HIGH TECH * HIGH TOUCH by John Naisbitt, Nana Naisbitt, and Douglas Philips

Ah, the nineties. The biggest threats to national security were gun-wielding, Doom-playing high schoolers, everyone could ignore our weekly Iraq bombings, and we were all worried that our new array of endless gadgetry, financed by an irrationally exuberant economy, felt so good to use that they must be bad for our health. And wherever there are Americans concerned that something is bad for their health, there's someone else there to confirm their worst suspicions. John Naisbitt filled this role superbly.

John's only one of a thousand technology critics who crawled out of the woodwork in the eighties and nineties. They all said the same things and the arguments are pretty familiar (and ignored) in the post-9/11 era. Luckily, John's thesis for the first part of the book provides a decent summary of the combined tech alarmism that pervaded the entire decade. According to him and his fellow authors, we're all (Or we all were--you can decide the degree of relevancy you're willing to grant the book in 2009) living in a "Technologically Intoxicated Zone." Your kids are intoxicated with violent video games, you're intoxicated with gadgetry, and we're all intoxicated with the promises of the "quick fix." In fact, let me just give you list he gives. We'll get it out the system right away so you never have to read one of these retarded tech-is-evil books again:

John's "symptoms" of a "Technologically Intoxicated Zone":

1.) "We favor the quick fix, from religion to nutrition" (Oh, come on John, that's nothing new. Americans have been obsessed with instant gratification since they started putting crack in medicine bottles to cure backaches).

2.) "We fear and worship technology" (Okay, I'll admit the level of fear is something relatively new, although you could argue it really started with the Industrial Revolution. By the way, do Scientologists actually worship technology? That might be a new level).

3.) "We blur the distinction between real and fake" (This, too, is nothing new, but thanks to 24-hour news networks, the Internet, and globalization, this blur has some real consequences now. Once something is blurred, it's really, really hard to unblur it. Just look at The Da Vinci Code.)

4.) "We accept violence as normal" (Really, John? Really? This is new? Humans have accepted violence as normal since the beginning of time. Remember, this book was written before the blood was even dry at Columbine, so get ready for a very long chapter on how video games, TV, and, somehow, Stephen Spielberg's Toy Soldiers are creating a generation of mass murderers. Oh, yeah, and a polemic in favor of censorship. Excellent.)

5.) "We love technology as a toy" (Once again, this isn't new. If any generation started this, it was the postwar fifties generation with their Kelvinator Ice Cube Makers and Automated Kitchen Systems. And honestly, what's wrong with toys? John never really explains this.)

6.) "We live our lives distanced and distracted" (Oh, this is good. Guess where he goes here? Yup, the "voluntary simplicity movement". Basically, yuppies sacrificing their laptops and cell phones to play Walden Pond at some godforsaken shack in the Rockies. And oh, how focused and "in touch" with their "humanness"--John likes this word--they became! Lolcatz.)

The main point is that we have to balance HIGH TECH (our gadgetry) with HIGH TOUCH (our "humanness"). And most importantly, we MUST protect our CHILDREN from the horrors of high tech. The most Columbinesque chapter in the book is called "The Military-Ninetendo Complex". It's every bit as bad as it sounds and a bag of chips (hey, we're back in the nineties here!). Oh, the parade of intellectual-sounding experts John trots out to terrify soccer moms. One Professor Stephen Kline--a quick Google search will tell you everything you need to know about him--warns us that "Play is paradoxical. It subsumes both a connection to reality and imagination by definition." Video games, Kline says, are "packaged emotions." Is anyone else getting a little beeping noise from their bullshit-o-meter?

The worst part is that, at the core of it, there's a point. It is a little scary that the military trains its men with the same video games seven-year olds are playing. It's true that a steady diet of violent TV, video games, and movies probably isn't very good for children. A lot of stuff isn't. Like eating Deet. Or sticking fingers into electrical sockets. Or sticking M&Ms up the nose. Fortunately, nature provided our little ones with at least one (usually two!) defenses against these things: PARENTS. But, typical of the yuppie nineties, John lays all the blame on the "media," and especially the video game companies, the boogeymen of the entire book. "The danger to our children presented by the electronic war zone," John says, "should be equated with crying 'fire' in a crowded theater--absolutely unaccepable and punishable by law." If that quote doesn't make you seriously question John's opinions, I'm very, very worried about America. "American courts today," John writes with an unmistakable twinge of sadness, "view with strict scrutiny any legislation that appears to infringe on the First Amendment." Enforcing the Constitution--horror of horrors! Oh, please, Surpreme Court, save us from the evils of the First Amendment! Yikes.

Don't give up on John yet, though. Remember his milieu. Writing Part I of this book was probably like trying to write a book about Islam in October 2001. Panic and paranoia can do strange things to otherwise intelligent people. Stick around for Part II. John and his fellow authors speculate on genetic technologies and their influences on morality and religion, and it's actually interesting. They argue that DNA is man's next great leap in his understanding of himself. Galileo gave us a cosmic perspective, Darwin gave us a natural perspective, and DNA technologies give us a molecular perspective. He quotes a ridiculous amount of very famous theologians from Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, and Islamic traditions about the ethical concerns involved in cloning, "designer babies," and genetically-engineered food like Roundup Corn. Irving Greenberg (creator of the "voluntary covenant" concept for any Jews in the audience), Archbiship Sly, and Pastor John Eagen all speculate on the new technologies' effects on their respective faiths. John correctly predicts that concerns over genetic privacy would need to be addressed by the federal government, and soon--he cites some terrifying stories about people denied insurance coverage because of the "cancer gene." At least here, I had a sense of relief: Congress did address it, of course, creating GINA (the Genetic Information Non-Discrimation Act) that's supposed to prevent any of those horror stories from ever happening again.

