Gay People Have Crushes Too

This article about a married 50-something dude looking up his second-grade crush is adorable, but I can’t help wondering how it would play out if the object of his affection was male.

I had dude-crushes at the rate of nearly one per year from daycare til middle school (OK, grad school). Some of them turned out to be gay, some of them didn’t. Some I still know, some I don’t. Some I’ve told, some I haven’t.

Everyone knows juvenile crushes are harmless. They say more about giver than the getter, and it should be flattering to know you exist in some neuronal nook of a forgotten acquaintance.

Still, I’d be nervous calling up the dudes I spent elementary and middle school pining over (and terrified of). Even 20 years later, even in 2012, I feel like straight guys wouldn’t find it cute and complimentary, but deceptive and threatening, like I’d stolen something from them.

Or maybe I’m just paranoid. Maybe its worth a shot! Does anyone have an e-mail address for Jonathan Taylor Thomas?

In the middle of an article on longevity, a ringing endorsement of Mayor Bloomberg

If you pay careful attention to the way Ikarians have lived their lives, it appears that a dozen subtly powerful, mutually enhancing and pervasive factors are at work. It’s easy to get enough rest if no one else wakes up early and the village goes dead during afternoon naptime. It helps that the cheapest, most accessible foods are also the most healthful — and that your ancestors have spent centuries developing ways to make them taste good. It’s hard to get through the day in Ikaria without walking up 20 hills. [...]

Every one of these factors can be tied to longevity. That’s what the $70 billion diet industry and $20 billion health-club industry do in their efforts to persuade us that if we eat the right food or do the right workout, we’ll be healthier, lose weight and live longer. But these strategies rarely work. Not because they’re wrong-minded: it’s a good idea for people to do any of these healthful activities. The problem is, it’s difficult to change individual behaviors when community behaviors stay the same.

In the United States, you can’t go to a movie, walk through the airport or buy cough medicine without being routed through a gantlet of candy bars, salty snacks and sugar-sweetened beverages. The processed-food industry spends more than $4 billion a year tempting us to eat. How do you combat that? Discipline is a good thing, but discipline is a muscle that fatigues. Sooner or later, most people cave in to relentless temptation. [...]

The big aha for me, having studied populations of the long-lived for nearly a decade, is how the factors that encourage longevity reinforce one another over the long term. For people to adopt a healthful lifestyle, I have become convinced, they need to live in an ecosystem, so to speak, that makes it possible. As soon as you take culture, belonging, purpose or religion out of the picture, the foundation for long healthy lives collapses. The power of such an environment lies in the mutually reinforcing relationships among lots of small nudges and default choices. There’s no silver bullet to keep death and the diseases of old age at bay. If there’s anything close to a secret, it’s silver buckshot.

Exactly this! People on this little Greek island aren’t morally or genetically superior, they’re just surrounded by an environment that systematically, comprehensively, ubiquitously encourages healthy behaviors. In the rest of the west, our environment does the exact opposite.

An Appealing Metaphor for Innovation

Kevin Carey, in the middle of an article about how Silicon Valley is upending higher education, has a supergreat metaphor:

So he walks over to the whiteboard that makes up the entire wall of the conference room and deftly sketches out the inner workings of a rocket engine, showing what happens when thousands of gallons of rocket fuel are sprayed into a chamber of fire, thus igniting and creating fantastic amount of force, the eddies and whorls of which need to be predicted and calculated in minute, down-to-the-millisecond detail, so that the force can be directed down through the closed chamber in which the initial combustion occurs and out the bottom of the rocket in the form of enough thrust to take something the size and weight of, say, a telecommunications satellite, up and away from the gravitational bonds of our planet.[...]

The real holy grail is a more efficient use of fuel to create thrust. The amount of thrust needed to liberate X amount of weight from the Earth’s gravity well is a brute math problem. It’s inescapable. And, crucially, as Scott explains it, when the rocket is sitting on the launching pad, most of the weight is fuel.

Most of the weight is fuel. [...]

Because when most of the weight is fuel, Scott explains, a reduction in the amount of fuel you need to create thrust increases the payload weight you can move from Earth into orbit along a logarithmic scale. It’s not a linear, one-to-one thing. The less fuel you need, the less fuel you need. It’s exponential.

I’ve been thinking about this since I read it three days ago, which probably means it’s true in some way. It’s a good article!

