Love at first tweet

After swallowing the humiliation from the BCS championship match-up, the football program of my Ph.D. alma mater, Notre Dame, and its biggest star, Manti Te’o, are again in the eye of a media/social-media-spun turbulence they would rather have avoided. It turns out the story Te’o was telling of a girlfriend who survived a car crash and then died of leukemia – asking him to keep on playing for her – was all a tasteless hoax. The young woman was an avatar, reducible to a Twitter account and a stolen photo pasted there. How did this happen?

Dreaming the “Dreamliner”

Boeing’s 787 has long been in trouble. It was initially plagued by delays, and – since deliveries started in September 2011 – the much ballihooed plane has suffered from multiple technical glitches. The last week or so has been particularly nightmarish, so the US aviation authorities – and perhaps others – have now felt pressed to order detailed safety inspections. Which could lead to further production hiccups, delays, revisions of projected earnings, and volatility in Boeing’s shareholder value. Why has this happened? I am tempted to offer a neat anthropological theory.

The mentally sick animal

Norwegian professor of philosophy Lars Fredrik Svendsen is concerned about the gradual lowering of diagnostic thresholds in psychiatry. He worries that if this trend continues, being normal could become an unachievable goal – like being a supermodel. He thinks that some common human features – like grieving after the loss of a loved one – could be medicalized, and the thought that we are mentally ill (as opposed to considering ourselves as resilient, healthily adapted individuals) could add insult to injury. Why has this trend taken shape over the last few decades, if it is so detrimental?

Oh, those Russians!

Over a month ago, the NYT published a review of a run-away Russian bestseller, “America – What a Life!,” by longtime security pundit Nikolai V. Zlobin. Apparently, the book has tapped a Russian thirst to find out more about that strange life in the “American cul-de-sac.” In doing this it also dusts off some old cultural stereotypes - and I am still scratching my head over one of those. I have always thought that some stereotypes exist for a reason – but probably not all.

Teutonic shift

If anyone doubts that the world is going to the dogs, they must cast another look at Germany. Since the eurozone crisis broke out a few years back, the intransigence of the German government has often been explained by a cultural peculiarity – Germans would never ever cross a red line, even at the cost of much personal or collective misery. In Germany itself, the problems of Greece and the troubled Mediterranean flank of the EU have similarly been attributed to a proclivity to cheat and evade sacrosanct rules. As it turns out, though, the word “verboten” seems to have lost much of its traditional punch in Germany itself – or at least its medical establishment.

After identity

The NYT carries an article (“Generation LGBTQIA”) which describes young people for whom even traditional gay or transgender identities, until recently seen as transgressive, have become too constraining. Apparently, some have gotten to a point where they just don’t know in what kind of body they would fit; or see their “gender” as just one undefined, “amorphous blob.” Come to think of it, this must be very liberating, even if at times a bit confusing. In fact, such a mini “daily referendum” could be conceived as the logical next step in the Enlightenment quest for freedom.

Long live gender equality!

As I have noted in the past, some stereotypes may exist for a reason. On average, women do seem to be a bit less reckless and aggressive – particularly when engaging in potentially risky undertakings like driving. Unsurprisingly, this proclivity translates into car accidents caused by woemen. On the basis of such statistics, until recently insurers in many EU countries rewarded female drivers with substantially lower insurance premiums. The EU commission, however, decided to put an end once and for all to this blatant gender discrimination against male drivers. 

Don’t read this book

Nassim Taleb, of “black swan” fame, has a new book out. It’s called Antifragile: How to Live in a World We Don’t Understand, and purports to explain what makes financial and social systems robust. I haven’t read the book, and probably never will – for reasons that will become apparent below. But I am still tempted to say a few words regarding Taleb’s mode of analysis. In doing this, I’ll follow Pierre Bavard’s advice on “how to talk about books you haven’t read” – without, of course, having read his book either.

The Baron von Münchhausen economy

A couple of years ago Emily Yoffe wrote an article on narcissism for Slate. Reading it, one could readily conclude that Alexis de Tocqueville’s and Christopher Lasch’s warnings had finally come to pass. Then Yoffe appeared on the Colbert Report and made the argument that narcissistic behaviors had helped ignite the financial crisis. To which Colbert retorted: “But the economy and the market are really just built up on confidence. Why don’t we just recapture that narcissism that we had a year ago and just pretend that everything is OK? And won’t the market just come right back? Won’t we just rebuild the bubble?”

