Who You Learn With, Who You Live With

 

Office markets have struggled since the pandemic, as increased remote work and other employee preferences reduce the amount of space companies need (sometimes all the way down to zero). I may prove to be wrong, but I suspect that while the new equilibrium may be lower than pre-COVID, it will still be a healthy amount of square footage, as there remain many benefits for employers and employees alike to be physically together, particularly in amenity-rich and multi-modal downtown settings.

What I can predict with greater confidence (again, doesn't mean I won't be proven wrong) is strong demand for on-campus housing at universities across the country. This is driven by a number of factors:

* Communities where universities are located can be expensive, incentivizing schools to be directly involved in meeting that demand

* Dorms can be money-makers for schools, if you are able to charge a premium for rent while keeping costs low through philanthropy or tax-exempt financing

* Town-gown relations are often exacerbated when a critical mass of students live off-campus, yielding issues around trash, traffic, and parking

But perhaps the biggest driver of bringing more students onto campus is a desire to intensify the social experience students can have during their four years in college. After all, the benefit of higher education is way more than just what you learn from your professors in your classrooms. It's also who you learn with, a profound influence that is multiplied many times over when the interactions extend beyond 9am econ class to include late-night philosophical discussions, midnight pizza runs, and the mundane day-to-day of sharing space with a roommate who started out as a complete stranger only to become the most important person in your life for eight months.

I've written countless grad school recommendation letters, and I keep coming back to wanting to emphasize how the candidate will be an active and positive contributor to the community that the school is building when it assembles a class. At the grad school, people are choosing into a program, and in turn a school should want to choose people who will enhance the learning experience for their classmates.

At the undergraduate level, it's the same but different. College students are younger and still figuring out who they are and what they want to be about. All the more that your four years are profoundly influenced by who you share space with, in the classroom but also in the cafeteria and dorm and community.

I think this is universally true, but it takes different forms at different places. Big-time athletic programs create a lifelong fan and in turn lifelong inclusion in a huge alumni network of fellow fans. Faith-based institutions seek to select and mold people of character, whose values will be formed and sharpened in the crucible of living and learning together. Every school has a culture that we learn about, are shaped by, and in turn help contribute to. 

A university wants this, badly. So it organizes freshman orientation, curates traditions, and provides spaces and experiences to build it up. Residential life is a natural extension of that, since it literally carries into the wee hours. It is no exaggeration and no small thing that who you learn with and who you live with can shape who you become for the rest of your life. What a wonderful opportunity that lies ahead on college campuses around the country.

Leadership Pet Peeves

 

 

“Leadership” is a good way to think about who to vote for in this year’s presidential election, in addition to being a set of traits we should ourselves aspire to in our respective positions of influence (at home, at work, in our communities). One way I want to explore the topic is to describe a few leadership pet peeves, which may not be important to others but to me are borderline disqualifying for those who exhibit these patterns. 

1. Words and deeds don’t line up with rhetoric. Leadership requires integrity, and an easy way to test for that in a leader is to see if they are living their life in an internal consistent way. Claiming to be a champion of the people but using denigrating words in private, taking the moral high ground while your closet is full of skeletons, acting religious in some settings and being dismissive of the religious in others…these are all examples that make me lose confidence in a person as a leader. I realize that leaders are not applying for sainthood, but my point is less about righteousness and more about the integrity of your words, deeds, and character meaning something that people can go to the bank with. 
2. Unprepared for obvious questions. Leadership requires preparation, so when you’re unable to respond to the people you’re leading or want to lead when presented with something you should know they will want to know about, that is insulting to me and tells me you’re not ready to lead. It’s not your job to have all the answers. It is your job to anticipate the obvious questions and to have thought about what your response is to them in advance. For example, I remember watching a not-for-profit leader being approached by someone who wanted to make a significant contribution to their organization, and this not-for-profit leader was unable to articulate the mechanics of how the potential donor could make the gift and what it would be used for. I mean, it’s your job to raise money for your organization and to express what that money goes towards, so how can you get caught off guard without a concise response?
3. Dismissive of ideas originated from elsewhere in the organization. Leadership doesn’t mean knowing it all, and in fact demands a humility that comes from knowing that you can’t possibly know it all. The best leaders don’t necessarily come up with the best ideas as much as they create an environment where great ideas can be formed, tested, and scaled. I really despise when leaders greet someone’s enthusiasm about a fresh approach with ambivalence, annoyance, or disdain. That’s a terrible way to create a culture of innovation. 

Do you have any leadership pet peeves?

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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "This Is Your Mind on Plants," by Michael Pollan.

All who try to construct a sturdy definition of drugs eventually run aground. Is chicken soup a drug? What about sugar? Artificial sweeteners? Chamomile tea? How about a placebo? If we define a drug simply as a substance we ingest that changes us in some way, whether in body or in mind (or both), then all those substances surely qualify. But shouldn’t we be able to distinguish foods from drugs? Faced with that very dilemma, the Food and Drug Administration punted, offering a circular definition of drugs as “articles other than food” that are recognized in the pharmacopoeia—that is, as drugs by the FDA. Not much help there. 

Things become only slightly clearer when the modifier “illicit” is added: an illicit drug is whatever a government decides it is. It can be no accident that these are almost exclusively the ones with the power to change consciousness. Or, perhaps I should say, with the power to change consciousness in ways that run counter to the smooth operations of society and the interests of the powers that be. As an example, coffee and tea, which have amply demonstrated their value to capitalism in many ways, not least by making us more efficient workers, are in no danger of prohibition, while psychedelics—which are no more toxic than caffeine and considerably less addictive—have been regarded, at least in the West since the mid-1960s, as a threat to social norms and institutions.

