Gregg Easterbrook addresses the seldom contemplated side-effects of long life in “What Happens When We All Live to 100?”:
Beginning in the 19th century, that slowly changed. Since 1840, life expectancy at birth has risen about three months with each passing year. In 1840, life expectancy at birth in Sweden, a much-studied nation owing to its record-keeping, was 45 years for women; today it’s 83 years. The United States displays roughly the same trend. When the 20th century began, life expectancy at birth in America was 47 years; now newborns are expected to live 79 years. If about three months continue to be added with each passing year, by the middle of this century, American life expectancy at birth will be 88 years. By the end of the century, it will be 100 years.
Viewed globally, the lengthening of life spans seems independent of any single, specific event. It didn’t accelerate much as antibiotics and vaccines became common. Nor did it retreat much during wars or disease outbreaks. A graph of global life expectancy over time looks like an escalator rising smoothly. The trend holds, in most years, in individual nations rich and poor; the whole world is riding the escalator.
Reid Mitenbuler writes on the inextricable relationship between how we communicate and the medium we use to do so in “How Paper Shaped Civilization”:
There’s a deeper question here. Beyond tweeting, how would Plato have responded to modern changes in the way humans communicate? During his own time, people increasingly recorded their thoughts and experiences in writing, and he worried that written language reduced our reliance on memory. The tool made us less human, even mechanical, he argued, because once something was jotted down, it no longer came from within a person. It was less authentic, and therefore less true.
Then again, Plato expressed this concern in Phaedrus, his dialogue that most famously grapples with the issue, by writing it down.
Plato’s complicated relationship with writing—or really, with the seismic shifts of technological change—forms the heart of an impressive new book, Paper: Paging Through History. Mark Kurlansky, the author, has written two previous books, Saltand Cod, that use the condensed histories of their respective subjects to explore the wider global histories of empire and capitalism. Here again he picks up a seemingly mundane commodity to examine a wider phenomenon: historical attitudes toward disruptive technologies. His question: how do humans absorb and disseminate information? His answer helps reveal the evolution, both politically and economically, of how the world has come to be organized.
Read the entire story here.
Adrienne LaFrance reports on the real life dangers that women face as a result of internet harassment in “When Will the Internet Be Safe for Women?”
“Any woman who is using the Internet for her professional life or for her personal life has come across that moment where there is all of the sudden a hateful or sexist comment coming back at you,” Clark said. “You do internalize it, and even though it is not someone directly in front of you, there is something about the anonymous nature of it—when you don’t know where a threat is coming from—that really gets into someone’s psyche.”
What Wu experienced was worse than most. Both men and women face widespread harassment online, but Gamergate involved a host of threats against women specifically—and high-profile women like Wu, in particular. In general, much of the worst harassment, including attacks that go beyond name-calling to include stalking and sexual harassment, is disproportionately targeted at women, according to a 2014 study by the Pew Research Center.
“When we heard of what Brianna Wu was going through, and really started looking into Gamergate and how extreme—not only the level of threats that were coming in, but the velocity with which they were attacking women; really a 24/7 onslaught of hateful threats and comments. This shouldn’t just be something that we accept as part of women using technology in their work lives and in their personal lives.”
But many women are told they must accept just that: If you don’t like the way you’re being treated online, you should log off.
Read the entire story here.
For the anniversary of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s death, revisit O.W. Holmes’ tender and sorrowful memoriam of the great American writer in his essay Hawthorne, from the July 1864 issue:
It was my fortune to be among the last of the friends who looked upon Hawthorne’s living face. Late in the afternoon of the day before he left Boston on his last journey I called upon him at the hotel where he was staying. He had gone out but a moment before. Looking along the street, I saw a figure at some distance in advance which could only be his,—but how changed from his former port and figure! There was no mistaking the long iron-gray locks, the carriage of the head, and the general look of the natural outlines and movement but he seemed to have shrunken in all his dimensions, and faltered along with an uncertain, feeble step, as if every movement were an effort. I joined him, and we walked together half an hour, during which time I learned so much of his state of mind and body as could be got at without worrying him with suggestive questions,—my object being to form an opinion of his condition, as I had been requested to do, and to give him some hints that might be useful to him on his journey.
His aspect, medically considered, was very unfavorable. There were persistent local symptoms, referred especially to the stomach,—“boring pain,” distension, difficult digestion, with great wasting of flesh and strength. He was very gentle, very willing to answer questions, very docile to such counsel as I offered him, but evidently had no hope of recovering his health. He spoke as if his work were done, and he should write no more.
