James' World 2

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On May 9, 2001, Steven M. Greer took the lectern at the National Press Club, in Washington, D.C., in pursuit of the truth about unidentified flying objects. Greer, an emergency-room physician in Virginia and an outspoken ufologist, believed that the government had long withheld from the American people its familiarity with alien visitations. He had founded the Disclosure Project in 1993 in an attempt to penetrate the sanctums of conspiracy. Greer’s reckoning that day featured some twenty speakers. He provided, in support of his claims, a four-hundred-and-ninety-two-page dossier called the “Disclosure Project Briefing Document.” For public officials too busy to absorb such a vast tract of suppressed knowledge, Greer had prepared a ninety-five-page “Executive Summary of the Disclosure Project Briefing Document.” After some throat-clearing, the “Executive Summary” began with “A Brief Summary,” which included a series of bullet points outlining what amounted to the greatest secret in human history.

Over several decades, according to Greer, untold numbers of alien craft had been observed in our planet’s airspace; they were able to reach extreme velocities with no visible means of lift or propulsion and to perform stunning maneuvers at g-forces that would turn a human pilot to soup. Some of these extraterrestrial spaceships had been “downed, retrieved and studied since at least the 1940s and possibly as early as the 1930s.” Efforts to reverse engineer such extraordinary machines had led to “significant technological breakthroughs in energy generation.” These operations had mostly been classified as “cosmic top secret,” a tier of clearance “thirty-eight levels” above that typically granted to the Commander-in-Chief. Why, Greer asked, had such transformative technologies been hidden for so long? This was obvious. The “social, economic and geopolitical order of the world” was at stake.

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For months, fans were relegated to watching their favorite singers and musicians over Zoom or via webcasts. Now, live shows – from festivals like Lollapalooza to Broadway musicals – are officially back.

The songs that beamed into living rooms during the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic may have featured an artist’s hits. But there’s just something magical about seeing music surrounded by other people. Some fans reported being so moved by their first live shows in nearly two years that they wept with joy.

As a music theorist, I’ve spent my career trying to figure out just what that “magic” is. And part of understanding this requires thinking about music as more than simply sounds washing over a listener.

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Most live shows took a pandemic-induced hiatus in 2020. Michael Hickey/Getty Images

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The most curious subplot in the news right now is the admission, at the most senior levels of the United States government, that the military services have collected visuals, data, and testimonials recording flying objects they cannot explain; that they are investigating these phenomena seriously; and that they will, in the coming months, report at least some of their findings to the public. It feels, at times, like the beginning of a film where everyone is going about their lives, even as the earthshaking events unfurl on a silenced television in the background.

A number of stories in The New York Times over the past few years have confirmed the existence of a military program on “Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification” and revealed videos in which trained pilots marvel over unidentified craft apparently defying the limits of known technology.

On April 30, The New Yorker published a revelatory article by Gideon Lewis-Kraus tracking the rise of congressional, military, and media interest in U.F.O.s. Harry Reid, the former Senate majority leader from Nevada, emerges as the key actor. In the middle of his decades-long career in government, he pushed to fund these investigations, and since retiring he’s been relentless in voicing his conviction that the military has information on U.F.O.s that the public deserves to know. He told Lewis-Kraus that he believed there was crash debris held by Lockheed Martin, but when he asked the Pentagon to see it, he was refused access. “I tried to get, as I recall, a classified approval by the Pentagon to have me go look at the stuff,” he said. “They would not approve that.”

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Igor Trushkin/EyeEm, via Getty Images

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Remove work apps like Slack from your phone that constantly draw you back in. Don’t worry, you can reinstall it in a matter of seconds when you return. With it available, you may find yourself habitually peaking in, even when nobody needs or wants to chat with you, rather than enjoying dinner with your family.

Those notifications can ping you on certain keywords or if a co-worker wants you to see something. As long as your managers know you’re out — and know how to reach you in case of emergency — there’s no need to leave Slack or other corporate chat apps installed.

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Earlier this year, the Pentagon released three videos of UFOs recorded by the Navy — one taken in 2004 and the other two in 2015. The videos, which first leaked a couple of years ago, show … well, it’s not exactly clear.

There are various objects — two of which look like aircraft — spinning through the sky and moving in ways that defy easy explanation. As the images bop across the screen, you can hear the pilots’ excitement and confusion in real-time as they track whatever it is they’re seeing.

I’m not what you would call a UFO enthusiast, but the videos are the most compelling I’ve ever seen. They seem to confirm, at the very least, that UFOs are real — not that aliens exist, but that there are unidentified objects buzzing around the sky.

Now, do I think aliens are real? Yeah, probably. Are they flying spaceships into our atmosphere? Who the hell knows?

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The “Area 51 Basecamp” event at the Alien Research Center in Hiko, Nevada, on September 20, 2019.Mario Tama/Getty Images

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Lucky for Edna Murphey, people attending an exposition in Atlantic City during the summer of 1912 got hot and sweaty.

For two years, the high school student from Cincinnati had been trying unsuccessfully to promote an antiperspirant that her father, a surgeon, had invented to keep his hands sweat-free in the operating room.

Murphey had tried her dad’s liquid antiperspirant in her armpits, discovered that it thwarted wetness and smell, named the antiperspirant Odorono (Odor? Oh No!) and decided to start a company.

But business didn’t go well—initially—for this young entrepreneur. Borrowing $150 from her grandfather, she rented an office workshop but then had to move the operation to her parents’ basement because her team of door-to-door saleswomen didn’t pull in enough revenue. Murphey approached drugstore retailers who either refused to stock the product or who returned the bottles of Odorono back, unsold.

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Photo by sergeyryzhov / Getty Images.

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MURIEL WILKINS: I’m Muriel Wilkins, and this is Coaching Real Leaders. Part of the HBR Presents network. I’m a long-time executive coach who works with highly successful leaders who’ve had a bump in the road. My job is to help them get over that bump by clarifying their goals and figuring out a way to reach them so that hopefully they can lead with a little more ease. I typically work with clients over the course of several months, but on this show, we have a one-time coaching meeting focusing on a specific leadership challenge they’re facing.

MURIEL WILKINS: Today’s guest is someone we’ll call, “Naomi,” to protect her confidentiality. She’s a lawyer and has followed a pretty traditional career trajectory from law school to a big firm to an in-house counsel job. But even though she acknowledges she’s done well for herself, she’s feeling unsettled.

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There’s one line from Twitter power user Chrissy Teigen’s latest mea culpa that I haven’t been able to get out of my head. Teigen, who recently returned to the platform less than a month after announcing she was quitting it forever, tweeted an apology to media personality Courtney Stodden, who had accused her of harassing them online when they were just 16 years old.

“I’m mortified and sad at who I used to be,” Teigen wrote to her 13.6 million followers last week. “I was an insecure, attention-seeking troll. I am ashamed and completely embarrassed at my behavior but that is nothing compared to how I made Courtney feel.”

It was the next bit, though, that’s been haunting me: “I have worked so hard to give you guys joy and be beloved and the feeling of letting you down is nearly unbearable.” There’s something deeply telling about Teigen’s admission that she works hard to “be beloved” — which, as writer Bolu Babalola notes, “is not the same as working to be a good person.”

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