The man who beat Edison, the Flu, and Terry Gross

The man who defeated Thomas Edison
The man who holds more patents than anyone (including Thomas Edison) is Lowell Wood of Bellevue, WA. What makes the story intriguing to me is that he was terrible in school.

Wood insists that if he’s smart, he didn’t start out that way. Growing up in Southern California, he says, “I didn’t do well in any classes.” He often failed or received the lowest score on the first exam given in a particular course and improved his marks through repetition and intense effort. The strategy worked. He skipped a couple of grades and enrolled at UCLA at 16, where he tested into an honors-level calculus class. The worst score on the first exam—once again—was his. “I’d gotten into the class on the basis of aptitude, not knowledge, which is a ruinous sort of thing,” he says. “It’s like being told I understand the theory of swimming, and so here I am tossed into a high-speed river.”
The score horrified Wood, and he tried to make up for it with a very hard extra-credit problem. “You had to figure out how to cover an area with tiles in a specified fashion,” he says. “This is back in 1958, and it was a famous math problem. It was hopeless, and everyone worked on it for a while and then threw it away.”
As it happened, UCLA had just taken delivery of the first digital computer west of the Mississippi. Wood taught himself how to use the machine over the Christmas break and then wrote a program to solve the tiling problem. “It was a shameless sort of thing,” he says. “I used brute force to solve a problem that was meant to be solved through cleverness.” After he turned in his work, his professor accused him of cheating. “And so I reached down in a briefcase and pulled out the program,” he says. “The professor’s jaw literally dropped, and he said, ‘What is a computer? You can have the points if you teach me how to use this thing.’”

It makes me wonder how many of my low scoring students have hidden talents that I can't see. Then it makes me wonder how we change the education system so that we might be able to see those talents more clearly.

The Flu
What makes the flu spread more easily in winter? Partially, it's the dry air:

Tyler Koep, then at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, has estimated that simply running an air humidifier in a school for one hour could kill around 30% of the viruses flying around the air.

Read the article here. 

Terry Gross
Fresh Air's Terry Gross is America's best interviewer (I'm sorry Charlie Rose, but it's true), and The New York Times Magazine just did a profile of her. The profile includes an exchange from an interview I vividly remember listening to. Maurice Sendak was so real, and his emotions were so naked. I'm really glad the profile captured part of it.

On ‘‘Fresh Air,’’ we listen to Gross grapple with the most complex questions of existence — racial prejudice, faith, family, illness, morality, betrayal, gratitude. In 2011, when Maurice Sendak was 83, Gross called him at his home in Connecticut. What was meant to be a short conversation about his new book, ‘‘Bumble-Ardy,’’ became a meditation on his nearness to death. You feel Sendak looking over into it from his living room.

Sendak: Oh, God, there are so many beautiful things in this world which I will have to leave when I die, but I’m ready, I’m ready, I’m ready. … You know, I have to tell you something.
Gross: Go ahead.
Sendak: You are the only person I have ever dealt with in terms of being interviewed or talking who brings this out in me. There’s something very unique and special in you, which I so trust. When I heard that you were going to interview me or that you wanted to, I was really, really pleased.

Read the interview here

Eureka!

One night in 1902, an ambitious young American engineer named Willis Carrier was waiting for a train, watching fog roll in across the platform, when he had a sudden flash of insight: he could exploit the principle of fog to cool buildings. He patented the idea, protected it fiercely, put his new invention into production, and made a fortune. In 2007, the still-surviving Carrier Corporation generated sales worth $15 billion.

This is how we think of great inventions - the "Eureka!" moment. But Steven Johnson argues, in an interview in The Guardian, that good ideas are more often the product of a long process, and that the breakthrough is simply the next logical step in a long progression, and that's why so many great inventions are "invented" by different people in different places at the same time.

Even more great insights are in the article here

Johnson's new book is Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation.

Art Cannot Be Factored Out

I was listening to a podcast discussing Harold Pinter’s plays (none of which I’ve never seen) and the author of an article on Pinter noted that, when Pinter was an actor, he got tired of all the stories where everything “factored out” at the end. The author used this term twice, and the second time he used it, I started thinking about what that meant.

In context, it seemed to be a mathematical statement. For instance, let’s take the algebraic equation 2x + 4=6x. We can solve for x. X equals 1. We have taken a somewhat complex equation and made it simple. No loose ends. No complexity. Simplicity. An answer. I think the author is referring to this type of process when he refers to a story being factored out at the end.

What has occurred in these processes, both dramatical and mathematical, is taking complexity and reducing it to simplicity. This is an apt metaphor for the type of “drama” I am accused of being snobbish about. When people accuse me of being a movie snob, it is because I am not entertained by or interested in films that factor out the complexity of life. Can we truly resolve every dramatic situation with an answer and a lesson?

I love art that highlights complexities. A favorite example is the film “In the Bedroom.” In this movie, in sum, a young man is killed by his girlfriend’s ex-husband, and the parents of the slain man attempt to live with the sorrow, even while the murderer roams free in the town after being released from jail. As the parents’ marriage unravels, the wife convinces the husband to kill the murderer. He does so. In the final scene, as he comes home after the murder in the blue light of dawn, he lays down in bed. His wife, showing a peace she hasn’t shown since before the murder, offers to get him a cup of coffee and gets up to make it. As she leaves, he lays in bed, staring at the ceiling, his life changed forever.

This is complex. The final murder has given the wife peace that it has not given the husband. The story is not over. All we have done is closed one chapter, and we can assume that more problems come in the future. We do not have a happily ever after. We do not have a full resolution. We only have a partial resolution that may lead to greater understanding of real complexities. That is life. And that is what drama should illuminate. All the rest, all that can be factored out to x=1, is fairy tale.

