SECRETS:

The Mindset List® of UNDERWEAR

You ae likely wearing undergarments while you read this. What’s in an undergarment—mindsets, that’s what. The history of underwear is a history of mindsets—about outer versus inner, about discretion versus convenience, about civilization versus comfort, about sex appeal versus repression of same, and about men versus women. Go backstage with us now to consider, say, the Victoria’s Secret Mindset of Fruit of the Loom!

1 As he began his life of crime in Breaking Bad, Walter White found it so hot in the meth lab that he had to strip down to his jockey shorts—yes, they were white.

2 The loin cloth was the earliest type of underwear, but only the rich could afford to have a portion of imported silk along with the wool and linen.

3 King Tut was buried with untold riches but didn’t neglect to include his loincloth in the tomb.

4 The loin cloth goes back 7000 years ago to present-day Hawaii.

5 The first medieval under garments weren’t under at all—at first—but were trousers (braies) worn when working outside.

6 In time the trousers went “under” as padding to relieve the discomfort of mail armor worn on the legs.

7 An added and convenient feature of these trousers: the codpiece, the flap of which obviated the need to remove all armor in order to pee.

8 Henry VIII padded his codpiece in order to emphasize his faux manhood—this started a trend.

9 Women in the later Middle Ages wore smocks and gowns, the latter well-decorated; and these too were displayed openly until later, when they too went “under.”

10 The first corsets were designed to flatten, not emphasize, the bust.

11 The cotton gin revolutionized underwear, as mass-market cotton textiles became available.

12 By the 1820s whales were incessantly killed for their corset-reinforcing bones, which now squeezed women’s waists to become so tiny that their breasts were more manifest than at any other previous time in history.

13 Whales lost their lives in the process, and sometimes women were so confined as to faint in public.

14 As fashion shifted to shorter skirts, pantaloons were in demand to cover the legs.

15 Even so, pantaloon crotches were left open in the interests of hygiene.

16 It would only be a matter of time until fashion would insist that women’s bottoms also be accentuated—hence, the relatively short-lived bustle.

17 By the turn of the 20^th century “Long Johns” were popular for men, women, and kids alike, but with a back flap to ease visits to the toilet.

18 The first actually comfortable corset—which stretched and removed the need for steel or whale bone—was called the “Liberty Bodice.”

19 In time, the Long John for men underwent fission, with underwear and undershirts two separate items.

20.By the 1920s there were actually ads for men’s underwear, stressing comfort and durability.

21 Boxer shorts for men spun off from boxing trunks; jockey shorts, from jockey straps, or “athletic supporters.”

22 The first bra came onto the market in 1914.

23 Bloomers began to replace pantaloons, but starting in the 1920s, hemlines got higher, comfort began to reign, bras began to flourish, and the days of the corset were numbered.

24 The first “panties” were called “step-ins.”

25 Women shed bloomers and began to cover their legs with stockings, held up by something called a “garter belt.”

26 In an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David’s estranged wife dates a man who manufactures “fly-less” men’s underwear.

27 After the Second World War, underwear actually became a fashion item, with lavish colors and synthetic materials such as dacron, rayon, and nylon.

28 Christian Dior gave the world the “Bullet-Pointed Bra.”

29 Fredericks of Hollywood made the first “Wonder Bra.”

30 As the 1960s dawned, the panty hose dawned with them.

31 In time, these would be prescribed by doctors for men and women alike who suffered from vascular leg problems.

32 The star quarterback Joe Namath became a spokesman for a leading panty house maker and was his own best role model.

33 As the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have worn on, underwear has become increasingly entangled with sex appeal, with the G-String or “thong” no longer confined to exotic dancers.

34 Underwear had not entirely lost his glamorous mystery, as the Victoria’s Secret Company long proved.

35 Bill Clinton was asked which underwear he wore—boxers.

36 Calvin Klein used almost nude male models to market his fashionable boxer shorts.

37 Underwear sales worldwide now top over 100 billion dollars a year.

38 10-year-old Jack Singer wore over 200 pair of underwear at once in 2010—a world record.

39 From the annals of “spontaneous combustion”: Before the early 1800s it was believed that pairing dirty underwear in a bucket with wheat germ would generate mice.

40 In Italy, ringing in the new year while wearing red underwear is thought to bring good luck.

41 Queen Victoria’s white cream underwear, embroidered with VR, is not priceless, but it did sell for nearly 15 grand.

42 As part of the anti-war movement in the 1960s, women’s underwear was sometimes emblazoned with PEACE and LOVE.

43 As men thought women should not wear anything between their legs, they were consigned to protection from petticoats alone.

44 Marie Antoinette once scandalized the French court by wearing a chemise dress previously used as underwear.

45 If you can find some, antimicrobial underwear can be worn for three months at a time.

46 Muslin was a popular material for underwear in 1903—and a necessary one for the Wright Brothers’ maiden flight.

47 Twelve percent of American consumers still own underwear that’s around eight years old.

48 Wearing underwear that’s been stored in a deep freeze, in order to keep cool, remains inadvisable and reserved only for the desperate.

49 Carrie Fisher wore no underwear during the filming of Star Wars because George Lucas persuaded her that there was no underwear in Outer Space.

50 Major league baseball umpires must wear black underwear in case their pants split on the field.

These poems trace days in the lives of such cats as Meo, Joe, Ophelia, and Big Boy. They also illustrate some lively feline wisdom. I’ve long thought that, the more like cats we are, the better off we will be, and will add to this verse at least once a week. –TM

A BLIZZARD OF CATS

We couldn’t tell even one from all the others,

De-itemized by sheer numbers as they were.

The wind blew them all from side to side.

A very few motorists braved the storm.

A Maine Coon or Siamese walloped their windshields.

Eight lives remained.

They blocked out the phone poles and swank cafes.

An endless feline deletion

Erased the prairies and the hills.

They filled all caves with squeaks and squeals.

Soprano, alto, baritone.

No message; just “what are you going to do about us?”

No white-out.

A black and orange and gray-out.

A rainbow, omnipresent and soft.

A spectrum of crayoned fur.

Some wag said, “This is better than a naked tree.”

He was hanged.

Some thought they would walk the tempest out

And got clawed on the noggin,

Brushed with allergic whiskers,

Made warm against their wills.

They covered their ears against

A voluptuous meowed howl.

Most stayed in and window-watched.

They could not long evade their destiny,

What we humans were born for.

Billions came for stray rats and wingless ravens,

Begged for Sensations, Party Mix,

Iams and Fancy Feast. No lap was safe.

Harrowed halibut and miserable mackerel

And every other fishy smell.

Even the man in the highest tower

Felt a stealthy brush against his slumbering leg.

When all finally agreed to surrender,

Wave the flag with the white British shorthair on it,

There were no first names left,

Every Toby, Scruffy, and Peg used up.

Some of us went mad and crawled on all our fours.

These played hockey with bottle caps

And decided life had no other meaning

But they no more could be bothered to care.

At night after the truce, we could hear

A gargantuan concert of purrs,

Like the background radiation that proved

The Big Bang.

MELISSA GOES TO MASS

The church had nothing to hide.

