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In the process—and for the first time since Watergate and the other scandals of the Nixon administration—the NSA has turned its surveillance apparatus on the US and its citizens. It has established listening posts throughout the nation to collect and sift through billions of email messages and phone calls, whether they originate within the country or overseas. It has created a supercomputer of almost unimaginable speed to look for patterns and unscramble codes. Finally, the agency has begun building a place to store all the trillions of words and thoughts and whispers captured in its electronic net. And, of course, it’s all being done in secret. To those on the inside, the old adage that NSA stands for Never Say Anything applies more than ever.
Rising narcissism isn’t so much a trend as the trend behind all other trends. In preparation for the 2013 edition of its diagnostic manual, the psychiatric profession is currently struggling to update its definition of narcissistic personality disorder. Still, generally speaking, practitioners agree that narcissism manifests in patterns of fantastic grandiosity, craving for attention, and lack of empathy. In a 2008 survey, 35,000 American respondents were asked if they had ever had certain symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder. Among people older than 65, 3 percent reported symptoms. Among people in their 20s, the proportion was nearly 10 percent. Across all age groups, one in 16 Americans has experienced some symptoms of NPD. And loneliness and narcissism are intimately connected: a longitudinal study of Swedish women demonstrated a strong link between levels of narcissism in youth and levels of loneliness in old age. The connection is fundamental. Narcissism is the flip side of loneliness, and either condition is a fighting retreat from the messy reality of other people.
After that experience, no one was surprised that Rahm abandoned Rich Daley’s practice of taking town-hall questions directly from voters in favor of questions e-mailed in or submitted on Facebook. His staff says that he interacts daily with average Chicagoans, so why waste time on there’s-a-dog-on-my-lawn complaints? But screening many of the questions plays into the impression of the mayor as a man obsessed with orchestrating events and cultivating his public image. He doesn’t seem to have noticed that even the president of the United States takes questions from all comers at town-hall events.
This doesn’t quite make Rahm the control freak of popular imagination.
His theory draws upon many of the most prominent views of how humans emerged. These range from our evolution of the ability to run long distances to our development of the earliest weapons, which involved the improvement of hand-eye coordination. Dramatic climate change in Africa over the course of a few tens of thousands of years also may have forced Australopithecus and Homo to adapt rapidly. And over roughly the same span, humans became cooperative hunters and serious meat eaters, vastly enriching our diet and favoring the development of more-robust brains.
By themselves, Wilson says, none of these theories is satisfying. Taken together, though, all of these factors pushed our immediate prehuman ancestors toward what he called a huge pre-adaptive step: the formation of the earliest communities around fixed camps.
The drive among classical music producers is to make a highly formal, disciplined occasion seem for listeners as casual and relaxed as possible.
The assumption is that severity in programming, presentation and even attire frightens away audience members who, perhaps more than anything else, need to feel comfortable
Neuroaesthetics isn't, its pioneers say, just an elaborate parlor trick: Hey, look at this nude, or this Henry Moore sculpture, and this circuit over here lights up. Rather, it is fundamental to an understanding of human cognition and motivation. Art isn't, as Kandel paraphrases a concept from the late philosopher of art Denis Dutton, "a byproduct of evolution, but rather an evolutionary adaptation—an instinctual trait—that helps us survive because it is crucial to our well-being." The arts encode information, stories, and perspectives that allow us to appraise courses of action and the feelings and motives of others in a palatable, low-risk way. Sometimes instinctively, sometimes more consciously, artists play with perception's variables in keen acknowledgment of the viewer's active role, which the art historian Ernst Gombrich poetically called the "beholder's share."
As manifestations of private wealth transferred to the public trust, American museums were founded, in part, to represent virtue. The visual education offered to the public by these museums through their permanent collections is not just an education in art history but also a lesson in how individual hard work can become an expression of virtue by giving over objects of beauty to the public trust. No other country has seen such private wealth, accumulated through industry, willingly transferred to the public good. Even as institutions around the world now attempt to supplement their own government funding with private support on the American model, the philanthropic culture of the United States remains a singular phenomenon. The countless “American Friends of . . . ” groups that now exist for cultural institutions around the globe are testament to America’s continued abundance of philanthropic energies.
What emerges over time, for those who live alone, is an at-home self that is markedly different — in ways big and small — from the self they present to the world. We all have private selves, of course, but people who live alone spend a good deal more time exploring them.
Today, there are more than 32 million people living alone—according to the latest census estimates, 32.7 million—and that’s about 28% of all American households. This is an enormous change. Instead of being most common in the West, it’s now most common in big cities, and it's common in big cities throughout the country. In Seattle, and San Francisco, and Denver, and Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., and Chicago, there are between 35 and 45% of the households have just one person. In Manhattan, where I live, about 1 of every 2 households is a one-person household.
