Borat's Cousin Makes Correction

A popular researcher (and yes a relation to Sasha Baron-Cohen) corrects a major publication for overblowing and distorting his research. Great success!

I don't really have an option about Dr. Baron-Cohen's research and writing in general, but I find it thought-provoking (for example, he's made the argument that recent changes in education and labor make it easier for individuals on the spectrum to make sexy time-- dunno if I agree or disagree but I like seeing someone I think of as a lab scientist thinking about larger social patterns), and it's cool to see someone take an active role in moderating how their research is perceived in the popular press. He's already well-established and all, and I wouldn't begrudge a less-established researcher enjoying whatever attention they get, but, still.

Hey, I was hibernating the last few months. Did I miss anything?

OK, just two more

Just two more mentions of basketball this month. Well, I'm sure I'll have something to say leading up to or immediately following Thursday's NBA draft, but I wanted to highlight a couple articles that even readers who aren't NBA fans might find interesting:

• An article about Len Bias, the #2 pick in the 1986 draft, and someone whose name comes up a lot at this time of year. For those who don't remember, Bias was the University of Maryland power forward drafted by the Celtics, who was expected to lengthen the Bird/McHale/Parrish dynasty, only to die of a cocaine overdose the day after the draft. I don't really remember this happening; I remember knowing that it was going on, and, although I was only 7, I suppose I might have remembered him from that year's Final Four, which I always watched, even then. I definitely didn't remember that his brother died a few years later, or even really pick up on the other Bias narratives at the time, other than, aside from the obvious tragedy, that this sort of doomed the Celtics for awhile, and that this was the downfall for the idea of college athletics as pure and innocent (despite how often college hoops is lauded over the NBA with a similar valence). The author of the piece, Michael Weinreb, spends time with Bias' mother, as well as a friend of the late Jay Bias, Len's younger brother, who was incarcerated for crack possession (given a sentence that Weinreb points out was three times as long for those of most murderers). As this might suggest, Weinreb ties the Bias story to America's response to crack (Bias OD'ed on powder cocaine, but the death of a young Black man to coca fed legislators' drive to lock up crack users), as well as presenting a fascinating case study of a young athlete caught between life stages and historical eras.


• A NY Times piece about Brandon Jennings, a top high school point guard I'd only recently been hearing about, expected to spend a year playing professionally in Europe. (Here's the King Kaufman column that lead me to it.) This is of course following the, in my opinion, dodgy collusion between the NBA, NCAA, and NBA players' union, to force elite American HS basketball to spend a year working for a college program, where they can risk injury and please boosters under the nurturing, watchful eye of the US sports media. Instead, Jennings will be paid to play, and Jennings and Kaufman assume that his game will develop and he will mature unproblematically, presumably while "dating" supermodels and developing a taste for fine art. I like both these articles and love Jennings' guts and drive here, but I can't help but notice a little idealizing of Ye Olde Worlde in both articles. You think he'll be safe from leeches and hangers on in Europe? He's going to develop financial and social savvy just by walking amongst sophisticated, art-appreciating Europeans? (I don't want to accuse the Times writer, William Rhoden, about whom I know nothing, or Kaufman, who I think is a thoughtful, enjoyable read and probably has a great social conscience, of racism, but I can't help but wonder if many other Americans who think this will be great for the kid think it'll be great for him to not be around so many other Black people.) I'd also like to add, in response to the positive references to the Euro leagues in both of these articles, we're seeing a pretty steady decline since 2001 (I'm referring to the draft that brought in Tony Parker, Pau Gasol [who, at least in this years NBA finals, decided to live up every negative stereotype about European athletes], and Mehmet Okur) in the quality of players who've come from the European leagues, at least in contrast to how highly they've been coveted. European players have been getting drafted way too high ever since the Spurs and the Mavs started making huge leaps with Parker and Dirk Nowitzki, and I have to say I disagree with the notion that Jennings will be playing a higher level of game in Spain than he would at a Big East, ACC, Big Te(leve)n, etc, school. But he won't be contributing to the bogus claim that he'd be there because we all value education. (For the record, I really like college basketball, I just prefer the game itself in the League.)

Anyway, enjoy.

"May your therapist always believe your explanations of why you're unhappy"

I just made up a fake old curse. You can easily turn it into a fake old blessing by inserting "not" before "always," if you're feeling nice.

What do I mean by this curse? I mean that, as a therapist, you might be performing a disservice by accepting your clients' explanations for why they feel the way they do. This seems obvious to anyone thinking in terms of psychological defenses (though I'd suspect that a lot of therapists, myself included, might take it too far, and are more likely to attribute something to defensiveness than to self-insight, but that's another matter), but not to a British pop psychologist.

From salon.com:

An expert has proclaimed that single women, despite their protestations to
the contrary, are completely miserable. According to Pam Spurr, an author and psychologist, single women who assert they are happy with their lives despite "their crushing loneliness and desperation" are not merely deluded, but outright lying. How does she know? Body language.
Upon talking with a woman at a party, who had every semblance of confidence, maturity and fulfillment (every semblance, that is, except for a ring on the all-important finger), the subject of sex and marriage came up. The sex therapist recounts:
"She immediately described herself as happily single. And yet her body language told another story: Chloe crossed her arms defensively over her chest until I just wanted to shout: 'Yes my dear, now try pulling another one.'"
Hmm. You don't suppose her body language seemed defensive because she realized she was talking to a hostile busybody eager to make snap judgments about her life on the spot and write disparagingly about her in an international newspaper, do you?

