School shooters, teachers, and do-gooders

Malcolm Gladwell on school shooters
As a high-school teacher, this article's conclusion terrified me. "The problem is not that there is an endless supply of deeply disturbed young men who are willing to contemplate horrific acts. It’s worse. It’s that young men no longer need to be deeply disturbed to contemplate horrific acts."
I don't know if he is right. God I hope not.

The podcast The Hidden Brain looks at education
Again, as a high-school teacher, I was intrigued and inspired by this podcast. More than one of the segments covered research that basically said that positive attitudes, and sharing those positive thoughts with the students, significantly improved performance. So I made myself a resolution: I am going to send a positive personal note to every student by the end of semester. On Friday, I sent six notes home. I hope I can keep the resolution going.

Strangers Drowning: Grappling with Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Overpowering Urge to Help 
The author of this book, Larissa MacFarquhar, had published a few of these chapters in The New Yorker, and they were fascinating. One was about people who donate a kidney to strangers. Another was about a couple who adopted 22 kids, many of them special needs. As I read the articles in the magazine, I wondered why I wasn't as selfless as these saints. However, as I read the book, it became clear that radical altruism is not an unalloyed good. MacFarquhar notes that, in one culture, the word "gift" can also mean poison, and that gifts often are a form of dominance, in that the receiver then "owes" something to the giver. She also notes that, even in our culture, codependence, has become an issue. So in the end, MacFarquhar claims that radical altruism isn't something we would all want to emulate.

Her conclusion lays out the complexity of the book: "If everyone thought like a do-gooder, the world would not be our world any longer, and the new world that would take its place would be so utterly different as to be nearly unimaginable. People talk about changing the world, but that's not usually what they mean. They mean securing enough help so there is less avoidable suffering and people can get on with living decent lives; they don't mean a world in which helping is the only life there is.
If there were no do-gooders, on the other hand, the world would be similar to ours, but worse. Without their showing what a person can do for strangers if he sets himself to do it, fewer would try. It may be true that not everyone should be a do-gooder. But it is also true that these strange, hopeful, tough, idealistic, demanding, life-threatening, and relentless people, by their extravagant example, help keep those life-sustaining qualities alive."

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Fleetwood Mac, a psychiatrist, toddlers with guns, college football, William F. Buckley and Allen Ginsberg

A great live cover by Haim of Fleetwood Mac's "Oh Well" I got this from Ryan Tucker, and it's awesome.

The story of a psychiatrist who had it all, then lost it, possibly due to frontotemporal dementia. But should he be held accountable for his crimes if they were "caused" by a brain disorder?

If you don't already think we have too many idiots with too many guns, read this. Roughly once a week this year, on average, a small child has found a gun, pointed it at himself or someone else, and pulled the trigger.

A former University of Maryland professor lays out the current disgraceful state of U of M football, and college football in general. His solution: get colleges out of the football business. 

A five-minute conversation between the reptilian William Buckley and Allen Ginsberg. At about the 4:30 mark, Ginsberg notes that police brutality is countenanced because we are not allowed to even us on television the language that the police use in their interactions when brutalizing black people.  I'm not sure I follow the causal logic, but the discussion is certainly still timely 50 years later (Forwarded by John Hagney)

The Life of a Con Man

"I discovered the McDonald's drive-thru could be exploited if you happened to be out with your hungry 6-year old nephew sans wallet and sounded particularly desperate. I discovered that if you called the front desk of a certain five-star hotel and told them that every time you turn on the TV you were assaulted by images of pornography -- and your wife is pregnant and she doesn't want to see this crap, for Chrissakes -- they'll gladly upgrade you to a suite at no extra charge. But what I really learned is that people will believe just about anything you tell them, if you channel the right persona.

I discovered just how susceptible people were to the right persona when, for over a year, I attended my local gym in California without becoming a member. I never knew what I was going to say to the worker at the front desk. This is because when you're conning someone, you must always give the illusion that your mind is on something else. Affable indifference works well. For the gym, I used athletic focus. Never once did I approach the front desk walking. I was always running, always in the zone, always pumped. I'd have my earphones in, music blaring, and say that I'd just taken a run around the block (interval training); I'd have my basketball shoes in hand and feign anxiety as I approached: Did the game start already? I'd shake my head impatiently and say that I had to feed the parking meter, briefly criticizing the city's parking regulations, and every time, the worker would sympathize, hand me a towel and tell me to have a good workout."

Excerpted from "How I became a con artist" on Salon.com. Read the rest of the article here.