With all his obvious depression, there was no failing noticeable in his conversational powers. There was the same backwardness and hesitancy which in his best days it was hard for him to overcome, so that talking with him was almost like love-making, and his shy, beautiful soul had to be wooed from its bashful pudency like an unschooled maiden. The calm despondency with which he spoke about himself confirmed the unfavorable opinion suggested by his look and history. The journey on which Mr. Hawthorne was setting out, when I saw him, was undertaken for the benefit of his health. A few weeks earlier he had left Boston on a similar errand in company with Mr. William D. Ticknor, who had kindly volunteered to be his companion in a trip which promised to be of some extent and duration, and from which this faithful friend, whose generous devotion deserves the most grateful remembrance, hoped to bring him back restored, or at least made stronger. Death joined the travellers, but it was not the invalid whom he selected as his victim. The strong man was taken, and the suffering valetudinanan found himself charged with those last duties which he was so soon to need at the hands of others.
Read the entire piece here.
From the June 2016 issue, Stephen Cave’s essay “There’s No Such Thing as Free Will” revisits one of the most essential questions of our humanity: are we free to choose?
The 20th-century nature-nurture debate prepared us to think of ourselves as shaped by influences beyond our control. But it left some room, at least in the popular imagination, for the possibility that we could overcome our circumstances or our genes to become the author of our own destiny. The challenge posed by neuroscience is more radical: It describes the brain as a physical system like any other, and suggests that we no more will it to operate in a particular way than we will our heart to beat. The contemporary scientific image of human behavior is one of neurons firing, causing other neurons to fire, causing our thoughts and deeds, in an unbroken chain that stretches back to our birth and beyond. In principle, we are therefore completely predictable. If we could understand any individual’s brain architecture and chemistry well enough, we could, in theory, predict that individual’s response to any given stimulus with 100 percent accuracy.
This research and its implications are not new. What is new, though, is the spread of free-will skepticism beyond the laboratories and into the mainstream. The number of court cases, for example, that use evidence from neuroscience has more than doubled in the past decade—mostly in the context of defendants arguing that their brain made them do it. And many people are absorbing this message in other contexts, too, at least judging by the number of books and articles purporting to explain “your brain on” everything from music to magic. Determinism, to one degree or another, is gaining popular currency. The skeptics are in ascendance.
Read the entire story here.
Acclaimed writer Dinaw Mengestu reflects on the commonly shared experience of Ethiopian immigrants in Washington, D.C. through the life of one man —Solomon — in Solomon’s Search.
In 1981, when Solomon arrived in Washington D.C., there were approximately 10,000 Ethiopians living in America. Over the next 10 years, roughly a thousand more were resettled each year, making the total Ethiopian-born population of America at the end of the decade roughly 20,000, or one-fifth of a professional football stadium’s capacity. Growing up in the suburbs of Chicago, I would have guessed that at least 90 percent of that population was in D.C., among them my uncle Fekada, who arrived in D.C. never expecting to make it back home. Fekada fled Ethiopia while he was a teenager, and like nearly all Ethiopian immigrants of his generation, he found his way slowly to a refugee camp in Sudan. Four years after leaving his parents’ home in Addis Ababa, my uncle joined my parents, sister, and me in Peoria, Illinois. My only memory of him at that time is of him standing behind my sister while she learned to ride a bike.
Among his memories—the one that stands out the clearest—was when, after months of job-hunting, a well-intentioned employment officer sent him to an interview at a country club. “Everyone looked at me like, what was I doing there,” he told me recently. Several people told him that he must have made a mistake coming there, and when the manager my uncle had been sent to see finally did come out, he was so surprised to see my uncle that he took him into his office. He called the man at the employment agency to ask, without asking, what the hell he was thinking sending a black man to his office. The well-intentioned employment officer tried to explain that this young man was Ethiopian—a political refugee fleeing the evil empire of communism, which made him different. Different, of course, didn’t make my uncle any less black, and so he was politely told there was no job for him. My uncle gave up on the Midwest at that point, and like a true American, decided he would head west, to friends in California; but first he decided to stop in D.C., where an old friend from Ethiopia had recently landed…
Read the entire story in The Atlantic
From the June 2016 issue, Dan P. McAdams, a psychologist, analyzes how Trump’s extraordinary personality might shape his possible presidency in The Mind of Trump:
More than even Ronald Reagan, Trump seems supremely cognizant of the fact that he is always acting. He moves through life like a man who knows he is always being observed. If all human beings are, by their very nature, social actors, then Donald Trump seems to be more so—superhuman, in this one primal sense.
