Internet websites and print journals are always trotting out essays by writers and editors and agents and readers about how nobody reads any longer—the reason being, these essays declare, that publishing houses simply want to crank out the cheapest book they can get by with, preferably in e-book format. This is certainly true. Major publishing houses are, without a doubt, money-grubbing book factories so intent on repeating the same paperback thrillers penned by ghostwriters that they increasingly treat serious literary writers without respect, not only financially, but also personally and artistically. All of this is true. But implicit in this argument, is that the writer is doing nothing wrong—and, is in fact generating engaging, progressive, striking works of art, which are in turn, rejected and incinerated by the publishing houses. And this, unfortunately, is certainly false. American realist writers—the vast majority of them—are also to blame for the no-one-is-reading crisis, because they have essentially ceased corresponding with and affecting American society, and their works have in turn, grown boring.
Susan Hughes, from Albright College in Pennsylvania, asked 1,041 college students questions about their kissing preferences, styles, attitudes and behaviors.
- Men and women reported having kissed a similar number of people in their lives; 14 was the average number for both men and women.
- About 50% of men would have sex without kissing their partner first; only 10% of women would do so.
- Men want to kiss someone based on their perception of facial attraction, women focus more on a man’s teeth in deciding if they would like to kiss him.
- Kissing seems to be more important before sex and much less so after.
- Overall, kissing is more important for women than for men in having a satisfying sexual experience.
- Overall men prefer wetter kisses with more tongue than do women.
- Both sexes preferred more tongue with long-term partners.
- Men are more than twice as likely to have sex with a bad kisser than are women.
For many philosophers, the scholarly debate around holes began in earnest in 1970, with Lewis and Lewis’s now classic article “Holes” (Australasian Journal of Philosophy 48: 206–212.) The authors presented their paper in a highly unusual format – that of an imaginary discussion between two philosophers, called Argle and Bargle, who are pondering the holes in a piece of Gruyère cheese. Argle believes that every hole has a hole-lining, and therefore the hole-lining is the hole. On the other hand, Bargle points out that even if hole-linings surround holes, things don’t surround themselves. Since the 70’s the philosophical debate around holes has continued and expanded considerably, and has now been complemented with an article by Kristopher McDaniel, assistant professor in the department of philosophy at Syracuse University, NY. The professor outlines the possibilities for a new and more comprehensive category of entities which includes holes, and which he calls “Almost Nothings.”
How much would someone have to pay you to give up the Internet for the rest of your life? Would a million dollars be enough? Twenty million? How about a billion dollars? “When I ask my students this question, they say you couldn’t pay me enough.”
(…)
Reframe this offer so that it has more time to generate social support, and no way would most people reject it.
At 5% interest, a million dollars pays ~$4,000 a month. So let’s imagine offering people $4,000 to give up TV or internet for one month, and then renewing the offer every month afterward – they could go on or off the plan at will.
In the late 1990s, Jane Anderson was working as a landscape architect. That meant she didn’t work much in the winter, and she struggled with seasonal affective disorder in the dreary Minnesota winter months. She decided to try meditation and noticed a change within a month. “My experience was a sense of calmness, of better ability to regulate my emotions,” she says. Her experience inspired a new study which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, which finds changes in brain activity after only five weeks of meditation training.
Previous studies have found that Buddhist monks, who have spent tens of thousands of hours of meditating, have different patterns of brain activity. But Anderson wanted to know if they could see a change in brain activity after a shorter period.
Why does exercise make us happy and calm? (…) How, at a deep, cellular level, exercise affects anxiety and other moods has been difficult to pin down. The brain is physically inaccessible and dauntingly complex. But a recent animal study from researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health provides some intriguing new clues into how exercise intertwines with emotions, along with the soothing message that it may not require much physical activity to provide lasting emotional resilience.
Every generation has its life-defining moments. (…) For much of my generation—Generation X, born between 1965 and 1980—there is only one question: “When did your parents get divorced?” (…)
“Whatever happens, we’re never going to get divorced.” Over the course of 16 years, I said that often to my husband, especially after our children were born. Apparently, much of my generation feels at least roughly the same way: Divorce rates, which peaked around 1980, are now at their lowest level since 1970. In fact, the often-cited statistic that half of all marriages end in divorce was true only in the 1970s—in other words, our parents’ marriages. Not ours.
According to U.S. Census data released this May, 77% of couples who married since 1990 have reached their 10-year anniversaries. We’re also marrying later in life, if at all. The average marrying age in 1950 was 23 for men and 20 for women; in 2009, it was 28 for men and 26 for women.
Peter Brabeck-Letmathe chairs Nestlé, the world’s 44th-largest company, which last year earned US$10.5 billion in profits on US$121.1 billion in revenues. He is the consummate international businessman, bargaining hard, overseeing 280,000 employees, outflanking competitors and at ease with heads of state. Yet Brabeck remains incapable of negotiating one simple and irreplaceable ingredient without which his company ceases to exist: water.
