Daniel Ben-Ami in Spiked:

If Americans had to be described with one word, there’s a good chance it would be ‘fat’. Americans, we are constantly told, are the fattest people on the planet. Obesity is rife. Compared with other nations the Americans are not just big, but super-size.

Yet this obsession with obese Americans is about more than body fat. Certainly there is a debate to be had about the extent to which obesity is a problem in America – a discussion best left to medical experts. But a close examination of the popular genre on obesity reveals it is about more than consumption in the most literal sense of eating food. Obesity has become a metaphor for ‘over-consumption’ more generally. Affluence is blamed not just for bloated bodies, but for a society which is seen as more generally too big for its own good.

It is especially important to examine this criticism of American affluence in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. An assumption underlying much of the discussion is that, at the very least, wealth did America no good in its battle with nature. An editorial in last weekend’s UK Guardian caught the tone: ‘America is the richest and most powerful country on Earth. But its citizens, begging for food, water and help, are suffering agonies more familiar from Sudan and Niger. The worst of the third world has come to the Big Easy.’ The implication is that America’s wealth is somehow pointless.

More here.

Jed Perl in The New Republic:

Something very strange has happened in the past year or so. Knocking the art world has become the latest art world fashion. I am not referring to the voices of dissent that have been heard for decades from artists and critics who operate at the margins. What’s going on now is that a certain disaffection and even disgust has become an insider’s badge of honor, a mark of sophistication, so that artists and critics and curators who frequent the art fairs and auctions where new stars are crowned can be heard bemoaning the corruption of the scene.   

Jerry Saltz, who writes for The Village Voice, personifies this new breed of insider disgruntlement. Writing about Damien Hirst’s astonishingly amateurish photo-realist paintings, which were at the Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea earlier this year, Saltz was dead-on accurate when he observed that “they are onlylabels–carriers of the Hirst brand. They’re like Prada or Gucci. You pay more but get the buzz of a brand.” Given all the attention that was lavished on these wanly rancid snapshots of a hospital corridor, a shelf full of pills, and a drug addict’s face, I can understand why Saltz thought he “heard the Drums of Destiny on the horizon” at Hirst’s “glitzy after-party, in an enormous tent on the roof of Lever House–amid dancing models, reveling stockbrokers and the same successful artists and art world showboats you see at every one of these events.”

More here.

From The Edge:

Let me begin by asking how it is that modern free market economies are as complex as they are, boasting amazingly elaborate production, distribution and communication systems? Go into almost any drug store and you can find your favourite candy bar. And what’s true at the personal level is true at the industrial level. Somehow there are enough ball bearings and computer chips in just the right places in factories all over the country. The physical infrastructure and communication networks are also marvels of integrated complexity. Fuel supplies are, by and large, where they’re needed. Email reaches you in Miami as well as in Milwaukee, not to mention Barcelona and Bangkok.

The natural question, discussed first by Adam Smith and later by Friedrich Hayek and Karl Popper among others, is who designed this marvel of complexity? Which commissar decreed the number of packets of dental floss for each retail outlet? The answer, of course, is that no economic god designed this system. It emerged and grew by itself. No one argues that all the components of the candy bar distribution system must have been put into place at once, or else there would be no Snickers at the corner store.

JOHN ALLEN PAULOS is a professor of mathematics at Temple University. His books include A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market and Innumeracy.

More here.

From Science:

Causing the largest natural disaster in U.S. history, Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast on 29 August with its eye hitting about 55 km east of the city. Although the storm initially brought more destruction to other areas along the Mississippi and Louisiana coast, several levees protecting New Orleans failed the following the day, and the city, about 80% of which is below sea level, filled with water. The floods may have killed thousands, stranded many more, and triggered a massive relief and evacuation effort.

As Katrina traveled through the Gulf of Mexico, unusually warm waters strengthened it into a monster hurricane. According to these models, Katrina’s storm surge should not have submerged the city. Instead of overtopping, the catastrophic collapse of several levees–ones that had been upgraded with a thick concrete wall– apparently sealed the city’s fate.

More here.

