Are We Worthy of Our Kitchens?

One of the best recent advertising campaigns is for a new line of high-end washers and dryers made by General Electric. A supermodel and a dorky scientist collide on the street, falling unexpectedly in love, uniting brains and beauty, utility and aestheticism. The fruit of this union is the household appliance of the future — sophisticated, sleek, an electronic image of domestic bliss for our times. The perfect washer and dryer create the perfect family.

Given the great range and power of our contemporary technologies, it is hardly surprising that our expectations for modern machines are especially high at home. We seek movie-quality entertainment with our oversized, flat-panel, high-definition televisions. We seek business-quality communication by installing satellite-powered Internet access in our home offices. We seek restaurant-quality kitchens with our six-burner stovetops and cappuccino-making machines. We want the latest high-tech contrivance or convenience, hoping that it will make old jobs easier, or that it will fulfill new longings we never knew existed.

At the same time, some of the most remarkable household appliances are now so mundane that we rarely think of them as technologies at all. Consider — or reconsider — the washing machine. In many homes, it is relegated to the basement or some other hidden corner. It is used often but not given much attention by its owner unless it breaks. Most households still have reasonably priced models, almost always in white, so loud and unattractive that they are kept out of public view. Despite its humble status, however, the electric washing machine represents one of the more dramatic triumphs of technological ingenuity over physical labor. Before its invention in the twentieth century, women spent a full day or more every week performing the backbreaking task of laundering clothes. Hauling water (and the fuel to heat it), scrubbing, rinsing, wringing — one nineteenth-century American woman called laundry “the Herculean task which women all dread.” No one who had the choice would relinquish her washing machine and do laundry the old-fashioned way.

Today, technology aids us in performing even the simplest domestic tasks. We have vacuums, juicers, blenders, dishwashers, lawnmowers, leaf blowers, bread machines, coffee makers, ice cream makers, food processors, microwave ovens, and much more. Yet if our domestic machines are more advanced than ever, it is unclear by what standard we should judge their success.

Many people justify buying the latest household machine as a way to save time, but family life seems as rushed as ever. Judging by how Americans spend their money — on shelter magazines and kitchen gadgets and home furnishings — domesticity appears in robust health. Judging by the way Americans actually live, however, domesticity is in precipitous decline. Families sit together for meals much less often than they once did, and many homes exist in a state of near-chaos as working parents try to balance child-rearing, chores, long commutes, and work responsibilities. As Cheryl Mendelson, author of a recent book on housekeeping, observes, “Comfort and engagement at home have diminished to the point that even simple cleanliness and decent meals — let alone any deeper satisfactions — are no longer taken for granted in many middle-class homes.” Better domestic technologies have surely not produced a new age of domestic bliss. (...)

During Khrushchev’s and Nixon’s “kitchen debate,” Khrushchev needled Nixon by asking, “Don’t you have a machine that puts food into the mouth and pushes it down? Many things you’ve shown us are interesting but they are not needed in life. They have no useful purpose. They are merely gadgets.”

Khrushchev might have been describing the modern American wedding registry. A tour of a typical registry reveals an extraordinary level of acquisitiveness for odd or luxuriously impractical machines: espresso makers costing thousands of dollars, exotic waffle irons, “professional-quality” pasta makers and even tiny blowtorches that allow budding dessert chefs to brown a perfect crème brûlée. The Williams-Sonoma kitchen company reportedly sells a $900 machine dedicated solely to the making of panini. Today’s in-the-know amateur cooks covet the Thermomix, a combination of mixer, blender, food processor, and miniature stove, unfortunately not available in stores. Purchasing one, as one New York Times food writer found, is akin to attending a series of bizarre, cult-like Tupperware parties.

Even practical technologies have become extremely fussy — and extremely expensive — in their modern incarnations. For $460, you can buy a vacuum that attaches to your waist with a padded belt for ease of carrying and features a HEPA filtration system. “With the Euroclean Hip Vac,” the product summary notes, “you not only vacuum more efficiently, you clean more effectively with the hospital-grade power of HEPA filtration to eliminate 99.99% of particles 0.3 microns and larger.” This expensive, hospital-grade technology is advertised in a catalogue, “Gaiam Harmony,” whose motto is “Simple choices make a difference.”

Unsurprisingly, much of our desire for domestic technology is focused on the kitchen, and high-end kitchen appliances are one of the most sought-after features in a home. The Market Forecaster report from Kitchen and Bath Business projected that Americans would spend $68.3 billion in 2005 to remodel their kitchens, and that “high-end [remodeling] jobs — those priced at $15,000 or more — are expected to increase almost 6 percent from 2004.” Scanning the luxury home and apartment listings in any urban newspaper, one finds a familiar litany of highlighted features: In Boston, for example, a “gourmet kitchen with granite countertops, Sub-Zero and Gaggenau appliances,” and in New York, “Sub-Zero refrigerators, Gaggenau appliances, granite countertops in the gourmet kitchen.” Similarly, the popular website Homeportfolio.com lists the brands of appliances considered desirable by design-conscious homeowners: Viking, Miele, Bosch, Wolf, Sub-Zero. A “coffee system” by Miele featured on the site — the price coyly “withheld by manufacturer” — likely costs more than a basic refrigerator and resembles a small spaceport.

One professional chef who occasionally cooks private dinners for wealthy patrons recently told the New York Times about the “spectacularly well-equipped kitchens I have seen, literally breathtaking. They’ve got these great big Viking or Garland or Aga stoves, gorgeous stone countertops ... multiple dishwashers, sometimes two, even three Sub-Zero refrigerators.... I walk into these kitchens and I just swoon.” This object love seems especially keen for those who seek the ultimate in modern domestic technology: “professional-grade” or “gourmet” appliances. Indeed, the word “gourmet” is now more frequently used as an adjective than a noun — to describe things in the home rather than the kind of person who might live there. Gourmet once meant a person who knew about and appreciated fine food and drink. Today gourmet is more likely to describe a state-of-the-art blender.

by Christine Rosen, The New Atlantis | Read more:
Image: Shutterstock

McDonald's: You Can Sneer, But It's the Glue That Holds Communities Together

[ed. After reading this my first impression was the same as some of the commenters: infomercial. But then I thought of all the people I've seen at McDonald's quietly enjoying a cup of coffee and convivial conversation late into the morning, kids on tentative first dates, little league teams and busy parents, old folks needing the company of other folks for a while before heading back to their lonely lives, and the just plain down and outers, hoping for a warm place to sit for a while (and maybe the use of a clean bathroom). Corporations get a lot of criticism and not much credit these days (for good reason), but in this case... thank you McDonald's. Thanks for letting people of all social, economic, generational and racial backgrounds use your facilities in peace, without harassment or resentment, for as long as they want, just for the price of a cup of coffee.]

