Moments

Radiolab presents 16: Moments by Will Hoffman. This film is a celebration of life that was inspired by David Eagleman's book, Sum.

 

@rydercarroll

I Would Be One of Many

Samar Jarrah of Port Charlotte, Florida describes the benefits she sees in experiencing Ramadan in the United States:

I just got back from Jordan…and my family was telling me, Why can’t you just stay a bit longer and spend a week of Ramadan in Jordan or in Egypt? And I said, You will never understand this, but the best Ramadan I ever spend in my life is always in America. Because I feel sometimes that I am the only person fasting, it’s more strenuous, I feel like every day is a jihad for me – a struggle to maintain my faith, to maintain my fast despite the amazing food around me and the smells. If I go shopping or if I go to the mall, there is food everywhere. Everybody’s eating except myself and this brings me amazing strength. And I wake up very early in the morning. I can be lecturing. I can be driving to my class – a hundred miles each way. I can be feeding the homeless. I can be doing amazing stuff that I would not be doing if I were living in a Muslim country, because the whole country would be fasting and I would be one of many.

[More…]

Listen to more voices at Revealing Ramadan from Speaking of Faith.

It Has Always Been Difficult

From “A Q&A with Agent Georges Borchardt,” by Jofie Ferrari-Adler, Poet & Writers (September/October 2009):

…in general, good authors have always been fairly miserable. They are now. They were then. It's always been a somewhat alien existence. Most authors still need to have a profession, usually in academia but not always, to sustain themselves. Especially the better ones, who don't want to compromise and just want to write what they feel like writing. But I don't think it has become much more difficult. It has always been difficult. I would not advise any of my friends to become writers as a career.

I think you're an artist because you have to be an artist. I don't think it's ever been easy. It's not easy for musicians. It's not easy for painters. But it has never been easy for those people. When Cézanne showed his first paintings, people laughed at him. They thought they were ludicrous. Van Gogh only sold one painting in his lifetime. To be an artist has always been difficult. To be an artist in the United States has been probably even more difficult than elsewhere because the arts are not considered all that valuable here.

If somebody asks you what you do and you say, "I'm a writer," the next question will be, "But what do you do for a living?"

Music is More Magical with Understanding

From “Music Written For Monkeys Strikes A Chord,” by Richard Harris, Morning Edition (9.2.09):

David Teie has been developing a theory to explain why music plays on human emotions. His theory is that music relates to the most primitive sounds we make and respond to, like laughter, heartbeats, or a mother's cooing.

Fearful monkey music:

Happy monkey music:

He says, "the paradox is that I distinctly remember thinking once that when they figure out why Puccini makes me cry, I hope I die the day before the news gets out. But the great news about this exploration into music is it's actually more magical and wonderful once you realize how it works."

David Teie Plays the Schuman Cello Concerto in A minor (Mvt 1) with the Eclipse Chamber Orchestra, April 2007

See also: Music for Cats

To Teach the World to Listen

“In this soaring demonstration, deaf percussionist Evelyn Glennie illustrates how listening to music involves much more than simply letting sound waves hit your eardrums.”

From TED Talks (Filmed 2/2003; Posted 4/2007)

Touch the Sound

Disconnecting Human Beings

Life Inc.

Life Inc. The Movie from Douglas Rushkoff on Vimeo.

Spending that Makes Us Happy

From “Happiness: A Buyer’s Guide,” by Drake Bennett, The Boston Globe (August 23, 2009):

The problem isn’t money, it’s us. For deep-seated psychological reasons, when it comes to spending money, we tend to value goods over experiences, ourselves over others, things over people. When it comes to happiness, none of these decisions are right: The spending that make us happy, it turns out, is often spending where the money vanishes and leaves something ineffable in its place.

Any attempt to put these findings into practice, however, has to contend with the subtle but powerful ways money itself channels our thinking, and the ways it plays on human attitudes about sharing and scarcity. Recent studies have suggested that merely thinking about money makes us more solitary and selfish, and steers us away from the spending that promises to make us happiest.

Birdman

“Forrest Bird’s invention, the respirator, has saved millions of lives and, at 86, he’s still living his life to the fullest, flying his airplanes and working 12-hour days.”

Watch CBS Videos Online

Pro-Knife

"I am not anti-gun. I'm pro-knife. Consider the merits of the knife. In the first place, you have to catch up with someone in order to stab him. A general substitution of knives for guns would promote physical fitness. We'd turn into a whole nation of great runners. Plus, knives don't ricochet. And people are seldom killed while cleaning their knives."

