A 'Heapin' of Alaska Hospitality

[ed. See also: More details emerge in fight that witnesses say involved Palin family.]

Sing along, boys and girls, to the tune of the "Beverly Hillbillies" theme song:

Come and listen to a story
'bout a woman named Palin.
At private-sector jobs
she was always a-failin',
Then one day
she got into the politics game,
And up through the web
came a bubblin' fame. 

Celebrity that is, money for nothin', Tea Party! 

Well, the first thing you know
ol' Palin's a millionaire,
Alaska voters said, "Palin move away from there,"
Said, "The screen's where you oughtta be."
So they gassed up the snowmachine and moved onto TV.
Reality that is: Bristol's Bayou, pay-per-view, cage match ...

Yes, for those of you who were out hunting and missed it, the 49th state's favorite, half-term, ex-governor and her clan are home for a spell and back at it again. This time it's a made-for-the-internet brawl in Oceanview, an upper middle-class Anchorage neighborhood.

Or at least an upper middle-class Anchorage suburb pre-Palin punchout. Who knows now. Property-value valuing homeowners on Harbor Circle may have joined the likes of American liberals hoping they never see Alaska's favorite reality TV clan again.

by Craig Medred, Alaska Dispatch |  Read more:

Image:CBS

Bertha: Stuck in the Mud

What do you do if you're operating the world'sbiggest tunneling machine and something goes wrong? You're digging along, everything fine, the machine's five-story maw about to chew beneath the skyscrapers of one of the great American cities. Then suddenly one day things are not so fine. Bertha—that's her name, in honor of Seattle's first woman mayor, Bertha Knight Landes—hits something. A few days later her temperature starts rising. Not good. Then her cutting head stops spinning.

Now what? What do you do when the world's largest tunneling machine is, essentially, stuck in the mud? Bertha is 60 feet under the earth, and you're on the surface watching a squirmy public swap rumors of cost and delay on the $1.35 billion tunnel component of an even larger transportation project, and the naysayers are howling: Just you watch, Bertha will be abandoned like an overheated mole, boondoggle to end all boondoggles. Because, don't forget, when you're boring the world's largest tunnel, everything is bigger—not just the machine and the hole and the outsize hopes but the worries too. The cynicism.

What do you do?

Here's what you do: You try to tune out the media. You shrug off the peanut gallery's spitballs. You put off the finger-pointing and the lawsuits for now; that's what the lawyers are paid for afterward. You do the only thing you can do. You put your head down and you think big, one more time. You figure out how to reach Bertha and get her moving again.

This is a rescue story.

Ask a Seattleite why he likes it here and he'll invoke the things we Seattleites always say: good fish. Better coffee. White sails on the blue water of Puget Sound. Never high on anybody's list is the Alaskan Way Viaduct. For 61 years the elevated double-decker freeway that slices along the waterfront has been the city's grim, gray mule, carrying roughly one-third of Seattle's north–south traffic while effectively divorcing the city from its waterfront, as so many other highways have done around the nation—from New York City's FDR Drive to Boston's Interstate 93 before the Big Dig buried it.

In 2001 a magnitude 6.8 earthquake rattled Seattle, cracking the aging viaduct. As years passed and the road deteriorated, the city argued about what to do. Finally, in 2009 local and state leaders decided: the viaduct would fall. In its place a waterfront renaissance would bloom as 26 blocks along Elliott Bay rejoined the city. James Corner Field Operations, visionary of the acclaimed High Line project in Manhattan, was hired to imagine a string of walkways, parks, public piers, bike paths, beaches—even a swimming pool on a barge—that would knit the city's core and its shoreline together and transform the place into an urban waterfront to rival those of Sydney, Copenhagen, Vancouver.

The costliest and most complicated puzzle piece—the one that would make all of this possible—would also be one of the least visible. A 2-mile tunnel would replace the hulking viaduct. The tunnel would whisk traffic underground from the Seattle Seahawks' stadium, just south of downtown's high-rises, north to the Space Needle and South Lake Union.

Seattle's tunnel wouldn't be very long—just 1.7 miles of it bored through the earth—but it couldn't be just any tunnel. It needed to be big enough to hold four lanes of traffic across two decks, with cars traveling at highway speeds. It would have to dive deep, more than 200 feet below downtown's heart, to avoid disturbing the city's skyscrapers and old buildings. The machine would have to be wily enough to dig through Seattle's funky soils, everything from glacial till to pudding, the latter a legacy of early city fathers, who flattened the lumpy pioneer town into the salt marshes to create the modern city by the sound.