He hardly seems a gloomy Malthusian, yet Brabeck foresees “limits to growth” because our global fresh water supply is both finite and being rapidly, stupidly, depleted. The world can sustainably use 4,200 cubic kilometres of water, he notes, but it consumes 4,500 even as aquifers plummet and rivers run dry.
Four nuclear reactors in Japan, Israel and Scotland were forced to shutdown due to infiltration of enormous swarms of jellyfish, which clogged the plant’s cooling system.
Such massive invasions of the jellyfish species have raised speculations and scientists are trying to figure out the reason behind such unusual growing trends.
Recent studies have found out that jellyfish blooming occurs mostly during the summer and spring months. This may partly explain why the three recent power plant incidents happened in close succession. The conditions brought on by climate change may also be creating more jellyfish blooms than there used to be.
Graham said there have been dozens of cases of jellyfish causing partial or complete shutdowns of coastal power plants in the past few decades, as well as shutdowns of desalination plants. Steve Haddock of the Monterrey Bay Aquarium Research Institute said a power plant in Australia was shut down by jellyfish as long ago as 1937. Such events aren’t surprising; all these plants draw water out of the ocean, and they are already fitted with filtration devices called flumes that remove jellyfish and other debris.
“Only when you have a huge influx of jellies do they overwhelm the flumes,” Graham told Life’s Little Mysteries. This happens when a jellyfish bloom — a huge swarm of adult specimens brought together by ocean currents — flows into a power plant’s filtration system.
Tom Waits (introducing Muriel, London, 1981): “This is a song about an American television personality named Ernie Kovacs who was very popular in the late 50’s. He had his own show and he had a beautiful wife, Edie Adams, (here in a high pitched goofy voice he sings): “And you may ask yourself, how did you get that beautiful wife? How did you get that beautiful car?” Ernie was very fond of Edie, they were very close for many years. They went to a party in Beverley Hills one night. Edie took the Rolls and Ernie took the Corvair. That’s just the way they had things worked out, and on Ernie’s way home, he’d had a few cocktails, and he wrapped himself around a telephone pole there on Santa Monica and La Cienega, he’s history now. Edie used to do advertisements for Muriel Cigars, it’s a real cheap 10 cent cigar in the States and so this is about a guy in the lounge who’s smoking a cigar and remembering - remember with me now.”
(…)
Larry Goldstein (about I never Talk to Strangers, 1978): “One of the few people with whom he can work is Bette Midler. “I met her, now let me see, a couple of years ago at the bottom Line (a nightclub) in New York,” he said, “and we got along famously. I admire her a great deal. And you know…I’ll kick anybody’s ass who knocks her. I wrote a couple of tunes for her.” (Shiver Me Timbers among them.) The two stayed close friends and then one day Bette dropped by the studio during the recording of Foreign Affairs just to say hello. The topic of duets arose, and she asked Waits to try and write one for them. So Tom went home and went to work and came back the next day with a brand new song, to be recorded that day, I Never Talk To Strangers, which has become the most popular song on the album. When I asked him about the possibility of more collaboration between the two, Waits was intentionally vague and mysterious. “We might work something out,” he said.
In 1980 this song prompted Francis Ford Coppola to contact Waits on working together on the soundtrack for One From The Heart.
Tom Waits (1981): “When I was in New York back in April of 1980, Francis was there auditioning people he wanted to be involved with the film. Somebody had sent him my records and Francis liked the song I Never Talk to Strangers, a duet I’d done with Bette Midler. He liked the relationship between the singers, a conversation between a guy and a girl in a bar. That was the impetus for him contacting me and asking me if I was interested in writing music for his film.”
It is well recognized that there are consistent differences in the psychological characteristics of boys and girls; for example, boys engage in more ‘rough and tumble’ play than girls do.
Studies also show that children who become gay or lesbian adults differ in such traits from those who become heterosexual – so-called gender nonconformity. Research which follows these children to adulthood shows that between 50 to 80 per cent of gender nonconforming boys become gay, and about one third of such girls become lesbian. (…)
The team followed a group of 4,000 British women who were one of a pair of twins. They were asked questions about their sexual attractions and behavior, and a series of follow up questions about their gender nonconformity. In line with previous research, the team found modest genetic influences on sexual orientation (25 per cent) and childhood gender nonconformity (31 per cent).
A lipogram (from Greek lipagrammatos, “missing letter”) is a kind of constrained writing or word game consisting of writing paragraphs or longer works in which a particular letter or group of letters is avoided — usually a common vowel.
Writing a lipogram is a trivial task for uncommon letters like Z, J, or X, but it is much more difficult for common letters like E, T or A. Writing this way, the author must omit many ordinary words.
Perec is noted for his constrained writing: his 300-page novel La disparition (1969) is a lipogram, written without ever using the letter “e.”
It has been translated into English under the title A Void (1994).