Many questions have arisen about Trump during this campaign season—about his platform, his knowledge of issues, his inflammatory language, his level of comfort with political violence. This article touches on some of that. But its central aim is to create a psychological portrait of the man. Who is he, really? How does his mind work? How might he go about making decisions in office, were he to become president? And what does all that suggest about the sort of president he’d be?
Read the entire cover story here.
Adrienne LaFrance maps the trajectory of the Zika virus in Tracing Zika Back to Patient Zero
Scientists have established that Zika causes grave abnormalities in fetuses, and can cause serious nerve disorders in children and adults, too. But it seems the virus wasn’t always this way. Learning how and when the Zika mutated could be one of the keys to unlocking why it’s so dangerous now, at a time when it appears poised to work its way through the Americas and possibly extend to the Mediterranean.
Zika was first discovered in Uganda in 1947, but it was five more years before the first human cases of the virus were detected in the region. “It is challenging to state definitively who the first patient is who ever contracted the virus or brought it to a new country,” said Ann Powers, the acting chief of the Arboviral Diseases Branch at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “We may sometimes report the first ‘detected’ case as such, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it is really the first time. What is more important than finding the one specific person is to understand overall movement patterns and assess if there are changes that have occurred—either in the virus, the vectors, or the host behaviors—that may be impacting the epidemiology.”
Read more here.
Ta-Nehisi Coates writes on the painful frustrations of notoriety in On Homecomings:
But the world is real. And you can’t really be a black writer in this country, take certain positions, and not think about your personal safety. That’s just the history. And you can’t really be a human being and not want some place to retreat into yourself, some place to collapse, some place to be at peace. That’s just neurology. One shouldn’t get in the habit of crying about having a best-selling book. But you can’t really sell enough books to become superhuman, to salve that longing for home.
I want you to know that I have been struggling, these past few months, to write about politics. I feel people, all around me, uninterested in questions and enthralled with prophecy. The best part of writing is the constant searching, the twisting, the turning, the back-and-forth, the things you think you understand, the things you understand more than you know. Prophecy has no real use for writing as discovery. And when people want prophets, they will make you into one, no matter your strenuous objections. If the world wants a “Writer Moves to Brooklyn Brownstone” story, it’s going to have one, no matter your thoughts. You are their symbol. This is all a very poor excuse for not writing. I find myself stuck in the past, pining for another time, blinded by nostalgia, longing for my old horde, longing for my old home.
Read more here.
J. Weston Phippen writes in Can Bears and Humans Coexist?:
It was 9:45 in the morning, high in the mountains of Flagstaff, Arizona, on a ranch road that runs alongside a dried-up lake named Dry Lake, when a bear wandered into town. The Arizona Game and Fish Department is responsible for managing wildlife, and sometimes that means killing them. For three hours last Friday, agents chased a black bear across roads, through thickets of pine trees, down hills, and over neighborhood fences. The bear was a male, three years old, and so considered an adult. A fatal category. Agents shot the bear with a tranquilizer near a busy highway, then they killed it.
It’s a precarious thing to live near the wild. Most people move to places like Flagstaff, known for its ponderosa pine forests and the red rock buttes to the south, precisely because of its proximity to nature––to be able to walk out the door and become lost in country that feels as raw as it did 200 years ago. But part of living so close to nature means living in wandering distance of animals that can kill, like mountain lions or black bears. After the agency killed the bear, it was not the town’s safety that concerned the most vocal residents. Instead, it started a conversation across the state that’s also come up recently in Los Angeles with a mountain lion named P-22, with wolves in rural Oregon and anywhere around Yellowstone National Park, and also with black bears in a gated community in central Florida. Can people, so comfortable to living unchallenged in the food chain, peacefully coexist with predators?
Read more about the tenuous relationship between bears and humans here.