The requirements emerged: Bertha's cutterhead—her face—would be 57½ feet across, as tall as the viaduct she was replacing. She would have hundreds of teeth to chew with. She'd digest the muck she chewed and then build the tunnel behind her as she worked, so she would be 326 feet long, as long as a home run over the right-field fence at nearby Safeco Field. She would weigh as much as the Eiffel Tower and would use enough power to light a town of 30,000 people. She'd be able to generate so much thrust—44,000 tons—she could send 13 space shuttles into orbit. And, of course, she'd be burly, because by the time she burrowed through the subterranean darkness and emerged on the other side she would have shed 9 tons of solid steel.

Bertha would be all of these things. She would be the biggest tunnel-boring machine ever built.

by Christopher Solomon, Popular Mechanics | Read more:
Image: WSDOT

How Gangs Took Over Prisons

On a clear morning this past February, the inmates in the B Yard of Pelican Bay State Prison filed out of their cellblock a few at a time and let a cool, salty breeze blow across their bodies. Their home, the California prison system’s permanent address for its most hardened gangsters, is in Crescent City, on the edge of a redwood forest—about four miles from the Pacific Ocean in one direction and 20 miles from the Oregon border in the other. This is their yard time.

Most of the inmates belong to one of California’s six main prison gangs: Nuestra Familia, the Mexican Mafia, the Aryan Brotherhood, the Black Guerrilla Family, the Northern Structure, or the Nazi Lowriders (the last two are offshoots of Nuestra Familia and the Aryan Brotherhood, respectively). The inmates interact like volatile chemicals: if you open their cells in such a way as to put, say, a lone member of Nuestra Familia in a crowd of Mexican Mafia, the mix can explode violently. So the guards release them in a careful order.

“Now watch what they do,” says Christopher Acosta, a corrections officer with a shaved head who worked for 15 years as a front-line prison guard and now runs public relations for Pelican Bay. We are standing with our backs to a fence and can see everything. (...)

Understanding how prison gangs work is difficult: they conceal their activities and kill defectors who reveal their practices. This past summer, however, a 32-year-old academic named David Skarbek published The Social Order of the Underworld, his first book, which is the best attempt in a long while to explain the intricate organizational systems that make the gangs so formidable. His focus is the California prison system, which houses the second-largest inmate population in the country—about 135,600 people, slightly more than the population of Bellevue, Washington, split into facilities of a few thousand inmates apiece. With the possible exception of North Korea, the United States has a higher incarceration rate than any other nation, at one in 108 adults. (The national rate rose for 30 years before peaking, in 2008, at one in 99. Less crime and softer punishment for nonviolent crimes have caused the rate to decline since then.)

Skarbek’s primary claim is that the underlying order in California prisons comes from precisely what most of us would assume is the source of disorder: the major gangs, which are responsible for the vast majority of the trade in drugs and other contraband, including cellphones, behind bars. “Prison gangs end up providing governance in a brutal but effective way,” he says. “They impose responsibility on everyone, and in some ways the prisons run more smoothly because of them.” The gangs have business out on the streets, too, but their principal activity and authority resides in prisons, where other gangs are the main powers keeping them in check. (...)

Another common misconception about prison gangs is that they are simply street gangs that have been locked up. The story of their origins, however, is closer to the opposite: the Mexican Mafia, for example, was born at Deuel Vocational Institution, in Tracy, California, in 1956, and only later did that group, and others, become a presence on the streets. Today, the relation of the street to the cellblock is symbiotic. “The young guys on the street look to the gang members inside as role models,” says Charles Dangerfield, a former prison guard who now heads California’s Gang Task Force, in Sacramento. “Getting sentenced to prison is like being called up to the majors.”

by Graeme Wood, Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Brian L. Frank

[ed. The good old days.]
Mac Desk
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Paul Gauguin. Still Life with Three Puppies.
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don't be afraid
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Why I Just Asked My Students To Put Their Laptops Away

Over the years, I’ve noticed that when I do have a specific reason to ask everyone to set aside their devices (‘Lids down’, in the parlance of my department), it’s as if someone has let fresh air into the room. The conversation brightens, and more recently, there is a sense of relief from many of the students. Multi-tasking is cognitively exhausting — when we do it by choice, being asked to stop can come as a welcome change.

So this year, I moved from recommending setting aside laptops and phones to requiring it, adding this to the class rules: “Stay focused. (No devices in class, unless the assignment requires it.)” Here’s why I finally switched from ‘allowed unless by request’ to ‘banned unless required’ (...)

People often start multi-tasking because they believe it will help them get more done. Those gains never materialize; instead, efficiency is degraded. However, it provides emotional gratification as a side-effect. (Multi-tasking moves the pleasure of procrastination inside the period of work.) This side-effect is enough to keep people committed to multi-tasking despite worsening the very thing they set out to improve.