The designers, not in vain, had tried

To make the Lord’s House glass,

As much as ever they could. The mass

Of every window to the ground

Could be seen through; even the sound

Of the organ could be heard from the great outdoors.

Thus did the church show off its stores

Of glory and of grace. Even Melissa the cat

Could gather at the earthen glass, and bat

Swarms of flies while she looked upon the Eucharist.

The priest was glad but thought Melissa missed

A vital point and told her that

“You want the Gospel, little cat,

But I don’t know your tongue.” Melissa heard

And thought, “I can’t afford your love; a sandwich turd

In the world from whence I come. Try to raise

Yourselves above yourselves. I praise

You, but myself can’t live on bread and wine.

Robins and roaches are especially fine:

The body and the blood; the Communion

Of every kitty’s common fun.”

FRANKLIN IN TWO MOVEMENTS

The kid wanted a black one.

We hastened to oblige. Too late

Did we find the speck of white lurking on his mane.

The creature sat with dignity,

Like a living statue in some carny show.

Ineffable logic made him Franklin.

They say cats are career-less.

Frank, shy but sly, was also disputatious.

He smudged his regal subtlety

With deep basso meows. A pro,

He built the family larder with sparrows & crows.

He defended family honor:

Tourneys with badgers and Molly Calico.

His vet bills were enormous.

This is the end of Part One.

His family having moved,

Frank thought that they themselves should fend

For fine cachet & food.

Always retiring in his way,

He retired in unobtrusive fact.

Every career has a finite run.

Walls were as fun

As warblers used to be.

Unlike his betters,

Frank knew that there could be

A time to flee.

Frank knew that he had done his course

And none dared disagree.

Of vet bills was the family free.

End of Part Two.

Coda:

When the family was away,

Frank fell beneath the sway

Once more of the Heady Out-of-Doors.

He confounded an alarm.

The cops came armed.

Franklin, retired at the time,

Would not pay the fine.

MWO: A LIFE

Two short legs legs at once,

As though prepared to pounce,

Meo sneaked out of the whiff

Of ammo executed well, and sniffed

The smoking flesh of owners

Now placed at mandatory rest. Goners

Were his mom and dad, whom he

Could always take or leave alone. The

Cop took Meo to the station

And gave him a nice vacation

From all the racket that

Had, with rat-tat-tat,

Banished his minders in a drug deal

That raised them off their crooked heels.

Officer Harry gave Meo a slice

Of hot dog and took him home, evidence

That he would snack on some benevolence. Meo

Provoked a possum soon and oh,

How he stole into the starless night.  A rival beast

Had left him gored, but at least

He could salivate a gaping wound.

Harry found him strewn

In midnight agony. A lab coat shot

Cools punctures grown too hot,

A chilling salve for every tragic bite.

In penance did Meo become a fright

For thrush and mouse alike:

Proof of feral expertise, a strike

For those who only munches strive to gain,

Indifferent to Lugers and white cocaine.

Nine long years he’d live,

Time have nothing else to give.

LOOK WHAT THE CAT DRAGGED IN

“No,” she said

“You are wrong.

We must find a room

With locks of finest steel

And astronauts’ food

That can be cooked over

And over again. We need

A soft rug on which we wait for God.

We are not meant for wilderness,

For want and bodily harm.

We are not made for the inferno that is others.

Our place is with God.

We must wait alone

On the rug

Wirth the astronauts’ stew

Until God comes to collect us. 

God needs no food.

God has no fear of snakes.

God will come to the orphanage to get us.

The orphanage will be this room

With the best steel locks and infinite Apollo grub.

We will be safe. We need only wait.

God will come in a chauffeured Mercedes Benz.”

“No,” he said.

“YOU are wrong.

We are hot meant for God.

We belong in the woods

Or among killers and sharks.

We are flesh, easily bruised and eaten.

We know we are.

We can never be with God.

God does not take in animals.

God is not like us.

God has no end.

God’s only end is not to have one.

But we can change the subject.

We can have hobbies.

We can fancy utopias

Like a puzzle finished or a crossword done.

We can double back on ourselves.

We can put off the bad-ass days.

We can go bowling.

A ten-strike makes it hard

To think of misery and ceasing to be.

No other animal can knock down pins

With a heavy black ball

Or color the ball green. Or White.

No. it is you who are wrong

With your dreams of rugs

And moon-walker steak.”

The cat pounced on the counter.

It knocked off a steak knife for attention.

“You are both wrong,”

Said the cat. “I am in Paradise

Because I do not know I am in Paradise.

Your poor, lousy, talking creatures.

Now I shall shut up.

I will never speak more,

Lest I learn by blabber that I am in Paradise

And fret that I will lose it, you see,

For Heaven is a yummy chickadee.”

FORSYTHIAS AT THE SPEED OF SOUND

March 5, 1953

Joe’s folks had found an early spring.

Cameron Park beckoned in the sun.

There were ponies to ride.

A little train to board

And a bluff that gave a river to adore.

Kitty Joe was left to his own device. He had a lawn,

His very own, and a shortcut—his, too—

And an unassuming green bush to hide in

And a narrow path beneath

That led to the bump-ravaged street

Where cars were rarely seen

And straight to Old Man Hildebrand’s

Bermuda grass, finely chiseled by a grouch.

From there could Joe find flower beds

Where hung out mice and  

A fallen thrush. Joe could make a meal

Of what was found

In Old Man Hildebrand’s forsythias.

The flowers were innocent bystanders.

Across the seas

On this very day

A human Joe lay prone,

His wheezing labor-intensive.

He was like the other Joe:

They both had so much, these Joes.

This one had a gargantuan block

With towers and turrets alike

And skulking within were all the stairs

That marbled led to unending comrades.

There was a room and in this room was

An anteroom and yet another.  

Finally, one reached a bed.

Where mustachioed Joe’s lungs worked overtime,

Like one of his Soviet farmers,

Who also labored overtime,

But was never paid for it.

Just as Joe had his lawn and his bush

And his ground tunnel and his street

And Old Man Hildebrand’s flower bed,

Joe had his Kremlin and his stairs

And his once-commanding bed.

Both Joes were blessed.

Old Man Hildebrand was mum

As he affixed his 12 gauge.

He would get Joe this time.

He would wipe him as the other Joe

Had murdered his traitors.

He would quiet all growls and every last meow,

Put a see-through hole into the larcenous fur,

Render pointless all the teeth and claws.

Old Man Hildebrand would save his forsythias

 As he believed his Lord Jesus Christ had saved

All mankind, but with slightly different methods.

Joe’s comrades thought he was dying

But didn’t know what to do.

If they called the docs, it might get out

And if they saved him, Joe would blame them

For saying he was sick.

Joe would have them shot.

If they did not fetch the medicos

And Joe got well,

For not calling docs

Joe would have them shot.

Old Man Hildebrand twirled his own mustache,

He draped granny specs across a pouty face.

Quiet as a mute chipmunk he went outdoors,

Glad that nature had endorsed a slaughter house.

He fired. Billy two houses down was sure

It was a plane breaking the sound barrier.

This excited Billy. Life was good.

Joe sensed a singing of his ears.

Hence did he travel

Faster than the speed of sound

Back to his street, beneath his hidey-hole,

Through his newly-green March bush,

And back onto his very own lawn

Where Old Man Hildebrand declined to tread.