Scientists recently discovered a handful of species that produce caffeine in their nectar, which is the last place you would expect a plant to serve up a poisonous beverage. These plants have discovered that they can attract pollinators by offering them a small shot of caffeine; even better, that caffeine has been shown to sharpen the memories of bees, making them more faithful, efficient, and hardworking pollinators. Pretty much what caffeine does for us. 

Once humans discovered what caffeine and morphine and mescaline could do for them, the plants that produce the greatest amounts of these chemicals were the ones that prospered in the sunshine of our attention; we disseminated their genes around the world, vastly expanding their habitat and providing for their every need. By now our fates and the fates of these plants are complexly intertwined. What began as war has evolved into marriage.

“You want to know what this was really all about?” Ehrlichman began, startling the journalist with both his candor and his cynicism. Ehrlichman explained that the Nixon White House “had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. . . . We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

So it seemed to me that I could remain safely on the sunny side of the law just as long as I didn’t attempt to extract any opium from my poppies. Yet I have to confess that this was a temptation I grappled with all last summer. You see, I’d become curious as to whether it was in fact possible, as I’d recently read, for a gardener of average skills to obtain a narcotic from a plant grown in this country from legally available seeds. To another gardener this will not seem odd, for we gardeners are like that: eager to try the improbable, to see if we can’t successfully grow an artichoke in Zone 5 or make echinacea tea from the roots of our purple coneflowers. Deep down I suspect that many gardeners regard themselves as minor-league alchemists, transforming the dross of compost (and water and sunlight) into substances of rare value and beauty and power. Also, one of the greatest satisfactions of gardening is the independence it can confer—from the greengrocer, the florist, the pharmacist, and, for some, the drug dealer. One does not have to go all the way “back to the land” to experience the satisfaction of providing for yourself off the grid of the national economy. So, yes, I was curious to know if I could make opium at home, especially if I could do so without making a single illicit purchase. It seemed to me that this would indeed represent a particularly impressive sort of alchemy.

Soon after the British East India Company began trading with China, cheap tea flooded England, rapidly displacing coffee as the nation’s preferred caffeine delivery system. A beverage that only the well-to-do could afford to drink in 1700 was by 1800 consumed by virtually everyone, from the society matron to the factory worker. To supply this demand required an imperialist enterprise of enormous scale and brutality, especially after the British decided it would be more profitable to turn India, its colony, into a tea producer, than to buy tea from the Chinese. This required first stealing the secrets of tea production from the Chinese (a mission accomplished by the renowned Scots botanist and plant explorer Robert Fortune, disguised as a Mandarin), seizing land from peasant farmers in Assam (where tea grew wild), and then forcing the farmers into servitude, picking tea leaves from dawn to dusk.* The introduction of tea to the West was all about exploitation—the extraction of surplus value from labor, not only in its production in India but in its consumption in England as well. 

In England, tea allowed the working class to endure long shifts, brutal working conditions, and more or less constant hunger; the caffeine helped quiet the hunger pangs, and the sugar in tea became a crucial source of calories. (From a strictly nutritional standpoint, workers would have been better off sticking with beer.) But in addition to helping capital extract more work from labor, the caffeine in tea helped create a new kind of worker, one better adapted to the rule of the Machine—demanding, dangerous, and incessant. It’s difficult to imagine an Industrial Revolution without it.

Here’s what’s uniquely insidious about caffeine: the drug is not only a leading cause of our sleep deprivation; it is also the principal tool we rely on to remedy the problem. Most of the caffeine consumed today is being used to compensate for the lousy sleep that caffeine causes. Which means that caffeine is helping to hide from our awareness the very problem that caffeine creates. 

Climate change is already pushing coffee production higher up the mountain and making life difficult for farmers. Coffee plants are notoriously picky about rainfall, temperature, and sunlight, all of which are changing in Colombia, rendering lands that had always been good for coffee production no longer viable. Worldwide, the prospects for coffee production in a changing climate are, according to the agronomists, dismal. By one estimate, roughly half the world’s coffee-growing acreage—and an even greater proportion in Latin America—will be unable to support the plant by 2050, making coffee one of the crops most immediately endangered by climate change. Capitalism, having benefited enormously from its symbiotic relationship with coffee, now threatens to kill the golden goose.

Perched somewhat crookedly on the steep slope of one of these caffeine mountains, my main thought was, You really have to give this plant a lot of credit. In less than a thousand years it has managed to get itself from its evolutionary birthplace in Ethiopia all the way here to the mountains of South America and beyond, using our species as its vector. Consider all we’ve done on this plant’s behalf: allotted it more than 27 million acres of new habitat, assigned 25 million humans to carefully tend it, and bid up its price until it became one of the most precious crops on earth. 

This astounding success is owing to one of the cleverest evolutionary strategies ever chanced upon by a plant: the trick of producing a psychoactive compound that happens to fire the minds of one especially clever primate, inspiring that animal to heroic feats of industriousness, many of which ultimately redound to the benefit of the plant itself. For coffee and tea have not only benefited by gratifying human desire, as have so many other plants, but these two have also assisted in the construction of precisely the kind of civilization in which they could best thrive: a world ringed by global trade, driven by consumer capitalism, and dominated by a species that by now can barely get out of bed without their help. 