The last part of the book is especially interesting. Here, in a chapter called "Death, Sex, and the Body: The New Specimen Art Movement," John and his fellow authors speculate on the new DNA tech's effects on art, music, and culture. The New Specimen Movement, by the way, is basically art using the "real" instead of the representative. "Specimen Art," John explains, "is based on real human specimens." If you remember that "Bodies in Motion" exhibit that came around recently, where they had real bodies donated to science set up in all those weird poses, then you saw Specimen Art. The beauty of the "inner body" and the "outer body" is represented as scientists become artists and artists become scientists. Nancy Kedersha has a few quotes in there. Even the artist of the very controversial "Piss Christ" makes an appearance. All in all, it's a nineties art reunion, but it's worth it.

In fact, the whole book's a nineties reunion. Reading through things I remember only vaguely--I was in grade school in 1999--gave me pangs of nostalgia for a time before al-Qa'ida and economic recessions, a time when the biggest concern was taking your measurements for a customized Y2K Doomsday space suit, a time when The New Millenium was still coming and held so much promise, before we realized that 2001 came after 2000 and humans were still killing each other. It was fun to remember what worried us all back then, how we all thought in a little more innocent times. And believe it or not, a lot of it really is still relevant.

Agree or disagree with John's politics (I mostly disagreed), but he undertook quite a cultural study here and used pretty sophisticated methods, which he describes in the appendices. He tries to raise our everyday consumer culture to the level of academic discourse, and I can't help but respect him for that. Technology DOES matter, and John and his fellow authors describe choices we all really do have to face both as individuals and as a society.

A nineties reunion and a tech morality lesson--who can argue with that?

CAUTIOUSLY RECOMMENDED

BORN THAT WAY: GENES, BEHAVIOR, PERSONALITY by William Wright

With every new generation of college freshmen there comes the list of things they never saw. My freshman year, 2007, was one of those "landmark" years, underscoring just how far the world had come and just how many more grays you have in your hair: I wasn't born for the Cold War, that entire fifty years of history that provided the world with, among other things, Mutual Assured Destruction, Robert Ludlum novels, the Space Race, and Dr. Strangelove. As if that experiential omission weren't enough, the science-oriented know that I missed another war, too, one that arguably came closer to going "hot" than any conflict between Capitalism and Communism: The Nature-Vs.-Nurture War. The basis of the conflict revolved around whether behavior was caused by inborn characteristics or environmental influences, and it started the closest thing to a World War in the sciences, beginning in Psychology and Anthropology and eventually sucking in Biology and Genetics, too. Philosophy was involved, and at the end, even Political Science took its shot. And, in rigid similarity with the Cold War, everyone who witnessed it started writing about its history and implications before the ink dried on the peace treaty.




In the Nature-Nurture war, the peace treaty exists in a scientific atmosphere that still bubbles with academic reputations staked on one side or the other, and while most scientists conceded the inevitable--nature and nurture interact, and both have a place in understanding human behavior--old feuds still resurface and Nazi comparisons still abound. In this book, written around 1996, Wright attempts to chronicle the Nature-Nurture War with the perceived advantage of having "no published positions to defend, no scholarly reputation to protect, no academic toes to fear trampling." That said, it's clear from the get-go that Wright is far from unbiased. Academia's manaical devotion to "behaviorism," which attributed all human behavior to environmental conditions, drove Wright away from Psychology as an undergrad at Yale in the fifites. Human motivations may be many, but I had the feeling Wright's motivation in writing this book was only one: REVENGE. Unfortunately for a book rightfully trying to defend genetic causes behind behavior, that "there-will-be-blood" attitude compromises its credibility.

In eighteen medium-length chapters, Wright interviews prominent behavioral geneticists, scientists searching for the genetic basis to behavior in both humans and other animals. The major study he cites is a now-famous study at the Univeristy of Minnesota by Tom Bouchard of identical and fraternal twins "reared-apart," meaning adopted into different homes shortly after birth and not reunited until many years into adulthood. Since identical twins are nature's original clones, their genes are carbon copies, and this, combined with their different rearing environments, makes "teasing apart" environmental and genetic causes of personality and behavior a little easier. Unsurprisingly, the study found strong correlations in the reared-apart identicals as opposed to the fraternals, especially in the loaded area of IQ and and in extraversion/introversion. Despite different families and environments, most identical twins shared baseline character traits; if your identical twin, who you just met, is chatty, there's a good chance you are, too, for example. Observations of the twin sets involved also revealed Twilight Zone-ish eccentricities between the identicals who were meeting for the first time, including two identicals coming to their first meeting both wearing seven rings on seven fingers.

This study, along with many other twin studies and animal studies, prove beyond a reasonable doubt that there is some genetic components in behavior, something that, as Wright points out, breeders have known since the beginning of animal domestication when they bred cows for their docility and dogs to fetch hunted ducks (or squeaky toys). And, like it or not, Richard Dawkins and his atheistic gang are right when they say that humans are, at the base of it, just a peculiar sort of animal that happened to produce Confucius and Nietzsche.

The discovery of these innate chemical balances (or inbalances) contributing to everything from criminal tendencies to altruism crashed a decades-long party for socialists, progressive "activists," and other social reformers whose ideologies focused on what Wright calls "tabula rasa," or the idea of a the human as a blank slate. Wright quotes behaviorist John Watson's statement that, given any newborn, he could make him or her into whatever he wanted: good or evil, doctor or mechanic, murderer or do-gooder. Various genetic heritability studies proved this simplistic assumption entirely unfounded. The terms "activists" and "reformers" however, don't imply people who take challenges lying down, and the various "tabula rasa"-oriented groups didn't. Many, as Wright documents with rabid fury, still don't. He interviews one of them, Leon Kamin, who has publicly said IQ may have "zero heritability," disregarding mountains of evidence to the contrary.

