Archive for February 2022
How to read ‘Ulysses’? With gratitude.
With gratitude and with others, it would seem. Manisha Aggarwal-Schifellite writes in The Harvard Gazette:
Four years ago, Sorcha Ashe ’22 enrolled in the seminar “Complexity in Works of Art: Ulysses and Hamlet” with a lofty goal: read one of the most challenging novels in the modern English canon.
“‘Ulysses’ has kind of a lore around it as being an impossibly complicated book, and I definitely thought that it was going to be beyond me when I started,” said Ashe, an integrative biology concentrator from St. Paul, Minnesota. “But I had always wanted to read it because my father is Irish and it’s his favorite book.”
Guided by instructor Philip Fisher, Felice Cowl Reid Professor of English, Ashe and her classmates journeyed together through James Joyce’s Irish modernist classic, which was first published in book form in February 1922. The rewards were equal to the task.
“I found it to be one of the most enjoyable reading experiences I’ve ever had,” Ashe said. “To get to talk about those challenging parts and the enjoyable parts with other people made the experience so much more valuable than it would have been if I had read it on my own. It was such a joy to hear different people’s takes on the same set of words.”
Ashe’s struggle and delight with the novel echo century-old refrains from Joyce’s contemporaries. Fellow modernists including Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot reacted with confusion and envy to the author’s combination of rich prose, shifting perspectives, and Homeric allusions in a meandering interior story that spans but a single day.
“Virginia Woolf was quite defensive about ‘Ulysses’ when it came out, because she said it was boring and overrated,” said Beth Blum, an assistant professor of English and Joyce scholar. “But after sitting with it more, she saw what he was trying to do and appreciated it. She began to see that Joyce was, as she put it, trying to get thinking into literature.”
Eliot lamented: “It is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.”
The book’s hold on literary culture is matched by few others, Blum noted. Internet searches yield multiple “how-to” guides for reading the novel, numerous essays debating whether one should even try, and arguments about which version should be read — with or without typos. All of these elements have coalesced into mythology, said Blum.
“Reading a book like ‘Ulysses’ represents a form of cultural capital and education, but the novel is also associated with a more democratic experience of humanity through the common man, Leopold Bloom,” she said, referencing Joyce’s protagonist. “Approaching the novel as a personal challenge allows you to reckon with difficulty and learn to persevere in the face of ambiguity and uncertainty. I think that is part of the reason why it continues to appeal to people and endures.”
Reflecting on her College experience with “Ulysses,” Ashe said the novel altered . . .
Note this post on which edition/printing to read. The inexpensive Kindle editions, for example, are generally from the first printing and riddled with typos.
The Farmers and Gardeners Saving the South’s Signature Green: Collards
I love collard greens and cook them whenever I see them, which up here is not often enough. Debra Freeman writes at Gastro Obscura:
IN THE AMERICAN SOUTH, MANY people have fond memories of a pot of collard greens simmering on the stove for hours, seasoned with a ham hock and stirred by a parent or grandparent. Cousins to cauliflower and broccoli, collards are a hearty green known for their robust, slightly bitter taste and the rich, nutritious “pot liquor” they produce when cooked. These greens and their liquor have been lauded for generations, but few in the South know that there’s more than one kind of collard green. Even fewer know that there are dozens of different varieties, and that many are now on the verge of disappearing forever.
That’s where the Heirloom Collard Project comes in. By distributing and growing rare and unique collards, this massive collaboration has created ties between chefs, gardeners, farmers, and seedsmen who hope to preserve the plant’s genetic diversity.
Collards are not native to the United States. Instead, they’re Eurasian in origin, and ancient Romans and Greeks feasted on them thousands of years ago. As for how they became prevalent in the American South, scholars have a number of theories. Collard seeds may have been brought over from Portugal in the 18th century, or from the British Isles to the early colonies. However, the most prevalent theory is that enslaved Africans introduced them to the region, since collard greens were a staple crop in many parts of Africa. Historian John Egerton, in his 1987 book Southern Food, declared that “from Africa with the people in bondage came new foods,” such as okra, black-eyed peas, yams, and collard greens.
Regardless of when or how they arrived stateside, collard greens flourished in Southern gardens. 20 main varieties, from the Yellow Cabbage collard to the Old Timey Green, established themselves as garden favorites. But after World War II, many Americans moved away from both their farmland and their agricultural lifestyles. One victim of this shift was the collard green. With fewer people farming, variety after variety dropped off the map, leaving only five types that could easily be found—Georgia Green, Champion, Vates, Morris Heading, and Green Glaze.
But five years ago, Ira Wallace and the members of the Seed Savers Exchange asked the USDA for over 60 collard green varieties to plant in Iowa. Wallace, as worker/owner of the cooperatively run Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, had been promoting the versatility and resilience of collards for years. Her inspiration for spearheading the Heirloom Collard Project was a series of photos taken by Edward Davis.
Davis and John Morgan, both geography professors at Emory & Henry College, traversed the South to collect rare heirloom collards between 2003 and 2007. The pair published a book on their quest, Collards: A Southern Tradition from Seed to Table, in 2015. They then gave . . .
Eat more collards.
West Point Expert Gives Ukrainians Advice on Conducting Effective Urban Warfare Against Russian Troops
Open Culture has an interesting column. It begins:
John W. Spencer currently serves as the Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point. He’s also Co-Director of the Urban Warfare Project, and host of the Urban Warfare Project podcast. Ergo, he knows something about urban warfare.
On Twitter, he gave advice to civilians resistors in Ukraine, especially Kyiv, on how to resist the Russian invasions. His tweet thread reads as follows:
- So I’ve been asked what my advice would be to civilian resistors in Ukriane, especially Kyiv. Someone with no military training but wanting to resist. Here are a few things #Kyiv #UkraineUnderAttack :
- You have the power but you have to fight smart. The urban defense is hell for any soldier. It usually take 5 attackers to 1 defender. Russians do not have the numbers. Turn Kyiv and any urban area leading to Kyiv into a porcupine.
- Go out and build obstacles in the streets! Start with any bridge you can find (they should have been destroyed). Block them with cars, trucks, concrete, wood, trash, anything! Then block any spot in the city where there are tall buildings on each side. Already tight areas.
- If it is a street you still need to use. Build a S pattern obstacle that still slows a vehicle down. Think police check point (which you could set up if you wanted to catch saboteurs before military reach your location)
- Once you have obstacles (never stop building). I really mean thousands of barriers/obstacles. You can decided places to fight. Places to shoot from or ambush any soldier or vehicle that stops or slows down at your obstacles.
- Do NOT . . .
Oatmeal cookie dough bites
The Eldest and her two sons (thus my grandsons) are coming for a visit, and I’ve been busy preparing, so blogging has been light and will probably continue to be light for the coming week.
I made this recipe just now, with my results shown above. They are now in the refrigerator, closed up in the storage container shown. It did take about 5 teaspoons of water to get them sticky enough to make them into solid balls. I tried one: very tasty indeed.
As you can see from the recipe at the link, these are good whole-food plant-based treats — for example, no refined sugar.
