This past week Eric Asimov’s Wine’s Pleasures: Are They All in Your Head? reigned as the number one emailed article at the New York Times. It’s #3 as I write this, and is quite simply a superb article, wrapping so much into 1700 words. Makes me a little jealous, since it’s a great model for what we do here, both in content and style.

Here’s Asimov’s opening hook, “The mind of the wine consumer is a woolly place, packed with odd and arcane information fascinating to few. Like the pants pocket of a 7-year-old boy, it’s full of bits of string, bottle caps and shiny rocks collected while making the daily rounds of wine shops, restaurants, periodicals and the wine-soaked back alleys of the Internet.”

Asimov then takes on recent reports of wine that reduced it to expectations and over-rated prices—the “normal people like the cheap stuff in blind taste tastes” kind of thing. “In press accounts of two studies on wine psychology, consumers have been portrayed as dupes and twits, subject to the manipulations of marketers, critics and charlatan producers who have cloaked wine in mystique and sham sophistication in hopes of better separating the public from its money.”

Asimov proceeds to do something unusual for most journalists, he digs deeper into the actual data. And what does he find? Significant variation. Sure, novices do like the cheap champagne, but the experts prefer the Dom Perignon. So there is no such thing as the “average oenophile.”

Continue reading “Wine’s Pleasures”

My Notre Dame students are great! All eight of their group posts are now up. I am so proud of them and the effort that they put into this project.

Already their posts have been read more than 1400 times, and been linked to from sites like Mind Hacks and Sharp Brains and promoted at del.icio.us and Stumble Upon. I hope to see much more as the word continues to gets out.

The eight posts came out of my class on “Alcohol and Drugs: The Anthropology of Substance Use and Abuse,” and represent the range of perspectives brought to bear on substance use over the course of the semester. Though I guided each group through multiple revisions, each post represents an argument that the students developed on a particular topic.

I started the series off with Stress and Addiction: The Vicious Cycle, which showed how stress and substance use go hand in hand, reinforcing a cycle of addiction.

Next was The Problem of Post-Conventional Outlaws, which examined how the US Drug War is increasingly at odds with our modern sensibilities of self.

The Genetic and Environmental Bases of Addiction was the third post in the series, an essay that took on both nature and nurture and won!

Fourth came Inequality and Drug Use, providing a clear demonstration on how social status and marginalization feed into worse drug use and even worse outcomes.

The other middle child was Understanding Brain Imaging, a comprehensive presentation of the different imaging technologies used to understand addiction and other mental health problems. Well worth a look!

It’s Our Fault: Denial, Disease and Addiction showed how the social roots of denial and misperceptions about what counts as a disease make for a double whammy against people struggling with alcohol and drug use.

The seventh post was Culture and Learning to Drink: What Age? This one covered debates about the legal drinking age in the United States, with an even-handed consideration of the costs involved and the varied ways we might think more creatively about how better to learn to drink.

Last but most certainly not least, College Drinking: Battle of the Sexes? examined how central gender is to the drinking culture on US college campus, in particular to understanding and doing something about binge drinking.

A great mix of essays! Please enjoy them.

-Daniel Lende

Savage Minds, the blog of “notes and queries in anthropology,” has an important post on “Camelot Revisited: The Department of Defense’s New Plan for Academia.” Robert Gates, Secretary of Defense and former university professor, wants to buy our research and shape it to military uses.

As the post says, “His goal is not to further the overall body of knowledge within academic disciplines, but to increase the military’s stock of knowledge about ‘the countries or cultures we [are] dealing with.’ And by ‘dealing with’, he doesn’t mean tourism.”

Why object? Besides the pernicious skewing of free inquiry (funding matters to researchers and university administrators alike), there is a more important argument: “it treats humans—their lives, their culture, their behavior—as means to an end. This is not knowledge for knowledge’s sake, not by a long stretch. It’s not knowledge for the betterment of humanity. It’s not even knowledge for the satisfaction of human curiosity. It’s knowledge for the achievement of strategic goals—goals that are set and grow out of particular political interests, not the priorities of anthropology and the other social sciences. Goals that take a particular status quo—US imperialism, to put a blunt point on it—as desirable, necessary, and even natural.”

Don’t think the military will do such a thing? They certainly are learning how to work the media, as the New York Times reports in Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand. Now they have a plan for academia too.