Of course, this all began strictly as an accident of history and biology—remember the goats that were said to have inspired that curious herder to taste his first coffee berry? But that’s how evolution works: nature’s most propitious accidents become evolutionary strategies for world domination. Who could have guessed that a secondary metabolite produced by plants to poison insects would also deliver an energizing bolt of pleasure to a human brain, and then turn out to alter that brain’s neurochemistry in a way that made those plants indispensable? 

The question arises: which party is getting the better of the symbiotic arrangement between Homo sapiens and these two great caffeine-producing plants? We probably lack the perspective needed to judge the question impartially, or to perceive how a plant we “use” might actually be using us. Big-brained and self-regarding primates that we are, we automatically assume we’ve been calling the shots with these two “domesticated” species, transporting and planting them where we choose, earning billions off them, and deploying them to gratify our needs and desires. We’re in charge, we tell ourselves. But isn’t that exactly what you would expect an addict to say? Sure you are. Bear in mind that caffeine has been known to produce delusions of power in the humans who consume it, and that this story of world-conquering success would read very differently had the plants themselves been able to write it.

Benally never used the term “cultural appropriation,” but it hung in the air between us. The background to his comments was a conflict that had recently erupted between the Native American Church and a new drug-policy reform movement called Decriminalize Nature. Almost overnight, this movement had persuaded municipal governments in several cities (including Oakland, Santa Cruz, and Ann Arbor) to order local law enforcement to treat the prosecution of crimes involving illicit plant medicines such as ayahuasca, psilocybin, and peyote as the lowest priority. Until the pandemic put everything on hold, the city councils of a half dozen other cities* were prepared to vote on Decrim Nature resolutions. 

The movement had single-handedly reframed the politics of drug-policy reform, beginning with the word “drug,” which it scrupulously refrains from using, along with “psychedelic,” another baggage-laden term. No, these were now “plant medicines,” or “entheogens”—a term for psychedelics meant to underscore their spiritual uses. (Entheogen means, roughly, “manifesting the god within.”) Decrim Nature has done a brilliant job of naturalizing psychedelics; in effect, reframing them as an age-old pillar of the human relationship with the natural world, a relationship in which the government simply has no legitimate role. There are now more than one hundred local chapters of Decrim Nature around the country. 

To those who believe adults should be able to use plant medicines without fear of the police, the early success of the movement seemed like unalloyed good news. But the Native American Church saw things differently. Worried that the decriminalization of peyote would fire demand, drawing fresh hordes of psychonauts to the peyote gardens, the Church requested that Decrim remove peyote from its list of approved plant medicines and images of the cactus from its website. 

This put Decrim in an exquisitely awkward spot. Its supporters are precisely the kind of people who deeply respect Indigenous cultures and regard themselves as woke on all questions of race, imperialism, and colonialism. Now they had run afoul of a group—Native Americans!—whose traditions and wisdom they not only revered but sought to emulate in their use of entheogens. Yet to exclude peyote from decriminalization, or limit access to it to one race and not another, would foul the beautiful simplicity of the movement’s message that there can be no such thing as a “criminal” plant. 

What to do? Hoping to mollify the Native Americans, Decrim agreed to stop talking about peyote specifically and refer instead to “mescaline-containing cacti.” (Even though peyote had been specified as one of the plants to “decriminalize” in the texts of the Oakland and Santa Cruz resolutions.) It did not take down images of peyote from its website, however, and published a statement on the site that only further antagonized the Indians: 

“It is therefore the position of the DN movement that the divine peyotl cactus does not belong to any one people, nation, tribe or religious institution. We consider it to be Mother Nature’s Gift to all of humanity, and we are firmly committed to awakening humankind to the spiritual insights and important messages that peyotl teaches to the human custodians of this planet we all share and live on.” 

“Decrim is a slap in the face of Indigenous people,” I was told by Dawn Davis, another member of the Native American Church. Davis is a Newe Shoshone-Bannock and lives on the reservation in the Ross Fork Creek District in Idaho; she is finishing her Ph.D. in natural resources at the University of Idaho. The natural resource she studies is the dwindling wild population of peyote. She worries that peyote could end up on the endangered species list, which could spell disaster* for peyotism and the religion it has spawned. She brought up Decrim during our Zoom call before I’d had a chance to ask her about it. 

“Now a person in Oakland has more rights to peyote than I do as a tribal member living on the reservation!” She was referring to the fact that, unlike the citizens of Oakland, Native Americans didn’t gain the right to cultivate peyote under the American Indian Religious Freedom Act Amendments of 1994; they also must prove their membership in a tribe and the Church in order to use peyote.

In this, white people like me have a role to play, Davis believes, which is why she accepts invitations to speak at psychedelic conferences. Her message: “Leave peyote alone. This is not what they want to hear. But I don’t believe this medicine is for everyone, or that it’s all about love and peace. They can synthesize all the mescaline they want, but please leave the wild populations alone.”* 

After speaking to Davis and Benally, I realized that calling the use of peyote by non-Native people an instance of cultural appropriation isn’t quite right. To appropriate an expression of culture—a practice or ritual, say—may or may not diminish it; the point can be argued either way. Yet the practice itself does not cease to exist by virtue of having been borrowed or copied. That is not the case with peyote today. Here, the appropriation is taking place in the finite realm of material things—a plant whose numbers are crashing. This puts the eating of peyote by white people in a long line of nonmetaphorical takings from Native Americans. I was beginning to see that, for someone like me, the act of not ingesting peyote may be the more important one.

