock radio, but not nearly as expensive as the higher-end models like Tivoli. I grew up in a house with radios all over, all the better to tune in a program in any corner (and the yard), and I did not think this would be a big ask.
Well, now. Had things ever changed in the marketplace.
“Age is not a particularly interesting subject. Anyone can get old. All you have to do is live long enough.” — Groucho Marx
A pop culture fixture long before my time, Groucho Marx was still a presence when I was growing up. You Bet Your Life went off the air in 1961, several years before I was born, but I guess it aired in reruns; I remember the “say the secret word” line and the duck dropping from above.
All these years later, you can find novelty gag items featuring plastic glasses and an oversized Groucho mustache. How’s that for staying power?
Goodness, did the boys in Keane actually look like boys when we glance back more than two decades to their breakthrough hit, Somewhere Only We Know. It seemed to be everywhere in 2004.
The trio in the video below are now in their late 40s (and the original trio is now a quartet), but when writing the song, they were navigating not just the pathway they knew “like the back of my hand,” but life itself.
Or adulting, to use a word that became more popular in the years since.
“Recreation means to ‘recreate’ — it’s spiritual. Think about the actual word. It’s fascinating what a beautiful word it is when you look it up in the dictionary.” — Billie Jean King
One of the greatest athletes of the 20th century, Billie Jean King remains a force to this day. The quote above comes from an interview with an ESPN columnist published in 2010.
King is right. The roots of the word “recreation” go back to Latin, and the verb recreare, which means to create again. The word travelled through the centuries into other languages, evolving in modern English to connote having fun, or in the Oxford Languages sense, “activity done for enjoyment when one is not working.”
“A hat should be taken off when you greet a lady and left off for the rest of your life. Nothing looks more stupid than a hat.” — P.J. O’Rourke
Swimming first with the counterculture, P.J. O’Rourke drifted to the political right as a pundit, all the while retaining a sharp wit and no fear of kicking up some rhetorical dust.
One of his famous targets was, oddly, hats. Apart from the above (it’s from his 1983 book Modern Manners), he also thought that wearing a hat “implies that you are bald if you are a man and that your hair is dirty if you are a woman.”
Ouch.
He may have a point; I’m quite bald on the top, and I do like the variety of hats I’ve picked up over the years.
