I really enjoyed doing this interview with Sarah Green at Harvard Business Review for their podcasting series. The title “The Myth of Monotasking” is based on the idea that the brain doesn’t know how to monotask, in fact the term “multitasking” doesn’t really mean much of anything when you think about it carefully since virtually everything we do as humans involves coordinating multiple cognitive tasks all happening at once. This interview helps straighten out some of the confusions around that mushy term and, I hope, helps lower anxiety about how well we are or are not doing against some mythical standard of sustained, focused attention. Bottom line: the mind wanders a lot because the mind’s task is to wander.
It doesn’t help to replace one mushy term with other mushy terms, and mushy thinking. No, it’s not true that “the mind wanders a lot because the mind’s task is to wander.” Sometimes the mind is free to wander; sometimes the mind benefits greatly from wandering; sometimes — say, when a surgeon is removing a brain tumor — the mind had damned well better not wander. If you’re going to be serious about these matters, you need to start by admitting what thoughtful people have acknowledged at least since the Buddha: that concentration is highly valuable but difficult to achieve, and that the focused mind has a multitude of enemies. (I will add here, after a Twitter exchange, that previous sentence is an awkward way of referencing Davidson’s own invocation of the Buddha in the podcast, where she says that if people could concentrate we’d have more Buddhas — but then she goes on to portray the attempt to find absolute focus as a recipe for insanity.)
It’s fine to argue that we don’t suffer from this problem any more today than people in the past did, though I’m not sure quite how to do a serious comparative study of these matters. (What was it exactly that distracted the medieval farmer?) But just think about this: Have you ever, even once in your life, thought, “Gee, I wish I could concentrate less”?
Modernist ambiguity, or realist emotional ambivalence, is unknown to Tolkien—the good people are very good, the bad people very bad, and though occasionally a character may be tossed between good and evil, like Gollum, it is self-interest, rather than conscience, that makes him tip back and forth. Betrayal and temptation happen; inner doubts do not. Gandalf and Aragorn never say, as even the most patriotic real-world general might, “I don’t know which side I should be on, or, indeed, if any side is worth taking.” Nor does any Mordor general stop to reflect, as even many German officers did, on the tension between duty and morality: there are no Hectors, bad guys we come to admire, or Agamemnons, good guys we come to deplore. (Comic-book moralities, despite their reputation, are craftier; the “X-Men” series is powerful partly because it’s clear that, if you and I were mutants, we would quite possibly side with the evil Magneto.)
It’s okay not to like Tolkien — it really is — but what I find annoying is that so many of the people who criticize him do so by saying things that are manifestly untrue. It obviously is conscience that troubles Gollum, his awareness that Frodo is a “Good Master” who deserves to be obeyed or at least treated honestly. (Moreover, Gollum and Frodo are bound by a shared suffering.) While it’s true that Aragorn has no “inner doubts” about whether Sauron might be a nice guy after all, he is afflicted by many doubts about his own role in the story, his own fitness to lead. Boromir doubts the wisdom of the Council, and can’t overcome those doubts. The doubts of his father Denethor consume him and send him over the edge and into despair. And of course Gopnik has forgotten completely about Saruman, who at a slightly earlier stage in the story than the one told in LOTR proper was a leader among the Wise — along with Gandalf, Elrond, and Galadriel — before undergoing corruption.
It has just become the tale that middle-to-highbrow critics tell — ever since Edmund Wilson was saying his own manifestly untrue things about Tolkien in the New Yorker fifty years ago — that Tolkien’s fictional world is morally simplistic and rigidly Manichaean. It may be true that the story of the Ring is less morally ambiguous than the average realistic novel, but that’s primarily because Tolkien wasn’t especially interested in the problem of knowing right from wrong. His concern was to explore the psychology of the moment when you know right from wrong but aren’t sure whether you have the courage and fortitude to do the right thing.
Modern liberalism likes to think that all our problems are epistemological: we are afflicted by never knowing with sufficient clarity what we ought to do. Our fictions tend to reflect that assumption. Tolkien, not being a modern liberal, thought it more interesting to explore situations when people know what they need to know but may lack the strength of will to act on that knowledge. He might say, and with some justification, that contemporary literary fiction is not simplistic in regard to such problems but oblivious to them.
One of the two Republican senators to vote for the Udall Amendment yesterday was Sen. Rand Paul, who quoted Thomas Jefferson: “The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become instruments of tyranny at home.” No. Truer. Words. At this moment in America we seem to be so fond of dividing Americans into us and &them that we have created all sorts of intriguing new legal double standards for the thems. Don’t think for a minute that these new powers will be used only against suspected terrorists. We already know that suspected illegal immigrants, suspected environmental activists, and suspected protesters have very different legal rights—which is to say, far more limited rights—than anyone else. And as Benjamin Wallace Wells detailed last August, the landmark anti-terror legislation known as the Patriot Act has, in the 10 years since its passage, been used in 1,618 drug cases and 15 terrorism cases. You’d never know it from watching the GOP hopefuls joyfully demonize women, immigrants, the poor, the prisoners, OWS protesters, and union members, but at some point, them always becomes us.
why I returned my Kindle Fire
- Biggest reason: I couldn’t find a comfortable way to hold the darn thing. The narrow bezel requires you to hold the device at its edges, or else you’ll turn pages or do something else on the touchscreen you don’t want to do. Also, the on-off switch is on the bottom, so if you use part of your hand to support it from below you’re always in danger of turning it off. So I could only read by holding it quite delicately in both hands. My Kindle 3 is far easier to hold. (The physical keyboard actually helps in that regard: you can’t touch the keys, of course, but the surrounding space gives you more places to put your thumb. I can also turn pages on the Kindle 3 while holding it with one hand.)