From Foreign Affairs:

When Americans were asked to name the most important global problems facing the United States, Iraq and terrorism were the two top concerns. Foreign nations’ negative image of this country ranked number three. These and other findings, released jointly by Public Agenda and Foreign Affairs magazine, are part of the new Public Agenda Confidence in U.S. Foreign Policy Index.

The survey also reveals that American thinking about U.S. relations with the Islamic world is a disquieting mix of high anxiety, growing uncertainly about current policy, and virtually no consensus about what else the country might do…

Strong majorities of the public believe the image of the United States is suffering abroad and large majorities are worried about it. Three-quarters say they worry that “the U.S. may be losing the trust and friendship of people in other countries” and that “there may be growing hatred of the U.S. in Muslim countries.” In both cases, four in ten say they worry “a lot” about this, compared to the one-quarter who say they don’t worry at all. A smaller majority, six in ten, say they’re at least somewhat worried accusations of torture against the U.S. will hurt our image.

More here.

Thomas Powers in the New York Review of Books:

One of the many complexities of the character of J. Robert Oppenheimer is apparent in his response to the discovery of nuclear fission in January 1939. “The U business is unbelievable,” he wrote to a colleague once he had satisfied himself that uranium atoms really did split when bombarded with neutrons. “It is I think exciting, not in the rare way of positrons and mesotrons, but in a good honest practical way.” He meant that fission didn’t turn physics upside down and inside out like so many other discoveries of the first decades of the twentieth century. Fission was as practical as a hammer. The clincher for Oppenheimer was watching the dramatic green spikes on the oscilloscope of the Berkeley physicist Luis Alvarez when an atom split. “In less than fifteen minutes,” Alvarez wrote later,

he not only agreed that the reaction was authentic but also speculated that in the process extra neutrons would boil off that could be used to split more uranium atoms and thereby generate power or make bombs. It was amazing to see how rapidly his mind worked….

The speed of Oppenheimer’s mind would not have surprised those who knew him. At thirty-four Oppenheimer was famously brilliant.

More here.

A British writer bravely attempts to catalog every big concept human civilization has produced.

Merle Rubin in the Christian Science Monitor:

Unlike their American counterparts, who generally aim for objectivity (or at least its appearance) by adopting a more impersonal tone in works of this kind, quite a few British savants (not only Wells and Johnson, but more recently, writers like journalist Paul Johnson in “Modern Times” or literary critic Martin Seymour-Smith in “The New Guide to Modern World Literature”) have not been shy about offering their own views along with the material.

Peter Watson, London-based author of 13 previous books, is no exception.

Having given us “The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century,” he’s now undertaken an even more ambitious project – Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, From Fire to Freud, a bold attempt to summarize the history of ideas from prehistoric times to the early years of the 20th century.

Perhaps it was the lure of alliteration, that led Watson (or his publisher) to single out “fire” and “Freud” in the subtitle. Watson himself is most interested in the ideas that contributed to the development of the natural sciences: This certainly includes fire, although the first primeval “ideas” discussed in his book, even before fire, are scavenging, bipedalism, and stone tools.

As for Freud, however, Watson is clearly no fan, concluding that the influential doctor, his writings, and the whole enterprise of psychoanalysis were – and are – useless fakes.

More here.

Robin Pogrebin in the New York Times:

Even as the federal government and local developers push to resurrect New Orleans as quickly as possible in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, some architects and urban planners are contemplating the larger question of what form the city should take – whether restored, reimagined or something in between…

Among the questions facing architects are whether the city’s footprint should be irrelevant, given that so many residents may not return; whether surviving industries should be pivotal to what is built; whether preservation should trump other priorities; and whether bold new architecture can or should rise from the muck and devastation.

Many experts also warned against moving too quickly, arguing that being away from the city could help residents clarify what was most valued and should be reclaimed.

More here.

Thomai Hatsios brings this to my attention, a letter from Jordan Flaherty:

I just left New Orleans a couple hours ago. I traveled from the apartment I
was staying in by boat to a helicopter to a refugee camp. If anyone wants
to examine the attitude of federal and state officials towards the victims
of hurricane Katrina, I advise you to visit one of the refugee camps.