In fact, throughout the years, the "radical environmentalists," a term social scientists use to refer to people who still believe genes play zero part in behavior, have used highly dubious and entirely irresponsible tactics against anyone who dared suggest a genetic basis for a trait. Sadly, Dodd's Corollary to Godwin's Law, stating that anyone who invokes Hitler or the Nazis in a debate has conceded the argument, isn't a law of nature, and some of the comparisons of behavioral geneticists with fascists stood without contest from level-headed observers. Fair questions were attacked rather than answered. For instance, why do only SOME inner-city blacks, in fact a very SMALL number, commit violent crimes despite their shared environment of racism and poverty? And, on the other hand, why do middle-class white kids like Ted Bundy, whose family ate dinner together each night in the petty-borgeois paradise of the suburbs, go on killing sprees? Wright is careful to point out that social factors are a huge part of behavior, just not the ONLY part, and this simple perspective was, for years, one of the most academically dangerous ones to hold in the United States.

Part of the modern stigma of this view stems from a notorious 1969 assertion by psychologist Arthur Jensen that the lower IQ scores consistently reported in black children relative to white children were due not to social factors but to genetic differences between blacks and whites. Although almost no behavioral geneticist agreed with him, the "Jensen furor," as Wright calls it, was the public face of behavioral genetics in the media for years after, and still is to an extent today, mining the territory of the field with accusations of racism and discriminatory social policy. The field is also laden with associations with the "eugenics" disaster of the early twentieth century, when otherwise-intelligent people started advocating sterilization for the mentally retarded and the criminally insane, among others.

Of course, modern behavioral geneticists don't support eugenics, and both the environmentally-oriented crowd and the genetically-oriented crowd (they're just "oriented" now--the war is over, but squabbles continue) include both political liberals and conservatives in their ranks, most united in believing that "knowledge is neutral," and that the public policy that may derive from that knowledge should not hinder the research into it. In other words, they all support academic freedom, in direct contest with campus radicals who believe they alone should decide what's researched. Wright describes instances of attempts at academic intimidation involving behavioral geneticist Dean Hamer, and, even more poignantly, describes witnessing protestors break into a behavioral genetics conference to shout down the speakers with blind exaltations of "genetics conference you can't hide, you're promoting genocide!" It's later revealed that sympathetic members among the conference-goers, the ones invited to provide their opposing views to the discourse, opened the doors for the protestors. This sort of perversion of civil disobedience, justified on so many campuses for the opposition of almost any cause deemed "dangerous," is among the most discouraging trends in American scholarship and debate today, and Wright's descriptions of it make a point far beyond the limited aspects of the behavioral genetics controversy.

Even with all this justifiable frustration, Wright goes a little far in his demonization of the opposition to genetic influences, sometimes treating them with the same snobbery he claims to abhor. The text sometimes reads like a Pat Robertson polemic, referring to behavioral geneticists as "the faithful" and describing the "conversions" of former environmentalists. Wright describes one author of a book about evolution as "a civilian Joan of Arc leading a handful of seasoned generals...[shattering] the fortress of behaviorism...."

Even worse are his characterizations of research by behavioral geneticists as "heroic," and descriptions of certain people as "carrying the torch" of the field through the days of environmentalism. At its worst, it was reminiscent of late-eighties Soviet propaganda, around the time Brezhnev caught his "cold," with all the empty references to "glorious heroes" of the "revolution." The rhetoric was distracting and unncessary. And for all the condemnation Wright lays on "the critics" about their "ad hominum" attacks, he takes a few swings that this method himself when he repeatedly chastizes respectable dissenters as practicing "dishonesty." He even goes so far as to call them "genophobes," invoking the specter of the label "homophobe" stuck to every unfortunate person guilty of suggesting gay marriage may have downsides. At the risk of sounding like an overplayed single off the Bush Derangement Syndrome soundtrack, the book was very us-versus-them. Read with skepticism.

One final aside before I come to the strangest chapter of the book. I'll just come out and say this: The writing was terrible. Wright frequently and confusingly changes topics right in the middle of a paragraph, and some of the arguments are so mired in grammatical convolution that they're harder to "tease out" than the very influences Wright is describing. Also, the tone of the text starts to fall into a low drone of blandly presented facts (when it's not exploding with near-religious passion). As an editor, I was constantly rewriting awkward sentences, and some I had to mentally restructure just to understand. In a world full of bad writing, it was a minor annoyance, but be prepared for it.




Finally, in the last chapter, called "Conclusions," Wright indulges in a science-writing tradition and plays around with some of the concepts he's covered, conjecturing about their possible meanings and uses. He correctly points out that public policy application of research is a "value question," not a scientific one, and should not inform scholarship. Instead, scientists should do the research first and then discuss and debate conclusions. With this disclaimer, I was willing to forgive the creepy suggestion that the government should intervene psychopharmaceutically with people at genetically "high risk" for crime. After all, this was only Wright's opinion, and he admitted it was up for debate. I could not forgive his extended metaphor about the link between genes and specific behaviors involving the abortion debate. He posits that "the pro-choicers' reasons--maternal rights, children's welfare, benefits to society--could be colliding with a gene in a portion of the population that says simply, 'killing fetuses is wrong.'" He then says that "if the antiabortionists...could see their stands as grounded in their biochemical makeup, rather than as moral convictions swathed in religious majesty, they might be more amenable to persuasion and compromise." This goes further than the obvious counterargument that the PRO-abortionists' stance may be gene-related, also. For someone who had an entire chapter entitled "Oh So Political Science," in which he argued that--you guessed it--science shouldn't be political, Wright engages in blatant hypocrisy here, certainly no better than behavioral genetics critic Richard Lewontin who says that "'Science is not and cannot be above "mere" politics.'" Wright exposes himself to the same political biases he accuses the critics of harboring. As it turns out, nobody's free of those very human motivations that inform so many of our decisions, including the writer a book about those very human motivations.




