Culture Shock 12.05.13: TV embraces your inner psychopath

James Spader in "The Blacklist."

The breakout series of this fall's TV season is NBC's "The Blacklist."

As a drama, it's a bit far-fetched, relying on coincidences, improbable twists and characters stubbornly keeping to themselves information that would resolve the plot. In other words, it's indistinguishable from most other TV dramas. But none of that matters, because what makes "The Blacklist" so addictive is James Spader's performance as globetrotting super-criminal and, when it suits him, FBI informant Raymond "Red" Reddington.

Spader has made a career of playing characters who earn the overused label "quirky," and he won three Emmys portraying windmill-tilting attorney Alan Shore. Now he has the role every actor dreams of. He has his own psychopath.

Well, maybe Red isn't quite a psychopath, but he's close enough. He has most of the same traits as the other antisocial protagonists who have become some of television's most popular characters. It's a pantheon so shady some of its members don't even qualify as anti-heroes, yet few of them are entirely villains, either. They go up to the line, cross the line, erase the line, and pick up the line and skip rope with it. They operate outside the system, live by their own moral codes and get things done when no one else can.

They're throwbacks to Clint Eastwood's "Dirty Harry" Callahan and Charles Bronson's Paul Kersey, who embodied 1970s outrage at runaway crime and a justice system seen as coddling criminals. Liberals recoiled, seeing "Dirty Harry" and "Death Wish" as fascist wish fulfillment. Conservatives looked at Callahan and Kersey and saw the last sane men in a world gone mad.

Since then, violent crime has declined to near-historic lows, but you couldn't tell from the way people still worry about it. Yet on top of that, now there is the perception white-collar crime is out of control, that Wall Street can wreck an economy, leave taxpayers to clean up and get away with barely a public shaming.

The political system is in thrall to the powerful and well-connected, government spy agencies spend most of their time spying on their own citizens, and now you can't even keep your health care no matter how much you like it. Every institution in America seems broken or corrupt or both.

No wonder we turn to characters like Red, who exist outside the system. The Miami police are so incompetent and politically compromised, they miss the serial killer in their ranks. Good thing Dexter Morgan goes after only other serial killers, armed with his own moral code, "The Code of Harry."

Hannibal Lecter isn't quite as nice, but he still rationalizes his actions by claiming to eat only the rude. Who hasn't wanted to deal out just desserts to a cad or 200?

Now NBC has turned Dracula, usually a villain and sometimes a tragic hero, into an anti-establishment crusader, pretending to be an American industrialist whose anachronistic, steampunk, green technology will bring down his hated enemies, who happen to be Victorian oil barons.

Yet Dracula is still Dracula. He acts without remorse, sacrifices pawns and leaves a trail of blood-drained corpses in his wake. He's no hero. He just has an agenda people nowadays kinda like.

The stakes today are much higher than they were in the 1970s, and our vigilantes have grown larger to match. No doubt, as liberals fretted, they are a kind of wish fulfillment, but liberals make wishes just as conservatives do. As H.L. Mencken wrote, "Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats."

We still turn to rule-breaking heroes: Dr. Gregory House, the two modern-day Sherlocks of CBS and the BBC, even Robert Downey Jr.'s Iron Man. They all break the rules to get their way.

But sometimes the threats are so bad, we want heroes who aren't heroes at all, really. Guys who will get their hands dirty and not lose a wink of sleep over it. In a world gone mad, it's the ultimate wish fulfillment.

Culture Shock 09.15.11: Don't be too quick to blame 'SpongeBob'

Someone needs to study whether or not stupid studies are detrimental to the nation's mental health.

They're driving me crazy.

The latest example, published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, says fast-paced TV programs could be harmful to preschool-age children.

Maybe they are, and maybe they aren't. None of the studies claiming that TV is detrimental to children are all that persuasive. That applies especially to studies claiming to link television viewing and violence, even as violent crime rates have declined for most of the past 30 years. But one thing about this new study is clear: It offers no valuable evidence one way or the other.

