When nutball fundamentalist preachers called Rock-and-Roll “the devil’s music,” the world laughed at how reactionary they were, and how very unprogressive.  But since those days in the 1950s, study after study has shown that, in many ways, they understood way more about music than the world.  They understood what Plato understood, which is that A) music is powerful, and B) its messages, both in form and content, are transformative in good ways and bad.  I aint saying rock is the devil’s music, however.  I’m just saying you are what you eat, so to speak.  A new report in The Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine says that “kids are receiving about 35 references to substance abuse for every hour of music they listen to.”

Researchers from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine studied the 279 most popular songs from 2005, based on reports from Billboard magazine, which tracks popular music. Whether a song contained a reference to drugs or alcohol varied by genre. Only 9 percent of pop songs had lyrics relating to drugs or alcohol. The number jumped to 14 percent for rock songs, 20 percent for R&B and hip-hop songs, 36 percent for country songs and 77 percent for rap songs […]

The study authors noted that music represents a pervasive source of exposure to positive images of substance use. The average adolescent is exposed to approximately 84 references to explicit substance use per day and 591 references per week, or 30,732 references per year. The average adolescent listening only to pop would be exposed to 5 references per day, whereas the average adolescent who listens just to rap would be exposed to 251 references per day.

If you listen to poorly made music all your life, you’ll grow up to believe shoddy craftsmanship is okay, and maybe even preferable.  And if you listen to as much music that celebrates depravity, in any form, the same will happen.  Where shall wisdom be found?  I hate to give up my Zeppelin.

A new study suggests that having children doesn’t make you happy.  Or perhaps I should rephrase.  A new study suggests that people with children report lower happiness levels than those without.  This is unexpected, to be sure:

In fact, no group of parents-married, single, step or even empty nest-reported significantly greater emotional well-being than people who never had children. It’s such a counterintuitive finding because we have these cultural beliefs that children are the key to happiness and a healthy life, and they’re not.

This is a complicated matter.  How would one explain such results?

For the childless, all this research must certainly feel redeeming. As for those of us with kids, well, the news isn’t all bad. Parents still report feeling a greater sense of purpose and meaning in their lives than those who’ve never had kids.

But still, how do you explain that parents show less happiness than non-parents?  The easy answer is that kids are no fun, but it seems it would be more complicated than that.  My answer is that happiness isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. 

A new study suggests that the brains of gay men resemble those of straight women and the brains of gay women resemble those of straight men.  For the last decade or two, science has stepped in to suggest that homosexuality is not a lifestyle choice, but a biological fate - and how can you judge someone for having biology?  But this study suggests that the differences between gay humans and straight humans can’t be explained by looking at DNA.

Are the differences genetic? Not likely. “As to the genetic factors, the current view is that they may play a role in male homosexuality, but they seem to be insignificant for female homosexuality,” the authors conclude. “Genetic factors, therefore, appear less probable as the major common denominator for all group differences observed here.”

The study also suggests that the link is not environmental, either, where, say, being around lots of sports and short haircuts doesn’t make a woman gay.  The differences between hetero and homo, it seems, may be hormonal.  Which is to say, getting the right kind, or the wrong kind, of hormones in utero may alter change the sexual orientation of a human being.  Now, this is still no argument for the unequivocal acceptance of homosexuality as good, because a certain hormone patter (just like a certain genetic predisposition or environmental factors) may also make one more violent, more inclined to like music, or more inclined to do all number of good and bad things.  For example, I am much more tempted to curse than my wife.  I am sure this has something to do with my genes, my raising, and my hormones.  But that doesn’t mean it’s okay to curse.  It just means it’s harder for me not to.

But the wicked problem with this hormonal study is that, if you found out your child, in utero, had the hormone indicators for homosexuality, would you attempt to have them altered with new hormones?

Everybody’s got an opinion about A.D.D. and A.D.H.D., about all the drugs that we give to children, and about the implications of what it all means.  Which is to say, don’t these kids just need a swift kick in the pants?  The answer to the question is not as easy as we want it to be.  Yet, concerns about overmedicating children have many thinking about how to help these children without doping them into zombies.

