Weill wasn’t the first or the last Wall Streeter to deal with the pressures of high finance through the performance-enhancing highs of cocaine or with plenty of other stimulants. Just six years earlier, one of the Street’s best-known, self-made stars, Wardell Lazard, the head of his own investment firm, died naked and alone in a Pittsburgh hotel from an overdose of vodka and cocaine, just two weeks before his 45th birthday. (…)

A University of Southern California researcher, who was once herself a Wall Street banker, followed more than two dozen freshly minted MBA’s from the boot camps, or “grind mills,” of investment banks as they clawed their way toward wealth and absolute power. By the fourth year in business, they had succumbed to a litany of out-of-control behavior.

“People working 120 hours a week, for prolonged periods of time, go through harsh psychological transformations,” says Alexandra Michel, a professor at USC’s Marshall School of Business, who findings appear in the current Administrative Science Quarterly. (…)

Her research examines how organizations influence white-collar workers’ psychological processes and performance. She is particularly interested in the way knowledge-based workers—not just on Wall Street, but in the media, law, consulting, technology and countless other fields—perceive themselves as autonomous, but in fact they are under unspoken organizational control.

That control is veiled by the perqs offered to white collar workers. “The bank erased distinctions between work and leisure by providing administrative support 24 hours a day, seven days a week, encouraging leisure at work, and providing free amenities, including childcare, valets, car service, and meals,” Michel writes. “Some of the banks’ embodied controls focused on managing employees’ energy and included providing free caffeine and meals during ‘‘energy slumps,’’ hiring young people, focusing on energy as the main hiring criterion, and firing low performers because of their energy drain.”


As they became overtaxed, 80 percent of Michel’s workers said they were struggling to control their bodies. As one vice president put it: “I wouldn’t call it control; I am at war with my body.” They were also at war with their private lives. Michel saw highly educated and highly motivated people willing to miss a child’s birthday or cancel on parents visiting from overseas to instead help with a client’s hostile corporate takeover.


To cope, bankers developed addictions and compulsions, such as eating disorders, as well as embarrassing tics, such as nail biting, nose picking and hair twirling. Normally mild-mannered people flew into out-of-control rages at the least provocation. (…)

To maintain their performance, bankers pushed harder, trying to reassert control over their bodies, writes Michel: “One banker combated her eating disorder by fasting and exercising more, training for a marathon even after midnight.” Bankers sought distraction through compulsive shopping, partying and watching porn to counteract the numbness (‘‘I need something to feel passionate about”), to achieve control (‘‘These are all ways to control something’’), and to escape (‘‘It is a way to escape, so that I cannot even ruminate about my problems if I wanted to’’).

Addiction and self-flagellation went hand in hand. One banker said, ‘‘The only way I can keep myself up nights in a row is through a mix of caffeine pills and prescription meds.’’ She even ignored serious injuries to her body. ‘‘I fell on my way to a meeting,” she recalled for Michel. “The leg changed color and I had pain but I chose not to think about it until after the meeting.’’ Her leg was actually broken in two places. (…)

High-finance intervention specialists, like Curry, have seen an uptick in drug abuse on Wall Street since 2008. It’s not necessarily because these guys are stressed. Just the opposite: It’s because many of them are bored.

{ The Fix | Continue reading }

photo { Daniel Ribar }

We are still living under the reign of logic: this, of course, is what I have been driving at. But in this day and age logical methods are applicable only to solving problems of secondary interest. The absolute rationalism that is still in vogue allows us to consider only facts relating directly to our experience. Logical ends, on the contrary, escape us. It is pointless to add that experience itself has found itself increasingly circumscribed. It paces back and forth in a cage from which it is more and more difficult to make it emerge. It too leans for support on what is most immediately expedient, and it is protected by the sentinels of common sense. Under the pretense of civilization and progress, we have managed to banish from the mind everything that may rightly or wrongly be termed superstition, or fancy; forbidden is any kind of search for truth which is not in conformance with accepted practices. It was, apparently, by pure chance that a part of our mental world which we pretended not to be concerned with any longer — and, in my opinion by far the most important part — has been brought back to light. For this we must give thanks to the discoveries of Sigmund Freud. On the basis of these discoveries a current of opinion is finally forming by means of which the human explorer will be able to carry his investigation much further, authorized as he will henceforth be not to confine himself solely to the most summary realities.

