Lock 'Em Up, Throw Away Their Dignity

Digby speculated yesterday that America's extreme incarceration rate may explain our collective lack of concern about the plight of the people at Guantanamo who are being imprisoned indefinitely in conditions that border on torture, without trial or any hope of one.

I agree, but I think it also goes further. There is an almost uniquely Calvinist mindset in much of America that is deterministic to the point of barbarity about punishment and reward. Income inequality is tolerated because the rich must have done something to deserve that wealth. Similarly, those who are poor must have been too lazy or too unloved in the eyes of Providence to better their condition. The mindset shows up in our debate over abortion, where abortion as a result of consensual sex is often frowned on, but abortion in the case of rape or incest is mostly accepted outside the far-right fringe because in the latter case, the poor woman didn't deserve to be burdened with the pregnancy. This has always been one of the ugliest facets of American culture, and it remains so to this day.

Nowhere is this view more brutally repulsive than in our views of criminal punishment. America has the distinction of being one of the very few modern industrialized democracies to retain capital punishment. We have some of the world's longest prison sentences.

Most bizarre, however, is our tolerance for prison rape and other abuse. Other countries take the care of prisoners much more seriously than does the U.S. In fact, prison rape in America has become a routine subject of mainstream comedy. Where it's not joked about, it's utilized as part of the punishment disincentive for crime, even by respected progressive allies. When Taibbi jokes about the supposedly salutary effect of throwing Blankfein in "pound-me-in-the-a** prison" (itself a reference to a line in the comedy Office Space), it plays on this same dynamic: the idea that prisoner abuse is all part of the just desserts of the wrongdoer and a lesson to others. Taibbi would doubtless object (and correctly so) that all he meant was for Blankfein to receive the same treatment as any other felon--but the point remains that to even mention such a thing is almost uniquely American.

It's shared across political lines and woven into our culture as a country, for better and (I believe) very much for the worse.

It's not surprising that we have high tolerance for depraved treatment of foreign prisoners suspected of terrorism. We have a similarly high tolerance for depraved treatment of our fellow Americans locked up for petty crimes. The abuses at Guantanamo are uniquely awful in their Kafkaesque unconstitutionality and maddening sensory deprivation. But least they know they're protected from one another, which is more than one can say for the inmates at your local penitentiary.

In America, once we lock people up, we seem to have no problem throwing away every last shred of their dignity.

by David Atkins, Hullabaloo |  Read more:

Should The Times Be a Truth Vigilante?

[ed. It says much about the current state of our media that the NY Times (!) would even consider asking this question. There's also this from the Washington Post.]

I’m looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge “facts” that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.

One example mentioned recently by a reader: As cited in an Adam Liptak article on the Supreme Court, a court spokeswoman said Clarence Thomas had “misunderstood” a financial disclosure form when he failed to report his wife’s earnings from the Heritage Foundation. The reader thought it not likely that Mr. Thomas “misunderstood,” and instead that he simply chose not to report the information.

Another example: on the campaign trail, Mitt Romney often says President Obama has made speeches “apologizing for America,” a phrase to which Paul Krugman objected in a December 23 column arguing that politics has advanced to the “post-truth” stage.

As an Op-Ed columnist, Mr. Krugman clearly has the freedom to call out what he thinks is a lie. My question for readers is: should news reporters do the same?

That approach is what one reader was getting at in a recent message to the public editor. He wrote:

“My question is what role the paper’s hard-news coverage should play with regard to false statements – by candidates or by others. In general, the Times sets its documentation of falsehoods in articles apart from its primary coverage. If the newspaper’s overarching goal is truth, oughtn’t the truth be embedded in its principal stories? In other words, if a candidate repeatedly utters an outright falsehood (I leave aside ambiguous implications), shouldn’t the Times’s coverage nail it right at the point where the article quotes it?”

This message was typical of mail from some readers who, fed up with the distortions and evasions that are common in public life, look to The Times to set the record straight. They worry less about reporters imposing their judgment on what is false and what is true.