Joe the Russian

Left town in his sleep.

His last rattle mocking

His thirst for blood.

Forsythia were laid at his bier.

Joe was born a thug.

Nothing better than a bullet

Fired into the brain at the speed of sound.

Joe was a cat:

Nothing finer than forsythia fowl.

OPHELIA: A LIFE

Ophelia, the star of the pound,

In the laps of everyone around,

Was taken to a home, where she

Declined the rules and felt quite free

To pad about at will.

They say that when a kitty girl is orange,

She’s always above the average.

Told to stay indoors, she still

Bullied screens off skinny patio doors

And made all lawns the floors

Of her domain. She conquered trees

And trolled with glee

The next-door pups, whose mistress

Said Ophelia’s folks might miss

Her evermore. Ophelia thrived.

But then no longer did she live.

As they love to say, she got into something.

And they could not bring

Her back. Ophelia was wild

But sweet & kind &mild

To those without four legs.

She preyed and preyed but this begs

The question of her final act:

Perishing in tooth & claw is just an average fact.

BIG BOY

Big Boy: a big-boned Siamese;

Called a walking kitty horse.

Uncle Watford was a strolling chimney,

Disdaining filters on his Lucky Strikes.

I’d rather have nothing, said he,

Than puff some rolled-up pulp.

He’d done his duty:

Was born, had kids, learned ropes.

Hardly ever did he dwell

On the accursed points of life.

His lungs got too well-celled.

Big Boy the Cat could never tell

That Wat would soon be finalized.

Why doesn’t this cat, Wat mused,

Ever clean up after me? It was the only time

He was ever moved to re-define.

As the Big C grew, it plundered

Watford’s chest and gut alike.

One night, a gasping mortal changed the lifter.

Then lay down at last.

Big Boy was not one to fritter

Away his time, and in new-laid sand

He lay his feces, as grand

As any microbes that kill a man.

While Wat rested breathless in the other room,

Big Boy his regular napping did presume.

God’s Three Rules

Or, Why Margaret Thatcher is the True Enemy of MAGA

Tom McBride

     It is a cliché in enlightened circles to muse that God’s list of responsibilities has dwindled. Sean Carroll, the famed physicist and podcaster, has put it precisely this way. God is no longer required to throw lightning bolts. Magnetic electricity can do that. No progressive would disagree. What the secular observer doesn’t get, though is that God is required more than ever.

     Throwing lightning bolts and raising the dead were never His main line of work—and yes, the masculine pronoun is sociologically correct. Throwing and raising were just commercials. The real work of God has been to establish and enforce rules, and this is especially true of the Christian God, or what we might call the MAGA God.

     What are these rules?

     The first one is to remember that there is always a predictable right and wrong. One might be tempted to think otherwise without God, for He is a warrant, an underwriter, of such a dichotomy. Giving birth to a child is right. Aborting it is wrong. Celebrating Alexander Hamilton is right; putting him in hip-hop is wrong. Sex in the vagina is right; sex in the anus is wrong. A secular progressive would say this is a matter of opinion. Religious MAGAs would beg to differ It is not a matter of human opinion if God is calling the balls and strikes. God is quite necessary in order to transform mere opinion into doctrinaire, metaphysical truth.  

     Progressives have difficulty getting their heads around this notion. They see God as superstition, but He is not. He is a vital social fact. His great miracle is to change social facts into brute facts. To doubt that abortion and homosexuality are wrong is like being skeptical about the existence of Mount Everest. MAGAs are blamed for conspiracy theories. In fact, religious MAGAs have a solid grounding in reality once you see that, for them, reality itself is rooted in metaphysics

     They are an excitable group, and why not? An apocalyptic war between good and evil is exciting.  Nothing less than good versus evil, the future of a godly America (the real one), and the outcome of History is at stake. Godly MAGAs are the Bolsheviks of the right. But they are not just metaphysical; they could also claim to e pragmatists. Human beings were not created to live without God, who supplies meaning, coherence, and stability. Without God you will stand for nothing and fall for anything. The greatest proof of God’s existence is that He is so utterly necessary. His existence is evinced by the total inability of human beings to think of attempting to live without Him. He is not Spinoza’s Nature but MAGA’s Necessity.

     There is a right and there is a wrong: Rule 1 What is Rule 2?

     It is this: Always remember that cities are heinously overrated.. This was also the message of God’s Son, Jesus, who operated out of the little burg of Nazareth. Were Jesus to come back today, he would be in Barron, Wisconsin, or Copperas Cove, Texas. Jesus lived in a time of great, sophisticated cities: Rome, Alexandria, Athens, Jerusalem, which he entered humbly on the back of a donkey. The great cities—think today of New York or Las Angeles or San Francisco—are mired in the ways of the world, the transient and sinful pleasures of the latest trend, streaming series, or deeply-learned bot. They are all settled in time, whereas the Nazareths and Copperas Coves are in touch with the Timeless, the true province of God and His Son.

     Again, progressives miss the point. Yes, Christ performed miracles and hung out with wand loved prostitutes and advocated turning the other cheek. But these were mere illustrations of the real point, which is that he grasps the eternal and is not impressed by the temporary. Were he around today, he would not be binging on The Succession of being a Taylor Swift groupie. Donald Trump is not especially Christ-like, it would seem, but he spoke for Jesus when he said Hamilton was overrated and so was Meryl Streep. For MAGA the city with its elitist trendiness is the foe. It was nice of Jesus to love the down-and-out, but his most important words were, “In my Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you.” Yes, MAGA Christians should love the homeless more, but with them, we’re just talking bodies, whereas souls are the real thing, and you can lose yours in San Francisco, where Tony Bennet’s concern about leaving his heart there is bigly beside the point.

     Rule 1 is “remember always that there. Is a right and wrong.” Rule 2 is “beware of cities.” Rule 3 is, “always know that you are being watched.”

     The genius of small towns is that one can be monitored. If you get married, someone will write down the date and see when the first child is born. The grapevine is concentrated and potent. This is why gays, women pregnant out of “wedlock,” feminists, and trans-genders tend to move to cities. They know they are being watched and long for anonymity, acceptance, and impersonality of the big metro. They like the idea of walking in a big city public garden alone, while MAGA Christians prefer to walk in a garden where “He walks with me and He talks with me/And He tells me I am his own,” in the words of an old gospel song made famous once by Willie Nelson. Without Him, life would be temping. It would be lonely.

     What we have here is hot a failure to communicate but a triumph of communication. For Rule 1, right v. wrong, is enforced by God. Rule 2, be wary of the city and its emptiness, is enforced by Jesus the Son. And Rule 3, know that you are being monitored, is enforced by the Holy Spirit.

     God’s Three Rules are the rules of the Godhead: Three in One. In theological terms the Trinity is an enigma. In social terms it makes a great deal of sense.

