Olympic spirit

Predictably, the Olympics opening ceremony unleashed a whirlwind of tweets, with twitterers competing to key in in real time the greatest punch line - ever. Then, multiple web sites rushed to compile lists of the funniest tweets. Then, other web sites compiled lists of the best lists of funniest tweets. Then – OK, I made that last one up. In any case, I combed through a couple of the lists, and I did find a clear winner. It came from an economist, Matthew Yglesias, who must have an uncharacteristic ironic streak since he writes for Slate. This is what he said: “Watching these open ceremonies, fairly confident that China will bury the west.”

Why Are Some Olympic Women’s Teams Flying Coach While the Men Fly Business?

The main example used in this article in Time Magazine refers to the different flying experiences of Japan’s women’s soccer team (reigning world champions) and their under-23 male counterparts (nobodies, at least before they stunned Spain in London). So, why the difference?

The end of morality, among other things

In November, Californian voters will cast ballots not only to elect the next president of the United States and members of Congress. They will also vote on a proposition to eliminate the death penalty, and replace it with life in prison without parole. Was this ballot initiative launched out of any humane concerns, including the possibility that impressionable juries are once in a while condemning innocents to death? Maybe, but the argument around the issue turns mostly on money.

The Downside of Liberty

Here are the first three paragraphs from a NYT op-ed piece under this title by writer Kurt Andersen: 

“This spring I was on a panel at the Woodstock Writers Festival. An audience member asked a question: Why had the revolution dreamed up in the late 1960s mostly been won on the social and cultural fronts — women’s rights, gay rights, black president, ecology, sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll — but lost in the economic realm, with old-school free-market ideas gaining traction all the time?

“There was a long pause. People shrugged and sighed. I had an epiphany, which I offered, bumming out everybody in the room.

“What has happened politically, economically, culturally and socially since the sea change of the late ’60s isn’t contradictory or incongruous. It’s all of a piece. For hippies and bohemians as for businesspeople and investors, extreme individualism has been triumphant. Selfishness won.”

Everybody Knows

Yesterday, another great white went belly up in the muddy waters of London-based haute finance.  As I was watching older footage of him giving testimony and sipping expensive whine, I called a friend so we could rejoice briefly over this rare downfall of a celebrity predator and strike for social sanity. My friend, however, immediately doused my gloating in conceptual cold water. He reminded me of a famous passage from John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty.” In it, Mill described the development of various mechanisms for keeping down the “innumerable  vultures” who would trample upon and exploit the week in any society – from the unlimited power of the ancient kings to modern “representative government.”  So my friend asked (what sounded like) a rhetorical question: could this age-old struggle have finally ended – with the complete and total victory of the vultures? Who may need from time to time to ritually sacrifice one of their own, but will never ever give up their status of a collective top dog?

This Mad, Mad, Mad World

The prosecution in the Breivik case announced yesterday that they would seek an insanity verdict. Apparently, there were two psychiatric evaluations of the mass killer which contradicted each other, and the prosecutors decided to side with the one pronouncing him insane. There seems to be a circular logic at work here. Why did Breivik commit his egregious crime? Because he is insane. And why is he insane? Because he committed that egregious crime.

Un-reality

I have often pondered the phenomenal success of "The Matrix" trilogy, particularly the first movie which came out in the distant 1999. I still haven't met a student who hasn't watched it, despite its ancient release date. The promotional web site created for it carried a few philosophical essays, and I read an additional philosophical collection which was published the old-fashioned way. There is now also "The Matrix 101" web site dedicated to "Understanding The Matrix Trilogy." Yet, nothing I read over the years provided a plausibe solution to the problem I was turning in my head. Until I had one of those miraculous flashes of insight Jonah Lehrer writes about in "Imagine."

The first-person shooter revisited

I was looking the other day at an old article by science writer Sandra Blakeslee. It came out in 2003, during her earlier stint at the NYT. The title says it all: “Video-Game Killing Builds Visual Skills, Researchers Report.” 

Another gem from “The Stone”

Philosophy professor Christine Overall directs the following appeal to the readers of “The Stone,” the NYT philosophy blog: “Think Before You Breed.” Under this heading, she is “arguing for the need to think systematically and deeply about a fundamental aspect of human life.” Prof. Overall believes that as far as kids are concerned, “the burden of proof – or at least the burden of justification – should … rest primarily on those who choose to have children, not on those who choose to be childless.” Why? Because “the choice to have children calls for more careful justification and thought than the choice not to have children because procreation creates a dependent, needy, and vulnerable human being whose future may be at risk.” Therefore, “the individual who chooses childlessness takes the ethically less risky path.” As I was reading this, I had two thoughts. First, the continued marginalization of academic philosophers in the Anglo-Saxon world, and the spread of these best practices to less advanced societies in the coming decades, may be essential to human procreation. Second, the Athenians who condemned Socrates for the kind of critical thinking he championed probably knew what they were doing. Pity they acted too late, only after their beloved city had fallen to the dumb Spartans.

Condemned to freedom – or at least to fretting over it...

A couple of years ago the NYT started a philosophy blog, “The Stone” (this was a key piece of evidence cited recently by Carlin Romano in support of his provocative thesis that America, usually seen as an “ ardently capitalist, famously materialist, heavily iPodded, iPadded, and iPhoned society,” in fact now “towers as the most philosophical culture in the history of the world, an unprecedented marketplace of truth and argument that far surpasses ancient Greece, Cartesian France, 19th-century Germany, or any other place one can name over the past three millennia”). Academic philosophers posting on “The Stone” have debated many topics, but one seems to have become a perennial favorite – the old dilemma about free will.

