Drake Bennett:

If you were given the choice, and you wanted to reduce human suffering by as much as possible, would you cure blindness or back pain? It seems a silly question. The thought of losing one's sight is, to most people, as frightening as it is depressing: we would no longer be stirred by sunsets or landscapes or the expressions on the faces of our loved ones. Everyday chores would become more difficult, crossing the street perilous. Many sports and pastimes would simply be off-limits, and we would lose a good deal of our independence.

Back pain, on the other hand, is just back pain.

But in fact, it's back pain that causes more misery.

From the archive:

If you saw two guys named Hambone and Flippy, which one would you think liked dolphins the most? I'd say Flippy, wouldn't you? You'd be wrong, though. It's Hambone.

Perfectly Happy

Joshua Wolf Shenk:

Is there a formula—some mix of love, work, and psychological adaptation—for a good life? For 72 years, researchers at Harvard have been examining this question, following 268 men who entered college in the late 1930s through war, career, marriage and divorce, parenthood and grandparenthood, and old age. Here, for the first time, a journalist gains access to the archive of one of the most comprehensive longitudinal studies in history. Its contents, as much literature as science, offer profound insight into the human condition—and into the brilliant, complex mind of the study’s longtime director, George Vaillant.

Have you seen Seven Up!?

Happiness Isn't About "Me"

Martin Walker:

It is apparent from the urban landscape across the developing ­world—­whether in Mumbai or Shanghai, São Paulo or Moscow, Dubai or ­Istanbul—­that a growing proportion of consumers seek to emulate a ­Western-­international lifestyle, which includes an air-conditioned house with a car in the garage, a private garden, satellite TV, and Internet access, along with the chance to raise a limited number of children, all of whom will have the opportunity to go to college. Whether the biosphere can adapt to such increases in consumption remains a critical ­question.

The world has changed. There is more and faster change to ­come.

The World's New Numbers

Ashby Jones on a story by Karen Sloan:

When we write about lawyers and unhappiness, we typically have a specific kind of unhappiness in mind. It’s more a restlessness than a deep despair, more a malaise or vague sense of dissatisfaction than an outright sadness. Whenever we write about this (which we and others tend to do with a certain amount of glibness), we do so with an unspoken assumption — that this category of unhappiness is entirely fixable — especially for big firm lawyers, what with their smarts and connections and hard-earned degrees. It’s just a matter of finding a new job or going part time or leaving the law altogether. Happiness exists just around the corner, it’s just a matter of figuring out how to get there.

But the unhappiness discussed in a National Law Journal story out today strikes an entirely different chord.

In Down Times, Depression Taking Hold Among More Lawyers

Roger Dobson:

All too often, creativity goes hand in hand with mental illness. Now we're starting to understand why.

Creative minds: the links between mental illness and creativity

Larry Brilliant:

Why are more new viruses with pandemic potential jumping from their traditional animal hosts to humans now? If I had to choose a single word answer it would be: "modernity." If I had two more words, I would add "human irresponsibility."

Two from the archive:

The grace of wildness changes somehow when it becomes familiar.

Perhaps the most powerful way in which we conspire against ourselves is the simple fact that we have jobs. We are willingly part of a world designed for the convenience of what Shakespeare called “the visible God”: money. When I say we have jobs, I mean that we find in them our home, our sense of being grounded in the world, grounded in a vast social and economic order. It is a spectacularly complex, even breathtaking, order, and it has two enormous and related problems. First, it seems to be largely responsible for the destruction of the natural world. Second, it has the strong tendency to reduce the human beings inhabiting it to two functions, working and consuming. It tends to hollow us out.

A dialogue between Dyson and Brand:

Dyson: If you mean balancing the permanent against the ephemeral, it's very important that we adapt to the world on the long-time scale as well as the short-time scale. Ethics are the art of doing that. You must have principles that you're willing to die for.

Brand: Do you have a list of these principles?

Dyson: No. You'll never get everybody to agree about any particular code of ethics.

