Robin Abrahams's Blog, page 7

Art & empathy

I’m trying to choose reading material for our upcoming vacation, and am debating whether or not to give the “Game of Thrones” books a whirl. I like political intrigue and family drama and dark, violent themes in my books–I also read fast, so a nice long read is a good thing, for a trip. (Even with a Kindle, it’s nice to stay in the same fictive world for a while, when your external environment changes every day.) On the other hand, I’m terrible at visualizing while reading, so extended battle sequences are a no-go, and also I can never follow espionage plots, so there’d better not be any of those.

I’ve asked my friends to chime in, but of course they aren’t going to take any of that into account, they’re simply going to tell me whether or not to read the books based on whether or not they liked them.

It’s a real cognitive load, apparently, to regenerate your memory of a particular experience and judge it against someone else’s criteria. I got interested in that idea a few years before I finished grad school–the idea that most people, even thoughtful and other-oriented people, find it very hard to recommend books (or movies, leisure activities, or restaurants) that will appeal to someone else. The mind defaults to a kind of distributive property of affection: If I like Friend, and I like Book, Friend will surely like Book!

Recently I was in D.C. and had dinner with a writer friend and his wife, a lovely and gracious couple, and mentioned to them after dinner that I was planning to visit the Smithsonian Museums the following day. I must, I was told immediately and enthusiastically by my friend, must see the Air & Space Museum. As he extolled its virtues I made eye contact with his wife, and in her dancing eyes I read the following: “You’re all about the First Lady dresses and the Great Hall of Mammals, aren’t you?” Yes, yes I am. Technology and machinery do not excite me, and I think my friend probably realized that on an abstract level, but his enthusiasm got the better of him. The kind of arts-empathy I was looking for really is difficult to generate and maintain.

There are at least two reasons for this. One is the unconscious assumption mentioned above, that everything I love must also love each other. The other is that memory doesn’t work like a video recorder. We remember what we encode, and we encode what is relevant to us. When my friends with kids ask me if a particular book or play would be appropriate for their child, I usually can’t answer, because I wasn’t watching or reading through that filter in the first place. So the stuff that I’m looking for, or looking to avoid, in an artistic experience might not even exist in your memory of that experience.

I think, though, that the basic reason people are terrible at predicting what other people would like is simply that they’re not trying hard enough. Almost all social reasoning–figuring out who to trust, what social cues to mimic, etc.–is done through rough, semi-aware heuristics. You can improve your reasoning through active effort. Social interaction is so much the water in which we fishies swim that half the time we’re not even fully conscious of it.

I used to randomly shove books that I loved at people I loved, and sometimes it would “take” and sometimes it wouldn’t. In grad school, my dissertation was on mental models of literary genres–or how people think about different kinds of stories–and started using my own research to better predict what I, and my good-read-seeking friends, might enjoy. It’s a fun exercise.

Here are some questions to ask yourself about what types of books (or plays, movies, television shows–stories are stories, to some extent) you enjoy.

Do you prefer

… stories about a complex individual or stories about a whole society?

… stories in which people compete with each other or in which they cooperate to solve a problem?

… stories that are universal in theme or stories that paint a vivid picture of a particular time and place?

… stories about extraordinary, unusual people and events, or stories about the ordinary and everyday?

… stories in which people are from very different walks of life, or stories about groups of equals?

It’s a different way of thinking than the usual “mystery,” “science fiction,” “romance” categories. See if it helps you make better recommendations!

Sunday column: Ladytax edition

Today’s column is online here, and it’s one of those odd ones with one serious and one not-so-very question. I hope they balance all right to the reader.

The first is from a woman who has overheard neighbors fighting, and seen the relationship end and then, unfortunately, renew itself. What struck me when I read it the first time was how much mental energy the LW had put into the situation already. I wrote, “First off, I’m sorry that you’re experiencing this. Intimate-partner abuse doesn’t only affect the direct victim but that person’s family, friends, co-workers, and neighbors?—?it’s not merely a private concern, but a public health problem.” The immediate evil of domestic violence, or rape, or harassment, or discrimination, is apparent, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the amount of energy even women who are not victims spend in thinking about these things. The waste of all that energy.

And this week Amanda Taub wrote a piece in Vox that sums up everything I was thinking:

Which brings us to the ways in which these sorts of attitudes disadvantage all women. When our society treats consent as “everything other than sustained, active, uninterrupted resistance,” that misclassifies a whole range of behavior as sexually inviting. That, in turn, pressures women to avoid such behavior in order to protect themselves from assault.

