Daily Media Diet

From The New York Times : [Steven] Pinker’s philosophical lens prevents him from seeing where the real problems lie. He calls himself an Enlightenment man, but he’s really a scientific rationalist. He puts tremendous emphasis on the value of individual reason. The key to progress is information — making ourselves better informed. The key sin in the world is a result either of entropy, the randomness that is built into any system, or faith — dogma clouding reason. The big problem with his rationalistic worldview is that while he charts the way individuals have benefited over the centuries, he spends barely any time on the quality of the relationships between individuals. That is to say, Pinker doesn’t spend much time on the decline of social trust, the breakdown of family life, the polarization of national life, the spread of tribal mentalities, the rise of narcissism, the decline of social capital, the rising alienation from institutions or the decline of citizenship and neighbor...

From The New York Times : [Steven] Pinker contends that we should not be nostalgic for the economy of the 1950s, when jobs were plentiful and unions strong. A third of American children lived in poverty. Sixty percent of seniors had incomes below $1,000 a year. Only half the population had any savings in the bank at all. Between 1979 and 2014, meanwhile, the percentage of poor Americans dropped to 20 percent from 24 percent. The percentage of lower-middle-class Americans dropped to 17 from 24. The percentage of Americans who were upper middle class (earning $100,000 to $350,000) shot upward to 30 percent from 13 percent. There’s a fair bit of social mobility. Half of all Americans wind up in the top 10 percent of earners at at least one point in their career. One in nine spend some time in the top 1 percent. Poverty has been transformed by falling prices and government support. “When poverty is defined in terms of what people consume rather than what they earn, we find that the...

From The Economist : An equity is a claim on the assets and the profits of a firm; a bond entitles the investor to a series of interest payments and repayment on maturity. Bitcoin brings no cashflows to the owner; the only return will come via a rise in price. When there is no obvious way of valuing an asset, it is hard to say that one target price is less likely than another. Bitcoin could be worth $10 or $100,000. One argument made by bitcoinnoisseurs is that it is a type of “digital gold”. Stores of value are supposed to keep their value; bitcoin, by contrast, is extremely volatile. Its code ensures that no more than 21m coins can ever be created; that sets bitcoin apart from fiat money, which central banks can create at will. Yet being limited in supply is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for having value; signed photographs of Economist journalists are rare but, sadly, of negligible worth. Nor is supply really limited. Plenty of other cryptocurrencies exist. If the...

From The New York Times : Convenience has to serve something greater than itself, lest it lead only to more convenience. In her 1963 classic, “The Feminine Mystique,” Betty Friedan looked at what household technologies had done for women and concluded that they had just created more demands. “Even with all the new labor-saving appliances,” she wrote, “the modern American housewife probably spends more time on housework than her grandmother.” When things become easier, we can seek to fill our time with more “easy” tasks. At some point, life’s defining struggle becomes the tyranny of tiny chores and petty decisions. An unwelcome consequence of living in a world where everything is “easy” is that the only skill that matters is the ability to multitask. At the extreme, we don’t actually do anything; we only arrange what will be done, which is a flimsy basis for a life. We need to consciously embrace the inconvenient — not always, but more of the time. Nowadays individuality has come ...

From The New York Times : We are willing to pay a premium for convenience, of course — more than we often realize we are willing to pay. During the late 1990s, for example, technologies of music distribution like Napster made it possible to get music online at no cost, and lots of people availed themselves of the option. But though it remains easy to get music free, no one really does it anymore. Why? Because the introduction of the iTunes store in 2003 made buying music even more convenient than illegally downloading it. Convenient beat out free. As task after task becomes easier, the growing expectation of convenience exerts a pressure on everything else to be easy or get left behind. We are spoiled by immediacy and become annoyed by tasks that remain at the old level of effort and time. When you can skip the line and buy concert tickets on your phone, waiting in line to vote in an election is irritating. This is especially true for those who have never had to wait in lines (whic...

From The New York Times : The dream of convenience is premised on the nightmare of physical work. But is physical work always a nightmare? Do we really want to be emancipated from all of it? Perhaps our humanity is sometimes expressed in inconvenient actions and time-consuming pursuits. Perhaps this is why, with every advance of convenience, there have always been those who resist it. They resist out of stubbornness, yes (and because they have the luxury to do so), but also because they see a threat to their sense of who they are, to their feeling of control over things that matter to them. By the late 1960s, the first convenience revolution had begun to sputter. The prospect of total convenience no longer seemed like society’s greatest aspiration. Convenience meant conformity. The counterculture was about people’s need to express themselves, to fulfill their individual potential, to live in harmony with nature rather than constantly seeking to overcome its nuisances. Playing the g...

