The Pursuit Of Happiness

Can prove counterproductive:

Groundbreaking work by Iris Mauss has recently supported the counterintuitive idea that striving for happiness may actually cause more harm than good. In fact, at times, the more people pursue happiness the less they seem able to obtain it. Mauss shows that the more people strive for happiness, the more likely they will be to set a high standard for happiness—then be disappointed when that standard is not met.  This is especially true when people were in positive contexts, such as listening to an upbeat song or watching a positive film clip. It is as if the harder one tries to experience happiness, the more difficult it is to actually feel happy, even in otherwise pleasant situations.

Mental Health Break

Shawn Reeder spent two years shooting a time-lapse of Yosemite National Park:

Holy Hallucinations

Alex Bellos profiles a Brazilian religion and its drug of choice:

Ayahuasca—or Daime as it is known locally—is a muddy-looking concoction made from boiling the Banisteriopsis caapi vine and the Psychotria viridis leaf. Across the Amazon, indigenous people drink it as a part of their rituals. In Brazil a century ago, however, the hallucinogen led to the birth of a new Christian movement, the religion known as Santo Daime.

How the religion started in Brazil:

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When Some Bishops Were Honest

Ah, to go back seventeen years ...

A Poem For Sunday

"The Universal Prayer" by Alexander Pope:

Father of all! In every age,
In every clime adored,
By saint, by savage, and by sage,
Jehovah, Jove, or Lord!

Thou Great First Cause, least understood
Who all my sense confined
To know but this, that Thou art good
And that myself am blind.

The poem continues.

(Image: mirrored sculptures by Rob Mulholland via Colossal)

Can Science Embrace Awe?

Philip Ball insists it's not reserved for religion:

Pretending that science is performed by people who have undergone a Baconian purification of the emotions only deepens the danger that it will seem alien and odd to outsiders, something carried out by people who do not think as they do. [Lorraine] Daston believes that we have inherited a “view of intelligence as neatly detached from emotional, moral and aesthetic impulses, and a related and coeval view of scientific objectivity that brand[s] such impulses as contaminants”.

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Sunday Dish

Two reader responses:

It's been a long week, and between a hectic business schedule and some touristing I'm doing while out of town, I completely lost track of what day it is. Thus, as I was finishing up some errands this afternoon, I thought how nice it would be to go check out what's on the Dish when I got home. Alas, when I returned home and saw my calendar, I realized it's Sunday. And sure enough, as expected, the Dish sucks today. It's full of all that god babble that you're so fond of. Down with god babble. More real content, please?

Another:

I often feel so in step with The Dish.  It is truly therapy for me.  Your post makes my heart break as my father died just two days ago, and the experience has shaken my soul.  Never have your Sunday reflections meant so much to me.  Please pray for my father and my family.

(Photo: a hospice therapy experiment with doves by John Moore/Getty.)

Face Of The Day

Robert Bentley Harrison documents life over 80 for his series, The Extraordinary. Alison Nastasi marvels:

Harrison’s portraits reverently survey the wisdom and complex emotions of age, each subject’s gestures and gazes revealing contemplative and playful moments in a life long-lived.

(Photo courtesy of the artist.)

How Cynical Is Romney?

This cynical.

Sacred Conflicts

Scott Atran explores why they are so hard to resolve:

In interviews, experiments, and surveys with Palestinians, Israelis, Indonesians, Indians, Afghans, and Iranians, my research with psychologists Jeremy Ginges and Douglas Medin finds that offering people material incentives (large amounts of money, guarantees for a life free of political violence) to compromise sacred values can backfire, increasing stated willingness to use violence toward compromise.

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The View From Your Window

Chicago, Illinois, 9.42 am

The "People's Parson"

Religion could use more like Reverend John Lambourne. From his kind obituary:

Lambourne provided comfort to the sick and bereaved, and there were few people in the parish of Salehurst and Robertsbridge whose lives he did not touch . A major part of his ministry, however, was conducted over a pint at the local pub, where he encouraged all sorts of unlikely people to become regular churchgoers — even to attending “bring-a-bottle” confirmation classes.

Even Hitch would have approved of this:

One parishioner recalls how at one Midnight Mass, held after a convivial evening in the pub, Lambourne embarked on his sermon but soon found himself struggling with the word “vicissitude”. After three valiant attempts he gave up with a “we’ll leave it there, I think”. At the same service the following year he began his sermon with “vicissitude” and continued where he had left off.

Ah, yes, the Church of England, the greatest bulwark against religion humankind has yet constructed.

