• Big barbecue in New York
  I’m a sucker for barbecue. This event in Madison Square Park next weekend promises to be delicious.
  (tags: Travel Food)

• Post Buyouts Come With an Emotional Cost
  Howard Kurtz’s thoughts on 100 of his colleagues taking voluntary redundancy at the Washington Post. “After pondering the offer, I decided: I’ll badly miss the people who are leaving, but I’m staying put.”
  (tags: Media Newspapers)
• Video: Rupert Murdoch Highlight Reel, Part One
  Murdoch tells his new employees at the WSJ they will be in direct competition with the NYT within months.
  (tags: Media Newspapers Forbes400)
• Video: Rupert Murdoch Highlight Reel, Part Two
  Murdoch thinks ‘rock star’ Obama is “fantastic” and admits to playing a role in NY Post endorsement.
  (tags: Media Politics Forbes400)

Sorry for the pause. I’ve been in the Adirondacks for a few days. While I was away there was a brilliant story in the New York Times about Harvard neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor, who experienced what she describes as nirvana after suffering a stroke eight years ago.

Within minutes, her left lobe — the source of ego, analysis, judgment and context — began to fail her. Oddly, it felt great.

The incessant chatter that normally filled her mind disappeared. Her everyday worries — about a brother with schizophrenia and her high-powered job — untethered themselves from her and slid away.

Her perceptions changed, too. She could see that the atoms and molecules making up her body blended with the space around her; the whole world and the creatures in it were all part of the same magnificent field of shimmering energy.

“My perception of physical boundaries was no longer limited to where my skin met air,” she has written in her memoir, “My Stroke of Insight,” which was just published by Viking.

After experiencing intense pain, she said, her body disconnected from her mind. “I felt like a genie liberated from its bottle,” she wrote in her book. “The energy of my spirit seemed to flow like a great whale gliding through a sea of silent euphoria.”

There’s an incredible video of Jill describing her experience at a TED conference earlier this year. It’s eighteen minutes long. If you can find the time to watch it, I guarantee it will be one of the most interesting things you see this year. (The embedded video seems to take a while to load. If you want to watch it instantly click here.)

Related:
A Superhighway to Bliss (NYT)
My Stroke of Insight (TED video of Jill Bolte Taylor)

• Police Are Out in Force as a Neighborhood Simmers With Tension Again
  Tension mounts between Hasidic and Black communities in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, scene of riots in 1991.
  (tags: Brooklyn Crown-Heights)
• Man jumps over Grand Canyon
  Amazing photos of a man, apparently drunk, rock-hopping over a ravine at the Grand Canyon
  (tags: Travel Stupidity)

Thanks to Jenna for sending this British comedy sketch “Facebook in Reality.”