From The New York Times: Americans say they prize competition, a proliferation of choices, the little guy. Yet our taste for convenience begets more convenience, through a combination of the economics of scale and the power of habit. The easier it is to use Amazon, the more powerful Amazon becomes — and thus the easier it becomes to use Amazon. Convenience and monopoly seem to be natural bedfellows. Though understood and promoted as an instrument of liberation, convenience has a dark side. With its promise of smooth, effortless efficiency, it threatens to erase the sort of struggles and challenges that help give meaning to life. Created to free us, it can become a constraint on what we are willing to do, and thus in a subtle way it can enslave us. Convenience as we now know it is a product of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when labor-saving devices for the home were invented and marketed. Milestones include the invention of the first “convenience foods,” such as canned p...

From The New York Times : In the developed nations of the 21st century, convenience — that is, more efficient and easier ways of doing personal tasks — has emerged as perhaps the most powerful force shaping our individual lives and our economies.  This is particularly true in America, where, despite all the paeans to freedom and individuality, one sometimes wonders whether convenience is in fact the supreme value. As Evan Williams, a co-founder of Twitter, recently put it, “Convenience decides everything.” Convenience seems to make our decisions for us, trumping what we like to imagine are our true preferences. (I prefer to brew my coffee, but Starbucks instant is so convenient I hardly ever do what I “prefer.”) Easy is better, easiest is best. Convenience has the ability to make other options unthinkable. Once you have used a washing machine, laundering clothes by hand seems irrational, even if it might be cheaper. After you have experienced streaming television, waiting t...

From The Guardian (Julian Barnes on "What books are on your bedside table?"): Keith Vaughan’s Journals, James Fenton’s Selected Poems, Posy Simmonds’s Literary Life, Adam Begley’s biography of John Updike. But on top of them are my more usual bedtime reading: copies of Private Eye and The Art Newspaper. From The Guardian (Julian Barnes on "Which came to you first: the characters, their situation or the book’s themes of innocence and experience?"): The situation, as it always does. I never start by making up a bunch of characters and then wonder what might happen to them. I think of a situation, an impossible dilemma, a moral or emotional quandary, and then wonder to whom it might happen and when and where. In part, this novel came out of The Sense of an Ending, in which there is a central relationship between a young man and a middle-aged woman, about which we are told nothing. We just have to intuit what it must have been like from the scantiest of evidence...

From  The TLS  (Steven Pinker on “What is your favourite book published in the past twelve months?”): Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro’s The Internationalists. The authors take up a question close to my heart – why has interstate war declined precipitously since 1945 – and, perhaps not surprisingly for a pair of legal scholars, suggest that it is because war is literally illegal. Through most of history, this was not true – might made right, war was the continuation of policy by other means, and to the victor went the spoils. They date the change to – don’t laugh – the Kellogg-Briand pact outlawing war in 1928. Though it was not respected right away (to put it mildly), the pact was the basis for the UN’s similar prohibition in 1945, which had more teeth. This is a big-think book; like The Clash of Civilizations and The End of History, The Internationalists tries to make sense of the world of today in the context of centuries of history. And Hathaway and Shapiro tell thei...

From The Economist : Conducting tasks while receiving e-mails and phone calls reduces a worker’s IQ by about ten points relative to working in uninterrupted quiet. That is equivalent to losing a night’s sleep, and twice as debilitating as using marijuana. By one estimate, it takes nearly half an hour to recover focus fully for the task at hand after an interruption. What’s more, Mr Nixon notes, constant interruptions accustom workers to distraction, teaching them, in effect, to lose focus and seek diversions. An initial increase in multitasking from the increased use of IT seems to raise productivity. But later, the accumulation of balls to be juggled reduces performance and increases the incidence of error. Whether or not brains fried by constant interruption are slowing growth, the digital deluge takes a toll. Mr Nixon reckons that distracted workers become less empathetic, a serious side-effect in an economy where human connections with customers are cast as a defence agai...

