How people ignored each other before smartphones. pic.twitter.com/OZvhvWLBPK
— Scott E. Bartner (@SBartner) January 18, 2015 Yesterday we compiled a series of photographs from Eric Pickersgill:
In each portrait, electronic devices have been edited out so that people stare at their hands, or the empty space between their hands, often ignoring beautiful surroundings or opportunities for human connection. The results are a bit sad and eerie—and a reminder, perhaps, to put our phones away.
The entire “Removed” series is here . But a reader, referencing the above tweet, offers a contrarian take:
There were no glory days when family members, lovers, or friends paid attention to each other during every hour spent together. People read books and newspapers, knitted, listened to the radio, watched TV, darned socks, put together jigsaw puzzles.
So let’s just let go of this notion that cell phones are isolating people. More often than not, they are conversing with others on the other end of that cell phone conversation, people who in the past would have been out of their lives because it was too expensive to call long distance and letters took ages to get there.
The aforementioned tweet makes me thing of this photo from 1946:
17 yr old Stanley Kubrick shot this in nyc. Love all the newspapers. @SalDaviesPhoto @RodneyBowes1 @OliviaBarratier pic.twitter.com/eyytInE0Mm
— Steve Warden (@SteveWarden1) January 22, 2015 More Notes From The Atlantic Al Gore, Felix Salmon, and How to Think About “Sustainabl... Oct 15, 2015 Gattaca Within Reach? Oct 15, 2015 Quoted Oct 15, 2015 The Fight Against Bullfighting Oct 15, 2015 Negroes in the Neighborhood Oct 15, 2015 Notes Home Most Popular On The Atlantic Jessica Rinaldi / Reuters How Doctors Take Women's Pain Less Seriously Joe Fassler When my wife was struck by mysterious, debilitating symptoms, our trip to the ER revealed the sexism inherent in emergency treatment.
Early on a Wednesday morning, I heard an anguished cry—then silence.
I rushed into the bedroom and watched my wife, Rachel, stumble from the bathroom, doubled over, hugging herself in pain.
“Something’s wrong,” she gasped.
This scared me. Rachel’s not the type to sound the alarm over every pinch or twinge. She cut her finger badly once, when we lived in Iowa City, and joked all the way to Mercy Hospital as the rag wrapped around the wound reddened with her blood. Once, hobbled by a training injury in the days before a marathon, she limped across the finish line anyway.
So when I saw Rachel collapse on our bed, her hands grasping and ungrasping like an infant’s, I called the ambulance. I gave the dispatcher our address, then helped my wife to the bathroom to vomit.
Continue Reading Kevin Morefield The Most Mysterious Star in Our Galaxy Ross Andersen Astronomers have spotted a strange mess of objects whirling around a distant star. Scientists who search for extraterrestrial civilizations are scrambling to get a closer look.
In the Northern hemisphere’s sky, hovering above the Milky Way, there are two constellations—Cygnus the swan, her wings outstretched in full flight, and Lyra, the harp that accompanied poetry in ancient Greece, from which we take our word “lyric.”
Between these constellations sits an unusual star, invisible to the naked eye, but visible to the Kepler Space Telescope , which stared at it for more than four years, beginning in 2009.
“We’d never seen anything like this star,” says Tabetha Boyajian, a postdoc at Yale. “It was really weird. We thought it might be bad data or movement on the spacecraft, but everything checked out.”
Kepler was looking for tiny dips in the light emitted by this star. Indeed, it was looking for these dips in more than 150,000 stars, simultaneously, because these dips are often shadows cast by transiting planets. Especially when they repeat, periodically, as you’d expect if they were caused by orbiting objects.
Continue Reading Mike Mozart / Flickr A 14th-Century Muslim Philosopher Explains Walmart's Slide David A. Graham The world’s largest retailer saw its stock dive Wednesday among dire forecasts. Ibn Khaldun saw it coming.
Walmart had its worst day in almost 30 years on Wednesday, after the company released dire predictions for profitability. While analysts had expected modest growth of 4 percent in the coming fiscal year, the big-box retailer forecast a decrease of 6 to 12 percent.