On the morning of their wedding, Omar and Betty shared a breakfast of egg McMuffins at a small McDonald’s table, dressed in their finest clothes. Before driving to a Houston courthouse to be married, they walked into the attached child’s play area and joked about one day bringing their kids there.

Few understand celebrating at a McDonald’s, but for Omar and Betty it made sense. They don’t have a lot of money, and McDonald’s is part of their life. It is that way in many poor and middle-income neighborhoods, where McDonald’s have become de-facto community centers and reflections of the surrounding neighborhood.

When many lower-income Americans are feeling isolated by the deadening uniformity of things, by the emptiness of many jobs, by the media, they still yearn for physical social networks. They are not doing this by going to government-run community service centers. They are not always doing this by utilizing the endless array of well-intentioned not-for-profit outreach programs. They are doing this on their own, organically across the country, in McDonald’s.

Walk into any McDonald’s in the morning and you will find a group of mostly retired people clustering in a corner, drinking coffee, eating and talking. They are drawn to the McDonald’s because it has inexpensive good coffee, clean bathrooms, space to sprawl. Unlike community centers, it is also free of bureaucracy.

Almost all of them name their group with variations of a self-deprecating theme: in suburban El Paso it is the Old Folks’ Home, and in rural New Mexico it is the Morning Brigade. In the small rural town of Natchitoches, Louisiana, it is the Romeo club, an acronym for Retired Old Men Eating Out.

The Natchitoches group, like many of them, sprawls across a corner of the McDonald’s, taking over more and more tables as people join, and emptying them as they leave. Everyone who comes knows each other; have for many years, some since childhood. (...)

In other McDonald’s, politics are central. In one near downtown Kansas City in an African American neighborhood, each Friday morning the sitting area is turned over to a community meeting. When I was there, the topic was the politics surrounding the Black Lives Matter movement. The discussion was often loud, with speakers not hiding their frustration. Against the backdrop of raised voices, the registers and drive-through continued with the normal morning rush of coffee and egg sandwiches.

It isn’t just groups who use McDonald’s. For many of the poorest, for the homeless, and for people caught in an addiction, McDonald’s are an integral part of their lives. They have cheap and filling food, they have free Wi-Fi, outlets to charge phones, and clean bathrooms. McDonald’s is also generally gracious about letting people sit quietly for long periods – longer than other fast-food places.

by Chris Arnade, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Chris Arnade

Norman Engel, Grandma's House
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It’s Sleazy, It’s Totally Illegal, and Yet It Could Become the Future of Retirement

Over 100 years ago in America — before Social Security, before IRAs, corporate pensions and 401(k)s — there was a ludicrously popular (and somewhat sleazy) retirement scheme called the tontine.

At their peak, around the turn of the century, tontines represented nearly two-thirds of the American insurance market, holding about 7.5 percent of national wealth. It’s estimated that by 1905, there were 9 million tontine policies active in a nation of only 18 million households. Tontines became so popular that historians credit them for single-handedly underwriting the ascendance of the American insurance industry.

The downfall of the tontine was equally dramatic. Not long after 1900, a spectacular set of scandals wiped the tontine from the nation’s consciousness. To this day, tontines remain outlawed, and their name is synonymous with greed and corruption. Their memory lives on mostly in fiction, where they invariably propel some murderous plot. (There’s even a "Simpsons" episode in this genre.)

Tontines, you see, operate on a morbid principle: You buy into a tontine alongside many other investors. The entire group is paid at regular intervals. The key twist: As your fellow investors die, their share of the payout gets redistributed to the remaining survivors.

In a tontine, the longer you live, the larger your profits — but you are profiting precisely off other people’s deaths. Even in their heyday, tontines were regarded as somewhat repugnant for this reason.

Now, a growing chorus of economists and lawyers is wondering if the world wasn’t too hasty in turning its back on tontines. These financial arrangements, they say, have aspects that make a lot of sense despite their history of disrepute.

Some academics even argue that with a few new upgrades, a modern tontine would be particularly suited to soothing the frustrations of 21st-century retirement. It could help people properly finance their final years of life, a time that is often wracked with terribly irrational choices. Tontines could even be a cheaper, less risky way for companies to resurrect the pension.

“This might be the iPhone of retirement products,” says Moshe Milevsky, an associate professor of finance at York University in Toronto who has become one of the tontine’s most outspoken boosters.

Though they seem alien today, tontines have a storied pedigree that reaches back at least half a millennium. The name comes from an Italian financier, Lorenzo de Tonti, who perhaps did not invent the tontine but did famously pitch a tontine scheme to the French government in the 17th century as a way for King Louis XIV to raise money. Historians suggest that Tonti’s idea originated with folk ways of finance in his native country. The idea didn’t catch on at first, and Tonti eventually landed in the Bastille (while his son, an explorer, would eventually help found the city of Detroit).

A few decades later, though, tontines became widespread in Europe. This is because royal financing in the late Middle Ages was a tricky thing. Taxes were often out of the question, so European monarchs borrowed to fund their internecine wars.

Back then, if you paid the king 100 pounds, he might promise to pay it all back to you with interest over the course of a dozen years — that would be a bond. Or the king might make small annual payments to you and descendants for the rest of eternity — that would be a perpetuity. Or the king might make you slightly larger annual payments until you died — that would be an annuity.

For denizens of the realm, tontines were a very popular twist on the annuity because they appealed to the gambling spirit. An annuity would pay you a steady trickle of money (boring). A tontine would pay you more and more as time went on because other people would be dying and you would be accumulating their shares.

It was the ultimate lottery. If you died, you lost everything in a tontine. But if you were the last person standing, you stood to collect huge annual payments.

Kings loved tontines because they could get away with paying out a lot less since everyone counted on being alive — and collecting the big bucks — at the end of the scheme.

These arrangements were so widespread in the 18th century that the young United States almost ran a tontine itself: Alexander Hamilton proposed a tontine to pay down national debt after the Revolutionary War. Though his idea was rejected, local communities often set up tontines in Colonial times to raise money for large projects. Scattered in cities all along the East Coast, including in the nation’s capital, there have been buildings that were financed through a tontine. Some roads continue to bear the name Tontine, a sign of how they were paid for.

Milevsky, who recently published a history of the tontine, emphasizes that it was not originally envisioned as a retirement scheme. The tontine of the 1700s was a financing trick that owed its popularity to the human tendency for optimism. The seductive risk of a tontine is one of its defining features — a feature that may sorely be needed today, for entirely different reasons.

by Jeff Guo, Washington Post |  Read more:
Image: Shutterstock

The Curse of Culture

One of the seminal books on culture is Edgar Schein’s Organizational Culture and Leadership. Schein writes in the introduction:

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of culture as a concept is that it points us to phenomena that are below the surface, that are powerful in their impact but invisible and to a considerable degree unconscious. In that sense, culture is to a group what personality or character is to an individual. We can see the behavior that results, but often we cannot see the forces underneath that cause certain kinds of behavior. Yet, just as our personality and character guide and constrain our behavior, so does culture guide and constrain the behavior of members of a group through the shared norms that are held in that group.

