Facebook will save the world

I knew Facebook had already done a lot to upgrade the lives of millions, but apparently its most important contribution to humanity still lies ahead ("The Age of Possibility"). In the NYT, Roger Cohen describes a momentous global transformation which will shift the center of economic and political gravity in the world from the West to the rest. He is well aware that similar transitions in the past have involved enormous bloodshed and suffering. yet, he is "not too worried." What gives him confidence that this time things will be different? The first item on his list is "the web of social networks that now span the globe." The one example Cohen gives on this account reads: "Half a billion Facebook users constitute some sort of insurance against disaggregation." In his view, "being in touch in ways that dissolve national borders makes it more difficult to be in large-scale violent conflict across fault lines." I am thinking - who else wasn't "too worrried" and thought that this time things would be different? Oh, yes - the dotcom crowd 10 years ago, and the bankers (plus the millions of small "investors" in "home equity" who took their bait). But let's stay away from such far-fetched analogies. We all know that one day things will be really, truly different. If we could only believe strongly enough.

The Harvard culinary show

Harvard has started offering a basic science course where the lab work is cooking. It employs a couple of celebrity chefs and is immensely popular. The idea is to introduce some formulas and concepts from chemistry and physics to analyze different processes students observe in the course of food preparation. A couple of years ago I read somewhere that as high school students were increasingly uninterested in basic science, they were being offered new courses in applied disciplines - like forensic science. Let me think - if Harvard is now using cooking as a way to make chemistry and physics more relevant to its students, what should Indiana University in Gary do to achieve a similar effect? Teach massage?

Just like you and me

There is a new German movie out on the life of the young Goethe. A young actress interviewed on Deutsche Welle TV described how she had been thrilled to find out that Goethe had, in fact, loved, drunk, and joked – just like her and her friends. My first reaction was: “Yeah, right…” But, on second thought, why put anyone on a pedestal, really? And why assume that 200 years ago celebrities – of any age – were any different from what they are today?

The importance of being earnest

Michael Kimmelman describes in the NYT a visit to the House of Humor and Satire in Gabrovo – a humorless, once industrial city in Bulgaria (“Take My Bulgarian Joke Book. Please.”). Most of the piece is quite condescending toward the place and the tour guide/PR officer who welcomed the author. Until at the very end he recognizes in what he sees a kind of earnestness he and his kind seem to have lost. Granted, approaching the outside world with a sense of irony and detachment is a sign of unmistakable sophistication. But being unable to leave your irony behind must be an utmost curse. Lord Chesterton once wrote: “Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde.” By the way, the Don Quixote statue next to the Gabrovo satirical shrine is astounding – all made of iron scrap welded together to capture the true spirit of Cervantes’s otherworldly hero. Apparently, Mr. Kimmelman wasn’t sufficiently impressed to include it in the picture of the Gabrovo attraction accompanying his article.

The price of progress?

As the Chilean president was handing medals and flags to the 33 miners in his palace, he took time to hug each one of them. Emotions were clearly overflowing - no Pan Am smiles there. I was going to say - of course, this is the reason why even Chile, the Latin American tiger (if there is one), will never be Switzerland. But let's not stereotype.

The continuing conquest of cool

A NYT article (“Looking to a Sneaker for a Band’s Big Break”) says lifestyle brands are fast becoming the new recording labels. Converse, for example, has set up a studio in which young musicians can make new recordings for free. Companies will sponsor different aspects of the music production, marketing, and distribution process, and sometimes acquire songs to give away at the own web sites. The overall strategy is for the youth-oriented brands to become patrons of hip music stars and thus acquire “coolness by association.” In the past, such “arrangements would have carried a stigma for the artists,” being seen as a sellout to the evil empire. Now they are embraced with casual enthusiasm. A hot female musician confidently proclaims: “Music is everywhere now, and if you have it tied to a brand, there’s nothing wrong with that.” The article mentions that the new largesse Converse and others have adopted is part of a more general strategy aiming “to infiltrate the lives of their customers on an ever deeper cultural level.” But never mind, we cannot really expect young musicians to connect those dots, can we? Even if some boast college degrees.