Great shave — Before, during, and after
Before the shave itself was the prep, of course: Grooming Dept Moisturizing Pre-Shave and then a wonderful lather from Tallow + Steel’s Cognac shave soap (whose ingredients are well described on this page). The lather, easily aroused with my Simpson Persian Jar 2 Super, was thick, creamy, and slick, and the fragrance is a delight:
Cognac (38%) | Oakwood (21%) | Vanilla (18%) | Orange (8%) | Tobacco (7%) | Cocoa (6%) | Jasmine (2%) | 100% natural aromatic extracts from botanicals.
The razor today is the excellent iKon Shavecraft X3, here mounted on a RazoRock Barber Pole handle, a handle that is one of my favorites. Three passes left my face perfectly smooth.
The blade is a Astra Keramik Platinum, no longer made, but when it was made, it — like many other excellent brands — was made in St. Petersburg, Russia. Russia — aye, there’s the rub, for who knows how much longer blades will be available from that source? Sharpologist has a list of brands that come from St. Petersburg. You might want to stock up while retailers still have a supply.
And after the shave, one naturally experiences the aftershave. And this aftershave! Smells good, feels good, is good — and here’s why:
Aftershave Ingredients
Organic Witch Hazel
A liquid that is distilled from the dried leaves, bark, and twigs of the Hamamelis virginianaor witch hazel shrub. Native Americans have long appreciated the medicinal properties of witch hazel and used the boiled plant parts to treat skin irritations and tumors. This herbal remedy is recognized world-wide as a natural cleanser and toner. Our witch hazel is certified organic.
Organic Aloe Vera
Aloe Vera is a clear gel coming from Aloe Vera leaves. Aloe vera contains many vitamins and minerals, and is an excellent treatment for burns, wounds, and inflammatory skin conditions. Our aloe vera is GMO-free and certified organic.
Organic Glycerin
Vegetable glycerin is an odorless liquid produced from plant oils. Glycerin is a great moisturizer and provides softening benefits for the skin. Our glycerin is GMO-free and certified organic.
Organic Rose Hydrosol
Also known as rose flower water, rose hydrosol is the aqueous product of rose distillation and carries the hydrophilic properties (water-soluble components) of the plant. Our rose hydrosol is certified organic.
Organic Calendula Hydrosol
Also known as calendula flower water, calendula hydrosol is the aqueous product of calendula distillation and carries the hydrophilic properties (water-soluble components) of the plant. Our calendula hydrosol is certified organic.
Alcohol
This alcohol is from the distillation of our organic witch hazel and acts a preservative for the aftershave.
Organic Quillaja Extract
Quillaja extract comes from the bark of the Quillaja Saponaria, or soap bark tree from Chile.
Organic Cucumber Extract
Cucumbers contain vitamin C, and plenty of vitamin K, both antioxidants, which fight dark circles under the eyes. This is why a couple of cucumber slices placed over tired, puffy eyes in the morning makes you look refreshed. Pantothenic acid, or vitamin B-5, is another compound found in cucumbers that helps your skin retain moisture. The vitamin A, or retinol, in cucumbers fights dark spots and freckles because it helps control your skin’s production of melanin.
Organic Licorice Root Extract
Licorice Root has been used for its health benefits as far back as ancient China. The syrupy juice from the herb’s root contains beneficial plant sterols, which promote skin elasticity and fight inflammation and wrinkle formation. Licorice root also contains glycyrrhizin, an acid that plays a role in increasing steroid hormones that naturally occur in skin.
Organic Rosemary Extract
Rosemary has antimicrobial and antiseptic qualities that make it beneficial in efforts to eliminate eczema, dermatitis, oily skin, and acne. We use it also as a natural preservative to help keep our aftershaves fresh, allowing us to avoid chemical preservatives.
Organic Willow Bark Extract
Willow Bark is beneficial for the skin due to its astringent, anti-inflammatory, soothing and conditioning properties.
Willow Bark contains salicylic acid which is created by the conversion of salicin to this acid compound. A 2010 study reported that salicin can help reduce the visible signs of skin aging. Researchers applied a serum product containing 0.5 percent salicin on the faces of women aged 35 to 70, every day for 12 weeks. Results showed significant improvements in wrinkles, roughness, pore size, radiance, and overall appearance after only one week, with additional improvements in hyper-pigmentation, firmness, and jawline contour after four weeks.
Leuconostoc / Radish Root Ferment Filtrate
A natural preservative derived from radishes fermented with Leuconostoc kimchii, a lactic acid bacteria.
Coconut Fruit Extract + Lactobacillus
A natural preservative derived from fermenting Coconut fruit with Lactobacillus.
Natural Fragrance (Botanical Extracts)
Natural fragrance materials – those extracted from botanicals. This means aromatic extracts like essential oils (from steam distillation), absolutes and resins (from solvent extraction), CO2 extracts (from supercritical carbon dioxide extraction), or infusions.
Meet the Texan Trolling for Putin
Back in April 2018 Sonia Smith wrote an article in the Texas Monthly that is newly interesting:
At first, Russell Bonner Bentley III wasn’t sure he would survive the winter. It was January 2015 in Donetsk, a war-torn city in eastern Ukraine, and the 54-year-old Texan was sequestered inside an abandoned three-story brick monastery, exchanging fire with Ukrainian troops. He and the dozen men fighting with him had been braving freezing temperatures for weeks. From the second floor, Bentley trained his rocket-propelled grenade launcher and his Kalashnikov rifle out of a tiny slit in the side of the building. There was no electricity or running water, and wood-fired stoves provided the only warmth. “The wind came from the south, and it would blow the smoke right back into the rooms,” he recalled.
Bentley had been husky and out of shape when he’d arrived a month earlier, but on a battlefield diet of tinned meat and buckwheat porridge, the weight was melting off. With bright white shoulder-length hair and clear green eyes, Bentley had a well-developed sense of his own myth. He had led something of a swashbuckling life; he’d been an Army engineer based in Germany, a hard-partying musician in South Padre, a marijuana legalization activist in Minnesota and Alaska, and a drug trafficker on the run from the U.S. Marshals. In the early nineties, he’d even vied for a seat in the U.S. Senate.
But nothing he’d ever done compared to this. He’d been drawn into the conflict while tapping away at his laptop in early 2014. He was living in Round Rock at the time, and though Russia’s involvement in the fight—first invading Crimea, a peninsula in the south of Ukraine, and then supporting pro-Russian separatists who led an uprising in the eastern Ukrainian region of Donbass—was denounced across the globe, Bentley immersed himself in Russian media sources that blamed the war on “U.S.-backed Nazis.” He imagined the struggle as something akin to the Spanish Civil War, which had been famously portrayed by writers such as Ernest Hemingway as a fight between democracy and fascism. He began fantasizing about banding together with like-minded freedom fighters against so-called “Ukrainian fascism,” and months later he started planning his journey to Donetsk.