In Schein’s telling, things like ping pong tables and kegerators are two (small) examples of artifacts — the visible qualities of an organization. They are easy to observe but their meaning is usually indecipherable and unique to a particular group (to put it another way, copying Google’s perks is missing the point).

The next level down are espoused beliefs and values, what everyone in an organization understands consciously: “openness,” for example, or “the customer is always right”; as you might expect espoused beliefs and values devolve rather easily into cliché.

It’s the third level that truly matters: underlying assumptions. Schein writes:

Basic assumptions, in the sense in which I want to define that concept, have become so taken for granted that one finds little variation within a social unit. This degree of consensus results from repeated success in implementing certain beliefs and values, as previously described. In fact, if a basic assumption comes to be strongly held in a group, members will find behavior based on any other premise inconceivable.

The implications of this definition are profound: culture is not something that begets success, rather, it is a product of it. All companies start with the espoused beliefs and values of their founder(s), but until those beliefs and values are proven correct and successful they are open to debate and change. If, though, they lead to real sustained success, then those values and beliefs slip from the conscious to the unconscious, and it is this transformation that allows companies to maintain the “secret sauce” that drove their initial success even as they scale. The founder no longer needs to espouse his or her beliefs and values to the 10,000th employee; every single person already in the company will do just that, in every decision they make, big or small.

Microsoft's Blindness

As with most such things, culture is one of a company’s most powerful assets right until it isn’t: the same underlying assumptions that permit an organization to scale massively constrain the ability of that same organization to change direction. More distressingly, culture prevents organizations from even knowing they need to do so. Schein continues:

Basic assumptions, like theories-in-use, tend to be nonconfrontable and nondebatable, and hence are extremely difficult to change. To learn something new in this realm requires us to resurrect, reexamine, and possibly change some of the more stable portions of our cognitive structure…Such learning is intrinsically difficult because the reexamination of basic assumptions temporarily destabilizes our cognitive and interpersonal world, releasing large quantities of basic anxiety. Rather than tolerating such anxiety levels, we tend to want to perceive the events around us as congruent with our assumptions, even if that means distorting, denying, projecting, or in other ways falsifying to ourselves what may be going on around us. It is in this psychological process that culture has its ultimate power.

Probably the canonical example of this mindset was Microsoft after the launch of the iPhone. It’s hard to remember now, but no company today comes close to matching the stranglehold Microsoft had on the computing industry from 1985 to 2005 or so.

The company had audacious goals — “A computer on every desk and in every home, running Microsoft software” — which it accomplished and then surpassed: the company owned enterprise back offices as well. This unprecedented success changed that goal — originally an espoused belief — into an unquestioned assumption that of course all computers should be Microsoft-powered. Given this, the real shock would have been then-CEO Steve Ballmer not laughing at the iPhone.

A year-and-a-half later, Microsoft realized that Windows Mobile, their current phone OS, was not competitive with the iPhone and work began on what became Windows Phone. Still, unacknowledged cultural assumptions remained: one, that Microsoft had the time to bring to bear its unmatched resources to make something that might be worse at the beginning but inevitably superior over time, and two, that the company could leverage Windows’ dominance and their Office business. Both assumptions had become cemented in Microsoft’s victory in the browser wars and their slow-motion takeover of corporate data centers; in truth, though, Microsofts’ mobile efforts were already doomed, and nearly everyone realized it before Windows Phone even launched with a funeral for the iPhone.

Steve Ballmer never figured it out; his last acts were to reorganize the company around a “One Microsoft” strategy centered on Windows, and to buy Nokia to prop up Windows Phone. It fell to Satya Nadella, his successor, to change the culture, and it’s why the fact his first public event was to announce Office for iPad was so critical. I wrote at the time:

This is the power CEOs have. They cannot do all the work, and they cannot impact industry trends beyond their control. But they can choose whether or not to accept reality, and in so doing, impact the worldview of all those they lead.

Microsoft under Nadella’s leadership has, over the last three years, undergone a tremendous transformation, embracing its destiny as a device-agnostic service provider; still, it is fighting the headwinds of Amazon’s cloud, open source tooling, and the fact that mobile users had six years to get used to a world without Microsoft software. How much stronger might the company have been had it faced reality in 2007, but the culture made that impossible.

Steve Job's Leadership

Shein defines leadership in the context of culture:

When we examine culture and leadership closely, we see that they are two sides of the same coin; neither can really be understood by itself. On the one hand, cultural norms define how a given nation or organizations will define leadership—who will get promoted, who will get the attention of followers. On the other hand, it can be argued that the only thing of real importance that leaders do is to create and manage culture; that the unique talent of leaders is their ability to understand and work with culture; and that it is an ultimate act of leadership to destroy culture when it is viewed as dysfunctional.

A great example of this sort of destruction was Steve Jobs’ first keynote as interim CEO at the 1997 Boston Macworld, specifically the announcement of Apple’s shocking partnership with Microsoft:

When Jobs said the word Microsoft, the audience audibly groaned. A few minutes later, when Jobs clicked to a slide that said Internet Explorer would be the default browser on Macintosh, the audience booed so loudly that Jobs had to stop speaking. When Jobs finally said the actual words “default browser” the audience booed even louder, with several individuals shouting “No!” It is, given the context of today’s Apple keynotes, shocking to watch.

Then, after Bill Gates spoke to the crowd via satellite (in what Jobs would call his “worst and stupidest staging event ever”), Jobs launched into what his biographer Walter Isaacson called an “impromptu sermon”:

If we want to move forward and see Apple healthy and prospering again, we have to let go of a few things here. We have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win Microsoft has to lose. OK? We have to embrace a notion that for Apple to win Apple has to do a really good job, and if others are going to help us, that’s great, cause we need all the help we can get. And if we screw up and we don’t do a good job, it’s not somebody else’s fault. It’s our fault. So, I think that’s a very important perspective. 

I think, if we want Microsoft Office on the Mac, we better treat the company that puts it out with a little bit of gratitude. We like their software. So, the era of setting this up as a competition between Apple and Microsoft is over as far as I’m concerned. This is about getting healthy, and this is about Apple being able to make incredibly great contributions to the industry, to get healthy and prosper again.

Here’s Shein:

But as the group runs into adaptive difficulties, as its environment changes to the point where some of its assumptions are no longer valid, leadership comes into play once more. Leadership is now the ability to step outside the culture that created the leader and to start evolutionary change processes that are more adaptive. This ability to perceive the limitations of one’s own culture and to evolve the culture adaptively is the essence and ultimate challenge of leadership.

