Mara 18 leader Jose Daniel Galindo (aka "Criminal") gestures as he is escorted into a police armoured security vehicle in Guatemala City on May 2, 2012. Galindo and eight other gang members were accused of extorting businessmen of the transport system and for the murder of several bus drivers. By Johan Ordonez/AFP/GettyImages.
Nope:
The 1950s—the era of large families, crowded churches, and schmoozing suburbanites—brought us hand-wringing books such as Man Alone: Alienation in Modern Society and the best-selling The Lonely Crowd, which landed author David Reisman on the cover of Time magazine. About a half-century before that, policymakers were worrying about the loneliness of America’s farmers, and observers were attributing a rising suicide rate to the loneliness of immigrants or to modernity in general. And so on, ever back in time. Noted historian Page Smith described colonial Americans’ “cosmic loneliness” and the upset stomachs and alcoholism that resulted. Americans have either been getting lonelier since time immemorial or worrying about it since then.
The latter is more likely. Social scientists have more precisely tracked Americans’ isolation and reports of loneliness over the last several decades. The real news, they have discovered, is that there is no such epidemic; there isn’t even a meaningful trend.
Previous looks at whether Facebook is making us lonely here and here.
Facebook has announced a new option allowing you to display your organ donor status. Why it matters:
Around 7,000 Americans die each year while waiting for an organ transplant — to put things in perspective, the median wait for a kidney is about four years. People who die waiting do so because there aren’t enough donors, not because of medical technology. The vast majority of organs transplanted come from deceased donors who tick off that “donor” box at the D.M.V., but fewer than half of adult Americans sign up, which medical experts say is because people don’t like thinking about death while standing in line to renew their license.
Jeff Jarvis illustrates the peer pressure that Facebook provides:
Imagine tomorrow, God forbid, one of your Facebook friends needs a kidney. There’s a tool staring you in the face asking you to get tested for a match. Do you join that lottery, getting tested and hoping to fail (or win)? Do you risk being shunned by your community if you don’t? Do you join in shunning others if they don’t?
Sarah Kliff eyes a Nudge-like alternative that doesn’t involve social networking:
Under presumed consent legislation, a deceased individual is classified as a possible donor unless he or she explicitly objects prior to death. Unlike the United States, where individuals have to opt into organ donation, in most of continental Europe, citizens must opt out. … Organ donation rates are 25 to 30 percent higher in presumed consent countries, according to a 2005 paper in the Journal of Health Economics. When Belgium instituted a presumed consent law in 1985, the number of organ donors nearly doubled within two years.
(Anatomical Neon by Jessica Lloyd-Jones. Hat tip: Colossal)
Like Goldstein, Kevin Drum calls for more early education:
[A]s near as I can tell, taking, say, $100 billion out of K-12 education and redirecting it to pre-K would almost certainly be a pure win. That might not be the best way to fund it, but if political realities prevent us from raising more money in the near future, shifting spending would be a second-best alternative.
Yglesias doubts funding will be made avaliable.
Bruce Bartlett, the conservative economist and apostate Republican, is a long-time compatriot of the Dish. His newest book, The Benefit and the Burden, was recently covered here. Noah Kristula-Green offers an overview:
[It] starts off as an examination of America's tax code. Once the book concludes, it has gone from explaining how the IRS got started to laying out a plan so that American can avoid an oncoming fiscal calamity. It is to Bartlett's credit as a writer that he makes this topic accessible, while showing great aplomb in dismantling many of the myths and misconceptions that exist about taxes. … Bartlett writes about the many problems with the current American tax code with an eye towards his ideal system: a tax code that is not held hostage to the whims of the business cycle, that can raise enough revenue for the government, and which is not riddled with market-distorting exemptions. This leads Bartlett to endorse a Value-Added-Tax both for its inherent benefits and because he believes it can raise enough revenue to prevent the oncoming entitlement crisis.
To submit a question for Bruce, simply enter it into the field at the top of the Urtak poll (ignore the "YES or NO question" aspect and simply enter any open-ended question). We primed the poll with a handful of questions you can vote on right away – click "Yes" if you are interested in seeing him answer the question or "No" if you don't particularly care. We will air his responses soon.
AKA brain freeze:
When it detects intense cold, the body pumps more blood to the brain to keep it functioning in a warm environment. But that activity may also be raising pressure inside the skull, producing the headaches we call brain freeze. Recovery happens when the artery returns to its normal size.
Stephanie Mencimer decries the annual ob-gyn exam requirement for oral contraceptives:
Doctors regularly hold women’s birth control prescriptions hostage like this, forcing them to come in for exams that research is increasingly showing are too frequent and often unnecessary and ineffective. A 2010 study published in the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology found that 33 percent of doctors always require a pelvic exam and Pap smear for a hormonal contraception prescription, and 44 percent regularly do so, even though there's no medical reason for linking the two.
More on the prescription pill racket here.
America fuck yeah:
(Hat tip: Alex Ogle)
Tom Friedman wants more scholarships and fewer tanks in the Middle East:
[The US] gave Egypt’s military $1.3 billion worth of tanks and fighter jets, and it gave Lebanese public-school students a $13.5 million merit-based college scholarship program that is currently putting 117 Lebanese kids through local American-style colleges that promote tolerance, gender and social equality, and critical thinking. I’ve recently been to Egypt, and I’ve just been to Lebanon, and I can safely report this: The $13.5 million in full scholarships has already bought America so much more friendship and stability than the $1.3 billion in tanks and fighter jets ever will.
Andrew Exum isn't persuaded:
That $1.3 billion in annual military aid? That is the price the United States pays to ensure peace between Israel and Egypt. For three decades, it has been a fantastic bargain.
Second, I am a proud graduate of the American University of Beirut, but do you know who else counted the AUB as their alma mater? The two most innovative terrorists in modern history, George Habbash and Imad Mughniyeh. U.S. universities and scholarship programs are nice things to do and sometimes forge important ties between peoples and future leaders, but they can also go horribly wrong and do not necessarily serve U.S. interests. There is certainly no guarantee a U.S.-style education leads to greater tolerance or gender and social equality.
Adam Elkus nods:
Friedman is distinctly arguing that exposure to American education will make students more pro-American and have positive political outcomes. Want to know who else came to the US for education? Sayid Qutb. The idea that exposure to American democratic norms and critical thinking would make you more liberal would also come as a surprise to foreign military officers who take American professional military education classes only to come home to either participate in repressive systems, commit human rights abuses, and/or launch military coups. Finally, while going to Harvard made Isoroku Yamamato mindful of America’s military and economic strength, he used such knowledge to plan military operations against the American Pacific fleet. Going to school in America will also not necessarily make many of China’s future leadership class pro-American or willing to help America at the expense of their nation’s interests.
The Dish 