~ Molly Ivins

The Ability to Project an Image of Success

Excerpt from “Youtopia and the Bubble of American Egos,” by Theo Horesh, Beyond Growth (Aug. 26, 2009):

What happens when a whole society of people learns to project an image of success and capability that few members of that society actually possess? Let us create for ourselves an imaginary world—we’ll call it Youtopia—and explore what might happen there…

In a socially mobile society like that of the US, in which individuals craft their own lives for themselves and must regularly recreate their own social worlds as they move from place to place and from one social class to another, the ability to project an image of success and capability can mean the difference between success and failure in almost any endeavor. So let us travel to Youtopia and see what happens when all of us do this?

First of all, it becomes difficult to distinguish who is actually successful and capable on Youtopia. For everyone will appear successful and capable whether or not he or she really is. And while new indicators of success and capability might be discovered, those indicators would be quickly learned by others on YouTopia, for if everyone possessed the ability to project an image of success and capability, whatever the indicators of success and capability were, they would learn them.

More…

What Could Be Useful About Depression?

Excerpts from “Depression's Evolutionary Roots,” By Paul W. Andrews and J. Anderson Thomson, Jr., Scientific American Mind, August 25, 2009:

Depressed people often have trouble performing everyday activities, they can’t concentrate on their work, they tend to socially isolate themselves, they are lethargic, and they often lose the ability to take pleasure from such activities such as eating and sex. Some can plunge into severe, lengthy, and even life-threatening bouts of depression.

So what could be so useful about depression? Depressed people often think intensely about their problems. These thoughts are called ruminations; they are persistent and depressed people have difficulty thinking about anything else. Numerous studies have also shown that this thinking style is often highly analytical. They dwell on a complex problem, breaking it down into smaller components, which are considered one at a time.

This analytical style of thought, of course, can be very productive. Each component is not as difficult, so the problem becomes more tractable. Indeed, when you are faced with a difficult problem, such as a math problem, feeling depressed is often a useful response that may help you analyze and solve it...Analysis requires a lot of uninterrupted thought, and depression coordinates many changes in the body to help people analyze their problems without getting distracted...

Sometimes people are reluctant to disclose the reason for their depression because it is embarrassing or sensitive, they find it painful, they believe they must soldier on and ignore them, or they have difficulty putting their complex internal struggles into words.

But depression is nature’s way of telling you that you’ve got complex social problems that the mind is intent on solving. Therapies should try to encourage depressive rumination rather than try to stop it, and they should focus on trying to help people solve the problems that trigger their bouts of depression. (There are several effective therapies that focus on just this.) It is also essential, in instances where there is resistance to discussing ruminations, that the therapist try to identify and dismantle those barriers.

More…

Andrews, P. W., & Thomson Jr, J. A. (2009). The bright side of being blue: Depression as an adaptation for analyzing complex problems. Psychological Review. 116 (3), 620.

 The Gates of Hell
La Porte de l'Enfer
Auguste Rodin

Nothing in My Arms

Helping My Daughter Move into Her First Apartment
by Sue Ellen Thompson

This is all I am to her now:
a pair of legs in running shoes,

two arms strung with braided wire.
She heaves a carton sagging with CDs 

at me and I accept it gladly, lifting
with my legs, not bending over,

raising each foot high enough
to clear the step. Fortunate to be 

of any use to her at all,
I wrestle, stooped and single-handed, 

with her mattress in the stairwell,
saying nothing as it pins me, 

sweating, to the wall. Vacuum cleaner,
spiny cactus, five-pound sacks 

of rice and lentils slumped
against my heart: up one flight 

of stairs and then another,
down again with nothing in my arms

From American Life in Poetry: Column 231

Coiling Tighter into Our Boring Little Selves

"Spend some time living before you start writing. What I find to be very bad advice is the snappy little sentence, 'Write what you know.' It is the most tiresome and stupid advice that could possibly be given. If we write simply about what we know we never grow. We don't develop any facility for languages, or an interest in others, or a desire to travel and explore and face experience head-on. We just coil tighter and tighter into our boring little selves. What one should write about is what interests one."

~ Annie Proulx, from The Writer’s Almanac (8.23.09)

Weary Traveler

“Only about a dozen people attended [Sammy] Green’s funeral on Thursday afternoon in these fog-wrapped mountains, tucked into the northeast corner of [Georgia]. None were relatives — they are all dead — and most hardly knew Mr. Green, if they knew him at all. The boys who built the coffin never met him. Yet it was the people of the county who made the funeral possible.”

From “A Georgia County Shares a Tale of One Man’s Life and Death,” by Drew Jubera, The New York Times, August 22, 2009.