Asians: Too Smart for Their Own Good?

This is the title of a NYT opinion piece by Carolyn Chen, Director of the Asian American Studies Program at Northwestern. In it, she argues forcefully for lifting the quotas for Asian Americans at top universities, the way those were renoved for superachieving Jewish students back in the 1960s. Of course, the Asian quotas can now only be secret, which makes their fallout all the more devastating: “At highly selective colleges, the quotas are implicit, but very real. So are the psychological consequences. At Northwestern, Asian-American students tell me that they feel ashamed of their identity — that they feel viewed as a faceless bunch of geeks and virtuosos. When they succeed, their peers chalk it up to ‘being Asian.’ They are too smart and hard-working for their own good.” And Amy Chua’s “tiger mom” bravado comes in for a beating since it “set back Asian kids by attributing their successes to overzealous (and even pathological) parenting rather than individual effort.”

Zeitgeist 2012

An article in the NYT recently gave some advice on (ad)dressing a festering social wound: “How to Attack the Gender Gap? Speak Up.” My immediate thought was: how about creating a less competitive and fairer social environment? But this just shows how naïve I can be.

We have been through this too many times…

These were the words of a visibly shaken Barack Obama yesterday as he fought back tears and parts of his face visibly trembled while he spoke. He was so emotional that CNN’s Wolf Blitzer appeared almost moved in his post-comment comments. Some will no doubt blame the president for failing to show the steely resolve befitting a strong Commander-in-Chief. As Antonio Damasio and others have demonstrated, though, lack of emotional input in judgment and decision making can be an even greater problem than uncontrolled emotionality. Which, by the way, shouldn't inspire much confidence in Angela Merkel's leadership style as described in Der Spiegel ("A Cold Heart for Europe: Merkel's Dispassionate Approach to the Euro Crisis").

You are not a number

The NYT carries two articles on different topics but with similar titles and even more similar messages: “Messi’s Brilliance Transcends His Numbers,” and “Dear Rafiki, You Are Not Your SAT Score.” I suspect Ethan Roeder, the chief quant of the Obama re-election campaign, would want to argue this point a bit. He would acknowledge that data cannot tell us everything about anyone; but would probably add that they, nevertheless, provide valuable information if analyzed properly.

Phony and Phonier

Observers cannot stop scratching their heads and nodding in disbelief at the inept naïveté  with which David Petraeus and his mistress-biographer Paula Broadwell tried to conceal their doomed escapades. Indeed, one would expect slightly greater sophistication from the spymaster of the Free World, and even from a West-Point-educated lieutenant-colonel from the U.S. Army reserve. I suspect, though, that their childish silliness has an easy explanation.

The German engineering genius

If anyone doubts that the world is going to the dogs, a couple of recent engineering disasters in Germany offer the final and definite proof. First, the opening of the new Berlin airport, initially scheduled for last June, has been pushed back several times because of concerns over its fire-control system. The current due date is October 2013. And this is only the latest of a series of high-profile construction projects to be plagued by serious snafus: a couple of train/subway stations, the new concert hall in Hamburg, the building of the German CIA…

Clash of the titans

A review in the NYT says the main protagonist in the movie “Flight” is played by a “titanic Denzel Washington.” This prompted the natural question: if Denzel Washington is titanic, what was, say, Martin Luther King? Supermegatitanic? The linguistic inflation epitomized by such bombastic language has long been lamented by intellectuals. German writer and linguist Uwe Poerksen has bemoaned the spread of “plastic words” like “development” and “empowerment” which have lost any substantive meaning and can be used to describe and justify almost anything. In a similar fashion, writer Jennifer Egan has lampooned a fictional academic star who studies “the phenomenon of word casings, a term she'd invented for words that no longer had meaning outside quotation marks” – like "friend," "real," "story," "change," “identity,” “search,” “cloud,” and countless others.

Give rape a chance?

According to a story in the Guardian, "more than one in three men surveyed in the Democratic Republic of Congo's war-torn east admits committing sexual assault, and three in four believe that a woman who "does not dress decently is asking to be raped." If I recall correctly, a similar study done in South Africa a few years ago produced similar results. Such findings, though, seem to have made no impression on Steven Pinker, Joshua Goldsten, and other liberal intellectuals who have confidently argued that both large-scale violence and violent crime are fast becoming obsolete - this time for real. 