As a whole, the book was a good read, but the witch hunt mentality came very close to spoiling it. The shoddy writing didn't help, either. If you're a behavioral geneticist fresh off an attack from campus radicals or a radical environmentalist seeking a confrontation, you've found your holy grail. If, like me, you're looking for an unbiased account of the history and future of the Nature-Nurture War, you may have to search elsewhere.




VERY CAUTIOUSLY RECOMMENDED

MY FRESHMAN YEAR: WHAT A PROFESSOR LEARNED BY BECOMING A STUDENT by Rebekah Nathan

I think it was the night that my roommate came home drunk and broke my fishbowl at three in the morning that I first seriously considered the sort of questions Rebekah asks in this book. I'll spare you the full story, but needless to say, it was a LONG night, one that required escorting my (angry) drunk roommate to the bathroom, cleaning up a fishbowl and pulling a fish from the jaws of death on my shag carpet, lining possible puke cans with plastic bags, and listening to a lot of incoherent ramblings, none of which she would remember in the morning, and all of which I would. Although not one to need a religious eight hours of sleep, I was exhausted after this all-nighter and, just as a side note, in great pain due to my own medical condition. Despite having done a fair amount of homework the night before, I had a full load of readings, tests, and group projects to manage for the next day, an agenda through which I would have to labor, like it or not.




As I tried to decide which side of my double vision was least blurry as I attempted to read my Philosophy assignment, I wondered what my professors were doing at that moment. There was an outside possiblity that they'd had an even worse night involving a drunk spouse, but most likely they were at home, preparing for their lectures and stimulating "discussions" (all college students know that "college discussion" is an oxymoron) that would go on in class the next day. In other words, I would walk in, having done the reading, give them the right answers, take notes studiously, and walk out, and my professors would have no clue about the drunkscapade that I was privy to only a few hours earlier. NO CLUE.






This generational and occupational gap is what motivated anthropology professor Cathy Small, AKA Rebekah Nathan, to do what, to her colleagues, was openly unthinkable: Go undercover as a student at her own university, albeit as an older "returning" student. She went through the ritual "summer of the envelopes," a tradition almost as static as freshman year itself, when each lucky student wheelbarrows in registration mail that demands decisions. She had to chose a meal plan and dorm living options (yup, she even lived in the dorms). She also had to attend what is almost definitely the most hellish part of the entire college experience: "Previews" and "Welcome Week" activities for incoming freshmen. If you've blocked it out of your mind, allow me to rekindle the reclaimed neurons: Bean bag games with complete (eighteen-year old) strangers, "name games" where everyone goes around the circle and says something about themselves ("uh, hi, I'm Jenny from Michigan, my major is elementary ed, and I like strawberry ice cream" x twenty), and "ice breaker" activites, which Cathy admits was the dominant type of activity through her entire first two weeks of classes. Cathy, clearly an extravert, seemed to borderline enjoy this medieval gamut, though, which slightly disappointed me.





Cathy presents her experiences in seven chapters, which are admittedly vague in particular details for the sake of privacy and ethics. In the dorms, however, she does immediately notice something old people always notice about young people today: We have a DAMN lot of STUFF. While Cathy has only some modest necessities with a few luxuries, she notices that her newfound peers have "joysticks, couches, mountain bikes, ski and sports equipment, guitars and keyboards, large and elaborate sound systems, multiple-layered electronics shelves holding TVs, VCRs, DVD players, refrigerators, tables, cabinets, floor and pole lamps, overstuffed throw pillows, as well as coffeemakers, slow cookers, and illegal sandwich grills." The Affluent Society indeed.






But it's more than that, Cathy notes, and she then proceeds to make an observation about her 1940s-built residence hall that I noticed during my own first month of freshman year: Almost none of it is used. Her hall has a spacious lobby with a TV and lots of chairs clustered around, an activity room and communal kitchen, and lounges on each floor with a TV, VCR, and tables where people can eat and socialize together. All of these loftily-designed community "togetherness" spaces are ghost towns most of the time. The place is a black hole of wasted space. During Super Bowl weekend, Cathy ventures into the lobby, where, advertisements plastered on every bulletin board squawk, there will be a get-together to watch the game on the communal TV. Seven people show up. As Cathy walks back to her room, she can hear the same game blaring from every room in the hall. Everyone is watching the game together, all right, but in their own rooms, with their own TVs, and with popcorn popped in their own microwaves. Cathy withholds judgment, but the implication is clear: The Affluent Society has lead to The Alientated Society.





This leads Cathy to an anthropologist's watering hole: the subjects of "community" and "diversity." Before personal computers and televisions were the common fare of every college student, "community" had at least a dab of self-interest. If you wanted to watch the Super Bowl, or type up a sociology report, or grill up your own sandwich, you were pretty much forced to use community facilities (I'll avoid the word "communal" here for its association with things like the Cultural Revolution), and as long as you have to be around other people, you might as well get to know them. Now, of course, five families in Nigeria could live off all the food students keep in their rooms, and dorms come with internet jacks in every corner. This certainly discourages community-by-self-interest and, for better and for worse, there's not much more than self-interest to create community on a college campus in the United States. "Community" may be a popular buzzword for administrators but, as Cathy notes, "requiring common experiences is vastly unpopular." And, as with other things, anything not required is quickly swept under the rug, mostly out of necessity but also out of a sense of "individuality" inherent in American culture, a sense of "don't tell me what to do." International students Cathy interviews observe this trend as well.