Earthly Chronicles

Ray Bradbury died yesterday aged 91. Science fiction writers are now routinely criticized for overimagining the technology of the future. As we now know, the first expedition to Mars did not take place in 1999; so Bradbury can be similarly faulted. Yet, in other ways he saw it all coming.

Lessons for life

The Atlantic carries an article (“Moneyballer”) about the new star in American college basketball, Harrison Barnes. In high school he was an honor student, sax player, bible aficionado, etc. When he had to make that crucial decision, he opted to go to college instead of jumping right into the NBA. He also chose to stay in college, at least for the time being, though after his freshman year he would have certainly been a top-five draft pick. Why did he do it? As a business major in college, Barnes has picked some key insights from brand-management theory. On the basis of these, “he believes remaining in college for at least one more year will eventually increase his endorsement potential.” In his own words: “The longer you stay in college, the better a brand you build.”

That virtual object of desire

The title of a NYT article proclaims “wasting time is new divide in digital era.” It says efforts to give the kids of the digital have-nots access to computers and the internet have had a paradoxical result – they are wasting considerably more time online than the children of better-off families.

The Path to Freedom

This is the title of an essay by Jonathan Franzen published in the Guardian, apparently as part of the publicity surge around his new essay collection. In this piece, he explains how he “overcame a sense of shame, guilt and disloyalty” (to his former wife, mostly) in order to became a great writer. What he doesn’t seem to have overcome, though, is an awkward degree of self-absorption. It is this self-involvement which allowed Franzen to slam last year in the New Yorker David Foster Wallace, ostensibly a friend and undoubtedly a competitor, as a narcissistic jerk – someone who contemplated his suicide as an adulation-craving career move, committed as if to spite him, Franzen.

Euphoria in Unhappiness circa 2012

Free to live

Terry Castle, a professor of English at Stanford, makes in the Chronicle of Higher Education ("Don't Pick Up") “the case for breaking up with your parents." She ridicules her own students a bit for being constantly in digital touch with mom and dad. She tells them that when she was a college student back in the 1970s, they DESPISED their parents.

Free to die

According to the title of an article which came out in Der Speigel two months ago, a Dutch NGO “pioneers mobile euthanasia.” The plan is to initially bring death to the homes of people who are terminally ill and suffering. But the end objective is to increase public acceptance and eventually achieve the full legalization of assisted suicide – so that this service can become available to anyone who fancies to die, no questions asked. After all, if someone thinks it is in their best interest to die, why should they be persuaded otherwise?

The evil empire strikes back

Tetris is described in a NYT article on “stupid” video games (“Just One More Game”) as a “simple but addictive puzzle game.” It came pre-installed on Nintendo’s first-generation Game Boy. That, of course, was the device which launched the hand-held gaming revolution back in that iconic year – 1989. As it turns out, Tetris had been designed in a Soviet computer lab back in 1984 – another curious coincidence. 

The efficient life

In a NYT interview, a 28-year old digital consultant shares tips about the countless cool web sites, “niche social networks,” apps, etc. she uses on a daily basis. Why is she almost continuously plugged in? Very simple: “Its [sic.] not just my geeky love for the Internet that keeps me trying new products,” she said. “It’s a quest to find things that will ultimately make my life more efficient and run smoothly.” This must be a truly epic quest. Self-betterment as self-optimization, if you will.

Harvard and the superrat race

Harvard’s alumni magazine carries a feature article reporting on the lives of its undergraduate achievement freaks. Called “Nonstop,” the piece begins with a description of the crazy schedule of a female student who rises long before the sun has done so, has rowing practice at 6:00 a.m., attends multiple activities late into the night – and does this every single day.

What’s in a name?

A friend sent me that famous quote from “Romeo and Juliet”:

What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.

I knew it, but this is conclusive evidence that Shakespeare had never heard of branding, conspicuous and inconspicuous consumption, etc. Who says there is nothing new under the sun?

The end of American exceptionalism?

David Brooks has long argued that Americans are becoming more conservative and reembracing older values. According to a recent NYT article (“The Go-Nowhere Generation”), this may be partly true. It says that even before the crisis young Americans had become almost twice less likely to move across state borders or to even leave the family nest. The authors argue it would be terrible for Americans to become risk-averse, and twenty-somethings should not think twice before hopping on a Greyhound bus that will take them to a neighboring state with lower unemployment numbers. 

The marketplace of ideas

Nick Cohen passes for a leftist British intellectual. Yet he seems strangely oblivious to all those Gramscian allegations about an oppressive "ideological hegemony" suffocating the downtrodden in bourgeois societies. A couple of weeks ago he wrote a comment for Time Magazine criticizing political censorship in Europe ("The Right to Be Wrong"). His ire was provoked by the aborted French legislation meant to criminalize denial of the alleged Armenian genocide in the Ottoman empire. What is Cohen's main argument? He thinks "European judges and politicians have an aristocratic fear that if they grant the masses unrestricted debate, mobs will embrace revolution, racism or fascism. They do not believe that bad arguments can be defeated by better ones in a free society."

Poor Whitney

I am still thinking of Lehrer's point about the link between creativity and self-control (see previous post). If we take this seriously, then the tragic downward spiral of Whitney Houston, Amy Winehouse, and countless other creative types would hardly come as a surprise; to say nothing of the careerwrecks experienced by Mel Gibson or Lars von Trier who would rather direct their impulsive outbursts at others...