- Along the same lines, the Fire weighs about the same as the much larger iPad, so it feels really heavy for its size. I couldn’t quite get used to that.
The web browser sometimes worked quickly, but stalled out way too often. Also, the touchscreen feedback was inconsistent: sometimes I would touch and get an immediate response, sometimes the response would be delayed, and sometimes it wouldn’t respond at all. I was never sure how long to wait before trying again. (To be fair, I occasionally had this problem with the iPad too.)
Navigating between programs is considerably slower and more awkward than with the iPhone or iPad. If I had anything even the slightest bit productive to do — adding a reminder to Remember the Milk, jotting down something in Simplenote, sending a quick email, even reading a document in Instapaper — I found it far easier to whip out my iPhone for the task.
While it’s nice to be able to read in the dark or dim without turning on a light, I can’t read on a backlit screen for very long without my eyes starting to ache.
I think the iPad screen is a great size for watching video, but the Fire screen seems too small to me.
In general, for reading the e-ink Kindles are infinitely better than the Fire, while for anything else my iPhone is better. I came to see, in just a couple of days, that I would simply never use the Fire. And it doesn’t make sense to pay two hundred bucks for something that’ll just sit around gathering dust.
It goes without saying that YMMV. I have a MacBook Air for work, a Kindle for reading, and an iPhone for general life management; I don’t see the need for a fourth device. (Which is why I also gave my iPad to my mom, even though it’s a far superior device to the Fire.)
Legislation is helpless against the wild prayer of longing that rises, day in, day out, from all these households under my protection: “O God, put away justice and truth for we cannot understand them and do not want them. Eternity would bore us dreadfully. Leave Thy heavens and come down to our earth of waterclocks and hedges. Become our uncle. Look after Baby, amuse Grandfather, escort Madam to the Opera, help Willy with his home-work, introduce Muriel to a handsome naval officer. Be interesting and weak like us, and we will love you as we love ourselves.”
Penn State lost a university president, a legendary head football coach, an athletic director, and a school administrator because they heard allegations of sexual abuse and did nothing to investigate or follow up. Who, I wonder, at ESPN—the network, the magazine, or the website—had knowledge of the Syracuse allegations—allegations of boys being raped—and decided not to pursue them? Who at ESPN is the equivalent of a board of trustees who will now step in and do the right thing by firing those responsible? Because this time boys weren’t raped just because the good old boys looked the other way. This time, boys were raped because the good old boys who were supposed to be watching the good old boys looked the other way.
The enigmatic Voynich manuscript, now online.
At bottom, he says, the Germans were blind to the possibility that the Americans were playing the game by something other than the official rules. The Germans took the rules at their face value: they looked into the history of triple-A-rated bonds and accepted the official story that triple-A-rated bonds were completely risk-free. This preternatural love of rules, almost for their own sake, punctuates German finance as it does German life. As it happens, a story had just broken that a division of a German insurance company called Munich Re, back in June 2007, or just before the crash, had sponsored a party for its best producers that offered not just chicken dinners and nearest-to-the-pin golf competitions but a blowout with prostitutes in a public bath. In finance, high or low, this sort of thing is of course not unusual. What was striking was how organized the German event was. The company tied white and yellow and red armbands to the prostitutes to indicate which ones were available to which men. After each sexual encounter the prostitute received a stamp on her arm, to indicate how often she had been used. The Germans didn’t want just hookers: they wanted hookers with rules.
What is notable about these would-be writers is how crest-fallen they are when their first writing efforts emerge from the editors’ hands. A typical piece might bear the handiwork of two editors, one junior and one more senior. And even though the pieces are short, much has been done to them to improve them. And so, on a typical day, I might find an intern bawling in the ladies’ room moments after I have turned back to her the edited version of her copy. No one has ever told her before that she isn’t perfect. And yet, the recent crops of interns seem to learn less and less from the edited copy turned back to them for perusal. I tell them that the reason for changes should be self-evident and to ask about a change if the reason isn’t apparent, but seldom does anyone inquire. You mean they might have something to learn. What a quaint idea.
Nevertheless, Les Dorr, a spokesman for the F.A.A., said the agency would rather err on the side of caution when it comes to digital devices on planes. He cited a 2006 study by the Radio Technical Commission for Aeronautics, a nonprofit group that tests and reports on technical travel and communications issues. The group was asked by the F.A.A. to test the effects of cellphones, Wi-Fi and portable electronic devices on planes.Its finding? “Insufficient information to support changing the policies,” Mr. Dorr said. “There was no evidence saying these devices can’t interfere with a plane, and there was no evidence saying that they can.” I’m not arguing that passengers should be allowed to make phone calls while the plane zooms up into the sky. But, why can’t I read my Kindle or iPad during takeoff and landing? E-readers and cellphones can be easily put into “Airplane Mode” which disables the device’s radio signals.