One Is the Quirkiest Number

If there is any doubt that we’re living in the age of the individual, a look at the housing data confirms it. For millenniums, people have huddled together, in caves, in mud huts, in split-levels and Cape Cods. But these days, 1 in every 4 American households is occupied by someone living alone; in Manhattan, mythic land of the singleton, the number is nearly 1 in 2.

Lately, along with the compelling statistics, a stealth P.R. campaign seems to be taking place, as though living alone were a political candidate trying to burnish its image. Two notable examples: Eric Klinenberg, a sociology professor at New York University, recently published “Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone,” a mash note to domestic solipsism, which he calls “an incredible social experiment” that reveals “the human species is developing new ways to live.” And last fall, an Atlantic magazine cover story examined the rise of the single woman, a piece in which the author Kate Bolick fondly invoked the Barbizon Hotel and visited an Amsterdam apartment complex for women committed to living solo.

In a sense, living alone represents the self let loose. In the absence of what Mr. Klinenberg calls “surveilling eyes,” the solo dweller is free to indulge his or her odder habits — what is sometimes referred to as Secret Single Behavior. Feel like standing naked in your kitchen at 2 a.m., eating peanut butter from the jar? Who’s to know?  (...)

What emerges over time, for those who live alone, is an at-home self that is markedly different — in ways big and small — from the self they present to the world. We all have private selves, of course, but people who live alone spend a good deal more time exploring them.

Rod Sherwood’s living-alone indulgences center on his sleep cycle. A music manager and record producer who works from his railroad apartment in Brooklyn, Mr. Sherwood, 40, said he’ll go to bed at 2 a.m. one night, and then retire later and later by increments, “until I go to bed when the sun comes up.”

He mused: “I wondered how many times in a year I repeat that cycle? I’d be interested to chart it.”

by Steven Kurutz, NY Times |  Read more:
Illustration: Mark Smith

Riesling Goes With Everything, and Sixteen Other Rules for Pairing Wine with Food

I led a wine tasting last week for students at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business. I like pouring for twenty-somethings because they’re so eager to taste and talk about wine. With B-schoolers like these, I’ll also cover the industry, from merchandising to pricing and distribution, but mostly I’m there to get wines into their bodies and get them thinking about the culture of wine, how to evaluate it, and how to integrate it into their lives.

About half-way through the tasting, I poured a round of a Rhône-style red blend, primarily grenache with a little syrah and cinsault added for depth and top-notes. It’s a light-bodied, fruit-driven wine with great acidity, and so it’s really food friendly. I asked the assembled what they might pair it with.

Poultry? someone ventured. Good, yes, roasted poultry would be great. What else? Cheese, someone said. Sure—and what else? Long pause. How about fish? I offered. This wine has supple tannins, so it would readily pair with lighter meats and seafood. Grenache in general is great with fish.

A few heads nodded hesitantly as I sensed some of them trying to wrap their minds around red wine with fish. A fellow in the corner raised his hand. So, how do you figure out what goes with what? he asked. How do you learn about pairing?

I don’t have an easy answer for you, I replied apologetically, but it is a great question. I have books on wine and food pairing, and while reading’s no substitute for tasting, books can introduce the foundation principles. You need to understand how to balance a wine’s sweetness, savoryness, acidity, fruitiness, tannin, and weight with those same elements in the food, while also accounting for the food’s spiciness, saltiness, or richness.

I guess it also helps that I’ve been cooking for twenty-five years, I continued, so I know what food tastes like, and I can conjure those taste memories when I’m tasting a wine. I jot notes on all the wines I taste, and addition to noting Color, Aroma, Flavor, and Finish, I’ve recently added a fifth category: Pairing. Here, while the wine’s fresh on my palate, I think about what I might pour it with—regardless of what I’m about to serve for dinner.

I guess my best answer, I concluded, is to buy a couple of books, then to become attentive, noticing what works best for you.

The young man nodded and smiled, perhaps appreciatively, or perhaps simply relieved that I’d run out of air.

I clearly hadn’t provided a remotely satisfactory answer for someone who is new to wine. So, as a kind of atonement, I’ve put together a short list of pairing rules I’ve derived over the years, lessons learned both by reading and by studying what’s in the glass, and on the plate, before me. I’ll track the young man down, and send him this list:

• Wines and foods from the same region generally pair well together. Think Albariño with seafood, Grenache with the aïoli platter, Alsatian Riesling with choucroute, Sherry with Manchego, Barbera with pasta, and Montrachet (the wine) with, well, Montrachet (the cheese). As some like to say, “if it grows together, it goes together.”

