August 27, 2018 in 2,488 words

It Would Take Only a Single Senator

_{^{With Republicans clinging to a precarious 50–49 majority, every individual GOP senator can serve as a check on Trump’s excesses whenever they choose to act}}

A few days ago I wrote a long item about changing assessments of Donald Trump: which first impressions had held up, and which had called for second thoughts over time.

The last part of the post concerned the main, and depressing, area where second thoughts were necessary. That was the complete failure of the congressional governing party—Paul Ryan and his large Republican majority in the House, Mitch McConnell and his razor-thin Republican majority in the Senate—to stand up either for its institutional prerogatives, as a separate branch of government, or for normal principles of accountability and the rule of law.

In keeping with the concept that if something is worth saying once, it’s worth saying again—and more concisely—here is the ending part of that previous post once more. It’s also been updated to reflect a sad change in the math of the Senate. When I wrote it, John McCain was ailing and absent from the Senate. Now, of course, he has died, and (as I write, when no replacement has yet been named) the Senate has for the moment only 99 members.

Here is the payoff part of the earlier post. …

WE NEED SOFTWARE TO HELP US SLOW DOWN, NOT SPEED UP

ONLINE COMMERCE HAS made it easier than ever to shop, right? Maybe too easy. A recent study by comparison-shopping site Finder revealed that more than 88 percent of Americans admitted to spontaneous impulse buying online, blowing an average of $81.75 each time we lose control. Clothes, videogames, concert tickets. One in five of us succumb weekly. Millennials do it the most.

“The main emotion that people feel after this impulsive spending is regret,” says Jennifer McDermott, a consumer advocate for Finder. While it’s not an impartial estimate, Finder calculates that we spend more than $17 billion on impulse buys—which is a lot of regret.

So McDermott’s team decided to help us rein in our impulses. They created Icebox, a Chrome plug-­in that replaces the Buy button on 20 well-known ecommerce sites with a blue button labeled “Put it on ice.” Hit it and your item goes into a queue, and a week or so later Icebox asks if you still want to buy it.

In essence, it forces you to stop and ponder, “Do I really need this widget?” Odds are you don’t.

This is a lovely example of what I’ve come to think of as “friction engineering”—software that’s designed not to speed us up but to slow us down. It’s a principle that inverts everything we know about why software exists. …

Skim reading is the new normal. The effect on society is profound

_{When the reading brain skims texts, we don’t have time to grasp complexity, to understand another’s feelings or to perceive beauty. We need a new literacy for the digital age.}

_{We need to cultivate a new kind of brain: a “bi-literate’ reading brain.}

Look around on your next plane trip. The iPad is the new pacifier for babies and toddlers. Younger school-aged children read stories on smartphones; older boys don’t read at all, but hunch over video games. Parents and other passengers read on Kindles or skim a flotilla of email and news feeds. Unbeknownst to most of us, an invisible, game-changing transformation links everyone in this picture: the neuronal circuit that underlies the brain’s ability to read is subtly, rapidly changing – a change with implications for everyone from the pre-reading toddler to the expert adult.

As work in neurosciences indicates, the acquisition of literacy necessitated a new circuit in our species’ brain more than 6,000 years ago. That circuit evolved from a very simple mechanism for decoding basic information, like the number of goats in one’s herd, to the present, highly elaborated reading brain. My research depicts how the present reading brain enables the development of some of our most important intellectual and affective processes: internalized knowledge, analogical reasoning, and inference; perspective-taking and empathy; critical analysis and the generation of insight. Research surfacing in many parts of the world now cautions that each of these essential “deep reading” processes may be under threat as we move into digital-based modes of reading.