One way to look at this is to say the reasons for Walmart’s decline are complex. Many analysts have expected for years that Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, would falter . The financial crisis served Walmart well , as its el-cheapo reputation made it a hub for skint shoppers. But with the economy in a long (if still slow) recovery, there’s an increasing desire among shoppers for more tailored experiences. Nothing seems more antithetical to the era of bespoke, small-batch goods than Walmart—though this artisanal cheese and fruit basket , at just $78.99, looks pretty good. Web commerce has cut into Walmart’s margins, and competitors like Target have caught up. And while the company has resisted unions, it has been forced to sweeten its pay packages , which reduces some of its competitive advantage.
Continue Reading Phil Toledano If You’re Not Paranoid, You’re Crazy Walter Kirn As government agencies and tech companies develop more and more intrusive means of watching and influencing people, how can we live free lives?
I knew we’d bought walnuts at the store that week, and I wanted to add some to my oatmeal. I called to my wife and asked her where she’d put them. She was washing her face in the bathroom, running the faucet, and must not have heard me—she didn’t answer. I found the bag of nuts without her help and stirred a handful into my bowl. My phone was charging on the counter. Bored, I picked it up to check the app that wirelessly grabs data from the fitness band I’d started wearing a month earlier. I saw that I’d slept for almost eight hours the night before but had gotten a mere two hours of “deep sleep.” I saw that I’d reached exactly 30 percent of my day’s goal of 13,000 steps. And then I noticed a message in a small window reserved for miscellaneous health tips. “Walnuts,” it read. It told me to eat more walnuts.
Continue Reading Lucy Nicholson / Reuters The Anti-Free-Speech Movement at UCLA Conor Friedersdorf Administrators and student activists at the university are attacking core First Amendment rights in a bid to punish expression that offends them.
A half-century ago, student activists at the University of California clashed with administrators during the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, a series of events that would greatly expand free-speech rights of people at public colleges and universities.
Today, activists at UCLA are demanding that administrators punish some of their fellow students for expressive behavior that is clearly protected by the First Amendment.
In the past, free-speech clashes have turned on whether Americans have the right to criticize their own government during wartime, to march as neo-Nazis past the homes of Holocaust survivors, to submerge a crucifix in urine, or to burn the United States flag.
All of those things, the courts have ruled, are protected speech.
Continue Reading Timothy Krause / Flickr What You Can Learn From Hunter-Gatherers' Sleeping Patterns Ed Yong It’s not what you think.
Here’s the story that people like to tell about the way we sleep: Back in the day, we got more of it. Our eyes would shut when it got dark. We’d wake up for a few hours during the night instead of snoozing for a single long block. And we’d nap during the day.
Then—minor key!—modernity ruined everything. Our busy working lives put an end to afternoon naps, while lightbulbs, TV screens, and smartphones shortened our natural slumber and made it more continuous.
All of this is wrong, according to Jerome Siegel at the University of California, Los Angeles. Much like the Paleo diet , it’s based on unsubstantiated assumptions about how humans used to live.
Siegel’s team has shown that people who live traditional lifestyles in Namibia, Tanzania, and Bolivia don’t fit with any of these common notions about pre-industrial dozing. “People like to complain that modern life is ruining sleep, but they’re just saying: Kids today!” says Siegel. “It’s a perennial complaint but you need data to know if it’s true.”
Continue Reading Stephen Voss ‘We Need an Energy Miracle’ James Bennet Bill Gates has committed his fortune to moving the world beyond fossil fuels and mitigating climate change.
In his offices overlooking Lake Washington, just east of Seattle, Bill Gates grabbed a legal pad recently and began covering it in his left-handed scrawl. He scribbled arrows by each margin of the pad, both pointing inward. The arrow near the left margin, he said, represented how governments worldwide could stimulate ingenuity to combat climate change by dramatically increasing spending on research and development. “The push is the R&D,” he said, before indicating the arrow on the right. “The pull is the carbon tax.” Between the arrows he sketched boxes to represent areas, such as deployment of new technology, where, he argued, private investors should foot the bill. He has pledged to commit $2 billion himself.
Continue Reading U.S. Military Academy The Unexpected Schools Championing the Liberal Arts Jon Marcus Military academies and chef schools say the humanities are essential to their graduates’ success.
WEST POINT, N.Y.—Christian Nattiel rattles off the way his course of studies has prepared him for his prestigious role as a company commander in charge of 120 fellow cadets at the U.S. Military Academy.
