Tag: featured

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Our Martian anthropologist

There are very few famous people whose deaths affect me, and fewer still whose deaths I worry about before they happen. But I have thought, from time to time, that Oliver Sacks must be getting on in years, and I have felt a pang at the thought that someday there will be no new Oliver Sacks essays to enliven and enlighten me.

Well, that time is coming.

I was young when I first read Oliver Sacks, still in college or maybe even high school. I must have picked up The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat off of the bookshelf in my grandmother’s office, where she kept all her psychology and spirituality textbooks (I also had my first browse through Kinsey in there).

Sacks’s  insights into the mind and the self had a strong effect on me. My own father had taught me, based on his psychedelic experiences in the 1960s, that reality is a contingent thing: if a few micrograms of the right chemical can alter it utterly, how certain are we about the reality we’re seeing now? Sacks, in his writing, took that insight and gave it depth and context through his clinical tales of people who encountered the world abnormally. He did more than simply catalogue the strange, though. As a doctor, he made it his task to help people live the richest, fullest lives they could, even when they were hampered by severe and strange impairments.

My father’s mother’s father was in the ward that Sacks wrote about in Awakenings, the book that became a Robin Williams movie, though he had passed away by the time Sacks arrived. My great-grandfather had been a society doctor when the influenza epidemic of 1918 struck. He worked himself to exhaustion and succumbed to the secondary epidemic of encephalitis lethargica — sleepy sickness — and was never the same afterwards. His decline changed my family’s fortunes and led to lifelong jealousies among his daughters.

In India, where I traveled on my own after graduating from college, I picked up Oliver Sack’s first book, Migraine, It’s not really a fun read: Sacks was not yet writing for a wide audience, and the style is clinical and technical. I picked it up in the bookshop of the Taj Mahal Intercontinental Hotel, and I read it during those first days of terrified overwhelm, coming to believe that I was experiencing migraines, or at least the migraine-like symptoms of nausea and headaches and semi-hallucinatory states. The claustrophobic quality of that book, and the sheer idiocy of choosing to read it then, remain with me as a core part of that initial experience abroad.

My grandfather, in his very last years, began running music workshops in his nursing home, bringing together his years of acting experience and his understanding of how music could reach even those who suffer from severe dementia — which included his wife, my grandmother. In this, he was informed by Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain more than any other text.

Sacks’s sense of curiosity and compassion remain a compass for me. His approach to healing has become my ideal. And whenever I see that the latest New Yorker or New York Review of Books has a Sacks piece, my mood brightens. I have rarely been disappointed. I haven’t yet read all of his books, but I expect I will — despite my earlier misstep in reading Migraine while hiding in terror in a Colaba hotel room, Sacks is usually good company on the road. And if I can approach the world — and the world inside my head — with Sacks’s trademark curiosity and kindliness, I know I’ll be doing all right.

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Wrongful acquittal

What would happen if a prosecutor announced that he was setting a bunch of murderers and rapists free, pretty much at random? He or she would be pilloried.

But in practice, that’s what happens every time someone is wrongly convicted of a violent crime.

Forensic fakes

We’ve known for some time that there are serious flaws with the forensics system. DNA evidence, where available, has turned over convictions. Now a horrifying Washington Post report reveals further systemic abuse: “of 28 examiners with the FBI Laboratory’s microscopic hair comparison unit, 26 overstated forensic matches in ways that favored prosecutors in more than 95 percent of the 268 trials reviewed so far.” These include 32 cases in which defendants were sentenced to death, of whom 14 have been executed or died in prison.

In other words, forensic “experts” lie. And almost always on the side of the prosecution.

Setting murderers and rapists free

The discussion of these cases almost always focuses on the people who have been wrongly convicted. And it should: these are lives destroyed by criminal justice system, and in many cases we still have the opportunity to set these people free, if not undo the damage.

What rarely gets a mention, though, is the hundreds of violent criminals — murderers, rapists, arsonists — who’ve been set free by this flawed system. For every person rotting in jail on a wrongful conviction, there’s a criminal who got away with it.

