On March 8, 1965, I went to Philadelphia to watch Princeton play Penn State in the opening round of the N.C.A.A. basketball tournament. As the two teams were warming up, a contact lens fell to the court from the eye of a Princeton player. He bent over to pick it up but couldn’t see it. Teammates stopped their drills and came to help. They got down on their hands and knees and grovelled, crawled like bugs. Some went completely prone and squinted down along the floorboards. No one saw the lens. Princeton’s Bill Bradley, who happened to be on the sideline talking to his coach, watched with a curiosity that evolved toward impatience as five minutes went by. People in the stands were clapping in unison. Bradley had enough. Leaving the sideline, he walked to mid-court, stopped, bent forward, and pointed at the lens.
Focus like that is an obvious asset in the central vision of a basketball player, and so is peripheral vision, which adds so much to court sense. When Bill was in high school, in Crystal City, Missouri, he would walk down the streets with blinders on his eyes to see if he could read the signs in shopwindows on either side. Nonsense? Court sense. In early December of his senior year at Princeton, I persuaded him to go with me to an ophthalmologist, who plotted his peripheral vision within circles on a graph, and we found that Bill could see as much as twenty-three degrees more than most people. Bill could practically see out the back of his head, let alone a bit of plastic on a floor.
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Denne historien er fra October 16, 2023-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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The Dark Time. - On the Arctic border of Russia and Norway, an espionage war is emerging.
On the Arctic border of Russia and Norway, an espionage war is emerging. The point of contact between NATO and Russia's nuclear stronghold is the small town of Kirkenes. For years, Russia has treated the area as a laboratory, testing intelligence and influence operations before replicating them across Europe.
MIRROR IMAGES
‘A Different Man” and The Substance.”
THE FOOTBALL BRO
Pat McAfee brings a casual new style to ESPN.
OTHER PEOPLE'S MONEY
Proximity to wealth proves perilous in Rumaan Alam’ novel Entitlement.”
EYES WIDE SHUT
How Monet shared a private world.
WITH THE MOSTEST
The very rich hours of Pamela Harriman.
HUGO HAMILTON AUTOBAHN
On the Autobahn outside Frankfurt. November. The fields were covered in a thin sheet of snow.
TRY IT ON
How Law Roach reimagined red-carpet style.
SORRY I'M NOT YOUR CLOWN TODAY
Bowen Yang's trip to Oz, by way of conversion therapy and S..N.L.”
SNIFF TEST
A maverick perfumer tries to make his mark on a storied fashion house.