World War Z
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Ivan Peretz
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In Praise of Adultery

Marriage as a problem, and as a solution, has always been the central subject for drama, the novel and the cinema, just as it has been at the centre of our lives. Most of us have come from a marriage, and, probably, a divorce, of some sort. And the kind of questions that surround lengthy relationships – what is it to live with another person for a long time? What do we expect? What do we need? What do we want? What is the relation between safety and excitement, for each of us? – are the most important of our lives. Marriage brings together the most serious things: sex, love, children, betrayal, boredom, frustration, and property. (...)

Le Week-End concerns a late middle-aged couple, Nick and Meg, both teachers, who go to Paris to celebrate their 30th wedding anniversary. While there, they discuss the meaning and direction of their marriage now that their children have left home. Time and health are running out for them as they consider their impending old age and wonder what sort of future they might want, either together or apart. They think about how they might die; but this couple also need to talk about how they have lived: the way in which they have brought up their children, and how the family has worked, where it failed, and where there is regret, bitterness and even fury.

The film shows the depredations of time, but also the lability of the past, its different meaning and value for both parties, and how, now that the couple are talking, the past can seem as unstable as the future. They are looking in the same direction, but cannot see the same thing. There is no narrative they can agree on.

Their short sojourn, whatever else it is, will be a time of difficult conversations. What if it occurs to one or other of them that their relationship was a mistake, that it didn't resemble their original hopes at all, and that they could have had a far better life elsewhere? Meanwhile, what have they done to one another? Was there harm? What did they use one another for?  (...)

As Nick and Meg are aware, marriage frees a certain sort of companionable love, if you're lucky. But it domesticates sex. The couple are over-intimate. They know too much about one another. Without obstacles, there can be no fascination. How can you desire what you already have? That's not all: the arrangements that marriage requires to survive – security, duration, reliability, repetition – can seem liberating in their continuity, or stifling, according to your nature. The suburbs suited my father, since he'd come from a more dangerous place, and wanted contentment.

But there was something about living there that could make you want to scream. For some, it would never be sufficient. You might learn, as Nick does in Paris with his wife – whom he still wants and needs – that the problem with desire is not that you cannot get rid of it, but that there is too much of it. It is ever-present, and ever-pressing, however much you want to discount it. You cannot wish it away, and it cannot be replaced by a substitute.

by Hanif Kureishi, Guardian | Read more:

Image: Nicola Dove. h/t (this and following post) 3 Quarks

Your Body, Their Property

Polio ravaged much of the United States during the 20th century, leaving thousands sick, paralyzed, and dead. Those who were not afflicted with the virus were constantly haunted by the terror that their loved ones—particularly children, who were most vulnerable—would awaken one morning unable to walk and destined to a life of leg braces and iron lungs. That is until 1953, when Jonas Salk created a vaccine. There were more than 45,000 total cases of polio in the United States in each of the two years before the vaccine became broadly available. By 1962 there were only 910. Salk’s invention was one of the greatest successes in the history of American public health.

Amidst the adulation and fame that came with saving untold numbers of lives, Salk did something that seems curious if not unwise by today’s standards: he refused to patent the vaccine. During a 1955 interview, Edward R. Murrow asked Salk who owned the patent, leading a seemingly bewildered Salk to respond, “The people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”

These days, amid a patent-driven biotech boom, it is difficult to imagine a researcher making a similar appeal to the commons. But this sensibility received a crucial endorsement in the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics. The Court held that Myriad, a biotech firm in Utah, could not patent naturally occurring objects such as the two cancer-related human genes in question.

The decision upended many aspects of American intellectual property law that emerged in the wake of Diamond v. Chakrabarty (1980), when the Court held that living organisms—specifically, manmade crude–oil bacteria—are patentable subject matter. Chakrabarty inspired a rush to patent not just living things but also a growing array of biological materials, including human genes.

Fast-forward a few decades and almost one-fourth of all human genes had been patented and controlled by private hands. This made it expensive for scientists to do research implicating these genes or to develop tests that examine how certain mutations might affect health outcomes. Until Myriad the sensibility evoked by Salk—that entities beneficial to all humankind should not be patented and privatized—had largely been treated as a distant memory of a bygone era, like the jukebox or rotary telephone.