{ André Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism, 1924 | Continue reading }

Surrealism had the longest tenure of any avant-garde movement, and its members were arguably the most “political.” It emerged on the heels of World War I, when André Breton founded his first journal, Literature, and brought together a number of figures who had mostly come to know each other during the war years. They included Louis Aragon, Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, Paul Eluard, Max Ernst, René Magritte, Francis Picabia, Pablo Picasso, Phillippe Soupault, Yves Tanguey, and Tristan Tzara. Some were “absolute” surrealists and others were merely associated with the movement, which lasted into the 1950s. (…)

André Breton was its leading light, and he offered what might be termed the master narrative of the movement.

No other modernist trend had a theorist as intellectually sophisticated or an organizer quite as talented as Breton. No other was [as] international in its reach and as total in its confrontation with reality. No other [fused] psychoanalysis and proletarian revolution. No other was so blatant in its embrace of free association and “automatic writing.” No other would so use the audience to complete the work of art. There was no looking back to the past, as with the expressionists, and little of the macho rhetoric of the futurists. Surrealists prized individualism and rebellion—and no other movement would prove so commercially successful in promoting its luminaries. The surrealists wanted to change the world, and they did. At the same time, however, the world changed them. The question is whether their aesthetic outlook and cultural production were decisive in shaping their political worldview—or whether, beyond the inflated philosophical claims and ongoing esoteric qualifications, the connection between them is more indirect and elusive.

Surrealism was fueled by a romantic impulse. It emphasized the new against the dictates of tradition, the intensity of lived experience against passive contemplation, subjectivity against the consensually real, and the imagination against the instrumentally rational. Solidarity was understood as an inner bond with the oppressed.

{ Logos | Continue reading }

The Earth has a large moon, making it unique in the inner solar system. Mercury and Venus have no moons, and Mars has only two small asteroid-sized objects orbiting it. In this essay, the father of the SMART-1 lunar mission, Bernard Foing of the European Space Agency, looks at the effect the Moon has had on the Earth, and explores how different our world would be if we had no planetary companion. Would life have evolved differently, or even appeared on Earth without the Moon?

{ Astrobio | Continue reading }

painting { Jules Joseph Lefebvre, La Vérité, 1870 }

These two charts represent what is arguably the biggest thing that is changing in the U.S. economy these days. Not only is the price of natural gas declining significantly, but it is getting cheaper relative to crude oil by leaps and bounds. And it’s all thanks to new drilling technology (fracking) that has resulted in huge new natural gas discoveries and production in the U.S.

{ Scott Grannis | Continue reading | MoneyCNN }

Oil and gas production in the United States and North America is going to skyrocket in the next 8 years due to strides in natural resource extraction, write Citi analysts in a report published yesterday. In fact, they went so far as to call North America “the new Middle East,” at least in terms of oil production. (…)

Citi economists expect total liquids production to as much as double for the continent in the next decade, and predict that the U.S. could overtake both Russia and Saudi Arabia in oil production by 2020.

{ BusinessInsider | Continue reading }

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed article, titled “Move Over, OPEC — Here We Come,” Ed Morse, a former deputy secretary of state for international energy policy, said: “I’m thinking that actually the U.S. is the fastest-growing oil-producing country in the world, the fastest-growing gas-producing country in the world, and yes, it’s happening mostly on private lands,” he said. “This has happened despite whatever politics have intruded on it.”

{ CNBC | Continue reading }

quote { Fernandel in Marcel Pagnol’s Le Schpountz, 1938 }

The speculation of what Apple is going to do with all their cash has long been a favorite topic in the tech and financial press. (…) What’s the point of having all that money if you’re not going to spend it?

