May 2014 – Page 59

Marriage Equality Update

Wikipedia’s marriage map has been updated to reflect the Arkansas ruling:

Joe Jervis, who is heavily covering Arkansas, notes that the map “might change today if the Arkansas ruling is stayed.” Lyle Denniston unpacks the ruling:

The judge likened the denial of equality to homosexuals to the denial of equality to racial minorities, and summoned up for comparison the Supreme Court’s discredited ruling in the Dred Scott case in 1857 saying that black people “had no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the government might choose to grant them.”

He also relied upon the Supreme Court’s 1967 decision in Loving v. Virginia, striking down Virginia’s ban on interracial marriages. He closed his opinion with these remarks about the woman involved in that case: “It has been over forty years since Mildred Loving was given the right to marry the person of her choice. The hatred and fears have long since vanished and she and her husband lived full lives together; so it will be for the same-sex couples. It is time to let that beacon of freedom shine brighter on all our brothers and sisters. We will be stronger for it.”

Dale Carpenter looks at the national picture:

There are now more than 70 lawsuits involving same-sex marriage pending in courts around the country. A dozen federal district courts have issued opinions in favor of same-sex marriage since last summer’s Supreme Court decision striking down the Defense of Marriage Act in United States v. Windsor. Five federal appellate courts are now considering the issue.

A photo of the happy couple who got the first marriage license:

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Kids These Days!

Steven Pinker wants you to cut them some slack:

Every generation thinks that the younger generation is dissolute, lazy, ignorant, and illiterate. There is a paper trail of professors complaining about the declining quality of their students that goes back at least 100 years. … I know a lot more now than I did when I was a student, and thanks to the curse of knowledge, I may not realize that I have acquired most of it during the decades that have elapsed since I was a student. So it’s tempting to look at students and think, “What a bunch of inarticulate ignoramuses! It was better when I was at that age, a time when I and other teenagers spoke in fluent paragraphs, and we effortlessly held forth on the foundations of Western civilization.” Yeah, right.

Here is a famous experiment.

A three-year-old comes into the lab. You give him a box of M&Ms. He opens up the box and instead of finding candy he finds a tangle of ribbons. He is surprised, and now you say to him, “OK, now your friend Jason is going to come into the room. What will Jason think is in the box?” The child says, “ribbons,” even though Jason could have no way of knowing that. And, if you ask the child, “Before you opened the box, what did you think was in it?” They say, “ribbons.” That is, they backdate their own knowledge. Now we laugh at the three-year-old, but we do the same thing. We backdate our own knowledge and sophistication, so we always think that the kids today are more slovenly than we were at that age.

Update from a reader who disagrees with Pinker:

No, three year olds do not “backdate” their knowledge. They answer incorrectly because they have not developed what is known as “Theory of Mind” – they are unable to understand fully that others see the world through their own perspective. They do not yet understand that others do not know, necessarily, what they know. Therefore they assume everyone knows it is full of ribbons – they do, so why wouldn’t another kid? Same for understanding that their knowledge has changed (or perhaps even fully understanding what a question like “What did you think was in the box bvefore you opened it?” actually means. He’s three. This question is complicated and asks him to fully understand what thought is, how it changes over time, what “before” means relative to now, etc. This same kid may easily think everything not right now is tomorrow or yesterday).

A clever and elegant-looking argument. But it’s not really true. And cannot be applied to an adult’s memory of what he/she was like at 16.

Another reader:

Kids These Days have been sliding inexorably toward delinquency, indolence, and immodesty for at least 1000 years. From the autobiography of the Benedictine monk Guibert of Nogent (c. 1055-1124):

O God, Thou knowest how hard, how almost impossible it would be for women of the present time to keep such chastity as [my mother’s example]; whereas there was in those days such modesty, that hardly ever was the good name of a married woman smirched by ill report Ah! how wretchedly have modesty and honour in the state of maidenhood declined from those times to these, and both the reality and the show of a mother’s guardianship shrunk to naught! Therefore coarse mirth is all that may be noted in their manners and naught but jesting heard, with sly winks and ceaseless chatter. Wantonness shews in their gait, only silliness in their behaviour. So much does the extravagance of their dress depart from the old simplicity that in the enlargement of their sleeves, the straitness of their skirts, the distortion of their shoes of Cordovan leather with their curling toes, they seem to proclaim that everywhere shame is a castaway A lack of lovers to admire her is a woman’s crown of woe. On her crowds of thronging suitors rests her claim to nobility and courtly pride. There was of old time, I call God to witness, greater modesty in married men, who would have blushed to be seen in the company of such women, than there is now in married women; and men by such shameful conduct are emboldened in their amours abroad and driven to haunt the marketplace and the public street.

