Author: Andrew Sullivan

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:

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.

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?

In a profile of Aubrey de Grey, author of Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime, Charlotte Allen considers the tension between empiricism and belief in the “live-forever movement”:

The current fascination with achieving immortality via science seems to track the general loss of religious faith in the modern West. Since the New Testament phrase “death hath no more dominion” no longer resonates with many people as a promise of heavenly survival, scientific life extension can be explained as an effort to achieve transcendence and eternal life by other means. Aldous Huxley explored those themes satirically in his 1939 novel, After Many a Summer Dies The Swan. … Interestingly, today’s living-forever movement involves precisely the same two themes that animated Huxley’s novel: advanced medical technology and primitive living. And also faith of a steadfastness to rival that of a medieval saint.

Living-forever people tend to display a consistent cluster of traits and fixations, of which de Grey’s major benefactor Peter Thiel is a quintessential example. Among them are: political libertarianism (a New Yorker profile of Thiel in 2011 explains that he built PayPal​ – ​since sold to eBay​ – ​in part because “he wanted to create an online currency that could circumvent government control”); boundless optimism regarding a technically enhanced utopian future (for Thiel, according to the New Yorker, it’s “sea-steading” – floating city-states on the high seas; for others, it’s colonizing Mars); and a preoccupation with one’s food intake. Nearly all living-forever people are on one version or other of the currently fashionable carb-free “Paleo diet,” if not cutting back on eating altogether. … Finally, most living-forever people seem to be confident that they personally will be around long enough to take advantage of the biomedical breakthroughs that Aubrey de Grey predicts lie just around the corner. Thiel told New Yorker writer George Packer that he expected to live until age 120​ – which, because he’s just 46 right now, should give him plenty of time to become that man of de Grey’s prophecy who lives until age 1,000.

Previous Dish on de Grey and longevity here, here, and here.