Maria Konnikova examines the research of Angela de Bruin:
De Bruin isn’t refuting the notion that there are advantages to being bilingual: some studies that she reviewed really did show an edge. But the advantage is neither global nor pervasive, as oftenreported.
Where learning another language does pay dividends:
One of the areas where the bilingual advantage appears to be most persistent isn’t related to a particular skill or task: it’s a general benefit that seems to help the aging brain. Adults who speak multiple languages seem to resist the effects of dementia far better than monolinguals do.
When Bialystok examined the records for a group of older adults who had been referred to a clinic in Toronto with memory or other cognitive complaints, she found that, of those who eventually developed dementia, the lifelong bilinguals showed symptoms more than four years later than the monolinguals. In a follow-up study, this time with a different set of patients who had developed Alzheimer’s, she and her colleagues found that, regardless of cognitive level, prior occupation, or education, bilinguals had been diagnosed 4.3 years later than monolinguals had. Bilingualism, in other words, seems to have a protective effect on cognitive decline. That would be consistent with a story of learning: we know that keeping cognitively nimble into old age is one of the best ways to protect yourself against dementia. (Hence the rise of the crossword puzzle.) When the brain keeps learning, as it seems to do for people who retain more than one language, it has more capacity to keep functioning at a higher level.
In a review of Robert Beachy’s Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity, Alex Ross ponders why the city proved a relatively hospitable place for a thriving gay subculture that emerged at the turn of the 20th century. One reason? A deep and abiding connection between Romanticism and German culture:
Close to the heart of the Romantic ethos was the idea that heroic individuals could attain the freedom to make their own laws, in defiance of society. Literary figures pursued a cult of friendship that bordered on the homoerotic, although most of the time the fervid talk of embraces and kisses remained just talk.
But the poet August von Platen’s paeans to soldiers and gondoliers had a more specific import:
“Youth, come! Walk with me, and arm in arm / Lay your dark cheek on your / Bosom friend’s blond head!” Platen’s leanings attracted an unwelcome spotlight in 1829, when the acidly silver-tongued poet Heinrich Heine … satirized his rival as a womanly man, a lover of “passive, Pythagorean character,” referring to the freed slave Pythagoras, one of Nero’s male favorites. Heine’s tone is merrily vicious, but he inserts one note of compassion: had Platen lived in Roman times, “it may be that he would have expressed these feelings more openly, and perhaps have passed for a true poet.” In other words, repression had stifled Platen’s sexuality and, thus, his creativity.
Gay urges welled up across Europe during the Romantic era; France, in particular, became a haven, since statutes forbidding sodomy had disappeared from its books during the Revolutionary period, reflecting a distaste for law based on religious belief. The Germans, though, were singularly ready to utter the unspeakable.
In an interview about his book, Beachy sizes up just how remarkable such an outpost of gay culture was:
I think there probably had never been anything like this before and there was no culture as open again until the 1970s. So it’s really not until after Stonewall that one sees this sort of open expression of gay identity or homosexual identity – lesbian identity. … [T]here was this proliferation of publications that started almost immediately after the founding of the Weimar Republic and it continued really right down to 1933 until the Nazi seizure of power. So I think it’s really important to emphasize these publications because they were sort of the substrate, in a certain way, of this culture. They advertised all sorts of events, different kinds of venues and they also attracted advertisers who were really appealing to a gay and lesbian constituency, and that’s also really startling, I think.
Yatzchak Francus has discovered for himself that “having recovered from a brain injury is vastly different from having recovered from any other injury”:
No one thinks that a broken leg or a kidney stone or pneumonia fundamentally changes the essence of who you are. But when you’ve had a brain injury, people don’t believe that you are quite the same, although no one will actually say so. Perhaps it is the expression of a universal personal terror. The brain is who we are in the most fundamental sense. We are what we think, and we think with our brain. Not for nothing does Descartes’ summation endure.
The perceptions of my injury endure as well.