However, Justice Clarence Thomas eloquently set the record straight in his unanimous opinion for the Court in Myriad by contrasting the company’s patents to those upheld in Chakrabarty: “Myriad did not create anything. . . It found an important and useful gene, but separating that gene from its surrounding genetic material is not an act of invention.” Now, many existing human gene patents are in question.

It is rare that a legal dispute of this importance, technical complexity, and jurisprudential nuance is resolved by the Court with such clarity, conviction, and common sense. Yet even after Myriad, the dispute over who can claim property interests in human biological materials, and in what circumstances, is far from over. Human gene patents are not the only means by which corporations and researchers assert rights to parts of human bodies, and many more legal reforms are needed to ensure that your body remains entirely yours.

by Osagie K. Obasogie, Boston Review | Read more:
Image: James Butler

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Viktoria Kalaichi 
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Doc Watson

Booster Proud of His Largess and Game-Day Parties

Roy Adams’s two-story brick home is tucked neatly into a middle-class residential street. In the driveway, University of Tennessee and Southeastern Conference flags fly at full staff. On the front door, a poster urges his guests to adhere to a five-drink limit.

Adams may be 75 years old, but his home looks like something dreamed up by teenage fraternity brothers: he has 36 big-screen televisions, five TV viewing rooms, three game rooms, a wet bar and, on a recent afternoon, two tapped kegs.

Adams, a retired restaurant and real estate developer, has been called the Great Gatsby of college sports for his legendary game-day parties, which often include athletes, coaches and politicians mixing with a crowd that can top 100. But he is more than a septuagenarian party animal.

A 1963 graduate of Tennessee, Adams represents the twilight of a college sports booster. For more than 40 years, he cherished his role as a benefactor for players, even if it meant breaking a few rules. If college athletes generally receive gifts in the shadows, Roy Adams is the rare booster who crows about his largess.

He is not remorseful, and now, largely out of the booster game, he says he is proud of his life’s work and the friendships he has made.

“I knew the N.C.A.A. rules,” he said. “I just didn’t care for them.” (...)

Today’s boosters, Adams said, have lost the intimate relationships with players he always sought. From his perspective, the N.C.A.A. rules have tightened drastically. And the players have changed too. “Today you give a kid a Chevrolet, and he wants a Cadillac,” Adams said. “You give them $1,000, they want two or three. It’s not the same as it used to be.”

Adams has been a Tennessee football fan for decades, but now, instead of making trips to Knoxville, he brings the party to his TV rooms — all five of them. On a typical Saturday, guests spill from room to room, passing a shuffleboard table, a stuffed deer head, a signed photograph from the former Tennessee star Peyton Manning.

On one wall a photograph of Adams shaking hands with Nick Saban hangs above a signed picture of Richard Nixon. In the pantry, Adams had a urinal installed. Then there are all the televisions, squeezed together like puzzle pieces around every corner. His friends say there is no better sports bar in Memphis.

by Ben Strauss, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Lance Murphey

You Won’t See This on TV

For the past four semesters I’ve taught a criminal justice–themed freshman composition course at a large public university in the Midwest. Each semester I’m amazed at the level of interest my students have for the topic of criminal justice. They’ve spent hundreds of hours watching Law & Order and CSI, read countless mystery novels and “true crime” stories, and sat through big-screen courtroom dramas galore. And yet each semester I’m also amazed by how little they actually know about how the American system of justice works.

In my previous career as a public defender who served thousands of clients, I tried everything from juvenile delinquency allegations to first-degree murder cases. I'm lucky (or, in certain senses, unlucky) to have a perspective on the American criminal justice system that most will never have. I can tell that my students care deeply about justice but do not have the language or the facts they need to discuss the criminal justice system cogently. They are uninformed because popular media, however it is packaged, is ultimately aimed at entertainment—or the provocation of misdirected outrage—rather than instruction.

Hollywood is always an unwelcome participant in conversations about criminal justice, in my view. Certain scions of criminal justice–themed entertainment argue that they are educating a generation—Dick Wolf, the creator of Law & Order and its spawn, is one prominent example—but the truth is significantly more interesting than scriptwriters’ fiction.

