There’s More to Nothing Than We Knew

Dr. Krauss delineates three different kinds of nothingness. First is what may have passed muster as nothing with the ancient Greeks: empty space. But we now know that even empty space is filled with energy, vibrating with electromagnetic fields and so-called virtual particles dancing in and out of existence on borrowed energy courtesy of the randomness that characterizes reality on the smallest scales, according to the rules of quantum theory.

Second is nothing, without even space and time. Following a similar quantum logic, theorists have proposed that whole universes, little bubbles of space-time, could pop into existence, like bubbles in boiling water, out of this nothing.

There is a deeper nothing in which even the laws of physics are absent. Where do the laws come from? Are they born with the universe, or is the universe born in accordance with them? Here Dr. Krauss, unhappily in my view, resorts to the newest and most controversial toy in the cosmologist’s toolbox: the multiverse, a nearly infinite assemblage of universes, each with its own randomly determined rules, particles and forces, that represent solutions to the basic equations of string theory — the alleged theory of everything, or perhaps, as wags say, anything. 

Within this landscape of possibilities, almost anything goes. 

by Dennis Overbye, NY Times |  Read more: 

Illustration: Elwood H. Smith

Leah Giberson
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Tax Justice: The Next Great American Movement

Brown v. Board of Education. The Voting Rights Act. Miranda v. Arizona. Roe v. Wade. Texas v. Johnson. The Americans with Disabilities Act. Same-sex marriage. Looked at one way, the past several decades in the United States have been an almost uninterrupted series of victories for the American left and its activist model of advancing civil right and civil liberties through litigation and legislation.

Looked at another way—in terms of tax justice, financial regulation, and income disparity—the economic right wing has dominated American politics for the past thirty-plus years. In the face of little popular resistance and with assistance from both major political parties, the richest Americans and the most powerful corporations have had a free hand to rewrite the tax code and the banking laws to enrich themselves, endanger the world economy, and deprive government of the revenues it would need to, as the Constitution puts it, 'promote the general welfare'.

As income inequality in the States approaches banana-republic levels, Americans are finally having a long-overdue national conversation about taxes, banking laws, and economic justice, but why were we not having this conversation all along? The singular focus on civil rights without a comparable commitment to tax justice may also be the greatest failure of the American left. While it is inarguably a great achievement that any child, regardless of color, can now swim in a public pool, that opportunity means little if tax revenues shrink to the point where cities can no longer afford to open the pools, let alone build new ones.

Let me say at the outset that nothing in this article should be construed to question the value or the necessity of the long, ongoing struggle for civil rights and civil liberties. The sacrifices, heroism, and eloquence of the struggle ennoble our history. Our successes on the road to the equal protection of the law are the nation's greatest historical achievements and the envy of the world. But those same victories might today be more widely enjoyed had we paid comparable attention to less obviously heroic matters, like the tax code and financial regulation.

Capitalism per se need not be at odds with civil rights. Indeed, many of the wealthy are socially progressive, as demonstrated by strong support on Wall Street for same-sex marriage in New York State, as reported multiple times by the New York Times. Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, has even made a video supporting marriage equality. The selfish energies that capitalism unleashes in the pursuit and creation of wealth don't discriminate against individuals, but they do require proper government regulation lest they destroy us all.

The reason that twenty-first-century tax rates constitute a political failure is that for most of the twentieth century tax rates were not what they are now: the rich were taxed more, much more, and the United States managed, despite high taxes on the rich, to be a world economic power. Those tax rates changed because one side, the rich, wanted them lowered and the other side, the rest, did not put up a commensurate fight.

Tables comparing the year-by-year highest tax brackets, like this one from the National Taxpayers Union, have been making the rounds of the internet lately. Here are some highlights:

• From 1954 through 1963, income above $400,000 was taxed at 91%.
• From 1965 through 1978, income above $200,000 was taxed at rates that varied from 70 to 77%.
• From 1982 through 1986, the income bracket varied a bit from $106,000 to $171,580, but the top marginal rate plummeted to 50%.
• When Reagan left office in 1989, the highest marginal tax rate was only 28% and it applied to everyone who made more than about $30,000 a year. In essence, progressive taxation vanished.
• George H.W. Bush raised the top marginal rate to 31%.
• Bill Clinton raised it to 39.6% on incomes over $250,000.
• Finally, George W. Bush lowered it again to 35%, where it remains under President Barack Obama.
For more detailed data, see this spreadsheet supplied by the Tax Foundation.

Were Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon communists for presiding over tax rates of 91% and 70% respectively? Hardly. The 1950s and 60s were decades of prosperity for American businesses and working people alike. Then Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, and the tax rates for the rich began their dramatic decline.

Income taxes are only one piece of the puzzle. Taxes on capital gains and other so-called 'unearned income' like stocks and bonds have also plummeted to favor hording by the rich. The current capital gains tax rate is only 15%, i.e. lower than the historically low income tax. Comparable declines have occurred in estate tax rates and corporate tax rates. The only aspect of taxation that has risen in recent decades has been the number of tax breaks and loopholes for the rich, like those that now allow dividends and so-called carried interest to be taxed at the same rate as capital gains. (For some of these facts in chart form, see this report by the Center for American Progress.)

