OZY Daily Dose

The Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1944 was complicated in a number of ways. There was the catastrophic war that was tearing Europe apart, inflicting unspoken suffering on millions of people. There’s also the fact that it wasn’t even awarded that year. Thanks to a stipulation in Alfred Nobel’s will, which mandated that the prize be held until the following year if none of the nominees met all the criteria, German scientist Otto Hahn took it home in 1945.

Eva González Pérez was sitting at the kitchen table when her husband showed her the letters. He operated a childcare agency in the Dutch city of Eindhoven, and his roughly 300 clients had all received strange letters from local tax officials stating they would no longer receive a benefit meant to help working parents pay for child care. They’d also have to pay back the government the thousands of euros they’d received in the past two and a half years.

The ’60s were heavy, even if you were a kid, and the early ’70s weren’t much different. Family friends got maced by cops for being hippies. Neo-Nazi sympathizers were weirdly finding common cause with the Nation of Islam. And the war back home continued full force with vets returning with heads full of hate, PTSD and veins sometimes full of heroin, since junkies were a common feature of the cityscape back then.

At 5 am in the northern Myanmar town of Myitkyina, the road is still, a cool mist rising. The faint outline of a motorcycle appears, followed by another. Silently accelerating, they reach the outskirts of the capital of Kachin state and ascend a steep hill. The young men park their bikes, cast off their flip-flops and stretch, mountain views emerging as the sun rises.

Nick Richards’ mother is a breast cancer survivor, so the University of Kentucky center wore pink shoes in a recent game against Georgia during Coaches vs. Cancer Week in support of his mom. Richards’ pink shoes were particularly alluring for two reasons: He was the only player wearing pink, and those pink feet never stopped moving. Up and down the court the 6-foot-11 Richards ran.

One day when my father was driving at the age of 55, he noticed the streetlights were wavering. For most of us, that would have been enough to make an appointment, but it took my father several years before he finally consulted an eye specialist. The diagnosis: macula of the retina. Since then, his eyesight has deteriorated so much that his ophthalmologist recommended a treatment: injecting an anti-VEGF (vascular endothelial growth factor) chemical directly into the eye.

Our friendly neighbor to the North? Not even. And very specifically not for Americans. You see getting into Canada has always been a colossal pain in the ass for Americans. “It’s not any easier for us getting into your country,” a border guard once sniffed at me, hinting at an in-kind reprisal campaign that benefits no one but border bureaucrats.

As the early Iowa caucus results started rolling in, call-and-answer chants of “Hari Hari” and “Shakti Devi” filled a dimly lit yoga studio in the tiny New Hampshire town of Keene more than a thousand miles away. To the beat of drums, cymbals and an acoustic guitar, 15 people gathered to chant and “send our positive intentions out to the world,” as the organizer described the event.

“You still not watching TV these days?” The phone crackled to life from some street corner where he was, to some street corner where I was answering. A Boston transplant to Los Angeles whose head was healthily zapped by the change of locale, he (let’s call him Mark) would call me irregularly, always at the oddest hours. He was tall, talkative and very definitely, for L.A., edgy. He didn’t call often, but there was always ample cause to take his calls very seriously.

If you’re trying to figure out how the Kansas City Chiefs made their way to the Super Bowl, a good place to start would be early in the second quarter of their Nov. 18 game in Los Angeles, when defensive end Frank Clark barreled into the Chargers’ backfield. The Chargers were at that point up 3-0, dominating in yardage and just 25 yards from the Chiefs’ end zone.