Snowboarder's High

#TheCrashReel is a documentary describing snowboarder #KevinPearce ’s protracted recovery after a horrific crash a few weeks before the 2010 winter Olympics. He fell on his head as he was trying a particularly difficult jump – as part of the daredevil escalation started by archrival Shaun White. Pearce suffered massive brain damage and spent weeks in intensive care, slowly regaining consciousness and control of his body and mind. And what was his strongest desire once he could have any? According to the pitch for the trailer on YouTube, “when he recovers, all he wants to do is get on his snowboard again, even though medics and family fear it could kill him” – in an attempt to get back “that feeling” only snowboarding could give him.

“My Goldman Sachs Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder”

This is the title of a post by Bethany McLean, a former Goldman analyst turned journalist. She says that job gave her a wonderful start in her professional career as it taught her some useful lessons – for example, to always pay attention to detail. There was a downside, though. McLean has the following confession to make: “Today, when my fellow analysts with whom I’m still in touch bring up things that happened, or people we worked with, I’m too embarrassed to admit that I often draw a total blank. I think I have post-traumatic stress disorder.” This sentence drew much fire in the comments below – with some US veterans criticizing McLean for her casual use of such a serious diagnosis.

AI

Edward Frenkel, math professor at UC Berkley, revisits on the NYT web site (which was recently revamped to make it “sleeker and faster”) the burning question: “Is the Universe a Simulation?” Apparently, there is a view among mathematicians that mathematical discoveries in fact reveal strings of the computer code underlying the “Matrix” we take for “reality.” Seriously? This immediately reminded me of Nicholas Carr’s now classic “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”

In bad taste?

In an interview for Times Magazine, “fashion-industry titan Tommy Hilfiger talks about acceptance, autism and why nobody should wear florals.” The “acceptance” part is related to the unwillingness of other fashion law-givers to accept him as a fellow designer after he had started out as a retailer. Autism is relevant to him as two of his five kids have been diagnosed with the disorder. And the florals? Mr. Hilfiger is asked if after five decades in fashion he thinks there is “any trend that should never be revived.” His response is that people wearing floral prints “really don’t have great taste.” So he asks a rhetorical question: “Why would you want to wear a print you see on a bedspread or wall paper in an older person’s home.”

In cold blood

This went viral, so everyone should have heard about it. It’s about the hapless Marius who was shod dead, dissected in front of an audience, cut up, and thrown as food to the lions at the Copenhagen zoo. The young giraffe was deemed genetically unfit to breed within the breeding pool the zoo had joined – so he had to die. A complex utilitarian calculation established that this would be the best outcome for everyone, not just the lions. Marius’s execution went on despite all the virtual outrage and proposals for a non-lethal solution. The zoo then issued a statement describing the killing “as a positive sign and as insurance that we in the future will have a healthy giraffe population in European zoos.” Then, a few days later, another Danish zoo announced they might kill one of their male giraffes, too (also named Marius) – for the same reason. So what’s with the Danes?

The end of everything, this time for real…

This is part of the display at the cash register in a local “hypermarket.” So what is the item in the middle of the upper row of small merchandise?

This precarious life

David Brooks is worried (“The American Precariat”) that Americans are not packing and moving as often as they did 60 years ago – when about 20 percent of the population switched residence every year. Why have Americans become as sedentary as the typical West European, or even more so? Brooks points to different explanations, but believes this unfortunate shift can be attributed mostly to a loss of self-confidence. He says there is a now “growing class of people living with short-term and part-time work with precarious living standards” – and bleak long-term prospects – which a British social scientist has dubbed the “precariat.” Apparently, the members of this group have lost some of their faith in capitalism and the “American dream,” and  have become more risk-averse than the part of the middle class they have replaced.

After authority, too?

I teach an upper-level class on “Culture and power” which examines the workings of “power” outside of explicitly political institutions (but still mostly on a larger social context, not in private relations along the lines of “the personal is political”). At the start of the semester we talked a little bit about the power relation which exists in the classroom between the teacher/professor and the students. Then, the other day a student from next door stepped in at the start of our class and asked me if she could borrow my chair since they did not have enough chairs in their classroom.

Beyond style, too

The other day I caught a segment on Euromaxx (Deutsche Welle’s lifestyle TV magazine) about Dutch celebrity designer Marcel Wanders. He was introduced as a “rock star” in his field – who had diversified into interior design after starting out as a jeweler. His claim to fame? Strange combinations of unusual shapes and striking colors (including some sort of tapestry or brocade featuring the enlarged face of “the master”) – “a bold celebration of the senses”  according to the DW script. What did “the master “ himself  had to say about his artistic approach? “Style is for the insecure, and I think it’s very boring.”And who wants that?

Beyond good, evil – and reading?