What happens when governments cannot collect enough revenue because they have lowered taxes too far? Services break down, public investment comes to a halt, and civil society declines. Here are a few examples of the consequences from around the country.

by Jeff Strabone, 3 Quarks Daily |  Read more:

The Odd Existence of Point Roberts, Washington

Wandering Google Maps can reveal magical geographies. When preparing for a recent first-time trip to Vancouver, I started zooming in and out and around the area to see what the surroundings are like. That was how I first learned of the existence of Point Roberts, Washington.

The town sits about 20 miles directly south of Vancouver, on a little peninsular tip of land, jutting just below the 49th parallel. That's the line, as you probably know, that generally demarcates the separation between Canada and the United States, at least from the middle of Minnesota westward. This borderline cuts between Blaine, Washington, and White Rock, British Columbia, the two counterpoint cities of this west coast end of the U.S.-Canada border. But through the waters of Boundary Bay, the line keeps heading west, true along the 49th and directly through the peninsula at this tip of British Columbia. To the south of the line sits Point Roberts, a 5-square mile fingernail of B.C. that is actually part of the United States.

Known as an exclave, Point Roberts is a bit of an oddity in that it’s not an island and yet it’s completely separated from the rest of the U.S. The only way to travel from Point Roberts to the rest of Washington and the U.S. is by passing through one international border crossing into Canada, driving 25 miles, and passing through another international border crossing into the U.S., which is a daily trek for schoolkids above third grade. Cars – a fair amount, but not a crush – regularly line up at either side of the border crossing at Point Roberts. Another 20 miles past the border at Blaine is Bellingham, Washington, the seat of Whatcom County, which oversees this unincorporated town in a strange bit of almost international bureaucracy.

To deploy a somewhat crude simile, Point Roberts is like the foreskin of America; cutting it off probably would have been more convenient, but keeping it has some benefits.

The border crossing is probably the biggest inconvenience, but it’s also the source of much of the town’s economic power.

Resident Kathryn Booth says the border tends to dominate outsiders’ perception of the town. As the operator of pointrobertstourism.com, she’s the self-appointed public relations face of Point Roberts, and she’s heard her share of incredulous visitors since moving here in 2009. “They’ll say ’Oh my god, how do people live here? It’s like a police state.’ And in some ways it kind of feels that way.”

“On the one hand, it’s been rated the safest community because it’s like having a really, really, really strict security guard gate,” Booth says.

by Nate Berg, Atlantic Cities |  Read more:

Bruce Springsteen: Wrecking Ball

At a Paris press conference on Thursday night, Bruce Springsteen was asked whether he was advocating an armed uprising in America. He laughed at the idea, but that the question was even posed at all gives you some idea of the fury of his new album Wrecking Ball.

Indeed, it is as angry a cry from the belly of a wounded America as has been heard since the dustbowl and Woody Guthrie, a thundering blow of New Jersey pig iron down on the heads of Wall Street and all who have sold his country down the swanny. Springsteen has gone to the great American canon for ammunition, borrowing from folk, civil war anthems, Irish rebel songs and gospel. The result is a howl of pain and disbelief as visceral as anything he has ever produced, that segues into a search for redemption: "Hold tight to your anger/ And don't fall to your fears … Bring on your wrecking ball."

"I have spent my life judging the distance between American reality and the American dream," Springsteen told the conference, where the album was aired for the first time. It was written, he claimed, not just out of fury but out of patriotism, a patriotism traduced.

"What was done to our country was wrong and unpatriotic and un-American and nobody has been held to account," he later told the Guardian. "There is a real patriotism underneath the best of my music but it is a critical, questioning and often angry patriotism."

by Fiachra Gibbons, Guardian |  Read more:
Photograph: Kevin Mazur/WireImage

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Can a Papermaker Help to Save Civilization?

Each November, a papermaker named Timothy Barrett gathers a group of friends and students on the grounds of the University of Iowa Research Park, a onetime tuberculosis sanitarium in Coralville, Iowa, for what he bills as a harvest event. Armed with hook-shaped knives, Barrett and his party hack away at a grove of bare, shrublike trees called kozo, a Japanese relative of the common mulberry. At his nearby studio, which is housed in the former sanitarium’s laundry facility, the bundles of cut kozo are steamed in a steel caldron to loosen the bark. After the bark is stripped from the kozo, it is hung on racks, where it shrivels to a crisp over a matter of days. Eventually the bark is rehydrated and sliced apart from its middle, “green” layer, and that layer, in turn, is sheared from the prized inner layer. It takes about a hundred pounds of harvested kozo trees to yield eight pounds of this “white bark,” from which Barrett will ultimately make a few hundred sheets of what connoisseurs consider to be some of the world’s most perfect paper.