On top of this, multi-tasking doesn’t even exercise task-switching as a skill. A study from Stanford reports that heavy multi-taskers are worse at choosing which task to focus on. (“They are suckers for irrelevancy”, as Cliff Nass, one of the researchers put it.) Multi-taskers often think they are like gym rats, bulking up their ability to juggle tasks, when in fact they are like alcoholics, degrading their abilities through over-consumption.

This is all just the research on multi-tasking as a stable mental phenomenon. Laptops, tablets and phones — the devices on which the struggle between focus and distraction is played out daily — are making the problem progressively worse. Any designer of software as a service has an incentive to be as ingratiating as they can be, in order to compete with other such services. “Look what a good job I’m doing! Look how much value I’m delivering!”

This problem is especially acute with social media, because on top of the general incentive for any service to be verbose about its value, social information is immediately and emotionally engaging. Both the form and the content of a Facebook update are almost irresistibly distracting, especially compared with the hard slog of coursework. (“Your former lover tagged a photo you are in” vs. “The Crimean War was the first conflict significantly affected by use of the telegraph.” Spot the difference?)

Worse, the designers of operating systems have every incentive to be arms dealers to the social media firms. Beeps and pings and pop-ups and icons, contemporary interfaces provide an extraordinary array of attention-getting devices, emphasis on “getting.” Humans are incapable of ignoring surprising new information in our visual field, an effect that is strongest when the visual cue is slightly above and beside the area we’re focusing on. (Does that sound like the upper-right corner of a screen near you?)

The form and content of a Facebook update may be almost irresistible, but when combined with a visual alert in your immediate peripheral vision, it is—really, actually, biologically—impossible to resist. Our visual and emotional systems are faster and more powerful than our intellect; we are given to automatic responses when either system receives stimulus, much less both. Asking a student to stay focused while she has alerts on is like asking a chess player to concentrate while rapping their knuckles with a ruler at unpredictable intervals.

Jonathan Haidt’s metaphor of the elephant and the rider is useful here. In Haidt’s telling, the mind is like an elephant (the emotions) with a rider (the intellect) on top. The rider can see and plan ahead, but the elephant is far more powerful. Sometimes the rider and the elephant work together (the ideal in classroom settings), but if they conflict, the elephant usually wins.

After reading Haidt, I’ve stopped thinking of students as people who simply make choices about whether to pay attention, and started thinking of them as people trying to pay attention but having to compete with various influences, the largest of which is their own propensity towards involuntary and emotional reaction. (This is even harder for young people, the elephant so strong, the rider still a novice.)

by Clay Shirky, Medium |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Poop Like a Caveman

Of all the rooms in my house, my favorite is the bathroom. Bedrooms and kitchens have their charms, sure, but neither approaches the bathroom’s blend of solitude and comfort. The bathroom is where magazines are read and ideas are generated; where a modicum of privacy and a moment of respite is possible. A good bathroom break is like a small-scale spa visit—a few minutes of self-care that can make the rest of the day a little more bearable.

For month two of my self-bettering experiment, I’m going to overhaul my bathroom—testing products, speaking to experts, and adopting the latest methods to make the most of my morning ablutions. What kind of toothbrush should I be using? How should I shower? Which brand of toilet paper is best? My goal is to make my bathroom as comfortable as possible—a luxurious Shangri-La retreat that will leave me coddled and rejuvenated.

The Toilet

My quest starts with the centerpiece of any bathroom: the toilet.

In his 1966 book The Bathroom, which is still considered the bible of bathroomology, Cornell professor Alexander Kira called the modern, sit-down toilet “the most ill-suited fixture ever designed.” Kira believed—and subsequent studies have confirmed—that toilets work against our bodies by forcing us into unnatural angles when we sit down to defecate.

The solution to hunched-over posture, Kira wrote, is squatting—a more natural position that opens the anal sphincter, moves the body’s plumbing into proper alignment, and allows us to evacuate more freely. A 2003 study published in Digestive Diseases and Sciences found that squatters took an average of 51 seconds to move their bowels, as opposed to 130 seconds for those sitting on a standard high toilet. A more recent study by a group of Japanese researchers found that “the greater the hip flexion achieved by squatting, the straighter the rectoanal canal will be, and accordingly, less strain will be required for defecation.” Our caveman ancestors, in other words, had it right.

I’m a renter, so I can’t exactly tear my toilet out of the wall and replace it with a hole in the ground. But I did figure out one way to replicate the pre-plumbing experience. I ordered the Squatty Potty, a nine-inch-tall stool ($24.99 on Amazon) that sits on the ground in front of your toilet.