Shameless

My friend Rob and I were talking recently about how many newscasters have included on the news stations' sites links to their personal blogs and MySpace pages. So, in one click, we can go from today's headlines to finding out that "meteoroligist" Kris Crocker likes System of a Down.

This led us to a discussion of how the younger generation is becoming inexplicable to us. What makes them confusing is their predilection for exposure. Sure, I have a blog, as does Rob, but our discussions tend not to be of the personal type--in other words, our entries are about externalities like art and politics...they are not the stuff of psychoanalysts' couches.

Young peoples' lives, ergo their blogs, seem not only to be an open book, but a book they beg us to read. Further, these are not books of accomplishments like a memoir or an autobiography, they are compendia of every innermost thought and desire, of trial personae, of pinup photos...things that our generation is accustomed to keeping to ourselves.

I thought of this as I read a short piece on France's president Nicolas Sarkozy, who, at the time of the writing, had yet to wed his new sweetheart, Carla Bruni. Sarkozy had, right after being elected, divorced his wife and began cavorting with Bruni. What makes Sarkozy's decision so odd is not that a French president has a mistress. Mitterand's mistress was an open secret, and she even attended his funeral, standing next to his wife. However, his emphasis was on "secret." Sarkozy has decided to emphasize the "open" part of the phrase "open secret."

What makes Sarkozy so thoroughly modern, so exquisitely MySpace, is how extrovertedly public he is about his sexcapades. As Adam Gopnick of the New Yorker wrote:

What distinguishes the ballad of Carla and Nicolas from similar tales is that this time the media is not trying to pry into the private life of a public man; this time, a public man is trying desperately to parade his private life in front of the media. Sarkozy not only performed for the press, welcoming photographers along as he and Bruni holidayed in Egypt and walked on the beach in what used to be called bathing costumes; he insists, to everyone’s embarrassment, on talking about their bonheur and their approaching marriage at press conferences. This is not tacit complicity, of the Princess Di-and-the-tabloids kind; it is Presidential leadership. Sarkozy wants people to think about his sex life, in the way that Bill Clinton didn’t want people thinking about his. The Sarkozy moment is more like Tom Cruise pounding Oprah’s sofa; the gentleman is so vehement about his love that something seems weird about it.

I don't think his vehement love is weird. I think it is a harbinger of the times, and we must begin getting used to these unseemly parades of information that used to be kept private. This type of exposure started years ago. Heck, we even know what kind of underwear Bill Clinton wears. (Wouldn't it be interesting if a wag decided to ask Hillary the same question?)

I could lament the fact that, as Rob's friend Derek proclaimed, "there's no shame any more," but I fear that I have finally settled on the adult side of the generational divide, so my complaints just sound like the typical grumblings of an old man.

Read the Gopnick article here.

Reading Really IS Fundamental

A recent article in The New Yorker, "Twilight of the Books" by Caleb Crain, added yet another lamentation concerning the decline of reading in western culture, and America in particular.

Even though I am an English teacher, I get tired of these jeremiads by the chicken littles who say the cultural sky is falling. The statistics (and the above article cites many--too many) seem to be irrefutable: people aren't reading as much as they used to read. But the question I always ask myself is, "Why does that matter?" We know that IQs have been rising pretty much all through the 20th century--the proof has been given the name the Flynn Effect (as outlined eloquently in a recent Malcolm Gladwell article).

So people are getting smarter, right? Well, as Gladwell points out, we have become more abstract in our thinking, and the IQ tests examine this type of abstract thinking. So we may not be getting smarter, we may just be getting better at abstract thinking. But as our culture becomes less literate, the Flynn Effect might reverse as we become less able to recognize patterns. This pattern recognition is what has led us to the IQ gains and to our modern, abstract way of thinking--a way of thinking that seems to be, more and more, the only way of thinking that allows for personal success.

Thus, abstract (modern) thinking seems to derive from literacy, so, to answer my question posed earlier, literacy is very important for the habits of mind it creates--the ability to reason. The Crain article cites a great example of the difference between literate and illiterate thinking:

It’s difficult to prove that oral and literate people think differently[....] But some supporting evidence came to hand in 1974, when Aleksandr R. Luria, a Soviet psychologist, published a study based on interviews conducted in the nineteen-thirties with illiterate and newly literate peasants in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Luria found that illiterates had a “graphic-functional” way of thinking that seemed to vanish as they were schooled. In naming colors, for example, literate people said “dark blue” or “light yellow,” but illiterates used metaphorical names like “liver,” “peach,” “decayed teeth,” and “cotton in bloom.” Literates saw optical illusions; illiterates sometimes didn’t. Experimenters showed peasants drawings of a hammer, a saw, an axe, and a log and then asked them to choose the three items that were similar. Illiterates resisted, saying that all the items were useful. If pressed, they considered throwing out the hammer; the situation of chopping wood seemed more cogent to them than any conceptual category. One peasant, informed that someone had grouped the three tools together, discarding the log, replied, “Whoever told you that must have been crazy,” and another suggested, “Probably he’s got a lot of firewood.” One frustrated experimenter showed a picture of three adults and a child and declared, “Now, clearly the child doesn’t belong in this group,” only to have a peasant answer: "Oh, but the boy must stay with the others! All three of them are working, you see, and if they have to keep running out to fetch things, they’ll never get the job done, but the boy can do the running for them."

Literacy allows people another way of seeing--the ability to be metacognitive, to think about thinking. This ability is not necessarily a better one, not necessarily a smarter one, but it certainly is an increasingly useful one in our modern world.