Here's how the study worked. One group of 4-year-olds watched nine minutes of "SpongeBob SquarePants." That was the fast-paced show. Another group of preschoolers watched nine minutes of a slower-paced PBS cartoon called "Caillou." Immediately afterward, all of the kids were given mental function tests, and the ones who watched "SpongeBob" scored lower and displayed less impulse control.

That led the study's authors to speculate that fast-paced cartoons are bad. Mmkay? (Tell that to everyone who grew up with Bugs Bunny and Tom & Jerry.)

I drew a different conclusion.

I suspect that when kids watch nine minutes of "SpongeBob SquarePants" and then are yanked away to take some boring old test, all those kids can think about is how much they'd rather still be watching "SpongeBob." What else would you expect? "SpongeBob" is one of the most popular kiddie-TV programs ever and, for the past decade, one of the most popular shows on cable.

Meanwhile, the kids forced to watch nine minutes of "Caillou" may have been somewhat less traumatized by no longer watching "Caillou," even if that meant taking a test.

After watching a seven-minute clip of "Caillou" I found on YouTube, I wanted to do something that was not watching "Caillou." I also realized why some parents online complain that the show's title character is an annoying brat.

Also, I never want to have children.

Even if the study's findings are valid, they apply only to the short term. Why not test the kids an hour or two after they watch "SpongeBob" and see how they perform then? Obviously that's too much like a real-world situation and makes too much sense. Besides, if the study's authors did that first, they might not have any need to include the usual disclaimer about how more study is needed.

It's a lot easier to get grant money for your next study if the first study's main finding is something may be a problem and its secondary finding is more study is necessary. Finding that something isn't a problem or that more study isn't needed is bad for business.

Despite my cynicism about this particular study, I actually do think our generally faster-paced culture — including movies and TV — may be rewiring our brains, adapting us to life's quickening pace and all of the information coming at us from every direction. I also suspect this is not necessarily a bad thing, and it may help us with things like multitasking. But if that's the case, then the way we test children's mental abilities must adapt, too.

Kids aren't getting dumber, and steady increases in IQ — the Flynn effect — back that up. But children  may be thinking differently, and our tests aren't accounting for that, which might partially explain why test scores have remained flat despite rising IQs and greater per-pupil spending than ever.

Or I could be wrong. Maybe more study is needed.

Culture Shock 09.16.10: Dating site reveals the stereotypes that unite us

As much as people hate to admit it, the horrible, rotten depressing truth is some stereotypes become stereotypes because they're true — or at least partly true.

I mention this because OkCupid, a free dating site that claims about 3.5 million active members, has released an analysis of its users' interests, broken down by race, religion and ethnicity. Some of the results are surprising. Others are not. And some are surprisingly unsurprising, if that makes any sense.

To see the complete results, visit http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-real-stuff-white- people-like. (And if you don't get the joke behind the title "The REAL Stuff White People Like," check out the humor website Stuff White People Like, at stuffwhitepeoplelike.com. It's devoted to making fun of trendy, white, urban hipsters who think recycling is a spiritual experience and tell people they vote Democratic even though they never remember when Election Day is. (Now there's a stereotype for you.)

I'll stick to the highlights or, as the case may be, lowlights. To avoid offending any more people than absolutely necessary, I'll save most of my negative and sometimes humiliating observations for my own demographic, the North American white male.

OkCupid's analysis took 526,000 users at random and scanned their user profiles, looking for keywords and interests that made each gender and racial grouping statistically distinct from the others.

A quick look at the results tells me one thing I've always suspected: White guys have terrible taste in music. One word: Phish. It stands out like a pimple on prom night — the sixth most distinctive-to-white-guys term in OkCupid's results.

Also: Van Halen, Soundgarden and Megadeth. I don't know what OkCupid's median age is, but obviously it's old enough to remember when MTV still aired music videos.