Barrett, who is 61, has dedicated his life to unlocking the mysteries of paper, which he regards as both the elemental stuff of civilization and an endangered species in digital culture. For his range of paper-related activities, he received a $500,000 fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation in 2009. “Sometimes I worry about what a weird thing it is to be preoccupied with paper when there’s so much trouble in the world,” Barrett told me, “but then I think of how our whole culture is knitted together by paper, and it makes a kind of sense.” The Library of Congress and the Newberry Library in Chicago are among the institutions that often use his paper to mend their most important holdings, from illuminated manuscripts to musical scores penned by Mozart. In 1999, officials at the National Archives commissioned Barrett to fabricate paper on which to lay the fragile parchment originals of the U.S. Constitution, Bill of Rights and Declaration of Independence. A visitor to Washington, Barrett said, would be unlikely to notice his paper resting beneath the founding charters. “But if you kind of turn your head sideways and squint, you can see it.”

I first met Barrett last winter, when I went to his studio to see him make washi, the lustrous, translucent, tissue-thin Japanese-style paper that is the fruit of his mulberry harvest. Washi, he told me, was a centuries-old winter vocation of Japanese rice farmers. A thermostat on a cinder-block wall read 50.2 degrees, and Barrett was wearing a thick long-sleeve undershirt, a flannel shirt and a down vest beneath his heavy apron. He makes washi only six weeks each year, and forms sheets of paper only on Thursdays. Much of the rest of the time he is preparing the white bark according to a regimen that includes cooking it in a solution of wood-ash lye, laboriously picking the strands free of tiny bits of debris, beating them with a mechanical stamping device, pounding them with mallets and then macerating the stringy clumps in a tub outfitted with S-shaped blades that he says are modeled on a medieval Japanese sword.

He stepped inside an 8-by-10-foot corner of the studio that was enclosed by curtains of plastic sheeting and scooped a few liters of wet white bark fibers into a vat of purified water. Then he poured in what he called a “formation agent” — plant secretions that, he said, were the key to the amazing strength, softness and flexibility of sheets no thicker than a Kleenex. He stirred the vat with a four-foot pole, then pushed and pulled the prongs of a huge, rakelike wooden tool through the solution to disperse the fibers evenly in the water. “A hundred and fifty strokes,” he said, though he didn’t appear to be counting. He stirred with the pole again and paused. Now he was ready to make a sheet of paper.

He took hold of a rectangular wooden frame, or mold, that had a bamboo mat and dipped it into the vat. He lifted it out, let excess water splash over the sides, then plunged it back in. He shook his arms rhythmically. Small waves formed on the surface. He might have been taken for someone at a washtub, though he swayed in a languid, trancelike manner. Finally, he bent his knees deeply, took one more pull out of the vat and quickly tossed the excess off. Nothing but a wet sheen was left on the mold. I thought that the process had, for some reason, failed to produce paper. But soon, from a corner of the frame, Barrett peeled off a pale yellow sheet, which resembled a large damp handkerchief. “People are always surprised when they see it for the first time,” he told me afterward. “It’s as though it comes out of nowhere.” By the end of the day he had a stack of 100 sheets or so, which he would drain overnight, clamp in a screw press and dry on a wall of steam-heated sheet metal the following day. The finished product was a rectangle of radiant simplicity, an unfancy, richly hued blank presence that was the predictable result, Barrett insisted, of selecting proper materials, preparing them in patient, time-honored ways and approaching their manufacture with a spirit of total dedication. “This is pretty much how it was done for 1,800 years,” he remarked. “By hand. One sheet at a time.” 

by Mark Levine, NY Times |  Read more:

Photo: Samantha Contis

One and Done: Physicists Create Single Atom Transistor

The smallest transistor ever built - in fact, the smallest transistor that can be built - has been created using a single phosphorous atom by an international team of researchers at the University of New South Wales, Purdue University and the University of Melbourne.

The single-atom device was described Sunday (Feb. 19) in a paper in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

Michelle Simmons, group leader and director of the ARC Centre for Quantum Computation and Communication at the University of New South Wales, says the development is less about improving current technology than building future tech.

"This is a beautiful demonstration of controlling matter at the atomic scale to make a real device," Simmons says. "Fifty years ago when the first transistor was developed, no one could have predicted the role that computers would play in our society today. As we transition to atomic-scale devices, we are now entering a new paradigm where quantum mechanics promises a similar technological disruption. It is the promise of this future technology that makes this present development so exciting."

by Steve Tally, Purdue University |  Read more:

Groupthink

In the late nineteen-forties, Alex Osborn, a partner in the advertising agency B.B.D.O., decided to write a book in which he shared his creative secrets. At the time, B.B.D.O. was widely regarded as the most innovative firm on Madison Avenue. Born in 1888, Osborn had spent much of his career in Buffalo, where he started out working in newspapers, and his life at B.B.D.O. began when he teamed up with another young adman he’d met volunteering for the United War Work Campaign. By the forties, he was one of the industry’s grand old men, ready to pass on the lessons he’d learned. His book “Your Creative Power” was published in 1948. An amalgam of pop science and business anecdote, it became a surprise best-seller. Osborn promised that, by following his advice, the typical reader could double his creative output. Such a mental boost would spur career success—“To get your foot in the door, your imagination can be an open-sesame”—and also make the reader a much happier person. “The more you rub your creative lamp, the more alive you feel,” he wrote.