Planet of the apes

Writing in the NYT, renowned primatologist Frans de Waal explains the utter feasibility of “Morals without God.” He bases his conviction on a theory of “continuity between human and animal,” or a denial of “human exceptionalism.” From this point of view, there is no qualitative difference between the way the human brain churns out an ethical judgment, and how a chimp’s brain motivates some altruistic behaviors. Nay, there isn’t really a meaningful quantitative difference in the structure of the human and the ape brain – “even our vaunted pre-frontal cortex turns out to be of typical size: recent neuron-counting techniques classify the human brain as …” Really? Reading Dr. de Waal’s expose, I would suspect that his and my brain click in qualitatively different rhythms, to say nothing of the brains of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and Cheeky Charley.

De Waal’s focuses on the altruistic tendencies we share with our primate cousins. A chimp, you see, will sometimes help – without the promise of any reward! – an arthritic elderly female climb on a tree to hang out with her kin; or will console a male who has lost a fight. Though de Waal says we should see the whole package of human motivations and behaviors as a product of evolution and a legacy we share with the animal kingdom, it’s clear where his heart lies. He wants to revive the old tale of the “noble savage” once popularized by Rousseau – the altruistic, compassionate side of our psychological makeup is inborn or natural (and thus shared with kindly behaving animals); and the nasty aspects come from the way our natural goodness has been twisted by “civilization.” Forget about those allegedly aggressive drives Freud fretted over, ready to break through the ”veneer” of civilized “propriety.” But why forget about them? In an older article, de Waal drew a contrast between chimps and their close relatives, the bonobos. The latter have apparently invented the ape version of la dolce vita: they engage in constant mutual grooming and casual sex, and spend most of their time in leisurely companionship and relaxation. Chimps, on the other hand, live in troops with rigid hierarchies where status is won and lost by a combination of fierce fighting and Machiavellianism. Submissive families occasionally stage coups against dominant ones, and chimp platoons sometimes even wage “wars” against other colonies. In general, the lives of young males (who, after puberty, need to win acceptance in a new troop) are often nasty, brutish, and short. Females fare a bit better, but most also need to show deference for the dominant female. They can also be savagely attacked by raiding males from other troops. So, should we attribute human bestiality, not just those spurts of altruism de Waal highlights, to the natural endowment we share with chimps?

As I was reading de Waal’s incisive analysis, I repeatedly cringed at all those evocations of obvious behavioral kinship between “us” and apes. Apparently, he did not cringe while typing out the whole piece. This could be a matter of personal idiosyncracies, including presence of lack of the “left-brained” sharpness needed for a high-flying scientific career. I am trying to banish from my mind another heretical thought, though. Could de Waal’s attitudes, which betray some very peculiar patterns of brain activation, be partly attributed to his own biocultural heritage? He is Dutch, and if you look at Dutch society, it seems pervaded – even against the backdrop of rising xenophobic fears – by a kind of bonobo-style, relaxed permissiveness combined with easy-going utilitarianism. Soft drugs, harder drugs administered to addicts, prostitutes posing in display windows, euthanasia, open-minded attitudes toward teenage sex, open-air urinals events attracting large numbers of beer-gulping young men – please, help yourself, you can have it all. Could such broad-mindedness partly translate into cheerful praise for the natural goodness we ostensibly share with those good-hearted, altruistic chimps? But probably we shouldn't stereotype - neither the Dutch, nor the chimps.

The end of disgust (among other things)?

An economist recently complained in the NYT about the rise of inequality in the United States. After the furor caused by the publication of The Spirit Level, it has apparently become acceptable even for practitioners of the “dismal science” to frown at extreme inequality. If not to condemn it on the basis of a frivolous “value judgment,” at least to point to its troublesome social consequences – including its negative externalities for even some of the top dogs. Call it the “negative utility” of wealth. The NYT contributor draws a stark contrast between two ages in American history: the 1950s, when decreased income and wealth inequalities (and a marginal federal tax rate of 91 per cent for incomes over $200,000 – or two million in today’s dollars) went hand in hand with rapid economic growth; and the period since the 1980s featuring rapid economic polarization , much slower growth rates, and a series of financial hiccups. Incidentally, there are other contrasts between the two periods. In the 1960s, the majority of American Caucasians professed to feel disgust if forced to drink from a water fountain after an African-American person. Three decades later such squeamishness at even imaginary contact with in individuals belonging to a different “race,” sexual orientation, or subculture had miraculously evaporated. Could this amazing march of tolerance have also come to include tolerance of gross inequality, as a result of weakened disgust at the obscene salaries and profits reaped by the best and the brightest in some sectors of the economy? And their casual flaunting of extreme opulence?