If You’re Gonna Kill Your Wife, Don’t Be Weird Afterwards

Here’s a pretty shocking story from Texas about a guy who was convicted of murder, absent any evidence, basically because he acted weird after his wife was killed:

His stoicism and his apparent lack of sentimentality for Christine only fed [his next door neighbor] Elizabeth’s anxiety. She was astonished to see him two days after Christine’s funeral using a Weed Eater to cut down the marigolds at the end of his driveway, which she knew Christine had planted over his objections. [...]

After a friend who worked in construction cleaned and repainted the master bedroom, Michael resumed sleeping there, on the water bed where Christine was killed.

These things seem callous because they go against the narrative of what you’re supposed to act like after your wife gets killed. You hear this in rape trials sometimes too, like ‘if the rape was so traumatic, why did you go to work the next day?’

It’s weird that we talk and think like this. How you behave after being the victim of a crime doesn’t indicate its severity. I’d love to talk to some cops about how people react to these kinds of crimes. There’s probably a surprisingly wide range, and ‘typical’ reactions probably encompass all kinds of behaviors you wouldn’t expect . People are different, and having a loved one murdered is such an extreme event that you could never foresee how you would react. Maybe you’d cry for days, maybe you’d go to Blockbuster and rent Lord of the Rings. Maybe you’d want to go to work, maybe you’d never work again. It’s not productive that our culture has a narrative for how one should behave in such a horrifying scenario.

When Michael himself took the stand on the fifth day of the trial, he calmly and steadily answered the questions that were posed to him, but he did not betray the sense of personal devastation that might have moved the twelve people who would render a verdict.

“During this whole ordeal, he never fell apart,” [his lawyer] Allison told me. “He wanted people to see him as strong. And I think in the end, that very trait worked against him.” Jurors were put off by his perceived woodenness on the stand. [The jury foreman] explained, “I would have been screaming, 
‘I could never have done this! I love my wife!’ ”

[Another juror] was not persuaded by his testimony either. “He just did not come off as genuine, because there was no emotion there,” she said.

I think if I was a lawyer I’d be endlessly frustrated at having to subtly manipulate jurors into believing what is true. Sometimes people don’t want to show their inner devastation to a creaking room full of strangers. Murderers can fake grief, and non-murderers can be stoic. This isn’t rocket science, Texas.

I read stories like this and I’m like ‘jury trials are the worst we have to stop them!’ This poor guy was convicted of murder based on nothing more than circumstantial evidence and some weak CSI shit just because the prosecution was able to convince 12 people that he was an asshole. Most people who kill people are assholes, so it must have been him.

It’s the kind of story that is meant to fuel outrage among its readers. But from what little I know about the criminal justice system, lots of crimes don’t have clear motives. And in many cases, circumstantial evidence and a convincing narrative are the only things that put genuinely guilty people behind bars. There’s a whole spectrum between an open and shut case and a true whodunit, and things like the accumulation of circumstantial evidence, rumors and past behavior is often the only thing investigators have.

So I guess what I’m saying is, there are probably a number of policies that would make American’s criminal justice much better. But I’m going to refrain from having an opinion on any particular one. This shit is complicated, and there are people who do it every day. I hope they’re reading this too.

Why Doesn’t Britain Do Longform?

America has dozens of magazines that print long, investigative narrative feature stories: Vanity Fair, GQ, Harper’s, Mother Jones, the New Yorker, I could go on.

Yet Britain, from what I can tell, doesn’t have any. The London Review of Books publishes longform, and some of the Sunday papers have magazines, but the features are mostly celebrity profiles/interviews and long reviews. The FT and the Guardian both publish promiscuously, but little in the 3,000-5,000 word range.

Are there cultural or economic reasons for this? Or are tons of great stories actually getting published I’m just missing them?

Book Publishers Can Prevent the Next Jonah Lehrer

From New York Magazine’s writeup of Jonah Lehrer’s rise (blogger, writer, TED talker) and fall (fabulist, fraud, quote-maker-upper), and what it means for journalism:

Then it got so much worse. Four excruciating months later, Jonah Lehrer is known as a fabricator, a plagiarist, a reckless recycler. He’s cut-and-pasted not just his own stories but at least one from another journalist; he’s invented or conflated quotes; and he’s reproduced big errors even after sources pointed them out. His publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, will soon conclude a fact-check of his three books, the last of which, Imagine, was recalled from bookstores—a great expense for a company that, like all publishing houses, can’t afford to fact-check most books in the first place. In the meantime, he’s been completely ostracized. It’s unclear if he’ll ever write for a living again.