“Your Creative Power” was filled with tricks and strategies, such as always carrying a notebook, to be ready when inspiration struck. But Osborn’s most celebrated idea was the one discussed in Chapter 33, “How to Organize a Squad to Create Ideas.” When a group works together, he wrote, the members should engage in a “brainstorm,” which means “using the brain to storm a creative problem—and doing so in commando fashion, with each stormer attacking the same objective.” For Osborn, brainstorming was central to B.B.D.O.’s success. Osborn described, for instance, how the technique inspired a group of ten admen to come up with eighty-seven ideas for a new drugstore in ninety minutes, or nearly an idea per minute. The brainstorm had turned his employees into imagination machines.

The book outlined the essential rules of a successful brainstorming session. The most important of these, Osborn said—the thing that distinguishes brainstorming from other types of group activity—was the absence of criticism and negative feedback. If people were worried that their ideas might be ridiculed by the group, the process would fail. “Creativity is so delicate a flower that praise tends to make it bloom while discouragement often nips it in the bud,” he wrote. “Forget quality; aim now to get a quantity of answers. When you’re through, your sheet of paper may be so full of ridiculous nonsense that you’ll be disgusted. Never mind. You’re loosening up your unfettered imagination—making your mind deliver.” Brainstorming enshrined a no-judgments approach to holding a meeting.

Brainstorming was an immediate hit and Osborn became an influential business guru, writing such best-sellers as “Wake Up Your Mind” and “The Gold Mine Between Your Ears.” Brainstorming provided companies with an easy way to structure their group interactions, and it became the most widely used creativity technique in the world. It is still popular in advertising offices and design firms, classrooms and boardrooms. “Your Creative Power” has even inspired academic institutes, such as the International Center for Studies in Creativity, at Buffalo State College, near where Osborn lived. And it has given rise to detailed pedagogical doctrines, such as the Osborn-Parnes Creative Problem Solving Process, which is frequently employed by business consultants. When people want to extract the best ideas from a group, they still obey Osborn’s cardinal rule, censoring criticism and encouraging the most “freewheeling” associations. At the design firm IDEO, famous for developing the first Apple mouse, brainstorming is “practically a religion,” according to the company’s general manager. Employees are instructed to “defer judgment” and “go for quantity.”

The underlying assumption of brainstorming is that if people are scared of saying the wrong thing, they’ll end up saying nothing at all. The appeal of this idea is obvious: it’s always nice to be saturated in positive feedback. Typically, participants leave a brainstorming session proud of their contribution. The whiteboard has been filled with free associations. Brainstorming seems like an ideal technique, a feel-good way to boost productivity. But there is a problem with brainstorming. It doesn’t work.

The first empirical test of Osborn’s brainstorming technique was performed at Yale University, in 1958. Forty-eight male undergraduates were divided into twelve groups and given a series of creative puzzles. The groups were instructed to follow Osborn’s guidelines. As a control sample, the scientists gave the same puzzles to forty-eight students working by themselves. The results were a sobering refutation of Osborn. The solo students came up with roughly twice as many solutions as the brainstorming groups, and a panel of judges deemed their solutions more “feasible” and “effective.” Brainstorming didn’t unleash the potential of the group, but rather made each individual less creative. Although the findings did nothing to hurt brainstorming’s popularity, numerous follow-up studies have come to the same conclusion. Keith Sawyer, a psychologist at Washington University, has summarized the science: “Decades of research have consistently shown that brainstorming groups think of far fewer ideas than the same number of people who work alone and later pool their ideas.”

And yet Osborn was right about one thing: like it or not, human creativity has increasingly become a group process. “Many of us can work much better creatively when teamed up,” he wrote, noting that the trend was particularly apparent in science labs. “In the new B. F. Goodrich Research Center”—Goodrich was an important B.B.D.O. client—“250 workers . . . are hard on the hunt for ideas every hour, every day,” he noted. “They are divided into 12 specialized groups—one for each major phase of chemistry, one for each major phase of physics, and so on.” Osborn was quick to see that science had ceased to be solitary.

Ben Jones, a professor at the Kellogg School of Management, at Northwestern University, has quantified this trend. By analyzing 19.9 million peer-reviewed academic papers and 2.1 million patents from the past fifty years, he has shown that levels of teamwork have increased in more than ninety-five per cent of scientific subfields; the size of the average team has increased by about twenty per cent each decade. The most frequently cited studies in a field used to be the product of a lone genius, like Einstein or Darwin. Today, regardless of whether researchers are studying particle physics or human genetics, science papers by multiple authors receive more than twice as many citations as those by individuals. This trend was even more apparent when it came to so-called “home-run papers”—publications with at least a hundred citations. These were more than six times as likely to come from a team of scientists.