In terms of sports, white males are more likely to prefer hockey and NASCAR. (Duh!)

I don't have an OkCupid account, but I confess to having the following "white guy" interests listed on my Facebook profile: "Ghostbusters," "The Big Lebowski," "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" and Robert Heinlein — all of which are tell-tale signs of membership in an exclusive white-guy subgroup known as "the geek."

Judging from the rest of the results for white males, I can conclude that we are more likely than other demographics to think we "can fix anything" even after "a few beers."

White females are distinguished by liking NASCAR, bad music (Kenny Chesney) and the typing skills of Nicholas Sparks.

OK, enough about white people. It's not always about us.

Black OkCupid users of both sexes tend to mention God and/or religion in their profiles twice as often as do whites, Asians and Latinos.

To my amazement, Latino men and women outpace other groups in their fondness for salsa. How is salsa not universal by now? Everybody loves salsa more than everybody loves Raymond.

Nearly everyone also likes sushi, but Asian men like sashimi, too. And both Asian males and females, as groups, are unusually fond of the book "Freakonomics" and author Malcolm Gladwell, which struck me as strangely random.

Now, if any of these or OkCupid's other findings depress you or offend you, keep in mind two points. First, OkCupid users are not necessarily representative of the larger public. Second, we're talking about people on a dating site, so obviously they're lying.

OkCupid profiles aren't about who you are but who you want other people, especially potential romantic partners, to think you are.

That does, however, raise an even more troubling possibility: Pretending to like 1980s hair bands is a successful mating strategy.

This New Year’s, resolve to fight pessimism

It’s the start of a new year, a time when most of us are hopeful about what the future will bring.

Unfortunately, that hope tends to fade quickly, and not only in tough times. Even though America is the “land of opportunity,” most Americans — in fact, most people everywhere — are pessimistic about the long run.

That is the bad news. The good news is our pessimism is unfounded.

Bryan Caplan, a professor of economics at George Mason University in Virginia, calls this “pessimistic bias.” It is one of four biases he cites in his 2007 book, “The Myth of the Rational Voter,” as leading to bad public policy.

Caplan shows that people are generally too pessimistic about long-term economic trends. In short, they believe things are bad when they’re actually good, and they believe things are worse when they’re merely bad. This is despite overwhelming evidence that, in the long run, economic conditions are improving overall.

Long-run improvement wasn’t always the case. Throughout most of history, living conditions barely improved at all.

In his recent book “A Farewell to Alms,” Gregory Clark, chairman of the economics department at the University of California, Davis, writes that for most of the last 100,000 years, living conditions stayed the same — awful. Even with improvements in technology, the arts and science, people ate poorly and died young. Short-term improvements in living standards led to larger populations that then overwhelmed available resources, causing living standards to drop. Over the long run, life for the vast majority of people remained nasty, brutish and short.

But in 1800, all of that changed. The Industrial Revolution made long-run improvements in living standards possible, at least in countries that had an industrial revolution. In the 21st century, we’re reaping the benefits of more than 200 years of economic growth.

Still, the pessimistic bias remains, with many people and interest groups predicting the End of the World is just around the corner. Professional pessimists still cite books written in the early 1970s that predicted a worldwide economic collapse by the 1990s. Even the current recession isn’t that bad.

With the U.S. and most of the rest of the industrialized world in a recession, some measure of short-term pessimism is understandable. But as a whole, we’re almost always more pessimistic than we should be, whatever the economic conditions.

Yet, while the bias toward economic pessimism is important — especially if, as Caplan argues, it leads to voters voting irrationally — it’s not our only pessimistic bias.

Various studies have found that people overestimate their cancer risk, think divorce rates are increasing when the opposite is true and greatly overestimate the threat of terrorist attacks following 9/11. Pessimistic bias is everywhere.

French researchers have found that people are most pessimistic when they think they have no control over a situation. Thus, many have a pessimistic bias against airplane travel, even though flying is far safer than being behind the wheel of a car.