     This is not a new story. In 1952 one of the saints of the Conservative Movement, Whittaker Chambers, wrote a great book called Witness, where he spelled out the metaphysical necessity of being a right-winger. The enemy of the Right is secular humanism and liberalism. It derives from the Enlightenment and the belief that great moral questions are a matter of opinion and that Man can overtake God in creating happiness and stability. Before he was fired, Tucker Carlson pointed out a few examples. Secular liberals wanted to force Christians and Real Americans to eat insects; to urbanize their leafy suburbs; and to take away their cars and guns. This is what comes from replacing Man with God, and THIS is the great epoch war of History. Make no mistake that it is war, and the enemy must be eliminated. History can be redeemed only if liberals, elites, feminists, gays, and the immigrants they sponsor can be gotten rid of. It is not that MAGA is gun-happy, but it needs those guns to win the Battle of History for God. The first great antagonists of God were the Communists; there can be little doubt that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and AOC would have joined the Party back then.  As for sinister John Kerry, he fought Commies for a while but then turned in favor of them and against his own godly land.

     There is a right and there is a wrong. Kerry was metaphysically wrong. He is an urban elite. He is unaccountable. God may be philosophically and scientifically dead. He is sociologically well.

     Towards the end of his fairly short and unpeaceful life, Chambers wrote that unless conservatives went up against the Machine, they would only be petulant and short-tempered and ineffectual. By this time, he had retreated to his Maryland farm and found some tranquility in nature. He had become, like another conservative, Martin Heidegger, anti-mechanical. Were Chambers around today in MAGA-land, he might have said that there was once upon a time a period when the desires of MAGA were met, though not in America. In England, Scotland, and Wales from the late 19^th century to the 1980s there was a settled community of workers, such as coal miners, who lived in socially conservative, chapel Christian villages where work was masculine, hard, but at least sufficient for a living. It was a blend of government supports, since the coal industry progressively was not able to operate totally on its own, and Christian piety. There were jobs; and there was God.

     It was a Tory, a conservative, Margaret Thatcher, who upended this socialist arrangement. She broke the unions, attacked the economic basis of their family values, and declared that the free market would rule from then own. Members of the Labour Party have never forgiven her. Glenda Jackson said she would rather die than attend Thatcher’s funeral. She destroyed a mélange of left-wing economics and once-pious family life. She ruined what we might think of as MAGA Rural UK.

     Chambers said conservatives needed to oppose the Machine. MAGA conservatives need to oppose global markets, whose creative destruction has outsourced their jobs and led to all those despised urban trends. It has made secular humanists like Jeff Bezos and Whoopi Goldberg rich. MAGA senses that free-market types like Paul Ryan are traitors to the cause, but it cannot bring itself to protest against global capitalism. Why not?

     The main reason takes us back to their metaphysical view of history as seen in the Godhead’s Three Rules. They identify the secular left, he socialistic liberals who are little better than Reds, as the enemy. Since the ancient foe of communism has been capitalism, MAGAs cannot figure out how they can fight socialism and fee markets at the same time. Thatcher and Ronald Reagan talked a great game about how we could have free markets and stern morality at the same tine—they spoke of “individual responsibility.” This was a lie. The relentless creativity of capital markets is the great promoter of temporariness and novelty, of dynamic economies that push citizens into a perpetual need to re-invent themselves. It is the greatest enemy God ever faced. It IS Chambers’ “Machine” And without going up against it, MAGA remains petulant and angry, dangerously tempted to get rid of its enemies at any cost while letting their real antagonists off the hook. They need to send a memo to God: Demote the Iron Lady.

Barbie’s Very Own Mindset List®

All Dolled Up

One of the great philosophical puzzles is called “Theseus’ Ship.” This ship over the decades has to be repaired so many times that finally there is not a single board left from the original vessel. Is “Theseus’ Ship” still THESEUS’ SHIP? It’s a question of continuity and identity—and it is relevant to the thousands of makeovers of Barbie Dolls over the past 6o-plus years. Is Barbie still BARBIE? You be the judge. Here’s a little list to help you decide!

1 Barbie is 64 but has never looked her age.

2 There are over a billion Barbies.

3 She has been on cable and streaming for nearly 20 years.

4 She and Ken might have a common-aw marriage, but likely not.

5 Barbie changes her hair color often, though generally stays with blonde or brunette.

6 She was inspired by a German comic strip character.

7 She is named after her designer’s daughter.

8 She was first made in Japan.

9 Her zebra-striped swimsuit was once a fashion statement sensation.

10 She used to look sideways demure but now looks feminist straight-on.

11 Her breast size has been readjusted according to tase and controversy.

12 Her pink shoes launched her film career ten years ago.

13 She has been a YouTube blogger for the past eight years.

14 The first live action Barbie film is imminent.

15 Her parents lived in Willows, Wisconsin, where for a while she attended high school.

16 Barbie & Ken have been back together for 12 years and may now be just friends.

17 Among her friends is Christie, an African-American.

18 She has both piloted airliners and served as a flight attendant on them.

19 She once owned a pet zebra.

20 There is an Andy Warhol Barbie.

21 She has been an astronaut and surgeon, summit diplomat, dentist, baseball player and much more in a diverse career that would be the envy of the imposter on “Catch Me If you Can.”

22. AS one-third of American judges are female, there has been a Judge Barbie.

23 Dream houses in her name have been built by Habitat for Humanity.

24 She has been variously called an inspiring role model and a dangerously unrealistic ideal of female bodies.

25 Barbie has generally been under weight.

28. But she has also been tall, petite, and curvy, though some children called the latter “fat.”

29 Her 1965 bathroom scale was permanently set at 110 pounds.

30 Among Barbies have been African-American and Cinco de Mayo.

31 The first Black Barbie lacked distinctive African-inherited features.

32 She has had up to 22 skin tones.

33 She once liked Oreo Cookies, but this proved to be unpopular.

34 A girl in Tacoma once pointed out that Barbie could not fit into the elevator of her dream house—adjustments were made.

35 University professors objected to her saying “Math classes are tough.”

36 There was a brief suspicion that Barbie might get pregnant by her adult friend Mitch.

37 There is an “Islamic Barbie” named Fulla.

38 In a Barbie book she accidentally infects her sister’s laptop with malware, leading to accusations that the tome was sexist.

39 There have been Frida Kahlo and Amelia Earhart Barbies.

40 There are at least one hundred thousand Barbie collectors, 90 percent of them women.

41 A Barbie once sold for nine thousand British pounds—a record.

42 Mattel makes porcelain Barbies just for collectors.

43 “Food Chain Barbie” ended up in a blender; Mattel sued the parodist and lost.

44 Jay Leno once presented a Barbie meth lab; no lawsuits.

45 Britney Spears has starred as Barbie’s sister.

46 Barbie has appeared in bondage clothing; legal opposition failed.

47 Barbie Benson has been sued for name infringement.

48 Someone once inserted Gi Joe’s voice in a Barbie doll.

49 Lisa Simpson once had a notable relationship with Barbie.

50 Barbie has been the most litigious fashion model in world history.

51 Barbie is an adjective modifying the clinical term “Syndrome.”

52 Nikki Exotica, the “Million Dollar Barbie” has had 12 breast implants.

53 Fewer human beings, apparently, have aspired to look like Ken.

54 Some studies suggest that girls who admire Barbie tend to have lower self-esteem.

55 She has few viable competitors, though “Moxie Girlz” might have come closest.

Shakespeare’s Philosopher-Ghosts

Tom McBride

     Ghosts all tell the same story: that what we thought was over and settled is not so; that miscreants can’t get away with their crimes and you can’t cut off and steal someone’s hand without their coming back as ghosts to claim it. The motto of ghosts is what Faulkner once said: “The past isn’t over; it’s not even past.” This is also the typical message of literary ghosts and part of the fun of ghost stories. The premise is that death settles nothing, in a way a comforting idea, and if you throw in the spookiness of ghosts, as long as we readers are safe from them, then the whole thing adds up to a most attractive human experience.

