In Seattle, following the 1999 WTO protests, in which violence and riots were far too common, the police department increased their tactical response ability with military-style weapons, armor, and vehicles. Following the 9/11 attack in 2001, police departments, large and small, around the country were given surplus military gear to better equip them for possible future attacks.

The images above are from the last week in Ferguson, MO, where tactical officers were called in to help police clear protestors who had taken to the streets over the police shooting of Michael Brown.

Research over the years has shown that the presence of heavily armed police increases the rate of violence and the likelihood of violence:

a great deal of social-psychological research, as well as important anecdotal evidence from law-enforcement specialists themselves, suggests that militarized policing can greatly inflame situations that might otherwise end peacefully

One wonders if the events in Ferguson will be a wake-up for police departments to avoid the military and militaristic approach to protests.

How Militarizing Police Can Increase Violence

By Jesse SingalFollow @jessesingal


Long before the killing of Michael Brown and the subsequent protests in Ferguson, Missouri, which have brought with them countless images of heavily armored local authorities pointing guns at and firing tear gas and other nonlethal weapons at unarmed protesters, some were disturbed by what Washington Post journalist Radley Balko calls “the rise of the warrior cop” — that is, the increasing tendency of some local police forces to rely on military-style gear and tactics, even in situations that appear devoid of any real threat to officers’ safety.

The story of how this happened and the oftentimes tragic results have been well-told by Balko, the American Civil Liberties Union, and others. In short, there’s been a flood of drug-war and post-9/11 money that has helped outfit police departments, even towns where a single murder is an incredibly rare event, with gear that could help repel seasoned paramilitaries.

What’s less clear is how this gear changes the psychological dynamics of policing and crowd control. Is it true, as many people are arguing online, that “When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail” — that is, that simply having military gear will make police more likely to act in an aggressive manner toward civilians? How does this change the relationship between police and civilians?

At the most specific level, these questions haven’t been studied empirically. But a great deal of social-psychological research, as well as important anecdotal evidence from law-enforcement specialists themselves, suggests that militarized policing can greatly inflame situations that might otherwise end peacefully.

The so-called “weapons effect” can partly explain what’s going on in Ferguson and elsewhere. The mere presence of weapons, in short, appears to prime more aggressive behavior. This has been shown in a variety of experiments in different lab and real-world settings.

“Theory underlying the weapons effect or similar kinds of phenomena would suggest that the more you fill the environment with stimuli that are associated with violence, the more likely violence is to occur,” said Bruce Bartholow, a University of Missouri social psychologist who has studied the weapons effect. Brad Bushman, a psychologist at Ohio State, agreed. “I would expect a bigger effect if you see military weapons than if you see normal weapons,” he said.

This isn’t just about a link between visual stimuli like guns and violence, however. It also has to do with the roles people adopt, with how they respond to the presence of others who may — or may not — mean them harm. To a certain extent, if you dress and treat people like soldiers facing a deadly enemy, they’ll act like it.

“This process isn't necessarily good or bad, but depends on the extent to which the more militaristic role fits the situation,” said Craig Anderson, a psychologist at Iowa State, in an email. “When it doesn't fit well, it is likely to lead to more judgment and behavior errors.” Maria Haberfeld, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice who has studied how police departments outfit themselves, said the dynamic could be particularly dangerous in the context of nonviolent protests like Ferguson (there was rioting and looting earlier this week, but there have also been widespread reports of nonviolent protests being broken up by police aggression).

“Military equipment is used against an enemy,” said Haberfeld. “So if you give the same equipment to local police, by default you create an environment in which the public is perceived as an enemy.” On the other side of these confrontations, this could have a negative effect on protesters. “We live in a democratic country, and we believe that this is our right to go out and exercise the right to [free speech],” she said. “And when you go out there and exercise that right and suddenly you are faced with soldiers — even though these are not soldiers, but police officers looking like soldiers — then something is triggered, definitely.”

Bushman said that meeting nonviolent protests with a militarized response is “really a bad idea. I can’t believe they’re doing it.” “It’s just really bad for the officers because they feel more powerful, more invincible, more militaristic, ready to attack,” he said. “And also, I think it elicits a response from the observers that, hey, this is war, and people become defensive and they have a fight/flight response.” The adoption of masks themselves in a militarized setting, on the part of police or protesters, can also contribute to violence by triggering senses of anonymity and what psychologists call deindividuation. "There's all kinds of evidence in social psychology that that will lead people to do things that they wouldn't do if they could be identified," said Bartholow.

All this militarization, said Bartholow, can be contrasted “against the old kind of beat-cop model where people in the neighborhood know the police officers’ name and he’s kind of everybody’s buddy in a sense.”

Gil Kerlikowske, the head of U.S. Customs and Border Protection and former police chief of Seattle, drew out this distinction in a striking recent interview with NPR’s Steve Inskeep. He explained that at the one-year anniversary of the damaging 1999 World Trade Organization riots, he took conscious steps to have his officers dressed like police rather than a counterinsurgency unit, which he said made it easier to deal with potentially dangerous crowds. But the police guild didn’t approve of this approach — its members wanted him to give the officers as much armor as possible.

INSKEEP: Kerlikowski paid attention [to the guild]. Though he came to wish he hadn't. The next time there were troublesome crowds it was Mardi Gras. Police did not go out in soft gear, they went out heavily protected. So, the cops felt safer but somehow the crowd became harder to control. Scores of people were injured as violence spread. Women were sexually assaulted. One man was killed as police watched.

KERLIKOWSKI: Well, to tell you the truth it makes it pretty difficult when you're talking from behind a face shield with a gas mask, to engage with the public and say, look let's tone this down, let's calm things down, let's make sure that those people that need to be apprehended are arrested because of their intoxicated state, their level of violence etc. It's pretty hard to engage in those discussions when you're hardened up. I regret that - today. I should've stuck by my decision earlier, I didn't.

Kerlikowski, Haberfeld, and other law enforcement seem to have developed an intuitive understanding of the psychological effects of police militarization. But that may not matter, because all this surplus military gear isn’t going away — $450 million of it was distributed to police in 2013 alone. So even after things calm down in Ferguson, we’ll still be in the midst of a sweeping, potentially dangerous experiment in social psychology and criminology.

“Even in my small midwestern town, the police no longer drive a standard police cruiser,” Bartholow said. “They drive these kind of big SUVs — they almost look like military humvees, and they’re more intimidating looking.”

Kirk Schneider - Why Are Humans Violent? The Psychological Reason We Hurt Each Other

Kirk Schneider is the author of The Polarized Mind: Why It’s Killing Us and What We Can Do About It (2013), as well as The Paradoxical Self: Toward an Understanding of Our Contradictory Nature (1990), Rediscovery of Awe: Splendor, Mystery and the Fluid Center of Life (2004), and several textbooks on humanistic psychology, including Existential-Integrative Psychotherapy: Guideposts to the Core of Practice (2007).

Here is some biographical background from his Amazon page:

KIRK J. SCHNEIDER, Ph.D., is a leading spokesperson for contemporary existential-humanistic psychology. Dr. Schneider is the recent past editor of the Journal of Humanistic Psychology (2005-2012), vice-president of the Existential-Humanistic Institute (EHI), and adjunct faculty at Saybrook University, Teachers College, Columbia University, and the California Institute of Integral Studies. A Fellow of the American Psychological Association (APA), Dr. Schneider has published over 100 articles and chapters and has authored or edited nine books (now 10). Dr. Schneider is the recipient of the Rollo May Award from Division 32 of the APA for "Outstanding and independent pursuit of new frontiers in humanistic psychology," the "Cultural Innovator" award from the Living Institute, Toronto, Canada, a psychotherapy training center which bases its diploma on Dr. Schneider's Existential-Integrative model of therapy, and an Honorary Diploma from the East European Association of Existential Therapy. Dr. Schneider is also a founding member of the Existential-Humanistic Institute in San Francisco, which in August, 2012 launched one of the first certificate programs in the "foundations" of Existential-Humanistic practice ever to be offered in the U.S.A.