More importantly for our society, a literate mindset seems to be the only one that would allow for the debate a democracy requires. As a researcher concluded after synthesizing existing research on the "oral mind-set":

Whereas literates can rotate concepts in their minds abstractly, orals embed their thoughts in stories. According to Ong, the best way to preserve ideas in the absence of writing is to “think memorable thoughts,” whose zing insures their transmission. In an oral culture, cliché and stereotype are valued, as accumulations of wisdom, and analysis is frowned upon, for putting those accumulations at risk. There’s no such concept as plagiarism, and redundancy is an asset that helps an audience follow a complex argument. Opponents in struggle are more memorable than calm and abstract investigations, so bards revel in name-calling and in “enthusiastic description of physical violence.” Since there’s no way to erase a mistake invisibly, as one may in writing, speakers tend not to correct themselves at all. Words have their present meanings but no older ones, and if the past seems to tell a story with values different from current ones, it is either forgotten or silently adjusted. As the scholars Jack Goody and Ian Watt observed, it is only in a literate culture that the past’s inconsistencies have to be accounted for, a process that encourages skepticism and forces history to diverge from myth.

It seems that just the widespread ability to read might have been the catalyst that dragged us hominids out of the dark ages. It now seems that the declining ability to read might be what is plunging us back into them.

Read the entire article here.

TV

Harper's ran an interesting story last month on the filmmaker Michael Haneke. (I actually posted about him recently too.)

The Harper's article had three interesting insights, only two of which were related, but each of them stirred my interest in film, and pointed out, in some ways, why I find it so rewarding.

The first quotation is from the author of the article, who discusses the uses of television.

My father, who would regularly read five or six novels a week, spent the last six weeks of his life in a hospital, watching the miniature television set that dangled from a crane beside his bed. He couldn't concentrate enough to read, he would say, with the surprise of somebody who was used to having a mind that did what he told it to do. Watching television allowed him to stay on the surface of things; without it, his thoughts would invariably turn inward, to what was happening to him, to what the doctors said was going to happen to him. Television was company and comfort; its distraction was welcome.

Anybody who knows me knows how I feel about television. I don't watch it, and I feel, for the most part, it's a colossal time waster. I especially hate the ads--they are getting so brazen and foul. I would be willing to bet kids get exposure to worse content on ads than they do on the shows.

But this quotation interested me not because it took a commonplace stance against TV. Instead, I realized why I am attracted to TV, because I am attracted, very much. I tell my students the reason I don't have cable is not because I can't find anything good to watch--if I had cable and a Tivo, I am so interested in so many things that I would find much too much to watch and I'd never get anything done.

When I do watch TV, after I'm finished a sense of (for lack of the ability to think of a better word) disorientation takes over. I snap off the TV and think "where did the time go?" Not in the sense of "time flies when you're having fun." That type of timebend allows you to look back and remember all the fun things you just did, and to realize that fully living life, for a short time, defies the tyranny of time. (It's almost like, for that time, you are deathless because you are living.)

Reading a great book or watching a great movie has a similar effect. It's effect, though, is on the future. When you surface from a great work of art, the world looks different. You are changed. A great work of art sticks with you--you have taken it in and assimilated it into yourself. You can't undo it--it has become part of you forever.

TV is the opposite. (I play video games too, and the effect is the same as in TV.) The time flies because life is denied. I cannot look back after playing a video game and remember much of anything, nor can I say the experience was enriching for my future. The action, as the quotation above said, is entirely on the surface. Time flies not because you are living life; time flies because your are killing time, not living at all.

The act of "vegging out" in front of a screen is common to all of us. I am not denying the exquisite pleasure of plugging myself in and losing myself. But it's pleasure is more akin to a drug. Drugs are not necessarily bad...in moderation. The problem arises when, as a nation, we watch 145 hours a month. For perspective, a full-time worker puts in 160 hours a month.

I'm rambling, as I usually do, and I've strayed from my point. Let me bring it back. The pleasures of film can be much richer than the pleasures of network TV. For instance, could you imagine any TV producer from any major network saying the following, as Haneke did?

I consider myself a realist. That doesn't mean I'm a pessimist. The pessimists are those who make purely escapist films, because they believe people are so stupid that it's useless to make a film about anything serious. But someone who points to wounds in society is also trying to change things, even just a bit.

Non-escapist films ask us to think, something we spend 145 hours a month of leisure time trying to avoid. Non-escapist films treat us like we're NOT stupid. Today, though, even many of the critically-acclaimed movies we watch are designed to tell us what we already know to be true.

With many other films we are bludgeoned with the "truth": the images and the narrative are so overburdened by what the filmmaker wants to tell us that any emotion is pushed to the surface, hardening into a thick crust of sentiment. Even those movies that are supposed to be smarter than the usual Hollywood fare get mired in this condescension. In The Constant Gardener, for instance, which is based on Jon Le Carre's novel about greedy pharmaceutical companies and their malfeasance in Africa, the villains kill, Ralph Fiennes cries, the music swells, and we feel sorry for him and disgusted with the evildoers. A. O. Scott of the New York Times, one of many critics who praised the film for its intelligence, declared that The Constant Gardener was "likely to linger in your mind and may even trouble your conscience." I suspect that the only people who left the theater with their consciences genuinely troubled by what they had just seen were executives a Pfizer or Roche. If, like most of the critics, you had even a trace of antipathy toward the pharmaceutical industry going into the film, you left it feeling that your suspicions had been confirmed: angry at the world, perhaps, but reassured of your assumptions about that world.

