Trash, Recycling and the Heartbreaking Lessons of YouTube Ethnography

By: | January 12, 2012

I live in a bubble. Its name is San Francisco, a magical place where everyone recycles, no one smokes, and Nancy Pelosi is considered distressingly conservative. Worse, I teach environmental sustainability at Stanford, where I’m surrounded by bicycle riding, reusable mug toting, enthusiastically composting colleagues and students. I come from the outside world, so I know my current behavioral baseline is a little skewed. But still, I was recently reminded that some Americans continue to use incandescent light bulbs, and I was genuinely surprised.

A far bigger shock came, as they usually do, unbidden from the Internet. Continue reading →

Inside the World of Poverty

By: | January 11, 2012

A few years ago, one of my Scottish cousins decided to delve into the murky waters of family history. For a time, I received regular emails from him, dispatches containing faded photos of long-dead relatives; biographies pieced together from birth and death certificates, and short sad notes on the lives of the working poor in Edinburgh. Most of my Scottish forebearers—candlemakers, housepainters, laundresses— struggled to make ends meet in Edinburgh’s tenements. I long suspected as much. But my through my cousin’s research, I learned something unexpected and disturbing: two of my relatives died as paupers in a Victorian workhouse.

I began thinking about this again this week, for the literary world is just now beginning to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens, a novelist who knew all about the social injustices of Victorian England. As a boy, Dickens saw his insolvent father hauled off to debtors’ prison: Dickens was then forced to work in a blacking factory. The experience opened the young novelist’s eyes to the plight of the poor, a world that later populated his novels.

In 1850, at the height of his fame, Dickens paid a visit to a London workhouse where as many as 2000 paupers resided. In a grim piece of non-fiction writing entitled “A Walk in a Workhouse,” he later described the experience. Continue reading →

Seeing What We Want to See

By: | January 10, 2012
Do we choose to blur this image?

Over the weekend, I listened to the latest episode of This American Life.  The segment was titled, “Where Your Crap Comes From” or “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory.”

The entire show was devoted to an adaptation of Mike Daisey’s monologue, the Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs. Daisey is a self-professed technophile and Apple aficionado, and his TAL story recounts his journey to the Chinese city of Shenzhen, where his favorite Apple products are made in giantic factories. You know what comes next.

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Guest Post: What a Five-Generation Study Reveals About the Scars of Disadvantage

By: | January 9, 2012

Britain in March 1946 was a dank, hungry, but optimistic place as people grappled with winter, rationing and the aftermath of World War 2. It was also the time that the country gave birth to something historically and scientifically remarkable. 13,687 babies born during one March week were weighed, measured and enrolled into what has, today, become the longest running study of human development in the world.

Last year I researched and wrote a feature for Nature about this group and its impact on science. I was able to talk to members of the study about their ordinary — yet extraordinary — lives as they reached 65, Britain’s official retirement age. And in the last couple of months, I’ve been learning more about the series of later British ‘birth cohorts’, born in 1958, 1970, 1991-2 and at the turn of the millennium. Each has its own story.
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The Lorax in the Anthropocene

By: | January 6, 2012

Late last year, I wrote about the dominance of the tragic “Lorax narrative” in environmental reporting. Journalists Sara Peach and Keith Kloor have since examined Lorax-ness in climate-change coverage, and I’ve been collecting climate stories that draw on other archetypal narratives (suggestions welcome).

The discussion has made me wonder: How would Dr. Seuss himself tackle climate change? After all, a tired narrative isn’t the only challenge for writers on the fast-shrinking climate beat. The story of climate change is muddy and complex, and its real drama is both geographically distant (if you’re lucky) and years in the future (ditto) — in other words, it lacks most of the ingredients that make any narrative memorable.

My guess is that the good doctor wouldn’t try to hide these problems. He wrote for kids, but he wasn’t afraid of complexity. He might even put the scientific, political, and personal knottiness of climate change at the heart of his story.

With apologies to the master, it might sound something like this.
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The Seven Deadly Sins: Anger

By: | January 4, 2012

A general psycho-neuro scenario of anger:  It begins outside you, with some sort of trigger – injustice, humiliation, betrayal, dishonor, frustration, negligence, restraint, physical threat.  It moves inside, into the pre-human depths of your brain and lights up a bunch of neurons called the amygdala.  The amygdala and some of its neural associates analyze the trigger’s shape, sound, and outrageousness, and decide to get angry.  They send out chemicals — serotonin, noradrenaline, and dopamine — which fly all over the brain and raise your blood pressure, increase your heart rate, turn your face red, intensify your alertness, narrow your attention, and screw up your judgment.  Whatever is in control now, it’s not you.  You cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war.  You lose it.

“If this were the worst of this passion, it were more tolerable, but it ruins and subverts whole towns, cities, families, and kingdoms,” wrote Robert Burton, the seventheenth century scholar, in the remarkable Anatomy of Melancholy.  The history of nations, he continues, is the history of anger:  “Look into our Histories, and you shall almost meet with no other subject, but what a company of hare-brains have done in their rage!” Continue reading →

The seven deadly sins: Lust

By: | December 30, 2011

 

Yes, lust made the seven deadly sins list, but it’s also the reason we’re all here. Nearly half of all pregnancies in America are unplanned. Eliminate the primal urge to get naked and share body fluids, and homo sapiens would die out rather quickly.

My admittedly incomplete internet search (it’s easy to get sidetracked when you start googling words like lust and sin) failed to turn up a definitive answer on when or how sin attained its status as one of the seven deadly sins. But according to Skipping Towards Gomorrah, sex columnist Dan Savage’s entertaining first-person romp through the seven deadly sins, the big seven list isn’t found anywhere in the Bible.

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