Alan Jacobs

After all, the radical transparency of Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook may not be mutually exclusive with what we might as well call the radical opacity of Christopher ‘moot’ Poole and 4chan. Their uses may even be mutually necessary. Peretti puts it this way: if 4chan is the id of the Internet, then 'Google is kind of like the ego, and Facebook is kind of like the superego.’ If that’s so, then there’s only one way the trend toward radical transparency won’t end up killing the Internet’s soul: if we can leave the light of all that openness every now and then to spend some time in the shadows where the crazy lives.

The devil has his grip on the business of the NFL. Former players, like Aikman, who are still profiting from their NFL image, see little benefit in questioning the safety of the game. Any such comments would be met by the league as a betrayal, and he would probably be relieved of his post as Fox’s No. 1 guy. And you can be sure he won’t let that happen. Troy Aikman has his dream job, and he will echo the company line. Aaron Rodgers’ brain could be leaking out of his earhole, and Aikman will be talking about James Jones’ inconsistent hands… .

Players like Aikman and Michael Irvin and Deion Sanders, two Hall of Famers and a future Hall of Famer, represent the extreme minority of the NFL experience. Yet theirs are the voices that fans listen to. They are the ones people look to for guidance, because their Hall-of-Famey-ness makes them giants. Their greatness as players also defines them, and to question the validity of the game that has made them superheroes is to cast their own capes into the fire. They will never do this. They will be the last line of defense in the fight against science. And I can’t really blame them. Even Steve Young, an extremely cerebral man who was forced out of the league by multiple concussions, can’t find the strength to weave even one controversial thread of commentary. The waters are that deep.

books owned and leased

The 2010 election seemed to be about voters repudiating the $14 trillion national debt, yet politicians of both parties continue to merrily squander taxpayers’ money on themselves. Whatever benefits my opponents is waste; spending on me is vital!

The South Florida Sun Sentinel reports that Florida’s new Republican governor, Rick Scott, who ran as a cost-cutting conservative, held a ‘three day party’ to celebrate his inauguration: ‘The governor-elect, family and guests shuttled between events around [Tallahassee] in a presidential-sized motorcade’ of a dozen SUVs, paid for by taxpayers.

Reader Tom Beck of Princeton, N.J., notes that although Mississippi has the worst poverty rate in the nation and its governor, Haley Barbour, regularly rails against government spending by Washington, Barbour lavishes taxpayer money on himself, taking numerous personal trips in a state-supplied private jet.

Ben Smith of Politico reports, 'Flight logs obtained by Politico indicate that Mississippi has spent more than $500,000 over the past three years on Barbour’s air travel. That total does not include security and other logistical costs associated with his trips. Much of the time, Barbour has used the plane to go to fundraisers for himself and other Republican candidates and committees, to football games and to at least one boxing match.’ Increasingly, high-level politics looks a lot like a hustle – use denunciations of spending to get elected, then spend lavishly on yourself.

‘The best research has failed to show that people who stutter, as a group, are more neurotic or have more psychological disorders than those who do not stutter. We do not think that children begin stuttering because of any serious emotional difficulties.’

What, then, causes stuttering? The only honest answer is that nobody really knows. Various brain scanning studies have identified a few interesting correlations, such as abnormal circuitry in the basal ganglia.   (Damage to the basal ganglia can also trigger sudden adult onset stuttering.) Interestingly, stutterers seem to show increased activity  in areas of the brain devoted to speech movements, such as the primary motor cortex. It’s as if the stammer is triggered by an excess of planning, much like the yips in golf. What’s important to note is that these differences aren’t triggered by deep-seated emotional problems. Instead, they are mostly mechanical defects, rooted in the machinery of translating our thoughts into a set of complex bodily movements.

Francesca Woodman

Did Montaigne intuitively know that by inviting his would-be enemy into his living room, and into the moral equivalent of his peripersonal space (or something like it), he was simultaneously invading the moral intimacy of his assailant, and was therefore in a better position to influence him, and precipitate in him a decency similar to his own?

Montaigne’s general point is clear: that we have an inbuilt propensity for sympathy and understanding, but that proximity matters. And whilst some could see this as a depressing limit on the jurisdiction of our moral sympathies, we can also see it as something on which to build. Montaigne is no political theorist, but rather a man who wishes to remind us of a fragile but significant fact: that the preservation of our moral awareness relies on the preservation of the nearness between us – something that no number of emails or tweets can ever properly replace.

Of course, technology doesn’t need to make us happy—indeed if it is capable of wanting, as Kelly suggests it is, it would be advised against wanting our happiness. From the point of view of a selfish technium, happiness is the bug: too much of it gets in the way of technology pursuing its fate or telos or autonomous ends. Our selfish genes, after all, never propagated themselves by placing happiness at the top of their agenda, much less the happiness of the denizens of the biosphere as a whole. Think of the females of a certain species of parasitic fly who live out their entire lives, wingless and blind, in the abdomen of their wasp hosts. The question, when it comes to technology’s evolutionary drive: are we technology’s host, or its pest? We could end up wingless and blind in the belly of technology, and technology would not mind at all.

The reason robots are such a slippery slope, according to Turkle, is that they take advantage of a deeply human instinct. When it comes to the perception of other minds, we are extremely gul lible, bestowing agency on even the most inanimate of objects. After children spend a few minutes playing with a Tamagotchi — a wildly popular ‘digital pet’ — they begin to empathize with the 'needs’ and 'feelings’ of the plastic device. And it’s not just little kids: Turkle describes the behavior of Edna, an 82-year-old who is given a robotic doll called My Real Baby during a visit with her 2-year-old great-granddaughter. When Edna is asked if the doll is alive, she scoffs at the absurdity of the question. But then the doll starts to cry. Edna cradles the robot in her arms and gently caresses its face. 'Oh, why are you crying?’ she asks the robot. 'Do you want to sit up?’ When her great-granddaughter starts whining, Turkle reports, Edna ignores her.

The guardians of the liberal arts have made exactly the same mistake. They themselves are securely grounded in the tradition of the liberal arts—they know the languages and literatures so well they can dispense with them—but they have small interest and less intention of giving their students anything approaching the same grounding. Like the early Jewish secularists in this country, they cannot see that it is their very grounding in the tradition that enables them to “blur [its] boundaries.” Their revolt against the liberal arts belongs to the liberal arts. But not their students’, who have been given nothing to revolt against. For their students, blurring the boundaries of the liberal arts has meant that nothing at all remains to be seen or learned. The liberal arts teachers valued something else, including their own self-image as enlightened revolutionaries, over the liberal arts and the continuity of liberal arts education.