Viv

When Apple announced the iPhone 4S on October 4, 2011, the headlines were not about its speedy A5 chip or improved camera. Instead they focused on an unusual new feature: an intelligent assistant, dubbed Siri. At first Siri, endowed with a female voice, seemed almost human in the way she understood what you said to her and responded, an advance in artificial intelligence that seemed to place us on a fast track to the Singularity. She was brilliant at fulfilling certain requests, like “Can you set the alarm for 6:30?” or “Call Diane’s mobile phone.” And she had a personality: If you asked her if there was a God, she would demur with deft wisdom. “My policy is the separation of spirit and silicon,” she’d say.

Over the next few months, however, Siri’s limitations became apparent. Ask her to book a plane trip and she would point to travel websites—but she wouldn’t give flight options, let alone secure you a seat. Ask her to buy a copy of Lee Child’s new book and she would draw a blank, despite the fact that Apple sells it. Though Apple has since extended Siri’s powers—to make an OpenTable restaurant reservation, for example—she still can’t do something as simple as booking a table on the next available night in your schedule. She knows how to check your calendar and she knows how to use Open­Table. But putting those things together is, at the moment, beyond her.

Now a small team of engineers at a stealth startup called Viv Labs claims to be on the verge of realizing an advanced form of AI that removes those limitations. Whereas Siri can only perform tasks that Apple engineers explicitly implement, this new program, they say, will be able to teach itself, giving it almost limitless capabilities. In time, they assert, their creation will be able to use your personal preferences and a near-infinite web of connections to answer almost any query and perform almost any function.

“Siri is chapter one of a much longer, bigger story,” says Dag Kittlaus, one of Viv’s cofounders. He should know. Before working on Viv, he helped create Siri. So did his fellow cofounders, Adam Cheyer and Chris Brigham. (...)

Their goal is to build a new generation of AI that can process massive troves of data to predict and fulfill our desires.

Viv strives to be the first consumer-friendly assistant that truly achieves that promise. It wants to be not only blindingly smart and infinitely flexible but omnipresent. Viv’s creators hope that some day soon it will be embedded in a plethora of Internet-connected everyday objects. Viv founders say you’ll access its artificial intelligence as a utility, the way you draw on electricity. Simply by speaking, you will connect to what they are calling “a global brain.” And that brain can help power a million different apps and devices.

“I’m extremely proud of Siri and the impact it’s had on the world, but in many ways it could have been more,” Cheyer says. “Now I want to do something bigger than mobile, bigger than consumer, bigger than desktop or enterprise. I want to do something that could fundamentally change the way software is built.”

by Steven Levy, Wired |  Read more:

Image: Ariel Zambelich

A Message to the Depressed

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Charles H. Traub, Dolce Via: Italy in the 1980s
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Colgate Total Ingredient Linked to Hormones, Cancer Spotlights FDA Process

The chemical triclosan has been linked to cancer-cell growth and disrupted development in animals. Regulators are reviewing whether it’s safe to put in soap, cutting boards and toys. Consumer companies are phasing it out. Minnesota voted in May to ban it in many products.

At the same time, millions of Americans are putting it in their mouths every day, by way of a top-selling toothpaste that uses the antibacterial chemical to head off gum disease -- Colgate-Palmolive Co.’s Total.

Total is safe, Colgate says, citing the rigorous Food and Drug Administration process that led to the toothpaste’s 1997 approval as an over-the-counter drug. A closer look at that application process, however, reveals that some of the scientific findings Colgate put forward to establish triclosan’s safety in toothpaste weren’t black and white -- and weren’t, until this year, available to the public.

Colgate’s Total application included 35 pages summarizing toxicology studies on triclosan, which the FDA withheld from view. The agency released the pages earlier this year in response to a lawsuit over a Freedom of Information Act request. Later, following inquiries from Bloomberg News, the FDA put the pages on its website.

