Dear Friend,

What song topped the charts in your final year of high school—and do you know it by heart? According to a global study from Finland’s University of Jyväskylä, the songs from our teenage years stick with us most closely, with men’s musical memories peaking earlier than women’s. The study also shows a “cascading reminiscence bump” in which younger generations tend to connect with music from about 25 years before their birth.

“Music is a potent cue for autobiographical memory,” the study notes, and can “evoke memories through mechanisms that partially bypass language.”

I don’t know about you—but music-wise, my most resonant decade is the decade in which I was born, the ’90s. Just a few notes of Weezer, the Spice Girls, the Backstreet Boys, or Shania Twain and I can smell the leather seats and diesel of school bus 96 careening through the snowy gulleys of New York state toward my elementary school. The top songs from my high school years don’t have nearly the resonance of the music from when I was 6 and 7. So my autobiographical memory doesn’t quite fit the study. Does yours?

Let’s see what else is going on in the world of arts and culture.

More Musings

Louvre it to the looters: Kim Stegall writes in WORLDteen about the Sunday theft of the Louvre jewels in Paris. The case brings up a telling cultural dilemma: How many of us subconsciously root for the thieves? The heist was pulled off in just eight minutes with little more than a glass cutter, feeling reminiscent of the triumphant robbery in Ocean’s Eleven. In our weekly God’s WORLD News staff meeting, Anna Smith wisely pointed out that in the old Ocean’s, unlike the remake, the criminals aren’t rewarded for their misdeeds. In the case of the Louvre, the $102 million loss provoked the museum curator to offer to resign.

Blocks burglar: While we’re on the subject of theft, how about this New York Times headline? “Police Break Up Lego Theft Ring, Recovering Hundreds of Beheaded Figurines.” The Lego thief, California resident Robert Lopez, stole $6,000 worth of the popular toys—which, as a parent, I estimate would pay for approximately three Lego sets.

Departure: Chess grandmaster and teacher Daniel Naroditsky died this week at the age of 29. Naroditsky and other A-list players took to online chess during pandemic lockdowns. In fifth grade, Naroditsky became the youngest person ever to win the Northern California K-12 Chess Championship, and he released the book Mastering Positional Chess at age 14. Cause of death has not been reported, though we do know Naroditsky was found unconscious in his home.

WORLD-wide reports

• In his review on The World and Everything in It, Joseph Holmes says, “What makes The Promised Land work as a faith-based comedy is that it’s always the people being made fun of, not God. And the people aren’t made fun of in a cruel way, but in a way that says ‘I can see myself in that.’ It feels like the show is designed to make you love people and love God more.”
• In WORLD Magazine, Collin Garbarino reviews Netflix’s A House of Dynamite. He writes that “over the last 40 years, we’ve lulled ourselves into viewing nuclear war as unthinkable. A House of Dynamite is an unsettling movie because it shows just how thinkable the unthinkable really is.”
• Also in the magazine, Claire Perkins and Israel Gole write about one man’s mission to paint murals honoring veterans in unusual places.

Curtain call

I’m still moving steadily through Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. I’m also listening to podcasts. A couple recent recs:

• Amy Poehler’s Good Hang interview with Judge Judy Sheindlin, who is 83. The two talk about Sheindlin’s career, how to tell when someone’s lying, and why you should pick up after your dog.

• Clean With Me. There’s nothing frilly about this pod—just the host talking about her life while you clean, throwing a few cleaning tips out as she goes. It works especially well with the ADHD crowd. I push play and 30 minutes later my house is clean. (To my husband’s great relief, since I’m the untidy half of my marriage.) In a recent episode, to my surprise and delight, the host also threw in a full presentation of the gospel.

Joy to you,

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