"Choice" runs heavily in American culture, and while students may have fifty choices when they go to an electronics store to buy their new combination TV-DVD, they have fifty THOUSAND choices when it comes to structuring their own schedules. With all the variables involved--course, time, and major--with scheduling classes alone, there's a minimal chance that students at a state university (where Cathy teaches) will ever even run into each other, never mind form "community" bonds. And that's not even including off-campus jobs (which an increasing number of students have) and clubs and activities. As Cathy shows using some activity journals collected secretly (so as not to blow her cover) from four students in her hall, almost all their schedules are packed. But that's not all. She discovers that these students, like many she talks to, have solved the problem of the missing "campus community" by constructing their own tiny "communities" of a few close friends that they interact with almost exclusively. And--SURPRISE!--these networks tend to consist of people within their own ethnic, religious, and gender groups. Whites with whites, minorities with minorities, Christians with Christians, Muslims with Muslims--these are all strong association groups.





I'm sure Cathy's right--this DOES affect "diversity" on campus--but in this part she's probably the most judgmental, and her political colors start to show (guess what side of the aisle she's on?). As Cathy (reluctantly) whines about Generation Y's "blindness about racism" and "sexism," she reveals herself as a bitter Baby Boomer still aching to fight the battles of the Sixites. Take it all with a grain of salt.







Somewhere between setting up a dorm room, going to ice cream socials, rushing a sorority, working at a bar, and reconfiguring a laptop, students eventually have to swat at a pesky little bug called CLASSES. As a professor, you could tell that the biggest revelation to Cathy was just how little academics figure into what students affectionately call "the college experience." One of Cathy's volunteer projects in her dorm is to maintain little signs posted in the stall doors of the womens' bathroom, where quirky, sometimes funny anonymous questions are posed and anonymous answers given. When Cathy posits some all-in-fun questions of her own on these sheets, she finds that "very few students ranked class activites as constituting more than 50 percent of what they learned in college," a statistic with which most college students would readily agree. So why go to college? Some responses: "Who wants to be in the real world anyway?"; "College is too fun. Granted classes get in the way a bit but it's all worth the experience! I'm having a blast."





Academics do figure in somewhat, though. Although Cathy mentions that Generation Y students are very career-oriented and occasionally manipulative to achieve their own ends (an observation she isn't the first to make), she also notes that there are certain "classroom conventions" that students follow, a general attitude that she quotes fellow researcher Michael Moffatt as calling "Undergraduate Cynical." And it's true. VERY, very true. Doing well is fine, even admirable, Cathy notes, as it will get you the "good job" that the modern college student desperately, desperately wants (their parents probably won't keep buying them cell phones and TVs once they're off the "dependent" list on the tax forms), but you'd BETTER do it quietly. And for each "A" you get, you owe your fellow students some under-the-table insults about the professor, the class, or the university system in general. "Sure, I got an 'A,' but only because I practically sucked his dick during his office hours" or "Man, that class is so fucking easy, I practically slept through it and still got an 'A.'" It's not the best students, Cathy notes, but the most engaged discussion leaders who are the outcasts.





When the dust settles from this experience, Cathy admirably decides to restructure her own Intro to Anthropology class around some of the things she observed. Generation Y doesn't do "time management," they do "college managment," and that includes skimming of whatever work isn't absolutely necessary in order to accomodate packed schedules. Cathy decides to severely restrict her required reading to only what she really wants her students to know, and to design required, graded activites around them. She also realizes that scheduling is a matter of skill and luck, and if the scheduling gods aren't smiling on you this semester, you'll probably end up having five minutes to walk from one end of the campus to the other. With this in mind, Cathy gives her students some leeway about tardiness.





All in all, Cathy stresses that the number one lesson she learned from her experience was "compassion" for her students and all the hurdles they have to jump--social, economic, and academic--to achieve their dreams of a good education and a great job. Her willingness to study this world with the eye of an anthropologist is admirable. Maybe if students stood in their professors' shoes (especially during those silent "discussions"), they may have a little more compassion for them. That's an experiment I'd like to see.





HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

THE LEARNERS by Chipp Kidd

Some people take up art as a hobby, but what's your hobby when you're an artist? If you're Chip Kidd, famed book cover designer, the answer is WRITING. And unlike most hobbies, writing has the potential to be at least somewhat profitable, especially if you're already in with all the publishers. Chip's first book, The Cheese Monkeys, was a quick read, and you could tell (for better and for worse) that it was a fun little side project for him, a sort of halfway-edited NaNoWriMo novel, with some of the rough edges being cute and some being...well, rough.

For the sequel, though, it looks like Chip's getting better with practice. The story, set in the early sixties, follows Happy out of Penn State and into the workforce at a small ad agency in New Haven (AKA Yalesville). I'm still slightly miffed that Chip REFUSES to reveal Happy's real name (it's explicitly a nickname), but I'm (pretty) sure that annoyance was Chip's intention, so I'll chalk it up to artistic license. Those who read the first book will probably be disappointed that Chip didn't bring Happy's teacher, Winter Sorbeck, back into the narrative (maybe he's saving it for Number Three???), and that Himillsey Dodd, Happy's friend from school, kills herself off so quickly. But the message is clear: This is about Happy.

Chip's characters were MUCH more believable this time around, and more complex (and therefore exciting). Chip's little asides on graphic design were interesting, too (merging a little work with the hobby?). But my favorite part of the book was Chip's inclusion of the Stanley Milgram experiment, in all its historical detail. Happy, the fictional character, designs the ad that Milgram runs for the experiment at Yale, and eventually participates, discovering himself capable of unimagined cruelty. If you've never heard of it, crawl out from under your rock and look it up.

This was meant to be short and sweet--I don't want to give too much away. I will say that I will definitely be picking up Number Three, if it's ever out there. I will also say something about Chip that I mean, sincerely, as a very high compliment: He writes without pretense. That's the thing with hobbies. He's not trying to prove anything to anyone. His writing is short, quick, punctuated, uncluttered, to-the-point. You could probably grate some symbolism out of it if you wanted to, but I'm sure he only meant a little of it. In a world where "novels" are bloated and high-strung, stocked with long, "artsy" sentences that you're supposed to pretend to enjoy, Chip doesn't really care. He's a REAL artist, and gets well-paid and -respected for it. He doesn't need to use his writing to showcase his intelligence--it's right on the cover of the last book cover he designed. This was brought home on the cover of his last book, when, presenting the cover reviews, he had SOME PEOPLE LIKED IT followed by the good reviews and SOME PEOPLE DIDN'T followed by bad reviews.

