This exhibit closes at the end of the month so I can’t put this one on the usual 6-month delay. (Sorry, “Is There a Replication Crisis in Finance?”, originally written in February—you’ll have to wait till the end of the year to be seen by the world.) I’d never heard of Neel before, which I guess is just my ignorance, but this was just about the most satisfying museum show I’ve ever seen. If you’re local, I recommend it. Some of the early work reminded me of Picasso, and the later work was in the style of Van Gogh (as was clear in one display which juxtaposed a Neal painting with one of the Met’s Van Goghs), but Neel conveyed relationships between people in ways that those other artists didn’t. The exhibit was beautifully curated, and I learned a lot from the little notes they had on the wall next to the paintings.

No statistics content at all here, except that after going through the Neel exhibit, we went into another one that didn’t interest me so much, so I read a few pages of the book I was carrying, “Two Girls, Fat and Thin,” by Mary Gaitskill, which had a synesthesia vibe to it. For example, “The voices sounded like young, cramp-shouldered people taking their lunch breaks in cafeterias lit by humming fluorescent lights.” And “she received a call from someone with a high-pitched voice that reminded her of a thin stalk with a rash of fleshy bumps.” Maybe we can use this as an epigraph for our sensification paper. And this:

Justine Shade’s voice sounded different in person than it had on the phone. Floating from the receiver, it had been eerie but purposeful, moving in a line toward a specific destination. In my living room, her words formed troublesome shapes of all kinds that, instead of projecting into the room, she swallowed with some difficulty.

This somehow reminds me of John Updike, if he had a sense of humor.