     Shakespeare is no exception. His three main ghosts all have roughly the same function.  Caesar’s ghost comes to Brutus to tell him that killing Caesar has not ended the Roman dreams of empire and that the future emperors are even now gathering to defeat him in battle. Banquo’s ghost tells Macbeth that he may have murdered Banquo but that his sins and his guilt will find him out and that the whole assassination scheme will end badly. Hamlet’s father’s ghost tells Hamlet that a great wrong has been done and that it is Hamlet’s job to make it right. Caesar, Banquo, Hamlet, Sr.: they are all dead, but they are really not, and their murders have settled nothing—the past is not done yet.

      Sometimes this whole thing is also a little embarrassing. Respectable society wants to live in the present and not bebothered by family secrets or shameful back stories. Freud, in his essay on “The Uncanny,” termed this the sort of thing that should remain hidden but won’t. Of course, Freud was drawn to this idea because it reminded him of the return of repressed instincts that should be kept in the psychic closet but always seem to get out. This is why so-called respectable women came to him to cure their hysterical episodes, which stemmed from something traumatic that happened long ago that they would just as soon forget but can’t quite do so, really.

     At first, we may think that Shakespeare’s three ghosts are generally all the same and have identical functions as plot-turners. The past is not over—not even in the past. Yet a closer look shows that there are philosophical distinctions among the three ghosts that are worth a look. Let us start with great Caesar’s ghost.

      We might assume that Caesar’s ghost is an immaterial phantom. How else could formerly living matter rise from the dead? Think again. We don’t need his ghost at all in order to know that what Caesar represented, alive or ghostly, has never died. This is the dream of empire, of conquest, of control and influence over vast territory. Even today, the idea has not perished in the minds of Putin and Xi and their followers. We could call this the “recurring ghost of empire,” but wait a minute. If the universe is made of matter, then how does such nationalistic and imperial consciousness get transferred from one human being to another over eons of time—from Rome to Mongolia to Persia to London to Washington, D.C.? The consciousness of empire, whether actualized or not, is hardly the only aspiration, hope, or anxiety so moved from consciousness to consciousness over the centuries—there is also, for instance, fascism, democracy, tolerance, and apocalypse. How does this happen in a material universe? If we are persuaded that the mind is a function of the brain, how do mere concatenations of neurons get us to conscious thoughts of empire?

     Matter can get us to the behaviors of empires—swords and guns—but much less obviously the idea of empire. One solution to this conundrum is the idea of panpsychism: that matter is itself tacitly conscious in some so far unknown and perhaps unknowable way. Only if there is some prototypical level of awareness in neurons, electrons, and quarks can there emerge not only my awareness of wanting empire but also my awareness that it is I who wants it and that I should seek out others who do as well.

     We could otherwise be left with an unworkable choice: that matter itself, left to its own devices, is too incoherent to account for organized consciousness and its inheritance, or that consciousness is itself a ghost, something totally apart from molecules and atoms. Phillip Goff has explored this enigma beautifully in Galileo’s Error.  It seems more likely, and more interesting to posit that Shakespeare’s haunting Caesar is not so much a ghost as a literary device that raises questions about how a material universe can produce what seems like a ghost—the mind’s great intangible awareness of itself. Indeed, when we see great Caesar’s ghost onstage or read him on the page, we are using our material tools of vision and ink (or fonts) and cognitive neurology.

     Caesar then is a Pan-psychic Ghost.

     If we may skip Banquo and Macbeth for a moment and go to Hamlet, we will find that his father’s spirit was a Mystical Ghost. How so? Was Hamlet’s encounter with his father’s ghost a mystical experience? A religious one?

     Modern philosophy helps us with these questions, and it begins with a skepticism worthy of Hamlet himself.  Such philosophy has long suspected what is sometimes called “naïve realism,” or the proposition that when we see X we see it precisely and accurately and wholly. Too much research has been done on misperception for that view to be easily sustained, but above all, there is the notion that natural selection has evolved human animals to see what it is necessary to see for survival and little else. Bats can hear better than we can, and octopi can feel better than we can, and a number of species have stereoscopic vision greater than ours. Perhaps we do not perceive other dimensions because we don’t need to see them, just as octopi and bats don’t need to talk in order to get on in the world.

     It is in this spirit of skeptical inquiry that William James asked (in Varieties of Religious Experience) why we honor scientific observation as a way to find out nature but dishonor mystical encounters as a way to find out God. Mystical experiences, James said, are noetic, passive, and transient: They impart knowledge about the divine; they don’t last long; and those who have them are attentive but not active participants. Was Hamlet’s meeting with his father’s ghost a “religious experience?” Later, Hamlet seems to think so, as he says “there’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will.” James says that knowledge of God, however defined, come via religious experience. You can’t find God in a scientific experiment or in a guess about how someone is going to react when you present bad news or in an estimate of your chances at a gambling table. One finds religion, says James, in, well, religious experiences—mystical, visionary, ghostly ones. Such experiences are life-changing; nothing is the same after them.

     Alastair McIntyre wrote that Hamlet received upon his return from the university, an “epistemological shock”: his father had died and his mother had married his beastly uncle. Yet it is equally true that Hamlet had a collision with a phantom that ushered him into his fate for the rest of his life, just as a religious experience can usher one into one’s life trajectory for the rest of one’s days.  Furthermore—this is the main thing—it is only through this sort of life-altering vision that Hamlet can find out the content and direction of his destiny. This alone justifies the ghost as a plot device to get thins rolling.

    To be sure, Hamlet’s religious experience is not the type we might expect. We might prefer some angel of the Lord convincing us that our life’s mission is to aid the poor. Yet surely Moses had a mystical experience when the Lord appeared to him in a Burning Bush on Mount Sanai and told him that he, Moses, was elected by Providence to lead his people out of bondage. Hamlet was elected to avenge his father’s death and bring justice to the Kingdom of Denmark. It is by no means something that he always wants to do or thinks he should do. But it is his life’s meaning, and it would never have been had it not been for his father’s ghost. And he at least manages to bring Claudius’ ruthlessly unfair rule to an end. Is this not a religious duty also?

     How much of all this is real? Could the ghost have been a psychic projection or delusion? Hamlet worries over this question, too. No matter. Hamlet thinks he has had it, and he behaves accordingly for the remainder of the play. James takes no position on the ontological status of religious experiences but adds that they are real to those who have them and communicate a knowledge that can frequently come in no other way.

     Hamlet Senior’s ghost is a Mystical Ghost. Banquo’s ghost is a Multiverse One. How so? The short answer is that before he became a ghost Banquo represented a profound counterfactual to Macbeth’s moral choices. Let us delve into the significance of counterfactuals via the work of a great modern philosopher.