As a result, certain opportunities are left unavailable to women, while still others are subject to expensive safety precautions, such as not traveling for professional networking unless you can afford your own hotel room. It amounts, essentially, to a tax that is levied exclusively on women. And it sucks.

Taub’s piece focuses on rape and sexual crimes, but her point can be taken more generally. A smart analysis, and a sobering one.

“All About Emily” and acting natural

This weekend I read Connie Willis’s novella “All About Emily,” a slight comedy of backstage intrigue, ambition, and … robots:

“Oh, dear.” Emily looked over at Dr. Oakes. “I knew I should have said I wanted to be an actress.” She turned back to me. “But I was afraid that might give the impression that I wanted your job, and of course I don’t. Artificials don’t want to take anyone’s job away from them.”

“Our artificials are designed solely to help humans,” Dr. Oakes said, “and to do only tasks that make humans’ jobs easier and more pleasant,” and this was obviously the company spiel. “They’re here to bring an end to those machines everyone hates—the self-service gas pump, the grocery store checkout machine, electronic devices no one can figure out how to program. Wouldn’t you rather have a nice young man fixing the bug in your laptop than a repair program? Or have a friendly, intelligent operator connect you to the person you need to talk to instead of trying to choose from a dozen options, none of which apply to your situation? Or—” he nodded at me, “tell you who starred in the original production of a musical rather than having to waste time looking it up on Google?”

“And you can do all that?” I asked Emily. “Pump gas and fix computers and spit out twenties?”

“Oh, no,” she said, her eyes wide. “I’m not programmed to do any of those things. I was designed to introduce artificials to the public.”

(You can read part of the story here.)

Connie Willis is one of my favorite authors for blending SF with 1940s screwball-comedy style banter. This novella isn’t great, but it’s a quick and entertaining read, and would possibly make a good stage play. Sometimes books and stories that are a little flat on the page come to wonderful life on stage or screen. Ms. Willis also predicts that “Chicago” will still be running in revival in 20 years, which strikes me as a safe bet. (Her chronology is a little dicey, but she has a good deal of fun predicting who and what will be lighting up Broadway in the near future.)

“All About Emily” is, of course, a takeoff on “All About Eve,” and the charming android Emily does ultimately decide she wants a stage career. Not as an actress, though, playing the messy heroines of Ibsen or Churchill. Emily wants to be a Rockette.

What else would a robot want to be? And yet, how unsatisfying would it be to watch the Rockettes and know that their illusion of inhuman perfection is no illusion? The whole point of the Rockettes is the uncanny spectacle of people behaving with the precision and uniformity of machines. Nobody would want to watch a robot Rockette.

A robot Medea, though? That might at least spark curiosity.

Theater, even at its most realistic, is not supposed to be indistinguishable from ordinary life. We want to be able to see a sliver of light between the actor and the character. We want to know what gap was bridged.

Stephen King is making Ebola worse

Salon addresses Ebola panic:

Ebola, at least from the American perspective, is something like the great white shark. It’s dangerous, all right, but the odds that it’s going to get you are vanishingly small. Fear of large predators and fear of the plague are deeply encoded in human experience and handed down from our ancestors. Maybe an instinctive response is invoked that we can’t resist. But in both cases, the self-refueling cycle of media panic is an epidemic that’s almost certainly more destructive than the original phenomenon itself — and the fear is not really about what we claim it’s about.

Author Andrew O’Hehir identifies the usual suspects for our collective overreaction: cognitive biases honed by evolution, fear-mongering by Fox News and its ilk, and the fact that the Ebola epidemic fits neatly, oh, far too neatly, into the kinds of stories we’ve already learned to tell and read:

Indeed, I’d suggest that Ebola-panic (like shark-panic) is shaped and informed by fictional thrillers — in this case, yarns about civilization-destroying plagues and the zombie apocalypse and so forth. It also taps into our cultural narcissism and xenophobia, into the paranoid imperial perception that American civilization is the center of the world and also that it’s precariously balanced, and constantly under attack from dangerous outsiders. All it takes is a handful of African visitors with cardboard suitcases and undiagnosed infections, and next thing you know the cable goes out at Mom’s house and we have to eat the neighbors.

Theater and science bump up against each other in all kinds of ways, and one of those ways is understanding the psychological science of storytelling. Humans are a narrative species, we put everything in story form–but reality is under no obligation to actually unwind itself like a well-told tale. In real life events may occur that do not foretell, call back to, or symbolize anything at all. They just happen.