The True Artist

“The true artist is connected. The true artist studies the past not as a copyist nor as a pasticheur will study the past, those people are interested only in the final product, the art object, signed sealed and delivered to a public drugged on reproduction. The true artist is interested in the art object as an art process, the thing in being, the being of the thing, the struggle, the excitement, the energy, that have found expression in a particular way. The true artist is after the problem. The false artist wants it solved [by somebody else].”

~ Jeanette Winterson, from Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery

Bad Writing

 

“Filmmaker Celebrates the Best of Bad Writing,” by Ani Vrabel, Paste Magazine (May 29, 2009)

Food Pleasure in Overdrive

“What my grandmother and my mother imbued in me was a love of food. And a sense of the joy of food, a firm conviction that food mattered, and that food was a vehicle for pleasure. In my case, I sometimes drove that vehicle at about a hundred and thirty miles an hour. And sometimes ended up in a ditch on the side of the road. Though I believe that food is a vehicle of pleasure, and a glorious vehicle at that, I felt like every time someone who’s a recognized food writer wrote a memoir, it was madly romantic, gauzy. And the truth of the matter is, one’s love of food can get out of hand. My story is not only about the joy of food, but also about the danger of food. I wanted to write about disordered food behavior, about food demons, but to not demonize food.”

~ Frank Bruni, discussing his memoir Born Round: The Secrect History of a Full-Time Eater on The Book Bench: The New Yorker (August 19, 2009)

Until Then

First Grade
by Ron Koertge

Until then, every forest
had wolves in it, we thought
it would be fun to wear snowshoes
all the time, and we could talk to water.

So why is this woman with the gray
breath calling out names and pointing
to the little desks we will occupy
for the rest of our lives?

 

From American Life in Poetry: Column 230

Putting the Consumer at the Center of the System

Excerpts from “How American Health Care Killed My Father,” by David Goldhill, The Atlantic (September 2009)

A wasteful insurance system; distorted incentives; a bias toward treatment; moral hazard; hidden costs and a lack of transparency; curbed competition; service to the wrong customer. These are the problems at the foundation of our health-care system, resulting in a slow rot and requiring more and more money just to keep the system from collapsing.

How would the health-care reform that’s now taking shape solve these core problems? The Obama administration and Congress are still working out the details, but it looks like this generation of “comprehensive” reform will not address the underlying issues, any more than previous efforts did. Instead it will put yet more patches on the walls of an edifice that is fundamentally unsound—and then build that edifice higher. 

…I hope that whatever reform is finally enacted this fall works—preventing people from slipping through the cracks, raising the quality standard of the health-care industry, and delivering all this at acceptable cost. But looking at the big picture, I fear it won’t. So I think we should at least begin to debate and think about larger reforms, and a different direction—if not for this round of reform, then for the next one. Politics is, of course, the art of the possible. If our health-care crisis does not abate, the possibilities for reform may expand beyond their current, tight limits.

The most important single step we can take toward truly reforming our system is to move away from comprehensive health insurance as the single model for financing care. And a guiding principle of any reform should be to put the consumer, not the insurer or the government, at the center of the system. I believe if the government took on the goal of better supporting consumers—by bringing greater transparency and competition to the health-care industry, and by directly subsidizing those who can’t afford care—we’d find that consumers could buy much more of their care directly than we might initially think, and that over time we’d see better care and better service, at lower cost, as a result.

A more consumer-centered health-care system would not rely on a single form of financing for health-care purchases; it would make use of different sorts of financing for different elements of care—with routine care funded largely out of our incomes; major, predictable expenses (including much end-of-life care) funded by savings and credit; and massive, unpredictable expenses funded by insurance.

Taking Responsibility for Our Own Happiness

From “Those Aren’t Fighting Words, Dear,” by Laura A. Munson, The New York Times, July 31, 2009:

“I don’t love you anymore. I’m not sure I ever did.”

His words came at me like a speeding fist, like a sucker punch, yet somehow in that moment I was able to duck. And once I recovered and composed myself, I managed to say, “I don’t buy it.” Because I didn’t.

He drew back in surprise. Apparently he’d expected me to burst into tears, to rage at him, to threaten him with a custody battle. Or beg him to change his mind.

So he turned mean. “I don’t like what you’ve become.”

Gut-wrenching pause. How could he say such a thing? That’s when I really wanted to fight. To rage. To cry. But I didn’t.

Instead, a shroud of calm enveloped me, and I repeated those words: “I don’t buy it.”

You see, I’d recently committed to a non-negotiable understanding with myself. I’d committed to “The End of Suffering.” I’d finally managed to exile the voices in my head that told me my personal happiness was only as good as my outward success, rooted in things that were often outside my control. I’d seen the insanity of that equation and decided to take responsibility for my own happiness. And I mean all of it.

More…