“It’s all about basic mechanics,” Robert Edwards, the CEO of Squatty Potty, told me. “It’s about taking it back to the way it was done thousands of years ago.”

There are two ways to use the Squatty Potty, Edwards said. The easy (and recommended) way is to put your feet up on it while sitting down on the toilet, which raises your legs and simulates a shallow squat. The even more effective, harder way is to stand on the Squatty Potty and lower yourself into a deep squat, either hovering over or barely touching the seat while you do your business.

I experimented with both methods for several days, and I found the hard-core one more satisfying. It makes going to the bathroom easier, and it saves time. I used to dawdle on the toilet, finishing long New Yorker articles and completing tough Candy Crush levels. But with the Squatty Potty, that’s impossible. After 30 seconds of deep squatting, your quads start to burn, so you learn to finish your business, wipe, and move on.

After testing the Squatty Potty for a week, I decided to venture to the other end of the comfort-efficiency spectrum. I e-mailed Brondell, a company that makes high-end toilet seats, and asked for a review model of their top-of-the-line model, the Swash 1000. The Swash 1000 ($599, Brondell.com) is a marvel of modern engineering. It has two bidet attachments (one in back, one in front for “feminine” washing), a heated seat, an electric air dryer, and options for sanitizing and deodorizing your toilet bowl. I installed it on my toilet in about 10 minutes.

Bidets haven’t caught on in the U.S., but there’s a reason they’re standard in most European countries: They’re cleaner and more civilized than wiping with paper alone. (Alexander Kira, the late bathroom expert, agreed: “Many are prepared to complain about a tomato sauce stain on a restaurant tablecloth,” he wrote, “whilst they luxuriate on a plush seat in their faecially stained pants.”) The first squirt of the Swash 1000’s bidet attachment shocked me—I jumped off the seat in surprise. But the second and third were less abnormal. And by the fourth, I was hooked. The Swash 1000 isn’t the most luxurious toilet fixture on the market—that would probably be the $6,000-plus Kohler Numi toilet—but it is one of the best things I can put in my bathroom without violating my lease. (A warning about the Swash 1000, though: It makes sitting on the toilet so pleasant that you’ll end up staying for much longer than normal. Adjust your social calendar accordingly.)

While enjoying my bidet seat, I experimented with several types of toilet paper. Consumer Reports’s favorite brand, White Cloud 3-Ply Ultra Soft and Thick, is good—thick, soft, not too expensive —but I preferred Quilted Northern Ultra Plush, which felt like a soft chamois cloth. I also tried several other toilet accessories, such as Cottonelle wet wipes and something called the Bottom Buddy ($36.20 on Amazon), a plastic stick with a grabbing mechanism on the end that holds a wad of toilet paper and makes it possible to wipe with minimal effort. (It’s meant for people with physical impairments but also works for the truly lazy.) But neither struck me as necessary, especially now that I’ve got the Swash 1000.

The most far-out solution I tried was based on a 2005 study by Korean researchers that found that people who received an abdomen massage using essential oils had an easier time overcoming constipation. To test this finding myself, I ordered some vials of lemon, peppermint, and rosemary oils and tried rubbing my belly with them before I went to the bathroom. I’m not sure whether it helped, but it did make me smell like a Yankee Candle store for the rest of the day.

by Kevin Roose, Medium |  Read more:

Image: Giacomo Gambineri

We Are a Camera

[ed. The history and future of GoPro.]

Woodman had the good fortune to invent a product that was well suited to a world he had not yet imagined. The ripening of the technology in his camera, after a half decade of tinkering, coincided with the fruition of broadband and the emergence of YouTube, Facebook, and other social-media platforms for the wide distribution of video. GoPro rode the wave. What might have been just another camcorder became a leading connector between what goes on in the real world and what goes out in the virtual one—a perfect instrument for the look-at-me age. Its charm lies perhaps in its sublimated conveyance of self, its sneaky tolerable narcissism. GoPro footage is related to the selfie, in its “Here I am” (or “was”) ethos, and its wide view and variety of mounts often allow the filmmaker to include himself, or some part of himself, in the shot. But because it primarily points outward it’s a record of what an experience looks like, rather than what the person who had the experience looked like when he stopped afterward and arranged his features into his pretested photo face. The result is not as much a selfie as a worldie. It’s more like the story you’d tell about an adventure than the photo that would accompany it.

