Latest news with #epiphany
Yahoo
02-08-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
With a little help from a Coldplay meme, Freddie Freeman stays hot in Dodgers' win
First, the meme made Freddie Freeman laugh. Then, in a serendipitous twist, it gave him a lightning-bulb epiphany about his recently ailing swing. At the end of a long day during last week's homestand — when Freeman was hit by a pitch on July 20, immediately removed from the game to get an X-ray, then informed he somehow hadn't sustained serious injury — manager Dave Roberts shared with the first baseman a comical video edit he had received from a friend. A light reprieve at the end of a stressful day. Read more: Plaschke: Andrew Friedman struck out on the Dodgers' urgent need for a closer In it, the swing of Freeman's walk-off grand slam in last year's World Series was incorporated into a spin-off of the viral Coldplay Kiss Cam video (yes, that Coldplay Kiss Cam). Freeman got a chuckle out of the clip. But, while rewatching his Fall Classic moment, he also made an observation about his iconic swing. On that night last October, Freeman noticed, 'I'm more in my front ankle,' he later said — a subtle, but profound, contrast to how he had been swinging the bat amid a two-month cold spell he was mired in at the time. So, for the rest of that night, Freeman thought about the difference. He went into the Dodgers' batting cages the next afternoon focused on making a change. 'It's a different thought of being in your legs when you're hitting,' said Freeman, who had started the season batting .371 over his first 38 games, before slumping to a .232 mark over his next 49 contests. 'It's just more [about leaning] into my front ankle. It's helping me be on time and on top [of the ball].' 'We'll see,' he added with a chuckle, 'how it goes in the game.' Ten games later, it seems to be going pretty well. Since making the tweak on July 21, Freeman is 14 for 39 (.359 average) with two home runs, four extra base hits, 10 RBIs and (most importantly) a renewed confidence at the plate. After collecting his first three-hit game in a month Tuesday in Cincinnati, then his first home run in all of July the next evening, he stayed hot in the Dodgers' series-opening 5-0 defeat of the Tampa Bay Rays on Friday, whacking a two-run double in the first inning and a solo home run in the fifth in front of a crowd of 10,046 at Steinbrenner Field (the New York Yankees' spring training park serving as the Rays' temporary home). 'That visual helped him kind of tap into something,' Roberts laughed recently of Freeman's post-meme swing adjustment. 'He is early, for a change. Versus being late, chasing.' Freeman's turnaround is something the Dodgers — who also got six scoreless innings out of Clayton Kershaw on Friday, lowering his season earned-run average to 3.29 in 13 starts — need out of several superstar sluggers over the final two months of the season. During Thursday's trade deadline, the team didn't splurge on big-name acquisitions. The only addition they made to their recently slumping lineup (which ranked 28th in the majors in scoring during July) was versatile outfielder Alex Call from the Washington Nationals. Instead, both Roberts and club executives have preached of late, the team is banking on players like Mookie Betts (who is batting .237), Teoscar Hernández (who has hit .215 since returning from an adductor strain in May), Tommy Edman (who has hit .210 since returning from an ankle injury in May) and even Shohei Ohtani (who leads the National League in home runs, but is batting only .221 since resuming pitching duties in June) to play up to their typical, potent standards. 'I think if you look at it from the offensive side, as far as our guys, they'll be the first to tell you they've got to perform better and more consistently,' Roberts said. 'That's something that we're all counting on.' For much of the summer, Freeman had been squarely in that group, as well. His recent Coldplay-inspired rebound, the club hopes, will be one of many that spark an offensive surge down the stretch this year. Read more: Dodgers welcome deadline additions, hopeful arrival 'raises the floor for our ballclub' Sign up for more Dodgers news with Dodgers Dugout. Delivered at the start of each series. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
The Guardian
09-07-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Sir Brian Clarke obituary
In later life, the artist Brian Clarke, who has died aged 71 of cancer, liked to recall an epiphany. As a child, on a school trip from his native Oldham to York Minster, and being shown its Great East Window, he had, he said, 'ceased to be aware of his friends, even of location, because something beyond location had replaced it'. He passed out cold. This experience, which he described on the online arts platform Heni in 2023, attached him to what he called the 'unbroken line to a glorious, complex and majestic past' represented by stained glass. When the Minster's east window had been finished in the first decade of the 15th century, most of the people who saw it would have been peasants living in poverty. Clarke's awe was their awe. The son of Edward, a coalminer, and Lilian (nee Whitehead), a cotton spinner at a local mill, Clarke had had a financially hard childhood. 'I am working class by birth and by inclination,' he would later say. 