Hypochondria: An Inside Look

When The New York Times called, inquiring if I might pen a few words “from the horse’s mouth” about hypochondria, I confess I was taken aback. What light could I possibly shed on this type of crackpot behavior since, contrary to popular belief, I am not a hypochondriac but a totally different genus of crackpot?

What I am is an alarmist, which is in the same ballpark as the hypochondriac or, should I say, the same emergency room. Still there is a fundamental difference. I don’t experience imaginary maladies — my maladies are real.

What distinguishes my hysteria is that at the appearance of the mildest symptom, let’s say chapped lips, I instantly leap to the conclusion that the chapped lips indicate a brain tumor. Or maybe lung cancer. In one instance I thought it was Mad Cow.

The point is, I am always certain I’ve come down with something life threatening. It matters little that few people are ever found dead of chapped lips. Every minor ache or pain sends me to a doctor’s office in need of reassurance that my latest allergy will not require a heart transplant, or that I have misdiagnosed my hives and it’s not possible for a human being to contract elm blight.

Unfortunately, my wife bears the brunt of these pathological dramas. Like the time I awoke at 3 a.m. with a spot on my neck that to me clearly had the earmarks of a melanoma. That it turned out to be a hickey was confirmed only later at the hospital after much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Sitting at an ungodly hour in the emergency room where my wife tried to talk me down, I was making my way through the five stages of grief and was up to either “denial” or “bargaining” when a young resident fixed me with a rather supercilious eye and said sarcastically, “Your hickey is benign.”

by Woody Allen, NY Times |  Read more:

Illustration: Maumont

The Science of Sex Abuse

Is it right to imprison people for heinous crimes they have not yet committed?

On a Saturday night in the summer of 1998, an undercover officer logged in to a child-pornography chat room using the screen name Indy-Girl. Within minutes, a user named John introduced himself and asked her, “Are you into real life or just fantasy?” Indy-Girl said that because of the “legality of it” she had never acted on her fantasies. But she soon revealed an adventurous spirit. She was a bisexual college sophomore, she said, and had learned about sex at an early age. “My mother is very European,” she explained.

John, a thirty-one-year-old soldier stationed in Fort Campbell, Kentucky, had been using the Internet for less than a year. He began downloading child pornography after watching a television special about how Internet child porn had become epidemic. He hadn’t realized that it existed. In the five months since he’d seen the show, he had downloaded more than two thousand images from child-pornography news groups. In the anonymous chat rooms, he felt free to adopt a persona repugnant to society. He told Indy-Girl that he was a “real-life pedophile,” adding, “At least here I can come out and admit it.”

“What’s the kinkiest you’ve done?” Indy-Girl asked. John said he’d had sex with a ten-year-old while her parents were skiing, and with a fourteen-year-old at a night club in Germany. Indy-Girl recognized that she was too old for him, which was “depressing,” but she offered that her little sister liked older men. “Maybe you could intro me,” John wrote. “We could meet somewhere discreet.”

John had been in the Army for eight years, serving in Desert Storm and Bosnia, and had graduated from Penn State with a degree in history. He was thinking of leaving the service, in part because he felt picked on by other soldiers. He had been commended for having a memory for technical details, but he was also nervous, nerdy, and eager to please. At all stages of his life, he had been afflicted with the sense that he was just a “wannabe.”

Unlike other people John met online, Indy-Girl seemed to like him. After a week of conversations, she asked John if he was “r/l” (real life) about the meeting, and when he said that he was she sent him a soft-focus digital image of a girl who she said was her fourteen-year-old sister. “Now don’t be mean when you see it,” she warned. “She still has some of her baby fat, she’s kinda embarrassed.” Undeterred, John described how the three of them would enjoy one another’s company: they could have sex in the shower or in a field of flowers. He encouraged Indy-Girl to “talk dirty” and “let your imagination go wild,” but she cut him off, explaining, “I’m not the cyber type.”

She preferred to discuss the logistics of their meeting, a subject that John approached hesitantly. During the following week, Indy-Girl repeatedly expressed concern that John was avoiding her: “You’re usually so fun to chat with . . . and now . . . I feel like just . . . blaaaahhh.” She apologized for getting “a bit too gabby” and for “being so weird” and “reading into things.” John said it wasn’t her—he worked long hours and was tired. He also admitted that he wanted a relationship more than he wanted sex. He hoped to find someone who “could accept me the way I am.” “Give it a chance,” Indy-Girl encouraged. “If you like her . . . and she likes you . . . things will work out.” She added, “It’s not like she’s gonna die if you don’t.”

They decided to meet at a park in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, where they could have a picnic or go boating on the lake. Two weeks after their first conversation, John drove three hours to the appointed meeting spot. He brought lacy undergarments in his briefcase. The Military Police Investigations unit, working with the F.B.I., had recruited two young officers to play the roles of the two sisters. They arrived early, spread a blanket on the grass, and waved at John, who was sitting at a picnic table, writing in his journal.

An athletic man with light-brown hair and green eyes, John slowly walked over to the girls, who were playing with a beach ball. He offered them sodas, and they chatted about what they liked to drink—Indy-Girl said she preferred beer—and about how long the drive had taken. It was a “normal conversation,” one of the cops later wrote, until John “saw the agents approaching him, and he began backing away.” A plainclothes officer whom John had seen standing by the lake, holding a fishing pole and a tackle box, shouted at him to put his hands behind his back.

