A Crossfit Total is a simple test of strength: three attempts to find a one-repetition max in the back squat, deadlift and press. Add up those numbers, and you have a Total. In September 2011, after finishing an eight-week cycle of lifts that tracked (quite closely) the programming prescribed in Mark Rippetoe’s Starting Strength program,Continue reading “A Tale of Two Crossfit Totals”
Author Archives: Samir Chopra
Megan McArdle’s Defense Of Property Rights
In the Atlantic, Megan McArdle offers a long, tilting-at-strawmen defense of (intellectual) property rights. (In what follows, I’m not going to attempt line-by-line rebuttals; McArdle rambled too much for that. I’ve simply directed my ire against the two aspects of the post that stood out the most: the attack on a strawman argument and theContinue reading “Megan McArdle’s Defense Of Property Rights”
Personal Identity And Wanting To Be Jim Lovell
Personal identity is a philosophical topic made for thought experiments. The problem of persistence of identity is quite simply posed; as the Stanford Encylopedia for Philosophy entry for personal identity puts it: What determines which past or future being is you? Suppose you point to a child in an old class photograph and say, “That’sContinue reading “Personal Identity And Wanting To Be Jim Lovell”
Things You Could Find On A Professor’s Office Door: Cavafy’s City
Professors put the darndest things on their office doors: I’ll-be-back-in-five-minutes notices, announcements of conferences, descriptions of new classes, suitably anonymized student grades, political posters, stickers. And then it gets wierd: vacation photos, children’s drawings, cartoons (a perennial faculty favorite in New York appears to be New Yorker cartoons), and of course, jokes culled from theContinue reading “Things You Could Find On A Professor’s Office Door: Cavafy’s City”
Asif Kapadia’s Senna Takes Pole Position
Asif Kapadia’s Senna, based on the life of the late Ayrton Senna, succeeds as documentary, a sports movie, and a movie. It works as biography, as a morally-instructive fairy-tale about an improbably good-looking, intelligent, sensitive, and articulate sportsman (in a sport made singular by its technologically-enforced impersonal distance from its spectators), and finally, as aContinue reading “Asif Kapadia’s Senna Takes Pole Position”
Goin’ to the Movies
Last December, I found myself stumped by a simple enough question: When was the last time you went to see a movie in a theater? Some ten hours later, I remembered: Terence Maillick’s _Tree of Life_ at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (I cannot remember the exact date). A few days later, I returned toContinue reading “Goin’ to the Movies”
Hiking The El Toro Trail in El Yunque
The problem with a rainforest is that, well, it rains. And when you are hiking the El Toro trail in the El Yunque National Forest in Puerto Rico, you are reminded of that quasi-tautological fact quite often. You are also reminded of the remarkable effect that moisture has on damp earth as it renders itsContinue reading “Hiking The El Toro Trail in El Yunque”
The Tyranny of the Tourism Poster
On December 26th, as I waited for a ferry to take me from Fajardo to Culebra, I noticed a poster for the Luis Pena Nature Reserve (more accurately, for the Cayo Luis Pena, part of the Culebra National Wildlife Refuge). As I gazed at the dazzling blue waters, the painfully-white glistening sands, bewitched by theContinue reading “The Tyranny of the Tourism Poster”
Katha Pollitt, George Orwell, Essayists and Posterity
For a couple of days now, Katha Pollitt’s obit/remembrance of Christopher Hitchens has been making the rounds to near-universal adulation. For good reasons; the piece is well worth a read, especially as it highlights aspects of Hitchens’ writing and personality that few have seen fit to focus on (especially not by his drinking buddies, whoseContinue reading “Katha Pollitt, George Orwell, Essayists and Posterity”
Dragon Tattoos And Flirting With Pointlessness
Right. So David Fincher’s remake of Neils Arden Oplev’s _The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo_ is out, and even the normally-hard-to-please Andrew O’Hehir isn’t entirely displeased with the product. For myriad reasons: Fincher’s cast adds “emotional depth;” the movie is “beautifully engineered;” it possesses a “depth and subtlety” that was perhaps absent in the StiegContinue reading “Dragon Tattoos And Flirting With Pointlessness”
Samir Chopra 