Phony warrior

Last week, Maureen Dowd complained about the “mind-boggling phoniness of [Mitt] Romney” (“My Mitt Fantasy”). According to David Brooks, however, “Romney’s shape-shifting nature” could in fact help him push though Congress some sort of bipartisan reform if he were to become president. Hurray for inner emptiness and “The Upside of Opportunism”! The funny part is that Brooks passes for a “conservative.” The more bizarre part is that the majority of GOP supporters – and probably some opponents – don’t seem to sense Romney’s inner emptiness.

A New Kind of Social Science for the 21st Century

This is the title of an interview on the Edge web site with Nicholas Christakis, a “Physician and Social Scientists” at Harvard. He hails the “biological hurricane approaching the social sciences” and “the era of computational social science.” He believes that by pooling all the relevant data “we” (or, rather, clear-sighted scientists like him) will soon achieve a clear understanding of previously murky aspects of human behavior – for example, of how “humans aggregate to form collective entities.” These new causal models will then allow for effective “interventions” at different societal levels.

To illustrate this new approach, Christakis points to a study he and others did on the Hadza, a hunter-gatherer population spread thinly on the Kenyan savannah. They created “a kind of Facebook for the Hadza” mapping the totality of their social connections. The result was quite surprising. As it it turned out, modern telecommunications and urbanization have absolutely no effect on the “structure of human social networks.“ In Christakis’s words, “Hadza social networks look just like ours. In every kind of way we could study these networks, mathematically, they didn't differ from ours.”

The go-go economist

The NYT features a profile of Glenn Hubbard, “Romeney’s Go-To Economist.” Hubbard is still dean of the Columbia business school, and can well become Secretary of the Treasury if Romney somehow sails into the White House. Once there, he would likely seek to revive George W. Bush’s economic policy, i.e., return the US to the economic course which once led it to the precipice. Otherwise, Hubbard looks like another nerdy libertarian economist who passes for a “conservative,” American-style. He has not shrunk from raking in millions from industries whose practices he has justified in academic papers and articles; and from corporations and executives accused of fraudulent behavior, in whose defense he has readily provided “expert” testimony.

Going solo Tajik style

On one of the news channels there was some curious footage from Tajikistan. It highlighted the plight of thousands of Tajik women who have been abandoned by their husbands. Since Tajikistan doesn’t offer an abundance of well-paying jobs, it turns out that perhaps 30 percent of Tajik bread winners have spent years as sometimes unwelcome gastarbeiter in Russia. As they were toiling away from home, at some point quite a few decided to call back home with a shocking announcement. They solemnly declared they were divorcing their wives, often leaving them to shoulder the burden of raising several children with very little income. Why has this trend taken such epidemic proportions in recent years? I have another elegant theory explaining it all.

Conspiracies all the way down

Maverick feminist Camile Paglia has joined the chorus singing paeans to capitalism on the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal. In her contribution, titled “How Capitalism Can Save Art,” she argues there is a simple reason why art has lost existential ground over the last couple of decades – what elese could you expect, if “the most talented college students are ideologically indoctrinated with contempt for the economic system that made their freedom, comforts and privileges possible.” This, of course, is a refrain of the conspiracy theory embraced by all sorts of cultural/social “conservatives” – and Paglia has swallowed it as self-righteously, though she describes herself as “a libertarian Democrat who voted for Barack Obama in 2008.” This fatal attraction of conspiratorial thinking is in fact quite curious.

Shame no more

Today, Dr. Brook Magnanti is some kind of British research scientist. A few years ago she was writing – alongside her dissertation – a racy blog describing her exploits as a high-end prostitute in London. Interviewed recently on the BBC chat show Hard Talk, she claimed that prostitution had empowered her; and said she would do it all over again if she had a choice. She also said she wished her daughter would one day follow confidently in her footsteps.

Hey, big spender

Following President Obama’s dispirited performance at the Denver debate, even many of his ardent supporters tweeted a blizzard of grumbles. According to the NYT, Andrew Sullivan, a liberal blogger, complained that the president was “boring, abstract, and less human-seeming than Romney!”