Link Banana

I’m increasingly leery of news stories proclaiming that academics have proven or demonstrated something or other. That said, some Dutch researchers have experimental evidence showing that signals of low-level crime make people more likely to litter or steal.

(via Ideas)

As Deron summarizes: Seeing attractive women in magazines makes men more self-conscious and less inclined to ask a woman out.

I’ve not read a book in a while and I’ve not missed it. But a good magazine article, those I have missed in their absense. This one, from 1991, is a good one. Take, for example, this excellent bit on weeks:

The week mocks the calendar and marches relentlessly and unbroken across time, paying no attention to the seasons. The British scholar F H. Colson, who in 1926 wrote a fascinating monograph on the subject, described the week as an “intruder.” It is an intruder that arrived relatively late. The week emerged as the final feature of what became the Western calendar sometime in the second or third century A.D., in ancient Rome. But it can be glimpsed in different guises—not always seven days long, and not always continuous—in many earlier civilizations.

And a bit about the psychology of weekends:

We have invented the weekend, but the dark cloud of old taboos still hangs over the holiday, and the combination of the secular with the holy leaves us uneasy. This tension only compounds the guilt that many of us continue to feel about not working, and leads to the nagging feeling that our free time should be used for some purpose higher than having fun. We want leisure, but we are afraid of it too.

(via Andrew Sullivan)

Many people have linked to this article on Flickr’s Director of Community and I didn’t get why. Then I read it. It’s pretty interesting.

This has been going around for some time, and I never found an hour with which to watch it. Today I finally did, and I’m glad for that. It’s well done, and brings new weight to Robin’s question: “How is YouTube not the greatest art project ever?”

I’m not sure what to think about this article. A part of me is made a little queasy by the idea, while another part agrees with the woman that no relationship should be forbidden so long as it is free of coercion:

There’s no comparison between siblings close in age having sexual feelings and contact and an adult forcing a younger member of the family to do something they neither understand nor want to be involved in.

(via Ross Douthat)

I’m personally torn about whether I’d find Peter Lovenheim a clever or annoying neighbor, but he’s got some interesting — right is another issue — things to say about the state of the American living.

The previous evening, as I’d left home, the last words I heard before I shut the door had been, “Dad, you’re crazy!” from my teenage daughter. Sure, the sight of your 50-year-old father leaving with an overnight bag to sleep at a neighbor’s house would embarrass any teenager, but “crazy”? I didn’t think so.

There’s talk today about how as a society we’ve become fragmented by ethnicity, income, city versus suburb, red state versus blue. But we also divide ourselves with invisible dotted lines. I’m talking about the property lines that isolate us from the people we are physically closest to: our neighbors.

In an idea that you’ll probably either welcome or condemn, 12 countries have hosted programs that allow citizens to rent a Muslim, an immigrant, or an Indian atheist. You know, for forced housework cultural interaction and stuff. An interesting detail:

The types of ‘book’ engaged vary from country to country. And the response from the public can be instructive. In Britain, for example, the Muslim and the ex-gang member are popular. In Hungary, it was the neo-Nazi, says Abergel. In some countries, homosexual ‘books’ are popular, but less so in a place like Britain, “because here you’re more liberal and used to it.”

In an interesting special report, The Economist explores the sociological impacts of what it’s calling the nomadic future.

Humans have always migrated and travelled, without necessarily living nomadic lives. The nomadism now emerging is different from, and involves much more than, merely making journeys. A modern nomad is as likely to be a teenager in Oslo, Tokyo or suburban America as a jet-setting chief executive. He or she may never have left his or her city, stepped into an aeroplane or changed address. Indeed, how far he moves is completely irrelevant. Even if an urban nomad confines himself to a small perimeter, he nonetheless has a new and surprisingly different relationship to time, to place and to other people. “Permanent connectivity, not motion, is the critical thing,” says Manuel Castells, a sociologist at the Annenberg School for Communication, a part of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

Also, because it seems I forgot, the magazine ran a special report about Israel the week before that was also rather good.

That’s roughly the argument made by sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh.

At the lucrative end of the market, I have found it useful to think of three tiers of women (men constitute only about 10 percent of high-end prostitutes). Spitzer was paying for “Tier 1” sex workers: Fees usually range from $2,000 to $5,000 per session; women come in all ages and ethnic stripes; they rigorously guard their health and watch for STDs; and most have a high-school degree but have limited work experience. They can promise you discretion, but most work through escort services that are routinely under surveillance. In practice, this means buyer beware. […]

Both Tier 2 and Tier 3 workers can typically do more to safeguard a client’s privacy. There are no guarantees, of course, but they tend to shun contractual relationships with agencies that advertise their services. There is less of a paper trail. They typically will only take a john via a referral, and even then, they may require that the john “date” them for weeks before deciding to offer up sex. I have heard of Tier 2 and 3 sex workers who vet prospective clients for months, sometimes hiring a private detective to see if the john is stable—psychologically and financially. As a former attorney general, Spitzer must have known all this.

It’s also worth noting that he’s not too sanguine on the trade in general.

In what amount to a literature review of Ben Olken’s papers on developmental economics — with all the slightly boringness that implies — Michael Moynihan explains that Robert Putnam may have been on to something.

So when he decided to test the validity of the much-debated “bowling alone” theory—Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam’s argument that television, among other “individualizing” cultural phenomena, has had a negative effect on the social fabric of the West—he found himself in Indonesia, a country not affected by many of the cultural externalities that compromise Putnam’s American-based study.

… “The main results suggest that each additional channel of television reception is associated with 7 percent fewer social groups existing in the village, and with each adult in the village attending 12 per­cent fewer group meetings.” That would seem to confirm Putnam’s thesis. But the results were nuanced. Olken noted that “despite the impact on social capital, improved [TV] reception does not appear to affect village governance, at least as measured by discussions in village-level meetings.”

The Economist has an interesting story about the new dynamics within Germany’s rapidly-growing Jewish community.

By the time the Berlin Wall fell, Germany’s Jewish community had only 30,000 ageing members and was dwindling rapidly. Today it is the third-largest, and the fastest-growing, Jewish population in western Europe, after France and Britain. Between 1991, when the country was unified and immigration rules relaxed, and 2005, more than 200,000 Jews from the former Soviet Union emigrated to Germany. (At the same time, more than a million emigrated from the former Soviet Union to Israel and about 350,000 to America, leaving only about 800,000 behind.) In some parts of Germany, immigrants—usually referred to as “the Russians”—make up 90% of the local Jewish population.