Looking back over this post, I'm looking for a thread, and the thread seems to be this: as many of my posts have done, I realize now that this one is simply a plea for people to stop seeing media simply as a commodity, as a pastime, as an entertainment, but also to see it as a way to possibly elevate ourselves, to teach ourselves, to emerge from our interaction with it changed people, ones who can then take the questions raised (for great art rarely gives answers) and use them to live our lives more fully, more deeply. That doesn't mean turn off the TV (though that's not a bad idea). It means put something good on your TV. You'll know it's good because it makes you feel more, not less, alive.

Thomas Jefferson is Rolling in his Grave

My friend Rob and I have been in a kind of long distance argument with some people over our disdain for popular entertainment. Rob and I have ridiculed such popular entertainments as Transformers, 300 and Dancing With the Stars. I don't have anything against any of these in particular (though 300 might be the stupidest movie I have ever seen), but I do hold a grudge against what passes for art in our society.

I have been accused of being elitist, and I don't necessarily disagree with that appellation. I believe that some art is better than others, the same way that I believe that some baseball players are better than others and that some food is better than others. It's funny, if I said steak is better than Kraft Mac N Chee, I'm not an elitist. If I say A-Rod is a better player than Yuniesky Betancourt, I'm not an elitist. But if I say Children of Men is better than 300, suddenly I'm an elitist. That's not to say that Mac, Yuni and 300 are not worthy of anybody liking them. That IS to say, though, that just because somebody likes something doesn't mean it's good.

I like America's Funniest Home Videos. I would watch it three hours a day if I could, no kidding. But it's not "good". It's entertaining, but it's not "good".

To say that something is good requires the frontal lobe, the thinking part. To say that I like something requires the brain stem, the reptilian brain, the feeling part. So I can't argue, and I won't argue, if people say they like something. However, I can argue, and will argue, if someone argues that something is good just because they like it.

And what America likes is getting, on the whole, stupider and stupider. We are not exercising the frontal lobe, the thinking part of our brain. To wit:

One in four adults read no books at all in the past year, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll released Tuesday. Of those who did read, women and older people were most avid, and religious works and popular fiction were the top choices.

The survey reveals a nation whose book readers, on the whole, can hardly be called ravenous. The typical person claimed to have read four books in the last year — half read more and half read fewer. Excluding those who hadn't read any, the usual number read was seven.

"I just get sleepy when I read," said Richard Bustos of Dallas, a habit with which millions of Americans can doubtless identify. Bustos, a 34-year-old project manager for a telecommunications company, said he had not read any books in the last year and would rather spend time in his backyard pool.

Read the entire article here.

I Guess I'm Quirky

I used to think I didn't like "quirky" things. I thought I went for more substance. Used to, that is, until I read this article in The Atlantic Monthly. It says :

We’re drowning in quirk. It is the ruling sensibility of today’s Gen-X indie culture, defined territorially by the gentle ministrations of public radio’s This American Life; the strenuously odd (and now canceled) TV sitcom Arrested Development; the movies of Wes Anderson; Dave Eggers’s McSweeney’s Web site; the performance art, music, and writing of Miranda July; and the just-too-wacky-to-be-fully-believable memoirs of Augusten Burroughs.

Ouch. I love This American Life, I love love Arrested Development, I love Wes Anderson's "Rushmore," I think Eggers is great, and I really liked July's movie "You, Me, and Everyone You Know." Thankfully for my ego, I read Burroughs' book "Running With Scissors" and I didn't really love it.

However, the damage is done. It doesn't feel very good to be put into a demographic category like that, to have someone say "Look, you fit neatly into this set of criteria." But I do fit. It appears that I'm a quirk lover, but I didn't think I was.

But what is "quirk"? According to the author of the article, Michael Hirschorn, it is:

an embrace of the odd against the blandly mainstream. It features mannered ingenuousness, an embrace of small moments, narrative randomness, situationally amusing but not hilarious character juxtapositions (on HBO’s recent indie-cred comedy Flight of the Conchords , the titular folk-rock duo have one fan), and unexplainable but nonetheless charming character traits. Quirk takes not mattering very seriously. Quirk is odd, but not too odd. That would take us all the way to weird, and there someone might get hurt.

He follows up this definition with two recent film examples of quirk: Napoleon Dynamite and Little Miss Sunshine. I liked Napoleon Dynamite and loved Little Miss Sunshine.

Oh no. I'm a quirkaholic.

As I said before, though, I didn't think I was. I hated the forced quirkiness of movies like Garden State and Waitress.

Ah, who am I kidding. If quirk is done reasonably well, I'm a total sucker. Micheal Hirschorn, you nailed me, and it doesn't feel good. As a final insult, here's a criticism of quirk that stings me.

Quirk, loosed from its moorings, quickly becomes exhausting. It’s easy for David Cross’s character on Arrested Development to cover himself in paint for a Blue Man Group audition, or for the New Zealand duo on Flight of the Conchords to make a spectacularly cheesy sci-fi video about the future while wearing low-rent robot costumes. But the pleasures are passing. Like the proliferation of meta-humor that followed David Letterman and Jerry Seinfeld in the ’90s, quirk is everywhere because quirkiness is so easy to achieve: Just be odd … but endearing. It becomes a kind of psychographic marker, like wearing laceless Chuck Taylors or ironic facial hair—a self-satisfied pose that stands for nothing and doesn’t require you to take creative responsibility. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

Read the entire article here.

Teens and sex

As I have noted here before, abstinence education doesn't keep teens from having sex. Guess what does work.

Nothing.

Here's my theory. First, let's look at what kind of teenagers are having sex. Apparently, it's the dumb ones.