Mark Edmundson has another long essay out (“When I Was Young at Yale”) – describing his experiences as a rebellious graduate student at Yale’s famed English department. It’s again beautifully written, and provides a most sublime “reading experience.” I sometimes tell students that such texts give me a real high – and most laugh, but it’s true. Which does not mean I necessarily accept Edmundson’s assessment on all issues. Most probably, the lofty ideals explored in “the best that has been thought and said” in literature and the humanities were not set free of any moral restraint by the jibes a few “deconstructionists” pseudo-debunkers. In fact, 16.5 years ago Edmundson himself seemed to acknowledge as much.

Feminism for the 21st century

BBC World News aired a Hardtalk with Gloria Steinem earlier today. I watched diligently the first couple of minutes, and I was again struck buy the elaborate, nerdy way in which she puts together her sentences. Substantively, I still ponder the following question. Ms. Steinem remade a point she has raised countless times in the past: in the U.S., “if you count up all the people who were killed in 9/11, plus Americans who were , and you count up all the women who were murdered by their husbands or boyfriends in the same amount of time, more women were murdered by their husbands and boyfriends than were killed in those three events.”

A formula for everything

I was looking yesterday at two articles which came out earlier this month, both holding a bold promise. One (“Simple Mathematical Formula Describes Human Struggles”) presents research done by an “interdisciplinary group” studying “complexity” (headed by a physicist) at the University of Miami. They believe they have found a formula which does just that – captures the whole dynamics of “a broad range of human struggles” – “from child-parent struggles to cyber-attacks and civil unrest.” The other article (from the NYT) describes research which has led to a similar success – the discovery of a “formula for happiness.” The author, Arthur C. Brooks, says happiness “has traditionally been considered an elusive and evanescent thing,” akin to a capricious butterfly. But Brooks claims social scientists now know better: they “have caught the butterfly. After 40 years of research, they attribute happiness to three major sources: genes, events and values. Armed with this knowledge and a few simple rules, we can improve our lives and the lives of those around us. We can even construct a system that fulfills our founders’ promises and empowers all Americans to pursue happiness.”

From Miley et al. – with self-love

The NYT ran an article last week covering the Christmas pop concert at Madison Square Garden. The average age of the chaperoned audience was maybe 9, at most 11. Many had come to see Miley, and she did not disappoint. The NYT piece starts with this remarkable paragraph: “The intensity for Miley is real,’ read an audience member’s live tweet above the stage during the Z100 Jingle Ball on Friday night. Stone truth. Up to the moment of Miley Cyrus’s appearance, whenever her name was mentioned … the massed screaming had something extra, a sound of acrid immediacy, released into the air of Madison Square Garden like the smell of burning wires.” Further on Ben Ratliff, the NYT pop critic, says “everything preceding her felt secondary”; and goes on to present a graphic depiction of the singer’s preposterous outfit and absurd “dancing” routine. In his view, despite the obligatory ironizing, there’s an obvious earnestness in Miley’s public provocations, “an almost boring will to transgress.” Mr Ratliff notes that her singing “became a pointed rejection of the rhythm of Jingle Ball, in which the upbeat mood must rule” – an attitude problem which was already apparent a few years back when the star was still 17, and couldn’t quite “access the deep joy" in another song.

Ambrose Bierce’s stroke of insight

I have always wondered how Ambrose Bierce could possibly come up with all his impossible, disconcerting witticisms and surreal plots. I assumed he might have suffered from what is now called PTSD, but I did not know if those four years in the Union army had left a more direct mark on him. And I never bothered to find out. Now it’s the centennial of Bierce’s mysterious disappearance into Panhco Villa’s Mexico, and stories about him are hard to avoid – courtesy of the imperative to maintain web traffic which even high-brow publications can hardly escape.

Those obscure objects of desire

A great piece on the NYT web site is, “The Agony of Instagram,” ostensibly addresses a new kind of “social media envy” cultivated by the Facebook subsidiary. It's blooming because these days “it’s not unusual to scroll through one’s Instagram feed and feel suffocated by fabulousness” – captured in perfect, slightly doctored images meant to relentlessly impress. But the article also points to a darker side of virtual self-actualization – which, for many, can raise the rat race to a whole new level.

Francis Bacon and the end of art, among other things

The record-breaking auctioning of Francis Bacon’s pathetic triptych had to stir yet another virtual tempest in a teacup, that’s for sure. And I thought that had already passed, as so many others have. But Jed Perl, who writes about art for the web site of The New Republic (and perhaps for the magazine, too – I haven’t touched it in maybe 15 years), still wants to fight the windmills. He has a new piece posted whose title cries out in large blue bold font: “The Super-Rich Are Ruining Art for the Rest of Us.”