'My art is for the working class.' It was also largely made in stained glass. His family having an interest in spiritualism, Clarke was sent to a spiritualist school before, at 13, winning a scholarship to Oldham School of Art and moving on to the Burnley College of Art two years later. At 17, he enrolled in the architectural stained glass course at North Devon College of Art and Design, graduating, in 1970, with a diploma in design. At the Devon art school he had met a fellow student, Liz Finch, whom he married in 1972. Finch's father, a clergyman, encouraged his new son-in-law to make a career in ecclesiastical glass. Like many art students of his day, however, Clarke had been won over by the snappy imagery of Pop artists such as Peter Blake. When he sent off his portfolio to traditional ecclesiastical glass makers, it was returned with horror. It was only in 1975 that he found a patron willing to commission him. The resulting window, at All Saints Church in Habergham Eaves, Lancashire, retold the creation story in blocks of saturated colour. This was later described by one art historian as 'the great dissonant masterpiece of English ecclesiastical stained glass of the 20th century'. Even so, its maker's life was hardly one of Anglican decorum. A 1983 photograph of Clarke by John Swannell in the National Portrait Gallery shows a faintly Bowie-esque artist apparently mid-crucifixion. By now, he had been the subject of an hour-long BBC Omnibus programme called Brian Clarke: The Story So Far (1978-79). This, and a Vogue Homme cover shot by Robert Mapplethorpe, propelled him into the London limelight. He was taken up by the gallerist Robert Fraser, known as Groovy Bob, who introduced him to the capital's creative beau monde: Paul and Linda McCartney, Vivienne Westwood, Malcolm McLaren and, fatefully, Francis Bacon. Bacon's response to the question put to him by Clarke at their first meeting hinted at a problem in the younger artist's future career. When Clarke asked Bacon whether he had ever made work in stained glass, the painter sneered, 'No, and I've never done any macrame either, dear.' Although Clarke also made paintings and works on paper, his fame, then as now, rested on his work as a maker of stained glass; and stained glass making was a craft, not an art. This stigma would continue to haunt him. Nevertheless, developing a technique by which he could work directly on float glass – 'You couldn't do a leaded window on a skyscraper,' Clarke reasonably remarked – he became internationally successful, particularly in architectural glass. In 1980, he was commissioned to design a decorative programme for the mosque at King Khalid airport at Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, studying the aniconic traditions of Islamic art at Qur'an school in Fez for the purpose. This was followed by other high-profile commissions, notably for the New York headquarters of the drug giant Pfizer (1995), and the architect Will Alsop's Hôtel du Département des Bouches du Rhône (1994), known locally as Le Grand Bleu for Clarke's wrap-around blue glass skin. He added backlit panels and pillars to Norman Foster's design for Stansted Airport (1991), and worked with Zaha Hadid on an unrealised housing project in Austria. (Clarke dubbed the material he had made for this Zaha-Glass.) He turned Queen Victoria Street in Leeds into an arcade by covering it over with a glazed roof (1990). His non-architectural glass works were shown in the bluest of blue-chip commercial venues, including the Gagosian and Pace galleries in London, and, most recently, at Damien Hirst's Newport Street gallery, in an exhibition held to mark the artist's 70th birthday. And yet the art establishment largely looked away. Although the Tate owns a suite of Clarke's works on paper, it has none of them on glass. No major public gallery has ever given him a show; he was never made a Royal Academician. In part, this was because of a lingering snobbery about what was seen as craft, although there was also a sense that the mass appeal of Clarke's work made it just too easy to be serious. 'People haven't always liked my art,' he said in an interview at the time of his 2023 show. 'People have been downright fucking rude about it, in fact. But it's all I've ever done.' His habit of falling out with museum directors did not help. 'I used to say it doesn't matter because they'll retire or die, then there'll be a new generation of them,' Clarke said. 'But now I've had rows with all the new ones too. British museums have made a point of ignoring me my entire career.' His capacity for belligerence was not confined to his own work. On Bacon's death in 1992, his companion, John Edwards, made Clarke an executor of the artist's estate. In 1998, he became its sole executor, launching a lawsuit against Bacon's former gallery, the Marlborough, for breach of duty over the painter, which was eventually dismissed and a settlement reached out of court, on terms that remain unknown. History repeated itself when Clarke became chairman of the Zaha Hadid Foundation following the architect's untimely death in 2016. A series of disputes between the foundation and Hadid's architectural firm followed, described in the press as toxic. Clarke was knighted in 2024. He and Liz were divorced in 1996, before remarrying in 2013. She and their son, Dan, survive him. Brian Clarke, artist, born 2 July 1953; died 1 July 2025
Yahoo
29-06-2025
- Lifestyle
- Yahoo
People Who Grew Up Wealthy Are Sharing The Moment When They Realized They Were Privileged, And It's Eye-Opening