High-school age adolescents with higher IQs and extremely low IQs were less likely to have had first intercourse than those with average to below average intelligence.

In fact, a more detailed study from 2000 is devoted strictly to this topic, and finds the same thing: Smart Teens Don't Have Sex (or Kiss Much Either).

The team looked at 1000s of representative teens grades 7-12 in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and The Biosocial Factors in Adolescent Development datasets, both of which include an IQ test, and include detailed sexual experience questions ranging from hand-holding to intercourse. As with the other study there was a curvilinear relationship: students with IQs above 100 and below 70 were significantly less likely to have had intercourse than those in between. Also like the other study, they found teens with IQs ranging from 75 to 90 had the lowest probability of virginity (the authors note this is also the same IQ range where propensity towards crime peaks). Read the article here.

After reading this, the natural tendency is to say that a better education for kids might reduce their chances of indulging in high-risk behavior, in this case sex. However, that idea supposes that IQ is something which can be elevated with education, and almost all the research tells us that IQ is mostly inherited.

For instance, according to this entry,

The role of genes and environment (nature and nurture) in determining IQ is reviewed in Plomin et al. (2001, 2003). Until recently heritability was mostly studied in children. Various studies find the heritability of IQ between 0.4 and 0.8 in the United States;that is, depending on the study, a little less than half to substantially more than half of the variation in IQ among the children studied was due to variation in their genes. The remainder was thus due to environmental variation and measurement error. A heritability in the range of 0.4 to 0.8 implies that IQ is "substantially" heritable.

So what that means, essentially, is that unintelligent people are mostly born that way, and education can help them but little when it comes to IQ. These "genetically challenged" teens are more likely to have sex earlier, thus putting them at greater risk of getting pregnant, and thus putting us as a society at greater risk of having even more "genetically challenged" parents in the future. In sum, stupid people have more babies, which, of course, explains the popularity of "Dancing With The Stars" and "300".

Catch-22

I was buying milk at the store this morning when the cashier asked me how I was doing.

Now, I know the proper response is "Well," as it is an adverb modifying the verb "doing," whereas "good" is an adjective and is, technically, the improper response to the question. However, when I respond by saying "well" I often feel like a pedantic ass, so, in most situations, I respond with the improper but familiar response.

"Good," I said, "how are you?"

"Well," she said.

That sort of exchange kind of puts me in a bind. I would like to say to her, "You know, I'd like to go back a little bit and change my response to 'well' because I know that is the proper English." Of course, you can't do that because it would make you look like a pedantic ass.

However, it made me think that maybe SHE was being a pedantic ass by sort of correcting me with her reply. It seems to me that if you make a generic query like "How are you?" (a query that really isn't even asking for a response--she doesn't care how I'm doing, and if I launched into a monologue about how awesome my marriage is, she will regret having asked me), politeness would seem to dictate that you mirror the person's response. After all, the question is simply a pleasantry, and it isn't pleasant to make the person you are talking to feel like a chump for using improper grammar.

That is why I call for a moratorium henceforth and forever more on asking the question "How are you?" or any of its variants (e.g. "How's it going?" et al).

First of all, the person rarely if ever cares what you say in response. Often, when I say "Hi" to someone in the morning as I am passing them in the hall at work, and if they respond "How's it going?", I will not respond, as I simply assume they are using the question to say "Hi" in return.

Second of all...well, I've already established the second of all.

But the problem has not been solved. What do I do if someone asks me the question first? I can't be a jerk and not respond. But I don't want to keep doing this over and over every day:

YOU: "How's it going?

ME: (Insert variant of "good" here: can't complain, not bad, hanging in there, it's Friday, staying busy) "How are you?"

YOU: (Insert variant of "good" here: can't complain, not bad, hanging in there, it's Friday, staying busy)

That's why I propose countering these types of questions with absurdity. Let's assume there are two generic questions: "How are you?" and "What's new?/What's going on?" What if we responded to one question as if we were really asked the other question. For instance:

"How are you?"

"Not much."

or

"What's new?"

"Can't complain."

If we all began doing this, we have a chance to make a dent in this rhetorical scourge. If asking the question fails to elicit the proper response, maybe, slowly and imperceptibly, the question will go away, and we can return to civilized exchanges like this:

"Hi, Eric."

"Hi, John."

That sounds nice.

Framing a debate

Slate magazine recently asked why conservatives have been so good at winning divisive debates like the ones concerning gun control and abortion. The theory the article proposed is certainly nothing new--it said they're better at framing debates.

In ideological terms, the conservative movement remains more disciplined and better skilled than the liberal side at framing political debates. It has cast both issues in terms of absolute principle: the right to life on abortion, and to personal liberty in the case of guns. The call to conscience tends to be more compelling than the call to practicality, and the contradiction between these two positions—one libertarian, the other anti-libertarian—bothers very few people.

But what does it really mean to "frame a debate" well? In my opinion, when someone says a group is better at framing the debate, it means that they have found a way to simplify the issue to the point where it is binary--yes or no, good or evil, freedom or bondage.

"Abortion is murder."

"Gun ownership is about personal liberty."

What these types of debates ignore is the fact that no debate that endures is truly binary. If it were truly binary, it wouldn't endure. Do we debate stealing is wrong? No, we don't, because that truly is a binary debate. Stealing is wrong, end of story, no debate necessary. But the fact that we keep debating gun control and abortion seems to point to the fact that neither debate is black and white. Are laws restricting gun ownership unconstitutional, or do most gun laws fall into the gray area of the Second Amendment, the gray area of "well regulated" or "militia"?

