Slate’s got a late, but very special, issue on procrastination.  Very good stuff, including this encomium to the time-wasting computer game called “Solitaire.”

Though on its face it might seem trivial, pointless, a terrible way to waste a beautiful afternoon, etc., solitaire has unquestionably transformed the way we live and work. Computer solitaire propelled the revolution of personal computing, augured Microsoft’s monopolistic tendencies, and forever changed office culture. It has also helped the human race survive innumerable conference calls and airplane trips. If solitaire is not the most important computer program of all time, it is at least in the top two, along with Minesweeper.

It’s the electronic version of taking a smoke break and letting the gears of your brain rest for a moment.  In that way, it’s actually a time-saver.  It’s also remarkably user-friendly.

The gameplay and aesthetic have remained remarkably stable; a visitor from the year 1990 could play the latest Windows version without a glitch, at least if he could figure out how to use the Start menu. It also remains one of the very few computer programs, game or nongame, that old people can predictably navigate. Brad Fregger, the developer of Solitaire Royale, the first commercial solitaire game for the Macintosh and the PC, told me that his 89-year-old mother still calls regularly to brag about her high scores.

I don’t play it.  Do you, and why?

For most of Western Civilization, thinkers and artists and writers have known that the imagination is a powerful legislator of human behavior, and that what people read and watch and hear - even when what they’re reading and watching and hearing is a fiction - has some kind of bearing on how the reader and seer and hearer understands the real world.  That’s why Plato didn’t want people watching too much tragedy in the amphitheater.  Yet, for the last fifty years or so, cultural critics have been essentially saying that we can watch and see and hear music and literature and art without any real negative effect.  Hence, it’s okay to play video games where you mutilate people.  But - alas! - researchers have breaking news that, indeed, this might be a bad thing.

Jeremy Bailenson, head of the [Virtual Human Interaction Lab] and an assistant professor of communication at Stanford, studies the way self-perception affects behavior. No surprise that what we think about ourselves affects the confidence with which we approach the world. What is a surprise is that this applies in the virtual world too […] What’s more, Bailenson’s research suggests that the qualities you acquire online - whether it’s confidence or insecurity - can spill over and change your conduct in the real world, often without your awareness.

The article is about one writer’s own experience with Second Life, which some of you may know well.  The point is, what you put in your head comes out through your mouth and your hands.  Be careful.  This doesn’t mean you can’t read about violence - see The Bible - but it does mean you should be careful what kind of imaginative experiences you let yourself have.  Fill up with rich, human experiences, not cheap, inhuman ones.

The Horace Mann School is in the elite of New York private academies - it’s the kind of school that doesn’t need publicity to generate donations and applications.  But it’s getting quite a lot of publicity from this New York Magazine cover story about a group of its students who let loose their privileged depravity all over the internet.  This article, which is long and may be too graphic for some of you, reads more like a Tom Wolfe satire of the Facebook age.  There’s nothing saucy or tantalizing in it, but it’s graphic.  If you work with high school students, or if you live with some, you might learn something.

I walk every day for about 40 minutes, and the only way I can tolerate the prosaic stroll (four times) around the park next to my house is by listening to words on my iPod. I don’t listen to music. I do that enough during the workday and have grown tired of it by 6pm. But podcasts. Podcasts keep me going. So my question to you is, What podcasts do you regularly hear? I tried sermons, which I thought sounded like the Christian thing to do, but I just couldn’t abide a sermon every day. It was brain-numbing and now I know why we’re only commanded to have corporate worship once a week. You may feel otherwise. I have many friends and relatives who regularly listen to sermons in the car, etc. I might be able to abide some sort of discussion of theology, if you have any suggestions, but the epideictic nature of a sermon is best experienced live.

Anyhow, what I listen to are these podcasts: The Fiction Podcast from The New Yorker, The Fresh Air Podcast from NPR, The This American Life Podcast, and The “Between the Covers” Podcast from National Review. I occassionally listen to the short podcasts from Slate. I discovered all these by navigating the startlingly user-unfriendly world of iTunes. I’d love to get suggestions from you all about what I should be searching for next on iTunes. And also: can you point the rest of us to any useful podcast directories? This is the “Books” post for today, so let’s keep these suggestions focused on podcasts of people talking, rather than people singing.

Harlan Coben, novelist and sometimes op-ed writer, says he thinks parents should be spying on their children.  Well, kind of.  He says he used to cringe when he’d hear parents talk about using spyware to see what their children were doing on the internet.  Now, after researching the matter, he says he’s all for it. 

One of the most popular arguments against spyware is the claim that you are reading your teenager’s every thought, that in today’s world, a computer is the little key-locked diary of the past. But posting thoughts on the Internet isn’t the same thing as hiding them under your mattress. Maybe you should buy your children one of those little key-locked diaries so that they too can understand the difference.

Coben reminds us that we’re using spyware to take care of them, to protect them.  And he reminds us that protecting children is the crux of a parent’s job.

Parenting has never been for the faint of heart. One friend of mine, using spyware to monitor his college-bound, straight-A daughter, found out that not only was she using drugs but she was sleeping with her dealer. He wisely took a deep breath before confronting her. Then he decided to come clean, to let her know how he had found out, to speak with her about the dangers inherent in her behavior. He’d had these conversations before, of course, but this time he had context. She listened. There was no anger. Things seem better now.

Our knee-jerk reaction as freedom-loving Americans is to be suspicious of anything that hints at invasion of privacy. That’s a good and noble thing. But it’s not an absolute, particularly in the face of the new and evolving challenges presented by the Internet. And particularly when it comes to our children.