That is why it’s important to help set the record straight. Hopefully these fifteen truths will act as a starting point for those civilians who want to change our criminal justice system but are not sure where to start.

None of what follows should be construed as legal advice. This is merely a bare-bones description of how important sectors of our criminal justice system work. You could learn much of this simply by sitting in the public gallery at a local courthouse for a few weeks, or by reading any trial practice manual intended for working attorneys.

• • •

1) Prosecutors are trained to charge cases using the maximum allowable number of criminal statutes, with preference always given to the statutes with the highest maximum term of imprisonment. The reason for this is that prosecutors know that more than 90 percent of their cases will end with a plea negotiation, so charging what is reasonable rather than what is possible is strategically unwise. The assumption behind what is termed “over-charging” is that some fresh-faced defense attorney will ensure, through zealous plea negotiations sometime in the future, that the final disposition of each case is a fair one. The problem is that with so few public resources devoted to the defense of the indigent in court, poor defendants are often assigned a well-intentioned but overworked attorney. The predictable result is that defendants too often plead to charges that necessitate terms of imprisonment that even prosecutors—were they unbiased observers—would not consider just.

As to why nearly every criminal statute in America is written so broadly that it can be egregiously misused in this way, the answer is simple: politicians enact criminal statutes, and voters’ limited understanding of the criminal justice system means that at the polls they nearly always reward whoever endorses the broadest and most draconian laws. How else to keep our communities safe from the ever-present scourge of violent crime, even when violent offenses are decreasing in number?

By the time you or a loved one of yours has been caught in the trap of an overbroad criminal statute with an outrageous series of penalties attached—often mandatory ones that even an independent-minded judge cannot contravene—it is too late to get wise to how obtuse, inflexible, and nonsensical most of our criminal statutes are.

by Seth Abramson, Boston Review |  Read more:

Image: Aapo Haapanen

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Jo Van Kampen
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A First Rate Girl: The Problem of Female Beauty

I have a friend who dates only exceptionally attractive women. These women aren’t trophy-wife types—they are comparable to him in age, education level, and professional status. They are just really, notably good looking, standouts even in the kind of urban milieu where regular workouts and healthy eating are commonplace and an abundance of disposable income to spend on facials, waxing, straightening, and coloring keeps the average level of female attractiveness unusually high.

My friend is sensitive and intelligent and, in almost every particular, unlike the stereotypical sexist, T & A-obsessed meathead. For years, I assumed that it was just his good fortune that the women he felt an emotional connection with all happened to be so damn hot. Over time, however, I came to realize that my friend, nice as he is, prizes extreme beauty above all the other desiderata that one might seek in a partner.

I have another friend who broke up with a woman because her body, though fit, was the wrong type for him. While he liked her personality, he felt that he’d never be sufficiently attracted to her, and that it was better to end things sooner rather than later.

Some people would say these men are fatally shallow. Others would say they are realistic about their own needs, and that there is no use beating oneself up about one’s preferences: some things cannot be changed. Those in the first camp would probably say that my friends are outliers—uniquely immature men to be avoided. Many in the second camp argue that, in fact, all men would be like the man who dates only beautiful women, if only they enjoyed his ability to snare such knockouts. In my experience, people on both sides are emphatic, and treat their position as if it is obvious and incontrovertible.

To me, these stories highlight the intense and often guilty relationship that many men have with female beauty, a subject with profound repercussions for both men and women.

You’d think it would also be a rich subject for fiction writers—after all, our attitudes about beauty and attraction are tightly bound up with the question of romantic love. But, in fact, many novels fail to meaningfully address the issue of beauty. In a recent essay in New York, the novelist Lionel Shriver argued that “fiction writers’ biggest mistake is to create so many characters who are casually beautiful.” What this amounts to, in practice, is that many male characters have strikingly attractive female love interests who also possess a host of other characteristics that make them appealing. Their good looks are like a convenient afterthought.

This is, unfortunately, sentimental: how we wish life were, rather than how it is. It’s like creating a fictional world in which every deserving orphan ends up inheriting a fortune from a rich uncle. In life, beauty is rarely, if ever, just another quality that a woman possesses, like a knowledge of French. A woman’s beauty tends to play an instrumental role in the courtship process, and its impact rarely ends there.