Storytelling can be crucial to good science, but one thing science does is to slap us out of that storifying instinct, and give us a way to demonstrate reality to other people besides telling stories about it. Artists tell. Scientists show.

I’m struggling now to have a rational response to the Ebola crisis. Practically every friend I have has posted the NPR “You’re Not Going to Get Ebola Already” graph:

… and I believe it, I really do.

But if there were going to be a zombie apocalypse … this is what the beginning of it would look like.

I’m a Stephen King fan going back years, see, and what people who think they don’t like Stephen King don’t realize is how utterly mundane and realistic his work is. Until the werewolves show up. But until then, it’s ordinary people living ordinary lives. A New England couple, say, who are doing basically okay, although she’s a little bored in her career and he’s coming off a big project and feeling burned out and they’ve both got some eldercare worries hanging over their heads and are planning a vacation in the Southwest to recharge their relationship.

And as he’s digging out from a mountain of licensing agreements and P&L statements and she’s looking up dude ranches in Flagstaff, they see the headlines and video clips from Africa … and then the quieter news of one patient identified in Dallas … and an editorial in the nation’s paper of record about what “virologists are loath to discuss openly but are definitely discussing in private.”

This is exactly how Stephen King would write it.

And stories fit in my head better than statistics. I don’t have to behave irrationally, and I can despise the fearmongering and xenophobia that people are bringing to this situation, but I can’t respond to it as though I haven’t spent decades reading and watching stories that began exactly like this.

Art will always have unintended consequences. Stephen King is a great humanitarian, a good writer, and by all accounts one hell of a mensch. But he’s taught us how horror looks–not in a Transylvanian castle, but in a Somerville three-decker. He’s taught us to see the terror in the everyday, he’s pulled it out of the gothic tradition and pushed it into comedies of manners and coming-of-age tales. So that now, when we see some loose thread of worry, it’s so easy to imagine pulling it until the entire garment of our comfortable-if-annoying middle-class lives unravels.

Sunday column: Everyone’s Poor Edition

Today’s column is online here and, like last week’s, features a story of cheapness. Last week’s LW wanted to skimp on paying a babysitter the going rate–this week’s LWs have been “invited to spend a weekend with friends at their Cape vacation home. In addition to the request to buy and cook dinner one night, we are also asked to bring a roll of toilet paper, paper towels, our own beverages, including bottled water, and provide our own lunches throughout the weekend.”

I’ve got a few more like that in the pipeline, too. I try to keep the column balanced, with not too many questions in a row on the same topic, or too many where I say the LW is wrong, or so on. People like variety. But the money questions are coming in fast and furious. In the next couple of weeks I’ve got one about how much one should contribute to a group gift, another one about cheap hosts that I discussed on my Facebook page, and one about what to do when you’re hit up for donations by friends.

I’ll believe the recession is over when I stop having to worry about running too many money questions in a row.

Science informing theater: Autism-friendly “Lion King”

A friend of mine posted this on Facebook* and I found it fascinating. “The Lion King,” playing in Boston through October 11, will be doing an “autism-friendly” performance on October 10. From Boston Magazine:

The show is still the same production that we all know and love, but with some slight tweaks in order to create a sensory-friendly and, most-importantly, judgment-free environment. Some of the unique elements include: a reduction of jarring sounds and overall intensity and volume level; the elimination of strobe lights focused on the audience; the addition of a “calming area” for audience members; and trained staff and volunteers to provide real-time support.

“They leave the house lights up so that people can come and go,” [director of state government affairs for Autism Speak Judith] Ursitti says. “That’s a big accommodation that they provide. Many times, people with autism need a sensory break and they need a place to go. The production itself, what you see on the stage, the changes are subtle. It’s mainly sound and lighting changes. The scene with the hyenas in the elephant graveyard where there’s a lot of little geysers shooting up and there lots of light and noise, they only do one little light, and special effects like that are reduced.”

Now that’s science theater! The idea that autistic kids might enjoy plays, but have a hard time coping with the sensory overload and the social rules of theatergoing, is frankly groundbreaking. Until recently–I mean until very recently–we were thinking of autism only in terms deficits in social reasoning. And if autistic people didn’t understand the games people play and the motivations that led them to play those games, what on earth could they possibly get out of going to a show? Increasingly, though, researchers are looking at the autism spectrum in terms of sensory processing. This is clearly the model that the modified “Lion King” is using.

