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Our brains become addicted to gambling the same way they get hooked on drugs:

Research to date shows that pathological gamblers and drug addicts share many of the same genetic predispositions for impulsivity and reward seeking. Just as substance addicts require increasingly strong hits to get high, compulsive gamblers pursue ever riskier ventures. Likewise, both drug addicts and problem gamblers endure symptoms of withdrawal when separated from the chemical or thrill they desire. And a few studies suggest that some people are especially vulnerable to both drug addiction and compulsive gambling because their reward circuitry is inherently underactive—which may partially explain why they seek big thrills in the first place.

Even more compelling, neuroscientists have learned that drugs and gambling alter many of the same brain circuits in similar ways. These insights come from studies of blood flow and electrical activity in people’s brains as they complete various tasks on computers that either mimic casino games or test their impulse control. In some experiments, virtual cards selected from different decks earn or lose a player money; other tasks challenge someone to respond quickly to certain images that flash on a screen but not to react to others.

A 2005 German study using such a card game suggests problem gamblers—like drug addicts—have lost sensitivity to their high: when winning, subjects had lower than typical electrical activity in a key region of the brain’s reward system.

Previous Dish on gambling addiction here and here.

Kitty Empire has high praise for Mark Lewisohn’s meticulous new bio, Tune In: The Beatles: All These Years, the first of three volumes:

We probably all knew the acerbic John Lennon could be a bastard, as cruel as he was witty, but Lewisohn uncovers interesting levels of illegitimacy in many of these often part-Irish Catholic families. In fact, they’re not even called the Beatles until 300 pages in; Ringo doesn’t actually join until around page 700. This is the story of the Beatles as schoolboys, of Lennon and McCartney “sagging off” to write in secret at Aunt Mimi’s, of the latest rock’n’roll and R&B cuts, and of lost virginities, of Stu Sutcliffe and Pete Best and Hamburg, of the “Piedels” – the German mispronunciation of Beatles, the Penises – on “prellies” (Preludin, the upper guzzled by many in the cellar clubs), ripping it up on the Reeperbahn. Sometimes, these famous men really seem like motherless children – both McCartney and Lennon lose their mothers in their teens and this huge, shared loss is given sensitive and apposite emphasis. Deaths, desertions and departures are key to the story.

Liz Thomson is also impressed with the author’s rigorous research:

Lewisohn spent six months living in Liverpool, and you can tell. Not just in the way he traces Beatle forebears but in the way he puts those forebears in their socio-historical context; in his understanding of the city’s psychogeography:

what it meant to grow up in rough-tough Dingle, as Ringo did, or in south-suburban Woolton, as John did, or to experience life like Paul and George, on the council estates created by Liverpool Corporation after the war as it moved people out of the city, leaving its bomb-damaged historic heart to rot until the 1980s renewal. The would-be Beatles criss-crossed its gap-toothed streets, guitars on their backs, in search of new musical experiences. Paul and George once crossed town to meet a stranger who they’d heard knew how to form a B7 chord. Today, you’d Google it.

Colin Fleming commends the book for bringing to life the sense of luck and good fortune that drove the group’s career:

If you know the Beatles’ story arc, you are aware that despite the adulation, the chart-topping, the madcap tours, “We’re more popular than Jesus,” Yoko, the breakup—all of that which occurred between 1963 and 1970—the choicest parts of the band’s story are the early, pre-fame years, culminating with 1962. … In this book, which focuses on 1957 to 1962, Lewisohn picks up on that supernal feel to the Beatles’ success, and at times his own wonder that all of this ever happened, with one amazing coincidence after another, feeds into our own.

For instance, crucial, confidence-building early work—a tour as a backing band in Scotland—comes about “not on merit but because no one else could fill the bill and they shifted everything to make it happen.” A recurring moment, the defining scene of this book, which happens about a dozen times: In doubt, and in the dumps, with ostensibly no prospects to ever get anywhere, one Beatle turns to the others and says, basically, “Something’ll happen.” And then, boom: It does.

