MIAD CD4_14 Uncommon Sense

Issue No.

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$5.00

PURPOSE & MEANING RIGHT & WRONG with Maria Popova HOW LITERACY HAS EVOLVED CHILDHOOD with Hayley Eichenbaum THE UNCERTAIN BIOLOGICAL BASIS OF MORALITY with Robert Wright

Issue No.1

CONTENTS The Extinction of Childhood Over the last century it can be seen that the behavior, language, attitudes, and desires—even the physical appearance—of adults and children are becoming increasingly indistinguishable.

by HAYLEY EICHENM AN

An Interview with Maria Popova Maria Popova is the founder and editor of Brain Pickings, has written for a number of high profile magazines. Read about her work, life and brain pickings here.

by TINA ESSM AKER

Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?

In 1999, Joshua Greene—then a philosophy graduate student at Princeton, now a prestigious psychology professor at Harvard—had a very fertile idea.

by ROBERT WRIGHT

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Uncommon Findings:

Barriers to Creativity in Education A new study by Adobe highlights the importance of preparing students to be innovators and how testing and government mandates are stifling creativity in the classroom.

by TACY TOBRIDGE

Uncommon Interview:

Shuli Hallak: Invisible Networks Invisible Networks is the ongoing project of Shuli Hallak, whose end goal is to showcase the palpable parts of the net we otherwise never think about. And it’s pretty damn fascinating.

by CHRIS GAYOM ALI

Uncommon Lessons:

20 Things I’ve Learned At age 26 Dev Basu, CEO of Powered by Search shares a few things he’s learned over the years about living a prosperous and purposeful life.

by DEV BASU

n o i t c n i t x The E yChildhood

by HAYLEY EICHENBAUM

Childhood is becoming an endangered concept. Over the last century it can be seen that the behavior, language, attitudes, and desires—even the physical appearance— of adults and children are becoming increasingly indistinguishable. In order to demonstrate this, it’s imperative to clarify the journey that childhood has taken throughout the course of history. What defines the parameters of childhood, or rather, what does it mean to be an adult? When and where do these two worlds intersect?

By answering these questions, the importance of preserving the realm of childhood becomes evident. Little is known about the attitudes toward children in antiquity. The Greeks gave us a foreshadowing of the idea of childhood.

They were ambivalent, perhaps even confused about the concept. Despite this obscurity, they were unswervingly passionate about education. Romans borrowed the Greek notion of schooling and went on to develop an awareness of childhood that surpassed the Greek idea.

The Roman rhetorician Quintilian played a substantial role in the defining of childhood.

He emphasized that children are special beings that require protection, nurturing, schooling, and freedom from adult secrets (particularly sexual secrets) (Postman 9).

During this era the concept of shame emerges; specifically it’s relationship to

childhood. The idea of shame rests, in part, on secrets. Secrets encompass the mysteries, contradictions, violence, and tragedy of adulthood. Quintilian expressed that childhood cannot exist without an established understanding of shame. In this case, shame is comparable to civilized behavior; Children have a tendency to demonstrate shameless behavior therefore adults must demonstrate controlled behavior. There is a pressure to privatize ‘adult’ impulses around younger parties. This leads to the realization that children require protection (Miller 63).

The Romans grasped this point, although, apparently, not all of them and not enough of them. It wasn’t until three centuries after Quintilian in AD 374 that the first known law prohibiting infanticide was sanctioned. This indicates a sensitivity to the specific arena that is childhood. After the Romans, however, it appears that all delineations of childhood begin to deteriorate (Postman 11). This deterioration was due, in large part, to a noticeable decline in literacy levels. After the collapse of the Roman Empire followed by Europe’s descent into the Dark and Middle Ages, a disregard for education develops.

The disappearance of literacy can be attributed to several phenomena. During this point in time the styles of writing and the letters of the alphabet multiplied, the shapes becoming complicated and obscured. As a consequence the readers’ capacities to

6 interpret it disappeared, and a condition called craft literacy took over. Craft literacy describes a circumstance where the art of reading is restricted to a few who form a privileged class. Its counter-condition is social literacy—a state where most people can and do read. It can be stated that the Roman Church was not unaware of the benefits of craft literacy as a means of keeping control over a large and diverse population. Thus, Europe returned to an instinctive condition of human communication, dominated by talk and reinforced by song (Aries 31).

This fateful transition directly leads to an evaporation of childhood. As essayist Neil Postman declares: Reading makes it possible to enter a non-observed and abstract world of knowledge; it creates a split between those who cannot read and those who can. Reading is the scourge of childhood because, in a sense, it creates adulthood. Literature of all kinds—including maps, charts, contracts, and deeds— collects and keeps valuable secrets.

Thus, in a literate world to be an adult implies having access to cultural secrets codified in unnatural symbols. In a literate world children must become adults.

The idea of shame hinges on secrets, as Quintilian knew. It was considered shameful to reveal these secrets too indiscriminately. In the modern world, as children move toward adulthood these secrets are revealed to them through education and experience. But such an idea is possible only in an atmosphere where there is a strong division between the adult and the child, and where there are institutions that articulate that distinction.

The medieval world made no such distinction and had no such institutions. Where literacy is valued there are schools, and where there are schools the concept of childhood thrives.

The invention of the printing press in the 15th century brought upon a shift in paradigms.

It created a new definition of adulthood based on reading competence and, as a result, a new ideation of childhood based on reading incompetence. The resurgence of learning and classical culture in the 13th century had triggered a craving for books.

Additionally, the growth of commerce and of the age of exploration generated a need for printed materials. The printing press had generated a knowledge explosion, and craft literacy evolves into social literacy. To be a fully functioning adult required one to go beyond custom and memory into worlds not previously contemplated. The Literate Man had been established (Eisenstein 22).

As childhood’s journey enters the 17th and 18th centuries a heightened sense of government responsibility for the welfare

e h t s i g n i d “Rea ood h d l i h c f o scourge , e s n e s a n i because, .” d o o h t l u d a it creates of children arises. New legislations were enacted to protect children and Europe developed a more compassionate regard of childhood: “The child became an object of respect—a special creature with a different nature and different needs, which required separation and protection from the adult world” (Postman 37).

A major contributor to this shift was the English philosopher and physician John Locke. Locke saw the connections between book learning and childhood.

He proposed a form of education that treated the child as a precious resource while still demanding attention to the child’s intellectual development and capacity for self-control. Locke also promoted the Tabula Rasa theory, which encompasses the notion that at birth the mind is a blank tablet—thus, a heavy responsibility falls to the parents, teachers, and government for what is ‘written’ on the mind (Postman 32).

This reintroduced the concepts of shame and guilt in association to adult and child obligations. Another influential figure in the development of childhood was the Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He expressed that the psychology of a child was fundamentally different from that of adults. In a view that differed from Locke, Rousseau suggested that a child’s intellectual and emotional life can be deadened by selfcontrol and shame; childhood is the stage of life when man most closely relates to the ‘state of nature.’ According to Rousseau the candor, understanding, curiosity, and spontaneity of a child can be suppressed by structure and education (Postman 60).

Locke and Rousseau shaped childhood in the New World. The Protestant conception of childhood, also known as the Lockean belief, maintained that the child is an unformed person who through literacy, education, reason, self-control, and shame may be made into a civilized adult. For those who followed this concept, education was viewed as an addition to self-quality.

On the other end of the spectrum was the Romantic perception of childhood, also

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known as the Rousseauian belief. This stance viewed education as a deduction of self quality—a way to suffocate the creativity of childhood. A strong example of the Romantic conception of childhood is Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Despite the differences among the beliefs, both platforms led to the establishment of new associations aimed to benefit the wellbeing of children.