Quote For The Day

"Living in the world as a cripple allows you to see more clearly the crippled hearts of some people whose bodies are whole and sound. All of us, from time to time, suffer this crippling. Some suffer it daily and nightly; and while most of us, nearly all of us, have compassion and love in our hearts, we cannot or will not see these barely visible wounds of other human beings, and so cannot or will not pick up the telephone or travel to someone’s home or writer a note or make some other seemingly trifling gesture to give someone what only we, and God, can give: an hour’s respite, or a day’s, or a night’s; and sometimes more than respite: sometimes joy," - Andre Dubus, "A Woman In April," from Broken Vessels.

Our Relationship With Death

Michael Wolff's eighty-six-year-old mother "has not been able to walk, talk, or to address her most minimal needs" for the past year and a half. Wolff mediates on our efforts to evade death:

The traditional exits, of a sudden heart attack, of dying in one’s sleep, of unreasonably dropping dead in the street, of even a terminal illness, are now exotic ways of going. The longer you live the longer it will take to die. The better you have lived the worse you may die. The healthier you are—through careful diet, diligent exercise, and attentive medical scrutiny—the harder it is to die. Part of the advance in life expectancy is that we have technologically inhibited the ultimate event. We have fought natural causes to almost a draw. If you eliminate smokers, drinkers, other substance abusers, the obese, and the fatally ill, you are left with a rapidly growing demographic segment peculiarly resistant to death’s appointment—though far, far, far from healthy.

Dreher shares his own struggles. Katie J.M. Baker gets scared.

Why Believe?

Christopher Page offers a series of posts on the stepping stones that led him to faith:

My journey involves things half-felt, thoughts ill-formed, impressions and sensations only partially detected. I move forward in what the anonymous 14th century mystical writer called a “cloud of unknowing.” My path is not illuminated with glaring flourescent lighting; my guide does not announce the way with the sound of a blaring voice. I move towards faith rather at the calling of a gentle whisper...

Meditation is one of his routes to belief:

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Is God Morality?

Julian Sanchez recently suggested that "invoking God doesn’t actually get you very far in ethics." Ross counters:

Virtue is not something that’s commanded by God, the way a magistrate (or a whimsical alien overlord) might issue a legal code, but something that’s inherent to the Christian conception of the divine nature. God does not establish morality; he embodies it. He does not set standards; he is the standard. And even when he issues principles or precepts through revelation (as in the Ten Commandments or the Sermon on the Mount) he isn’t legislating in the style of Hammurabi or Solon. Instead, he’s revealing something about his own nature and inviting us to conform ourselves to the standards that it sets.

Sanchez fires back: 

Ross evidently thinks this counts as some sort of explanation of how there might be moral truths. I think it is a classic virtus dormativa—a series of grammatically well-formed strings masquerading as propositions. It’s not much of an explanation to say Zeus causes thunderstorms unless you have an account of how Zeus does it ...

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The Web's Brand Of Comedy

Luke Epplin wants to see SNL get over its "preferred target" - television. He points out that "of the 152 live sketches aired this season, a whopping 58 percent (88 sketches) were television parodies of some sort": 

For all the talk-show parodies aired on SNL this season, none matched the caustic wit of Zach Galifianakis's Between Two Ferns, a chat fest that ridicules both the lo-fi production values of many web series and the empty questions often lobbed at celebrities in televised interviews.

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Maybe She's Born With It ...

The Late Night Pick-Up Line

Why it might work:

Ask a straight man, "How do you like your women?" and it’s unlikely he’ll answer, "Dumb and sleepy." But according to new findings, these characteristics—and any other traits suggesting that the lady isn’t particularly alert—are precisely what the human male has evolved to look for in a one-night-stand.

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Hathos Alert

Yay Sweden! Yay Guardian Eurovision live-blog! It just has that indispensably snarky British spin on it all, as in:

Standard drinking game rules apply tonight – a swig of whatever you fancy every time you spot a performance involving a) startling amounts of facial hair, b) excessive use of a wind machine, c) on-stage flames, d) accordion playing or e) gratuitous wearing of capes. Ordinarily we'd also suggest you drink whenever the presenters get a bit cringeworthy, but based on the semis you'll be crying in a corner with a bottle before the first note has been sung.

This year, even the British entry was ironic. I'm not sure how else to interpret Engelbert Humperdinck. 

Sleeping With A Jerk

A look at the science of the spasms that strike as you doze off, known as hypnic jerks:

As sleep paralysis sets in remaining daytime energy kindles and bursts out in seemingly random movements. In other words, hypnic jerks are the last gasps of normal daytime motor control. ... So there is a pleasing symmetry between the two kinds of movements we make when asleep. Rapid eye movements are the traces of dreams that can be seen in the waking world. Hypnic jerks seem to be the traces of waking life that intrude on the dream world.