John waived his right to a lawyer, hoping to end the humiliation quickly. (His mother, for the sake of John’s two younger brothers, has asked that I not use the family’s last name.) In an interview with the agents, John confessed that he frequently downloaded child pornography, storing it on his hard drive in a folder labelled “2Young.” He was sexually attracted to the girls in the photographs, he admitted, but he had never had sexual contact with anyone below the age of eighteen. He insisted that he had invented his sexual exploits to impress Indy-Girl. According to an F.B.I. report summarizing the interview, “Everything that he said on the Internet was a lie.”

by Rachel Aviv, New Yorker |  Read more:
Illustration by Noma Bar/Dutch Uncle.

Fernandez Arman (1928-2005) - Guitar, 1995.
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Man Ray, Seguidia 1970.
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Grant Wood, Young Corn 1931.
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The Violent Femmes of Football

"Hey! HEY! Lemme get a picture!" A stumpy man in a Darren McFadden jersey, whose cheeks are glopped with two generous Rorschach blots of eye black, is shouting over to the two women next to me, Metal Cindy and Dre of the Dead. This keeps happening. It's taken us about thirty minutes to walk just sixty yards from our tailgate in the southwest corner of Lot C toward the entrance of the Oakland coliseum, home of the Oakland Raiders. And not because a crowd has formed to get inside. It's just past noon, an hour before kickoff, and there's time for one more beer before the tailgaters are required to pack up their grills. No, we're traveling at turtles-on-benzos pace because Cindy, 27, and her 17-year-old protégée, Dre, a quiet, raven-haired beauty, who, in her striped leggings and black tutu, recalls a 1990s Winona Ryder, are celebrities here. Navigating the lot with them, as I've been doing for the past four hours, is like walking around a junior high school with Justin Bieber. Only in this junior high, the kids wear spikes and chains and generally look like groupies who got tossed out of a Kiss concert for freaking out the band.

Here's a sampling of who Cindy and Dre have posed with so far this morning: three teenage girls openly smoking a pipe of weed; a pack of smallish Mexican men who speak no English; two lady police officers on bicycles; a pair of incongruously well-dressed European gentlemen; a big group of rowdy drunks; a phocomelic young man in a wheelchair; a bulldog with an eye patch; a middle-aged couple wearing Raiders jerseys and khakis who look like the parents from the movie Pleasantville; and two shy Latino teen boys, both built like vending machines, who trade Hey, fuck you's in Vito Corleone voices.

The guy in the McFadden jersey finagles himself between Cindy and Dre, his head barely rising above Cindy's toothsome cleavage, which is cinched and pushed up to her clavicle by a Raiders bustier top with maybe a thousand decorative belt buckles. Cindy is an aspiring model who's done some "very dark fetish" work for pinup calendars and music ads. She looks like a goth JWoww, or a honeypot T-800 whose face has been half blasted off to its metal core; the right side of her face is painted like Skeletor, and one of her big brown eyes is concealed by a ghoulish white Raiders contact lens. Just before the photo is snapped, McFadden guy turns and grins directly into Cindy's chest flesh, throwing a lecherous thumbs-up to the camera.

In all of Raider nation, there are about fifty or so "superfans," and Metal Cindy and Dre of the Dead are two of them. Along with other "characters"—including Gorilla Rilla, a dude who shows up every game day in a full ape suit, plus a jersey and sunglasses over the ape suit, and who, according to Metal Cindy, got married in that getup—Cindy and Dre never miss a Sunday. They're like walking and waving Disney World mascots for the drunk-at-10-A.M. set. Hunter S. Thompson once described them as "the sleaziest and rudest and most sinister mob of thugs and whackos ever assembled." They represent NFL obsession at its most fervent—or unhinged, depending on your viewpoint.

Which is why I've come here, of all NFL cities, to find women like Metal Cindy and Dre: because I have no earthly idea why any woman would want to be part of this scene. It's not that I hate football—I reserve that word for Nazis and tuna-fish salad—but it's safe to say I don't -particularly enjoy the game. If you say "football," I think: "pack mentality," "day drinking," "pissing on sidewalks," "brain damage," "homoerotic pile-ups," and "Dad ignoring me." Basically, rock-bottom male behavior, quintupled. I realize you're probably not on my side here. And I'm probably not being fair. But it's a gut reaction—like how you might see a gaggle of girls watching The Real Housewives of Atlanta together and think: Ugh, women.

Apparently, though, I'm in the minority when it comes to football. Because with every given Sunday, more and more women are being drawn into its cult. And the NFL has gotten wise to its big new demo: In 2010 the league launched a new ad campaign for its line of women's apparel featuring, among others, a grinning Condoleezza Rice wearing a slim-cut Browns jersey. And according to the most recent league stats, females make up 44 percent of the NFL's fan base. Most of these women, I have to assume, are just casual fans. Watch-from-the-couch-on-Sunday types. But there's a small sliver of them who freak out over football just as hard as the men. And I wanted to see how these women—football's female diehards—assimilate into such a uniquely macho culture. Especially since I've always gotten the impression that guys value the notion that football is something for them. (Case in point: "man caves.") It's as if these ladies are pledging the biggest frat in America. So what are the hazing rituals? What are the privileges of membership? And how do these women have to shape (or reshape) themselves to fit in with Phi Kappa Football?