This is an interesting article, but I suspect his most recent book is something I really need to read. 

Why Are Humans Violent? The Psychological Reason We Hurt Each Other

Terror management theorists explain how when we feel small and humiliated, we'll do anything to feel big.

July 30, 2014 | By Kirk Schneider

Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com

From the crises in the Middle East to mass shootings in U.S. schools to the reckless striving for wealth and world domination, there is one overarching theme that almost never gets media coverage—the sense of insignificance that drives destructive acts. As a depth psychologist with many years of experience, I can say emphatically that the sense of being crushed, humiliated and existentially unimportant are the main factors behind so much that we call psychopathology.

Why would it not follow that the same factors are at play in social and cultural upheavals? The emerging science of “terror management theory” shows convincingly that when people feel unimportant they equate those feelings with dying—and they will do everything they can, including becoming extreme and destructive themselves to avoid that feeling.

The sense of insignificance and death anxiety have been shown to play a key role in everything from terrorism to mass shootings to extremist religious and political ideologies to obsessions with materialism and wealth. Just about all that is violent and corrupt in our world seems connected to it.

So before we rush to judgment about the basis of violence in our world, we would do well to heed the terror management theorists and consider missing pieces of the puzzle. Economic, ideological and biological explanations take us only so far in unpacking the bewildering phenomenon of slaughtering people in cold blood, or playing recklessly with their health, safety or livelihoods. Granted, some violence is defensive and perhaps necessary to protect the lives of sovereign individuals and states. But too often violence is provocative, and when it becomes so betrays a common thread of psychological destitution—the sense of insignificance, the sense of not counting, of helplessness, and of emotional devaluation. We have stories daily about both lone gunmen and soldiers who seek vengeance and “prestige” to cover over their cultural and emotional wounds. Correspondingly, such stories parallel the kind of psychopathy of some in the corporate sector who speculate, pollute and militarize at will.

How do we prevent such terrorizing cycles from continuing to arise? How do we transform people who feel so utterly estranged and stripped of value that they are willing to do virtually anything to redress perceived injustices? That transformation is not likely to occur through political or military coercion (as is now being contemplated in Iraq), nor through the ingestion of pills nor anger management programs (as was the case with several mass shooters), nor through the usual hand-wringing about stricter gun laws and increased diplomacy, which are imperative, but don’t go far enough.

What is needed is no less than a “moral equivalent of war,” to echo the philosopher William James, but at a fraction of the cost. The rampant sense of insignificance needs to be addressed at its root, and not with simplistic bromides. This means that alongside providing affordable short-term public mental health services, we also need to provide affordable long-term, in-depth mental health services. Such services would emphasize the transformative power of deeply supportive, subtly attuned relationships over short-term palliatives and would likely be life-changing (as well as life-saving) in their impact.

We could (and should) also provide cadres of group facilitators to optimize encounters between people in power. These encounters could include heads of state, members of diplomatic corps and legislators. Such facilitators could be schooled in well-established approaches to mediation, such as nonviolent communications, and would likely be pivotal in the settlement of intractable disputes. While the most hardened extremists may be unreachable, there are many others who might surprise us and engage the opportunity.

There is no theoretical reason why such practices would not work with the appropriate adaptations; we see these practices work every day in our clinics and consulting rooms, and often with the most challenging personalities.

The range of violent upheaval in the world is alarming. The quick fix, militarist solutions to this problem are faltering. In many cases, they are making situations worse (as we have seen with recent military operations). The time for a change in societal consciousness is at hand. By focusing our resources on the root of the problem, the many people who feel they don’t count, we not only bolster individual and collective lives, we provide a model that others will find difficult to ignore.

~ Kirk Schneider is president-elect of the Society for Humanistic Psychology of the American Psychological Association, and author of “The Polarized Mind: Why It’s Killing Us and What We Can Do About It.”

How Trauma Affects The Brain Of A Learner (NPR)

From NPR and KPCC Public Radio in Southern California, this is an excellent set of articles on how to change the way we teach children such that we acknowledge the impact trauma has on learning.

It's great to see that happening - it needs to be something that happens everywhere there is poverty and violence - it's the children in those communities who suffer most.

How Trauma Affects The Brain Of A Learner

by Anya Kamenetz

June 15, 2014 

 

Chronic stress can cause deficiencies in the pre-frontal cortex, which is essential for learning.

  
Our public media colleagues over at KPCC, Southern California Public Radio, have a fascinating  two-part report on the efforts of schools in the Los Angeles area to address the effects of "toxic stress" on student learning.

"As researchers work to solve one of the most persistent problems in public education – why kids in poor neighborhoods fail so much more often than their upper-income peers – more and more they're pointing the finger at what happens outside the classroom.

Shootings. Food insecurity. Sirens and fights in the night. Experts are finding that those stressors build up, creating emotional problems and changes in the brain that can undermine even the clearest lessons."

Eighty percent of the students in the Los Angeles Unified School District are in poverty. Scientists are zeroing in on how it can affect their developing brains.

"Studies show chronic stress can change the chemical and physical structures of the brain.

'You see deficits in your ability to regulate emotions in adaptive ways as a result of stress,'said Dr. Cara Wellman, a professor of neuroscience and psychology at Indiana University.

Dendrites, which look like microscopic fingers, stretch off each brain cell to catch information. Wellman's studies in mice show that chronic stress causes these fingers to shrink, changing the way the brain works. She found deficiencies in the pre-frontal cortex – the part of the brain needed to solve problems, which is crucial to learning.

Other researchers link chronic stress to a host of cognitive effects, including trouble with attention, concentration, memory and creativity."

Responding in part to this research, Camino Nuevo, a network of eight charter schools, dedicates resources to creating what it calls a "continuum of integrated support" for students. One fourth of students at the schools see counselors to help them build social and emotional skills. The schools hold group sessions for parents to help them deal with stress in their lives too, and employ full-time parent liasions to help families access health care, mental health, housing, legal, or immigration services. To pay for all this, the schools privately raise about $1.6 million in outside funds. They also tap into MediCal and work with private providers to integrate services right within the school.

Blanca Ruiz is a Mexican immigrant and single mother with a child, Luis, at a Camino Nuevo middle school.

"Since she started counseling at the school, Ruiz lost fifty pounds and saved money to buy a reliable car.

Last year, Ruiz moved her kids 15 miles east to a house in El Monte with a tiny porch and big lemon tree. But there was no way she was changing schools.

She still drives Luis to Camino Nuevo in MacArthur Park every day on her way to work. Sometimes she'll bring him a special treat of KFC for lunch...

Luis's sixth grade teacher, Sarah Wechsler, keeps a close eye on him. She tracks even the smallest details, like how often she encourages him. She wants to make sure positive reinforcements far outpace stern talk.

Wechsler said in the last year, she's seen Luis completely turn around and take ownership of his schoolwork."

At LAUSD public schools, it's a different story. Resource constraints mean just one percent of the school population can access mental health services. Read the rest of the series here.

Here is the remainder of the story linked to at the end of the NPR piece.

Teaching Through Trauma: How poverty affects kids' brains

Annie Gilbertson | June 2nd, 2014

Maya Sugarman/KPCC

Training in self control starts early at Camino Nuevo. Karina Rodriguez leads preschoolers through a motor skills exercise, asking them to start and stop based on musical cues. Students will be exposed to 14 years of curriculum designed to address academic and soft skills.

Teaching Through Trauma: the first in a series of stories on poverty in Los Angeles schools. Read Part Two here.

New research shows the mere fact of being poor can affect kids' brains, making it difficult for them to succeed in school.

Los Angeles public schools — where more than 80 percent of students live in poverty — illustrate the challenges for these students. Less than half of third graders in L.A. Unified read at grade level and 20 percent of students will have dropped out by senior year.

But researchers also offer hope. They said the right interventions can make a difference. And one school in MacArthur Park is battling biology by helping children with life as well as school — to growing success.

Children living in poor neighborhoods are more likely to suffer traumatic incidents, like witnessing or being the victims of shootings, parental neglect or abuse. They also struggle with pernicious daily stressors, including food or housing insecurity, overcrowding and overworked or underemployed, stressed-out parents.