• Wines with moderate acidity are generally quite food-friendly. This is because they can cut the richness of a rich dish, and can also balance the flavor of acidic ones, like salad dressing or fresh tomato sauce. Also, acidity in a food can emphasize fruit flavors in the wine.

by Meg Houston Maker, The Palate Press |  Read more:

Nathalie Leverger, “Couleurs Basques”, huile sur toile
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Little Wahinis by Shuna Nabonogu
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Aquarium Collectors are Depopulating Hawaiian Reefs

The movement to end trade in Hawaiian reef fish, led by Snorkel Bob’s maven Robert Wintner, has only grown since his Nov. 2010 interview here on his ultimately successful campaign on Maui to ban certain practices used in shipping them to the aquarium industry and individual collectors.

The Kaua‘i and Hawai‘i county councils recently passed nonbinding resolutions supporting a statewide ban on aquarium fish collecting, while the state Division of Aquatic Resources is considering less restrictive regulations that would still limit the kinds of reef fish that could be collected. Now Petco is currently in the crosshairs, after a supporter of Wintner’s For the Fishes advocacy group spotted a dead baby yellow tang in a tank at its Kahului store.

After a demonstration last month, a store representative announced it would first no longer sell yellow tang, then that it would no longer offer fish from Hawaiian reefs in its two Hawai‘i locations — but activists note that leaves the chain’s Mainland locations unaddressed, as well as the larger issue of trafficking in wildlife from any coral reef worldwide. Another protest is scheduled at 11 a.m. local time in front of the Maui Petco.

According to a Petco representative whose comments were aired on KNUI-FM this morning, “We do sell captive bred animals whenever and wherever possible. When they are not available, we do partner with people who are practicing corporate and sustainable methods” in collecting reef fish.

“Petco knows what the right thing is — they know that taking fish off the coral reefs is wrong and that captive breeding is the answer. There simply is no reason to take wildlife from the reefs,” responded For the Fishes activist and dive instructor Rene Umberger, who with Wintner was featured on the Maui radio station’s morning call-in show.

According to Umberger, over 30 species of reef fish are routinely taken from Hawai‘i and sold at Petco — and collectors can catch unlimited numbers of fish, in contrast to the total ban on live coral extraction. Although state aquatic specialists have reported growth in the number of yellow tang, callers from the Kona Coast and South Maui, as well as Wintner and Umberger, spoke of drastic reductions in the variety and number of reef fish in their favorite snorkeling spots over the last several decades. “I have been at the beach and seen collectors come with buckets and it’s just heartbreaking,” said one Maui resident.

Aquarium collectors, represented by Coral Magazine, Reefbuilders.com and other blogs, dispute the activists’ statistics on the size of the catch and mortality rates, and point to other significant threats to reef life — from runoff pollution and global warming to damage from visitors who step on coral — as worthier causes of concern. “Because they’re not the cause of these problems, (aquarium collectors think) they should be given carte blanche extraction privileges,” Wintner told the KNUI interviewers, in response to one critical call. He also observed that the sale of other kinds of wildlife is much more heavily regulated, if not outright banned, worldwide.

“We have no problems with taking reef fish for food, or a reef fish for a pet, but we’re opposed to the massive extraction for profit,” said Wintner, who earlier noted on the radio show that his dive shops stopped selling fish food years ago because “it was the right thing to do.”

by Jeanne Cooper, San Francisco Chronicle |  Read more:

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Japanese Fart Scrolls

Approximately 200-400 years ago during Japan's Edo period, an unknown artist created what is easily the most profound demonstration of human aesthetics ever committed to parchment. I am referring to He-Gassen a.k.a. 屁合戦 a.k.a. "the fart war." In this centuries-old scroll, women and men blow each other off the page with typhoon-like flatulence. Toss this in the face of any philistine who claims that art history is boring.

Gassy competitions weren't limited to the scenes of He-Gassen (which is hilariously named in retrospect). Fart wars were also used to express displeasure at the encroaching European influence in Edo Japan — artists would depict Westerners being blown home on thunderous toots.

More scrolls here:

by Cyrianque Lamar, IO9 |  Read more:

Fracture Putty

Broken bones in humans and animals are painful and often take months to heal. Studies conducted in part by University of Georgia Regenerative Bioscience Center researchers show promise to significantly shorten the healing time and revolutionize the course of fracture treatment.

"Complex fractures are a major cause of amputation of limbs for U.S. military men and women," said Steve Stice, a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar, animal and dairy scientist in the UGA College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences and director of the UGA Regenerative Bioscience Center.

"For many young soldiers, their mental health becomes a real issue when they are confined to a bed for three to six months after an injury," he said. "This discovery may allow them to be up and moving as fast as days afterward."

Stice is working with Dr. John Peroni to develop a fast bone healing process. "This process addresses both human and veterinary orthopedic needs," said Peroni, an associate professor of large animal surgery in the UGA College of Veterinary Medicine and a member of the RBC.

Peroni and Stice are leading a large animal research project funded by the U.S. Department of Defense. The project includes scientists and surgeons from the Baylor College of Medicine, Rice University and the University of Texas, who conducted the early studies.

by Faith Peppers, University of Georgia |  Read more:
Photo: Wikipedia

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
via:

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: