Month: April 2014

Richard Florida compared “rankings of sprawling and compact development to voting patterns, as well as other significant economic and demographic variables”:

In recent decades, America’s politics have exhibited a new trend, where Red America finds its home base in some of the country’s most sprawling places, while Blue America is centered in denser, more compact metros and cities. … The connection between sprawl and conservatism come through loud and clear in our analysis of more than 200 of America’s metro areas. Our correlations suggest that sprawled America is Red America, while Blue America takes on a much more compact geography. The Sprawl Index was negatively associated with the share of voters in a metro who voted for Mitt Romney in 2012 (with a correlation of -.44); and it was positively associated with the percentage who voted for Barack Obama (.43). These were among the strongest correlations in our analysis.

This is in line with other research that connects sprawl or density and political affiliation. Researchers have identified a tipping point of roughly 800 people per square mile where counties shift from Red to Blue, as I noted in the weeks following Barack Obama’s reelection. Princeton historian Kevin Kruse similarly explained this spatial link between a spread-out landscape and Republican political positions to the New Republic. “There are certain things in which the physical nature of a city, the fact the people are piled on top of each other, requires some notion of the public good,” he said. “Conservative ideology works beautifully in the suburbs, because it makes sense spatially.”

Recent Dish on sprawl here. More from the archives here and here.

Shane Parrish challenges the notion of idleness as a moral failing, quoting from Andrew Smart’s Autopilot: The Art And Science Of Doing Nothing:

Our brain, much like an airplane, has an autopilot, which we enter when resting and “relinquishing manual control.”

The autopilot knows where you really want to go, and what you really want to do. But the only way to find out what your autopilot knows is to stop flying the plane, and let your autopilot guide you. Just as pilots become dangerously fatigued while flying airplanes manually, all of us need to take a break and let our autopilots fly our planes more of the time.

Yet we hate idleness don’t we? Isn’t that just a waste?

Our contradictory fear of being idle, together with our preference for sloth, may be a vestige from our evolutionary history. For most of our evolution, conserving energy was our number one priority because simply getting enough to eat was a monumental physical challenge. Today, survival does not require much (if any) physical exertion, so we have invented all kinds of futile busyness. Given the slightest or even a specious reason to do something, people will become busy. People with too much time on their hands tend to become unhappy or bored.

Yet, Smart agues, boredom is the key to self-knowledge.

What comes into your consciousness when you are idle can often be reports from the depths of your unconscious self— and this information may not always be pleasant. Nonetheless, your brain is likely bringing it to your attention for a good reason. Through idleness, great ideas buried in your unconsciousness have the chance to enter your awareness.

Meanwhile, researchers recently found that “procrastination and impulsiveness are both at least moderately heritable.”

A reader adds to this post, which went pretty viral on Facebook:

I certainly agree that Sipho Mabona’s work is fantastic. He is extremely intelligent, as you can see in this YouTube video. However, what Dish readers may not realize is that we are in the middle of a huge revolution inorigami, as new techniques are allowing origami artists to create ever more sophisticated creatures. Dr. Robert Lang, a Cal Tech Ph.D who left physics to do origami as a living, has been at the forefront of many of these new techniques, many of which come out of mathematics or computers. The result is a life-like depiction of animals and insects that are uncanny: it could be a bull moose, or a panther, a red-tailed hawk or a life-sized pteranodon – they are all made from just one piece of paper, with no cuts. Origami is considered to be a Japanese art form, but it has gone world-wide in the last 25 years, as Mr. Mabona and Dr. Lang show.

The rhino seen above is by Mabona as well. See more of his amazing work here. Update from a reader:

I watched Between the Folds on Netflix about a year ago and was fascinated by the many different techniques, styles, etc. It’s several years old, but really good. I’ll always love the paper swans I made in 3rd grade, but there’s a whole world of origami out there that I knew nothing about.

The whole documentary is also available on YouTube:

That’s the question Alex Bellos, a math blogger for The Guardian, set out to answer:

Bellos set up the website http://favouritenumber.net and asked people to cast votes for their favorite numbers and explain why they liked them. More than 44,000 people did. Along the way, Bellos noticed lots of patterns. “Definitely, non-mathematical reasons were more frequent than mathematical ones,” he says. “Dates and birthdays are the most common.” Odd numbers do better, in general, than even ones. In China, 8 is popular because it sounds like “prosperity,” and 4 is unpopular because it sounds like “death.” English has sound-alikes, too: one voter said his favorite was 11, because “it sounds like lovin’.”

Dana Mackenzie counts down the results:

The bronze medal goes to the number 8. Hey, all those Chinese people can’t be wrong!

The silver medal goes to the number 3. That should go over well with fans of the Three Musketeers, the Three Stooges, and the Three Little Pigs.

But the number cited most often as a favorite number is (drum roll, please) …

7.

To be honest, this is hardly a shock. If you go to Las Vegas, you can’t miss the 7’s all around you. “People’s strongest emotional reaction is to the number 7, and this has been true throughout history,” says Bellos. But strangely enough, no one really knows why. “The argument most frequently given, which I think is not credible, is that there are seven visible planets or seven days in the week,” Bellos says. He thinks that we like 7 because it’s the only number between 2 and 10 that is neither a multiple nor a factor of any other. It somehow stands apart from the others.

