Mind Tricks

[ed. Hat tip to Boing Boing for pointing out this Reddit stream on "mind tricks" for everyday life.  Here are a few examples:]

You know that awkward moment when you and a stranger are walking towards each other but need to get past each other and you get confused and end up doing a left to right dance? Not for me! When I walk through large crowds of people, to avoid walking into anyone, I simply stare at my destination. I look no one in the eyes. People actually will watch your eyes and they avoid the direction you are going. If I look into people's eyes as we are walking into each other, we are sure to collide. You have to let people know where you intend to go with your eyes. It always works for me, try it!

If you're trying to find something, try looking right to left as opposed to left to right. Your eyes tend to skim over things if you search in the direction you are used to reading in, so skim the opposite way. It takes me a bit more effort to do this, but I notice more details.

If you're in a crowded social group, restaurant, bar, party etc... and you want to know if someone is checking you out try this: Turn sideways from them (they will be either 90 degrees right or left of you), then very obviously, look at your watch (even if you don't wear one, lift your wrist) then point at your watch and nod thoughtfully. Over acting is perfectly acceptable. If they are keeping tabs on you, even peripherally, they will have a sudden urge to know the time and will either look at their own watch, cell phone, or casually look at the various obvious places where someone would put a clock.

The door-in-the-face technique. The general idea is that you ask someone for a huge favor which you're relatively confident they'll say no to. Then you ask them for a small favor. Subjects who initially refuse the huge favor have a much higher compliance rate on the small favor than if you just ask directly for the small favor or if you present both at once. If they end up saying yes to the huge favor, that's also good.

If you ask a question, and receive only a partial answer, respond with polite silence. Simply wait. A more complete answer will usually follow.

There's something in sales called the Sullivan Nod. Basically when you're asking someone something, nod up and down while you're asking. Their mirror neurons start firing and they begin nodding and agreeing with you subconsciously. 60% of the time it works every time.

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Cat-Butt Coffee: A Critical Review

Kopi Luwak is the most expensive coffee in the world. At my local specialty coffee bean store, it sells for $420 per pound—or $10 for a 10 oz. brewed cup.

Kopi Luwak is very different from that cheap, gauche coffee you and I drink every day. This is because each hand-harvested bean of Kopi Luwak has been artisanally shat out of the digestive system of a small Indonesian pseudo-cat.

Yesterday, my husband and I split a cup of Kopi Luwak in an attempt to figure out whether having cat butt all over your coffee beans really did noticeably improve the flavor, or whether this was all just an elaborate practical joke on the part of Indonesian farmers.

The Asian Palm Civet is not really a cat, per se. It's a viverrid, a family of animals not found in North America. Viverrids belong to the same suborder as cats, so they are related. But, if you're not from Asian or African tropics, these animals will probably look a little weird to you. Imagine what might happen if the bastard love child of a ferret and a lemur had babies with your house cat. That's an Asian Palm Civet.

And Asian Palm Civets, as it turns out, really like to eat the fruits off of coffee plants. Although the civet can digest the fruit itself, the same can not be said for the bean at the center. Coffee beans pass through the civet whole. But they don't leave unchanged. Enzymes in the civet digestive tract break down proteins in the coffee beans. We know this because researchers at the University of Guelph actually did a detailed analysis in 2002, comparing Kopi Luwak and normal Columbian coffee beans. (You will be pleased to note that the same study confirmed that Kopi Luwak is safe to drink.)

Civets poop out coffee beans. This can happen on farms, or in the wild. Either way, once the pooping is done, somebody comes along to harvest the "processed" beans, cleans them, and roasts them. And then you have Kopi Luwak.

Here are the two things you need to know about the taste of Kopi Luwak:

• There is a difference in flavor. Kopi Luwak is noticeably not bitter. Swallow a sip, and it's like you just drank some water. There's no sting or heavy flavor left in the back of your throat. That makes sense. Proteins are part of what is responsible for the bitterness of coffee. Kopi Luwak beans have fewer whole proteins than normal beans. So they're less bitter, but still taste good. As my husband put it, "Everything that is wrong with cheap gas station coffee is right about this."

