3. There is nothing wrong with you. You’re amazing. I love you. When I look at you I see a complex human being with awesome potential but some others will look at you and see a thug. Even if their only evidence is your skin. Their racism relates to larger anxieties and problems in America that you didn’t create. When someone is racist toward you—either because they’ve profiled you or spat some slur or whatever—they are saying they have a problem. They are not speaking about you. They’re speaking about themselves and their deficiencies.

humanity

My friend Wes linked to this article in the New York Times Sunday Review Op-Ed. It’s about how we’re in danger of losing our selves and our sanity due to screens, the internet, and cellphones (it’s well written and probably better than that description, but…). But as I read these articles from time to time there is a sense that there is something right about them, but I think I ultimately largely disagree with these assessments. Does anyone else find that they don’t have a problem with their selfhood in the context of the internet/cellphones? Maybe it’s because a large part of the way I use these gadgets and all this information is for reading quality writing (like the article Wes linked to) and interacting in intellectually engaging ways with other humans. But that would just reiterate to me that technology is what one makes of it. It isn’t inherently distracting. It can be used for reflective analysis of how one uses technology, like what I’m doing right now. This is form and content in harmony.

We’re on I-95, and she unhooks the pole, and she’s holding the morphine bag over her head with her gown that’s flying up in the air so you could see her entire naked, bony body with the morphine bag whipping in the wind, and we’re passing by these guys in their Lamborghinis, and I’m looking at them like, What the hell kind of life are you living? Look at me, I’m on top of the world here.

I don’t like this expression “First World problems.” It is false and it is condescending. Yes, Nigerians struggle with floods or infant mortality. But these same Nigerians also deal with mundane and seemingly luxurious hassles. Connectivity issues on your BlackBerry, cost of car repair, how to sync your iPad, what brand of noodles to buy: Third World problems. All the silly stuff of life doesn’t disappear just because you’re black and live in a poorer country. People in the richer nations need a more robust sense of the lives being lived in the darker nations. Here’s a First World problem: the inability to see that others are as fully complex and as keen on technology and pleasure as you are.

One event that illustrated the gap between the Africa of conjecture and the real Africa was the BlackBerry outage of a few weeks ago. Who would have thought Research In Motion’s technical issues would cause so much annoyance and inconvenience in a place like Lagos? But of course it did, because people don’t wake up with “poor African” pasted on their foreheads. They live as citizens of the modern world. None of this is to deny the existence of social stratification and elite structures here. There are lifestyles of the rich and famous, sure. But the interesting thing about modern technology is how socially mobile it is—quite literally. Everyone in Lagos has a phone.

Many of us have been extraordinarily lucky—and we did not earn it. Many good people have been extraordinarily unlucky—and they did not deserve it. And yet I get the distinct sense that if I asked some of my readers why they weren’t born with club feet, or orphaned before the age of five, they would not hesitate to take credit for these accomplishments. There is a stunning lack of insight into the unfolding of human events that passes for moral and economic wisdom in some circles. And it is pernicious. Followers of Rand, in particular, believe that only a blind reliance on market forces and the narrowest conception of self interest can steer us collectively toward the best civilization possible and that any attempt to impose wisdom or compassion from the top—no matter who is at the top and no matter what the need—is necessarily corrupting of the whole enterprise. This conviction is, at the very least, unproven. And there are many reasons to believe that it is dangerously wrong.

While the case for the progressivist view seems overwhelming, it's hard to prove. How do you show that the lives of people 10,000 years ago got better when they abandoned hunting and gathering for farming? Until recently, archaeologists had to resort to indirect tests, whose results (surprisingly) failed to support the progressivist view. Here's one example of an indirect test: Are twentieth century hunter-gatherers really worse off than farmers? Scattered throughout the world, several dozen groups of so-called primitive people, like the Kalahari bushmen, continue to support themselves that way. It turns out that these people have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors. For instance, the average time devoted each week to obtaining food is only 12 to 19 hours for one group of Bushmen, 14 hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania. One Bushman, when asked why he hadn't emulated neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, replied, "Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?"

...

One answer boils down to the adage "Might makes right." Farming could support many more people than hunting, albeit with a poorer quality of life. (Population densities of hunter-gatherers are rarely over on person per ten square miles, while farmers average 100 times that.) Partly, this is because a field planted entirely in edible crops lets one feed far more mouths than a forest with scattered edible plants. Partly, too, it's because nomadic hunter-gatherers have to keep their children spaced at four-year intervals by infanticide and other means, since a mother must carry her toddler until it's old enough to keep up with the adults. Because farm women don't have that burden, they can and often do bear a child every two years.

