To illustrate how typeface design affects how we read, Chris Gayomali describes an experiment by Phil Renaud, a college student who noticed his grades were climbing despite no conscious attempt to improve his performance:
What he did change, however, was his essay font — three times, in fact. Renaud went back and looked at his [52] essay scores and the different typefaces he’d used when he submitted his work. His papers were handed to his professors in three different fonts: Times New Roman, Trebuchet MS, and Georgia. Here’s what he tallied:
Why did Georgia — which he switched to later on in his college career — perform better than the others? Here’s what Renaud wrote:
Maybe fonts speak a lot louder than we think they do. Especially to a professor who has to wade through a collection of them; Times seems to be the norm, so it really doesn’t set off any subconscious triggers. Georgia is enough like Times to retain its academic feel, and is different enough to be something of a relief for the grader. Trebuchet seems to set off a negative trigger, maybe just based on the fact that it’s not as easy to read in print, maybe on the fact that it looks like something off a blog rather than an academic journal. Who knows. [Source]
For the record, the Dish comes to you in Georgia. In other font news, graphic designer Sang Mun has created an “NSA-proof font”:
Sang has no illusions that even a clever cryptographic font—which he says you can use in email messages to shield them from snoops and font-recognition bots—will remain encoded for long. They’re not meant to be long-term tools with which to combat the NSA. Rather, he views them as an awareness-raising measure.
[I]t is precisely because science is so powerful that we need the humanities now more than ever. In your science, mathematics and engineering classes, you’re given facts, answers, knowledge, truth. Your professors say, “This is how things are.” They give you certainty. The humanities, at least the way I teach them, give you uncertainty, doubt and skepticism.
The humanities are subversive. They undermine the claims of all authorities, whether political, religious or scientific. This skepticism is especially important when it comes to claims about humanity, about what we are, where we came from, and even what we can be and should be. Science has replaced religion as our main source of answers to these questions. Science has told us a lot about ourselves, and we’re learning more every day. But the humanities remind us that we have an enormous capacity for deluding ourselves.
His case seems to be supported by recent research indicating that reading serious fiction can help us resist “cognitive closure”:
[Psychologist Maja] Djikic and her colleagues describe an experiment featuring 100 University of Toronto students.
After arriving at the lab and providing some personal information, the students read either one of eight short stories or one of eight essays. The fictional stories were by authors including Wallace Stegner, Jean Stafford, and Paul Bowles; the non-fiction essays were by equally illustrious writers such as George Bernard Shaw and Stephen Jay Gould.
Afterwards, each participant filled out a survey measuring their emotional need for certainty and stability. They expressed their agreement or disagreement with such statements as “I don’t like situations that are uncertain” and “I dislike questions that can be answered in many different ways.”
Those who read a short story had significantly lower scores on that test than those who read an essay. Specifically, they expressed less need for order and more comfort with ambiguity. This effect was particularly pronounced among those who reported being frequent readers of either fiction or non-fiction.
Karen Swallow Prior contemplates how reading fiction makes us human:
[R]eading, unlike spoken language, does not come naturally to human beings. It must be taught. Because it goes beyond mere biology, there is something profoundly spiritual — however one understands that word — about the human ability, and impulse, to read. In fact, even the various senses in which we use the word captures this: to “read” means not only to decipher a given and learned set of symbols in a mechanistic way, but it also suggests that very human act of finding meaning, of “interpreting” in the sense of “reading” a person or situation. To read in this sense might be considered one of the most spiritual of all human activities. It is “spiritual reading” — not merely decoding — that unleashes the power that good literature has to reach into our souls and, in so doing, draw and connect us to others.
Max Fisher profiles the “spiritual leader” behind the violent anti-Muslim movement escalating among Buddhists in Burma:
[Ashin] Wirathu calls himself “the Burmese bin Laden” and was recently labeled on the cover of Time magazine as “the face of Burmese terror.” A prominent Burmese human rights activist, after a lifetime of fighting government oppression, now warns that Wirathu’s movement is promoting an ideology akin to neo-Nazism.
Already, the movement has expanded beyond this one self-styled radical Buddhist monk. It’s now expanding across Burma (also known as Myanmar) according to [a NY] Times article. The anti-Muslim sentiment has spread with alarming speed over just the last year, as Burma – which is finally opening up after years of military dictatorship – loosened its strict speech laws. It has prompted boycotts and sermons that can sound an awful lot like calls for violence against Muslims. Monasteries associated with the movement have enrolled 60,000 Burmese children into Sunday school programs.
