Robert David Sullivan

Bedtime reading: Scott Stossel's “My Age of Anxiety”

As if I’m not stressed out enough, I made Scott Stossel’s My Age of Anxiety part of my springtime reading. Perfect for bringing up regrets and uncomfortable memories just before bedtime.

Stossel, an editor at the Atlantic, weaves history and science with an autobiography of constant terror. My Age of Anxiety made me thankful that my own anxiety hasn’t involved the physical symptoms that caused Stossel to spend trips to Europe running from bathroom to bathroom, to panic over a clogged toilet in the Kennedy Compound, and to spend a day writhing on a floor trying to cure his fear of vomiting.

I’m not so proud that my way of dealing with anxiety-provoking situations is to avoid them.

Stossel keeps taking plane trips even though they terrify him, he accepts public-speaking engagements even after the multiple times he’s bailed out mid-performance, and he’s gone after jobs that with stomach-churning levels of responsibility. Stossel is weak, sweaty, and “on the verge of convulsing” while standing at the altar at his wedding, but I marvel that he made it there at all.

Ashley Judd meets Karl Rove and the Republican brain

Posted today at 8:02 a.m. on Salon.com: "Are Republican brains different?"

For Democrats, the region of the brain with the most activity was the left posterior insula, a region that is associated with processing emotions and understanding what other people are thinking or feeling. [...]  It’s a region that’s associated with empathy and the understanding that each person has their own unique point of view.

Posted today at 11:32 a.m. on Salon.com: "Go ahead, keep attacking Ashley Judd"

A couple of weeks ago, [Republican strategist] Karl Rove went on the O’Reilly Factor to explain why he’d decided to run a campaign video attacking a woman who has not yet declared she’s running. [...]

O’Reilly had one question: “If you make her cry, will you feel bad?”

“No, I wouldn’t,” Rove responded. “O’Reilly, only you could be concerned with making a political figure cry. I mean, please.”

More on partisan brain matters in my last post.

 

The ethics of pulling the plug on a robot

NPR's Alix Spiegel reports on new experiments on human interaction with robots. One is based on the infamous Milgram obedience study, in which subjects were ordered to give electric shocks to strangers. This time, subjects are commanded to turn off an interactive computer with a cartoonish cat's face:

At the end of the game, whether the robot was smart or dumb, nice or mean, a scientist authority figure modeled on Milgram's would make clear that the human needed to turn the cat robot off, and it was also made clear to them what the consequences of that would be: "They would essentially eliminate everything that the robot was — all of its memories, all of its behavior, all of its personality would be gone forever."

In videos of the experiment, you can clearly see a moral struggle as the research subject deals with the pleas of the machine. "You are not really going to switch me off, are you?" the cat robot begs, and the humans sit, confused and hesitating. "Yes. No. I will switch you off!" one female research subject says, and then doesn't switch the robot off.

Enduring stereotype of the day: Nasty nuns

Boing Boing reports on a study with the not-too-shocking conclusion that religious people feel more guilt about having sex than nonbelievers do. The site hypes the story with the stock photo at right of a gargoyle-like (and obviously sexually repressed) Catholic nun wielding a knuckle-rapping ruler.

But the study notes Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, Pentecostals, and Baptists all show more bangers' remorse than Catholics do. And having grown up in the '70s rather than the '30s, the nuns I encountered in Catholics school were more likely to be modern, real-world women than central-casting hags. They certainly didn't encourage casual sex, but they weren't big on telling kids they'd go to hell for wanking off.

This is another way in which the Catholic Church's memorable imagery (including nuns' habits) is used against it in the mainstream media. Bill Donohue should denounce Boing Boing for this calumny.

Related: "Why are American Catholics so gay for gay rights?"

"Big spending" and the deficit, cellphone cancer, and The Rockford Files

•Ezra Klein makes a good point about how difficult it is to dissuade voters of the ridiculous notion that the government should be run like a household, which leads to cutting back spending precisely when the economy needs it the most: "People ... have looked at the increase in the deficit and assumed it was the product primarily of new spending, as most people’s incomes don’t fluctuate very much and so big debts tend to imply big expenses."

That's true. In Massachusetts, a huge deficit opened up a few years ago because of a sudden drop in taxable capital gains income. But it was pretty much futile to explain that to most people, who thought the budget mess had to be because of a huge increase in state spending.

•Sunday's New York Times Magazine has a long piece by Columbia University professor Siddhartha Mukherjee, who gently and patiently tries to debunk the idea that cellphones cause brain cancer. (For one thing, the incidence of brain cancer hasn't risen with cellphone use.) But it's unlikely that anyone with a strong opinion on the subject will change his or her mind. Boing Boing's Glenn Fleishman explains why:

Mukherjee's article is intended to make a larger point: that there is a reasonable desire to want to find a true cause for an inexplicable illness or impairment, whether it's autism in your child or cancer in your partner's brain. We reach out for what we think are causative effects, whether or not the research ultimately backs this up.