Lehrer was the poster boy of the recent rise of ‘academia lite’ publishing, where journalists aggregate and retell a body of scientific knowledge for a popular audience. For better (Daniel Kahneman) or worse (David Brooks), readers need narratives, publishers need content, academics need publicity, these aren’t going anywhere.

The process of fact-checking these books has come under scrutiny lately, and Lehrer is just the most recent case of a journalist misinterpreting (deliberately, accidentally, who cares) the results of academic studies to fit their own manufactured narrative.

My understanding of the publishing industry is that publishers lose money on basically 99 percent of the books they publish every year, and get into the black on just a few blockbusters. Publishers say they can’t fact-check all the books they print. I’m not all that sympathetic to this (‘it would be super hard’ is rarely a convincing defense for a multinational corporation), but more books rather than fewer is a good thing, and the reality is that publishers aren’t gonna put a New Yorker-style confirmation apparatus in place overnight.

I feel like a first step toward more accuracy in publishing is for authors to be much more accountable to their sources. Lehrer is basically accused of coming up with a conclusion first, then arranging his quotes and sources to confirm it. From what I know from my (brief) experience as an actual journalist, this is pretty standard practice. You hear about a story, you read a bit, you write it up, and you leave spaces with tags like quote from Yankees fan goes here or need Census data for this paragraph to fill in later. Good journalists will, obviously, change the story if their facts contradict their conclusions, but the actual methodology is fairly widespread.

The problem with this approach is that it conceives of sources as Mad Libs generators. You need a quote from someone, you call them up, you get them to talk til they say something that will fill the hole, you hang up. In journalism school you’re told a million times that sources aren’t allowed to see the final story before it’s published, and don’t get to amend their quotes.

This maybe makes sense for political journalism, where sources have an incentive to make themselves look good. If you’re interviewing them about some aspect of their job performance as a public official, they might try to spin you in a particular way if they know what you’re writing. Fine.

But science journalism is different. In the kinds of books and articles Lehrer was writing, his sources’ incentives were aligned with his own. Scientists want their work to reach a mass audience, and for articles to portray their results accurately.

I mean, check this out:

If Lehrer was misusing science, why didn’t more scientists speak up? When I reached out to them, a couple did complain to me, but many responded with shrugs. They didn’t expect anything better. Mark Beeman, who questioned that “needle in the haystack” quote, was fairly typical: Lehrer’s simplifications were “nothing that hasn’t happened to me in many other newspaper stories.”

Maybe book publishers can’t independently verify every single fact in every single book. But they can certainly call five or ten of their authors’ main sources, show them some chapters, and ask them if their work is being fairly represented. If Lehrer knew that his work would be shown to people he interviewed and the authors of studies he cited, he would have  been much less likely to distort their findings.

Yes, this approach has problems. Maybe the sources are dicks, and they don’t want a journalist broadcasting their results. Maybe they’re crazy-academic, and they don’t want their work published unless it’s drowning in jargon and caveats.

But maybe they’re not. Maybe they want to help make sure their work is fairly represented. Maybe they want to contribute additional information that could clarify it.

Either way, I fail to see how contacting an author’s sources—and being transparent with readers about it—would be worse than the current model, in which sources are interviewed and then discarded, and play no instrumental role in how their words and their work is represented. Sources shouldn’t necessarily have the right to approve everything that’s written about their work, but they should at least be consulted.

Authors and journalists that see true stories and correct information, rather than dazzling writing, as their primary constituents, should be arguing for this themselves.

Ultimately, I think Lehrer’s real sin was not believing in his own skill as a writer. If his work had focused on how there isn’t a simple explanation for complex phenomena, how much we don’t know about intuition, how evidence doesn’t clarify the world around us, he might still have ended up famous. And maybe, he could even have ended up right.

If 10,000 Hours of Practice Makes You More Creative, What Does 20,000 Do?