In the refugee camp I just left, on the I-10 freeway near Causeway,
thousands of people (at least 90% black and poor) stood and squatted in mud
and trash behind metal barricades, under an unforgiving sun, with heavily
armed soldiers standing guard over them. When a bus would come through, it
would stop at a random spot, state police would open a gap in one of the
barricades, and people would rush for the bus, with no information given
about where the bus was going. Once inside (we were told) evacuees would be
told where the bus was taking them – Baton Rouge, Houston, Arkansas, Dallas,
or other locations. I was told that if you boarded a bus bound for Arkansas
(for example), even people with family and a place to stay in Baton Rouge
would not be allowed to get out of the bus as it passed through Baton Rouge.
You had no choice but to go to the shelter in Arkansas. If you had people
willing to come to New Orleans to pick you up, they could not come within 17
miles of the camp.

I traveled throughout the camp and spoke to Red Cross workers, Salvation
Army workers, National Guard, and state police, and although they were
friendly, no one could give me any details on when buses would arrive, how
many, where they would go to, or any other information. I spoke to the
several teams of journalists nearby, and asked if any of them had been able
to get any information from any federal or state officials on any of these
questions, and all of them, from Australian tv to local Fox affiliates
complained of an unorganized, non-communicative, mess. One cameraman told
me “as someone who’s been here in this camp for two days, the only
information I can give you is this: get out by nightfall. You don’t want to
be here at night.”

More here.  [Thanks, Thomai.]

From Scientific American:

In the very first lecture of the Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowship in June, a University of Cambridge biologist assured the 10 journalists in his audience that science and religion have gotten along much better, historically, than is commonly believed. After all, scientific pioneers such as Kepler, Newton, Boyle and even Galileo were all devout Christians; Galileo’s run-in with the Church was really a spat between two different versions of Catholicism. The notion that science and religion have always butted heads is “fallacious,” declared Denis Alexander, who is, not coincidentally, a Christian. Other lecturers, who included four agnostics, a Jew, a deist and 11 Christians, also saw no unbridgeable chasm between science and their faith.

As the two-week meeting unfolded, however, conflict kept disrupting this peaceable kingdom. Lecturers and journalists argued over a host of questions: Without religion, would humanity descend into moral chaos? Are scientific claims in some sense as unprovable as religious ones? Can prayers heal, and if so, is that evidence of the placebo effect or of God’s helping hand? Why does God seem to help some people and ignore others? By the end of the conference, the gulf between science and religion–or at least Christianity–seemed as wide as ever.

(In the picture: Biologist Richard Dawkins (left), an agnostic leaning toward atheism, explains his reasoning to philosopher Nancey Murphy, a materialist who also adheres to nonscientific ideas, such as the resurrection of Christ).

More here.

From The New York Times:

The movie is “March of the Penguins,” and of all the reactions it has evoked, perhaps the most surprising is its appeal to conservatives. They are hardly its only audience; the film is the second highest grossing documentary of all time, behind “Fahrenheit 9/11.” But conservative groups have turned its stirring depiction of the mating ordeals of emperor penguins into an unexpected battle anthem in the culture wars.

“March of the Penguins,” the conservative film critic and radio host Michael Medved said in an interview, is “the motion picture this summer that most passionately affirms traditional norms like monogamy, sacrifice and child rearing.” Speaking of audiences who feel that movies ignore or belittle such themes, he added: “This is the first movie they’ve enjoyed since ‘The Passion of the Christ.’ This is ‘The ‘Passion of the Penguins.’ “

More here.

From CNN:

The ethnically divided Bosnian city of Mostar has agreed to erect a new symbol of unity — a statue of kung fu legend Bruce Lee, worshipped by Muslims, Serbs and Croats.

A group of enthusiasts came up with the idea of honoring the childhood hero of the city’s ethnic groups in 2003, on the 30th anniversary of his death. They launched the project, found donors and waited a year for the city’s approval.

“We plan to erect the statue in November in the center of the city,” Veselin Gatalo, a member of the Urban Movement organization, told Reuters by telephone on Monday.

“This will be a monument to universal justice that Mostar needs more than any other city I know.”