Caplan’s George Mason colleague Tyler Cowen devotes a chapter of his 1998 book, “In Praise of Commercial Culture,” to cultural pessimism, the belief that art, music and culture as a whole are always getting worse.

“The later we stand in history, the more likely that our favorite cultural products will lie in the relatively distant past,” he writes. “The passage of time implies that the entirety of the past contains an increasing amount of culture relative to any single point in time, such as the present. Cultural pessimism therefore appears increasingly persuasive over time.”

Persuasive? Yes. But not justified, as Cowen shows.

So, this New Year’s Day, resolve to hang on to that optimism you’re feeling. Even when everything around you seems to be falling apart, chances are at least some of that pessimism that taunts you is just in your head.

Culture Shock 03.01.07: Loving celebrities is in our genes

It's a common complaint: People are too interested in trivial celebrity gossip and pay too little attention to real news. And the mass media fosters this "culture of celebrity" by pandering to it, while coverage of important issues suffers.

Instead of reporting on the war in Iraq and the state of the economy, the argument goes, cable news channels offer hours of coverage of the Anna Nicole Smith legal battles, Britney Spears' shaved head and Madonna's latest trip to Africa in search of some unsuspecting child to adopt.

In the stuffy neoconservative magazine The Weekly Standard, Joseph Epstein writes "Without celebrities, whole sections of the New York Times and the Washington Post would have to close down."

The assumption, usually unspoken, is that the culture of celebrity is something new, something forced on us by "crass consumerism" and media saturation. All I needed, however, was a quick Google search to find some genuine, capitalism-hating Marxists making the point forthrightly.

A blogger at RadicalLeft.net writes disparagingly of Andy Warhol's pop art. Warhol, you see, had the gall to turn celebrity and pop culture into an art form. The same blogger also slams Oprah Winfrey: "... Oprah, whose fetishizing of celebrity and high-end consumer goods is legend, has fed that compulsive consumerism as much as anyone in modern media."

There is no doubt that capitalism produces more — better, faster and less expensively. That is why the capitalist West was growing rich while people in the former Soviet Union were standing in lines for hours to buy toilet paper. Capitalism and the mass media make celebrity gossip, and even the rare instance of real celebrity news, convenient and inexpensive for anyone who wants it.

But they don't create the demand for it.

People have been obsessed with celebrities going virtually as far back as our written records take us. Archaeologists have found graffiti about famous gladiators of the day scrawled on ancient Roman ruins. And ancient Greek athletes had cult-like followings.

Our collective interest in the lives of celebrities has been with us all along because, like most human behavior, it has its roots in our genes.

Celebrities, after all, are not like the rest of us. Some are bigger, stronger and faster. Others are prettier. Others still are just stranger. They stand out.

In prehistoric times, those were the sorts of qualities that helped get you a mate, enabling you to pass on your genes to the next generation. And genes are all about being passed on.

To get an idea how this works in practice, it helps to think about birds. In many bird species, males have brightly colored plumage. This makes them easier prey for predators, but the females love it. Attractive feathers are so useful when it comes to finding a mate that the advantage outweighs the disadvantage of possibly being eaten. Male peacocks in particular have elaborate tails that require a lot of extra calories to maintain. This would be an evolutionary minus if not for the fact that those otherwise useless tails drive the ladies wild.

Paris Hilton is the human equivalent of a peacock. She is mostly useless, but she has wealth, looks (to a degree) and fashion sense that signal "successful mate" to the primitive parts of male brains. Her night-vision sex tape probably didn't hurt, either.

Still don't believe celebrity culture comes from your genes? Well, not even the Marxists are immune. They're the ones buying T-shirts emblazoned with the image of communist guerrilla and ruthless killer Che Guevara. Che is now the celebrity icon for people who claim to hate celebrity icons. Regardless of politics, we all have some celebrity who arouses our interest. After all, we're only human.