What the Chicago Bulls' new hire means for human development

I'm not trying to be a very poor man's FreeDarko today, but the basketball world's chattering classes are surprisingly a-twitter over rumors coming out of Chicago. (I say it's surprising because we are possibly two games away from one of the greatest NBA Finals' storylines in years, and sports talking heads all over are speculating about a possible head coaching hire by a 33-49 team.) Supposedly, the Bulls are set to re-hire Doug Collins, NBA tv analyst, Illinois State alum and former NBA all-star, Wizards coach, Pistons coach, and, most importantly, Michael Jordan's coach for the Bulls before Phil Jackson took over and drove the Air Jordan car to 6 NBA titles.

Common wisdom in Chicago has had it that Collins is a great expert on the game, but too much of a taskmaster to lead great basketball players in the present NBA. (Disregarding all the questionable implications implicit in this, and the fact that that immediately makes people think of newly deposed Scott Skiles, I can't shake a piece I read a few years ago about Collins unable to coach Jordan's Wizards team under 23's shadow.)

What do I think this has to do with human development? It's bringing to the forefront one of the more poorly understood questions in our lives: how much can adults change? One of the more immediate points being made is the following: Doug Collins is a head coach who couldn't win with Michael Jordan on his team. What can he do with Hinrich, Deng, Noah, etc?

There are a couple of ideas here I'd like to tease out. The most simple point here is that Jordan, greatest of all time or not, still came into the league without the maturity or teammates to win a championship. The Jordan that Doug Collins coached was not the same Jordan coached by Phil Jackson, plain and simple.

There are two other moving targets here: Doug Collins' coaching ability, and the NBA environment. While no immediate NBA examples come to mind, I'd like to point out a couple of examples from baseball of a coach leaving his role to be an analyist: Bob Brenly and Joe Torre were both able to take what they observed as analysts and apply it to their coaching style. (This is assuming you think a baseball manager or NBA coach have all that much to do with their team's success; I think both are pretty open questions, but think that, particularly in baseball, the players and their talent and cohesion matter much more. But I won't go there.)

A phrase I've heard a couple of times today is "a leopard doesn't change its spots." I think as a society we've retired a few cliches about how people can't change themselves and their place in the world: "there are no second acts in American lives" has been killed over and over again, for example. Here's hoping that Doug Collins can popularize a belief that I, and most of my colleagues, hold: that there is plenty of room to change oneself, and one's ability to thrive within their environment, even late into adulthood.

If you've ever wanted to watch a monkey feed itself using a robotic arm..

"Andrew Schwartz and his team at the University of Pittsburgh, which reports on the monkey experiment in the journal Nature Thursday, say the experiments are paving the way toward prosthetic devices that "could ultimately achieve arm and hand function at a near-natural level."
Observers agree the work is promising, but caution it will take years to perfect the technology that uses electrodes implanted in the brain to control robotic devices."

lost the plot

I'm noticing that, after a period of being pretty effective with my time and on top of things, I am really bad with time lately. Not in terms of sleeping in (though I did this morning, and luckily ended up not having time to take the train to work), or missing appointments, or anything like that. I'm talking about a certain kind of unhealthy binging behavior that has, for a long time, been a problem of mine, that I'm only now starting to feel comfortable addressing.

What happened was, I didn't get home until about 10:00, but planned on catching the end of a certain basketball game, a certain baseball game and perhaps a certain hockey game. Since I'd gotten a lot done while at work today, I was going to just check my fantasy baseball rosters, turn off the computer, watch said games, and turn in early. (Aside: I worry that I sound like I'm 80 years old when I use the phrase "the computer." Anyway.)

I ended up wasting several hours of precious, precious time tracking down ultimately useless information. I spent at least 30 mintes reading news reports about the suspension of a 19 year old minor leaguer I'd been thinking of adding to my keeper fantasy baseball team (if you don't know, you really, really, really don't care). I finally realized who Sydney Pollack was and read reviews of about 8 films from the 70s to the 90s that I not only will not see, but will probably never look at again. This led me to read reviews of several of the movies showing at Cannes this year that I will also never even think about again, and... so on. It only gets less interesting, so I'll spare the details, except to say I've noticed the following: This kind of behavior is binging. Like binge drinking or eating, only not quite as big a problem, information binging leads to the joyless, pointless consumption of information. I don't have any need for most of the information I'm chasing (seriously, one of the tabs open in my browser right now is a wikipedia page for some operetta from the mid-90s), I don't enjoy consuming it, but here I am, up too late, consuming it for its own sake. All this crap distracted me from 3 excellent games and a good night's sleep. Argh.