Nattiel, of Dade City, Florida, isn’t focusing at West Point on military science, or strategy, or leadership. He’s majoring in philosophy.
Ramrod straight in his Army combat uniform on the historic campus—where future officers are required to take humanities and social-sciences courses such as history, composition, psychology, literature, and languages—he said that, in philosophy, “There’s no right answer, and that’s very useful in the Army, so you’re not so rigid.”
Thirty miles up the Hudson River, students in chefs’ whites and toques experiment with recipes and test ingredients at the Culinary Institute of America, one of the nation’s foremost schools for chefs, whose seal is a knife crossed with a knife sharpener. They’re required to take liberal-arts courses, too, including sociology, psychology, and languages, and have to write and present a senior thesis, all to help them later with such things as managing employees and preparing business plans and raising capital to open their own restaurants.
Continue Reading Maison Bonfils / Library of Congress / Zak Bickel / The Atlantic Raiders of the Lost Web Adrienne LaFrance If a Pulitzer-finalist 34-part series of investigative journalism can vanish from the web, anything can.
The web, as it appears at any one moment, is a phantasmagoria. It’s not a place in any reliable sense of the word. It is not a repository. It is not a library. It is a constantly changing patchwork of perpetual nowness.
You can't count on the web, okay? It’s unstable. You have to know this.
Digital information itself has all kinds of advantages. It can be read by machines, sorted and analyzed in massive quantities, and disseminated instantaneously. “Except when it goes, it really goes,” said Jason Scott, an archivist and historian for the Internet Archive. “It’s gone gone. A piece of paper can burn and you can still kind of get something from it. With a hard drive or a URL, when it’s gone, there is just zero recourse.”
Continue Reading David Goldman / AP So Long Bobby Jindal? Russell Berman The Louisiana governor is running out of money, and his presidential campaign might be running out of time.
Thursday could mark the beginning of the end for Bobby Jindal’s increasingly slim presidential hopes.
The Louisiana governor’s campaign reported having just $260,000 to spend at the end of September after raising a little over half a million dollars and spending significantly more than that in the third quarter. It’s a paltry sum compared to his rivals, and if Jindal can’t jumpstart his White House bid soon, he could be headed the way of Rick Perry and Scott Walker, who ended their campaigns when their coffers ran dry.
Jindal’s haul—or lack thereof—was the most ominous signal that came from the quarterly FEC filing deadline on Thursday, which showed that the top two Democrats, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, each raised more money between June and September than any of the 15 Republicans still in the race. (Donald Trump, of course, has access to more money than any of them through his own personal wealth.) Clinton raised $28 million and Sanders raised $26 million. Ben Carson’s rise to a close second in the polls was reflected in his fund-raising, as he led the GOP field by taking in $20 million in the third quarter.
Continue Reading Latest Notes Al Gore, Felix Salmon, and How to Think About “Sustainable Capitalism” Gattaca Within Reach? Quoted The Fight Against Bullfighting Negroes in the Neighborhood More Most Popular On The Atlantic Jessica Rinaldi / Reuters How Doctors Take Women's Pain Less Seriously Joe Fassler When my wife was struck by mysterious, debilitating symptoms, our trip to the ER revealed the sexism inherent in emergency treatment.
Early on a Wednesday morning, I heard an anguished cry—then silence.
I rushed into the bedroom and watched my wife, Rachel, stumble from the bathroom, doubled over, hugging herself in pain.
“Something’s wrong,” she gasped.
This scared me. Rachel’s not the type to sound the alarm over every pinch or twinge. She cut her finger badly once, when we lived in Iowa City, and joked all the way to Mercy Hospital as the rag wrapped around the wound reddened with her blood. Once, hobbled by a training injury in the days before a marathon, she limped across the finish line anyway.
So when I saw Rachel collapse on our bed, her hands grasping and ungrasping like an infant’s, I called the ambulance. I gave the dispatcher our address, then helped my wife to the bathroom to vomit.
Continue Reading Kevin Morefield The Most Mysterious Star in Our Galaxy Ross Andersen Astronomers have spotted a strange mess of objects whirling around a distant star. Scientists who search for extraterrestrial civilizations are scrambling to get a closer look.