     David Lewis, in On the Plurality of Worlds, and other writings, argued that the world you and I inhabit is one of very many others. He was trained in a philosophical world in which all answerable questions were presumed to be scientific ones. Metaphysical speculation was a waste of time. But Lewis noticed that in daily practice we speculate a great deal of the time, mostly about alternative scenarios. “I’d better do X because doing Y will be bad for me.” We run in our minds counterfactual outcomes in order to do the right thing, however “right” is defined. Lewis in time came to believe that if counterfactuals have a status in this world, there would be no way to disprove that they do not exist in different worlds altogether. There may be worlds in which it would be better for us to do Y instead of X; or worlds where X and Y aren’t options at all; of worlds where we do not even exist. There can be an infinite number of such worlds. At the same time, there were limits to Lewis’ plurality of worlds, for in all such words he posited that there was causation in space and time. He was a many-world guy but not a promiscuous one. He was also a moral realist, who thought murder was wrong in a real-world sense and not a matter of cultural preferences or social constructions. The wrongness of murder is no more a social fact than is the law of gravity.

     In the world of Macbeth, three prophetic weird sisters tell him and Banquo about their futures. They tell Banquo that he will never be king but that he will establish a line of kings. They tell Macbeth that he will be king.  Banquo does not do anything about the prophecy that pertains to him. He prefers to relax and enjoy, until Macbeth has him killed to make sure that Banquo cannot possibly start a line of kings that will outshine his own rule (which, by the way, will have no successors since Macbeth and Lady Macbeth have no children). Banquo is an index to the fact that Macbeth, too, could have decided to relax and enjoy. The witches tell him he will be king, so why not wait to see if it will happen? Why force the issue with an assassination—a murder (always wrong, in Lewis’ view). Why would Macbeth not have tuned into his que-sera-sera channel?

      It is hard to say why. But the fact is that he didn’t. He decided to take matters into his own hands. A counterfactual would be that King Duncan would die and Macbeth be named his successor, or that Duncan become ill and name Macbeth his successor.

     And indeed, per David Lewis, there are worlds in which that happened. They are not the world of the play. They are different worlds, but one thing common to them all: murder is wrong as a brute fact, not a social one. It is wrong in the world where Macbeth did no murder and the one, that of the play, in which he does. There is a world where Macbeth wins the lottery and one in which he becomes a killer.

     This should in turn lead us to re-interpret, big time, Banquo as a ghost. The standard view is that he reminds Macbeth of his guilt, and indeed Macbeth is terribly frightened of Banquo’s ghost and denies that he had anything to do with his murder (Banquo’s son Fleance got away and went on to found the Stuart line of kings that resulted in King James I, who attended the play). Yet Banquo’s ghost is not only an agent of guilt and potential retribution. He is also a reminder that Macbeth had had another way—a Banquo way—of waiting and seeing if the sisters’ prediction came true. Banquo is a visitor from a separate world: the world in which Macbeth could have been patient and kindly and become monarch after all. IN this deep sense Banquo is a Multiverse Ghost—an index of counterfactual worlds, separate ontological realms that are, alas, totally cut off from our world—and from Macbeth’s.

     Banquo thus expresses the idea that there are multi-verses, decidedly different from one another, but in all of which murder is wrong. This of course does not settle other philosophical questions. Existing as he did in his world, could Macbeth have done anything other than become an assassin? Banquo suggests that Macbeth did have other choices. The answer to the difficult question might well go like this: Had Macbeth preferred to relax and enjoy, he would have made his world different, although there might well be another world in which he chose to kill his sovereign. Thus: we are not trapped in our world but have a role in defining it. We make our worlds, but there are other denizens in other worlds that make theirs, and quite differently. You and I may make our worlds by becoming florists instead of killers, but there will be others, to be sure, where florists become killers; and still others where killers try to hide from their wrongs by becoming florists; and still others in which killers murder only florists. Meanwhile, Macbeth made his world and it was the one he had to live and die in.  

     Banquo visits him from a different world and reminds him that it didn’t have to be this way.

     We are left, then, with the commonly observed function of the three ghosts as expressions of deficient justice (or at least deficient historical judgment) and of a coming squaring of accounts. But the ghosts reveal more, and this more is nothing short of describing who we are as human beings and what we must confront as such. This includes being made of a matter that, however transient as an emergent creature, somehow manages to communicate a continuing cultural consciousness long after we as individuals have been buried with our molecules; a potential for visionary experience that seems to be one of the few privileged ways by which we learn our directions; and an authorship of moral choices that mandate that we live in one world as opposed to another. We are historically conscious beings, mysteriously destined ones, and morally realistic ones. Do these things go together neatly? No. Shakespeare’s universe is as varied and contradictory as is the assortment of his ghosts.

Beloit From A to Z:

Tom McBride

Note: This list only tickles the surface of a Beloit College record abundant with colorful achievements. It will be edited from time to time to become as inclusive as possible. Suggestions are welcome at mcbridet@beloit.edu

A: Aaron. Aaron Lucius Chapin was Beloit’s first president, a Congregational minister praised by Lincoln for helping civilize “the west.” Midway through his presidency, just after the Civil War, he said the new college was growing into what he called “lustsy manhood.”  Folks talked differently back then.

B: Beloit. Beloit, Wisconsin is the home of Beloit College and gave it its name. It was founded in the mid-1840s or about the same time as the college was. It was meant to be a New England village with a college, a green (now Horace White Park) and a Congregational church.  Where did the name come from? One theory: “Beloit” is the sound of a Presbyterian farting in the bathtub, or perhaps in the Rock River.

C: Chad. Chad Walsh taught at Beloit from 1945 to 1977. A renowned member of the English Department, he is best known for having introduced C.S. Lewis to American audiences; he and his wife Eva played a matchmaking role in Lewis’ marriage to Joy Gresham, an event portrayed in the movie Shadowlands with Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger.

D: David.  David Heesen served Beloit for nearly 30 years as the director of a much-understaffed secretarial pool. A strong Christian evangelical who often opposed Beloit’s morae secular values, he became a beloved friend to many faculty members. He put up a small mirror in his office that said, “faculty: check your teeth before teaching.”

E. Effigy Moundbuilders, who constructed religious and burial mounds in the upper Mississippi Valley about 1200 years ago and whose mounds populate the Beloit campus. Most of the mounds in the Lake Michigan area have been plowed under, but several of them remain at Beloit College, most notably the long Turtle Mound behind the Wright Art Museum. Dean Frank Wong once observed that changing a college’s curriculum is like “moving a graveyard” and added that Beloit is the only college he knew that was built on one.

F. F.S.C. Northrop graduated from Beloit in 1915 and became a distinguished professor of philosophy at Harvard, authoring one of the first books on comparative philosophy, The Meeting of East and West in 1946.

G. Geology. Geology was and is one of Beloit’s most successful science departments, graduating hundreds of earth scientists who now work around the world. For many years it was propelled by the legendary Hank Woodard (“The Chief”), who spoke in a high-pitched New England accent and was never without an almost manic energy; and Richard Stenstrom, Beloit ’57, who was much lower-key but always a champion explainer of difficult concepts about the crust of the planet.