For instance, the National Education Association was founded in 1857, followed by the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (1875), and the Society for the Study of Child Nature (1890). Research indicates that childhood—as a universal concept—experiences a real highpoint between 1850 and 1950. During this time, successful attempts were made to get children out of factories and into school,

Freud and Dewey operated, 100 laws were passed that classified children as qualitatively different from adults and offered protection from the idiosyncrasies of adulthood (Aries 79). This was also the period in which the stereotype of the modern family was cast; a period in which adults developed the psychic mechanisms that allow for a full measure of empathy, tenderness, and responsibility toward children—this is a huge mental evolution.

However, as war and media began to take over in the 20th century, a major disruption in the progression of childhood occurs.

The News Industry took off, coupled with a wave of invention, and information was transformed from a personal possession to a commodity of worldwide value. The camera, telephone, film, radio, and television not

media moves literacy to the periphery of culture, different attitude and character traits come to be valued and a new definition of adulthood emerges—or rather, a hybridization of the two realms occurs.

In modern culture, there is a phenomena revolving around the ‘adultified child’ and the ‘childified adult’ (Postman 138). Children are increasingly anxious to grow up while adults are increasingly hesitant to grow up. This confusion threatens our culture, as the whimsies of childhood are wasted and the responsibilities of adulthood are neglected. Childhood, as a whole entity, has experienced many tribulations over the course of history. It has become clear that the survival of childhood depends on the survival of literacy, education, protective laws, and adult compassion and obligation.

“The child is understood a s having its own rules x developmen t, s a charm, curiosity, and exuberance that must not be strangled—indeed, is st rangled—at the risk of losing mature a dulthood. and into their own clothing, furniture, literature, games, and social world (Aries 54). This highpoint is fueled in part by infamous neurologist Sigmund Freud and philosopher John Dewey. Postman asserts: Freud and Dewey crystallized the basic paradigm of childhood that had been forming since the printing press: the child as schoolboy or schoolgirl whose self and individuality must be preserved by nurturing, whose capacity for self-control, deferred gratification, and logical thought must be extended, whose knowledge of life must be under the control of adults.

At the same time, the child is understood as having its own rules for development, and a charm, curiosity, and exuberance that must not be strangled—indeed, is strangled—at the risk of losing mature adulthood. During the time in which

only transformed the world of information but the world of children as well.

These electronic and graphic revolutions represented a powerful assault on language and literacy. For example, television tends to make the rigors of literate education irrelevant; it requires no instruction to grasp its form; it does not make complex demands on the mind; it does not segregate its audience. In essence, electric media cannot withhold any secrets, and, without secrets there is no childhood. Suddenly the mysteries of sexuality and violence are accessible to everyone, and as a result, the innocence of childhood dissolves. It is evident that the media has the ability to uproot childhood through its form and context. It can be seen in the merging of taste and style of children and adults. As electric

When any one of these components is taken out, the entire realm of childhood is threatened. It’s important to preserve this realm in order to ensure a healthy and secure future. In the eloquent words of Neil Postman, children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see.

Works cited: Aries, Philippe. Centuries of Childhood. New York: Random House, Vintage Books, 1962.

Eisenstein, Elizabeth. The Printing Press As an Agent of Change. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1979.

Miller, Alice. The Drama of the Gifted Child. New York: Basic Books, 1981.

Postman, Neil. The Disappearance of Childhood. New York: First Vintage Books Edition, 1982.

p h o t o s by E M I LY E B E R T

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by TINA ESSM AKER

Maria Popova is the founder and editor of Brain Pickings, has written for Wired UK, The Atlantic, Nieman Journalism Lab, the New York Times, and Design Observer, among others, and is an MIT Futures of Entertainment Fellow.

11 Describe your path to what you’re doing now as an editor and writer.

I started Brain Pickings when I was still in college because I felt unstimulated by the experience of higher education. The enormous lecture classes of 400 people, professors who didn’t know students’ names, reading off of PowerPoint presentations, and assigning reading to be done at home— none of that was my idea of personal growth and enrichment. I started learning and reading about things on my own and Brain Pickings was a record of that.

At the time, I was also paying my way through school by working at a small ad agency, in addition to three other part-time jobs. I noticed that what the guys were circulating around the office for inspiration was stuff from within the ad industry.

I didn’t believe that was how creativity worked. I started sending out an email every Friday including five things that had nothing to do with advertising, but that I thought were meaningful, interesting, or important—and not just cool. I noticed that the guys were forwarding those emails to other people and I thought that maybe there was an intellectual hunger for that sort of cross-disciplinary curiosity and self-directed learning.

On top of my four jobs and full university course load, I enrolled in a night class to learn very basic web design and I took Brain Pickings online. That was before Wordpress was mainstream, so I was hard-coding static HTML pages every Friday, taking them down, and putting up the new ones.

Eventually, I moved it over to Wordpress and it’s grown pretty organically. I’ve never been too strategic about it and that whole game of social marketing is something I’ve never been deliberate about. To this day, I just write about things that interest and inspire me as well as things that I think are important to be preserved. That’s that, I guess.

To this day, I just write about things that interest and inspire me as well as things that I think are important to be preserved.”Maria is the founder and editor of Brain Pickings, a site which, in her own words, offers “cross-disciplinary curiosity-quenchers” and “things you didn’t know you were interested in until you are. There’s also a newsletter.

Where did you grow up?

I was born in Bulgaria and grew up there. I moved to the US for college.

How was creativity a part of your childhood there?

I’ve always been very visually driven. Bear in mind that I grew up during communism

and during my early childhood, there wasn’t much available; I didn’t have crayons or a lot of other things. Perhaps the best present ever given to me was from my uncle, who is an architect. Right after communism “fell”, he gave me a drawing kit that came in a suitcase and had crayons, pencils, rulers, watercolors, and other paints.

I didn’t read a lot myself, but my grandmother, who is very intellectual, would read to me. I was also very fascinated by her encyclopedias—she had a whole collection of them. With the Internet, I think we’re losing the ability to learn about something random that we didn’t know we were looking for. That’s what encyclopedias are great at.

Did you have an “aha” moment when you knew that editing and curating, for lack of a better term, was something you wanted to do?

Not at all. I also don’t believe in the terrible, toxic myth of the “aha” moment. Progress is incremental for us, both as individual creative beings and together as a society and civilization. The flower doesn’t go from bud to blossom in one spritely burst.

It’s just that culturally, we are not interested in the tedium of the blossoming. And yet that’s where all the real magic is in the making of one’s character and destiny.

Progress is incremental for us, both as individual creative beings and together as a society and civilization. The flower doesn’t go from bud to blossom in one spritely burst. It’s just that culturally, we are not interested in the tedium of the blossoming.

I really appreciate what you just said. We see people who are successful and often think it happened overnight, but that’s usually not the case. Individuals, especially young people starting out, seem to believe that their careers should take off quickly and when that doesn’t happen, they get discouraged. But there’s a lot of hard work that has to be put in behind the scenes and no one is necessarily going to commend you or say, “Great job. Keep going.”

You just have to keep doing it.

Yeah, it’s funny. Right before this interview, I was over at Hyperakt, the design studio.

They do these great lunch talks and my friend Debbie Millman, who runs the wonderful Design Matters podcast, spoke today. At the Q & A after her talk, she cited this anecdote, which is basically what you just said. She had just given a talk at the Tyler School of Art and this young

12 student asked, “How do I get people to visit my blog? I’m very frustrated with it.”

Debbie asked her, “How long have you been doing it?” and the student sincerely and earnestly replied, “A month.”

but I’ve tried to make things as seamless and easy and digestible as possible. At the end of the day, Brain Pickings is about the ideas and content and not at all about the bells and whistles surrounding it.

I think if you have a great idea and are intelligent and articulate about it, people will gravitate toward it sooner or later. But also, I’ve been doing what I do for seven years and I never started it with the notion that it would be my life. It is my life now and it will continue to be, but I couldn’t have predicted it. I don’t believe that the best work happens when you gun for a specific outcome—I just don’t think that’s how it works.

I like that you’ve made Brain Pickings accessible to everyone.

You mentioned that you’ve been doing Brain Pickings for seven years. For our readers who might not be familiar with it, would you elaborate on how it’s grown over the years?

Conceptually, it has changed very, very little. Granted, I’ve grown a lot as a person and because it’s such a personal thing, my interests and my intellectual and creative curiosities have changed.

However, the nature of what I write about and more importantly, why I write about what I write about has not changed.

Technically speaking, the platforms have changed as it started with an email newsletter, went to an HTML site, and then to Wordpress with some cosmetic redesigns along the way. I also have a newsletter again, which was almost an afterthought.

In 2009, a friend nudged me to do it and now it’s become pretty sizable. It’s strange because the demographic of people who read Brain Pickings is very diverse, so I get high school students, but also—and I don’t know why—I have a pretty large chunk of older people, including a large portion of retired educators. Now, many of the people who subscribe to the email newsletter are older and many of them don’t realize the newsletter is based on the site or realize that the site even exists.

Observing this organic journey has been very educational in understanding how people relate to knowledge and how they choose to absorb what they absorb. My philosophy and the one thing I’ve been strategic and deliberate about from the beginning is reader first—I don’t want anything to tell people how to engage with what they want to engage with. I don’t believe in slideshows, pagination, truncated RSS feeds, paywalls, and all these things that basically punish your most loyal readers. I’m just one person; I can’t optimize everything to be perfect,

Yes. Well, I guess there are two things I’ve been very strict about since the beginning.

The first I already mentioned and the second is that I don’t run ads; I don’t believe in ad-supported media and journalism, so the site is funded by readers through donations.

I’m a big believer in the “pay what you will” model; if you see value in it, you give whatever value you see. I think this model incentivizes integrity and encourages people to do work they actually care about.

Have you had any mentors along the way?

Not directly that I can think of. There are people whose work I admire in different ways, but no “mentors” per se.

Susan Sontag on love (cropped), based on the second volume of Sontag’s published diaries. Edited by Maria Popova and illustrated by Wendy MacNaughton.

I think you need to be a little in love— not necessarily in a romantic sense, although that helps—but to be in love with the reality of your own life in order to produce beautiful and meaningful and intelligent things creatively.

Has there been a point in your life when you decided you had to take a big risk to move forward?

Professionally, yes. When I graduated college out of the factory that is the Ivy League system, all the recruiters came to offer students big, corporate jobs.

Of course, I had all these offers in marketing and management and banking.

It was interesting because it was a risk in the sense that I grew up being really financially challenged and my family was still in Bulgaria, a country on a very different income scale, and they were not well off either. To them, getting a job offer with a big paycheck attached to it was a big deal. Those were numbers that would be a fortune in Bulgaria.

But for me, the consideration was, “Do I want to bury myself in a corporate job that I’m going to spent 80% of my waking hours at and hope that the money it gives me will make the other 20% of my life better, even though I’m burned out? Or, do I want to do something that makes me happy to wake

up to and happy to go to sleep having done and let the financial part figure itself out?” In fact, when I was first running Brain Pickings in my sophomore and junior years of college, I already had a bunch of job offers. What’s funny is that I couldn’t afford to take that basic web design night class I mentioned earlier. In order to pay for it, I saved money by eating store brand oatmeal and canned tuna for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for three weeks until I had enough money to pay for the class. (laughing) That didn’t feel like a sacrifice or risk at the time—it just felt like what I needed to do to be happy and I’m glad I did it. I can’t imagine having done it any other way.

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Where did you go to school?

UPenn.

Did you move to New York after school?

No. I stayed there for about a year working at that creative shop where I started Brain Pickings.

In the past decade, my life has been plagued by immigration bullshit and bureaucracy. In 2007 and 2008, there was this thing nicknamed Visa Gate, which was a government goof that affected two-thirds of people working on H–1B Visas here. That was the type of visa I was trying to get, so I was affected and had to pack up my entire

life, say goodbye to my friends, and leave.

I went back to Europe and lived in Bulgaria, but also spent quite a bit of time in London.

I was in exile there for a little over a year until I couldn’t take it anymore. Culturally, it was draining me; it was so negative and the people and ideas and events I wanted to be around were ten time zones away.

Eventually, I got an offer from an ad agency in LA and even though I didn’t want to work in advertising, it was a way in. Also, it was so loose; they just basically wanted me involved and I was able to create my own job. They were really smart and good people, but I had a cognitive dissonance with being in advertising. So, I moved to LA without having ever been there and having always loathed it from a distance. On day

two, I just knew it wasn’t my thing. I’ve chosen not to drive; I don’t want to learn.

Instead, I bike. After being a cyclist in LA, I have a body full of marks to show for it. I also felt lonely, isolated, and unhappy there.

Laurie Coots, the CMO of TBWA—the agency—took me under her wing and helped me move to the New York office.

She was so gracious about all of it and made sure I was happy. After I moved to New York, there was such a shift in my quality of life—there was creative stimulation and a massive exhale because I was no longer feeling isolated.

The other thing is that I love books. Between the time I left Philly and the time I moved to NY, I had lived in 12 apartments in five cities, on two continents and three coasts—all in less than two years. When you move that much, you can’t have books.

14 All my books were in storage and I wasn’t getting new books. In the year I spent in Bulgaria, I couldn’t even get eBooks; there wasn’t an iPad then. I felt deprived.

Once I moved to NY, I got all my books back and I started getting a ton of new books. Now, I’m buried in books.

be true to our sense of right and wrong, our sense of purpose and meaning. That’s how we contribute to the world. Anyone who is able to do that for him or herself is already contributing a great deal of human potential into our collective, shared pool of humanity. That’s my litmus test, I guess.

So now you’re staying put in NY?

Are you satisfied creatively?

Well, I just dealt with another immigration issue in the spring when I quit the ad agency and tried to transfer my visa to my new employer, an education startup called Lore.

Transferring your visa is supposed to be a seamless process, but something went wrong and I lost it and had to leave again.

Thankfully it was resolved fairly quickly.

Oh, completely.

It is a really disorienting thing to feel like everything you’ve built for yourself—your whole life—can be pulled out from under your feet by no fault of your own. It’s an arbitrary force that’s always there and it’s really, really frustrating and disempowering.

If it were up to me, I would never move away from NY, but I don’t trust the immigration system at all, so I’m cautious.

Are your family and friends supportive of what you do?

My friends, the only important people in my life, I’ve met through what I do.

They’re absolutely supportive.

My family tries to understand it and they’re always supportive, but I’m not convinced they actually get what it is I do. I don’t even know how to articulate it to myself most days, but that’s okay because I don’t need to. I just need to do it and be fulfilled by it and for them, that’s enough.

Are you at Studiomates?

I am in theory, although I’m so busy that I’m barely there. Tina jokes that I use it as my mail room. (laughing) It’s so close to where I live, but it’s just that every second is accounted for somehow.

Do you feel a responsibility to contribute to something bigger than yourself?

Well, isn’t that every person’s ultimate measure of happiness on some level, consciously or subconsciously? It’s very challenging to talk about these things that are very deep and existential without it sounding contrived or dishing out clichés, but at the end of the day, the reason clichés exist is that they’re true. That’s all one big disclaimer to what I’m about to say, which is that I truly, truly believe that our first responsibility is to ourselves—to

That said, is there anything you’re interested in exploring in the next 5 to 10 years?

Well, like I said, I don’t believe in planning for things. I believe in doing what inspires you and seeing how it grows organically.

If you could give a piece of advice to a young creative starting out, what would you say?

Again, this is a cliché, but it’s been true for me. Don’t let other people’s ideas of success and good or meaningful work filter your perception of what you want to do.

