a portrait of the artist as a young man

There’s two weeks of stuff you can teach someone who hasn’t written fifty things yet and is still kind of learning. Then it becomes more a matter of managing various people’s subjective impressions about how to tell the truth vs. obliterating someone’s ego.

Pressure? This isn’t pressure and this is not pain. Afghanistan, Iraq and that other place, Croatia and Bosnia - now, that is pressure. This ain’t nothing but a little hoops.

I never dressed up [on Halloween]. Nah, we used to snatch bags from kids that did dress up.

Lance Armstrong became one of the two or three most transcendent American sports stars of his generation despite the fact that hardly anyone in America cares at all about his particular sport. The ratio of passionate Lance Armstrong fans to people who have ever actually watched Lance Armstrong race except for maybe a few minutes during this one Tour de France is just crazily out of whack. Somewhere, I realize — Luxembourg? — there is a large core of passionate cycling fans who are skipping their Luxembourger lunch breaks to take in the early mountain stages in the Giro d’Italia, but in America it’s almost definitely the case that more people have seen Lance Armstrong commercials than have seen Lance Armstrong compete. Which is all just to state the ultra-obvious, that it was his story that made him a superstar: his comeback from near-fatal cancer, the hope he offered other cancer patients, his charitable work through the Livestrong Foundation, the yellow bracelets, the sense of larger purpose. Cycling wasn’t the cause here so much as the arbitrary venue in which the cause could prove itself noteworthy.

Which means, from one point of view, that Armstrong’s career was always about the triumph of sports narrative over actual sports — or at least that was a feature of it, that so many people could become so invested in a guy whose competitive endeavor they’d never given two thoughts to before. Obviously, you don’t get that kind of exposure without a pretty big hand from the media, and Armstrong’s story — which was genuinely moving — was beautifully suited to the redemption/uplift arm of the SPORTSLIFE machine. In some ways, it was actually better that cycling was such an afterthought. Since hardly anyone actually watched much of Armstrong racing, he didn’t even have to be packaged in terms of live entertainment.1 He could be broadcast as pure information, or whatever the emotional equivalent of information is. He was a hero of feeling, not a hero of sports.

[A] new branch of the neuroscienceexplains everything genre may be created at any time by the simple expedient of adding the prefix “neuro” to whatever you are talking about. Thus, “neuroeconomics” is the latest in a long line of rhetorical attempts to sell the dismal science as a hard one; “molecular gastronomy” has now been trumped in the scientised gluttony stakes by “neurogastronomy”; students of Republican and Democratic brains are doing “neuropolitics”; literature academics practise “neurocriticism”. There is “neurotheology”, “neuromagic” (according to Sleights of Mind, an amusing book about how conjurors exploit perceptual bias) and even “neuromarketing”. Hoping it’s not too late to jump on the bandwagon, I have decided to announce that I, too, am skilled in the newly minted fields of neuroprocrastination and neuroflâneurship.

Now that Keret House is complete, Mr. Szczesny said with relief, “I’m going to get drunk for the first time in my life.