• That difference is totally not worth the price. Again, to quote my husband, "If I were a Russian oligarch or an investment banker or something, and $420 a pound represented a much smaller amount of my time worked, I'd probably drink this. As it is, not worth it."*

Cat-butt coffee: The coffee of the 1%?

Interestingly, Wikipedia tells me that Kopi Luwak originated during Dutch colonization of Indonesia, when Indonesians were banned from drinking any of the coffee they worked to grow and harvest. Instead, they gathered beans from civet poop and brewed that. And they talked about how great this cat-butt coffee was. Eventually, the Dutch colonists got curious, tried it for themselves, and then pretty much took it over. That's how Kopi Luwak became a luxury item. It's been expensive since the 19th century.

Of course, that history also lends a little more evidence to the theory that, somewhere, Indonesian farmers are having a good, long chuckle.

by Maggie Koerth-Baker, Boing Boing |  Read more:
Image: Kopi Luwak, Kaffee, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from ohallmann's photostream

Monday Night Lights

How Jon Gruden became America’s football coach

Jon Gruden has one of the most recognizable faces in professional football, partly because he hasn’t worn a helmet since 1985, when he began his transformation from feckless college quarterback to triumphant professional coach. In 1998, he was named the head coach of the Oakland Raiders; in 2003, at thirty-nine, he won the Super Bowl with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Sports Illustrated chronicled his “spectacular” rise, and People anointed him one of the “beautiful people,” although his appearance was more impish than debonair—he was known as Chucky, because of his devilish squint, which made him resemble the psychotic doll from the horror movie “Child’s Play.”

In 2009, after a particularly disappointing season, the Buccaneers fired him, but, instead of moving on, he stayed put, and prospered. Gruden, who is now forty-eight, remained in Tampa, with his wife and three sons. He rented an office in a local strip mall, where he began presiding over irregular gatherings of a group that he calls the Fired Football Coaches Association. (He keeps boxes of F.F.C.A. visors and T-shirts in the bathroom, stacked in the shower stall.) Gruden’s office contains one of the country’s greatest collections of football videotapes, sorted according to a complicated taxonomy of his own devising. He says, “You want to talk about two-minute offense? Ball security? Nickel jam? Red-zone touchdown passes? Quarterback fundamentals? Read options? Three-down nickel blitzes? Checkdowns? Wildcats? I got it all down here.”  (...)

Gruden wakes up early, at three-seventeen (an arbitrary alarm-clock setting that stuck), and on a recent Thursday morning he arrived at the F.F.C.A. at around three-forty-five, pulling his white Mercedes into the empty lot. He wanted to learn everything he could about the New England Patriots and the Kansas City Chiefs, who were playing in the following Monday’s game. Gruden spent the morning examining “melts,” video compilations that allow him to view every play from just about every angle.

He is fit and reflexively physical, with a habit, common to coaches, of accentuating his statements with pokes, taps, and gentle shoves. But he has trained himself to sit still for hours, holding a professional-grade remote control called a Cowboy clicker, watching plays forward and backward, at full speed and in slow motion. He works in silence, except for his own occasional remarks. Every week, as he gets to know the two teams, he quickly comes to view their achievements and blunders as his own. “That wasn’t very good,” he murmured, after one uninspired Chiefs sequence. “That wasn’t our best effort. Wonder what happened.” Then he hit rewind and watched the play again.

There is no rational way to explain the amount of time that Gruden invests in each “Monday Night Football” broadcast: he spends days memorizing the names, numbers, and tendencies of all fifty-three players on both teams, even though little of this information makes it onto the broadcast. Once he has a sense of each team, he starts editing, creating a series of four-minute demonstration reels, known as “cutups,” to share with his producers and fellow-broadcasters, partly so they can create highlight clips for the show, and partly so that he can be sure they know what he’s talking about. When he is finished compiling a cutup, he sits with the Cowboy clicker in his left hand and a mouse in his right hand, so that he can run back and forth over the plays and draw emphatic arrows and circles, while he records an audio commentary track. These commentaries, for internal use only, are both loopier and more technical than what’s broadcast on “Monday Night Football.”

by Kalefa Sanneh, New Yorker |  Read more:
Illustration: Dan Adel

Saul Leiter
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Turn On, Tune In and Get Better?

