Spotlight: Summer 2004

No cheerful atheists
Along with the self-confidence of belief, the self-confidence of unbelief has also been broken. In contrast to the cozy world of old, protected by the well-intentioned, friendly Nature of the atheistic Enlightenment, the godless world of today is perceived as an afflicted, eternal chaos. It is robbed of all meaning, all direction, all road signs, and all structure. . . . For over a hundred years, since Nietzche announced the death of God, one has rarely seen cheerful atheists. A world in which a person is left to his own powers, in which he has declared himself a free lawgiver for any order of good and evil, in which he—freed from the condition of a slave of God—had hoped to recapture his lost worth, this world has transformed itself into a place of endless worry.

—Leszek Kolakowski, former Polish Marxist philosopher, quoted in Context, October 1, 2003.

Bag end
Since Ireland instituted a 10-cent-per-bag tax last year, shops there have reduced their bag use by 90 percent. The result? A billion fewer plastic bags in the waste stream this year compared to last.

—The Week, quoted in Utne Reader, Jan-Feb 2003.

Multitasking and your health
As a physician involved in preventive medicine, I often ask my patients how they rate their current level of stress. . . . Most admit they are completely stressed out. In the process of exploring why, I've discovered a common denominator. These people are overloaded. Most of us are trying to do too much. And it's a hard habit to break, because our age views multitasking as the normal way of getting things done. If we're not juggling a dozen commitments at once, we tend to think there is something wrong with us.

From a medical perspective, however, the opposite is true. . . . We aren't well adapted to deal with surges of adrenaline and cortisol—two major stress hormones—day after day. In evolutionary terms, traffic jams, two-career marriages and kids involved in six after-school activities were not part of the plan. . . .

Control your impulse to multitask! In the effort to do too much, we actually accomplish less. Rediscover the pleasure and surprising efficiency of doing one thing at a time. Most of us harbor a nagging belief that a slower life is a luxury we can't afford. Our bodies tell us otherwise. Slowing down is essential to our health.

—Dan Beskind in Utne Reader, March-April 2004.

Fizzy fruit?
According to Living Nutrition, British supermarkets are studying the potential of adding carbonation to certain fruits to make them more attractive to kids. Researchers are pumping carbon dioxide into oranges, pineapples and pears, making them fizzy like soda. But bananas aren't on the list; they explode.

Wired kids
A study by the U.S. Department of Education shows that 90 percent of people ages five to seventeen use computers and nearly 60 percent use the Internet. Both numbers surpass those of adults. One out of five five-year-olds uses the Internet, and 60 percent of ten-year-olds surf the Web. At age sixteen, that figure reaches 60 percent. Girls now use the technology as much as boys. However, the gap in racial and ethnic background still remains, with only 41 percent of black students having Internet access at home, compared to nearly two-thirds of white students.

—The Ivy Jungle Report, November 2003.

Start ’em young
School field trips to places like the local fire department or zoo are gradually being replaced by visits to national chain retailers like Toys “R” Us and Petco, which hosted 3,300 student tours last year. Companies like the Field Trip Factory operate as go-betweens to link local schools with corporate chains.

—Source: In These Times.

Move over, Nike
Anticonsumerism guru Kalle Lasn and his Adbusters magazine are entering a marketplace with—what else?—a line of sneakers, notes Reason (Nov. 2003). Blackspot sneakers will be manufactured in a unionized South Korean factory abandoned by Nike. . . . Lasn says, "We decided to stop whining about Nike. Why not make $10 million and use it to run a media literacy campaign instead?"

—Adapted from Utne Reader, March-April 2004.