When a novelist does examine beauty more closely, the results are often startling. Two of my favorite male novelists do not fall into the trap that Shriver delineated. They are clear-sighted and acute chroniclers of the male gaze.

Consider Richard Yates’s “Revolutionary Road,” a novel about a dysfunctional marriage. Frank Wheeler’s love for his wife, April, has everything to do with her good looks: April, whom he first spots across the room at a party, is a “tall ash blonde with a patrician kind of beauty.” Frank’s upbringing was distinctly un-patrician. His father was a lifelong salesman; during the Depression, his parents struggled to hold onto their modest lower-middle-class existence. Then Frank served in the Second World War, which allowed him to attend Columbia on the G.I. Bill. He built a new identity, as a bohemian and an intellectual—an “intense, nicotine-stained, Jean-Paul Sartre sort of man,” in his self-romanticizing account. But he still couldn’t quiet a certain anxiety about his status. Yates writes,

It nagged him, in particular, that none of the girls he’d known so far had given him a sense of unalloyed triumph. One had been very pretty except for unpardonably thick ankles, and one had been intelligent, though possessed of an annoying tendency to mother him, but he had to admit that none had been first-rate. Nor was he ever in doubt about what he meant by a first-rate girl, though he’d never yet come close enough to one to touch her hand.

Enter April, “an exceptionally first-rate girl whose shining hair and splendid legs had drawn him halfway across a roomful of strangers.” Frank, “bolstered by four straight gulps of whiskey … followed the counsel of victory.” He approached her, and “within five minutes, he found he could make April Johnson laugh, that he could not only hold the steady attention of her wide gray eyes but could make their pupils dart up and down and around in little arcs while he talked to her.” So begins one of contemporary literature’s worst relationships.

For Frank, April represents success. April, for her part, likes Frank O.K.—he’s “interesting,” she tells him—but she doesn’t like him well enough that he ever feels secure. To be so close to the woman who represents so much but to also feel her perpetually holding back maddens Frank. When April gets pregnant, she wants to have an illegal abortion, which Frank interprets as a rejection of him. And this is intolerable. Though he doesn’t want a child any more than she does, he is finally able to talk her into getting married and having one. Anything is better than a rejection from the only first-rate girl he’s ever been close to.

It is notable that April’s power over Frank does not lie in the fact that she excites him more than other women sexually—it is, rather, that her cool brand of beauty imbues her, in his mind, with a higher social value than that of his previous lovers. In other words, he is driven, if unconsciously, by an impulse cooler and more calculating than lust.

by Adelle Waldman, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Jing Wei

How the Ebay of Illegal Drugs Came Undone

For the past two and a half years, the underground online marketplace Silk Road has been described as the eBay of illicit goods and services—an anonymous, electronic black market where one could find and easily purchase everything from black-tar heroin and cocaine to illegal firearms and contract killers. But yesterday, the site was shuttered in what could be the biggest Internet drug bust in history.

According to the F.B.I., Silk Road’s enigmatic alleged owner, twenty-nine-year-old Ross William Ulbricht, who until now was known only by the handle Dread Pirate Roberts, was arrested on Tuesday at a public library in San Francisco. The Silk Road Web site has since been effectively seized by the Department of Justice, along with up to four million dollars in bitcoins, the digital currency that powers the site’s transactions.

At the time of its closing, Silk Road users had nearly thirteen thousand drug listings for substances ranging from methamphetamines to LSD and marijuana; they also offered other, more dubious goods and services, like forged documents, malicious computer software, hackers for hire, and stolen bank-account credentials. (Guns and explosives were also once sold on the site, but had been removed by its owner, who limited offerings to what he considered “harmless contraband.”)

The crackdown took place just a few weeks after Forbes published a rare public interview with Ulbricht. In light of new competition from a rival drug site called Atlantis, he used the opportunity to openly promote his site for the first time, espousing radical libertarian views and claiming to have “won the State’s War on Drugs because of Bitcoin.” Some users of Silk Road’s forums, which remain operational, suspected the publicity stunt marked the beginning of the end for the site, which first appeared in 2011 and attracted more than nine hundred thousand users mainly by word of mouth.

