Posts Tagged ‘Psychology’
“Walking is man’s best medicine”*…
Thomas J. Bevin on the essential virtues of walking as inactivity…
… The vital thing to understand- and the point that I want to stress the most- is that walking is not an activity. Or rather, it should not be conceptualised as and reduced to being a mere activity. It is much more than that because it is much less than that. Walking is one of the great forms of inactivity and in a world of striving and consumerism and grasping and impatience it is one of only very few potential forms of inactivity left. It is that makes it precious.
You see, when you walk slowly and with no real destination in mind you are not doing, you are just being. Such walking, such contemplation is the beginning of freedom, it is the necessary pre-condition for having your own thoughts and as such for truly living your own life.
Which is why it is such a shame when people pollute their potentially edifying walks by turning to their ever-present phones. When I walk the streets and alleys of my city I constantly see people either shouting inanities into their phones or else using them to wirelessly pump music or podcasts into their eager ears. Walking thus becomes reduced to a mere mode of transportation for the carless and these reluctant pedestrians become- like so many other one-person-per-vehicle drivers- detached and isolated units moving through space. The audio and the journeying cancel each other out and it all bleeds into one, it becomes a blur that blots out the boredom of not being at your destination yet. Worse still is when this is combined with step counting apps or wristwatches which tragically instrumentalise the beautiful art of wandering around and turn walking into a metricated means of merely keeping the body alive and in some sort of working order. Such devices reduce us to machines, and one of the great tricks of Capitalism or The System or however you want to conceive it is that it not only turns us into machines for consumption and generating wealth for The Economy, but it also burdens us with the upkeep of the machinery that we have been reduced to becoming…
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… When you start tracking your step count when you go for your daily constitutional you turn the walk into ‘free time’ in this sense. It becomes an Activity, something that is Good For You. And this only compounds if you listen to some manner of Educational Podcast as you do so. The thrillingly, daringly subversive non-activity of moseying around the neighbourhood for no reason other than the sheer pleasure of being alive, able to walk and out of doors degenerates into just another means of being visibly productive. Because eking out maximum amounts of productivity from every moment of our days has been working out so great for us thus far. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy and we are all so play-deprived that many of us are becoming passive, disembodied viewers of our own on-screen lives…
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… what does it say then when walking- something that is already complete and requires no thought or effort or expense- is polluted and diminished into just another opportunity to consume and document said consumption? What does it say when we so thoughtlessly desecrate our leisure like this? I would argue that to do these things is more than a little dehumanising.
Animals survive and act and react but only humans can opt out of this cycle and into the higher realm of inactivity. Just as silences make music more beautiful and pauses make conversations richer in meaning, it is inactivity- that is the moving beyond doing into being– that makes life human. Responding to stimuli alone, satisfying needs as they arise alone makes life nothing more than a cycle of biological survival.
The beauty is in the gaps. Art and culture arise from the blank spaces (which may be why these vital spheres in particular seem to be diminishing in this time of always on, always available activity). Uselessness and purposelessness are true luxury, true wealth. Look at any heart-stirring ceremony or custom or event- they are filled with detours and excesses, they are far from efficient. You could easily workshop a way of getting to the same basic endpoint much, much quicker and in doing so you would kill everything that made that ceremony unique and beautiful and, well, ceremonial.
The luxury of the aimless walk is one of the most accessible and readily available blank spaces we have. It is no coincidence that such a stroll will all of itself produce ideas and insights and new observations. In the absence of a task the mind will begin to play. It will be free. This is why walking and creativity go absolutely hand in hand. Insight comes to the contemplative and contemplation comes from inactivity, from not trying to generate insights, or indeed trying to do much of anything at all. In a try-hard world this is a difficult truth to convince people of. Because it asks for patience. It asks for more than mere effort. It asks for participation in the world as it is, which for the mind that has always trained itself to be busy is a big ask indeed. But it is the only way to be free…
Reclaiming our humanity: “Walking as Inactivity.”
And for a reminder that this wisdom has it place in the technical sphere of our lives: “Design for lingering.”
Sadly apposite: “More on Pedestrian Deaths.”
* Hippocrates
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As we amble, we might send insightful birthday greetings to a man who walked both aimlessly and purposely, Lewis Mumford; he was born on this date in 1895. A historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and cultural critic, Mumford is probably best remembered for his writings on cities, perhaps especially for his award-winning book The City in History. (See also The City— the extraordinary film that Mumford made with Ralph Steiner and Wiilard Van Dyne, from an outline by the renowned documentarian Pare Lorentz, with a score by Aaron Copland.)
