I dreamed that being in a house in the city, and with much company, looking towards the end of the room from the upper end of it, I descried a figure which I immediately knew to be Milton’s. He was very gravely, but very neatly attired in the fashion of his day, and had a countenance which filled me with those feelings that an affectionate child has for a beloved father. … My first thought was wonder, where he could have been concealed so many years; my second, a transport of joy to find him still alive; my third, another transport to find myself in his company; and my fourth, a resolution to accost him. I did so, and he received me with a complacence, in which I saw equal sweetness and dignity. I spoke of his Paradise Lost, as every man must, who is worthy to speak of it at all, and told him a long story of the manner in which it affected me, when I first discovered it, being at that time a schoolboy. He answered me by a smile, and a gentle inclination of his head. He then grasped my hand affectionately, and with a smile that charmed me, said, ‘Well, you for your part will do well also’; at last recollecting his great age (for I understood him to be two hundred years old) I feared that I might fatigue him by much talking, I took my leave, and he took his, with an air of the most perfect good-breeding.
A large group of actors relax and talk on the lawn at Monticello in Virginia, December 1928.
Photograph by Jacob J. Gayer, National Geographic
The cheese-rolling pictures are always a highlight of my year.
This week, “From the Outside In” shares the story of Samuel Beckett and his novel Watt. This doodle, featured as a window etching in the Ransom Center’s south atrium, is from the second of seven manuscript notebooks for the novel.Image courtesy of the Estate of Samuel Beckett.
The problem with Google’s vision is that it doesn’t acknowledge the vital role that disorder, chaos, and novelty play in shaping the urban experience. Back in 1970, cultural critic Richard Sennett wrote a wonderful little book—The Users of Disorder—that all Google engineers should read. In it, Sennett made a strong case for “dense, disorderly, overwhelming cities,” where strangers from very different socio-economic backgrounds still rub shoulders. Sennett’s ideal city is not just an agglomeration of ghettos and gated communities whose residents never talk to one another; rather, it’s the mutual entanglement between the two—and the occasionally mess that such entanglements introduce into our daily life—that makes it an interesting place to live in and allows its inhabitants to turn into mature and complex human beings.Google’s urbanism, on the other hand, is that of someone who is trying to get to a shopping mall in their self-driving car. It’s profoundly utilitarian, even selfish in character, with little to no concern for how public space is experienced. In Google’s world, public space is just something that stands between your house and the well-reviewed restaurant that you are dying to get to. Since no one formally reviews public space or mentions it in their emails, it might as well disappear from Google’s highly personalized maps. And if the promotional videos for Google Glass are anything to judge by, we might not even notice it’s gone: For all we know, we might be walking through an urban desert, but Google Glass will still make it look exciting, masking the blighted reality.
I’m always glad to see a null finding reported, so I liked this paper by Robert Fairlie and Jonathan Robinson about what happened when they gave computers to randomly selected California schoolkids whose families had no computer at home. The short answer is nothing.The slightly longer answer is that the kids reported an almost 50 percent increase in time spent using a computer, with the time divided between doing homework, playing games, and social network. But there was no improvement in academic achievement or attendance or anything else. There wasn’t even an improvement in computer skills. At the same time, there was no negative impact either. The access to extra computer games didn’t reduce total time spent on homework or lead to any declines in anything. They broke it down by a few demographic subgroups and didn’t find anything there either. It’s just a huge nada. Nothing happening.
“Smash Imperialist Invasion and March Forward for the building of Our Peaceful, Happy Life”
Loyau-Kennett is deeply concerned, she says, about the direction modern society is headed. “I prefer the values of the past than the non-values of today, where most people don’t seem to give a damn about others.” The events of last Wednesday have magnified her feelings. She has particular disdain for some of the people who stood by recording on their phones, refusing to offer help.“It annoyed me to see those people with mobile phones filming,” she says. “They were doing it for money, with the idea of selling the footage. I was annoyed at what must be in their heads that they just wanted to watch and record the unhappiness of others. And then there was the stupidity of the mothers who had stopped there with their kids. The man could have reached them in five seconds if he’d run at them. It would never cross my mind to show a heavily bleeding body to my kids.”
If people were scared, she ponders, why didn’t they just run away? That’s an understandable reaction, she says. “It’s a horrible mentality that some people have these days. I think we have this culture now – maybe started by things like soap operas – where we have this unhealthy curiosity about other people’s lives. You shouldn’t just be there watching like it’s on TV. By only watching they are actually interfering. Do something useful. Don’t just stand there. Move away.”
The Internet, a plain whose grasses hide so many digital predators, can activate that same response in contemporary humans. It offers “fight” and “flight” in one tidy package. Reading emails or hunching over a screen, Stone says, can cause people to go into a kind of resting state. Some 80 percent of people, she has shown, stop breathing (temporarily) or start breathing shallowly (continuously) when they check their email or look at a screen. Stone calls this condition “email apnea.” And she attributes it to our anticipation that the stuff we’re scanning will eventually require a response from us. Our drone-like surveys of our screens will eventually reveal an email from our boss or a note from a friend. And, when that happens, we’ll need to spring to action to respond.
If Obama commits to making responsible fatherhood a central theme of his second term, he could have a deep and durable effect on American culture. Any legislative achievement would pale in comparison.