Is that the prevailing view? And if so, how can The Times do this in a way that is objective and fair? Is it possible to be objective and fair when the reporter is choosing to correct one fact over another? Are there other problems that The Times would face that I haven’t mentioned here?

by Arthur S. Brisbane, NY Times |  Read more:

Persol

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I Am Trying To Save My Alt Business

‘The numbers just aren’t adding up,’ said my best friend, who recently became my business partner in a joint alt venture. We were really good friends, but at the same time, being in business together changed our relationship. We barely even hang out any more. I could hear the tension in his voice. We thought it was a really good idea, emerging markets, new media, old media, building a tribe, getting the word out on social media, reaching consumers both on the internet, and in real life. It was fool proof. We were basically going to be printing buzz money, opening up our own buzz mint. The trouble was, despite all of the buzz, the blog press, the decent turnouts, the merch, the meetings, the important emails, the time we met that famous & successful person who said they liked what we were doing, we were still ONLY making buzz dollars.

I guess I was wrong. Maybe it was a bad idea to start a buzzband / record label / blog / viral meme blog / aggregator of memes / party promotion firm / PR firm / online video series / site on the internet that changes the way that we interpret journalism / diy venue space / playhouse / mumblecore film collective / documentary film series / alt non-profit scam / party photo website / cassette tape label / online design company / microblogging service / alt-fundraising website / vintage store / online vintage store / t-shirt making company / art gallery space / booking agency / food truck / vegan restaurant / creative agency / zine / magazine / alt comedy troupe / [miscellaneous alt venture].

We met with my dad’s friend, who was an accountant, and he told us every thing that we needed to get together in order to formalize our business. The truth was, taking a look at our business led us to realize that we weren’t making any REAL money. It was a tough spot to be in. I second guessed all of our decisions. The time we printed flyers on glossy colored paper instead of just using a DIY copy machine. The time we hired my friend who is a designer to design our website but he overcharged us and left us with a broken website. The time I borrowed my mom’s credit card to fly us to an important music and interactive conference in order to make connections, but we just ended up partying. Although it has been a wild ride, maybe the ride is pulling up to the final terminal. Not even a golden alt calculator could solve this mess. It was truly shaping up to be an Enron-level alt financial conspiracy.

He asked me, “Do you realize that we have never actually made money?”

It was at that moment that I realized that I didn’t actually have an alt business. I was paying to have an identity. Sure, my twitter follower count was admirable, and I did have things to do every night of the week, but what was I really paying for? A mediocre presence in an alternative scene? I struggled to understand what I was trying to become a part of, an undying alt spirit that desperately wanted to contribute something to a community that might not even exist.

“I’m out. This is too much. I’m getting my old job back at my dad’s company,” said my friend.

I wasn’t upset that he was leaving. This whole operation was my idea, anyways, and most of his ideas were super unoriginal and lame. I knew how to keep things authentic. But maybe keeping things authentic wasn’t making any more and bringing in new clients, new visitors. In fact, I wasn’t actually sure what we DID. But I was confident that I could figure it out on my own and utilize my tribe to get the word out that we were doing something different.

I thought about the first days of the business when we would just sit around on the internet and chat about how awesome things were going to get for us. VIP parties, tons of money, press, notoriety, validation from the scene, validation from our parents—we would have EVERYTHING. But maybe it was time to realize that this was never going to happen. The numbers just weren’t adding up.

On days like today, I had to wonder if my entire alternative social experience misled me, leading me to a place where I had nothing to my name. No money, no alt fame, and just a bunch of connections with a bunch of other people who were pretending to be successful, just like me. Don’t get me wrong, this was a valuable existence, and even if I have to begin a new venture, I am confident that it will work out because this experience exposed me to the harsh realities of what it takes to get an alt business off the ground and over the hump. But do I have the energy to do this again? Maybe I’m just not an alternative entrepreneur.