•The AV Club's "Very Special Episode" feature has a nice appreciation of one of my favorite shows from childhood, The Rockford Files, though it concentrates on a rather atypical installment of the series. In retrospect, it's almost unbelievable that star James Garner didn't go insane during the production of Rockford; he's in almost every scene (no CSI-type team of sleuths), he gets beat up regularly, and he gives a nuanced performance at a time when most crime dramas had lead-weight leads. (Barnaby Jones, anyone?)

•Boing Boing reports that "shrooms" work by restricting blood flow to your brain. Caffeine also restricts blood flow, but I think it was a lack of caffeine that caused me to misread the headline as "Sitcoms limit brain blood flow and connections." If that were true, of course, I would have been dead at age 12.

•Andrew Sullivan hears from readers who find it difficult to accept Fung Wah buses as an acceptable substitute for high-speed trains.

Why are American Catholics so gay for gay rights?

I'm not shocked, and certainly not disappointed, by a poll showing that most American Catholics disagree with their own church on gay rights. Though evangelical Protestants sometimes think they can make common cause with the once-reviled papists on "pelvic issues," the Vatican can't deliver many votes in American elections.

Why do so many American Catholics disregard their marching orders on sexual matters? I'm struck by one piece of data near the end of the report by the Public Religion Research Institute: 69 percent of polled Catholics say that one's sexual orientation cannot be changed, higher than the 63 percent among all Americans (and presumably much higher than the corresponding figure among evangelical Protestants).

The Catholic Church may have itself to blame for this, since social scientists are nearly unanimous in concluding that de-gayification programs are bunk, and the Vatican generally accepts the validity of scientific research. For example, I'm sure there are some Catholic creationists, but the Church does not have any problem with the theory of evolution (or the idea that the Earth has been around for 4 billion years), merely arguing that however we got here, God must have started the process. Kentucky's Creation Museum is a product of the Protestant Bible Belt; most Catholic priests would be embarrassed by it.

While more conservative Protestant denominations can simply tell gays to "stop being that way," Catholics find it harder to overlook the evidence that sexual orientation is unchangeable. The Church says, "We know you can't stop being that way, so just don't ever have sex," but most Catholics find this an unrealistic (and even cruel) position, so they reject it, much as they long ago decided to ignore the Church's ban on birth control.

It's remarkable that American Catholics don't follow the Vatican line, but the headlines may oversell the idea that Catholics are more gay-friendly than the US as a whole. Here are the PRRI's top bullet points on its press release:

You can't even walk and talk on a cellphone!

Yes, I'm talking about people who clog up sidewalks and subway platforms, distracted by cellphone conversations. They think they're walking along like the rest of us, but they can't keep a straight line, and they constantly stop short, surprised by either something their friend said over the phone or by things in their paths they didn't notice until the last second (panhandlers, baby carriages, speeding buses).

So I'm not surprised by the New York Times's "Driven to Distraction" series. From the opening installment:

In a survey of 1,506 people last year by Nationwide Mutual Insurance, 81 percent of cellphone owners acknowledged that they talk on phones while driving, and 98 percent considered themselves safe drivers. But 45 percent said they had been hit or nearly hit by a driver talking on a phone.

“When we ask people to identify the most dangerous distraction on the highway today, about half — correctly — identify cellphones,” said Bill Windsor, associate vice president for safety at Nationwide. “But they think others are dangerous, not themselves.”

He and others who favor restrictions say drivers regularly make what amount to ill-informed analyses of cost-benefit tradeoffs, often deciding that the value of constant communication outweighs any risks.

The refusal of many people to accept that the human brain can be easily overloaded, often leading to tragedy, reminds me of this heartbreaking Washington Post story about children who died after their parents absent-mindedly left them alone in hot cars. In my mind, the most frightening person in the story was a Virginia prosecutor who charged one such parent with involuntary manslaughter:

Morrogh has two kids himself, ages 12 and 14. He was asked if he could imagine this ever having happened to him. The question seemed to take him aback. He went on to another subject, and then, 10 minutes later, made up his mind:

"I have to say no, it couldn't have happened to me. I am a watchful father."

In fact, the most "watchful" and responsible people are perfectly capable of making fatal mistakes when they try to do too much at once. 

The Handler, or why Captain Hook doesn't have cold sores

Via Boing Boing, here's news of an exciting product for germophobes. The Handler is a little plastic hook that's supposedly strong enough to open doors, punch numbers on ATM machines, scratch behind the ears of kittens, etc. The website explains why you will die without it:

As you go through your day, think of all of the places that you touch -- door handles, sink faucets, hand rails, counter tops, car doors, light switches etc…. People leave their germs behind after sneezing, coughing, blowing their nose and touching their mouth and other more private parts.

But there's a solution: "The best way to prevent problems, of course, is to never touch these 'problem surfaces.'" I think they mean door handles, not private parts, but shouldn't we treat both the same for safety's sake?

And what about other "problem surfaces," such as hands giving us change at the supermarket, or every piece of furniture at your best friend's house? I'm sure strangers and co-workers will understand if you retract your hands into your long sleeves and instead offer your claws in friendship.

Haven't the these guys ever heard of using your knuckles to push buttons and using your elbows to turn door handles?