Walter Russell Mead points out that no one in government is condemning the content of Wirathu’s sermons:
He frequently suggests there is a conspiracy afoot to turn Burma into a Muslim country, that Muslims will overrun “good” Buddhists, force them to convert to Islam, and steal their women and daughters and jobs. In his sermons, heard by thousands of people across the country, he describes violence against Muslims, like the massacre of children in Meiktila in March, as a show of strength.
Nevertheless, President Thein Sein lept to Wirathu’s defense, labeling him a “son of Buddha” and a “noble person” in an official statement. He made no mention of Wirathu’s hate-filled speeches, nor the rampaging mobs that burned and slaughtered their way through Muslim neighborhoods on several occasions earlier this year. As of this writing, celebrated human rights activist and Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi—whose earlier criticism of violence against Burmese Muslims was pretty weak, at best—has neither defended nor attacked Wirathu.
(Photo: Wirathu attends a conference about the religious violence that has shaken the country at a monastery on the outskirts of Yangon on June 13, 2013. By Ye Aung Thu/AFP/Getty Images)
True, that sounds like a lot. When President Barack Obama called in February for an increase to $9 an hour from $7.25, he was accused of being a dangerous redistributionist. Yet consider this: If the minimum wage had simply tracked U.S. productivity gains since 1968, it would be $21.72 an hour — three times what it is now.
There are surely some US jobs which simply aren’t economic at $15 per hour, and those jobs will end up being lost. (In aggregate, as I say, raising the minimum wage is probably good for employment, but the extra jobs at employers taking advantage of all that extra spending aren’t going to be in the same places as the jobs lost at employers who can’t afford to pay that much.) But the point here is that the US has already done a spectacularly good job of exporting most of its exportable low-wage work. As Hanauer says, “virtually all of these low-wage jobs are service jobs that can neither be outsourced nor automated”. As a result, raising the minimum wage will result in many fewer job losses now than it would have done a couple of decades ago.
Dylan Matthews, who isn’t necessarily opposed to small increases in the minimum wage, thinks that a $15 minimum wage is a “terrible idea”:
The evidence we have on the effects of minimum wage increases, [economics professor Arindrajit Dube] notes, are “limited to a historical period where statutory minimum wages have ranged between roughly 35% and 50% of the national median wage.” Hanauer’s proposal would put the minimum wage at roughly 75 percent of the national median, which Dube notes would put it higher than any OECD country, including several European social democracies. “We just do not know what a $15/hour minimum wage would do based on the type of careful research designs that have become the hallmark of modern labor economics, and ones I strive to use in my work,” Dube writes in an e-mail.
Matthews’ bottom line:
There’s a case to be made that mild increases in the minimum wage are worth it, either because one doesn’t believe in employment effects or because one believes the wage increases it causes are worth it. But Hanauer’s proposed increase is recklessly large and even supporters of minimum wage hikes don’t think it’s a serious option.
Another update to the stellar coverage provided by Dish readers, this one from São Paulo:
Fortunately, even though the initial demands by the protesters have been met (the transit fare has returned to its previous level), the protests have continued. In fact, they are showing this amazing level of self-organization. Groups will march together and decide which route to follow, where to stop and chant, where to sit and block the street, etc. There will be announcements about when and where the next protest will happen, and once the end time is reached, the protest will end.
There have been protests for various things, the largest being against PEC 37, which if passed, will make it much harder to catch and convict wrong doers within the government (involved in corruption, the horrors of the military government, etc).
Among the other protests, there was a protest against the Cura Gay (Gay Cure), which if passed would allow psychiatrist/psychologists to offer treatments to those who want to cure their same-sex attraction. This has been outlawed by the government since 1999, as its fraud, the treatment does not exist, and the acceptance of it sends the wrong message. Keep in mind that a poll done asking whether Brazilians thought the law should be passed found that 49% did not believe it should be passed, 36% felt it should and 11% had no opinion. (I have been desperately searching for where I read these numbers, but haven’t been able to find the link.) Also, unlike the US, same-sex marriage is legal and is recognized by the federal government.
Of note, if the Cura Gay legislation is passed, gays may be able to retire or I suppose go on paid disability as they are “sick.” !!!! Here’s the link. The Cura Gay is being pushed by Marco Feliciano, who is a Deputado Federal (roughly equivalent to a congressman in the US) and who is involved in the Assembleia de Deus (Assembly of God), one of the powerhouse churches of Brazil’s increasingly popular evangelical movement.