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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Bicycle Diaries," by David Byrne.

 

I’ve been riding a bicycle as my principal means of transportation in New York since the early 1980s. I tentatively first gave it a try, and it felt good even here in New York. I felt energized and liberated. I had an old three-speed leftover from my childhood in the Baltimore suburbs, and for New York City that’s pretty much all you need. My life at that time was more or less restricted to downtown Manhattan—the East Village and SoHo—and it soon became apparent to me that biking was an easy way to run errands in the daytime or efficiently hit a few clubs, art openings, or nightspots in the evening without searching for a cab or the nearest subway. I know, one doesn’t usually think of nightclubbing and bike riding as being soul mates, but there is so much to see and hear in New York, and I discovered that zipping from one place to another by bike was amazingly fast and efficient. So I stuck with it, despite the aura of uncoolness and the danger, as there weren’t many people riding in the city back then. Car drivers at that time weren’t expecting to share the road with cyclists, so they would cut you off or squeeze you into parked cars even more than they do now. As I got a little older I also may have felt that cycling was a convenient way of getting some exercise, but at first I wasn’t thinking of that. It just felt good to cruise down the dirty potholed streets. It was exhilarating.

This point of view—faster than a walk, slower than a train, often slightly higher than a person—became my panoramic window on much of the world over the last thirty years—and it still is. It’s a big window and it looks out on a mainly urban landscape. (I’m not a racer or sports cyclist.) Through this window I catch glimpses of the mind of my fellow man, as expressed in the cities he lives in. Cities, it occurred to me, are physical manifestations of our deepest beliefs and our often unconscious thoughts, not so much as individuals, but as the social animals we are. A cognitive scientist need only look at what we have made—the hives we have created—to know what we think and what we believe to be important, as well as how we structure those thoughts and beliefs. It’s all there, in plain view, right out in the open; you don’t need CAT scans and cultural anthropologists to show you what’s going on inside the human mind; its inner workings are manifested in three dimensions, all around us. Our values and hopes are sometimes awfully embarrassingly easy to read. They’re right there—in the storefronts, museums, temples, shops, and office buildings and in how these structures interrelate, or sometimes don’t. They say, in their unique visual language, “This is what we think matters, this is how we live and how we play.” Riding a bike through all this is like navigating the collective neural pathways of some vast global mind. It really is a trip inside the collective psyche of a compacted group of people. A Fantastic Voyage, but without the cheesy special effects. One can sense the collective brain—happy, cruel, deceitful, and generous—at work and at play. Endless variations on familiar themes repeat and recur: triumphant or melancholic, hopeful or resigned, the permutations keep unfolding and multiplying.

In a way, this was one of the best and most memorable bike rides I’ve ever taken. In a car one would have sought out a freeway, one of the notorious concrete arteries, and would never have seen any of this stuff. Riding for hours right next to it was visceral and heartbreaking—in ways that looking at ancient ruins aren’t. I recommend it.

Europeans’ attitude toward their landscape is to cultivate the continent as if it were a vast garden, while Americans prefer to subdue the landscape by force, paving over vast areas, or planting miles of a single crop—like corn—that stretch to the horizon. In the New World it is assumed that there will always be more land over the horizon, so sustainable cultivation and conservation are often viewed as namby-pamby. I suppose a lot of Russia and the former Soviet republics are like this too, which might explain a thing or two. Maybe that’s why lots of North Americans feel that the whole world has to be tamed and brought under control while Europeans, having more or less achieved that control in their own lands, feel a duty to nurture and manage rather than simply subdue. 

As in many other places I’m almost the only one on a bike. Again, I suspect that status might be a big reason for this—bike riding, in many countries, implies poverty. I rode around Las Vegas and was told that the only other people on bikes there were people who had lost everything, probably through gambling. They’d lost their jobs, families, houses, and, I guess—ultimate insult for an American—their cars. All they had left was a bicycle to get around on. As cheap cars become available I’m afraid lots of folks in India and China will ditch their bikes as quickly as they can so they too can be elegant modern car drivers.

It’s often said that proximity doesn’t matter so much now—that we have virtual offices and online communities and social networks, so it doesn’t matter where we are physically. But I’m skeptical. I think online communities tend to group like with like, which is fine and perfect for some tasks, but sometimes inspiration comes from accidental meetings and encounters with people outside one’s own demographic, and that’s less likely if you only communicate with your “friends.”

I have no romantic feelings for run-down neighborhoods where crack vials litter the pavement and the plumbing barely works. Granted, those neighborhoods typically offer cheap housing and a tolerance for noise and eccentricity, but to confuse the availability of space with the unfortunate circumstances that often make those spaces cheap is, well—they don’t need to go hand in hand.

The Philippines, for many Americans, is the land where maids and nurses come from, and that’s about all they know about it. I have to admit I’ve seen quite a lot of men and women in medical attire. Filipinos are hopeful that Japan, for example, might employ some of their highly trained medical personnel, but the Japanese are notoriously uncomfortable dealing physically with foreigners, and the idea of being touched by one, God forbid! The Japanese instead prefer to develop robots to take care of their own mundane housekeeping and medical needs. Racism as a spur to technical innovation.

On a bike, being just slightly above pedestrian and car eye level, one gets a perfect view of the goings-on in one’s own town. Unlike many other U.S. cities, here in New York almost everyone has to step onto the sidewalk and encounter other people at least once a day—everyone makes at least one brief public appearance. I once had to swerve to avoid Paris Hilton, holding her little doggie, crossing the street against the light and looking around as if to say, “I’m Paris Hilton, don’t you recognize me?” From a cyclist’s point of view you pretty much see it all. 

