Top of the agenda this past week: a really, really smart person says gravity is an “illusion” and LeBron James’s Princeton grad dad emerges from the mist. Wait, what?

Renowned babies scholar

First off: we pay our respects to Norman Ryder, a revolutionary Princeton sociologist who passed away at the age of 86. Ryder pioneered the “cohort” approach to demographic study, which analyzes a group of people of the same age as they “go through life and share similar experiences,” sort of like that movie about babies.

Speaking of babies, Ryder did a lot of massively influential research on fertility. He and another Princeton professor, Charles Westoff, co-directed the National Fertility Studies in ‘65, ‘70, and ‘75, interviewing thousands of American women and eventually demonstrating, among other cool things, “that a drop in unplanned births accounted for nearly the entire decline in U.S. fertility following the post-World War II baby boom.”

And speaking of unplanned births …

This past week, LeBron James, one of the best humans to have ever touched a basketball, decided where he was going to bounce and shoot that basketball for the foreseeable future. For those who managed (somehow) to miss it, it was a big deal. The national media salivated, tongues lolling dumbly, as Mr. James managed to scientifically pinpoint himself as the center of the known universe (I don’t want to talk about it here it will get ugly I’m going to stop right now). It was a spectacle – and in the midst of it all a strange 55-year-old man decided to smack LeBron with a lawsuit, claiming to be his father and accusing his “son” of a fraudulent cover-up.

Is he really LeDaddy?

You may be wondering why I am talking about this. The fact is …