Author: Andrew Sullivan

A Poem For Saturday

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Dish poetry editor Alice Quinn writes:

Michael Longley’s The Stairwell, just published by Wake Forest Press, the premier publisher of Irish poets in America, is his thirteenth collection. He has also edited 20th Century Irish Poems and selections of the work of some of his favorite poets—among them Louis MacNeice, Brendan Kennelly, and Robert Graves, and he is the author of a winning memoir, Tuppeny Stung. He is a superb elegist and his poems about birds, children, and the natural world – exquisitely delicate – are among his most enchanting, often just four lines long, or two.

We’ll start with four of these shorter poems:

“Maisie at Dawn”:

Wordless in dawnlight
She talks to herself,
Her speech-melody
A waterlily budding.

“Wild Raspberries”:

Following the ponies’ hoof-prints
And your own muddy track, I find
Sweet pink nipples, wild raspberries,
A surprise among the brambles.

“Hailstones”:

at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin

It must have been God, or rather, Yahweh
Who scattered the granite slabs with hailstones
And threw them from His Hand so accurately
Not one Jew was uncommemorated.

“The Frost”:

They kept you refrigerated for days, my twin.
I kissed your forehead where the frost was fading.

(From The Stairwell © 2014 by Michael Longley. Used by permission of Wake Forest University Press. Photo by Jenny Downing)

Our Smartphones, Ourselves

A new study suggests the mere presence of an iPhone improves test-takers’ performance:

[P]articipants were placed in a cubicle and asked to perform word search puzzles. Researchers monitored their anxiety levels, heart rate, and blood pressure while the subjects had their iPhones with them. Then, the real experiment began. Researchers told participants that their iPhones were causing interference with the blood pressure cuff and asked them to move their phones. The phones were placed in a nearby cubicle close enough to be within eyeshot and earshot of each subject. Next, the researchers called the subjects’ phones—now placed out of reach—while they were working on the puzzle. Immediately afterwards, they collected the same data.

The results changed dramatically. Not only did the participants’ puzzle performance decline significantly while the phones were off-limits, but their anxiety levels, blood pressure and heart rates skyrocketed.

Of course, students aren’t representative of all people, but Russell Clayton, a doctoral candidate who led the study, thinks the results can tell us something about how we see our phones. “iPhones are capable of becoming an extension of selves such as that when separated, we experience a lessing of ‘self’ and a negative physiological state,” he writes. Clayton and his co-authors suggest that having phones nearby may help smartphone owners perform better during tasks that require undivided attention.

Julian Baggini expands on that last point, drawing on the “extended mind” hypothesis of philosophers David Chalmers and Andy Clark, which proposes “that the boundaries of the human mind might extend beyond the skull”:

The extended mind thesis simply points to the fact that we also use things outside of our bodies in the same way. We don’t store all our memories in our brains: we put some in phone books, photo albums and diaries. We don’t just use fingers to count: we use calculators and abacuses. If we’re trying to think things through, we may physically as well as mentally list the pros and cons to help weigh them up.

Some find our increased reliance on such mental prosthetics troubling. Will a generation that can google everything, everywhere, grow up unable to remember anything? Any gains should outweigh the losses. Brain power is a finite resource and we don’t want to use it all up on data storage and retrieval. After all, savants who remember everything often understand very little. Being able to outsource some of the grunt work of cognition frees up our brains to do the interesting, creative processing of the information. The best way of keeping our minds engaged and active might well be to let them extend far outside our skulls.

Beard Of The Week

A reader writes:

I submit as a candidate this photo of my friend, snapped by his wife, both of Northfield, Minnesota, with kittens Cosmo and Bartimaeus.  She titled this photo “things are taking a turn for the strange today”.  He and I are all among a group of folks who play Nordic Traditional music here in Northfield on Monday nights at the Contented Cow Pub.  We have been playing together for 10 years and I like to think we are the best and largest nordic traditional music jam session west of Bergen.  People have to keep warm here in Minnesota somehow when the nights are 14 below.

Previous BOTDs here.

Correction Of The Day

From a Guardian piece entitled, “132-year-old rifle found propped up against tree in Nevada desert”:

An earlier Reuters version of this story was amended on 16 January 2015 to correct the model of gun mentioned. It is a Winchester Model 1873, not a 1773, as we first said. The headline was also changed to make it clear that an old gun had been found, not a decrepit cowboy.

Beware The Sponsored Charticle

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Last month, Jacob Harris raged against the rise of  “data journalism” created by companies looking for viral media coverage, such as the Durex effort Voxified above:

PR-driven data stories [come] from an opposite direction to traditional data journalism. This is not data that is collected and analyzed in response to specific questions and whose quality is checked before publication, but prebuilt charts pushed to news organizations like press releases and targeted against specific topics like sex, anxiety, and shame that are more likely to elicit clicks. If you’re a company looking for press, why not use those fancy data scientists you hired to also generate some free publicity outside the company? And if you’re a reporter at a news startup who needs to constantly fill the news hole with new material, why wouldn’t you run one of these? Everybody’s happy, even if the data isn’t right.

Today he revisited the topic, wondering why more people aren’t creeped out by companies harvesting and publishing data about them like this:

Remember [that article] about Target figuring out which customers are pregnant [by analyzing what seemingly unrelated products they bought]; it’s hard not to see it as an invasion of privacy even if it’s perfectly legal. Contrast that with this analysis by Jawbone showing how the Napa earthquake affected its users’ sleep. Despite being built on deeply personal information, it doesn’t seem to have raised any ire from readers online. Why?