Mumford’s approaches to technology, its history, and its roles in society were acknowledged influences on writers like Jacques Ellul, Witold Rybczynski, Amory Lovins, E. F. Schumacher, Herbert Marcuse, Thomas Merton, and Marshall McLuhan. In a similar way, he was an inspiration for the organicist and environmentalist movements of today.
Unfortunately, once an economy is geared to expansion, the means rapidly turn into an end and “the going becomes the goal.” Even more unfortunately, the industries that are favored by such expansion must, to maintain their output, be devoted to goods that are readily consumable either by their nature, or because they are so shoddily fabricated that they must soon be replaced. By fashion and build-in obsolescence the economies of machine production, instead of producing leisure and durable wealth, are duly cancelled out by the mandatory consumption on an even larger scale….
Restore human legs as a means of travel. Pedestrians rely on food for fuel and need no special parking facilities…
– Lewis Mumford, The City in History
“Metaphors and similes (puns, too, I might add) extend the dimensions and expand the possibilities of the world”*…
A. J. Jacobs, in defense of “the lowest form of humor“…
… I used to hate puns. Here’s an anti-pun passage from my first book, The Know-It-All – it occurs when I’m describing my trip to a Mensa convention (that’s the high IQ society).
Mensans love puns. I heard about how the eating of frogs’ legs makes the frogs hopping mad. A person who is interested in architecture has an edifice complex. When I met one Mensan who worked in a photo shop, he told me “It gives me a very negative outlook on life.”
“I shudder to think,” I responded, which simultaneously earned his respect and made me hate myself a lot.
Two reactions on re-reading this passage:
First, a photo shop? Things have certainly changed in twenty-plus years.
Second, maybe I shouldn’t have had so much self-loathing (and maybe I should have gone with the sentence “Things have certainly developed in twenty-plus years).
The point is, since writing my first book, I’ve made a U-turn on puns, or at least non-obvious twisty puns. I don’t consider myself a great punster. I’m no Myq Kaplan. But in recent years, I’ve improved a bit (or gotten worse, depending on your view of puns).
One reason for my newfound respect for puns is that I host a podcast all about word puzzles, which wouldn’t really exist without puns. Another is that my wife Julie is president of Watson Adventures Scavenger Hunts, a company that puts on events where teams work together to solve punny riddles (and have a delightful time doing it!)
But I like to tell myself that another reason I’m now pro-pun is that I had an epiphany: Puns serve a greater purpose. They make us more aware of something important about language: That it is often arbitrary, slippery, and ambiguous.
I believe my interest in puns has helped me become more linguistically aware, a more flexible thinker. Whenever I read the news nowadays, I’m hyper-conscious of the different meanings of words, which makes me more skeptical of people who try to manipulate language to make their point.
Consider the word “free” as an example. “Free” has multiple definitions. Mostly, it’s got a positive aura to it. So when you say “free market,” for instance, you’re immediately disposed to like a free market. But if a market is totally “free” in this sense—zero government regulations whatsoever—it may cause the opposite of freedom in other ways: monopolies thrive, customers lack freedom of choice, and workers lack freedom to negotiate.
Do I have proof that puns make us better thinkers? Sadly, there’s no decades-long study in which a pun-loving population and a pun-hating population create two societies from scratch, allowing us to study which is more susceptible to propaganda and authoritarianism.
But if you conduct a Google Scholar search, you can find some hints that back up my idea. Such as…
—A study in the journal Personality and Individual Differences argues that pun-based humor “not only facilitates insight problem-solving directly, but may also exert an indirect positive influence on insight problem-solving through cognitive flexibility.”
—A neuroscience paper arguing that puns ignite the same areas of the brain as frame-shifting, which is key for problem-solving.
—A paper linking awareness of ambiguous words with critical thinking.
So…maybe?
Puns, of course, have their downsides. First, I’ve been in conversations with people who are so focused on making puns that they can’t engage in meaningful dialogue.
Some argue, as Samuel Johnson allegedly did, that puns are a “lower form of wit.” (It’s not clear he said this, but he did once write that Shakespeare’s weakness for following puns “engulfed him in the mire.” Johnson later — allegedly, again — confessed to his own pun use, saying: “If I were to be punishèd for every pun I shed, there would be no puny shed of my punnish head.”)