Likewise—now don’t laugh—cars and trucks should view the bike lanes as if they are sacrosanct. A driver would never think of riding up on a sidewalk. Most drivers, anyway. Hell, there are strollers and little old ladies up there! It would be unthinkable, except in action movies. A driver would get a serious fine or maybe even get locked up. Everyone around would wonder who that asshole was. Well, bike lanes should be treated the same way. You wouldn’t park your car or pull over for a stop on the sidewalk, would you? Well then, don’t park in the bike lanes either—that forces cyclists into traffic where poor little meat puppets don’t stand a chance. 

Same with pedestrians—who in New York famously saunter out into traffic wherever they see a little gap. They’ve got enough brains not to walk in front of a truck, but they’ll step right into the path of a cyclist, thereby initiating a game of urban chicken. The cyclists then have to slam on their brakes to avoid Mr. BlackBerry or Ms. Check-Me-Out.

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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution," by Cat Bohannon.

 

One-size-fits-all doses of antidepressants are given to men and women, despite evidence that they may affect the sexes differently. Prescriptions for pain medications, too, are considered sex neutral, despite consistent proof that some may be less effective for women. Women are more likely to die of heart attacks, even though they’re less likely to have them—symptoms differ between the sexes, so women and their doctors alike fail to catch them in time. Anesthetics in surgery, treatments for Alzheimer’s, even public education curricula suffer from the ill-conceived notion that women’s bodies are just bodies in general—soft and fleshy, and missing a couple of significant nether bits, but otherwise, just the same as men’s. And of course, nearly all of the studies that produced these findings include only cisgender subjects—in the world of scientific research, there’s been very little attention to what happens in the bodies of people assigned one or another sex at birth who then go on to identify differently. In part, that’s because there’s a massive difference between biological sex—something wound deep into the warp and weft of our physical development, from in-cell organelles all the way up to whole-body features, and built over billions of years of evolutionary history—and humanity’s gender identity, which is a fluid thing and brain based and at most a few hundred thousand years old.

But it’s not just that. The fact of the matter is that until very recently the study of the biologically female body has lagged far behind the study of the male body. It’s not simply that physicians and scientists don’t bother to seek out sex-specific data; it’s that until all too recently the data didn’t exist. From 1996 to 2006, more than 79 percent of the animal studies published in the scientific journal Pain included only male subjects. Before the 1990s, the stats were more disproportionate. And this is hardly unusual—dozens of prominent scientific journals report the same. The reason for this blind spot concerning female bodies, whether we’re talking about basic biology or the nuances of medicine, isn’t just sexism. It’s an intellectual problem that became a societal problem: for a long time, we’ve been thinking about what sexed bodies are, and how we should go about studying them, in entirely the wrong way. 

In the biological sciences, there’s still such a thing as the “male norm.” The male body, from mouse to human, is what gets studied in the lab. Unless we’re specifically researching ovaries, uteri, estrogens, or breasts, the girls aren’t there. Think about the last time you heard about a scientific study—some article about a new window into obesity, or pain tolerance, or memory, or aging. More than likely that study didn’t include any female subjects. That’s as true for mice as it is for dogs, pigs, monkeys, and, all too often, humans. By the time a clinical trial for a new medication starts testing on human subjects, it might not have been tested on female animals at all. 

And that’s one of the most surprising discoveries about breast milk. Just in the last decade or so, scientists have come to realize that maybe its nutritional value isn’t the biggest deal off the top. Milk is really about infrastructure. It’s city planning. Some combination of a police force, waste management, and civil engineers. 

There’s one last point to make against the idea that mammals’ milk evolved mostly for nutrition. It turns out a significant portion of our milk isn’t even digestible. 

Modern human milk is mostly water. Among the things that are not water—proteins, enzymes, lipids, sugars, bacteria, hormones, maternal immuno-cells, and minerals—one stands out. The 6ʹ-sialyllactose that colostrum delivers to newborn baby guts is not the only oligosaccharide in breast milk. In fact, the third-largest solid component of milk comprises oligosaccharides. These complex, milk-specific sugars aren’t even digestible by the human body. We don’t use them. They’re not for us. They’re for our bacteria.

It’s been quantified, in fact: while men are nearly 18 percent faster than women in 5K races, they are only 11 percent faster at marathons, 3.7 percent faster at 50 miles, roughly even as they approach 100 miles, and then women routinely outpace the men at races 195 miles and up (Ronto, 2021).

If you put a pregnant mouse in an enclosure with a male who isn’t the father, she’ll abort (this is called the Bruce effect).

The consensus is that this capacity evolved as a response to threat since male mice will usually kill and eat pups they don’t recognize as their own. From the female body’s perspective, why invest energy giving birth to pups the new guy will eat? Cut your losses and abort. 

Once the scientific community recognized the Bruce effect in the 1950s, researchers started finding it all over the mammalian world. Rodents do it. Horses do it. Lions seem to do it. Even primates do it. 

But we humans don’t. And that’s rather telling.

Between ages two and four, you have a very difficult time sorting out all the strong emotions you’re feeling. But if having that emotionally unstable toddler brain of yours also makes you better at learning language, the gains could outweigh the tantrums. Your growing brain is engaged in a very special sort of cognitive development—building a communication engine inside the narrow window when your brain is just plastic enough to be able to wire itself for the job. 