Untreated, researchers have found these events compound, affecting many parts of the body. Studies show chronic stress can change the chemical and physical structures of the brain.

“You see deficits in your ability to regulate emotions in adaptive ways as a result of stress,” said Dr. Cara Wellman, a professor of neuroscience and psychology at Indiana University.

Dendrites, which look like microscopic fingers, stretch off each brain cell to catch information. Wellman’s studies in mice show that chronic stress causes these fingers to shrink, changing the way the brain works. She found deficiencies in the pre-frontal cortex – the part of the brain needed to solve problems, which is crucial to learning.

Other researchers link chronic stress to a host of cognitive effects, including trouble with attention, concentration, memory and creativity.

For students in many Los Angeles public schools, those chronic stressors are everywhere.

Growing up hearing gunshots

Take MacArthur Park, where Census surveys show the child poverty rate is double the California average. The neighborhood’s namesake grassy square is so crime-ridden that many parents refuse to let their children play outside.

The Los Angeles Police Department arrested 3,000 juveniles in the neighborhood in 2011 alone, the most recent data available. Most were for theft — but 14 were taken in on suspicion of homicide.

Kids here deal with parents being deported, siblings being locked up or social workers being called in to take kids away from neglectful or abusive parents. They often live in cramped, crowded apartments with two or more families.

Ana Ponce herself grew up an immigrant in MacArthur Park and thought: it’s time to change how a school tries to reach students.

“We had this understanding that we can not teach kids that are not ready to learn because they were preoccupied with all of the barriers they encountered on their way to school - or all of their fears they had leaving school,” she said.

In the early 2000s, Ponce joined the leadership of a small charter school called Camino Nuevo in her neighborhood. It has since grown to a network of eight schools.

A different approach

At a recent 7 a.m. meeting, Camino Nuevo elementary and middle school teachers clustered into groups, sounding a lot like social workers. Their task: to figure out how to “use positivity and relationships to reverse some of the negative effects of poverty.”

Sarah Wechsler reported a dramatic improvement in one of her students, whose mother was recently deported.

“We’ve loved him, and we’ve replaced his mom the best we can,” she said. “And he’s done all his work this week.”

Ponce said she sees the school’s job as improving the lives of students’ entire families.

Staff helps parents enroll younger siblings in preschool and hooks parents up with healthcare providers. School sites have a full-time parent liaison to provide referrals for those struggling with housing, employment or legal problems.

In group sessions, parents are taught how to participate in their children’s education and relate better to them.

 

Tracking wellbeing

Camino Nuevo’s teachers are trained to track not just academic progress but also overall wellbeing.

If academics slip, they offer reading or math tutoring. In the same way, when emotional or behavior issues bubble-up, a student is referred to a counselor to develop those equally vital emotional skills.

Most schools in L.A. Unified only provide counseling for the most serious mental disorders, targeting resources to the less than 1 percent of the student population – those diagnosed with a serious emotional disturbance. (Read more on this in the second part of our series.)

At Camino Nuevo, about one in four students receives one-on-one counseling or group interventions. They don’t just talk about their problems at home, but also learn how to process emotions and make better decisions.

“They need the place to - you know – detox, so to speak. To let go. To get all this out, and to learn about themselves,” said Gloria Delacruz-Quiroz, head of mental health at Camino Nuevo.

Research shows that not all children who experience trauma will struggle emotionally. Those who feel they have support from an adult seem to do better.

Ninety-seven percent of students at Camino graduate high school, compared to 68 percent district-wide, where the rate slips even further for Latino and low-income students.

To pay for it, the school taps MediCal, California’s version of Medicaid.

The charter school created a system where its own staff works alongside private counseling service providers - including the Los Angeles Childhood Development Center and Didi Hirsch Mental Health Services – right at the schools.

The services aren’t free. Camino Nuevo scrapes together $1.6 million to cover what the providers cannot, plus a smattering of other services school leaders term their "continuum of care," which include not just counseling but things like after school programs and field trips.

A single mother

Camino Nuevo’s Burlington middle school campus is around the corner from where Blanca Ruiz works long hours at a nail salon.

Since she came here from Mexico years ago, she often felt she was barely keeping it together. She was sharing an apartment with her two kids and several roommates. Sometimes the stress would overwhelm her kids.

“I’m a single mother who came here with very low self-esteem, very unfocused, and with severe economic problems,” she said in Spanish. “If I was insecure, my kids would feel the same way.”

Her son Luis acted out. He got bad grades. He refused to do what his mom said and that enraged her.

“She screams because I don’t want to listen to her,” he said.

In class, sometimes Luis would stare off at his desk, checked out; other times he’d become disruptive, start talking, get up and walk around. He expressed no interest in learning and made it difficult for other students in class to stay on task.

“Sometimes I forgot, or sometimes I would decide not to do my work,” he said flatly.

In fifth grade, he was sent to the principal’s office for ignoring his teacher’s instructions. The principal suspended him from school.

Written off?

Rather than write him off, the staff at Camino Nuevo got him to meet with a mental health counselor at the school. He also received tutoring everyday to catch up in math.

His mom went to the school’s group sessions for parents.

“I think it helped me because if you want to help your kid, you have to be emotionally stable, a clear mind and more positive,” she said.

Since she started counseling at the school, Ruiz lost fifty pounds and saved money to buy a reliable car.

Last year, Ruiz moved her kids 15 miles east to a house in El Monte with a tiny porch and big lemon tree. But there was no way she was changing schools.

She still drives Luis to Camino Nuevo in MacArthur Park every day on her way to work. Sometimes she’ll bring him a special treat of KFC for lunch.

A turnaround

Luis’s sixth grade teacher, Sarah Wechsler, keeps a close eye on him. She tracks even the smallest details, like how often she encourages him. She wants to make sure positive reinforcements far outpace stern talk.

Wechsler said in the last year, she’s seen Luis completely turn around and take ownership of his schoolwork.

“You want to be your own man, don’t you?” she said, smiling at Luis with encouragement.

Luis still has days where he feels unfocused, and Wechsler allows him to take breaks or move to another desk. On a recent school day, Luis chose the table facing a wall. Without distraction, he hunkered down to divide fractions.

As the school year was drawing to a close, evidence of Camino Nuevo’s work – and Luis’s - became evident in one unmistakable way: He finally reached grade level in math.

How does that make him feel?
“Proud,” he said.

Annie Gilbertson, Education Reporter
Follow @AnnieGilbertson on Twitter
More from Annie Gilbertson

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misidentified Ana Ponce as a founder of Camino Nuevo and misstated its current number of campuses. KPCC regrets the errors.
 

Steven Pinker - ‘What Could Be More Interesting than How the Mind Works?’

A long and interesting interview with Steven Pinker from the Harvard Gazette. Pinker is the author of a lot of really, really thick books, including The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2012), The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature (2007), The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2002), and How the Mind Works (1999).

‘What could be more interesting than how the mind works?’

Steven Pinker’s history of thought

May 6, 2014 


By Colleen Walsh, Harvard Staff Writer
Steven Pinker follows Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, Martha Minow, and E.O. Wilson in the Experience series, interviews with Harvard faculty members covering the reasons they became teachers and scholars, and the personal journeys, missteps included, behind their professional success. Interviews with Melissa Franklin, Stephen Greenblatt, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Helen Vendler, and Walter Willett will appear in coming weeks.

The brain is Steven Pinker’s playground. A cognitive scientist and experimental psychologist, Pinker is fascinated by language, behavior, and the development of human nature. His work has ranged from a detailed analysis of how the mind works to a best-seller about the decline in violence from biblical times to today.

Raised in Montreal, Pinker was drawn early to the mysteries of thought that would drive his career, and shaped in part by coming of age in the ’60s and early ’70s, when “society was up for grabs,” it seemed, and nature vs. nurture debates were becoming more complex and more heated.