Make no mistake: even though he had been gone for over a decade, Steve Jobs was responsible for that booing.

Jobs had set up Apple generally and the Macintosh specifically as completely unique and superior to the alternatives, particularly the hated IBM PC and its Windows (originally DOS) operating system. By 1997, though, Microsoft had won, and Apple was fighting for its life. And yet the audience booed its lifeline! That is how powerful culture can be — and that is why Jobs’ “impromptu sermon” was so necessary and so powerful. It was Apple’s version of Office on the iPad, and a brilliant display of leadership.

by Ben Thompson, Stratechery |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Brenda Cablayan, The Boat Ramp
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Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life

[ed. I can't recommend this book highly enough (it won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for autobiography). See also: this excerpt - Off Diamond Head.] 

In his new book, the New Yorker staff writer and veteran war reporter William Finnegan demonstrates the advantages of keeping meticulous mental maps. For him, memorizing a place is a matter of nostalgia, of metaphysical well-being, but also of life and death. Finnegan’s memoir is not about his professional life reporting on blood-soaked Sudan or Bosnia or Nicaragua; it’s about the “disabling enchantment” that is his lifelong hobby.

“The close, painstaking study of a tiny patch of coast, every eddy and angle, even down to individual rocks, and in every combination of tide and wind and swell…is the basic occupation of surfers at their local break,” he writes in Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life. Surfers, like children, naturally develop sensory affinity for their surroundings: they can detect minor changes in the smell of the sea, track daily the rise and fall of sandbars, are grateful for particularly sturdy roots onto which they can grab when scurrying down bluffs. The environment becomes an almost anatomical extension of them, mostly because it has to.

Unlike football or baseball or even boxing, surfing is a literarily impoverished sport. The reasons for this are practical. It’s not a spectator sport: it is hard to see surfers from the shore. That the best waves are seldom anywhere near civilization makes it an activity especially resistant to journalism, and first-rate writing by surfers is also rare: the impulse to surf—a “special brand of monomania,” Finnegan calls it—is at direct odds with the indoor obligations of writing.

In many ways this is true for any athletic activity—that its very best practitioners will very seldom be the same people who document it—but it’s particularly true of surfing, which demands more traveling, logistical planning, and waiting around than any other athletic endeavor. Even when surfers are not surfing, they’re thinking about it: listening to buoy reports, peering off cliffs with binoculars, preventing themselves from buying new boards.

Though middle school students have worn surfwear-branded clothing for decades now and surfing has become increasingly popular among the billionaires of Santa Clara County, it remains an elusive pastime in the minds of most everyone who has never done it. The reasons for this too are practical. Appropriate beaches are rare; high schools don’t have teams; and while not as prohibitively expensive as skiing, surfing requires roughly the same amount of cumbersome gear and is, if possible, even more physically uncomfortable. There are the damp, mildewed wetsuits; the feet cut by coral; the sunburns and the salt-stung eyes. Pair all this with the specter of Jeff Spicoli (the surfer and pot smoker played by Sean Penn in the 1982 film Fast Times at Ridgemont High) and the easy-to-imitate accent, and you have a hobby that is easy to mock, if not ignore. It’s certainly not a pastime anyone associates with ambition or mental agility.

Which is precisely what makes the propulsive precision of Finnegan’s writing so surprising and revelatory. For over half a century at this point, readers have taken it as a given (and writers as a professional prerogative) that lowbrow culture is deserving of bookish analysis. But unlike so many writhing attempts to extort meaning from topics that seem intellectually bankrupt, Finnegan’s treatment of surfing never feels like performance. Through the sheer intensity of his descriptive powers and the undeniable ways in which surfing has shaped his life, Barbarian Days is an utterly convincing study in the joy of treating seriously an unserious thing.

“Getting a spot wired—truly understanding it—can take years,” Finnegan writes, continuing, later, to say that “all surfers are oceanographers.” Over the course of a life spent in and out of the water, he has amassed a truly staggering amount of applied knowledge, of marine biology and carpentry and cartography. Surfing requires kinetic intuition, physical fitness, and courage in the face of an indifferent force, but it also demands the sort of mental work we don’t typically associate with extreme sports. Any good writing about an underexamined way of life must be, at least at times, expository, and Finnegan is lucid when it comes to the necessary task of explaining to the uninitiated some of the most basic tenets of surfing: why waves break where they do; how it’s possible to stand on a floating piece of fiberglass, go into a moving tube of water, and emerge looking just as you did upon entry. But despite all this, surfing, as Finnegan renders it, is more than just a fun physical activity: it’s a way of being in the world, with its own private politics and etiquette and benchmarks of success. (...)

It can also be a backdrop to a unique brand of companionship—among men, specifically, which, unlike female friendship, is not often tackled in books. The adoration with which Finnegan writes about his fellow surfers is of a sort usually seen only in soldiers’ memoirs. Bill was “aggressively relaxed—the essential California oxymoron.” Glenn “moved with unusual elegance.” Finnegan writes that “chasing waves remains for me a proximate cause of vivid friendships.” That they are often forged despite unpleasant obstacles (tropical diseases, food poisoning, near drowning) adds a kinetic dimension to what would otherwise be merely interior, emotional dynamics. And as Finnegan admits, “male egos were always subtly, or otherwise, on the line.”

Reputations are made and maintained in the ocean, but they’re premised on more than just talent. Seniority, humility, pain tolerance, and a hundred other factors contribute to a surfer’s local eminence. Speech patterns are just one of the outward signs of the insular social order that attends the sport. Surfers speak in a vivid vernacular: a mix of esoteric oceanographic detail and play-by-play narration expressed in slang. Finnegan is, of course, fluent—in it but also in the language of literature. The adjectives he attributes to waves are alternately the kind one might find in a contemporary novel—hideous, boiling, miraculous, malignant, mechanical—and the sort overheard in rusted-out pickup trucks—rifling, peaky, shifty, hairy, meaty, stupid. On the elemental aspects of surfing, Finnegan is especially capable of coming up with phrases that are at once poetic and concrete. Though “surfers have a perfection fetish…. Waves are not stationary objects in nature like roses or diamonds.” They are, instead, at once “the object of your deepest desire and adoration” but also “your adversary, your nemesis, even your mortal enemy.” Riding them is “the theoretical solution to an impossibly complex problem.”

by Alice Gregory, NY Review of Books |  Read more:

Image: Donald Miralle/Getty Images/NY Times

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Listening to Speech Has Remarkable Effects On a Baby’s Brain

Imagine how an infant, looking out from her crib or her father’s arms, might see the world. Does she experience a kaleidoscope of shadowy figures looming in and out of focus, and a melange of sounds wafting in and out of hearing?