He said Mostar, scene of fighting between Muslims and Croats in 1993-1994, needed a symbol of justice, mastery and honesty — virtues upheld by the late Chinese-American actor.

More here.

From the BBC:

UK scientists have won permission to create a human embryo that will have genetic material from two mothers.

The Newcastle University team will transfer genetic material created when an egg and sperm fuse into another woman’s egg.

The groundbreaking work aims to prevent mothers from passing certain genetic diseases on to their unborn babies.

Such diseases arise from DNA found outside the nucleus, and thus inherited separately from DNA in the nucleus.

More here.

Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow in The Village Voice:

As Hurricane Katrina revealed, these days natural disasters have plenty of human accomplices. Before Katrina flooded the Gulf Coast and the headlines, another “natural” menace—avian flu—had begun to surface in the media. Since 1997, the influenza strain H5N1 has killed dozens in Asia and forced the mass slaughter of chickens. The virus is, as urban-theory star Mike Davis tells the Voice, “the chief bioterrorist in our midst,” poised to explode into a sequel to the 1918–1919 flu epidemic that wiped out up to 5 percent of humanity. In The Monster at Our Door, Davis provides an ominous account of the threat and advises against chalking it up to the whims of Mother Nature. Through dense urban poverty, the Tysonization of poultry farms, and the dithering of government, he argues, we have created this monster.

More here.

Lawrence F. Kaplan in The New Republic:

Without the Cold War,” Rabbit Angstrom asks in John Updike’s Rabbit at Rest, “what’s the point of being an American?” Rabbit’s question, which he posed in 1990, anticipated something in the national mood during the decade that followed. In 1995, social critic Christopher Lasch wrote that the United States had descended into a “democratic malaise,” the most telling symptom of which, Harvard public policy scholar Robert Putnam wrote, was a decline in civic engagement. In his famous essay and then book, Putnam amassed a mountain of evidence–measuring everything from rates of church attendance to participation in bowling leagues–and pronounced that Americans were “bowling alone.” A survey conducted by pollster Daniel Yankelovich in 1995 reported that Americans felt “a sickness in the very soul of society to which they cannot give a name.” For conservatives especially, the ’90s were wasted years, the decade’s signature traits being narcissism, cultural rot, and sheer purposelessness. The coarseness of the public square “has shattered America’s traditional confidence about itself, its mission, its place in the world,” morality czar William Bennett wrote in Commentary.

More here.

Bryan Burrough reviews Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America’s Most Powerful Mafia Empires by Selwyn Raab, in the New York Times:

Earlier this year The Times published a front-page article describing an F.B.I. drive to rid the New York waterfronts of Mafia influence. At first glance the story appeared so anachronistic it was jarring. The Mafia? You mean those guys still exist? Given the fact that New York hasn’t hosted a decent godfather since Sammy the Bull ratted out John Gotti 14 years ago, one might be forgiven for believing that the world of Italian-American organized crime had gone the way of other crumbling pillars of midcentury American culture, like heavyweight boxing, thoroughbred horse racing and the Democratic Party.

But no. Despite a 25-year onslaught by prosecutors armed with high-tech listening devices and racketeering statutes, despite the fact that so many mobsters have been sent away that not one of New York’s infamous ”five families” even has an identifiable godfather at the moment, rumors of the Mafia’s death appear premature. Still, the mob’s influence in the opening years of the 21st century remains a far cry from its glory days, as Selwyn Raab reminds us in his excellent history of the New York Mafia, ”Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America’s Most Powerful Mafia Empires.”

More here.

3QD’s own J.M. Tyree recently published an article about Ignatious Donnelly in The Believer. A.O. Scott of the New York Times mentions it in the Sunday Magazine:

And so The Believer’s content is often as pointedly untimely as its approach is digressive. Some of its best articles dust off the reputations of half-forgotten writers and historical characters – Charles Portis, John Hawkes, Ignatius Donnelly – and the interviews, with the very, the semi-and the narrowly famous, range far beyond the usual plugging of the latest projects. “In October we have David Sedaris talking mostly about monkeys,” Vida said. “What makes it timely is its untimeliness.”