Human brains do seem to have a cutoff for such wiring. If you learn a new language after puberty, you’re never going to achieve true fluency. You’ll be able to function. But unless you’re a very rare bird, no American is going to speak French well enough to pass as a Parisian.[*18] You can certainly brutalize an older brain into memorizing the new rules of grammar. But there’s something about how the brain learns language when it’s young that older brains just can’t do. For fluency in a second language, the cutoff ranges anywhere between ages ten and seventeen, depending on whom you ask.

Which brings us back to mothers. Among songbirds, evolution has long since optimized parent-child interactions to take advantage of the critical window. During that window, zebra finch parents, for instance, communicate with their offspring in ways that seem particularly good at teaching them how to sing. After that window closes, the parents spend much less time fussing over the kids, who slowly gain their independence. 

Because milk is part of how we make and grow babies, we mammals have a preestablished period of childhood when the mother has to closely interact with her offspring. If a mammal were to have a critical window for language learning, it would make sense for evolution to optimize for that while the child is still breast-feeding. Among modern-day hunter-gatherers, babies aren’t completely weaned until somewhere between ages three and five—precisely the stretch where their brains reach peak synaptic density and when most children’s vocabularies and grammatical sophistication explode. 

You could call it coincidence. Or you could call it a useful optimization. If humans do have a critical window for language learning, it would be useful if it coincided with the time the child has regular, necessary, up-close interaction with an adult language user. Given how expensive brain tissue is to grow and utilize, it’d also be handy to have that window coincide with a time when the child’s food supply is regular, easily supplemented, and dense with sugars and brain-friendly fatty acids. 

So when we think about the evolution of human language—how it’s actually passed on from generation to generation—it’s useful to remember that what seems to be the most critical part of the so-called critical window happens while the child is spending regular portions of the day in its mother’s arms. While there’s more collective child-care happening among humans than among chimps or gorillas, most human infants and toddlers still spend most of their time in close contact with their mothers. 

Mom, in other words, is at least half of how language happens. And she’s not passive. Not at all. Human mothers have evolved to be language engines—prodigious users and teachers of language. This is especially true during the synaptic blooming of their children’s brains.

No—sexism is one of the ways our ancestors solved our hardest problem, which, as I’ve already discussed at great length, is that we categorically suck at making babies. 

I think of sexism and gynecology as two sides of the same coin: they’re two behavioral strategies our species employed—and still employs—to try to jury-rig a glitchy system. If pregnancies are dangerous and babies are needy, you need work-arounds. For example, birth spacing to control how often the girls in your troop are pregnant. Gynecology gives you tools for birth control and abortion. But you can also create cultural rules around when and where the males get access to female bodies, and then create punishments for those who break the rules. 

That’s the core of what sexism is: a massive set of rules that work to control reproduction. The aspects shift from place to place, but every single human culture has rules about what women should wear, where they can go and in what circumstances, whom they should talk to and when, and most certainly when and how and with whom they should have sex. Each rule tweaks access to a woman’s body, shaping the parameters of her reproductive life. 

But again, let’s take a biological view here: how smart you are affects how likely you are to stay alive. If you have an IQ even fifteen points higher than the average when you’re eleven years old, you’ll have a 21 percent higher chance of surviving into your seventies. That’s a bigger boost to longevity than just about anything you can think of—bigger than what’s provided by your level of wealth and your access to medicine combined. 

As I discussed in the “Brain” chapter, your IQ is influenced by your genes, but being “smart” isn’t something you’re just born with. “Smartness” is something that brains actively do. It’s also strongly shaped by how your brain developed in the womb, in childhood, and even through the sorts of things you ask it to do when you’re an adult. Sexism can compromise the cognitive development of children in both genders. In other words, sexism makes everyone less smart. 

You might think I’m about to talk about education again. But let’s start with something even more basic: food. The human brain is literally built out of food. All the sugar, protein, and fat a fetus uses to build its nascent brain come directly from the mother’s body. So, what happens when you starve women and girls? Their future fetuses and nursing children starve, too. 

In many Indian states, it’s normal for young women and new brides to eat last. In Maharashtra, for example, the cultural rule is that guests eat first, followed by the oldest men, then the younger men, then the older women, then the children. In traditional families, a younger woman eats only once everyone else has been fed. That rule doesn’t change if she’s pregnant. 

More than 90 percent of adolescent Indian girls are anemic. More than 42 percent of all Indian mothers are underweight. And that’s not just down to poverty; only about 16.5 percent of sub-Saharan mothers are underweight. Even worse, the average woman in India weighs less in her third trimester than most sub-Saharan African women do when they first become pregnant.[*52] Malnutrition is deadly and dangerous all the time, but especially when you’re pregnant. If the mother and child both manage to survive, the newborn usually arrives too soon, too tiny, and too fragile. Many die within weeks of being born. Those who don’t usually face severe health problems throughout their lives, including problems with cognitive development. 

It’s true that pregnant women in India’s rural areas are more vulnerable to these problems. But rural Indians make up 68 percent of the country’s population.[*53] The majority of the world’s second most populous nation live in areas where there often isn’t enough food and, as a rule, pregnant women eat last. 

Sexism, in other words, is starving India from the inside out. At the same time, the country is investing a lot of its resources in a bid to become one of the biggest technology centers of the world. You need a lot of good brains to be a tech giant. Well-fed brains. To build them, you’re going to need pregnant women to jump the line at dinner. 