Was my alternative business a mistake?

It was just one of those days where you felt like ________ had everything, and you had nothing.

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Behind Every Great Woman

Among the 80 or so customers crammed into Bare Escentuals, it’s easy to spot Leslie Blodgett. It’s not merely her six-inch platform heels and bright magenta-and-blue dress that set her apart in the Thousand Oaks (Calif.) mall boutique, but her confidence. To the woman concerned she’s too old for shimmery eye shadow, Blodgett swoops in and encourages her to wear whatever she wants. With a deft sweep of a brush, she demonstrates a new shade of blush on another customer’s cheek. And when she isn’t helping anyone, she pivots on her heels for admirers gushing about her dress, made by the breakout designer Erdem.

Blodgett, 49, has spent the past 18 years nurturing Bare Escentuals from a startup into a global cosmetics empire. She sold the company for $1.7 billion to Shiseido in March 2010 but still pitches products in stores around the world and chats incessantly with customers online. Scores of fans post daily messages on Blodgett’s Facebook page, confessing details about their personal lives and offering opinions on her additive-free makeup. She only wishes her 19-year-old son, Trent, were in touch with her as frequently as he is with her husband, Keith. In 1995, at 38, Keith quit making television commercials to raise Trent, freeing up Leslie to build her business. She’d do it all again, but she’s jealous of her husband’s relationship with her son. Trent, a college sophomore, texts his father almost every day; he often goes a week without texting her.

“Once I knew my role was providing for the family, I took that very seriously. But there was envy knowing I wasn’t there for our son during the day,” says Blodgett. “Keith does everything at home—the cooking, repairs, finances, vacation planning—and I could work long hours and travel a lot, knowing he took such good care of Trent. I love my work, but I would have liked to have a little more balance or even understand what that means.”

Blodgett’s lament is becoming more familiar as a generation of female breadwinners look back on the sacrifices—some little, some profound—required to have the careers they wanted. Like hundreds of thousands of women who have advanced into management roles in the past two decades—and, in particular, the hundreds who’ve become senior corporate officers—she figured out early what every man with a corner office has long known: To make it to the top, you need a wife. If that wife happens to be a husband, and increasingly it is, so be it.

by Carol Hymowitz, Bloomberg Businessweek |  Read more:

Utagawa Hiroshige (Japanese), Trout, woodblock print, c. 1832
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Europe’s $39 Trillion Pension Threat Grows

[ed. wtf...$37 Trillion?!]

Even before the euro crisis, people were worried about Europe’s pension bomb.

State-funded pension obligations in 19 of the European Union nations were about five times higher than their combined gross debt, according to a study commissioned by the European Central Bank. The countries in the report compiled by the Research Center for Generational Contracts at Freiburg University in 2009 had almost 30 trillion euros ($39.3 trillion) of projected obligations to their existing populations.

Germany accounted for 7.6 trillion euros and France 6.7 trillion euros of the liabilities, authors Christoph Mueller, Bernd Raffelhueschen and Olaf Weddige said in the report.

“This is a totally unsustainable situation that quite clearly has to be reversed,” Jacob Funk Kirkegaard, a research fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, said in a telephone interview.

by Rebecca Christie and Peter Woodifield, Bloomberg |  Read more:

With Enough Bandwidth, Many Join the Band

When Dr. John McClure, a pathologist in Edina, Minn., was pondering his wish list several years ago, he added something a little out of the ordinary: learn to play the bagpipes. But his goal seemed like a long shot after a friend who had been teaching him moved away.

Now he is getting lessons from a top-tier teacher — Jori Chisholm, whose résumé includes a first-place award at the 2010 Cowal Highland Gathering in Dunoon, Scotland. Mr. Chisholm lives in Seattle, but distance is no longer a problem — Dr. McClure now takes lessons over Skype.