He also flags the above recording – from a seven-song set in October, 1963 – as an example of the band’s raw energy in those early days:

They open with Paul McCartney’s “I Saw Her Standing There,” and they immediately make clear that this is going to be a full-speed affair. The sound isn’t just loud; it’s over-loud, possibly the loudest rock and roll anyone had ever cut to date. The guitars distort, adding abraded edges that make the song sound more lascivious than it is, the lines of “She was just 17 / If you know what I mean” now sufficiently scabrous to get the likes of Humbert Humbert up and dancing. The four guys sound thrilled, maybe over the fact that for once hardly anyone is screaming back at them.

In a HUGE victory for Obamacare, I just rubbed my firm nude bottom on the window of a crowded coffee shop.

— rob delaney (@robdelaney) November 6, 2013

Katie Rogers reviews prolific Twitter-comic Rob Delaney‘s new book, Rob Delaney: Mother. Wife. Sister. Human. Warrior. Falcon. Yardstick. Turban. Cabbage:

The book – we’ll call it ‘MWSHWFYTC’ – is a speed read that takes the reader from Delaney’s native Marblehead, Massachusetts in the early 1990s to present-day Los Angeles, where he lives with his wife and two sons. The years in between, though, are where Delaney’s prose is at its most powerful. The comical (if dangerous) bouts of binge drinking suddenly crash into Delaney’s rock bottom, which involves a hospital, rehab and a halfway house.

Many pages of his book are strewn with profanity, fart jokes or comments about genitalia; you’ll finish the book knowing more about his personal evolution in masturbatory habits than his courtship with his wife. The language is stronger than the typical memoir of triumph over struggle, but then again, not every writer can weave body fluids and body parts into a touching essay about a battle with depression, or three halfway house buddies who never made it out. Those vignettes bookending his battles are less engaging, but Delaney’s unflinching description of addiction and depression should be required reading for those who’ve ever struggled with either disease.

A sample from the book:

At the end of my freshman year I fell asleep on my roommate’s bed when he was out of town. I’d taken a girl to a screening of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and I’d struck out. So I convinced my other roommates to drink ten or fifteen beers with me, then passed out in his bed instead of my own and pissed in it thoroughly. When I woke up and realized what had happened, I sprang into action.

I washed his comforter, sheets, and mattress pad. Then I dried them and, in the process, melted his mattress pad. Great holes were seared into it, all over, but I put it on his bed anyway with the sheets and comforter over it. When he got back to the dorms, lay down on his bed, and felt the crunchy mattress pad under him, he pulled the sheets off and asked the heavens, “What the fuck?”

Rather than admit I’d passed out on his bed and irrigated it, I told him, “Sometimes mattress pads melt under your sheets when it gets hot.” I don’t know if he believed this, but we didn’t speak of it again, and we went to our respective homes for the summer a few days later. He’s a bank vice president now, as is another of our suitemates, with whom I smoked pot regularly through a hose that hooked up to a Vietnam-era gas mask that we would take turns strapping to our faces.

In an interview at Slate, Delaney explains why, despite the idea of the tortured artist, “depression itself is not a good thing for comedy”:

Previous Dish on Delaney here, here and here.

In an interview with J.C. Hallman, Walter Kirn discusses the current state of literary criticism:

JCH: Are books and literature in a state of crisis these days? If so, does that have anything to do with how we write about literature?

WK: I certainly hope they’re in a state of crisis. The moment they’re not, they’ll probably cease to matter much. Maintaining a state of crisis around matters that many people might considered settled – What is it to be a person? What is it to tell a story? – is the first job of literary art. Nothing keeps the novel livelier and more relevant than those ceaseless “Is the novel dead?” essays, for example. The markets live by the competition of fear and greed, they say, and literature lives by the struggle between hope and despair over certain fundamental concerns such as whether life can be fruitfully represented at all. Crisis and criticism go hand in hand. …

JCH: As you see it, what happened to criticism? That is, how did we move from [Matthew] Arnold and [Walter] Pater and [Oscar] Wilde to the kind of academic criticism produced in English departments?