Also in puns’ disfavor: people often refer to puns as “groaners.” But I’d argue not all puns are groaners. Only the easy ones. If someone on a tennis court complains about losing his balls and his friend replies with a comment about testicles, I don’t think the friend should automatically be awarded the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.
On the other side of the spectrum, there are the puns so complex and intricate that they require mental gymnastics of a Simone Biles-ian level.
Perhaps the most elaborate pun I’ve run across is by Thomas Pynchon. In his novel Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon relates a story about the classic film director Cecille B. DeMille, a fleet of rowboats, and a bunch of criminals in the fur trade. Does this story advance the novel’s plot? Not at all, but it allowed Pynchon to write the following sentence at the end of the section:
“For DeMille, young fur henchman cannot be rowing.”
Get it? I didn’t. But when I looked it up, it turns out to be an elaborate pun on the phrase “40 million Frenchmen can’t be wrong,” which was a 1920s phrase arguing that France’s pro-alcohol, sex-positive attitudes were superior to America’s puritanism.
Perhaps you could accuse Pynchon of making too great a leap — that it’s no fun if there’s so little chance of figuring the pun out. But I still appreciate the effort.
I also appreciate when puns are pushed to their limit in another direction – namely, a relentless barrage of puns. In fact, I’ll end with my friend (and new dad!) Joe Sabia’s award-winning pun routine in the O. Henry Museum Pun-Off World Championships a few years back…
“Can Puns Save Democracy? Probably not. But maybe a little?“
See also: “Pun for the Ages” (gift article, and source of te image above)
And for contrast(?), enjoy: “A Collection of Terrible Puns.”
* “Metaphors and similes (puns, too, I might add) extend the dimensions and expand the possibilities of the world. When both innovative and relevant, they can wake up a reader, make him or her aware, through elasticity of verbiage, that reality—in our daily lives as well as in our stories—is less prescribed than tradition has led us to believe.” Tom Robbins, Wild Ducks Flying Backwards
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As we double down on doble entendre, we might send painfully-observant birthday greetings to a man in whose repertoire puns sometimes figured, Lenny Bruce; he was born on this date in 1925. A comedian, social critic, and satirist, he was ranked (in a 2017 Roling Stone poll) the third best stand-up comic of all time– behind Richard Pryor and George Carlin, both of whom credit Bruce as an influence.
“The American Constitution was not written to protect criminals; it was written to protect the government from becoming criminals.”- Lenny Bruce
“The best way out is always through”*…
Adam Mastroianni (and here) with a diagnosis of the malaise (“Borg vibes,” as he calls them) that so many of us feel– and a remedy (or, at least, a constructive response)…
Everyone I know has given up. That’s how it feels, at least. There’s a creeping sense that the jig is up, the fix is in, and the party’s over. The Earth is burning, democracies are backsliding, AI is advancing, cities are crumbling—somehow everything sucks and it’s more expensive than it was last year. It’s the worst kind of armageddon, the kind that doesn’t even lower the rent.
We had the chance to prevent or solve these problems, the thinking goes, but we missed it. Now we’re past the point of no return. The world’s gonna end in fascists and ashes, and the only people still smiling are the ones trying to sell you something. It feels like we’re living through the Book of Revelation, but instead of the Seven Seals and the apocalyptic trumpeters, we have New York Times push notifications.
On the one hand, it’s totally understandable that these crises would make us want to curl up and die. If the world was withering for lack of hot takes, I’d assemble a daredevil crew and we’d be there in an instant. But if history is heading more in the warlords ‘n’ water wars direction, I’m out.
On other hand, this reaction is totally bonkers. If our backs are against the wall, shouldn’t we put up our dukes? For people supposedly facing the breakdown of our society, our response is less fight-or-flight and more freeze-and-unease, frown-and-lie-down, and despair-and-stay-there.
Maybe humanity has finally met its match, but even though people talk like that’s the case, the way they act is weirdly…normal. Every conversation has a dead-man-walking flavor to it, and yet the dead men keep on walking. “Yeah, so everything’s doomed and we’re all gonna die. Anyway, talk to ya later, I gotta put the lasagna in the oven.” If things are just about to go kaput, why is everyone still working 60 hours a week?
Something strange is going on here, and I’d like to offer an explanation in two parts: a wide circle, and a bullet with a foot in it…
Eminently worth the read: “Use this magic bullet to shoot yourself in the foot,” from @mastroianni.bsky.social.
