My favorite brain scientist

I met Robert Sapolsky when we were both undergraduates in North House -- I had the privilege of living among an amazing group of future scientists, most of whom would not remember me. It was the best part of my education, however.

Sapolsky has had a career that combines primatology with neuroscience, and has led to some profound insights into those darn humans.

This is his 2009 Stanford Class Day speech.
You have to sit through 5 minutes of provost introduction first, just for authenticity.
Enjoy.

Today in "No shit, Sherlock"

According to a report from the Pew Research Center, as reported in the NYTimes:

Over all, the evidence shows that the shifts within marriages — men taking on more housework and women earning more outside the home — have had a positive effect, contributing to lower divorce rates and happier unions.

And:

Sociologists and economists say that financially independent women can be more selective in marrying, and they also have more negotiating power within the marriage. But it’s not just women who win. The net result tends to be a marriage that is more fair and equitable to husbands and wives.

 

Yahoo! Data to support my lifelong belief that feminism would make things better for men and women.
But count on the Times to find a way to make women sound petty and controlling and men to sound entitled:

Men, for instance, sometimes have a hard time adjusting to a woman’s equal or greater earning power. Women, meanwhile, struggle with giving up their power at home and controlling tasks like how to dress the children or load the dishwasher.

Because, like, resenting your wife's work is so very completely balanced by her being picky about the dishwasher.

Also, this:

Even among dual-earning couples, women still do about two-thirds of the housework, on average, according to the University of Wisconsin National Survey of Families and Households. But men do contribute far more than they used to. Studies show that since the 1960s, men’s contributions to housework have doubled, while the amount of time spent caring for children has tripled. 

I'm not sure you should use "doubled" and "tripled" when starting with the 1960s as a base. Because when you multiply zero by 2 or 3, you still get zero. Or is this one of those jokes about women not understanding math? 

But it all has a happy ending, in the words of this stay-at-home dad:

Mothers tend to shower him with praise. “I get the same reaction from all the moms,” he said. “They say, ‘That’s great, my husband wouldn’t be able to do it.’ I think they’re selling their husbands short. All guys could do it, just like all women can be the breadwinners.”

Indeed.

 

Sunday papers, post-MaSen edition

Frank Rich has his own advice for Obama:

"When it comes to economic substance, small symbolic gestures (the proposed new bank “fee”) won’t cut it. Nor will ineffectual presidential sound bites railing against Wall Street bonuses beyond the federal government’s purview. There’s no chance of a second stimulus. The White House will have to jawbone banks on foreclosures, credit card racketeering and the loosening of credit to small businesses. This means taking on bankers who were among the Obama campaign’s biggest backers and whose lobbyists have castrated regulatory reform by buying off congressmen of both parties. It means pressing for all constitutional remedies that might counter last week’s 5-to-4 Supreme Court decision allowing corporate campaign contributions to buy off even more.

"It’s become so easy to pin financial elitism on Democrats that the morning after Brown’s victory the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee had the gall to accuse them of being the “one party who bailed out the automakers and insurance companies.” Never mind that the Bush White House gave us the bank (and A.I.G.) bailouts, or that the G.O.P. is even more in hock than Democrats to corporate patrons. The Obama administration is so overstocked with Goldman Sachs-Robert Rubin alumni and so tainted by its back-room health care deals with pharmaceutical and insurance companies that conservative politicians, Brown included, can masquerade shamelessly as the populist alternative."

I think Rich is angry, too.

"If the administration sticks to this trajectory, all bets are off for the political future of a president who rode into office blessed with more high hopes, good will and serious promise than any in modern memory. It’s time for him to stop deluding himself."

Or at least disappointed. Me, too.

The Future of Journalism, part 907

I really like this article. I've been not-reading Columbia Journalism Review for the past year because every time I open it up it's so full of fogey, luddite, boring crap about what's happened to the world of information that it just makes me despair. So, in this week of bad political news, much of it essentially about the way information does and doesn't get to the electorate, this was a bright spot for me:
A Thousand Cuts , by Terry McDermott.

Here's my excerpt, but go read the whole thing.

I hated the conventions that bound daily journalism, the stilted, odd language in which it was written as well as the contrived structures into which that odd language was shaped. The common newspaper style is so heavily codified you need a Berlitz course to interpret it. More than formal, the style is abstract and artificial. I once (on the very first day at a new job) got into a frighteningly intense argument with a city editor who had objected to my use of the word “slumbered” to describe the behavior of two political candidates during a debate. They didn’t really sleep through it, did they? he asked. Of course not, I said. I meant it figuratively, not literally. We don’t use figurative language here, he told me. Then he changed the word to “lumbered.”

That was one benighted guy, but the problem was nearly universal. Until recently, you couldn’t escape it. Now you can. The advent of the Web and the proliferation of smart, aggressive bloggers around the globe have torn journalism loose from its hinges. The hounds have been unleashed.

While disliking it intensely, it is easy to forget there was a reason for the soporific style of newspaper writing. Newspapers were actually trying to do something good. They recognized that they held powerful, uncontested positions as conveyors of news to their communities. After much coaxing, they took it upon themselves to shed their partisan pasts and don a cloak of social responsibility—a practice that they called objectivity. They did it in part to sell papers—they thought if they made fewer people angry they would have more readers—but mainly they did it because they thought it was the right thing to do.

In which your author loses her temper

Several of you probably received a message like this one today:

Yesterday's disappointing election results show deep discontent with the pace of change. I know the OFA community and the President share that frustration.

We also saw what we knew to be true all along: Any change worth making is hard and will be fought at every turn. While it doesn't take away the sting of this loss, there is no road to real change without setbacks along the way.

We could have simply sought to do things that were easy, that wouldn't stir up controversy. But changes that aren't controversial rarely solve the problem.

Our country continues to face the same fundamental challenges it faced yesterday. Our health care system still needs reform. Wall Street still needs to be held accountable. We still need to create good jobs. And we still need to continue building a clean energy economy.

The President isn't walking away from these challenges. In fact, his determination and resolve are only stronger. We must match that commitment with our own.

But it won't be easy. Real change never is. For that reason, I am grateful you're part of this fight with us.

Thank you,

Mitch

Mitch Stewart
Director
Organizing for America

Unfortunately, Mitch is not who I want to hear from today, and this is not the message I want to hear. He should really have given it a couple of days weeks. So unfortunately, I am sending this response:

Mitch, honey, this is bullshit. Our country *does* continue to face the same fundamental challenges it faced yesterday, and I only wish the administration really *had* fought to reform our health care system and really *had* fought to hold Wall Street accountable. It's not *me*, or your other supporters in Massachusetts, who were unready to make difficult changes. It was the administration. You shmucks had a 60-vote Senate supermajority, and you dicked around with pro-corporate, pseudo-centrist bullshit until you lost it. Don't blame me; I voted for Capuano in the primary. We wouldn't be squabbling about whether the health insurance reform bill that can be passed is worth passing if it were a stronger bill, with a real public option. That whole world-weary pragmatism thing seems particularly stale coming from Mr. Change-You-Can-Believe-In. Your team includes the most vicious enforcer in Democratic politics today, Rahm Emanuel, and you're wasting him on shutting up your base. Why don't you have him stop by Congress and explain to everybody *there* what's at stake? Trust me, we in Massachusetts already know.

And by the way, I am not donating because I myself could still use one of those "good jobs" you speak of.

This is on you guys, on Obama and his organization and on the DNC.

So do not presume that you get to tell me what I should think today. If you get around to remembering how your guy got elected and want to know what *I* think, you'll find it here: http://laurenmerlin.blogspot.com/2010/01/coakleybrown-women-politics-etc.html

UPDATE: Of course, info@barackobama.com's server bounced my message, and the Organizing for America Web site told me to send my comments to whitehouse.gov. So I did.

Coakley/Brown, Women, Politics, etc.

What I'm thinking this morning is that Coakley's failure, especially in light of the semi-controversial brain-hurt from Clay Shirky, really demonstrates how good a politician Hillary Clinton turned out to be. Okay, she didn't make it all the way to president, but she did manage to win a senate seat in a state whose electorate, contrary to popular belief, is not entirely made up of the mythical Manhattan liberal elite. (Manhattan's real elite is not all that liberal anyway. Viz, Mayor Bloomberg, (R-Finance).)

I am not sure yet whether I think this, but it could be that both these women failed when they approached a race like Margaret from Dennis-the-Menace: "Hey! I did my homework. I'm smarter than you. It's my turn!" Except this is not a mistake made only by women -- it's also the campaign strategy that relegated Bob Dole to hawking Viagra.

So: One lesson from Coakley/Brown: "It's my turn" = still a sucky campaign strategy.

The thing that scares me this morning, and that I hadn't thought through last night, is that the Republicans did find a way to exploit voter resentment and cast themselves as some kind of party of anti-establishment change. I still think they harnessed a particular Massachusetts kink on the issue, because Massachusetts is so often a one-party state and has been one for so long that it is relatively easy here to portray Republicans as outsiders with respect to the Democratic machine. That's how you get Mitt Romney as governor. But there are, alas, clear national ramifications which I just plain did not want to credit last night. Because although the tactics will have to be tailored to the individual states and individual seats, in fact, yes, there is enough resentment abroad in the land, and Republicans can find candidates who will play as "outsiders" to tap it. I don't know if the Democrats need to do more to give people less to resent or if they need to ally themselves with resentment. I mean, I would prefer that the Dems start kicking ass, taking names, and pushing through some legislation that did some actual good. But even so, it bears noting that somehow the Bush administration was particularly good at blaming "government" even while they were the government. Maybe it's time to figure out how they did that.

So, second lesson: Republicans will continue to push their identity as the party of resentment.

Third lesson is the lesson Howard Dean tried to teach the party: Take no state for granted.

Fourth lesson  may be that the Republicans are better liars than we are, and we need to find candidates who make honesty look better than Martha Coakley managed to do. It may be true that if you are the kind of devout Catholic -- or the kind of devout Protestant, for that matter -- who can't bear to give emergency contraception to rape victims then perhaps you should not work in that part of the emergency room, but it made a lousy and unnecessarily polarizing sound bite. One of the great things about Obama as a speaker is that he speaks in carefully considered complete sentences, with the result being that he is hard to take fully out of context. He structures those sentences so that at the very least the sound-bite nearly has to contain the whole thing. He needs to spend his next vacation teaching public speaking at Young Legislators Camp (TM).

And I think the inevitable fifth lesson is that progressives are way tired of being played. There is always the danger of losing us again to a Ralph-Nader-like candidate, who may read as a mere "spoiler" to the Dem establishment, but gives us the relief of honestly voting for the policies we actually want. We wouldn't be squabbling about whether the health insurance reform bill that can be passed is worth passing if it were a stronger bill, with a real public option, etc. Compromise wears everybody down, and that whole world-weary pragmatism thing seems particularly stale coming from Mr. Change-You-Can-Believe-In. He's got the most vicious enforcer in Democratic politics today, Rahm Emanuel, and he's using him to shut up liberals? What a waste. If you want us to come out in the freezing rain, you have to give us something more than party affiliation once in a while. (See lessons 1 and 3 above.)

OK. Now I'm going to go focus on my personal life. Or at least, crawl back under the bed for a few more days.

Sunday papers 2

Just sharing this:
The New Age Cavemen and the City
because it's on the NYTimes Fashion page.

OK, I can't resist posting some of the fun stuff:

Andrew Sanocki, 38, a former Navy officer, explained that he preferred working out on an empty stomach near the end of a fast, and then following up with a large meal. This is a common caveman schedule, intended to reflect the exertion that ancient humans put into finding food. It is as if, Mr. Sanocki explained, “we’ve gone out and killed something, and now we have to eat it.”

Another caveman trick involves donating blood frequently. The idea is that various hardships might have occasionally left ancient humans a pint short. Asked when he last gave blood, Andrew Sanocki said it had been three months. He and his brother looked at each other. “We’re due,” Andrew said.

I met someone once who had been taught by a professor who believed that the development of agriculture was the beginning of human decline -- a theory based in part on the idea that only depressed people would voluntarily give up hunting and gathering to stay in one place and grow stuff. Sigh.

Sunday papers

Frank Rich, back from vacation, reminds us that our economy did not fall, it was pushed (and many people who were not speculators but merely trying to live their lives indoors were pushed with it):

Americans must be told the full story of how Wall Street gamed and inflated the housing bubble, made out like bandits, and then left millions of households in ruin.

He also points out that Warren Buffett warned us in 2003.

Mr Buffett argues that such highly complex financial instruments are time bombs and "financial weapons of mass destruction" that could harm not only their buyers and sellers, but the whole economic system.

So, you know, f*ck that noise about how nobody coulda predicted this, too.

Next week, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission begins public hearings. Rich again:

The new inquiry does have subpoena power, but its entire budget, a mere $8 million, doesn’t even match the lobbying expenditures for just three banks (Citi, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America) in the first nine months of 2009. The firms under scrutiny can pay for as many lawyers as they need to stall between now and Dec. 15, deadline day for the commission’s report.

And for the first time I am seeing the health reform bill as a deliberate distraction from the real issue. Although decimated, the bill remains a perfect misdirection tool because compared to the derivatives market it is actually remarkably simple; because the stupid end of the news media can still cast it as a horserace; and because the progressives and economists who could be paying attention to the broader financial crisis can be distracted by it. I am grateful to Rich for pointing out that we've got to pay attention to both, and more.

So the thing that is becoming interesting for me is that in many places, it's getting hard to avoid that if we are lucky, we will look back on these battles as the beginning of the war against the ongoing corporate takeover of government. It's like, we must fight Sauron, but we still need to get that ring melted.