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Here at the (Implicit) Fitness Center
It’s fair to say that the filmmaker Alexander Payne takes a grim view of aging in America. In last year’s darkly comedic road film Nebraska, the highly praised Bruce Dern plays the alcoholic and incompetent Woody Grant, who suffers under the delusion he has won a million dollar sweepstakes prize. And Payne’s earlier About Schmidt is unrivaled as the most depressing cinematic depiction of retirement ever. Jack Nicholson plays the title character with sympathy, but there’s no getting around his pathetic and lonely existence. Both Grant and Schmidt are models of decrepitude as well. They embody our worst fears about the elderly body’s inevitable deterioration.
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Healing the Wounds of the Future
Several years ago, the satirical newspaper The Onion ran an article about “Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder,” based on a “study” by the Department of Future Veterans Affairs. Victims of the disorder, according to the report, experience “vivid, ultra-realistic flash-forwards” of disturbing wartime events that are yet to come. Soldiers who have never experienced a day of battle nevertheless “prelive” the hell of war. The story was irreverent and no doubt offensive to some, but it was funny. It was funny because the whole idea of remembering the future is absurd. Or is it? Well, obviously we don’t recall actual memories of things yet to happen, but we can imagine future events—and vividly.
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Have and Have Not: The Widening Gap
The late Peter Drucker is widely viewed as the inventor of modern corporate management, although before his death he was discouraged by the short-sightedness of many business leaders. He was especially concerned about the widening pay gap between CEOs and the average worker—a trend he had observed with alarm for decades. As far back as 1984, Drucker had warned that the pay gap should not exceed 20-to-1. Anything beyond that, he believed, would foster mistrust and resentment and erode the kind of teamwork needed for long-term growth. The actual pay gap today is 354-to-1. So why aren’t workers marching and picketing and otherwise complaining about this inequity?
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Is Postpartum Depression a Disease of Modern Civilization?
In the current issue of The New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert describes her family’s brief and not entirely successful experiment with the Paleolithic diet. Her account is humorous, but it also explores some of the science underlying this popular style of eating, which basically avoids everything but meat, tubers and fresh fruits and vegetables. The idea behind “Paleo” meals and menus is to get back to the healthier diet that our ancient ancestors consumed before the advent of agriculture, which has led to all sorts of dietary and lifestyle changes—and to a host of modern diseases.
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The Handiest Tool in the World
Long before we had inches and centimeters, we had hands. The breadth of a man’s hand was the metric of choice at least as far back as ancient Egypt, and the bodily ruler is still used in a few countries, primarily to measure the height of horses. This makes sense. As tools go, this one is, well, handy. You’re not going to misplace it, and it’s familiar enough that everyone knows what hand-sized means, at least roughly. And it’s easier to use than, say, a foot. But that’s not enough to explain why the hand became such an enduring and popular ruler. For the hand to be reliable as a metric, our perception of it must be constant.
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Why Psychotherapy Appears To Work (Even When It Doesn’t)
One of the classic papers in the history of psychology is Hans Eysenck’s “The Effects of Psychotherapy: An Evaluation,” published in 1952. The London-based psychologist examined 19 studies of treatment effectiveness, dealing with both psychoanalytic and eclectic types of therapy in more than 7000 cases. His overall conclusion was damning: The studies, he wrote, “fail to prove that psychotherapy, Freudian or otherwise, facilitates the recovery of neurotic patients.