Pair with: “Apocalypse 24/7” (an excerpt from Roy Scranton‘s Impasse: Climate Change and the Limits of Progress)… a deeper, darker– but sadly, all-too-credible– dive into the context that Mastrioanni sketches… while (as your correspondent reads it, anyway) it doesn’t contradict Mastroianni’s prescription (“pick up a sponge and start washing”), it reminds us just how much grime there is to get through… all the more reason to get started…
* Robert Frost
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As we grapple, we might recall that it was on this date in 1965 that Bob Dylan’s “Positively 4th Street” was released. Dropping between Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde, as the follow-up to Dylan’s hit single “Like a Rolling Stone“, it was not included on either album. But it reached No. 1 on Canada’s RPM chart, No. 7 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100, and No. 8 on the UK Singles Chart, and has been ranked by Rolling Stone No. 203 in their 500 Greatest Songs of All Time list.
“We don’t laugh because we’re happy – we’re happy because we laugh”*…
Emily Herring on Henri Bergson and the importance of laughter…
… Before Bergson, few philosophers had given laughter much thought. The pre-Socratic thinker Democritus was nicknamed the ‘laughing philosopher’ for espousing cheerfulness as a way of life. However, we know more about his thoughts on atomism than on laughter. Similarly, the section of Aristotle’s Poetics that dealt with comedy hasn’t come down to us. Other major thinkers who have offered passing, often humourless, reflections about humour include Thomas Hobbes and René Descartes, who believed that we laugh because we feel superior; Immanuel Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer who argued that comedy stems from a sense of incongruity; and Herbert Spencer and Sigmund Freud who suggested that comedians provide a form of much-needed relief (from, respectively, ‘nervous energy’ and repressed emotions). Bergson was unconvinced by these accounts. He believed that the problem of laughter deserved more than a few well-worded digressions. Although his theory retained elements of the incongruity and superiority theories of humour, it also opened entirely new perspectives on the problem…
… Why did a philosopher of such renown deviate from his more traditional and serious philosophical obsessions – the nature of time, memory, perception, free will and the mind-body problem – to focus on the apparently frivolous case-studies of slapstick, vaudeville and word play? And what was there to be gained from such analysis? The topic was a ticklish one. Laughter, wrote Bergson, had ‘a knack of baffling every effort, of slipping away and escaping only to bob up again, a pert challenge flung at philosophic speculation’. It was almost as though there was something unnatural about subjecting one of the most pleasurable and ubiquitous human experiences to dry philosophical speculation…
… He believed that laughter should be studied as ‘a living thing’ and treated ‘with the respect due to life’. His investigation was therefore more like that of a field zoologist observing frogs in the wild:
we shall not aim at imprisoning the comic spirit within a definition … We shall confine ourselves to watching it grow and expand.
Like all good metaphorical field zoologists, Bergson started his study by familiarising himself with his metaphorical frog’s natural habitat: in other words, the conditions under which laughter is most likely to appear and thrive. Following this method, Bergson arrived at three general observations.
The first one, according to Bergson, was so ‘important’ and ‘simple’ that he was surprised it hadn’t attracted more attention from philosophers: ‘The comic does not exist outside the pale of what is strictly human.’ When Bergson wrote these words, he couldn’t have foreseen that, a century later, through the power of the internet, one of the most popular forms of comedy would be provided by our own pets in the form of viral videos, memes and gifs. But, in a way, he anticipated it in what he wrote about laughter directed at non-humans:
You may laugh at an animal, but only because you have detected in it some human attitude or expression…
… Bergson’s second observation might appear counterintuitive to anyone who has been reduced to tears by a fit of uncontrollable giggles: ‘Laughter has no greater foe than emotion.’ But his point was that certain emotional states – pity, melancholy, rage, fear, etc – make it difficult for us to find the humour in things we might otherwise have laughed at (even anthropomorphic vegetables). We instinctively know that there are situations in which it is best to refrain from laughing. Those who choose to ignore these unspoken rules are immediately sanctioned…
… This is not to say that it’s impossible to laugh in times of hardship. In many cases, humour appears to serve as a coping mechanism in the face of tragedy or misfortune. In 1999, as he was being carried out of his house on a stretcher after a crazed fan stabbed him, the former Beatle George Harrison asked a newly hired employee: ‘So what do you think of the job so far?’ On his death bed, Voltaire allegedly told a priest who was exhorting him to renounce Satan: ‘This is no time for making new enemies.’ Following Bergson’s logic, perhaps in some cases humour is cathartic precisely because it forces us to look at things from a detached perspective.