Bitcoins, a quasi-anonymous, math-based currency whose rise in popularity closely mirrored that of Silk Road’s, were essential to the site’s secure, anonymous operation. The site made the currency virtually untraceable using a built-in laundry and escrow, which concealed the coins’ origins within Bitcoin’s public ledger, known as the “block chain.” Past estimates by Forbes placed the site’s annual revenue between thirty million and forty-five million dollars’ worth of bitcoins. The F.B.I.’s criminal complaint alleges that the site has handled approximately 1.2 billion dollars in sales, producing eighty million dollars in commissions, during its lifetime. (The figures are hard to pin down, however, due to the erratic fluctuations in the value of a single bitcoin, particularly after the shuttering of Silk Road, which caused the currency’s value to fall by twenty per cent before recovering.)

The site had been an F.B.I. target since at least the end of 2011, when undercover officers began buying drugs. But the site is designed to prevent users and transactions from being easily tracked. It doesn’t exist on the regular World Wide Web; it can be accessed only via a special browser connected to the Tor network, which provides anonymous Web browsing. Once connected, the Tor software obfuscates the origin of users and hidden services by bouncing traffic off of a series of relays located around the world.

Originally developed by the U.S. Navy, Tor is known as a tool of liberation among journalists and human-rights organizations, as well as activists living under authoritarian regimes that punish online dissent and censor large portions of the Internet. Of course, that means it also allows drug lords, child pornographers, and other cybercriminals to conduct their business in relative obscurity, a fact frequently used by governments to justify harsh crackdowns on anonymous online speech.

by Joshua Kopstein, New Yorker |  Read more:
Image: Laurie Rosenwald

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Marc Chagall, Over the Town, 1918
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Where the Sun Always Shines. And Where It Never Does.

You know him I, promise. He is difficult to avoid — especially, it seems, in our great urban centers. Curiously, the tonier the ZIP code, the more he seems to multiply like some droning, infuriating ungulate. He is the person who weaves through three lanes of traffic suddenly, without signaling. He is the person who sits near you at a movie theater and proceeds to take a phone call in the middle of the feature. He is the person who cuts in front of you at your local lunch spot and pretends not to realize that he is doing so, blithely. He makes his presence felt: he is to be accorded special privileges, and his precedence over you is to be accepted a priori. He is morally stainless, for is it not merely in accordance with the natural order of things for him to leave work early, but make you stay late? For him to purchase a third term as mayor of The Greatest City in the World™, no matter the laws or the express desires of his own constituents? For him, as head of a major investment bank, to cause through his avarice a global financial crisis, but to blame that crisis on the fecklessness and greed of middle-class homeowners? Or for him, as vice president, to lie repeatedly to his compatriots, justifying an invasion of a certain Middle Eastern country on the grounds that the dictator he is seeking to depose is lying? Of course this is natural, he thinks: of course. How could it be otherwise? This man, I think you will agree, is an irritant. This man is an outrage.

This man is an asshole.

He is also, as Aaron James rightly observes in his convincing and often quite funny book, Assholes: A Theory, an important object of moral inquiry. Assholes are a social type. They arouse our anger and indignation, and sometimes leave us with a vague feeling of powerlessness and self-loathing. The strength and nature of our reaction to assholish behavior signals the extent of the moral violation caused by it. Thus, for James:

The problem of the asshole [. . .] presents a major obstacle to progress and social justice but also threatens the hard-fought and hardwon gains for decency a society has already made. The problem affects whole societies, international relations, and so the entire world.

The problem of the asshole, then, is a problem for us all.