I can see, though, the allure of binary-type thinking. It makes life very easy, as it no longer requires you to think. All you need to do, when presented with a new problem, is apply the algorithm of your binary thinking, and all gray areas disappear. This, of course, can be a good thing. The Golden Rule is binary: when presented with a situation, just imagine what kind of treatment you would like, then do it. WWJD is binary. That's a good thing. I'm not religious, but I believe that if Christians read the Gospels and behaved exactly as Jesus did, the world would be transformed into a heaven on earth.

But so many things in the world cannot be reduced to binary thinking. That's why I think Libertarianism is such a flawed "philosophy." In the real world, with everything so interconnected, few debates that matter are binary. Is welfare good or bad? That depends on what kind of welfare, who is getting it and for how long? Are high taxes good or bad? That depends. If you are fighting a war, how the heck else are you going to pay for it? (Come to think of it, how ARE we going to pay for it?) You see, in the real world, binary thinking is reductive and possibly dangerous.

So, it seems the only way to combat this oversimplified thinking is to ask those types of clarifying questions. What about this? Have you thought of that? Sure, it may make our head hurt when we think a lot and the issue gets complex, but this is the only way, really, to find solutions that work. I guess the mantra we should always have in our heads is "It just isn't that simple. Let's find the complexity." That's when the real debate will begin.

Simplify

Every year when I teach Walden, I begin asking myself some deep questions: Am I doing what I want to do with my life? Am I living deliberately or robotically? Am I spending my life pursuing "stuff," forgetting the truly valuable things in life?

Thoreau was a crank, a jerk, a hypocrite, but that does not change the fact that almost everything he said was true. When many think of Thoreau and Walden, they think he suggested we all drop out of society and go live in the woods as a hermit. The fact is, Thoreau was not a hermit--he walked to town almost every day. Rather, he decided to simplify his life, so he could determine truly what his life should be--that is, once you strip away all the unnecessaries of life, you will, by definition, be left with only what is necessary.

And, what is necessary for you must, of course, be different that what is necessary for me. Thus, Walden was simply a call for every one of us to simplify our life, determine what our goals are, and advance confidently in their direction.

Perhaps my favorite quotation from Walden is this:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan- like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

Every year I learn something from reading Walden. Reading it also puts me on the lookout for modern day Thoreaus, like this guy.

Down a rambling residential road on the outskirts of Sebastopol, the dream house sits like a testament to discriminating taste.

This dream house is the love child of artist-builder Jay Shafer, who lovingly hand-crafted it. The stainless-steel kitchen, gleaming next to the natural wood interior, is outfitted with customized storage and built-ins. From his bed, Shafer can gaze into the Northern California sky through a cathedral window. In his immaculate office space, a laptop sits alongside rows of architectural books and magazines -- many featuring his house on the cover. And from the old-fashioned front porch, he can look out on a breathtaking setting: an apple orchard in full bloom.

But in an era when bigger is taken as a synonym for better, calling Shafer's home a dream house might strike some as an oxymoron. Why? The entire house, including sleeping loft, measures only 96 square feet -- smaller than many people's bathrooms. But Jay Shafer's dream isn't of a lifestyle writ large but of one carefully created and then writ tiny.

Read the entire article (and see pictures of the house) here.

Abstinence education

...even in 1990s Texas, where Mr Bush spent $10m a year on abstinence education, the state had the fifth highest teen pregnancy rate in the US. Over the past six years he has stepped up the programme to more than $100m a year. He recently braved ridicule by extending it to adults aged 20-29, an age range in which 90% of people are sexually active.

The fact that abstinence education doesn't work does not fill me with joy, even though I had a feeling it wouldn't work--now the research shows that. I do not want teenagers having sex any more than my right wing compatriots. But when more than $1 billion of federal money has been spent on promoting abstinence since 1998 - posters printed, television advertisements broadcast and entire education programs devised for hundreds of thousands of girls and boys, we have to try something different. Please let's stop throwing money down this sinkhole.

Maybe the problem is that abstinence education isn't designed to work. Maybe it's not really a policy decision--rather, it's a decision meant to align with certain religious principles. That's fine, I suppose. But the policy still needs to work. And it doesn't. So let's stop it and maybe try something new.

Read the article here.

Would Beauty Transcend?

HE EMERGED FROM THE METRO AT THE L'ENFANT PLAZA STATION AND POSITIONED HIMSELF AGAINST A WALL BESIDE A TRASH BASKET. By most measures, he was nondescript: a youngish white man in jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt and a Washington Nationals baseball cap. From a small case, he removed a violin. Placing the open case at his feet, he shrewdly threw in a few dollars and pocket change as seed money, swiveled it to face pedestrian traffic, and began to play.

It was 7:51 a.m. on Friday, January 12, the middle of the morning rush hour. In the next 43 minutes, as the violinist performed six classical pieces, 1,097 people passed by. Almost all of them were on the way to work, which meant, for almost all of them, a government job. L'Enfant Plaza is at the nucleus of federal Washington, and these were mostly mid-level bureaucrats with those indeterminate, oddly fungible titles: policy analyst, project manager, budget officer, specialist, facilitator, consultant.

Each passerby had a quick choice to make, one familiar to commuters in any urban area where the occasional street performer is part of the cityscape: Do you stop and listen? Do you hurry past with a blend of guilt and irritation, aware of your cupidity but annoyed by the unbidden demand on your time and your wallet? Do you throw in a buck, just to be polite? Does your decision change if he's really bad? What if he's really good? Do you have time for beauty? Shouldn't you? What's the moral mathematics of the moment?

On that Friday in January, those private questions would be answered in an unusually public way. No one knew it, but the fiddler standing against a bare wall outside the Metro in an indoor arcade at the top of the escalators was one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made. His performance was arranged by The Washington Post as an experiment in context, perception and priorities -- as well as an unblinking assessment of public taste: In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?