One nice thing result is that it did lead me to the following quote (an actress in one of the useless articles I read attributed this to Flaubert): "Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work." That's kind of what I've been working toward in the past few years of my life, and definitely how I plan to approach my dissertation. So there.

133 Parents' Stories Reveal That Parents Don't Matter

Look, I love research that challenges sacred cows. If you designed a good study that showed that watching baseball while eating apple pie baked by one's mother turned people into sociopaths, I'd talk about it to everyone and high-five you into oblivion.

But do we really want to take a verbal response to "several stories" as a reliable stand-in for what parents provide their children, even if it (somewhat) predicts how children will use a particular toy? Seriously? Do we think this correlates with the environment they provide their children? What if how they respond to these stories correlates with how the family's day is going? With any of the dozens of ideas that seem more likely to correlate with responding to a specific story than the entire effect of all their parenting practices do? The ways they respond to their (specific, real) children when they're being really annoying, or particularly cute, or particularly upset? Their ability to repond affectionately but competently across a variety of contexts?

Read the article, and if I'm way off in thinking this study is weak as hell, please, PLEASE, let me know. Look, parenting, making babies, etc, aren't freaking magical. But, to my eyes, these people are massively overstating what their research design is capable of showing.

your first summer jam

to put it mildly, I haven't been blown away by much commercial R&B lately, but this track features:

-what sounds like a Slick Rick sample

-a sweet steppers' groove mid-to-uptempo beat with nice housey synth and electric piano

-male falsetto (is all falsetto male falsetto? is it called something else for women? someone please enlighten me.)

-a Lil' Wayne verse. (This song is way too smooth and "normal" to allow for him to draw from his dank moldy well of psychologically twisted genius, but, whatever. Actually, his verse is, verbally, pretty blah, but I don't care, it fits the track and is catchy, and reminded me to make a copy of one of his 400 mixtapes from 2007 for a friend of mine.)

Nothing special, just some nice Chicago and Bronx via New Orleans ear candy to enjoy for a couple months, throw on a mixtape or two, and feel nostalgic over when you hear it in a couple years, when it takes you back to whatever pleasant silly shit is going on in your life right now.

mission postponed

Not moving to LA just yet after all...

Decided, after consulting with several people whose advice I trust, to postpone my move, at least I finish my dissertation proposal. Which means I'll be in Chicago at least through the winter.

Don't feel like writing much write now, other than to say I'm watching one of my new favorite shows, "Shameless," and it's great. Probably my favorite British TV show ever, other than Father Ted. A few years ago, I planned on doing my research around Britain's hysteria over "anti-social behavior*," which led me to read a lot about the British literary class' disaffection with Britain's white working class. Shameless does a good job of humorously and affectionately, with a minimum of condescension and/or romanticism, portraying what Americans might call "white trash" Britain.

Whether this is a sign I'll soon be back to working on an escape plan to Britain or Ireland, I dunno. My dissertation research will definitely be taking place in the US, so I doubt it.

(*"Anti-social," in this particular discourse [if you're interested, google "ASBO britain" or something], doesn't mean the same thing that, say, American clinicians mean, as in markedly unempathic, sadistic behavior. The British punditry meant it in much the same way Giuiliani and allies might use it in their "Broken Windows" approach approach to crime reduction**.)

(**Don't want to get into this, but NYC's decrease in violent crime during Giuiliani's tenure wasn't much better than those of cities that took on a much less authoritarian approach to social order, and analysts who did think that New York's crime rate went down for any specific reason usually, as far as what I've read, tied it to initiatives associated with previous mayor David Dinkins, or massive gentrification.)

Orgasms and evolution

This article (linked in title) isn't bad, but reinforces for me something that's been on my mind lately. I've even mentioned here that a lot of, and probably most, evolutionary psychology research involves looking for some measurable presumed correlate (i.e. brain scans, hormone levels) of some presumed evolutionary mechanism ("the fight or flight response," sexual jealousy) that we assume was useful in some imagined past (when we were being chased by saber-toothed tigers, or when men were out hunting all the time), that shows us something we "know."