It’s true that some of these criminals end up in prison for other things they do wrong, but that’s cold comfort. In some cases, they’re in prison for violent crimes they committed after the crimes they got away with.

Protecting public safety

It’s hard to get traction for overturning false convictions. Prisoners are powerless by design, and they’re often unsympathetic characters, which is part of how they ended up convicted in the first place.

Instead, it might make sense to frame the issue as a matter of public safety. Even for old convictions, it’s worrying that murderers, rapists, arsonists, and other violent criminals are still lurking — or might be. These may be cold cases, but they’re cases nonetheless. Predators are unaccounted for. How can that be okay?

I am not arguing for increasing our prison population or for treating violent criminals more harshly. Indeed, I think we need to refocus our justice system on rehabilitation because prisoners are mostly going to rejoin the world sooner or later.

But I am arguing that we should find and prosecute violent criminals, not ignore them because we’ve already convicted someone else. Overturning false convictions and setting people free is a matter of public safety because it will allow the system to pursue those who did commit terrible crimes.

There shouldn’t be a statute of limitations on murder — even if someone else has already been wrongly convicted of the crime.

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Buying blind

Airlines are getting worse, and Slate would have us believe that it’s our fault. And there is truth to the argument that consumers who will happily pay an extra $2 for what they believe to be a superior cup of coffee, or an extra $15 for what they think is a better haircut, might pause before spending $50 extra on a flight.

But I think it’s more than that. The real trouble is that I can’t buy quality. Not reliably, anyway.

Uninformed consumers

When it comes to things where people spend a lot of extra money — a cab instead of the subway, say, or a fancy meal instead of a cheap one — it’s usually easy to understand what the difference is that you’re paying for.

Not so with airlines.It’s not that consumers don’t realize there are differences among airlines. It’s that we don’t know with any clarity what those differences are.

Most consumers fly only occasionally — rarely more than, say, six times a year, which isn’t nearly often enough to have a sense of what the marketplace is like. Nor can you go to an airport and try out the entertainment systems and seats on different airlines, the way you can test-drive cars or sit on furniture in a showroom. And even if I’ve flown a certain airline before and liked the amenities, there’s no guarantee I’ll find them on my next flight.

When I get on Kayak.com to book a flight, I see prices, times, flight durations. That’s all I have to choose from.

Where consumers spend more

There are areas where consumers spend more, and it’s where we know what we’re getting. I haven’t been able to find the data (let me know if you can), but I assume that people often choose direct flights that cost more than flights with layovers — I know I’ve made that choice, and if no one else did, the direct flights wouldn’t be there.

Another way that consumers pay more for comfort is by choosing more expensive but less unpleasant flight times; again, I don’t have the data, but I assume there are reasons of supply and demand behind the higher prices for flights that don’t leave at 6 am or land at 2 am.

Changing what we pay for

If airlines really want to escape the spiral of ever-decreasing prices and ever-crappier service, they’ll need to offer services that are predictable, reliable, demonstrable and worthwhile. For example, if Virgin wanted to be the legroom airline, they would have to guarantee that every seat has the legroom you expect, then charge a premium for it.

Would people pay for the airline that offers meals and legroom and other nice things? Maybe. Building trust will be difficult.

But for now, blaming the consumers is unfair.

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Technology, time, and memory

If you haven’t seen it yet, go spend some time walking up the Guggenheim ramp for the masterful show On Kawara–Silence. Kawara is a strange artist whose work makes sense only cumulatively — I had previously seen a few of his famous date paintings at Dia:Beacon and been unmoved — and the Guggenheim’s widening gyre is pretty much the perfect venue for experiencing the blank yet personal way Kawara documented the passage of time.

His most famous work is the date paintings: meticulously rendered, unfailingly bland paintings of the date, in whatever language and format was used wherever he was the day he painted it. But each painting also has a box that the artist created for it, lined with some not-quite-random snippet of that day’s newspaper, also from wherever he was. Kawara also sent scads of postcards stamped with “TODAY I GOT UP AT” and with a handwritten time, and then later he began sending telegrams that said simply, “I AM STILL ALIVE.” He also kept binders with lists of the people he met each day — you can play a fun little game of spot-the-conceptual-artist — and also binders of maps of where he walked each day, carefully traced out in pen.