Matthew Dallek writes on the steady rise of conservatism in The Conservative 1960s from the December 1995 issue:
In the late 1950s and early 1960s conservatives were widely dismissed as “kooks” and “crackpots” with no hope of winning political power. In 1950 the literary critic Lionel Trilling spoke for a generation of scholars and journalists when he wrote that “in the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition…. It is the plain fact [that] there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation” but only “irritable mental gestures which seem to resemble ideas.” The historian Richard Hofstadter echoed Trilling’s assessment, arguing that the right was not a serious, long-term political movement but rather a transitory phenomenon led by irrational, paranoid people who were angry at the changes taking place in America.
Journalists were equally contemptuous. In 1962 a writer in the The Nation suggested that conservatives were more interested in thinking up “frivolous and simple-minded” slogans than in developing intelligent proposals to meet the complexities of post-Second World War America. The Washington Post described members of one conservative group as people who liked to “complain about the twentieth century.” And even a sympathetic commentator in Commonweal wondered whether a right-wing student group was a new political voice or “merely a new political organization out to repeal the twentieth century?”
More than three decades later Americans are still struggling to understand the rise of modern American conservatism. Much of this is the fault of scholars and journalists. Very little has been written about the rise of the right in the 1960s. From today’s vantage point, this is arguably the most significant development of that decade, yet scholars and journalists have focused almost exclusively on the new left, civil rights, and the decline of American liberalism.
Read more on the poignantly, relevant rise of conservatism here.
Lynda Miles and Michael Pye map out George Lucas’ course as a filmmaker in The Man Who Made Star Wars from the December 1979 issue:
The idea of Star Wars was simply to make a “real gee-whiz movie.” It would be a high adventure film for children, a pleasure film which would be a logical end to the road down which Coppola had directed his apparently cold, remote associate. As Graffiti went out around the country, Lucas refined his ideas. He toyed with remaking the great Flash Gordon serials, with Dale Arden in peril and the evil Emperor Ming; but the owners of the rights wanted a high price and overstringent controls on how their characters were used. Instead, Lucas began to research. “I researched kids’ movies,” he says, “and how they work and how myths work; and I looked very carefully at the elements of films within that fairy-tale genre which made them successful.” Some of his conclusions were almost fanciful. “I found that myth always took place over the hill, in some exotic, far-off land. For the Greeks, it was Ulysses going off into the unknown. For Victorian England it was India or North Africa or treasure islands. For America it was Out West. There had to be strange savages and bizarre things in an exotic land. Now the last of that mythology died out in the mid-1950s, with the last of the men who knew the Old West. The last ‘over the hill’ is space.”
Other conclusions were more practical. “The title Star Wars was an insurance policy. The studio didn’t see it that way; they thought science fiction was a very bad genre, that women didn’t like it, although they did no market research on that until after the film was finished. But we calculated that there are something like $8 million worth of science fiction freaks in the USA, and they will go to see absolutely anything with a title like Star Wars.” Beyond that audience, Lucas was firm that the general public should be encouraged to see the film not as esoteric science fiction but as a space fantasy.
Read more here.
Vann R. Newkirk II writes in The Taboo Larry Wilmore Broke:
Georgia McDowell was born the daughter of farmers and teachers in North Carolina in 1902. She was my great-grandmother, and she taught me to read, despite the dementia that clouded her mind and the dyslexia that interrupted mine. I loved Miss Georgia, though she kept as many hard lines in her home as she had in her classrooms. One of the hardest lines was common to many black households: The word “nigger” and all of its derivatives were strict taboos in person, on television, and on radio from any source, black or otherwise, so long as she lived and breathed. She’d kept the taboo through decades of teaching black students and raising black children. For most of my childhood, the taboo was absolute.
Miss Georgia certainly would not have enjoyed the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, where comedian Larry Wilmore ended his performance by blowing past her taboo in the most public of places to the most revered of people. “You did it, my nigga,” he said, and then looked at the president, who returned his gesture of affection with a chest thump. He had just called the most powerful man in the world a nigga to his face.
Continue reading here.
Ralph Waldo Emerson shares his thoughts on the significance of solitude in his 1857 essay, “Solitude and Society:”
We have known many fine geniuses have that imperfection that they cannot do anything useful, not so much as write one clean sentence. ‘Tis worse, and tragic, that no man is fit for society who has fine traits. At a distance, he is admired; but bring him hand to hand, he is a cripple. One protects himself by solitude, and one by courtesy, and one by an acid, worldly manner,—each concealing how he can the thinness of his skin and his incapacity for strict association. But there is no remedy that can reach the heart of the disease, but either habits of self-reliance that should go in practice to making the man independent of the human race, or else a religion of love. Now he hardly seems entitled to marry; for how can he protect a woman, who cannot protect himself?