Although I have been fully back to normal for close to eight months, “How are you feeling?” continues to supplant “Hello” as the greeting of choice. Sometimes, it seems I hear the question at 15-minute intervals, as I did in the hospital. I half-expect the rest of the ICU script to follow: “Can you smile for me? Can you stick out your tongue? Can you hold up your arms up as if you’re holding a pizza box? Can you tell me what month it is?” When I decline a glass of wine at a holiday party, my host exclaims, “Of course, you have restrictions.” When my parents phoned a few minutes before Yom Kippur because I had forgotten to call them, I could hear the barely-suppressed panic in their voices, their improbable fear of a persistent vegetative state overwhelming the prosaic reality that the day had simply gotten away from me.
Many readers aren’t buying Ruth Graham’s view that Friends, and especially Chandler, were homophobic:
I’m sorry, but Friends is mocking homophobia, not displaying it. As a soon-to-be married gay man, I find the idea that this relatively recent show being representative of some benighted era to be an example of ridiculous outrage-mongering.
Another sees “no nastiness in the Chandler bits”:
They aren’t so much about the fear of being gay as they are part of a larger theme of the character – his insecurity – which plays itself out in a number of ways.
Another reader:
First, I grow tired of peeling apart 1994 shows with 2015 sensibilities. Second, the author of that piece has not acknowledged a major part of Chandler’s story:
His father abandoned him. There is no “loving, involved” father, just one who announced he was leaving the family. Whose bed he was leaving for is immaterial.
As for the gay-panic, this would have been the early 1980s when Mr. Bing left. They were in wealthy, WASPy Long Island. Plenty of gossip for a pre-teen boy to deal with. But no, let’s hate the character. (I can tell you that Ruth Graham hasn’t responded to numerous complaints about this in the comment sections. It’s a shoehorning of an agenda onto a popular character and then a cowardly retreat.)
At some point, we have to make a decision to take older shows as they are. Picking them apart now is a miserable experience.
Another piles on:
Ruth Graham reminds me of the character on Friends played by Brooke Shields, who didn’t know the difference between TV/entertainment and real life.
One more reader’s take:
The fear of being thought gay was (and still is) one of the key comic motifs of Two and a Half Men, yesterday’s most popular network sitcom, and of The Big Bang Theory, today’s most popular one. And, of course, how can we ignore the Seinfeld “not that there’s anything wrong with that” episode? In fact, I think it’s fair to say that this is one of the eternal comic themes of American mainstream comedy, just like stupid husbands, wives who don’t want to have sex, children who disdain their parents’ cluelessness, etc.
So I don’t see this as truly homophobic. It’s sitcom comedy, which in its classic form is based in cliches and plays on our fears and desires. Even Will & Grace, considered the breakthrough network show for gays, frequently played up the comic themes of Will acting in a cliched gay manner and Grace being the classic “fag hag”. If we can’t laugh at cleverly-done comic pieces like this without being considered homophobic, then we’ve all lost our senses of humor.
Monday: Man, these guys work hard. Tuesday: Pretty good opinion piece. Wednesday: Wow, that was an amazing amount of great content. Thursday: Sully’s a great fucking editor. Friday: Okay, that really made me think. Saturday: Totally worth the subscription.
Sunday: Oh, for fuck’s sake.
That’s not a complaint. If only everyone nailed six out of seven.
SkyMall, surely the most interesting thing to read in your seat-back pocket, looks like it’s folding. Roberto Ferdman sums up the news:
SkyMall made its business over the past 25 years by entertaining commercial airline passengers and, occasionally, persuading them to purchase whimsical, often expensive products, including a $1,000 serenity cat pod, a $2,250 garden yeti statue and a $16,000 personal sauna system. But the company has suffered at the hands of recent changes to airline policy, which have given passengers alternative means of entertainment and flooded them with different avenues for online purchasing. The permitted use of smartphones on commercial flights has usurped the magazine’s place as the de facto way to pass the time while cruising at 30-some-odd thousand feet in the air. And the growing number of airlines providing in-flight Internet service has not only further eaten into the catalogue’s bread and butter but also paved the way for more competition in the form of online retailers.