Though GoPro is known primarily for its connection to adventure sports, the camera is increasingly used in feature films and on TV, and by professionals of many stripes—musicians, surgeons, chefs. Many BMWs now come with an app to control a GoPro in the dash (in case you want to show the kids your commute). The company has been promoting its use in broadcasting traditional sports. An armada of GoPros greatly enhanced the coverage of last year’s America’s Cup, in San Francisco Bay, but perhaps they’d shed less light on the mysteries of an N.F.L. line of scrimmage: one imagines indecipherable grunting and rustling, the filmic equivalent of a butt dial. The opposite of this, and the big thing these days, is the footage that comes from mounting GoPros on small quadcopter drones: sublime sweeping shots and heretofore unseen bird’s-eye vantages, on the cheap.(...)

Two years ago, my son, then ten, won a GoPro in a school raffle. On a ski vacation that spring, he affixed it to the top of his helmet with the standard mount—Tinkywinky, we called him, after the Teletubby with the triangle on its head—and let it roll most of the day, five to fifteen minutes at a stretch. What struck me, while watching some of the footage on a laptop later, was the idiosyncratic ordinariness of it. As he skied, he whistled to himself, made odd sounds, looked around at the mountains, shouted to his brother and his cousin, cried out at the slightest hint of air, and now and then bent forward and filmed upside down through his legs. Even though the camera was turned outward, filled mainly by the sight of the terrain sliding past, it provided, more than anything, a glimpse into the mind of a dreamy and quiet boy—who, to my eyes, during the day, had been just a nose, his features and expressions otherwise hidden by helmet, neck gaiter, and goggles. I didn’t need a camera to show me what he looked like to the world, but was delighted to find one that could show me what the world looked like to him. It captured him better than any camera pointed at him could. This was a proxy, of sorts. (...)

At many ski areas nowadays, you can rent a GoPro for the day. The slopes teem with Teletubbies. People have helmet mounts for P.O.V. cameras of every make, and even smartphones in waterproof shells. It’s not just groms or pros. It’s grampas and gapers, too (“gapers” being the shredder’s term for hapless wannabes). A ski trip has become a kind of life-logging vacation. People who’d never film a minute of their ordinary lives deem a day riding chairlifts and creeping along groomed trails to be worthy of wall-to-wall coverage. The sense among many serious skiers is that the cameras have contributed to heedless, or at least distracted, behavior in the backcountry. Any attention given to getting the shot, or posing for it, is attention diverted from the task of staying safe. Of course, there is no data to support this, and it could well be mere curmudgeonly grumbling. It’s just that there are so many videos of bad stuff happening to backcountry skiers. GoPros have made it possible to see, really for the first time, the way the snowpack jigsaws around you (a skier’s version of a land mine’s click) when an avalanche kicks off or how it looks and sounds to be buried when the slide comes to a stop.

When it ends badly, the camera can be a kind of black box. A fantasy of the film-everything movement is an end to forensic uncertainty. Wearable P.O.V. cameras are also coming into vogue as a tool for soldiers and police. The premise is that reviewability makes for greater accountability—that seeing is knowing. After the Michael Brown shooting, in Ferguson, many commentators, accustomed already to the ubiquity of cameras, were dismayed that there was no footage of the incident. In this instance, we may wish we had some, but a world in which the police film every interaction with the public is not all sweetness and light. You may catch some bad cops, but you’d also hamstring the good ones. By enforcing uninterpretable standards of exchange, a video record has the effect of a mandatory sentence. It deprives the police of discretion, and the public of leniency. There are many things we’d rather not see or have seen.

GoPro, like Google Glass, has the insidious effect of making the pervasiveness of cameras seem playful and benign when it may one day be anything but. The Economist called the film-everything culture “the people’s panopticon”—the suggestion being that with all these nifty devices we might be unwittingly erecting a vast prison of self-administered surveillance.

by Nick Paumgarten, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: GoPro

Rogue Taxidermy

The back room is where they cut open the dead animals, and the front room is where they sell them. They choose the creatures carefully, dealing only in what is legal and authentic. Working as their ancestors would, they make sure to use every part of the animal.

They are not butchers.

They are not burly men mounting the spoils of a hunting expedition on plaques for a man cave.

They’re hipsters, 20- and 30-somethings with art backgrounds and thick-rimmed glasses and — “I hate the H-word,” one of them says.

“I mean, it’s really getting to be a slur, because it’s so broad. Like, what does that mean?” the 27-year-old Greg Hatem continues, standing in his Baltimore storefront. “There are all kinds of people doing what we do.”

What they do — and in this case, what they sell — is “rogue taxidermy.” (...)

Call it hipster or call it art, rogue taxidermy’s popularity in New York and London is making its way to other urban locations in the United States, where young and creative people have taken to reinventing the centuries-old process of removing and rearranging the skin of a dead animal.

