E. Benjamin Skinner recorded the following conversation inside a brothel in Bucharest, Romania. Listen as a pimp offers Skinner and his translator a handicapped, suicidal girl in exchange for a used car.

From the archive:

In prior eras, the slave trade was conducted openly, with ads prominently posted and the slaves paraded and inspected like animals, often at public auctions. Today’s sex traffickers, the heirs to that tradition, try to keep their activities hidden, although the rest of the sex trade, the sale of the women’s services, is advertised on a scale that can only be characterized as colossal.

As a society, we’re repelled by the slavery of old. But the wholesale transport of women and girls across international borders and around the U.S. — to serve as prostitutes under conditions that in most cases are coercive at best — stirs very little outrage.

And from earlier this week (or, rather, from 1902):

The American Public takes another sip of its coffee and remarks, “How very unpleasant!”

And from farther back, and farther afield:

It hits the poor, not because it wants to hurt them, but to frighten the rich ... Having refused the poor what is necessary, they give the rich what is superfluous.

The Price of Life

Mark Fiore:

A Familiar Snuggly Bear explains Warrantless Wire Tapping & Love.

The Spies Who Love You

For seven years, our lame-duck President has rejected the idea that mere civilians – historians, armchair experts, American voters – have any right to criticize his foreign policy maneuvers. Not only is he the “decider,” but his decisions are based on criteria conveniently beyond our scrutiny, and thus unavailable for second-guessing. We may study the news reports and policy papers he doesn’t read, we may scrutinize the leaked and perhaps faulty CIA intelligence he ignores – but we can’t do the one thing that, according to President Bush, really matters: we can’t look foreign leaders in the eye.

The Back Room President: On Pakistan | n+1

Truth be told, Barash's line of inquiry, like Richard Dawkins' or Steven Pinker's, does result in bracing and unsettling ideas. Through the lens of evolutionary psychology, we are forced to face our ancient self, that bestial creature that knows nothing of atomic bombs or jihad, marriage or MySpace, but still haunts our body, fuels our emotions and rules our lives — our genetic identity. For this single-minded creature, monogamy is a myth, free will is doubtful, and so-called altruism is merely a misguided attempt to protect people who might be carrying our genes. (Since humans once lived in small, closely related packs, protecting others made genetic sense.) In a recent article for The Chronicle of Higher Education, Barash wrote about how electrocuted rats develop ulcers and swollen adrenal glands unless they are allowed to fight other "innocent" rats. In short: Random acts of violence are never actually random; we are merely obeying a million-year-old code of behavior, a code of displaced aggression that Barash finds in The Iliad, in Sweeney Todd and in our current war in Iraq. Barash's latest book, Natural Selections, published by Bellevue Literary Press (a small press run out of the oldest public hospital in the United States, Bellevue in Manhattan), seeks to follow the concepts of evolutionary psychology and sociobiology to their logical conclusions. "Many people claim to accept the tenets of evolution," he says, "but few actually look at where these premises lead."

I talked with Barash by phone about his book, his science and his philosophy.

Tyranny of the Natural: David P. Barash's Natural Selections

Having a large network of friends and family, a new study suggests, may help surgical patients experience less anxiety and pain before their operations and a quicker recovery afterward.

Prognosis: Large Social Networks May Help Surgical Patients

What will happen to reading and writing in our time?

Could the doomsayers be right? Computers, they maintain, are destroying literacy. The signs -- students' declining reading scores, the drop in leisure reading to just minutes a week, the fact that half the adult population reads no books in a year -- are all pointing to the day when a literate American culture becomes a distant memory. By contract, optimists foresee the Internet ushering in a new, vibrant participatory culture of words. Will they carry the day?

Maybe neither. Let me suggest a third possibility: Literacy -- or an ensemble of literacies -- will continue to thrive, but in forms and formats we can't yet envision.

The End of Literacy? Don't Stop Reading.

Officials say the incident was a model of how Washington often scores its rare victories these days in the fight against al-Qaeda inside Pakistan's national borders: It acts with assistance from well-paid sympathizers inside the country, but without getting the government's formal permission beforehand.

It is an approach that some U.S. officials say could be used more frequently this year, particularly if a power vacuum results from yesterday's election and associated political tumult. The administration also feels an increased sense of urgency about undermining al-Qaeda before President Bush leaves office, making it less hesitant, said one official familiar with the incident.

Unilateral Strike Called a Model For U.S. Operations in Pakistan

This project is part of the MoMA exhibit I mentioned earlier this week.

New York Talk Exchange illustrates the global exchange of information in real time by visualizing volumes of long distance telephone and IP (Internet Protocol) data flowing between New York and cities around the world.

In an information age, telecommunications such as the Internet and the telephone bind people across space by eviscerating the constraints of distance. To reveal the relationships that New Yorkers have with the rest of the world, New York Talk Exchange asks: How does the city of New York connect to other cities? With which cities does New York have the strongest ties and how do these relationships shift with time? How does the rest of the world reach into the neighborhoods of New York?

New York Talk Exchange

Security is like liberty, in that many are the crimes committed in its name. The menace to the security of this country, be it great as it may, from this girl’s admission is as nothing compared to the menace to free institutions inherent in procedures of this pattern. In the name of security, the police state justifies its arbitrary oppressions on evidence that is secret, because security might be prejudiced if it were brought to light in hearings. The plea that evidence of guilt must be secret is abhorrent to free men, because it provides a cloak for the malevolent, the misinformed, the meddlesome, and the corrupt to play the role of informer undetected and uncorrected.

–Robert H. Jackson, in United States ex rel. Knauff v. Shaughnessy, 338 U.S. 537, 557 (1950)(dissenting)

Jackson on Crimes Committed in the Name of Secrecy

Practitioners, however, have another purpose. They wish to know how to make their patients better. But until we can organize a compendium of mental illnesses according to a better working knowledge of the brain, the therapeutic revolution in psychiatry will have to wait. Neuroscientists and psychiatrists have certainly made prodigious strides -- and yet we are far from grasping how those swirling galaxies of neurons and molecules make us who we are, both in sickness and in mental health. Even as we gather light, we are still struggling in the dark.

From the archive:

A recent poll conducted by the Pew Research Center shows that almost 85 percent of Americans believe that they are very happy or at least pretty happy.

What drives this rage for complacency, this desperate contentment?

Are some people lying, or are they simply afraid to be honest in a culture in which the status quo is nothing short of manic bliss?

The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow Into Depressive Disorder