From  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences : Individuals with higher educational attainment live healthier and longer lives. However, not everyone benefits equally from higher education. In particular, the black–white gap in life expectancy is greater at higher levels of educational attainment. Furthermore, recent research suggests that disadvantaged African Americans in the rural Southeast who attend college have worse physical health than their similarly disadvantaged peers who do not attend college. The extent to which this pattern generalizes to a nationally representative, mixed-race sample is unknown. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, we test whether the health benefits associated with college completion vary by level of childhood disadvantage for depression and metabolic syndrome in young adulthood, across race/ethnicity. We find uniform lower depression associated with college completion regardless of childhood disadv...

From The New York Times : [If] you grew up in war-torn Syria and wound up at a community college in Ohio, you’re almost bound to be magnetic and original. If you grew up in a Baptist home in Alabama and now are first-generation college at an Ivy League school, your life is propelled by an electric, crosscutting cultural dynamic. The Amphibians are pluralism personified. Pluralism, remember, isn’t just living with difference, or tolerance. It’s the weaving together of different life commitments. It’s being planted here and also being planted there, but somehow forming yourself into a third thing, one coherent personality. Amphibians make E pluribus unum their life mission. Amphibians have to master two or three different ways of being in the world, and often they do not fit perfectly anywhere. They were considered liberals in their Midwestern high school but are considered conservatives in college. They come from a mostly black town and work at a mostly white company. They have th...

From The New York Times (Kristin Hannah on "Who is your favorite novelist of all time?"): Well, my favorite novel is “The Lord of the Rings,” but favorite novelist? It’s a tossup between Stephen King and J. K. Rowling. I am a sucker for epic, world-building novels with high stakes that are written beautifully and are impossible to put down. Extra points if I laugh or cry. Few authors can do this once or twice in a career. Mr. King and Ms. Rowling are masters at it. I stand in awe. From The New York Times (Kristin Hannah on "Who are your favorite writers — novelists, essayists, journalists, poets — working today?"): Besides Stephen and J. K.? I adore Carlos Ruiz Zafón, Donna Tartt, Anne Rice, Timothy Egan, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Haruki Murakami, Joan Didion, Roxane Gay, Jane Smiley, Anne Tyler — and I can’t wait to see what’s next from Amor Towles and Yaa Gyasi. From The New York Times (Kristin Hannah on "What genres do you especially enjoy reading? And whi...

From The Economist : Distraction is a constant these days; supplying it is the business model of some of the world’s most powerful firms. From The Economist : Depending on the study you pick, smartphone-users touch their device somewhere between twice a minute to once every seven minutes. From Harper's : A six-year-old Moroccan girl who presented with difficulty breathing was found to have a leech living in her throat. From Harper's : Delta waves were recorded in the brain of a Canadian man ten minutes after he died. From Jean-Luc Godard : To be or not to be. That’s not really a question.

From The Guardian (George Saunders on The Complete Works of Shakespeare): This is my reading project for the new year: to read all the plays in order. I’m putting all other reading aside. I got hold of this newish copy and I’ve been working through it. I’m not even at the good plays yet – I’m up to Henry VI, Part One – but it’s been so invigorating. I’m trying to figure out how to mimic the way he could get so many people in a play so fully realised, and I’m learning some tricks. I won’t say what they are, but my thought is that if I read all these I’ll absorb some fundamental lesson. From The Guardian (George Saunders on Stamped from the Beginning): I finished this before Christmas and it really has kind of changed my way of thinking. The subtitle is The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. It’s a big, 600-page academic history of what racism is and how it started and how it’s been propagated over the years, and it’s mind-blowing. It’s not passionate, it’s very, ...

From The Economist : Mr Musk and others are worried about what might happen when a firm finally cracks “general intelligence”, the ability of a computer to perform any human task without being explicitly programmed to do so. Such a vision is probably decades away, but that does not stop Google from talking about it. “We absolutely want to” crack general AI, says Jeff Dean, the boss of Google Brain. If a firm were to manage this, it could change the competitive landscape entirely. From The Economist : Most techies are too consumed by the promise and potential profits of AI to spend too much time worrying about the future. From Harper's : Frogs and toads can still see colors when humans can see nothing at all. From Harper's : Male Siamese fighting fish, who usually lead with their right eyes when aggressing, favor their left eyes if they are on Prozac. From Harper's : Swiss and Austrian psychologists isolated the brain activity that distinguishes laughing wi...

From The Economist : Self-driving cars are just one example of how technology firms’ AI strategies are pushing beyond the virtual world of software into hardware. Many companies, including Alphabet, Apple and Microsoft, are also investing to build specialised, powerful “AI chips” that can power their various activities. These will compete with those made by NVIDIA, a tech firm that has built an empire on powerful chips used in various AI realms, such as autonomous cars and virtual reality. From The Economist : It seems likely that the incumbent tech groups will capture many of AI’s gains, given their wealth of data, computing power, smart algorithms and human talent, not to mention a head start on investing. History points to the likelihood of concentration; both databases and personal computers ushered in ascendancies, if only for a while, of a tiny group of tech firms (Oracle and IBM in databases, Microsoft and Apple in personal computers). From The Economist : By the metri...

From The New Yorker : Childhood should not be considered a chain of causes leading to an ultimate effect: you do this so that will happen. The popular motto of stoic acceptance, “It is what it is,” should be replaced by a stronger motto, embracing existence: “What is is what is.” The reason we don’t want our kids to watch violent movies is not that doing so will turn them into psychos when they grow up; it’s that we don’t want them seeing bloody movies now. From The New Yorker : As the nineteenth-century Russian philosopher Alexander Herzen said, after the unimaginable loss of a child drowned (in words famously adapted by Tom Stoppard in “The Coast of Utopia”), “Because children grow up, we think a child’s purpose is to grow up. But a child’s purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn’t disdain what only lives for a day. It pours the whole of itself into each moment. . . . Life’s bounty is in its flow, later is too late.” From The New Yorker : Nothing works in child rearing becaus...

From The New Yorker : What sustains us in any competition are the moments of interiority when the competition vanishes; what sustains us in any struggle are the moments when we forget the struggle. From The New Yorker : Accomplishment, the feeling of absorption in the flow, of mastery for its own sake, of knowing how to do this thing, is what keeps all of us doing what we do, if we like what we do at all. The prizes are inevitably disappointing, even when we get them (as the life of Bob Dylan, prize-getter and grump extraordinaire, suggests). It is, perhaps, necessary only that we like the process as we seek the prize. From The Economist : If companies can lure the right people in AI, the effect is to extend their workforces exponentially. AI is “like having a million interns” at one’s disposal, says Benedict Evans of Andreessen Horowitz. That computational power is then integrated into firms’ existing businesses. From The Economist : The advantages of AI are most visible...

From The New Yorker : For every prodigy doomed to misery by early success, we can cite another who started off strong and kept going. From The New Yorker : We understand instinctively that being a prodigy wasn’t his platform for a lifetime’s achievement; it marked the possibility of a highly specific, highly term-limited kind of performance. From The New Yorker : [Unusual] excellence emerges within tightly structured local traditions, whether they are in fifteenth-century Florence, in painting, or in San Pedro de Macorís, the “cradle of shortstops.” One good painter with an apprentice produces a Renaissance, just as one good coach with willing kids supplies the major leagues. From The New Yorker : What typically emerges from looking at kids, gifted and ordinary, is that, from the kids’ point of view, accomplishment, that is, the private sense of mastery, the hard thing suddenly made easy, counts for far more in their inner lives than does the achievement—the competition wo...

From The Economist (on Machine Learning): Computers sift through data to recognise patterns and make predictions without being explicitly programmed to do so. The technique is now used in all manner of applications in the tech industry, including online ad targeting, product recommendations, augmented reality and self-driving cars. From The Economist : Zoubin Ghahramani, who leads AI research at Uber, believes that AI will be as transformative as the rise of computers. From The Economist : Over the next several years, large tech firms are going to go head-to-head in three ways. They will continue to compete for talent to help train their corporate “brains”; they will try to apply machine learning to their existing businesses more effectively than rivals; and they will try to create new profit centres with the help of AI. From The Economist : Today AI systems are like “idiot savants,” says Gurdeep Singh Pall of Microsoft. “They are great at what they do, but if you don’t ...

From The New York Times : Obviously not everyone who provides care for others is a saint. But engaging in that daily devotion, or even living with its expectation, has enormous potential to change a person. It forces one to constantly imagine the world from someone else’s point of view: Is he hungry? Maybe she’s tired. Is his back hurting him? What is she trying to say? From The New York Times : The most obvious cure for today’s gender inequities is to put more women in power. But if we really hope to create an equal society, we will also need more men to care for the powerless — more women in the boardroom, but also more men at the nurses’ station and the changing table, immersed in daily physical empathy. If that sounds like an evolutionary impossibility, well, it doesn’t violate the laws of physics, so we can achieve it. It is surely worth at least as much investment as defeating death. From The Economist : Imagine a future, some warn, in which you are transported everywhe...