The Believer grew out of the blending of two different ideas – an interview magazine Vida and Eggers were discussing and a book review Julavits was interested in starting. The magazine, which made its debut in March 2003 and has just published its 27th issue, is older than n+1, which is on its third. It is also larger, both in trim size (an eccentric, pleasing-to-hold 8ð by 10 inches, compared with n+1’s more orthodox and bookish 7 by 10) and in circulation. The Believer prints around 15,000 copies of its regular issues, and more of its special issues devoted to music and visual art, while n+1, having sold out its 2,000-copy first issue, has increased its run with every subsequent issue.

More here.

Comedy’s fundamental strategy is that of misdirection. It sets you up for one thing, and — pop! –gives you another. In very direct humor, the moment of revelation, the punch line, can be an authentic surprise: crossing the street with a winning lottery ticket, a man is hit by a car. Or, in more reflexive humor, it can be based on the auditor’s knowledge of other jokes with the same set-up: the chicken crosses the road to get to the other side. Or the punch line can be so simplistically ironic that one wonders how it can possibly suffice: the aristocrats! (This last is the subject of a documentary that penetrates joke culture, revealing another thing: that the teller’s unique charisma has everything to do with the impression a joke makes.) The most critically successful humor of late conducts multiple grades of social observation into wry, overloaded tableaux, always with an overmatched bumbler at the center: David Brent, Larry Sanders, Larry David, and their daddy, Homer J. Simpson.

When we come to mainstream American film comedy, however, we find a different model. Movie comedy has to be pitched at a broad audience that is demographically identified to average out to a post-adolescent male. To find a common denominator amongst that audience, screenwriters tread the line between surprise and disgust. Perhaps the inaugural moment of the current epoch in comedy was Cameron Diaz’s mistakenly applying semen instead of gel to her hair in the Farrelly brothers’ There’s Something About Mary. This episode has all the ingredients of adolescent anxiety dreams: bodies and bodily fluids, combined all wrong; the danger of the intimate other; the safety of retreating to laughter and to one’s “buddies.” It is not hard to see in these fantasias the opposite number to the romantic comedy, which performs many of the same functions from a differently gendered perspective. In any case, this strand of comedy provides a kind of socialization, offering reassuring camaraderie and drawing (by crossing) the boundaries of etiquette for easily embarrassed young males. The humor, then, is a disarming disguise under which threatening topics can be unveiled – perhaps primary among them, male love. It is homosocial comedy.

Twenty years ago, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick published Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. Fully readable today, the book’s analytic clarity made it a touchstone for emergent scholarly inquiries into the social histories of the concepts of gender and sexuality. In her study of Anglo-American masculinity, Sedgwick argues that acceptable heterosexuality is defined, in our culture, against the abject state of homosexuality, with the corollary that whole sets of attitudes, behaviors, and mannerisms exist to reroute forbidden male affection through distancing mechanisms: the shared joy and pain of spectator sports, for instance. Most importantly, for Sedgwick, male homosocial desire is divided from erotic desire, which is homosexual and thus beyond a boundary. (It should be stressed here that Sedgwick does not schematically read all male affection as repressed sexual desire; rather, she holds that cultures define differently what counts as sexuality–as a glance at, say, two Indian men walking down the street holding hands reveals.) Paradoxically, then, much male bonding takes place in nominal relation to women. Talking about women, how to pick them up, what to do when women do this or that thing, boasting of prowess with women: these forms of male bonding reroute what is risky and precarious, male friendship and affection, into a comfortably heterosexual discourse. The consequence of this, unfortunately, is to render women in much male conversation mere objects to be regarded, discussed, frightened of, and obsessed with, from the safe distance of the proverbial frat house.

Such a line of thinking explains much about the fixations of contemporary comedy. Beer commercials, for instance, almost invariably proceed from the axiom: beer and friends reliable, women unreliable. (I would guess that promoting repressed male friendship, which takes an awful lot of beer to lubricate, makes a much better marketing tactic for Anheuser-Busch than promoting heterosexual dating and its two glasses of wine.) Similarly, the film Old School, along with many other homosocial comedies, has as its premise the escape from domesticity, conformity, and women who either suffocate or humiliate, back to a frat house and the alibi of alcohol. When Will Ferrell promises his wife he won’t drink, takes four or five hits from a beer bong, streaks naked down the streets, and finally suffers the humiliation of being driven home by his wife and three female friends (no doubt on their way back from a “rom-com” where they learned to recognize their true Mr. Darcy), the whole thing plays as a cautionary tale on the limits on male erotics and the danger of subverting domestic conformity. Like so many of the films featuring the unofficial company of Ferrell, Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson, and Vince Vaughan, Old School generates humor out of the misdirected shock of hearing forbidden male affection speak its name.

