That is the way of it, when a great question falls into the public debate, or at least, that’s how it will look to the outsider. The extremes on either side bash away energetically at each other, the op-eds and the commentaries are reeled out like so many furiously unfurled rolls of toilet paper, until either the issue is resolved definitively, or everyone is quite tired of it — or some great event crashes in unexpectedly and renders the whole thing absolutely moot.
Arts & Letters
“Where Have You Been Whit Stillman?”
After 13 years, acclaimed writer/director Whit Stillman returns to the big screen with Damsels in Distress, a “comedy of manners” that echoes his previous work in Metropolitan, Barcelona and The Last Days of Disco. The Post’s Nathalie Atkinson convened this week’s TIFF-centric Culture Club to ask whether Whit’s wit has been missed.
Enough with my “regular” series of topics. I am becoming a bore on the subject, even to myself. (Especially to myself.) At any rate, Happy Thanksgiving! What a joy it is to share my thoughts with you from time to time. I like this corner of the internet.
The Indy Author Game
For those who are interested – below the fold…
68F on November 13, 2011
The Location: The front porch, Oak Park.
The Drink: Bourbon and ginger ale.
The Book: Twenty Million Tons Under the Sea: The Daring Capture of the U-505
We won’t get many more nice days like this one this year. Today is pretty much an aberration. I am expecting a severely cold winter this year, based on pure guesswork and gut feel, speculation about sunspot activity and its effect, contrarianism about global warning, general pessimism, and not much else.
(Below the fold, Gallery on the conning tower of the captured U-505, via Wikipedia.)
Fiction and Empathy
An article by Keith Oatley, in Scientific American/Mind, asserts a connection between exposure to fiction and the development of empathy. It’s not a new idea–IIRC, the idea that seeing plays and reading novels has tended to increase empathy throughout entire societies has been asserted by Harold Bloom, among others–but Oatley describes empirical research he’s done to test this assertion.
In one experiment, Oatley and colleagues assessed the reading habits of 94 adults, separating fiction from nonfiction. They also tested the subjects on measures of emotion perception (being able to discern a person’s emotional state from a photo of only the eyes) and social cognition (being able to draw conclusions about the relationships among people based on video clips.) This study showed a “strong” interconnection between fiction reading and social skills, especially between fiction reading and the emotion-perception factor. This correlation, of course, does not by itself demonstrate the direction of causality.
Another study involved assigning 303 adults to read either a short story or an essay from the New Yorker and following up with tests of analytical and social reasoning. Those who read the story tended to do better on the social reasoning test than those who read the nonfiction essay.
Oatley argues that “Good social skills require having a well-developed theory of mind…the ability to take the perspectives of other people, to make mental models of others, and to understand that someone else might have beliefs and intentions that are different from your own.” He says that children start to acquire this ability at about 4 years old, and that “the ability to gauge emotion from pictures of just the eyes correlates with theory-of-mind skills, as does the capacity for empathy.”