Sex, Drugs, and Boredom

Through play we can engage in battle with others without real-world consequences. Or we can experience strong feelings without putting ourselves in dangerous situations. Play happens in an imaginary world, a world that doesn't count. That's true, but it's also false. Read More

In the early 1970s, renowned anthropologist Clifford Geertz published his most influential book, The Interpretation of Cultures. The book was widely read throughout the social sciences and humanities, and influenced intellectual agendas in these realms for decades. One of the powerful arguments for which the book is known is Geertz' attack on the idea of human nature. Read More

Games can be so much fun that people devote much of their waking time to them. As they do so, their skill grows, which can make the game even more compelling. At some point, for some people, the game becomes so important that it begins to impinge upon the player's other valued activities, such as other interests or social relationships, and the player's life begins to deteriorate. Read More

Here's a little secret about human beings: We find the raw emotional stimulation of sex and violence and intoxication so compelling, such a turn-on, that we either spend our lives trying to get more of these things or making sure we avoid them. Oh, almost forgot. Read More

If Martians landed on earth and they turned out not to be invaders but anthropologists, we can be certain that they would find many human activities rather puzzling. Head hunting and strange initiation rituals would surely seem bizarre to them, but perhaps nothing would seem so odd as millions of people sitting glued to their televisions watching obese people try and lose weight. "Look! Read More

I'm sure most of you were just as surprised as I was when the world didn't end on May 21, as Harold Camping had prophesied. That is to say, you weren't surprised at all. I had actually made a prophecy of my own the previous week, although it didn't get much media attention. "Lo," I said to my wife, "the world shall not end on May 21. Read More

What do we mean when we say that someone is a fanatic? One variety of fanaticism has to do with religious or political views. This sort of fanatic is a person who is so sure that his or her views are the truth that they see anyone who holds different views as evil or inhuman. Read More

The new year is now upon us, and with each new year comes the pressure to reassess ourselves and our lives, to figure out what we should do differently. I will exercise more! Eat less! Volunteer more! But it's hard to fit anything new in, because we're all so busy, we're all going at 90 miles an hour, right? Read More

It's sometimes difficult to get across in print when you are kidding, so let me state upfront that I don't really think that Bill Gates and his crew are minions of the devil. I do think, however, that the popularity of PowerPoint helps us to understand about how we think about knowledge here in the 21st century. Read More

The rules of the most basic celebrity game are simple. We watch the celebrity, so the celebrity is a special being. But the celebrity is in our world, so...we too are special! Thus you might want to watch a TV program with lots of pictures and video of the glamorous celebrity but with plenty of stories about how the celebrity messes up his or her life. Read More

Having confessed that I don't like museums, I am now ready to reveal that I also don't like shopping. This is unlikely to get picked up by the major news services: "Guy doesn't like shopping!" Of course I don't like shopping, men never like shopping. Read More

I was a late bloomer. There's some self-praise embedded in that statement, because it implies that I bloomed, a point that could be disputed. So we'll just say that to the extent I bloomed, it happened late. Specifically: I didn't start dating until my late teen years, and it was also then I finally stopped growing and discovered my admittedly limited athletic abilities. Read More

Most of what we regard as entertaining is suspenseful. Turn on your television and you will see contests (which man will she choose? Who will lose the most weight?), sporting events, murder mysteries, all sorts of different ways of generating suspense. Even the news attempts to be suspenseful ("Coming up after the break...") Read More

We live in a culture of entertainment, a society in which being entertained is so highly valued that at times it seems that if something isn't entertaining, it should be avoided or ignored. The demand for just about everything to conform to the standards of entertainment has, in the last few decades, extended to the person. You have to be entertaining, or you will be avoided or ignored. Read More