What the World Needs Now
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In one of those monthly magazines like Vanity Fair or Esquire, they end each issue with a questionnaire answered by someone famous. One of the questions is: What do you most value in your friends? Sometimes the answer is straightforward ("loyalty") and sometimes it's whimsical ("their proclivity to laugh at my jokes"). I started thinking about this in earnest the other day.
I was watching one of the best 30 minutes of TV that I've ever seen: Jon Stewart's devotion of his entire Daily Show to a treatment of Glenn Beck's recent broadcasts on the "cancer" of progressivism. As I was watching Stewart's brilliant, intelligent, comic satire, one word came to mind: subtlety. The satire was at such a high level, and it required of its viewers the ability to think carefully: to draw on a wide field of facts, to make fine distinctions, to apply all manner of logic. I actually felt privileged to be experiencing this piece of television. Combining intelligence and humor with high moral concerns is about as great as art gets.
It also made me think of all the people who would, truly, be unable to absorb this kind of communication. Which led me to how lucky I feel to have friends who can. And this is what I really value most in my friends: subtlety of thinking. Of course they are kind and moral and smart and loyal and funny. But the trait that is most rare and that I thus value most is their fine minds---"fine" not just in the sense of "good quality" but of precision.
The ability to think carefully doesn't make for good talk radio but it does make for a good democracy. Luckily, there are a lot of books out right now who main purpose is, in effect, to instruct readers in careful thinking. Books like Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink" and "The Tipping Point" and Stephen Leavitt's "Freakonomics" take readers on a tour of interesting phenomena and show them the way a scientist or sociologist would work through the issues of cause and effect. Why were women not hired in top-tier orchestras until the late 1980s? Why was the name Brittany a "high-end" name in the 1970s and a "low-end" name in the 1990s? Why did the crime rate drop precipitously in 1990? I just started another book called "Survival of the Sickest," which describes the evolutionary upside of diseases, with much the same kind of mental parsing. In the age of Glenn Beck, it's more than reassuring---it's uplifting and incredibly hope-inspiring to see the persistence of such minds at work.
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In one of those monthly magazines like Vanity Fair or Esquire, they end each issue with a questionnaire answered by someone famous. One of the questions is: What do you most value in your friends? Sometimes the answer is straightforward ("loyalty") and sometimes it's whimsical ("their proclivity to laugh at my jokes"). I started thinking about this in earnest the other day.
I was watching one of the best 30 minutes of TV that I've ever seen: Jon Stewart's devotion of his entire Daily Show to a treatment of Glenn Beck's recent broadcasts on the "cancer" of progressivism. As I was watching Stewart's brilliant, intelligent, comic satire, one word came to mind: subtlety. The satire was at such a high level, and it required of its viewers the ability to think carefully: to draw on a wide field of facts, to make fine distinctions, to apply all manner of logic. I actually felt privileged to be experiencing this piece of television. Combining intelligence and humor with high moral concerns is about as great as art gets.
It also made me think of all the people who would, truly, be unable to absorb this kind of communication. Which led me to how lucky I feel to have friends who can. And this is what I really value most in my friends: subtlety of thinking. Of course they are kind and moral and smart and loyal and funny. But the trait that is most rare and that I thus value most is their fine minds---"fine" not just in the sense of "good quality" but of precision.
The ability to think carefully doesn't make for good talk radio but it does make for a good democracy. Luckily, there are a lot of books out right now who main purpose is, in effect, to instruct readers in careful thinking. Books like Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink" and "The Tipping Point" and Stephen Leavitt's "Freakonomics" take readers on a tour of interesting phenomena and show them the way a scientist or sociologist would work through the issues of cause and effect. Why were women not hired in top-tier orchestras until the late 1980s? Why was the name Brittany a "high-end" name in the 1970s and a "low-end" name in the 1990s? Why did the crime rate drop precipitously in 1990? I just started another book called "Survival of the Sickest," which describes the evolutionary upside of diseases, with much the same kind of mental parsing. In the age of Glenn Beck, it's more than reassuring---it's uplifting and incredibly hope-inspiring to see the persistence of such minds at work.
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posted by Anonymous at
3:23 PM
2 Comments:
DEB: *doesn't get it* *nervously* ha ha ha ha. you're so funny, lynn . . . *shifty eyes seek approval* *cough* huh. i guess i missed that episode of The Daily News. *clears throat* judd stewart is a funny guy. . . . *vague* *sudden enthusiasm* *frat yell* LIBER-ALL-S RULE! HOOOO! *shifty eyes*
EX POST FACTO: and what does that leave? BERT.
DEB: *wolf whistle*
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