Singing the Blues

Millgram et al (2015) find that depressed people prefer to listen to sad rather than happy music. This matches personal experience; when I'm feeling down, I also prefer sad music. But why? Try setting aside all your internal human knowledge: wouldn’t it make more sense for sad people to listen to happy music, to cheer themselves up?

A later study asks depressed people why they do this. They say that sad music makes them feel better, because it’s more "relaxing" than happy music. They’re wrong. Other studies have shown that listening to sad music makes depressed people feel worse, just like you’d expect. And listening to happy music makes them feel better; they just won’t do it.

I prefer Millgram’s explanation: there's something strange about depressed people's mood regulation. They deliberately choose activities that push them into sadder rather than happier moods. This explains not just why they prefer sad music, but sad environments (eg staying in a dark room), sad activities (avoiding their friends and hobbies), and sad trains of thought (ruminating on their worst features and on everything wrong with their lives).

Why should this be?

Let’s review control theory, ie the theory of homeostasis and bodily set points.

Many of your body systems have set points. For example, your temperature set point is usually around 98.6 degrees F. If you’re out in the snow and get colder than 98.6, your body will kick in various heating mechanisms (like shivering) until it’s back at the set point. If you’re out in the desert and get hotter than 98.6, it will kick in cooling mechanisms (like sweating) until it’s back.

Your inner thermostat acts through both conscious and unconscious processes. The examples above - shivering and sweating - are mostly unconscious. The conscious process is that when your body goes too far below 98.6, it makes “your conscious mind” “feel” “cold”. That “incentivizes” “you”, the “conscious” “actor”, to do things like go indoors, or put on a jacket, or turn on your space heater. You can think of the feeling of coldness as the conscious projection of the wider homeostatic drive to become warmer.

Although specific set points (eg 98.6) are set by evolution, they’re not hard-coded. Master regulatory systems can change set points in response to changing demands. For example, when you get infected by a heat-sensitive pathogen, your immune system might choose to boil it away, and increase your inner thermostat to (let’s say) 102 (instead of 98.6). Now you have a fever.

The funny thing about fevers is that you feel cold. Someone with a fever shivers. They demand to cover themselves in blankets. All of this makes sense, right? Your inner thermostat notices you’re at 98.6, and that’s colder than the desired temperature of 102. So it activates unconscious regulatory processes (like shivering) and conscious regulatory processes (like making you feel cold). Since you consciously feel cold, you engage in heat-seeking behaviors. You cover yourself in blankets, or turn up the space heater. This seems paradoxical (why does someone with a fever, ie someone who is too hot, feel cold?!) but it’s perfectly logical from the control theory perspective. (...)

Now let’s take it all the way:

In depression, you are dangerously sad, but instead of trying to cheer up, you feel “driven” to perform behaviors that make you even sadder. (...)

Depression is often precipitated by some psychosocial event (like loss of a job, or the death of a loved one). It’s natural to feel sad for a little while after this. But instead of correctly activating regulatory processes to get mood back to normal, the body accepts the new level as its new set point, and tries to defend it.

By “defend it”, I mean that healthy people have a variety of mechanisms to stop being sad and get their mood back to a normal level. In depression, the patient appears to fight very hard to prevent mood getting back to a normal level. They stay in a dark room and avoid their friends. They even deliberately listen to sad music!

The feverish person feels too cold, and the anorexic person feels too fat, so we might expect the depressed person to feel too happy. I think something like this is true, if we put strong emphasis on the “too”. One of the official DSM symptoms of depression is “feelings of guilt/worthlessness”. A depressed person will frequently think things like “I don’t deserve my friends / job / money / talents.” In other words, they believe they’re too happy! They think they deserve to be sadder! (...)

Psychologists already suspect the existence of a happiness set point (thymostat?); this is the principle behind ideas like the "hedonic treadmill". So my theory here is that at least some cases of depression involve recalibrated happiness set points. A set point can either recalibrate randomly (ie for poorly understood biological reasons) or after a specific shock (ie interpreting a prolonged period of sadness as "the new normal"). Once a patient has a new, lower, happiness set point, their control system works to defend it. It enlists both biological systems (possibly changing the levels of various neurotransmitters?) and behavioral systems to defend the new set point. If it "succeeds", the person maintains an abnormally low mood.

by Scott Alexander, ACX |  Read more:

Video: Tony Joe White/YouTube

[ed. Here's Tony feeling better: Undercover Agent for the Blues.]

Fire Them All; God Will Know His Own: Harvard's Claudine Gay Resigns

In retrospect, Claudine Gay’s fate was sealed by a single word. (She resigned the presidency of Harvard on Tuesday, just six months into her tenure.) It wasn’t “plagiarism” or “genocide” — the fearsome fighting words most publicly associated with her case — but rather a careful, neutral piece of language that struck some listeners as outrageous for precisely that reason: an attempt at anti-inflammatory rhetoric that had the opposite effect. The word was “context.”

Testifying at a congressional hearing in early December with two other university presidents — only one of whom, Sally Kornbluth of M.I.T., still has her job — she was asked by Representative Elise Stefanik (Republican of New York; Harvard ’06) whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” violated “Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment.” Dr. Gay replied that it might, “depending on the context,” a formulation she reiterated when Ms. Stefanik rephrased the question. Dr. Gay later apologized for those remarks, but they had already entered the media bloodstream, making her and her fellow witnesses an overnight meme representing the insensitivity and cluelessness of elite academic leadership.

Now that Dr. Gay is out (following M. Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, who resigned shortly after the hearing), there is more than enough context to go around. Her career, until last July a steady, brisk climb through faculty and administrative ranks to the pinnacle of American higher education, has become a punditic bonanza and a culture-war Rorschach test. (...)

The Israel-Hamas conflict and American election-year politics are not the only salient context here. Academia seems to be in the grip of a multidimensional crisis that goes beyond ideology, and also beyond Harvard. Higher learning is plagued by opaque admissions policies; runaway tuition costs; administrative bloat; grade inflation; helicopter parents; cancel culture. The list goes on. An assiduous scholar might connect these phenomena with recent events in Harvard Yard. An enterprising writer could weave the whole thing into a bristling campus novel, something worthy of Paul Beatty or Mary McCarthy.

Instead, for now, we will have to make do with Dr. Gay’s letter of resignation — emailed to students, faculty, alumni and others with the subject line “Personal News” — and the message from the Harvard Corporation (the university’s secretive governing body) about her departure.

What is most striking about these texts — each amounting to little more than 600 words, all of them carefully measured, few of them memorable — is their rigorous avoidance of context. No mention is made of Congress, or Gaza, or anything that might actually explain what happened. “We live in difficult and troubling times,” the corporation’s letter asserts, “and formidable challenges lie ahead.” The nature of the trouble is mainly left unspoken, in keeping with an overall commitment to abstraction, as if bland, nonspecific language could wash away the difficulty. It’s only when the letters note what the corporation calls the “repugnant and in some cases racist vitriol” Dr. Gay faced as Harvard’s first Black president that they register some of the rawness and rage of contemporary reality. (...)

What’s curious, though, is that Harvard, which compels its undergraduates to master expository writing in their freshman year, cannot find the language to defend itself. The corporation does not apologize or explain. Instead, it throws up its hands in prayer: “May our community, with its long history of rising through change and through storm, find new ways to meet those challenges together, and to affirm Harvard’s commitment to generating knowledge, pursuing truth and contributing through scholarship and education to a better world.”

The clouds of mystification gather early. Can a nearly 400-year-old entity that began as a seminary for young Protestant men and grew into a global educational brand with a $50 billion endowment be said in any meaningful sense to constitute a community? The sentence then succumbs to a storm of clattering prose and conceptual incoherence. It’s hard to know just what or how many things Harvard is committed to, or what new ways of affirming that commitment might be found.

by A.O. Scott, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Adam Glanzman for The New York Times
[ed. Covered previously here, in this post: 'The Only War is Culture War'. Now: Harvard Must Learn The Lessons of President Gay’s Troubled Tenure; and, The Rise and Fall of Harvard President Claudine Gay (Harvard Crimson). Finally, see also: Fire Them All; God Will Know His Own (Harvard Crimson):]

***

"Across the University, for every academic employee there are approximately 1.45 administrators. When only considering faculty, this ratio jumps to 3.09. Harvard employs 7,024 total full-time administrators, only slightly fewer than the undergraduate population. What do they all do? (...)