Read more here.
Sarah Jeong writes in You Can’t Escape Data Surveillance In America:
From the end of the Civil War to the mid-20th century, the breadth and detail of information collected by [credit] reporting agencies only increased. Control over the access to that information, however, did not seem to keep up. “People do not realize, for example, that their own credit files are accessible to virtually anyone who understands the workings of credit bureaus and has a few dollars to spend on a report,” said one study in 1969. And those credit reports contained personal information ranging from the deeply prejudicial to the utterly inane.
The reports were compiled using information from retailers, from the public record (court records, newspaper clippings), and from interviews with friends and neighbors. In 1972, a Senate aide testified before a committee about the type of information that was collected by the automobile insurance industry: “If they, in any way, have some deviant behavior characteristics, they wear pink shirts, or have long hair and a mustache, they read Karl Marx … They can look in your library and see what books you read, what magazines you subscribe to…”
Continue reading here.
“The use of mercenaries in warfare has a very long history—much longer, in fact, than the almost-exclusive deployment of national militaries to wage wars. Before the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 ended Europe’s Thirty Years’ War and marked the rise of the modern state system, medieval powers from kings to popes routinely hired private fighters to do battle for them. As state governments sought a monopoly on the use of force within their territories in the 17th century, however, they moved to stamp out violence by non-state actors, including mercenaries, driving the industry underground.
America’s reliance on private military companies in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade hasn’t just expanded the industry; it’s also started to change the conduct of international relations.”
Read more here
“The national obsession with weight got a big boost in 1942, when a life-insurance company created a set of tables that became the most widely referenced standard for weight in North America. The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company crunched age, weight, and mortality numbers from nearly 5 million policies in the United States and Canada to create “desirable” height and weight charts. For the first time, people (and their doctors) could compare themselves to a standardized notion of what they “should” weigh.”
Read more here
“After less than two years in the Senate, Cruz has positioned himself to make waves on a Republican debate stage in 2016 and to compete as a more conservative alternative to Jeb Bush or Scott Walker. What’s more, it’s likely that Cruz’s popularity among the conservative base in Texas will ensure his re-election should he decide to run for a second term in the Senate in 2018. Although media pundits and the Washington establishment may assume that Cruz’s apocalyptic rhetoric is alienating to audiences, his success would suggest that it is having the opposite effect. By creating a world that deals in black and white, the Texas freshman provides his supporters with a comforting degree of clarity amid the bewildering complexities of reality.”
Read more here
“France’s 475,000 Jews represent less than 1 percent of the country’s population. Yet last year, according to the French Interior Ministry, 51 percent of all racist attacks targeted Jews. The statistics in other countries, including Great Britain, are similarly dismal. In 2014, Jews in Europe were murdered, raped, beaten, stalked, chased, harassed, spat on, and insulted for being Jewish.”
Read more here
“What’s sometimes referred to as the global jihadist ‘movement’ is actually extremely fractured. It’s united by a general set of shared ideological beliefs, but divided organizationally and sometimes doctrinally. Whether to fight the ‘near enemy’ (local regimes) or the ‘far enemy’ (such as the United States and the West), for example, has been contentious since the 1990s, when Osama bin Laden declared war on the United States. Rivalry among like-minded militant groups is as common as cooperation. Identities and allegiances shift. Groups align and re-align according to changing expectations about the future of the conflicts they’re involved in, as well as a host of other factors, such as competition for resources, leadership transitions, and the defection of adherents to rival groups that appear to be on the ascendant.”
“As a reminder to those who argue that Jews should stop worrying so much about people who threaten to kill them, here is some (just some) of what Iran’s leaders, and leaders of its proxy militia, Hezbollah, in Lebanon, have said about Israel.”
Read more here:
“With nearly half of Americans reporting that they have tried marijuana and more than a third of college students having used it in the last 12 months, any organization—in the public or private sector—with strict anti-marijuana policies could be missing out on a significant portion of the talent pool.”
Read more here
“And what are memes if not games? They are small; they are low-stakes; they are often silly. (Sorry, #llamadrama.) But they are also communal. They invite us to participate, to adapt, to joke, to create something together, under the auspices of the same basic rules. That is not a small thing. That is, in fact, a huge thing.”