This may sound overstated or glib, but James, a professor of philosophy at UC Irvine, makes a rigorous case for why we should take the problem of the asshole seriously. The book surveys diverse asshole subtypes: asshole bosses, royal assholes, the corporate asshole, and delusional assholes, to name just a few. But first James neatly unpacks the basic features of this most loathsome individual. For him, an asshole is defined by three important qualities, which also serve to differentiate his behavior from other morally repugnant characters such as the jerk, or much more seriously, the sociopath. First, the asshole considers himself — and James and I agree, assholes are almost always men — to possess special privileges or advantages over others. Moreover, he behaves in a manner that reflects this belief (making the asshole distinct from the mere egoist, who may believe that he is better than others, but for a variety of reasons, does not act on this belief systematically.). Second, the grounds for this belief are assumed and not argued for. An asshole believes deeply that he alone deserves special treatment, that he is somehow entitled to it. This kind of asshole behavior, as James goes on to show, produces both minor-league assholes, such as the line-cutter or reckless freeway driver, as well as their major-league brethren, such as, say, Donald Trump or Anthony Weiner. (Of course, significant overlap is possible, and minor leaguers rarely disappoint when called up to the big leagues.) Third, and finally, assholes are “immunized” to the protests of others. An asshole might hear you out, recognizing your complaints as valid in an abstract way, but he never truly listens. A real asshole does not feel the need to justify his behavior to you, okay? Thanks.

by Zach Dorfman, LA Review of Books |  Read more:

Image: from the book Assholes, by Aaron James

Money Makes the World Go Round

The first thing to know about the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas is that you should get there a little early. Security is tight—the entrance to the parking lot alone employs a series of three gates, plus guards. To enter the building you have to get a visitor’s badge, which allows you and your bag to go through the metal detectors into the lobby, where you can exchange your first badge for another one. This badge allows you to proceed beyond the lobby, although you’re not exactly free to roam. The reason for all the security is that in the basement of the Dallas Fed there’s a vault the size of a five-story building, and sitting in that vault, under heavy protection, is the most staggering concentration of physical wealth in Texas: trolleys full of shrink-wrapped bundles of brand-new bills, piles and piles of old bills, stacks as far as the eye can see. The exact amount fluctuates, but on any given day, there are billions of dollars down there. And all of it’s in cash.

Take the elevator in the other direction and you’ll find floor after floor of the same types of workers you’d find at a commercial bank: managers and analysts and researchers and lawyers. But these men and women (more of the latter than you might expect) are part of the Federal Reserve System, so they have a public role: they produce research about the region, serve as our friendly local central bankers, and, as a group and along with the Fed’s board of governors in Washington, help make decisions about how much money the richest nation in the history of the world should have on hand.

The twelve regional banks of the Federal Reserve System, which was created by Congress in 1913, are actual banks, but since their customers are other banks, as opposed to people or businesses, they tend to be supersized. The Dallas Fed isn’t the biggest of these regional banks—that would be the New York Fed, naturally—but it is unusual, because of geography. It’s the only Fed bank with a district that’s basically just a single state, and since that state is Texas, the Dallas Fed has a long tradition of being a pain in the ass. (...)

The simplest way to explain what the Fed does is to say that it stabilizes the country’s money supply. This is done by managing currency, overseeing member banks, deciding the interest rates at which the government can borrow or lend money, and, when necessary, making the purchases or loans that private banks will not. To put it another way, the Federal Reserve often acts as a counterweight to looming problems in the private sector. If private players are getting too optimistic, racking up debt, and risking inflation, the Fed may move to raise interest rates, thus tightening the money supply. If, on the other hand, the private banks are too spooked to do much of anything, the Fed can lower interest rates to encourage lending or even act as a sort of substitute, spending money when no one else will.

This last activity has caused a fair amount of debate over the past five years. Since the financial crisis hit, the Fed has intervened several times to make large-scale asset purchases, a move known as quantitative easing. It works like this: If commercial banks have assets they can’t readily sell, they end up in a defensive posture, unwilling or unable to buy anything else. So the Fed buys up huge batches of securities, in the hopes of creating a ripple effect among the private banks, which would enable companies to get access to much-needed credit, restructure their liabilities, make new investments, and above all, put people back to work.

Most countries in the developed world have a central bank like our Federal Reserve. It’s a useful thing, but Americans have historically been torn about whether or not to have one. The bank’s weird, quasi-public nature means it has expansive powers and unusual independence; dissolving the Fed, or at least auditing it, is among the recurring demands of the tea party movement, although the idea attracts support from progressives too. Others support the system in general but frequently disagree with what the Fed is doing. (...)

