I have been listening to old This American Life episodes as I work. How sad is the postscript at the end of the episode that includes the story of the priest, in which Ira Glass tells us that Patrick Wall no longer attends mass… And after some more listening, some fascinating research by Will Felps on bad apples and group dynamics. I’d be curious to see more documentation about the longer term effects on in any group, workplace, or family; though thinking about the groups I’ve been a part of, I think I know what they’d be. The most interesting part of the research is the idea that it’s possible to counter this effect. Most of us know the minimum needed to make a group run smoothly, it’s just that some people are certain none of it applies to them.

This is absolutely fascinating: work on a nanovaccine that stops autoimmune disease by stimulating the immune system. Obviously the immune system is much more than a single function or closed loop, but what is it? The researcher describes the two types of T-cells as “musicians in the same orchestra,” but it must be more than that… I haven’t researched it, but anyone with an autoimmune disease knows from experience they are more prone to infection than other people. (There’s probably data on that.) What does that mean? Also, how does this tie in to the hygiene hypothesis? e.g. if we accept the conjecture that autoimmune diseases are in part a result of generations of hand washing, vaccinations, pasteurization, antibiotics, and parasitelessness (good things!) in our extremely sanitized developed world, could we start to think of something like this as a complementary prophylactic therapy?⁰¹

The comics of Alejandro Jodorowsky. (via We Love You So)

I mostly gag at tips for boosting creativity, but some of these are actually interesting. (I always feel like a crank for not liking creativity boosters.⁰² Everyone appears to adore them even when they suck… While we’re at it, I also dislike exhortations to designers to see every bit of organization and infrastructure as Important Design Problems. Don’t say that. Most of us who make things waste a lot of time procrastinating by telling ourselves that everything is a design problem. Everything can be, but you’ll accomplish a lot more of the stuff you love if you can learn to live with the odd badly designed mess without coming unraveled or having to turn into a design superhero.) I’d add recording your dreams. For some reason, when my brain feels like a shuttered house, a few days of recording my dreams always cracks something open inside my head. Maybe this counts as absurdist stimulation.

Mike Perry’s Lost In The Discovery I love the wall of prints and the painted wood blocks.

Just in case you’ve missed Significant Objects.

Quick—before all these things get away from me:

Andrea Branzi’s birch and silver coffee set. I saw this a while ago and couldn’t remember where or who made it. Usually when that happens, the thing morphs in my head until the reality is disappointing when I come across it again. Not so here.

Celeste Biever on creating a conscious machine. And also in The New Scientist, “the first evidence that food bacteria can transfer genes to our own gut bacteria.”

Getting Jane Jacobs right. I’m convinced that a lot of people who talk the talk haven’t actually read Jane Jacobs at all. In fact, it’s probably time for me to reread.

Annie Hall’s fashion at Jezebel.

Look at all these complete books for download at Public Collectors, including an exhibition catalogue for the restaurant FOOD (Gordon Matta-Clark and co) and How To Build Your Own Living Structures.

Kate Kretz’s embroidery with human hair. See the shading detail, done with different colors. Out of all the flirtations art carries on with the abject, I think hair is the most interesting. It’s not straightforward like shit. Everyone knows the meaning of excrement, but most people haven’t really examined their discomfort with hair. People have visceral reactions to hair without a person attached, or even to hair that grows too far from the scalp of its owner, but it’s not always clear why.

Thin slicing and how the intensity of a smile predicts longevity. The big question is how the researcher is certain about the intensity of a single smile or a lot of smiles. I know someone who had a very vacant, unhappy childhood and a miserable teenagehood and has only recently begun to have a solid amount of happiness in his life; and I am always struck when I see pictures of him these days at how utterly different his smile now is from any I’ve ever known on his face, and I wonder at all the times I assumed he was happy when he laughed or smiled before… But that, I suppose, is a matter of deep dish slicing.

Stefanie Posavec’s work. (Via Information Is Beautiful) Look at the Writing Without Words projects (some prints of which are for sale).

Todd Hido’s photographs. I’d only ever seen the photos of places and buildings and I found them richly mysterious until I saw the portraits, which somehow made the images of the spaces seem thinner and more static. I still find them very beautiful, but wish I hadn’t seen the portraits. I can’t help populating the spaces with the inhabitants of the portraits and it kills something to know who lives there (American Apparel models).

Alice Finslippy, who bothers to defend herself again, even when she shouldn’t have to.

Amy Martin’s winning poster for Public Option Please.

~

All the two and a half year old wailing and gnashing of teeth and shouting for impossible things like potatoes from Costa Rica or a ripe pineapple is grinding me down. Something’s up right now. It feels like Aure’s on the cusp of something new and is resisting it with all his might. He loses control entirely if anyone mentions potty training or asks to change his diaper. In between rambling stories about imaginary injuries and exquisitely articulated opinions (“To-be-perfetly-honest, I prefer a lot of honey—a huge, a monstrous honey! on a spoon with ghee. Please!”) he insists he’s a newborn baby and needs to be swaddled and held while he fake cries. I’m confused, but probably not any more than he is.

Sometimes I see what he needs and still some part of me rears up in front of that and shrieks that my head is pounding and I can’t think, and I become paralyzed and cold and filled with disgust with myself that even in those moments when it should be possible (i.e. I’m not trying to work), I can’t always bring myself to do what I can see he needs so badly. He’s only two, he can’t control himself, and he’s begging for my help. And worst of all, he imagines I’m not holding him every minute because he’s not acting happy enough. He gags and hiccups, snot and tears everywhere, in a useless attempt to calm himself, choking and stuttering that he’s “so calm now, so happy and tranquilo now.” How did he learn such a thing? As for the other times, this is the thing—there’s never any telling myself that it’s good for him to have me walk out the door while he weeps himself sick. It has to be done, but it’s undoubtedly bad for him. He is shaky and clingy for days afterward. When I drop everything and give him my physical presence and all my attention, he morphs back into his baby self—gregarious, silly, full of questions, and interested in strangers. He actually needs what he says he needs. I can’t give it to him, but it’s not because I don’t believe he needs it…

And after I wrote all that, the lovely woman who babysits in the mornings arrived with her two children, and the three of them began to coax him into showing off his special magnetic blocks and singing a bit, and after a while he asked if he could use the potty and proudly did for the first time and apparently that’s the extent of potty training because he hasn’t gone back to diapers at all. He is suddenly calm and cheerful and normal again as if the decision had been weighing heavily on him for weeks. Huh. Cue end of maternal anguish and ebb sheepishly away from the previous paragraph’s melodrama. I feel like I stomped down on the last step and it wasn’t there… This is why parents should not be left so strictly alone with their own children and children shouldn’t be left so alone with their parents. Which reminds me, I recently learned there’s no use fussing over extended family and the Dissolution of American Life as it turns out increasing residential mobility is a myth, but still something feels lost in the way I live.