Now, I’m hardly the sort of person who wants to think of women as simply baby factories. But as a species, let’s say all of us want to get smarter. That’s what it takes to cure cancer. To solve the climate crisis. How do we do that? For a start, we might want to acknowledge that human brains are something that are made primarily out of women’s bodies: first in their wombs, and then from their breast milk, and then from the quality of interactions mothers have with their children. So if you want the best possible chance to make a lot of kids with high IQs, you want healthy women who are fed well, and have been fed well, consistently, for at least two decades before they become pregnant. You want them to have had a rich and well-supported childhood education. And you want them to be well cared for throughout their reproductive lives, with readily available education about nutrition and healthy habits and newborn caretaking. You want them to have community resources available when they get sick and when their kids get sick. And, because STIs have such a proven effect on reproductive health, you want them to have ready access to prophylactics and good sex ed.

There’s also a ton of evidence that more sex-egalitarian education tends to be associated with the golden ages of human civilizations in our past. Our societies seem to be at our best, in other words, when we’re educating girls. 

One well-studied example is the history of Islam in the Middle East, Africa, and Europe. By many measures, medieval Islamic societies were more gender equal than the Arab world today. In fact, the Prophet Muhammad’s first wife, Khadija—famously his most beloved—was older than him, twice widowed, already had children, and was a widely respected businesswoman when he met her.[*54] In the twelfth century, the Islamic philosopher Ibn Rushd (Averroes) wrote that women should be considered equal to men in all respects, including education and opportunities for employment. 

Remember, this is the Middle Ages. At the time, Islam wasn’t just more egalitarian than European societies. It was also more intellectually productive. Because Muslims believed reading the Quran was vital for the soul, these societies expected all children, male and female, to be literate and well educated—not just in the Quran, but in a range of topics they found valuable: visual arts, mathematics, the sciences, even music. Public education was both available and well funded. Public schooling didn’t take hold among the Christians of Europe and North America until the Industrial Revolution. If you were a child born between 1100 and 1400, you definitely wanted to be born in an Islamic society, whether you were male or female. 

The payoffs were enormous. Islam’s golden age produced algebra, chemistry, the magnetic compass, better modes of navigation, and all sorts of advancements in medicine and biology. While Europe was busy telling itself the plague was caused by an evil fog, Islamic doctors had already figured out that copper and silver instruments were best for surgery (the metals are antimicrobial). Philosophy also flourished, with new ideas about humane government and social interdependence, many of which directly influenced the rise of the European Enlightenment. The golden age of Islam, in other words, produced one of the most intellectual, egalitarian, cosmopolitan, and profoundly influential societies of its time. And women were right there at the fore, contributing to its success.[*55] 

This isn’t to say the only reason civilizations falter is that sexism rears its ugly head. Many factors contributed to the decline of Islamic nations, colonialism not least of them. And money is certainly a factor in whether a civilization is likely to be intellectually productive. (Golden ages are called “golden” for a reason.) But as of 1989, many Arab nations had become incredibly wealthy and yet managed to produce only 4 frequently cited scientific papers. The United States, by contrast, produced 10,481. Why? For one, they’d systematically cut off education for half their population. Roughly sixty-five million adult Arab people are illiterate right now, of which two-thirds are women.[*56] Many of those women live in wealthy countries, such as Iran and Saudi Arabia. Places that, once upon a time, shone with the brightest lights in human intellectual progress. But we’ll never know which of these women could have been a modern Khadija. We’ll never meet their Marie Curie, their Ada Lovelace. Whatever contributions those women and girls might have made have been sacrificed to the symbolic function of their modesty. Unless, of course, they escape these more restrictive communities and get the support they need elsewhere—but what if they can’t afford to? 

Where women are undereducated, entire societies eventually go fallow. If history proves right, neglecting girls’ education is a sign of a civilization’s decline. You can neglect half the brains in your community for only so long.

Lazy Linking, 242nd in an Occasional Series

 

Stuff I liked lately on the Internets:

242.1 Meta-analysis finds insufficient evidence that social media is bad for teens’ mental health: https://bit.ly/4h0AqXs 

242.2 Move over, helicopters and snowplows; “Lighthouse Parents” show the way but give room for kids to find it https://bit.ly/3zOIV78 

242.3 Milton was so bad Waffle House actually closed some locations https://bit.ly/3NneRmf 

242.4 Success addressing housing affordability in Nashville because state govt made it easier to add units on existing parcels https://bit.ly/3Yl3zoZ 

242.5 Was the ball in or out? Wimbledon is getting rid of its line judges and going all digital https://bit.ly/3ZWrlZC

Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 448

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "The Three-Body Problem," by Cixin Liu.

Through her wet clothes, the chill of the inner Mongolian winter seized Ye like a giant's fist. She heard her teeth chatter, but eventually even that sound disappeared.The coldness penetrated into her bones, and the world in her eyes turned milky white. She felt that the entire universe was a huge block of ice, and she was the only spark of life within it. She was the little girl about to freeze to death, and she didn't even have a handful of matches, only illusions...

As an astrophysicist, Ye was strongly against nuclear weapons. She knew this was a power that should belong only to the stars. She knew also that the universe had even more terrible forces: black holes, anti-matter, and more. Compared to those forces, a thermonuclear bomb was nothing but a tiny candle. If humans obtained mastery over one of those other forces, the world might be vaporized in a moment. In the face of madness, rationality was powerless.

Interrogator: Let's look at the current composition of the ETO. The Adventists would like to destroy the human race by means of an alien power; the Redemptionists worship the alien civilization as a god; the Survivors wish to betray other humans to buy their own survival. None of these is in line with your original ideal of using the alien civilization as a way to reform humanity.