They even squeeze in a lesson sometimes when Dr. McClure, 50, is at work, though he keeps the noise down by using a practice chanter, essentially a pipe without a bag. “I’ve been on call, waiting for a specimen from the O.R., and I’ll do a lesson with Jori,” Dr. McClure said.

Skype and other videochat programs have transformed the simple phone call, but the technology is venturing into a new frontier: it is upending and democratizing the world of music lessons.

Students who used to limit the pool of potential teachers to those within a 20-mile radius from their homes now take lessons from teachers — some with world-class credentials — on other coasts or continents. The list of benefits is long: Players of niche instruments now have more access to teachers. Parents can simply send their child down the hall for lessons rather than driving them. And teachers now have a new way to build their business.

“I’ve seen videos of individuals teaching students all over the world,” said Gary Ingle, chief executive of the Music Teachers National Association. “There will be people who would never take a music lesson unless it’s done online. As music teachers, we should be willing to meet students where they are.”

by Catherine Saint Louis, NY Times |  Read more:
Photo: T.C. Worley for The New York Times

Sue Corr, untitled 10
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Research Bought, Then Paid For

Through the National Institutes of Health, American taxpayers have long supported research directed at understanding and treating human disease. Since 2009, the results of that research have been available free of charge on the National Library of Medicine’s Web site, allowing the public (patients and physicians, students and teachers) to read about the discoveries their tax dollars paid for.

But a bill introduced in the House of Representatives last month threatens to cripple this site. The Research Works Act would forbid the N.I.H. to require, as it now does, that its grantees provide copies of the papers they publish in peer-reviewed journals to the library. If the bill passes, to read the results of federally funded research, most Americans would have to buy access to individual articles at a cost of $15 or $30 apiece. In other words, taxpayers who already paid for the research would have to pay again to read the results.

This is the latest salvo in a continuing battle between the publishers of biomedical research journals like Cell, Science and The New England Journal of Medicine, which are seeking to protect a valuable franchise, and researchers, librarians and patient advocacy groups seeking to provide open access to publicly funded research.

The bill is backed by the powerful Association of American Publishers and sponsored by Representatives Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of New York, and Darrell Issa, a Republican from California. The publishers argue that they add value to the finished product, and that requiring them to provide free access to journal articles within a year of publication denies them their fair compensation. After all, they claim, while the research may be publicly funded, the journals are not.

by Michael B. Eisen, NY Times |  Read more:

Lockdown: The Coming War on General-Purpose Computing

General-purpose computers are astounding. They're so astounding that our society still struggles to come to grips with them, what they're for, how to accommodate them, and how to cope with them. This brings us back to something you might be sick of reading about: copyright.

But bear with me, because this is about something more important. The shape of the copyright wars clues us into an upcoming fight over the destiny of the general-purpose computer itself.

In the beginning, we had packaged software and we had sneakernet. We had floppy disks in ziplock bags, in cardboard boxes, hung on pegs in shops, and sold like candy bars and magazines. They were eminently susceptible to duplication, were duplicated quickly, and widely, and this was to the great chagrin of people who made and sold software.

Enter Digital Rights Management in its most primitive forms: let's call it DRM 0.96. They introduced physical indicia which the software checked for—deliberate damage, dongles, hidden sectors—and challenge-response protocols that required possession of large, unwieldy manuals that were difficult to copy.

These failed for two reasons. First, they were commercially unpopular, because they reduced the usefulness of the software to the legitimate purchasers. Honest buyers resented the non-functionality of their backups, they hated the loss of scarce ports to the authentication dongles, and they chafed at the inconvenience of having to lug around large manuals when they wanted to run their software. Second, these didn't stop pirates, who found it trivial to patch the software and bypass authentication. People who took the software without paying for it were untouched.

