Tag: Premium

Ezra discusses research on “identity-protective cognition”:

[Professor Dan] Kahan doesn’t find it strange that we react to threatening information by mobilizing our intellectual artillery to destroy it. He thinks it’s strange that we would expect rational people to do anything else.

“Nothing any ordinary member of the public personally believes about the existence, causes, or likely consequences of global warming will affect the risk that climate changes poses to her, or to anyone or anything she cares about,” Kahan writes. “However, if she forms the wrong position on climate change relative to the one that people with whom she has a close affinity — and on whose high regard and support she depends on in myriad ways in her daily life — she could suffer extremely unpleasant consequences, from shunning to the loss of employment.” …

Recognizing the problem is not the same as fixing it, though. I asked Kahan how he tries to guard against identity protection in his everyday life. The answer, he said, is to try to find disagreement that doesn’t threaten you and your social group — and one way to do that is to consciously seek it out in your group. “I try to find people who I actually think are like me — people I’d like to hang out with — but they don’t believe the things that everyone else like me believes,” he says. “If I find some people I identify with, I don’t find them as threatening when they disagree with me.” It’s good advice, but it requires, as a prerequisite, a desire to expose yourself to uncomfortable evidence — and a confidence that the knowledge won’t hurt you.

Jason and Darren Black Bear married: October 31, 2013 http://t.co/lmgNNsjpHW

— darla shelden (@darlajane) November 2, 2013

Kate Redburn assesses the state of gay unions among Native American tribes, focusing particularly on the Navajo Nation, which bans same-sex marriage:

So what happens to a gay Navajo person who wants to get married?

If she lives on the portion of the Navajo Nation that overlaps with New Mexico or Utah, she can probably get a marriage license from one of those states on the principle of using state institutions. She and her wife would then be entitled to federal marriage benefits, following the Supreme Court’s finding in United States v. Windsor that DOMA was unconstitutional. If the couple returned to the Navajo Nation, however, the Navajo Nation’s authority would not recognize their marriage, and it’s unclear whether they would still be eligible for federal benefits. The laws in New Mexico and Utah are so new, in fact, that it appears that no Navajo couples have yet tested this approach.

What we do know is that tribal authority is strong enough to allow same-sex marriages on Native lands even when state law prohibits it outright. Take the much-documented union of Darren Black Bear and Jason Pickel, who wed in Oklahoma last October under the jurisdiction of the Cheyenne and Arapahoe Tribal Court despite the fact that gay marriage is banned by the state constitution (although if Judge Terence Kern has his way, Oklahoma’s ban will be thrown out). Of the 562 federally recognized tribal governments within the United States, eight allow gay marriage and just six have banned it outright.

Ze Frank turns his focus to one of the Dish’s pet subjects:

Oliver Sacks also contemplates the creature:

Here, as a start, the nervous system is much larger—an octopus may have half a billion nerve cells distributed between its brain and its “arms” (a mouse, by comparison, has only 75 to 100 million).

There is a remarkable degree of organization in the octopus brain, with dozens of functionally distinct lobes in the brain and similarities to the learning and memory systems of mammals. Cephalopods are not only easily trained to discriminate test shapes and objects, but some reportedly can learn by observation, a power otherwise confined to certain birds and mammals. They have remarkable powers of camouflage, and can signal complex emotions and intentions by changing their skin colors, patterns and textures.

Darwin noted in The Voyage of the Beagle how an octopus in a tidal pool seemed to interact with him, by turns watchful, curious, and even playful. Octopuses can be domesticated to some extent, and their keepers often empathize with them, feeling some sense of mental and emotional proximity. Whether one can use the “C” word—consciousness—in regard to cephalopods can be argued all ways. But if one allows that a dog may have consciousness of an individual and significant sort, one has to allow it for an octopus, too.

Previous Dish on the minds of octopuses here, here, and here. All sorts of eight-armed fun here.

Consumers overwhelmingly support the security option for their smart phones:

According to a recent study at Creighton University, Americans spend about $4.8 billion per year on cellphone insurance and $580 million per year to buy new phones when theirs get stolen. Now, if cellphones came with a “kill switch,” users could control remotely when their devices were stolen, and the Creighton study estimates that consumers could save about $2.6 billion per year. The study, conducted by statistician and data scientist William Duckworth, was based on a February survey of 1,200 smartphone users. Duckworth’s survey showed that 99 percent of respondents thought cell carriers should make kill switches an option on phones. Ninety-three percent felt that this service should be free, and 83 percent said that such a feature would reduce theft.