The pages show how even with one of the U.S.’s most stringent regulatory processes -- FDA approval of a new drug -- the government relies on company-backed science to show products are safe and effective. The recently released pages, taken alongside new research on triclosan, raise questions about whether the agency did appropriate due diligence in approving Total 17 years ago, and whether its approval should stand in light of new research, said three scientists who reviewed the pages at Bloomberg News’s request.  (...)

Colgate removed triclosan from its Softsoap liquid handsoaps and Palmolive antibacterial dish liquid in 2011, citing changing consumer preferences and superior formulations. It said it has no plans to reformulate Total, which is the only triclosan toothpaste approved for U.S. sale.

by Tiffany Kary, Bloomberg |  Read more:

Image: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg

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Why Scientists Are Trying To Make Fake Shark Skin

From velcro to bullet trains, nature has inspired some of the most impressive feats of human innovation. This summer a crab-like, underwater robot, developed by Korean scientists, will search for ancient artifacts in the Yellow Sea. Drones are mimicking the flight movements of birds and bees. And, our biomimetic future looks bright.

A handful of researchers are now hot on the heels of a new creation: synthetic skin.

Marine animals use their skin to help navigate and survive their environment. Dolphins living in cold waters actually have thick skin to insulate their bodies and stay warm. Octopuses’ sucker-lined skin not only contains millions of nerves that help them sense and grasp prey, but it’s also embedded with unique color-changing cells that can render them invisible to predators. The skin bumps that line humpback whales' pectoral fins increase the animal's buoyancy. So, scientists see potential.

Using 3D printing and computer modeling technology, researchers are developing artificial-but-realistic marine animal skin for use in everything from anti-microbial door handles to underwater robots. George Lauder, an ichthyologist at Harvard University in Boston, and his team have developed the first true artificial shark skin with help from a top-end 3D printer.

Previous attempts involved rubber molds and fabric, and researchers struggled to manufacture material with both soft and hard components. Shark skin-inspired swimsuits made a splash at the 2008 Olympics, but Lauder’s research team actually found that the material in suits like Speedo’s Fastskin II doesn’t truly mimic shark skin or reduce drag, because it lacks denticles.

Sharks can swim at high speeds through ocean waters thanks to tiny, tooth-like denticles that cover their silky skin. “That turns out to be a very critical feature of performance of shark skin during swimming,” says Lauder. One would think smoother skin is better for speed. But, he adds, “It’s actually good to be rough, to have a rough surface of a certain kind when you want to move through a fluid environment, water or air, as efficiently as possible.”

by Helen Thompson, Smithsonian |  Read more:

Image: Dennis Kunkel Microscopy, Inc./Visuals Unlimited/Corbis

Benjamin Pech & Isabelle Ciaravola
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50 Million New Reasons BuzzFeed Wants to Take Its Content Far Beyond Lists

Here are three completely crazy insights about BuzzFeed, the viral content start-up:

1. BuzzFeed is a web traffic sensation that draws 150 million average monthly viewers.

2. Numbered lists, like this one, are what the site is most famous for and drive much of its audience.

3. BuzzFeed wants to be known for much, much more.

To help make that happen, BuzzFeed just closed a new $50 million investment from Andreessen Horowitz, a prominent venture capital firm in Silicon Valley. The investment values the company at about $850 million, according to a person with knowledge of the deal.

Now the question is whether BuzzFeed can maintain the agility and skills of a tech start-up while building the breadth of a large media company.

“As we grow, how can we maintain a culture that can still be entrepreneurial?” said Jonah Peretti, the company’s co-founder and chief executive. “What if a Hollywood studio or a news organization was run like a start-up?”

That is exactly what Mr. Peretti is going to try. On Monday, BuzzFeed will announce that its new cash infusion will be used to make several major changes, including introducing new content sections, creating an in-house incubator for new technology and potential acquisitions, and putting far more resources toward BuzzFeed Motion Pictures, its Los Angeles-based video arm.