Real men may wear pink shirts, but real artists don't care about bad reviews, and Chip is one of them. "You don't like my hobby?" he says. "Get your own. Better yet, get a job. Something USEFUL." Maybe, as an essay I read recently hoped, the American disdain for snobbery in literature will make a comeback, and maybe Chip will lead the way. This one, at least, will be a good review.

RECOMMENDED

2150 A.D. by Thea Alexander

If only.

If only all humans WERE part of a giant, quasi-Buddist, semi-Christian all-knowing Macrocosm. If only all human souls had multiple lives to "evolve" back to that Paradise of Oneness. If only karma WERE real, and all actions in this world DID balance out in the end. If only you COULD achieve everything in your life with only sufficient desire and belief. If only people COULD achieve "Macro powers" like clairvoyance, telepathy, and psychokinesis. And, most of all, if only the seventies HAD seen the dawn of a new civilization, one bent on love, wisdom, and leadership that would eventually evolve into a semi-collectivist paradise in 2150, fixing all the planet's problems, providing optimal education for all, and helping souls advance in Macrocosmic awareness.

Or maybe not.

It's not challenging, especially for a rabid individualist and realist like me, to find flaws in this utopian novel, which follows a man named Jon Lake who wakes up in 2150 to an Eden of "Macrocosmic" awareness combined with semi-socialist living conditions, mixed in with a mystical addition of his "twin soul" and Macrocosmic "powers" like telepathy. It takes the traditional utopian formula (a modern person finds him/herself in the future and a sympathetic "guide" explains how the future has solved all social problems) and adds in a strangely alluring element of fantasy, philosophy, and life coaching.

If the word "fantasy" just scared you, keep reading: I, the ultimate anti-fantasy guru (the bookworm I am, I refuse to read Harry Potter) could handle it, and even enjoyed it. It never crossed the line. It bordered: scantily clad women, some overt sexuality, and a character named "Elgon," but I assure all fantasy-phobes that it's safe to cross. Overall, it read more like something drug addicts would have to read as part of their "rehabilitation," what with all the "don't-blame-others," "take-control-of-your-life," "you-are-greater-than-yourself" memes present throughout.

As with most of these sorts of books, the plot takes a backseat to the philosophy, and the writing could be better. The concepts though, are worth consideration, even if, like me, you don't really believe any of it at the end of the day. Thea manages to anger Communists, Capitalists, Buddhists, Christians, Muslims, business leaders, civil rights workers, sociologists, and individualists, though not necessarily at the same places. She presents the idea of a futuristic "Macro" society that, like most utopias, is based heavily on collectivistic principles. The difference is that this was written in the seventies, not the sixties, so think less social justice and more New Age desperate optimism and mysticism. In fact, people fighting for "social justice" will probably be most angered: One of the most controversial parts of Thea's plot/philosophy (it's sometimes hard to tell where one ends and the other begins) is that all souls chose their own lives and sufferings. That poor black woman in the ghetto in D.C., subsisting on rice and Spam whose son was killed in the crossfire of gang violence? It's not injustice; there is no injustice from a Macro perspective. Her soul simply chose to incarnate in that body during that time, knowing all the horrible details but deciding that it would be a "learning experience" for her, so her next life could be better, moving her forward toward Macrocosmic Oneness, or "everything was was, is, and ever will be." In fact, getting angry at the government agencies, businesses, and elite that exploit only proves how "micro" you truly are, as being "Macro" means that you accept everything that is with love, as everything is chosen by individuals before incarnation and is perfect for them.

On the off chance all of this reminds you of Todd Gitlin's assertion that the sixties student movement fell apart because of just this sort of mysticism, you're right, and he may be, too. The publication date is 1976, when former disillusioned political radicals were seeking some sort of desperate escape, and, trust me, this is desperate. But in an age when Sixties ideas of rebellion, quasi-social justice advocacy, and "blame-big-business" have become institutionalized, Thea's ideas, once considered "conformist," are now paradoxically radical. Anger, Thea's characters assert, is the product of refusing to accept that everything in one's own life is one's own fault; after all, you chose your own life before you reincarnated from the last one. Blaming poverty on the poor isn't exactly in vogue today, but anyone who considers him or herself open-minded shouldn't be opposed to at least giving her mystical ideas a spin, just for fun.

Overall, Jon Lake was a likeable character, if not entirely believable. Thea manipulates the idea of reincarnation to twist the plot around a little. Especially interesting is hearing about Jon's past lives, and one of the best scenes in the book involves Jon making telepathic contact with a heart attack patient's subconscious mind in the twentieth century (when he falls asleep in 2150, he wakes up back in 1976, and vice versa). He now has the power to heal using psychokinesis, but he must first contact the person's subconscious mind to do this. To his surprise, the unconscious heart attack patient's subconscious mind recognizes JON'S mind from their shared existence in a previous life on Atlantis 50,000 years ago, when Jon had healed him. Now, however, the man's mind doesn't want to be healed--this time, the mind tells him, he's ready to "evolate" (a contraction of "evolve" and "graduate," basically meaning die), having learned everything he needed to in this life. Back in 2150, Jon recognizes that the patient's soul has reincarnated into the body of a young girl in that futuristic time.

In the end, you have to be ready to think to read this. The philosophy is, if you're open to it, somewhat applicable to your life today (e.g. you can accomplish anything with only sufficient desire and belief). Jon's foray onto "micro island" in the future provides a revealing comparison to our own world in 2008, unfortunately nowhere near Macrocosmic enlightenment. The plot delivers one final twist in the end that had a delicate beauty about it. I read over thirty books a year, so only the ones a little off the beaten track stick with me, and this will be one of them.