Jones’s explanation is that scientific advances have led to a situation where all the remaining problems are incredibly hard. Researchers are forced to become increasingly specialized, because there’s only so much information one mind can handle. And they have to collaborate, because the most interesting mysteries lie at the intersections of disciplines. “A hundred years ago, the Wright brothers could build an airplane all by themselves,” Jones says. “Now Boeing needs hundreds of engineers just to design and produce the engines.” The larger lesson is that the increasing complexity of human knowledge, coupled with the escalating difficulty of those remaining questions, means that people must either work together or fail alone. But if brainstorming is useless, the question still remains: What’s the best template for group creativity?

by Jonah Lehrer, New Yorker |  Read more:
Illustration: Nishant Choksi

My Facebook Angst

A few days ago, my friend Elizabeth posted an item to Facebook. I wanted to comment but held back, though not exactly because I had plenty of work to do. Instead I sent her a text: “Sometimes do you want to say something or post something or like something on FB, but then you think of all those unanswered emails and texts and silence yourself, so people won’t see you ‘wasting’ time when you could be responding to them?”

“Sometimes?” she replied.

“It’s called Twilt, that feeling,” I answered, laughing, having coined the term on the spot.

Twilt (n): the particular brand of guilt or self-reproach that results from posting, liking or commenting on items on Facebook or Twitter while simultaneously not responding to emails, text messages, phone calls or other types of personal communication with the knowledge or anxiety that the specific message senders will notice your public offerings and question your lack of private ones. Twilt, while related, is not the same as the guilt that results from general Internet-specific procrastination such as browsing blogs or online shopping, which, though it may result in its own brand of self-disgust, generally has no public shame component.

Adam Zagajewski, in his essay “The Shabby and Sublime,” says that the poetry of recent years is “marked by a disproportion … between powerful expressions of the inner life and the ceaseless chatter of self-satisfied craftsmen.” The same could be said for Facebook updates, our contemporary confessional. I have eaten the plums in the refrigerator, and they were yummy. Facebook is bad for me because I not only embarrass myself but I keenly feel the embarrassment of others whose lack of discretion, as I perceive it, I quietly judge and am embarrassed by all the same.

When someone starts a conversation with me on Facebook, in public, I’m mortified. There’s a message function for that! I have email and a cellphone. Let me respond when I can, away from the watch of hundreds. Sometimes I disable my Wall so people can’t write things there, until someone points it out and I feel guilty that I’ve done this so I change it back. I don’t like to talk on the phone in public and when a friend speaks too loudly in a cafe I am nervous that someone will overhear our conversation. At home I don’t like the sensation of my husband overhearing me order pizza, let alone having more sensitive conversations with friends. I have never been one to kiss and tell, and I like to keep my private life private. Why I have a Facebook account at all still perplexes me. I like the idea of seeing what’s going on, but I don’t want to always be a part of it. I don’t want to not be a part of it either. I want to swoop in and swoop out. But Facebook doesn’t allow for inconsistency without amplifying it, a constant record of our obsessions and our contradictions to the point of caricature.

The conversations between couples embarrass me the most, whether they’re sentimental or self-referential. It’s not that you live with that person and somehow don’t need electronic communication — I often text my husband across the table at a bar to make a snarky comment, or sometimes I send ridiculous things to the online printer in his office just to be impish. But it’s done in private, between us. That’s the point. It’s something about the relationship having a public facade so contrived and self-aware that makes my eyes water with shame. We all have facades and personas, of course, that are not Internet confined. Game faces. Once, at a reading, a poet thanked his wife so gushingly that I whispered to my friend, “That guy is totally having an affair.” I didn’t know a thing about him. But it turns out, I was right. Maybe the wife requested the shout-out, but if I were his wife I would have smiled at the crowd and taken flight. Up, up and away.

by Natalie Bakopoulos, Salon |  Read more:
Illustration: Salon/iStockphoto

Matticchio
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What a Tangled Web We Weave

Together, our sensory systems are organised to give us a detailed and accurate view of reality, exactly as we would expect if truth about the outside world helps us to navigate it more effectively. But once this information arrives in our brains, it is often distorted and biased to our conscious minds. We deny the truth to ourselves. We project on to others traits that are true of ourselves - and then attack them. We repress painful memories, create completely false ones, rationalise immoral behaviour, act repeatedly to boost positive self-opinion and show a suite of ego-defence mechanisms.

Why? Surely these biases are expected to have negative effects on our biological welfare. Why degrade and destroy the truth? Why alter information after arrival so as to reach a conscious falsehood? Why should natural selection have favoured our marvellous organs of perception, on the one hand, only to have us systematically distort the information gathered, on the other? In short, why practise self-deception? (...)