But Dave Smith points to the major player blocking such reform:

Though Duckworth’s report should help the case for a kill switch, lawmakers will still face some pushback from the CTIA, the lobbying group that represents the telecom industry—which has two executives from companies that sell insurance to smartphone owners on its board of directors.

The CTIA has a different idea on how to handle smartphone theft. Instead of shutting down stolen phones individually, the CTIA has offered up a database that can block stolen phones from being reactivated by the phone’s new owner. Unfortunately, the database has a few weaknesses, including the fact that it only works with a handful of countries; in other words, if you steal a phone and travel to the right country, the CTIA can’t block those stolen phones from getting reactivated.

Previous Dish on the subject here.

My take on #GerryBrownlee and the #Chch rebuild. Little Gerry doesn’t like to share. #caricature pic.twitter.com/JwosNFgig2

— Jeff Bell (@JeffBellNZ) April 11, 2013

Josh Fruhlinger reviews The Art of Controversy, Victor Navasky’s book on political cartoons:

[Navasky’s] early dissection of the subject can be pretty abstract, but it does yield one concrete and intriguing interpretation of the power of the political cartoon: the idea that caricatures overload our facial-recognition circuitry and thus seem more face-like than actual faces. Such images “amplify the differences” between their target and the average person, exaggerating the features our brains latch on to in order to distinguish some individual countenance from everyone else’s. Thus Obama’s increasingly prominent ears on editorial pages across the country, thus Jimmy Carter’s teeth, thus Nixon’s . . . well, thus most things about Nixon’s face, as he was a caricaturist’s playground. “His nose told you he would bomb Cambodia,” cartoonist Doug Marlette once said.

It would be tidy if there were a moment in the history of art that we could point to as the birth of caricature; in reality, it’s been discovered again and again, in many times and places. Navasky does try to find early examples: Bernini’s seventeenth-century sketch of Pope Innocent XI looking like a skeletal alien creature; James Gillray’s 1798 “Doublers of Character,” which is essentially a primer for making various facial types more grotesque.

Previous Dish on the history of cartoon art here.

Researchers have discovered links between overexposure to light and depression and obesity:

Randy Nelson, a circadian biologist at Ohio State University, has been studying light’s effects on depression and obesity since 2004, when one of his graduate students was hospitalised for a staph infection. The student complained bitterly about the bright lights in his room and in the hospital hallway, which robbed him of sleep and stressed him out. Nelson and another graduate student, Laura Fonken, decided to investigate this complaint using rodents as experimental subjects. They found that mice who were exposed to constant bright light exhibited depressive symptoms, behaving listlessly and ignoring their sugar-water treats. Remarkably, they then found that the same happened when the mice were exposed to only 5 lux at night, when the animals were normally active. This is equivalent, Fonken notes, to leaving a television on in your bedroom, or a computer screen next to your head as you nod off. …

Along the way, Fonken also noticed something unexpected: the light-exposed rodents got fat, even though they were eating the same number of calories as their dark-sequestered mates. What changed was their circadian rhythms; like a snacky night owl, they were eating when they should have been inactive, upending their digestive and metabolic activity

In the last couple of days, we’ve seen quite a panic from the war criminals who will likely be definitively exposed for who they are in the upcoming Senate Intelligence Report and, yes, in history. For some reason, the Washington Post gave Jose Rodriguez – the man who is so proud of his record performing humane enhanced interrogations that he destroyed the evidence of them – a platform to say … well, nothing:

Unlike the committee’s staff, I don’t have to examine the [torture] program through a rearview mirror. I was responsible for administering it, and I know that it produced critical intelligence that helped decimate al-Qaeda and save American lives … I don’t know what the committee thinks it found in the files, but I know what I saw in real time: a program that provided critical information about the operations and leadership of al-Qaeda …

Translation: I don’t need to know any of the facts, or review any of the evidence, to know that I was right. He sounds like my dad refusing to ask for directions. And of course, you can see why, psychologically, he must believe this.

He has a massive sunk moral cost in the torture program. If you have tortured people, you will  grasp at anything to believe it was justified. The alternative is acknowledging you committed war crimes – and then covered up the evidence (which cover-up, of course, precipitated the Senate investigation).

And then we have this risibly sexist attempt to duck responsibility for his own war crimes from former CIA chief Michael Hayden:

Hayden said Feinstein “wanted a report so scathing that it would ensure that an un-American brutal program of detention interrogation would never again be considered or permitted. That motivation for the report may show deep emotional feeling on the part of the senator, but I don’t think it leads you to an objective report,” Hayden said.

You can and should be outraged (but hardy surprised) by the fact that these men throwing dust in the air are given such prominent platforms in Washington. But you might be encouraged by one obvious conclusion from their remarks: they’ve obviously got nothing. And their bluff is slowly being called.