The 24/7 brain

There are now numerous brain studies which indicate that sleep can do wonderful things for you. Apparently, sound sleep affects positively gene expression and helps the myelination (or maturation) of neural fibers connecting distant brain regions (which is essential for neural and mental integration); plays a key role in neural restoration and washing away the toxins built in the brain during a stressful day; facilitates the consolidation of long-term memories; etc. All these findings should perhaps prompt the obvious question:

Historical Moneyball

Cass Sunstein offers on The New Republic web site a critical review a new entry in the bulging “digital humanities” genre – a new book in which Steven Skiena and Charles Ward present a statistical model for ranking the most significant figures in the history of humankind. Sunstein’s title speaks for itself: “Statistically, Who Is the Greatest Person in History? Why Quants Can’t Measure Historic Significance.” He describes how the two authors developed their model based on what they saw as “objective” indicators – taken from the latest constellation of entries in the English-language Wikipedia, and weighted with a version of Google’s algorithm. Skiena and Ward kept refining their formulas as those kept producing absurd results – until they reached a list of names which to them seemed credible, but Sunstein still finds quite ludicruous.

The “selfish gene” lives on…

– despite the express desire of David Dobbs and a few biologists he interviewed to “lay it to rest.” Dobbs (of “orchid kids” fame) describes their scheming in another great article on epigenetics in Aeon, “Die, Selfish Gene, Die.” In it, he explains why some biologists have offered a revisionist view, seeking to dethrone the “selfish” gene as the lead actor in the evolutionary show. Instead, they have tried to represent it as a member of a larger cast – featuring prominently epigenetic mechanisms. Richard Dawkins and other evolutionary hardliners, however, have refused to budge. Perhaps Dawkins’s fundamentalist stance on this shouldn’t be surprising since his reputation and personal fortune are so heavily invested in the “selfish gene” meme he let out of the bottle. What does seem a bit surprising, though, is the fervor with which in the comments below the article supporters of Dawkins and his fellow travelers accuse Dobbs, readers who like his article, and – be extension, the dissident scientists he quotes – of misunderstanding the gene-centric theory. They argue that the theory merely states that the gene is the elementary unit which gets selected and transmitted in evolution, nothing more than that. So should we conclude that the revisionist biologists who have converted to the epigenetics paradigm are similarly dumb?

The banality of overtheorizing

Richard Brody has taken another stab at Hannah Arendt's reputation as a thinker on the web site of The New Yorker  (“Hannah Arendt’s Failure of Imagination”) – this one occasioned by the release of a new book with interviews (including her last) and a new documentary. Unlike Arendt’s notorious diagnosis of Eichmann, Brody’s take-down seems spot on. He claims Arendt’s “mechanistic view of Eichmann’s personality, as well as her abstract and unsympathetic consideration of the situation of Jews under Nazi rule, reflect her inability to consider the experiences of others from within.” So Eichmann came out as a quasi-automaton and a mere cog in the machine, and Jewish leaders who were pressed to collaborate with the murderous Nazi regime appeared almost equally guilty of the tragedy which befell their community.

Pro-social psychopaths?

Neuroscientist James Fallon, who some time ago delivered on stage a striking self-revelation, has a new book out, The Psychopath Inside. I haven’t read the book, but I did revisit the online talk which preceded it. In his routine, Fallows describes how a few years back he got around to doing a neuroimaging study of the brains of psychopathic serial killers; how he recruited himself and family member as controls; and how he found out that the brain which showed the most obvious lack of activity in its empathetic regions turned out to be – his own.

Everything bad is good – or bad – for you

A few days ago, Science Daily published two summaries of new neuroimaging studies whose findings seemed to point in opposite directions: “Video Game Play May Provide Learning, Health, Social Benefits,” and “Teens Eat More, Cheat More After Playing Violent Video Games.” What are we to make of these divergent evidence-based conclusions?

Men and women, same but equal?

A brain study made front-page news the other day (at least in The Independent), and was splashed across countless information outlets across the world. A team of researchers scanned the brains of close to a thousand men and women, and uncovered “striking differences” (as one title put it) between the brain connectivity typical of the two genders. They “found greater neural connectivity from front to back and within one hemisphere in males, suggesting their brains are structured to facilitate connectivity between perception and coordinated action." Women, on the other hand,  appeared to have stronger wiring between the two hemispheres,  indicating they were generally better at integrating analytic thinking and intuition.

Want to think like a nerdy detective?

It’s been almost a year since Maria Konnikova’s book, Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Homes, hit the bookstores – or, mostly, their virtual reincarnations. Since then, the author has produced countless articles and online video appearances aimed at hawking her thinking manual. They all leave, however, one vital question unaddressed: Why would anyone in her right mind want to think like Sherlock Holmes? So, here is how Arthur Conan Doyle once introduced Holmes: