arkster | Instant karma.

There was a girl at Bryant Park with a laden wire cart pulled behind her and a full duffel over her shoulder, poofy blossoms and stray leaves poking out of both. I offered to carry the cart's back end and we made it up three flights of stairs in good time, at which point I plugged in my headphones and went on my merry way.

Not a minute later my shopping bag split open at the bottom, and three other strangers stopped to help me gather up my goods.

I finished Perfect Rigor, the necessarily unauthorized biography of Grigory Perelman: Russian mathematical genius and crazy man. Now, by the logic presented in-book, refusing the Fields Medal wasn't crazy. Rejecting the Millenium Prize, as he did just last week, wasn't crazy either – just principled. Living in a tiny apartment with his mother, speaking to no one, renouncing all mathematics and playing table tennis against the wall? Worrying.

It's a good book, if a little uncomfortable to read about a guy who is living on the other side of the world right now and doesn't want to be read or written about. In fact this brand of discomfort is itself novel; who doesn't want celebrity? ANS: Perfectly purist mathematicians. Or maybe that's the purist mathematician, singular.

My hair is short now! My head is lighter, I am enjoying this. Art to come.