It’s possible that the difference is wearing a Jawbone is voluntary — but so is shopping at Target. Indeed, I think it’s clear that both companies analyzed personal data that users generally assume is private. It looks like Jawbone managed to sidestep squeamishness by releasing a cool chart instead of boasting about their ability to target individual user’s sleep pattern, although that’s likely something their servers are doing. All of which suggests a golden opportunity for big retailers who didn’t know how to talk about their use of big data without sounding totally creepy. Now they can — with maps!

What Does The SAT Test?

Jeffrey Aaron Snyder gives a mixed review to Lani Guinier’s The Tyranny of Meritocracy: Democratizing Higher Education in America. In particular, Snyder finds wanting the book’s criticisms of the SAT:

Guinier, like many critics of the SAT, is dismissive of the test’s predictive power, claiming that the correlation between SAT scores and first-year college grade-point-average is “very, very slight.” In fact, most studies put the figure in the neighborhood of .45, which is a shade higher than the correlation between rates of smoking and incidences of lung cancer. It is also only a tad lower than the correlation between cumulative high school GPA and first-year college GPA. …

Guinier has been arguing for years that the SAT is a “wealth test.” Is she right? Money indisputably matters. The correlation between socioeconomic status and SAT scores is around .40. (If the SAT were nothing but a wealth test, as Guinier maintains, this figure would be 1.00.) For high school graduates from the class of 2013, students from families earning more than $200,000 a year had an average combined SAT score of 1,714 (out of 2400) compared to an average combined score of 1,326 for students from families earning less than $20,000 a year. These averages, of course, obscure the enormous variation within different income brackets—many poor students ace the test while many rich ones bomb it.

Standardized testing aside, Snyder is open to Guinier’s suggestion that “our educational system should re-orient itself around collaboration and peer learning”:

The message that we send to students through standardized testing is often perverse: we are going to assess your abilities in a vacuum, without access to the books, Internet, or peers that you will almost always have access to in the working world. In this respect, standardized testing promotes an antiquated model of teaching, learning, and knowledge. While collaboration in the workplace is rewarded, collaboration on a test is penalized as cheating. It is not just testing, however, that prizes individual achievement. The conventional classroom is organized around individual performance, with students laboring away at solitary desks. The push for more open, collaborative classrooms has always faced stiff resistance from “traditional” teachers and school administrators. If you agree with Guinier that education should be a more cooperative enterprise, then the crucial question is how to incentivize schools to embrace this cultural shift.

The Wealthy Don’t Smoke Anymore, Ctd

A reader calls the following quote from Keith Humphreys “excuse making for low-income smokers”:

“Although lower income people’s access to health care is being improved by the Affordable Care Act, they are still likely to lag middle class people in their access to effective smoking cessation treatments.” Access to “effective smoking cessation treatments”, like access to birth control, is ubiquitous – any drug store sells Nicorette and the patch over the counter.  A patch costs $5 a day.  A pack of cigarettes costs $7 and up, depending on where you live [upwards of $15 in New York].  The patch is very effective.  There may be structural issues specific to lower income people that make starting smoking easier and stopping more difficult, e.g. education, lower intelligence and lack of personal responsibility if one is willing to skip the PC BS, but “access” is leftish code for more unmet needs requiring government intervention.

As far as the reader’s “very effective” claim, the nicotine patch stops people from smoking only about 19% of the time, at least according to this study. What’s been found to be a more effective?

E-cigarettes are more effective than nicotine patches and gum in helping people to quit smoking, according to a study that challenges the negative views of some public health experts.

The issue of e-cigarettes has become a public health battleground, alarming those who think that their marketing and use in public places where smoking is banned risks re-normalising tobacco. Supporters say the vast majority of smokers are using e-cigarettes to kick their tobacco habit and that the health consequences of nicotine use without the tar from cigarettes appear, as yet, to be far less of a problem. The study, by a team from University College London, looked at attempts of nearly 6,000 people to stop smoking and found that, while engaging with the NHS smoking cessation services was the most effective way to quit, using e-cigarettes beat nicotine replacement therapy, as well as the efforts of people to stop with no help at all. … When the results were adjusted to account for the differences between the smokers in terms of background, age and other variables, those using e-cigarettes were around 60% more likely to quit than those using nicotine replacement therapy or just willpower.

Hathos Alert

The headline says it all:

“I have not seen ‘American Sniper’,” writes New Republic’s reviewer of ‘American Sniper’

Well, almost all:

Update from a reader:

The headline most assuredly does NOT say it all. It is an opinion piece about the characterization of American Sniper put forward by the marketing of the movie.  The author disagrees with this characterization.  It is not in any way, shape or form a “movie review,” but if you just lie and say it is, then you can create another phony right-wing Gotcha! moment to chew up the next news cycle.

By the way, thank you for not having a comments section.

Another reader retorts:

Unfortunately, the headline does say quite a bit. Look at what the article actually says.

In the fourth paragraph, the author states that he’s reminded of Zero Dark Thirty, and that in that movie the use of torture is given such a nuanced portrayal, that people who supported and defended the practice left “believing their views were validated.” Next, “I have not seen American Sniper. But if the trailer is any indication, Eastwood’s film, like Zero Dark Thirty, tries to make a straightforward situation more complex than it is.”

So I guess he’s saying … Zero Dark Thirty takes a nuanced view of something that, perhaps, one doesn’t need to take a nuanced view. Based solely on the trailer, American Sniper sure looks like it might do the same thing. He doesn’t actually know, because he hasn’t actually watched it.

Fair enough: this isn’t a movie review. It’s poseur clickbait that doesn’t stand on solid ground, but wants you to think that it does. I had higher expectations of my students when I taught a first-year undergraduate course on written communications at the University of Illinois. 

Finally, I do not know if the commenter’s other point was meant to be sarcastic, but I applaud your the lack of a comment field, for reasons all too eloquently put by The Oatmeal here.