Ye: I started the fire, but I couldn't control how it burnt.

I Got a Sneak Preview of Growing Old and I Didn't Like It

 

 

 

On the golf course where I first took lessons and played my first thirty or so rounds, Walnut Lane, it is possible to finish 18 holes in 2 hours. It's a short course, and if you drive and don't play terribly, you can whiz through at six or seven minutes per hole. The important thing about this whole scenario is that it helps if you have the course to yourself, which when the weather is bad then you're never really getting clogged up by people playing ahead of you.

I forgot that critical last characteristic when, earlier this year, I tried to sneak a round of golf in before Asher's "First Tee" lesson. The weather had turned for the year and the mild temps brought a bunch of people out even first thing in the morning. I was paired with two newcomers who were worse than me, which is saying a lot, so while I actually got a good start to my round, I had to wait for them to hit five, six, seven, eight, nine, and ten times per hole. 

After a few holes of this, I realized that I was never going to get anywhere close to done before having to make it to Asher's lesson, so I decided to tempt the golf gods by breaking off from my group and skipping ahead. Alas, there were two groups ahead of us so I had to whiz past them too, but I figured 14 holes and done on time was better than far fewer if I had just stayed in place.

Alas, I then caught up with some of the younger golfers taking their lessons by playing holes on the course, so I had to whiz past them. At this point, I had worked myself into a fever pitch, which as you might imagine is not conducive to playing good golf. Sure enough, the good rhythm of the first few holes soon gave way to me spraying balls everywhere, culminating in not one but two out-of-bounds shots on a particularly tricky hole. 

In a pique, I drove off to find one of the balls before I had my hands fully on the steering wheel, and Asher and I quickly found ourselves stuck. In a panic, I tried to lift the golf cart out of the area when I felt something pop in my leg. At first I thought I'd been hit by a stray ball, but when I tried to take a step my leg crumpled in pain. I had stupidly torn my calf muscle, and could only pack up our stuff and limp back to the car and drive home.

I went to urgent care later that day, and the doc I saw did a good job of explaining what had happened and what I should do from here. I got the area wrapped, promised him I'd do my best to rest it for at least the weekend, and began fretting over all of the changes of plans this unfortunate injury would place upon my otherwise breakneck pace.

I've been blessed to be relatively injury-free, and even this mishap is small in the grand scheme of things. But it has proved to be a window into what it will like to grow old. And I have to say that I have not liked how I have responded.

A leg injury is a long journey of favoring the area, moving slower, feeling discomfort, and most of all not being able to do everything you used to, or having to do it slower or less long or less well. Thankfully, with injuries, you eventually heal from them, and then you build back up your strength, and then you are back to normal. The restrictions and the discomfort are then in the past, no longer something that hold you back from your best life.

Ah, but some day we all grow old, if we're lucky, and when we do, even if we're lucky we will eventually slow down. Things we could do easily and pleasurably when we were young we find we can only do with great struggle, or perhaps at some point not at all.

A leg injury is a particularly difficult thing for me to bear. Hurting my leg and having to throttle down made me realize how much I enjoy running, how much pleasure I derive from being able to move about fast and without second thought. As I raged at not being able to be my full self, I also thought with horror about a day that such limitations will not be temporary but permanent, and not only permanent but worsening. Such is the inevitable plight of growing old, and I feel more deeply how common it is when people struggle to find peace about the aging process.

A favorite Bible verse of mine is in the Psalms, which says "it was good that I was afflicted, that I may learn Your statutes." Comfort is something we all naturally seek. But discomfort can serve a good purpose in our lives too, by bringing us some critical lesson we cannot easily gain outside the discomfort. I can't say I've fully absorbed this recent lesson, but at least I acknowledge I need it. Slowly and slowly, or all at once, aging takes things from us; would that I am grounded enough to accept and embrace this natural evolution.

Inconvenient Truths

 

Al Gore's climate change documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," came out almost 20 years ago. The phrase, "inconvenient truth," as applied in this case, is meant to say that climate change is real (that's the "truth" part), and that we have to do something about it even if it's difficult and we're tempted to do the easy thing which is nothing (that's the "inconvenient" part).

Whether you agree with the content in the documentary, you surely must assent to the notion that some truths are in fact inconvenient to learn, accept, and act on. This is true of unassailable but innocuous things, like "staying in shape means largely forgoing habits that are otherwise enjoyable," but it is also true of controversial and divisive things, much to our chagrin.

When stories come out that paint our favored political candidate in a negative light, it's preferable to ignore those stories, smear the sources, or deflect to some other parallel point, rather than accept the inconvenience of the truth and have to change our minds accordingly.

When evidence is presented that our favored political position will result in bad outcomes for the very people we say we are advocating for, it's preferable to obfuscate or yell or dig in, rather than learning how things work and doing the hard work that it takes to make them happen.

When we are informed that the very foundations we stand on, metaphorically, are irreparably damaged by structural evils, it is preferable to act like everything is fine rather than bear great personal cost to fix those systemic problems.

I truly believe we have lost our value for the truth. When the stakes are highest and truths are messily inconvenient, we clearly prefer many other things besides owning the truth: comfort, feeling smart, our side winning. The thing about the truth is that its consequences cannot be indefinitely avoided or deferred. I fear a reckoning unless we summon the commitment to truth, and perhaps more importantly the humility to accept when a truth is inconvenient for us and we need to change our tune.