The goal: Try a bunch of new features, and fast.

BuzzFeed, which is based in New York, started in 2006 as a kind of laboratory for viral content — the kinds of highly shareable lists, videos and memes that pepper social media sites. But in recent years, the company has added more traditional content, building a track record for delivering breaking news and deeply reported articles, and it has tried to marry its two halves in one site.

But what has really set BuzzFeed apart, Mr. Peretti said, is its grasp of technology. The company, which now has 550 employees, has been especially successful at distributing its lists and content through mobile devices and through social sites like Facebook and Twitter.

The photo-sharing site Pinterest, in particular, now drives more traffic to BuzzFeed’s Life section than Twitter does, Mr. Peretti said. Social media accounts for 75 percent of BuzzFeed’s referral traffic, according to the company.

Chris Dixon, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, who will join BuzzFeed’s board, said: “We think of BuzzFeed as more of a technology company. They embrace Internet culture. Everything is first optimized for mobile and social channels.”

by Mike Isaac, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

The Long and Short of It

[ed. Breaking news in the exciting world of tech startups.]

Micha Weinblatt, 31, a Potomac native and University of Maryland graduate, has a new tech company called Betterific, which has teamed with Dormify, the college dorm room decorator, to solve a long-standing problem with those annoying fitted bedsheets that confuse you about which way is up.

“We have suggested a length and width indicator on the sheets that will say [which side is] ‘long” or ‘short,’ ” said Weinblatt. “It is simple and it makes life so much better.”

Weinblatt approached Karen Zuckerman, the local marketing maven and founder of Rockville-based HZDG advertising agency and of Dormify.

Zuckerman loved the idea.

“It’s the first product that has been created from a Betterific idea, and that is what’s cool about it,” Zuckerman said. “It is Dormify’s mission to make dorm living and college life easier. That is why this was a perfect fit, both for us and the bedsheets.”

The one-inch labels, which say “long side” or “short side,” have been placed in Dormify’s full production run for this school year.

by Thomas Heath, Washington Post |  Read more:

Image: Amanda Zuckerman

Annie Morton by Peter Lindberg 1996.
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With Judge’s Rebuke, a System Built on Hypocrisy Is Wobbling

Intercollegiate athletics became a little less of a plantation system Friday when a United States District Court judge in Oakland, Calif., ruled that athletes in big-time sports programs could reap some of the financial benefits of participating in those programs.

This decision will prove revolutionary for college sports. The highly commercialized intercollegiate sports system that masquerades as an educational enterprise has been ordered to begin sharing its profits.

Judge Claudia Wilken ruled in favor of Ed O’Bannon, the former U.C.L.A. basketball star. O’Bannon and 19 other plaintiffs challenged the N.C.A.A. on the grounds that the organization violated antitrust laws by not allowing student-athletes to profit from the use of their likenesses in broadcasts and video games.

By ruling against the N.C.A.A., Wilken tackled the hypocrisy at the root of the big-time college sports system.

Wilken’s injunction will allow players at high-revenue-generating programs — football players in the top 10 conferences and all Division I men’s basketball players — to receive a share of the profits from lucrative television contracts.

The ruling also acknowledges the blind spot that allows colleges to reap the financial rewards built on the talents of young athletes.

The Big Ten commissioner, Jim Delany, and other N.C.A.A. officials have argued that paying student-athletes will hurt college sports. The objection reflects the hypocrisy of a system that uses young labor but prevents those laborers from profiting from their work.  (...)

If approved, the plan will allow 64 colleges in the so-called Big 5 conferences, and Notre Dame, to set new ground rules — for example, the universities could enhance the value of scholarships — that could make these programs more appealing to prospective athletes.

Yet representatives of these power conferences complain about allowing athletes a share of the revenue. They want it both ways: The rich universities want to break from the pack and set up their own rules, but they object to sharing the revenue with the athletes who generate the wealth.

