The Dish

John Buntin challenges the conventional wisdom:

That gentrification displaces poor people of color by well-off white people is a claim so commonplace that most people accept it as a widespread fact of urban life. It’s not. Gentrification of this sort is actually exceedingly rare. The socio-economic status of most neighborhoods is strikingly stable over time. When the ethnic compositions of low-income black neighborhoods do change, it’s typically because Latinos and other immigrants move into a neighborhood—and such in-migration is probably more beneficial than harmful. As for displacement—the most objectionable feature of gentrification—there’s actually very little evidence it happens. In fact, so-called gentrifying neighborhoods appear to experience less displacement than nongentrifying neighborhoods.

He shares some research by sociologist Patrick Sharkey showing gentrification’s surprising benefits:

Sometimes these changes can be difficult, resulting as they often do in new political leaders and changes to the character of the communities. But Sharkey’s research suggests they also bring real benefits. Black residents, particularly black youth, living in more diverse neighborhoods find significantly better jobs than peers with the same skill sets who live in less diverse neighborhoods. In short, writes Sharkey, “There is strong evidence that when neighborhood disadvantage declines, the economic fortunes of black youth improve, and improve rather substantially.”

In other words, the problem isn’t so much that gentrification hurts black neighborhoods; it’s that it too often bypasses them. Harvard sociologists Robert Sampson and Jackelyn Hwang have shown that neighborhoods that are more than 40 percent black gentrify much more slowly than other neighborhoods. The apparent unwillingness of other ethnic groups to move into and invest in predominantly black communities in turn perpetuates segregation and inequality in American society.

Previous Dish on gentrification here.

(Photo by Flickr user MsSaraKelly.)

Alexander Nazaryan considers the recently released, over one-thousand page David Foster Wallace Reader, which includes everything from excerpts of Wallace’s fiction to the syllabi of classes he taught:

[D]o we need The David Foster Wallace Reader? According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, probably not. Though the book seems like a Christmas gift in the making, it contains almost no new work. But I think I get what [editorial adviser and Wallace’s former editor Michael] Pietsch is doing here, and I am all for it. You need evidence of miracles for sainthood; you need something only marginally more mundane to sustain a bid for lasting literary greatness, for entrance into that pantheon protected from the vicissitudes of literary taste. This is part of that effort, a reminder of how good Wallace could be, whether he was writing about Kafka or the Illinois State Fair, whether he was making stuff up or trying to see things as they actually are.

Tim Groenland posits that the Reader answers the eternal dilemma of what DFW newbies should read first:

The David Foster Wallace Reader is, essentially, an attempt to address this question by presenting as many of the answers as possible between one set of covers. Assembled with one eye firmly on the classroom (and, perhaps, the other on a world in which people are less and less likely to read 1,079-page novels), it includes selections from each of Wallace’s fictional works as well as several of his most celebrated essays with occasional commentary from writers, critics and friends.

The foreword (written jointly by Wallace’s editor, his agent and his widow) claims that “teachers will find here an ideal introduction for students”, a statement that makes the book’s main purpose clear. The Reader can be seen as a move by the Wallace estate in the emerging struggle to manage his legacy. Since his untimely and tragic death (he took his own life at the age of 46) a certain amount of romantic tortured-genius aura has accumulated around Wallace, to the dismay of friends and family. A Hollywood biopic is due shortly in which the author will be played by Jason Segel (star of The Muppets and Knocked Up, among others); the Wallace estate has already disowned the film. The Reader represents an attempt to position the writer as a serious literary figure rather than a pop icon.

Recent Dish on David Foster Wallace here, here, and here.

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.