His earliest work involved research in both visual imagery and language, but eventually he devoted himself to the study of language development, particularly in children. His groundbreaking 1994 book “The Language Instinct” put him firmly in the sphere of evolutionary psychology, the study of human impulses as genetically programmed and language as an instinct “wired into our brains by evolution.” Pinker, 59, has spent most of his career in Cambridge, and much of that time at Harvard — first for his graduate studies, later as an assistant professor. He is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology.

Q: Can you tell me about your early life? Where did you grow up and what did your parents do?

A: I grew up in Montreal, as part of the Jewish minority within the English-speaking minority within the French-speaking minority in Canada. This is the community that gave the world Leonard Cohen, who my mother knew, and Mordecai Richler, who my father knew, together with William Shatner, Saul Bellow, and Burt Bacharach. I was born in 1954, the peak year of the baby boom. My grandparents came to Canada from Eastern Europe in the 1920s, I surmise, because in 1924 the United States passed a restrictive immigration law. I can visualize them looking at a map and saying “Damn, what’s the closest that we can get to New York? Oh, there’s this cold place called Canada, let’s try that.” Three were from Poland, one from what is now Moldova. My parents both earned college degrees. My father had a law degree, but for much of his career did not practice law. He worked as a sales representative and a landlord and owned an apartment-motel in Florida. But he reopened his law practice in his 50s, and retired at 75. Like many women of her generation, my mother was a homemaker through the ’50s and ’60s. In the 1970s she got a master’s degree in counseling, then got a job and later became vice principal of a high school in Montreal.

I went to public schools in the suburbs of Montreal, and then to McGill University, which is also where my parents went. I came to Harvard in 1976 for graduate school, got my Ph.D. from this [psychology] department in 1979, went to MIT to do a postdoc, and came back here as an assistant professor in 1980. It was what they called a folding chair, since in those years Harvard did not have a genuine tenure track. I was advised to take the first real tenure-track job that came my way, and that happened within a few months, so I decamped for Stanford after just one year here. Something in me wanted to come back to Boston, so I left Stanford after a year and I was at MIT for 21 years before returning to Harvard ten and a half years ago. This is my third stint at Harvard.

Q: Were your parents instrumental in your choice of a career?

A: Not directly, other than encouraging my intellectual growth and expecting that I would do something that would make use of my strengths.

Q: What were those strengths?

A: My parents wanted me to become a psychiatrist, given my interest in the human mind, and given the assumption that any smart, responsible young person would go into medicine. They figured it was the obvious career for me. The 1970s was a decade in which the academic job market had collapsed. There were stories in The New York Times of Ph.D.s driving taxis and working in sheriff’s offices, and so they thought that a Ph.D. would be a ticket to unemployment — some things don’t change. They tried to reason with me: “If you become a psychiatrist, you get to indulge your interest in the human mind, but you also always have a job. You can always treat patients.” But I had no interest in pursuing a medical degree, nor in treating patients. Psychopathology was not my primary interest within psychology. So I gambled, figuring that if the worst happened and I couldn’t get an academic job I would be 25 years old and could do something else. Also, I chose a field — cognitive psychology — that I knew was expanding. I expected that psychology departments would be converting slots in the experimental analysis of behavior, that is, rats and pigeons being conditioned, to cognitive psychology. And that’s exactly what happened. Fortunately, I got three job offers in three years at three decent places. My parents were relieved, not to mention filled with naches.

Q: I read that an early experience with anarchy got you intrigued about the workings of the mind. Can you tell me more about that?

A: I was too young for ’60s campus activism; I was in high school when all of the excitement happened. But it was very much the world I lived in. The older siblings of my friends were college students, and you couldn’t avoid the controversies of the ’60s if you read the newspaper and watched TV. In the ’60s everyone had to have a political ideology. You couldn’t get a date unless you were a Marxist or an anarchist. Anarchism seemed appealing. I had a friend who had read Kropotkin and Bakunin and he persuaded me that human beings are naturally generous and cooperative and peaceful. That’s just the rational way to be if you didn’t have a state forcing you to delineate your property and separate it from someone else’s. No state, no property, nothing to fight over . . . I’d have arguments over the dinner table with my parents, and they said that if the police ever disappeared, all hell would break loose. Being 14 years old, of course I knew better, until an empirical test presented itself.

Quebec is politically and economically very Gallic: Sooner or later, every public sector goes on strike. One week it’s the garbage collectors, another week the letter carriers. Then one day the police went on strike. They simply did not show up for work one morning. So what happened? Well, within a couple of hours there was widespread looting, rioting, and arson — not one but two people were shot to death, until the government called in the Mounties to restore order. This was particularly shocking in Montreal, which had a far lower rate of violent crime than American cities. Canadians felt morally superior to Americans because we didn’t have the riots and the civil unrest of the 1960s. So to see how quickly violent anarchy could break out in the absence of police enforcement was certainly, well, informative. As so often happens, long-suffering mom and dad were right, and their smart-ass teenage son was wrong. That episode also gave me a taste of what it’s like to be a scientist, namely that cherished beliefs can be cruelly falsified by empirical tests.

I wouldn’t say it’s that incident in particular that gave me an interest in human nature. But I do credit growing up in the ’60s, when these ideas trickled down, and the early ’70s, which were an extension of the ’60s. Debates on human nature and its political implications were in the air. Society was up for grabs. There was talk of revolution and rationally reconstructing society, and those discussions naturally boiled down to rival conceptions of human nature. Is the human psyche socially constructed by culture and parenting, or is there even such a thing as human nature? And if there is, what materials do we have to work with in organizing a society? In college I took a number of courses that looked at human nature from different vantage points: anthropology, sociology, psychology, literature, philosophy. But psychology appealed to me because it seemed to ask profound questions about our kind, but it also offered the hope that the questions could be answered in the lab. So it had just the right mixture of depth and tractability.

Q: You started your career interested in the visual realm as well as in language, but eventually you chose to focus your energies on your work with language. Why?

A: Starting from graduate school I pursued both. My Ph.D. thesis was done under the supervision of Stephen Kosslyn, who later became chair of this department, then dean of social science until he left a couple of years ago to become provost of Minerva University. My thesis was on visual imagery, the ability to visualize objects in the mind’s eye. At the same time, I took a course with Roger Brown, the beloved social psychologist who was in this department for many years. In yet another course I wrote a theoretical paper on language acquisition, which took on the question “How could any intelligent agent make the leap from a bunch of words and sentences in its input to the ability to understand and produce an infinite number of sentences in the language from which they were drawn?” That was the problem that Noam Chomsky set out as the core issue in linguistics.

So I came out of graduate school with an interest in both vision and language. When I was hired back at Harvard a year after leaving, I was given responsibility for three courses in language acquisition. In the course of developing the lectures and lab assignments I started my own empirical research program on language acquisition. And I pursued both projects for about 10 years until the world told me that it found my work on language more interesting than my work on visual cognition. I got more speaking invitations, more grants, more commentary. And seeing that other people in visual cognition like Ken Nakayama, my colleague here, were doing dazzling work that I couldn’t match, whereas my work on language seemed to be more distinctive within its field — that is, there weren’t other people doing what I was doing — I decided to concentrate more and more on language, and eventually closed down my lab in visual cognition.

Q: Did you have any doubts when you were starting out in your career?

A: Oh, absolutely. I was terrified of ending up unemployed. When I got to Harvard, the Psychology Department, at least the experimental program in the Psychology Department, was extremely mathematical. It specialized in a sub-sub-discipline called psychophysics, which was the oldest part of psychology, coming out of Germany in the late 19th century. William James, the namesake of this building, said “the study of psychophysics proves that it is impossible to bore a German.” Now, I’m interested in pretty much every part of psychology, including psychophysics. But this was simply not the most exciting frontier in psychology, and even though I was good in math, I didn’t have nearly as much math background as a hardcore psychophysicist, and I wondered whether I had what it took to do the kind of psychology being done here. But it was starting to become clear — even at Harvard — that mathematical psychophysics was becoming increasingly marginalized, and if it wanted to keep up, Harvard had to start hiring in cognitive psychology. They hired Steve Kosslyn, we immediately hit it off, and I felt much more at home.