But our culture has changed quite a bit since 1985, the year of Sedgwick’s book. Love does speak its name much more freely now, and the issue for these comedies is not exactly to guard the citadel of patriarchy from queer and possibly pleasant invaders. Instead, I think the constant use of gay themes to generate comedy bespeaks a certain kind of progress, when compared to the eighties’ repressive “buddy pictures,” for which the surfacing of such desires would represent a huge crisis, or the pathological view of alternative genderings on view in films like The Silence of the Lambs or Deliverance. A current beer commercial shows a regular guy amongst superheroes, who are asking him if he has any powers that would allow him to join the crew. He shrugs, then turns his shoe into a Heineken, delighting all, and getting a meaningful glance from a spandex-clad Superwoman. The commercial’s final shot, though, is of a Batman and Robin-like duo, the dom calling out to the beer-shoe guy, “You can room with me!,” while the Robin figure’s face registers shock and hurt. Gay allusions in a beer ad, usually the locus classicus of enforced homosociality? A sort of progress, I suppose, though note it still takes place in proximity to an objectified woman.

The best current example of this outing of subtexts has been made by the on-the-surface classically homosocial film Wedding Crashers. Ostensibly about two aging rakes’ learning to give up the thrill of the chase and substitute real love, the film’s psychic energies are much more concentrated on the de facto marriage of the leads, Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughan. In the first scene, the two divorce lawyers (interesting career choice, huh?) witness a spat between a married couple adjudicating their divorce. In the heat of battle, the wife snarls “White trash! Hillbilly!” before the two learn to compromise and part as friends. Late in the film, their friendship in tatters, Vaughan’s character tells his romantically disconsolate friend that he is getting married. Wilson looks at him, anger building, before letting slip the Freudian: “White trash! Hillbilly!” They make up and Wilson later apologizes to Vaughan for the insults, saying “I don’t even know where that came from!” But we do, if we’ve been paying attention. Their friendship is not dissimilar to a marriage, the film is letting us know, remarkably unthreatened by the homoerotic overtones of such a metaphor.

Max Weber once wrote that cultural reorientations are often sparked by charismatic individuals. If so, Vince Vaughan is that individual. Fearlessly displaying the neuroses underlying his Machiavellian player-tactics, Vaughan spends the movie being humiliated and finding it’s not so bad, while effortlessly keeping his status as the most engaging line-deliverer in American comedy intact. At one point, he is tied to a bed and endures (if not responds to–after all, this is still the mainstream) advances by his fiancee’s gay brother. Instead of being violently repudiated, that brother is later a groomsman at Vaughan’s wedding. If these somewhat generic comedies function as a barometer of our culture’s slowly reorienting mainstream attitudes, then the lightness with which Wedding Crashers is able to play with, instead of police, male affection is a sign of encroaching relaxation. Although women in the film are predictably given not much to do, if indeed it’s becoming more possible for men to express themselves to themselves, maybe we owe Vince Vaughan a beer.

Note: My apologies to S.Z. for the title.

P.S. Regarding the U.S. Open final: A tip of the cap to the majestic Swiss, but my favorite pugilist deserved to win. Lance Armstrong works harder than any other cyclist, and is rewarded by total supremacy. More courageously, Andre Agassi works harder than any other despite the heartbreak of losing the biggest matches. The victory he covets, and the reason he still plays, is to beat the best player in the world, be it Sampras or Federer, in a match of ultimate consequence. That is why he runs hills, lifts weights, endures unanesthetized nine-minute injections to his sciatic nerve. Sadly, he was denied for the fourth time in Flushing Meadows. If there were gods, they would have sped him to victory at one set all, 4-2, 30-love. But there are no gods, only Agassi, doing what he can.

