Ripped from the Headlines: September, 2019: This Week In Culture: August 31–September 6, 2019

Exciting progress has been made in treating blindness by stimulating the brain in a very specific way. This (still theoretical, but promising) approach bypasses the eyes altogether, using genes to change neurons into photoreceptors and then a tiny camera mounted on glasses connected to implants in the visual cortex. There are many steps yet to complete, but this visionary idea could mean that an incredible breakthrough is not far off.

Tennis star Novak Djokovic had to drop out of the U.S. Open quarterfinals this week due to injury. The author argues that despite his many accomplishments and #1 ranking in the world, he remains underrated by fans. Bumptious means overbearing and rude; pairing it with scrum, a rugby term meaning a tight formation of players pushing forward, paints a vivid picture with just two words.

The many-worlds theory is an attempt to explain the bizarre and extremely complex world of quantum physics. Simply put, the idea is that every time any tiny thing in our universe changes, another universe splits off where the opposite event occurred. While it's impossible to prove — and it can make your head hurt trying to understand it — it is logical and elegant. There might be another world where you already know this word!

Nathaniel Crosby, son of the legendary singer Bing, was just picked as the leader of the American team in the Walker Cup, an amateur golf tournament held every two years between the U.S. and Great Britain and Ireland. Convivial originates in the Latin word for feast, and today means a festive atmosphere: a fancy way of saying "We're partying."

The Prime Minister of Greece, with an eye toward his country's bicentennial independence celebrations in 2021, has offered Britain a chance to exhibit antiquities that have never been seen outside of Greece before in exchange for the return of the Parthenon frieze sculptures which have been at the British Museum since 1816. France has agreed to consider returning its famous section of the frieze.

Richard Serra, the sculptor famous for his huge steel works, has a number of shows in the next couple of months featuring his new work made of massive forged steel blocks and cylinders, weighing 40-50 tons each. Some of his earlier pieces involved balancing massive slabs of metal, which could cause a shiver of fear that they might fall. If you've shuddered at a scene in a horror movie, that was a frisson.

The author of this piece collaborated with Prince on his biography, which comes out next month. Using letters in place of words is commonplace now, but Prince popularized it long before texting existed. Though we're not all geniuses who revolutionize popular music, we do all have traits or habits that make us unique: idiosyncracies.

The movie Ford v Ferrari premiered in August at the Telluride Film Festival. It tells the story of two drivers — Carroll Shelby and Ken Miles, played by Matt Damon and Christian Bale — who convinced the Ford company to let them develop and drive a car that could beat Ferrari at Le Mans. Melancholy is a medieval word, referring to one of the "humors" which were though to regulate our moods.

A teenage British boy's diet of only junk food caused him to go blind. After years of eating little more than fries and chips, he developed an illness called nutritional optic neuropathy, where vitamin and mineral deficiencies caused his eyes to stop working properly. Doctors and lawyers refer to what they do as a "practice", even if they're experts with decades of experience.

Actress Valerie Harper died this week. Best known for playing Rhoda Morgenstern, first on the Mary Tyler Moore Show and then its spin-off Rhoda, she won four Emmys and two Golden Globes over the course of her career. Her sense of humor — smart, sarcastic, and never mean — made Rhoda hugely influential in the history of television. Wry originally meant crooked or bent.