So I flew to Oakland, home of fans who apparently could out-weird Hunter S. Thompson, to spend game day with women who willingly get up at 4 A.M. to drink and grill and celebrate football, so that I could experience the sport through their eyes. Could it be that I, the lamest cliché of the lady football hater, am missing out on something awesome?

by Lauren Bans, GQ |  Read more:
Photo: Ture Lillegraven

What Should We Be Worried About?

[ed. If you'd like to spend a very productive half-hour, check out the essays mentioned in this article at: Edge: 2013: What *Should* We Be Worried About?]

Each December for the past fifteen years, the literary agent John Brockman has pulled out his Rolodex and asked a legion of top scientists and writers to ponder a single question: What scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive tool kit? (Or: What have you changed your mind about?) This year, Brockman’s panelists (myself included) agreed to take on the subject of what we should fear. There’s the fiscal cliff, the continued European economic crisis, the perpetual tensions in the Middle East. But what about the things that may happen in twenty, fifty, or a hundred years? The premise, as the science historian George Dyson put it, is that “people tend to worry too much about things that it doesn’t do any good to worry about, and not to worry enough about things we should be worrying about.” A hundred fifty contributors wrote essays for the project. The result is a recently published collection, “What *Should* We Be Worried About?” available without charge at John Brockman’s edge.org.

A few of the essays are too glib; it may sound comforting to say that ”the only thing we need to worry about is worry itself” (as several contributors suggested), but anybody who has lived through Chernobyl or Fukushima knows otherwise. Surviving disasters requires contingency plans, and so does avoiding them in first places. But many of the essays are insightful, and bring attention to a wide range of challenges for which society is not yet adequately prepared.

One set of essays focusses on disasters that could happen now, or in the not-too-distant future. Consider, for example, our ever-growing dependence on the Internet. As the philosopher Daniel Dennett puts it:

We really don’t have to worry much about an impoverished teenager making a nuclear weapon in his slum; it would cost millions of dollars and be hard to do inconspicuously, given the exotic materials required. But such a teenager with a laptop and an Internet connection can explore the world’s electronic weak spots for hours every day, almost undetectably at almost no cost and very slight risk of being caught and punished.

As most Internet experts realize, the Internet is pretty safe from natural disasters because of its redundant infrastructure (meaning that there are many pathways by which any given packet of data can reach its destination) but deeply vulnerable to a wide range of deliberate attacks, either by censoring governments or by rogue hackers. (Writing on the same point, George Dyson makes the excellent suggestion of calling for a kind of emergency backup Internet, “assembled from existing cell phones and laptop computers,” which would allow the transmission of text messages in the event that the Internet itself was brought down.)

We might also worry about demographic shifts. Some are manifest, like the graying of the population (mentioned in Rodney Brooks’s essay) and the decline in the global birth rate (highlighted by Matt Ridley, Laurence Smith, and Kevin Kelly). Others are less obvious. The evolutionary psychologist Robert Kurzban, for example, argues that the rising gender imbalance in China (due to the combination of early-in-pregnancy sex-determination, abortion, the one-child policy, and a preference for boys) is a growing problem that we should all be concerned about. As Kurzban puts it, by some estimates, by 2020 “there will be 30 million more men than women on the mating market in China, leaving perhaps up to 15% of young men without mates.” He also notes that “cross-national research shows a consistent relationship between imbalanced sex ratios and rates of violent crime. The higher the fraction of unmarried men in a population, the greater the frequency of theft, fraud, rape, and murder.” This in turn tends to lead to a lower G.D.P., and, potentially, considerable social unrest that could ripple around the world. (The same of course could happen in any country in which prospective parents systematically impose a preference for boys.)

Another theme throughout the collection is what Stanford psychologist Brian Knutson called “metaworry”: the question of whether we are psychologically and politically constituted to worry about what we most need to worry about.

In my own essay, I suggested that there is good reason to think that we are not inclined that way, both because of an inherent cognitive bias that makes us focus on immediate concerns (like getting our dishwasher fixed) to the diminishment of our attention to long-term issues (like getting enough exercise to maintain our cardiovascular fitness) and because of a chronic bias toward optimism known as a “just-world fallacy” (the comforting but unrealistic idea that moral actions will invariably lead to just rewards). In a similar vein, the anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson argues that “knowledgeable people expected an eventual collapse of the Shah’s regime in Iran, but did nothing because there was no pending date. In contrast, many prepared for Y2K because the time frame was so specific.” Furthermore, as the historian of ideas Noga Arikha puts it, “our world is geared at keeping up with a furiously paced present with no time for the complex past,” leading to a cognitive bias that she calls “presentism.”