After the jump is a longer update from our reader. Meanwhile, Colin Snider pushes back against critics of the protesters:
As is all too often the case amongst neoliberal analysis, they falsely equated growth to development. Sure, Brazil’s economy had grown, but it also retained one of the higher levels of income inequality in the world. … Brazilians had been told for ten years that things had improved, that Brazil had finally “arrived,” and that they were now enjoying material and social benefits that they’d always been excluded from. And in some ways, there were real gains in the 2000s – the purchasing power of the working class and middle class strengthened somewhat, and programs like Bolsa Familia and Fome Zero helped millions of poor families. But at the first sign of economic instability, it all threatened to come apart… .
James Greiff refers to such insecurity as “the middle-class illusion” in Brazil:
Millions of Brazilians have indeed made it into the middle class and enjoy the trappings of a lifestyle that would be recognized by their economic peers in the U.S., Japan, Canada and most of Europe. They have iPhones and SUVs, Nike sneakers, Oakley sunglasses, take overseas vacations, enjoy imported delicacies, get braces to straighten teeth and plastic surgery to mask the wear of time.
They enjoy much of this material plenty, though, inside a personal-security bubble. Houses are fortified behind high walls topped by broken glass and barbed wire, while iron bars seal windows. Apartment complexes are similarly ring-fenced, with entranceways secured by guards, often bearing arms. These are needed not just to keep out robbers, but also so much else of what’s on the other side. Indeed, the middle-class illusion ends at the first step outside the front door.
As Brazilians move into or climb up the middle class, they inevitably pay more in taxes – yet they also inevitably grow increasingly aware that they do not get their money’s worth. One commonly hears Brazilians complain that they pay “1st world taxes” – about 36% of GDP – but receive “3rd world services” in return. The protests thus represent growing frustration that established political parties are unwilling to implement reforms on both sides of the fiscal coin – to improve public services (particularly healthcare, education, and public safety) and reduce corruption.
Marc Tracy sees the ongoing protests as an outcome of urbanization:
This process upended centuries of a static social order in which the majority were denied many rights. Brazil’s urbanization, then, was in one sense a major step forward for most Brazilians, providing, as Holston put it, “a new density of opportunity” that stemmed from the literal density of the way people actually lived.
But the dialectical result of this new density and these new nominal rights has been that as tremendous inequality has remained—and when it has been ostentatiously exacerbated by, say, hosting international prestige projects such as the World Cup Finals and the Summer Olympics—Brazilians in the satellite cities on the peripheries (and even poorer Brazilians in the favelas, the frequently illegal shanty towns which are almost like the peripheries of the peripheries) have grown angry that their economic rights have not caught up with their political rights.
When you add to this mix the fact that everyone now lives closer to each other—another opportunity borne of density—you have the recipe for these massive protests.
However, when comparing Brazil to Turkey, James Traub finds that the former has democratic institutions better able to handle such strife:
While [Turkish Prime Minister] Erdogan has demonized his foes, President Dilma Rousseff of Brazil has praised protestors for waking the country to its shortcomings. Brazil, too, faces a crisis, but not a crisis of representation, as Turkey does. Larry Diamond, a leading democracy scholar at Stanford, points out that both Rousseff and her Erdogan-like predecessor, Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva, had to do far more political bargaining than Erdogan because they rule through coalitions while Erdogan controls a parliamentary majority. And the reason for this, in turn, is that Turkish law excludes parties from parliament which do not win more than 10 percent of the national vote. The Turkish system enables Erdogan’s worst impulses. Working with rival parties might force him to learn a few hard lessons.
Another update from our São Paulo reader on the ground:
The protests and protesters here have been overwhelmingly peaceful and the police response has been largely peaceful for over a week. Following a series of protests in which the Policia Militar (they are the police force for this type of situation) were being very brutal and injured not only protesters but also passersby and journalists, the state governor Geraldo Alckmin, who controls the PM, told them to cool it. Since then, the front-lines of the PM who are following the protests are largely not carrying guns.
On Saturday night, at this protest I was following the police seemed to be in a good mood, at times were laughing along with the protesters. All this while the protesters were halting traffic on busy thoroughfares. Fortunately, many of the drivers seemed to be in favor of the protest, and were honking their horns and giving thumbs-ups. The difference that I saw between now and a week and a half ago is downright shocking.
In other parts of the country, however, the situation is completely different. While it seems that the vast, vast majority of protesters are peaceful and only want to engage in peaceful actions, the police response has been BRUTAL. In this report on Globo’s Jornal Nacional, one can see footage of the police response during a huge protest that occurred in Rio on Thursday June 20th. This was a huge protest with tens of thousands of people. At one end of the avenue were vandals who decided to attempt to break into city hall and do general damage to their local area. But the rest of the crowd were peaceful protesters, many of whom hadn’t even take part in a previous protest out of fear of violence. The way I have described it to my worried American friends is imagine a protest from Times Square to 72nd Street along Broadway. The crowd is peaceful, except for those between 70th and 72nd.