Finally, laughter ‘appears to stand in need of an echo’, according to Bergson. Evolutionary theorists have hypothesised about the adaptive value of laughter, in particular in the context of social bonding. Laughter might have emerged as a prelinguistic signal of safety or belonging within a group. Laughter and humour continue to play an important role in our various social groups. Most countries, regions and cities share a wide repertoire of jokes at the expense of their neighbours. For example, this Belgian dig at my compatriots, the French: ‘After God created France, he thought it was the most beautiful country in the world. People were going to get jealous, so to make things fair he decided to create the French.’
Jokes need not be nationalistic or even derogatory in nature to facilitate social bonding. Most friends share ‘in-jokes’ that are meant to be understood only within the context of their particular social group, as do certain communities brought together by a football team, political opinions or shared specialist knowledge (‘Why are obtuse angles so depressed? Because they’re never right’). Our laughter ‘is always the laughter of a group’, as Bergson put it. Even in those cases when we are effectively laughing alone, to, or perhaps at ourselves, laughter always presupposes an imagined audience or community.
Bergson’s observations tell us where to find laughter, under which conditions it is possible for laughter to emerge, but they don’t tell us why we laugh. They do nonetheless provide us with important clues. It is no accident that we laugh exclusively at other humans, and that laughter is a communal experience: its purpose, or ‘function’, wrote Bergson, is social. In addition, it isn’t by chance that laughter requires a temporary shutdown of our emotions: though pleasurable, laughter is above all punitive. But what, or whom, is laughter punishing, and how does it do that?
Read on to find out how Bergson reached his conclusion that laughter solves a serious human conundrum– how to keep our minds and social lives elastic: “Laughter Is Vital,” from @emilyherring.bsky.social in @aeon.co.
For those finding it difficult to laugh in these troubled times, see this piece on the pessimisitic Schopenhauer‘s conoisseurship of very distinctive kinds of happiness: “The semi-satisfied life.”
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As we chortle, we might send smiling birthday greetings to Ramón Valdés; he was born on this date in 1924. An actor and comedian, he is best known for the character he made iconic: “Don Ramón” in El Chavo del Ocho, a hugely-successful Mexican sitcom that aired for 8 seasons (31 episodes) across Latin America and in Spain.
“Whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past; for human events ever resemble those of preceding times”*…
In times like these, perspective is at a premium. Here, Derek Thompson on what we might learn from our not-so-terribly-distant past…
When we hear about technological change and social crisis in the 21st century, it is easy to imagine that we are living through a special period of history. But many eras have grappled with the problems that seem to uniquely plague our own. The beginning of the 20th century was a period of speed and technological splendor (the automobile! the airplane! the bicycle!), shattered nerves, mass anxiety, and a widespread sense that the world had been forever knocked off its historical axis: a familiar stew of ideas. I think we can learn a lot about the present by studying historical periods whose challenges rhyme with our own.
My favorite period of history is the 30- to 40-year span between the end of the 19th century and the early innings of the 20th century. It was an era of incredible change. From Abundance (which Thompson co-authored with Ezra Klein):
Imagine going to sleep in 1875 in New York City and waking up thirty years later. As you shut your eyes, there is no electric lighting, Coca-Cola, basketball, or aspirin. There are no cars or “sneakers.” The tallest building in Manhattan is a church.
When you wake up in 1905, the city has been remade with towering steel-skeleton buildings called “skyscrapers.” The streets are filled with novelty: automobiles powered by new internal combustion engines, people riding bicycles in rubber-soled shoes—all recent innovations. The Sears catalog, the cardboard box, and aspirin are new arrivals. People have enjoyed their first sip of Coca-Cola and their first bite of what we now call an American hamburger. The Wright brothers have flown the first airplane. When you passed into slumber, nobody had taken a picture with a Kodak camera or used a machine that made motion pictures, or bought a device to play recorded music. By 1905, we have the first commercial versions of all three—the simple box camera, the cinematograph, and the phonograph.
No book on turn-of-the-century history has influenced me more, or brought me more joy, than The Vertigo Years: Europe 1900-1914 by Philipp Blom. I think it might be the most underrated history book ever written. In my favorite chapters focusing on the years around 1910, Blom describes how turn-of-the-century technology changed the way people thought about art and human nature and how it contributed to a nervous breakdown across the west. Disoriented by the speed of modern times, Europeans and Americans suffered from record-high rates of anxiety and a sense that our inventions had destroyed our humanity. Meanwhile, some artists channeled this disorientation to create some of the greatest art of all time.