Rogue taxidermy is about a decade old. The New York Times wrote about Marbury and his fellow rogue taxidermy pioneers in 2005, calling their work “absurdly gory” and “aggressively weird.” Marbury thought his run of cool might be over that year, with national media attention and, tragically, a few plastic versions of animal mounts being sold at Urban Outfitters. But a post-recession surge of do-it-yourself enthusiasm has launched rogue taxidermy onto Etsy, Pinterest and Instagram. There are goat heads turned into wedding hairpieces, mice with mohawks and leather jackets, and deer with golden Gucci symbols for antlers.

Bazaar, the oddities shop in Baltimore that Hatem owns with partner Brian Henry, regularly hosts taxidermy classes. A recent session sold out in less than 20 minutes. Although the instructors typically come from New York, the students — mostly 20- to 35-year-old women — come from Washington and Baltimore.

In a class on making a winged guinea pig, taxidermy novice Miranda Beck was thrilled to find an opportunity for formal instruction after years of trying to figure it out herself. She added the flying guinea pig, which she named Clarence, to a collection that included her first piece of taxidermy, a fox named Zelda. The 37-year-old aesthetician has since mummified a friend’s ferret, taxidermied a mole to dress him like Hamlet and started a small business selling Christmas ornaments made of deer bones. She works on her dining room table.

by Jessica Contrera, Washington Post | Read more:
Image: uncredited

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A Feeling of Control

In Mischel’s view, emotions are the bane of self-control: These “hot” responses make us impatient and cloud our logical judgment of what’s valuable. And so in his experiments, Mischel had children try to override their emotional responses to the marshmallow by having them use “cool” strategies like singing to distract themselves, focusing solely on the treat’s color, or pretending it was a cotton ball. When children tried these approaches, they demonstrated more willpower in resisting temptation. (...)

The trouble with all this is that willpower, for all its merits, is full of holes. Maintaining it requires not only a good deal of effort but also a conducive environment. The University of Minnesota psychologist Kathleen Vohs, one of the nation’s leading experts on willpower, has shown that seemingly irrelevant factors like being at home versus being at work, or even the need to make simple decisions unrelated to resisting temptation (“Should I wear a white shirt or a blue one?”) can diminish self-control. The result? People whose willpower is taxed fail to resist about one out of every six temptations they face, according to Vohs, even when they try using cognitive strategies to manage their “hot” responses. Willpower also appears to be quite finite in supply. One of Baumeister’s famous experiments demonstrated that, when people avoid eating chocolate chip cookies placed in front of them by using sheer determination and willpower, they become much more likely to give in to the temptation to shirk on a difficult task a few minutes later. If people don’t rest between temptations, it puts them in something of a death spiral in which each willpower success perversely increases the likelihood of willpower failure when facing the next temptation. In fact, Vohs’s most recent work shows that the people who appear the best at maintaining self-control succeed not because their willpower is actually greater, but because they employ the simple strategy of avoiding coming into contact with temptation in the first place.

So where does that leave us? There’s abundant evidence that self-control is an important skill for success and societal functioning, but we don’t have much to show for all our efforts aimed at devising strategies to cultivate it. As Duckworth herself has written, no one really yet knows how to teach people to cultivate self-control and grit in a way that endures.

It’s a safe bet that research on how to boost willpower will continue apace. But to my mind, our troubles may stem not so much from a failure to unlock some secret about willpower as from a rut in our thinking about emotion. (...)

Now, it’s certainly possible that this divergence from the usual set of cool, cognitive strategies for resisting temptation arises from the possibility that the brains of addicts, as some suggest, aren’t like those of the rest of the population. It’s also true that the efficacy of strategies like counting one’s blessings has yet to be subjected to rigorous scientific analysis in the context of addiction; it’s possible such strategies don’t work quite as well as 12-step advocates think they do.

But there’s another equally likely, and potentially profound, possibility that’s worth considering when it comes to understanding how self-control works. It’s a possibility that my lab at Northeastern University has been exploring in a series of experiments for the past few years: Maybe these kinds of emotion-based strategies have persisted in support groups because the usual methods to combat temptation—those based on willpower—simply aren’t strong enough to do the job. Maybe we, as individuals and as a society, have bet on the wrong horse. Maybe shortsightedness in decisions among the general populace is so widespread because we’re not using the most powerful weapons against temptation that are available to us—the ones based on emotion, not reason and cognitive control.