Typically, the way this happened is a programmer, with possession of technology and expertise of equivalent sophistication to the software vendor itself, would reverse-engineer the software and circulate cracked versions. While this sounds highly specialized, it really wasn't. Figuring out what recalcitrant programs were doing and routing around media defects were core skills for computer programmers, especially in the era of fragile floppy disks and the rough-and-ready early days of software development. Anti-copying strategies only became more fraught as networks spread; once we had bulletin boards, online services, USENET newsgroups and mailing lists, the expertise of people who figured out how to defeat these authentication systems could be packaged up in software as little crack files. As network capacity increased, the cracked disk images or executables themselves could be spread on their own.

This gave us DRM 1.0. By 1996, it became clear to everyone in the halls of power that there was something important about to happen. We were about to have an information economy, whatever the Hell that was. They assumed it meant an economy where we bought and sold information. Information technology improves efficiency, so imagine the markets that an information economy would have! You could buy a book for a day, you could sell the right to watch the movie for a Euro, and then you could rent out the pause button for a penny per second. You could sell movies for one price in one country, at another price in another, and so on. The fantasies of those days were like a boring science fiction adaptation of the Old Testament Book of Numbers, a tedious enumeration of every permutation of things people do with information—and what might be charged for each.

Unfortunately for them, none of this would be possible unless they could control how people use their computers and the files we transfer to them. After all, it was easy to talk about selling someone a tune to download to their MP3 player, but not so easy to talk about the the right to move music from the player to another device. But how the Hell could you stop that once you'd given them the file? In order to do so, you needed to figure out how to stop computers from running certain programs and inspecting certain files and processes. For example, you could encrypt the file, and then require the user to run a program that only unlocked the file under certain circumstances.

But, as they say on the Internet, now you have two problems.

by Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing |  Read more:

Breakfast Power by Bocognani Vincent
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How Many Stephen Colberts Are There?

There used to be just two Stephen Colberts, and they were hard enough to distinguish. The main difference was that one thought the other was an idiot. The idiot Colbert was the one who made a nice paycheck by appearing four times a week on “The Colbert Report” (pronounced in the French fashion, with both t’s silent), the extremely popular fake news show on Comedy Central. The other Colbert, the non-idiot, was the 47-year-old South Carolinian, a practicing Catholic, who lives with his wife and three children in suburban Montclair, N.J., where, according to one of his neighbors, he is “extremely normal.” One of the pleasures of attending a live taping of “The Colbert Report” is watching this Colbert transform himself into a Republican superhero.

Suburban Colbert comes out dressed in the other Colbert’s guise — dark two-button suit, tasteful Brooks Brothersy tie, rimless Rumsfeldian glasses — and answers questions from the audience for a few minutes. (The questions are usually about things like Colbert’s favorite sport or favorite character from “The Lord of the Rings,” but on one memorable occasion a young black boy asked him, “Are you my father?” Colbert hesitated a moment and then said, “Kareem?”) Then he steps onstage, gets a last dab of makeup while someone sprays his hair into an unmussable Romney-like helmet, and turns himself into his alter ego. His body straightens, as if jolted by a shock. A self-satisfied smile creeps across his mouth, and a manically fatuous gleam steals into his eyes.

Lately, though, there has emerged a third Colbert. This one is a version of the TV-show Colbert, except he doesn’t exist just on screen anymore. He exists in the real world and has begun to meddle in it. In 2008, the old Colbert briefly ran for president, entering the Democratic primary in his native state of South Carolina. (He hadn’t really switched parties, but the filing fee for the Republican primary was too expensive.) In 2010, invited by Representative Zoe Lofgren, he testified before Congress about the problem of illegal-immigrant farmworkers and remarked that “the obvious answer is for all of us to stop eating fruits and vegetables.”

But those forays into public life were spoofs, more or less. The new Colbert has crossed the line that separates a TV stunt from reality and a parody from what is being parodied. In June, after petitioning the Federal Election Commission, he started his own super PAC — a real one, with real money. He has run TV ads, endorsed (sort of) the presidential candidacy of Buddy Roemer, the former governor of Louisiana, and almost succeeded in hijacking and renaming the Republican primary in South Carolina. “Basically, the F.E.C. gave me the license to create a killer robot,” Colbert said to me in October, and there are times now when the robot seems to be running the television show instead of the other way around.