Another points to another old passage:

When I read threads like this (Pinker etc.) I’m always reminded of Baldassare Castiglione (1478-1529). His Book of the Courtier (Part II) pretty much nails it:

I have often considered not without wonder whence arises a fault, which, as it is universally found among old people, may be believed to be proper and natural to them. And this is, that they nearly all praise bygone times and censure the present, inveighing against our acts and ways and everything which they in their youth did not do; affirming too that every good custom and good manner of living, every virtue, in short every thing, is always going from bad to worse.

And verily it seems quite contrary to reason and worthy to be wondered at, that ripe age, which in other matters is wont to make men’s judgment more perfect with long experience, should in this matter so corrupt it that they do not perceive that if the world were always growing worse, and if fathers were generally better than children, we should long since have reached that last grade of badness beyond which it is impossible to grow worse.

The View From Your Window

Denver, Colorado, 8.10 am. “Middle of May. 30 degrees. Sigh.” Similar scenes after the jump:

Boulder, Colorado, 6.40 am

Denver, Colorado, 10.48 am. “That’s the setup for America’s Ninja Warrior in Civic Center Park, along with May snow.”

Frisco, Colorado, 8.24 am. “Happy spring from a loyal reader in Colorado!”

Aimless Aviators

A team of researchers has determined that noise from man-made electronics disrupts the internal compass of songbirds:

The team laboriously erected a grounded aluminium cage around the robins’ hut and connected it to an electrical supply. When the birds were exposed to background electromagnetic noise in their unscreened huts, they flew in random directions. When the Faraday cage was on, their compass started working again. “It was like flipping a switch,” says [researcher Henrik] Mouritsen.

It was an astonishing result, and one that Mouritsen knew he needed to check carefully. As he writes, “seemingly implausible effects require stronger proof’’. Many small studies have claimed that man-made electric and magnetic fields could affect animal biology and human health, and many people have anecdotally claimed that they’re highly sensitive to such fields. But whenever scientists investigate those claims through proper experiments—double-blind trials with a large sample size—the effects vanish. (Here’s a good PDF summary of the evidence.) …

This has nothing to do with wi-fi, mobile phones, or power lines. By deliberately adding electromagnetic fields inside the grounded huts, the team showed that they were sensitive to frequencies between 2 kilohertz and 5 megahertz. With that range, the culprits are likely to be either AM radio signals or fields produced by electronic equipment in the university, although it’s hard to narrow the source down any further.

The Neuroscience Of Buzz

What makes videos like the one above go viral? To answer the question, Nicholas Hune-Brown looks into research investigating what the “buzzy,” trend-predicting brain looks like:

[P]sychologists recruited 19 undergraduates and asked them to pretend they were interns at a TV studio. With their brains hooked up to an fMRI machine, which measured activity in various neurocognitive networks, they then read through ideas for TV pilots and decided whether or not to pass the pitches on to their “producers” (79 other students). After the scan was over, the interns created video interviews about each pilot idea, rating the pitches. The videos were sent to the producers, who then had to decide whether or not they would recommend the pitch to other individuals. A pitch that the producers approved of, an idea that had been successfully passed from one person out into the wider world, was “buzzy.” …

The researchers found that when encountering a future viral hit, people who were able to successfully create buzz showed significant activity in the temporoparietal junction, or TPJ.

There was more activity in the TPJ compared to people who weren’t able to convince the producers—poor pushers of viral content—and compared to themselves, when they were reading a dud of a pitch.

The TPJ is part of the brain’s “mentalizing network,” which we use to think about the thoughts and feelings of others. It’s the part of the brain that sparks during successful conversations, when we’re trying to figure out how to communicate, or when we read a book and try to put ourselves in the mind of the main character. While reading the most successful pitches, the interns weren’t just concerned about enjoying a pitch themselves—they were anticipating what others might enjoy. The people most able to make something “go viral” were those who instantly began thinking about how to make the information useful to a larger community.

He glimpses the future:

As my editor said, it’s easy to see where this is going: a dystopian, Philip K. Dickian future in which BuzzFeed is edited by a group of precogs endlessly fed story ideas—“tiny salamanders wearing tiny capes,” “tiny mice riding medium-sized frogs”—while researchers hover above, waiting for the TPJ to light up like a slot machine with the next viral hit.