For example, last December, all Faculty of Arts and Sciences affiliates received an email from Dean Claudine Gay announcing the final report of the FAS Task Force on Visual Culture and Signage, a task force itself created by recommendation of the Presidential Task Force on Inclusion and Belonging. This task force was composed of 24 members: six students, nine faculty members, and nine administrators. The task force produced a 26-page report divided into seven sections, based upon a survey, focus groups, and 15 separate meetings with over 500 people total. The report dedicated seven pages to its recommendations, which ranged from “Clarify institutional authority over FAS visual culture and signage” to “Create a dynamic program of public art in the FAS.” In response to these recommendations, Dean Gay announced the creation of a new administrative post, the “FAS campus curator,” and a new committee, the “FAS Standing Committee on Visual Culture and Signage.”

Regardless of your stance on the goal of fostering a more inclusive visual culture, the procedural absurdity is clear. A presidential task force led to the creation of an FAS task force which, after expending significant time, effort, and resources, led to the creation of a single administrative job and a committee with almost the exact name as the second task force. I challenge anyone other than the task force members themselves to identify the value created for a single Harvard student’s educational experience.

Such a ridiculous process may seem relatively harmless, but the aggregation of these frivolous, bureaucratic time-and-money-wasters may have made college as outrageously expensive as it is. In 1986, Harvard’s tuition was $10,266 ($27,914 adjusted for inflation). Today, Harvard’s tuition is $52,659, representing an 89 percent increase in real cost. The Harvard education is certainly not 89 percent better than it was 36 short years ago, nor is it 89 percent more difficult to provide. Rather, the increased cost seems to lie within the administration and its tendency to solve problems by hiring even more administrators. In a 25-year timespan within the same window, American colleges added over 500,000 administrators at a hiring rate double that for faculty."

Hula Girl Obsessions

How America's Obsession With Hula Girls Almost Wrecked Hawai'i (Collector's Weekly)

You’ve seen her hanging around tiki bars, swiveling her hips seductively but woodenly indifferent to the scene around her. She’s often found bobbing and playing ‘ukulele on the dashboard of cars, dangling from key rings, lounging under palm trees on matchbook covers, and thanklessly holding up lampshades. Often scantily clad or topless, her uniform may include a grass skirt, a coconut bra, bright floral fabrics, and flowers in her hair. She beams from Hawaiian tourism brochures, and her most modest incarnation meets travelers arriving by plane or ship, lovingly placing a lei around their necks.

She’s the comely Hula Girl, the ever-present icon beckoning Westerners to Hawai‘i—and she’s about as grounded in reality as Disney’s Enchanted Tiki Room. Certainly, the hula is an actual ancient Hawaiian dance form, which has shifted and morphed during 200-plus years of Western contact. But popularized images of female hula dancers have deviated far from their origins, perpetuating stereotypes that have had devastating impacts on perceptions of Hawai‘i.

Image: Universal Fruit & Produce Co.

Disjunction & Surprise

Row, row, row your boat
gently down the stream.
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
life is but a dream.

What happens in the first three lines of this familiar poem? In the first line the scene is set. The reader and the speaker are rowing a boat. Note how the repetition of the word ‘row’ and the repetitive rhythm textually mirror the real-life act of rowing. The sentence of the first line continues on the second line. Where are we? We are still in the stream. Still rowing. ‘gently down the stream’ modifies all those verbs ‘row’ in the first line. Again, note how the rhythm is expressive of the act – which does a lot to put us, as readers, in the world of the poem, with the speaker. The lines are moving with the pace and feel of a boat being rowed through water. What happens on the third line? A bunch of ‘merrily’’s over and over. Are we still in the stream? Certainly. Merrily modifies or describes the emotional state of the rowing.

But what about the fourth line? It’s a pretty grand declaration – about the nature of existence, no less – and one that has little, specifically, to do with boats and rowing. In some ways this poem, as a whole, is built entirely to set us up for a surprise ending. To lull us into a state of dreamy, lazy ‘merriment’ – only to pull the rug out from under us at the end with a deceptively simple commentary on the fleeting, and possibly even false, nature of life itself. Is life ‘but a dream’?

Mark Leidner, University of Iowa | Read more:
Image: uncredited via

[ed. I know, not rowing, and those aren't boats. Disjunction and surprise. See also: The Disjunctive Dragonfly: A Study of Disjunctive Method and Definitions in Contemporary English‑language Haiku (Haiku Research); with a more concise/understandable summary here.]

The Hofmann Wobble

Wikipedia and the problem of historical memory

At twenty-six, in 2006, the year before the iPhone launched, I found myself driving a red Subaru Outback—the color was technically “claret metallic,” the friend who’d lent me the car had told me, in case I ever wanted to touch up the paint—on Highway 12 in Utah. I was heading to the East Bay after a painful breakup in New York. I remember, wrongly, that I was listening to a book on tape, a work by a prominent linguist, as I moved through the alien landscape, jagged formations of red rock towering against a cloudless sky.

Consider the metaphorical association of argument and war, the linguist says in my memory, the way we speak of “attacking” or “defending” our “position.” If we frame an argument metaphorically as armed conflict then we will think of our interlocutor as an enemy. But what would happen, the voice asked me as I gripped the wheel with both hands, tense from fifteen hours of continuous driving, having pulled over only for gas and Red Bull and granola bars and Camels since departing Omaha, where I’d napped and showered at the childhood home of a college friend—what would happen if we shifted the metaphorical frame and thought of argument as a kind of dance, as a series of steps undertaken with the goal of mutual expression, satisfaction, even pleasure?

The wheel began to shake in my hands; the road had grown slick, as though with oil. I thought something was wrong with the car and I slowed down, then pulled over. There was no traffic; my solitude was total. I got out to look at the tires. It took me a few seconds to comprehend what I was seeing, what I was standing on. There were these very large, very black crickets everywhere, a dark sensate carpet covering the road, extending hundreds of yards into the distance on either side of me. I must already have crushed thousands of them. They were perfectly indifferent to my presence; without adjusting their pace, they moved over my shoes. If I’d had a smartphone, I would have protected myself by taking a video, establishing a frame. A slow black wave spilling over the highway and across the arid soil. My car was still on, the audiobook still playing: Here are three tools for identifying implicit metaphor.

The mass of migrating insects, the sound of the voice in the empty car talking of inducers and concurrents over the engine noise—in my mind, this is where this story began. There was simply no contact between the language filling the car and the world to which it supposedly referred. It was as though I heard the recorded voice the way the crickets might, not through my ears, but through tympanal organs on my leg that vibrate in response to vibrating air. Or maybe I heard the voice in the car as mere stridulation, and the prominent linguist was the insect. Needless to say, all of these words are wrong. But as I stood there—dusk was falling, or dusk was rising from the ground, from the innumerable exoskeletons—the terms of my own life reached a point of total unintelligibility. It began with the crickets, although Wikipedia says that what I saw were not “true crickets,” but a kind of shield-backed katydid.

The linguist had founded a think tank to bring his ideas about framing into progressive politics. You can’t argue effectively against something called “tax relief” from a left perspective because the metaphorical frame makes taxation an affliction. If a progressive assents to that frame—and so finds herself having to argue for “less relief,” more affliction—she has already lost. We have to generate new frames: taxation is patriotic investment.