As a result, we often move toward the future with our eyes too tightly focussed on the immediate to care much about what might happen in the coming century or two—despite potentially huge consequences for our descendants. As Knutson says, his metaworry is that actual threats [to our species] are changing much more rapidly than they have in the ancestral past. Humans have created much of this environment with our mechanisms, computers, and algorithms that induce rapid, “disruptive,” and even global change. Both financial and environmental examples easily spring to mind.… Our worry engines [may] not retune their direction to focus on these rapidly changing threats fast enough to take preventative action.

by Gary Marcus, New Yorker |  Read more:

Illustration by Lou Brooks

The Searchers

[ed. I guess I naively assumed that 'Search' was pretty much a static issue these days with only incremental refinements as more big data became available -- Google won, end of story. But Facebook is making quite a splash today, and search seems to be evolving in very significant ways. FB has a lot of data to work with, but as one source noted, it could also be pretty "noisy data".] 

When we talk about “searching” these days, we’re almost always talking about using Google to find something online. That’s quite a twist for a word that has long carried existential connotations, that has been bound up in our sense of what it means to be conscious and alive. We don’t just search for car keys or missing socks. We search for truth and meaning, for love, for transcendence, for peace, for ourselves. To be human is to be a searcher.

In its highest form, a search has no well-defined object. It’s open-ended, an act of exploration that takes us out into the world, beyond the self, in order to know the world, and the self, more fully. T. S. Eliot expressed this sense of searching in his famously eloquent lines from “Little Gidding”:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Google searches have always been more cut and dried, keyed as they are to particular words or phrases. But in its original conception, the Google search engine did transport us into a messy and confusing world—the world of the web—with the intent of helping us make some sense of it. It pushed us outward, away from ourselves. It was a means of exploration. That’s much less the case now. Google’s conception of searching has changed markedly since those early days, and that means our own idea of what it means to search is changing as well.

Google’s goal is no longer to read the web. It’s to read us. Ray Kurzweil, the inventor and AI speculator, recently joined the company as its director of research. His general focus will be on machine learning and natural language processing. But his particular concern, as he said in a recent interview, will entail reconfiguring the company’s search engine to focus not outwardly on the world but inwardly on the user:

“I envision some years from now that the majority of search queries will be answered without you actually asking. It’ll just know this is something that you’re going to want to see.” While it may take some years to develop this technology, Kurzweil added that he personally thinks it will be embedded into what Google offers currently, rather than as a stand-alone product necessarily.

This has actually been Google’s great aspiration for a while now. We’ve already begun to see its consequences in the customized search results the company serves up by tracking and analyzing our behavior. But such “personalization” is only the start. Back in 2006, Eric Schmidt, then the company’s CEO, said that Google’s “ultimate product” would be a service that would “tell me what I should be typing.” It would give you an answer before you asked a question, obviating the need for searching entirely. This service is beginning to take shape, at least embryonically, in the form of Google Now, which delivers useful information, through your smartphone, before you ask for it. Kurzweil’s brief is to accelerate the development of personalized, preemptive information delivery: search without searching.

In its new design, Google’s search engine doesn’t push us outward; it turns us inward. It gives us information that fits the behavior and needs and biases we have displayed in the past, as meticulously interpreted by Google’s algorithms. Because it reinforces the existing state of the self rather than challenging it, it subverts the act of searching. We find out little about anything, least of all ourselves, through self-absorption.

by Nicholas Carr, Rough Type |  Read more:

Photo from John Ford’s “The Searchers.”

Zao Wou-Ki
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Gamifying Beauty

A few months ago, I stumbled across a website that promised a “virtual makeover.” You’d upload a photo of yourself, then apply various “looks” with all manner of makeup colors and hairstyles; you could even “borrow” a celebrity’s entire look, pasting her makeup and hair onto your image.

I’d seen similar tools before, of course, but they were always comically bad—more along the lines of my friend Lindsay Goldwert’s awesome collection of horror-makeover images than anything you’d actually use to evaluate whether you’d look good in, say, coral lipstick. On a whim, though, I decided to give it a try, figuring that the technology must have changed since I’d last given them a whirl.

I was right. Though the results were obviously computerized, the tech had developed so that you could align your face more precisely in the application frame, meaning that lipstick actually landed on your lips instead of where the computer wanted your lips to be. More important, it was actually useful. I was surprised to find that I actually might look good in coral lipstick; I confirmed that, sadly, the mod look makes me look just wrong; I found a half-up, half-down hairstyle that looked great on me, and when I tried it out on terra firma, it was indeed flattering.

The site linked out to other sites that had features besides makeovers—you could digitally slim yourself down, or plump yourself up. You could get a breast lift, breast augmentation, or both, which served as a complement to the rhinoplasty and face-lift features on the makeover site.

Do I even need to tell you what happened? I went down the rabbit hole. Making adjustment after adjustment, I manipulated my face and body—just to see, of course. Learning what I’d look like with Gwen Stefani’s hair (absurd) led to seeing what I’d look like what Penelope Cruz’s hair (not bad), which led to me trying on dozens of brunette celebrity styles to see which might suit me best (Ginnifer Goodwin?). I plumped my body out 20 pounds to see if it would resemble how my body actually looked when I was 20 pounds heavier (it did), then trimmed myself down 10 pounds to see if it echoed my erstwhile 10-pounds-lighter frame (it didn’t, which didn’t stop me from going on to drop another 15 virtual pounds, because, hey, this is just a game, right?). I narrowed my nose, went up three cup sizes, ridded myself of my deep nasolabial folds, and alternated between digitally tanning and digitally “brightening” until I realized I was aiming for pretty much the skin tone I actually have. And then, a good two hours after I’d sat down to try on Gwen Stefani’s hair for a lark, I went to bed.