A new documentary, Finding Vivian Maier, investigates the life and art of the professional nanny whose stunning photography was discovered only after her death in 2007. (The film’s co-director, John Maloof, stumbled upon Maier’s work when he purchased a box of negatives at a Chicago auction for $380.) In a review of the film, Erin Fuchs focuses on revelations of Maier’s dark side:

She was an odd woman. Maier always had a Rolleiflex camera around her neck and dragged her charges around Chicago’s seedy areas to take pictures. Those pictures often captured the weakest moments of their subjects, who included children weeping and a young boy who had just been hit by a car. Maier took one of her charges, Inger Raymond, to a stockyard, where she exposed the young child to the slaughter of livestock. …

Despite Maier’s odd and mean behavior, at least two of her former charges had some affection for her, as they put her up in an apartment near the end of her life. In her final years, Maier often sat in the park, mumbling in French, eating food directly from a can, and accepting old clothes from strangers.

Jillian Steinhauer considers the movie “standard artist-as-subject fare” but still appreciates the tribute:

Finding Vivian Maier isn’t particularly experimental or innovative in form, and suffers from a bit of structural scrambling when the narrative veers abruptly at one point. But it does a good and moving job of telling the story of Maier, which is the most important and interesting thing under discussion. Maier’s life was — if not tragic, then certainly sad. … She became — and the film emphasizes this to great effect — one of those characters her younger self would have photographed: a crazy old poor lady. “There’s a lot of eccentric people around here, and I just thought she was one of them,” says a former neighbor.

Haley Mlotek calls the film a “necessary documentary, and a necessary story”:

As a photographer, Vivian captured scenes, places, people — the elements of life that cannot be fixed, things that are either converted into memories that dim over time or discarded as unimportant and not worth preserving. As I watched image after image of Vivian’s work, I wondered if Vivian would have even called herself a photographer. Some interviewees in the documentary talk about her peculiar habit of calling herself a spy, giving fake names and false histories to the people she interacted with — a woman at a pawn shop, a man at the library — instructing them to call her V. Smith, Vivian Mayer, and other such versions of her real name.

Mlotek goes on to consider what Maier might have made of the attention her work now receives:

Vivian liked too-good-to-be-true headlines, the kinds of stories you can only see in newspapers and never in fiction: “Man Bites Dog,” that sort of thing. [Co-director Charlie] Siskel told me, when I asked about whether Vivian would have enjoyed being the subject of so much attention, that Vivian “knew a great story when she heard one. We would like to think this is exactly the kind of story Vivian would have appreciated. ‘Nanny takes 100,000 photos and hides them in storage lockers, but they’re discovered years later and she becomes a famous artist.’ That’s the kind of story Vivian would have liked.” I agree. But it’s not clear if that’s the kind of story Vivian wanted to tell.

Explore her work here. Previous Dish on Maier here.

Morgan Meis ponders it after viewing Rossellini’s 1954 film Journey to Italy, which follows an estranged couple through the ruins of Pompeii:

The real journey in Journey to Italy is a journey toward death. Ingrid Bergman’s character is confronted by death as soon as she comes to Italy. Death comes toward her from afar. First, death comes in the form of ancient statues in the museum. Then it comes in the form of a funeral procession that passes in front of her car. Death comes again in the form of the cult of death, and the people who live among the skulls and skeletons of the dead at Fontanelle Cemetery. Finally, death comes out of the ground, in the penultimate scene of the movie, as the calchi [plaster casts].

After Bergman’s character and her husband see the calchi, something unexpected happens.

The estranged lovers are able to see one another again. Their eyes are opened. Death, in the final scene of the movie, is transformed into love. This is not a romantic love. It isn’t born of passion or high feelings. It is a love between two people who have come to hate one another, and who have shared a shocking encounter with death.

The implication of the final scenes of Journey to Italy is, therefore, that genuine love has something to do with death or that death makes it possible. Love, in Journey to Italy, does not happen because two people are attracted to one another or find they have similar interests. Love happens because two people who are already married, and antagonistic toward one another, confront the full reality of death. Death opens the door to love. The calchi open the door to love. There is something, Roberto Rossellini suggests with his movie, about confronting the immediacy of death that makes a person, paradoxically, more alive. The person who is shocked into life by death is capable of love, since love, as Rossellini portrays it, is not a feeling so much as a commitment, a commitment to another human being made under the eyes of death. The calchi, surprisingly and finally, are not only emblems of death; they are the promise of love.

Meis’ passage brings to mind the following song from the Mountain Goats, from the album Tallahassee, themed around a despondent, alcoholic couple on the brink of divorce: