Bear McWhorter is a very good young man. A mensch. Michigan recruited him for their offensive line and beat out Clemson, South Carolina, Alabama and Florida. Yay. But I only learned about him (at the cost of $30) from today’s NYT sports page. The story is all about how his family adopted two girls and started a foundation in Bear’s name to help families adopt kids. It’s the Brother Bear Foundation and you can find it at http://www.brotherbear.foundation.
Bear’s real first name is Josh (same as his dad’s), but he’s nicknamed Bear for famed Alabama coach Bear Bryant because his grandfather was a big ‘Bama fan. (Grandpa has since switched allegiance to Michigan, of course.) Bear’s dad’s a big guy too and played football at Furman. When their first adoptee, Olivia, met Bear’s dad for the first time she said “You’re as big as the sun.”
The foundation raises funds currently by selling currants, sorry, I mean t-shirts — hence my being out $30 (includes shipping). For obvious reasons, sizes run as large as 3XL.
Here are the four McWhorter kids, Bear and Lily in the middle. The two youngest are Olivia and Lydia who were adopted.
There’s only one thing left to say: Go Blue!
This poem is by Angela Janda and is called “At Quarter To Five.”
I was feeling lonely so
I went outside to the wind
swept yard and beyond
that to the wind-tousled outer
yard and found where last
night in the moonlight we left
two sets of boot prints, when
you stopped on your way
through the darkness to bring a
lemon bar and a movie, and
beside ours the tracks of the
smallest thing with claws, which
must have followed sometime
later. And I chased its tiny prints
and our mud-wash indents to
the far back gate and through
the gate out to where the
land is still dirt and brush
and bushes and cow
pies, my hair pinned
to my head but still blowing,
blowing, and finally a hard
breath, and I could see
through lonely to the wide
open, long blue lines of sunset,
moonlit night, the airplanes
trailing one another
down to tarmac, all those
people landing home.
It’s hard, if not impossible, to explain what made Schwalberg such an extraordinary professor for the many of us he reached so deeply. The student of his who spoke after me mentioned the “crystalline clarity” with which he expressed concepts and processes, even complex ones. That certainly was part of it. He also mentioned the personal connection he fostered in class — his seeming ability to maintain eye-contact with each student as he spoke.
The speaker after me was Michael Sandel, a political philosopher, and a professor of Government at Harvard. His course Justice was Harvard’s first course to be made freely available online and on television. It has been viewed by tens of millions of people around the world. He attended Brandeis on a basketball scholarship (no he didn’t), and graduated with a BA in Politics in ’75. (Thank God I didn’t have to speak after him.)
He told a story about Barney and him. The topic was “pollution credits.” The idea was there would be an overall “world” limit on pollution, and a rich country like the U.S. could buy “rights to pollute” off of a poor country. The economists liked the idea. Part of the thinking was that altruistic impulses are limited. So if you relied on Country A’s good instincts to avoid polluting, as opposed to a system such as this one, Country A would do less “good” on other issues in the world.
Michael wrote an op-ed piece in the NYT disagreeing. He said that wasn’t a good model for human behavior. Would you want your son to drop a piece of litter on the ground, and when you chided him he’d say “Don’t worry, I paid Billy $5 to pick it up?”
He received a lot of mail as a result of the piece, much of it from economists, and he heard, very good-naturedly, from Barney. And at the end of Barney’s note he wrote, “Please just do me one favor — don’t tell anyone I was your economics professor.” We all chuckled.
Michael later wrote a book on a variety of issues and he recounted his back-and-forth with Barney in it and was careful not to mention Barney by name, in keeping with the pledge/request. He immediately got a mildly frantic email from Barney saying he hoped Michael knew that he was kidding years earlier when he asked Michael not to tell anyone who his economics professor was. Michael assured Barney he knew he was kidding and told him that whenever he told the story the audience did too (and laughed, as we did).
Michael went on to tell us that over the years in their correspondence Barney told Michael that he came around to agree with him on one point. It centered on that business about altruistic impulses being finite — that if you do good in one area you would be less likely to do good in another. Michael’s take was completely different: it was like building up muscles at the gym. If you did good in one area, it made you more likely to continue doing good — you would become inclined in that direction. Michael said Barney came around to agreeing with him there. As Michael put it, “He agreed that ‘money isn’t everything.’”
Here’s Michael Sandel.
One last point, if I may crow a bit. Since Michael spoke after me, when I finished I had to hand the microphone over to him (it was a hand-held mic). And when I did, he said to me about my speech “Well done.” That was much appreciated, believe me, especially after I heard him speak.
Today’s puzzle theme was silly wordplay, i.e., our favorite kind. The revealer was LAST BUT NOT LEAST, and the three theme answer all had “last” words that were like “least,” but weren’t least. They were BELLY OF THE BEAST, BREWER’S YEAST, and MOVEABLE FEAST. And, btw, beast, yeast, and feast are the only five-letter words ending in “east” apart from least.
ADELE was in the puzzle, clued by “Singer of the theme song to ‘Skyfall.’” Son Volt shared this cover of one her songs.
You know how time flies;
Only yesterday was the time of our lives.
Here’s Sierra Ferrell, whose voice you just heard.
In Saturday’s puzzle, the clue at 55A was “Board game variant used as a last-resort tiebreaker.” You hear about this? A problem in chess, according to some, is that there are a lot of draws (ties). It sorta sucks if you have a big tournament and no winner emerges. So a tie-breaker was devised called ARMAGEDDON CHESS (the answer for the puzzle).
Here’s how it was described for this year’s tourney in Norway:
“Armageddon in chess resolves drawn classical games with a fast-paced tiebreaker. White gets 10 minutes, while Black has 7 minutes, with a 1-second increment per move starting from move 41. [What?] If the game draws, Black wins, giving White the incentive to press for victory. Norway Chess 2025 adopts this format to ensure every round delivers a winner, amplifying excitement. ‘It completely changes the dynamics,‘ says Magnus Carlsen, six-time Norway Chess champion, praising the format’s intensity.
“This format pushes players to their limits. White must attack aggressively to avoid a draw, while Black defends strategically, knowing a draw secures victory. The time disparity adds pressure, making Armageddon a test of skill and nerves.”
It’s the chess version of the runner on second base in extra innings in baseball. BTW, I have no idea how the hell it works based on the above description, but who cares?
I played this girl in chess once and she had to say “Your move” to me over thirty times.
Things to learn:
The clue for OTTER at 54D was “River animal often seen on its back,” but commenter JNKMD says: It is the Sea Otter that feeds while floating on its back not the River Otter. [OK. Thanks! — so it’s the otter OTTER.]
For the clue “Outliers in the data” at 34D, the term is EDGE CASES. New to me.
An edge case is a problem or situation that occurs only at an extreme (maximum or minimum) operating parameter. For example, a stereo speaker might noticeably distort audio when played at maximum volume, even in the absence of any other extreme setting or condition. An edge case can be expected or unexpected. In engineering, the process of planning for and gracefully addressing edge cases can be a significant task.
[Isn’t that nice? — “gracefully addressing.”]
I’m shamelessly stealing (verbatim) the opening portion of historian Heather Cox Richardson’s newsletter from Saturday, June 7, as follows:
“In April, John Phelan, the U.S. Secretary of the Navy under President Donald J. Trump, posted that he visited the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial ‘to pay my respects to the service members and civilians we lost at Pearl Harbor on the fateful day of June 7, 1941.’
“The Secretary of the Navy is the civilian head of the U.S. Navy, overseeing the readiness and well-being of almost one million Navy personnel. Phelan never served in the military; he was nominated for his post because he was a large donor to Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. He told the Senate his experience overseeing and running large companies made him an ideal candidate for leading the Navy.
“The U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, is famous in U.S. history as the site of a surprise attack by 353 Japanese aircraft that destroyed or damaged more than 300 aircraft, three destroyers, and all eight of the U.S. battleships in the harbor. Four of those battleships sank, including the U.S.S. Arizona, which remains at the bottom of the harbor as a memorial to the more than 2,400 people who died in the attack, including the 1,177 who died on the Arizona itself.
“The day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States entered World War II.
“Pearl Harbor Day is a landmark in U.S. history. It is observed annually and known by the name President Franklin Delano Roosevelt called it: ‘a date which will live in infamy.’
“But that date was not June 7, eighty-four years ago today.
“It was December 7, 1941.”
Could you plotz? See you tomorrow.
The Wellington Files 