“It’s bizarre,” remarked an admiring Jon Stewart, whose own program, “The Daily Show,” immediately precedes “The Colbert Report” on Comedy Central and is where the Colbert character got his start. “Here is this fictional character who is now suddenly interacting in the real world. It’s so far up its own rear end,” he said, or words to that effect, “that you don’t know what to do except get high and sit in a room with a black light and a poster.”

by Charles McGrath, NY Times |  Read more:
Photo: Todd Heisler/The New York Times

The Fragile Teenage Brain

If the sport of football ever dies, it will die from the outside in. It won't be undone by a labor lockout or a broken business model — football owners know how to make money. Instead, the death will start with those furthest from the paychecks, the unpaid high school athletes playing on Friday nights. It will begin with nervous parents reading about brain trauma, with doctors warning about the physics of soft tissue smashing into hard bone, with coaches forced to bench stars for an entire season because of a single concussion. The stadiums will still be full on Sunday, the professionals will still play, the profits will continue. But the sport will be sick.

The sickness will be rooted in football's tragic flaw, which is that it inflicts concussions on its players with devastating frequency. Although estimates vary, several studies suggest that up to 15 percent of football players suffer a mild traumatic brain injury during the season. (The odds are significantly worse for student athletes — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that nearly 2 million brain injuries are suffered by teenage players every year.) In fact, the chances of getting a concussion while playing high school football are approximately three times higher than the second most dangerous sport, which is girls' soccer. While such head injuries have long been ignored — until recently, players were resuscitated with smelling salts so they could re-enter the game — it's now clear that these blows have lasting consequences.

The consequences appear to be particularly severe for the adolescent brain. According to a study published last year in Neurosurgery, high school football players who suffered two or more concussions reported mental problems at much higher rates, including headaches, dizziness, and sleeping issues. The scientists describe these symptoms as "neural precursors," warning signs that something in the head has gone seriously wrong.

This research builds on previous work documenting the hazards of football for the teenage brain. In 2002, a team of neurologists surveying several hundred high school football players concluded that athletes who had suffered three or more concussions were nearly ten times more likely to exhibit multiple "abnormal" responses to head injury, including loss of consciousness and persistent amnesia. A 2004 study, meanwhile, revealed that football players with multiple concussions were 7.7 times more likely to experience a "major drop in memory performance" and that three months after a concussion they continued to experience "persistent deficits in processing complex visual stimuli." What's most disturbing, perhaps, is that these cognitive deficits have a real-world impact: When compared with similar students without a history of concussions, athletes with two or more brain injuries demonstrate statistically significant lower grade-point averages.

by Jonah Lehrer, Grantland |  Read more:
Photo: Charles LeClaire/US Presswire

Huang Yongyu. Owl

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Michael Kiwanuka

Advice From Life’s Graying Edge on Finishing With No Regrets

At 17, I wrote a speech titled, “When You Come to the End of Your Days, Will You Be Able to Write Your Own Epitaph?” It reflected the approach to life I adopted after my mother’s untimely death from cancer at age 49. I chose to live each day as if it could be my last — but with a watchful eye on the future in case it wasn’t.

My goal was, and still is, to die without regrets.

For more than 50 years, this course has served me well, including my decision to become a science journalist instead of pursuing what had promised to be a more lucrative and prestigious, but probably less enjoyable, career as a biochemist. I find joy each day in mundane things too often overlooked: sunrises and sunsets, an insect on a flower, crows chasing a hawk, a majestic tree, a child at play, an act of kindness toward a stranger.

Eventually, most of us learn valuable lessons about how to conduct a successful and satisfying life. But for far too many people, the learning comes too late to help them avoid painful mistakes and decades of wasted time and effort.

In recent years, for example, many talented young people have denied their true passions, choosing instead to pursue careers that promise fast and big monetary gains. High rates of divorce speak to an impulsiveness to marry and a tenuous commitment to vows of “till death do us part.”