_{There’s an old rule in neuroscience that does not alter with age: use it or lose it.}

This is not a simple, binary issue of print vs digital reading and technological innovation. As MIT scholar Sherry Turkle has written, we do not err as a society when we innovate, but when we ignore what we disrupt or diminish while innovating. In this hinge moment between print and digital cultures, society needs to confront what is diminishing in the expert reading circuit, what our children and older students are not developing, and what we can do about it. …

5 Catchphrases That Came From The Last Place You’d Expect

For whatever reason, certain cinematic turns of phrase just burrow their way into our collective consciousness, whether it’s the Terminator announcing he’ll be back, the Godfather bragging about his killer offers, or one of Adam Sandler’s many screeching noises. Where do they come from? Sometimes the answer’s way stranger than you’d think. For instance …

5. Star Wars‘ “May The Force Be With You” Was Intended To Evoke The Bible

It’s rare that a movie quote becomes so famous that it literally spawns a holiday, in this case on a date that sounds like a drunken slurred version of the phrase. Of course we’re talking about the most famous line in the Star Wars series: “May the Force be with you.” It was first uttered in A New Hope, not by Obi-Wan, Leia, Luke, or even Aunt Beru, but by an avuncular Rebel leader who likely went back to working as a mall Santa after the movie was over.

In context, it basically meant “Hopefully, magic will help you with your suicide mission.” But where did it come from? Originally the line was “May the Force of others be with you,” implying that the Force was some kind of communal pool of psychic mojo, like how body odor on a city bus combines into one dominant entity. The phrasing seems to reference our Earth religion of Catholicism, specifically the blessing Dominus vobiscum, which means “The Lord be with you.” According to the film’s producer, Gary Kurtz, that “comparison was exactly the intention.”

These religious undertones didn’t go unnoticed by the Christian community at the time, either. One of the first books ever written about Star Wars was a Christian-themed analysis, The Force Of Star Wars by Frank Allnutt. The book suggested that the message of the movie was about finding the Force (God) rather than spending your life “wallowing in the mud of pornography, dope, materialism and vain philosophies.” Which brings up a new question: What the hell did Allnutt think was going on over at Tosche Station?

_{And when did Bette Middler get so buff?}

Allnutt also proposed that Obi-Wan’s death was a speedier crucifixion, and later in life floated the theory that the word “Jedi” is secretly a contraction of “JEsus’ DIsciple.” Disappointingly, the book never even attempts to explain why Christianity hasn’t been able to tap into the whole telekinesis thing. …

Sports teams think the color pink can help them win

_{LOCKER ROOM ROUGE}

A soccer team in England has painted the dressing room for opposing squads pink because it thinks it will help lower the testosterone levels of their rivals and give them an edge.

The sporting director of Norwich City, a club in the second tier of English soccer, told fans that doing so is aimed at lowering the aggression of opponents. The team’s own dressing room, by contrast, is a bright white. The local Eastern Daily Press quoted a psychology lecturer from the University of East Anglia who suggested the color’s effect would be small—yet possibly enough to tip results in marginal games.

It’s not the first sports team to try this, or the first sport. The gridiron opponents of the University of Iowa face not only an all-pink locker room, but also all-pink bathrooms, including the urinals and the ceilings. It was the brainchild of former head coach Hayden Fry, who had a master’s degree in psychology.

“When I talk to an opposing coach before a game and he mentions the pink walls, I know I’ve got him,” Fry wrote in his autobiography, according to Sports Illustrated. “I can’t recall a coach who has stirred up a fuss about the color and then beat us.” Colorado State also did something similar. …

Ethereal underworld: exploring Helsinki’s colossal new art bunker

_{In a vast expanse beneath the Finnish capital lies a soaring circus-top culture hub. Will the €50m Amos Rex art museum put the city at the forefront of Europe’s art scene?}

_{It’s as if the museum is bubbling up into the square.}

Bulging white mounds rear up out of the ground in the middle of Helsinki, tapering to circular windows that point like cyclopean eyes around the square. Children scramble up the steep slopes while a skateboarder attempts to glide down one, past a couple posing for a selfie at the summit.

This curious landscape of humps and funnels signals the arrival of Amos Rex, a €50m (£45m) art museum for the Finnish capital, which opens this week in a vast subterranean space beneath a former bus station parking lot.

“It is as if the museum didn’t quite agree to go underground,” says Asmo Jaaksi of local architecture firm JKMM, which masterminded the project, “and it’s somehow bubbling up into the square.”

_{Digital dreamscape … the museum’s inaugural exhibition.}

It is a suitably truculent metaphor for this forthright city, which in 2016 turned down the prospect of having its own Guggenheim Museum, after five years of bitterly contested public debates. While the Guggenheim’s mooted harbour-front location remains empty (earmarked as a potential site for a new architecture and design museum, announced last week), the opening of the privately funded Amos Rex adds convincing weight to the argument that Helsinki is a world-class cultural destination in its own right, without the need for a branch of the US franchise.