He arrived in early December 2014, and after a week he found a militia group, the Vostok Battalion, that was accepting foreign fighters. It was led by Alexander Khodakovsky, a then 42-year-old who has since been sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department “for being responsible for or complicit in actions or policies that threaten the peace, security, stability, sovereignty, or territorial integrity of Ukraine.” After enlisting, he went through two weeks of rudimentary military training and then settled into a unit called Sut’ Vremeni, or “Essence of Time,” a Stalinist communist movement. When he was asked to select his nom de guerre, Bentley, a fourth-generation Texan, anointed himself “Texas,” pronounced in Russian like the Spanish “Tejas.”
He quickly made a name for himself in combat. “Texas showed himself to be a good, hardy fighter, and an excellent machine gunner,” a writer for Sut’ Vremeni’s newspaper once noted. In battle, Bentley often wore a straw cowboy hat that he’d adorned with a red Soviet star.
Each evening at the monastery, he entertained his bunkmates by strumming his guitar and singing in pidgin Russian. At night they were careful to walk the hallways in total darkness, lest the beam from a flashlight attract the eye of a Ukrainian sniper. Once, a mortar struck the wall directly outside the room where Bentley was sleeping, sending shrapnel into his sleeping bag. He escaped unscathed.
One drizzly day in March 2015, a news crew from Ruptly, an English-language streaming video service affiliated with the Russian news channel RT (formerly known as Russia Today), stopped by Vostok’s base to report on the war. Bentley agreed to an interview. Wearing a green coat layered over his dusty black flak jacket, he focused just above the camera as he spoke. Behind him, a red Soviet Banner of Victory hung on the wall. “I’ve seen a lot of death and destruction. And I know that every person that’s been killed, every house that’s been burned, every bullet hole in every fence, every hungry dog, all the troubles of this war are because of the decisions of the United States and the influence of the United States,” he said, expertly peddling the Kremlin’s narrative of the conflict. He rested his hands—grubby from a stretch of days without a proper shower—on his AK-74, which was balanced across his lap. “I felt a responsibility to come here and show the people of Donbass and the world that not everyone in the United States supports the fascist government of the United States that supports the Nazi government of Ukraine.”
It was his first appearance on Russian state media, but it wouldn’t be his last.
That same month, while Bentley was still hoisting a grenade launcher, Russian defense minister Sergei Shoigu took the stage at a ministry awards ceremony in Moscow for war correspondents. Looking out at a crowd of reporters, propagandists, and members of the military, he described journalists as “a kind of weapon” and explained that “the day has come when we’ve all recognized that words, cameras, photographs, the internet—and information in general—have become another kind of weapon, another branch of the armed forces.”
Since the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the words “Russian meddling” have seemed almost permanently lodged in the tickers of cable news stations. A declassified U.S. intelligence memo released two weeks before Donald Trump’s inauguration concluded with “high confidence” that Putin himself gave an order to launch an influence campaign aimed at “undermin[ing] the US-led liberal democratic order.” From there, the revelations snowballed, eventually ensnaring a host of public officials and private entities, including Facebook, which accepted payments from Russian-backed groups that used the social media platform to target U.S. voters. This February, special counsel Robert Mueller alleged in an indictment that the Internet Research Agency, a troll farm based in a drab office building in St. Petersburg and allegedly funded by Kremlin-linked oligarch Evgeny Prigozhin, “began operations to interfere with the U.S. political system” as early as 2014.
Though Moscow has been transmitting propaganda and dezinformatsiya, or disinformation, since the Soviets came to power in 1922, the propaganda’s tenor and volume have sharpened and increased over the past decade. At a NATO summit in Wales in September 2014, U.S. general Philip Breedlove described Russia’s actions as “the most amazing information warfare blitzkrieg we have ever seen in the history of information warfare.”
The Russian propaganda campaign employs what political scientists from the nonpartisan RAND Corporation have termed the “firehose of falsehood” model: basically, an overwhelming number of half-truths and outright lies are spewed across a dizzying array of media channels. The goal is to sow confusion and exploit existing rifts inside Western democracies. And in 2008, around the time that Russia began refining this new model of disinformation warfare, there was plenty of internal unrest to exploit.
The Great Recession had given rise to political upheaval across the West. In the U.S., demonstrators protested near Wall Street when investment banks were bailed out after causing the economy to tank, and the populist anger spawned movements as varied as Occupy Wall Street and the tea party. In turn, the Russian propaganda machine exploited unsettling questions about economic inequality, globalization, and free trade. RT, the Kremlin’s biggest foreign-facing megaphone (founded in 2005 to, in Putin’s words, “try to break the Anglo-Saxon monopoly on the global information streams”), offered wall-to-wall coverage of the Occupy movement. The channel’s editor in chief, Margarita Simonyan, later characterized this coverage as “information warfare” meant to propagate discontent in the U.S.
RT and others seized on the global migrant crisis to cultivate fears about security and identity. The Internet Research Agency, for example, created a Facebook page called “The Heart of Texas” to promote Texas secession, and it accumulated more than 225,000 fans before it was shut down late last summer. In May 2016 the group organized a rally outside a Houston mosque called “Stop Islamization of Texas.” Another troll-operated Facebook page, the “United Muslims of America,” was used to organize a simultaneous counterprotest. “What neither side could have known is that Russian trolls were encouraging both sides to battle in the streets and create division between real Americans,” Senator Richard Burr said at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing last November. Even now the American public is only beginning to grapple with the scope and effectiveness of the Russian campaign—and the extent to which people like Bentley are unwittingly drawn in.
In the waning days of 2013, Bentley couldn’t . . .
Lesson From Ukraine: Breaking Promises to Small Countries Means They’ll Never Give Up Nukes
Murtaza Hussain writes in The Intercept:
UKRAINE WAS ONCE home to thousands of nuclear weapons. The weapons were stationed there by the Soviet Union and inherited by Ukraine when, at the end of the Cold War, it became independent. It was the third-largest nuclear arsenal on Earth. During an optimistic moment in the early 1990s, Ukraine’s leadership made what today seems like a fateful decision: to disarm the country and abandon those terrifying weapons, in exchange for signed guarantees from the international community ensuring its future security.
The decision to disarm was portrayed at the time as a means of ensuring Ukraine’s security through agreements with the international community — which was exerting pressure over the issue — rather than through the more economically and politically costly path of maintaining its own nuclear program. Today, with Ukraine being swarmed by heavily armed invading Russian troops bristling with weaponry and little prospect of defense from its erstwhile friends abroad, that decision is looking like a bad one.
The tragedy now unfolding in Ukraine is underlining a broader principle clearly seen around the world: Nations that sacrifice their nuclear deterrents in exchange for promises of international goodwill are often signing their own death warrants. In a world bristling with weapons with the potential to end human civilization, nonproliferation itself is a morally worthwhile and even necessary goal. But the experience of countries that actually have disarmed is likely to lead more of them to conclude otherwise in future.
The betrayal of Ukrainians in particular cannot be understated. In 1994, the Ukrainian government signed a memorandum that brought its country into the global Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty while formally relinquishing its status as a nuclear state. The text of that agreement stated that in exchange for the step, the “Russian Federation, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the United States of America reaffirm their obligation to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine.”