As a way of generating hypotheses or heuristics I don't see anything wrong with it, but when it becomes the only way that a field is represented in any popular way, it leads to a lot of bad thinking. (I don't know enough about evolutionary psychology to say whether this is the main way that things work in this field, but usually when I cross a popular or borderline-popular evolutionary psychology argument, it seems kind of stupid, and often reinforcing of of faulty concepts like biological bases for "race," or just really basic "men are like this, women are like this" standup comedy material.)

So one of the things I like about the research described in this article is that it looks at both "emotion," which sounds like they mean the sentimental attachments held for partners, and more general levels of fear and exitation, and "pleasure," i.e. the orgasm, in both men and women, instead of the common heuristic (men=aggressive/visual/pleasure and power driven; women=sentimental/emotional/relationship driven).

What I don't like is the implicit assumption that sexual reproduction is primarily "pleasure"- and orgasm-driven. Why? First, I don't think pleasure is a very useful construct for an evolutionary argument, being, I believe, too tied to historical and environmental context. The notion that sex is about mutual orgasm for both (in this argument, inevitable male and female) partners might be a very nice idea, but it's likely not one that has driven human behavior for the last few millenia. If it is, it certainly went away until the Kinsey era, at least by my reading. Men and women get all kinds of things out of sex- social relations, chemical effects, economic benefits, etc. Certainly, orgasms are interesting, even from a more evolutionary and less phenomenologically-based perspective, and maybe they really are where the action is for sex research. (I don't know if those were really lame jokes or what.) But by assuming sex="pleasure"=orgasms, we're only going to learn things that we already believe. I think it's likely that other mechanisms, evolutionary and psychological, impact sexual relationships, and we might learn more by thinking more carefully about what sex behavior brings people other than orgasm.

(*of course, the big point I'm not addressing here is that reproduction would not occur without male ejaculation, and that female sexual arousal also greatly facilitates reproduction. all I'm going to say about this for now is that sexual arousal isn't neccessarily, and certainly in the past might not have been, orgasm-directed, and that I wonder if orgasm and ejaculation have always been as directly connected throughout human/hominid history. While simultaneous ejaculation/orgasm is the prototype and ideal in our social world, even within this social world we are aware of premature ejaculation and other non-orgasmic mechanisms for transmitting sperm.)

(** sorry for all the scare quotes.)

Only 0.1% on coffee?

A friend of mine sent me this link (http://consumerist.com/5008065/consumer-price-index-shows-that-consumers-like-eating-out-gasoline) to consumerist, referring to a NYT graph on American consumer spending.

Categories in which I Whup The Average American's Ass include coffee, health insurance, and men's shoes.

A sprited defense of fast food to follow.

I wanna live in Los Angeles, not the one in Los Angeles

Off to a couple job interviews in LA next week.


I promise that I will never become a Lakers fan.

I was always a hater, in the sense that I hated people who were successful, people who were happy, people who have it easy and have it made. Of course there are as many, well, probably more, unhappy etc people in the Los Angeles area, but it was that very hater in me that always assumed I'd hate LA. Sunny weather, presumably attractive people, simultaneous proximity to ocean/desert/mountains/forest, and generally just being American shorthand for the opposite of the Serious, Moody, Dark midwesterner I'd always seen myself as, perpetually digging myself out from snowbanks , dodging tornadoes, doling sage advice and directions to clueless strangers. LA was the d-bag at the party in the sunglasses even though it's dark who wants to do coke with your girlfriend. I saw myself as the guy who had to clean up the next morning.


That was stupid. At some point in my life, I learned that I could stop beating my head against the wall and enjoy myself every once in awhile. (Coke and hitting on people's girlfriends are still lame. Coke Zero, tangentially, is the best.) I know I'm not heading off to golden age hollywood or Ventura Highway by America, that my life there will be like my life here, just with more sunshine, traffic, and possibly cheaper produce. But I like it that I'm off to live somewhere I never would have as the know-it-all hater I used to be.

decollecting

As money is tight, had to sell a lot of records today. Some pretty good stuff (a lot of semi- to fairly-obscure European and Japanese hardcore, some dance music [Liaisons Dangereuses, Giorgio Moroder]), some of which had some sentimental value. Did not sell the above record.