From The Economist : Older generations have been complaining about the state of young people’s writing since a teacher of Sumerian complained about his charges 4,000 years ago. (“A junior scribe...does not pay attention to the scribal art.”) From The Economist : [Two] letters can add up to a lot of money. No area of technology is hotter than AI, or artificial intelligence. Venture-capital investment in AI in the first nine months of 2017 totalled $7.6bn, according to PitchBook, a data provider; that compares with full-year figures of $5.4bn in 2016. In the year to date there have been $21.3bn in AI-related M&A deals, around 26 times more than in 2015. In earnings calls public companies now mention AI far more often than “big data”. From The New York Times : As the longevity entrepreneur Arram Sabeti told The New Yorker: “The proposition that we can live forever is obvious. It doesn’t violate the laws of physics, so we can achieve it.” Of all the slightly creepy aspects to...

From The Guardian (Hanya Yanagihara on "The book that is most underrated"): It was (rightly) praised when it was published, but I wish more people who read Wolf Hall would also read Hilary Mantel’s earlier work, which is so nasty, funny and delicious: Every Day Is Mother’s Day? Vacant Possession? An Experiment in Love? All so wonderful. Also, he has a much bigger audience in the UK than in the US, but I do love Jonathan Coe’s The Rain Before It Falls. From The Guardian (Hanya Yanagihara on "The book I wish I’d written"): The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. Though really, there are scores of them. You know you’ve read something special when your blinding jealousy is eclipsed (barely) by admiration. From The Guardian (Hanya Yanagihara on "The book that changed my life"): So many. But I’ll say Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth. My father gave it to me (he reread it as I read it) and it was a revelation. I didn’t understand much of it – it wa...

From The New York Times (Amy Chua on "Tell us about the last great book you read."): Tara Westover’s “Educated,” a memoir about a girl born into a survivalist family in the Idaho mountains who was not allowed to go to school and spent her days foraging for metal in a junkyard while trying to avoid the catalytic converters hurled at her by her fanatic, anti-government father. She somehow breaks free of the violence and emotional prison of her family and, against all odds, ends up getting a Ph.D. from Cambridge University. The book, which will be published on Feb. 20, is heart-wrenching. But it’s also a beautiful testament to the power of education to open eyes and change lives. From The New York Times (Amy Chua on "Which novelists do you especially enjoy reading?"): I love classics. Some of my favorites are Tolstoy’s “War and Peace,” Eliot’s “Middlemarch,” Flaubert’s “Salammbô,” James’s “The Golden Bowl” and Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury.” “Dream of the ...

From  Social Science Research : Although the health-relevant resources that marriage is argued to provide vary by socioeconomic status (SES), little research has examined whether the association of marriage with psychological well-being varies by SES. Focusing on depressive symptoms as an outcome and using a two-stage Heckit procedure with multilevel modeling, results from analyses of four waves of data (n = 4340 person-waves) from the American Changing Lives Survey (ACL) shows that differences in depressive symptoms between never-married and married adults varies by adjusted household income. Depressive symptoms are highest among the never married, and differences from the married greatest, at the lowest levels of income. As income increases these differences are eliminated. The conditioning effect of income is partially mediated by financial security, self-efficacy, and social support from friends and relatives. The implications of these findings for U.S. marriage promotion pol...

From The Economist : In theory, standards encourage trade, by building trust for foreign products. In practice, they often do not. A recent study for the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies estimated that where they applied to cheese, technical barriers, such as labelling requirements, lowered trade volumes by 6.7%. Sanitary and phytosanitary measures, imposed on health grounds, lowered them by 7.3%. From The Economist : Some rules are designed to stop imitation cheeses. Try to export Brie to France, or Gorgonzola to Italy, and you will meet more lawyers than cheesemongers. From Harper's : White women assume racists are also sexist, while black and Latino men assume sexists are also racist. From Harper's : Republicans who are overweight blame their habits, while overweight Democrats blame their genes. From Journal of Personality and Social Psychology : The scent of another person can activate memories, trigger emotions, and spark romantic attra...