Archive fever

I was surprised at how touching I found Kawara’s life project. The work is blank, impersonal, which creates a space for projection of our own thoughts. What must it have been like to be a Japanese-born artist traveling so often to so many places, writing postcards and dropping them in the mail each day, making paintings in hotel rooms, getting up at strange hours? And what obsessive drive led to the cataloguing of so many details so consistently for so long?

Kawara is as pure an example as you can find of Derrida’s Archive Fever, a passion for recording as a bulwark against inevitable death. Most artists are fighting a battle against mortality, but few make it so explicit (I AM STILL ALIVE, over and over, is a key part of the oeuvre of a dead man).

The poignancy of the obsolete

Part of what fascinates, though, is the extent to which technology has rendered every single one of Kawara’s obsessions obsolete. It’s hard to imagine the effort Kawara must have gone to just to get copies of maps of all the cities he was in, much less to recall and trace out his routes each day, all of which could now be handled by a smartphone and a couple of apps. Who he met each day? A few smartphone snapshots and tags would cover it. Postcards and telegrams are, of course, obsolete as well: you just tweet your location or post it on Facebook, and everyone knows you’re still alive and where you are. Various technologies can tell you what time you got up each day and can even post that information to your friends. Pasting newspapers into boxes? Who reads newspapers anymore?

If an artist today were to take on Kawara’s projects using the artist’s toolkit, it would be an exercise in willful anachronism, as much as if Kawara had chosen to mix his own mineral pigments or carve his own typescript from wood.

Archive fever vs. curation cancer

Kawara lived in an era of archive fever. The urge to catalog and archive is an enlightenment project, but it reached a sinister fever pitch in the 20th century, with the explosion of vast, mechanized government archives, often in the service of unspeakable evil. Kawara’s idiosyncratic personal archive is a kind of individual refutation of the vast state archives that had come to rule the world he lived in. State information was at once domineering and inaccessible. If you wanted to remember your own life, you had to do it yourself.

But today artists have to face a very different circumstance. Big data has made vast reams of information instantly available, manipulable. You can find anything about anything. You can listen to every album ever. No, this isn’t strictly true, but it is true that we’re buried under information. The problem is no longer access but overwhelm.

And so we move from the urge to archive to the urge to curate. How many metastasizing exercises in curation can you think of, off the top of your head? A couple of my favorites are Engrish.com and Terrible real estate agent photographs. Porn, which you used to have to seek out in illicit locations, is now, on Tumblr, turned into a system of likes, repost loops, managed subscription lists and infinite scroll.

Showing the world

In Kawara’s time, the artist’s task was to render legible and comprehensible the machine world, and you can see it in the work of artists like Dan Flavin, Richard Serra, Carl Andre, Andy Warhol. Their work enabled us to see newly and with greater insight the era of mass media, mass production and state archiving, in the way that the Dutch masters gave the burghers of the emergent Netherlands a way of understanding themselves and their place in the world.

Today the world artists have to reflect upon is the world of big data. What will this mean for art? We don’t know yet, but I expect it will involve something cleverer than embroidered Facebook posts (though I give Kathy Halper credit for taking on digitalization and feminism in her work). The conceptualists of an earlier era found ways to humanize and render into art the world in which they lived; a new generation of conceptualists will do the same for the radically changed mental landscape in which we find ourselves.

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Train wrecks and cancer

There are things you can only learn from being in a train wreck. Like how to survive a train wreck, what to do when you’re in a train car and it’s on its side and on fire and everyone around you is screaming or dead. Like what it feels like to be in a train wreck. And being in a train wreck is so intense and loud and such a big fucking deal that you start to think that there’s maybe nothing grander or sweeter or profounder than the things you learn from being in a train wreck.