Read the rest of the article here. It's long, but it is well worth it, I promise.

A Civics Lesson from "This American Life"

I'm listening to this podcast right now, and it is blowing my mind. Do yourself a favor: download this and listen to it intently. It just may change the way you look at things.

Habeas Schmabeas
Winner of a 2006 Peabody Award

For a limited time, download an mp3 of this episode for free! It's our special, uncut version containing several minutes of additional material.Also, you can also download a transcript.

The right of habeas corpus has been a part of this country's legal tradition longer than we've actually been a country. It means the government has to explain why it's holding a person in custody. But now, the war on terror has nixed many of the rules we used to think of as fundamental. At Guantanamo Bay, our government initially claimed that the prisoners should not be covered by habeas — or even by the Geneva Conventions — because they're the most fearsome terrorist enemies we have. But is that true? Is it a camp full of terrorists, or a camp full of our mistakes?

Prologue.
Joseph Margulies, a lawyer for one of the detainees at Guantanamo, explains how the detention facility there was created to be an ideal interrogation facility. Any possible comfort, like water or natural light, are entirely controlled by the interrogators. (3 minutes)

Act One.There's No U.S. in Habeas.
Jack Hitt explains how President's Bush's War on Terror changed the rules for prisoners of war, and how it is that under those rules, it'd be possible that someone whose classified file declares that they pose no threat to the United States, could still be locked up indefinitely — potentially forever! — at Guantanamo. (24 minutes). Clarification: When Seton Hall Professor Baher Azmy discusses the classified file of his client, Murat Kurnaz, in this act, he is referring to information that had previously been made public and published in the Washington Post. That material has subsequently been reclassified.

Act Two. September 11th, 1660.
Habeas Corpus began in England. Recently, 175 members of the British Parliament filed a "friend of the court" brief in one of the Supreme Court cases on habeas and Guantanamo, apparently the first time that's happened in Supreme Court history. In their brief, the members of Parliament warn about the danger of suspending habeas: "During the British Civll War, the British created their own version of Guantanamo Bay and dispatched undesirable prisoners to garrisons off the mainland, beyond the reach of habeas corpus relief." In London, reporter Jon Ronson, author of Them, goes in search of what happened. (6 minutes)

Act Three. We Interrogate the Detainees.
Although over two hundred prisoners from the U.S. Facility at Guantanamo Bay have been released, few of them have ever been interviewed on radio or television in America. Jack Hitt conducts rare and surprising interviews with two former Guantanamo detainees about life in Guantanamo. (20 minutes)

Standards

While looking through Netflix recently, I looked at some of the movies the site recommended. One of the recommendations was The Deer Hunter. I remember liking it a lot when I saw it my freshman year in college, but I really can't be sure any more if I would still like the movies I liked back then. For instance, I really liked Rain Man when it came out, but when I saw clips recently, I was shocked at how much the movie didn't stand the test of time. It was ham-fisted and sentimental.

I guess this change in my tastes is a good thing. I don't believe 36-year-olds like me should like all the same movies we liked when we were teenagers. When we watched a stupid movie, we didn't have the experience to say, "I've seen this story a thousand times." With experience comes better taste. Here is an analogy.

If I saw a gymnast perform on the uneven bars, and I was asked to give her a score, I would give her a ten. I have no idea what to look for, and the routine looks hard, so I'll reward her with that ten. What do I know? Then, let's say the next gymnast performs and does a worse job than the first. I give her a...7. Sure, whatever. Then, let's say the third gymnast performs and blows both of the previous two out of the water. I look back and realize I shouldn't have given the first gymnast a 10. Experience has given me two things: 1) more information to use for judging; 2) more information that sheds light on previous judgments. Then, imagine how refined my scoring system would be if I saw thousands of routines over the ensuing years. I would have a great deal of information with which to make judgments, and I would be able to make distinctions that few people can make.

This is how life should be. For instance, once you have seen "When Harry Met Sally," you should look back and realize that all the previous chick flicks you saw were pretty lame compared to this one, and that most of the ones you will see will also probably pale in comparison. This is what art appreciation is, and this is what great critics do.

Criticism has gotten a bad rap recently. It is often a badge of pride for people to loudly proclaim that they ignore movie critics, or that they like all the movies the critics hate. This seems to me to be not only a form of anti-intellectualism (the same impulse that made us call the "A" students "nerds"), but it also robs people of the pleasure of art.

Criticism's goal is not to have logic trump what we like. Great criticism weds the head and the heart. Its aim is not to denigrate art, its aim is to help us "love wisely what we before loved well," as Margaret Fuller put it.

According to critic Alfred Kazin, to appreciate art on should begin "by noticing his intuitive reactions and building up from them." Another illustration of the equation [Reaction + Thought = Art appreciation] came from possibly the greatest movie critic of all time, Pauline Kael, who said that "the only...intelligent way to experience movies was to combine one's deepest emotional reactions...with a probing analysis of them." She added that the best movie critic was the person "who is aware of what is well done and what badly done in a movie, who can accept some things in it and reject others, who uses all his senses in reacting, not just his emotional vulnerabilities." That may be the best defense of criticism I have seen. We should all be critics, taking our first reaction and thinking about it, molding it as we consider and gain new information, possibly rejecting our initial, visceral reaction after thinking about it for a while. Isn't that the aim of great art, to provoke consideration of the deeper things in life? In the end, too, criticism IS art appreciation, and both of them, at their core, are really about having standards.