Listen to your heart and mind’s purpose; keep listening to that and even when the “shoulds” get really loud, try to stay in touch with what you hear within yourself.

You’ve talked a lot about New York. How does living there impact your creativity?

The novelist William Gibson has a wonderful term, “personal micro-culture”, by which he means all the things you surround yourself with—people, books, and any kind of ideological input. Those things essentially shape what you think and care about.

Living in NY, my personal micro-culture is that much richer. But mostly, I don’t have a separation between work and life; I don’t believe in the idea of work-life balance. The people in my personal life are also very much entrenched in what I do professionally and creatively. Being in NY and not feeling isolated is wonderful. Having true friends who are aligned with what I care about, but who are also different enough to broaden my curiosity and worldview, is enormous to me. I’m so grateful for it every day.

It sounds like it’s important to you to be part of a creative community of people?

Yes, but I’m wary of the word “community” because it sounds very organized. I think there’s a value in surrounding yourself with people who stimulate and challenge you, who don’t just agree with you all the time.

But I think the most important thing is to feel safe, seen, and understood by the people around you. I believe it was Bill

Nye who said this—everyone in your life knows something you don’t. And I believe it’s important to live in that unknown and to welcome and celebrate it. That can only happen when you actually come into contact with people and not in superficial ways, but when you deeply connect with them. That’s really important to me.

I agree. It’s about those meaningful, face-to-face connections, which have been really important for us since moving to New York and meeting people who we can connect with beyond online interactions.

That’s been life-giving for us.

I think that’s so, so important. It’s funny because, in the past year, I’ve been the subject of some online trolling and a lot of it tends to be personal rather than ideological.

One thing people would throw out a lot is, “All this time on Twitter—you don’t have a personal life,” or conflating being active on the social web as reducing all of your social life to that. I kind of chuckle at that stuff because I am so profoundly grateful for my friendships and the deep relationships I have in my life are the reason for everything for me. Kurt Vonnegut said, “Write to please just one person,” and I think you need to be a little in love—not necessarily in a romantic sense, although that helps—but to be in love with the reality of your own life in order to produce beautiful and meaningful and intelligent things creatively.

This might be a tough question. What does a typical day look like for you? (laughing) Because the volume of what I need to get done in a day is so enormous, I’m super disciplined and there’s a routine to my day that helps center and move me along. It’s pretty much always the same day.

I get up in the morning and preschedule some of my tweets and do very mild email.

Then I head to the gym where I do my long-form reading on the iPad while on the elliptical. I come back, have breakfast, and start writing. I write three articles a day— usually two shorter ones and one longer—so I try to write the longer one in the first half of the day before things get too crazy.

In the afternoon, I do more reading and preschedule the second half of my tweets.

In the evening, I do yoga or meditation and then I usually have some sort of event or a one-on-one with a friend, which is my preferred mode of connecting. When I get home, sometime between 10pm and 1am, I write the remainder of what I haven’t finished.

15 That’s a very full day. Now for some lighter questions.

Current album on repeat?

ever evolving. To anchor yourself with such certainty to something like an all-time favorite is the opposite of progress.

Sugaring Season, the new Beth Orton album, is amazing. This isn’t new anymore, but Love This Giant, the St. Vincent and David Byrne album has been on repeat for a long time. I’m also an enormous lover of covers. I’ve been on a kick of listening to covers of Talking Heads’ “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)” lately.

I will say this. I’ve been on a spree and really enjoying the diaries of Anaïs Nin and I know they’ll be a big part of my life forever. She started writing when she was 11 years old and wrote until she died.

There are 16 volumes and I’m only up to the fifth one. The diaries are personal, but she writes them as a nonfiction narrator and they’re essentially philosophy and thoughts on creativity and life. She also meets all these historical figures and gives descriptions that get to the core of who that human being is. I am very moved by her writing.

You probably don’t have time to TV or movies. Do you watch anything?

No. Oh, this is going to be the toughest question I ask you. Do you have a favorite book?

I’m not answering that question. (laughing) Do you have a favorite book from childhood?

I do, but that’s irrelevant because part of the beauty of intellectual life is that it’s

Do you have a favorite food?

I eat the same things every single day. I wouldn’t call them favorites— it’s more of a functional thing. I do love all seafood except oysters.

What kind of legacy do you hope to leave?

I don’t really care about “legacy” per se.

I want to be fulfilled while I’m living and when I die, it’s what people make of it. I would hope it’s something that’s meaningful to other people, but I also think legacy is caught up in all this ideology of afterlife and culturally, we spend too much time expecting the next moment to bring what this one is missing. That distracts from, to use Anaïs Nin’s term, “the art of living”. I don’t want to think about legacy; I want to think about doing things that are meaningful today and that’s plenty for me. Above all, I wholeheartedly believe Larkin put it best: “What will survive of us is love.”

Originally featured on The Great Discontent, November 2012.

Follow Maria on brainpickings.org.

16

Why

CAN ’T

WE ALL

JUST get

ALONG? The Uncertain Biological Basis of Morality

by ROBERT WRIGHT

In 1999, Joshua Greene—then a philosophy graduate student at Princeton, now a prestigious psychology professor at Harvard —had a very fertile idea.

He took a pretty well-known philosophical thought experiment and infused it with technology in a way that turned it into a very well-known philosophical thought experiment—easily the best-known, mostpondered such mental exercise of our time.

In the process, he raised doubts about the rationality of human moral judgment.

The thought experiment—called the trolley problem—has over the past few years gotten enough attention to be approaching “needs no introduction” status. But it’s not quite there, so: An out-of-control trolley is headed for five people who will surely die unless you pull a lever that diverts it onto a track where it will instead kill one person. Would you—should you—pull the lever?

Now rewind the tape and suppose that you could avert the five deaths not by pulling a lever, but by pushing a very large man off a footbridge and onto the track, where his body would slow the train to a halt just in time to save everyone—except, of course, him. Would you do that? And, if you say yes the first time and no the second (as many people do), what’s your rationale? Isn’t it a one-for-five swap either way?

Greene’s inspiration was to do brain scans of people while they thought about the trolley problem. The results suggested that people who refused to save five lives by pushing an innocent bystander to his death were swayed by emotional parts of their brains, whereas people who chose the more utilitarian solution—keep as many people alive as possible—showed more activity in parts of the brain associated with logical thought.

If you put Greene’s findings in general form— human “reasoning” is sometimes more about gut feeling than about logic—they are part of a wave of behavioral-science research that in recent years has raised doubts about how much trust your brain deserves. The best-seller lists have featured such books as Predictably Irrational, by the Duke psychologist Dan Ariely, and Thinking, Fast and Slow, in which the Princeton psychologist and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman covers acres of research into humanity’s logical ineptitude.

But there’s a difference between this work and Greene’s work. Ariely and Kahneman spend lots of time in their books on financial and other mundane decisions, whereas Greene is focusing on moral matters. It’s one thing to say “Isn’t it crazy that you’ll drive 10 miles to save $50 on a $100 purchase but not to save $50 on a $500 purchase?” It’s another thing

18 to say “Isn’t it crazy that you’ll dutifully kill a guy by pulling a lever but refuse on principle to give him a nudge that leads to the same outcome?” The first question is about selfhelp. The second is about something more.

How much more? To judge by Greene’s new book, a whole lot more. It’s called Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them—and, in case the title alone doesn’t convince you that the stakes are high, Greene writes that his book is about “the central tragedy of modern life.” He’s not alone in thinking this is high-gravitas stuff. The Yale psychologist Paul Bloom, who also studies the biological basis of morality, has a new book called Just Babies, about the emergence of moral inclinations in infants and toddlers. He’s chosen the subtitle The Origins of Good and Evil.

I have a fairly robust immune response to bookmarketing hype, but in this case it’s showing no signs of activity. The well-documented human knack for bigotry, conflict, and atrocity must have something to do with the human mind, and relevant parts of the mind are indeed coming into focus—not just thanks to the revolution in brain scanning, or even advances in neuroscience more broadly, but also thanks to clever psychology experiments and a clearer understanding of the evolutionary forces that shaped human nature. Maybe we’re approaching a point where we can actually harness this knowledge, make radical progress in how we treat one another, and become a species worthy of the title Homosapiens.

on both the domestic and international fronts, bringing reason to discussions about abortion and gay rights; calming tensions between India and Pakistan, Israel and Palestine; and so on. Greene’s diagnosis is, at its foundation, Darwinian: the impulses and inclinations that shape moral discourse are legacies of natural selection, rooted in our genes. Many of them are with us today because they helped our ancestors realize the benefits of cooperation.

As a result, people are pretty good at getting along with one another, and supporting basic ethical rules that keep societies humming.

Anyone who doubts that basic moral impulses are innate will have Paul Bloom’s book to contend with. He synthesizes research—much of it done by him and his wife, Karen Wynn— demonstrating that an array of morally relevant inclinations show up in infants and toddlers. His list of natural moral endowments includes “some capacity to distinguish between kind and cruel actions,” as well as “empathy and compassion— suffering at the pain of those around us and the wish to make this pain go away.” Bloom’s work has also documented “a rudimentary sense of justice—a desire to see good actions rewarded and bad actions punished.”

Different Perspectives So if we’re such moral animals, why all the strife? Joshua Greene’s answer is appealingly simple. He says the problem is that we were designed to get along together in a particular context—relatively small hunter-gatherer

The impulses and inclinations that shape moral discourse are legacies of natural selection, rooted in our genes.

Both Bloom and Greene evince concern for the human predicament; both authors would like to do something about it; and both have ideas about what that something should be. But only Greene’s book brings the word messianic to mind. His concern is emphatic, his diagnosis precise, and his plan of action very, very ambitious. The salvation of humankind is possible, but it’s going to take concerted effort. Greene offers readers “the motivation and opportunity to join forces with like-minded others,” the chance to support what he calls a “metamorality.” And as this metamorality spreads, we can expect to solve problems

societies. Our brains are good at reconciling us to groups we’re part of, but they’re less good at getting groups to make compromises with one another. “Morality did not evolve to promote universal cooperation,” he writes.

Greene seems to think this wouldn’t be such a big problem if we were still living in the Stone Age, back when sparse population meant that groups didn’t bump into one another much—and when, anyway, a neighboring village might share your language and your culture and maybe even include some of your kin. But the modern world smushes groups together and they have different values.

This fact—that different groups view life “from very different moral perspectives”—is what Greene calls the “Tragedy of Commonsense Morality.” He opens his book with a parable in which different tribes subscribing to different values can’t get along and says, “They fight not because they are fundamentally selfish but because they have incompatible visions of what a moral society should be.”

If this diversity of moral codes is indeed the big problem, one solution suggests itself: get rid of the diversity. We need “a common currency, a unified system for weighing values,” Greene writes. “What we lack, I think, is a coherent global moral philosophy, one that can resolve disagreements among competing moral tribes.”

One question you confront if you’re arguing for a single planetary moral philosophy: Which moral philosophy should we use?

For starters, there are those trolley-problem brain scans. Recall that the people who opted for the utilitarian solution were less under the sway of the emotional parts of their brain than the people who resisted it. And isn’t emotion something we generally try to avoid when conflicting groups are hammering out an understanding they can live with?

The reason isn’t just that emotions can flare out of control. If groups are going to talk out their differences, they have to be able to, well, talk about them. And if the foundation of a moral intuition is just a feeling, there’s not much to talk about. This point was driven home by the psychologist Jonathan Haidt in an influential 2001 paper called “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail” (which approvingly cited Greene’s then-new trolley-problem research). In arguing that our moral beliefs are grounded in feeling more than reason, Haidt documented “moral dumbfounding”—the difficulty people may have in explaining why exactly they believe that, say, homosexuality is wrong.

If everyone were a utilitarian, dumb-foundedness wouldn’t be a problem. No one would say things like “I don’t know, two guys having sex just seems … icky!” Rather, the different tribes would argue about which moral arrangements would create the most happiness. Sure, the arguments would get complicated, but at least they would rest ultimately on a single value everyone agrees is valuable: happiness.

You may ask: How do you get devout Christians, Jews, and Muslims to abandon their religiously based value systems? Greene realizes that this isn’t a summer-vacation project, and I don’t think practicality is the core problem with his plan. I think the big problem comes earlier, in the diagnosis phase: overestimating the role played by divergent values. Consider one of Greene’s examples. It’s true that some Jews believe God reserved the West Bank for them.

19

i l l u s t r a t i o n s by MELISSA JOHNSON

But it’s also true that this belief—and religious belief in general—has had very little to do with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Zionism was a largely secular movement, featuring minimal God talk, and the Arab resistance to it wasn’t particularly religious. After the Palestinian Sirhan, enraged by Robert F. Kennedy’s pledge to send arms to Israel, assassinated Kennedy, he said he had done it for “my country,” not “my religion.” And, anyway, his religion was the same as Kennedy’s: Christianity.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is at its root a conflict between two peoples who think they’re entitled to the same piece of land. When they argue about this, they don’t generally posit different ethical principles of land ownership.

They posit different versions of history—different views on how many Arabs were living in Palestine before 1948, on who started the fighting that resulted in many Arabs leaving the area, on which side did which horrible things to the other side first, and so on. It’s not clear why these arguments over facts would change if both groups were godless utilitarians. In fact, Greene’s own book suggests they wouldn’t.

Notwithstanding its central argument, it includes lots of evidence that often the source of human

conflict isn’t different moral systems but rather a kind of naturally unbalanced perspective.

He cites a study in which Israelis and Arabs watched the same media coverage of the 1982 Beirut massacre and both groups concluded that the coverage was biased against their side. Any suspicion that this discrepancy was grounded in distinctive Jewish or Arab or Muslim values is deflated by another finding he cites, from the classic 19354 study in which Princeton and Dartmouth students, after watching a particularly rough PrincetonDartmouth football game, reached sharply different conclusions about which side had played dirtier. Was the problem here a yawning gap between the value systems prevailing at Princeton and Dartmouth in the 1950s?

The problem was that both groups consisted of human beings. As such, they suffered from a deep bias—a tendency to overestimate their team’s virtue, magnify their grievances, and do the reverse with their rivals. This bias seems to have been built into our species by natural selection—at least, that’s the consensus among evolutionary psychologists. This means that some self-serving biases are rooted in what Greene presents as the good news about our

evolutionary past: that people are designed by natural selection to extract the benefits of cooperating with other people. Yes, you and your three fellow hunter-gatherers will all be better off if you cooperate on a hunt to kill an animal none of you could kill individually. But when it comes time to divvy up the meat, it’s better to get 30 percent than 25 percent. So we’re naturally good bargainers—with ready access to facts that support our worthiness and less-ready access to facts that don’t; we seem designed to believe in our entitlement.

Opposite Worlds If real-world examples of our self-serving biases seem hard to find, that’s because they’re supposed to be hard to find; the whole idea is that we’re not aware of the information these biases exclude. So, for example, if you’re like the average American, here’s a fact you don’t know: in 1953, the United States sponsored a coup in Iran, overthrowing a democratically elected government and installing a brutally repressive regime that ruled for decades.

Iranians, on the other hand, are very aware of this, which helps explain why, to this day, many of them are gravely suspicious of American

20 be impartial. When you combine judgment that’s naturally biased with the belief that wrongdoers deserve to suffer, you wind up with situations like two people sharing the conviction that the other one deserves to suffer.

Greene and Bloom, and lots of other scholars, believe the sense of justice to be a legacy of natural selection, and the logic is straightforward. For starters, though extracting the benefits of cooperation involves things like making overtures to help someone (since maybe that person will help you down the road), it also means following up selectively— reciprocating kindnesses extended to you but not continuing to help those who don’t help you. It may even mean punishing those who have abused your trust by, say, feigning friendship only to desert you once they’ve reaped the benefits of your generosity. So the impulses governing cooperation range from the gratitude that cements friendships to the sort of righteous indignation that fuels violence. intentions. It also helps explain the 1979 takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran—an event that many Americans no doubt chalk up to unfathomable religious zealotry. This is the way the brain works: you forget your sins (or never recognize them in the first place) and remember your grievances. As a result, the antagonisms confronting you may seem mysterious, and you may be tempted to attribute them to an alien value system. Indeed, this temptation may itself be part of our built-in equipment for making our rivals’ positions seem groundless. In any event, viewing values as deeply causal, as Greene and so many others do, seems to be deeply human. It’s also unfortunate, because, time and again, that belief keeps us from addressing the actual issues that underlie conflict.

Many of these self-serving biases fall under the broader rubric of “confirmation bias”—a tendency to notice facts consistent with your thesis and overlook facts that contradict it. Confirmation bias is generally called a cognitive bias, not a moral bias, along with our other funny intellectual quirks. But cognitive biases can have moral consequences just as surely as trolley-car intuitions do.

What makes the moral stakes especially high is the way these biases interact with a feature of psychology that is more obviously moral in nature. Namely: the sense of justice—the intuition that good deeds should be rewarded and bad deeds should be punished. Rewarding good behavior increases its frequency, and the threat of punishment discourages bad behavior.

But this assumes impartial judgment—that the punishment will go to those who did the bad things and the rewards will go to those who did the good things. And, as we’ve just seen, our judgments are designed not to

This polarity may be the origin of what eventually evolved into a full-fledged sense of justice, evident in people from an early age.

Bloom shows us 1-year-olds who feel that a puppet that doesn’t play nice with other puppets should be punished—in fact, they’ll personally do the punishing, by taking the puppet’s treats away. It sounds sweet, in that context—hard to believe that this same impulse, when fused with natural cognitive biases, can lead to genocide.

Greene doesn’t neglect these sorts of impulses and biases. Indeed, he explains the dark side of our cooperative machinery and of human nature generally. This all feeds into his belief that “our brains are wired for tribalism.” If indeed we’re wired for tribalism, then maybe much of the problem has less to do with differing moral visions than with the simple fact that my tribe is my tribe and your tribe is your tribe. Both Greene and Bloom cite studies in which people were randomly divided into two groups and immediately favored members of their own group in allocating resources—even when they knew the assignment was random.

Of course, for things to get really nasty, you need more than just the existence of two groups.

The most common explosive additive is the perception that relations between the groups are zero-sum—that one group’s win is the other group’s loss. In a classic 1950s study mentioned

by Bloom (a study that couldn’t be performed today, given prevailing ethical strictures), experimenters created deep hostility between two groups of boys at summer camp by pitting them against each other in a series of zero-sum games. The rift was mended by putting the boys in non-zero-sum situations—giving them a common peril, such as a disruption in the water supply, that they could best confront together.

Zero-Sum When you’re in zero-sum mode and derogating your rival group, any of its values that seem different from yours may share in the derogation. Meanwhile, you’ll point to your own tribe’s distinctive, and clearly superior, values as a way of shoring up its solidarity. So outsiders may assume there’s a big argument over values. But that doesn’t mean values are the root of the problem.

The question of how large a role differing value systems play in human conflict hovers over some of the world’s most salient tensions.

Many Americans see Muslim terrorists as motivated by an alien “jihadist” ideology that compels militants to either kill infidels or bring them under the banner of Islam. But what the “jihadists” actually say when justifying their attacks has pretty much nothing to do with bringing Sharia law to America. It’s about the perception that America is at war with Islam.

Just look at the best-known terrorist bombers and would-be terrorist bombers who have targeted the United States since 9/11: the Boston Marathon bombers, the would-be “underwear bomber,” the would-be Times Square bomber, and the would-be New York subway bombers.

All have explicitly cited as their motivating grievance one or more of the following: the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, drone strikes in various Muslim countries, and American support for Israeli policies toward Palestinians.

There’s no big difference over ethical principle here. Americans and “jihadists” agree that if you’re attacked, retaliation is justified (an extension of the sense of justice, and a belief for which you could mount a plausible utilitarian rationale, if forced). The disagreement is over the facts of the case—whether America has launched a war on Islam. And so it is with most of the world’s gravest conflicts. The problem isn’t the lack of, as Greene puts it, a “moral language that members of all tribes can speak.” Retributive justice, for better or worse, is a moral language spoken around the world—but it is paired with a stubborn and lethal bias about who should be on the receiving end of the retribution.

None of this is to deny the existence of genuine disputes over values, or to say that such disputes never matter. Certainly domestic politics features explicit debates over values, and here—in the realm of abortion and gay rights—Greene’s argument may hold more water. I’m sure there would be less homophobia if people were driven more by pure reason— not just because they would sidestep scriptural injunctions, but also because they would transcend gut reactions against forms of sex that they themselves don’t find enticing.

But even in the domestic arena, the fact that

21

We seem designed to twist moral discourse—whatever language it’s framed in—to selfish or tribal ends, and to remain conveniently unaware of the twisting. people fight over values doesn’t mean values are the prime mover. The conflicts may draw at least as much energy from prior intertribal tensions—including a sense that your group is threatened by another group, so that the game is zero-sum. Two decades ago, then–Vice President Dan Quayle paired criticism of abortion and gay parenting with a warning about the “cultural elite” who were said to be foisting such values on ordinary Americans. That was smart, because once you’re convinced that an enemy group has contempt for your values, your values will seem, more than ever, worth fighting for.

And you’ll do what it takes to fight for them.

But you’d do that even if—as in Greene’s ideal world—the ground rules confined your weapons to utilitarian argument. Indeed, debates in the public square over things like gay rights are already pretty utilitarian. (Is having gay parents good for children?) Yet the debates remain hard to resolve—in part because utilitarian arguments can be so creatively hypothetical. (Will the logic behind gay marriage lead to an acceptance of polygamy—and what effect would that have on human happiness?) It’s enough to make you wonder how much conflict a moral lingua franca would really prevent.

The Infamous Lever Greene’s evangelical mission, like many evangelical missions, is rooted in a not-veryflattering view of human nature. Namely: some of our deepest moral intuitions are gut feelings that are with us for no more lofty a reason than that they helped our ancestors protect themselves and spread their genes.

Even the emotional aversion to pushing the guy onto the trolley track (an aversion so deep that utilitarians overcome it only with effort) isn’t here because natural selection frowned on pushing people to their death per se. Greene speculates, rather, that we are averse to conspicuously harming people because in the hunter-gatherer environment of our evolution, that would have invited retaliation from the victims or their kin or friends. Killing someone remotely, by pulling a lever, doesn’t trigger the same aversion as low-tech, obvious assault.

In a sense, then, people who obey their moral intuitions and refrain from pushing the man to his death are just choosing to cause five deaths they won’t be blamed for rather than one death they would be blamed for. Not a profile in moral courage! So you can see why Greene would like to recruit us to a moral philosophy that doesn’t rest on a bunch of emotional intuitions. It holds out the hope of helping us transcend natural selection’s amoral agenda.

But however dark the view of human nature that inspired this mission, I fear it’s not dark enough.

If Greene thinks that getting people to couch their moral arguments in a highly reasonable language will make them highly reasonable, I think he’s underestimating the cleverness and ruthlessness with which our inner animals pursue natural selection’s agenda. We seem designed to twist moral discourse—whatever language it’s framed in—to selfish or tribal ends, and to remain conveniently unaware of the twisting.