The bullshit part is the thinking that all of life is like your train wreck. It’s not. Hardly any of life is like your train wreck, and your actual train wreck is boring. I once sat through an AA meeting up in Harlem where the speaker kept saying things like, “Remember zip guns?” or “Remember razor fights?” and the black men in their forties and fifties would nod, and I was thinking, Zip guns? Razor fights? I haven’t ever seen that shit in my life.

We are taught, however, to think of certain types of train wrecks as glamorous, even universal. I knew enough that in the seventh grade, when I went to San Francisco to do pot for the first time with Zorick and Tony the Russian car thief, and when they took me to somebody’s house where everyone was slumped on the floor, dazed and wasted and listening to thrash metal in their Megadeth T-shirts, that I was seeing the coolest fucking thing on the goddamn planet. I knew when I watch Sid and Nancy that I was supposed to want to be a suicidal junkie. There are a million rock songs about that particular train wreck — so many that you might start to think you haven’t really lived unless you’ve hung around Casey Jones and gone off the rails.

You know what else is a train wreck? Cancer. And it’s boring as shit. No one wants to read your cancer memoir. I’ve known too many women who’ve had cancer and written godawful poetry about it and cried when they read the poetry and been pissed as hell that I didn’t cry too. But it’s your train wreck, not mine, and no one’s written good songs about it — not even Bob Marley, who died of cancer while writing songs about marijuana and gunfights.

So yes, Michael Lally and Dave Hickey and Greil Marcus and Anthony Kiedis and a dozen other ex-junkies, I get a kick out of the way you jam. I was raised on it. Half the time I’m not even sure what you’re on about — maybe the drugs fuzzed a circuit up there, and now you talk faster than you think, or maybe that’s the particular skill that kept you alive when everyone else was crushed under luggage and broken glass. But don’t try to sell me on the golden glory of the old-timey railway and its switching errors. There are other ways of being alive, other ways of knowing. When you’re not so caught up on the trouble ahead and the trouble behind, you can light out and look all around.

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Ways of telling tales

I like the way Owen Lattimore writes. He’s got style and verve, and he doesn’t shy away from bold statements, whether it’s comparing the Urga Living Buddha’s shopping spree in Shanghai to that of a drunken sailor or simply declaring this or that political action a disaster. It’s probably only my Asian studies friends who will ever end up reading Lattimore, but as I make my way through Nomads and Commissars: Mongolia Revisited, from 1962, it makes me realize how useful it is to have a plainspoken, amiable guide to obscure times and places.

Lattimore was a mid-20th century China Hand, to use a now-dated term. He advised Chiang Kai-shek during World War II, and he spoke fluent Mongolian when no one else did, and he wrote it as he saw it. Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that he never earned an advanced degree, though he served in major academic posts. He never went through the seasoning — deadening? — process of learning to write only sentences that you can defend to a committee.

And if there was one thing Lattimore failed at, it was defending himself to a committee. His later years were damaged by Senator Joseph McCarthy, who claimed that Lattimore was “the top Russian espionage agent in the United States.” The charges mostly amounted to invented hearsay, and stemmed perhaps from what looks, in retrospect, like Lattimore’s eminently sane approach to Communism and Communists, which was to consider them carefully and write about this or that particular action or person on the merits.

So set aside the Communist nonsense. What strikes me is that I write a lot about foreign places, I plan to write a lot more about foreign places, and Lattimore is an example I like of how to do it.

There’s room to criticize. Lattimore’s breezy confidence smacks of a casual imperialism that was common among British writers of an earlier era and American policy experts at mid-century. Nomads and Commissars is written at almost the last possible moment before any serious thinker on Asia had to take into account Orientalism and postmodernism more generally. The best products of the new ideas — Laurel Kendall is a personal favorite — have found new ways to tell good stories without the narratorial remove of earlier writers.

But just as the earlier writing was (usually unintentionally) dishonest about the motives and power dynamics that underlay it, post-modern scholarship is often dishonest in the other direction, as writers strive to pretend that they don’t have personal opinions. Kendall, for example, always dodges the question of whether the shamanism she studies is “real,” and of course any good postmodernist can tear apart the whole concept of the real until the person who asked the question feels like an idiot for believing in reality.Another fine postmodern storyteller, Heonik Kwon, dodges questions by fictionalizing his accounts, putting them entirely into the voices of his informants. And yet I am sure that Kendall and Kwon have some gut-level beliefs about ghosts and spirits, one way or the other, and it seems somehow a little sneaky never to come out and say what those beliefs are.