Now, there’s plenty to say here about the nature of that rabbit hole, and how it relates to self-esteem and dissatisfaction. (Is it any surprise that after inflating my breasts three cup sizes, clicking back to the photo of myself au naturel left me feeling deflated?) But in truth, after spending an evening creating a slimmer, bustier, better-made-up version of myself, the most pervasive feeling I had was not of self-abasement but of extraordinary fatigue. It was like I’d spent 12 hours proofreading a dissertation on, I don’t know, dirt, printed out in 7-point font. I felt the brain-drain not only of sitting in front of the computer for too long, but of doing crap I don’t actually feel like doing. Which is to say: I felt like I’d been working.

In fact, I sort of was working, even if I tricked myself into thinking I was doing it just for fun. It made me think of gamification, the use of game elements and digital gaming techniques in non-game situations. The idea, in part, is that by lending the benefits of gaming to more tedious tasks (like work), the tedium is lessened because it feels more like play. Perhaps you’ll be more likely to, say, complete online training courses if you earn “points” or “badges” for each segment you finish. It seems silly that something essentially imaginary would motivate people—but one peek at the popularity of programs like Foursquare that allow you to gamify your own life shows that it works. The term more broadly applies to any sort of game thinking that applies to non-game situations—like interactive features (that annoying Microsoft Word pop-up dude) and simulation (think 3-D modeling à la SimCity), though most of the critiques of gamification that I’ve read focus on its reward aspects.

by Autumn Whitefield-Madrano, The New Inquiry |  Read more:

Yozo Hamaguchi
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Someone’s Knocking at My Door

I’ve been living in complete silence for months, I might say for years, with just the usual dull sounds you hear at the outskirts of town, the occasional echo of steps in the corridor and, further off, in the stairwell, someone dragging a sack, a carpet, a package, or a corpse, God knows what, along the ground; or the sound of the elevator as it slows, stops, opens, then closes and starts to rise or descend. Every so often a dog barks briefly, someone laughs or shouts. But everything dies away, soon lost in the constant low-level murmur of the street outside. That is what complete silence is like round here.

There are of course times I put on a Zelenka mass or listen to one of Schiff’s “Wohltemperiertes Klavier” interpretations, or take out Spoon, Karen Dalton or Vic Chesnutt, but after a few bars I turn it off so it may be quiet again, because I want to be ready and I don’t want anything disturbing going on when he arrives and finds me.

To be honest I wouldn’t have been surprised if he hadn’t knocked but beat at the door, or simply kicked the door in, but now that I hear the knocking, it’s clear there is no difference between his knocking and beating or kicking the door in, I mean really no difference, the point being that I am dead certain it is him, who else; he of whom I knew, and have always known would come.

The most tragic figure in history is the one in whom two terrible conditions meet. The two conditions that meet and combine in him are bottomless idiocy and unbounded aggression. Someone —a self-exiled Hungarian writer in San Diego — once said that this kind of person inevitably crawls from the gutter during one of those historical lulls. I don’t agree, there is never a sufficiently long lull in history. If he did ever live in one of those filthy historical sewer systems, he has been at liberty for many a long year now, for decades, ready to raise flags, discover kindred spirits, move about in groups and organize secret meetings. He is rarely alone but is always to be found in one of those indeterminate military uniforms, his ideas nonsensical or non-existent, since these are simply obligatory forms of hatred, hatred being his raison d’être, his guiding principle, a hatred whose object is usually only hinted at, though hatred never lacks an object, an object being very much the point and I should know since I am that object.

Say I am sitting in a bar and he steps in. I can immediately see that he has immediately singled me out. My eyes are light blue, I am thin and don’t stand straight, that’s all. I have no idea how this tells him, makes him so certain that I am the one but there’s no denying he has an instinct for picking us out, picking out the weak — I say weak because weakness, I suspect, is the thing in me that irritates him — so he stands beside me, and everyone near us feels the tension, and both he and I know what must follow. It doesn’t in fact matter where I am, whether I’m at a railway station where he picks me out in the waiting room, or in a store I happen to be shopping in, our eyes will lock and then it’s too late, too late for me that is, to look away, because I always know what is coming and am simply incapable of making an escape. I know it would be in vain.

If he could find the words to articulate his hatred he would say he is defending himself, that he feels threatened, by me as it happens, though I wouldn’t hurt a fly. He goes to the gym, does martial arts, and trains day and night so that after a while his body is, as they say, pure muscle, nothing spare, his skin merely an ornament to his physique, no superfluous hair, eyes, nose or ears, needing nothing but this pure muscle, because he had better be prepared, as the others tell him, I mean the pack he goes to the gym with, to shoot with, and to train with, prepared because the enemy is all but invisible. The enemy can be named and is everywhere, but as soon as you put your hand out to grab him —at least in is his own experience — the enemy slips through those pure-muscle fingers, wriggles free, slips away and pretty soon disappears so there’s nothing left in the pure muscle fist and he has to start all over again, searching, fencing him in, and pounding him with his fist again and again.

