Life

Most people will know that there are no rivers in Monaco. The one I found there is the metaphorical waterway used by poker player and professional pollster Nate Silver to describe an ecosystem of people and ideas focused on probabilistic thinking and calculated risk-taking. The term is derived from poker, where the last community card to be revealed in a game of “Texas Hold ’Em” is known as the River. Poker players paddle about in the river, but so do stock-market traders, venture capitalists and anyone else consistently taking calculated risks. A politician deciding how to respond to Covid or a foreign invasion is “in the river.” In the broadest sense, we all live in it as we make risky decisions in an uncertain world, tipping our hats to Heraclitus from time to time.

Alexandria, Virginia Close your eyes. Picture an elementary school orchestra on a school bus. All instruments are plastic recorders. Now picture the school bus hurtling into a warehouse filled with barn owls. Open your eyes. Welcome to my dinner table. The priest assured us he wanted to experience family life at its fullest. No need for a special meal, he said (we will pretend that we eat duck every week). No need to clean (fat chance). Only a bachelor could think that freshly swept floors and expert cooking could detract from an authentic family meal in a house full of women. Aside from grace I do not think I have completed a sentence at the dinner table since 2017. There are too many riddles and recess incidents to discuss.

On August 25, 1953, neurosurgeon William Beecher Scoville drilled holes into the skull of a young epileptic named Henry Gustav Molaison and vacuumed out part of his brain. In August 2023, Mrs. McMorris watched her husband turn his hat backward while teaching her daughters to fish — and then she drank wine. Modern man tends to think “botched lobectomy” is redundant, though the frequency and severity of Molaison’s seizures receded. Picture the neurosurgeon, contemplating the forthcoming medical association medals, the ceremonies he would keynote as the Jonas Salk of drilling holes into skulls, the Clara Barton of vacuuming-out brain tissue. Mr. Molaison left the operating room able to recount his childhood crush but could not tell you whether his parents were alive.

If the meme is to be believed, I do not hate journalists enough. You would be hard-pressed to find a more self-loathing individual — and yet I cannot bring myself to cheer on AI or venture capital’s march through the newsroom. I worry not for my own sake but for the future of my favorite type of journalist: the foreign clickbait farmer. Armed with a broken pocket translator and battered Fourth Edition of Roget’s Thesaurus (1977), these writers fearlessly tackle the issues of the day.

Alexandria, Virginia  I sit on bathtub’s edge, back spasming, left leg numb, inner cheek bitten raw — pain that must be endured if I am to triumph over fatherly futility. #5 is only twenty months old but understands that in a household of eight people the toilet is the optimal, if not the only, place for contemplation. I am reflecting, too, on an event that occurred three years earlier, one that will be with me on my deathbed. I was in a rush for reasons I cannot recall as #4 sat lost in thought or perhaps the fiftieth reading of Yertle the Turtle. I grew frustrated. “Go pee! Go poo!” She looked up at me and said with the calm gravity befitting a statesman: “Go Mets.” Only then did she poop.