“We’re at our worst when it comes to politics,” declares Paul Bloom in an essay about reason and morality:
Most of us know nothing about constitutional law, so it’s hardly surprising that we take sides in the Obamacare debate the way we root for the Red Sox or the Yankees. Loyalty to the team is what matters. A set of experiments run by the Stanford psychologist Geoffrey Cohen illustrates this principle perfectly.
Subjects were told about a proposed welfare program, which was described as being endorsed by either Republicans or Democrats, and were asked whether they approved of it. Some subjects were told about an extremely generous program, others about an extremely stingy program, but this made little difference. What mattered was party: Democrats approved of the Democratic program, and Republicans, the Republican program. When asked to justify their decision, however, participants insisted that party considerations were irrelevant; they felt they were responding to the program’s objective merits. This appears to be the norm.
The Brown psychologist Steven Sloman and his colleagues have found that when people are called upon to justify their political positions, even those that they feel strongly about, many are unable to point to specifics. For instance, many people who claim to believe deeply in cap and trade or a flat tax have little idea what these policies actually mean.
So, yes, if you want to see people at their worst, press them on the details of those complex political issues that correspond to political identity and that cleave the country almost perfectly in half.
The latest installment in the saga of a brilliant comic actor felled by his extreme temper unfolds this week in New York magazine. The “greatest actor in the world” has declared that he is now withdrawing from public life, and eschewing “show-business” for the artist’s life. I hope he finds happiness, really hope he can do what he does best again, and I sure don’t begrudge him his utter frustration with the price of celebrity in 2014.
But he accuses me and Anderson Cooper of falsely accusing him of homophobia. He insists he did not call that photographer a “cock-sucking faggot.” Rather, he called him a “cocksucker” and some other word he can’t quite remember. And he had no idea that “cock-sucker” was an anti-gay slur in any case. Yes, he did refer to someone has a “toxic little queen” but again he was utterly unaware that the phrase had anything to do with homosexuals. He is now researching homophobia he was so oblivious to it before: “I want to learn about what is hurtful speech in your community.”
A couple things: as I said before, I have no window into Alec Baldwin’s soul and have no reason to believe he is, in some permanent or fundamental way, homophobic. So much of his public life would seem to portray the opposite. My point is nonetheless that he deployed homophobic curse-words in public against other human beings, in order to cut them down to size. All he has to say is that he has a hot Irish temper, that it got the better of him, that he realized he has some buried issues that he needs to grapple with … and get on with his life. The gay community would have welcomed him with open arms. But he cannot accept the truth of what transparently occurred, because it would dent his pride. So he still bizarrely insists his Twitter tirade against a nasty British tabloid hack had nothing to do with homophobia:
At the time, I didn’t view “toxic little queen” as a homophobic statement. I didn’t realize how those words could give offense, and I’m sorry for that.
Really? He had no idea that this was homophobic:
George Stark, you lying little bitch. I am gonna f%#@ you up … I want all of my followers and beyond to straighten out this fucking little bitch, George Stark. @MailOnline … My wife and I attend a funeral to pay our respects to an old friend, and some toxic Brit writes this fucking trash … If put my foot up your fucking ass, George Stark, but I’m sure you’d dig it too much … I’m gonna find you, George Stark, you toxic little queen, and I’m gonna fuck…you…up.
My italics. And so – drum-roll – comes the classic non-apology apology:
If I offended anyone along the way, I do apologize.
And, of course, after a non-apology will come a non-exit from public life. If you want to exit from public life, you can do it. You can stop giving paparazzi what they live for; you can let old stories die and rebuild your career with good work; and you can give to charity with total anonymity. Alternatively, you can write a long screed in New York magazine, claim that you were completely and falsely smeared, re-visit every tortured detail of the story that made life more difficult for you, detail your expansive holiness, throw barbs at lots of people who once worked with you, and loudly tell the world you’re taking your marbles and going home.
Alec Baldwin is less sad if you imagine Jack Donaghy saying the things that come out of his mouth. “I won’t be in tomorrow, Lemon, I’m being subpoenaed by the Gay Department of Justice.
Alex has apparently morphed into Jack Donaghy, or was that portrayal truer to life than we knew?
Paul Ford ponders how new currencies like Bitcoin might actually make us appreciate online advertising:
Advertisers pay to reach highly valued online audiences; they use a variety of technologies, many surprisingly ineffective, to find these individuals. Could cryptocurrencies help? [Digital advertising and finance analyst Larry] Smith asks us to consider the following scenario: imagine a brand like Dunkin’ Donuts that wanted to create a loyalty program. Now imagine that brand creating its own currency: DunkinDollars. Finally, imagine an online advertising campaign where people who clicked on an advertisement would be given the virtual coins. Small amounts of money might be distributed without friction. If large brands could create their own currencies and allow individuals to participate in this marketplace, they could create consumers who were truly invested, in every sense.