H. Hull. Roger Hull was Beloit’s 8^th president and arguably its most successful, raising desperately-needed funds in the 1980s and heading fund-raising drives that refurbished both Pearsons Hall and the Field House, two historically-compelling structures that had nonetheless fallen on the hard times of the law of entropy.  

I stands for Irrmann. Robert Henry (Bob) Irrmann was Beloit’s most popular professor after World War II. A jolly man ad life-long polio sufferer, he looked a great deal like the character actor Wilfred Brimley and gave stem-winding lectures daily on medieval and Renaissance history. His classes were jam-packed, but he always said his proudest moment was when students gave him a free membership to the Playboy Club in nearby Lake Geneva.

J. Journalists. Beloit has a long tradition of graduating those who went on to become dedicated journalists, among whom the most inspiring was Dan Bolles 56, who lost his life in Arizona exposing illegal racketeering. Killed by a car bomb, he is also the subject of a recent streaming documentary.

K. Knapton. Bill Knapton was Beloit’s most successful basketball coach and, above all, the decisive vote on the official committee that approved the 3-point shot from behind the line.  Every time you see a star hooper hitting a basket from “downtown,” you can thank Bill.

L. Larry. Larry White taught psychology at Beloit from 1984 to 2020. His special field of inquiry, in which he published widely, was the interrogation of children and teens by law enforcement officials and attorneys, and he was featured on that subject in the famed Netflix documentary, MAKING A MURDERER.

M. Maurer. Irving Maurer was Beloit’s 4^th president. A distinguished intellectual minister from Columbus, Ohio, and an affable bear of a man, he steered Beloit through the tough years of the Second World War and once, on a fund-raising trip to Philadelphia, accidently crushed a dowager donor’s toy poodle but was forgiven and left with a contribution.

N. Nief. Ron NIef came to Beloit as its public information director in the mid-90s and invented the internationally-known Mindset List for which Beloit was known for twenty years. It was cited by Time and the New Yorker as a go-to source for cultural trends and got Tom McBride on the Today Show thrice.

O. O’Brien. Kirk Patrick O’Brien, a 1983 graduate of Beloit, was one of its most colorful. An English major whose first love was cartooning, he was known at Beloit as The Potato Head for his Celtic ancestry and went on to become a flourishing cartoonist and art teacher in Virginia. His mother was mayor of Charlottesville and won re-election despite her brilliant and eccentric son.

P. Peterson Martha Peterson was Beloit’s 7^th president and is savior during a precarious time in its financial history. A native Kansan who first established her administrative credentials at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, she went on to become president of Barnard College before coming to Beloit and using her considerable connections to right the ship. She was erudite, shrewd, decisive—always a hardy woman of the Kansas plains, on which she is buried.

Q. Q stands for Quiz Shows. The Beloit faculty have rarely defeated the students in on-campus Jeopardy contests. Warren Harshbarger ’78 found himself floundering on Jeopardy in the mid-80s until the category switched over the film, after which he, an expert, cleaned up; while John Christensen ’93, won big on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire in the 1990s. His final answer was the right one.

R. R stands for Round Table, the campus newspaper and the second-oldest in the United States. Over the years it has featured the journalistic debuts of such writing worthies as Tom O’Neil, later a major writer for National Geographic and K.C. Johnson, long-time sports journalist for the Chicago Tribune; and also featured such informative columns as “Madame Exotica” and “Vagina Facts.”

S. Sikanddra Spain. One of Beloit’s most able students in the 1970s, she was a devoted scholar and activist in international relations. She was killed tragically young in the 1980s, but lives on at Beloit in the form of the prestigious Sikandra Spain Award, given annually to the Beloit student who most fosters international understanding.

T. Thomas Chrowder Chamberlin, famous Beloit scientist who first pointed out (in the early 20^th century) the dangers of carbon-based energy as a producer of global warming and who wrote one of the greatest scientific essays of the 20th century, “The Methods of Multiple-Working Hypotheses.”

U. Upton. Miller Upton was Beloit’s longest-serving president after Word War II. A courtly Southerner with a handsome granite face to go along with his six-foot tall perfect posture, he was a former All-American footballer at Tulane and the dean of the Washington University School of Business. He was a political conservative but academic libertarian who presided over the innovative Beloit Plan that motored Beloit’s prestige and prosperity during the 1960s and early 1970s.

V, Velma. Velma Hamilton was an African-American student at Beloit in the 1950s who joined an on-campus sorority only to find that the national chapter shamefully banned the local, Beloit one for welcoming her. Her mother was a Beloit graduate, and so was her brother Harry, a long-time member of the Board of Trustees, and her niece Lisa graduated from Beloit in the early 90s. The snack bar in Beloit’s sports center, “Velma’s Place,” bears her name.

W. W stands for WAC , or the World Affairs Center, long the home of the English and Classics and Modern Languages Departments and also the center of Beloit’s overseas study program. It was originally the first Carnegie Library building established on a college campus and remains a handsome structure with its understated gray walls and pristine Doric columns.

X. X stands for the “Xes” once lightly painted on campus tree trunks to guide the college’s Frisbee-Golf players where the various 18 “holes” were. X is also the Roman numeral for 10 and might remind us of the many Top 10 Lists made by the college, such as “The Best Bargains in American Higher Education” (Parade Magazine) and “The Most Creative Faculty in the United States” (US News & World Report),

Y. Year One. Year One in the college’s history is 1846, when George Colley walked from Mineral Point to Beloit, a distance of over 50 miles, to get a liberal arts education from the newly-established college. President Roger Hull and a group of students replicated and celebrated this walk in the 1980s.

Z. Z stands for Zielinski, as in the redoubtable Jim Zielinski, one of Beloit’s great admissions counselors and recruiters, who was a past master at cultivating high schools across the nation to find good Beloit “fits.”  He is of no relation to Ukraine’s heroic president, but Jim was and always shall be a hero in Beloit College history, serving from the early 90s to the 2000 teens.

The Mindset List of Shrinking Attention Spans

Tom McBride

In the 1600s the philosopher Blaise Pascal said that the world was troubled because so few of its inhabitants could sit in a quiet room alone for an hour without interruption. By this standard, the world is in trouble indeed. The distinguished journal New Philosopher recently called “Distraction” a leading issue of our time and devoted a whole issue to it.  Here is a quick & dirty overview of the issue: a conversation starter for the Age of All-Too-Shortened Focus.

1 2015: Citing a dubious footnote in a Microsoft study, leading media publications proclaimed that the average human attention span is now one-second fewer than that of the average goldfish—whose focus lasts 9 seconds.

2 Goldfish have long been known by marine biologists for their excellent memory and learning capacities.

3 A California professor of “info-metrics” has found that average human screen time has declined from 2+ minutes in 2004 to 47 seconds today.

4 More impulsive personalities and those considered “neurotic” allegedly have shorter screen- time focus.

5 The California professor has found that shrinking ability to focus on a screen is correlated with higher blood pressure.

6 Commercials of 60 seconds were not unusual 20 years ago; now they may be as short as 6.

7 Films made only 15 years ago—such as Atonement and Children of Men—had scenes that lasted up to six minutes.

8 Movie scenes today are shorter than they used to be, and so is the average film’s feature length, but this trend may be due to controlling financial risks as much as to a shorter customer attention span.  