Hallucinogens and other street drugs are increasingly being studied for legitimate therapeutic uses, such as helping patients deal with post-traumatic stress disorder, addiction, chronic pain, depression and even terminal illness.

Janeen Delany describes herself as an "old hippie" who's smoked plenty of marijuana. But she never really dabbled in hallucinogens — until two years ago, at the age of 59.

A diagnosis of incurable leukemia had knocked the optimism out of the retired plant nurserywoman living in Phoenix. So she signed up for a clinical trial to test whether psilocybin — the active ingredient in "magic mushrooms" — could help with depression or anxiety following a grim diagnosis.

Delaney swallowed a blue capsule of psilocybin in a cozy office atJohns Hopkins University in Baltimore. She donned a blindfold, a cuff and a headset playing classical music. With two researchers at her side, she embarked on a six-hour journey into altered consciousness that she calls "the single most life-changing experience I've ever had."

What a long, strange trip it's been. In the 1960s and '70s, a rebellious generation embraced hallucinogens and a wide array of street drugs to "turn on, tune in and drop out." Almost half a century later, magic mushrooms, Ecstasy and ketamine are being studied for legitimate therapeutic uses. Scientists believe these agents have the potential to help patients with post-traumatic stress disorder, drug or alcohol addiction, unremitting pain or depression and the existential anxiety of terminal illness.

"Scientifically, these compounds are way too important not to study," said Johns Hopkins psychopharmacologist Roland Griffiths, who conducted the psilocybin trial.

In their next incarnation, these drugs may help the psychologically wounded tune in to their darkest feelings and memories and turn therapy sessions into heightened opportunities to learn and heal.

"We're trying to break a social mind-set saying these are strictly drugs of abuse," said Rick Doblin, a public policy expert who founded the Multidisciplinary Assn. for Psychedelic Studies in 1986 to encourage research on therapeutic uses for medical marijuana and hallucinogens. "It's not the drug but how the drug is used that matters."

Regulators and medical researchers remain wary. But among at least some experts at the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration, the shift in attitude "has been dramatic," Doblin said.

by Melissa Healy, LA Times |  Read more:

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Are Urban Bicyclists Elite Snobs?

In March, New Yorker columnist John Cassidy blogged about the city’s new bike lanes. He was annoyed that they made it harder for him to drive his Jaguar around Manhattan, and bemoaned the city’s bicyclists as a privileged, insular aristocracy, a “faddist minority intent on foisting its bipedalist views on a disinterested or actively reluctant populace.”

The Internet pounced. Cassidy’s blog posts usually get around a dozen comments. This one got 109, and not all were adoring fans. “The most tone-deaf, philistine commentary I’ve ever seen in these pages,” read one. “Honestly, if you love driving so much, please move to the Midwest,” another suggested. “Philistine and desultory drivel.”

Welcome to the new urban order: the Jag-driving New Yorker columnist is a philistine better suited to the suburbs of Wichita. Meanwhile, the city’s bicyclists are an entitled, imperial cabal cruising around on Trek Bellville three-speeds, an insidious locus of unchecked power and influence. How is this possible? As the blog Bike Snob NYC put it, someday in the future, “humanity will marvel that there was once an age in which a mode of transportation as inexpensive and accessible as the bicycle was considered ‘elitist.’”