Q: If you were trying to get someone interested in this field today, what would you say?

A: What could be more interesting than how the mind works? Also, I believe that psychology sits at the center of intellectual life. In one direction, it looks to the biological sciences, to neuroscience, to genetics, to evolution. But in the other, it looks to the social sciences and the humanities. Societies are formed and take their shape from our social instincts, our ability to communicate and cooperate. And the humanities are the study of the products of our human mind, of our works of literature and music and art. So psychology is relevant to pretty much every subject taught at a university.

Psychology is blossoming today, but for much of its history it was dull, dull, dull. Perception was basically psychophysics, the study of the relationship between the physical magnitude of stimulus and of its perceived magnitude — that is, as you make a light brighter and brighter, does its subjective brightness increase at the same rate or not? It also studied illusions, like the ones on the back of the cereal box, but without much in the way of theory. Learning was the study of the rate at which rats press levers when they are rewarded with food pellets. Social psychology was a bunch of laboratory demonstrations showing that people could behave foolishly and be mindless conformists, but also without a trace of theory explaining why. It’s only recently, in dialogue with other disciplines, that psychology has begun to answer the “why” questions. Cognitive science, for example, which connects psychology to linguistics, theoretical computer science, and philosophy of mind, has helped explain intelligence in terms of information, computation, and feedback. Evolutionary thinking is necessary to ask the “why” questions: “Why does the mind work the way it does instead of some other way in which it could have worked?” This crosstalk has made psychology more intellectually satisfying. It’s no longer just one damn phenomenon after another.

Q: Is there a single work that you are most proud of?

A: I am proud of “How the Mind Works” for its sheer audacity in trying to explain exactly that, how the mind works, between one pair of covers. At the other extreme of generality, I’m proud of a research program I did for about 15 years that culminated in “Words and Rules,” a book about, of all things, irregular verbs, which I use as a window onto the workings of cognition. I’m also fulfilled by having written my most recent book, “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” which is about something completely different: the historical decline of violence and its causes, a phenomenon that most people are not even aware of, let alone have an explanation for. In that book, I first had to convince readers that violence has declined, knowing that the very idea strikes people as preposterous, even outrageous. So I told the story in 100 graphs, each showing a different category of violence: tribal warfare, slavery, homicide, war, civil war, domestic violence, corporal punishment, rape, terrorism. All have been in decline. Having made this case, I returned to being a psychologist, and set myself the task of explaining how that could have happened. And that explanation requires answering two psychological questions: “Why was there so much violence in the past?” and “What drove the violence down?” For me, the pair of phenomena stood as a corroboration of an idea I have long believed; mainly that human nature is complex. There is no single formula that explains what makes people tick, no wonder tissue, no magical all-purpose learning algorithm. The mind is a system of mental organs, if you will, and some of its components can lead us to violence, while others can inhibit us from violence. What changed over the centuries and decades is which parts of human nature are most engaged. I took the title, “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” from Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural. It’s a poetic allusion to the idea that there are many components to human nature, some of which can lead to cooperation and amity.

Q: I read a newspaper article in which you talked about the worst thing you have ever done. Can you tell me about that?

A: It was as an undergraduate working in a behaviorist lab. I carried out a procedure that turned out to be tantamount to torturing a rat to death. I was asked to do it, and against my better judgment, did it. I knew it had little scientific purpose. It was done in an era in which there was no oversight over the treatment of animals in research, and just a few years later it would have been inconceivable. But this painful episode resonated with me for two reasons. One is that it was a historical change in a particular kind of violence that I lived through, namely the increased concern for the welfare of laboratory animals. This was one of the many developments I talk about in the “The Better Angels of Our Nature.” Also, as any psychology student knows, humans sometimes do things against their own conscience under the direction of a responsible authority, even if the authority has no power to enforce the command. This is the famous Milgram experiment, in which people were delivering what they thought were fatal shocks to subjects pretending to be volunteers. I show the film of the Milgram experiment to my class every year. It’s harrowing to watch, but I’ve seen it now 17 times and found it just as gripping the 17th time as the first. There was a lot of skepticism that people could possibly behave that way. Prior to the experiment, a number of experts were polled for their prediction as to what percentage of subjects would administer the most severe shock. The average of the predictions was on the order of one-tenth of one percent. The actual result was 70 percent. Many people think there must be some trick or artifact, but having behaved like Milgram’s 70 percent myself, despite thinking of myself as conscientious and morally concerned, I believe that the Milgram study reveals a profound and disturbing feature of human psychology.

Pinker, at his Boston home, might someday add photography to his list of book topics.

Q: What would you say is your biggest flaw as a scholar? What about your greatest strength?

A: That’s for other people to judge! I am enough of a psychologist to know that any answer I give would be self-serving. La Rochefoucauld said, “Our enemies’ opinions of us come closer to the truth than our own.”

Q: As an expert in language, what do you think of Twitter?

A: I was pressured into becoming a Twitterer when I wrote an op-ed for The New York Times saying that Google is not making us stupid, that electronic media are not ruining the language. And my literary agent said, “OK, you’ve gone on record saying that these are not bad things. You better start tweeting yourself.” And so I set up a Twitter feed, which turns out to suit me because it doesn’t require taking out hours of the day to write a blog. The majority of my tweets are links to interesting articles, which takes advantage of the breadth of articles that come my way — everything from controversies over correct grammar to trends in genocide.

Having once been a young person myself, I remember the vilification that was hurled at us baby boomers by the older generation. This reminds me that it is a failing of human nature to detest anything that young people do just because older people are not used to it or have trouble learning it. So I am wary of the “young people suck” school of social criticism. I have no patience for the idea that because texting and tweeting force one to be brief, we’re going to lose the ability to express ourselves in full sentences and paragraphs. This simply misunderstands the way that human language works. All of us command a variety of registers and speech styles, which we narrowcast to different forums. We speak differently to our loved ones than we do when we are lecturing, and still differently when we are approaching a stranger. And so, too, we have a style that is appropriate for texting and instant messaging that does not necessarily infect the way we communicate in other forums. In the heyday of telegraphy, when people paid by the word, they left out the prepositions and articles. It didn’t mean that the English language lost its prepositions and articles; it just meant that people used them in some media and not in others. And likewise, the prevalence of texting and tweeting does not mean that people magically lose the ability to communicate in every other conceivable way.

Q: Early in your career you wrote a number of important technical works. Do you find it more fun to write the broader appealing books?

A: Both are appealing for different reasons. In trade books I have the length to pursue objections, digressions, and subtleties, something that is hard to do in the confines of a journal article. I also like the freedom to avoid academese and to write in an accessible style — which happens to be the very topic of my forthcoming book, “The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.” I also like bringing to bear ideas and sources of evidence that don’t come from a single discipline. In the case of my books on language, for example, I used not just laboratory studies of kids learning to talk, or studies of language in patients with brain damage, but also cartoons and jokes where the humor depends on some linguistic subtlety. Telling examples of linguistic phenomena can be found in both high and low culture: song lyrics, punch lines from stand-up comedy, couplets from Shakespeare. In “Better Angels,” I supplemented the main narrative, told with graphs and data, with vignettes of culture at various times in history, which I presented as a sanity check, as a way of answering the question, “Could your numbers be misleading you into a preposterous conclusion because you didn’t try to get some echo from the world as to whether life as it was lived reflects the story told by the numbers?” If, as I claim, genocide is not a modern phenomenon, we should see signs of it being treated as commonplace or acceptable in popular narratives. One example is the Old Testament, which narrates one genocide after another, commanded by God. This doesn’t mean that those genocides actually took place; probably most of them did not. But it shows the attitude at the time, which is, genocide is an excellent thing as long as it doesn’t happen to you.

I also find that there is little distinction between popular writing and cross-disciplinary writing. Academia has become so hyperspecialized that as soon as you write for scholars who are not in your immediate field, the material is as alien to them as it is to a lawyer or a doctor or a high school teacher or a reader of The New York Times.