Beneath the lumpy landscape stretches a gargantuan 2,200 sq m flexible exhibition space (almost twice the size of the V&A’s new underground gallery), which has been cleverly excavated in the centre of town, between a former army barracks and the Lasipalatsi, or glass palace, a 1930s entertainment and retail complex. This glory of Finnish functionalism has been immaculately restored, with timewarp interiors of fleshy salmon columns, a sweeping spiral staircase and spherical glass light fittings that dangle like clumps of frogspawn from bright red and blue ceilings. Its 500-seat cinema is a wonder of the period, with chrome-edged red upholstered seats, flying saucer lamps and pleated mustard-coloured curtains. Outside, the building’s former boilerhouse chimney stands proudly in the centre of the new square with a nautical air, like the funnel of a ship now cast adrift in the churning sea of paved mounds. …

Video Goodnesses
_{and not-so-goodnesses}

Jake Tapper provides a reminder of what “fake news” actually means and explains why truthful reporting and checking facts shouldn’t be controversial.

THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.

John Oliver sets the record straight about some dubious claims he’s made in the past.

THANKS to HBO and Last Week Tonight for making this program available on YouTube.

We speak to ‘unboxer’ Safwan Ahmedmia and web psychologist Nathalie Nahai about the internet craze ‘unboxing’

もちろん、入っているまる。Maru is in the box!

FINALLY . . .

Courir de Mardi Gras

_{A Cajun tradition that combines costumes, gumbo, and chasing chickens.}

Man and animal. A chase, locked in time. Feathers flying everywhere. Wait, what? No, this isn’t the running of the bulls. Potential injuries at this event are limited to a couple of chicken scratches, or a drunken slip in the mud. This is Courir de Mardi Gras.

In the small towns outside of New Orleans, far from the tourist-driven theatrics, Mardi Gras means something very different. The Cajun tradition of Courir de Mardi Gras sees teams of vibrantly costumed (some theatrics remain) individuals going from house to house, calling out for donations of ingredients for gumbo. Led by capitaines who typically guide the procession on horseback, these groups dance and sing in exchange for their food. The running part comes as the homeowners release a live chicken into the crowd, setting off a frenzy of limbs and wings until the bird is captured.

And so the the group progresses, collecting vegetables, rice, meat, and spices for a giant gumbo at the end of a long day. Modern events are more ceremonial, as making gumbo for hundreds of participants is a day-long process and must begin long before the participants have collected all the ingredients. The chase, nonetheless, continues on. …

DEGREE OF DIFFICULTY: Remember to pace yourself with any booze: You will have to run eventually.

FINALLY . . . FINALLY . . .

Feeding Crows for the Shradh

_{In this Hindu ritual, families feed crows who represent deceased relatives.}

There are no crows to be seen. It is noon, and the sun is high in the sky in Chennai, India; two women carry a veritable feast in their arms eager to feed the crows, but there are none. “Caw, caw,” one woman mumbles, calling to the birds. When none respond, they take the banana leaf containing their feast—sugar-flecked kalkand rice, plain rice smothered in sambhar, yogurt, green gram dal, rice soaked in rasam, savory doughnuts called vadai, plantain chips, and semolina payasam—into the car. They wind their windows down and squint outside at treetops and at the sky, willing one crow to appear. Just one.

This is part of a Hindu ritual known as shradh, an annual rite conducted on a day known as the tithi, or the anniversary of a loved one’s death, calculated according to astrology and the Vedic calendar. Hindus believe that crows are the link between the worlds of the living and the dead; ancestors, it is said, visit the living in the form of a crow. Every year following a loved one’s death, the family cooks a feast filled with all of their relative’s favorite foods. Each of them take turns to ladle the feast onto a banana leaf until they have all served something, and then the leaf is carefully carried outside. But sometimes, there are no crows, and that’s when a family must drive around looking for them. (Feeding a crow is considered auspicious and is practiced on all sorts of occasions, tied to all sorts of rituals.) …

The shradh has concluded when a crow pecks at the feast and begins to eat. This signifies that the soul of the loved one is now satiated and is at peace. …

_{Ed. More tomorrow? Probably. Possibly. Maybe. Not?}