In another installment of his series on hip-hop culture, Questlove considers what it means to be “cool,” arguing that “black cool, when it comes right down to it, is everyone’s cool.” He cites a passage from the anthology Black Cool to make his point:

When I read through the book, I locked into an essay by Helena Andrews. It’s called “Reserve,” Andrews’s piece, and it’s about the mask that black women learn to wear as girls. She imagines a black woman moving through a city, negotiating the looks of others on the subway.

She seems to be doing more than everyone else by doing so much less. Your eye is drawn to her. She acknowledges your presence by ignoring it. She is the personification of cool by annihilating your very existence.

What drew me to Andrews was these four sentences, which articulated, in a different way (gender-specific, subway-specific), something that I have thought about black cool for a long time, which is that it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Black cool is part of society in general, part of white society. Black cool is the tip of African-American culture’s engagement with the broader white culture. Black cool only works the way it works because it’s part of a relationship. Look at Andrews’s scene more closely. The woman, getting attention, rejects that attention, and as a result gets more attention. Cool has an additional dimension, too, which is that it buys time. In an uncertain social situation, where the wrong decision can have disastrous consequences, cool lets you stay a beat behind while you settle on the path of least destruction. Taken to the extreme, cool can be sociopathic; taken to the right levels, it’s a supremely intelligent mix of defense mechanism and mirroring.

Don’t Blame New Yorkers For Baby Brooklyns

They’re not the ones naming their daughters after the borough:

In 2012, roughly 5 out of every 10,000 baby girls from Brooklyn, New York, were named Brooklyn, while roughly 131 out of every 10,000 baby girls born in West Virginia were named Brooklyn. You can see examples of this same trend elsewhere. In 2012, four of the most popular 100 girls’ names were also cities with a metro area of greater than 250,000 people. One of those names is Madison, the capital of Wisconsin. Only one other state (California) names its children Madison less often than parents from the Badger State.

Against Gluco-Determinism

David Kohn investigates the notion that blood sugar levels regulate self-control:

“We have three weeks of food in our kitchens,” [psychologist Michael] McCullough says. “But that’s not how we evolved. It doesn’t make sense that cognition is so fragile that two hours after your last meal, thinking goes haywire. I don’t think natural selection would have been kind to humans whose brains shut down whenever they got hungry.”

I asked him how he would explain my kids’ tendency to insurrection when they’re hungry. “I am perfectly willing to believe that hunger is linked to angry outbursts in your kids,” he said. “If a child or animal is running low on blood glucose, it will act differently.” But this, he points out, does not prove that glucose regulates self-control. The change in behavior could be a direct, perhaps unconscious, way to signal hunger. (If that’s true, the strategy works, at least in our house. Outbursts usually lead to a pre-dinner snack.) Or it may be a vestigial sign that the organism is sick of being hungry, and is getting ready go find some food on its own.

Update from a reader:

Ya, the brain goes haywire when it’s low on glucose. Our six-year-old daughter is a Type 1 diabetic. We watch her behavior for both high and low blood sugar tip offs. However, one of the dead give-aways that she is going low is that she becomes dreamy and illogical. Last night, in the tub, she said “Dad, do all liquids controls their containers? Like if I were water in a bucket, would I have a shoe?” Yep: Blood sugar of 48. And just as inexplicable, when she’s high (say 230 against a normal of 130), she is very hungry and very crabby.

Gays Don’t Stray Far

At least not when they live in “gayborhoods,” according to a recent study:

In their simplest model, comparing the travel patterns of members of gay, lesbian, and straight couples, the authors found that travel for non-work purposes were shorter in neighborhoods with more gay and lesbian couples. But this was especially true for gay men. Travel distances of trips made by straight men and women and lesbian women decreased by 6.2 percent for each percentage-point increase in the share of same-sex couples in the census tract. For gay men, trips decreased in length at nearly twice that rate, at an incredible 12.2 percent. …

So what’s behind this connection between shorter travel distances and gay neighborhoods?

The authors suggest that it reflects a broader concept of “neighborhoods of affinity,” where people live in neighborhoods because they share common interests and are drawn to similar features and amenities, as well as, potentially, the kinds of jobs that are available. In other words, in addition to our search for jobs, services and amenities, and transportation access, it is the very fact that we sort and cluster together that defines the way we move around a neighborhood. And these travel patterns can inadvertently reinforce the forces of sorting and segregating, as shorter travel patterns create even more self-contained worlds for some city residents.