Urban bicyclists have an image problem. They’ve become stereotyped as pretentious, aloof jackasses, and a lot of this has to do with the changes taking place in cities right now. During the last decade, dozens of urban cores were inundated by young, well-educated newcomers. Places like Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago and Washington added tens of thousands of these new residents. And one thing’s for sure: These kids really like bikes. An analysis by Atlantic Cities showed that bicycle ridership in these cities soared during this period. In some cases, it more than doubled.

by Will Doig, Salon |  Read more:
Illustration: Salon/Mignon Khargie

The Connoisseur - Norman Rockwell, 1962
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John Prine

Lyrics:

Getting Far, Far Away From It All

On a Friday morning in October — Oct. 21, to be exact — Mark Trippetti, an advertising consultant from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, surrendered his laptop and iPhone to storage at a remote mountainside center in southern Colorado and prepared to drop out of human contact for a month.

The previous week he had begun the withdrawal process, leaving word with clients, cutting back his use of technology and giving up caffeine. Before checking out completely, he made one final call to his girlfriend, Jee Chang.

By careful design, Mr. Trippetti would not see or communicate with anyone until Nov. 20. At his spartan cabin he would rise each day at 3 a.m., sip from a thermos of tea that he had made the night before and move straight from his mattress to a cushion for three and a half hours of meditation and mantra recitation.

His days would be built around that, plus chores, repeated reading of some 200 pages of sadhana text and his own thoughts. Worldly necessities like food would be dropped periodically by the retreat center’s staff at the end of a path, 75 yards away, to avoid his glimpsing another human being. Bedtime was 10 p.m.

The silent, solo retreat, known as a lerung, is part of the practice of Tibetan Buddhism, a path that Mr. Trippetti, 54, a former advertising executive at J. Walter Thompson and Young & Rubicam, has been following for six years. He says that the effect on him has been profound.

“Going into a retreat is really about breaking down the constructs of ‘you,’ ” he said. “The whole idea is for you to take a very close look at the you you have become in your mind. The you you are in your real mind isn’t necessarily the real you.”

The idea of going for more than an hour or two without checking some sort of device for a text or e-mail, never mind face-to-face interaction, is unfathomable to many people in the professional world Mr. Trippetti inhabits. But there are overworked, overcommitted professionals in big cities like New York who periodically do just that.

by Hilary Stout, NY Times | Read more: 
Photo: Caleb Kenna for The New York Times

Obamacare Explodes Today

I have long argued that the impact of the Affordable Care Act is not nearly as big of a deal as opponents would have you believe. At the end of the day, the law is – in the main – little more than a successful effort to put an end to some of the more egregious health insurer abuses while creating an environment that should bring more Americans into programs that will give them at least some of the health care coverage they need.
There is, however, one notable exception – and it’s one that should have a long lasting and powerful impact on the future of health care in our country.

That would be the provision of the law, called the medical loss ratio, that requires health insurance companies to spend 80% of the consumers’ premium dollars they collect—85% for large group insurers—on actual medical care rather than overhead, marketing expenses and profit. Failure on the part of insurers to meet this requirement will result in the insurers having to send their customers a rebate check representing the amount in which they underspend on actual medical care.

This is the true ‘bomb’ contained in Obamacare and the one item that will have more impact on the future of how medical care is paid for in this country than anything we’ve seen in quite some time.  Indeed, it is this aspect of the law that represents the true ‘death panel’ found in Obamacare—but not one that is going to lead to the death of American consumers. Rather, the medical loss ratio will, ultimately, lead to the death of large parts of the private, for-profit health insurance industry.

by Rick Ungar, Forbes | Read more:

Seasteading: Cities on the Ocean

The Pilgrims who set out from England on the Mayflower to escape an intolerant, over-mighty government and build a new society were lucky to find plenty of land in the New World on which to build it. Some modern libertarians, such as Peter Thiel, one of the founders of PayPal, dream of setting sail once more to found colonies of like-minded souls. By now, however, all the land on Earth has been claimed by the governments they seek to escape. So, they conclude, they must build new cities on the high seas, known as seasteads.