This article in Salon–an excerpt from Gregory Hickok’s book on neurology and cognition–is a heavy read, but does an outstanding job explaining the various controversies in the field. Here he is on the logic of the sensory-overload hypothesis:

This kind of effect—hyper-responsivity leading to avoidance— is observed regularly and uncontroversially in the sensory domain. Autistic individuals often cover their ears when even moderately loud sounds are present in the environment and exhibit other forms of avoidance behavior. As with the rock concert sound system example at the beginning of this chapter, if an autistic person failed to get information out of moderately loud sounds or simply left the room, we wouldn’t say that he or she had a diminished capacity to hear the sound. The response is more readily explained as an increased sensitivity to sensory stimulation. As autistic author Temple Grandin said in a radio interview, “How is a person going to socialize if their ears are so sensitive that just being at a restaurant is like being inside the speaker at a rock ‘n’ roll concert and it’s hurting their ears?” Good question.

One piece of evidence cited for autistics’ supposed lack of concern for other people’s mental states is that autistic people often do not look at faces, either in social situations or in lab experiments. However, what if faces contained too much information for them to focus on?

Also consistent with the alternative, emotional hyperreactivity hypothesis are statements from autistic individuals themselves. Here’s a sample gleaned from a paper covering face processing in autism: It’s painful for me to look at other people’s faces. Other people’s eyes and mouths are especially hard for me to look at.

My lack of eye contact sometimes makes people, especially my teachers and professors, think that I’m not paying attention to them.

—Matthew Ward, student, University of Wisconsin

Eyes are very intense and show emotions. It can feel creepy to be searched with the eyes. Some autistic people don’t even look at the eyes of actors or news reporters on television.

—Jasmine Lee O’Neill, author

For all my life, my brothers and everyone up ’til very recently, have been trying to make me look at them straight in the face. And that is about the hardest thing that I, as an autistic person, can do, because it’s like hypnosis. And you’re looking at each other square in the eye, and it’s very draining.

—Lars Perner, professor, San Diego State University

These are revealing statements for two reasons. First, they provide a clear indication of an intact theory of mind in these individuals (“my lack of eye contact . . . makes people . . . think that . . .”). And second, active avoidance of eye contact provides just as much evidence for sensitivity to the information contained therein as does active engagement of eye contact. If you can’t recognize that there is information in the eyes, why avoid them?

In this piece from the New York Times, a father recounts how Disney movies have enabled him to connect with his autistic son. Owen Suskind’s extreme affinity for Disney movies gave him an emotional vocabulary, a set of images and metaphors and models for being that he could use to interact with the world around him. He learned to read by sussing out the credits.

Owen’s chosen affinity clearly opened a window to myth, fable and legend that Disney lifted and retooled, just as the Grimm Brothers did, from a vast repository of folklore. Countless cultures have told versions of “Beauty and the Beast,” which dates back 2,000 years to the Latin “Cupid and Psyche” and certainly beyond that. These are stories human beings have always told themselves to make their way in the world.

But what draws kids like Owen to these movies is something even more elemental. Walt Disney told his early animators that the characters and the scenes should be so vivid and clear that they could be understood with the sound turned off. Inadvertently, this creates a dream portal for those who struggle with auditory processing, especially, in recent decades, when the films can be rewound and replayed many times.

The latest research that Cornelia and I came across seems to show that a feature of autism is a lack of traditional habituation, or the way we become used to things. Typically, people sort various inputs, keep or discard them and then store those they keep. Our brains thus become accustomed to the familiar. After the third viewing of a good movie, or a 10th viewing of a real favorite, you’ve had your fill. Many autistic people, though, can watch that favorite a hundred times and seemingly feel the same sensations as the first time. While they are soothed by the repetition, they may also be looking for new details and patterns in each viewing, so-called hypersystemizing, a theory that asserts that the repetitive urge underlies special abilities for some of those on the spectrum.

Disney provided raw material, publicly available and ubiquitous, that Owen, with our help, built into a language and a tool kit. I’m sure, with enough creativity and energy, this can be done with any number of interests and disciplines. For some kids, their affinity is for train schedules; for others, it’s maps. While our household may not be typical, with a pair of writerly parents and a fixation on stories — all of which may have accentuated and amplified Owen’s native inclinations — we have no doubt that he shares a basic neurological architecture with people on the autism spectrum everywhere.

The challenge is how to make our example useful to other families and other kids, whatever their burning interest. That’s what Team Owen seems to be talking about. How does this work? Is there a methodology? Can it be translated from anecdote to analysis and be helpful to others in need?