When asked to give his name he prefers to remain silent because even if he has a name as such he doesn’t really have one because he has no need of one; he is entirely subsumed in his function, his hatred, the hatred that should be his proper name, that is if he has to have a name, though what he loves best is having no name, anonymity being his natural condition, his desire to become of sufficient weight to kill, to deliver a fatal blow, a single terminal blow that has accurately located its object.

He dreams a lot. But not of that single blow, rather that, should he find the person he is looking for, he might grind him between his fingers and make mincemeat of him, not the way the slaughterhouse man deals with the pig in the abattoir, that is to say quickly, but the way the butcher deals with his meat, with a certain languorous pleasure, so the enemy should feel, really feel what he himself had suffered down there in that dark, filthy labyrinth of tunnels until he emerged to crush this, his object. Most of his dreams end like this: he keeps punching the face which by now is a bloody pulp, but he keeps hitting it, beating and beating it, unable to stop, and he wakes in a cold sweat, his mouth dry, his knuckles so painful it might not have been a dream at all.

by Laszlo Krasznahorkai, NY Times | Read more:
Illustration: Balint Zsako

Anka Zhuravleva
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javier jaén

Time Passing

So here's the problem. If you don't believe in God or an afterlife; or if you believe that the existence of God or an afterlife are fundamentally unanswerable questions; or if you do believe in God or an afterlife but you accept that your belief is just that, a belief, something you believe rather than something you know -- if any of that is true for you, then death can be an appalling thing to think about. Not just frightening, not just painful. It can be paralyzing. The fact that your lifespan is an infinitesimally tiny fragment in the life of the universe, and that there is, at the very least, a strong possibility that when you die, you disappear completely and forever, and that in five hundred years nobody will remember you and in five billion years the Earth will be boiled into the sun: this can be a profound and defining truth about your existence that you reflexively repulse, that you flinch away from and refuse to accept or even think about, consistently pushing to the back of your mind whenever it sneaks up, for fear that if you allow it to sit in your mind even for a minute, it will swallow everything else. It can make everything you do, and everything anyone else does, seem meaningless, trivial to the point of absurdity. It can make you feel erased, wipe out joy, make your life seem like ashes in your hands. Those of us who are skeptics and doubters are sometimes dismissive of people who fervently hold beliefs they have no evidence for simply because they find them comforting -- but when you're in the grip of this sort of existential despair, it can be hard to feel like you have anything but that handful of ashes to offer them in exchange.

But here's the thing. I think it's possible to be an agnostic, or an atheist, or to have religious or spiritual beliefs that you don't have certainty about, and still feel okay about death. I think there are ways to look at death, ways to experience the death of other people and to contemplate our own, that allow us to feel the value of life without denying the finality of death. I can't make myself believe in things I don't actually believe -- Heaven, or reincarnation, or a greater divine plan for our lives -- simply because believing those things would make death easier to accept. And I don't think I have to, or that anyone has to. I think there are ways to think about death that are comforting, that give peace and solace, that allow our lives to have meaning and even give us more of that meaning -- and that have nothing whatsoever to do with any kind of God, or any kind of afterlife.

Here's the first thing. The first thing is time, and the fact that we live in it. Our existence and experience are dependent on the passing of time, and on change. No, not dependent -- dependent is too weak a word. Time and change are integral to who we are, the foundation of our consciousness, and its warp and weft as well. I can't imagine what it would mean to be conscious without passing through time and being aware of it. There may be some form of existence outside of time, some plane of being in which change and the passage of time is an illusion, but it certainly isn't ours.

And inherent in change is loss. The passing of time has loss and death woven into it: each new moment kills the moment before it, and its own death is implied in the moment that comes after. There is no way to exist in the world of change without accepting loss, if only the loss of a moment in time: the way the sky looks right now, the motion of the air, the number of birds in the tree outside your window, the temperature, the placement of your body, the position of the people in the street. It's inherent in the nature of having moments: you never get to have this exact one again.

And a good thing, too. Because all the things that give life joy and meaning -- music, conversation, eating, dancing, playing with children, reading, thinking, making love, all of it -- are based on time passing, and on change, and on the loss of an infinitude of moments passing through us and then behind us. Without loss and death, we don't get to have existence. We don't get to have Shakespeare, or sex, or five-spice chicken, without allowing their existence and our experience of them to come into being and then pass on. We don't get to listen to Louis Armstrong without letting the E-flat disappear and turn into a G. We don't get to watch "Groundhog Day" without letting each frame of it pass in front of us for a 24th of a second and then move on. We don't get to walk in the forest without passing by each tree and letting it fall behind us; we don't even get to stand still in the forest and gaze at one tree for hours without seeing the wind blow off a leaf, a bird break off a twig for its nest, the clouds moving behind it, each manifestation of the tree dying and a new one taking its place.

And we wouldn't want to have it if we could. The alternative would be time frozen, a single frame of the film, with nothing to precede it and nothing to come after. I don't think any of us would want that. And if we don't want that, if instead we want the world of change, the world of music and talking and sex and whatnot, then it is worth our while to accept, and even love, the loss and the death that make it possible.

Here's the second thing. Imagine, for a moment, stepping away from time, the way you'd step back from a physical place, to get a better perspective on it. Imagine being outside of time, looking at all of it as a whole -- history, the present, the future -- the way the astronauts stepped back from the Earth and saw it whole.

Keep that image in your mind. Like a timeline in a history class, but going infinitely forward and infinitely back. And now think of a life, a segment of that timeline, one that starts in, say, 1961, and ends in, say, 2037. Does that life go away when 2037 turns into 2038? Do the years 1961 through 2037 disappear from time simply because we move on from them and into a new time, any more than Chicago disappears when we leave it behind and go to California?

It does not. The time that you live in will always exist, even after you've passed out of it, just like Paris exists before you visit it, and continues to exist after you leave. And the fact that people in the 23rd century will probably never know you were alive... that doesn't make your life disappear, any more than Paris disappears if your cousin Ethel never sees it. Your segment on that timeline will always have been there. The fact of your death doesn't make the time that you were alive disappear.

And it doesn't make it meaningless. Yes, stepping back and contemplating all of time and space can be daunting, can make you feel tiny and trivial. And that perception isn't entirely inaccurate. It's true; the small slice of time that we have is no more important than the infinitude of time that came before we were born, or the infinitude that will follow after we die.

But it's no less important, either.

I don't know what happens when we die. I don't know if we come back in a different body, or if we get to hover over time and space and view it in all its glory and splendor, or if our souls dissolve into the world-soul the way our bodies dissolve into the ground, or if, as seems very likely, we simply disappear. I have no idea. And I don't know that it matters. What matters is that we get to be alive. We get to be conscious. We get to be connected with each other, and with the world, and we get to be aware of that connection and to spend a few years mucking about in its possibilities. We get to have a slice of time and space that's ours. As it happened, we got the slice that has Beatles records and Thai restaurants and AIDS and the Internet. People who came before us got the slice that had horse-drawn carriages and whist and dysentery, or the one that had stone huts and Viking invasions and pigs in the yard. And the people who come after us will get the slice that has, I don't know, flying cars and soybean pies and identity chips in their brains. But our slice is no less important because it comes when it does, and it's no less important because we'll leave it someday. The fact that time will continue after we die does not negate the time that we were alive. We are alive now, and nothing can erase that.

Greta Christina's Blog, via:  (repost)

Creativity vs. Innovation

Creativity

Innovation

Sometimes there's a difference

image credits:
[ed. Repost]

[ed. Is it just me, or is it hard to find good new music these days? Here are a few favorites from the archives.]

via:

Walmart, Your One-Stop Destination

When Adam Lanza entered Sandy Hook Elementary School on Friday, December 14, inexplicably bent on ending as many lives as possible, he was carrying a Bushmaster AR-15 assault rifle and several high-capacity magazines. Sadly, this isn’t the first time the country has had to deal with the aftermath of a horrific shooting spree, nor is it the first time we’ve encountered an AR-15 in this context: only days earlier, it was the weapon of choice for a shooting at an Oregon mall that killed two people. Five months earlier, it was used by James Holmes in an attack that wounded fifty-eight people and killed twelve in an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater. And several years before that, a man and his teenage accomplice used a Bushmaster AR-15 to terrorize the Washington, DC, area with a series of random shootings.

Although it is not yet clear where the Bushmaster AR-15 used by Lanza (and registered to his mother) was purchased, the model is familiar to many Walmart shoppers. It’s on sale at about 1,700 Walmart stores nationwide, though the retail chain pulled the weapon from its website three days after the attack. While the deadly rampage in Connecticut has finally and unmistakably highlighted the madness of making such weapons readily available, it’s a concern that many people with a Walmart in their community have been trying to address for years. Several months back, the Rev. Greg Brown had a troubling conversation with two members of his youth group from the northwest side of South Bend, Indiana. “They were honor roll students and little young folks that love the Lord,” Brown recounted. “One of the kids came up to me and said, ‘Rev, you ain’t gonna believe what happened the other day at Walmart.’” The kids went on to describe how, on a recent visit to the big-box store, a man asked them to fill up a gym bag with ammunition and sneak it out of the store for him. They declined.

Walmart’s ammunition sales have troubled Brown since at least 2009, when two teenagers shoplifted bullets from the local Walmart, shot at an employee who tried to stop them in the parking lot, and then embarked on a citywide robbery spree in which one man was seriously injured. When Brown headed down to the store to see how easy it would be to steal ammunition, he was shocked. Not only were there bullets arrayed on the unlocked shelves; there were rows of guns as well, including assault rifles.

South Bend has the most violent crime per capita in Indiana and well more than double the national median. Brown was outraged that Walmart was even selling these weapons, let alone that they were unlocked and under the supervision of hourly employees without specific training in firearm handling and sales. (Brown says a former Marine handles the gun sales at a nearby Dick’s Sporting Goods.) “It’s totally wrong, and it’s totally unacceptable,” he said. “You look back there and see a dad holding a gun, his son pulling on his pocket. And the son knows the gun is going home. The son’s going to know where the gun is.”

South Bend isn’t the only place where Walmart is stocking guns, including combat-style weapons and gun-related paraphernalia. The big-box chain at one point sold guns in only about a third of its stores, mainly in remote rural areas where hunting is popular. But in 2011, without much fanfare, Walmart expanded gun sales to about half of its 3,982 stores nationwide, including those in more urban areas like Albuquerque and Spokane.