It is not a completely crazy idea: large maritime structures that resemble seasteads already exist, after all. Giant cruise liners host thousands of guests on lengthy voyages in luxurious surroundings. Offshore oil platforms provide floating accommodation for hundreds of workers amid harsh weather and high waves. Then there is the Principality of Sealand, a concrete sea fort constructed off Britain’s coast during the second world war. It is now occupied by a family who have fought various lawsuits to try to get it recognised as a sovereign state.

Each of these examples, however, falls some way short of the permanent, self-governing and radically innovative ocean-based colonies imagined by the seasteaders. To realise their dream they must overcome some tricky technical, legal and cultural problems. They must work out how to build seasteads in the first place; find a way to escape the legal shackles of sovereign states; and give people sufficient reason to move in. With financing from Mr Thiel and others, a think-tank called the Seasteading Institute (TSI) has been sponsoring studies on possible plans for ocean-based structures and on the legal and financial questions they raise. And although true seasteads may still be a distant dream, the seasteading movement is producing some novel ideas for ocean-based businesses that could act as stepping stones towards their ultimate goal.

Floating some ideas

Seastead designs tend to fall into one of three categories: ship-shaped structures, barge-like structures based on floating pontoons and platforms mounted on semi-submersible columns, like offshore oil installations. Over-ordering by cruise lines means there are plenty of big, second-hand liners going cheap. Ship-shaped structures can pack in more apartments and office space for a given cost than the other two types of design, but they have a big drawback: their tendency to roll in choppy seas. Cruise ships can sail around storms, but static seasteads need to be able to ride them out. And the stabilisers on big cruisers only work in moderate seas and when the ship is moving.

by The Economist | Read more:

Battle of the Bands

[ed.  C'mon, no contest.  Heart, Joan Jett, War, Donovan, Donna Summer.  It's a toss up between Freddy King and Donna Summer, neither of which is really rock n roll, but I'll give it to Donna since she was so dominant in her day (and still has fingerprints all over club music today; but then again, Freddy was a major influence on Clapton).  Everybody else, see you next year.]

Old rock ’n’ rollers don’t fade away. They just hope for a nod from Cleveland.

Specifically, for a nod from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, where the stars who once filled our ears get another shot at immortality, or at least some big money.

With the recording industry under financial attack from many sides, one of the few ways for old acts to pique new interest is to be inducted into the hall of fame. So, each fall, managers and record labels dive into a mosh pit of monster egos, clashing tastes and rival interests in the industry, all in the hope of placing their artists among the royalty of rock. The 15 nominees for 2012 include The Cure, Donna Summer, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts and Guns N’ Roses. Ballots are due on Sunday, and winners will be announced on Wednesday.

For the inductees, the reward can be enormous. Weekly record sales for a performer or band leap 40 to 60 percent, on average, in the weeks after selection, says David Bakula, a senior vice president at Nielsen SoundScan. While winning a Grammy often helps one album, a nod from Cleveland can lift an entire back catalog.

These days, labels and artists need all the help they can get. The music business is worth half of what it was 10 years ago, and the decline doesn’t look as if it will slow anytime soon. Total revenue from shipments of CDs, DVDs and other music products in the United States was $6.85 billion in 2010, according to the Recording Industry Association of America; in 2000, that figure topped $14 billion.

But the path to the hall of fame can be long and difficult. Controversy surrounds the selection process, which is shrouded in secrecy.

What is known is that a nominating committee of about 30 music critics, entertainment lawyers and recording executives winnows the field each year to 15 artists. Then another committee, this one of about 500 people, including past winners, selects five inductees. Artists can qualify for a spot 25 years after their first recording, which means that performers from the 1980s now have a chance to rank up there with Elvis. (The winners to be announced this week will be inducted at a ceremony next April.)

With fame and money at stake, it’s no surprise that a lot of backstage lobbying goes on. Why any particular act is chosen in any particular year is a mystery to performers as well as outsiders — and committee members say they want to keep it that way. The Bee Gees were passed over 11 times before being inducted in 1997; some fans and managers say the long wait reflected an anti-disco bias within the selection committees. And despite 27 studio albums and 45 years of touring, as well as a style that would influence many other artists, Alice Cooper was passed over 16 times before finally being inducted this year.

“When I wasn’t being nominated, I played it down all the time,” Mr. Cooper says. “But it really does make a big difference.”

He continues: “I used to think that when you got in, you’d understand how it worked, and how you get nominated — there would be a secret handshake, and there’d be a dossier about Area 51 and the president’s assassination.”

No such luck.

by Janet Morrisey, NY Times | Read more:

Still Life with Herrings, Chaim Soutine
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No Actor Parking

On a good day, I leave an audition and run errands, wearing a lot of makeup and clothes without stains, in a decent mood. The mood of someone who has done her job. On a bad day, I can’t get back to my house quickly enough: to change clothes, rinse my face and my brain, and set about forgetting the thirty shifty seconds I spent in front of a camera. It’s hard to tell what factors contribute to the audition being good or bad: was I just not right? Did I drink too much coffee? Too little? Did I misunderstand something pivotal, like the location of the audition or where the product to be sold falls on the aspiration meter? Or perhaps I was late; perhaps I got the audition notice at ten and had to be there at eleven and I just couldn’t wash the conditioner out of my hair quickly enough, perhaps I couldn’t find a meter and the empty lot was plastered with signs saying NO ACTOR PARKING.  

Most of my work day, as an auditioning Angeleno, consists of getting to and from casting locations and, once there, waiting on benches. Commercial auditions rarely span more than five minutes. It’s the preparation (the side streets, the car sing-alongs, the tongue swipes over the teeth to remove any lipstick traces, the studying of copy that is often short or even non-verbal) and the after-effects (trying to convince yourself the job, an often life-changing job that could be like a row of three cherries on the slot machine, meant nothing to you, to tell yourself that you can’t even make note of what you wore because that would mean assuming you would have to remember it for a callback, which would mean imagining you would even be invited to the callback, which would mean jinxing yourself) that consume time and energy.  

The space surrounding auditions is dangerous: it seems ideal to house despair and self-doubt. On a big white wall in the corner of your mind you can screen a mental tape of you in a bright room wearing a bikini, you stuttering and asking in a high-pitched voice to start again, and then being denied and slinking off, out the door, putting on your smudged glasses. In one scene you are drinking whiskey on a Tuesday afternoon and wiping mascara off your cheek; in another you are coming home to see the piece of spinach that was lodged in your teeth all along. Included in the footage is the time you sang a song in your off-key alto about shaving your bikini line while wielding a hedge trimmer. And were denied, denied, denied.  

Illegitimi non carborundum, but like most experiences that require you to submit yourself for evaluation regularly, auditioning can leave you feeling rather raw. The events surrounding your brief period of performance congeal into a vast and disjointed perception of your own work day: three hours to get ready and get there; three hours after to cleanse my brain of any psychic wounds. In between, the audition itself: “Carol, I didn’t know you were a coffee drinker!” (To which the client casting this coffee ad replies “I wasn’t but then I discovered the delicious new taste!”) Carol, I didn’t know you were a coffee drinker! Carol, I did not know you were a coffee drinker! Carol, oh Carol, I didn’t even know!