Somewhere there’s a balance. As I continue to write on topics that interest me in cultures not my own, I’ll have to work on that balance. As I do, I should remember Lattimore and the pleasure of a bold assertion well stated.

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Money for love

McDonald’s wanted you to demonstrate love in order to receive food. Coke fantasized that it could overcome hate through a Coke-based industrial accident. And now Dove is telling women to shut up already about their bodies (through a Twitter campaign that replies to women’s negative posts about their bodies with messages that are supposed to be empowering or positive).

These campaigns are part of an ugly trend in advertising. It’s troubling is when brands want to be my leader, my friend, my moral compass.That’s not OK. I would like to be able to drink a cup of tea without receiving an exhortation, for example.

Brands, corporations, and people

We all know that giant corporations like Facebook and Google (yes, the hand that feeds me) have more information than they ever did about our daily habits, thoughts, desires, interactions. It’s astonishing, when you think about it, just how much you could gather from my mobile phone data, Google searches, and Facebook feed. And we all know that these giant corporations sell that data to advertisers and marketers. And I’m actually pretty OK with all that: advertising has been a part of my world for my entire life, and I’d rather see ads that are relevant to me than just random garbage scattered across the televisual landscape. Done right, advertising can actually be useful, like an airline recognizing that I’m searching for flights to a particular city and deciding to give me a discount to entice me to go with them. They win, I win. It’s fine.

Brands are owned by corporations, and corporations are organizations designed to make profits, not to improve your moral worth. As such, they lack the disinterested moral authority of clergy (pledged to a religious responsibility), therapists (licensed and beholden to professional ethics), or friends and family (people we’ve decided for our own reasons to trust). Moral exhortations from corporations are a confidence game.

Now it’s worth remembering that, as Mitt Romney had it, corporations are people, or at least made out of people (like Soylent Green). Marketing campaigns do not create themselves. Corporate leaders can and often do desire to do good in a broader sense than simply making profits. That kind of leadership is good and should be encouraged. Companies that provide great service or go green or treat their employees well deserve accolades.

Do as I say, not as I sell

But as with people, there’s a difference between companies that do good and companies that talk about doing good. Dove is the latter. So is McDonald’s. That’s what rankles, the way it would rankle to have some rich guy fly in on a private jet, ride his souped-up Harley over to your shitty little house, and remind you how important it is to be humble and leave only footprints.

To a great extent, these campaigns have consisted of corporations wrong-footing themselves in a complicated Internet landscape that they don’t quite know how to handle. Because we have the Internet, we can talk back, and people are doing just that. I suspect that the current trend of earnest moral exhortation as brand message will not last — not if it keeps pissing people off.

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Money for love

McDonald’s wanted you to demonstrate love in order to receive food. Coke fantasized that it could overcome hate through a Coke-based industrial accident. And now Dove is telling women to shut up already about their bodies (through a Twitter campaign that replies to women’s negative posts about their bodies with messages that are supposed to be empowering or positive).

These campaigns are part of an ugly trend in advertising. It’s troubling is when brands want to be my leader, my friend, my moral compass.That’s not OK. I would like to be able to drink a cup of tea without receiving an exhortation, for example.

Brands, corporations, and people

We all know that giant corporations like Facebook and Google (yes, the hand that feeds me) have more information than they ever did about our daily habits, thoughts, desires, interactions. It’s astonishing, when you think about it, just how much you could gather from my mobile phone data, Google searches, and Facebook feed. And we all know that these giant corporations sell that data to advertisers and marketers. And I’m actually pretty OK with all that: advertising has been a part of my world for my entire life, and I’d rather see ads that are relevant to me than just random garbage scattered across the televisual landscape. Done right, advertising can actually be useful, like an airline recognizing that I’m searching for flights to a particular city and deciding to give me a discount to entice me to go with them. They win, I win. It’s fine.