The most common strategy involves diet changes, like giving up processed foods, sugars and food additives. About 20 percent of children with the disorder have been given some form of herbal therapy; others have tried supplements like vitamins and fish oil or have used biofeedback, massage and yoga.

Unfortunately, there’s no data to back up the use of herbal remedies, but that doesn’t mean people won’t try.  Read this article if you teach or raise an A.D.H.D. child.

Slate writes about the American vacation problem, which is that none of us seem to take them anymore. 

There are several factors at work here. To begin with, technology has helped iron downtime out of the economy. Many Americans are struggling to cope with job creep-the phenomenon of work quietly grabbing more and more of our leisure time. We are forever receiving co-worker or client messages on our BlackBerrys, or responding to work e-mails on our home computers on weekends, or lugging our laptops on vacation.

Yeah, yeah, we’ve all heard that before.  But it’s actually more complicated, I think.  How are we defining the word vacation, is it a good thing or a bad thing, and if it’s a good thing, when and where and how often should we be doing it?  God worked all six days and took a break on the seventh.  I do that, too.  So, perhaps I have all the vacation I need.  Is it my right to go to the beach, even if I don’t live next to one?  I don’t think it is.  If a man works a good, full day - which I’d say is about 12 hours, give or take - for five or six days a week, and he doesn’t do anything on Sunday, or anything much, then isn’t that enough? 

Some of us are complicit in vacating our vacations. Today’s overstressed workplace has spawned the phrase “extreme jobs”-hyperdemanding positions of 70, 80 hours a week, with intense deadlines and unpredictable developments that can torpedo a weekend, however cherished and planned. Jeffrey Immelt, GE’s chief executive, has boasted of working 100 hours a week for more than two decades. That translates to working six days a week from 7 a.m. to 11:30 p.m. One software engineer I wrote about at Electronic Arts, a video game company, had to work 179 out of 180 days during one stretch in 2004, usually for 13 hours a day.

Which is to say, it seems like half of us are hyper-obsessed with the idea of leisure and affluence to suggest to ourselves that vacations are obligatory, and the other half is so brainwashed by the drive for affluence and the faux-Protestant work ethic that we’ve convinced ourselves vacations are bad.  Both extremes seem confused.  Work hard, play hard, don’t be an idiot.  Best advice I ever got.

John Staddon has an interesting take on driving in the U.S.  All our signs, all our safety, all our speed limits are really not very helpful.  He would be an expert on it, too, given the fact that he’s spent considerable time driving in other countries and comparing. 

Often when I return to the U.S. (usually to a suburban area in North Carolina’s Research Triangle), I see a fender bender or two within a few days. Yet I almost never see accidents in the U.K.  This surprised me, since the roads I drive here are generally wider, better marked, and less crowded than in the parts of England that I know best.

He goes on:

Consider the stop sign. It seems innocuous enough; we do need to stop from time to time. But think about how the signs are actually set up and used. For one thing, there’s the placement of the signs-off to the side of the road, often amid trees, parked cars, and other road signs; rarely right in front of the driver, where he or she should be looking.

Then there’s the sheer number of them. They sit at almost every intersection in most American neighborhoods. In some, every intersection seems to have a four-way stop. Stop signs are costly to drivers and bad for the environment: stop/start driving uses more gas, and vehicles pollute most when starting up from rest. More to the point, however, the overabundance of stop signs teaches drivers to be less observant of cross traffic and to exercise less judgment when driving-instead, they look for signs and drive according to what the signs tell them to do.

In other words, if there are fewer stop signs, we actually pay attention to cross streets and intersections, because we know we’ll be hit if we just truck on through.  Very smart, and completely counterintuitive.  Read this article, further evidence that technological progress and the onward march of history don’t always go in the same direction.

