I ran a race for the first time in more than 20 years, part of my fitness kick, which has seen me drop 25 pounds and be in better shape than I’ve been for at least a decade. Age has not improved my racing tactics, which caused me to go out too fast and fade, but I was proud to finish without stopping. I’m not in the picture above the results of the Artesani Park 5K, but my kids are.
Shankar Vedantam’s Washington Post column this week is The Color of Health Care: Diagnosing Bias in Doctors. He looks at a study on bias in treatment by doctors. The study showed that without being aware of it, doctors would identify heart attack symptoms in blacks more often than those in whites, but would prescribe medicine to treat it less frequently. That’s despite no conscious bias on the part of the doctors, as this comment shows:
Mahzarin Banaji, a co-author and Harvard psychologist who helped develop the Implicit Association Test used in this study, said the racial bias unearthed by the study is at odds with conventional views of bigotry — and perhaps more insidious. Rather than harboring deliberate ill will, she said, the physicians had apparently internalized racial stereotypes, and these attitudes subtly influenced their medical judgment without their even realizing it.
It would be interesting to see if some sort of educational effort could be made to reduce this kind of bias, in much the way that some people talk about inoculating religious believers from holding extreme views, like that God approves of suicide bombers.
Inc. has posted my article on Windows Vista, which it titled Nice View, Rough Terrain. It’s also posted my latest technology guide, a look at social networking tools with a business bent.
Here’s an interview on the ongoing development of the massively multiplayer game Lord of the Rings Online, featuring its creative director, Cardell Kerr (also known as my brother-in-law).
My latest Prototype column for the New York Times,
It Takes Deep Pockets to Fight Global Warming, looks at some of the big ideas in climate change, and how hard it will be to get them implemented.
My friend and fellow Templeton-Cambridge journalism Fellow Juliet Eilperin has published a terrific piece, Warming Draws Evangelicals into Environmental Fold, on efforts by evangelicals and environmental activists to work together on climate change issues.
Juliet’s piece highlights that evangelicalism in the U.S. is not a monolith, though it is perhaps not so fragmented as the older Mainline denominations.
After my fellowship, I wanted to take a break from heavy reading in science and religion. So I started ‘Atonement,’ Ian McEwen’s 2001 novel about an English schoolgirl who commits a sin (referred to in the book as a crime). It had been recommended to me by my late inspirer, Wayne Booth.
I found the novel slow at first, but then devoured all the courses that followed the opener like a glutton.
He kept me going with a couple of lovely descriptions of the writing process and what it so often lacks, first that ‘vital knowingness about the ways of the world which compels a readers respect,’ (page 6) and later that desire to ‘send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader’s….reading a sentence and understanding it were the same thing….’ (page 35) [that last of course explains how we writers suffer doubly when an editor or reader criticizes our work, at least until we’re able to get rid of our own magical thinking about writing, to the extent we ever do.]
I’m not sure that would work for readers who aren’t writers, but I can tell you that not long after the beginning, McEwen has a couple of the best cliffhangers I’ve ever read, and he draws out their resolutions expertly. It’s also exquisitely painful, with extraordinary highs of emotion and hope mixed in with brutal lows. I’m sure Wayne recommended it in part because of McEwen’s narrator, unreliable and honest both (and with a clever twist, to boot).
There is one plot mechanism that I think will stop some readers short. I think it’s a flaw in the structure of the book. But I was too immersed in the ongoing cliffhanger to care much about it while reading.
I’ve been in Cambridge UK for the week, the final part of the formal period for the journalism fellowship I’m on. They treated us to a performance of Re:Design, a brand new play pulled together from the correspondence of Charles Darwin and Asa Gray, an American botanist and theist. (for more of Darwin’s correspondence, see the Darwin Correspondence Project).
It turns Darwin into a vibrant human being, while also giving a dramatic portrayal of Darwin and Gray’s debate over whether natural selection obviates God as nature’s designer. That debate still goes on today, of course. But to see the doubt and indecision and see it amidst the everyday life of Darwin was remarkably powerful.
Playwright Charles Baxter’s script is here http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/content/view/89/74/. We saw a shorter version, slightly less than an hour, designed for use in schools.
The U.S. gets widely accused of cultural imperialism, a phrase that has support from the rise of Western history, where the West’s technological superiority and penchant for conquest has forced much of the world’s culture to change. It turns out that one of those cultures, Japan, has modified Western culture in its own way, and now exports things like manga back at the West.
I interviewed Susan Napier late last summer, for the Japanese magazine Shukan Daiyamondo. The interview only recently was published, but Napier’s observations remain timely. For instance, she notes that Japanese culture has long fascinated the West, but now elements of it are almost mainstream.
The question is why Japanese stuff so popular now? I think it’s a combination of things: it’s different enough to be very interesting, and it’s an alternative to American culture. That seems to have hit a chord in today’s world.
At the same time, I just went to see the Transformers, which was all done with computer animation and live actors. In Japan, it would almost certainly have been completely animated. Napier isn’t sure that will ever catch on in the U.S., despite a general increase in interest in animation on television, in movies and elsewhere.
Americans still expect animation to be funny. Look at The Simpsons, the Family Guy, South Park. These are very witty and clever and imaginative, but in a way they’re circumscribed, they’re not dealing with the big theme. Japanese animation is like Hollywood, it covers everything. I do wonder when we’ll see serious cartoons in America. There seems to be a real huge kind of block about that.
The full interview is here.
The patent system exists to encourage innovation. It may now be discouraging innovation. Read my latest New York Times column,