“When people take revenge, the same reward centers of the brain are activated that are associated with satisfying hunger, thirst, sexual appetite.”
Ian McEwan from a profile in The New Yorker
[I often wonder if the people I think about when I think about revenge realize that I’m still thinking about them.]
“Problem w/Professional Politicians:They’re more concerned w/holding a title in perpetuity than just accomplishing goals they promised voters”
Strangers are more likely to return lost wallets containing photos of cute babies, according to British researchers. The scientists sprinkled 240 wallets across Edinburgh last year with pictures of either a smiling baby, a puppy, a “happy family,” or a “contended elderly couple.” It turns out nobody cares about your pooch, retired parents, or smugly superior family life. But that cute wittle baby? Apparently it triggers a “compassionate instinct towards vulnerable infants that people have evolved to ensure the survival of future generations.”
George Herman “Babe” Ruth made his Major League debut, pitching for the Boston Red Sox at Fenway 95 years ago today.
Ruth held Cleveland to five hits in six innings and got the win. He was 0 for 2 at the plate.
He was 19-years-old.
Just this last year [Stewart Udall] rafted down the Colorado River from Lees Ferry — named for Udall’s grandfather — and, with a grandson, trekked from the floor of the Grand Canyon up Bright Angel Trail some 7,000 feet to the South Rim. His family had cautioned against it, and he rejected a Park Service offer of a mule. “They wouldn’t have liked it if I hadn’t made it,” he recounted, “but what a way to go.” Once at the South Rim, Udall marched straight to the bar at the Tovar Lodge and ordered a martini.
Udall was 84 when the above took place. Stewart Udall was Secretary of the Interior under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. He is the father of New Mexico’s junior U.S. senator Tom Udall.
From a 2005 Los Angeles Times profile of Udall.
The duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr was 205 years ago this morning. Hamilton biographer Ron Chernow wrote about the duel five years ago. Here are the essentials, but the whole piece is worth reading.
Two hundred years ago today, Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton squared off in a sunrise duel on a wooded ledge in Weehawken, N.J., above the Hudson River. Burr was vice president when he leveled his fatal shot at Hamilton, the former Treasury secretary, who died the next day in what is now the West Village of Manhattan. New Yorkers turned out en masse for Hamilton’s funeral, while Burr (rightly or wrongly) was branded an assassin and fled south in anticipation of indictments in New York and New Jersey. To the horror of Hamilton’s admirers, the vice president, now a fugitive from justice, officiated at an impeachment trial in the Senate of a Supreme Court justice.
…So Hamilton, at 49, decided to expose himself to Burr’s fire to prove his courage, but to throw away his own shot to express his aversion to dueling. He gambled that Burr would prove a gentleman and merely clip him in the arm or leg — a wager he lost. With Hamilton’s death, America also lost its most creative policymaker. (The murder indictments against Burr petered out, and he died a reclusive old man in 1836.)
Seeking to regain political power after the duel, Burr allegedly led an expedition to establish an independent nation along the Mississippi River, separating territories from the United States and Spain. He was charged with treason but acquitted.
It’s a fine album.