The Dunbar Number, From the Guru of Social Networks
Social network CEOs look for wisdom from evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar, who pioneered research into human relationships:
“A little more than 10 years ago, the evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar began a study of the Christmas-card-sending habits of the English. This was in the days before online social networks made friends and “likes” as countable as miles on an odometer, and Dunbar wanted a proxy for meaningful social connection. He was curious to see not only how many people a person knew, but also how many people he or she cared about. The best way to find those connections, he decided, was to follow holiday cards. After all, sending them is an investment: You either have to know the address or get it; you have to buy the card or have it made from exactly the right collage of adorable family photos; you have to write something, buy a stamp, and put the envelope in the mail. These are not huge costs, but most people won’t incur them for just anybody.
“Working with the anthropologist Russell Hill, Dunbar pieced together the average English household’s network of yuletide cheer. The researchers were able to report, for example, that about a quarter of cards went to relatives, nearly two-thirds to friends, and 8 percent to colleagues. The primary finding of the study, however, was a single number: the total population of the households each set of cards went out to. That number was 153.5, or roughly 150.”
An Open Letter to the Girl I Pretended To Have a Crush On in Eighth Grade
A writer recalls being 14 and in the closet in 1995:
“I had never been more proud of myself. I decided to notice you so no one would notice me, and now I was not only assumed straight, but assumed worthy of conversation. I just had to keep broadcasting straightness loud enough to drown out the gay humming underneath.
“Despite having two classes together, I had still barely met you. Ms. Hughes’s class was divided into fifteen tables, each with two students. She had already changed the seating arrangement twice. We couldn’t tell if this was a deliberate strategy on her part—obedience through churn—or if she just couldn’t decide how she’d like us arranged. Each time, you and I had ended up at different ends of the class.
“‘Table six,’ she was saying as we waited near the door, ‘Michael Hobbes and Tracy Dolan.’
“The class, as one, made a kind of awwwww sound, like the studio audience on ‘Full House’.”
The Longest Hunger Strike
A prisoner in Connecticut who is protesting his conviction by refusing food is now being force-fed. Is it torture?
“Staff turned off the video camera typically used to record medical procedures. They strapped Coleman down at ‘four points’ with seatbelt-like ‘therapeutic’ restraints. Edward Blanchette, the internist and prison medical director at the time, pushed a thick, flexible tube up Coleman’s right nostril. Rubber scraped against cartilage and bone and drew blood. Coleman howled. As the tube snaked into his throat, it kinked, bringing the force of insertion onto the sharp edges of the bent tube. They thought he was resisting so they secured a wide mesh strap over his shoulders to keep him from moving. A nurse held his head. Blanchette finally realized that the tube had kinked and pulled it back out. He pushed a second tube up Coleman’s nose, down his throat, and into his stomach. Blanchette filled the tube with vanilla Ensure. Coleman’s nose bled. He gagged constantly against the tube. He puked. As they led him back to his cell, the cuffs of Coleman’s gray sweatshirt were soaked with snot, saliva, vomit, and blood.”
Coming Home
A political journalist comes home from the campaign trail and reacquaints himself with his children:
“During my absence, I left express instructions that my son was not to approach puberty, but as I tie his tie I am met by his deodorant. He’s wearing something called Axe. They use it to repel rioting crowds, I believe. Once this gets up your nose, it’s like having a Billy Joel song stuck in your head. You can’t get it out. Working too hard can give you a heart-attack-ack-ack-ack.
“My son also now has a ‘walk,’ the careful way the preadolescent boy carries himself to look like he doesn’t give a damn. His variation is somewhere between shuffling to arraignment and the bob you see from middle-aged men grooving to Billy Joel while stopped at a traffic light.”
My So-Called Stalker (1999)
(Via David Carr’s Reddit Q&A) A woman recounts what it was like to be stalked by one man for years—and how police ignored her plea for help:
“Ron left frequent answering-machine messages that had no real pattern. Sometimes they were weird, nonsensical treatises, accusatory and rambling, definitely creepy, but not exactly life-threatening. Certainly not enough for the authorities to care–and not enough to motivate me to file a report.
“Then he started showing up at the store and lurking on the sales floor, peering at me. It was a busy place, and he often got by without anyone’s seeing him. I felt him even when he wasn’t there.