The idea that emotional responses can only hinder long-range thinking makes very little sense when you step back and think about how the mind truly works. There is almost universal agreement among psychologists studying emotion that these mental states exist to aid humans in meeting challenges. They are the engines that drive us toward adaptive behaviors in rapid and efficient ways. The state we call fear, for example, prepares our body to deal with threat and alters our decisions, making us proceed more cautiously. We don’t have to “think” about and institute such preparations; they happen automatically. And although it’s true that emotions can be problematic when experienced in inappropriate contexts or too intensely, it’s just as true that if emotions were always troublesome—if they always resulted in negative outcomes—they would have been extinguished by natural selection long ago.

When it comes to self-control, there’s certainly evidence thatsome emotions work against long-term thinking. In the buzzing world of neuroeconomics, brilliant scholars like the Harvard economist David Laibson and the Carnegie Mellon decision scientist George Loewenstein have shown that limbic systems of the brain—areas thought to involve emotion—specifically devalue future rewards. But there’s little reason to believe that this research examines the full range of human emotions. Yes, there are emotions that can lead to vice (envy, lust, anger). But there are also emotions associated with virtue (gratitude, compassion, love). At the same time, while it’s true that reason and willpower can engender virtuous action—as when people adhere to a code of ethics or a long-range plan—they can just as easily be used to motivate and justify quite impulsive behavior. (More on this later.) The first step in understanding how self-control really works, then, is to give up the idea that emotions necessarily lead to impatience.

by David Destend, Pacific Standard |  Read more:

Image: Getty

[ed. Just got back from a beautiful sunny weekend in Seattle and my first visit to Safeco Field. We'll resume our regularly scheduled programming shortly.] 

Linda Vachon, Affiche 39 (head noggin)
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[ed. Kurt Vonnegut on Lot's wife, Dresden, the horrors of war, and compassion.]
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Amazon, Publishers, and Readers

In the current fight between Amazon and the publisher Hachette over the price of ebooks and print-on-demand rights, Amazon’s tactics are awful, the worst possible in fact: They are denying readers access to books, removing pre-order options and slowing delivery of titles published by Hachette. Amazon’s image as a business committed to connecting readers to books is shredded by this sort of hostage-taking. The obvious goal for readers in should be to punish anyone using us as leverage.

This skirmish will end, though, and when it does, we’ll be left with the larger questions of what the landscape of writing and reading will look like in the English-speaking world. On those questions, we should be backing Amazon, not because different principles are at stake, but because the same principle — Whose actions will benefit the reader? — leads to different conclusions. Many of the people rightly enraged at Amazon’s mistreatment of customers don’t understand how their complaint implicates the traditional model of publishing and selling as well.

Some of the strongest criticism of Amazon comes from authors most closely aligned with the prestigious parts of the old system, many of those complaints appearing as reviews of “The Everything Store”, Brad Stone’s recent book on Amazon and Jeff Bezos. Steve Coll, Dean of the Columbia Journalism School, wrote one such, “Citizen Bezos,” in The New York Review of Books:

At least two qualities distinguished Bezos from other pioneers of e-commerce and help to explain his subsequent success. The first was his gargantuan vision. He did not see himself merely chipping away at Barnes & Noble’s share of retail book sales; he saw himself developing one of the greatest retailers in history, on the scale of Sears Roebuck or Walmart. Secondly, Bezos focused relentlessly on customer service — low prices, ease of use on his website, boundless inventory, and reliable shipping. To this day, Amazon is remarkably successful at pleasing customers.

Coll does not intend any of this as a compliment.

He writes about book-making and selling as if there are only two possible modes: Either the current elites remain firmly in charge, or else Amazon will become a soul-crushing monopoly. The apres nous, le deluge!-ness of this should be enough to convince anyone that the publishers are bullshitting, but if your worry is market manipulation, the publishing cartel we have today has has already created decidedly non-hypothetical harms.

Back in 2007, when publishers began selling large numbers of books in digital format, they used digital rights management (DRM) to lock their books to a particular piece of hardware, Amazon’s new Kindle. DRM is designed to transfer pricing power from content owners to hardware vendors. The publishers clearly assumed they could hand Amazon consolidated control without ever having to conspire with one another, and that Amazon would reward them by passing cost-savings back as inflated profits. When Amazon instead decided to side with the customer, passing the savings on as reduced price, they panicked, and started looking around for an alternative conspirator.

Starting in 2009, five of the six biggest publishers colluded with Apple to re-inflate ebook prices. The model they worked out netted them less revenue per digital sale, because of Apple’s cut, but ebooks were not their immediate worry. They wanted (and want) to protect first editions; as long as ebook prices remained high, hardback sales could be protected. No one had any trouble seeing the big record companies as unscrupulous rentiers when they tried to keep prices for digital downloads as high as they had been for CDs; the book industry went further, violating anti-trust law as they attempted to protect their more profitable product.