The entire web of advertising would suddenly become a more interesting place. Before, the ads seemed to hunt you, but now you would have reason to hunt for ads. The coins you earned could then be exchanged for branded goods, but they could also be exchanged on an open market, like a kind of penny stock. “Pay consumers for clicks and acquisitions,” says Smith, defining this new kind of model.
When the Karachi-born Bay Area rapper Bohemia released an album including lyrics in Punjabi in 2006, he kicked off a new wave for rappers in Pakistan. Hamzah Saif describes how contemporary Pakistani rappers moved on from the English raps of Eminem and began to embrace the vernacular:
The new rappers owned their product. Their rhymes, rapped in street vernacular, had now found a vocabulary familiar with representing their own experience. … Kasim Raja’s track Black Hoods Black Sheeshay illustrates this indigenization of creative trajectory. While the track shares a celebration of braggadocio and automotive culture with commercial American rap, its engagement with alcohol is a radical departure from the substance abuse celebrated by Eminem and Bohemia, “Not into drugs / we’re into cars… Poppin bottles but only sodas / livin far from drugs, we’re against drugs / we’re against drugs…” …
Vernacular raps added another new dimension to Pakistani rhyming. Rappers were no longer just rapping; they were rapping in their language, itself a socio-political statement. “Why should I rap in someone else’s tongue?”, says Jawad from [rap group] DirtJaw, “I love Punjabi very much.” This sentiment was quick to catch on among non-Punjabis as well.
(Video: “Black Hoods Black Sheeshay” by Kasim Raja)
For a recent study, researchers in Taiwan examined the data of 469,000 patients who had been hospitalised with mental disorders, then “parsed those admissions against changes in the broad-based Taiwan Stock Exchange Capitalization Weighted Stock Index (TAIEX)”:
The study found that a 1,000-point fall in the TAIEX (about two-thirds of its standard deviation) caused a daily increase of 4.71% in hospitalisations for mental disorders. Relatively routine stockmarket declines also had an impact: a 1% daily fall in the market raised the number of admissions by 0.36% on that day. Consecutive daily declines, regardless of size, led to cumulative increases in such hospitalisation: 0.32% for each additional day. So when share prices fell for five consecutive trading days, the fifth day saw a 1.6% increase in hospitalisations for mental disorders—a relentlessly falling stockmarket clearly has a mounting impact on psychological wellbeing. The study also notes that, on average, hospitalisations were 200% higher on trading days than on non-trading days.
Although falling stock prices influenced men, women and all adult age groups to some degree, the researchers found that the mental health of men and the middle-aged were most severely affected. A possible explanation comes from previous studies, which found that men invest in the stockmarket far more actively than women; are more inclined to relate their own competence to management of their finances; and take greater risks. Middle-aged investors, by contrast, have fewer future opportunities to recover their losses, making stockmarket declines more threatening to their mental wellbeing. And, as the study notes, age itself is an important risk factor for mental health.
S. Brent Plate meditates on Ai Weiwei and the paradox of iconoclasm:
In the modern age, as art has become sacred, the smashing of the artistic tradition becomes itself an iconoclastic act. One of Ai’s great works is a large-scale, three-panel photo artwork from 1995 titled Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn. It is iconoclastic, smashing an object of the past and by extension smashing the tradition itself.
[Last] week, Ai’s artwork [was] back in the news. On Sunday, Dominican-born artist named Maximo Caminero walked into the Pérez Art Museum in Miami and smashed one of the vases that was part of Ai Weiwei’s Colored Vases display. Caminero’s complaint? That local galleries put all their time and effort into international artists of high esteem, and forsake the locals. Here’s the thing:
iconoclasm is itself an iconic act. One image replaces another. Ai was careful to have his iconoclastic act documented, skillfully shot on camera and reproduced for many to see. Likewise Caminero did not sneak into the gallery under cover of night to do his smashing; he went in the middle of the day on Sunday and was sure that others were watching (we are waiting for the video surveillance footage of Caminero to emerge and watch that go viral). Tradition is itself a series of creative and destructive acts, stability and instability; the icons are the tradition as much as the images of iconoclasm. Nothing stays the same.