Wilken’s ruling put a price on the cost of doing business.

by William C. Rhoden, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Jae C. Hong/Associated Press

Robert Rauschenberg, Estate, 1963
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The Government of the Future

For hundreds of years now, humans have tended to believe that the best sort of government is one which leaves its citizens maximally ‘free’. We’ve come to associate good government directly and uncomplicatedly with the promotion of ‘freedom’: freedom to worship as one pleases, to publish what one wants, to dress as one likes, to love whomever one desires. In the meantime, those who have opposed ‘freedom’ have been presented in horrifying terms: they have been the wicked priests, the murderous Communists and the demented Nazis.

However, this dichotomy (freedom = good/restriction = bad) has blinded us to a vital nuance with a grave potential to derail and corrupt public life: we’ve overlooked that there are better and worse kinds of freedom and that promoting freedom above all other values may be deeply unhelpful to the long-term and collective interests of the nation. Freedom is not a baseless word, but it is in general simply too vague, ambiguous and emotive a term to guide policy or to be an ideal around which a nation can reasonably cohere. It has grown too easy for corrupt and venal organisations to operate under the banner of ‘freedom’ in order to get away with activities that covertly run sharply counter to the public good. Freedom is evidently not a virtue when it involves the freedom of bankers to offload ruinous financial instruments on an uneducated public, just as censorship – that bogeyman of contemporary politics – is evidently far from a vice when it prevents corporations from pushing alcohol on children or denying affordable housing to the poor.

In the Utopia, the word ‘freedom’ would therefore be used with far greater care than today – and would never come at the top of the list of what any government should aim for. The real aim of government should be the promotion of the public good and the flourishing of the greatest number – never simply the defence of the freedom of more or less anyone to do more or less anything.

In the Utopia, the government would – with great intelligence and democratic accountability – often be interested in restricting freedom. Though we bridle at folk memories of police states, there is a more important and ambitious view of what government is for than merely freedom. Government is the institutionalisation of our long-term and collective interests. And the painful fact is that the pursuit of what matters to us in the long-term and collectively may at times be in sharp conflict with our short term and individual pleasures.

It’s something parents understand very well about their children. They are forever having to say no – not because they are mean but because they know it’s their job to stand up for their child’s and their society’s longer-term needs. It’s because the parent keeps in mind (when the child can’t) that they will feel sick later, that they’ll be exhausted tomorrow, that they can’t simply cause chaos in the playground, that they step in. We have fully accepted this sort of case at the level of families. But we resist the thought that, as adults in society, we stand in equal need of having our own well-being protected against the worst wishes of others as well as against our own more unhelpful and destructive desires.

by The Philosopher's Mail |  Read more:

Image: Getty

More Bang for Your Buck

For those seeking commercial sex in Berlin, Peppr, a new app, makes life easy. Type in a location and up pops a list of the nearest prostitutes, along with pictures, prices and physical particulars. Results can be filtered, and users can arrange a session for a €5-10 ($6.50-13) booking fee. It plans to expand to more cities.

Peppr can operate openly since prostitution, and the advertising of prostitution, are both legal in Germany. But even where they are not, the internet is transforming the sex trade. Prostitutes and punters have always struggled to find each other, and to find out what they want to know before pairing off. Phone-box “tart cards” for blonde bombshells and leggy señoritas could only catch so many eyes. Customers knew little about the nature and quality of the services on offer. Personal recommendations, though helpful, were awkward to come by. Sex workers did not know what risks they were taking on with clients.

Now specialist websites and apps are allowing information to flow between buyer and seller, making it easier to strike mutually satisfactory deals. The sex trade is becoming easier to enter and safer to work in: prostitutes can warn each other about violent clients, and do background and health checks before taking a booking. Personal web pages allow them to advertise and arrange meetings online; their clients’ feedback on review sites helps others to proceed with confidence.