In the Northern hemisphere’s sky, hovering above the Milky Way, there are two constellations—Cygnus the swan, her wings outstretched in full flight, and Lyra, the harp that accompanied poetry in ancient Greece, from which we take our word “lyric.”
Between these constellations sits an unusual star, invisible to the naked eye, but visible to the Kepler Space Telescope , which stared at it for more than four years, beginning in 2009.
“We’d never seen anything like this star,” says Tabetha Boyajian, a postdoc at Yale. “It was really weird. We thought it might be bad data or movement on the spacecraft, but everything checked out.”
Kepler was looking for tiny dips in the light emitted by this star. Indeed, it was looking for these dips in more than 150,000 stars, simultaneously, because these dips are often shadows cast by transiting planets. Especially when they repeat, periodically, as you’d expect if they were caused by orbiting objects.
Continue Reading Mike Mozart / Flickr A 14th-Century Muslim Philosopher Explains Walmart's Slide David A. Graham The world’s largest retailer saw its stock dive Wednesday among dire forecasts. Ibn Khaldun saw it coming.
Walmart had its worst day in almost 30 years on Wednesday, after the company released dire predictions for profitability. While analysts had expected modest growth of 4 percent in the coming fiscal year, the big-box retailer forecast a decrease of 6 to 12 percent.
One way to look at this is to say the reasons for Walmart’s decline are complex. Many analysts have expected for years that Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, would falter . The financial crisis served Walmart well , as its el-cheapo reputation made it a hub for skint shoppers. But with the economy in a long (if still slow) recovery, there’s an increasing desire among shoppers for more tailored experiences. Nothing seems more antithetical to the era of bespoke, small-batch goods than Walmart—though this artisanal cheese and fruit basket , at just $78.99, looks pretty good. Web commerce has cut into Walmart’s margins, and competitors like Target have caught up. And while the company has resisted unions, it has been forced to sweeten its pay packages , which reduces some of its competitive advantage.
Continue Reading Phil Toledano If You’re Not Paranoid, You’re Crazy Walter Kirn As government agencies and tech companies develop more and more intrusive means of watching and influencing people, how can we live free lives?
I knew we’d bought walnuts at the store that week, and I wanted to add some to my oatmeal. I called to my wife and asked her where she’d put them. She was washing her face in the bathroom, running the faucet, and must not have heard me—she didn’t answer. I found the bag of nuts without her help and stirred a handful into my bowl. My phone was charging on the counter. Bored, I picked it up to check the app that wirelessly grabs data from the fitness band I’d started wearing a month earlier. I saw that I’d slept for almost eight hours the night before but had gotten a mere two hours of “deep sleep.” I saw that I’d reached exactly 30 percent of my day’s goal of 13,000 steps. And then I noticed a message in a small window reserved for miscellaneous health tips. “Walnuts,” it read. It told me to eat more walnuts.
Continue Reading Lucy Nicholson / Reuters The Anti-Free-Speech Movement at UCLA Conor Friedersdorf Administrators and student activists at the university are attacking core First Amendment rights in a bid to punish expression that offends them.
A half-century ago, student activists at the University of California clashed with administrators during the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, a series of events that would greatly expand free-speech rights of people at public colleges and universities.
Today, activists at UCLA are demanding that administrators punish some of their fellow students for expressive behavior that is clearly protected by the First Amendment.
In the past, free-speech clashes have turned on whether Americans have the right to criticize their own government during wartime, to march as neo-Nazis past the homes of Holocaust survivors, to submerge a crucifix in urine, or to burn the United States flag.
All of those things, the courts have ruled, are protected speech.
Continue Reading Timothy Krause / Flickr What You Can Learn From Hunter-Gatherers' Sleeping Patterns Ed Yong It’s not what you think.
Here’s the story that people like to tell about the way we sleep: Back in the day, we got more of it. Our eyes would shut when it got dark. We’d wake up for a few hours during the night instead of snoozing for a single long block. And we’d nap during the day.
Then—minor key!—modernity ruined everything. Our busy working lives put an end to afternoon naps, while lightbulbs, TV screens, and smartphones shortened our natural slumber and made it more continuous.
All of this is wrong, according to Jerome Siegel at the University of California, Los Angeles. Much like the Paleo diet , it’s based on unsubstantiated assumptions about how humans used to live.