Will Fracking Ruin Beer?

The Brooklyn Brewery fears so:

The brewmeister of Brooklyn Brewery says toxic fracking chemicals like methanol, benzene, and ethylene glycol (found in anti-freeze) could contaminate his beer by leaking into New York's water supply. Unlike neighboring Pennsylvania, New York state has promised to ban high-volume fracking from the city's watershed. But environmentalists say the draft fracking regulations are weak and leave the largest unfiltered water supply in the United States—not to mention the beer that is made from it—vulnerable.

Meanwhile, Walter Russell Mead digests a new study that found gas production, often via fracking, has actually reduced carbon emissions by 450 million tons over the past five years:

While greens have spent years chasing a global green unicorn, America has been moving towards reducing its carbon footprint on its own, and fracking has been the centerpiece of this change. In fact, America’s drop in carbon emissions is greater than that of any other country in the survey.

Read On »

The View From Your Window

Raleigh, North Carolina, 2.15 pm

Quote For The Day III

"There are two kinds of fighting—narcissistic fighting and Oedipal fighting. Oedipal fighting is father and son rolling up their sleeves and duking it out. Narcissistic fighting is putting yourself above the opponent by putting him down. I think Obama does both. He knows how to be a narcissistic fighter and an Oedipal fighter. He knows how to argue about policy and argue with people. Be he also has this other part of him—and I don’t know where it comes from—that’s like this pocket of nastiness," - Justin A. Frank, author of "Obama On The Couch."

I worry that the president risks losing some of his favorability and likability with the sneering. He has the better arguments. He should simply make them.

Sex In A Hospital Bed

Mike Ervin, aka Smart Ass Cripple, weighs the pros and cons:

When you think about it, hospital beds can be excellent kink vehicles. They contort into all kinds of positions. Some have trapezes. And some hospital beds even give vibrating massages. But a hospital bed is designed to look like a deathbed. You can’t have a swinging bachelor pad with a hospital bed. You’re not supposed to do anything in a hospital bed except sleep, eat, shit in a bedpan, peruse Reader’s Digest and/or die.

Mental Health Break

Abstract shapes never felt so NSFW:

Quote For The Day II

"What we thought was that Japan was a cautionary tale. It has turned into Japan as almost a role model. They never had as big a slump as we have had. They managed to have growing per capita income through most of what we call their ‘lost decade’. My running joke is that the group of us who were worried about Japan a dozen years ago ought to go to Tokyo and apologise to the emperor. We’ve done worse than they ever did. When people ask: might we become Japan? I say: I wish we could become Japan," - Paul Krugman, in conversation with Martin Wolf.

Building A Better Bookstore

Tony Sanfilippo reimagines the bookstore as a place with bestsellers up front, a print-on-demand machine in the middle, and a scale of pricing options for how to buy or rent the books in the rest of the store, including ebooks:

"We can have the publisher drop ship a brand new copy anywhere you like, or you can purchase this used copy. You can also rent the book, but you might want to consider a membership because then the rental is free. Members don’t pay for rentals, though like non-members, if they don’t return the book eventually, the cost of the book is charged to their credit card and we order another."

"How much is membership?" you ask.

"For an individual, it’s $49.95 a year. But with that membership you can borrow any book in the store for free. In most cases you can also request that we acquire a book for you to borrow and we will, or we’ll print it for you using our Espresso Book Machine."

Scott McLemee is intrigued:

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Face Of The Day

Pinar admires Isaac Cordal's recent project, Cement Bleak:

His medium of choice? A strainer. Cordal manipulates metallic colanders to look like three-dimensional faces popping out. ... Using street lamps as his main source of illumination, the light seeps through the perforated structure held up by its handle, which is propped up in the cracks of the pavement, and shines down on the adjacent ground. The two-step process produces two levels of art that are each appealing in their own right. The strainers, themselves, are so finely formed that it almost seems like people simply stuck their heads into them and kneaded the metal in to conform to their faces. The structure's silhouette exhibits an equally life-like impression.

If You Want Another Debt And Spending Binge, Vote GOP, Ctd

The AP now weighs in, ultimately relying on McCain economics adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin as a neutral arbiter. But it's another helpful run-through of the numbers. The first question, as I noted in my first post on the subject, is how to apportion the 2009 fiscal budget. The second is how to treat TARP. If you assign much of TARP and the 2009 budget to Bush, the subsequent rate of growth of spending does indeed look remarkably tight-fisted. Equally, assigning all of that to Obama, when he took office well into the fiscal year, alters things dramatically. Yes, he signed funding bills in 2009, but the cake was well-baked by then. But the AP assigns "much" of the spending in 2009, including the stabilizers, to Obama alone. They also refuse to give Obama any credit for the payback of TARP in 2010 or the decline in support for Freddie and Fannie.