The experimenter’s dilemma

A lengthy feature in Prospect (“Matters of Life and Death”) describes the multiple experiments carried out by experimental philosophers seeking to understand the nature of ethical judgment. Those all turn around the famous trolley/footbridge dilemma: a runaway trolley is racing down a rail track and is going to kill five people. Would you pull a lever to divert it into a different track whether it will kill only one? And if you have the same situation, but you are standing on a footbridge above the track and the only way to avert the bloodbath is to push a “large” person standing next to you in front of the trolley. Would you do it? In the first case, most experimental subjects respond “yes,” on the basis of a simple utilitarian calculation: it is well worth saving five lives at the price of one. In the second case, most participants say they will not do it. And often cannot explain why. In my naïveté, I thought these thought experiments demonstrated that ethical judgments can be influenced by our instinctive emotional reactions. This is most likely to happen in situations which feel close-up-and-personal – like pushing someone to his death (I hope the gendered language would be acceptable here). When we operate a mechanical device (like those drones hunting down those Taliban militants in Pakistan?), it’s easier to keep our emotions at bay and rely on utilitarian calculations. A new crop of experimental philosophers, though, are unsatisfied with this interpretation. They want to know on the basis of what ethical doctrine exactly most people can decide to pull the lever, but would not push a warm, breathing human body in front of the racing trolley. So they design increasingly clever experiments to tease this out – in dozens of versions. What if the person on the second track had been tied down there by bullies? What if those bullies, unknowingly, had also put themselves in harm’s way by picnicking on the first track? What if the second track looped and joied the first track – in which case you would need to wish that the single person be killed in order to save the others? One scientist (“scholar” doesn’t seem the right word to describe this academic occupation) explains the goal off her experiments (for some reason, most of these practitioners are women): “Real-life cases have a lot of factors going on, and it’s hard to test whether it’s this factor that’s crucial or that factor. You have to artificially construct cases to focus on the factors that are important. It’s like the scientist in the lab who has to figure out whether, say, the dust particle makes a difference to friction, and tries to hold everything else constant.” You know, as they do it in real science. As I was reading, I was increasingly thinking: “What is wrong with these people? Why can’t they just accept the ‘fox doctrine’ (after the fox from the Little Prince) or the ‘Pascal doctrine,’ both stating that certain things can be understood only through the heart?” One possibility is that to the uniformly cheerful researchers conducting the experiments the different scenarios don’t feel all that different. So finding some coherent doctrine seems the only possible explanation for choosing one course of action over other similarly unpalatable options. On the face of it, this seems unlikely – the article says responses among experimental subjects are uninfluenced by social status or educational level. But the article also mentions a dispute during WW II between Winston Churchill and one of his cabinet ministers on whether to try to have more V1 cruise missiles rain over south London. The minister, policeman’s son, “perhaps felt more keenly … the risk that the people in the working-class areas of south London would be running.” So maybe there are some meaningful differences in how individuals think and feel about ethical dilemmas – and the philosophers conducting the experiments (like Churchill) are overly clever and upbeat outliers.

Can we handle the truth?