That thinking is what we saw when Apple recently announced their cash plans. (..) “Saddened by Apple’s plan for a huge dividend. Apparently, they have nothing truly capital-intensive in the product pipeline.” (…)

Even after issuing dividends and repurchasing shares, Apple’s cash reserves will likely grow this year. They added more than $35 billion in cash and equivalents last year alone. There’s nothing “capital-intensive” that they can’t do, short of opening an Apple Store on the moon. (…)

The idea floating around before Apple’s Monday announcement that they would be buying a company like Foxconn or building factories of their own seems to make sense, since Apple is one of the more vertically integrated consumer electronics companies in the world. And they are, after all, notorious for both control and quality. But they’ve managed to lead the industry on the latter without owning a significant portion of their supply chain. (…)

Apple has this enormous negotiating power, and they use it, I am told by our sources, very aggressively to come in and basically say, “Show us your entire cost structure, every single part of what you pay and what you… and we are going to give you a razor-thin profit margin that you’re allowed to keep.

In other words: Why buy the cow?

Apple also, more importantly, finances the factories by loaning them cash and buying significant amounts of components in advance. This “Bank of Apple” strategy further establishes control over the factories, locks out competition and seems to be why competitors can’t seem to match Apple’s cost structure for products like the iPad. (…)

This brings us to those who think Apple has run out of ideas on what to do with their cash. The fevered result of this are the acquisition talks — hence the recently oft-mentioned and largely nonsensical suggestion that Apple should buy a company like Twitter. But Apple’s approach to acquisitions has always been extremely conservative, especially compared to their brethren. Since 2010 Apple’s bought a grand total of nine companies. In that same period Google has bought 52.

{ TechCrunch | Continue reading | Thanks Glenn }

related { The FBI made public a background investigation of Steve Jobs in 1991, when he was being considered by the George H. W. Bush administration for a spot on the President’s Export Council. }

People often compare education to exercise. If exercise builds physical muscles, then education builds “mental muscles.” If you take the analogy seriously, however, then you’d expect education to share both the virtues and the limitations of exercise. Most obviously: The benefits of exercise are fleeting. If you stop exercising, the payoff quickly evaporates. (…) Exercise physiologists call this detraining. As usual, there’s a big academic literature on it.

{ EconLib | Continue reading }

Pseudogenes are genes that used to have a function, but no longer do. If a gene contributes to an important function for the organism, offspring with deleterious mutations that ruin the gene will have lower fitness, and as a result won’t have as many offspring, if any at all. That mutated gene will likely not go to fixation (become prominent in the population). On the other hand, if the gene used to have a function, but no longer do, then mutations affecting the gene won’t be deleterious. (…)

Examples where pseudogenization is coupled to function is rare. A new study published in PNAS links genes that code for taste receptors to specific dietary changes in carnivorous mammals. Basically, animals that do not eat sweets don’t have receptors for sweetness (e.g., cats), and animals that swallows their food whole have no receptors for umami (e.g., sea lions, dolphins).

{ Pleiotropy | Continue reading }

artwork { Darick Maasen }

She is a scientist, and believes in evidence.

She spent two years as a full-time member of an evangelical church in Chicago, and another two years in a congregation in Palo Alto. (…)

Some Vineyard women had a regular “date night” with Jesus. They would serve a special dinner, set a place for him at the table, chat with him. He guided the Vineyarders every minute of the day. (…)

She discusses their views in relation to D. W. Winnicott’s theories about transitional objects. For some evangelicals, she says, God is not unlike a stuffed Snoopy. (…)

Luhrmann warns us against calling the evangelicals’ visions and voices “hallucinations”; that is a psychiatric and, hence, pathologizing term. In her vocabulary, such events are “sensory overrides”—sensory perceptions that override material evidence. She cites evidence that between ten and fifteen per cent of the general population has had such experiences. And she reports a vision of her own, which she had while working with the English witches.

{ The New Yorker | Continue reading }

“Eskimo has one hundred words for snow.” The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax [PDF | Wikipedia] was demolished many years ago. (…)

People who proffer the factoid seem to think it shows that the lexical resources of a language reflect the environment in which its native speakers live. As an observation about language in general, it’s a fair point to make. Languages tend to have the words their users need and not to have words for things never used or encountered. But the Eskimo story actually says more than that. It tells us that a language and a culture are so closely bound together as to be one and the same thing. ”Eskimo language” and the “snowbound world of the Eskimos” are mutually dependent things. That’s a very different proposition, and it lies at the heart of arguments about the translatability of different tongues.