As in any system, the trick is finding the right balance. When I asked him about the financial crisis, Fisher told me that by the fall of 2007, he was feeling seriously worried. “Mortgage-related markets were manic,” he said, and big banks like Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch looked as if they were in trouble (both were sold in 2008). “I don’t think I got a full night’s sleep for eighteen months,” he recalled. Behind closed doors, the Fed was in a state of high alarm, and he would either be awakened by a middle-of-the-night call from one of his counterparts or be already lying awake, wondering if the actions he’d advised were the best ones.

When the crisis did blow open, Fisher’s public commentary was temperate. In October 2008 he gave a speech in Washington counseling calmness. Countries have weathered crises before, he said, and America would weather this one. In his view, the Fed had to resist providing undue comfort to foundering companies who had run into trouble through their own misconduct or ineptitude. To do so would create moral hazard, the risk of encouraging similarly bad behavior in the future. At the same time, Fisher argued that the Fed’s response should be muscular. (...)

“I think we did that well,” Fisher continued. “My dispute has been with what we did afterward.”

by Erica Greider, Texas Monthly |  Read more:

Image: Jeff Wilson

What Is Wisdom?

We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, and effort which no one can spare us.- Marcel Proust (In Search of Lost Time Vol. II: Within a Budding Grove, 1919)

Proust was on to something. I think there is profound truth to the notion that it is only through our own experience that we gain wisdom. I also believe that there are certain kinds of experiences that are particularly suited to the development of wisdom.

Take a moment and think of someone whom you consider wise. Perhaps it is a revered spiritual or political leader, a grandparent or one of your high school teachers, maybe a pastor or a college professor, or perhaps, as one medical student expressed, it is the person who cleans the hallways of the hospital at night. What qualities or behaviors make you think they are wise? Finally, how do you think that they got so wise?

Then, let's back up for a minute. What exactly is wisdom? Truth be told, wisdom is not so easy to define in the abstract. Why is that? It may be, in part, because we understand wisdom in the context of a life, of decisions and actions, so it is difficult to define in the abstract. This is, in part, why psychologists and sociologists have done research on wisdom by studying people who are exemplars of wisdom. This is not as easy as it might seem, because one of the characteristics of wise persons is humility, so a wise person is unlikely to say that they are wise. Often, then, we identify these people by having other people nominate them, and it is interesting who gets on those lists. It can range from the Dalai Lama to Abraham Lincoln to Oprah Winfrey.

The other reason wisdom might be difficult to define is that wisdom actually has many dimensions. I imagine that if I polled all of you about what qualities you selected as wise, we could create a long list of answers. Researchers have actually confirmed this, and the list includes things like compassion, ability to see the big picture, to put things in perspective, to see things from many points of view, to be able to reflect on and rise above one’s own perspective. Wisdom is different from intelligence. Intelligence seeks knowledge and seeks to eliminate ambiguity. Wisdom on the other hand, resists automatic thinking, seeks to understand ambiguity better, to grasp the deeper meaning of what is known and to understand the limits of knowledge. (Sternberg). Monika Ardelt is a modern wisdom researcher who has put all of these into a 3 dimensional model of wisdom: cognitive, reflective and affective. The cognitive dimension includes the desire to deeply know and understand things, including the limits of our knowing. The reflective dimension represents the capacity for self-reflection, and the capacity to see things from many perspectives. The affective dimension of wisdom is empathy and compassion. So, a wise person is one who desires to deeply understand things, who is humble and aware of the limitations of knowing, who can see things from many perspectives and avoids black and white thinking, and who radiates compassion.

Does Adversity Make Us Wise?

But how do we become wise? Think about that person that you identified at the beginning of this essay. How do you think they got wise? This question takes us back to Proust. If no one can hand us wisdom on a silver platter, and we must discover this for ourselves through our own experiences, our own journey, what kind of experience might be the best teacher? I would argue that for all the downsides of adversity, just like necessity is the mother of invention, adversity is the seedbed for wisdom. What better teacher of compassion than one’s own experience of suffering? How better to learn humility than to make a mistake? And what better to discover the deeper meaning of one’s life than to face a circumstance that forces you to focus on that which is of most value to your life? An unexpected turn of events is likely to help us to understand the ambiguity and uncertainty in life, and the limitations of our own perspective. But what evidence do we have that adversity can lead to wisdom?

by Margaret Plews-Ogan, Big Questions Online | Read more:
Image: Getty, h/t 3 Quarks Daily

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