Ukraine’s territorial integrity has not been much respected since. After the 2014 annexation of the Ukrainian territory of Crimea by Russia — which brought no serious international response — Ukrainian leaders had already begun to think twice about the virtues of the agreement they had signed just two decades earlier. Today they sound positively bitter about it.
“We gave away the capability for nothing,” Andriy Zahorodniuk, a former defense minister of Ukraine, said this month about his nation’s former nuclear weapons. “Now, every time somebody offers us to sign a strip of paper, the response is, ‘Thank you very much. We already had one of those some time ago.’”
UKRAINIANS ARE NOT the only ones who have come to regret signing away their nuclear weapons. In 2003, Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi made a surprise announcement that his nation would abandon its nuclear program and chemical weapons in exchange for normalization with the West.
“Libya stands as one of the few countries to have voluntarily abandoned its WMD programs,” wrote Judith Miller a few years later in an article about the decision headlined “Gadhafi’s Leap of Faith.” Miller, then just out of the New York Times, added that the White House had opted “to make Libya a true model for the region” by helping encourage other states with nuclear programs to follow Gaddafi’s example.
Libya kept moving forward. It signed on to an additional protocol of the International Atomic Energy Agency allowing for extensive international monitoring of nuclear reserves. In return, sanctions against the country were lifted and relations between Washington and Tripoli, severed during the Cold War, were reestablished. Gaddafi and his family spent a few years building ties with Western elites, and all seemed to be going well for the Libyan dictator.
Then came the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings. Gaddafi found that the same world leaders who had ostensibly become his economic partners and diplomatic allies were suddenly providing decisive military aid to his opposition — even cheering on his own death.
Promises, betrayals, aggression: It’s a pattern that extends even to countries that have merely considered foreclosing their avenues to a nuclear deterrent.
Take Iran: In 2015, the Islamic Republic signed a comprehensive nuclear deal with the U.S. that limited its possible breakout capacity toward building a nuclear weapon and provided extensive monitoring of its civilian nuclear program. Not long afterward, the agreement was violated by the Trump administration, despite the country’s own continued compliance. Since 2016, when Trump left the deal, Iran has been hit with crushing international sanctions that have devastated its economy and been subjected to a campaign of assassination targeting its senior military leadership.
The nuclear deal was characterized at the time as the first step toward a broader set of talks over regional disputes between Iranian and U.S. leaders, who had been alienated since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Instead, the deal marked another bitter chapter in the long-troubled relationship between the two countries.
To date, no nuclear-armed state has ever faced a full-scale invasion by a foreign power, regardless of its own actions. North Korea has managed to keep its hermetic political system intact for decades despite tensions with the international community. North Korean officials have even cited the example of Libya in discussing their own weapons. In 2011, as bombs rained down on Gaddafi’s government, a North Korean foreign ministry official said, “The Libyan crisis is teaching the international community a grave lesson.” That official went on to refer to giving up weapons in signed agreements as “an invasion tactic to disarm the country.”
Perhaps the starkest contrast to the treatment of Ukraine, Libya, and Iran, however, is . . .
The US doesn’t keep its end of the bargain. Nations realize that now.
Updated homemade salad dressing replacement for Panera salad dressing
In an earlier post, I explained why I dumped out the Panera salad dressing I had just purchased, and gave a recipe for a replacement (which I poured into the Panera bottle).
When I made that batch of salad dressing, I used a relatively inexpensive extra-virgin olive oil from a local Syrian delicatessen whose owner said it was made from olives on his family’s land in Syria. One problem in buying extra-virgin olive oil is that all too often what is labeled as “extra-virgin olive oil” is some concoction that contains only some EVOO. Whatever was in the bottle I bought did not taste all that good and also made me feel queasy after i had some.
Lesson learned: Be sure of the brand and origin of the EVOO you buy. I discarded the (large) bottle I had purchased and bought a new supply of a reliable brand (Partanna).
And today I made a new batch of the salad dress, using Partanna EVOO. This time I had the inspiration to use my immersion blender, which blended the dressing much better than my whisking did, and also made it easy to add the oil slowly as I continued blending. The result is an excellent salad dressing, and that it was so easy to make is a (big) bonus.
Historic sanctions on Russia had roots in Zelensky’s emotional appeal
David J. Lynch, Michael Birnbaum, Ellen Nakashima, and Paul Sonne report in the Washington Post (gift link, no paywall):
As the leaders of the European Union gathered for an emergency summit on Thursday night, momentum was already moving toward imposing tough new sanctions on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine.
But a handful of key leaders — notably including German Chancellor Olaf Scholz — were reluctant to proceed with some of the harshest proposals. Scholz told reporters on the way into the leaders-only meeting that he wanted to focus on implementing sanctions that had already been approved before enacting new ones.
After a perfunctory debate, the presidents and prime ministers quickly approved sanctions on Russian President Vladimir Putin, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and some of Russia’s biggest banks. Talk of barring Russia from the global financial messaging system known as SWIFT, however, stalled amid skepticism on the part of Scholz and the leaders of Austria, Italy and Cyprus.
Volodymyr Zelensky dialed into the meeting via teleconference with a bracing appeal that left some of the world-weary politicians with watery eyes. In just five minutes, Zelensky — speaking from the battlefields of Kyiv — pleaded with European leaders for an honest assessment of his country’s ambition to join the EU and for genuine help in its fight with the Russian invaders. Food, ammunition, fuel, sanctions — Ukraine needed its European neighbors to step up with all of it.
“It was extremely, extremely emotional,” said a European official briefed on the call. “He was essentially saying: ‘Look, we are here dying for European ideals.”
Before disconnecting the video call, Zelensky told the gathering matter-of-factly that it might be the last time they saw him alive, according to a senior E.U. official who was present.
Just that quickly, the Ukrainian president’s personal appeal overwhelmed European leaders’ resistance to imposing measures that could drive the Russian economy into a state of near collapse. The result has been a rapid-fire series of developments boosting Ukraine’s long shot fight to hold off the Russian military and shattering long standing limits on European assertiveness in national security affairs.
The actions culminated on Saturday, when the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom and the European Union announced they would bar several major Russian banks from SWIFT, crack down on Russian oligarchs, and prevent the Russian central bank from bailing out the domestic economy. The actions led Russians to crowd ATMs in a desperate bid to withdraw cash and sparked a furious response from Putin, who called them “illegitimate” and ordered his nuclear forces to a higher state of alert.
The latest sanctions mean the western allies are effectively waging financial war against Russia, matching Moscow’s military offensive in Ukraine with attacks on the intangible assets comprising a $1.5 trillion economy.
“We’re not going to fight with bullets. We’re going to choke them financially,” said Marc Chandler, chief market strategist at Bannockburn Global Forex.
European and U.S. officials were expected to make public details of the new sanctions late Sunday, before financial markets open in Asia. But even before they have taken effect, the Russian financial system is wobbling.
The ruble, which already was near a historic low against the dollar, plunged in informal trading in Moscow.
On Sunday, the fraying of Russia’s ties with the global economy accelerated. The European Union closed its airspace to Russian aircraft and announced it would fund the purchase of weapons for the first time in what European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen called a “watershed moment.”