by Tess Lynch, n+1 | Read more: 
Image: "Beverly Mirrors." From aberg86

Being Funny

In the late 1960s, comedy was in transition. The older school told jokes and stories, punctuated with the drummer's rimshot. Of the new school, Bill Cosby—one of the first to tell stories you actually believed were true—and Bob Newhart—who startled everyone with innovative, low-key delivery and original material—had achieved icon status. Mort Sahl tweaked both sides of the political fence with his college-prof delivery. George Carlin and Richard Pryor, though very funny, were still a few years away from their final artistic breakthroughs. Lenny Bruce had died several years earlier, fighting both the system and drugs, and his work was already in revival because of his caustic brilliance that made authority nervous. Vietnam, the first televised war, split the country, and one's left or right bent could be recognized by haircuts and clothes. The country was angry, and so was comedy, which was addressed to insiders. Cheech and Chong spoke to the expanding underground by rolling the world's largest doobie on film. There were exceptions: Don Rickles seemed to glide over the generation gap with killer appearances on "The Tonight Show," and Johnny Carson remained a gentle satirist while maintaining a nice glossary of naughty-boy breast jokes. Tim Conway and Harvey Korman, two great comic sketch actors working for the affable genius Carol Burnett, were deeply funny. The television free-for-all called "Laugh-In" kept its sense of joy, thanks in part to Goldie Hawn's unabashed goofiness and producer George Schlatter's perceptive use of her screw-ups, but even that show had high political content. In general, however, a comedian in shackles for indecent language, or a singer's arrest for obscene gestures, thrilled the growing underground audience. Silliness was just not appropriate for hip culture. It was this circumstance that set the stage for my success eight years later.

In a college psychology class, I had read a treatise on comedy explaining that a laugh was formed when the storyteller created tension, then, with the punch line, released it. I didn't quite get this concept, nor do I still, but it stayed with me and eventually sparked my second wave of insights. With conventional joke telling, there's a moment when the comedian delivers the punch line, and the audience knows it's the punch line, and their response ranges from polite to uproarious. What bothered me about this formula was the nature of the laugh it inspired, a vocal acknowledgment that a joke had been told, like automatic applause at the end of a song.

A skillful comedian could coax a laugh with tiny indicators such as a vocal tic (Bob Hope's "But I wanna tell ya") or even a slight body shift. Jack E. Leonard used to punctuate jokes by slapping his stomach with his hand. One night, watching him on "The Tonight Show," I noticed that several of his punch lines had been unintelligible, and the audience had actually laughed at nothing but the cue of his hand slap.

These notions stayed with me until they formed an idea that revolutionized my comic direction: What if there were no punch lines? What if there were no indicators? What if I created tension and never released it? What if I headed for a climax, but all I delivered was an anticlimax? What would the audience do with all that tension? Theoretically, it would have to come out sometime. But if I kept denying them the formality of a punch line, the audience would eventually pick their own place to laugh, essentially out of desperation. This type of laugh seemed stronger to me, as they would be laughing at something they chose, rather than being told exactly when to laugh.

by Steve Martin, Smithsonian | Read more:
Photo: Cheryl Carlin

Welcome to the Age of Overparenting

“We’re in the midst of a giant social experiment,” child and family psychologist Richard Weissbourd tells me when I visit him in his cozy Harvard office. Weissbourd is the author of The Parents We Mean to Be: How Well-Intentioned Adults Undermine Children’s Moral and Emotional Development, and I’ve come to him for advice on how to regain some sanity in my own parenting. “Historically, parents have been concerned with things like obedience, manners, and respect for authority. We’re the first parents in history who really want to be their kids’ friends. Some parents even talk about wanting to be their kids’ best friends.” Parents today, he says, are so focused on bonding with their children that it can undercut their authority and derail normal development. Treating kids as equals doesn’t allow them to idealize their parents and learn to adopt their values. Parents need to let their children separate in adolescence, of course, but that’s much harder if Mom and Dad have come to depend on them for close friendship.

I think of how I ask my kids how they feel more times in a day than my own parents asked me in a year. “What’s wrong?” I say at any look of discomfort on their faces. “How do you feel?” I calmly intone over their cries. Lately, my son, who’s now nine, has responded to my queries with “I’m not trying to be mean, but could you please leave me alone?” And the other day, when I tried to break up a fight between him and his nearly six-year-old sister, she said, “Don’t worry, Mama. We’re fine.” Even our toddler sometimes squirms from my embrace. Maybe I’m the one who’s not fine.

My friends experience a similar yearning for engagement. One mom told me that she once berated her daughter, a first grader, in the car on the way home from school for not telling her about her day — yelling, “I don’t see you all day and now you’re not going to talk to me!” And when I was out with a group of friends last summer, someone told the story of how her mother had spent the weekend with her and her two young daughters. At the end of the visit, her mother asked, “Do you always talk to them so much?”

