Susan Cain on “the New Groupthink”

Susan Cain is skeptical about too much togetherness:

Solitude is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in.

But there’s a problem with this view. Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption.

The Rise of the New Groupthink (New York Times)

I’m reminded of an observation from Richard Mitchell in The Graves of Academe (1981):

The acts that are at once the means and ends of education, knowing, thinking, understanding, judging, are all committed in solitude. It is only in a mind that the work of the mind can be done.

[Introverts of the world, separate!]

Stop PIPA and SOPA

Yes, I am opposed to PIPA and SOPA and have let my representatives in Congress know that. As a Blogger user, I cannot “go dark.” I don’t want to either. I already have enough problems when I try to use Blogger on an iPad.

The images above are the work of Sam Anderson, found here.

Further reading
Stop American Censorship (Fight for the Future)
Stop the Internet Blacklist Legislation (Electronic Frontier Foundation)

“Rain umbrella”

So that’s what those thingamajigs are for. Useful today.

Why umbrella? The New Oxford American Dictionary explains: “ORIGIN early 17th cent.: from Italian ombrella, diminutive of ombra ‘shade,’ from Latin umbra.”

Andrew Sullivan on Barack Obama

The cover story from Newsweek:

If I sound biased, that’s because I am. Biased toward the actual record, not the spin; biased toward a president who has conducted himself with grace and calm under incredible pressure, who has had to manage crises not seen since the Second World War and the Depression, and who as yet has not had a single significant scandal to his name.

How Obama’s Long Game Will Outsmart His Critics (Newsweek)

[I’d like to link to the single-page version, but it’s pretty unreadable. By design?]

“Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory”

“A lifelong Apple superfan, Daisey sees some photos online from the inside of a factory that makes iPhones, starts to wonder about the people working there, and flies to China to meet them.” From This American Life: “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory.”

March 16, 2012: This American Life has retracted the story. The short explanation: “many of Mike Daisey’s experiences in China were fabricated.”

MLK

On wealth and poverty:

Jesus told a parable one day, and he reminded us that a man went to hell because he didn’t see the poor. His name was Dives. He was a rich man. And there was a man by the name of Lazarus who was a poor man, but not only was he poor, he was sick. Sores were all over his body, and he was so weak that he could hardly move. But he managed to get to the gate of Dives every day, wanting just to have the crumbs that would fall from his table. And Dives did nothing about it. And the parable ends saying, “Dives went to hell, and there were a fixed gulf now between Lazarus and Dives.”

There is nothing in that parable that said Dives went to hell because he was rich. Jesus never made a universal indictment against all wealth. It is true that one day a rich young ruler came to him, and he advised him to sell all, but in that instance Jesus was prescribing individual surgery and not setting forth a universal diagnosis. And if you will look at that parable with all of its symbolism, you will remember that a conversation took place between heaven and hell, and on the other end of that long-distance call between heaven and hell was Abraham in heaven talking to Dives in hell.

Now Abraham was a very rich man. If you go back to the Old Testament, you see that he was the richest man of his day, so it was not a rich man in hell talking with a poor man in heaven; it was a little millionaire in hell talking with a multimillionaire in heaven. Dives didn’t go to hell because he was rich; Dives didn’t realize that his wealth was his opportunity. It was his opportunity to bridge the gulf that separated him from his brother Lazarus. Dives went to hell because he was passed by Lazarus every day and he never really saw him. He went to hell because he allowed his brother to become invisible. Dives went to hell because he maximized the minimum and minimized the maximum. Indeed, Dives went to hell because he sought to be a conscientious objector in the war against poverty.

And this can happen to America, the richest nation in the world — and nothing’s wrong with that — this is America’s opportunity to help bridge the gulf between the haves and the have-nots. The question is whether America will do it. There is nothing new about poverty. What is new is that we now have the techniques and the resources to get rid of poverty. The real question is whether we have the will.

Martin Luther King Jr., “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution,” National Cathedral, Washington, D.C., March 31, 1968.

Domestic comedy

[The television was on in the background.]

“Is that what I think it is?”

“Yehhpp.”

[Sometimes you just can’t get enough of the self-storage auction industry.]

Related reading
All domestic comedy posts (via Pinboard)

Logic and marriage

Rick Santorum’s recent performance in a sparring match with college students is one small moment in the evolving story of equal marriage rights. But it’s a moment that makes me mighty angry, for three reasons:

1. Santorum treats an urgent question about the dignity of human relationships as an occasion to score cheap debater’s points: “Well, what about three men?” He begins by moving right past the possibility of partnership to raise the specter of conjugal trios and quintets. Notice too his ham-fisted sarcasm: “I’m surprised I got a gay-marriage question in a college crowd. I’m really — that’s a shocker for me.” He is a clueless, tasteless smarty-pants who seems to have no understanding of why same-sex partners in a loving relationship might want to marry.

2. Santorum casts marriage as “the union that causes children to be created.” But men and women marry for many reasons. And they “come together to have a union” for many reasons, not necessarily “to produce children.” (Produce?)

3. Santorum’s slippery-slope logic is specious. Santorum says that “Reason says that if you think it’s okay for two, then you have to differentiate with me as to why it’s not okay for three.” Slippery slopes though have a way of tripping up those who argue from them. If we follow Santorum’s logic, it’s the institution of heterosexual marriage that is itself the cause of problems. For when we allow a man and a woman to marry, look what happens: same-sex partners want to marry too.

That Santorum is on the wrong side of history seems pretty clear to me. It’s telling though that even he pays some sort of lip-service to the dignity of same-sex partnerships by granting that “all relationships provide some good to society.” That must mean that same-sex relationships provide some good to society. So why can’t same-sex partners marry?

Related reading
The Flag of Equal Marriage (“An evolving protest flag for equal marriage rights in the United States”)

Webster's New Collegiate ad

[Life, November 17, 1961. Click for a larger, more readable view.]

I’m reading Herbert C. Morton’s The Story of Webster’s Third: Philip Gove’s Controversial Dictionary and Its Critics and teaching David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. I have dictionaries on my brain. Thus this post.

It’s impossible to tell from the ad that Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (published in September 1961, lower left in the ad) was already the subject of heated (and often badly informed) criticism. This issue of Life has a letter from Gove defending the Third against a recent editorial:

The controversy over Webster’s Third is a remarkable moment in the so-called culture wars (resulting largely from an ill-conceived publicity campaign). I laugh to think that I used this dictionary for many years before learning that anyone found fault with it: to me, the Third seemed, and still seems, just fine. And I for one like the idea of Ethel Merman being quoted in a dictionary (or “the dictionary”): “Three shows a day drain a girl.”

A related post
-wise-wise (The Life editorial and -wise)

[Is that Rick Perry, time-traveler, smiling in 1961?]

Waterstones’s missing apostrophe

David Marsh, who created International Apostrophe Day, isn’t troubled by the disappearance of the apostrophe from the name of the British book chain Waterstones (was Waterstone’s). Nor am I. It’s tedious turning names ending in ’s into possessives. Consider Chuck E. Cheese’s.

Other apostrophe posts
Apostrophes and corn
Apostrophes and vandalism
LETS PLAY TWO