A nostalgic Emily Dreyfuss reflects on the end of an in-flight era:
SkyMall was a tradition. An absurd, capitalistic embodiment of everything that was shallow and wrong with our lives, and yet it also brought us comfort. No matter if the plane was delayed, or we were stuck alone on a layover, missing whichever parent we were leaving, missing the friends and the life we were leaving behind each time we went between homes, it was there to make us laugh. To let us roll our eyes. To surprise us with a new level of novelty and frivolity.
SkyMall, that stupid wonderful completely American wonder that, with its insistence that you take your own free copy, announced it was your right as a human in the ‘90s to never not be shopping. Never not be consuming.
Joe Pinsker thinks through the value SkyMall has provided for businesses:
It’s essentially a classified section, with pictures. Manufacturers, retailers, and lone-wolf inventors could pay for space in the catalog—with a full page reportedly costing $129,000 per issue—and then give a small cut of any sales to SkyMall. While it lasted, this was a pretty sweet deal: Sellers, some of them amateur inventors, saw big leaps in sales after their products were exposed to nearly 700 million flyers. And SkyMall got access to a well-off demographic: Their average customer was a college grad earning more than $75,000 a year.
Either way, the catalog’s demise makes sense to McArdle, who’d much rather browse her iPad than flip through eclectic junk:
Skymall was something that frequent flyers all over this great land had in common, like getting groped by the TSA. [But aficionados] of the catalog shouldn’t fret too much; you can still buy the Zombie of Montclaire Moors from Amazon.
But, paradoxically, Danielle Kurtzleben points out that other dead-tree catalogs are actually seeing a mini-renaissance:
In 2013, retailers sent out 11.9 billion catalogs in the US, the first uptick since 2007, but also down from nearly 20 billion sent out in 2007, according to the Wall Street Journal. And that’s in part because retailers have increasingly figured out how to use catalogs to their advantage.
For an example of this, look no further than one resurrected catalog: JC Penney. That retailer announced just this week that it’s bringing its catalog back from the dead. Yes, catalogs take money to print and distribute, but they also bring customers in. In a recent report, retail consulting firm Kurt Salmon found that eliminating catalogs in an effort to cut costs can backfire for a retailer, because it engages customers so much less. Meanwhile, customers engaging with a retailer on multiple platforms (online, with catalogs, in stores) also spent a lot more. This is part of what retailers call an “omnichannel” strategy — using several mediums simultaneously to attract customers. And it makes intuitive sense: encourage customers to find your goods in a variety of ways and places, and they’ll both remember you and keep coming back.
I’m sorry to report that even I have been a free rider. Like a Times reader who clears his cookies daily to avoid the paywall, I have enjoyed the SkyMall catalog hundreds of times without ordering so much as a single inflatable body pillow.
Rather than religion, a reader points to the “double-blind experiment” as our greatest innovation:
It’s the means by which we can finally escape the illogical and incorrect claims of religion and discover the way the universe actually works.
Another is more critical:
Yuval Noah Harari has got to be joking; religion is one of humanity‘s worst inventions. The scientific method ranks far higher, the products of the enlightenment rank far higher. Why does systemic enforcement of belief in myth rank higher than actually figuring out how the universe works?
Another is even more blunt:
“Without some kind of religion, it is simply impossible to maintain social order.” What a bunch of self-serving theist bull crap.
You don’t need religion to maintain social order. Religion might have been used for that purpose at times, but the fact that you had few pure religious forms of government, ones where the priests were the sole holders of power, argues that religion is insufficient to maintain social order, at best. Heck, if you look at the population of prisons, you will see a lower percentage of Atheists than you do in the general population.
Religion is great at making claims and repeating them until their followers believe them to be true. But the purpose of those great lies is to perpetuate religion, not any kind of search for real truth.
And another:
Frankly, as an agnostic (albeit one who respects your right to view the Universe as you will), I can’t help but view faith as mankind’s greatest stumbling block. Every advance we have made as a species has been in spite of the efforts of religion to keep us perpetually beholden to unseen, unknown, and unknowing deities that disapprove of our efforts to transcend our animal instincts. The ability to reason is the only gift we have that separates us from more primitive life forms. Religion encourages us to pitch reason away and remain forever huddled around the campfire, afraid of the monsters in the night. Reason, not religion, is our greatest “invention”.