Even in places such as America, where prostitution and its facilitation are illegal everywhere except Nevada, the marketing and arrangement of commercial sex is moving online. To get round the laws, web servers are placed abroad; site-owners and users hide behind pseudonyms; and prominently placed legalese frames the purpose of sites as “entertainment” and their content as “fiction”.

The shift online is casting light on parts of the sex industry that have long lurked in the shadows. Streetwalkers have always attracted the lion’s share of attention from policymakers and researchers because they ply their trade in public places. They are more bothersome for everyone else—and, because they are the most vulnerable, more likely to come to the attention of the police and of social or health workers. But in many rich countries they are a minority of all sex workers; just 10-20% in America, estimates Ronald Weitzer, a sociologist at George Washington University.

The wealth of data available online means it is now possible to analyse this larger and less examined part of the commercial-sex market: prostitution that happens indoors. It turns out to be surprisingly similar to other service industries. Prostitutes’ personal characteristics and the services they offer influence the prices they charge; niche services attract a premium; and the internet is making it easier to work flexible hours and to forgo a middleman.

by The Economist |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Knoll Ad 1957. Herbert Matter, from L’Œil Magazine, March 1957
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Slot-Machine Science

When people think of casinos, they often think of games like blackjack or roulette — high-stakes bouts of chance where fortunes can be won or lost in seconds. But that image is increasingly obsolete.

"Slot machines have this reputation for being these arcade devices only played by little old ladies," Schüll says. "But these devices are now driving the gambling industry and bringing in the majority of profits." By the late 1990s, slots were twice as profitable as all the other table games combined. She quotes one gambling official estimating that the machines account for as much as 85 percent of industry profits.

How did slots become so widespread? During the recession in the early 1990s, state legislatures started looking to increase revenue without raising taxes — and many of them settled on bills to allow machine gaming. "It was much easier to push through legislation [expanding the availability of slot machines] than things that carried a weightier vice image, like table gambling or poker," Schüll says. (...)

The gambling industry has realized that the biggest profits come from getting people to sit at slot machines and play for hours and hours on end. (Schüll says the industry refers to this as the "Costco model" of gambling.) As such, slot machines are designed to maximize "time on device."

Computerized slots have made this all possible. Again, in the old days, you pulled the lever and either won or you lost — and when people lost, they'd walk away.

Today's multi-line slot machines are far more elaborate. Instead of a single line, a player can bet on up to 200 lines at a time on the video screen — up, down, sideways, diagonal — each with a chance of winning. So a person might bet 70 cents and win on 35 of the lines, getting 35 cents back. That feels like a partial win — and captivates your attention.

"The laboratory research on this shows that people experience this in their brains in an identical way as a win," Schüll says. (And the economics research shows that these multi-line machines are far better at separating players from their money.)

That subtle advance, Schüll says, has helped revolutionize the gambling industry. Fewer and fewer people are now going to casinos to experience the thrilling chance at a big jackpot.

Instead, for many of the people Schüll interviewed, these slot machines have become a "gradual drip feed." They play because they enjoy being in the zone and losing themselves in the machine. Some players she talked to confessed that they actually get annoyed when they won a jackpot — because it disrupted the flow of playing.

by Brad Plumer, Vox |  Read more:

Image: Reno Tahoe/Flickr

A Brief History of Bloggering

After the internet, it was an obvious next step,” says Al Gore, in that Al Gore kind of way. “People were all like, 'Before we invent social networking, we really need to start somewhere else. So how about blogging?’”

Blogs. Weblogs. Bloggering. Now an activity shrouded in the mists of the Old Internet, but in its day a pioneering way for people to share links and photos and stuff. Even older than YouTube.

Depending on who you ask, the first bloggering happened in the late 1990s, when the web was still young, and clicking links to pages where you’d click more links was cool. This was in the days when the only use for an animated GIF was to tell people you were still working on your web page. Even if you weren’t.