Yesterday on CNN, Fareed Zakaria hosted a panel which discussed the tea party movement in the United States. On it, two liberal historians faced off a journalist from Wall Street Journal. One of the historians kept repeating that the movement had been fanned by Fox News and funded by a few angry billionaires. It’s funny how easily any trend we dislike turns into a shallow conspiracy. Milosevic once alleged that much of Albanian nationalism in Kosovo. And liberal Western intellectuals thought the same of Milosevic’s brand of Serb nationalism. Meanwhile, a New York Times article (“Voter Disgust Isn’t Only About Issues”) says independent voters participating in focus groups indicated they saw specific political and economic problems as part of a broader social malaise: “the larger breakdown of civil society – the disappearance of common courtesy, the relentless stream of data from digital devices,* the proliferation of lawsuits and the insidious influence of media on their children.” The Wall Street Journal woman retorted that the tea party in fact had a sensible economic agenda of shrinking a bloated government machine. The other historian lamented that all those stirrings around tea party populism were leaving aside a fundamental issue – the problem of social justice. Historically, governments have been charged with restraining the “innumerable vultures” John Stewart Mill thought could be found in any society. The tea party rank and file, though, feel quite happy to side with the sharks against the only force which could potentially control their predatory greed and “perpetual and restless desire of power after power.” Apparently, no amount of liberal hand-wringing can help the “government-is-the-problem” crowd start connecting the dots. Meanwhile, in Belgrade protesters tried to attack a gay rights procession and injured over 80 riot policemen. That outburst must have been another political conspiracy. You know, in the sense of politics is about “who gets what, when, how.” Except, it’s unclear what the rioters could possibly hope to “get” in this case. Such violence may raise a troubling question: can “civilized” political institutions function in a society which includes a critical mass of uncivilized young males? I guess most political scientists would answer in the affirmative. Some would discount the significance of political culture, arguing that political actors respond rationally to the incentive structures they face. Others would argue that an appropriate set of attitudes can develop as a result of learning within a democratic institutional framework. I do hope one of these theories is right.

* Ooops – the Google founders will probably be ticked that many Americans don’t seem to take their corporate slogan seriously

Wittgenstein did have a wonderful life!!!

In his book, The Temperamental Thread, Harvard developmental psychologist Jerome Kagan summarizes his findings from decades of painstaking research and hundreds of clever experiments. He describes two basic inborn temperaments: low-reactive and high-reactive. While low-reactive individuals are relaxed, high-reactives are uptight perfectionists who are easily disturbed by sights, sounds, and even minor incidents. In a couple of places Dr. Kagan expresses sympathy for the high-reactives whose lives seem to be one unending torture. “I confess to some sadness,” he says, “when I reflect on the fact that some adults, because of the temperament they inherited, find it difficult to experience on most days the relaxed feeling of happiness that a majority in our society believe is life’s primary purpose.” And since high-reactives tend to be deeply introverted, Dr. Kagan expresses sorrow that they “miss the joys that come from meeting new people and visiting new places.” Well, they do “have the advantage of living a few years longer than extroverts.” But how can this compensate for all the cheerless suffering they are destined to endure? And what if some high-reactives find their own life satisfying at some deeper level? Dr. Kagan thinks they should know better. He gives the example of Ludwig Wittgesnstein who suffered many personal misfortunes, “never put roots down in any one place,” and “was profoundly depressed and anxious his entire life.” At one low point he even confessed “that he could not imagine a future with any joy or friendship.” Yet, on his deathbed he said to an attending relative: “Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life.” Dr. Kagan’s verdict? “This comment provides sufficient reason to question the meaning and accuracy of what people say about their moods and behaviors.” So, Wittgenstein wasn’t really in his right mind. I wish Dr. Kagan could fathom what it means to lead a truly intense life like Wittgenstein’s; to say nothing of the lives of all those poets, philosophers, mathematicians, etc. who have descended into madness, committed suicide, or narrowly escaped such a fate. A book with an evocative title, Living with Intensity, offers a good introduction to this tricky issue once addressed by Polish psychologist Kazimierz Dabrowski. But reading a book, or piles of psychological “findings” for that matter, won’t help you appreciate that extatic mode of “being-in-the-world” unless you can feel some of its emotional intensity in your own gut. Judging by the unfailingly reserved and even tone of Dr. Kagan’s writing, he has successfully avoided that developmental curse. He does recognize the usefulness of all those wretched high-reactives in his own work, though. He has regularly hired them as research assistants because they are oh so conscientious.

Long live transgression!

The Venice film festival was overshadowed by the controversy surrounding the awarding of the main prize to Sofia Copola – by a jury chaired by her former boyfriend Quentin Tarantino. What caught my attention, though, was another movie featured briefly in the “Cinema” segment on Euronews. I think the actors spoke German, though I am not quite sure. In one of the scenes, they showed a 20-something daughter and her 40-something dad sitting on a row of white chairs in some waiting room – a few feet apart in a spotlessly sterile environment, meant probably as a metaphor for their existential distance. Here is roughly the dialogue that ensued:
Daughter: “Have you imagined me naked?”
Dad: “No, I haven’t.”
Daughter: “Is it because it is some kind of taboo?”
Dad: “Yes. And such taboos exist for a reason among mammals – so that they can procreate.”
Daughter: “Well… I have imagined you naked.”
As that famous ad addressed to young women in the 1960s said, “You’ve come a long way baby.” Indeed. If anyone has doubts on that account, how about that German gunwoman who killed three people (including her five-year old sun and her former husband) before dying in a hale of police-fired bullets?