[Thompson uses passages from Blom to unpack those issues– a world moving too fast, the anxiety occasioned by technological change, and the responses of artists and creators of culture. He concludes with a consideration of two influential new theories of human nature that arose at that point…]
… Blom closes his chapter “1910: Human Nature Changed” by considering two intellectual giants of the time: the sociologist Max Weber and the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, whose International Psychoanalytic Association was founded in 1910. The tension between their theories of human nature are profoundly relevant today.
In his famous work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber, a German sociologist, argued that certain Protestant—especially Calvinist—traditions supported habits that aligned with the development of modern capitalism. He argued that the Protestant tradition of northern European worshippers cultivated a disciplined approach to work, savings, and investment that proved valuable in commerce, while the Calvinist doctrine of divine grace “could lead believers to read worldly success as a possible sign of God’s favor,” as Blom summarizes. Weber believed that Protestantism not only encouraged followers to pour their energies into labor (hence the allusion to Work Ethic in the book’s title) but also helped create a culture of trade and investment that supported the rise of modern capitalism.
“It is easy to see how Freud’s analysis follows on from Weber’s,” Blom writes. To Freud, human nature was at risk of being fully dissolved by capitalism and modern society, like chalk dropped in acid. Beneath the polite masks demanded by modern society, he said, there lurked a more atavistic and instinctual self. Freud saw our psyche as a tug-of-war between the id (our animal urges) and superego (the voice in our head that internalizes society’s rules), with the ego stuck in the middle trying to negotiate an authentic identity in the face of mass inauthenticity. One of Freud’s most fantastic insights was that some people can channel or redirect their most raw and unacceptable urges toward productive and acceptable work. His name for this bit of psychological alchemy was sublimation.
Modern capitalism, in Freudian terms, was the sublimation of self-interest—or, one might even say, the sublimation of greed. “The suppression of natural urges is a necessary precondition for capitalist success,” Blom writes in summary, “but while it is productive for the group and its wealth, such an approach will eventually exact its revenge on the individual.” By this interpretation, the mass anxiety of the early 1900s—whether you call it neurasthenia, American Nervousness, or Newyorkitis—was price of modernity, technological development, and even capitalism itself.
There is little evidence that Freud and Weber ever debated one another. Yet when you set their theories side by side, it’s hard not to hear a conversation that still shapes much modern commentary. Weber wrote that modern capitalism evolved from religious doctrines that fit our nature, while Freud argued that human nature is unfit for a modern world that distorts and represses our basic urges. Are our most impressive inventions the ultimate expression of our humanity, or are they the ultimate threat to it? This is the question that every generation must answer for itself, including our own. It is a question equally worthy of the automobile and artificial intelligence. The troubling answer—for Weber and for Freud; for 1910 and for 2025—is: perhaps, both.
Learning from our past: “1910: The Year the Modern World Lost Its Mind,” from @dkthomp.bsky.social. Eminently worth reading in full.
Pair with another “history lesson,” a consideration of American mechanisms of voter restriction/suppression over the years (as context for the current application of the Orban playbook by the Trump Administration and states like Texas: “Competitive authoritarianism” and America’s slide toward it.” moves fueled by appeals to the very anxieties (and to false nostalgia for times that were free of it) discussed above.
* Machiavelli
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As we look back to look forward, we might send altitudinous birthday greetings to a man whose work figured into the tale that Thompson and Blom tell: Orville Wright; he was born on this date in 1871. An inventor and aviator, he American inventor and aviator, he invented, with his elder brother Wilbur, the first powered airplane, Flyer, capable of sustained, controlled flight. In 1903, at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Orville made the first ever manned powered flight, airborn for 12 sec. By 1905, the brothers had improved the design, built and and made several long flights in Flyer III, which was the first fully practical airplane, able to fly up to 38-min and travel 24 miles (though not without incident). Their Model A was produced later in 1908, capable of over two hours of flight. By 1909 their flights were the subject of wide public interest, watched by leaders (like President Taft) and by public crowds of as many as a million people (in Manhattan during the Hudson-Fulton Celebration in New York City)… by 1910, flight and its future had become one of the many accelerating vectors driving the turmoil that THompson describes.
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