The lifestyle you grow up in is often the one you become accustomed to, and for those who grew up wealthy, sometimes it's the one you assume everyone has as well. Recently, BuzzFeed Community members who grew up rich shared the "epiphany" moments when they realized they were privileged, and it's incredibly insightful: 1."I was leaving work (a job I did because I was bored), and a coworker asked why I was changing clothes. I said, 'Oh, we're buying another home and signing paperwork.' He looked at me and said that he and his mom have never lived in a house. I didn't tell him that we owned five houses at the time. I didn't learn my lesson, though. Years later, at a new job, I rented an apartment nearby so that I didn't have to commute every day. When speaking to a coworker, I said I was shocked that three beds could fit in 1,000 square feet. He looked at me and said that his family lived in an 850-square-foot home. Then, he said very kindly, 'You were raised a little differently than most people, weren't you?' Humbled. I was completely humbled." —shaysmith3 2."I grew up solidly upper-middle class. I remember going to my friend's home, and she had to sleep in the same room as her mom. I found that so weird." —kmpbnjelly 3."When the guy I was interested in said he finally owned his car. I knew he'd had the car for 8–10 years. I didn't realize that not everyone went into the dealership and paid for a new car in full." —Anonymous 4."When I was a kid, I thought we were poor because our maid only came over three times a week, and I had friends who had live-in staff." —Joe, 68, New York 5."I can't pinpoint when in my adult life I realized I was privileged growing up, but I remember as a child, I'd innocently asked my grandparents, 'Which family is that?' whenever I saw airplanes with names on them. I thought all families had private jets." —Anonymous 6."I had a private garage with all the high-end tools to fix my hot rods when I was 14." —Anonymous 7."I was going to have a sleepover at my friend's house, but I didn't have any clothes or things, so her mom drove us to my home to go pick some things up. My friend came in with me and loudly exclaimed, 'Wow! Your house is so big! That TV is so big! You guys are rich!' I'd never once considered that we were upper-middle class before that moment. I'd always just thought we were in the solid middle. It really opened my eyes to how privileged we were growing up. I still don't feel like our house was wildly fancy or anything big, but it was definitely nicer and newer than many of my friends' houses at the time." —Anonymous 8."When I was in college, we were visiting Florida as part of our swim team winter training. A friend of mine invited me over to visit an aunt who lived nearby. We went out for a boat ride, and I mentioned in passing, 'Oh, this reminds me of Puerto Rico, when my family went there on vacation.' They gave me a surprised look and made a comment that I must be wealthy to have been able to go to Puerto Rico as a kid (this would've been in the '80s). Up until that point, it never occurred to me that people didn't just go on vacation to warm places during the winter. My friend had never even seen a real palm tree in her life." —Anonymous 9."My public elementary and middle schools in the San Francisco Bay Area offered a winter break that was officially called 'Ski Week.' During that week, all of our families would take us skiing or on other vacations during the week of President's Day. Many of us had second homes in Lake Tahoe or other resort towns. The lore was that the school district started offering it because so many parents were taking their kids out during that time. It was kind of an 'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em' situation. It wasn't until I got to college that I learned that nobody else got Ski Week growing up. Now, in my 40s, I mention Ski Week sometimes, and nobody who didn't grow up in Marin County knows what I'm talking about!" —jennerator 10."My dad would take his plane and fly my mom and some friends to El Paso from our West Texas town to go out to eat." —Anonymous 11."I always knew that our family had enough money, and I am so grateful for the home that I've grown up in. The first time I realized our family was well-off was when we bought a nice house during the pandemic. It really sank in that I was very privileged when I was talking to a friend, and she told me that her family would be rich when her brother joined the army." —Anonymous, Oklahoma 12."We live in a nice 2,500 square-foot home that we built 27 years ago. I still remember the first Halloween we lived there. One trick-or-treater asked how many people lived here. I told him it was my husband, our daughter, and me. He said, 'Wow, you must be rich.' Now, mind you, I grew up lower-middle class. We didn't take big, fancy vacations or anything. However, it struck me when this kid said that." —blissbednar 13."I thought it was normal that my family went on vacation four times a year, but many of my friends haven't been on a vacation in years. I'm married now, and my parents take my husband and me on trips with the whole family still. My grandparents did that for them, and they want to pass down the tradition." —heyitsmadsss 14."I grew up in an upper-middle-class family, but I didn't realize we were doing better financially than many people. My brother and I went to private schools, and my