The police response was brutal. Instead of just focusing on the troublemakers (those between 70th and 72nd), they decided to just go bananas, shooting tear gas and rubber bullets at protesters along the length of the crowd. In Globo’s report, there were people who were just waiting for the subway station to be reopened who were targeted. I came across reports of canisters of teargas being shot into bars where people are not even taking part in the protests, and tear gas was apparently even shot into a hospital.
In addition, there was a report in which three “protesters” were picking fights, yelling at the police and punching the horses of the mounted policemen (horrible!). The peaceful protesters (who were apparently everyone else) demanded that the police arrest these three vandals, but the police apparently refused and decided instead to shoot rubber bullets and tear gas at the entire group. The report was indicating that the bad protesters were planted there by the police to give them an excuse to be violent. Apparently, reporters were there but are no reporting this event. Here’s the link.
The police forces should be maintaining security for the peaceful protesters, in my opinion. Many of the people who have hit the streets have come out because of disgust at the violent police response. Brazilians have the constitutional right to protest and on this point Dilma agrees. However, the situation outside of what I have seen in the city of São Paulo has not changed.
Anyway, I don’t know where this is going. What I do know is that politicians have been incredibly spoiled by a populace who felt largely disenfranchised and who had accepted that the government was corrupt, there was no way to stop it, and let’s just focus on football, novelas and Big Brother. That feeling of disenfranchisement seems to have changed.
In this poll by Folha de São Paulo, 66% of people think the protests should continue. The fact that two-thirds of Paulistanos think the protests should continue is amazing, as the protests are negatively affecting all sorts of businesses (due to lack of customers), not to mention the traffic situation. For many of these people, their two-hour commute between work and home is growing even longer.
As everyone knows, Brazil has lots of problems, but Brazilians seem optimistic. According to Fantástico, Globo’s Sunday night news program, 94% percent of those polled thought that the issues pressing Brazil would be addressed, and 82% said they would not vote for a candidate who was corrupt. Here’s the link.
Readers respond to a recent post on genetically-modified organisms:
I have this argument with my liberal friends all the time. The problem as far as I can see is the separating of the issue of crops that grow their own pesticides that cannot be washed off from the process that developed the crop to begin with. GM is a method that should be fully supported while embedding pesticides into my corn should be outlawed.
I find a similar problem with nuclear power. Some people on the left just don’t want to hear that just like audio replication technology, nuclear power plants designed and built today are nothing like the ones designed in the ’50s and built in the ’60s.
Another reader:
I’ve been thinking about GMOs and the fear people have of them, particularly those on the Left. And despite any science saying otherwise, I think the reason they are so feared is because of the messenger. Monsanto doesn’t have a very good record. It created Agent Orange, Saccharin, DDT, and PCB – all of which have been linked to either cancer or other health problems. And we’re supposed to trust them with the most basic parts of our lives – our food? Really?
Another:
I used to share skepticism about supposed GMOphobia – until the details of Monsanto’s 11th hour rider in the recent budget bill came to light.
Most of the criticism I read had relatively little to do with the kind of luddite-hippie nexis that the media likes to portray, and much more to do with any one of three concerns, all broadly labeled under the “GMO” heading: a) the Monsanto’s corporate-political nexis of financial interest that, like the drone issue, seems absolutely immune to even sustained public pressure, b) that a major corporate force in our food supply is using political leverage to make it absolutely impossible to grow crops that aren’t part of their intellectual property – to the point where they’re prosecuting independent farmers while legislatively declaring themselves immune to prosecution, and c) that the specifics of certain modifications might have a real effect on our health, our agricultural product and our environment, effects which, again, Monsanto has summarily declared themselves immune from prosecution for thanks to legislative fiat.
None of these concerns should be dismissed as “phobias” – they’re very real, and deserve at the least a thorough airing and debate – but it is maddening to see the media repeatedly rehash GMO criticism as if critics are blanketly opposed to any genetic modification at all. No, we’ve been engaging in genetic modification of agricultural product since the days of Mendel and well before – Guns, Germs and Steel sums up the practice and its advantage rather nicely.
Another:
I am amazed at the faux-science observations of people like PZ Meyers when it comes to GMO crops. He states that: “All of our crops, everyone’s crops, are heavily modified genetically.” While this is a true statement, in the context of the GMO debate it could not be further from the truth.