That's one reason I love American Idol, especially the first few weeks of each round. The terrible singers who audition have rarely if ever been told how terrible they are. My assumption is that friends, relatives, or lovers don't have the courage to say, "Honey, though you may have many other talents, you don't have the talent for singing." So this person goes through life believing he/she is wonderful. Then, American Idol performs a valuable public service by telling these people that the world has standards and you aren't meeting them. Idol is the perfect antidote to a world that tells everyone they're special, and that we all can be anyone we want to be.


We should always be growing, always be gathering information about the world and our place in it, and we should be adjusting our world view accordingly. One of the signs that we are still growing is the ability to look back at something we liked when we were younger and say, "What was I thinking?" We do that all the time with fashion--we see a picture of ourselves, with our Flock of Seagulls hairdos or parachute pants and, rightly, blush. We sometimes even do that with politicians and political parties--can we officially now count on one hand the number of people who are still staunch Bush/Republican supporters?

Thus, being rational, we grow up, we change, we gather new information and we come to a new decision. This is called being an adult, a human being. Then why is this considered waffling when a politician does it? I would find it refreshing if a pol could say, "I have looked at new information, I have had the benefit of X years of experience, and I can now say I was wrong."

We all could benefit from saying something like this more often.

Big Babies?

I imagine myself to be a grown-up, as, presumably, do you. You think that because you negotiated puberty and developed secondary sexual characteristics, and got qualifications and opened a bank account and subjected yourself to the scrutiny of anti-terrorism laws and anti-money-laundering laws and learned to drive and got a job and perhaps a spouse and maybe children, and quite possibly even pay your taxes, you are a grown-up.

Sometimes, things strike you as a bit odd. It strikes you, for example, as out of kilter that between getting off the plane and reaching the outside world at London Heathrow there were, at last count, 93 notices telling you off for things you hadn't done or which it hadn't even occurred to you to do.

The plain fact is that you are being treated like a baby. You, I, all of us are on the receiving end of a sustained campaign to infantilise us: our tastes, our responses, our behaviour, our private thoughts, our decisions, our buying habits, our philosophies, our political sensibilities.

We are told what to think. We are talked down to. We are distracted with colour and movement, patronised, spoon-fed, our responses pre-empted and our autonomy eroded with a fine, rich, heavily funded contempt.

Here is a random sample of what is implicit in the assumptions that are made about all of us:

We are unable to control our appetites;
We cannot postpone gratification;
We have little sense of self, and what we do have is deformed;
We have no articulable inner life;
We are pre- or sub-literate;
We are solipsistic;
We do not have the ability to exercise responsible autonomy;
We require constant surveillance and constant admonition;
We are potentially, if not actually, violent;
We have no social sensibilities beyond the tribal;
We have no discrimination.
Do we still want to sign up to this? Do we want to be Big Babies?

While I disagree that it is the media's fault, this article made me think about how much of a kid I am: I play video games; I have posters on my basement walls; I have an iPod. The list goes on. I realize that many people of my generation are like me: they haven't fully grown up yet. I wonder, though, if that is a problem.

After I looked at the following list, in which the authors suggests ways to be an adult, I wonder if I really want to be an "adult." However, some of the suggestions would be good not only for me, but for everone in our culture--especially the first suggestion.

How to be an adult
Don't be affronted: Being affronted (or offended, or complaining about 'inappropriateness') is no response for a grown-up. Only children believe the world should conform to their own view of it: a sort of magical thinking that can only lead to warfare, terrorism, unmanageable short-term debt and the Blair/Bush alliance
Mistrust anything catchy, whether it's the Axis of Evil, advertising slogans, or blatant branding ('New Labour'). Catchiness exists to prevent thought and to disguise motive. Grown-ups can think for themselves
Ignore celebrities, except when they are doing what they are celebrated for doing: acting, playing football et cetera. Skill does not confer moral, political or intellectual discrimination. (Except in the case of writers. Writers know everything and can lecture you with impunity.) If a celebrity is not celebrated for doing anything but being a celebrity, smile politely but pay no notice
We should not assume that market forces will decide wisely. The market is rigged by manipulation and infantilisation
Consider our own motivations: We may rail about being treated like children, ordered about, kept from the truth, nannied and exploited… but are we complicit in it? Could the reward actually be infantilisation itself?
Autonomy is the primary marker of being grown up. Babies, children and adolescents don't have any. We don't want to be in their boat
Suspect administration: Its purpose is to free the organisation to do what it's meant to do: but the triumph of the administrators - the lawyers, the accountants, the professional managers - means that too many organisations now believe that what they are meant to do is administer themselves. This is a profoundly infantile attitude
Do not love yourself unconditionally: Such love is for babies and comes from their mothers. Ignore fashion, particularly in clothes. You don't want to look like a teenager for ever
Never do business with a company offering 'solutions' as in 'ergonomic furniture solutions which minimise the postural strain associated with sitting' (chairs) and 'Post Office mailing solutions' (brown paper). The word suggests we have a problem, but since we are grown-ups, that is for us to decide
Denounce relativism at every turn: Shouting 'not fair' is childish. Demanding respect without earning it is childish. Don't fear seriousness. Babies aren't allowed to be serious
Watch our language. Is there really much difference between a six-year-old in a fright-wig and his father's waders shouting 'I'm the Mighty Wurgle-Burgle-Urgley-Goo' and an ostensible grown-up demanding to be called 'Tony Blair's Respect Tsar'?
Hide: Grown-ups are not required to be perpetually accountable, while the instincts of government and big business, both of which are, almost by their nature, great infantilisers, are to keep an eye on everyone all the time
Eat it up: There is nothing more babyish than having dietary requirements