But the desire to transgress constraining prohibitions is neither gender, nor country bound. It has become truly all encompassing – a trend which comes through very clearly, for example, in a NYT article about a new strand of culinary experimentation (“Waiter, There’s Soup in My Bug”). It features a chef and artist who recently organized a feast with all kinds of insects and larvae – dead and alive – on the menu. He raises those in his own apartment in miniature houses designed by his girlfriend – also an artist. These are now on display in some gallery as a daring work of art. The event itself was billed as half meal, half performance art, with a modest 85-dollar price tag. A few of the guests could not overcome their narrow-minded prejudice or disgust and went home hungry. But most relished the treats they were served. And it wasn’t just the taste of it all – no, they were exhilarated that they had crossed such a difficult threshold. Now, some felt, anything was possible – nothing could hold them back in the pursuit of all kinds of life satisfaction. At a similar event some time ago, the intoxication produced by this act of culinary transgression apparently helped the participants overcome some unrelated inhibitions and they began hugging each other, a few even started groping and kissing in a corner. As the culinary artist says, once you see people eating insects as if it’s the most natural thing to do, “it turns your world upside down a little bit.”

I thought eating insects – in addition to inspiring that invigorating feeling of personal liberation – could solve some nutritional problems. Maybe it could unlock our access to a new locally grown, organic source of protein which is, after all, commonly consumed around the world. But an expert is quoted as saying the global population of edible insects is not that significant on a per capita basis, and people in places where malnutrition is a real problem already snack on all kinds of insects. So maybe we need to take a step further and consider some other organic substances which are currently off the menu – but could be nourishing and abundant if properly prepared and marketed. Even if some of these seem off limits now, maybe in 50 years no such silly squeamishness will stand in the way of technological, social, and moral progress. The kids in that famous psychological experiments who, at maybe four years of age, begin to wrinkle their noses in disgust at the sight of a giant cockroach floating in a glass of water? Maybe their grandchildren will just slurp it – or any other digestible item in its place – without the slightest twitch; and ask for more. A small step on the way to a more rational, or cost-benefit, analysis of what is now still a nutritional dilemma – which can help resolve humankind’s alleged Malthusian predicament once and forever. For now, though, let’s take things one transgression at a time…

High on pixels?

Dr. Richard Friedman describes in the NYT (“Lasting Pleasures, Robbed by Drug Abuse”) how many of his patients who are addicted to drugs like cocaine seem to lose the ability to enjoy the small things in life. After a while, even the drug itself no longer gives them the same high. And these effects persist even many years after they have kicked the habit. Dr. Friedman explains that mind-altering drugs highjack the reward system of the human brain as they act much more powerfully on it than any natural stimuli. With time, neurons in the brain become less sensitive to all the dopamine being released under the influence of the drug, and pleasure fades away. Is this mechanism activated only by chemical substances, though? I am looking at a review of Fun, Inc. by Tom Chatfield. He thinks that video games are clearly the greatest invention in the history of humanity. Yet, even he recognizes that games are designed to tap into the same reward circuits that are activated by sugar, alcohol, and other drugs. Could they, then have a similar effect, desensitizing the brain to the smaller pleasures of life?

Karate wisdom

Our daughter took me to see Karate Kid the other day (a remake of the 1987 original). Some of the fighting sequences in the movie are a bit too graphic, but it has a great lesson at its heart: kung fu (which has now replaced karate) is not about beating up on the enemy; it’s about achieving internal balance and self-control. The Chinese bully knows all the moves, but cannot suppress his rage – so he must bow his head in defeat. Most of the critics reviewing the movie are completely missing this point, and make unfavorable comparison to the original movie which they probably saw in their own youth. This means most kids will probably miss the main point, too. I do hope, though, it will stick in the mind of Will Smith’s cute son who plays the leading role. He will need plenty of self-control as he is growing up in order to resist all the temptations and distractions bound to plague the life of a celebrity kid.