The silent disappearance of the letter might be considered a metaphor for the Jewish experience during the Second World War. Both of Georges Perec’s parents perished in World War II. In French, the phrase “sans e” (”without e”) sounds like “sans eux” (”without them”).
I stand at the window and see a house, trees, sky.
Theoretically I might say there were 327 brightnesses and nuances of color. Do I have 327? No. I have sky, house, and trees. It is impossible to achieve 327 as such. And yet even though such droll calculation were possible and implied, say, for the house 120, the trees 90, the sky 117 — I should at least have this arrangement and division of the total, and not, say, 127 and 100 and 100; or 150 and 177. (…)
Or, I hear a melody (17 tones) with its accompaniment (32 tones). I hear the melody and accompaniment, not simply 49 and certainly not 20 plus 29. (…)
When we are presented with a number of stimuli we do not as a rule experience “a number” of individual things, this one and that and that. Instead larger wholes separated from and related to one another are given in experience; their arrangement and division are concrete and definite.
Do such arrangements and divisions follow definite principles?
What’s the tradeoff between people using their experience (people using the knowledge they’ve gained, and the expertise that they’ve developed), versus being able to just follow steps and procedures?
We know from the literature that people sometimes make mistakes. A lot of organizations are worried about mistakes, and try to cut down on errors by introducing checklists, introducing procedures, and those are extremely valuable. I don’t want to fly in an airplane with pilots who have forgot their checklists. (…)
How do people make the tradeoffs when they start to become experts? And does it have to be one or the other? Do people either have to just follow procedures, or do they have to abandon all procedures and use their knowledge and their intuition?
This gets us into the work on system one and system two thinking.
System one is really about intuition, people using the expertise and the experience they’ve gained. System two is a way of monitoring things, and we need both of those, and we need to blend them.
Amazon.com made waves in March when it announced Cloud Player, a new “cloud music” service that allows users to upload their music collections for personal use. It did so without a license agreement, and the major music labels were not amused. Sony Music said it was keeping its “legal options open” as it pressured Amazon to pay up.
In the following weeks, two more companies announced music services of their own. Google, which has long had a frosty relationship with the labels, followed Amazon’s lead; Google Music Beta was announced without the Big Four on board. But Apple has been negotiating licenses so it can operate iCloud with the labels’ blessing.
The different strategies pursued by these firms presents a puzzle. Either Apple wasted millions of dollars on licenses it doesn’t need, or Amazon and Google are vulnerable to massive copyright lawsuits. All three are sophisticated firms that employ a small army of lawyers, so it’s a bit surprising that they reached such divergent assessments of what the law requires.
Why does music elevate your mood, move you to tears or make you dance? It’s a mystery to most of us, but not so much to evolutionary neurobiologist Mark Changizi.
My research suggests that when we listen to music without any visual component, our auditory system—or at least the lower-level auditory areas—”thinks” it is the sounds of a human moving in our midst, doing some sort of behavior, perhaps an emotionally expressive behavior.
The auditory system “thinks” this because music has been “designed” by cultural evolution to sound like people moving about. That is, over time, humans figured out how to better and better make sounds that mimicked (and often exaggerated) the fundamental kinds of sounds humans make when we move.
I lay out more than 40 respects in which music sounds like people doing stuff. At the core of “moving people” is the walk. The human gait has unique characteristics, from its regularly repeating step (the beat) to the sounds of other parts of the body during the gait that are in time with the step (notes, more generally).
I have been reading Curzio Malaparte’s Technique of the Coup d’état this weekend. It’s a fascinating document – the basic argument is that the October Revolution represented an exportable, universally applicable technology for taking control of the state, quite independent of ideological motivation or broader strategic situation. (…)
So, what’s this open-source putsch kit consist of? Basically you need a small force of determined rebels. Small is important – you want quality not quantity as secrecy, unanimity, and common understanding good enough to permit independent action are required. You want as much chaos as possible in advance of the coup, although not so much that everything’s shut. And then you occupy key infrastructures and command-and-control targets. Don’t, whatever you do, go after ministries or similar grand institutional buildings – get the stuff that would really cause trouble if it blew up.
As a shy person, I’ve believed for most of my life that being among new people required an elaborate social disguise, one that would allow me to feel both present and absent, noticed and unnoticed. I’d yearn for some sort of social recognition without the bother of having to be recognized, without that oppressive pressure to live up to anything that might get me attention in the first place. So I’d find myself executing oblique tactics — being stingy and stealthy with eye contact; wearing a mask of deep concentration; staring at an underappreciated object in the room, like a light fixture or molding — in hopes of discouraging people from engaging me in actual conversation while still conveying the impression that I might be interesting to talk to.
The problem with polite conversation, I thought, was that it required the orderly recitation of platitudes before one can say anything interesting, let alone something as original and insightful as I wanted to believe myself to be. I couldn’t bear it. I had an irrational expectation that people should already know what I was about and come to me with suitable topics to draw me out.