Explorer-linguists observed quite correctly that the languages of peoples living in what were for them exotic locales had lots of words for exotic things, and supplied subtle distinctions among many different kinds of animals, plants, tools, and ritual objects. Accounts of so-called primitive languages generally consisted of word lists elicited from interpreters or from sessions of pointing and asking for names. But the languages of these remote cultures seemed deficient in words for “time,” “past,” “future,” “language,” “law,” “state,” “government,” “navy,” or “God.”

More particularly, the difficulty of expressing “abstract thought” of the Western kind in many Native American and African languages suggested that the capacity for abstraction was the key to the progress of the human mind… The “concrete languages” of the non-Western world were not just the reflection of the lower degree of civilization of the peoples who spoke them but the root cause of their backward state. By the dawn of the twentieth century, “too many concrete nouns” and “not enough abstractions” became the conventional qualities of “primitive” tongues.

That’s what people actually mean when they repeat the story about Eskimo words for snow. (…)

If you go into a Starbucks and ask for “coffee,” the barista most likely will give you a blank stare. To him the word means absolutely nothing. There are at least thirty-seven words for coffee in my local dialect of Coffeeshop Talk.

{ David Bellos/Big Think | Continue reading }

The pubic louse evolved around 3.3 million years ago, and it could not have done so until ancestral humans lost their body fur, creating its niche. What’s more, [we have] dated the evolution of body lice, which live in clothing, to around 70,000 years ago. So it looks like our ancestors wandered around stark naked for a very long time.

{ NewScientist via | Overcoming Bias | Continue reading }

photo { Helmut Newton, Nu dans les algues, Saint-Tropez, 1981 }

We need to understand why we often have trouble agreeing on what is true (what some have labeled science denialism). Social science has taught us that human cognition is innately, and inescapably, a process of interpreting the hard data about our world – its sights and sound and smells and facts and ideas - through subjective affective filters that help us turn those facts into the judgments and choices and behaviors that help us survive. The brain’s imperative, after all, is not to reason. Its job is survival, and subjective cognitive biases and instincts have developed to help us make sense of information in the pursuit of safety, not so that we might come to know “THE universal absolute truth.” This subjective cognition is built-in, subconscious, beyond free will, and unavoidably leads to different interpretations of the same facts. (…)

Our subjective system of cognition can be dangerous. It can produce perceptions that conflict with the evidence, what I call The Perception Gap.

{ Big Think | Continue reading }

{ Maddie the Coonhound | Thanks Glenn }

Absinthe, a bitter spirit containing wormwood (Artemisia absinthium L.), was banned at the beginning of the 20th century as consequence of its supposed unique adverse effects. After nearly century- long prohibition, absinthe has seen a resurgence after recent de-restriction in many European countries. This review provides information on the history of absinthe and one of its constituent, thujone. Medical and toxicological aspects experienced and discovered before the prohibition of absinthe are discussed in detail, along with their impact on the current situation. The only consistent conclusion that can be drawn from those 19th century studies about absinthism is that wormwood oil but not absinthe is a potent agent to cause seizures. Neither can it be concluded that the beverage itself was epileptogenic nor that the so-called absinthism can exactly be distinguished as a distinct syndrome from chronic alcoholism.

The theory of a previous gross overestimation of the thujone content of absinthe may have been verified by a number of independent studies. Based on the current available evidence, thujone concentrations of both pre-ban and modern absinthes may not have been able to cause detrimental health effects other than those encountered in common alcoholism. Today, a questionable tendency of absinthe manufacturers can be ascertained that use the ancient theories of absinthism as a targeted marketing strategy to bring absinthe into the spheres of a legal drug-of-abuse. Misleading advertisements of aphrodisiac or psychotropic effects of absinthe try to re-establish absinthe’s former reputation.

{ Substance Abuse Treatment, Prevention, and Policy | Continue Reading | Read more/via: A bouquet from Mendel }

When we watch a show on stage, TV or movie, we do the little trick of suspending disbelief. We do not believe what we are experiencing but we treat the content ‘as if we believed it’ for the duration of the show. We can re-enter that disbelieved experience if we choose, as if it were a memory of something that actually happened. The show can have lasting effects on how we view the world and interact with others. It has all the hallmarks of a really personal experience except that we know it is fictional. (…) What is the difference between this sort of memory and what we call false-memory? It is only the believe that the events remembered actually happened to us.