In his Principles of Psychology (1890), William James imagined the infant’s world as ‘one great blooming, buzzing confusion’. But today, we know that even very young infants have already begun to make sense of their world. They integrate sights and sounds, recognise the people who care for them, and even expect that people and other animate objects – but not inert objects – can move on their own.

Very young infants also tune in to the natural melodies carried in the lilting stream of language. These melodies are especially compelling in ‘motherese’, the singsong patterns that we tend to adopt spontaneously when we speak to infants and young children. Gradually, as infants begin to tease out distinct words and phrases, they tune in not only to the melody, but also to the meaning of the message.

Once infants utter their first words, typically at around their first birthdays, we can be sure that they have begun to harness the sounds of language to meaning. In my own family, after nearly a year of guessing what my daughters’ babbles might mean, their first words – datoo (bottle), Gaja (Roger, a beloved dog), uppie (a plea for someone to pick her up) – assured me, in a heartbeat, that they do speak my language!

In all cultures, babies’ first words are greeted with special joy. This joy is testimony to the power of language – a signature of our species and our most powerful cultural and cognitive convention. Language permits us to share the contents of our hearts and minds, in ways that are unparalleled elsewhere in the animal kingdom. It is the conduit through which we learn from and about others, across generations and across cultures.

But how, and when, do infants begin to link language to meaning?

We know that the path of language acquisition begins long before infants charm us with their first words. From the beginning, infants are listening, and they clearly prefer some sounds over others. How could we possibly know this? Newborn infants can’t point to what they like or crawl away from what they don’t. But when infants’ interest is captured by a particular sight or sound, they will suck rapidly and vigorously on a pacifier.

Using rates of sucking as a metric, infancy researchers have discovered that, at birth, infants prefer hearing the vocalisations of humans and non-human primates. Then, within months, they narrow their preference specifically to human vocalisations. And toward the end of their first year, infants become ‘native listeners’, homing in with increasing precision on the particular sounds of their own native language.

So, the early preference of newborns for listening to language sets the stage for them to zero in on their own native language sounds and to discover its words and syntax. But only recently did we discover that listening to language benefits more than language acquisition alone. It also boosts infants’ cognition.

by Sandra Waxman, Aeon |  Read more:

Image: markk

Socks

In Anna Karenina, the day after the fateful ball, resolved to forget Vronsky and resume her peaceful life with her son and husband (“my life will go on in the old way, all nice and as usual”), Anna settles herself in her compartment in the overnight train from Moscow to St. Petersburg, and takes out an uncut English novel, probably one by Trollope judging from references to fox hunting and Parliament. Tolstoy, of course, says nothing about a translation—educated Russians knew English as well as French. In contrast, very few educated English speakers have read the Russian classics in the original and, until recent years, they have largely depended on two translations, one by the Englishwoman Constance Garnett and the other by the English couple Louise and Aylmer Maude, made respectively in 1901 and 1912. The distinguished Slavic scholar and teacher Gary Saul Morson once wrote about the former:

I love Constance Garnett, and wish I had a framed picture of her on my wall, since I have often thought that what I do for a living is teach the Collected Works of Constance Garnett. She has a fine sense of English, and, especially, the sort of English that appears in British fiction of the realist period, which makes her ideal for translating the Russian masterpieces. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were constantly reading and learning from Dickens, Trollope, George Eliot and others. Every time someone else redoes one of these works, reviewers say that the new version replaces Garnett; and then another version comes out, which, apparently, replaces Garnett again, and so on. She must have done something right.

Morson wrote these words in 1997, and would recall them bitterly. Since that time a sort of asteroid has hit the safe world of Russian literature in English translation. A couple named Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have established an industry of taking everything they can get their hands on written in Russian and putting it into flat, awkward English. Surprisingly, these translations, far from being rejected by the critical establishment, have been embraced by it and have all but replaced Garnett, Maude, and other of the older translations. When you go to a bookstore to buy a work by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol, or Chekhov, most of what you find is in translation by Pevear and Volokhonsky.

In an article in the July/August 2010 issue of Commentary entitled “The Pevearsion of Russian Literature,” Morson used the word “tragedy” to express his sense of the disaster that has befallen Russian literature in English translation since the P&V translations began to appear. To Morson “these are Potemkin translations—apparently definitive but actually flat and fake on closer inspection.” Morson fears that “if students and more-general readers choose P&V…[they] are likely to presume that whatever made so many regard Russian literature with awe has gone stale with time or is lost to them.”

In the summer of 2015 an interview with the rich and happy couple appeared in The Paris Review. The interviewer—referring to a comment Pevear had made to David Remnick in 2005—asked him: “You once said that one of your subliminal aims as a translator was ‘to help energize English itself.’ Can you explain what you mean?” Pevear was glad to do so:

It seemed to me that American fiction had become very bland and mostly self-centered. I thought it needed to break out of that. One thing I love about translating is the possibility it gives me to do things that you might not ordinarily do in English. I think it’s a very important part of translating. The good effect of translating is this cross-pollination of languages. Sometimes we get criticized—this is too literal, this is a Russianism—but I don’t mind that. Let’s have a little Russianism. Let’s use things like inversions. Why should they be eliminated? I guess if you’re a contemporary writer, you’re not supposed to do it, but as a translator I can. I love this freedom of movement between the two languages. I think it’s the most important thing for me—that it should enrich my language, the English language.

This bizarre idea of the translator’s task only strengthens one’s sense of the difficulty teachers of Russian literature in translation face when their students are forced to read the Russian classics in Pevear’s “energized” English. I first heard of P&V in 2007 when I received an e-mail from the writer Anna Shapiro:

I finished the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation of Anna Karenina a few weeks ago and I’m still more or less stewing about it. It leaves such a bad taste; it’s so wrong, and so oddly wrong, turning nourishment into wood. I wouldn’t have thought it possible. I’ve always maintained that Tolstoy was unruinable, because he’s such a simple writer, words piled like bricks, that it couldn’t matter; that he’s a transparent writer, so you can’t really get the flavor wrong, because in many ways he tries to have none. But they have, they’ve added some bad flavor, whereas even when Garnett makes sentences like “Vronsky eschewed farinaceous foods” it does no harm…. I imagine Pevear thinking he’s CORRECTING Tolstoy; that he’s really the much better writer.

When I leafed through the P&V translation of Anna Karenina I understood what Anna Shapiro was stewing about. The contrast to Garnett glared out at me. Garnett’s fine English, her urgent forward-moving sentences, her feeling for words—all this was gone, replaced by writing that is like singing or piano playing by someone who is not musical. For example:

Garnett: All his efforts to draw her into open discussion she confronted with a barrier that he could not penetrate, made up of a sort of amused perplexity.