Miriam Pawel’s new biography The Crusades of Cesar Chavez paints the labor leader as “a media-savvy pragmatist not averse to dealmaking”:

Yet unlike the hard-headed Anglos who ran the industrial unions, he saw himself more as a spiritual guide than a labour leader. He despaired of the tendency among poor workers he helped to desire colour televisions and golf clubs as they grew richer. He distrusted colleagues who sought pay rises, and rejected them for himself; sacrifice, he urged, must be the mark of the movement. He embarked on regular fasts, both to draw attention to the cause and, in trying times, to strengthen his own fortitude. Gandhi, rather than King, was the role model.

Peter Dreier considers Chavez’s legacy, particularly with regard to the United Farm Workers union:

The UFW served as an incubator of movements. It trained thousands of organizers and activists — boycott volunteers as well as paid staff. Many became key activists and leaders in the labor, immigrant rights, feminist, antiwar, consumer, and environmental movements. There is no progressive movement in the country today that has not been influenced by people whose activism began with the UFW.

Another legacy is the nationwide upsurge of cultural pride and political action by Latinos, most of whom were not farmworkers, that was inspired by Chavez and the UFW. The fruits of Latino activism can be seen in the growing voting power of Latinos in American politics, the thousand of Latino and Latina elected officials at all levels of government, and the growing immigrant rights movement, especially among young people.

But Liza Featherstone is less happy about the effects of Chavez’s work:

[A]s labor writer (and former UFW staffer) Michael Yates has suggested, the most important question should be: Is life for farmworkers in California any better today than it was before Cesar Chavez and the UFW came along? The answer to that, sadly, is no. As Chavez himself acknowledged, during the waning years of the UFW’s power, farmworkers’ children were 25% more likely than other American kids to die at birth. Their parents’ life expectancy was two-thirds that of the rest of the population. Laws protecting their union organizing rights were not enforced. Some drank water from irrigation pipes and lived under trees.

Citing the new documentary Cesar’s Last Fast as well as Pawel’s book, Nathan Heller explores Chavez’s 1988 fast in protest of farmworkers’ exposure to pesticides:

By the thirtieth day of the fast, Chavez had lost thirty pounds. He had renal problems and muscle wasting. His doctors urged him to break his fast. When he wouldn’t, Dolores Huerta and the Reverend Jesse Jackson devised an endgame. Chavez’s friends would pass the fast along: they’d each do three days or so, and the sacrifice would continue. Chavez agreed, and on the thirty-sixth day, a Sunday, he appeared at Mass. He was carried, limp, between the shoulders of his sons. Jackson and Martin Sheen were there, along with the family of Bobby Kennedy. Ethel Kennedy broke off a morsel of blessed bread, and Chavez finally ate. His mother sat beside his nearly lifeless body, weeping and stroking his face.

Did Chavez have a Christ complex? The question looms behind Pawel’s biography and [Richard Ray] Perez and [Lorena] Parlee’s film. “How did Cesar become such a powerful, brilliant organizer and leader?” the Reverend Chris Hartmire, of the National Migrant Ministry, asks in the documentary. “I think it was fundamentally his Catholic upbringing and his mother’s teachings.” Chavez’s eagerness to take on moral responsibility through physical sacrifice, to lead an expanding moral movement, to be both humble and irreplaceably authoritative has its roots in the founding tropes of the Church. These affinities strengthened his project, as Hartmire suggests; they also slowly eroded it. Through the hard postwar years, farmworkers needed a political and cultural leader. Chavez’s faith helped make his ethical and organizational ambitions clear. But he also aspired to be a spiritual leader, and his efforts there had less stirring effects. Workers, in the end, already had a holy figure they could trust.

Listen to an interview with Pawel here.

(Video: Trailer for Cesar’s Last Fast)

Robert Alter insists that Paul de Man was a “total fraud,” praising Evelyn Barish’s biography of the once-central figure in American literary studies. For example, he managed to join the faculty of Bard College with absolutely no qualifications:

How does a new immigrant without credentials get appointed at an American college? De Man produced a fictitious curriculum vitae in which he claimed to hold the “equivalent of your Master’s degree.” He also said he had been an editor at Editions de Minuit in Paris, a prestigious publishing house with which he had had no contact, and that his grandfather was a “founder of the University of Ghent.” Later, in his Harvard years, he would embellish this fictitious autobiography further: the collaborator did not hesitate to represent himself as a man who had fought in the Belgian army and then joined the Resistance, and he claimed several times, both in conversation and in writing, that he was the illegitimate son, not the nephew, of [prominent Belgian collaborator] Henri de Man. This ostensibly odd attribution of paternity worked in two ways for him: he could claim to be the son of one of the leading figures in Belgian politics during the 1930s and into the war; and after his supposed father became Belgium’s Quisling, he could say he was the target of undeserved hostility, which eventually drove him to 
leave the country.

Alter attempts to reconcile de Man’s work with his personal life:

Was there any continuity between his early entanglements in crimes and lies and the literary theory that made him famous?

Barish, like others before her, proposes a link between his negation of history and his career of deception, between his denial of the continuity of the self and his suppression of his own past (he even forgot his native Flemish!), between his insistence that the written or spoken word never tells anything about the intention of its originator and his assumption of a new identity. This is certainly plausible, but I would also like to suggest a different kind of continuity between de Man’s mode of operation as a literary theorist and his mode of operation as a con man. It has to do with his style. In his writing, abstruseness, bristling abstraction, and a disorienting use of terms make his essays often difficult to penetrate. This was part of the key to his success: to his American admirers, with their cultural inferiority complex, it seemed that if things were difficult to grasp, something profound was being said.