Liberation technology?

A recent Newsweek article has an ominous title: "The Creativity Crisis." It says creativity scores were rising among young Americans until the early 1990s. Then they started to slowly but steadily fall. Experts are scratching their heads, and most tend to blame the decline on educational reforms emphasizing standardized testing and rote memorization. Incidentally, the 1990s saw the spread of personal computers, video games, and internet use - all on top of hours of TV viewing. Could there be a link here? According to a recent NYT article, neuroscientists now believe the incessant use of electronic devices for instant communication, entertainment, and access to information (including hand-held computers masquerading as cell phones) may be depriving the brain of much needed downtime ("Digital Devices Deprive Brain of Needed Downtime"). This is an aspect of computer use left out of that famous Mac ad evoking Orwell.

"Does Your Language Shape How You Think?"

According to this fascinating NYT article, the short answer is "yes." The only problem with it is that the whole argument departs from a very disembodied understanding of thinking as a purely mental activity. So language "shapes" thought by inducing certain "habits" of thinking. It might be much more insightful to see the whole issue in a different light - to consider the way in which our native language must be influencing our brain wiring. From this point of view, it become clearer why being a native English speaker (a language which - quite unusually - does not assign gender to inanimate objects) may not exactly enhance your emotional connectedness to the larger social and natural world.

Creative destruction

The Pavlovsk experimental station outside St. Petersburg holds seeds from millions of varieties of fruits and berries. Most of the seeds there, which come from many countries, are not kept any place else in the world. They need to be planted in order to be preserved as they would not survive freezing. The station was established by an eminent biologist who died in a Stalinist camp in 1943. Now a Russian state agency has decided the land it occupies is not being used profitably. So they want to hand it over to developers who plan to construct luxury apartments on it. A court will rule on that decision on Monday, but is unlikely to find any legal grounds to overturn it. During World War II, twelve Soviet scientists starved to death rather than eat from the seeds which they felt a duty to preserve for future generations. With the benefit of hindsight, they should have known better. Though Putin may still ride in on a white horse and somehow save the plants. Which would cement further his reputation as a protector of ordinary Russians (and some sort of common good) from all sorts of greedy vultures – the only one on offer for some time to come.

In memoriam

A journalist writing in a Bulgarian paper called Tony Judt "one of the greatest contemporary historians and analysts." Employing the same word to refer to Judt that is commonly used with reference to TV pundits - it's hard to think of a greater sacrilege. His last piece in the New York Review of Books ("Words") composed as he was losing control of his vocal chords (after many months on assisted breathing) is a true tribute to the endurance of the human spirit. May he rest in piece...

The Iron Mask

In an old episode of Mad Men (from its first season) Don Draper meets his younger brother. He hasn’t seen him in maybe 15 years, and has meanwhile started a new life under an assumed identity. One brother comes across as sincere and emotional, the other emits zero emotion and speaks with utter indifference. Guess who is the successful marketing executive and who is the janitor who lives in a cheap rental room. That emotional suppression comes very handy in the incessant verbal ping-pong the ad men practice exchanging wisecracks on all sorts of issues. Repressed emotions also help them maintain a credible façade as they cheat on their frustrated wives. Oh, the price of civilization…

P.S. A few episodes later, I am left with one lingering sensation – the emotional distance between the characters is just staggering. One of the young writers complains that his newly acquired wife is just another stranger - as they all are to one another. To be unable to reach out emotionally to another human being – this must be a truly unusual and severe punishment. This emotional deficit creates ubiquitous and incessant jostling for power and status, and thus a very treacherous and hostile social (and office) milieu - assumed by game theory to be most natural and ubiquitous. Of course, Tocqueville foresaw it all when he wrote: “not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.” On the other hand, there seems to be a mismatch between the spirit of the costume drama and the Zeitgeist of the time as reflected in the style of the objects and ads from 1960. Who knows what those people truly thought and felt...