The idea that talent isn’t inborn, that you have to practice something constantly and deliberately for 10,000 hours before you master it, makes intuitive sense. It’s especially appealing for the arts. Mozart wasn’t a prodigy, the theory goes, he just crammed in 10,000 hours of practice before his 19th birthday. Nearly every filmmaker, artist and writer talks about having a passion for their medium astonishingly early in life (M. Night Shyamalan and PT Anderson, for example, were both making  movies when they were still eating peanut butter out of the jar).

Again, this makes sense. The arts have technical and craft-like aspects, and you gotta master the tools before you use them to make something that’s never existed before.

But I’m interested in what happens after you’ve done your 10,000 hours, and you keep practicing. Why do artists peak and decline?

I can see how physical or technical skills (sports, surgery) would continue to develop until they are hindered by the body’s decreasing ability to put them to use. Michael Jordan may have decades more skill than LeBron James, but the 49-year-old body simply won’t collaborate with the brain the same way as a 27-year-old’s will.

But creativity is different. You don’t need physical skill to be a writer, painter, composer or singer. So why do so many of our best examples of the 10,000 hour rule show such marked decline in the quality of their output as they get older?

Last week I read a couple reviews of Tom Wolfe’s new book, ‘Back to Blood’:

Wolfe isn’t interested in ordinary life. Ordinary life is complex, contradictory, prismatic. Wolfe’s characters are never contradictory, because they have only one big emotion, and it is lust—for sex, money, power, status. His own prose is monotonous in the same way. It confuses the depiction of strength with the energy of verisimilitude.

Wolfe is 81, and an absolute skyscraper in the world of journalism. He invented, or at least perfected, the art of longform feature reporting, and every month GQ and Vanity Fair print ripples of his voice and perspective. Yet as he’s gotten older,  his output has (OK, arguably) become repetitive and extravagant, less a man examining the world around him than a man staring at his own infinite reflection in a bathroom mirror.

This week I’ve also been listening to Paul Simon’s ‘Graceland’ basically on repeat, since it just got rereleased. It’s self-evidently the best thing ever, and Simon has (again, arguably) never made anything that holds up so well since.

Across the creative spectrum, artists generally produce works of decreasing interest as they get older. From Bob Dylan to Clint Eastwood to Claude Monet, artistic output tends to peak—sometimes early, sometimes late—then steadily decline. It’s as if, like an aging body, an aging brain no longer has the strength to throw as many spears through the fog.

I wonder if creativity, perhaps distinctly from sports or technical skills, is a kind of multiplication. It only manifests when talent breeds with inspiration, desire for risk, engagement with the outside world. Maybe it’s not the talent that diminishes, but the appetite for novelty.

Or maybe it doesn’t diminish at all. Maybe Tom Wolfe and Paul Simon are actually producing better and better work, they’re just becoming increasingly nuanced and complex as their talent develops, and are no longer embraced by the ‘tl;dr’ heathen mainstream. Their best years weren’t a creative peak so much as an extended overlap with the tastes and desires of the masses, and now they’ve diverged.

Or maybe—I hate this option—aging simply wears out the mind as profoundly as it does the body. The brain becomes so unmalleable as it ages that it can’t make intellectual jump shots anymore. Tom Wolfe today is unable to write a great novel just like Sandy Koufax is unable to pitch a no-hitter. The brain and the body are both exhausted, just one is more visible than the other.

Or maybe I’m full of shit! And thousands of works have come screaming forth from their creators’ autumnal decades, I just haven’t noticed. Maybe Mozart and Cobain and Hendrix, had they lived, would have produced peak after peak, their talent aging like Italian cheese.

Like all broad human phenomena, though, I’m firstly interested in how it applies to me. I don’t think I’ve done anything for 10,000 hours, much less 20,000. I’d better get started! As my body begins its earthward descent, I want to make sure I reach a few highs in case it takes my brain with it.

Nobody Knows What News Is

You know how in high school dance troupes, all the dancers are sort of looking at each other to see what to do next? They’re not confident enough in the moves to go through them straight-on, so you catch them looking out of the corner of their eye at the rest of the troupe to guide them through the routine.

This is basically how modern journalism works. I was reminded of this reading Walter Kirn’s dispatch from the Democratic National Convention:

They predict with assurance that [Michelle Obama's] speech will be deemed a success, and I guess they ought to know because they’re the ones who will start the deeming process. Which, in fact, has already begun. And which, in fact, turns out just the way they said it would, which I learn when I finally get back to my room and turn on cable TV.