Nicholas Hune-Brown reviews a study that allowed test subjects to “earn” chocolate by listening to a harsh noise (representing “work,” as compared to the option of listening to pleasant music, representing “leisure”). Researchers divided participants into two categories: “high-earners, who got a chocolate every 20 times they listened to the noise, and low-earners who had to hear the noise 120 to earn their reward.” The results:
[R]esearchers found their test subjects earning far more chocolate than anyone would ever hope to consume. High-earners earned an average of 10.74 chocolates but only ate 4.26. They needlessly exposed themselves to unpleasant noises, then left the majority of their earnings on the table. Low-earners, meanwhile, earned slightly less chocolate than they could eat, but listened to about the same number of sounds. This suggests that both groups weren’t considering the optimal results, but rather how much work they could bear. Instead of trying to create the most enjoyable experience, they unthinkingly worked as much as possible, stockpiling useless treasure.
The researchers call this behaviour “mindless accumulation”—the tendency for people to forgo leisure to work towards rewards they’ll never be able to use. They argue that it’s a distinctly modern problem. For much of human history, earning rates were low and people needed to work as much as possible just to survive. The idea that you could “overearn” simply wasn’t realistic. If you’re one of today’s highly paid office workers, however, earning comes comparatively easily, yet the drive to hoard as much as possible remains. The researchers compare overearning to overeating, another distinctly modern problem caused by a life of surprising abundance.
In an essay celebrating the American two-lane highway, Anne Helen Petersen explains why she finds the above map so beautiful:
Look at all those red lines! Those are the red lines of awesomeness, the red lines that I love. They’re the cross-hatching that fills in the vast “emptiness” between major metropolitan areas. But if you grew up where I did, where I live now, or in any of those substantial white areas, those red lines meant something familiar and, usually, beautiful. They cut through mountain passes, they wrap around bodies of water; there are places where the forest still threatens to take the whole enterprise under. They’re often isolated, usually dangerous, and absolutely my favorite way to travel.
Rural highways are the closest we come to the ways that people a century before us traversed and appreciated the land. The decrease in speed, either in accordance with posted speed limit or because of the truck hauling a horse trailer in front of you, forces you not only to consider the wildflowers of the field, but the towns you pass through on the way to your destination.
About every six to twelve months somebody stumbles on Setters of Catan and thinks that it’s the game destined to replace Monopoly. But until it’s in Wal-Mart, there’s just no chance of that happening. Plus, it is always funny for a game that was released in 1995 to be considered new. Classic is becoming ever more an appropriate term.
Update from a reader: “Just a note that Walmart carries two separate versions of the game.” Another reader:
Imagine if popular television were as static as the most popular board games. Mickey Mouse would dominate the market the way Monopoly does, and most intelligent adults would dismiss it as a silly pastime for kids and families. Settlers of Catan has introduced many people to the fact that board games have been designed since 1940, and that’s good. But it’s actually a pretty boring game. It doesn’t even make BoardGameGeek’s Top 100 list. Settlers of Catan is better than Monopoly, but it still sucks compared to good games.
Another disagrees:
It’s a popular game because it is easy to explain, doesn’t take forever to finish and is competitive right up to the end. The game play is anything but boring.
I’ve been playing strategy board games for over 40 years. Before the German-style board games started appearing in this country, 20 years ago, it was a niche market and finding like minded players was difficult. Most strategy board games, until that time, were military themed and had hundreds of small cardboard pieces that required a lot of set-up time and took many hours (or days) to finish playing. The players were stereotypically uni-sex and geeky. Since the advent of games like Settlers of Catan, I have participated in hundreds of game nights where up to 20 people were playing 4 to 5 different games in an evening. The gender ratio is evenly split and it has become a great social event in my world.
I own many dozens of strategy board games of varying degrees of sophistication and difficulty, but Settlers of Catan continues to be a popular choice on our game nights. My 5- and 7-year-old children are already requesting that we take it out to play on weekends. I will gladly choose this over Monopoly or Risk any time.
Settlers of Catan is the 10th most popular “Gateway” game. This is a game that is great for introducing people to the world of strategy board games. Board Game Geek’s rankings are skewed because the people who hang out there are always looking for the next big thing. They are like the people who dismiss a certain type of music they adored once it becomes popular with everyone else. There is a bit of elitism going on. When geekdom becomes mainstream, you have to move more to the extreme to maintain your geek credentials.
Another fan:
I think that part of the reason for the popularity of Settlers is because of people like me. I don’t think I’d played a board game in about 15 years (I’m 35 years old) before I tried Settlers for the first time last year. Since then, I’ve played it about once a month. And every single time has been with my wife and several other couples who’ve decided to make a night of it and get roaring drunk at the same time. It lends itself to booze and laughter and the wheeling-and-dealing aspect of it makes it a much more social game than any other I’ve played. It’s like the Wii of board games; it’s easy and accessible and anyone can do it. There’s nothing complicated and it doesn’t take years of practice to master. Men and women love it and you don’t need to be a nerd (which I say lovingly, but you know what I mean.)
And to link it to another long-term thread of yours, it also goes great with smoking a joint.
The Dish 