Q: Were you a big reader as a teen? Can you think of one or two works you read early, fiction or nonfiction, where you came away impressed, even inspired, by the ideas, the craft, or both?

A: I was a voracious reader, and then as now, struggled to balance breadth and depth, so my diet was eclectic: newspapers, encyclopedias, a Time-Life book-of-the-month collection on science, magazines (including Esquire in its quality-essay days and Commentary in its pre-neocon era), and teen-friendly fiction by Orwell, Vonnegut, Roth, and Salinger (the intriguing Glasses, not the tedious Caulfield). Only as a 17-year-old in junior college did I encounter a literary style I consciously wanted to emulate — the wit and clarity of British analytical philosophers like Gilbert Ryle and A.J. Ayer, and the elegant prose of the Harvard psycholinguists George Miller and Roger Brown.

Q: Might we one day see a Steven Pinker book about horse racing or piano playing — or a Pinker novel? Is there a genre or off-work-hours interest you’ve thought seriously about putting book-length work into?

A: Whatever thoughts I might have had of writing a novel were squelched by marrying a real novelist [Rebecca Goldstein] and seeing firsthand the degree of artistry and brainpower that goes into literary fiction. But I have pondered other crossover projects. I’m an avid photographer, and would love to write a book someday that applied my practical experience, combined with vision science and evolutionary aesthetics, to explaining why we enjoy photographs. And I’ve thought of collaborating with Rebecca on a book on the psychology, philosophy, and linguistics of fiction — which would give me an excuse to read the great novels I’ve never found time for.

Q: You have won several teaching awards during your career. What makes a great teacher?

A: Foremost is passion for the subject matter. Studies of teaching effectiveness all show that enthusiasm is a major contributor. Also important is an ability to overcome professional narcissism, namely a focus on the methods, buzzwords, and cliques of your academic specialty, rather than a focus on the subject matter, the actual content. I don’t think of what I’m teaching my students as “psychology.” I think of it as teaching them “how the mind works.” They’re not the same thing. Psychology is an academic guild, and I could certainly spend a lot of time talking about schools of psychology, the history of psychology, methods in psychology, theories in psychology, and so on. But that would be about my clique, how my buddies and I spend our days, how I earn my paycheck, what peer group I want to impress. What students are interested in is not an academic field but a set of phenomena in the world — in this case the workings of the human mind. Sometimes academics seem not to appreciate the difference.

A third ingredient of good teaching is overcoming “the curse of knowledge”: the inability to know what it’s like not to know something that you do know. That is a lifelong challenge. It’s a challenge in writing, and it’s a challenge in teaching, which is why I see a lot of synergy between the two. Often an idea in one of my books will have originated from the classroom, or vice versa, because the audience is the same: smart people who are intellectually curious enough to have bought the book or signed up for the course but who are just not as knowledgeable about a particular topic as I am. The obvious solution is to “imagine the reader over your shoulder” or “to put yourself in your students’ shoes.” That’s a good start, but it’s not enough, because the curse of knowledge prevents us from fully appreciating what it’s like to be a student or a reader. That’s why writers need editors: The editors force them to realize that what’s obvious to them isn’t obvious to everyone else. And it’s why teachers need feedback, either from seeing the version of your content that comes back at you in exams, or in conversations with students during office hours, or in discussion sessions. Another important solution is being prepared to revise. Most of the work of writing is in the revising. During the first pass of the writing process, it’s hard enough to come up with ideas that are worth sharing. To simultaneously concentrate on the form, on the felicity of expression, is too much for our thimble-sized minds to handle. You have to break it into two distinct stages: Come up with the ideas, and polish the prose. This may sound banal, but I find that it comes as a revelation to people who ask about my writing process. It’s why in my SLS 20 class, the assignment for the second term paper is to revise the first term paper. That’s my way to impress on students that the quality comes in the revision.

Q: How do students differ today from when you were a student?

A: What a dangerous question! The most tempting and common answer is the thoughtless one: “The kids today are worse.” It’s tempting because people often confuse changes in themselves with changes in the times, and changes in the times with moral and intellectual decline. This is a well-documented psychological phenomenon. Every generation thinks that the younger generation is dissolute, lazy, ignorant, and illiterate. There is a paper trail of professors complaining about the declining quality of their students that goes back at least 100 years. All this means that your question is one that people should think twice before answering. I know a lot more now than I did when I was a student, and thanks to the curse of knowledge, I may not realize that I have acquired most of it during the decades that have elapsed since I was a student. So it’s tempting to look at students and think, “What a bunch of inarticulate ignoramuses! It was better when I was at that age, a time when I and other teenagers spoke in fluent paragraphs, and we effortlessly held forth on the foundations of Western civilization.” Yeah, right.

Here is a famous experiment. A 3-year-old comes into the lab. You give him a box of M&Ms. He opens up the box and instead of finding candy he finds a tangle of ribbons. He is surprised, and now you say to him, “OK, now your friend Jason is going to come into the room. What will Jason think is in the box?” The child says, “ribbons,” even though Jason could have no way of knowing that. And, if you ask the child, “Before you opened the box, what did you think was in it?” They say, “ribbons.” That is, they backdate their own knowledge. Now we laugh at the 3-year-old, but we do the same thing. We backdate our own knowledge and sophistication, so we always think that the kids today are more slovenly than we were at that age.

Q: What are some of the greatest things your students have taught you?

A: Many things. The most obvious is the changes in technology for which we adults are late adopters. I had never heard of Reddit, let alone knowing that it was a major social phenomenon, until two of my students asked if I would do a Reddit AMA [Ask Me Anything]. I did the session in my office with two of my students guiding me, kind of the way I taught my grandmother how to use this newfangled thing called an answering machine. That evening I got an email from my editor in New York saying: “The sales of your book just mysteriously spiked. Any explanation?” It was all thanks to Reddit, which I barely knew existed. Another is a kind of innocence — though that’s a condescending way to put it. It’s a curiosity about the world untainted by familiarity with an academic field. It works as an effective challenge to my own curse of knowledge. So if you want to know what it’s like not to know something that you know, the answer is not to try harder, because that doesn’t work very well. The answer is to interact with someone who doesn’t know what you know, but who is intelligent, curious, and open.

Q: If you weren’t in this field, what would you be doing?

A: Am I allowed to be an academic?

Q: You can be anything you want.

A: I could have been in some other field that deals with ideas, like philosophy or constitutional law. I have enough of an inner geek to imagine being a programmer, and for a time as an undergraduate that appealed to me. But as much as I like gadgets and code, I like ideas more, so I suspect that the identical twin separated from me at birth would also have done something in the world of ideas.

Q: No Steven Pinker interview would be complete without a question about your hair. I recently saw a picture of you from the 1970s, and your style appears unchanged. Why haven’t you gone for a shorter look?

A: First, there’s immaturity. Any boy growing up in the ’60s fought a constant battle with his father about getting a haircut. Now no one can force me to get my hair cut, and I’m still reveling in the freedom. Also, I had a colleague at MIT, the computer scientist Pat Winston, who had a famous annual speech on how to lecture, and one of his tips was that every professor should have an affectation, something to amuse students with. Or journalists, comedians, and wise guys. I am the charter member of an organization called The Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists. The MIT newspaper once ran a feature on all the famous big-haired people I had been compared to, including Simon Rattle, Robert Plant, Spinoza, and Bruno, the guy who played the piano on the TV show “Fame.” When I was on The Colbert Report, talking about fear and security, he pulled out an electromagnetic wand and scanned my hair for concealed weapons. So it does have its purposes.

Interview was edited for length and clarity.

 

Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2011) received a lot of praise, and it was also dismissed as "hallucinatory" by Robert Epstein in Scientific American.

People pay more attention to facts that match their beliefs than those that undermine them. Pinker wants peace, and he also believes in his hypothesis; it is no surprise that he focuses more on facts that support his views than on those that do not.

So watch the talk below, given at UC Berkeley in February, but just posted on the UCTV Channel, and see if you agree with Epstein or with Pinker.