9 It has long been an academic consensus that student attention during a lecture peaks after about 15 minutes and declines thereafter—though the charisma of the lecturer may well lengthen the focus.

10 It seems that we self-interrupt almost as often as we are interrupted—even if our task is not disrupted by a phone call or text message ping, we call or text someone ourselves.

11 On the premise that there are so many features but so little time, websites are now locked into a vicious “attention-economy” struggle—where click bait” is of inestimable value.

12 Those who deny that attention spans area shrinking point out that such spans are task-dependent and that there is no good evidence that people cannot focus on jobs that require longer to complete.

13 Switching often among tasks is sometimes termed “switch costs,” leading to more anxiety, less concentration, and more errors.

14 Some management experts advocate that companies mandate certain times of the day when emails can be neither sent nor received: it is easier to go cold turkey collectively than individually.

15 In Ireland and France are “right to disconnect” regulations that prohibit employers from intruding on employees’ time—with emails or texts—once they are off work and this permits them, if they wish, to lock their phones in a drawer until morning comes.

16 TED talks may be no longer than 18 minutes.

17 On YouTube there are at least 10 videos on the intricate philosophy of existentialism—none longer than 14 minutes.

18 Multi-tasking may be an over-hyped and inefficient “skill” unless you are walking and chewing gum at once or singing in the shower.

19 Some research shows that if you are interrupted doing task 1 you will not return to it for an average of 25 minutes but rather move on to task 2 until you are interrupted again and then move on to task 3.

20 Hiding social media apps on your phone so that you have to work hard to find them might lead to lower hypertension.

21 Those giving public talks might note that Americans check their phones an average of 352 times per day.

22 In a 2009 Pixar film called Up, Squirrel the Talking Dog was distracted with pitiful ease by almost anything.

23 Daily news podcasts are quick to point out that they can cover essential information in under 5 minutes.

24 ADHD diagnoses in children increased fivefold between 1999 and 2010; in adults, they doubled from 2007-2016.

25 This List has taken only a few minutes, tops, to read, but in the spirit of our times of reduced attention, the author is loath to make it longer.

The Mindset List of Throwback Technology

Is it possible to go forward and backwards at the same time? The wisdom about advanced technology seems settled: it comes fast; new is always better; it makes us more productive but tyrannizes our time. And so: there is a reaction—a wish to go backwards with THROWBACK TECHNOLOGY. Some of this is a genuine preference for the older technology; some of it is sheer nostalgia; some of it is the design of an old-tech façade with new-tech convenience. Whatever it is, retro is in!  THE MINDSET LIST OF THROWBACK TECHNOLOGY is a fast and lively look at this peculiar paradox.

1 It took seventeen years for the telegram to replace the Pony Express; it took only eight for the digital camera to replace Polaroid.

2 It took nearly thirty years for TV sets to replace radios as a preferred infotainment option; it took only 13 for video compact discs to replace videocassettes.

3 If you think high tech is going too fast, you can purchase an old-fashioned phonograph—complete with Bluetooth technology.

4 It took thousands of years for typewriters to replace quills, pens, and ink.

5 In 1980 every office had a typewriter; in 1990 few if any did.

6 In the current craze for throwback technology, no one has gone back to typewriters, and there seems to be no way to put word processors into typewriter casings.

7 Feeling nostalgic? You can buy a digital camera housed in Instamatic design.

8 If you are still pushing buttons on your remote controls and not using a touch screen, you are holding a soon-to-be-ancient technology.

9 For those who want to revisit their childhoods, you can buy a hand-held Nintendo player, though it will include FAR more games than you could have imagined when you were ten.

10 When the Walkman started including CDs, it seemed that it could never get any better than that.

11 If you are still planning trips via paper maps, what’s wrong with you?

12 There were smart watches forty years ago, including one that doubled as a stop watch, phone book (up to 10 names), and game player—costing only $355 in 2020 money.  

13 Pagers were everywhere in the 90s; nowhere in the 2000s.

14 If you look hard, you can still buy a curved TV screen, but why would you want to?

15 Ethernet as a connection has gone the way of ether as an anesthetic.

16 Few technologies have fought off obsolescence as well as the FAX machine.

17 There’s now one pay phone for every 3300 Americans, but no lines to use one.

18 It took hundreds of years for white boards to replace blackboards, but only 20 years for interactive whiteboards to replace dumb whiteboards.

19 It took 20 years to go from crank auto windows to power windows; 10 years to go from power windows to remote control ones—you only need your key fob now on a hot day.

20 YouTube is the ultimate jukebox, and if you danced to a jukebox, then you also recall when a car’s headlight dimmer was a steel button on the floor.

21 A phonograph is now called a “vinyl player” and you can buy them in hyper-portable designs.

22 Shown a vintage portable record player from the 1950s, a Millennial asked how you were supposed to jog with it.

23 If you’re feeling ultra-retro, you can buy abacuses now.

24 Etch-a-Sketch is back—for your I-Pad.

25 Want to slow down?  You can buy a rotary phone for as low as 45 bucks.

26 You can still send an American “telegram” (or something that looks like one) via regular postal service.

26 Telegram service is still available in Brazil, Canada, China, Japan, Portugal, Poland, Israel, and 17 other countries.

26 Cars were fully-carbureted forty years ago; now 40 percent of a new car’s cost is its computerization.

26 Number of internet users twenty years ago: 381 million worldwide; today’s total number of users on FACEBOOK ALONE: nearly 3 billion.

27 To escape the autocracy of the Internet and to find a greater variety of styles Gen Z is going back to the Flip Top Phone: you can make the screen—and the digital universe—go away for a while.

28 Sixteen hundred years ago, the book replaced the scroll–until billions of people began to “doom-scroll down their screens with a masochistic thirst for terrible news.

29 Some folks just can’t help themselves: they miss the feel of paper photos, the sound of a keyboard clicking, or the whirr of a camcorder.

30 A YouTube channel devoted to retro tech has over 300,000 subscribers.

31 If we can photograph everything on our phones, how do we know what’s a truly special occasion?

32 Sony has issued a look-alike 1979 Walkman while Atari has launched a look-alike 1982 game console.

33 When will virtual reality be convincing enough so that we can live in the good old days when Fill-in-the-Blank was president and everything was great?

34 There is a market for “new” record players so that you can hear your grandparents’ treasured old 78 RPMs.

35. Look for lovely curved wooden houses–for calculators.

36 Do new technologies in a retro design just seem—somehow—more permanent?

37 For those of you who just can’t shake the childhood joy of drug store fountain cokes, there’s a cylindrical carbonator to take you back to the days of Buddy Holly, Teresa Brewer, and marble counters—and soda jerks.

38 Talk about retro: In a world where parents drool over their kids growing up to be STEM geniuses, the Rubik’s Cube has become, once more, one of the most popular toys on the planet.

39 So far no one wants to bring back floppy discs, even if they were stored in an elegant oaken chest from the good old days.

40 If a xerox machine can’t also print, scan, and fax, no amount of nostalgia can bring it back.