The oil giant BP said it would exit its 19.75 percent stake in the Russian energy company Rosneft. Two BP-nominated directors — CEO Bernard Looney and former group CEO Robert Dudley — have resigned from the Rosneft board, effective immediately. And FedEx and United Parcel Service both announced they have suspended shipments to Russia.
On Saturday, the credit ratings agency Standard & Poor’s cut Russia’s government debt rating to “junk.” That will force the . . .
Continue reading. Again: it’s a gift link, which bypasses paywall.
Why Humans Wage War
Nautilus in January of last year had an interesting interview of Margaret MacMillan by Steve Paulson, which began:
In 1991 two hikers in the Italian Alps stumbled on a mummified body buried in the ice. The Iceman, it turned out, died more than 5,000 years ago. At first, archeologists assumed he’d fallen in a snowstorm and frozen to death. Then they discovered various cuts and bruises on his body and an arrowhead embedded in his shoulder. They also found traces of blood on the stone knife he was carrying. Most likely, he died fighting.
Canadian historian Margaret MacMillan regards the Iceman story as emblematic of our violent tendencies. Humans are a quarrelsome lot with a special talent for waging war. In her book War: How Conflict Shaped Us, she argues that warfare is so deeply embedded in human history that we barely recognize its ripple effects. Some are obvious, like the rise and fall of nations, but others can be surprising. For all that we cherish peace, war has also galvanized social and political change, sometimes for the better. It’s also sparked scientific advances.
MacMillan is the author of several highly regarded histories of war and peace. She also has a personal interest in this subject. Her father and both her grandfathers served in wars, and her great grandfather was David Lloyd George, Britain’s prime minister during World War I. But she says her family history isn’t that unusual. “I’m in my 70s and most of us have had family members who were in the First World War or the Second World War or knew someone who was in either war,” she told me.
MacMillan synthesizes a vast body of literature about war, from battlefield accounts to theories of war, and she shows how new technologies and weaponry have repeatedly changed the course of history. As I discovered during our conversation, she’s especially interested in the question she poses at the beginning of her book: “Does war bring out the bestial side of human nature or the best?”
Do you think human beings are inherently violent?
I come down on the side that we’re not inherently violent but we may have violent tendencies that evolution has left us. When we’re afraid, we have a tendency to lash out, but I don’t think that means we are necessarily violent. We often see examples of altruism and people living together. What is more important is why people fight—and I’m thinking of war, not just random one-on-one fighting. People fight wars because of organization, ideas, and cultural values. The more organized we are, unfortunately, the better we seem to get at fighting. War is very organized. It’s not the brawl you get outside a bar or the random violence you might get when someone feels frightened.
Steven Pinker says human beings are getting less violent, especially since the Enlightenment. What do you think of his argument?
It’s a very interesting argument, which he makes with great evidence and subtlety. We no longer have prizefights where people batter each other to death. We no longer have public executions. And in most developed societies and many less developed societies, the homicide rates are way down. Your own country, the United States, is something of an outlier there. I think his argument that we are becoming more peaceful in domestic societies is right. But I don’t think that’s war. War is something different.
There’s a very interesting counterargument by Richard Wrangham called “the goodness paradox.” He argues that we have, in fact, become nicer and less violent as individuals. We may have domesticated ourselves by our choice of mates and by breeding out those who are most violent, or killing those who are most violent among us, like the way wolves have been domesticated into friendly dogs who sit on your lap. We may have become nicer as individuals, but we’ve also become better at organizing and using purposive violence. That’s the paradox. We’ve gotten better at making war even as we’ve become nicer people.
Isn’t waging war actually uncommon in the animal kingdom?
Well, our nearest cousins, the chimpanzees, do seem to wage war. Chimpanzees will stake out their own territory and male chimpanzees will go out in bands to patrol that territory. If an unfortunate chimpanzee from another band stumbles into that territory, the chimpanzees will gang up and kill the intruder. But our other close cousins in the animal kingdom, the bonobo, do live in harmony and peace and don’t react with violence to outside bonobos coming in. It may be because chimpanzees have natural predators and bonobos, for geographical reasons, don’t.
It’s worth pointing out that bonobos are matriarchal, whereas chimpanzees are dominated by the big males.
And that leads to a very interesting speculation. Are men more likely to . . .
The Uncanny Valley of Xenobots
Marco Altimarano writes in Nautilus:
They appear, at first, like so many toy tops spinning around a petri dish, etching squiggly patterns on the plate as if it were an ice rink. But soon enough, their work makes you realize that these tiny dervishes are, unmistakably, alive. You are in the presence of xenobots, which a few years ago made headlines as the world’s first living robots: computer-modeled critters that can perform useful tasks and even repair themselves. Recently, these manufactured organisms showed off yet another hallmark of life: Xenobots are the first created organisms that can self-replicate.
The four scientists that created the xenobots—computer scientist Josh Bongard, Tufts University biologists Michael Levin and Doug Blackiston, and roboticist Samuel Kriegman—are a motley crew and, when together, even they find it hard to resist the “roboticist, computer scientist, and two biologists walk into a bar” joke. In their recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, published in December 2021, the researchers say that the abilities of their xenobots suggest that “future technologies may, with little outside guidance, become more useful as they spread, and that life harbors surprising behaviors just below the surface, waiting to be uncovered.” They also incorporate their creator’s diverse backgrounds: At once designed by a computer and completely organic, xenobots challenge the boundary between biology and robotics, and they promise to change how we think about life and technology.
We normally think of robots in a Star Wars mold—shiny droids with English accents that co-pilot spaceships, and darling custodian droids that produce brooms and dustpans from their stumpy casings like progenitors of the Roomba. The creation of xenobots, however, suggests a much different trajectory for robots: life forms that are programmable yet completely bereft of computer chips and silicon. Instead of droids and Roombas, the robots of the future might resemble a school of tadpoles collecting microplastics from the ocean or a colony of ants piling contaminants from polluted soil.
“Xenobots are actually closer to the original concept of a robot,” Bongard, an evolutionary roboticist at the University of Vermont, says, noting that the word “robot” actually comes from a play written over 100 years ago called Rossum’s Universal Robots, where robots were made with some strange biological muck, not metal. “So robots were originally conceived as something already between machine and organism. It was only after the technological revolution that we started to think of robots as C3PO.”
The idea of a machine that can create other machines has long been a dream of robotics. In the 1940s, the polymath scientist and engineer John von Neumann conceived of large-scale self-replicating machines that would take raw materials from their surroundings in order to duplicate themselves. This became a nightmare in science-fiction tales like The Matrix, which presented a post-apocalyptic world where colossal, dark-metaled robots took us as their source material, transforming human bodies into batteries. But Levin, who specializes in regenerative medicine at Tufts University, finds this worry a little far-fetched.
“In a world full of human engineered pathogens and genetically modified organisms,” Levin says, “it’s surprising anyone would be worried about xenobots when we can control their tiny existences and engineer their lifespans.” Blackiston, a frequent collaborator with Levin, says, “We’ve seen that happen with invasive species and genetically modified organisms, but this isn’t that kind of system.” Xenobots are not like genetically engineered organisms, like the modified mosquitoes released last year in Florida. “This is a really contrived, petri dish system,” Blackiston says, “so unless you have an impossible amount of frog stem cells that are for some reason in your pond or local environment, this is not a system you’ll ever see replicate in the wild.”
