amy g. dala

Freedom, opportunity, respect, dignity, self-determination and equality — those universal human rights we somehow judge optional for women — do not make people unhappy. Only roadblocks to those entitlements do. Particularly when those impediments are packaged as what we “really” want.

It is easy to dismiss this cornucopia as information overload. We’ve all seen people scrolling with one hand through a BlackBerry while pecking out instant messages (IMs) on a laptop with the other and eyeing a television (I won’t say “watching”). But even though it is easy to see signs of overload in our busy lives, the reality is that most of us carefully regulate this massive inflow of information to create something uniquely suited to our particular interests and needs—a rich and highly personalized blend of cultural gleanings.

The word for this process is multitasking, but that makes it sound as if we’re all over the place. There is a deep coherence to how each of us pulls out a steady stream of information from disparate sources to feed our long-term interests. No matter how varied your topics of interest may appear to an outside observer, you’ll tailor an information stream related to the continuing “stories” you want in your life—say, Sichuan cooking, health care reform, Michael Jackson, and the stock market. With the help of the Web, you build broader intellectual narratives about the world. The apparent disorder of the information stream reflects not your incoherence but rather your depth and originality as an individual.

I’m going as a semicolon for Halloween. It’s a well-known fact people fear them more than vampires.

Sounds tend to be processed faster than images, so without some sort of grouping system we might, say, hear a vase smashing before we see it happen.

Yet Dad Lit is a tricky business, fraught with traps: the putatively self-­deprecating vignette that actually demonstrates how pleased the author is with himself; the inordinately delineated neuroses of the overexamined life; the T.M.I. disclosures of sexual proclivities and other familial weirdness; the tone-deaf presentation of some mundane, schleppy aspect of parent­hood (e.g., the absence of “me” time, the utility of swim diapers) as some sort of epiphanic discovery.

In 1999 the research director at investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein invented something called the “Skyscraper index”, arguing that the construction of super-tall buildings is often a sign that an economic downturn is on the way.

…Or that the school’s endowment is in freefall largely thanks to the ruinous—dare one say girlish?–miscalculations of a former Harvard president best known for deriding the math abilities of the fairer sex.

A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.