“I invented bloggering,” says mad old Laurence Fortey, a mad old internet guy from the old, old days. He can remember hand-coded websites. He started coding his own just weeks after Tim Berners-Lee, a tunnel engineer helping to build the STERN protein collider, discovered ancient scrolls buried in the Swiss soil that revealed the secrets of HTML.

Fortey didn’t call it bloggering then, of course.

“I didn’t know it was going to be called that,” he says now, interviewed in a hotel room in Chicago. “We had other names for it back then. FTP diary-ing. Internet log link sharing. Web journalizing.”

Fortey sits back in his comfortable chair, eyes upward, remembering. His hair and beard are huge, wild. Perhaps someone should switch that fan off, it’s blowing right into his face.

“It was good back then,” he says. “No comments. No one had invented comments. Oh God, comments.”

Another early bloggerer was Fran Lilley, later a successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur but at the time winding up her first graduate degree.

“We started bloggering when we were still on Gopher,” she recalls. “We’d write up text files and upload them to Gopherspace, which was a bit like Twitter is now. But without the lolcats.”

She remembers clearly how blogging changed and grew as more people got involved: “We all thought it was pretty cool when you could put words and pictures together on the same page. That beat the heck out of Gopherspace, let me tell you.”

“Once blogging software came along and all the other stuff got added in, we thought we were in heaven.”

Categories and archives were Lilley’s favorite new ideas.

“Categories were great! Suddenly all your stuff was, like, totally categorized. OK, so a lot of the time it was categorized in the ‘Uncategorized’ category, but even so. Archives were so much more useful after that.”

Lilley pauses to watch raindrops on the window. “Well, a bit more useful.”

Asked to make some comments about comments, she grimaces and turns her attention back to the raindrops.

by Giles Turnbull, TMN |  Read more:

Image: William Powhida, A Major B-List Celebrity, 2013

Be Lucky - It's an Easy Skill to Learn

A decade ago, I set out to investigate luck. I wanted to examine the impact on people's lives of chance opportunities, lucky breaks and being in the right place at the right time. After many experiments, I believe that I now understand why some people are luckier than others and that it is possible to become luckier.

To launch my study, I placed advertisements in national newspapers and magazines, asking for people who felt consistently lucky or unlucky to contact me. Over the years, 400 extraordinary men and women volunteered for my research from all walks of life: the youngest is an 18-year-old student, the oldest an 84-year-old retired accountant.

Jessica, a 42-year-old forensic scientist, is typical of the lucky group. As she explained: "I have my dream job, two wonderful children and a great guy whom I love very much. It's amazing; when I look back at my life, I realise I have been lucky in just about every area."

In contrast, Carolyn, a 34-year-old care assistant, is typical of the unlucky group. She is accident-prone. In one week, she twisted her ankle in a pothole, injured her back in another fall and reversed her car into a tree during a driving lesson. She was also unlucky in love and felt she was always in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Over the years, I interviewed these volunteers, asked them to complete diaries, questionnaires and intelligence tests, and invited them to participate in experiments. Tby he findings have revealed that although unlucky people have almost no insight into the real causes of their good and bad luck, their thoughts and behaviour are responsible for much of their fortune. (...)

My research revealed that lucky people generate good fortune via four basic principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.

by Richard Wiseman, The Telegraph |  Read more:

Image: Umberto Salvagnin; Flickr

Hidden Costs to Your New Comcast Xfinity Router

[ed. I called Comcast a while ago with a technical problem and was told I needed to get this new router. I didn't get it, but managed to get the problem fixed anyway. Now it looks like these new routers are part of an initiative to build out a nationwide public WiFi network (commendable) at the expense of Comcast's customers (not so commendable).]

With the hopes of creating a nationwide public WiFi network, Comcast has been pushing new Xfinity WiFi routers into its customers’ homes that broadcast a public wireless network in addition to the home Internet connection. It’s an interesting idea that has been embraced by some, but has raised questions about security with others. As a bandwidth-obsessed engineer, my immediate inclination was to wonder where the heck the extra bandwidth for the public hotspot was coming from, and what kind of hidden electricity costs that might come with.