PS – I know your skin is far too thick to be bothered by my random dissent, but the squish in me feels compelled to make it clear that I love your blog!
Another has more on Yuval Noah Harari and his views:
I’m waiting for my copy of the US release of his Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, out in February, so I can’t say for sure that you didn’t quote him directly or correctly. But in his course, which I took on Coursera.org (one of the two largest consortia of universities running MOOCs), Dr. Harari actually teaches that it is humanity’s ability to create “imagined realities” that is the greatest invention.
Religion, of course, falls into this category, in his view. (His course gave fits to the very religious among the course-takers … you should have seen the discussion boards.) But many things that we accept, in addition to religion, are “imagined realities” – nations, for example; corporations, laws, money … and all have roles in creating societies and keeping them together, until people no longer believe in those imagined realities (such as the divine right of kings; or the Third Reich, or the Fourth Republic) and then institutions come crashing down.
Dr. Harari gave a remarkably funny and thought-provoking lecture in which he uses DuPont Chemical Company as an example of an imagined reality, consisting not of its managers (they are not the corporation; it continues if they die), not its board of directors (ditto), not its shareholders (they change constantly), not its employees (ditto), not its factories (DuPont could build new ones if they burn down, and it exists in the meantime); but rather, a company exists because everyone agrees that it does, and its priests (the lawyers!) say certain words and write certain words, and another imagined reality (the State of Delaware) says ok “you exist”, and as long as everyone believes it exists, it does!
I appreciate the desire to offer some encouragement to Egyptian citizens who supported January 25, and I agree that it is important to keep thinking of how to be active, even under these terrible circumstances[.] I also agree that we are not just back to the old days — there was a huge rupture, and even if the hopes it raised were defeated, the repressive techniques employed to achieve this (media propaganda; Saudi subsidies; massive repression; a shameful politicization of the judiciary) are destabilizing and seemingly untenable in the long-term. But I take a much darker view of the kind of days we’re in. People used to say that the revolution had brought down the wall of fear and it could never be back up; I think the army and police have done a great reconstruction job. Virtually every institution in Egypt is worse off than it was four years ago; a big segment of society has been complicit — out of fear, ignorance, self-interest — with the falsification of its own history and with granting impunity for state injustice and violence.
But Eric Trager doubts that most Egyptians, content with the devil they know, will pursue another uprising:
Sisi appears to have staying power. This is party due to the fact that the state is performing better under his stewardship in certain critical respects. Bread shortages have diminished, a smart-card system for distributing subsidized bread is being implemented, and Sisi announced major gas-subsidy cuts during his first month in office—a vital cost-cutting measure. It is also partly due to his repression of the opposition, including a severe crackdown on the Brotherhood and the arrest of many prominent revolutionary activists under a 2013 law that significantly limits protest activity.
But perhaps the most important reason for Sisi’s staying power is the popular mood, which is a cocktail of weariness and relief. Egyptians are exhausted after four years of tumult, but at the same time satisfied that their country hasn’t suffered the devastating chaos of Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Yemen. So while many of the economic and demographic problems that caused the 2011 uprising haven’t been resolved, a critical mass of Egyptians now prefer their broken state to spinning the wheel again and risking further collapse.
A more hopeful H.A. Hellyer advises the veterans of Tahrir Square to be more organized, plan longer-term political strategies, and get back to the basics:
[The revolutionaries must] remain cognizant of what has distinguished it. The core of the January 25 revolutionary uprising was speaking truth to power. That is a tremendous stance of ideational power, if not political power. While the revolutionary camp may sometimes embrace certain fixed and regular political personalities or forces, it ought never to make the mistake of confusing its mission with that of simply acquiring a power position.
A spokesman for the California state health department has told Reuters that he believes “unvaccinated individuals have been the principal factor” in a mid-December measles outbreak at Disneyland that has infected more than 70 people in six western states and Mexico, including five Disney employees.