The truth is that through natural selection and cross pollination, some varieties of fruits and vegetables have changed over time. This happens naturally and through human intervention. GMOs are so different from this process so as to render Meyers’ statement a lie. GMOs have their DNA manipulated in a laboratory in a variety of ways that could NEVER occur naturally. Through gene splicing and protein engineering, scientists create organisms that sometimes contain the DNA from vastly different lifeforms. One of the favorite tricks is to combine virus and plant DNA to deliver some aspect of the virus through the plant.
While this is all cool science, and great for the bottom line of huge chemical companies, no one knows what the long-term effect of these human-created organisms will be. Chemical companies cannot say they are safe in the long run because they don’t know. And, because they are making huge piles of money, they really don’t care. So they use their piles of money to drown out any objections because it is quicker and cheaper than research.
While I find some of the anti-GMO rhetoric a bit overblown, I cannot imagine that this kind of tampering with the genetic makeup of our food should be cavalierly called a “strange unfounded fear” until we know a lot more about the long-term effects of this tampering.
Update from a reader:
I’m a Ph.D student in genetics and have been following the GMO freak out for some time. It’s very frustrating to me to see so much misinformation repeated over and over again as fact with no supporting evidence. Your last poster in the most recent iteration of the topic really pissed me off.
First they claim that all crops being the result of natural selection makes them less scary. If humans are selecting for specific traits, that’s not natural selection. That’s artificial selection. It’s slow, and imprecise, but over time you can turn maize into corn and wild boars into bacon. Using modern genetic tools, we can do that faster and more importantly, more precisely. As ancient humans selected for certain traits, others were lost. Some of these can be regained using targeted genetic manipulations (the story of how tomatoes lost their taste is a recent example).
The second thing that drove me up the wall was this bit: “One of the favorite tricks is to combine virus and plant DNA to deliver some aspect of the virus through the plant.” Viruses are used as a packaging and delivery system; the actual virus proteins are removed. There are many methods to get genetic material into cells, and viral vectors are only some of the options (link). The virus your poster is concerned about is more than likely actually a soil bacteria first discovered in 1907.
Jeb Harrison interviews Simon Vance, the prize-winning audiobook narrator who has lent his voice to over 450 recordings:
JH: What is your process for determining the voice for any given character?
SV: My first anchor will be the information given in the text by the author — Dickens is particularly good at painting the picture of a character, giving me some idea of his/her physical characteristics and social status even before they open their mouth. Often, if there’s nothing spelled out I use my intuition based on who the person is, what they want and how they interact with the other characters. There’s usually something I can hook onto. …
JH: What advice would you give to folks just getting started in audiobook narration?
SV: Really, you want to sit in a dark closet sized space for hours on end reading to yourself? Are you crazy? You’re going to have to really love reading….
Seriously, it’s become a very crowded profession recently and I’m lucky to have established myself some time ago. One must bear in mind that it’s not just the hours spent behind the microphone… I spend a lot of time pre-reading and researching pronunciations, plus their are the technical aspects of running a home studio. But if you’re dedicated, who knows? Plug yourself into all the audiobook groups in social media and absorb as much as you can. Listen to the respected readers and try to discover what it is they bring to a narration that the less successful clearly do not. I think, as a very basic requirement, you need an actor’s sensibility… it’s not just about a pretty voice.
Thanks for covering this, as I find the militarization of our police a worrisome thing. The article you linked to talks about what are essentially tanks being sold to “90 of the 100 largest cities”. But this is by no means a big city issue. Look no further than my home town of Keene, New Hampshire to see how pervasive this has become. From one of the few articles written about how insidious this militarization of even small town police forces has become:
“Keene is a beautiful place. It’s gorgeous, and it’s safe, and we love it here. We just don’t want to live in the kind of place where there’s an armored personnel carrier parked outside of City Hall. I mean, it’s completely unnecessary. But it’s more than that. It’s just not who we are.” Some city council members have said that because the vehicle will be paid for by a federal grant, the town would be foolish not to take it. O’Meara doesn’t buy it. “They try to say it’s ‘free.’ Well it isn’t free. Taxpayers are still paying to put this militaristic thing in our town. And it isn’t about the money, anyway. It’s about what kind of town we want to be.”
You should especially watch the [above] video of how Lenco marketed these things before the publicity here in Keene caused them to pull it down. Supporters point to police safety (and what politician can be seen arguing against that), but the video reminds us that trouble with giving small-town police an expensive, armored toy like this is that the temptation to use it even for trivial things, like breaking up a drunken frat party, becomes overwhelming.