“One day, I was stocking shelves and sensed someone standing behind me. Minutes went by, and I realized the same person was still standing over my shoulder. I scooted to the right a bit, thinking perhaps he was trying to look at the shelf I was blocking. I heard the rustle of his pants as he shifted with me. Oh my god oh my god, I thought frantically, Oh my god it’s Ron. It has to be. He’s right fucking behind me! The breath left me, and I stared straight ahead at the shelves, immobilized by something I couldn’t explain. In that split second, I finally understood that my life would never be the same.”
Frontline and Longreads: Inside Obama’s Presidency
Coming Tuesday from Frontline: “Inside Obama’s Presidency.” We’ve collected a list of stories from Obama’s first term—share your favorite presidential stories on Twitter with the hashtag #longreads.
The Soul of Student Debt
Why do we treat student differently than other debt? An argument that it is “a form of social control”:
“As states disinvest from public higher education and compel students to take on ever-increasing debt loads to fund their studies, the experience and purpose of higher education is transformed. The pursuit of a college diploma becomes an entrepreneurial activity, a species of personal investment and risk-taking that places the attainment of future returns above all other concerns. By integrating higher education into the circuits of financial capitalism, the state encourages debtors to look to the market for self-improvement and personal security. Like the subprime mortgage borrower or the worker with a 401(k) plan, the indebted student is taught to view access to credit and the financial markets as the golden ticket to prosperity and security.
“Student debt subjects the borrower to a distinctly capitalist pedagogy, transforming higher education into an increasingly expensive commodity that is bought and sold on the market. But as the legions of student loan debtors can attest, investment in a college education is no longer a guarantee of remunerative employment or personal financial security. It is an increasingly risky investment that can bring the student debtor into severe financial distress, and in the worst cases, to the door of the bankruptcy court to seek relief.”
The Party Faithful
In Israel, people like Naftali Bennett are leading a move to the right:
“More broadly, the story of the election is the implosion of the center-left and the vivid and growing strength of the radical right. What Bennett’s rise, in particular, represents is the attempt of the settlers to cement the occupation and to establish themselves as a vanguard party, the ideological and spiritual core of the entire country. Just as a small coterie of socialist kibbutzniks dominated the ethos and the public institutions of Israel in the first decades of the state’s existence, the religious nationalists, led by the settlers, intend to do so now and in the years ahead. In the liberal tribune Haaretz, the columnist Ari Shavit wrote, ‘What is now happening is impossible to view as anything but the takeover by a colonial province of its mother country.'”
Two Men, One Sky: A Flight to the Finish
Two 32-year-old men attempt to break the record for the farthest anyone has ever flown in a hang glider:
“Strong thermals, which are sought and feared, are capable of lifting a hang glider thousands of feet in minutes. Lighter thermals, the ones Martin was hunting, require precise flying to find and then ascend. In most other places, pilots would simply wait until the day had warmed sufficiently before starting their flights. But for this record chase, every extra minute of daylight mattered.
“So Martin traveled cautiously, watching for soaring birds and developing clouds to detect areas with lift, while eyeing the ground to make sure he had a backup plan if he kept descending.
“Pilots hated this early stretch of the trip. Air conditions often force them to fly so low that they have to be ready to land at any time. But there was nowhere to land, except the clearings around the occasional oil pump, that did not risk shredding them and tearing up their gliders with thorns up to three inches long.”
Hot Water in Sunriver
Is a local businessman stalking police in a resort town in Oregon? Or are the police causing the trouble?
“On a more sinister level, Foster claims that ever since a particularly divisive community meeting in 2007, in which he says he felt he was finally making headway with local leaders, the police have been actively dogging him.
“‘From that day forward, it’s been follow me everywhere I go,’ he says. In one episode, he says he looped through one of Sunriver’s many traffic circles to see if police would continue tailing him. He made it through a couple of times with a cop car close behind. Police, he claims, once videotaped him walking his toddler grandchildren through a grocery store, then putting them in car seats.
“Police even follow him outside their legal patrol area. ‘A disproportionate amount of everything they claim I’ve done, had I done it, has happened outside their jurisdiction,’ Foster says. ‘When you look at the police files, it gets pretty obvious who’s following who.'”
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