WK: What happened to criticism is that it became a profession, even a guild, heavy on trade craft and jargon and dedicated to exclusion and self-protection. It became a way of credentialing an insider class and assuring its members of an income inside of the academy. As such, criticism took up a specialized vocabulary whose chief function, as I see it, was to signal loyalty to the executive board of the approved critical class. There are all these words in contemporary criticism – “gendered,” “hegemonic,” “interrogate,” etc. – that strike me as verbal secret handshakes. They might have been meaningful once, but more and more they feel like coded transmissions between the troops and their leaders. And they make for very ugly sentences. Critical prose of the type that includes them is singularly ugly prose, and I’m with Einstein and similar physicists in believing that elegance bears a close relation to truth. …

Writerly criticism uses a personal vocabulary, not a received or assumed one. It sounds, when read, like an actual human being thinking and feeling. It resists theoretical paraphrase. It provokes conversation rather than shutting it down through intimidating, scholastic moves. It gives pleasure. It releases more energy than it traps. And it takes responsibility for its points and statements rather than shifting responsibility to some larger body of expert thought.

Reviewing Linda Leavell’s new biography of poet Marianne Moore, Jenny McPhee finds that the book’s “greatest achievement … is [Leavell’s] nuanced, sensitive, and revelatory depiction of surely one of the most intensely destructive/productive mother-daughter relationships in literary history”:

While at Bryn Mawr, Moore discovered she was “possessed to write” and “a demon needing wild horses to drag me from the diabolical profession.” A few years after graduation, she and her mother moved to New York City, where they would live together for nearly thirty years until [Moore’s mother] Mary’s death in 1947. Everything Moore did, everything she wrote, was subject to her mother’s intense scrutiny. Mary did all she could to hinder her daughter’s healthy, prolific existence while also devoting herself to Moore’s success in body, soul, and literary vocation. She committed herself so fully to Moore’s thwarting she often became an invalid herself, suffering from “nervous exhaustion,” which forced Moore to become her nurse.

Moore’s only place to be alone was in her poetry: she relentlessly pursued syllabic meter, unsentimental topics, searing irony, quirky stanzas with odd line breaks, and an inscrutable language in an effort to keep her mother out.

“The frailest bit o’ bones that could presume to be ‘a man'” is how Mary described her daughter, and Leavell speculates that Moore’s chronic low weight — she probably suffered from anorexia — may have contributed to her total lack of sexual interest. [Ezra] Pound flirted heavily with her, as did many artists, writers, editors, and patrons both male and female; but Moore’s amorous indifference was profound and unwavering. Besides, as her poem “Marriage” suggests, for all intents and purposes she was already faithfully married to her mother and would do nothing to upset, much less betray, that formidable bond.

This mysterious, uncompromising attachment in which Mary masculinized Moore, at least on a linguistic level, became a source of great power. Throughout her life, in her subversive fashion that at once circumvented and celebrated her mother, she cultivated her own considerable power: “To be understood” is “to be no / Longer privileged.” And in “Marriage”: “men have power / and sometimes one is made to feel it.” In a book review, she wrote, “Love is more important than being in love”; and in her poem “The Paper Nautilus,” she described a mother’s love as “the only fortress / strong enough to trust to.”

(Image of Marianne Moore in 1935 via Wikimedia Commons)

Science writer John Horgan recently belittled his beat:

I’m struck … by all the “breakthroughs” and “revolutions” that have failed to live up to their hype: string theory and other supposed “theories of everything,” self-organized criticality and other theories of complexity, anti-angiogenesis drugs and other potential “cures” for cancer, drugs that can make depressed patients “better than well,” “genes for” alcoholism, homosexuality, high IQ and schizophrenia.

Gary Marcus takes offense, writing, “The problem with some of these punches is not that they are wrong, but that they are one-sided”:

When Horgan writes that “the biggest meta-story in science over the last few years—and one that caught me by surprise—is that much of the peer-reviewed scientific literature is rotten,” it’s not just that he is arguably overstating things, it’s that he’s missing half the story.