Sarah Kliff spells out how more individuals getting vaccinated could have protected the six infants who got sick:
The measles vaccine is not licensed for use on babies younger than 12 months. That means that, for the first year of life, babies depend on the fact that everybody else around them gets vaccinated. This essentially creates a firewall: if other people are vaccinated, they won’t catch the disease — and won’t spread it to young children who cannot get protection.
This is what scientists call “herd immunity,” and its a huge reason we get vaccines in the first place. The shots aren’t just about protecting ourselves from measles, mumps, the flu, or other diseases. They’re about making it really hard for those who are medically frail (like the elderly) and those who can’t get the vaccine (often babies and pregnant women) to catch a disease that could be devastating to them.
Another reason herd immunity is important is because vaccines don’t always work. Katie Palmer explains:
The measles vaccine is actually one of the most effective vaccines in the world. According to Greg Wallace, lead of the measles, mumps, rubella and polio team at the CDC, two doses are 97 percent effective against infection. (Compare that to 88 percent for two doses of the mumps vaccine from the MMR shot.) It’s a live version of the virus, just weakened—or attenuated—so it doesn’t cause severe symptoms. The vaccine replicates just like the full-on measles virus, inciting your immune system to produce antibodies against it. Those antibodies then protect against actual measles as well.
But in some people, that response just doesn’t happen. No one knows why. Either your body doesn’t produce enough antibodies, or the ones it does produce aren’t specific enough to latch on to the virus and kill it.
After reviewing recent court cases, Eugene Volokh finds legal support for requiring vaccinations:
Phillips v. City of New York (2d Cir. Jan. 7, 2015) reaffirms that the government may mandate vaccinations. It may mandate vaccinations for everyone, and it can certainly mandate them for everyone who goes to public school. Seems quite right to me; there may indeed be a presumptive constitutional right to be free from unwanted medical treatment, but such a right can be trumped by the very strong public interest in preventing people from becoming unwitting carriers of deadly illness. … Such statutes often do allow religious exemptions, but that’s not a matter of constitutional obligation. In Phillips, the one of the plaintiffs did try to claim the exemption, but the trial court found that her “objections to vaccinations were not based on religious beliefs,” and the plaintiff didn’t appeal that finding.
Genna Buck looks at where our vaccination rates need to be:
In California’s Santa Monica-Malibu school district, 11.5 per cent of parents refuse to vaccinate their kids. In nearby Orange County, the figure is 8.6 per cent. In Beverly Hills it’s five per cent—almost, but not quite, a safe level of vaccine coverage. In a large study that observed measles infections in the Netherlands over decades, scientists calculated that 95.7 per cent of a population needs to be immune to measles to prevent regular outbreaks. And since no vaccine is perfectly effective, even more than that number need to be vaccinated to protect the whole community.
Tara C. Smith notes that MMR vaccination is “at or close to 90 percent by age 3 and about 95 percent by kindergarten”:
However, national statistics obscure local trends. Those 5 percent who are unvaccinated aren’t randomly distributed throughout the country. Instead, they tend to cluster in location, with many unvaccinated children living in close proximity to others, creating anti-vaccine communities with high susceptibility to measles and other vaccine-preventable diseases.
Why this is so dangerous:
What many forget is that we had a massive outbreak of measles in the United States from 1989–1991. While our 644 cases in 2014 seems high compared with recent years, 25 years ago measles incidence spiked to 18,000 cases per year, with a total of more than 55,000 infections before the outbreak began to dwindle. It was the largest measles outbreak in this country since the 1970s. … Despite our advances and our modernity and our status as a developed country, we still saw 123 measles deaths during this epidemic—here, in the United States, where we get plenty of Vitamin A. There were also 11,000 hospitalizations—fully one-fifth of people infected with measles became sick enough to be hospitalized.
This was to be the winter of their deep content. Having won the mid-terms on a platform of pure fear and panic, they had Washington DC in their pocket. The agenda was going to be theirs – even if they hadn’t run on much of a platform. They would prove to be a capable governing party again, get the Congress in order, and finally put an asterisk next to Obama’s name for two years.
And what has happened since? We’ve had an attempt to ban all abortion past twenty weeks, with an implicit claim that some rapes are not legitimate (because they weren’t reported to the cops). Critical Republican congresswomen balked, and a largely symbolic vote on a day devoted to pro-life activism collapsed in disorder. Before that, the House voted on the most draconian legislation yet that would require, by some analyses, deporting up to 10 million undocumented immigrants. Moreover, the polling of the base shows, as Aaron Blake argued, that
Although [Republicans] supported citizenship over deportation 43 to 38 percent in November 2013, today they support deportation/involuntary departure over citizenship, 54 to 27 percent. That’s two to one — a stunning shift.
Meanwhile, Obama’s ratings among Latinos have sky-rocketed and Jorge Ramos is now unrelenting in his attacks on the GOP. On economic policy, the Republicans have focused on the Keystone Pipeline and free trade treaties. And that may be it. Dave Camp’s real tax reform proposals fizzled. Cutting Medicare or social security in today’s climate is a very heavy lift. Reform conservative policies have not found a compelling advocate. On foreign policy, the decision to invite Binyamin Netanyahu to address the US Congress (again!) over the head of the sitting president is a grotesque blunder. That’s particularly so as the speech will take place two weeks before the Israeli elections – a piece of meddling that really will hurt the US-Israel relationship.
But don’t take it from me, take it from Fox News:
And what is the argument the GOP wants to make on Iran? That it should be the US that derails the critical last stage of the talks? And that, after doing that, we should respond with a new war in the Middle East to prevent what would then be a rush to get the bomb in Iran? Makes. No. Sense. If the GOP wants to fight the next election on the basis of re-entering the Iraq War with ground troops or a huge bombing campaign against Iran, they’re welcome to try. But the American public is not as obsessed as Sheldon Adelson and AIPAC with the Middle East. And the Iraq war was not a Clint Eastwood fantasy. Even Americans haven’t forgotten that.
Then we had the spectacle of last weekend’s Steve King confab in Iowa. In Roger Simon’s words, the clown car became the clown van. The crowd egged on the far right to go further over the edge. The one candidate who might begin to appeal to more than the base – Bush – was a no-show. By all accounts, Scott Walker gave a bravura performance, which may be the only salient thing to last once the vapors have lifted (and he’s worth watching). But to have so many wackos deliver such red meat to a far right base – with Palin and The Donald delivering random strips of steak tartare – is not a basis for appealing to the broader middle any major party has to, if it wants to govern and not merely scream.
The Palin speech was truly a wonder – an Allen Ginsberg-style Republican “Howl”. I know that with respect to her, I’m an alcoholic who shouldn’t go near a bar – but I couldn’t help myself. Watching the stream of narcissistic, delusional consciousness was like downing three shots of Jäger at once. And there were times when it seemed as if she’d done the same thing (just pick any three minutes at random):
A party that nominated a deranged fantasist like this for vice-president – and still lets her rally its base – is, to put it mildly, a joke. Her one political strength – her ability to channel populism – is undermined by the fact that the GOP has a much less appealing set of proposals to address that, compared with the Democrats. This is an era when cultural populism may finally be weaker than economic populism. Obama’s SOTU was simply a reminder that in this moment, with growth returning but all of it going to the very top, the left-of-center party has the advantage. And a right of center party that refuses to raise any taxes on the extremely rich is at a steep disadvantage. There are some reform conservative ideas that are worth airing in that respect – but they are not stirring the base and do not have – as of yet – a plausible GOP proponent or candidate. The only one who might pull it off has the Bush name hanging like an albatross around his neck. And Romney? All he will do is generate energy against him from the base.
Of course, this could change. Events could intervene; the economy might falter again; Putin could do something very reckless. One candidate may surprise us. But right now, the GOP looks to me like a party unable to see any enemies to the right, with few policies to address soaring inequality, deeply alienated from Latinos and African-Americans, and with a foreign policy that looks increasingly like Cheney’s.
That’s not a party headed back to government. If it stays the course, it’s headed toward oblivion.
The Dish 