It is said that we are all three different people: the person we think we are (the one we have invented), the person other people think we are (the impression we make) and the person we think other people think we are (the one we fret about). -- Stephen Bayley, The Gentle Art of Selling Yourself, March 4, 2007

In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates. -- Michel Foucault, Of Other Spaces, 1967

Critics like Charles Taylor have accused Malick of pursuing a false dualism in his work, of sending in a crude human archetype, boorish and unseemly, to “despoil the uncorrupted beauty of nature.” But Malick’s nature is not Milton’s; here it is the garden that is fallen. Oddly, in this, our most profound modern fable of war, humanity is a transfiguring force: the first of nature’s forms to buck its amino acid programming, to strain tragically at something beyond Hobbesian survival. In the end, The Thin Red Line is a work of humanism, not nature worship; a reminder that even if history and war should extinguish the first flickers of truth and beauty, they will linger on in human memory, as hints of a possible transcendence.

Deron Bauman on May 12th, 2011 at 12:22 pm
My favorite idea lately has to do with all the autonomous systems we have running in the background below the awareness of our conscious selves.

Deron Bauman on May 12th, 2011 at 12:23 pm
The hum of the factory, as it were.

When someone is very good at a given thing, what is it that actually makes him good?

But Mr. Fogel said that he remained an optimist at heart. The human body is enormously flexible and responsive, he said, a fact that fills him with confidence that “the trend of larger bodies and longer lives will continue into the future.”

"DAD-dy! DAD-dy! DAD-dy!"

Just like I think she's The Greatest Thing in the Universe.

But, even when my shitty little crank was not attached to anything, I did keep cranking. Because, Dads do their job. It's what they do.

They crank. They crank and crank and crank and crank.

My book needs to be about choosing a hard thing and then living with it. Because it’s your thing.

I'm done cranking. And, I'm ready to make a change.

This is not me quitting the book. No fucking way. This is me doubling down on the book--on my book.

“What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.”

- Kurt Vonnegut

t's funny how the most vital things I do as a nurse almost never require a degree.

If office workers lack a view to natural features outdoors, do they compensate by bringing plants and pictures of nature indoors? The authors used cross-sectional survey data from 385 Norwegian office workers to investigate whether such compensation occurs. The authors found that workers without windows had roughly five times greater odds of having brought plants into their workspaces than workers with windows, independent of age, gender, type of office, job demands, control over work, and personalization. Windowless workers also had three times greater odds of having brought pictures of nature into their workspaces. The authors consider implications of the findings for environmental design that offers contact with nature to people who spend much of their time indoors.

That's right. Late-night television brings you what is truly and sincerely intended as a discussion of your humanity.

What made the show so unusual doesn't rely on whether you agreed with everything either of them said, or whether this or that comment had any element of awkwardness, or anything of that nature. It was the calm good humor and ... really, the gentleness of this exchange. It is a qualitatively different use of this form. It is an effort to use, of all things, the late-night talk show as a home for the kind of conversations that too rarely happen in public and are almost never broadcast on commercial television.

This is what we do, humans. We tinker and change and endlessly imagine a more perfect future. And, at the same time, we idealize the past. So, we’re trapped. Progress’ constant companion is nostalgia for the way things used to be.

The thing we forget about progress: there is no master plan. It lurches forward, in the dark, accidentally, and you’re never sure where it’s taking you. There’s no going back, whether it wants to or not.
Cite Arrow Ira Glass, This American Life

He broke no laws, other than a 2007 open-container violation.

Every year, Rogers put up a small artificial Christmas tree and decorated it. "I kind of forced him" to celebrate holidays, Rogers said. She gave him a mountain bike after his was stolen, and bought extra reflectors for his birthday. Because it was important not to wait, she gave him the reflectors Sept. 10, before his birthday.

Two days later, Mr. Smith had nearly finished the bike ride home from work and was just a block from the mobile home park when a car hit his bicycle from the rear in the 7300 block of Fourth Street N. Witnesses reported it was a white or light-colored midsized sedan — possibly a Ford Taurus or Mercury Sable. Police said that Mr. Smith was following bicycle safety recommendations such as wearing light-colored clothing, using reflectors and riding in the bicycle lane.

His head struck a metal light pole. He never regained consciousness.

Here’s my favorite all-time moment as a teacher from my time working in a traditional school:

I was standing in the hall during the five minutes between classes when one student, who was a drummer in the jazz band, pulled out his drumsticks and began tapping on his locker. A friend walked up and began clapping a beat. Quickly, three others joined them: one was beat-boxing, one slapping his thighs, the other also clapping a beat.

It was awesome. A five-man percussion band had formed, spontaneously, and was in full jam when the final bell rang alerting students that they should be in class. The boys all looked at each other, recognizing they needed to wrap it up. Within 30 seconds, they concluded their impromptu jam session. I smiled at them and said, “Now get to class.” They responded with a smile, “On our way, Miranda.”

They all moved on to their respective classes where, I suspect, their teacher welcomed them and admonished them not to be late next time. That was the culture of the

“If you can think of times in your life that you’ve treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings. The ability to do that with ourselves. To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely loved more than life itself. And I think it’s probably possible to achieve that. I think part of the job we’re here for is to learn how to do it. I know that sounds a little pious.”