Is self-deception good or bad for marriage? There are two extreme forms of deception in a relationship where sex and love are concerned: the sex is great and you have to fake the love, or the love is real but you have to fake the sex. For the latter, we often invoke fantasy, a prior partner, an imagined partner, an imagined sexual act. Note that these relations are especially dangerous to the partner. If the partner is unaware of your own true reactions, he or she will be unprepared for the betrayal that so likely awaits. On the other side, it may be much harder to fake love when there is strong sexual interest. Low-love relationships are apt to be more volatile, open hostility coexisting with passionate sex.

The aphorism that you should go into marriage with both eyes open and, once in it, keep one eye shut captures part of the reality. When you are deciding whether to commit, weigh costs and benefits equally; when you have committed, try to be positive and not dwell on every little negative detail.

Consider first the positive form of self-deception. Couples last longer if they tend to overrate each other compared to the other's self-evaluation. This has an appealingly romantic ring: "I love you, darling, more than you love yourself, and thereby uplift you." Effects work on both sides. The more you overrate the other, the longer you stay together, and vice versa.

Evidence suggests that marital satisfaction declines linearly over time, but people have a biased memory - they remember early declines in satisfaction, but also more recent increases that offset the early decreases. In one study, both spouses reported steady increases in relationship satisfaction over two and a half years while none could be detected. By the end of the time, though, memories were readjusted so as to remember no improvement in the more distant past, only in the more recent.

In trying to predict which couples would stay together three years later, scientists enjoyed surprising success based on studying the interaction between the two people during recorded sessions. Those who rewrote history in a more thoroughly negative way were predicted to break up. On this basis alone, the scientists correctly predicted all seven marital break-ups, while incorrectly predicting three break-ups that did not occur. Other students of marriage claim to notice that when the ratio of positive to negative acts towards the partner drops below 5:1, the marriage is in trouble.

by Robert Trivers, New Statesman |  Read more:
Illustration: Gianni de Conno (giannideconno-illustrator.com) via:

Can a Font Help a City Make a Comeback?

Around the world, only a few hundred people make a living as fulltime typeface designers. Two of them happen to live in Chattanooga, Tennessee, population 167,000, where they've embarked on an ambitious project to distill the city's artistic and entrepreneurial spirit into a font called Chatype. The goal is to help the city and its businesses forge a distinct and cohesive identity through custom typeface, sending a visual message to the world that Chattanooga—a rapidly growing city in the midst of a creative renaissance—is “more than just your average Southern town.”

Chatype came about when D.J. Trischler, a brand consultant, discovered he'd been sitting next to typeface designer Jeremy Dooley at their local coffee shop. The two became fixated on a question: What if Chattanooga had its own typeface? The idea may sound strange from an American perspective, but it's actually the norm throughout Europe, where even small cities employ unique typefaces to distinguish themselves. In the United States, the only similar attempt was a failed one by academics in the Twin Cities, according to the Chatype team. Yet Trischler and Dooley say this is the first-ever attempt to create custom typeface at the grassroots level, rather than from the demand of a city government.

by Zack Stone, Good |  Read more:

Erik Satie

Photo: markk

I Couch-Surfed Across America—and Lived to Tell

I found Halvorson and Orange Acres through CouchSurfing.org, an online social network that pairs travelers who need a place to stay with total strangers who don't mind putting them up—for free. It's hardly a new concept: Mennonites, Mensa members, and Esperanto speakers all have their own free travel clubs. And since 2002, Hospitality Club has brought a more wide-open approach through the internet. But the former are all confined to niche demographics, and the latter has been slow to take off, owing, perhaps, to its Geocities-chic interface. CouchSurfing is slick, aspirational (its slogan used to be "Creating a Better World, one Couch at a Time"; the current one is "Creating Inspiring Experiences"), and growing fast.

Since its inception in 2004, the site has swollen to 3.7 million members in 249 territories and countries; it touts 6.6 million "positive experiences," a metric it tracks through a self-reporting survey system. Media reports about travel-networking sites like CouchSurfing—and there have been a few—typically present it as a portal for backpackers and study-abroad types looking to see Europe on a budget, an à la carte youth hostel for the Facebook generation. (...)

Part of the appeal of CouchSurfing is that it offers you the luxury of choosing precisely the kind of person you're looking to stay with (provided they'll have you, of course). You can seek out specific hosts—a college senior, a senior citizen, an urban farmer, an actual farmer—with the ease of picking heirlooms at a farmer's market. It's an advantage that hitchhiking never had.

And hosts talk openly about traveling vicariously through their surfers. Bud and Carol, a near-retirement-age LDS couple in Utah, had us sign a guest log articulating (among other things) the scope of our trip, along with a written guide to our hometown. They don't travel much themselves, but their kids do, and so they host as many travelers as they can as a form of karmic insurance. In Mississippi, we stayed with an Air Force vet from Seattle working as a contractor at a Naval air base. He'd given up on meeting new people in Meridian—how could you, unless you joined the Rotary Club or a church? For him, hosting surfers was a way of keeping in contact with folks like himself.

Bill, our host in Duluth, described himself in his profile as a Zamboni operator and freelance detective. In reality, he manned the graveyard shift at an assisted living facility and supplemented his income by donating plasma on the weekends. With the decline of the Iron Range, he explained, blood was now the city's largest export. This was also false.

