Month: January 2011

Louis Menand highlights an unusual twist to 1960s literature:

“The Feminine Mystique” did not recommend that women pursue full-time careers, or that they demand their legal rights. It only advised women to be prepared for life after the children left home. “The Silent Spring” did not call for a ban on pesticides. It only suggested that their use be regulated. These are books whose significance exceeds anything they actually said. For many people, it doesn’t even matter what they said or why they were written. What matters is that, when the world turned, they were there.

Colombian William Chavarriaga, 49, performs as cartoon character Popeye the Sailor at Olaya Herrera airport on January 17 , 2011 in Medellin, Colombia. Chavarriaga has worked at the airport in different trades for 30 years. By Raul Arboleda/AFP/Getty Images.

Alan Jacobs celebrates Wikipedia's anniversary: 

No one understands the true genius of Wikipedia if they look only at the current version of any given page. James Bridle makes this clear when he explains why he decided to record the Wikipedia debate about how to recount the story of the Iraq war: "Wikipedia is a useful subset of the entire Internet, and as such a subset of all human culture. It's not only a resource for collating all human knowledge, but a framework for understanding how that knowledge came to be and to be understood; what was allowed to stand and what was not; what we agree on, and what we cannot." (The books are cool, but they are frozen in time: who knows how Wikipedia's account of the war may change in the coming years or even decades?)

Nicholas Carr reviews Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work!, the new biography by Douglas Coupland on the man who "came to be worshipped as a techno-utopian seer in the early ’60s":

[McLuhan's] books read like accounts of acid trips written by a bureaucrat. That kaleidoscopic, almost psychedelic style made him a darling of the counterculture—the bearded and the Birkenstocked embraced him as a guru—but it alienated him from his colleagues in academia. To them, McLuhan was a celebrity-seeking charlatan.

Neither his fans nor his foes saw him clearly. The central fact of McLuhan's life, as Coupland makes clear, was his conversion, at the age of twenty-five, to Catholicism, and his subsequent devotion to the religion’s rituals and tenets. Though he never discussed it, his faith forms the moral and intellectual backdrop to all his mature work. What lay in store, McLuhan believed, was the timelessness of eternity. The earthly conceptions of past, present, and future were, by comparison, of little consequence. His role as a thinker was not to celebrate or denigrate the world but simply to understand it, to recognize the patterns that would unlock history’s secrets and thus provide hints of God’s design.

 

John Walkenbach points to this chart on interstate migration and isolates the obvious:

Washington D.C. was #1 in the inbound list. … New Jersey was #1 in outbound moves.

Troy Patterson signals the end of the world with Playboy TV's new series "Brooklyn Kinda Love", which follows four couples as they "open their homes and their thighs":

The subjects give us too much information about their relationships, and they conduct those relationships with too much drama, and they have sexual intercourse on videotape. As produced by the creators of Taxicab Confessions—that classic text of late-night voyeurism—Brooklyn Kinda Love is possibly the final stroke in TV overexposure. For Brooklyn, I mean. Whether the show represents a new level of reality-TV exhibitionism is debatable, and there are certainly more barrel bottoms where it came from, but its appearance is possibly a signal that Brooklyn is finally overexposed, played out, and fatally unfashionable.

Ed Yong reports on a new study that changes how we view oxytocin, which "has been linked to virtually every positive aspect of human behaviour, including trust, social skills, empathy, generosity, cooperation, and even orgasm." The study shows one other, not so beneficial, side:

[Carsten de Dreu at the University of Amsterdam] presented volunteers with a famous series of moral dilemmas. For example, a runaway rail trolley is hurtling towards five people who are about to be killed unless you flip a switch that diverts the trolley into the path of just one person. All of the dilemmas took the same form – you weigh the lives of one person against a group. And in all the cases, the lone person had either a Dutch, German or Arab name, while the group were nameless.

After a sniff of placebo, the Dutch volunteers were just as likely to sacrifice the single person, no matter what name they had. But after sniffing oxytocin, they were far less likely to sacrifice the Dutch loners than the German and Arab ones.

Jonah Lehrer notes that these findings apply to most attempted "enhancements" to the brain:

This suggests that the feelings of trust and warmth triggered by oxytocin come with a hidden cost, in that we become less likely to trust “outsiders.” Although the chemical sharpens our positive feelings towards those we already know and understand, it also exaggerates the perceived differences between our in-group and everyone else. There is no love for all.

This shouldn’t be too surprising. One of the endlessly repeated lessons of the human brain is that it’s a finely equilibrated machine, full of carefully engineered compromises and tradeoffs. As a result, many of our attempted “enhancements” come with a steep cost, triggering a raft of unintended side-effects.

Akim Reinhardt argues as much as we would like to believe it, most of us wouldn't have been "the person working to free slaves through the underground railroad, or living peaceably with Indians, or smuggling Jews out of Europe." He explains:

You know who the abolitionists were?  Not to paint with too broad of a brush here, but a lot of them were religious fanatics.  They were the crazies, the radicals, the ones that everyone else pointed to and said: Hey, you’re really nuts.  What the hell’s wrong with you?  Knock it off already.  Abolitionists were the ones who regular people mocked, jeered, and cursed.  They were the outsiders of their day, the lunatic fringe of the early 19th century.  Slavery was normal, so a society that largely accepted slavery labeled them as crazy.

Gabriela Herman's photo series showcases dramatic pictures of various bloggers. Alex Balk wryly submits his own.

A reader writes:

Have you picked up on the fact that Loughner used Salvia Divinorum?  As you might gather from my previous emails on hallucinogens, I'm in favor of legalizing them.  But salvia is a totally different story.  I used it on a number of occasions, and I can say there were no positive qualities associated with it. 

It makes you entirely dissociative and causes powerful hallucinations.  The "come down" kind of feels like going from insane => sane.  I couldn't describe it any other way; your thoughts are jumbled, you don't know where you are or what matters. If you speak, it's generally nonsensical to the sober people around you.  Unlike mushrooms or LSD, there is no insight, no feeling of empathy – just a powerful feeling of alienation and jumbled, dissociative thoughts.  I can easily see a young mind, susceptible to mental illness, being snapped by a couple salvia trips. 

I'm not saying this should turn into a witch hunt against salvia, but if there was ever a drug that I felt young people should not be able to get their hands on, salvia is the one.  Frum's cannabis argument is pretty specious, but I'm telling you, salvia is a psychologically dangerous drug, especially when smoked as an extract, and especially for young, or mental-illness-prone minds.

Kate Dailey reported on the Loughner-Salvia link and found it highly dubious. The semi-legal drug has seen a surge of popularity since Miley Cyrus was recently caught on camera.