Parents undermine children’s self-confidence and self-esteem by punishing them physically or pushing them down paths, both academic and athletic, that they are ill equipped to follow. And myriad prescriptions for antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs reflect a widespread tendency to sweat the small stuff, a failure to recognize time-honored sources of happiness, and a reliance on material acquisitions that provide only temporary pleasure.

Enter an invaluable source of help, if anyone is willing to listen while there is still time to take corrective action. It is a new book called “30 Lessons for Living” (Hudson Street Press) that offers practical advice from more than 1,000 older Americans from different economic, educational and occupational strata who were interviewed as part of the ongoing Cornell Legacy Project.

Its author, Karl Pillemer, a professor of human development at the College of Human Ecology at Cornell and a gerontologist at the Weill Cornell Medical College, calls his subjects “the experts,” and their advice is based on what they did right and wrong in their long lives. Many of the interviews can be viewed at legacyproject.human.cornell.edu.

Here is a summary of their most salient thoughts.

by Jane Brody, NY Times |  Read more:

All They That Labored

Scholars piece together the monumental job of creating the King James Bible—and reinterpret its legacy

Generations of Protestant Christians have heard God speaking through the language of the King James Bible. Four hundred years after it was first published, in 1611, it still has an unrivalled reputation as a shaper of English prose, its phrases a lasting contribution to how we use the language. It's given us such expressions as "out of the mouth of babes," "suffer fools gladly," "seek, and ye shall find," and "Am I my brother's keeper?"

Yet the 50 or so learned men who labored in teams to create the King James Bible did not set out to create a literary masterpiece. They wanted to establish as direct a connection as they could to the original languages of the Old and New Testaments. And it's not a miracle that this monumental exercise in translation-by-committee turned out as well as it did. By the time they set to work, in 1604, the King James translators had a hundred years of pioneering work on which to draw. They leaned heavily on texts and translations put together by theologians and linguists such as Erasmus and William Tyndale.

In recent decades, scholarship on the making of the King James Bible has made it plain just how much cumulative human labor and debate went into its creation. "The King James Bible didn't drop from the sky in 1611," says Helen Moore, a fellow and tutor in English at Corpus Christi College at the University of Oxford. Moore led the curatorial committee that put together "Manifold Greatness," an anniversary exhibit at Oxford's Bodleian Library devoted to the making of the King James Bible. The most famous Bible in English, she says, was "made by many different people in many different places using many different people's words and many reference texts."

by Jennifer Howard, Chronicle of Higher Education |  Read more:

Photo: Annotated text, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, 2011

The Incredibly, Insanely, Undeniably Awesome Return of Van Halen

Van Halen performed at Café Wha? last night. It’s possible you’ve already heard reports of this, since Café Wha? only holds 250 people and just about every single person inside the venue was a journalist, an industry bozo, or a former Wimbledon champion (John McEnroe was there). This event was partially the result of Café Wha? being previously owned by David Lee Roth’s 92-year-old uncle, but it mostly happened because Van Halen assumed unfathomable intimacy would be an easy way to remind the media that they’re still awesome. The stage was about 15 feet long and eight feet deep; in 1981, it’s possible Roth could have touched the ceiling with his foot, or at least with his samurai sword. It was a little like watching Darryl Dawkins dunk over Kareem Abdul-Jabbar on a Nerf hoop in your grandparents' basement.

So, just to be clear: Van Halen is still awesome.