So why doesn’t the pattern hold for lesbians? As the authors speculate (gated paper),“Gay neighborhoods are often located closer to the urban core and are typically denser than lesbian neighborhoods … This may be because gay men have the capital to locate in more expensive areas; moreover, being less likely to have children, gay men may have the disposable income to live in high-amenity locations.” Update from a reader:

I certainly think there’s some value in appreciating how social networks create certain neighborhood identities. In geography, my discipline, the emphasis would be on the reciprocal nature of this relationship: how communities create spaces that reflect their own interests and identities but also how those spaces in turn help solidify or further influence individuals’ social identity. Gay men didn’t just go to the Castro because they were gay. In some sense, living there may have defined for them what being gay meant.

However, I’m also struck in this article by the almost complete absence of any literature on segregation and external factors that limit the mobility of individuals. Certainly, when we consider race or poverty, high concentrations of minority groups aren’t just a matter of similar populations preferring to live in close proximity (though that can’t be completely discounted as a factor). In my own research on food access, I talked to several individuals who shopped at stores in the neighborhoods, but only because they lacked the resources to go elsewhere. One summed it up this way: “I live in the ‘hood, but I hate it.” In the case of Smart and Klein’s article, a focus on neighborhoods of affinity leaves largely unstated what seems an equally significant issue: these communities are necessary in part because the people and spaces found there remain socially unacceptable in many other communities.

In case you’re interested, I’m also sending along a couple of articles done by a couple of geographers on census maps of gay/lesbian households in San Francisco [pdf – here and here]. They similarly found that gay men were highly clustered at a neighborhood scale, but that lesbian households were much more dispersed and thus more “invisible” in conventional mapping approaches. They ask how the concentration of same-sex couples in urban areas might affect both their political power and their sense of their own sexual identities.

Books Over Baghdad

Ahmed Saadawi’s novel Frankenstein in Baghdad won the 2014 International Prize for Arabic Fiction (I.P.A.F.), known as the “Arabic Booker.” Ursula Lindsey discusses the role of the award in the rise of Arab literature:

When I attended the Cairo International Book Fair, earlier this year, several bookstores and publishers were promoting I.P.A.F. winners. A salesgirl practically ordered me to buy last year’s winner, “The Bamboo Stalk,” which tells the story of a young man born to a Kuwaiti father and his family’s Philippina maid, dealing, along the way, with the second-class-citizen status of immigrants in the Persian Gulf.

Across the Arab world—where literacy rates remain low, copyright law is hard to enforce, and a print run of three thousand is considered a success—the lack of fiction readers is regularly bemoaned. But this does not seem to discourage writers here, who focus on the conflicts and cities they know, of course, but to whom the increased possibility of a regional and international audience may act as an added encouragement. Prizes like the one “Frankenstein in Baghdad” received lead to lively literary discussions and an increased awareness of new writers and trends across the region, in which books do not circulate nearly as freely as one would expect, owing to censorship, bureaucracy, and a struggling publishing business. The prize committee has added a writers’ workshop to its activities; Saadawi is a graduate.

Arab states have never been more in crisis than they are today, whether they have been destabilized by outside intervention, sectarian strife, religious extremism, or the demands of fed-up citizens. The governments’ ideologies, which once held out the promise of dignity and advancement, have become threadbare covers for corruption and repression; the spectre of their own dissolution is one of their main mobilizing tactics. One can only regret the staggering waste, chaos, and suffering this has entailed. But Arab writers are stitching the pieces back together again; what emerges may not be pretty, but it is already fascinating.

Meanwhile, in an interview, Hassan Blasim – the Iraqi author of The Corpse Exhibition: And Other Stories of Iraq – explains why he’s not especially interested in achieving recognition in his native country:

Some Iraqi writers are more daring today and have excellent imaginations and their material is rich in human experience. But the Arab prizes … are part of the context of life in the Arab world—anarchy, confusion, and corruption. I’m not much interested in prizes, whether from the Arab world or from the Western world. … For the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2014, one of the judges works in the Saudi Shura Council. The Saudi Shura Council is not a parliament that is elected and free and that defends the interests and rights of Saudi citizens. It’s an obscurantist council that is a tool of oppression in the hands of the king of Saudi Arabia and his family. How can someone who doesn’t speak out about all the human rights violations in his country judge a literary prize?

Month: May 2014