Robert David Sullivan

Southerners suspect that we have a foreign-born president

Steve Benen points out that there's a big regional difference in answers to the question "Do you believe that Barack Obama was born in the United States of America or not?"

To be fair, however, I come from Massachusetts, so I suspect that most Southerners would be equally dubious that I "was born in the United States of America."

You can't even walk and talk on a cellphone!

Yes, I'm talking about people who clog up sidewalks and subway platforms, distracted by cellphone conversations. They think they're walking along like the rest of us, but they can't keep a straight line, and they constantly stop short, surprised by either something their friend said over the phone or by things in their paths they didn't notice until the last second (panhandlers, baby carriages, speeding buses).

So I'm not surprised by the New York Times's "Driven to Distraction" series. From the opening installment:

In a survey of 1,506 people last year by Nationwide Mutual Insurance, 81 percent of cellphone owners acknowledged that they talk on phones while driving, and 98 percent considered themselves safe drivers. But 45 percent said they had been hit or nearly hit by a driver talking on a phone.

“When we ask people to identify the most dangerous distraction on the highway today, about half — correctly — identify cellphones,” said Bill Windsor, associate vice president for safety at Nationwide. “But they think others are dangerous, not themselves.”

He and others who favor restrictions say drivers regularly make what amount to ill-informed analyses of cost-benefit tradeoffs, often deciding that the value of constant communication outweighs any risks.

The refusal of many people to accept that the human brain can be easily overloaded, often leading to tragedy, reminds me of this heartbreaking Washington Post story about children who died after their parents absent-mindedly left them alone in hot cars. In my mind, the most frightening person in the story was a Virginia prosecutor who charged one such parent with involuntary manslaughter:

Morrogh has two kids himself, ages 12 and 14. He was asked if he could imagine this ever having happened to him. The question seemed to take him aback. He went on to another subject, and then, 10 minutes later, made up his mind:

"I have to say no, it couldn't have happened to me. I am a watchful father."

In fact, the most "watchful" and responsible people are perfectly capable of making fatal mistakes when they try to do too much at once. 

Who cares what you're reading?

Several bloggers are debating whether the Kindle and other electronic-book devices are ruining "conspicuous consumption." Kindle user Matt Yglesias laments:

I’m going through Infinite Jest, as are a lot of people this summer, but I can’t visibly display the book on the Metro or around my house.

Conor Clarke translates:

[Yglesias] doesn't get to show the rest of the world that he's reading such a hefty, ponderous tome.

But isn't conspicuous consumption, no matter how banal or useless the products being exhibited, a benign way to encourage human beings to interact with each other? A sizable share of the conversations I've had with strangers on trains and buses, in cafes, and while standing in line for something have been sparked by the reading material in my hand. People see me reading, say, Oliver Sacks's Musicophilia and ask, "How is that?" or "What is that about?" or "Have you read This Is Your Brain on Music?"

I'd say that almost everyone who starts a conversation over a book title is polite and engaging. (People who disapprove of your book generally keep quiet about it.) And many of them wouldn't start a conversation at all without the book as an ice-breaker. Posting your favorite novels on Facebook just isn't the same.