Let’s say that I, having looked for any excuse to flee Brooklyn, had moved to the East Bay for a “new-media fellowship” at the linguist’s institute. I rented the first apartment I looked at, a studio I couldn’t afford in the rear of a yellow Arts and Crafts building on Derby Street, half a mile from the Berkeley campus. My windows opened onto a back garden with lemon and magnolia trees. I went to the Ikea in Emeryville and then, praying nobody would steal my boxes, had a ten-minute consultation in downtown Oakland with a doctor my sister had recommended, so I could get my medical marijuana prescription. Back “home” in my apartment, I unloaded and assembled a coffee table, two chairs, and a queen-size bed. See the little hex key. I’m alarmed to recall I got my mattress for free off Craigslist from a floridly insane woman who was wearing a bathrobe over her sweatshirt and jeans. I did not get bedbugs, but that first night in my apartment I seemed to dream the woman’s dreams. A man was chasing me (but I wasn’t me) down Telegraph with a knife, yelling that the knife was mine, that he just wanted to return it to me.

On my first day at the institute, a smiling man in his sixties named Anderson (I would never learn if this was his first or last name) who wore an I HEART ARUBA baseball cap and thrice mentioned his PhD in cog sci introduced me to the “team” (the linguist wasn’t there; nobody from the board was there) and then showed me to my desk, which was basically a library carrel. That they placed their New Media Fellow in a ponderous wooden structure (not even a cubicle) that could have been from the nineteenth century allowed me to relax about how badly I’d exaggerated my “tech savvy” in my application. (...)

I did an okay job talking about getting up to speed on the institute’s research (I’m particularly taken with the recent work around “tax relief”), its online presence, the lay of the land. I used some vocabulary from her books, but in a fashion that suggested I’d so thoroughly internalized her work that I was not aware of the homage I was paying it. I was performing like a person, but the periphery of my vision contracted just a little as I spoke, the crickets closing in. We are very hopeful that with your experience, Dr. Hofmann said, you can help us to figure out how best to leverage new technologies to get our message out. I did a lot of nodding. I wondered what she thought of as my relevant experience. Did “new technologies” mean anything more specific than the internet? “Settling in,” “up to speed,” “lay of the land,” dead metaphors; I vibrated in response to vibrating air. Perhaps at our group meeting the following month I would walk us through my plan.

I need another character so let’s say my cousin introduced me over email to a woman named Tam who taught social studies at Berkeley High. Even as I walked to the coffee shop I wasn’t sure I’d go in. I actually liked the musical staff tattoo she had on her left bicep, how there weren’t any notes. She had her niece’s EKG around the other. We took a walk in the rose garden and got high and when she asked about my work I cracked her up by telling her the truth: I have no idea what I’m supposed to be doing. The Ikea bed frame I’d assembled with a hex key barely held. I had not been with anyone but the woman in Brooklyn in several years. And for the past year or so it was always shadowed with the impasse over kids. I saw my room through the eight eyes of the yellow garden spider whose large circular web was just outside my window when I came. I can tell you’ve been carrying a lot of pain, Tam said. I picture her as in a long-term open relationship with a woman who was in Bolivia doing fieldwork for her PhD.

We were in bed one night in the third month of my fellowship, passing the vape balloon back and forth, real cats or raccoons setting off the fictional backyard motion lights at intervals, lighting up the foliage, the star-shaped flowers. She told me she’d had a funny experience in her summer-school class. A kid had clearly plagiarized his paper on Malcolm X. She googled the suspiciously coherent if not particularly well-written paragraphs and there they were, word for word, on Wikipedia, which was at that point relatively new. (New enough that I remembered that a lawyer friend had been absolutely scandalized to discover that a colleague had had it open on his desktop; he thought it was worse than porn, that the colleague should be fired.) Tam confronted the student in class about the plagiarism a day or two later and he denied it. So she walked him to the computer center and summoned the page to show him the passages. But they were gone. The kid’s smile, Tam said, made clear that he’d deleted or radically altered the text in question. Tam didn’t have any idea how to look at the edit history of the page so she just let it go. We laughed at his mixture of ingenuity, bravado, stupidity (wasn’t this more work than just writing a couple of boilerplate paragraphs?), and the strange mutability of sources now, with the dawn of open source. We went to sleep.

An hour later I sat up, wide awake. I went to the coffee table and opened my laptop and googled Malcolm X. Of course the first hit was Wikipedia; it had become the first hit for everything. Contained in Tam’s story were several things I’d only half-known at the time: People, especially young people, had begun to go first to Wikipedia for any and all information. Wikipedia was apparently so easy to edit that a failing student in summer school could do it. And even pages on major historical figures were alterable, up for grabs, not just the entries on obscure athletes or operas.

I spent an hour creating and editing a page for Elaine Hofmann, then made a page for her institute, adding links to Hofmann and the institute to a variety of other Wikipedia pages—I had no particular computer aptitude but the edits were easy enough to make. Then I turned my attention to “tax relief.” First and foremost I made it so that “tax relief” redirected you to a larger page called “tax loopholes.” I organized all the material in a way that emphasized—with various levels of subtlety—evasion, structural inequality, the patriotic importance of investing in the future. I added a slew of progressive sources from other websites. By dawn I was familiar with almost every aspect of the editorial interface and had some sense of how the talk pages—the pages behind the pages, where editors debate changes that they’ve made—functioned. When Tam, wearing one of my shirts, brought me coffee, I asked her to do me a big favor: I need her to assign the students an extra credit paper where they researched “tax relief” (her class had a unit on “government”). I explained why, probably making little sense. But she said she would and I asked her to show me anything that quoted Wikipedia or might be plagiarized from it.

At the institute’s all-group meeting a week later I presented a PowerPoint. A couple of slides about Wikipedia becoming the world’s “largest clearinghouse for information,” its scale, its reach. A slide of the old “tax relief” entry. A slide of the new one. And then I showed them slides from the student papers, demonstrated the uptake: “according to Wikipedia, what is often described as ‘tax relief’ is actually a type of ‘tax evasion,’ in which . . . ”; I highlighted language I’d written (stoned, in my underwear) and put it beside unattributed language in a second paper about taxation as patriotic. I kept pausing, thinking somebody would say something; others kept looking at Hofmann, who’d put her glasses on, and whose personal page (before and after) I now pulled up to flatter her. In their stunned silence, birdsong was audible. Only I could hear the silence of the crickets.

What we need, what I’m going to establish, is an ever-expanding phalanx of Wikipedia editors to create, reframe, and defend these pages, which are treated by more and more of the human population as both encyclopedia and news source. Of course, there will be challenges, complexities. But the fact that you have had, Dr. Hofmann, your groundbreaking insights into the importance of metaphorical framing at the precise moment when all existing frames are up for grabs at Wikipedia—well, I’ve been so excited about this project I’ve been finding it very hard to sleep.

by Ben Lerner, Harper's |  Read more:

Image: Dima Kashtalyan
[ed. A wild west story about early Wikipedia editing. More fascinating than you might think, and excellent writing!]

Banksy, champagne bottle rat
via:

On Cousins

And  the great cousin decline

Perhaps you’ve heard: Americans are having fewer children, on average, than they used to, and that has some people concerned. In the future, the elderly could outnumber the young, leaving not enough workers to pay taxes and fill jobs. Kids already have fewer siblings to grow up with, and parents have fewer kids to care for them as they age.

Oh, and people also have fewer cousins. But who’s talking about that?

Within many families—and I’m sorry to have to say this—cousins occupy a weird place. Some people are deeply close to theirs, but others see them as strangers. Some cousins live on the same block; some live on opposite sides of the world. That can all be true about any family relationship, but when it comes to this one, the spectrum stretches especially far. Despite being related by blood and commonly in the same generation, cousins can end up with completely different upbringings, class backgrounds, values, and interests. And yet, they share something rare and invaluable: They know what it’s like to be part of the same particular family. 

... cousin connections can be lovely because they exist in that strange gray area between closeness and distance—because they don’t follow a strict playbook. That tenuousness means you often need to opt in to cousin relationships, especially as an adult. And the bond that forms when you do might not be easy to replace. (...)

Your “vertical,” intergenerational bonds can be tight and tremendously meaningful, but they also tend to come with care duties, and a clear hierarchy: Think of a grandparent babysitting their child’s toddler, or an adult tending to their aging parent. At the same time, siblings can easily develop fraught dynamics because of their intense familiarity: Perhaps in childhood you fight over toys, and in adulthood, you argue over an inheritance or your parents’ eldercare.

The classic cousin relationship, relative to that, is amazingly uncomplicated. ... Pop culture is full of sibling antics: bickering, pranking, sticking up for one another in school. Fewer models demonstrate how cousins are supposed to interact.

Without a clear answer, some cousins just … don’t interact often. Only about 6 percent of adult cousins live in the same census tract (typically about the size of a neighborhood); the rest live an average of 237 miles apart. Jonathan Daw, a Penn State sociologist, told me that the rate at which adults donate a kidney to a cousin is quite low: While siblings make up 25 percent of living kidney-donor relationships, cousins constitute less than 4 percent. That’s likely not because they’d decline to give up a kidney, but because many people wouldn’t ask a cousin for something that significant in the first place. Organ donations, he told me, raise the question “What do we owe to each other?” For cousins, the answer might be “Not much.”

Still, a bond that’s light on responsibility doesn’t need to be weak. Researchers told me that cousins can be deeply important—perhaps because of the potential distance in the relationship, not in spite of it. (...)

They might also play a specific role in your larger support network (even if you wouldn’t ask them for a kidney). In one study, Reed and her colleagues found that in the fall of 2020, in the midst of pandemic isolation, about 14 percent of participants reported increasing communication with at least one cousin. The relationship, she said, seemed to be “activated in this time of crisis.” She thinks the fact that cousins are less likely to depend on one another for material help might actually make them well suited to give emotional solace. That can be especially relevant when family difficulties come up; a cousin might be one of the few people who understand your relatives’ eccentricities, virtues, and role within the clan. When a parent dies, Verdery told me, many people bond with their cousins, who just get it in a way others don’t.

That’s the funny thing about cousins: In all other areas of your life, you might not be alike at all. But knowing the nuances of your family ties through decades of exposure—however sporadic—is a form of closeness in itself. The low stakes of your own relationship can make you perfect allies—but the potential for detachment also means you have to work for it. You can intentionally insert yourselves into each other’s lives, or you can slowly fade out of them.

The latter scenario can be understandable. A lot of people, when they’re kids, might run around with their cousins on special occasions—and then go months without seeing them. Perhaps they start to realize that their bonds are somewhat arbitrary; they grow less and less relevant, and ever more awkward. Consider this, though: In middle age and older, the cohesion of a whole family can begin to depend on the bonds between cousins. Along with siblings, cousins become the ones organizing the reunions and the Thanksgiving meals. The slightly random houseguests in your younger years become the stewards of the family in your older ones—as do you.

by Faith Hill, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Stella Blackmon

Pat Metheny Group

[ed. Pat and Lyle. If you haven't seen Fandango (with a young Kevin Costner) you're missing one of the best movies ever  : )]

Twenty-One Species Declared Extinct This Year

Kauaʻi ʻōʻō

‘Grief is a rational response’: the 21 US species declared extinct this year (The Guardian)

Image: WikiMediaCommons

[ed. While extinction is a fairly common phenomenon (over time and various species), it appears to be accelerating. For a variety of reasons. See also: the post following this one.]

The bird flitted away – but a few moments later, when they hiked down to an old nest tree, they heard it again. Jacobi wanted to make sure his recorder was ready and working, so he rewound the tape and played it back.

Suddenly, ʻōʻō came soaring toward the researchers, singing its mellifluous song. It came so close that they didn’t need binoculars to see its glossy black feathers, and the peek of yellow at its tail.

“I thought, wow, this is fantastic!” Sincock said. Almost immediately, he deflated. The ʻōʻō had been drawn to a recording of its own voice – thinking it was another bird. “It came because it thought it heard something that it probably hadn’t heard for a long time – another of its kind,” he said. This bird was perhaps the last of his species, singing for a mate that would never come.

The Endangered Species Act: 50 Years Later

Fifty years ago tomorrow, on December 28, 1973, President Richard Nixon signed the Endangered Species Act into law. Declaring that Congress had determined that “various species of fish, wildlife, and plants in the United States have been rendered extinct as a consequence of economic growth and development untempered by adequate concern and conservation,” the act provided for the protection of endangered species.

Just over a decade before, in 1962, ecologist Rachel Carson had published Silent Spring, documenting how pesticides designed to eliminate insects were devastating entire ecosystems of linked organisms. The realization that human destruction of the natural world could make the planet uninhabitable spurred Congress in 1970 to create the Environmental Protection Agency. And in 1973, when Nixon called for stronger laws to protect species in danger of extinction, 194 Democrats and 160 Republicans in the House—99% of those voting—voted yes. Only four Republicans in the House voted no.

 

Such strong congressional support for protecting the environment signaled that a new era was at hand. While President Gerald Ford, who succeeded Nixon, tended to dial back environmental protections when he could in order to promote the development of oil and gas resources, President Jimmy Carter pressed the protection of the environment when he took office in 1977.

In 1978, Carter placed 56 million acres of land in Alaska under federal protection as national monuments, doubling the size of the national park system. “These areas contain resources of unequaled scientific, historic and cultural value, and include some of the most spectacular scenery and wildlife in the world,” he said. In 1979 he had 32 solar panels installed at the White House to help heat the water for the building and demonstrate that it was possible to curb U.S. dependence on fossil fuels. Just before he left office, Carter signed into law the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, protecting more than 100 million acres in Alaska, including additional protections for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Oil companies, mining companies, timber companies, the cattle industry, and local officials eager for development strongly opposed Carter’s moves to protect the environment. In Alaska, local activists deliberately broke the regulations in the newly protected places, portraying Carter as King George III—against whom the American colonists revolted in 1776—and insisting that the protection of lands violated the promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness promised in the Declaration of Independence.

For the most part, though, opposition to federal protection of the environment showed up as a drive to reform government regulations that, opponents argued, gave far too much power to unelected bureaucrats. In environmental regulations, the federal government’s protection of the public good ran smack into economic development.

In their 1980 presidential platform, Republicans claimed to be committed to “the conservation and wise management of America’s renewable natural resources” and said the government must protect public health. But they were not convinced that current laws and regulations provided benefits that justified their costs. “Too often,” they said, “current regulations are…rigid and narrow,” and they “strongly affirm[ed] that environmental protection must not become a cover for a ‘no-growth’ policy and a shrinking economy.”

In his acceptance speech for the Republican presidential nomination, Ronald Reagan explained that he wanted to see the U.S. produce more energy to fuel “growth and productivity. Large amounts of oil and natural gas lay beneath our land and off our shores, untouched because the present Administration seems to believe the American people would rather see more regulation, taxes and controls than more energy.”

In his farewell address after voters elected Reagan, Carter urged Americans to “protect the quality of this world within which we live…. There are real and growing dangers to our simple and our most precious possessions: the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the land which sustains us,” he warned. “The rapid depletion of irreplaceable minerals, the erosion of topsoil, the destruction of beauty, the blight of pollution, the demands of increasing billions of people, all combine to create problems which are easy to observe and predict, but difficult to resolve. If we do not act, the world of the year 2000 will be much less able to sustain life than it is now.”

“But,” Carter added, “[a]cknowledging the physical realities of our planet does not mean a dismal future of endless sacrifice. In fact, acknowledging these realities is the first step in dealing with them. We can meet the resource problems of the world—water, food, minerals, farmlands, forests, overpopulation, pollution if we tackle them with courage and foresight.”

Reagan began by appointing pro-industry officials James G. Watt and Anne M. Gorsuch (mother of Supreme Court justice Neil Gorsuch) as secretary of the interior and administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, respectively; they set out to gut government regulation of the environment by slashing budgets and firing staff. But both resigned under scandal in 1983, and their replacements satisfied neither those who wanted to return to the practices of the Carter years nor those who wanted to get rid of those practices altogether.

Still, with their focus on developing oil and gas, when workers repairing the White House roof removed the solar panels in 1986, Reagan administration officials declined to reinstall them.

Forty years later, we are reaping the fruits of that shift away from the atmosphere that gave us the Endangered Species Act and toward a focus on developing fossil fuels. On November 30 the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), an agency of the United Nations, reported that global temperatures in 2023 were at record highs both on land and in the seas, Antarctic sea ice extent is at a record low, and devastating fires, floods, outbreaks of disease, and searing heat waves have pounded human communities this year. (...)

And yet the forces that undermined that spirit are still at work. In the 2022 West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency decision, the Supreme Court claimed that Congress could not delegate “major questions” to executive agencies, thus limiting the EPA’s ability to regulate the emissions that create climate change; and House Republicans this summer held a hearing on “the destructive cost of the Endangered Species Act,” claiming that it “has been misused and misapplied for the past 50 years” with “disastrous effects on local economies and businesses throughout the United States.” Chair of the House Committee on Natural Resources Bruce Westerman (R-AR) accused the Biden administration of stifling “everything from forest management to future energy production through burdensome ESA regulations.”

by Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American |  Read more:

Image: NOAA

[ed. Early in my career I had the dubious distinction of being the Federal Oil and Gas Review Coordinator for the State of Alaska's only Fish and Wildlife agency, developing policy and mitigation measures for all federal oil and gas activities affecting the state. Early battles included things like leasing in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, expanding North Slope oil development, drilling in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas (which, among other things, would affect endangered bowhead whales), and responding to then Interior Secretary James Watt's accelerated OCS Leasing Program, which essentially put the entire Outer Continental Shelf adjacent to the state up for grabs over a short period of time ("area-wide leasing"). It was an intense and very busy time (for someone just in their late-20s!). For an excellent overview of the entire process and history see: Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Development in the Alaskan Arctic - Natural Resources Journal, (pdf):]

***

"A vital component of the ESA and another wildlife management statute, the Fish and Wildlife Coordination Act of 1976 (FWCA)"' is the requirement that federal agencies consult with the appropriate wildlife protection agency"' regarding the wildlife impacts of a proposed activity. Though the FWCA requires consultation to ensure that "equal consideration"' 's  is given to wildlife values when undertaking federal actions, " it is the responsibility of the agency proposing the activity to determine whether it has complied with the act. The ESA consultation provision is more powerful, particularly since formal procedures for a highly structured process are established in the statute... During the section 1536 consultation, no "irreversible or irretrievable commitment of resources" can occur that would preclude the choice of alternative actions. 

By the time the D.C. Circuit court in October 1981 had issued its remand, James Watt had been appointed Secretary of the Interior by the Reagan administration. Earlier that year, Secretary Watt had already submitted his proposed five-year leasing schedule for 1982-1987 to Congress, " and after preparing more drafts to comply with the court's order, Watt approved his final, program in July 1982. Watt's "accelerated" leasing schedule planned to offer for lease nearly the entire OCS, almost 1 billion acres, which was 20 times the acreage offered by Andrus, and 25 times the acreage offered from 1953 to 1980. Forty-two lease sales were scheduled, with half of the acreage to be offered lying in the frontier area off of Alaska.

 "In addition to this drastic plan to lease nearly the entire OCS, Watt instituted fundamental changes to the leasing administrative process. The new "area-wide" leasing program replaced the former "tract selection" process by which the industry, states, and other groups nominated certain tracts within a large area to be included or deleted from a lease sale. The U.S. Geological Survey then narrowed the choice of tracts to those with the most promising hydrocarbon potential, and an environmental impact statement was prepared only for these tracts. Under the areawide system, Watt divided the United States' OCS into 18 large planning areas, ranging from 8 to 133 million acres, with lease sales offered annually in planning areas within the Gulf of Mexico and biennially elsewhere. An environmental impact statement is prepared for an entire OCS planning area, and information is gathered on industry interest and on other concerns which will determine the actual tracts to be offered, though the tracts are not determined until right before the sale. Tracks are also no longer evaluated prior to the lease sale to set a minimum bid, but are evaluated after bids are accepted based on the Secretary's revised system. Watt's area-wide leasing program was highly criticized22 except by the oil industry. Soon after Watt approved his leasing schedule, the state of Alaska, four other states, and several environmental organizations filed suit."

The Selfie Camera Has Gotten Too Good.

My New iPhone Is Making Me Look Uglier

This past spring, I participated in the sacred tradition that comes around once every few years: I got a new iPhone. The speaker on my old one had broken, forcing my hand. But let’s be clear. I didn’t care about the speaker. The real reason you upgrade an iPhone, of course, is to get a better camera.

Within a couple of weeks of unboxing my new iPhone 14 Pro, however, I noticed something odd happening. I’d take a selfie, think I looked great, and lock my phone, satisfied. Later, I’d open my camera roll to find that the same photo was different than I remembered. My skin no longer looked smooth, the way it had on my old phone, and even in the preview on my new one before I snapped the photo. Instead, every selfie seemed to intensify my imperfections. I could see the budding wrinkles on my 30-something forehead and the faint red glow of the eczema patches around my eyes. Startled, I began questioning my appearance. Then I began questioning my device.

Other new iPhone owners have done the same: “I’ve noticed that my skin looks awful on this new camera,” read one post on Reddit. A commenter complained that the iPhone 14 “turns you into [an] ugly panda with dark circles.” A woman on TikTok posted a plea, asking that someone from the Apple “community” please tell her “how to fix this raggedy colorless front camera.” Another called it a “travesty.” Hundreds of posts and comments across the internet complain about the selfie camera, and debate exactly what could be causing its problems. (...)

In recent years, complaints about the selfie camera seem to pop up whenever people upgrade their iPhones. The launch of the new iPhone 15 this fall seems to have set off another round of whining. A few models in particular—the 13, 14, and 15—dominate internet grumbling about how selfies now look too detailed (and worse, in the eyes of would-be posters). A recurring theme is also that selfies look better in the preview, before the person presses the shutter.

All three of these iPhones have a 12-megapixel front-facing camera, compared with the 7-megapixel lens on my old phone. But the reason that selfies are now so detailed isn’t because of megapixels. (The iPhone 12 also has a 12-megapixel selfie camera, but I haven’t seen many complaints about it.) Apple didn’t comment on what, if anything, might have changed beginning with the iPhone 13, but noted that the device has gotten more advanced at processing images after they are taken. An iPhone 14 and above can perform 4 trillion operations per photo to enhance the details and render a more natural skin tone, and not all of these changes are previewed in the Camera app before you press the shutter. The goal is to make your final photos as accurate as possible, Apple said. (...)

It’s hard to build a camera that’s just right. Five years ago, the iPhone presented the opposite problem. In 2018, Apple’s newly launched XR and XS models took photos that made people look suspiciously good. The phones were accused of artificially smoothing skin, in what came to be known as “beautygate.” Apple later said that a software bug was behind these unusually hot photos, and shipped a fix. “Do you want a nicer photo or a more accurate representation of reality?” Nilay Patel, the editor in chief of The Verge, wrote in his review of the XR. “Only you can look into your heart and decide.”

The answer to Patel’s question seems to be that people want something in the middle—not too hot, but not too real either. People are chasing a Goldilocks ideal with the selfie camera: They want it to be real, authentic, and messy, just not too real, authentic, or messy.

“When someone thinks of a perfect selfie, they don’t think of having no pores,” Maria-Carolina Cambre, an education professor at Concordia University in Montreal, told me. “And they don’t think of having every single pore visible. It’s neither one of those extremes.” For more than years, Cambre and a colleague ran selfie focus groups in Canada, discussing the style of photography with more than 100 young people. They found that people examine selfies in a very specific way, which they termed the “digital-forensic gaze.” People inspect such images closely, pinching in to look for details and for evidence of any filtering. They look for flaws and inconsistencies. “This is the paradox,” she told me. “Everything is optimized, but the best selfies look like they haven’t been optimized. Even though they have.”

Every smartphone tackles this selfie challenge in a slightly different way. But because devices mediate so much of our self-perception at this point, switching them out can knock us off balance.

by Caroline Mimbs Nyce, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Ben Kothe/The Atlantic. Source: Getty

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"I spent a morning perusing the Hemingway papers at the JFK Library in Boston and came upon this sketch of his from fishing off the coast of Havana."

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[ed. From the comments: Big Game fishing and IGFA records were a thing in Hemingway’s time. I wonder if that relates to record-catch submissions? The drying part may be to sumbit proof of the catch/species to IGFA officials (without sending in rotting flesh)?]

The Case of the Lego Bandit

On October 4, 2018, a young Frenchman named Louis came home from work to find the window in his front door smashed. A practical-minded 20-year-old with short dark hair, he figured it was just another petty crime in the rural outskirts of Paris, where he lived with his parents. But when he saw the familiar gleam of a tiny red plastic brick on the driveway, his stomach plunged. It was his Lego.

In brickspeak, Louis is an Adult Fan of Lego — known as AFOLs, for short — and among the most ardent. His grandmother gave him his first set, the Lego Clone Scout Walker, for his sixth birthday, igniting a singular passion that hasn't let up since. Under his handle Republicattak (the missing "c" a childhood misspelling that gnaws at him), he shares his custom Star Wars-themed builds on his YouTube channel. Unlike many aspiring influencers, he keeps his identity private, other than his first name, to avoid embarrassment at work. "Otherwise, it'll be very awkward," he tells me over Zoom in his thick French accent. "Because in my videos, I'm very much like, basically, a grown man playing with toys."

On that October day, his toys were everywhere. Colorful parts littered the walkway outside his house — a green baseplate here, a yellow sloped brick there. As Louis slowly followed the trail, he recognized chunks of his most beloved builds: a broken cockpit from his UCS X-Wing, the black treads ripped from his Clone Turbo Tank, a limbless Stormtrooper Minifigure staring helplessly from inside its helmet. "It was like a horror movie," he recalls, "but for Lego."

Though his parents were away, Louis feared the intruder might still be inside as he pushed open the broken front door. Nervously, he followed the trail of Lego to his bedroom. Since that first gift from his grandma, he'd painstakingly acquired, cataloged, and dusted ("just the dust," he tells me, is "terrible, painful work") more than 300 sets worth more than $20,000.

Now, his collection appeared to have been blasted by a Death Star Superlaser. Whole models had vanished, mint-condition boxes were ransacked, and scattered across the floor were the remnants of his most valuable builds.

His cash and laptops were untouched, but the Millennium Falcon his parents had given him was gone; so was the original Clone Scout Walker from his grandma. Most painful of all, the intruders had destroyed the massive, original Lego opus he'd been building over nights and long weekends for 10 months, a 35,000-piece installation he called "Imperial Gate."

"I really feel like the whole part of my stomach is missing," Louis recalls. "It is just so much that I'm just collapsing on the ground. I will just crush my head against the floor. Then I will just stand up and crush my head against the walls and just screaming. I will just run outside screaming. I will maybe scream for at least 10, 20 minutes."

That afternoon, he taped what he said was his final YouTube message. "I don't know what I'm going to do," he said into his cellphone camera, blinking back tears. "It really was my passion. That's the end of this channel."

Louis grew up in the Golden Age of Lego. The company, headquartered in the tiny Danish town of Billund, recently opened a Googleplex-like campus for its 2,000 employees. When I visited last year, the company had hoisted a King Kong-size, primary-colored Lego Minifigure at the entrance. In the lobby, a full-scale Lego Bugatti flashed its headlights. Fifteen million tourists a year flood the flagship Legoland theme park down the street, and a mile-long Lego factory runs around the clock, 361 days a year, churning out nearly 5 billion pieces a month. There are now more Minifigs in the world — 8.3 billion — than human beings.

The boom has also given rise to a multimillion-dollar secondary market for the most sought-after builds. Researchers at the Higher School of Economics in Russia found that from 1987 to 2015 Lego investments returned about 10% annually — better than stocks, bonds, gold, and collectible items like wine and stamps. A Space Command Center Lego set that sold for $25 in 1979 is worth over $10,000 today. "Investors in Lego generate high returns from reselling unpackaged sets, particularly rare ones, which were produced in limited editions or a long time ago," said Victoria Dobrynskaya, one of the study's authors.

But the big money in little bricks comes with a downside: crime. In 2012, the police arrested a 47-year-old Silicon Valley executive for tricking stores into giving him a discount on Lego sets and then reselling them on eBay. In 2015, a 46-year-old Florida man and his mother were convicted of stealing an estimated $2 million worth of Lego from Toys R Us stores from Maine to California. In 2020, thieves blasted through the warehouse wall of Fairy Bricks, a charity in England that donates Lego sets to sick kids at hospitals around the world, and absconded with $800,000 worth of bricks. That same year, police arrested three Polish suspects accused of robbing Lego toy stores across France as part of an international crime ring. Counterfeiting is even more lucrative: In Shanghai, the police recently broke up a crime syndicate accused of making and selling nearly $50 million in bogus Lego.

Before Louis' bricks were stolen, he had devoted every birthday and Christmas wish list, every euro he earned tending his parents' garden, to their accumulation. When his grandmother complained about the pieces littering his bedroom, he told her she couldn't blame him — she was the one who had introduced him to the hobby. At school, his obsession became a liability. "It became more difficult," he says. "I was looked at as the guy who does Lego still." (...)

From the outside, every subculture seems strange and incomprehensible to the uninitiated. AFOLs exist in an obsessive ecosystem of websites, TikToks, Instagrams, conventions, trading sites, black markets, newsletters, and competitions devoted to the cult of the brick. The most hardcore make a pilgrimmage to Billund, where the Danish carpenter Ole Kirk Christiansen cobbled together the first bricks 90 years ago. For many, building with Lego is an almost spiritual experience. "It's about having a mindset of always using the endless opportunities," says Esben Christensen, a 76-year-old who plays in the Lego marching band with his son. "It's about looking at what can I get out of these bricks."

Santiago Carluccio, a 32-year-old AFOL from Buenos Aires, Argentina, spent two years studying Danish and bought a one-way ticket to Billund with the hope of scoring a design job at the company. In the meantime, he's cooking poached salmon and sautéed pumpkin at the Mini Chef café, where robots serve meals in giant plastic bricks. "Lego is a part of how I'm built," he tells me.

Lego is well aware of the value of its adult fans; the company estimates that 20% of its sales are grown-ups buying sets for themselves. At its headquarters in the center of town, it maintains a Masterpiece Gallery of AFOL MOCs. A 50-foot Tree of Creativity, made of over 6 million pieces, soars up from the lobby. There are intricate Lego flowers, elaborate Lego Rube Goldberg machines, a broom-size pop-art Lego toothbrush achingly detailed down to the bristles. "One of our philosophies is to showcase the endless possibilities of the brick," Stuart Harris, the gallery's master builder, tells me as we gaze up at a 10-foot-tall orange-and-red Tyrannosaurus rex. He hands me a bag of six red bricks, noting that they can be snapped into 915 million combinations. "You might have something in your mind as to what you want to create," he says. "But then it's engineering: How am I going to do that? What kind of bricks and techniques am I going to use? It's the challenge that's fun and inspiring."

by David Kushner, Business Insider |  Read more:

Image: Mojo Wang

[ed. A miracle of modern engineering design and consistency. See also: How Lego Is Constructing the Next Generation of Engineers (Smithsonian).]

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Nominative Determinism

Nominative determinism is the hypothesis that people tend to gravitate towards areas of work that fit their names. The term was first used in the magazine New Scientist in 1994, after the magazine's humorous "Feedback" column noted several studies carried out by researchers with remarkably fitting surnames. These included a book on polar explorations by Daniel Snowman and an article on urology by researchers named Splatt and Weedon. These and other examples led to light-hearted speculation that some sort of psychological effect was at work. Since the term appeared, nominative determinism has been an irregularly recurring topic in New Scientist, as readers continue to submit examples. Nominative determinism differs from the related concept aptronym, and its synonyms 'aptonym', 'namephreak', and 'Perfect Fit Last Name' (captured by the Latin phrase nomen est omen 'the name is a sign'), in that it focuses on causality. 'Aptronym' merely means the name is fitting, without saying anything about why it has come to fit.

The idea that people are drawn to professions that fit their name was suggested by psychologist Carl Jung, citing as an example Sigmund Freud who studied pleasure and whose surname means 'joy'. A few recent empirical studies have indicated that certain professions are disproportionately represented by people with appropriate surnames (and sometimes given names), though the methods of these studies have been challenged. One explanation for nominative determinism is implicit egotism, which states that humans have an unconscious preference for things they associate with themselves.

Background

In history, before people could gravitate towards areas of work that matched their names, many people were given names that matched their area of work. The way people are named has changed over time. In pre-urban times people were only known by a single name – for example, the Anglo-Saxon name Beornheard. Single names were chosen for their meaning or given as nicknames. In England it was only after the Norman conquest that surnames appear to have been used, with pre-Conquest individual relying on a number of bynames that were not hereditary, such as Edmund Ironside. Surnames were created to fit the person, mostly from patronyms (e.g., John son of William becomes John Williamson), occupational descriptions (e.g., John Carpenter), character or traits (e.g., John Long), or location (e.g., John from Acton became John Acton). Names were not initially hereditary; only by the mid-14th century did they gradually become so. Surnames relating to trades or craft were the first to become hereditary, as the craft often persisted within the family for generations. The appropriateness of occupational names has decreased over time, because tradesmen did not always follow their fathers: an early example from the 14th century is "Roger Carpenter the pepperer". (...)

Empirical evidence

Those with fitting names give differing accounts of the effect of their name on their career choices. Igor Judge, former Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, said he has no recollection of anyone commenting on his destined profession when he was a child, adding "I'm absolutely convinced in my case it is entirely coincidental and I can't think of any evidence in my life that suggests otherwise." James Counsell on the other hand, having chosen a career in law just like his father, his sibling, and two distant relatives, reported having been spurred on to join the bar from an early age and he cannot remember ever wanting to do anything else. Sue Yoo, an American lawyer, said that when she was younger people urged her to become a lawyer because of her name, which she thinks may have helped her decision. Weather reporter Storm Field was not sure about the influence of his name; his father, Dr. Frank Field, also a weather reporter, was his driving force. Psychology professor Lewis Lipsitt, a lifelong collector of aptronyms, was lecturing about nominative determinism in class when a student pointed out that Lipsitt himself was subject to the effect since he studied babies' sucking behaviour. Lipsitt said "That had never occurred to me." Church of England vicar Reverend Michael Vickers, who denied being a Vickers had anything to do with him becoming a vicar, suggesting instead that in some cases "perhaps people are actually escaping from their name, rather than moving towards their job".

by Wikipedia |  Read more:

Image: Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt; Fernando Frazão/Agência Brasil

[ed. Soo Yoo has to be my favorite.]

Still Dancing: Dick Van Dyke’s Charmed Career

My mother said I was a good boy—and now, at almost eighty-five years old…I guess I stayed that way,” Dick Van Dyke writes in his 2011 autobiography, My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business: A Memoir.

The legendary comedian was the star of the transformative Dick Van Dyke Show, along with the long-running Diagnosis Murder and classic films like Mary Poppins and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. His book delves into them—but much like the autobiographies of fellow legends Sophia Loren and Fred Astaire, it also keeps a lot close to the vest. Yet the people-pleasing star tells what he chooses with such good nature and gratitude that the reader hardly minds.

“I have endeavored to write the kind of book I think people want from me. It’s also the kind of book that I want from me,” Van Dyke writes by way of explanation. “But a word of warning about this book: If you are looking for dirt, stop reading now.”

This attitude is unsurprising for a man so universally beloved. “Nobody has a rotten thing to say about him,” Merv Griffin once said, “and they have rotten things to say about everyone.” A loving father of four, Democratic booster, and civil rights advocate, Van Dyke also volunteered for years every holiday at Los Angeles’s Midnight Mission, dancing, singing, and hugging unhoused folks on Skid Row.

But this wholesome boy had a dark side, fighting a lengthy battle with alcoholism. He recounts those low points with grace and light honesty. “Hope is life’s essential nutrient, and love is what gives life meaning,” Van Dyke writes. “I think you need somebody to love and take care of, and someone who loves you back. In that sense, I think the New Testament got it right. So did the Beatles. Without love, nothing has any meaning.” (...)

Put on a Happy Face

In 1942, Van Dyke signed up for the Air Force, and is refreshingly truthful recalling his relief that he was put in the special services. Instead of fighting, he was tasked with performing in variety shows, and even put up a DJ booth in the mess hall where he played records and read the news. “That was,” he writes, “about as military as I wanted to get.”

Some of the most fascinating and enjoyable parts of My Lucky Life are Van Dyke’s memories of his next 20 years as a drifting journeyman disc jockey, vaudeville performer, news reader, and local variety show host in the wild and wooly early days of radio and television. “The only certainty was that something would go wrong, if not today, then tomorrow,” he recalls. “It required nerves of steel and a sense of humor to match.” (...)

On-air disasters were frequent, like the time Van Dyke was interviewing a dog sled racer live. “I began clowning around and jokingly said, ‘Mush.’ It just came out of me. His dogs didn’t understand it was a joke and they took off. They ran through the kitchen set, the weather set, and two other sets, knocking all of them down, before they stopped.”

CBS let him go after three years, and Van Dyke was again drifting, appearing on talk and game shows. He was saved by becoming a regular on Pantomime Quiz, a charades-like TV show where he was paired with his pal Carol Burnett. “Thanks to a slew of imperceptible hand signals we came up with to tip each other off…we were unbeatable,” he writes. “It was a good thing, too. I needed the two hundred dollars we were paid each time we won to buy groceries.”

Paid to Play

The early 1960s changed everything, leading into Van Dyke’s golden era. In 1960, he was a smash in the Broadway hit Bye Bye Birdie, for which he won a Tony. In 1961, writer and creator Carl Reiner cast him in a new sitcom based on Reiner’s life as a comedy writer commuting from New Rochelle to New York City. Van Dyke was clearly as shocked as anyone that he got the role.

“I have…heard and read various accounts of why they liked me,” he writes. “My favorites? I wasn’t too good-looking, I walked a little funny, and I was basically kind of average and ordinary. I guess my lack of perfection turned out to be a winning hand.”

He was even more surprised when Reiner suggested naming it The Dick Van Dyke Show. So was his wisecracking costar Rose Marie. “Rosie, appearing more perplexed than anyone, shook her head and said, ‘What’s a Dick Van Dyke?’ I agreed. It sounded like a mistake. ‘Nobody’s ever heard of me,’ I said. ‘Who’s going to tune in?’”

They shot the pilot on January 21, 1961. Van Dyke paints his five seasons on the show as a collaborative, congenial wonderland of creativity, overseen by his hero Carl Reiner. “I often went into the set on Saturdays to work out little bits,” he writes. “I couldn’t turn my brain off, that’s how much fun I was having on the show.”

Now a beloved, Emmy-winning superstar, Van Dyke clung to his family life and eschewed the Hollywood party scene, much like his level-headed Mary Poppins costar Julie Andrews (whom he adored). But he couldn’t resist a little flirtation with his on-set wife, Mary Tyler Moore.

“We couldn’t stop giggling when we were around each other,” Van Dyke writes. “I finally asked a psychiatrist friend of mine about it. He stated what was patently obvious. ‘Dick, you’ve got a crush on her.’ I put my head in my hands and laughed. Of course, I did. Who didn’t adore Mary? If we had been different people, maybe something would have happened. But neither of us was that type of person. Still, we were stuck on each other.”

The Six-Foot Tower of Jell-O

An amateur philosopher and elder at his Presbyterian church, Van Dyke consistently tried to live up to its ideals of brotherly love. But his faith was shaken during a contentious church meeting regarding civil rights:

One of the elders emphatically stated that he did not want any black people in the church. Appalled, I stood up, shared my disgust, grabbed my jacket, and walked out. I never went back there or to any other church. My relationship with God was solid, but the hypocrisy among the so-called faithful finished me for good.

But Van Dyke admits he was not always so brave. “My dislike of confrontation was so obvious that Rosie turned it into a joke. She dubbed me ‘the Six-Foot Tower of Jell-O,’” he writes.

This aloofness meant many felt he was an unknowable enigma. “He’s a loner,” Carl Reiner once said. “You don’t see him hurting,” Mary Tyler Moore agreed. In My Lucky Life, Van Dyke addresses this depiction, revealing the anxiety and navel-gazing underneath his unflappable exterior.

“The public saw a smiling, nimble-footed performer while my family and friends were served up a more contemplative loner, a man who many said was hard to know,” he writes. “I will say that it was not intentional…. Throughout my whole life I have pondered the big questions. I’ve thought more like a philosopher…. If I was hard to know, it was because I would disappear into this abyss of questions and debate…. What was the point? What was I supposed to do? Was I getting it right?”

by Hadley Hall Meares, Vanity Fair |  Read more:

Images: CBS Photo Archive/Getty; Earl Theisen Collection/Getty Images.

[ed. Lucky man. Seems like every bit the nice guy he's played all his life. Plus, he got to star opposite Mary Tyler Moore and Julie Andrews. How lucky is that? See also: 'My Whole Life Went Before Me' (People).]

Saved by Infinite Jest

In the surreal aftermath of my suicide attempt and amid the haze of my own processing, my best friend visited me in the hospital with a (soft-bound and thus mental-patient-safe) copy of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest under his arm. It was the spring of 2021. A couple months earlier, I had slipped in a tub, suffered a concussion, and triggered my first episode of major depression, and those had been the most difficult months of my life.

Though a lifelong ‘striver’ and ‘high achiever’, nothing I’ve ever done was harder than waging that war against myself while catatonic on that Brooklyn sofa. This was an inarticulable and so alienating war, one during which, at every moment, it was excruciating and terrifying to exist at all. I thought I knew the extent of my own mind’s capacity to torture itself, to hurt me, and what this thing we call depression can really be like. But I had been wrong.

For anyone who hasn’t experienced it at its worst, I now think it is psychologically impossible to imagine. It may even prove impossible for those who have experienced to still remember it after the fact, just as someone who temporarily perceives a fourth dimension wouldn’t really, fully remember what it was like once the perception is lost, only facets of the larger, unfathomable thing.

So maybe I can’t really remember, either: but I can recall thinking again and again these staggered reflections I’m writing now. Some of the swirling emotions that distressed and disoriented me on that sofa also remain faintly accessible, like the crippling inability to make any decisions, no matter how small, such that even contemplating a choice among some host of mine’s warmly offered selection of teas would incapacitate me with self-loathing and breathless, gushing tears. I remember hopelessly trying to make myself feel even the glimmer of anything good, turning to everything – the music, the friends – that had brought me so much joy before, only to find that I could no longer feel any of it but rather just, from somewhere afar, see and long for it while watching as the ever-darkening blackness in me instead consumed it all.

I remember the debilitating guilt and shame that emerged for everything I had ever done, including for having the audacity to keep existing for so long. And I remember an overwhelming empathy as I wondered how many others felt this way in the history of the world, imagining the vastness of all these solitary confinements within our minds across space and time. At the same time, it was unfathomable to me that anyone had ever felt like this, or that there could even be enough darkness in the universe to realise the experience more than this once.

From the days following my injury through the several months after, my ultimate challenge on that sofa was finding a way to endure the passage of time. I needed something to help me get through each moment and make it to the next one while still intact. I couldn’t actually do anything, but staring into space (or even watching TV) kept me vulnerable, as the cognitive passivity left ample room for the darkness to seep in and swallow me away. After a few desperate weeks, I eventually found that reading fiction – filling my head with another world that left room for little else – was the one thing that made it more bearable to exist. My best friend then suggested (after having gently and generously recommended the book to me for years) that perhaps this was the moment to read Infinite Jest. I think every day about how grateful I am that he did.

I started reading and it soon became the case that so long as Infinite Jest was in my hands, it was possible, okay even, for me to stick around. The core themes of the book that would soothe and sustain me over the coming weeks can be conveyed, I think, by its two dominant and contrasting venues – a halfway house for addicts in recovery on the one hand, and an elite and high-pressure tennis academy on the other – in conjunction with an underlying and unifying thesis: all of us, whether we’re chasing substances, achievements or whatever else we hope will satisfy us and make it bearable to exist, are afflicted. We are all, for lack of a better word, fucked in the head in the very same ways.

With Infinite Jest in my hands, I was suspended afloat by a contradictory catharsis, this evanescent insight that I could hold on to so long as I just kept reading and rereading the book’s (blessedly many) pages: that I was not crazy, nor alone, precisely because I really was crazy, which is to say that this all wasn’t me but rather it – it was a human condition. The book assured me that this was just what it was like to be crazy in this way, was exactly how others crazy in the same way were made to feel, a crazy that made them feel just as alone as I now felt. The book witnessed me, affirmed me, and assured me that my experience was familiar to the world. I can’t put it any better than just saying the book was my friend.

Some passages can only speak for themselves, as they so articulate (and help me remember) facets of the thing I was facing on that sofa. On the ‘psychotic depression’ suffered by the character Kate Gompert, the most haunting and compelling personification of depression I have come across:

It is a level of psychic pain wholly incompatible with human life as we know it. It is a sense of radical and thoroughgoing evil not just as a feature but as the essence of conscious existence. It is a sense of poisoning that pervades the self at the self’s most elementary levels. It is a nausea of the cells and soul … It … is probably mostly indescribable except as a sort of double bind in which any/all of the alternatives we associate with human agency – sitting or standing, doing or resting, speaking or keeping silent, living or dying – are not just unpleasant but literally horrible.

No description that I’ve encountered has better conveyed, so clearly and directly, the precise nature of that moment-by-moment agony in which I had found myself.

Infinite Jest’s most famous lines are on suicidality, and the air-tight logic that it brings along. The book analogises it to the choice faced by those trapped inside a burning building and deciding whether to jump:

Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; ie, the fear of falling remains a constant … It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.

The suicidal person, in other words, is not misguided but rather literally facing different choices – ones unimaginable to those who do not also have flames slowly engulfing them.

I don’t think I can really explain what reading all this meant to me. The book could see me like a mirror at that moment and describe it all right back. More concretely, I can’t explain what it meant to find such forceful validations of my particular sense of this ‘mental illness’, not as some wrong or irrational reaction by me, a misapprehension or miscalculation on my part, but rather as something happening to me; it was a thing inside me – a billowing shape, as the book often calls it – to which all my dread and despair was actually just the reasonable and appropriate response. But I can tell you that, once I finished Infinite Jest, my grip on this self-understanding – and so my self-preservation – quickly started to slip away, and it was only a few days later that I tried to kill myself. By then, I was back to being alone on that sofa, surrounded by those flames the book had managed to keep at bay. I think reading Infinite Jest had been keeping me alive. (...)

As of this September, it has been 15 years since Wallace’s suicide and two and a half years since my attempt. Like Wallace’s, my own decision to take my life had immediately followed an adjustment to my antidepressants. I remember it clearly: I’d been holding on so long as I’d still been reading, and when the reading was over and the enkindling darkness took its place, there was just barely enough left in me to pull myself up and pick up a phone, to articulate the necessary words and ask the professionals if they could possibly find some way to help me out. I’d still been searching in anguish for an escape as the walls closed in, a way to still win, to stick around.

Sadly, it was the prescribed dosage increase itself that hit me – as it is sometimes known to do – with another dark wave, knocking me back into the depths of myself, right as I’d been treading so very hard to reach a stable surface. I know Wallace’s suicide had been amid choppy chemical changes of his own, which is to say that we’d both still been fighting, and so these disparate outcomes were the product of random chance. There is a tragedy and humanity, I think, for one’s own desperate attempt at staying alive to be the very thing that does one in – and I admit to sometimes feeling guilty for being the one who found salvation in his book instead of him, as though this salvation was itself cosmically predestined to be scarce.

by Mala Chatterjee, Aeon | Read more:
Image: Martin O’Neill/Cutitout
[ed. A lot of people who've read Infinite Jest (even those who haven't) put it down for various reasons that I won't go into here. But there's no denying it was written by a mind operating at a different level. I read it during one of the most intensely depressive moments of my life too and can relate to all of this.]