Category Archives: Current Affairs

This month’s Harper’s magazine includes the audio transcript of a conversation Gov. Schwarzenegger had with his chief speechwriter in April 2006. It was leaked to the L.A. Times last year. Money quote:

Imagine someone coming to your house because his house burned down next door. Because of the misery he went through, you say, “Come on in here for a week or two weeks until you get going.” And that person comes out and says, “I’m not going to move anymore. You know something? I’m here to fucking stay.”

John Colapinto has a fantastic article in the current New Yorker (not online) about the Pirahã tribe in the rainforest of northwest Brazil.

His subject is Dan Everett, an American linguistics professor, who has done what few linguists dare to do: publicly challenge and refute Chomsky’s theory of universal grammar by documenting the rare and incredibly simple language of the Piraha. Their language has no numbers, no fixed color terms, no perfect tense, no deep memory, no tradition of art or drawing, and no words for "all," "each," "every," "most," or "few". There is no recursion.

Chomsky’s UG theory says that language is an organ, like a leg or an arm, and that it starts to grow the moment we pop out of the womb. In other words, all humans share a universal grammar. All utterances are composed of universal chunks of grammar within other chunks within other chunks (the Piraha have no such recursion).

The Piraha have a fascinating language structure: all of their words are relative to what they can immediately experience. They only talk and think about things they can see. They don’t abstract about future or past events. Consequently, they don’t hunt and store food for more than a day or two at a time. A key explanation is, "It’s the way it’s always been" (instead of analyzing the past to help explain the present). Everett calls this the "immediacy-of-experience" principle — they are wholly dedicated to the empirical reality that they can observe right now.

There are a few takeaways for me here:

1. It’s fun to read about people who don’t live in modern civilization. I want more pictures and more narrative journalism!

2. This is a great example of the dynamics of an industry or discipline when one person wields disproportionate influence. Everett implies that Chomsky dismisses contrarian views with a wave of his arm and — thanks to his reputation — people nod and move on without a wink of evidence. I think it’s the responsibility of any person who commands influence — be it a CEO in a large company, a notable entrepreneur in a smaller ecosystem (like Boulder, where I lived for three months), or a leading researcher in her field — to be proactive about encouraging views different from their own.

3. Linguistics, at an amateur level, is really interesting.

Our beloved San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom recently demonstrated a strong grasp of ebonics. In this hilarious YouTube video, Gavin joins Hillary Clinton in "talking black" in front of African-American audiences. Hat tip to SFist.

And for those wondering about the title of my post, I can only refer to Urban Dictionary:

"fo shizzle ma nizzle" is a bastardization of "fo’ sheezy mah neezy" which is a bastardization of "for sure mah nigga" which is a bastdardization of "I concur with you whole heartedly my African American brother"

President Bush delivered a 5 minute humor monologue last night at the Radio and TV Correspondent’s dinner, as is the tradition for the standing president. It’s hilarious. He begins:

“Well …where should I start. A year ago my approval rating was in the 30s, my nominee for the Supreme Court had just withdrawn, and my vice president had shot someone.”

It has special resonance for me since a few years ago I read Clinton & Me by President Clinton’s humor speechwriter, Mark Katz, who described in detail how he crafts the jokes the president delivers.

Here’s an analysis of the monologue at Humor Power.

“I feel comfortable when I hang out with them.” “I’m truly interested in understanding their point of view.” “I feel I can be myself when I am around them.” “To enrich my life, I would try to make more friends (from that group).”

Those are the warm fuzzy feelings that Professor Todd Pittinksy wants to promote, according to this piece in The Economist ($). When it comes to prejudice, most people stress "tolerance". Not good enough (nor effective), says Pittinksy. He believes in “allophilia” — liking for other groups — and the behavior it inspires.

For example, the attitude of an American voter towards immigration is determined less accurately by party affiliation or social and economic status than by the degree to which he or she simply likes Latinos. And people’s choices in charitable giving, study, voluntary work and travel are guided, not surprisingly, by the sort of groups that make them feel good.

More controversially, allophilia theory holds that efforts to fight racism often err in trying to abolish or minimise the difference between groups—telling people that “we and they are really the same” or “we all belong to a bigger group, and that matters more than any slight difference.”

Other ideas and articles that flowed through my brain today:

• Scott Sossel’s review of Nigel Hamilton and the biography genre: "Fiction and biography, he writes, have in some ways traded places, and the boundary between fact and fiction in memoir and biography is only becoming more porous."
• Are gay neighborhoods, most notably San Francisco’s Castro, losing their identity thanks to heterosexual couples moving in and the sense among gays that they don’t need their own hood? Also, are gay executives the best leaders? Interesting research from USC.
• Notes from a talk given by Google’s Marissa Mayer. "If at least 20% of people use a feature, then it will be included."
• Claremont Graduate University is establishing the nation’s first psychology doctoral program on happiness, led by Claremont Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of Flow.
• Dave Chapelle as "Black President Bush". Hilarious.
• The "Mystery Man on Film," a screenwriter who blogs about the art of the craft, reminds us to consider a character’s goals in the context of Maslow’s Hierarchy.
• Journalist Neil Strauss: "The average life takes about 17 hours to tell. Every life story I’ve ever collected has ended up taking up almost the exact amount of tape. It’s odd, when you think about it, that in all those years, each of us has only collected less than a day of interesting material."