Dispatches:

The Other Sweet Science
Rain in November
Disaster!
On Ethnic Food and People of Color
Aesthetics of Impermance

3QD editor Marko Ahtisaari in an excellent essay posted on his personal blog:

I sit here connected, flying somewhere over Las Vegas. Wireless networks and satellite links combine to draw me online. Right now, finally always on, seems a fitting time to reflect on how we got here and where we should go next.

Introduction: Scale

Next year there will be more than 2 billion mobile phone users in the world. Over the last fifteen years the mobile industry has seen amazing growth. Much of this growth has been in the developed economies but increasingly the value is created in emerging markets.Just as it is difficult to perceive the speed of an airplane from within – blogging over Las Vegas – it is hard to fathom the scale of adoption of mobile technologies. We are numb to it.

How will we explain to our children that before, when you wanted to call someone, you needed to stand against a wall? Mobile phones today have become ubiquitous, embedded into the fabric of everyday life. They have become a mobile essential. If someone owns a mobile phone today it is likely to be one of the three things that she always carries with her, the other two being keys and some form of payment.

What made this growth possible? Where did this massive scale come from? What was the structure of the mobile industry that made reaching this two billion mark possible? Three features stand out:

1. An object with a social function tied to a service. The primary human benefit driving the growth of the mobile industry was that of social interaction, people connecting with each other. Initially this meant calling people – a familiar activity at the time – but with a new twist: the cord had been cut. Over time this began to also mean sending short text messages.

2. Service providers – mobile operators – subsidizing price. To compete for customers those providing voice and messaging services subsidized – in markets where this was legally possibly – the price of the mobile devices in exchange for a longer term customer relationship. As a result end customers rarely saw the full price of the device and the infrastructure combining both devices and networks was rolled out at unprecedented speed.

3. The shift from a familiar collective object to a personal object.The last, and often overlooked, feature of the mobile industry is that it was based on a shift from a familiar collective object – the family phone – to a personal object, the mobile phone. The idea of a personal phone simply did not exist in the popular consciousness 20 years ago.

With this growth, this bigness, came a new communications mass market, some of the most valued brands in the world, and massive economies of scale. And with it came perhaps the strongest example of a hybrid consumer product. The mobile platform – because of it’s scale and it’s focus on the big human fundamental of social interaction – is a center of gravity for other familiar benefits and functionalities. Think of the clock. Imagine how many people wake up to a phone each morning, how many have stopped using a wristwatch. Or, to take a more recent example, the camera is now moving onto the mobile platform.

Against this background of scale I’ll outline seven challenges to our shared mobile future.

1. Reach

The first challenge has to do with increasing access to mobile technologies. How will mobile technologies reach the next 2 billion people? One can raise legitimate concerns about this goal as an end in itself. At the very least enabling people to connect in affordable ways leads predictably to economic growth. Recent research has established that…

More here.

Also in the Boston Review, Rebecca Saxe looks at cognitive psychology and moral reasoning.

“A decade after [James Q.] Wilson’s book [The Moral Sense] was published, the psychological and neural basis of moral reasoning is a rapidly expanding topic of investigation within cognitive science. In the intervening years, new technologies have been invented, and new techniques developed, to probe ever deeper into the structure of human thought. We can now acquire vast numbers of subjects over the Internet, study previously inaccessible populations such as preverbal infants, and, using brain imaging, observe and measure brain activity non-invasively in large numbers of perfectly healthy adults. Inevitably, enthusiasts make sweeping claims about these new technologies and the old mysteries they will leave in their wake. (“The brain does not lie” is a common but odd marketing claim, since in an obvious sense, brains are the only things that ever do.)

The appeal of the new methods is clear: if an aspect of reasoning is genuinely universal, part of the human genetic endowment, then such reasoning might be manifest in massive cross-cultural samples, in subjects not yet exposed to any culture, such as very young infants, and perhaps even in the biological structure of our reasoning organ, the brain.

How far have these technologies come in teaching us new truths about our moral selves? How far could they go? And what will be the implications of a new biopsychological science of natural morality?