If you're looking for something other than cookie-cutter, Barnes and Noble "fiction" that's pumped out of novel mills every year, THIS IS IT. Enjoy.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

TRAFFIC: WHY WE DRIVE THE WAY WE DO (AND WHAT IT SAYS ABOUT US) by Tom Vanderbilt

"You're a bad driver." In America, a nation built on Automobile Culture, it's hard to find a accusation that provokes more heated defenses that that one. The subtitle of this book is "Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us)," and, by the time Tom's through with you, he's hoping to convince you that it says a WHOLE lot about you--something I think many people suspect, which is why the issue can get thorny. "A messy desk means a messy mind" they used to say, prompting a new question: Does being a bad driver make you a bad person?

If the answer is yes, we apparently have a problem, because Tom throws a library's worth of data and anecdotes on you in a seeming attempt to prove that most Americans are, in fact, terrible drivers. We talk on our cell phones, read our papers, work on our laptops, drink our coffee, and fiddle with our MP3 players while navigating toll plazas. After a mere 30 seconds of waiting to make a left through traffic (after Tom's many subtle polemics about the problems of left turns, I started to wonder whether he was advocating an all-right-turn America), we get antsy and start to think about cutting in front of that tractor trailor coming at us at 70 mph.

That is, if we perceive it--it turns out we're terrible at judging distance and speed. Humans can only run, at most, 20 mph, so doing 60 mph in a careening deathmobile called a car isn't exactly recommended in our evolutionary instruction manual. We also tend to hit a lot of bicyclists. And little children. And "stationary objects." Believe it or not, "single-car" crashes (read: driver sees UFO while driving down I-80 and swerves off the road, striking a speed limit sign) are the most common type of accident. In other words, not only do we crash a lot, but we also have dorky crashes--forget Lethal Weapon. And, by the way, "studies" tend to show that people do "live as they drive," which promotes the policy of insurance companies looking at credit scores when determining rates, on the basis that people who are riskier with credit will be riskier drivers. More on why you should probably be suspicious of these "studies" translating into policy later.

The information is packed tightly together: Tom brings in evolutionary biology, the dynamics of insect traffic management (ants are the undisputed kings), and neo-Freudian psychology to explain how and why we humans behave the way we do in traffic. Why do more roads create more traffic? Are divorcees more likely to have accidents? And, of coure, how in God's name does the city of Los Angeles manage its famously suicidal traffic situation? If you're a researcher, the notes are a real treasure trove of information; basically, the research has already been done for you, so find a new job. Tom interviews New York City traffic commissioners, Los Angeles ATSAC managers, and European traffic engineers, coming up with a wide range of opinions and statistics in nine medium-sized chapters. Much of it is fascinating: He introduces Hans Monderman, a European traffic engineer who advocates turning "village" roads into more pedestrian-friendly places (a nod to the "New Urbanism" movement).

Tom also presents a fairly convincing case for congestion pricing in America, although I still disagreed. He points out that "hotels charge more for in-season rooms, railways and airlines charge more for peak travel periods, and telephone companies charge more during the times when more people are likely to call--why should roads not cost more when more people want to use them?" As a capitalist, I was tempted to support this argument, except for one problem: Hotel rooms, airlines, and even long-distance telephone calling are luxuries; roads, at least in America, no longer are. Our infrastructure is built around them, and besides being wildly inefficient as anything controlled by the government would be, congestion pricing could also derail productivity. Still, the fact that he made me consider it is a considerable compliment to him.

Far into the grimy alleyways of this book, around page 253, Tom throws in a sentence that should be front and center, in the prologue: "statistics are one of the most dangerous things about traffic." The sentiment is taken out of context here--it's mentioned in relation to a discussion on rear-end crashes--but a book that relies as much on statistics as this should probably acknowledge it more openly. Unless your cynicism glands are malfunctioning, you'll probably start to tire of every sentence beginning with "studies have shown..." or "researchers in Sweden have found..." or "psychologists have discovered...". Maybe the studies are valid--after all, it did make intuitive sense that traffic fatalities tend to decrease as GDP per capita increases, and that roundabouts are actually safer than conventional intersections (because people are less certain of what to do, they tend to drive more cautiously). But after "studies" have "shown" that power lines cause cancer, BPA is the doomsday chemical for all human infants, and all white people are "racist," I was highly skeptical of these results on a scientific level. Although Tom provides an extradordinarily detailed bibliography explaining exactly where he got his information (papers with names like "The Perception and Cognition of Environmental Distance: Direct Sources of Information"), I started to suspect that he only questioned the "studies" that conflicted with his own personal opinions, which, to be fair, he valiently tried to keep out of the narrative. "Studies" bashing SUVs were prevalent, as were "psychological theories" about everything from BAC levels (they're not set low enough) to how drivers perceive bicyclists. I would caution the reader to be skeptical: Were these "studies" conducted fairly and without bias? Did they include stringent operational definitions of all involved concepts? Were they double-blind? Of course, it's impossible to wade through the astonishing amount of information Tom provides, both in the text and in the notes, so a general aura of suspicion should rule the day.

A couple of other problems: For math-a-phobics, the narrative sometimes tends to read like a physics book. He describes scenarios in specific velocity-speed terms that occasionally become a little heavy if you're expecting a quick read. If you're willing to follow it, the results can be worthwhile. Also, Tom goes a little easy on pedestrians, sometimes making them out to be helpless victims in a massive conspiracy of car drivers to flatten them in the nation's intersections. While, statistically, it may seem like drivers are trying to do just that, the fact remains that some pedestrians (e.g. the ones who walk against traffic signals, and the ones who do their makeup as they jaywalk across city streets) make their own beds. Cars have rights, too, Tom!