The AP takes the hardest position on Obama and comes up with the following bottom line:

All told, government spending now appears to be growing at an annual rate of roughly 3 percent over the 2010-2013 period, rather than the 0.4 percent claimed by Obama and the MarketWatch analysis.

I think that's excessively tilted against the president. But even so, lets accept it for the sake of argument. A 3 percent annualized increase in federal spending would still put Obama in first place for spending restraint since LBJ - which is staggering given the scale of the economic collapse he inherited. A quick comparison? Bush's first term - with no global great recession - saw spending grow an annualized 7.3 percent. Reagan's first term? 8.7 percent.

And again, remember the Romney claim that started this all off: that "since President Obama assumed office three years ago, federal spending has accelerated at a pace without precedent in recent history."

Even when you put the maximal blame on Obama for spending in the last three years, including all the automatic spending that came with the collapse of 2008, that's still untrue. And it's odd that the GOP insists it isn't. Shouldn't they be claiming some credit for restraining spending from 2010 onwards?

To Profile Or Not To Profile?

Sam Harris debates Bruce Schneier - in a rare example of light defeating heat on this question.

The Life Of A Writer

If you're asking if you should become one, you shouldn't. A classic old letter from Malcolm Cowley:

Quote For The Day

“Pot smokers, cops, I got everybody. And everybody was lovely," - John Waters, after a cross-country hitch-hiking experiment he survived intact. Lovely, lovely story.

How To Propose In 2012

New expectations are set:

Can't Look Back

Science fiction author William Gibson confesses:

It’s harder to imagine the past that went away than it is to imagine the future. What we were prior to our latest batch of technology is, in a way, unknowable. It would be harder to accurately imagine what New York City was like the day before the advent of broadcast television than to imagine what it will be like after life-size broadcast holography comes online. But actually the New York without the television is more mysterious, because we’ve already been there and nobody paid any attention. That world is gone.

Charlie Stross illustrates how science fiction is increasingly indistinguishable from today's technology:

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A Poem For Saturday

"I'm So Busy" by P.G. Wodehouse

I always said
That the man I would wed
Must be one who would work all the time.
One with ambition,
Who'd make it his mission
To win a position sublime.
One whose chief pleasure would be
Making a fortune for me;
One who would toil all the day
Down in the market and say:

Lizzie, Lizzie,
I'm so busy,
Don't know what to do.
Goodbye dear, I'm off to the street.
Can't stop now,
I'm cornering wheat.
I shall keep on till I'm dizzy,
Till the deal goes through.
Lizzie, I'm so busy,
I'm making a pile for you.

Continued here. My take on Wodehouse and his inimitable humor here and here. Christopher Jobson explains the above video:

Rizzling is the fine art of becoming completely intoxicated, placing loose rolling paper on your fingertips and running around a room like an idiot in front of your drunk friends while the papers spin like pinwheels.

The View From Your Window Contest

You have until noon on Tuesday to guess it. City and/or state first, then country. Please put the location in the subject heading, along with any description within the email. If no one guesses the exact location, proximity counts.  Be sure to email entries to VFYWcontest@gmail.com. Winner gets a free The View From Your Window book. Have at it.

How Do Views Change?

In a long post on various matters, Razib Kahn asserts that people "follow the views of their social milieu, no matter their actions":

You follow the positions and views of your social and cultural milieu because it is a cognitively cheap and convenient way to go. Logical thought is energetically taxing. The changes of the milieu’s opinions though can occur very rapidly (at least on the cultural time-scale). As those changes result in a flip, your own rational faculties simply re-write the past accordingly. Inter-temporal cognitive dissonance is minimized, because people have a bias in attributing their views and opinions to their own conscious and rational faculties.The social science strongly indicates that the heuristic "believe what your peers believe" is the primary factor driving most opinion. So you always need to be careful about taking the self-serving rationales of the individuals at the heart of the phenomenon at face value. 

Ask Pinker Anything: What Most Endangers The Trend Toward World Peace?

More Dish discussion of Steven Pinker's latest book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here. "Ask Anything" archive here.

Another Country, Ctd

Another British expat lists 10 things that irk her about living in the States:

3. They take your plate away too soon
Americans love to please, and nowhere is this more evident than in restaurants. If I want a side of pickled kitten lungs or a splash of spaniel milk in my coffee, then by God they’ll make it happen. On the flip side, over-eager waiters will whip away an individual diner’s plate the second it’s empty. In my case, that’s long before anyone else at the table has finished. And people are like, "Seriously, did you even chew?" No. No I did not. ...

Read On »