mother made it very clear that we weren't 'in the league' of other students, whose families were really wealthy. Still, we had a vacation house in a resort town, went to premier summer camps, took private horseback riding lessons, etc. When I was 10, my parents wanted to get out of the city, so we moved to a farm about an hour out of town. It so happened that this was a couple of miles from the summer camp we'd always attended. I remember telling my new friends about how cool it was that camp was so close now. They looked at me incredulously and said that nobody local could afford to go to camp, but that many parents and siblings worked there. That was a big wake-up call for me. I realized that many people didn't have the privilege I did as a kid." —Anonymous 15."A friend in college told me they'd never flown on an airplane before. I straight-up did not believe her. Another person had to break it to me." —ORD2414 "I went to treatment for my alcoholism more than once. One time, the state didn't pay for it, so my parents did. It was around $6,000. My parents are middle-class but good with money and investments. My entire family is supportive. I've heard stories about other people's parents, and it really put me in my place. Some people were completely abandoned, or had to abandon their parents to be safe and sober. I never went hungry, and I never had to worry about the condition my parents were in when I had my friends over. I had stability, which isn't guaranteed to anyone, no matter their socioeconomic situation. Without my family, I might've been unhoused, dead, or in prison." —princesscansuelabananahammock *Cries in broke.* If you grew up wealthier than most, when did you realize you were privileged? Let us know in the comments, or you can anonymously submit your story using the form below! Note: Some submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.
Daily Mail
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Jerry Maguire: Trailer, certificate and where to watch
Tom Cruise shows us the money as the amoral sports agent experiencing an epiphany 1996
Gizmodo
18-05-2025
- Science
- Gizmodo
This Is What Your Brain Looks Like When You Solve a Problem
We've all had the aha moment, when the solution to a problem is suddenly obvious. In cartoons, that eureka feeling is usually depicted as a lightbulb floating above a character's head—which is not that far off from what actually takes place in the brain during these moments. Researchers have revealed that epiphanies physically reshape brain activity. What's more, they discovered that people remember epiphanies better than solutions reached through a more methodical approach. These results could have important implications for how instructors approach teaching in classrooms. 'If you have an 'aha! moment' while learning something, it almost doubles your memory,' Roberto Cabeza, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke, said in a university statement. 'There are few memory effects that are as powerful as this.' Cabeza is senior author of a study published earlier this month in the journal Nature Communications. As study participants solved brain teasers, he and his colleagues recorded their brain activity with functional magnetic resonance imaging, a technique that measures changes in blood flow associated with brain activity. The brain teasers were visual fill-in-the-blank puzzles that revealed a previously hidden picture once participants completed the image. While such an activity might seem childish, this small discovery 'produces the same type of characteristics that exist in more important insight events,' Cabeza explained. Once participants thought they'd solved a puzzle, the team asked them how certain they were of their solution, and whether they'd reached the solution suddenly (in an aha moment) or worked it out more intentionally. Overall, the researchers noted that participants who reported epiphanies remembered their solutions significantly better than those who hadn't—and the more certain they were about their flash of insight, the greater the likelihood they'd still recall it five days later. The functional magnetic resonance imaging revealed that the epiphanies triggered an explosion of activity in the hippocampus, a part of the brain involved in learning and memory. Stronger moments of insight caused stronger bursts of activity. When participants solved the puzzle and finally recognized the secret object, researchers also noted changes in the participants' neuron firing dynamics—especially in regions of the ventral occipito-temporal cortex, which is involved in recognizing visual patterns. Similarly, the more powerful the moment of insight, the greater the changes researchers recorded. 'During these moments of insight, the brain reorganizes how it sees the image,' said Maxi Becker, first author of the study and a cognitive neuroscientist at Humboldt University. Furthermore, the researchers linked more powerful epiphanies with more connectivity between those parts of the brain. 'The different regions communicate with each other more efficiently,' said Cabeza. As such, 'Learning environments that encourage insight could boost long-term memory and understanding,' the researchers wrote in the statement. While in this study the team imaged brain activity before and after participants' 'aha' moment, moving forward they hope to investigate what takes place in between—when the real magic happens.