Still, don't let these things bother you too much: Just keep an open mind and you'll learn things you never suspected about all the hundreds of "sub-skills" you activate when making your (on average) 1.1 hours of commute per day. Tom's tone is conversational, and he tries to be nice when he suggests that you get a little more "feedback" on your driving before deciding you're a pro at it. And the environmental impact of cars? I couldn't have agreed more with Tom's sentiment in the epilogue: "It will be easier to remove the internal-combustion engine from the car than it will to remove the driver."

The real question is, of course, left open in the end: What will the future of transportation look like? The next few years should be interesting. For now, though, climb in the driver's seat at your own risk: It's a scary road out there.

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ATOMIC KITCHEN: GADGETS AND INVENTIONS FOR YESTERDAY'S COOK by Brian S. Alexander

"In one sense, the term 'atomic kitchen' is a fun way of describing a streamlined, labor-saving, 1950s super kitchen, offering the ultimate in Space Age modern convenience, ease, and beauty," Alexander says. "But it's also a term appropriate for its time--one that illustrates the optimism that housewives held for the future." Indeed, paging through this book, with three very short chapters and a huge bulk of 1950s gizmo ads and appliances, some of that post-War optimism rubs off. Brian dug through the bowels of the 1950s advertising world and unearthed hundreds of those suburban paradises that defined a generation: lipsticked, smiling women with pointy red nails beaming almost orgasmically in front of their new "Kelvinator 'Automatic Cook' Electric Range" or their Servel Ice Cube maker.

Alexander generally steps out of the way of the old ads, contributing only a few pages of text to what's largely a picture book with captions. In the Fifties, he says correctly, the Atomic Kitchen wasn't a laughable metaphor at all; Scientific American was giddy about the future of atomic-powered devices, and these gadgets making it into kitchens seemed "just around the corner." From the "Can-O-Mat" to "Decorator Refrigerator" (possibly one of the first LSD-inspired ideas, consisting of matching, say, your plaid curtains with a plaid refrigerator), the future looked both high-tech and high-fashion.

Because the decade's advertisements are probably its most iconic feature, often imitated for satirical purposes, it's impossible not to shake your head and laugh when you read an ad pushing an "all-steel" kitchen that "brightens her eyes...because it's beautiful" and "lightens her heart...because it lightens her housework." Or an ad for a refrigerator that "practically hands you the food." Clearly, some things caught on (electric mixers, individual ice cube makers) and some things didn't (eye-level, cabinet-style refrigerators, spaghetti forks), and some things probably should have (a nifty "sandwich pie" maker that toasted the contents of a sandwich over the stove). Anyone who spent time in the kitchen in the Fifties is bound to find something (maybe with some embarrassment) that graced their cupboards proudly back then.

The most interesting part of the book, though, was Alexander's examples of variations on "Kitchen of Tomorrow" displays that were popular at the time. The "House of Tomorrow" featured at the 1933 Chicago Century of Progess Exposition inspired a strange kind of sadness, a sort of failure to live up to expectations: it was 12-faced and still looks futuristic, with a personal airplane hangar where the garage still, unfortunately, is today. General Electric's "Kitchen of Tomorrow" foresaw TVs and air purifyers creeping into the kitchen, but also predicted automatic floor cleaners and a control station that would monitor temperature levels and food stock, for instance, features that have yet to come true or whose functions are outdated. These sorts of features make this book a great coffee-table book, something to pick up and page through every once in a while for kicks and giggles or party entertainment.

That said, Alexander never quite addresses the key question: What became of the Atomic Kitchen? He acknowledges that fashions changed: fruity decorations and shiny "magic" gadgets gave way to smooth lines and earth-tone colors. But that's not it at all. Although these ads are hilarious and even pathetic to observe today, they were truly inspirational to department store owners and consumers alike in their heyday; basically, these things were SERIOUS in the Fifties--these pieces of colorful, exaggerated marketing paraphenalia made General Electric's, Servel's, Tupperware's, and many other companies' fortunes. They moved merchandise. Because once, in the euphoria of post-War economic prosperity and optimism, when people looked at the shiny, perfect kitchen and the flawless, pacified women, they held a tremendous quantity of hope: "Someday, somehow, that woman could be ME!"

What changed wasn't only the designs; what changed was people's attitudes. In the Sixties, when the bitter Baby Boomers hijacked public opinion, the optimism soured, and suddenly, these sorts of ads inspired quite a different sentiment: "This is a LIE"; "These women aren't real"; "This isn't how people live"; and, later, "All these women are WHITE." The Great American Pessimism was born, and every generation since had varying degrees of it rubbed off on them. The Atomic Kitchen was burned down by the fires of the 1968 DNC, firehosed with the civil rights protestors in the South, detonated with the bombs of Vietnam. Technological advancement continued, of course, at a rapidfire pace, but the milieu changed, and advertising changed with it.

Still, even with all these changes, the American yearning for a touch of magic to accompany technology lives on. Jackson Lears, a commentator on the American Experience, has said that "the recurring motif in the cultural history of American advertising could be characterized as the attempt to conjure up the magic of self transformation through purchase while at the same time containing the subversive implications of a successful trick." Basically, Americans want some soul with their progress. They don't only want a dishwasher that will wash the most dishes in the fastest amount of time; they want a dishwasher that will do all that AND make them feel like good people. Rob Walker, in the last book, Buying In, talks about selling an idea along with a product, and although the media has changed, some of that "self transformation" implied in the Fifties "Kelvinator Kitchen" ads survives in marketing in the millenium.

And who knows? Maybe the optimism, at long last, was warranted. Maybe Atomic Kitchen itself will become the object of parody in the future as atomic-enabled citizens page through this turn-of-the-twenty-first-century book, marvelling at the lack of foresight during our own "modern" era.

Some things never change

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