How exactly do you do metacognition? Well, you could start by pondering all the evidence that your brain is an embarrassingly misleading device. Self-doubt can be the first step to moral improvement. But our biases are so subtle, alluring, and persistent that converting a wave of doubt into enduring wisdom takes work. The most-impressive cases of bias neutralization I’m aware of involve people who have spent ungodly amounts of time—several hours a day for many years—in meditative practices that make them more aware of the workings of their minds. These people seem much less emotiondriven, much less wrapped up in themselves, and much less judgmental than, say, I am.

Happily for those of us who can’t spare several hours a day, more-modest progress can be made by pursuing this “mindfulness meditation” in smaller doses. And this practice exploits a strategy that is common in successful evangelical missions: using self-help as bait. Loosening the grip of your emotions can make you happier, and for many meditators that’s the big draw.

The fact that emotionally driven and subtly self-centered moral judgments loosen their hold on you as well seems almost like a side effect.

Within various kinds of tribes—religions, nations, political parties—there are people urging their compatriots to see things from a less tribal perspective, to put themselves in the shoes of the other, to explore the non-zero-sum prospect of accommodation. These voices can prevail without Greene’s recommended overhaul of tribal value systems, and if they do prevail, the distinctive tribal values that seem so explosively divisive now will start to seem less so.

This sort of global metacognitive revolution, even with the assistance it’s getting from science, may be a long shot, and it certainly will be a long, hard slog. But nourishing the seeds of enlightenment indigenous to the world’s tribes is a better bet than trying to convert all the tribes to utilitarianism—both more likely to succeed, and more effective if it does.

Don’t get me wrong: Some of my best friends are utilitarians. In fact, the utilitarian tribe is another tribe I belong to. I even once spent a chapter of a book defending utilitarianism as the best available moral philosophy. I just don’t think it’s the key to salvation.

It’s tempting for us utilitarians to look around at people with more emotionally rooted value systems and think that these primitive worldviews are what stand in the way of progress. But if psychology tells us anything, it is to be suspicious of the intuition that the other guys are the problem and we’re not.

Originally featured in The Atlantic, November 2013.

Copyright © 2014 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.

22

Uncommon Findings

BARRIERS TO CREATIVITY IN EDUCATION Exclusive Adobe study reveals education system is stifling creativity.

Top 3 most important steps to promote and foster creativity in education:

by TACY TOBRIDGE, Education Programs Lead at Adobe

Adobe released a research study that reveals the state of creativity in

education. It highlights the importance of preparing students to be innovators and how testing and government mandates are

stifling creativity in the classroom.

This international study, “Barriers to Creativity in Education: Educators and Parents Grade the System,” shows there is a growing concern that the education system itself is a barrier to developing the creativity that drives innovation. Parents and educators agree that today’s education system places too much emphasis on testing and not enough investment in the training, tools and time needed to teach creativity.

Among the 4,000 adults, 2,000 were educators and 2,000 were parents of students in K-12 and higher education. A strong majority of the participants across the United States, United Kingdom, Germany and Australia, call for a transformation in the ways schools work. Furthermore, educators agree that they can do more to foster creativity with more tools and training to integrate it into the classroom.

When asked about the most important step to promote and foster creativity in education, U.S. respondents cited the need to: • Provide tools and training to teach creativity • Make creativity integral to the curriculum • Reduce mandates that hinder creativity Originally posted at blogs.adobe.com, June 2013.

86

%

of parents and educators believe teaching creativity requires a transformation in the way schools work.

23

United States

30%

Providing tools and training to educators to enable creativity

18

%

24%

Making creativity integral to the curriculum

Reducing mandates that hinder creativity

UK, Australia, Germany

23%

Improving curriculum

22%

Providing tools to educators that enable creativity more effectively

21

%

Making creativity integral to the curriculum and rewarding educators who inspire students to be creative

Source: Adobe “Barriers to Creativity in Education: Educators and Parents Grade the System� Study. Study based on interviews with 4,000 adults, including 2,000 educators of students in K through higher education and 2,000 parents of children in K through higher education.

The top 3 barriers to teaching creativity according to parents and educators:

United States 1. System too reliant on testing 2. Educators restricted from straying outside the curriculum 3. Lack of resources International Combined 1. Current education curriculum 2. Misunderstanding of the importance of creativity in education 3. Lack of resources and restriction from straying outside the curriculum (tied)

24

Uncommon Interview

SHULI HALLAK: INVISIBLE NETWORKS One woman’s fantastic quest to photograph the living internet

by CHRIS GAYOMALI

We tend to think of the Internet as vast and infinite, an amorphous nebula of tweets, cats, and words spilled on Flappy Bird.

And to an extent, we’re right—according to some estimates, 90% of the world’s data was generated in just the last two years alone. Yet the Internet and its crushing presence is very much finite, in as much as the space and infrastructure required to contain it is, physically speaking, limited in form. Reddit’s server rooms take up space. And so does your computer.

Which is why in many ways, this Internet—the physical Internet—is even more mysterious to us than the more-familiar information universe housed inside it. One ambitious photographer would like to change that.

Invisible Networks is the ongoing project of Shuli Hallak, whose end goal is to showcase the palpable parts of the net we otherwise never think about. And—perhaps unsurprisingly—it’s pretty damn fascinating.

After getting her MFA at the School of Visual Arts in 2005, Hallak’s journey as a photographer led her to do an artist series on cargo ships. It was there the seed for Invisible Networks was planted. “I photographed the whole world of cargo shipping for like two years and got access to a port. I was really fascinated with how ships come in and how containers come off the ships,” she told Fast Company.

“There was this whole invisible network of infrastructure we don’t see.” I sat down with Hallak over coffee on a slushy day in February to talk about her goals, the creative process, and the Internet most of us are unfamiliar with. The following is an edited transcript.

Gayomali: So a cargo ship, huh? What were the accommodations like?

How do you even go about photographing the Internet?

Where did you start?

Shuli Hallak: Not too bad! It was like a Best Western. It was crazy. And a lot of fun.

I made contacts and told people what I was doing, and found a few who were interested. Some of these telecoms and people building infrastructure really want to get their stuff seen and heard in the right way. I built the right relationships, I think, because I was in it for the long haul.

So I’m guessing that living on a cargo ship is not where you came up with the idea to photograph the Internet.

No, no. It’s been a long, organic evolution.

After cargo ships, I became fascinated with all the invisible stuff that makes our world run that we don’t see, like energy. Coal, oil, renewable resources—stuff like that. In the back of my mind, I was always thinking about The Matrix, you know? [Laughs] The world we really live in and the whole illusion thing.

Then, about two years ago, I was reading about how data centers consume all this energy—almost as much as small cities. And I’m like, “Well, that’s crazy.” Facebook is building these huge server farms on the Arctic Circle. And they’re huge. They’re enormous.

And all it is really is our photos, the stuff we do every day. We’re building a whole other layer—a whole new world—on top of our existing world. And we don’t even see it.

It just made me really curious. At first, [I just wanted to photograph] data centers because I think that’s all I had a visual concept of. It just points to the fact that we think of the Internet in the abstract. Or in the cloud. And it’s absolutely not. It’s very, very physical. It’s graspable. And it’s why I started Invisible Networks last March.

So the telecoms were receptive to you taking pictures of their work?

Yeah. I met this guy named Hunter Newby, who helped me out a lot. He was one of the people who started Telx.

He told me about 325 Hudson, which is this huge carrier hotel here in New York that I photographed for my e-book.

What’s a carrier hotel?

It’s this neural point in the network where these core networks come together and start connecting. A core network is a network that carries high bandwidth. Facebook is a core network. Sony is a core network because of all the gamers. There are a bunch of other ones that we haven’t heard of.