So, what do you think?  Does it breed suspicion and distrust to use spyware on your kids, or is it just another way of protecting them, or both, or something else?

Thanks to the internet, we no longer need to shower, get dressed, and leave the comfort of our homes to shop, bank, work, or even socialize, so we shouldn’t be surprised to discover online opportunities to worship God. These “virtual churches” claim they can fulfill your spiritual needs through online interaction and downloadable resources. This trend of doing church in front of your computer screen has grown substantially over the past several years, with sites offering links to lead you through the liturgy, or a video feed broadcasting the week’s sermon.

For instance, at the virtual church maintained by Shepherd’s Care Ministries, you and your mouse are called to worship by clicking on the opening prayer and reading through prayer requests, followed by “soul questions,” a sermon, and the closing prayer. The site does offer a disclaimer, albeit buried in a long paragraph of tiny type near the bottom of the page: “A church online is not as good as a church of believers.”

Other online churches offer chat rooms for weekly small group interaction, and members of Churchoffools.com can create 3-D characters that sit on pews and interact with other members each week. At Onlinechurch.com, a link supposedly guides people toward salvation in Jesus. When I followed the link, I wound up on several other pages, including one that listed even more Web sites. I never found the Gospel message.

If you’re not so much looking for the Gospel as you’re looking to cleanse your conscience, you can now also virtually bare your soul. According to CNN, confessional websites such as Ivescrewedup.com and mysecret.tv have become places where people can share their secret sins anonymously and in a non-confrontational way. The confessions can range from somewhat silly — “I don’t think my boyfriend is cute”— to criminal and relationally destructive— “I stole $15,000” and “I cheated on my wife.” The lure to these sites is substantial: When mysecret.tv recently was featured on AOL’s home page, more than 1.3 million people clicked through to the site that day.

When asked about the validity of online confessions, Father Ricardo Bailey of Holy Spirit of Atlanta told CNN, “As a priest, we ask people questions, we tell them to approach the person or persons they’ve wronged. [Online confession] is another way for people to avoid taking responsibility.”

As the Bible teaches us, we can only experience God’s fullness through genuine community and authentic accountability. For both of those experiences, real interaction with real people, not hiding behind a computer screen, is required.

Invisibility, force fields, and light sabers.  That’s what Michio Kaku - a professor of theoretical physics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, a cofounder of string field theory - writes about in his new book, Physics of the Impossible.  This short review explains how all three of those science fiction fantasies could come true in the near future.  Kind of freaks me out.  But since, according to some of my critics here, I don’t believe in science or facts, I suppose I’ll have nothing to worry about.

Newsflash!  Apparently, it’s impossible to be friends with all of your friends on Facebook.

The average length of time users spend on all of the top three sites is on the slide. Bebo, MySpace and Facebook all took double-digit percentage hits in the last months of 2007. December could perhaps be forgiven as a seasonal blip when people see their real friends and family, but the trend was already south.

Get the numbers here.  Has your employment of Web 2.0 levelled off, or declined?

Phi Beta Cons writes about a Harvard professor who wants to empower impoverished NYC junior high and high school students by giving them the one thing we all know they need: cellphones.

The cellphones are intended to serve as educational devices with access to Internet programs; links between students, teachers, parents, and mentors; granters of such dubious rewards for high achievers as ring tones from Jay-Z or song downloads from Beyoncé; and receptors for motivational messages from an advertising campaign.

Impoverished children need help.  No doubt about that.  “But in the end, behavior modification via cellphone - not to mention the commercial promotion of pop culture - will hardly substitute for the hard-wiring of students in homes and classrooms with the virtues necessary for achievement.”

The study of morality, once only the province of people who actually believed in it, is now the new new thing in the materialistic universe of science.  This is a good thing (science should study everything it can study, knowing its limitations) and a bad thing (science can only let itself make proclamations about material causes, and so can be counted on to be wrong much of the time).  Anyhow, at least the author of this leviathon piece from the Times magazine understands the difficulty of saying that every moral judgment is a matter of evolution and chemical reaction: “If morality is a mere trick of the brain, some may fear, our very grounds for being moral could be eroded.”

Indeed.  After some interesting thought experiments and facts and non-facts, the author, Steven Pinker, gets down to brass tacks about the origins and purposes and operations of morality.  In the passage below, when he says “the scientific outlook,” he’s talking about the worldview that refuses to consider any non-physical phenomena as actually real.  In other words, love, joy, right, and wrong are chemical reactions and nothing more.  Notice how he dances around the implications of what he’s suggesting, all the while seeming to acknowledge it: 

The scientific outlook has taught us that some parts of our subjective experience are products of our biological makeup and have no objective counterpart in the world. The qualitative difference between red and green, the tastiness of fruit and foulness of carrion, the scariness of heights and prettiness of flowers are design features of our common nervous system, and if our species had evolved in a different ecosystem or if we were missing a few genes, our reactions could go the other way. Now, if the distinction between right and wrong is also a product of brain wiring, why should we believe it is any more real than the distinction between red and green? And if it is just a collective hallucination, how could we argue that evils like genocide and slavery are wrong for everyone, rather than just distasteful to us?

His answer is not very convincing.  What do we do when we recognize (as materialists, which I am not) that everything is meaningless matter and that morality is nothing but a vapor?  According to Pinker and just about every other materialist since the Enlightenment, we can do nothing but ignore the implications of the horror of the idea we won’t let ourselves not believe.