Xenobots are made from embryonic cells of the African clawed frog Xenopus laevis, the darling amphibian of biology on account of the 10,000 eggs that they lay, each of which “develop into perfect little embryos in front of your eyes in a petri dish, allowing them to be manipulated more easily than, say, a mouse embryo, which grows internally so it’s harder to get to,” Levin says. “But there’s nothing magical about frog cells that are causing this. Any embryo skin cells can be transformed into a xenobot.”
Normally, of course, if you remove a skin cell from a creature, you get a dead skin cell. “What’s interesting here is that . . .
An international political paradigm shift
Heather Cox Richardson writes:
We are in what feels like a moment of paradigm shift.
On this, the third day of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, it appears the invasion is not going the way Russian president Vladimir Putin hoped. The Russians do not control the airspace over the country, and, as of tonight, despite fierce fighting that has taken at least 198 Ukrainian lives, all major Ukrainian cities remain in Ukrainian hands. Now it appears that Russia’s plan for a quick win has made supply lines vulnerable because military planners did not anticipate needing to resupply fuel and ammunition. In a sign that Putin recognizes how unpopular this war is at home, the government is restricting access to information about it.
Russia needed to win before other countries had time to protest or organize and impose the severe economic repercussions they had threatened; the delay has given the world community time to put those repercussions into place.
Today, the U.S. and European allies announced they would block Russia’s access to its foreign currency reserves in the West, about $640 billion, essentially freezing its assets. They will also bar certain Russian banks from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication system, known as SWIFT, which essentially means they will not be able to participate in the international financial system. Lawmakers expect these measures to wreak havoc on Russia’s economy.
The Ukrainian people have done far more than hold off Putin’s horrific attack on their country. Their refusal to permit a corrupt oligarch to take over their homeland and replace their democracy with authoritarianism has inspired the people of democracies around the world.
The colors of the Ukrainian flag are lighting up buildings across North America and Europe and musical performances are beginning with the Ukrainian anthem. Protesters are marching and holding vigils for Ukraine. The answer of the soldier on Ukraine’s Snake Island to the Russian warship when it demanded that he and his 12 compatriots lay down their weapons became instantly iconic. He answered: “Russian warship: Go f**k yourself.”
That defiance against what seemed initially to be an overwhelming military assault has given Ukraine a psychological edge over the Russians, some of whom seem bewildered at what they are doing in Ukraine. It has also offered hope that the rising authoritarianism in the world is not destined to destroy democracy, that authoritarians are not as strong as they have projected.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has stepped into this moment as the hero of his nation and an answer to the bullying authoritarianism that in America has lately been mistaken for strength. Zelensky was an actor, after all, and clearly understands how to perform a role, especially such a vital one as fate has thrust on him.
Zelensky is the man former president Donald Trump tried in July 2019 to bully into helping him rig the 2020 U.S. election. Then, Trump threatened to withhold the money Congress had appropriated to help Ukraine resist Russian expansion until Zelensky announced an investigation of Joe Biden’s son Hunter.
Since the invasion, Zelensky has rallied his people by fighting for Kyiv both literally and metaphorically. He is releasing videos from the streets of Kyiv alongside his government officers, and has been photographed in military garb on the streets. Offered evacuation out of the country by the U.S., he answered, “I need ammunition, not a ride.” His courage and determination have boosted the morale of those defending their country against invaders and, in turn, captured the imagination of people around the world hoping to stem the recent growth of authoritarianism, who are now making him—and Ukraine—an icon of courage and principle.
In a sign of which way the wind is blowing, today Czech president Miloš Zeman and Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orbán, both of whom have nurtured friendly relations with Putin, came out against the invasion. Zeman called for Russia to be thrown out of SWIFT; Orbán said he would not oppose sanctions. Even Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson has begun to backpedal on his enthusiasm for Russia’s side in this war.
Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who was part of the scheme to get Zelensky to announce an investigation of Hunter Biden, today got in on the act of defending Ukraine. He tweeted: “The Ukrainian People are fighting for freedom from tyranny. Whether you realize or not, they are fighting for you and me.” But then he continued: “And our current administration is doing the minimum to support them, even though Biden’s colossal weakness and ineptitude helped to embolden Putin to do it.”
The right-wing talking point that Biden is weak and inept and therefore emboldened Putin to invade Ukraine is belied by the united front the western world is presenting. After the former president tried to weaken NATO and even discussed withdrawing from the treaty, Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have managed to strengthen the alliance again. They have brought . . .
Continue reading.
Dead Soul: Vladimir Putin
Vanity Fair allows non-subscribers to read one article for free. This October 2008 article by Masha Gessen is a good choice for that article. It begins:
Nearly every weekday morning one of Moscow’s central arteries, the Kutuzovsky Prospect, empties out suddenly, and an eerie, otherworldly silence takes hold. This means that police have sealed all the on-ramps to Kutuzovsky, an eight-lane avenue that cuts through the city from the west straight through to the Kremlin. Traffic backs up on the ramps for miles, but Kutuzovsky is quiet. Then a low hum can be heard, which quickly builds to a roar. Spread across the 60 yards of Kutuzovsky, a convoy of motorcycles and S.U.V.’s moves at breakneck speed, like fighter planes in tight formation. In the middle of it, veiled from onlookers by moving vehicles and densely tinted glass, rides Vladimir Putin, the Russian leader, in a custom-made black Audi with the license plate 007. He is commuting from his residence in Novo-Ogarevo, a country home that the Russians coyly refer to as a dacha but that a Westerner would recognize as a villa. He races along an avenue lined with enormous Stalin-era apartment buildings constructed for the Communist Party elite, then through the Arc de Triomphe, erected in celebration of Russia’s victory over Napoleon, in 1812, and finally across the Moscow River. In years past, when the title Putin held was that of Russia’s president, the formation would have headed for the Kremlin. Now the cars roar off toward the Moscow White House— the high-rise building that once housed the Russian parliament, where pro-Yeltsin Russians erected barricades against an attempted coup by hard-liners in 1991. Once, it was the symbol of a nascent Russian democracy. Now it’s the command center of an entrenched Russian autocracy. An entire floor was redone before Putin moved in, claiming the title of prime minister and bringing the power of the Kremlin along with him.
The man in the car leads a shielded and perhaps lonely existence. His older daughter, Maria, 23, is rumored to be living in Germany; her 22-year-old sister, Katerina, is a student at St. Petersburg University, though it is unclear whether she actually attends classes. Putin shares the dacha with his wife, Lyudmila, from whom he is said to be increasingly estranged. Another resident is a black Labrador named Koni. A night owl, Putin rarely takes his meals in company, and does not usually return home from work until late, often past midnight. His hobbies are those of a loner: downhill skiing and horseback riding. As he speeds through the city, alone, he listens to audiobooks, often popular histories of Russia, which he came to rule almost by accident nearly 10 years ago.