So, they bring their equipment to a carrier hotel and set it up inside what’s called a “meet me room.” They run a fiber through a “meet me area” and then, if they want to connect to another network, that network brings another fiber into the “meet me area,” too. It’s so they’re not dealing directly to another company’s equipment.

25

Let’s backtrack a bit. Why do you think it’s important for people to see this stuff? This living part of the Internet?

It’s important because we’re moving into an information era from the industrial era.

This is the infrastructure we are relying on.

In the industrial era, we relied on electricity and actual highways to make and move products. We’re making things on the Internet and transporting them on the Internet. We’re at a disadvantage if we don’t know what that looks like because it’s physical, and we’re building our entire next era on this.

Our lives, our economy, everything is built on this—the future of cities are going to be built around where the best broadband is. There are a lot of implications. If we know what this stuff looks like, then we can actually speak about it and think about it. It’s not actually very complicated or difficult. We’re visual thinkers. And we can speak about things when we have a visual concept.

Let’s talk about your creative process. How do you go about composing photos when you get to a site? Do you already have a story in mind?

Sometimes I really have no idea what I’m going to see. For some of the stuff, I’m really happy that this is a long-term thing because I get to grow with it. It’s not a one-off thing, so there’s no pressure. I try to just not think, because I think when I think. And it ruins it.

As a photographer, I realized that all your work is done way before you ever get there. You’ve already done your work as an artist by beating yourself up and by taking in all the visual stimulus and punching it through. It’s just there. It’s an impulse, I think. If you really love what you do, you don’t think about it. I’m just paying attention to what’s happening. I try to get into it.

Have you ever gotten to a site and thought, Whoa I wasn’t expecting that?

I photographed these companies pulling fiber through the streets of New York, like Stealth and OCG Fiber. They opened up the manholes and I actually went down into one. It was a mess. [Laughs] You went down into the sewer?

Yup. That’s our critical infrastructure. It’s a mess. It’s a total disaster. It’s not the companies’ faults—they’re just doing whatever they have to do. It’s just layers and layers of a person or company pulling

whatever it is they need to pull. It’s actually pretty cool because it’s a history of New York down there—electric, telecom, whatever. You look down and you don’t think it’s so bad. But then you go in! Apparently, the one I saw wasn’t even that bad.

So where do underwater cables come into the picture? Do you plan on diving or anything to photograph them?

The funny thing is it doesn’t even really require diving. [The cables] do go on the water, and there is an element to it that requires a submarine rover. But the process is really about the physical part of it: The cables that get manufactured and then loaded up onto these huge ships. It takes like three weeks to load these giant cables onto the actual ship.

And then the ship goes out to sea for like a month. It’s a beautiful process—kind of an art form. There’s over a half million miles of submarine cables all around the world that are tying all of us together and sending us our information. I’m excited to see it. It’s going to be really beautiful.

Are these cables really attacked? Like that one in Egypt a few years back?

They have cable cuts all the time, but it isn’t that big a deal. When the cables come close to shore they are usually buried. But anchors and fishing ships sometimes cut them. From what I understand, it happens quite often.

What do you mean?

When we don’t have a visual concept, we’re grasping for how to speak about it.

We don’t know what a fiber cable looks like. We can imagine it, because we kind of know what cables look like. But when we’re talking about fiber optics, we’re just drawing up blanks. Like, what the hell’s a router? What’s a carrier hotel? These kinds of things are important. Words are meaningless without an actual symbol.

Images provided by Shuli Hallak

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Uncommon Lessons

20 THINGS I’VE LEARNED An SEO CEO shares tips on living a purposeful, prosperous, and happier life.

by DEV BASU

1 Never accept anyone

else telling you what you can or cannot do.

No one can decide what you’re capable of except you. Don’t let anyone choose which lines you want to color in.

2 Focus on possibilities instead of problems.

Problems are often opportunities in disguise.

3 If you don’t go after what

you want, you’ll never have it.

The biggest enemy of progress is using the phrase “someday”. Successful people don’t wait for opportunities — they create them.

4 Create more

than you consume.

We spend our lives in front of screens of various shapes and sizes. In a garbage-in garbage-out world, share your wisdom by creating a wealth of knowledge rather than only consuming it.

5 The world doesn’t owe you anything.

Your work will go unappreciated. Your partner will take you for granted. Your boss will take credit for your work. Remember that the world owes you nothing and that your future is in your own hands.

6 Good actions count

more than good intentions.

What you do matters more than what you intended. No one can read your mind and no one owes it to you to really try.

At age 26 Dev Basu, CEO of @poweredbysearch shares a few things he’s learned over the years about living a prosperous and purposeful life.

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7

Be kind to your body and your soul.

Every 10 years, one can look back a decade and feel markedly different about their physical fitness, levels of energy, and drive. As we age it is important to take care of your mind and body.

Expect nothing in return for the things you do for others.

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13

You don’t need to believe in karma to do good things for others. Be selfless in helping others and do not do it for any other reason but brighten someone else’s day.

9

Strive for happiness and nothing but happiness.

Strive to be happy and content. Focus on maximizing your happiness over everything else: status, money, power, ego, etc.

10

Spend a few moments with yourself alone, every day.

Failure is a reflection of an event, not a person.

When you fail learn from the experience.

Life is full of chances (whether you create opportunities or chance upon them) and learning from your failures will help you shape into a better person.

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Money is a great enabler and can open many doors but having money is not the same as being wealthy. True wealth comes from the sense of freedom and contentment that is not easily displaced or replicated.

12

Learn something new every day.

Spend your downtime learning new things that can enrich your life. I learned how to pitch better on my daily drive into work by listening to audio books back when i was around 19-21.

Break big projects into tiny blocks.

When I was starting my undergraduate and working i remember it being difficult to complete exercises and create scope of work proposals at the same time. I learned to “chunk” projects. In it’s most rudimentary form I’d chart out any given project into an outline and then work on sections one-by-one.

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Take a couple of minutes every day to be at peace with yourself. If you’re into meditation then take 10 minutes to do that. If you aren’t, spend the time grounding yourself by appreciating what you have today and preparing for the dreams you want to pursue tomorrow.

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You aren’t truly wealthy until you have something money can’t buy.

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When thinking about your life’s work you don’t have to settle for what’s proven.

What is most important is to pick a passion that you’ll likely never get bored of and then be the best at it. Success and money will come in spades if it’s something that others care about.

Choose your partner carefully. They can make your life 100x better or worse.

I couldn’t imagine life without my wife. She is a constant source of joy, happiness, inspiration, and the best friend i could ever ask for. All relationships take time, effort, and understanding but having the right partner can make life 100x better.

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Pick the something you love and be amongst the best in the world at it.

17

Let go of your anger and jealousy.

Seriously. It isn’t worth it and the only person you’re holding back is yourself.

A good life is when you assume nothing, do more, need less, smile often, dream big, laugh a lot, love with complete abandon, and count your blessings every single day.

Look for work-life fit, not work-life balance.

Your boss and colleagues count on you to pull long-hours and you may be dissatisfied with your job. Most people aren’t actually motivated by money to switch jobs but instead look for work-life balance. It doesn’t really exist. Worklife fit focuses on employees’ flexibility in their working hours, allowing them to balance work along side personal goals or duties.

Learn to listen twice as much as you talk.

Everyone wants to be heard. It pays to listen to anyone you speak to and understand what they are saying instead of thinking of your next response while they’re talking. This way we speak with each other instead of at each other.

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Always be hungry and fight complacency.

Never get too comfortable in life. Seek new challenges regularly.

Work with your boss to help set goals for you that you can work toward if you aren’t allowed to set them yourself.

Uncommon Sense was designed in the Fall of 2014 at the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design by EMILY EBERT.