P&V: To all his attempts at drawing her into an explanation she opposed the impenetrable wall of some cheerful perplexity.

Or:

Garnett: After taking leave of her guests, Anna did not sit down, but began walking up and down the room. She had unconsciously the whole evening done her utmost to arouse in Levin a feeling of love—as of late she had fallen into doing with all young men—and she knew she had attained her aim, as far as was possible in one evening, with a married and honorable man. She liked him very much, and, in spite of the striking difference, from the masculine point of view, between Vronsky and Levin, as a woman she saw something they had in common, which had made Kitty able to love both. Yet as soon as he was out of the room, she ceased to think of him.

P&V: After seeing her guests off, Anna began pacing up and down the room without sitting down. Though for the whole evening (lately she had acted the same way towards all young men) she had unconsciously done everything she could to arouse a feeling of love for her in Levin, and though she knew that she had succeeded in it, as far as one could with regard to an honest, married man in one evening, and though she liked him very much (despite the sharp contrast, from a man’s point of view, between Levin and Vronsky, as a woman she saw what they had in common, for which, too, Kitty had loved them both), as soon as he left the room, she stopped thinking about him. (...)

Another argument for putting Tolstoy into awkward contemporary-sounding English has been advanced by Pevear and Volokhonsky, and, more recently, by Marian Schwartz, namely that Tolstoy himself wrote in awkward Russian and that when we read Garnett or Maude we are not reading the true Tolstoy. Arguably, Schwartz’s attempt to “re-create Tolstoy’s style in English” surpasses P&V’s in ungainliness. Schwartz actually ruins one of the most moving scenes in the novel—when Kitty, fending off her sister’s attempt to comfort her for Vronsky’s rejection, lashes out and reminds her of her degraded position vis-à-vis the womanizing Stiva. After the outburst the sisters sit in silence. In Garnett’s version:

The silence lasted for a minute or two. Dolly was thinking of herself. That humiliation of which she was always conscious came back to her with a peculiar bitterness when her sister reminded her of it. She had not expected such cruelty from her sister, and she was angry with her. But suddenly she heard the rustle of a skirt, and with it the sound of heart-rending, smothered sobbing, and felt arms about her neck. 

Schwartz writes:

The silence lasted for a couple of minutes. Dolly was thinking about herself. Her humiliation, which was always with her, told especially painfully in her when her sister mentioned it. She had not anticipated such cruelty from her sister, and she was angry with her. Suddenly, however, she heard a dress and instead of the sound of sobs that had been held back too long, someone’s hands embracing her around the neck from below.

by Janet Malcolm, NY Review of Books |  Read more:

Image:Photofest, Vivien Leigh in Julien Duvivier’s adaptation of Anna Karenina, 1948

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Sushi Robots and Vending-Machine Pizza Will Reinvent the Automat

Decades from now, historians may look back on 2016 as the year Earthlings ate pizza from vending machines, bought burritos from a box in New York’s Grand Central Terminal and devoured sushi rolled by robots.

“Automation is coming whether we want it to come or not,” said Andy Puzder, chief executive officer of CKE Restaurants Inc., which owns the Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr. fast-food chains. “It’s everywhere. It’s in everything.”

At a time when more consumers are embracing hand-made artisanal foods, 24/7 Pizza Box, Burritobox and Sushi Station are headed in the other direction. Vending-machine pizza will start popping up in Florida later this year and chipotle-chicken burritos, accompanied by guacamole and salsa, can now be ordered from an automated box. Sushi-making robots from Japan are already operating in U.S. restaurants and university cafeterias.

Vending machines are a $7.52 billion business that’s growing in the U.S., according to researcher IBISWorld Inc. Sales rose 3.3 percent last year and are expected to gain 1.8 percent a year, on average, through 2020. But most have nothing to do with freshly cooked food. The leaders are Outerwall Inc., which dispenses movies through Redbox, and Compass Group Plc, which sells snacks.

Millennials, accustomed to apps and online services such as Uber Technologies Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and GrubHub Inc., increasingly don’t want to interact with other humans when ordering dinner, calling a cab or stocking up on toilet paper. That’s why eateries including McDonald’s Corp., Panera Bread Co. and CKE Restaurants are investing in kiosks and tablets so customers can also feed their misanthropy. (...)

For those who may think eating lunch out of a vending machine is gross, Koci said he understands.

“I get it. But this is not a vending machine, it’s an automated restaurant,” he said. “There are real humans making the burritos. Everything is handmade.”

No, those humans are not super-small and no, they don’t toil in the machines. The burritos are made in kitchens that also supply restaurants, sometimes flash-frozen, and then shipped to the boxes. They’re defrosted before going into the machines. An employee checks the boxes once a day to make sure there’s fresh inventory.

The vending machines harken back to the Automat, a 20th-century fast-food restaurant that featured cubbyholes with food items behind glass doors. Put coins in a slot and the door would open for a gratuity-free snack or meal.

The bright orange Burritoboxes are higher tech. They have a touch screen, mobile-phone charging station and live-chat customer service in case there’s an issue. It takes about 90 seconds to heat a complete meal, including Cinnabon-brand gooey bites for dessert. Customers can watch music videos on the touch screen while waiting.

by Leslie Patton, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: 24/7 Pizza Box

How the Sense of an Ending Shapes Memory

Many years ago, I listened to a string quartet perform a challenging piece of contemporary music. The piece, we were told, represented a journey of suffering and redemption. It would descend into discordant screeching for nearly 20 minutes before finally resolving harmoniously. The small concert hall was packed — there were even people seated on stage behind the performers — so there was little choice but to stick it out.

Everything unfolded as promised. The performance sounded like a succession of cats being tossed into a food processor. Eventually, though, the dissonance became resonance, the chaos became calm. It was beautiful.

But then came a sound that had not been in the score; the electronic peal of a mobile phone rang out across the tranquil auditorium. To make matters worse, the beeping arpeggios were emerging from the pocket of an audience member who was sitting on the stage. He was so close to the performers that he could easily have been downed by a solid backhand swing with the viola. It must have been tempting.

The music had been ruined. But it’s curious that 20 minutes of listening can be redeemed or destroyed by what happened in a few moments at the conclusion.

Daniel Kahneman, psychologist and Nobel laureate, tells a similar story about a man enraptured by a symphony recording that is ruined by a hideous screech — a scratch on the vinyl — in the final moments.

“But the experience was not actually ruined,” writes Kahneman, “only the memory of it.” After all, both concerts were almost complete when interrupted. The lived experience had been unblemished until the final moments. The remembered experience was awful.

When we recall things — a concert, a holiday, a bout of flu — we do not play out the recollection minute by minute like a movie in our minds. Instead, we tell ourselves a little story about what happened. And these stories have their own logic in which the order of events makes a difference. (...)

Of course, it is no coincidence that the best bit of the music was at the finale: composers, like novelists and film directors, try to end on a high.

Restaurants keen to manipulate their online reviews have discovered a similar trick: twice recently I’ve dined at restaurants in unfamiliar towns that were highly rated on TripAdvisor. Both times, the food was good but unremarkable. Both times, the proprietor pressed gifts upon us as we left — a free glass of grappa, a nice corkscrew. It seems that when people thought back and wrote their reviews, they remembered this pleasant send-off. That makes sense: if you want people to remember you fondly, it’s best to engineer things so that the last thing they remember of you is something other than signing a bill.

by Tim Harford, Undercover Economist |  Read more:

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The Art of Pivoting

It’s June 2016 and I’m packing my bags to move back to Germany after 12 years of academic research at the University of Cambridge and surrounding institutes, like the famous MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, forge of Nobel Prizes and home to eminent scientists like Watson & Crick, Sanger, Perutz, the ones you know from Jeopardy or biochemistry textbooks. I had come from a Max-Planck-Institute in Germany, where I had previously completed a life science PhD in slightly under three years. When I started my degree there in 2001, I had been the fastest student to fulfil the requirements for the Diplom in biology at my home university — and already had two peer-reviewed publications in my pocket. You may see the trajectory: success, efficiency, coming from good places, going to good places; the basic ingredients for a successful academic career.

My wife and I had moved to Cambridge in 2004 to both do a brief postdoc abroad. Spice up the CV a bit, meet interesting people before settling down with a normal job back in the home country, that sort of stuff. The work I did was advanced and using technology not available to many people in Europe outside Cambridge at the time, but not revolutionary. However, combining experimental molecular biology and computational analysis of large biological datasets had just seen its first great successes, and I was a man in demand with my coding skills. Publications are the number one currency to climb the academic ladder and, by 2007, I had accumulated enough credit both in terms of scientific output as well as reputation in the field that I seriously considered an academic career for life.

Here, it may need to be explained to everyone who hasn’t spent time in academia why seriously considered is the appropriate phrase. It was a conscious decision for the long game. It’s the Tour de France or Iron Man of a career. You have to believe that you can do it and secure a position against all odds and a fierce competition. You have to be in it to win it. Chances are that you’re not going to make it, a fear that’s constantly present but there’s normally no-one you know who you could ask what life on the other side looks like, because failed academics -an arrogant view I held myself for a long time about those not making it- tend to disappear, ashamed and silent. Or get normal, unglorious jobs. According to my wife, who left academia when our second child was on the way, you got to be “stupid enough to commit to that”, given that academic salaries are poor compared even to entry-level industry positions, the workload is bigger, quite similar to that of running a start-up, and the so-called academic freedom is these days reduced to framing your interests into what funding bodies consider worth supporting.

Speaking of start-ups. 90% of start-ups fail. That’s a slightly better success rate than getting into the game that allows you to fight for a permanent academic position in the first place. In my cohort of Royal Society University Research Fellows, the success rate of obtaining a salary whilst building up a team was about 3%. What happens to the others who want to do science in academia? I’m sure many would not mind to stay postdoctoral scientists forever and pursue research in support of some other principal investigator (PI, a research group leader), but the system doesn’t cater well for that career track. Up is the only way. If you can’t make it to the group leader level, chances are that sooner or later you’re running out of funding. That’s because on the postgraduate level, especially after the financial crisis, there is a rather limited amount of money in the system that allows employment which resembles a regular job. Ambition, ego or an almost unreasonable love for the subject is the key driver for everyone else. Money is dished out competitively, and of course it’s considered an honour to be bringing your own salary to work unsocial hours for a rising star or established hot-shot. This sees many PhD level researchers leave academia sooner or later.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s just not what many of them had envisaged when they started their journey in university because they were hoping to do independent research in an academic setting. (...)

It’s a common joke that academics have a problem with time management because of their inability to say no. Everyone higher up the food chain tells young investigators to say no. No to teaching. No to committees. No to administrative duties. “Concentrate on your science, because that’s what you’re going to be assessed on”. At the same time, it’s very clear that if the choice is between two candidates, the better departmental citizen is more likely to be successful. In fact, my good citizenship was explicitly spelled out in my Head of Department’s recommendation letter to the Royal Society, while at the same time pointing out to me that I might want to consider a few less activities.

The rules about departmental citizenship are nowhere written. It’s just what you hear between the lines in comments about the poor performer who failed to do submit his part for a communal bid or the raised eyebrow about some lazy bastard who refused to teach. Unless the system discourages anyone with the ambition to secure a permanent post actively from taking on additional responsibilities, unestablished PIs are going to pour themselves into research, teaching, administration, outreach, you name it — at 110% of what’s healthy.

Add three little kids into that mix, and it may become clear why over time I’ve acquired a collection of meds vast enough to run a burn-out clinic. (...)

Five years into my Fellowship, I felt more and more like a chased rabbit. Work was not about science anymore, work had become that abstract thing you need to do in order to secure a post. Also, with all the activities I agreed to do and to participate in, the time I actually spent doing my own hands-on research had become marginal. While my research group was at its peak and, from the outside, I looked like a very successful scientist, my job and my attitude towards it had completely changed. I began to hate my job.

Running a prolific computational biology research team at the University of Cambridge, I imagined it would be easy to switch into a management role in pharmaceutical R&D. I sent a few applications and had a few telephone conversations, but very soon it emerged that I did not have the relevant qualifications -that is: no business experience- to successfully run a group in industry. My wife explained to me that I had long surpassed the point-of-no-return, because just as you have to earn your stripes in academia to be trusted with directing research, you do have to have industrial project experience and considerable domain knowledge about drug development to be trusted with a R&D team. My most realistic chance would be a more technical role, at least to start with.

Swallowing my pride, I applied for Senior Scientist positions, or, as I thought of it, I applied to become a compute monkey for someone with a lot less academic credibility. However, while next-generation sequencing, gene expression analysis, pathway reconstruction and pipeline development were all happening in my own research group, I was clearly not the one who knew the nitty-gritty of their implementation anymore. The interviews were humiliating. “What’s your favourite Bioconductor package for RNA-seq?” — “Uh, I’d have to ask my PhD student for that.” “How do you force the precise calculation of p-values in kruskal.test?” — “I’d google it!”. Needless to say, I didn’t get a single offer.

by Boris Adryan, Medium | Read more:
Image: uncredited

How Americans Came to Die in the Middle East

The writing of this historical synopsis began yesterday, Memorial Day. It is an attempt by this former artillery officer with a father buried in a veteran’s cemetery to understand why brave Americans were sent to their death in the Middle East and are still dying there.

The hope is that we finally can learn from history and not keep repeating the same mistakes.