I'm definitely of the opinion that for young-ish Americans, consumption is one of the major means through which we develop or enact our identity. (Romance, work, and education are also pretty major.) I'm not thinking of that as a good or bad thing, though it certainly has both positive and negative effects. (or Negative FX, if you're drawn to that record in the above collage.) I also think that by selling these records, I'm making some comment about where I'm at in life, and what sort of objects I choose to keep around me. I felt an odd sense of comfort that everything I brought in would be sold, that I got a pretty decent amount of money for it, and that a couple of the clerks at the store had already earmarked some of the records. Kind of like I found a nice farm family for them.

I want to explore the notion of resale and identity further at some point, but if anyone has any thoughts about consumerism or resale and identity (particularly consumerism of countercultural objects), please feel free to share.

R.I.P. Eight Belles

It's a little disengenuous of me, as someone who enjoys thoroughbred racing, to express sadness at the death of one of these [noble creatures/pieces of livestock], when I know perfectly well the physical strain that the sport puts these [beautiful/deply inbred] animals under. But of course I felt sad. It was interesting to hear how gendered she was (as the only filly in the race, and damn near the first filly to win the Kentucky Derby in decades) by commentators, both leading up to the race and while being eulogized, talking about what a brave girl she was, bravely giving it her all against all those colts, holding out to place 2nd.

(Oh yeah, wasn't able to get a ticket for the sold-out DBT show and doubted my ability to talk or sneak my way in.)

Springtime

"There's a little bit of springtime in the back of my mind

remembers things perhaps as they should have been...

Although it's nice to know there's a place to go

where there's still so many things

left to see"

(Photo taken from http://jamiesrunoutgroove.blogspot.com/ ; review of a Frankie NW Stubbs acoustic solo 10" that I really, really like. Dunno the guy or gal who does the blog, but from a cursory glance s/he has great taste in music.)

(Plenty more Leatherface/Frankie Stubbs posts to follow.)

(Off to listen to "Not Industructible" by Jesse, a 90's/Leatherface hiatus [I think] Stubbs band, and to get back to the task at hand: watching Houston at Utah with the windows wide open on a beautiful spring evening.)

(Update: Utah is back to making Houston look silly. OK, not silly, just incapable of stopping Deron Williams. If nothing else, let this be the series that teaches America the correct pronunciation of Deron Williams' name ["Derrin," not "De Ron."].)

The Limits of Neuro-talk (from New Atlantis)

An article by Matthew B. Crawford concerning the misapplication of neuroscience in psychology and popular culture. I was glad to read this article (and its use of "scientism"), particularly after damage done to my brain while watching sports commentator Skip Bayless hypothesise on Sportscenter that LeBron James lacks a "clutchness gene." Sigh.

Anyway, this was a particularly interesting paragraph to me:

[Arizona State University psychologist William] Uttal suggests that the
perennial need to divide psychology textbooks into topic chapters—“pattern
recognition,” “focal attention,” “visual memory,” “speech perception,” and
the like—has repeatedly induced an unwitting reification of such terms,
whereby they come to be understood as separable, independent modules of
mental function. The ad hoc origin of such mental modules subsides from the
collective memory of investigators, who then set out to search for their
specific loci in the brain.

There are many more great things said in this article concerning what the author refers to as "scientism," many of which can be applied to evolutionary psychology and its popularization, and the author specifically addresses the attempt to locate "emotion" squarely in the brain, disconnecting it from the conceptual, ethical (as he says) and social (as I'd say) networks of meaning that give it life.

I'm also quite fond of this move made by the author:

I would like to make the case for giving due deference to ordinary human
experience as the proper guide for understanding human beings. Such deference
may be contrasted with the field of “neurophilosophy” (most famously, the work
of Paul and Patricia Churchland), which is intent on replacing “folk terms”—such
as “reflection” and “deliberation”—with terms that describe brain states.
Needless to say, brain states are objective facts, whereas our introspective
experience of our own mental life is inherently subjective. But this divide
between the objective and subjective, between the brain and the mind, does not
map neatly onto cause and effect, nor onto any clear distinction between a layer
of reality that is somehow more fundamental and one that is merely
epiphenomenal.

whoa, I'm glad I heard about this

DRIVE-BY TRUCKERS , 8 pm, 5/3. The Metro.