We ran some tests with one of these dual-signal routers in our office, and found that it was indeed costing Xfinity customers several dollars extra per month to support the public hotspot with this particular router. Not a huge deal on the individual level, but it’s worth noting that, when multiplied out by Comcast’s millions of residential customers, it seemed like subscribers might potentially be footing a bill in the tens of millions to roll out the ISP’s public WiFi network. A few weeks ago, we published a blog post with our findings, and we must have tickled the beast, because within an hour-or-two, I was on a call with Comcast.

Comcast Calling

The folks at Comcast reached out to let us know that we weren’t testing with their latest home router, and that they wanted to furnish us with the latest-and-greatest so we could re-test. Sure, why not? We wanted to present solid and accurate data, after all.

A few days later, an Xfinity tech replaced our existing hardware with a Cisco DPC3939B (XB3 is the residential variant, but we have the BWG business variant). We were told that the business and home versions are identical pieces of hardware that run slightly different software. This new Xfinity router box takes the place of four different components that we used to have:

• Cable modem for the Xfinity Hotspot
• WiFi access point for the Xfinity Hotspot
• Cable modem gateway for our business account
• Linksys access point that we provided

So, while they’ve certainly packed a lot in the new DPC3939B router, it’s also about the size of those four separate components duct-taped together!

by Speedify |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Wanting to be Normal

“I just want to be normal.” I've lost count of the number of times I've heard this phrase in my therapy room and, as a client in therapy, said it myself. In my previous career as a writer, I spent a number of years exploring my own perceived inability to be normal. In fiction, performance, and memoir, I looked to my audiences to reflect something, anything, back to me that would allow me to fit in. I took this question to professionals too, asking if they could help me feel the way I thought other people did. And now that I am a therapist myself, my clients ask the same of me.

Feeling indefinably different from others is often a sign of depression, which is why therapists encounter it so often. Some people live their entire lives never feeling what they perceive to be normal. The seeming ability of other people to live their lives without apparent effort feels like an impossibility. You walk through life as if pushing at thickened glass. Some people with depression use alcohol and drugs in response, some self-harm, some withdraw, and some overcompensate. Depression, similarly to anxiety, parks itself like an extra layer of awareness on top of ordinary consciousness. Every living moment is so heavy with unwanted importance that it takes on a symbolic quality. (...)

Believing that you are the wrong kind of different encompasses the contentious issue of introverts versus extraverts, a very contemporary binary. Online, many people self-identify as introverts, and introvert pride is a growing movement. An increasing number of people are outing themselves as introverts who struggle in an extravert world, existentially stressed by the enforced social and adversarial interactions of school and after, pressed into high-level human sociability, bracing themselves for the onslaught of convivial activities and enforced games, and seeing extraverts constantly rewarded over and above them. It is hard not to feel abnormal when you are on the wrong side of that binary. (...)

And yet, in view of the apparent desirability, and seeming near-impossibility, of attaining the elevated state of being normal, it is perhaps surprising there are not more public affirmations of it, such as statues or street names. There is no Jungian archetype of the normal person, nor does it appear in the tarot's major arcana. I stand to be corrected, but I'll hazard a guess that there isn't a Shakespeare play, classical drama, or opera that celebrates the protagonist attaining the state of normal as their climax or finale. And within alternative lifestyles, the word can be a euphemism for boring. Words containing norm (eg, heteronormative) are, at worst, spat out with derision. A gulf seems to exist between the meaning of normality as an outward state, and its desirability as an inward state.

And here's the kicker. When I start unpacking what this normal is all about in a therapy session, very often a similar reply comes back. And I discover that normal isn't just about wishing to be happy, secure and an agent of one's own destiny. Being normal, I have been told a number of times, actually means being in a long-term romantic relationship and owning a house.

by Tania Glyde, The Lancet | Read more:
Image: Wikipedia