Say you have a country and no one to run it. Say you decide to invent a president. Say you hold auditions, and then you pick someone. You endow him with all the characteristics that you, the people of your country, and many people elsewhere, want to see in a president. You present him, fully formed, to the world. You pat yourself on the back— and that is all you have time to do before everything starts to go wrong.
That is what happened to the people who invented—or thought they had invented— Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. They had a brilliant plan. That plan has been shattered by the man himself and, more important, by the secret-police apparatus that actually formed this man and continues to sustain him.
A decade after Putin’s ascension to power, Russia is a changed country. The democratic reforms of the early 1990s have been reversed. Elections have been virtually eliminated. A new war with Georgia signals a return to an era when an aggressive, expansionist Russia threatened all its neighbors. Power in the country is concentrated to a degree even greater than in Soviet times in the hands of a small group of people. Under the old regime, two large power blocs, the Communist Party and the K.G.B., continually vied with each other for dominance. In the U.S.S.R., the K.G.B., whose job it was to gather information, provided much-needed corrections to the party line, allowing an occasional ray of light to seep through the ideological blinds. And while corruption was rampant in the Soviet Union, the competition between two corrupt power centers meant that there were limits to what either could steal. Russia may be the first country in the world that is ruled solely by its secret police. They control the economy and steal from it; they control the television networks and also watch them, believing what they see. Russia has become a closed system, sealed off from the rest of the world by a wall of secrets and lies.
In May of this year, with much fanfare, Putin handed over his post as president of the Russian Federation to a handpicked successor, Dmitry Medvedev, and installed himself as prime minister—a formality made necessary by the fact that Putin was constitutionally prevented from running for another term. Medvedev is the telegenic face who now attends G-8 summit meetings. But Russians continue to inhabit a country which is Putin’s creation and in which his authority is supreme, and they will be living in Putin’s Russia for a long time to come.
The Quest for a Faceless Man
This is the story of how the world’s largest country, with all its nuclear warheads, all its oil, all its tragic history, and all its unfulfilled hopes, ended up in the hands of a small man and a large machine.
It begins with desperation. By the summer of 1999, Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s larger-than-life first post-Soviet president, felt besieged and betrayed by everyone he knew. In the preceding 18 months the ailing and alcoholic Yeltsin had gone through four prime ministers. The country was careening from political crisis to economic crisis and back. Like a boxer gone blind, Yeltsin was spinning in the ring, striking the air, losing his balance. Political power had perceptibly shifted to Yevgeny Primakov, a former Yeltsin prime minister and former head of the foreign intelligence service, who had entered into alliances with the powerful mayor of Moscow and a number of governors and federal-level politicians, and with the wealthy businessmen, known as the oligarchs, who had grown fat off Yeltsin and then abandoned him. The president’s circle of trusted advisers had shrunk to what was known as “the Family”: Yeltsin’s daughter Tatyana; her husband, Valentin Yumashev, who was Yeltsin’s chief of staff; and the oligarch Boris Berezovsky, one of Russia’s richest men. Though Berezovsky controlled Channel 1, the country’s largest TV network, this was not enough to permit Yeltsin to hold on to the reins. It seemed likely that when Yeltsin’s second and final presidential term expired, in 2000, Primakov and his crowd would seize power. The Yeltsin-era economic and social reforms would be turned back, and the members of the Family, who were not saints by any measure, could very well find themselves not only in disgrace but also on trial. The Family needed a plan—and a man.
Incongruities of scale haunt the story. When I meet Berezovsky in London—where he has fled for his safety—he talks to me about the search for the man who would save Russia and the Family. What strikes me is how tiny the pool of potential candidates was, and how primitive the criteria. As Berezovsky tells it, he and other members of the Family were casting about, trying to see promise in the faces of the faceless men who were available. Anyone with any real political capital and ambition—anyone with a personality to speak of, in other words—had already abandoned Yeltsin. This is when they hit upon Vladimir Putin.
What exactly were his qualifications? Berezovsky had met him in the early 1990s, in St. Petersburg, where Putin was deputy mayor. Putin had helped Berezovsky, who owned a network of car dealerships, set up shop in the city—and did not demand or accept a bribe. This was unusual behavior, and it impressed Berezovsky. They communicated off and on over the years, forming not exactly a friendship—the Jewish intellectual and the K.G.B. officer with his working-class background had little in common—but more a sort of mutual loyalty. In February 1999, when Berezovsky, who had by then held a series of top-level government appointments, came under attack from the newly powerful Primakov, and was shunned by most of the political elite, Putin made a point of attending Berezovsky’s wife’s birthday party. Berezovsky repaid Putin by championing his candidacy to run the F.S.B., Russia’s secret police, formerly the K.G.B., and ultimately by suggesting that the Family make him president.
To sum up, the man’s qualifications were: he did not take a bribe from a car dealership, and he had been unafraid to go to a party for an acquaintance who had fallen into disfavor. Putin had no articulated political vision and no identifiable political ambition. Nor had he had any apparent career successes. As a K.G.B. agent he had accomplished nothing; as deputy mayor he had run his boss’s failed campaign for re-election and had then narrowly avoided a corruption probe; and, if Berezovsky is to be believed, he was stunningly ineffectual as the chief of the secret police. Berezovsky says that when he went to see Putin at the F.S.B. headquarters, in Lubyanka Square, Putin would insist that they talk in a disused elevator shaft, because he was convinced that his own office was bugged.
In the spring of 1999, Putin’s name was bandied about among members of the Family. In July 1999, Berezovsky was dispatched to France, where Putin was on vacation with his wife and daughters, to draft him as Russia’s new president. They spent a day talking in Putin’s rented condominium, and in the end, says Berezovsky, “he said to me, ‘All right, let’s try it. But you understand that Boris Nikolaevich has to ask me himself.’ And I said, ‘Volodya, of course, I came here at his request. I just needed to make sure there would be no misunderstanding, where he starts talking with you and you start saying you are not interested.’ And he said, ‘No problem, let’s do it.’ . . .
Top 10 ways to make better decisions
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Decisions, decisions! Our lives are full of them, from the small and mundane, such as what to wear or eat, to the life-changing, such as whether to get married and to whom, what job to take and how to bring up our children. We jealously guard our right to choose. It is central to our individuality: the very definition of free will. Yet sometimes we make bad decisions that leave us unhappy or full of regret. Can science help?
Making good decisions requires us to balance the seemingly antithetical forces of emotion and rationality. We must be able to predict the future, accurately perceive the present situation, have insight into the minds of others and deal with uncertainty.
Most of us are ignorant of the mental processes that lie behind our decisions, but this has become a hot topic for investigation, and luckily what psychologists and neurobiologists are finding may help us all make better choices. Here we bring together some of their many fascinating discoveries in the New Scientist guide to making up your mind.
1 Don’t fear the consequences
Whether it’s choosing between a long weekend in Paris or a trip to the ski slopes, a new car versus a bigger house, or even who to marry, almost every decision we make entails predicting the future. In each case we imagine how the outcomes of our choices will make us feel, and what the emotional or “hedonic” consequences of our actions will be. Sensibly, we usually plump for the option that we think will make us the happiest overall.