Greeting us on the front steps of a Victorian apartment building overlooking Leif Erickson Park, he cuts a distinctive figure—aspiring mutton chops and a shock of rusty-brown hair framing a pair of beat-up glasses held together by masking tape. His neck cranes down and then back up when he walks, as if he's ever battling an invisible torrent of sleet; the lazy eye almost seems superfluous.

In anticipation of our arrival, he's sorted through a dumpster for an extra set of couch cushions, bedbugs be damned. But, he warns, "I'm gonna have a rager tonight, kind of. Like it'll be pretty wild, so if you guys just want to stay with someone else, that's cool."

The rager ultimately consists of seven people, clustered in a kitchen. There's a strobe light in the living room, but no dancing. The whole thing, Bill concludes, would have been better if he could have scored some dry ice. Still, he shows us the side of the city you'll never find in a guide book: a Brazilian Laundromat with live parakeets; an abandoned ski jump with a panoramic view of the harbor; and the "graffiti graveyard," an I-35 overpass that's home to the city's finest underground art.

by Tim Murphy, Mother Jones |  Read more:
Photo: sweens308/Flickr

The Forgetting Pill Erases Painful Memories Forever

In the past decade, scientists have come to realize that our memories are not inert packets of data and they don’t remain constant. Even though every memory feels like an honest representation, that sense of authenticity is the biggest lie of all.

When CISD fails, it fails because, as scientists have recently learned, the very act of remembering changes the memory itself. New research is showing that every time we recall an event, the structure of that memory in the brain is altered in light of the present moment, warped by our current feelings and knowledge. That’s why pushing to remember a traumatic event so soon after it occurs doesn’t unburden us; it reinforces the fear and stress that are part of the recollection.

This new model of memory isn’t just a theory—neuroscientists actually have a molecular explanation of how and why memories change. In fact, their definition of memory has broadened to encompass not only the cliché cinematic scenes from childhood but also the persisting mental loops of illnesses like PTSD and addiction—and even pain disorders like neuropathy. Unlike most brain research, the field of memory has actually developed simpler explanations. Whenever the brain wants to retain something, it relies on just a handful of chemicals. Even more startling, an equally small family of compounds could turn out to be a universal eraser of history, a pill that we could take whenever we wanted to forget anything.

And researchers have found one of these compounds.

In the very near future, the act of remembering will become a choice.

by Jonah Lehrer, Wired |  Read more:
Photo: Dwight Eschliman

Jennifer Sanchez, “ny.10.#31”, mixed media on paper
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King of Pain

Just about everyone who pays any attention at all to contemporary fiction knows two things about David Foster Wallace (1962-2008): he wrote a thousand-page novel with hundreds of end-notes that launched him as a cult hero, and he killed himself while still quite a young man. The novel, Infinite Jest (1996), his second, and the last one he completed, has established Wallace as a supreme postmodernist master, revered like John Barth or Thomas Pynchon by those who take a passionate interest in that kind of thing. The suicide for its part enhanced the mystique, as suicides of distinguished artists almost invariably do.

Wallace may be dead but he is not finished, or rather the Wallace industry is not finished with him. His 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College has appeared posthumously in a book of postcard dimensions, with one sentence per page, a format more suited to the lucubrations of Khalil Gibran or Rod McKuen. Columbia University Press has issued Wallace's undergraduate philosophy thesis in a volume with his name above the title and his photograph on the cover, although his essay actually occupies 75 pages of a 262-page book, the rest filled with pieces by assorted other hands on similar topics. The torso of an unfinished novel, The Pale King, appeared last year. A volume of unpublished stories and another of uncollected journalism look to be on the horizon; two volumes of letters are in prospect as well.

Encomia soar ever higher with the passing of time; every admirer feels obliged to surpass every other admirer in the length, breadth, and depth of his admiration. James Ryerson, an elegant and judicious journalist, mourns the loss of contemporary American fiction's "most intellectually ambitious writer." Greg Carlisle, an actor and drama professor from Kentucky who spent five years producing a 500-page commentary on Infinite Jest, calls Wallace "the best and most important author of the late 20th and early 21st centuries"; one supposes Wallace had better be at least that important, if the professor is to justify devoting five years of work to criticism of a single novel. An even headier enthusiast, Jon Baskin, claims nothing less than world-historical significance for his hero:

It became a commonplace and then a cliché and then almost a taunt to call him the greatest writer of his generation, yet his project remained only vaguely understood when it was understood at all. With the benefit of time, it will be recognized that Wallace had less in common with Eggers and Franzen than he did with Dostoevsky and Joyce.  (...)

Pain

He had lived for recognition and sensual pleasure; he had figured in the American entertainment culture as both producer and consumer; and he had scraped bottom. Seriousness, indeed salvation, lay along another road. In 1991 he began writing Infinite Jest, his intended summa on the national compulsion for diversion unto death. The book would engage all his powers as no previous work of his had done. Wallace was writing for his life, and for the lives of his countrymen. The matter was as grave as that.