And the problem with frictionless sharing is that it may leave the door open for the government to collect and use information without a warrant.
To be sure, Finland is an unusual nation. Its schools are carefully designed to address the academic, social, emotional, and physical needs of children, beginning at an early age. Free preschool programs are not compulsory, but they enroll 98 percent of children. Compulsory education begins at the age of seven. Finnish educators take care not to hold students back or label them as “failing,” since such actions would cause student failure, lessen student motivation, and increase social inequality. After nine years of comprehensive schooling, during which there is no tracking by ability, Finnish students choose whether to enroll in an academic or a vocational high school. About 42 percent choose the latter. The graduation rate is 93 percent, compared to about 80 percent in the US.
Whatever special abilities dyslexia may bestow, difficulty with reading still imposes a handicap. Glib talk about appreciating dyslexia as a “gift” is unhelpful at best and patronizing at worst. But identifying the distinctive aptitudes of those with dyslexia will permit us to understand this condition more completely, and perhaps orient their education in a direction that not only remediates weaknesses, but builds on strengths.
Many of these parents feel that city schools—or any schools—don’t provide the kind of education they want for their kids. Just as much, though, their choice to homeschool is a more extreme example of a larger modern parenting ethos: that children are individuals, each deserving a uniquely curated upbringing. That peer influence can be noxious. (Bullying is no longer seen as a harmless rite of passage.) That DIY—be it gardening, knitting, or raising chickens—is something educated urbanites should embrace. That we might create a sense of security in our kids by practicing “attachment parenting,” an increasingly popular approach that involves round-the-clock physical contact with children and immediate responses to all their cues.
The latest trend should be a relief to anyone averse to immodesty. This is not racy lingerie but baggy, even frumpy, clothing that typically furnishes coverage a Victorian could love. Fathers of teenage daughters, it's safe to say, would prefer that their little angels venture forth in shapeless flannel pajamas than micro-minis and flimsy tank tops.
If you want your child to be a writer, go bankrupt.
The evidence confirms it. Failing that, at least suffer a severe financial reversal, obliging your son or daughter to endure the social opprobrium of changed schools and dropped friendships. Let him know the shame of fallen status, that he might grow ever more attuned to the minutest of slights, real or imagined. Careful scrutiny of his fellows will likely become a habit, a good sense of humor his first line of defense. Imagination will be his refuge. If you want your child to be a writer, do all this, and you may yet join an impecunious fraternity of writers’ parents that includes John Shakespeare, John Joyce, John Clemens, John Dickens, John Ernst Steinbeck, and Kurt Vonnegut, Sr.
In non-relativistic systems, where particle speeds are much less than the speed of light, interactions still occur very quickly, and they often involve lots of particles. As a result, measuring the speed of interactions within materials has been difficult. The theoretical speed limit is set by the Lieb-Robinson bound, which describes how a change in one part of a system propagates through the rest of the material. In this new study, the Lieb-Robinson bound was quantified experimentally for the first time, using a real quantum gas.
Well, I was a freelancer—a polite term for unemployed—at the time, so I extorted a tiny advance and went off to collect everything I could find out about Solzhenitsyn’s life. Looking back, it’s curious that I had the biographical itch from the beginning, because I could have written about many things, I suppose, and it didn’t necessarily need to be a biography, but that was the way I thought about it. However, Solzhenitsyn was so successful at covering his tracks that I couldn’t find out nearly enough to satisfy me, and I simply gave up.
The big question for universities going forward is this: Can control of credentialing last for long without control of knowledge? If a great many people learn from Sebastian Thrun and Udacity how to create a search engine, and if some of those are very good search engines, might not the most successful students simply point to their work as a sufficient indicator of their coding chops? Who needs a credential when they can use a simple URL to show potential employers not just what they're capable of but what they have already achieved?
It's not hard to understand why the theme is so attractive, even though it's also so repulsive. Children are supposed to be innocent. Adults deserve what they get, if they are bad, but children should always be exempt. Our entire moral understanding depends on everybody agreeing upon this. Audiences project onto children their own feelings of protectiveness, and depicting a child in distress is one of the most effective ways of engaging an audience in any story.
Because in order to survive, bookstores must stop trying to compete with Amazon.
I should pause here to clarify that when I use the word “bookstore,” I mean “independent bookstore.” Considering that barely any bookstore chains are left standing, this should be fairly apparent—but just in case any of you might think I’m talking about the few remaining Barnes & Noble or Borders megastores that still rise like brick-and-mortar colossi over the exurbs, I’m not.
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