Brands are owned by corporations, and corporations are organizations designed to make profits, not to improve your moral worth. As such, they lack the disinterested moral authority of clergy (pledged to a religious responsibility), therapists (licensed and beholden to professional ethics), or friends and family (people we’ve decided for our own reasons to trust). Moral exhortations from corporations are a confidence game.

Now it’s worth remembering that, as Mitt Romney had it, corporations are people, or at least made out of people (like Soylent Green). Marketing campaigns do not create themselves. Corporate leaders can and often do desire to do good in a broader sense than simply making profits. That kind of leadership is good and should be encouraged. Companies that provide great service or go green or treat their employees well deserve accolades.

Do as I say, not as I sell

But as with people, there’s a difference between companies that do good and companies that talk about doing good. Dove is the latter. So is McDonald’s. That’s what rankles, the way it would rankle to have some rich guy fly in on a private jet, ride his souped-up Harley over to your shitty little house, and remind you how important it is to be humble and leave only footprints.

To a great extent, these campaigns have consisted of corporations wrong-footing themselves in a complicated Internet landscape that they don’t quite know how to handle. Because we have the Internet, we can talk back, and people are doing just that. I suspect that the current trend of earnest moral exhortation as brand message will not last — not if it keeps pissing people off.

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Vaccines and time

Remember the scare about EMFs? Remember Satanic ritual abuse? Remember how cell phones were going to give us brain cancer? The list of things we’ve been afraid of is long, but it changes over time.

That’s something to keep in mind as you consider the current dangerous anti-vaccine movement. Because these scares have no basis in fact, they’re not sticky. They’re fashion trends, and things go in and out of fashion. In particular, it’s worth noting that the anti-vaxx crowd consists of people who like to think they’re smarter than everyone else: lefty liberals, Northern Californians, Silicon Valley tech workers. Once your marvelous insight is shared by the great unwashed masses, it’s time to move on to something else.

Vaccines present an unusual problem because the panic has a meaningful way of manifesting: parents refuse to vaccinate their children. This is different from simply being freaked out about power lines or mobile phones. Nevertheless, I do think there’s some hope that this anti-vaccine trend will taper off with time — especially (alas!) after some children begin to die.

A worrying counter-trend is food fears, which do tend to last: people are still insisting on the dangers of aspartame and MSG and gluten long after the initial studies showing problems with these ingredients were overturned by better studies. I think that’s because of the ritual, almost spiritual quality of food in human life, and I hope that’s the case; if it’s more an issue of being afraid about what we put in our bodies, then the anti-vaccine problem might be stickier than I’m predicting.

Nevertheless, I do think there may be some possibility that the anti-vaccine epidemic, like so many earlier epidemics, will run its course with time. Hopefully we can inoculate ourselves against a recurrence.

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Ms. Lee on Mr. Shin

Recently I wrote about the troubling case of North Korean defector Shin Dong-hyuk, who admitted to giving inaccurate accounts of his life in North Korea.

Now defector and advocate Hyeonseo Lee has written about Shin in the New York Times. With eloquence and far more personal, direct insight than I could ever provide, she’s made some of the same points I wanted to get across. Here’s the heart of it:

This unfolding saga is troubling to me and to other defectors who tell the truth about the horrors of life in the North. The furor over Mr. Shin’s confession is really a sideshow, a distraction from the larger issue: Pyongyang’s continuous abuse of human rights.

Mr. Shin has been examined by doctors who believe he was subjected to torture and child labor, given the evidence of his scars and unnaturally bowed arms. We shouldn’t lose sight of that when discussing his lies.

It’s easy to see how Mr. Shin was tempted to obscure the truth. For defectors, sometimes doing so is the only way to survive.

Beyond that, she talks about the hardships and challenges North Koreans face when they arrive in South Korea, and the need to give them with greater support, which organizations like Liberty in North Korea work to provide.

There are many reasons North Korean defectors lie, as Lee notes. But at its heart, the issue remains the North Korean regime and its human rights abuses, not the personal foibles and mistakes of some of its victims.