The Salon poster also makes the excellent point that, in using her patients as her other source of evidence that single women are unhappy, she's using a very skewed sample. (She's also using a skewed sample in that she's only looking at successful professional women in their 20s, 30s and 40s.)
What the poster doesn't point out is that the psychologist in question seems to be taking at face value her patients' assessment of why they are unhappy. This isn't neccessarily a bad thing, but living in a society in which happiness through relationships is such a major talking point, and participating in a sector of the economy (psychotherapy) that produces many ready-made solutions and snap analyses for these problems, patients like those seen by the psychologist in question have a ready-made, easily presented explanation for their malaise. Taking this explanation for granted might be a disservice to her patients, and it's certainly a disservice to anyone listening to your explanation of widespread social phenomena.

(The issue [mostly] overlooked in this very class- and age-specific discussion: are ways of living that are adaptive to upwardly-mobile professionals in their 20s and 30s maladaptive afterward? [The psychologist would be receptive to this argument, and hints at it.] Or are enough people taking on these ways of living that they will develop, as a cohort, adaptive new responses to their situation as they reach their 40s, 50s, and upward [to which I think the salon poster would be receptive], and what are married rich people unhappy about?)

More questionable developmental thinking in sportswriting

In this week's edition of "the deformed lovechild of free darko and fire joe morgan," let's look at one Miami sportswriter's concerns about all-but-certain top-two NBA draft pick Michael Beasley (I put the stuff in bold):

"I'm still a kid," [Beasley] says. "I'm learning day by day."
...From a personal standpoint, that's comforting, considering the pandemonium he has left in his wake.
No, this is not Caron Butler selling drugs and stashing
guns, only to learn ultimate lessons in solitary confinement.
This, instead, is the kid who sees how far he can push,
without ever pushing too far, the kid who places a dead rat in a teacher's
drawer, who signs his name in as many places as possible in prep school, who wore pajamas to his high school cafeteria, who once put glue on his cousin's underwear, who was suspended from kindergarten — yes, kindergarten — for cutting off a girl's pigtail.
The sum total: Banishment from more high schools than there are grades in
high school. In all, he attended seven schools in five states, a journey that
concluded at Notre Dame Prep in Fitchburg, Mass.
Since high school? Nothing more than a speeding violation.
Of course, "since high school" is just one year ago

I'm going to disregard the "banishment from.. high schools" part, after saying: This refers to a Washington Post article from last year that many people who know Beasley, including many quoted and referenced in the article, misrepresents and takes out of context Beasley's short tenure at these schools. (Basically, what all that boiled down to was the Beasley left schools for a variety of somewhat reasonable basketball reasons; "somewhat reasonable" if we consider the common practice of private high schools recruiting 14 year olds, and adults encouraging said kids to transfer schools for the purpose of increasing their exposure to potential endorsers, etc. Ultimately, Beasley left every school with the endorsement and encouragement of supportive adults in his life, who, while certainly having different priorities than I do, sound like they did care about the kid).

Anyway, let me get this straight. You want your reader be concerned that Beasley has certain, shall we say, temperamental or personality traits that will make his legacy more like that of Derrick Coleman or Vin Baker than Malone/Barkley/McHale/whomever. This is a fair concern, I guess, though I think it has more to do with the fact that, in this draft narrative, the other sure-fire top two 19 year old has been fairly arbitrarily granted the status of "mature, wise, non-uppity player," than anything driven by a realistic assessment of these two very young people.

So yeah, assuming this is a fair concern, assuming that Rose's perceived maturity is more a product of his own psychology than that of a tired old sports narrative that gets trotted out whenever we have to compare two hard-to-compare athletes, let's consider the evidence employed here. The writer uses the redemption of Caron Butler, a Racine, Wisconsin native famously "arrested 15 times before he turned 15." (Oooh! Was he the 7th son of a 7th son? Does he like Iron Maiden as much as I do?) Now the writer seems to assume that it was solitary confinement that redeemed Mr. Butler. While I'd really, really doubt that, let's say that something drastic was required to turn Butler away from his life of "selling drugs and stashing guns." The writer also seems to be assuming that Beasley has lacked this character-developing experience to redeem him from his past sins. I don't think that maturity is dependent on trauma, but I'll buy the fact that many times young athletes who've never heard "no" in their life might need a little extra reality check to be the kind of person we might hope.

The premise that I can't buy, not even for a second, is that any of this stuff Beasley did is all that worrisome. Cutting off a girls' pigtail? Cruel if a teenager does it, creepy if an adult does it. If a kindergartner does it? DUDE. THE KID WAS 5. He had NO IDEA what he was doing. (And what is with "-- yes, kindergarten--?" We're not talking about drug dealing or spousal abuse in kindergarten, which would be truly shocking. But anyway.) Playing a scary prank on a teacher? "Graffito tagging," as Marge Simpson worried about? Wearing pajamas in a high school cafeteria? Would this be the high school he attended that consisted of a basketball team and 12 ESL students that exists as an AAU vehicle, or one of his actual high schools? Either way, WHO CARES? Am I so off-base in thinking that this is fairly average behavior for a bored high school boy?

Even if I am off-base, and I'll admit the dead rat is a little creepy, I don't think that anyone sees these as more worrisome than bringing a gun to school, selling crack, and fathering a child at 14. These were things that Caron Butler did as a kid in Racine, and, by all accounts, he's become not only one of the best players in the Eastern Conference, but a really nice guy. Beasley was a kid who never had structure in his high school life, didn't have age-normative social expectations to make use of, and who responded to being treated like a star/investment in a way that many people would-- pushing limits in a relatively nonmalicious way. Ultimately, Beasley's mischevous response to an unstructured, chaotic environment in his teenage years is useless for predicting future behavior.

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.