Brand: In some cultures you're supposed to be responsible out to the seventh generation -- that's about 200 years. But it goes right against self-interest.

The Age of Pandemics

Neil Strauss has a new book.

Before the next disaster strikes, you're going to want to read this book. And you'll want to do everything it suggests. Because tomorrow doesn't come with a guarantee.

From the archives, a trio of Jim Kunstler:

What we have in America is a nation of places not worth caring about.

World Made By Hand: a novel of America's post-oil future

All parties join in a game of "pretend," that nothing has really happened to the fundamental equations of business life, as the whole system, the whole way of life, enters upon a circle-jerk of mutual denial in a last desperate effort to forestall the mandates of reality.

How long will these games go on?

A parting thought:

“People loved comedies during the depression, too,” said R. J. Cutler, executive producer of “Flip That House.”

Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life

From an interview with John Yoo:

Q. Have you done anything interesting since moving to Southern California?

A. I'm getting in shape, which everyone here seems to be in.

From an NYT story last November:

An extremely fit woman of indeterminate Los Angeles age pulled her Mercedes up to the curb on Adelaide Drive, popped open her trunk, pulled out a five-pound weight and began lifting.

Geoff Parcells, who was running along the street, said that he sympathized with residents but that the area “is a public place” and that he did not quite know how to view the enhanced enforcement.

“If I lived here and there were all really good-looking people working out, I probably wouldn’t mind,” said Mr. Parcells, 45. “So I guess it depends on who parks in front of your house.”

From a few years ago:

Sometimes an idea comes along that is so stupid, all you can do is stand back, give it some room, and stare.

Yoo Too

This study examines how conversing with passengers in a vehicle differs from conversing on a cell phone while driving.

We compared how well drivers were able to deal with the demands of driving when conversing on a cell phone, conversing with a passenger, and when driving without any distraction. In the conversation conditions, participants were instructed to converse with a friend about past experiences in which their life was threatened.

The results show that the number of driving errors was highest in the cell phone condition; in passenger conversations more references were made to traffic, and the production rate of the driver and the complexity of speech of both interlocutors dropped in response to an increase in the demand of the traffic.

The results indicate that passenger conversations differ from cell phone conversations because the surrounding traffic not only becomes a topic of the conversation, helping driver and passenger to share situation awareness, but the driving condition also has a direct influence on the complexity of the conversation, thereby mitigating the potential negative effects of a conversation on driving.

Recently, Decius wrote:

The National Safety Council is all over the press calling for an immediate ban on the use of cellphones while driving.

Passenger and Cell Phone Conversations in Simulated Driving

You see them everywhere -- nurses, doctors and medical technicians in scrubs or lab coats. They shop in them, take buses and trains in them, go to restaurants in them, and wear them home. What you can't see on these garments are the bacteria that could kill you.

In a hospital, C. diff contaminates virtually every surface.

Imagine sliding into a restaurant booth after a nurse has left the germ on the table or seat. You could easily pick it up on your hands and then swallow it with your sandwich.

From 2004:

Who wants to eat at a chain where the food has almost no character?

From 2007:

"I might have had the hefeweizen," he said. "But I’m not going to kill them for it."

From 2008:

Those that died of kuru were highly regarded as sources of food, because they had layers of fat which resembled pork. It was primarily the Fore women who took part in this ritual. Often they would feed morsels of brain to young children and elderly relatives. Among the tribe, it was, therefore, women, children and the elderly who most often became infected.

Recall:

Worry about the wrong things puts us at greater risk of the diseases that should be concerning us in the first place.

You see:

That's not grime you're seeing, it's historical charm.

Finally:

Hi. Um, I'm just wondering, have you got any kind of like, sort of punky, electronica, kind of grime, kind of like, new wave grime, kind of maybe like more broken beats, like kinda dubby broken beats, but a little bit kind of soulful ...? but kinda drum and bassy, but kinda more broken drum and bass, like sort of broken beats, like break-beat broken kind of drum and bass ... do you know what I mean? No?

Hospital Scrubs Are a Germy, Deadly Mess