Dual use

A NYT piece says "a professor of engineering and neuroscience at Brown University is studying how human brain signals could combine with modern electronics to help paralyzed people gain greater control over their environments." Obviously, the same technology could be used to help perfectly healthy young guys fly fighter jets and helicopters, guide missiles to their targets, etc., all without a "joystick." The Pentagon, of course, is working on this. I am wondering if it is also part of the engineer/neuroscientist's business plan.

My rest über alles

The latest data says one quarter of American couples now normally sleep in separate bedrooms. Apparently, this is a recent trend which is expected to grow steadily. A former museum director offered the following explanation to a NYT reporter: “Not that we don’t love each other, but at a certain point you just want your own room.” As a sleep specialist observed, "what happened in the last decade, is that people are suddenly making their own sleep a priority. If their rest is being impaired by their partner, the attitude now is that I don’t have to put up with this.” Why, indeed, put up with any personal inconvenience if you don't really have to?

Good guys (and gals) finish last

Two researchers on child development comment in the NYT on new law in Massachusetts requiring schools to institute anti-bullying programs, investigate complaints, report serious cases, etc. They are concerned the new legislation will encourage schools to make mostly superficial efforts which will not produce real results. The title of the article proclaims: "There’s Only One Way to Stop a Bully" - and this is "to teach children how to be good to one another" and to instill in them "a sense of responsibility for the well-being of others." Let's say schools and teachers decide to make an all-out, determined effort to "instill" these laudable values. On the other hand, children cannot remain blind to the fact that in the jostling for social status going on everywhere around them - from school cliques to boardrooms - it is often the nice guys and gals who finish last. And existing social mechanisms for the distribution of material and non-material rewards often favor, in the words of Paul Krugman, "bad actors." As Donald Trump likes to reminds his "apprentices," you do need to be tough, sometimes even mean, if you want to play with the big boys. Not that there is anything inherently wrong with this state of affairs - many will argue that this very harshness of the competition at all levels is at the heart of the dynamism which sets American capitalism apart from the more lethargic European versions. But it's quite obvious which lesson will leave a stronger mark on the minds of most impressionable kids and adolescents.

The revolution will be monetazied - well, maybe not this time

A web site called the Great American Apparel Diet invites visitors to commit not to buy any new clothes for a whole year. Since last September, 150 people have taken the pledge, though some have quit. Even the founder of the web site cheated twice, so going cold turkey on new apparel must be real stiff. More curiously, the pioneering dieter behind the website told a NYT reporter "she had thought about ways to make money off the diet." At the end, she decided to pass on the maintenance of the web site to future apparel dieters. One might sense a glaring contradiction between the spirit of the whole initiative and the urge to make money off its success. On the other hand, if we become overly sensitive about such cultural contradictions of capitalism, the whole economy could grind to a halt - like in North Korea.

Back to the future

I week ago, I came back frm Amsterdam. I arrived there on the eve of the Spain-Netherlands final game of the World Cup, and the whole city was overcrowded, euphoric, and draped in orange. The most striking sight I saw, however, were dozens of open-air portable urinals throughout the downtown area. Those were lined up not just on the edges of the Museum Square where the giant TV screens were set up, but also on other city squares, canal bridges, etc. - and were put to good use by mostly young men. I guess this is sound, pragmatic public policy, reflecting Holland’s famously utilitarian spirit – most of the male fans were carrying cases of Heineken, so they needed a convenient place to pass all that liquid out if they were not to pee on trees (which some did anyway). Such open-air urinals have also been deployed in Denmark, Britain, and a few other countries. In one Chinese city, the locals shunned the unfamiliar facilities, so municipal officials were instructed to use them in order to set an enlightened example. The whole issue, however, has another curious aspect. There are all these writings coming out about the erosion of the modern state and a return – politically – to the Middle Ages. I guess the return is also cultural. Several ages ago, people freely ate with greasy hands, belched, passed gas, urinated and did other things in public or semi-public settings. Then they gradually developed more “civilized” attitudes, at the core of which was an acute sense of embarrassment. That uncomfortable feeling drove such bodily functions underground, into an intensely private cocoon. Now all sorts of previously private activities are out in the open again, without any discernible sense of embarrassment or awkwardness. Any resistance or hesitancy, like in that distant Chinese city, will be whittled away. And most would see this as progress – a laudable pealing away of silly taboos and inhibitions.