There is a crisis in replicability, as both Horgan and The Economist suggest (and as I noted last December). But there is also a huge, rapidly growing movement to address it. When I revisited the topic a few months later, I reported at least five new efforts focussed on increasing replicability. Since then, the list has continued to grow. … The wholesale shift in the culture of how scientists think about their craft is at least as significant a meta-story as the replicability crisis itself. But the prophets of doom never let their readers in on this happy secret.

His conclusion:

The most careful scientists, and the best science journalists, realize that all science is provisional. There will always be things that we haven’t figured out yet, and even some that we get wrong. But science is not just about conclusions, which are occasionally incorrect. It’s about a methodology for investigation, which includes, at its core, a relentless drive towards questioning that which came before. You can both love science and question it.

Recent Dish on the subject here.

Beyond the straightforward theme of sending young people to fight and die in war, Alexander Huls reads the new film as a partial defense of Generation Y, with Ender saving the world at the request of condescending and ungrateful Boomers:

Boomers tend to represent Gen Y’s virtues simultaneously as faults (Millennials are great at tech! Millennials are narcissistic and distracted workers because of tech!) but the film understands the impulses behind them. Technology is presented not as an indulgence, but a highly useful tool Ender wields to achieve productive results and self-exploration—not narcissism. When Ender feels outraged that Graff revokes his email privileges, the movie presents the hero’s anger not as lost entitled access to technology. He’s upset that he’s lost what he uses the technology for: meaningfully connecting with people he cares about.

Millennials will likely be happy with the portrayal. They, after all, played a major part in propelling Ender’s Game to its canonical status. This adaptation honors the text they grew up with while heightening the generational conflicts in it, going even rougher on the adults.

Andrew O’Hehir reads into a historical analogy probably not intended by author Orson Scott Card or the filmmakers:

“Ender’s Game” can definitely be read as an allegorical treatment of the other American original sin, besides slavery: the destruction and replacement of Native American society, which stood in the way of our nation’s manifest destiny. The sentimental idea that whites who killed or uprooted the Indians became infused with their spiritual or moral essence did not begin with New Agers in the 1960s. It goes clear back to the invented legend of the first Thanksgiving feast and the apocryphal peace treaty between William Penn and the Lenape chief Tamanend (aka Tammany) in 1683.

Harris O’Malley, who stubbornly refuses to see the film due to Card’s history of homophobia, points out that the book preaches a message of tolerance:

[F]or someone who seems consumed by hate, he has produced what is, in many ways, his own counter-argument. …

Ender’s ultimate strength isn’t his willingness to win at any cost, it’s his empathy. To quote Ender: “In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.” Ender’s own horror at the realization that he has committed xenocide is born out of that empathy; in the end, he realizes that the “buggers” were never truly the threat that everybody thought them to be.

It’s a shame that Card seems incapable of equal understanding, instead of grumpily complaining about the intolerant reception of his own intolerance.

Rany Jazayerli, a long-time fan of Card’s writing who grew increasingly pained by the author’s hateful rhetoric in real life, grapples with further complexities:

We all feel alienated at some point, but the book’s message resonates even deeper with those who really stick out from the crowd. The empathy extends to the reader. There are no gay characters, but that is presumably because most of the characters are prepubescent children. (Ender is essentially asexual.) But there are girls at Battle School who play important roles; there are characters who are dismissed by other kids because they’re too short; there are Jewish kids who get mocked for the size of their noses.

I am neither gay, nor a girl, nor short. I am, however, a Muslim who grew up in Kansas in the 1980s, and I struggle to think of a more perfect recipe for creating a sense of isolation in an American teenager. … It was in the context of trying to find my place in the world, of struggling to reconcile my faith with my country when I had no role models to show me the way, that I encountered the following passage about Ender and his Battle School classmate Alai. It stopped me cold:

“I don’t want to go,” he said.

Alai hugged him back. “I understand them, Ender. You are the best of us. Maybe they’re in a hurry to teach you everything.”

“They don’t want to teach me everything,” Ender said. “I wanted to learn what it was like to have a friend.”

Alai nodded soberly. “Always my friend, always the best of my friends,” he said. Then he grinned. “Go slice up the buggers.”