Siegel’s team has shown that people who live traditional lifestyles in Namibia, Tanzania, and Bolivia don’t fit with any of these common notions about pre-industrial dozing. “People like to complain that modern life is ruining sleep, but they’re just saying: Kids today!” says Siegel. “It’s a perennial complaint but you need data to know if it’s true.”
Continue Reading Stephen Voss ‘We Need an Energy Miracle’ James Bennet Bill Gates has committed his fortune to moving the world beyond fossil fuels and mitigating climate change.
In his offices overlooking Lake Washington, just east of Seattle, Bill Gates grabbed a legal pad recently and began covering it in his left-handed scrawl. He scribbled arrows by each margin of the pad, both pointing inward. The arrow near the left margin, he said, represented how governments worldwide could stimulate ingenuity to combat climate change by dramatically increasing spending on research and development. “The push is the R&D,” he said, before indicating the arrow on the right. “The pull is the carbon tax.” Between the arrows he sketched boxes to represent areas, such as deployment of new technology, where, he argued, private investors should foot the bill. He has pledged to commit $2 billion himself.
Continue Reading U.S. Military Academy The Unexpected Schools Championing the Liberal Arts Jon Marcus Military academies and chef schools say the humanities are essential to their graduates’ success.
WEST POINT, N.Y.—Christian Nattiel rattles off the way his course of studies has prepared him for his prestigious role as a company commander in charge of 120 fellow cadets at the U.S. Military Academy.
Nattiel, of Dade City, Florida, isn’t focusing at West Point on military science, or strategy, or leadership. He’s majoring in philosophy.
Ramrod straight in his Army combat uniform on the historic campus—where future officers are required to take humanities and social-sciences courses such as history, composition, psychology, literature, and languages—he said that, in philosophy, “There’s no right answer, and that’s very useful in the Army, so you’re not so rigid.”
Thirty miles up the Hudson River, students in chefs’ whites and toques experiment with recipes and test ingredients at the Culinary Institute of America, one of the nation’s foremost schools for chefs, whose seal is a knife crossed with a knife sharpener. They’re required to take liberal-arts courses, too, including sociology, psychology, and languages, and have to write and present a senior thesis, all to help them later with such things as managing employees and preparing business plans and raising capital to open their own restaurants.
Continue Reading Maison Bonfils / Library of Congress / Zak Bickel / The Atlantic Raiders of the Lost Web Adrienne LaFrance If a Pulitzer-finalist 34-part series of investigative journalism can vanish from the web, anything can.
The web, as it appears at any one moment, is a phantasmagoria. It’s not a place in any reliable sense of the word. It is not a repository. It is not a library. It is a constantly changing patchwork of perpetual nowness.
You can't count on the web, okay? It’s unstable. You have to know this.
Digital information itself has all kinds of advantages. It can be read by machines, sorted and analyzed in massive quantities, and disseminated instantaneously. “Except when it goes, it really goes,” said Jason Scott, an archivist and historian for the Internet Archive. “It’s gone gone. A piece of paper can burn and you can still kind of get something from it. With a hard drive or a URL, when it’s gone, there is just zero recourse.”
Continue Reading David Goldman / AP So Long Bobby Jindal? Russell Berman The Louisiana governor is running out of money, and his presidential campaign might be running out of time.
Thursday could mark the beginning of the end for Bobby Jindal’s increasingly slim presidential hopes.
The Louisiana governor’s campaign reported having just $260,000 to spend at the end of September after raising a little over half a million dollars and spending significantly more than that in the third quarter. It’s a paltry sum compared to his rivals, and if Jindal can’t jumpstart his White House bid soon, he could be headed the way of Rick Perry and Scott Walker, who ended their campaigns when their coffers ran dry.
Jindal’s haul—or lack thereof—was the most ominous signal that came from the quarterly FEC filing deadline on Thursday, which showed that the top two Democrats, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, each raised more money between June and September than any of the 15 Republicans still in the race. (Donald Trump, of course, has access to more money than any of them through his own personal wealth.) Clinton raised $28 million and Sanders raised $26 million. Ben Carson’s rise to a close second in the polls was reflected in his fund-raising, as he led the GOP field by taking in $20 million in the third quarter.
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