The expansion of gun sales at Walmart came after a five-year slowdown. In 2006, the chain announced that it was rolling back gun sales, citing declining profit margins on the relatively expensive weapons, which even at Walmart can retail for hundreds of dollars. But in 2011, company executives were looking at eight straight quarters of declining sales at stores open for a year or more—the worst slump in Walmart’s history.

They must also have noticed that Barack Obama’s inauguration had sparked a rally in gun sales, which have steadily increased every year since 2008. The government isn’t allowed to track firearm sales, but the FBI does release figures on how many retailers ask it to run background checks—a relatively reliable indicator of total gun sales, although likely a lowball estimate, since a person can buy multiple guns on a single background check, and many gun shows aren’t required to perform such checks. In 2007, retailers asked the FBI for just over 11 million background checks; by the end of 2009, 14 million checks were requested—a 27 percent increase.

In April 2011, Walmart began stocking guns in more and more stores, expanding the sales to 1,750 outlets nationwide. By the end of that year, the FBI received 16.4 million background check requests; the number is 16.8 million this year. Overall Walmart sales figures are back on track after the 2011 slump, and executive vice president Duncan Mac Naughton told shareholders at a meeting in October 2012 that gun sales in particular are a staple of the chain’s strategy to continue boosting its numbers. He said that over the past twenty-six months, gun sales at Walmart stores open for a year or more were up an astonishing 76 percent, while ammunition sales were up 30 percent. Walmart is now the biggest seller of firearms and ammunition in America.

“This gun thing, it’s really just a nightmare,” says Bertha Lewis, president of the Black Institute, which has been organizing Walmart workers this year to protest wages and working conditions. Given its aggressive gun sales, Walmart’s logo “shouldn’t be a smiley face; it should be an automatic weapon,” she adds.

by George Zornick, The Nation |  Read more:

Photo: Uncredited

Do I Smell a Metaphor Melting?

Edge has a fascinating, discursive new interview with the renowned philosopher-of-mind Daniel C. Dennett. As someone who has a deep distrust of the popular metaphor that portrays the brain as a computer, I was struck by something Dennett says near the start:

“The vision of the brain as a computer, which I still champion, is changing so fast. The brain’s a computer, but it’s so different from any computer that you’re used to. It’s not like your desktop or your laptop at all, and it’s not like your iPhone except in some ways. It’s a much more interesting phenomenon.”

Normally, the explanatory power of a metaphor comes from describing a thing we don’t understand in terms of a thing we do understand. But this brain-as-computer metaphor now seems to be diverging from that model. The computer in the metaphor seems to be something very different from what we mean when we talk about a “computer.” The part of the metaphor that is supposed to be concrete has turned into a mystery fluid.

The brain is like a computer! 

Cool. What kind of computer is the brain like? 

It’s not actually like any computer that’s ever been invented. 

So what kind of computer is it like? 

It’s like the unique form of a computer that we call a brain. 

So the brain is like a brain? 

Yes, exactly.

It sounds like it’s time for a new metaphor.

The new explanatory metaphor Dennett is proposing, or at least playing with, doesn’t sound much at all like a digital computer, even if there’s computation of some sort going on:

“We’re getting away from the rigidity of that model, which was worth trying for all it was worth. You go for the low-hanging fruit first. First, you try to make minds as simple as possible. You make them as much like digital computers, as much like von Neumann machines, as possible. It doesn’t work.”

The new metaphor, like the brain itself, is much more interesting:

“Each neuron is imprisoned in your brain. I now think of these as cells within cells, as cells within prison cells. Realize that every neuron in your brain, every human cell in your body (leaving aside all the symbionts), is a direct descendent of eukaryotic cells that lived and fended for themselves for about a billion years as free-swimming, free-living little agents. They fended for themselves, and they survived. 

They had to develop an awful lot of know-how, a lot of talent, a lot of self-protective talent to do that. When they joined forces into multi-cellular creatures, they gave up a lot of that. They became, in effect, domesticated. They became part of larger, more monolithic organizations. … [B]ut in the brain I think that (and this is my wild idea) maybe only in one species, us, and maybe only in the obviously more volatile parts of the brain, the cortical areas, some little switch has been thrown in the genetics that, in effect, makes our neurons a little bit feral, a little bit like what happens when you let sheep or pigs go feral, and they recover their wild talents very fast. 

Maybe a lot of the neurons in our brains are not just capable but, if you like, motivated to be more adventurous, more exploratory or risky in the way they comport themselves, in the way they live their lives. They’re struggling amongst themselves with each other for influence, just for staying alive, and there’s competition going on between individual neurons. As soon as that happens, you have room for cooperation to create alliances, and I suspect that a more free-wheeling, anarchic organization is the secret of our greater capacities of creativity, imagination, thinking outside the box and all that, and the price we pay for it is our susceptibility to obsessions, mental illnesses, delusions and smaller problems.”

A pack of feral pigs going rogue in a jailhouse: Now, that sounds a lot like my brain. Much more so than does an iMac running Microsoft Office.

by Nicholas Carr, Rough Type |  Read more:
Photo by jennystiles315