“Yeah.” Ender smiled back. Alai suddenly kissed Ender on the cheek and whispered in his ear, “Salaam.” Then, red-faced, he turned away and walked to his own bed at the back of the barracks. Ender guessed that the kiss and the word were somehow forbidden. A suppressed religion, perhaps. Or maybe the word had some private and powerful meaning for Alai alone. Whatever it meant to Alai, Ender knew that it was sacred; that he had uncovered himself for Ender, as once Ender’s mother had done, when he was very young, before they put the monitor in his neck, and she had put her hands on his head when she thought he was asleep, and prayed over him. Ender had never spoken of that to anyone, not even to Mother, but had kept it as a memory of holiness, of how his mother loved him when she thought that no one, not even he, could see or hear. That was what Alai had given him; a gift so sacred that even Ender could not be allowed to understand what it meant.

If you don’t see the importance of this passage, I envy you. Alai is clearly a Muslim, and in the 1980s, Muslims were portrayed in American popular culture as one of three categories, if they were portrayed at all: crazy ayatollahs, greasy lecherous oil sheikhs, or bomb-wielding hijackers. Ender’s Game was literally the first time I had encountered a positive portrayal of a Muslim character in American fiction. It floored me. I finally saw a positive image of myself in print, and it came not from a fellow Muslim but from a wildly popular Christian author who could trace his American lineage for generations.

Previous Dish on the film and the controversy over Card here, here, and here.

The top 33 in America:

Derek Thompson parses the data on work and race:

[Hispanics] make up about half of all farm workers and laborers, 44 percent of grounds maintenance workers, and 43 percent of maids and house cleaners. Blacks, who make up just 11 percent of the workforce, account for more than a third of home health aides and about 25 percent of both security guards and bus drivers – rather low paying jobs. Whites, on the other hand, make up more than 80 percent of the country’s workers. But they account for nearly all farm managers and ranchers (96 percent) construction managers (92 percent), carpenters (91 percent), and CEOs (90 percent). The story is true for Asians, as well – not included in these graphs for a lack of historical data. Asian-Americans account for 5 percent of the workforce, but also a whopping 60 percent of personal appearance workers, (e.g. hairdressers, nail salon workers), 29 percent of software developers, and nearly one in five physicians and surgeons.

Update from a reader:

The list forgot to include “NFL Head Coach” and “US Senator”.

Alex Halperin argues that the “entire moon should be an international history and science preserve—an Off-World Heritage site, if you will”:

[A]n increased sense of conscience about the Apollo sites recently spawned a bill to preserve them. The proposal, put before Congress this past summer, is to eventually nominate them as UNESCO World Heritage sites. It’s not perfect. First, under the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, accepted by 101 countries, no nation can claim the moon as sovereign territory, an official prerequisite for nomination. And the bill doesn’t cover the rest of the moon—only where the astronauts landed and worked. Instead of passing piecemeal bills, let’s go all the way. The moon was part of Earth until about 4.5 billion years ago, according to current models. It could answer key questions about the history of our planet and therefore needs to be protected.

The idea is not without precedent:

[W]e’ve already reached global consensus on preserving an otherworldly place in this way:

Antarctica. The continent is managed by 50 nations under the 1959 Antarctic Treaty “with the interests of science and the progress of all mankind.” The treaty is short (just 14 articles), and the management duties are light (meetings to discuss updates, procedures, and scientific missions). But it works. For more than half a century, the agreement has allowed science and tourism to flourish in an area that belongs to both no one and everyone.

A preservation treaty for the moon would need a few special clauses. For example, while there’s a voluntary moratorium on mining in Antarctica, it doesn’t make sense to ban the practice on the moon: That’s one of the incentives to get us there. Rare substances, such as helium-3 (a possible fuel for nuclear power), are the sort of rewards that will motivate the development of private spaceflight and off-world habitation. So mining should be allowed, pending environmental-impact assessments similar to those conducted by the U.S. Forest Service. As for tourism, we don’t need to wrap the moon in no trespassing signs, but let’s keep ATVs away from important craters.

(Image of moon by Flickr user shahbasharat)