What I thought I was seeing clearly, through my own eyes—a wandering, vaporous, contrived display of middle-brow sentimentality and word-goo—I entirely misinterpreted, apparently. Or everyone else misinterpreted it, perhaps, which comes to the same thing.

Every newsroom I ever worked in had TVs on the wall showing CNN, the sound off, day and night. Every once in awhile a conversation with a colleague or editor would instantly veer as the newsroom, en masse, attended to the Breaking News banner.

‘Hey, we should get lunch at that Italian oh my god they found Laci Peterson’s body!’ your colleague shrieks, sprinting to his desk.

I didn’t work as a journalist very long (That ‘every’ up there? It’s two. Two newsrooms.), but what struck me then and since is that no one seemed to know what actually constituted news. Murders, accidents, disasters happen every day. Some of them produce great stories, or affect how we live, or change how we understand the world. Others are just remainders of calculations we’ve already made.

Here’s Kirn again:

It’s not just a journalistic challenge, either. It’s the challenge we all face as modern political animals, caught in the feedback loops and logic mazes that come of trying to know the truth, our own truth—the truth worth casting our one and only vote for—when we don’t even know where to look, or through whose eyes.

Why is this murder, this hurricane, this bridge collapse news? It’s easier when someone else has already decided. You look at the other dancers so you don’t have to learn the routine yourself.

What’s the Opposite of Precocious?

I am a sophomore at Nathan Hale High School in Seattle, Washington. I have friends from all walks of life and believe that I would be perfect for your panel. I do not play any sports, although I had a brief stint with the lacrosse team my freshman year. I am a big fan of the entertainment industry. I have very diverse tastes in TV, movies, books, theater, and music. I cannot say no to quality entertainment, whatever the genre. I am obsessed and fascinated by pop culture, and I love reading the newspaper and magazines.

That’s the beginning of an essay I wrote in 1997. I was 15, and applying to be a ‘teen correspondent’ at USA Today.

The world of teenagers is very different from how it was in the fifties and sixties. Most males are concerned only with sex and drugs. Females seem mostly concerned about how to avoid them.

Of course, there are the few lonely souls who dare to be different, but they are labeled as ‘weirdos’ or ‘faggots’ and are generally ignored. To be popular and successful as a teenager, one must be willing to conform to what the media and their peers tell them.

The only thing more incredible than the thudding artlessness of these passages is that fact that I got the job. Based solely on the ‘strength’ of this essay, I was one of USA Today’s go-to teens for more than two years. Shit’s still on my resume.

The essay is one of hundreds of files my parents excavated  from my old hard drive and sent to me a few years ago. They all have the original names, but I’m starting to think I should just label them Cringe_1, Cringe_2 and onward to mortifying infinity. There’s one called ‘White_Racial_Identity.doc’ that I’m thinking about deleting without opening.

In this age of single parents and families in which both parents are working, the role of mother and father begin to mean less and less. Oftentimes parents would like to be home with their kids, but can’t, because they have to work a double shift so the aforementioned children can keep ordering pizzas and watching cable.

It only gets worse from there.

Maybe the worst thing about modern technology isn’t the triviality, or the ubiquitousness, but the permanence. If this essay wasn’t saved on a 15-year-old hard drive, I never would have read it again. I could have lived the rest of my life believing, on the rare occasions when I recall this period, that it was good , that I expressed something true, that I was worthy of pontificating upward from hotel room doorsteps for two years. This essay would have remained, undisturbed, a worthwhile general rather than an embarrassing particular.

We forget the extent to which we construct our childhood from input more diverse than its actual events. History, movies, retold stories, aborted friendships, it all gets folded into the way you think you had it when you were a kid. These pictures and texts from my childhood seem like some sort of alternate reality to my ‘real’ upbringing, the one I keep in my head. It’s easy to forget that it’s actually the other way around.

The Plural of Anecdote

I want to agree with this study because it confirms my pre-existing biases, but am I really supposed to ignore this paragraph?

The study’s 21 participants, 18 to 40 years old, initially lost 10% to 15% of their body weight during a three-month diet that contained about 45% of total calories from carbohydrates, 30% from fat and 25% from protein.

… So this experiment basically took three groups of seven people, put them on a diet, and recorded what happened. I know that controlled laboratory studies on weight loss are difficult and expensive, but an n this small isn’t science, it’s a reality show.