Faced with evidence of their connivance, the publishers all settled with the Department of Justice. (Apple argued they’d done nothing wrong, took the case to court, and lost.) For all the worries about a future where Justice has to investigate Amazon, nothing that company has done comes close to conspiring against their customers. Coll concedes that these publishers did, in fact, break the law, but excuses them on the grounds that had they not colluded, they might make less money. (...)

As has been widely noted, the last time the industry panicked about increased access to reading material was with the original spread of paperbacks, an invention that occasioned similar hand-wringing about the economics and prestige of publishing. “Successful authors are not interested in original publishing at 25 cents,” said one publisher at the time, a sentiment as vain as it was wrong. Whole genres were born after the spread of low-cost publishing, a happy colloquium of new writers and new readers previously thwarted by high prices.

Although Hachette’s CEO recently claimed “The invention of mass-market paperbacks was great for all”, the real story is one of co-optation. When paperback publishers were independent, prices fell for the first two decades of the new format. Agitated publishers worried that the new format “could undermine the whole structure of publishing.” They finally figured out how to restore that structure in the early 1960s, through industry-wide consolidation. Over the next two decades, hardback publishers bought up the competition and increased paperback prices by almost 300%, while delaying their publication for a year or more.

All this had the effect of degrading paperbacks as a substitute for hardbacks. The industry’s idea of co-existence looks like a reduction in competition rather than a response to it. The same dynamics are playing out today. The big publishers complain about the Kindle, but they could create a competitive market for ebook readers tomorrow morning, by simply publishing without DRM (as Tor, O’Reilly, Baen and other publishers currently do.) This would make digital distribution more attractive, though, which is the last thing they want. (...)

Similarly, the idea that only the Big Five will fund speculative work for small audiences doesn’t jibe with the growth of niche publishing enabled by lower publishing costs. (A quarter-million titles have appeared on the Kindle in the last 90 days.) Nothing here is magic. Books are just large chunks of writing. Digital publishing creates many new ways for delivering those chunks from writer to reader. Only some of those new ways require the services of people who work in lower Manhattan.

by Clay Shirky, Medium |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Social Networks Are Like The Eye

On of the oft-repeated phrases on Edge is "New Technologies=New Perceptions". As we create tools we recreate ourselves. In the digital information age, we have moved from thinking about silicon, transistors, and microprocessors, to redefining, to the edge of creating life itself. As we have seen in recent editions of Edge — "Life: What A Concept!" (Freeman Dyson, Craig Venter, George Church, Robert Shapiro, Dimitar Sasselov, Seth Lloyd) at Eastover Farm in August, "Life: A Gene-Centric View" (Richard Dawkins and Craig Venter) in Munich in January; "Engineering Biology" (Drew Endy) in our most recent edition — we are redefining who and what we are.

Such scientific explorations are not limited to biology. Recently, Harvard professor and sociologist Nicholas Christakis has shown that there's more to think about regarding social networks such as Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, and Twitter than considerations of advertising and revenue models. According to The New York Times , ("On Facebook, Scholars Link Up With Data", by Stephanie Rosenbloom 12.17.07):

Each day about 1,700 juniors at an East Coast college log on to Facebook.com to accumulate "friends," compare movie preferences, share videos and exchange cybercocktails and kisses. Unwittingly, these students have become the subjects of academic research. To study how personal tastes, habits and values affect the formation of social relationships (and how social relationships affect tastes, habits and values), a team of researchers from Harvard and the University of California, Los Angeles, are monitoring the Facebook profiles of an entire class of students at one college, which they declined to name because it could compromise the integrity of their research.

Christakis notes that he is "interested not in biological contagion, but in social contagion. One possible mechanism is that I observe you and you begin to display certain behaviors that I then copy. For example, you might start running and then I might start running. Or you might invite me to go running with you. Or you might start eating certain fatty foods and I might start copying that behavior and eat fatty foods. Or you might take me with you to restaurants where I might eat fatty foods. What spreads from person to person is a behavior, and it is the behavior that we both might exhibit that then contributes to our changes in body size. So, the spread of behaviors from person to person might cause or underlie the spread of obesity." (...)

Christakis, along with his colleague James Fowler, "have started with several projects that seek to understand the processes of contagion, and we have also begun a body of work looking at the processes of network formation — how structure starts and why it changes. We have made some empirical discoveries about the nature of contagion within networks. And also, in the latter case, with respect to how networks arise, we imagine that the formation of networks obeys certain fundamental biological, genetic, physiological, sociological, and technological rules. "

"So we have been investigating both what causes networks to form and how networks operate."

by Nicholas A. Christakis, Edge | Read more:

Image: Nicoloas A Christakis

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Jeff Buckley & Elizabeth Fraser