Sighs

Sighs

Audible exhales.

It is rare to hear honest emotion in pop songs. It has lost its place, the human experience deemed too variable to market to the masses. Instead, raw sentiment is piped through layers of production, transforming artists into endlessly relatable archetypes. Skip to 2:42 in Charlie Puth’s radio single “Attention”, however, and you’ll hear something foreign—breathing. Calculated or not, his breath is unmistakably human, a disarming indication of something genuine, a tiny peek into the artist’s interior. These moments are worth cherishing as reminders that there are people behind the sounds emanating from your radio.

Size

How big something is.

Disregarding a crowd’s influence on the outcome of a game, soccer and baseball are the team sports with the most home-court advantage. In both sports, the laws of the game allow the home team to dictate the dimensions of the playing field. This lack of uniformity is purely historical (the location of certain stadiums was limited by other urban developments) and the sports have never adapted. With Tottenham recently erecting a new ground, I wonder whether they consulted the sporting director to establish favorable dimensions based on their compact playing style.