It’s important to stick to the facts, since the history of the Middle East already has been grossly distorted by partisan finger-pointing and by denial and cognitive dissonance among the politicians, foreign policy experts (in their own minds), and media blowhards and literati on the left and right, who now claim that they had nothing to do with grievous policy mistakes that they had once endorsed.

The key question, as in all history, is where to begin the history lesson.

We could go all the way back to religious myths, especially the ones about Moses and the Ten Commandments and about Mohammed and his flying horse. Or on a related note, we could go back to the schism that took place between Shia and Sunni Muslims in the seventh century. Such history is relevant, because American soldiers have been foolishly inserted in the middle of the competing myths and irreconcilable schism, but without the inserters acknowledging the religious minefields and steering clear of them.

We also could go back to the First World War and the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, when France and Britain carved up the Middle East into unnatural client states, when Arabs were given false promises of self-determination, when American geologists masqueraded as archeologists as they surreptitiously surveyed for oil, and when the United States joined Saudi Arabia at the hip through the joint oil venture of Aramco.

Another starting point could be 1948, when the United States, under the lead of President Truman, supported the formal establishment of the Jewish State of Israel, thus reversing the longstanding opposition to Zionism by many (most?) American and European Jews and non-Jews. One can endlessly debate the plusses and minuses of our alliance with Israel, as well as the morality of Israel’s violent founding and the violent Palestinian resistance. But it’s undeniable that the alliance has led many Muslims to put a target on Uncle Sam’s back.

Still another starting point could be the 1953 coup d’état against the democratically-elected Iranian President Mohammad Mosaddegh, orchestrated by the CIA in conjunction with the Brits. The coup was triggered when Mosaddegh demanded an auditing of the books of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, a British company known today as BP. He threatened nationalization when the British refused to allow the audit. He was replaced by the Shah of Iran, who was seen by many Iranians and Arabs as a puppet of the United States. (Ironically, during the Second World War, Great Britain and the Soviet Union had occupied Iran and deposed an earlier shah.)

It’s considered unpatriotic to ask how my fellow Americans would feel if the tables had been turned and Iranians had deposed an American president and replaced him with their lackey. Therefore, I won’t ask.

It also would be unpatriotic to ask how we’d feel if Iranians had shot down one of our passenger jets, as we had shot down one of theirs in 1988 as it was crossing the Persian Gulf to Dubai from Tehran. Again, I’m not asking.

Anyway, let’s return to the Shah. Starting with President Nixon and continuing with President Carter, the USA sold weapons to the Shah worth billions of dollars. There was even an agreement to sell nuclear reactors to him. Those weapons would later be used by Iran against the U.S. in the Persian Gulf after we had sided with Saddam Hussein in his war against Iran.

At a state dinner in Tehran on December 31, 1977, the Shah toasted President Carter. Carter responded effusively, saying that Iran was “an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world.” He went on to say: This is a great tribute to you, Your Majesty, and to your leadership and to the respect and the admiration and love which your people give to you.”

Actually, most Iranians hated the Shah. Two years later, on January 16, 1979, the unpopular Shah fled into exile after losing control of the country to Shiite cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his Iranian Revolution.

Then in October of that year, Carter allowed the Shah to come to the USA for medical treatment. Responding with rage, Iranian students stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran and took embassy personnel hostage, in a hostage drama that would last 444 days, including a failed attempt to rescue the hostages that left dead American soldiers and burnt helicopters in Iran. The drama ended on the day that Carter left office.

But none of the above events is where our history of American lives lost in the Middle East should begin. It should begin in the summer of 1979, with a report written by a low-level Defense Department official by the name of Paul Wolfowitz. His “Limited Contingency Study” assessed the political, geopolitical, sectarian, ethnic, and military situation in the Middle East and recommended a more active American involvement in the region, including possible military intervention to blunt the Soviet Union’s influence, protect our access to oil, and thwart the ambitions of Iraq under its dictator, Saddam Hussein.

Wolfowitz would later become a deputy to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld under the presidency of George W. Bush.

Note that Wolfowitz’s paper was written long before 9/11 and long before the toppling of Saddam Hussein in the Second Gulf War after he was accused of having weapons of mass destruction.

Until the Wolfowitz report, the USA had taken a rather passive and indirect role in the Middle East, placing it secondary to other geopolitical matters and using proxies and intelligence “spooks” to protect its interests in the region. Of course this low-level interference in the affairs of other nations was not seen as low level by the targets of the actions. To use common vernacular, it pissed them off, just as it would have pissed us off if the roles had been reversed. But again, it’s unpatriotic to consider the feelings of others, especially if they are seen as the enemy, or backwards, or religious zealots.

Strategic and tactical thinking began to change with the Wolfowitz paper. Plans started to be developed for military action to replace more benign approaches. Eventually, the plans indeed resulted in military actions, ranging from full-scale war to bombing from the air to drone warfare, in such places as Lebanon, Afghanistan, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia (the locale of “Blackhawk Down”), with side actions outside of the Middle East in Bosnia and Kosovo.

In each case the American military performed admirably and often exceptionally, but less so for Defense Department analysts, for Congress and the White House, for the press on the left and right, or for the public at large—most of whom got caught up in the passions of the moment and didn’t understand the cultures they were dealing with and didn’t think through the unintended consequences of military actions in lands where Western concepts of justice, fairness, equality, tolerance, pluralism, religious freedom, diversity, and multiculturalism were as foreign and out of place as an American tourist wearing flipflops and shorts in a mosque.

by Craig Cantoni, Mish Talk | Read more:
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A New Theory Explains How Consciousness Evolved

Ever since Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, evolution has been the grand unifying theory of biology. Yet one of our most important biological traits, consciousness, is rarely studied in the context of evolution. Theories of consciousness come from religion, from philosophy, from cognitive science, but not so much from evolutionary biology. Maybe that’s why so few theories have been able to tackle basic questions such as: What is the adaptive value of consciousness? When did it evolve and what animals have it?

The Attention Schema Theory (AST), developed over the past five years, may be able to answer those questions. The theory suggests that consciousness arises as a solution to one of the most fundamental problems facing any nervous system: Too much information constantly flows in to be fully processed. The brain evolved increasingly sophisticated mechanisms for deeply processing a few select signals at the expense of others, and in the AST, consciousness is the ultimate result of that evolutionary sequence. If the theory is right—and that has yet to be determined—then consciousness evolved gradually over the past half billion years and is present in a range of vertebrate species.

Even before the evolution of a central brain, nervous systems took advantage of a simple computing trick: competition. Neurons act like candidates in an election, each one shouting and trying to suppress its fellows. At any moment only a few neurons win that intense competition, their signals rising up above the noise and impacting the animal’s behavior. This process is called selective signal enhancement, and without it, a nervous system can do almost nothing.

by Michael Graziano, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Chris Helgren / Reuters

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