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

Published on Apr 29, 2014


Believe it or not, violence has been in decline for long stretches of time, and we may be living in the most peaceful era in our species existence. Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker presents the data supporting this surprising conclusion, and explains the trends by showing how changing historical circumstances have engaged different components of human nature. Recorded on 02/04/2014. Series: "UC Berkeley Graduate Council Lectures" [5/2014] - (Visit: http://www.uctv.tv/)

Harvard professor of psychology Steven Pinker visited UC Berkeley back in February as a part of the Conversations with History lecture series. In this talk he focused on the development of his understanding of human nature, including some discussion of his most recent book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.

Understanding Human Nature with Steven Pinker - Conversations with History

Published on Apr 1, 2014 
(Visit: http://www.uctv.tv/)


Conversations host Harry Kreisler welcomes Harvard's Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology, for a discussion of his intellectual journey. Pinker discusses the origins and evolution of his thinking on human nature. Topics include: growing up in Montreal in a Jewish family, the impact of the 1960's, his education, and the trajectory of his research interests. He explains his early work in linguistics and how he came to write his recent work, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. In the conversation, Pinker describes the importance of interdisciplinary research and analyzes creativity. He concludes with a discussion of how science can contribute to the humanities and offers advice to students on how to prepare for the future.

Recorded on 02/04/2014. Series: "Conversations with History" [4/2014]

Breaking Bad Is Over and Everyone Has an Opinion

Last night was the final 75 minutes of one of the most compelling television shows in my lifetime. I can not remember and show whose final episodes has engendered such a profusion of opinions, assessments, analysis, or explication. Many bloggers and critics are reading this series as one might read a novel . . . and employing many of the same tools of exegesis.

ALL of the articles listed below were written before the airing of the final episode, so none of them have the advantage of knowing the whole story, yet they still have a profound need to write, including at least one plea for Walt's death.

I'm just posting a little taste of these articles - follow the links to read the whole of any article(s) about which you are curious. Here they are, in no particular order.

Why You’re Hooked On Breaking Bad

The show developed legions of fans thanks to deft writing, superb acting and the miracles of binge-watching

By Eric Dodds
Sept. 28, 2013

 

Though the premise for Breaking Bad — a high school chemistry teacher transforms himself into a meth kingpin — might sound far-fetched, the explanation for Walter White’s rapid ascension to the top of the drug game is not. He has the best product, the best distribution and the best reputation. In the landscape of television dramas, the same is true of Breaking Bad show-runner Vince Gilligan.

Since its debut in 2008, Breaking Bad has arguably been the best drama on television — not unlike Heisenberg’s blue meth. Of course, there are plenty of other reasons why the show has become so incredibly popular over the last year (we’ll get to those in a bit), but that popularity begins and ends with the fact that Breaking Bad is simply better than its peers. That superiority is thanks, in large part, to Gilligan, who was a writer for the X-Files prior to creating Bad. His vision for the show (taking Mr. Chips and turning him into Scarface) has been unwavering since the beginning, but what’s far more impressive is the way in which he has realized that vision without veering off into the convoluted plot twists and unnecessary melodrama that afflicted so many of Bad‘s contemporaries.

* * * * *

“Breaking Bad”: Walter White must be punished – America, finally, needs to see someone pay

We'll be rooting for justice because there's so little of it: Jamie Dimon walks free but whistleblowers face prison

By Colin McEnroe 

 
Jamie Dimon, Walter White, James Clapper (Credit: AMC/Ursula Coyote/Reuters/Gary Cameron/Jason Reed)

You may be aswim with doubts about the real-world efficacy of punishment, the usefulness of the “war on drugs” and the morality of the death penalty, but I’m betting you expect to see Walter White die in the final episode of “Breaking Bad.” I’m betting you even need that.

Maybe it’s a little easier because Walt is dying from cancer anyway. He’s a pre-digested protein. He’ll zoom through Death’s intestines like a kid on a water park slide.

We all have strong ideas about the fates of Walt and the people around him partly because – here in real life — crime and punishment seem more disjointed from one another than ever before. You’re more likely to be prosecuted for lying to Congress about steroids and strikeouts than for bald-faced perjury about the wholesale government espionage directed at all of its citizens. You can run a major investment bank using the handbook from a pirate ship and never face criminal indictment. Blow the whistle about war crimes, and you could be looking at serious prison time.

And it’s not just the crimes. There’s something in Walt’s self-righteous tone and his indifference to the little people who get hurt that we recognize from today’s news. In 2010, Charlie Munger, number two guy at Berkshire Hathaway, was asked if bailout money should have gone to beleaguered homeowners instead of to big banks. His answer: “At a certain place, you’ve got to say to people: Suck it in and cope, Buddy. Suck it in and cope.” And this week AIG CEO Robert Benmosche told the Wall Street Journal the public caterwauling about bonuses for executives at bailed-out banks was “just as bad and just as wrong” as the lynchings decades ago in the Deep South.

* * * * *

The hidden clues to “Breaking Bad’s” meaning
 
The show's many visual "Easter eggs" reveal its deeper message 

By Michael Darnell 

 
Aaron Paul as Jesse Pinkman in "Breaking Bad" (Credit: AMC/Ursula Coyote) 

At the end of “Breaking Bad’s” five-season run, I, like so many others, have turned to the Internet to squeeze every last drop of enjoyment from this remarkably rich series. Redditors in particular have long been poring over the subtle callbacks and visual motifs that have become “Breaking Bad’s” signature, compiling a virtual archive of many details that I, for one, missed on my first viewing. (This piece is much indebted to the Redditors’ keen eyes.) Much has been made, for example, of Season 2′s pink teddy bear, which, having fallen in the wreckage of Wayfarer 515, haunts the show as a constant reminder of the chaos wrought by Walter White. These Easter eggs are a reward to dedicated fans and a boon to television theorists who read them as messages from Vince Gilligan himself. But they’re also invitations for an ethical interpretation of a show based around the effects of violence.

“Breaking Bad’s” main ethical dilemma challenges the viewer to decide at what point Walter White ceases to be the hero and starts to be the villain of his own story; and implicit to this question are still stickier ones. What acts of violence are we prepared to accept as somehow not bad enough to deserve our contempt? And why are we willing to condone our protagonist’s violence while condemning the violence of others?

The pink teddy bear invites us to consider these questions by subtly connecting three seemingly unrelated acts of violence with the visual of a half-destroyed face. The charred bear initially signals Walt’s indirect blame for the death of Jesse Pinkman’s girlfriend Jane when he chooses not to save her from a fatal overdose. His inaction ultimately leads Jane’s grieving father, an air traffic controller, to cause the midair collision where we first see the bear. Two seasons later, after we’ve forgotten Wayfarer 515 and the telltale teddy bear, the symbol returns as the mangled face of drug lord Gus Fring who, himself guilty of several grisly murders, is justifiably (apparently) killed by Hector Salamanca at Walt’s behest. And most recently, Jesse’s face is similarly mutilated after Walt hands him over to the Aryan Brotherhood for going to the DEA.

* * * * *

The One Who Knocked First 

From start to finish, Breaking Bad has echoed the uncannily similar—and equally good—cop show The Shield.

By Mark Peters 

 
Michael Chiklis on The Shield and Bryan Cranston on Breaking Bad. Photos courtesy FX, AMC 

My favorite TV show is a Shakespearean tragedy in which the antihero’s sins, spinning out from a fatal decision he makes in the pilot, slowly destroy everyone around him. The main character insists he’s doing it all for his family—but he’s lying, especially to himself. There’s a lot of collateral damage, but this murderer’s worst crime might be the corruption of his vulnerable younger partner. The show maintains a remarkable level of quality throughout its run, and helped put its network on the map. It was largely carried by a great performance from its lead actor, a man previously known mainly for comedy who transformed himself into an Emmy-winning badass. 

Of course, I’m talking about The Shield.

As Breaking Bad winds down, conventional wisdom says it’s a contender for Best Show Ever, along with The Wire and The Sopranos. No argument there. But major argument here: The Shield should be in that conversation, too. Shawn Ryan’s saga of Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis) and the Strike Team, which aired on FX from 2002 to 2008, remains—pardon the expression—criminally underrated. It was every bit as riveting and consistent as Breaking Bad. And the two shows are also remarkably similar. In many ways, The Shield was Breaking Bad before Breaking Bad.

