culture

John Kass in the Tribune:

Yet even reformers go away, like Lawrence Bloom, Hyde Park’s former alderman, the face of good government who got caught up in a federal sting. So in corrupt Chicago — did I mention it’s the city that has earned the title Corruption Capital of America? — we’ve had scores of aldermen indicted since the 1970s, and some more than once. They keep sprouting, like eyes on a potato in your pantry, or a bloodthirsty many-headed hydra if you’re into mythology.

This pains me to post, simply because I prefer good news about where I live, but I am hopeful for a new future for Chicago. Our church and family (even though it provokes eye-rolling from some) fervently pray for a prosperous and just city (Psalm 144:12-14).

A couple of years old, but good read from NYT on Instagram and FOMO:

Viewers, meanwhile, are expected to let the sumptuous photos wash over them and chip in with comments (“Gorgeous sunset!”) and heart-shape “likes,” which function as a form of social currency, reinforcing the idea that every shot is a performance worthy of applause. The result is an online culture where the ethic is impress, rather than confess.

It is as if every last image is designed to call to mind Norman Mailer’s book title, “Advertisements for Myself.”

Om Malick in The New Yorker:

…the designers didn’t consider it, perhaps because those who write these algorithms have not experienced such trauma, or perhaps they just weren’t talking about the human feelings in their product meetings—a particularly likely possibility when a company is focussed on engagement and growth. The lack of empathy in technology design doesn’t exist because the people who write algorithms are heartless but perhaps because they lack the texture of reality outside the technology bubble. Facebook’s blunders are a reminder that it is time for the company to think not just about fractional-attention addiction and growth but also to remember that the growth affects real people, for good and bad.

Columbia humanities professor Mark Lilla in the NYT:

But the fixation on diversity in our schools and in the press has produced a generation of liberals and progressives narcissistically unaware of conditions outside their self-defined groups, and indifferent to the task of reaching out to Americans in every walk of life. At a very young age our children are being encouraged to talk about their individual identities, even before they have them. By the time they reach college many assume that diversity discourse exhausts political discourse, and have shockingly little to say about such perennial questions as class, war, the economy and the common good.

h/t @nickoparsons

Fascinating — and scathing — profile in the Miami Herald:

As he [Castro] changed the face of Cuba, he remapped South Florida as well, transforming it from the southernmost tip of the United States to the northernmost point of Latin America. The suffering of the refugees he sent pouring into Miami eventually turned to triumph as they forged economic and political success.

Watch on YouTube

Richard Florida in a February 2013 piece:

America’s political divide is an outgrowth of its increasingly divided economic landscape. The very same forces of talent-clustering and knowledge industry concentration that shape the divergent economic fortunes of our cities and regions, increasingly shape our politics.

In short, cities tend to vote democratic. (Florida cites some of the reasons why, like education and the kinds of jobs people have.)

Florida in a piece this week:

But the bigger reality [regarding the post-election narrative] according to my own analysis is that the 2016 election follows the same basic contours of class and location — the same divides of knowledge and density — of the last several election cycles.

In short, cities tend to vote democratic.

D Yanagizawa-Drott, Economics Professor at the University of Zurich:

https://twitter.com/yanagiz/status/796382521688727552

His Twitter feed has more, including some alternate visualizations of the voter turnout data from other contributors.

Grant, O Lord, that the course of this world may be so peaceably ordered by your governance, that your people may joyfully serve you in all godly quietness. Amen.

Adapted from Thomas Cranmer by Tim and Kathy Keller in The Songs of Jesus (p 163)

Yinka Adegoke, Quartz Africa editor:

It’s all very ironic because much of what’s happened in this very unusual US election season (unusual in recent American history) are familiar themes in Africa.

A controversy-ridden former first lady is running for president against a wealthy former ally and megalomaniac who accuses the other side of rigging the election before it happens. There’s much fear of his supporters rioting if results don’t go their way. There are also rumors that some people in certain regions won’t be allowed to vote. Meanwhile, the current president’s half-brother is complaining the president hasn’t done enough for his people (in a different country). If you’d pitched that script to a Hollywood producer about an imaginary African country it would get turned down for lazy stereotyping (well, it should).