We all laughed: “Of course we always talk to them so much! That’s what you’re supposed to do!”

But are you? And who decides? I posed the question to Weissbourd.

“The need for closeness can be more about you than about your kids,” he replies, and I suddenly find myself slinking down in my chair. The question we have to ask ourselves when it comes to interacting with our kids, he says, is “When is this about me, and when is it about you? And that’s a hard thing to do.”

Yes it is, and I need help.

by Katherine Ozment, Boston Magazine | Read more:
Illustration by Larry Ruppert.

Steve Winwood, Eric Clapton

The Thoroughly Modern Guide to Breakups

Julie Spira isn’t just any writer. She bills herself as an expert on Internet dating, and wrote a book called The Perils of Cyber-Dating. When, in 2005, she met The Doctor on an online dating site, Spira was positive she’d finally found The One. “He seemed very solid and close to his family,” Spira recalls. He made it clear on their first date that, after the end of a lengthy marriage and a year of serial dating, he was looking for an enduring relationship. “That was very appealing to me.”

She took it as a sign of his integrity. It didn’t hurt that he was handsome, too. Eight months of exclusive dating later, The Doctor asked her to marry him.

They planned a simple wedding. But first, they put their individual homes up for sale so they could buy a place together. They went house-hunting together nearly every weekend. When her father got sick, The Doctor saved his life.

Fourteen months into their engagement, Spira received an email from her fiancé titled, simply, “Please Read This.” She put the message aside to savor after work and other commitments. When she finally clicked on it, she wished she hadn’t. “The email had an attached document. It said I was not the woman for him, that the relationship was over, and to please send back the ring. It said my belongings would be delivered tomorrow,” Spira says. “I sat there and my whole body started to shake.”

Spira had to plaster on a happy face for a few days—her parents were renewing their marriage vows at a family party on the other side of the country and she wasn’t yet ready to tell anyone about the broken engagement. “I wore my ring. I pretended my fiancé had an emergency and couldn’t make it. Then I went to my room and sobbed in secret.” Once home, she cried every day for a month. Then another electronic communiqué arrived from The Doctor. It said, in its entirety,

“Are you OK?”

That was all she ever heard from him.

The breakup left her socially paralyzed. She didn’t, couldn’t, date, even after many months. She remains single today, three years later. Disappointment ignites anger when she thinks about what happened. “It was cowardly and cruel. Where’s the human side of it? Where’s the respect from someone who was devoted to you for two years?” It’s scant comfort when people tell her that Berger dumped Carrie by Post-it note on Sex and the City. “With email, you don’t even have a guarantee that the person got your message.”

Saying good-bye is heartbreaking, and most of us are total jerks about it. Bad dumping behavior is booming, especially among the young. In one recent survey, 24 percent of respondents aged 13 to 17 said it was completely OK to break up with someone by texting, and 26 percent of them admitted to doing so. “It’s always been hard to break up with someone face to face,” says Stanford University sociologist Clifford Nass, author of The Man Who Lied to His Laptop, “but lack of social skills makes it harder. And we’re learning fewer and fewer social skills.”

As a result, remote shortcuts like electronic endings look deceptively appealing—although, at the very least, they chip away at the self-respect of the dumpers and deprive dumpees of a needed shot at closure. Little wonder that hypersensitivity to rejection is on the rise, and it’s contributing to large increases in stalking behavior, especially on college campuses. More than 3 million people report being stalking victims each year, the ultimate measure of collective cluelessness about ending love affairs well.

As drive-by breakups like Spira’s become more common, mastering the art of the ending is more necessary than ever. The average age of first marriage now hovers around 27, five years later than in 1970. Most people are having more and more serious relationships before they find the one that works. The emerging social reality demands some preparation for romantic rejection, given its potential to shatter one’s sense of self. For both parties, the experience influences how—or even whether—one moves on with life and love.

by Elizabeth Svoboda, Psychology Today | Read more:

Don Dahlke
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