Month: December 2011

Samuel McNerney reviews the work of social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Haidt proposed that humans believe in five universal moral foundations: Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating, Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, and Sanctity/Degradation:

As the graph illustrates, liberals value Care and Fairness much more than the other three moral foundations whereas conservative endorse all five more or less equally. This shouldn’t sound too surprising, liberals tend to value universal rights and reject the idea of the United States being superior while conservatives tend to be less concerned about the latest United Nation declaration and more partial to the United States as a superior nation.

The new polls today are striking in two respects. First, Newt is headed toward a landslide victory in the early states, apart from New Hampshire. He beats Romney in Florida and South Carolina by 15 and 19 points respectively. But in the same poll, Obama beats Gingrich in the general election in both Florida and South Carolina! I know it's way too soon, and I will bet, I dunno, $10,000, that the Republican candidate will win South Carolina next November. But still: Obama beats Gingrich by 12 points in Florida. Nationally, Obama beats Newt by around the same margin he beat John McCain – 6.9 percent – during a brutal recession.

Romney is far more competitive with Obama (behind by only 1.5 percent) but still underperforms the generic Republican by 2.5 points.  So now you know why the Establishment is beginning to panic.

Isaac Chotiner reviews Joseph Epstein's new book, Gossip: The Untrivial Pursuit:

Gossip tends to be discussed as a pastime for adults, but it is children who actually bear its heaviest burden. I spent almost a decade working in a neighborhood pharmacy in Berkeley, where old men would wander in to pick up Viagra prescriptions and teenagers would circle the condom section before sheepishly bringing their selection to the counter. It was all so obvious that I hardly noticed: The elderly viewed their erectile dysfunction as nothing more than life’s course, and could not have cared less if someone saw them. The teenagers looked pained to buy birth control, even from someone who was their own age. The older you are, the less you care what other people think.

Gossip has the power it does because we are all wary of having too much of ourselves revealed. This is probably why those moments from childhood—the secret that a classmate uttered, the detail from your home life that made it to school—can still register years later. If age has not been good to the practice of gossip, as Epstein argues, aging is the only remedy for overcoming the pain of being gossiped about. 

In a new book Jean-Louis Cohen argues that changes in architecture and design were a major legacy of WWII. Josh Rothman summarizes:

During the war, military manufacturers needed huge, windowless buildings large enough to hide aircraft manufacturing; today, the same sorts of structures are used for "big box" stores and factories everywhere. During the war, buildings often had to be prefabricated; today, prefab houses and sheds are in nearly every American town. Inspired by the Jeep — an off-road vehicle first built for the war, in 1941 — postwar auto designers moved away from the heavily-ornamented, luxury aesthetic of the prewar automobile, and started designing simpler, more utilitarian-looking cars. "Domestic interiors," Cohen writes, "were influenced by the compact spaces created in vehicles, airplanes, and ships."

(Photo: Mrs. Irma Lee McElroy, a former office worker, paints the American insignia on airplane wings in August of 1942. By the Library of Congress.)

One theory proposes that our primate ancestors needed a way to evoke three of our most dangerous predators (leopard, python, eagle) once we decided to walk on the ground. It's called the "snake/raptor/cat complex":

Faced with information overload, the brain of Australopithecus resorted to lumping information into manageable and memorable chunks. As a result, the cat, the snake, and the raptor were merged into a hybrid creature that had the salient predatory features of each: the face of a feline, the body of a snake, and the talons of a raptor. This is the hybrid “monster” that came to be known as the “dragon.”

Adam Kirsch reviews Life and Fate, a novel by Vasily Grossman:

Statistically speaking, the representative Holocaust story might not feature concentration camps or hiding places or repressive laws at all; it might simply be the story of waking up one morning to find German tanks in your street and a month later being shot and buried in a mass grave. 

Sir David Attenborough’s greatest hits in honor of his final appearance on the BBC:

Gary Stix reviews Sebastian Seung's Connectome, a book named after the "complete circuit diagram of the brain," which some hope will allow us to make digital copies of brains. The main philosophical question:

The central question for [Seung, a computational neuroscientist from MIT] —and the one that also keeps the transhumanists on tenterhooks—is whether you are your connectome. If you could deduce every connection point of every brain cell, the strength with which each neuron fires, and the way these firing patterns change as the cells interact with each other, would, in fact, you be left with a copy of you?

Why it's more exciting than it sounds: 

[H]ere on Earth, 90 percent of our methane comes from living things (farting cows, for example) or from dead, decaying, formerly living things. The other ten percent comes from not-so-exciting rocks leaching gas when in contact with moving water. In other words: on Earth, methane is evidence of life 90 percent of the time.

Vice explores it (video after the jump because it auto-plays):

The video's caption:

In the Issyk-Kul region of Kyrgyzstan, tradition is king. Polo's still played with a freshly killed goat and the men still marry their women the old-fashioned way: by abducting them off the street and forcing them to be their wife. Bride kidnapping is a supposedly ancient custom that's made a major comeback since the fall of Communism and now accounts for nearly half of all marriages in some parts of the country.

More videos in the series here.