I’m enjoying Ken Jennings as the guest host of Jeopardy! He brings a boyish enthusiasm to the show, and his conversations with the contestants after the first break are necessarily brief but genuine exchanges. Last night, after the returning champion mentioned the initial he uses to remember three influential teachers, Jennings asked him to say their names. When he finished, Jennings told him that that was the most important thing he would do all evening. It was spontaneous, touching, and clairvoyant, as the man went on to lose.
Matthew Parris admits to finding facemasks not only effective but somewhat sexy, at least on men. “There’s something,” he writes, “of the codpiece about them.”
Lionel Shriver, in a column titled “The female disadvantage,” lists the injustices of puberty: “Breasts: they arrive whether or not you asked for them, like an amuse-bouche. … And you get no say about how large they grow. You can’t object: ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t think of myself as someone with big boobs.’”
Petronella Wyatt writes: “The one thing none of us can ever be is grown up; a spirit clothed in wisdom alone, free of all mischief, envy and malice and guilt. Even Voltaire lived with a child inside him … [and] carried that child to his grave, as we all will to our own.” (It may or may not be pertinent that Wyatt once had an affair with Boris Johnson.)
Songwriter Nick Cave, asked if AI is capable of writing a good song, answers that what we respond to in music is “human limitation and the audacity to transcend it.” Anything with limitless potential, like AI, is deprived of that. “Music has the ability to touch the celestial sphere with the tips of its fingers and the awe and the wonder we feel is in the desperate temerity of the reach, not just the outcome.”
Paul Kildea, in his review of Jan Swafford’s Mozart: The Reign of Love, writes: “One critical development of the Enlightenment was that art escaped from religion and into the larger world.”