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Breaking Bad Is TV’s Best Medical Drama, Ever
 

Not that there’s a lot of worthy competition.
 
By Haider Javed Warraich 

 
Jesse Pinkman (Aarol Paul) in Breaking Bad | Courtesy of AMC 

Breaking Bad is about a lot of things—the contextualization of evil, the blind bond of family, the consequences of lifelong repression—and of course, the macro and micro-economics of the methamphetamine industry. But wrapped within all of this is a medical drama unlike any other, possibly the best medical drama on TV, ever. 

Not that current medical dramas offer any meaningful competition. Personal disclaimer: As a physician, I can’t stand watching medical dramas. They are inaccurate, over the top, and give a very poor representation of the environments we work in, the nature of the work, and the people involved. But my wife sees enough, leaving me to explain that not every shower taken in the hospital involves collateral canoodling à la Grey’s Anatomy or that it’s impossible for me to simultaneously do both surgery and cardiac catheterization and run all my own lab tests à la House. Even when there are interesting subplots, deeper themes, or stellar performances, the lack of overall believability makes it hard for me to become engrossed or to separate the medical setting from the drama.

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Jesse Pinkman: One Sorry Individual 

 

Every single bad thing that's happened to Breaking Bad’s saddest soul.

By Andrew Bouvé



Breaking Bad comes to an end Sunday after five grueling seasons, and no one has had a harder time than poor Jesse Pinkman. Here is our video goodbye.

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Breaking Bad Has a Pinkman Problem

By Jessica Winter

   

In the pilot episode of Breaking Bad, Jesse Pinkman is sprinting away from the fearsome drug dealers Emilio and Krazy 8 when he trips and falls eye-socket-first onto a rock in the New Mexico desert. When he wakes up, he’ll have a scone-shaped shiner the color of a Marie Schrader accent wall. But for the moment, he’s out cold, and Emilio can’t resist kicking him—hard, spitefully, once in the side—when he’s down.

As goes Emilio, so goes Breaking Bad. This show has never passed up an opportunity to kick Jesse Pinkman when he’s down. It’s forever endeavoring to find new, more vigorous techniques for kicking him when he’s down—through pirouettes of plot and calisthenics of character development—and new, pliant body regions to kick or, when the kicking is done, punch or stomp or split open bleeding. What horrible thing hasn’t happened to Jesse, perhaps repeatedly, over the last five seasons? Psycho Tuco beat him bad enough to put him in the hospital. Psycho Hank beat him bad enough to put him in the hospital again. He awoke one morning to find his beloved Jane dead beside him. He feels responsible for the deaths of Jane and Combo and Tomás. He is responsible for the death of Gale, although Walter was the one really pulling the strings. He’s been rejected by his biological family, and lost his adopted one—Andrea and Brock—around the time that Walter decided the best plan of action for preserving his meth empire was to poison a small child and later plant a ricin cigarette in Jesse’s Roomba, just to reinforce one more time (but not one last time) what a stupid worthless junkie imbecile Jesse is, because that’s always been Walter’s favorite topic of discussion—his go-to when the cocktail chatter is flagging.

However difficult this may be to watch, Jesse’s ongoing abasement served a narrative purpose. Jesse evolved from bratty burnout to, for a time, the show’s most complex and interesting character—a “bad” kid who increasingly, desperately wanted to be good, without knowing that in the pitiless Breaking Bad universe, no good deed goes unpunished.

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Breaking Bad: I Want Walter White to Survive the Finale

How wrong is it that some fans want this evil person to get away with his crimes?

By Charlotte Alter Sept. 27, 2013

 

Walter White (Bryan Cranston) | Frank Ockenfels/AMC 

Unless you’re decomposing in a barrel of acid, you are likely aware that Breaking Bad ends this Sunday.

And unless you’re one of the 15% of Americans who don’t have Internet, you must also have come across some of the endless back-and-forth about how the show will end, and why. Who shall live, and who shall die; who by ricin and who by Uncle Jack; who shall be degraded and who shall be mourned.

But for some TV critics and active tweeters, the question of Breaking Bad’s ending has become as much a moral question as an artistic one. And while I love the back-and-forth, it’s getting a little sanctimonious for my taste.

You see, I want Walt to get away with all the horrible things he’s done. So sue me.

I’d like to see him drive across the desert with little Holly and a truck full of cash, off to start a new life somewhere like Mike and his granddaughter might have done. Skyler, I have a lot of respect for you, and I wish you the best. Walter Jr., whatever.

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The World According to Team Walt

By ROSS DOUTHAT

Published: September 28, 2013

ACROSS five seasons of riveting television, the antihero of AMC’s “Breaking Bad,” Walter Hartwell White, has committed enough crimes to earn several life sentences from any reasonable jury. He has cooked crystal meth in bulk, hooking addicts from his native Albuquerque all the way to Prague. He has personally killed at least seven people and is implicated in the deaths of hundreds more. He has poisoned an innocent child, taken out a contract on his longtime partner, and stood by and watched a young woman choke to death.

But one thing he hasn’t done, as this weekend’s series finale looms, is entirely forfeit the sympathies of his audience. As a cultural phenomenon, this is the most striking aspect of “Breaking Bad” — the persistence, after everything he’s done, of a Team Walt that still wants him to prevail. In the online realms where hit shows are dissected, critics who pass judgment on Walt’s sins find themselves tangling with a multitude of commenters who don’t think he needs forgiveness. And it isn’t just the anonymous hordes who take his side. “You’d think I’d bear Walt some serious ill will considering he sat there and watched Jane die,” the actress who played his vomit-choked victim wrote for New York magazine last week, “but I’m still rooting for everything to work out for the guy.”

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The Psychology of Becoming Walter White  

Six reasons why breaking bad is easier than it looks  

Published on September 28, 2013 by Thomas Hills, Ph.D. in Statistical Life

Vince Gilligan, creator of Breaking Bad, said that his goal with Walter White was to turn Mr. Chips into Scarface. Take a regular person, like you—assume you’re regular for a second—and then make you nice and evil, like a witch in a gingerbread house. Is that really even possible? Could you become another Walter White?

I’m inclined to believe that most of us still think some people are good and some people are bad, and never the twain shall meet. Despite the lessons we learned from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, we still think that good and evil belong in different people. Walter clearly shows that it doesn’t. And he demonstrates this with so many good psychological reasons—reasons that experimental psychologists observe in ‘normal’ people on a daily basis.

What are these reasons and do they apply to you? See for yourself.

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Walter White’s sickness mirrors America

"Breaking Bad" strikes such a nerve because Walt's ills of body and soul are also those of our country

By David Sirota

 

Bryan Cranston as Walter White in "Breaking Bad" (Credit: AMC/Frank Ockenfels 3)

It is safe to say that as “Breaking Bad” comes to a close, Vince Gilligan’s series is the moment’s Best Show In the History of Television. Incredibly, the show isn’t even over yet, and it is already a cult classic, with all the attendant prop fetishization and tourism industries that come with such a designation. But as we approach the final episode, there’s an unanswered question: What makes the show so historically important?

Critics have rightly lauded the series for, among other things, its cinematography, its dialogue, its character development and its carefully constructed plot twists. Yet, in this much-vaunted new Golden Age of TV, there are plenty of programs with great visuals, terrific conversations, nuanced personalities and enticing stories — but most never achieve the same notoriety as the life of Walter White. Similarly, “Breaking Bad” is part crime drama, part satire of the legal system and part commentary on family dysfunction — but those narrative vectors are hardly unexplored territory in television. So what makes the story of Walter White so special?

Here’s a theory: Maybe “Breaking Bad” has ascended to the cult firmament because it so perfectly captures the specific pressures and ideologies that make America exceptional at the very moment the country is itself breaking bad.

Whew . . . and that was only the ones that showed up in my feeds the last couple of days.