Jonathan Haidt in his excellent book, The Righteous Mind:

[Dan] Ariely summarizes his findings from many variations of the paradigm like this: “When given the opportunity, many honest people will cheat. In fact, rather than finding that a few bad apples weighted the averages, we discovered that the majority of people cheated, and that they cheated just a little bit.”

People didn’t try to get away with as much as they could. Rather, when Ariely gave them anything like the invisibility of the ring of Gyges, they cheated only up to the point where they themselves could no longer find a justification that would preserve their belief in their own honesty.

The bottom line is that in lab experiments that give people invisibility combined with plausible deniability, most people cheat. The press secretary (also known as the inner lawyer) 27 is so good at finding justifications that most of these cheaters leave the experiment as convinced of their own virtue as they were when they walked in.¹

There is so much fascinating (and useful) information in this book that it was almost impossible to select a single quotation to post here.

Also, here’s a solid review of the book from a Christian perspective.

Brooke Lea Foster in the NYT:

Married or not, many of us sleep with our phones on our night stands, pocket them as we go from room to room and think nothing of using them in the presence of our partners, whether they are talking or snuggling or reading beside us.

Experts say that smartphone use is meddling in our marriages in ways that are sometimes benign but often frustrating, causing quarrels and forcing couples to address an ever more important question: At what point are we choosing to spend more time with our smartphones than with our spouses?

Health workers can request a blood drop via text message, and it arrives around 30 minutes later. That makes a big difference in a country where short road trips can take hours. Blood loss after birth is one of the reasons maternal mortality is much higher in poor countries than rich ones; it’s the leading cause of death in Rwanda for pregnant women. And blood has to be stored carefully and matched to the recipient.

Article also links to video of first blood drone delivery.

Excellent piece by Andrew Sullivan in NYMag on the Internet taking over our lives. Includes this bit from Louis C.K.:

On the Conan O’Brien show, C.K. explained: “You need to build an ability to just be yourself and not be doing something. That’s what the phones are taking away,” he said. “Underneath in your life there’s that thing … that forever empty … that knowledge that it’s all for nothing and you’re alone … That’s why we text and drive … because we don’t want to be alone for a second.”

He recalled a moment driving his car when a Bruce Springsteen song came on the radio. It triggered a sudden, unexpected surge of sadness. He instinctively went to pick up his phone and text as many friends as possible. Then he changed his mind, left his phone where it was, and pulled over to the side of the road to weep. He allowed himself for once to be alone with his feelings, to be overwhelmed by them, to experience them with no instant distraction, no digital assist. And then he was able to discover, in a manner now remote from most of us, the relief of crawling out of the hole of misery by himself. For if there is no dark night of the soul anymore that isn’t lit with the flicker of the screen, then there is no morning of hopefulness either. As he said of the distracted modern world we now live in: “You never feel completely sad or completely happy, you just feel … kinda satisfied with your products. And then you die. So that’s why I don’t want to get a phone for my kids.”

Reading the article made me recall Chris Travis’ observation that “attention is the scarcest resource” in our society today.

Eric Posner, interviewed on Freakonomics Radio:

The great lesson of Roman history was that, for quite a long time, the Roman Republic had a limited government. It was not run by kings or emperors, and it was also highly successful. By the standards of the time, it was wealthy and it conquered lots of places. It was a fantastic kind of role model for the Founders who were very ambitious for the U.S. but who didn’t want a king. But then the Roman Republic collapsed and was replaced by an emperor.

So the Founders, looking back, said, “We’d like to be powerful like the Roman Republic, and we’d like to imitate the constitutional structure of the Roman Republic to the extent that it was able to maintain both liberty while creating a powerful country. But we want to avoid the errors they made which paved the way for an emperor.”

Good interview, full of other insight from Posner, like the principle that limitation of presidential power might help America to be great, but often by over-stepping (or ignoring) that limitation presidents become great.

Posner’s paper here.