This “affective forecasting” is fine in theory. The only problem is that we are not very good at it. People routinely overestimate the impact of decision outcomes and life events, both good and bad. We tend to think that winning the lottery will make us happier than it actually will, and that life would be completely unbearable if we were to lose the use of our legs. “The hedonic consequences of most events are less intense and briefer than most people imagine,” says psychologist Daniel Gilbert from Harvard University. This is as true for trivial events such as going to a great restaurant, as it is for major ones such as losing a job or a kidney.
A major factor leading us to make bad predictions is “loss aversion” – the belief that a loss will hurt more than a corresponding gain will please. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman from Princeton University has found, for instance, that most people are unwilling to accept a 50:50 bet unless the amount they could win is roughly twice the amount they might lose. So most people would only gamble £5 on the flip of a coin if they could win more than £10. Yet Gilbert and his colleagues have recently shown that while loss aversion affected people’s choices, when they did lose they found it much less painful than they had anticipated (Psychological Science, vol 17, p 649). He puts this down to our unsung psychological resilience and our ability to rationalise almost any situation. “We’re very good at finding new ways to see the world that make it a better place for us to live in,” he says.
So what is a poor affective forecaster supposed to do? Rather than looking inwards and imagining how a given outcome might make you feel, try to find someone who has made the same decision or choice, and see how they felt. Remember also that whatever the future holds, it will probably hurt or please you less than you imagine. Finally, don’t always play it safe. The worst might never happen – and if it does you have the psychological resilience to cope.
2 Go with your gut instincts
It is tempting to think that to make good decisions you need time to systematically weigh up all the pros and cons of various alternatives, but sometimes a snap judgement or instinctive choice is just as good, if not better.
In our everyday lives, we make fast and competent decisions about who to trust and interact with. Janine Willis and Alexander Todorov from Princeton University found that we make judgements about a person’s trustworthiness, competence, aggressiveness, likeability and attractiveness within the first 100 milliseconds of seeing a new face. Given longer to look – up to 1 second – the researchers found observers hardly revised their views, they only became more confident in their snap decisions (Psychological Science, vol 17, p 592).
Of course, as you get to know someone better you refine your first impressions. It stands to reason that extra information can help you make well-informed, rational decisions. Yet paradoxically, sometimes the more information you have the better off you may be going with your instincts. Information overload can be a problem in all sorts of situations, from choosing a school for your child to picking a holiday destination. At times like these, you may be better off avoiding conscious deliberation and instead leave the decision to your unconscious brain, as research by Ap Dijksterhuis and colleagues from the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands shows (Science, vol 311, p 1005).
They asked students to choose one of four hypothetical cars, based either on a simple list of four specifications such as mileage and legroom, or a longer list of 12 such features. Some subjects then got a few minutes to think about the alternatives before making their decision, while others had to spend that time solving anagrams. What Dijksterhuis found was that faced with a simple choice, subjects picked better cars if they could think things through. When confronted by a complex decision, however, they became bamboozled and actually made the best choices when they did not consciously analyse the options.
Dijksterhuis and his team found a similar pattern in the real world. When making simple purchases, such as clothes or kitchen accessories, shoppers were happier with their decisions a few weeks later if they had rationally weighed up the alternatives. For more complex purchases such as furniture, however, those who relied on their gut instinct ended up happier. The researchers conclude that this kind of unconscious decision-making can be successfully applied way beyond the shopping mall into areas including politics and management.
But before you throw away your lists of pros and cons, a word of caution. If the choice you face is highly emotive, your instincts may not serve you well. At the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in San Francisco this February, Joseph Arvai from Michigan State University in East Lansing described a study in which he and Robyn Wilson from The Ohio State University in Columbus asked people to consider two common risks in US state parks – crime and damage to property by white-tailed deer. When asked to decide which was most urgently in need of management, most people chose crime, even when it was doing far less damage than the deer. Arvai puts this down to the negative emotions that crime incites. “The emotional responses that are conjured up by problems like terrorism and crime are so strong that most people don’t factor in the empirical evidence when making decisions,” he says.
3 Consider your emotions
You might think that emotions are the enemy of decision-making, but in fact they are integral to it. Our most basic emotions evolved to enable us to make rapid and unconscious choices in situations that threaten our survival. Fear leads to flight or fight, disgust leads to avoidance. Yet the role of emotions in decision-making goes way deeper than these knee-jerk responses. Whenever you make up your mind, your limbic system – the brain’s emotional centre – is active. Neurobiologist Antonio Damasio from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles has studied people with damage to only the emotional parts of their brains, and found that they were crippled by indecision, unable to make even the most basic choices, such as what to wear or eat. Damasio speculates that this may be because our brains store emotional memories of past choices, which we use to inform present decisions.
Emotions are clearly a crucial component in the neurobiology of choice, but whether they always allow us to make the right decisions is another matter. If you try to make choices under the influence of an emotion it can seriously affect the outcome.
Take anger. Daniel Fessler and colleagues from the University of California, Los Angeles, induced anger in a group of subjects by getting them to write an essay recalling an experience that made them see red. They then got them to play a game in which they were presented with a simple choice: either take a guaranteed $15 payout, or gamble for more with the prospect of gaining nothing. The researchers found that men, but not women, gambled more when they were angry (Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, vol 95, p 107).
In another experiment, Fessler and colleague Kevin Haley discovered that angry people were less generous in the ultimatum game – in which one person is given a sum of money and told to share it with an anonymous partner, who must accept the offer otherwise neither gets anything. A third study by Nitika Garg, Jeffrey Inman and Vikas Mittal from the University of Chicago found that angry consumers were more likely to opt for the first thing they were offered rather than considering other alternatives. It seems that anger can make us impetuous, selfish and risk-prone.
Disgust also has some interesting effects. “Disgust protects against contamination,” says Fessler. “The initial response is information-gathering, followed by repulsion.” That helps explain why in their gambling experiments, Fessler’s team found that disgust leads to caution, particularly in women. Disgust also seems to make us more censorious in our moral judgements. Thalia Wheatley from the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, and Jonathan Haidt from the University of Virginia, used hypnosis to induce disgust in response to arbitrary words, then asked people to rate the moral status of various actions, including incest between cousins, eating one’s dog and bribery. In the most extreme example, people who had read a word that cued disgust went so far as to express moral censure of blameless Dan, a student councillor who was merely organising discussion meetings (Psychological Science, vol 16, p 780).
All emotions affect our thinking and motivation, so it may be best to avoid making important decisions under their influence. Yet strangely there is one emotion that seems to help us make good choices. In their study, the Chicago researchers found that sad people took time to consider the various alternatives on offer, and ended up making the best choices. In fact many studies show that depressed people have the most realistic take on the world. Psychologists have even coined a name for it: depressive realism.
4 Play the . . .
Russia thanks its GOP comrades
You’ll recall that President Trump held up the sale of arms that Ukraine wanted to buy to defend themselves because the Ukrainian president would not pretend to find dirt on Hunter Biden. And even now ex-President Trump defends Russia.
Later On 