NYT: We Agreed to Agree, and Forgot to Notice
Looking at the recent surges by Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee, Kirk Johnson wonders if the United States is on the verge of a cultural turning point:

But theres no doubt that for one night, in one state, Americans dramatically changed the subject. Race didnt matter even though Mr. Obama was an African-American running in a nearly all-white state but talk of unity and common ground did, as Mr. Obama galvanized his supporters by promising to toss historical and political division aside.

How far rhetoric and passion can take a man, or a nation, is another question, and theres plenty of reason to doubt were anywhere near a transformative era in 2008. Look around today, Dr. Bunzl and other social theorists say, and its easy to see nothing but cynicism, apathy, polarization and political gridlock.

But if you listen closely, you might hear something a faint but persistent tapping at the window that economists, criminologists and biologists say is the sound of change arriving anyway. From capital punishment to global warming to homosexuality to abortion, many of the social issues that divide us are shifting and evolving perhaps even in some instances into a new consensus, or at least, and no less profoundly, toward a reframing of the old debates.

POLITICS might be stuck in the slow lane, but science, capitalism and American culture and society are decidedly not, and all are making creative end runs around the gridlock. Mr. Obamas call in his Iowa victory speech for a coalition for change that stretches through red states and blue states evokes an earlier time in America, but it also suggests a future that may be unfolding no matter what politicians like him say or do.

Blogcritics: The Metaphorical Medicine of House
Diane Kristine talks with Lisa Sanders, NYT’s “Diagnosis” columnist and technical advisor to the TV show House:

“I have never broken into any of my patients’ houses,” she added dryly. “I have on occasion made house calls, but I ring the doorbell and if they’re not home, I come back later.”

Yet she brings this up not simply as a critique, but rather a way of illustrating the show’s metaphorical take on medicine.

“One of the things we do, one of the great pleasures of being a doctor, is you get to ask all these incredibly nosy, intrusive questions,” Sanders said. “People can feel extremely violated with intimacy. Of course, it’s part of a trusting relationship, you hope, but you probe into the inner recesses of their personal life as if you were breaking into their house.”

“Their propensity to break into houses is a perfect visual representation, a psychological representation, of what we’re doing,” she continued. “I love that.”

Wired: The Next Victim of Climate Change Will Be Our Minds
Clive Thompson looks at climate change induced sadness, a phenomenon Glenn Albrecht — a philosopher by training — calls solastalgia:

Everyone’s worrying about resource management and the spooky, unpredictable changes in the ecosystem. We fret over which areas will get flooded as sea levels rise. We estimate the odds of wars over clean water, and we tally up the species polar bears, whales, wading birds that’ll go extinct.

But we should also be concerned about the huge toll climate change will inflict on our mental health. In the modern, industrialized West, many of us have forgotten how deeply we rely on the stability of nature for our psychic well-being. In a world of cheap airfares, laptops, and the Internet, we proudly regard mobility as a sign of how advanced we are. Hey, we’re nomadic hipster capitalists! We love change. Only losers get attached to their hometowns.

This is a neat mythos, but in truth it’s a pretty natural human urge to identify with a place and build one’s sense of self around its comforts and permanence. I live in Manhattan, where the globe-hopping denizens tend to go berserk if their favorite coffee shop closes down. How will they react in 20 or 30 years if the native trees can’t handle the 5-degree spike in average temperature? Or if weird new bugs infest the city in summer, fall shrinks to a single month, and snow becomes a distant memory? “We like to think that we’re cool, 21st-century people, but the basic sense of a connection to the land is still big,” Albrecht says. “We haven’t evolved that much.

-Greg Dahlmann