According to a recent paper, belief and memory are separate processes. We can have: memories that we believe were events, memories that we do not believe were events, beliefs about events that we do not remember, and events that we neither believe nor remember. (…)

The authors found that belief is easier to modify than memory. It is easier to create a false belief in a subject that it is to create a false memory. And likewise, it is easier to destroy a false belief than a false memory.

{ Thoughts on thoughts | Continue reading }

The Age of Antibiotics may prove to be our downfall as more and more microbes find a way around the compounds we use to treat bacterial infections. A potential antibiotic is no more tested, synthesized, clinically tested and approved than a bacterial strain finds a way to circumvent its action and shares this solution with other bacteria. While physicians are becoming more concerned about the lack of new antibiotics in their arsenals to treat patients with methicillin-resistant Stapholococcus aureus (MRSA) or other multidrug-resistant (MDR) bacteria, researchers are exploring alternative means to fight MDR microbes that can devastate human health.

{ Promega | Continue reading }

photo { Thomas Ruff }

Since quite a long time neuroscientists know where the process of creative thinking takes place in the brain: mainly in the frontal lobe. The part of the brain behind our forehead is responsible for the production of ideas that are not only original, rare and uncommon but also appropriate, thus useful and adaptive. Against that background, findings about impairments in creative cognition as a consequence of frontal lobe damages are not surprising.

The neuroscientists Shamay-Tsoory et al. however, looked at this relation a little bit closer. Lesions in the frontal lobe do not always entail negative consequences for creativity. Rather on the contrary.

{ United Academics | Continue reading }

artwork { Femke Hiemstra }

Facebook has trademarks on its name and many variations of it—including the letter “F.” The company is expanding its claim over the word “book.”

{ Ars Technica | Continue reading }

also { Facebook says it may sue employers who demand job applicants’ passwords }

Today’s word: the business term for membership services (gyms, streaming music) being paid for but not used is “breakage.”

{ Sasha Frere-Jones }

photo { Nathaniel Ward }

Researchers have established a direct link between the number of friends you have on Facebook and the degree to which you are a “socially disruptive” narcissist, confirming the conclusions of many social media skeptics.

People who score highly on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory questionnaire had more friends on Facebook, tagged themselves more often and updated their newsfeeds more regularly.

The research comes amid increasing evidence that young people are becoming increasingly narcissistic, and obsessed with self-image and shallow friendships.

A number of previous studies have linked narcissism with Facebook use, but this is some of the first evidence of a direct relationship between Facebook friends and the most “toxic” elements of narcissistic personality disorder.

{ Guardian | Continue reading }

photo { Leo Berne }

quote { Hamilton Nolan/Gawker }

Most of the songs played on Top Forty radio are collaborations between producers like Stargate and “top line” writers like Ester Dean. The producers compose the chord progressions, program the beats, and arrange the “synths,” or computer-made instrumental sounds; the top-liners come up with primary melodies, lyrics, and the all-important hooks, the ear-friendly musical phrases that lock you into the song. “It’s not enough to have one hook anymore,” Jay Brown, the president of Roc Nation, and Dean’s manager, told me recently. “You’ve got to have a hook in the intro, a hook in the pre-chorus, a hook in the chorus, and a hook in the bridge.” The reason, he explained, is that “people on average give a song seven seconds on the radio before they change the channel, and you got to hook them.”

The top-liner is usually a singer, too, and often provides the vocal for the demo, a working draft of the song. If the song is for a particular artist, the top-liner may sing the demo in that artist’s style. Sometimes producers send out tracks to more than one top-line writer, which can cause problems. In 2009, both Beyoncé and Kelly Clarkson had hits (Beyoncé’s “Halo,” which charted in April, and Clarkson’s “Already Gone,” which charted in August) that were created from the same track, by Ryan Tedder.

{ The New Yorker | Continue reading }

illustration { Jordan Metcalf }