Edward Tenner

After years of apparently spectacular results, the social scientific study of happiness is at a crossroads. Subjective well-being is easy to measure; just ask people how they feel on a standardized numerical scale and correlate the answers with whatever other variables you like. (I've already suggested that findings create dilemmas for both legislation and the legal profession.)Now there's a new round of misgivings. Barbara Ehrenreich used to be on the sunny side… More »

Earlier in the year Jonah Lehrer explained in the New Yorker how cool deferred gratification is and how we need to teach it to our kids, the younger the better. Now, in the New York Times, John Tierney suggests that it's really an insidious habit for grownups, sacrificing real enjoyment for the mirage of an even better future. Can everything good be bad for you?Of course the respective sets of behavioral research described might be consistent. Children who master… More »

The founder and CEO of Amazon.com, Jeff Bezos, declares in a Newsweek interview: [T]he physical book really has had a 500-year run. It's probably the most successful technology ever. It's hard to come up with things that have had a longer run. If Gutenberg were alive today, he would recognize the physical book and know how to operate it immediately. [Yes, but would he be turning over in his grave? ET] Given how much change there has been everywhere else, what's… More »

Excellence. There must be a catch. And a prominent New York pediatric ophthalmologist, Dr. Mark Steele, says there's a downside to the city's ultra-selective private schools, according to the New York Post: "The kids in private school do more reading, and that puts them at increased risk. Youngsters doing a lot of reading tend to become nearsighted. The bulk of students get it between the ages of nine and 14." When nearsighted kids shows up in his Upper West… More »

What Oral Roberts and Sol Price would have thought of each other's often side-by-side obituaries we'll never know. But the politically conservative Pentecostal Protestant faith healer and the liberal Jewish retailing multimillionaire had much in common. Each challenged establishments -- religious and commercial, respectively. Roberts once remarked that he had more friends among doctors than among other ministers, and Price overcame great opposition from… More »

In his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, President Obama declared:[W]ars between nations have increasingly given way to wars within nations. The resurgence of ethnic or sectarian conflicts; the growth of secessionist movements, insurgencies, and failed states -- all these things have increasingly trapped civilians in unending chaos. In today's wars, many more civilians are killed than soldiers; the seeds of future conflict are sown, economies are wrecked,… More »

The Philadelphia Inquirer's John Timpane reflects on celebrities, cell phones, and indiscretion: Technology has changed the nature of the illicit affair. It's astonishing, frankly, that people in the public eye would ever commit their passions to cyberspace at all, ever again, in light of what has happened with e-mails and text messages lately. Are the alleged affairs of Tiger Woods and other celebrities and politicians only the latest instances of perennial,… More »

Consider (as Rod Steiger Serling might have introduced a Twilight Zone episode) the case of the Finnish-born American architect Eero Saarinen, who died in 1961 at only 51 years old. Few designers were as attuned to the needs of the future. And as it so often is, the future has been scandalously ungrateful. As a book editor I flew to Europe from Saarinen's terminal at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. The central building has fortunately been saved… More »

What if the solutions to many of the world's, and America's, challenges of health, education, and productivity already exist and are waiting to be multiplied? That's the premise of a new approach to innovation described by Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow in "The Power of Positive Deviants." Instead of imposing solutions from without, the method [of Positive Deviance] identifies outliers in a community who, despite having no special advantages, are doing exceptionally well.… More »

They have some of the world's best medical care; their professors award the field's Nobel Prize. International studies show they're among of the globe's happiest as well as healthiest people. So why are a small but growing number of Swedes paying their hard-earned, high-taxed kronor to seek back pain relief with Russian-inspired nail mats? The New York Times reports on the newest Stockholm Syndrome:"It's quite painful initially," said Catarina Rolfsdotter-Jansson,… More »

A Wall Street Journal feature on "The Million-Dollar Penny" illustrates an unexpected result of the new marketplace the Web helped create: high-end objects go even higher, while the formerly solid center sinks in value."It's easier to sell a $100,000 coin today than a $1,000 coin," says John Albanese, founder of Certified Acceptance Corp., based in Bedminster, N.J., which verifies graded coins.I've been studying the rare book market, which is far more transparent… More »

"Don't Be Evil"? Silicon Valley seems to be thinking a lot more about the unthinkable, or at least the distasteful.The New York Times Digital Domain feature notes with tongue only partly in cheek that Apple has just applied for a patent on a system that would let consumers use electronic devices free in return for exposure to a stream of advertisements that would compel responses before the machines would resume functioning. Would anyone have guessed that Apple, so… More »

Names can be prophetic. Consider this account of a German privacy case by my friend John Schwartz, about a lawyer suing Wikipedia to enforce globally a German law limiting the naming even of convicted criminals after their release: Mr. Stopp has already successfully pressured German publications to remove the killers' names from their online coverage. German editors of Wikipedia have scrubbed the names from the German-language version of the article about the… More »

President Obama wants to make it easier to dismiss teachers whose students aren't performing well on tests. But what about the parents? By the president's own account, his daughter's performance jumped when he and his wife made clear their expectations, evidently without a change of instructor:The president . . . went off script for a few moments, telling of a C grade that his 11-year-old daughter, Malia, brought home from school recently. It didn't meet the… More »

Why do some technological and cultural products spread like kudzu while others wither on the vine? Journalists and academics have written volumes about "stickiness," but even the sharpest manufacturers, publishers, and producers have been rejecting future hits for decades -- often ideas and styles the break normally reasonable rules. Parker Brothers actually declined Monopoly twice: as the Landlord's Game (a simulation promoting Henry George's socialist tax reform… More »

Whatever investigators and courts ultimately decide about three deaths and a number of alleged injuries in a "sweat lodge" program at his Arizona New Age retreat, the guru James Arthur Ray has no plans to abandon his mission. And to judge from the positive reaction of many prospects, the risk might even make the program look more attractive -- no pain, no gain and all that. (There's a theory that as technology makes motoring and other activities safer, some people… More »

In flu season, what price prevention? That's a question the Philadelphia Inquirer is asking as religious and medical leaders discuss the ethics of the handshake. While there is medical debate about avoiding the gesture -- some doctors say a ban is only minimally effective, others carry hand sanitizer in bottles with them -- some people fear a moral contagion. One mother whose family had swine flu last summer called avoidance."extreme. . . . That's who we are as… More »

A Newark Star-Ledger report on this year's Nobel Prize for Physics shows how the twentieth century's greatest innovation in imaging was the indirect result of two research "failures." Wired has more details of the internal politics.The breakthrough of Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith, the charge-coupled device (CCD), had a curious motivation. What catalyzed it was the peculiar agenda of AT&T in the late 1960s. Managers of Bell Labs thought that a new… More »

Consider this idea of the Harvard philosopher and television ambassador Michael Sandel as summarized in the (London) Times Higher Education. (I have not been able to get Sandel's new book itself yet and will correct this post if it turns out I am misinterpreting the original.)Adopting the philosopher John Rawls' argument that a person does not merit success merely because he or she was lucky enough to be born with gifts that are in demand, Professor Sandel says a… More »

Who thought up the white-coat policy for doctors meeting with President Obama in the Rose Garden to advocate health care reform? Since when do physicians attend political gatherings in semi-ritual clinical garb? I haven't seen many caps, gowns, or hoods at higher education conferences. More importantly, why choose a custom that has itself been targeted for reform? Authorities in Scotland recently banned white coats from hospitals on the grounds that long sleeves… More »