I've loved Drive-By Truckers since I heard "Carl Perkins' Cadillac," appropriately, while driving, on WHPK. I pretty much immediately went out and bought The Dirty South, which had just come out, and not long afterward picked up Southern Rock Opera and the rest of their pre-existing catalogue. They sound like a bunch of former punk rockers, who can play really really good, drawing on the southern rock, country and power pop/bar rock canons. What really puts them up a notch for me are the lyrics. Not really for cynics, though they often tell stories about cynics, Patterson Hood, Mike Cooley, Jason Isbell (when he was with the band), and now Shonna Tucker (bassist on the last few albums who has a few songs on the new one) write with such an affection for (for lack of a better word) the common (and now that I think about it, uncommon) man and woman, while keeping one eye on the dangerous, bad things in the world.
I've never seen them before (did see Patterson Hood play solo in December at the bottle) and Can. Not. Wait.
I can't describe this band without getting really cheesy (like that's a bad thing), so I'll just go full on dairy here and describe their new "Brighter Than Creation's Dark" as a series of beautiful, often painful pictures of America in 2008. A+ RECOMMEND

poem draft

The fragility of historiography

Watching TV, thinking about a dream I’d just had about Jerry Orbach
when the dog, telling a joke, used his name.
I turned to you, somehow proud of, then frozen by, this coincidence
and unlike the dog couldn't speak. I knew you wouldn’t believe me,
that if it ever came up after that very night

I would have thought you were right
when you’d say that first we watched cartoons,
and only later could I have dreamed about Jerry Orbach

We might even decide I'd gone to sleep watching Law and Order.

Phrases We Like: Baseball edition

I have a baseball game on, and the announcer just used the phrase "dead red," and I really like this phrase. Not just because it rhymes and is vaguely metal, I just like how it evokes a certain baseball situation effectively, crisply, and, yes, does so in a rhyming and metal fashion. I encourage you to post baseball phrases you like. Some others of mine include:
-Southpaw (I like dogs);
-Showing bunt;
-Can of corn (involves [Midwestern] food);
-Rope, as in to "rope a line drive" (really like that Hitchcock movie);
-chin music (I like music);
-wheelhouse (sounds like a shoegaze band; is it?).

I'm not counting Jose Canseco and Mark Grace phrases like "road beef" and "slump buster."

To those of you interested and near the U of Chicago

"Please join the Money and Markets Workshop for a specialsession, Friday, May 2, as we welcome Viviana Zelizer,professor from Princeton University, delivering a paper on'circuits of capital.' Please note that we will meet in Cobb107 for this unusually scheduled session."

Awesome.

Zelizer wrote an influential (to me and to various fields in the social science) book on the historical emergence of Modern American Childhood called Pricing the Priceless Child, and another book called the Purchase of Intimacy which, among other arguments, productively challenges our idea that money invariably poisons intimate relationships.

A big question.

Do we take seriously the notion that modern life (in any sense) has left us relatively (to some idealized past) isolated? This has always seemed to imply that this isolation is a bad thing, and emerges in defiance of some evolutionary imperitive to be less isolated-- more specifically, to live lives that are intimately connected with others.

There are several useful theories of human development that rest on some notion that evolution has left us predisposed, even physiologically dependent on, recognizable connections to social others. (A lot of these theories are under the umbrella of what many American psychologists [see Steven Mitchell] refer to as Relational psychoanalysis, emerging from British object-relations schools of psychoanalysis [see Donald Winnicott]. Relatedly, see Bowlby and all and Attachment Theory) There's another basic argument that relates to how we presumably survived through collaboration and connections with others, and the ability to "think" as a group (what I would consider Culture, in the broadest sense).

Despite its dependence on some imagined, undertheorized and de facto unempirical notion of our past (I am particularly disturbed by the influence these imagined pasts hold in arguments emerging from evolutionary psychology), I really like this notion, in contrast to what unfairly gets called a "Darwinian" perspective on human biology (some might call this Machiavellian, or individualistic, etc. Basically, the assumption that we are in some pure, deep way just Looking Out For Number One). Even at my most misanthropic and self-isolating, I take pleasure in the work and emotional, symbolic expressions of others: sad movies, sad songs, food and drink technologies, etc. I tell myself I'm ALONE when I'm sitting at home drinking a beer, watching Miller's Crossing, and ignoring my phone, but we know that Tom Reagan and Myrna Birnbaum and the Coen brothers and millenia of farmers and brewers are there with me.

This isn't really intended as a refutation as the proposition mentioned at the top of this post, though maybe I should think of it that way. Upcoming I will post a few notes suggesting that Romance, in most of its senses, and perhaps the arts (?; not really my forte, but..) have perhaps emerged as evolutionary adaptations to this putative crisis of isolation.