The committee drafted a straightforward set of dietary guidelines calling on Americans to cut down on red meat and dairy products. Within weeks a firestorm, emanating from the red-meat and dairy industries, engulfed the committee, and Senator McGovern who had a great many cattle ranchers among his South Dakota constituents was forced to beat a retreat.
The committee’s recommendations were hastily rewritten. Plain talk about food — the committee had advised Americans to actually “reduce consumption of meat” — was replaced by artful compromise: “Choose meats, poultry and fish that will reduce saturated-fat intake.” A subtle change in emphasis, you might say, but a world of difference just the same.
I often suspect government is near the root of many social problems. I’m often right.
The new research on negative moods, however, suggests that sadness comes with its own set of benefits and that even our most unpleasant feelings serve an important purpose. Joe Forgas, a social psychologist at the University of South Wales in Australia, has repeatedly demonstrated in experiments that negative moods lead to better decisions in complex situations. The reason, Forgas suggests, is rooted in the intertwined nature of mood and cognition: sadness promotes “information-processing strategies best suited to dealing with more-demanding situations.” This helps explain why test subjects who are melancholy — Forgas induces the mood with a short film about death and cancer — are better at judging the accuracy of rumors and recalling past events; they’re also much less likely to stereotype strangers.
Last year Forgas ventured beyond the lab and began conducting studies in a small stationery store in suburban Sydney, Australia. The experiment itself was simple: Forgas placed a variety of trinkets, like toy soldiers, plastic animals and miniature cars, near the checkout counter. As shoppers exited, Forgas tested their memory, asking them to list as many of the items as possible. To control for the effect of mood, Forgas conducted the survey on gray, rainy days — he accentuated the weather by playing Verdi’s “Requiem” — and on sunny days, using a soundtrack of Gilbert and Sullivan. The results were clear: shoppers in the “low mood” condition remembered nearly four times as many of the trinkets. The wet weather made them sad, and their sadness made them more aware and attentive.
In both New York and Illinois, there is a close connection between fiscal irresponsibility and political malfeasance. Both states are in marked decline; both are essentially one-party polities run by Democrats (although the Republicans, when in office, have engaged in their fair share of corruption). In both cases, a largely unaccountable political class left unchecked by a decreasingly engaged electorate has, buffered by the rhetoric of compassion, gone into business for itself. Big government may not be good for the economy or for the citizens, but it been very good for a political class that has thrived on state spending despite the growing risk of getting hauled off to the hoosegow. In New York and Illinois, oversized government seems immune to reform; scandals have led only to new scandals.
New research has found that young adults who slept for 90 minutes after lunch raised their learning power, their memory apparently primed to absorb new facts.
Brilliant rules for writing by brilliant writers. Some of my favorites:
Cut out the metaphors and similes. In my first book I promised myself I wouldn’t use any and I slipped up during a sunset in chapter 11. I still blush when I come across it.
It’s doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
Don’t have children.
Don’t worry about posterity – as Larkin (no sentimentalist) observed “What will survive of us is love”.
Israelis tried, and failed, to maintain a socialist commune that eventually turned into a market socialist commune.
In truth, however, Nachshon has spent the past four years in the grip of a social and economic revolution that swept away most of the socialist ideals and egalitarian practices that marked this experiment in communal life. The buildings and fields are still the same, the left-wing leanings are still there, as is a sense of solidarity. But in most practical terms, the lives of kibbutzniks like Jane Ozeri have changed beyond recognition.
Graduate school may be about the “disinterested pursuit of learning” for some privileged people. But for most of us, graduate school in the humanities is about the implicit promise of the life of a middle-class professional, about being respected, about not hating your job and wasting your life. That dream is long gone in academe for almost everyone entering it now.
My soul is the humanities, but my formal disciplinary niche is the social sciences. Doesn’t help much for political theorists, though.
Increasingly, the crucial distinction is between the minority of serious politicians in either party who are prepared to speak directly about our choices, on the one hand, and the majority who indulge the public’s delusions, on the other. I would put President Obama and his economic team in the first group, along with California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Republicans are more indulgent of the public’s unrealism in general, but Democrats have spent years fostering their own forms of denial. Where Republicans encourage popular myths about taxes, spending, and climate change, Democrats tend to stoke our fantasies about the sustainability of entitlement spending as well as about the cost of new programs.
I’m not sure this is a new development, but it is significant.
The source of America’s cynicism is not hard to find. Americans despise the inauthentic. Gregory House, of the eponymous TV medical drama, is a hero not because he is nice (he isn’t) but because he is true. Tiger Woods is a disappointment not because he is evil (he isn’t) but because he proved false. We may want peace and prosperity, but most would settle for simple integrity. Yet the single attribute least attributed to Congress, at least in the minds of the vast majority of Americans, is just that: integrity.
But with reelection rates as high as they are, voters forget all about integrity in the ballot box.
Before about 1980, just 4% of families were choosing cremation over burial. Now, 39% select cremation, and in the next 15 years, the percentage is expected to approach 60%, according to the Cremation Association of North America. The increase is being driven in part by cremation’s cheaper cost, and in part by the fact that fewer extended families are rooted in one specific place anymore—which means they don’t live close enough to visit a loved one’s gravesite.
You’ve stumbled upon a group of beings. For all you can tell, these beings are self-aware, intelligent, have emotions, solve complex problems, and call each other by name. They have thoughts and feelings and probably experience life in a way that is very similar to your own. Are they persons? And do you have moral obligations towards them?
Thomas White, Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, has made news claiming that we have found such a group of beings. In fact, we’ve been living alongside them for a while now. They’re dolphins, and they’re people too. At an upcoming AAAS conference in San Diego, White will be arguing that dolphins deserve the status of “nonhuman persons”. The research in marine science now overwhelmingly shows that dolphins have a highly sophisticated type of consciousness and inner world – and their cognitive capacity is second only to humans (yes, they beat chimps). With such high intellectual and emotional abilities, White claims they are entitled to special moral status and protections. The implications for current practices involving dolphins (in the context of fishing, entertainment, research and the military) are serious, since they would be considered chillingly unethical if they involved human persons.
Lets leave to one side, for the duration of this blog post, the question of whether it is wise for our society to spend colossal sums of money replacing an existing technology [the book] that is durable, versatile, and aesthetically pleasing. (I will let slip this much: No, I do not care how many trees die. They should be so lucky as to be reincarnated as, say, the poems of Surrey. Ents, do your worst!)
If, by reason of the height of the banks, or the strength of the place and its position, it is impossible, when besieging a place, to avail oneself of the plan of bombardment, I have methods for destroying every rock or other fortress, even if it were founded on a rock, etc.
As the article points out, he doesn’t list accomplishments at all… only what he can do for the potential employer. Fascinating.
A gripping account of hypothermia’s affects on the body in Outside:
But then, in a final moment of clarity, you realize there’s no stove, no cabin, no friends. You’re lying alone in the bitter cold, naked from the waist up. You grasp your terrible misunderstanding, a whole series of misunderstandings, like a dream ratcheting into wrongness. You’ve shed your clothes, your car, your oil-heated house in town. Without this ingenious technology you’re simply a delicate, tropical organism whose range is restricted to a narrow sunlit band that girds the earth at the equator.
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