The fundamental human experience in this novel is pain-physical, mental, emotional, contrived by the powers so that it is never quite the same for any two persons but also so that most everyone (there is one possible exception) gets rather more than he could ever want. The very word pain rings throughout the novel the way virtue does in Machiavelli or real in Proust or good in Hemingway. Seeking pain, killing pain, using pain, surviving pain are some of the variations on the theme. There are certain peculiarly American aspects to this general torment: modern democratic life features tortures less spectacular but no less intense than the sufferings of Job or the fires of the autos-da-fé. (Wallace was writing during an interlude of peace.) Of course we have analgesics and anesthetics and we don't burn heretics. Compassion is the pre-eminent democratic virtue, and many of us feel the suffering not only of our fellow human beings but of animals that we hesitate to dismiss as dumb beasts. Enormities have not vanished from our tender-hearted republic, however; quite the contrary. Psychic distress abounds. People want the wrong things, or want good things in the wrong way. Desires all too readily become addictions. Antidepressants are the most commonly prescribed medications in America. Our sensitivity to pain has prompted us to do all we can to eliminate it, but we are ever more vulnerable to the pain we cannot root out. And there will always be human monsters, who take pleasure in the pain of others, who transmit misery from generation to generation, who infect whatever they touch.

by Algis Valiunas, The Claremont Institute |  Read more:
Photo: Wikipedia

How Companies Learn Your Secrets

The desire to collect information on customers is not new for Target or any other large retailer, of course. For decades, Target has collected vast amounts of data on every person who regularly walks into one of its stores. Whenever possible, Target assigns each shopper a unique code — known internally as the Guest ID number — that keeps tabs on everything they buy. “If you use a credit card or a coupon, or fill out a survey, or mail in a refund, or call the customer help line, or open an e-mail we’ve sent you or visit our Web site, we’ll record it and link it to your Guest ID,” Pole said. “We want to know everything we can.”

Also linked to your Guest ID is demographic information like your age, whether you are married and have kids, which part of town you live in, how long it takes you to drive to the store, your estimated salary, whether you’ve moved recently, what credit cards you carry in your wallet and what Web sites you visit. Target can buy data about your ethnicity, job history, the magazines you read, if you’ve ever declared bankruptcy or got divorced, the year you bought (or lost) your house, where you went to college, what kinds of topics you talk about online, whether you prefer certain brands of coffee, paper towels, cereal or applesauce, your political leanings, reading habits, charitable giving and the number of cars you own. (In a statement, Target declined to identify what demographic information it collects or purchases.) All that information is meaningless, however, without someone to analyze and make sense of it. That’s where Andrew Pole and the dozens of other members of Target’s Guest Marketing Analytics department come in.

Almost every major retailer, from grocery chains to investment banks to the U.S. Postal Service, has a “predictive analytics” department devoted to understanding not just consumers’ shopping habits but also their personal habits, so as to more efficiently market to them. “But Target has always been one of the smartest at this,” says Eric Siegel, a consultant and the chairman of a conference called Predictive Analytics World. “We’re living through a golden age of behavioral research. It’s amazing how much we can figure out about how people think now.”

The reason Target can snoop on our shopping habits is that, over the past two decades, the science of habit formation has become a major field of research in neurology and psychology departments at hundreds of major medical centers and universities, as well as inside extremely well financed corporate labs. “It’s like an arms race to hire statisticians nowadays,” said Andreas Weigend, the former chief scientist at Amazon.com. “Mathematicians are suddenly sexy.” As the ability to analyze data has grown more and more fine-grained, the push to understand how daily habits influence our decisions has become one of the most exciting topics in clinical research, even though most of us are hardly aware those patterns exist. One study from Duke University estimated that habits, rather than conscious decision-making, shape 45 percent of the choices we make every day, and recent discoveries have begun to change everything from the way we think about dieting to how doctors conceive treatments for anxiety, depression and addictions.

This research is also transforming our understanding of how habits function across organizations and societies. A football coach named Tony Dungy propelled one of the worst teams in the N.F.L. to the Super Bowl by focusing on how his players habitually reacted to on-field cues. Before he became Treasury secretary, Paul O’Neill overhauled a stumbling conglomerate, Alcoa, and turned it into a top performer in the Dow Jones by relentlessly attacking one habit — a specific approach to worker safety — which in turn caused a companywide transformation. The Obama campaign has hired a habit specialist as its “chief scientist” to figure out how to trigger new voting patterns among different constituencies.

Researchers have figured out how to stop people from habitually overeating and biting their nails. They can explain why some of us automatically go for a jog every morning and are more productive at work, while others oversleep and procrastinate. There is a calculus, it turns out, for mastering our subconscious urges. For companies like Target, the exhaustive rendering of our conscious and unconscious patterns into data sets and algorithms has revolutionized what they know about us and, therefore, how precisely they can sell.

by Charles Duhigg, NY Times |  Read more:
Photo: Antonio Bolfo