We’ve posted before about the politics of autism, and now there’s this story you may have heard out of Florida, where an autistic child was “voted” out of his classroom by his classmates, and it happened under the supervision of the teacher.  Nuts.  It started when young Alex Barton was escorted out of class for kicking students, eating crayons, etc. 

During Alex’s absence, his teacher, Wendy Portillo, “gathered the students to talk with them” about the youngster’s misbehavior.

When Alex returned, Portillo, who has been teaching in Port Lucie for 12 years, directed the youngster to the front of the room and “asked him to listen to what the children didn’t like” about him. According to Alex, the children complained that he “eats paper, picks boogers … and bites his shoelaces,” and Portillo herself said, “I hate you right now. I don’t like you today.” (Page 2). Portillo next “polled the class” about whether to let Alex back in (Page 4). Alex lost the class vote, 14-2, and spent the rest of the school day in the nurse’s office. That night, Alex “did not eat dinner [and] would not sleep in his own bed.” (Page 2).

Read the rest here, and see the document that testifies to it all.

This blog has recently considered the ethics of deaf parents who want to engineer a deaf child.  The politics of identity is surely one step in the logical chain of existential philosophy, where only we define our reality and only we can act out in authenticity living in the identity we construct.  This blog has also considered what it means to call oneself a man when one is a woman.  The sweeping revolution has now moved on to another hot subject of the day: autism.  There is a movement, it seems, for autism to be accepted as normal.  I know very little about it, but the posture of the following passage is quite provocative.

The first person to articulate the autism-rights position, Jim Sinclair, has produced only a few page-long essays. In his seminal invective, “Don’t Mourn for Us,” from 1993, he wrote, “It is not possible to separate the autism from the person. Therefore, when parents say, ‘I wish my child did not have autism,’ what they’re really saying is, ‘I wish the autistic child I have did not exist and I had a different (non-autistic) child instead.’ Read that again. This is what we hear when you mourn over our existence. This is what we hear when you pray for a cure. This is what we know, when you tell us of your fondest hopes and dreams for us: that your greatest wish is that one day we will cease to be, and strangers you can love will move in behind our faces.”

This is a pretty cogent little excerpt that might be a good defense for why parents shouldn’t drug their children with Lithium to keep them in line, but I’m not sure about autism.  If you have autism in your family, or if you’re concerned about the excesses of identity politics, you might enjoy this long treatment of the issue from New York Magazine.

Psychologist Wray Herbert retells a story from a Woody Allen film, and all of us can relate.

In the classic film “Play It Again, Sam,” Woody Allen is the nervous and insecure Allan Felix, who has recently been dumped by his wife. When his best friends set him up with a blind date, the character blunders his way through the evening with one gaffe after another, ending with an appalling display of table manners at a Chinese restaurant. When his visibly dismayed date excuses herself to go to the restroom, Allen turns to his friends: “She likes me,” he says confidently. “I can read women.”

The dramatic irony, of course, is that he can’t. We are privileged in the film to read his behavior and judge him unable to read women, at least in that situation. The other ironic thing is that this happens to all of us all the time. We judge ourselves incorrectly all the time. Herbert things he knows why.

Willpower is a paradoxical thing, according to these researchers.  For one, we can use up our willpower.  For example, if you need to work late all week long, requiring a lot of willpower, then your diet may suffer that week. 

The brain’s store of willpower is depleted when people control their thoughts, feelings or impulses, or when they modify their behavior in pursuit of goals. Psychologist Roy Baumeister and others have found that people who successfully accomplish one task requiring self-control are less persistent on a second, seemingly unrelated task.

This is commonsensical stuff, for sure, but new studies are backing it up.  The paradoxical thing, though, is that - even while willpower is depletable - it’s also like a muscle and can be extended and strengthened.

In psychological studies, even something as simple as using your nondominant hand to brush your teeth for two weeks can increase willpower capacity. People who stick to an exercise program for two months report reducing their impulsive spending, junk food intake, alcohol use and smoking. They also study more, watch less television and do more housework. Other forms of willpower training, like money-management classes, work as well.

Hooray for self-control.