They were really, truly, absolutely incredible. Their 45-minute performance exceeded my expectations, which were unrealistically high to begin with. The musicianship was muscular and impeccable. After Dime Bag Darrell’s funeral and Sammy Hagar’s autobiography, I had a real fear that Eddie Van Halen was going to come across as a stumbling, vomiting, toothless hobbit; in actuality, he was flawless and (seemingly) quite happy. Alex Van Halen was a little restrained owing to the size of the room, but his drumming remained precise and propulsive. Eddie’s son Wolfgang was equally competent on bass and did a remarkable job simulating Michael Anthony’s soaring background vocals, even on songs like “Dance the Night Away.” As a pure power trio, Van Halen has virtually no peers. Robert Christgau once wrote that “this music belongs on an aircraft carrier,” which he meant as a criticism — but for anyone who loves Van Halen, that reality defines the magnitude of their merit. These guys are hydro-electric destroyers. Watching Eddie Van Halen play guitar is like watching the detonation of a nuclear bomb from inside the warhead.

by Chuck Klosterman, Grantland |  Read more:
Photo Courtesy of Chuck Klosterman

The Willpower Trick

January is the month of broken resolutions. The gyms are packed for a week, Jenny Craig is full of new recruits and houses are cleaned for the first time in ages. We pledge to finally become the person we want to be: svelte, neat and punctual.

Alas, it doesn’t take long before the stairmasters are once again sitting empty and those same dirty T-shirts are piling up at the back of the closet. We start binging on pizza and beer — sorry, Jenny — and forget about that pledge to become a kinder, gentler person. Human habits, in other words, are stubborn things, which helps explain why 88 percent of all resolutions end in failure, according to a 2007 survey of over 3,000 people conducted by the British psychologist Richard Wiseman. (...)

Is there a way out of this willpower trap? Are there secret exercises that can make it easier to stick with our new year resolutions? Not really. Baumeister has found that getting people to focus on incremental improvements, such as the posture of the back, can build up levels of self-control, just as doing bicep curls can strength the upper arm. Nevertheless, it’s not clear that most people even have the discipline to focus on their posture for an extended period, or that these willpower gains will last over the long term.

But there is a neat way to circumvent the intrinsic weakness of the will, which helps explain why some people have a much easier time sticking to their diet and getting to the gym. A fascinating new paper, led by an all-star team of willpower researchers including Wilhelm Hofmann, Baumeister and Kathleen Vohs, gave 205 participants in Würzburg, Germany a specially designed smartphone. For seven days, the subjects were pinged seven times a day and asked to report whether they were experiencing a strong desire. The participants were asked to describe their nature of their desire, how strongly it was felt, and whether it caused an “internal conflict,” suggesting that this was a desire they were attempting to resist. If a conflict existed, the subjects were asked to describe their ensuing success: Did they manage to not eat the ice cream? The researchers suggest that this is the first time experience-sampling methods have been used to “map the course of desire and self-control in everyday life.”

Christian Jarrett, at the excellent BPS Research Digest, summarizes the results:

The participants were experiencing a desire on about half the times they were beeped. Most often (28 per cent) this was hunger. Other common urges were related to: sleep (10 per cent), thirst (9 per cent), media use (8 per cent), social contact (7 per cent), sex (5 per cent), and coffee (3 per cent). About half of these desires were described as causing internal conflict, and an attempt was made to actively resist about 40 per cent of them. Desires that caused conflict were more likely to prompt an attempt at active self-constraint. Such resistance was often effective. In the absence of resistance, 70 per cent of desires were consummated; with resistance this fell to 17 per cent.

But not everyone was equally successful at resisting the psychological conflict triggered by unwanted wants. According to the survey data, people with higher levels of self-control had just as many desires, but they were less likely to feel that their desires were dangerous. Their desires also tended to be less intense, and thus required less inner strength to resist.

These findings are incredibly revealing, as they document the banal secret of willpower. It’s not that these people have immaculate wills, able to stare down tempting calories. Instead, they are able to intelligently steer clear of situations that trigger problematic desires. They don’t resist temptation — they avoid it entirely. While unsuccessful dieters try to not eat the ice cream in their freezer, thus quickly exhausting their limited willpower resources, those high in self-control refuse to even walk down the ice cream aisle in the supermarket.

by Jonah Lehrer, Wired |  Read more:
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