Yes, parents of neurotypical kids, there are children who want to watch “Frozen” over and over again in a way that makes your daughter look like a quitter. Let it go!

From laboratory to stage to family rec room, scientists and artists and parents are using stories and theater to understand the human mind–and using our increasing knowledge of the human mind to tell stories in new ways. Ways that more of us can understand.

This kind of thing excites me, and fills me with great hope.

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Thoughts on science theater from a local actor

Casey Preston, a local actor who excels at playing men who are not very intelligent, is in fact very intelligent (that’s the “acting” part, you see!) and wrote an absolutely brilliant response to the beginning of my science-theater manifesto. He’s a little bit skeptical of the endeavor. Here’s what he had to say–much to chew on and I wanted to make sure no one missed it:

I have a number of thoughts floating around in my head about science theater due to being an actor, having a graduate degree in the sciences, having done dramaturgy and acted in science based shows, and having watched more than a few. Mostly, I think theater about science is a trap.

Here are just a few brief thoughts:

1) Almost invariably, actors speaking about scientific concepts sound like they do not understand what they are saying. It is like speaking in a foreign language and having a vague idea of the concept, but not a firm grasp or conceptualization of the actual words.

2) When a show is about competing ideas, the director and actors often try to enhance the drama of the debate. After all, theater is about conflict, right? But, if you are having a passionate argument about science, you are doing science wrong. The scientific method is about testing ideas, not arguing about them. Turning science into a competitive debate is fundamentally misunderstanding and doing a disservice to science. This is how we end up with the fiascos of climate change and vaccinations.

3) The vast majority of audiences don’t want to go to a show whose fundamental purpose is about teaching them about science. Most people don’t enjoy science. Sure, they like entertaining shows that touch on scientific themes, but actual scientific research is boring.

4) Science and research is a very introverted activity. Therefore, shows about these topics have to find artificial ways to make it interesting. Of course, this is the nature of theater, but it also fundamentally misrepresents the nature of the scientific process. Also, most scientists are quite introverted and this can make public presentations by scientists boring.

5) Almost all scientific based shows seem to have this eureka moments of discovery. “Oh my goodness, I just cured polio!” Great theater, but it misrepresents how almost all actual science works.

All that being said, the scientific shows that seem to get produced the most and are the most successful are generally biographical in nature. The scientific themes are not driving the plot and it is still a character based show. Often these shows fall into the trap of having big arguments and conflict around scientific concepts and eureka moments of discovery, but it is still entertaining.

Most people with a decent science education have long ago learned to disregard all science in movies and television so that they can still enjoy the story. The science in entertainment is always junk. I realize that this is the basic point of your blog post- that it doesn’t have to be junk. But, as any decent writer will tell you, the reality of the situation is driven by the emotional life of the characters, not the external physics or processes of the environment. This is why I, personally, preferred the absolute scientific unreality of Snowpiercer, to the almost reality of Apes. I kept questioning the science in Apes, like why people all congregated in the fort and how their power worked, whereas in Snowpiercer I could just accept that the physics served the story and the characters.

Finally, I think the real market for science based theater is educational theater for elementary and middle school. Parents and some schools are willing to pay for theater if they think their kids will learn something. Much more so than they are willing to pay to go see science based theater themselves. Also, the basic science at these levels is much more exciting and the joy of discovery more immediate.

Good luck with your endeavor. I think it is a worthwhile cause, but I also think it can be very hard to do science theater well.

I don’t think Casey has put the bullet through the head of science theater, but he’s certainly identified a lot of the problems with it. His first point, about actors not knowing what they’re saying … yes. I’ve seen that. But I’ve also seen Bryan Cranston as Walter White. It’s not inevitable. One thing I’d like to see happen in Boston would be for actors to know where to go to research science-heavy roles, and for local scientists to open themselves up to be “shadowed” by actors looking to learn.

His points about the tension between science and story are harder to reconcile. One of the reasons I chose to study narrative in grad school was because of my increasing realization that the human mind puts events in story form–it just does–but reality is under no obligation to conform to narrative constraints. We see stories even when they aren’t there. Show people a bunch of shapes moving randomly around a screen and ask them to narrate, and you’ll get a story–”The big circle is chasing the little triangle so it’s hiding with the squares …” And we have culturally conditioned expectations of what a “good” story is. And that high-conflict, big-moment, dramatized “good” story, as Casey rightly points out, is often very untrue to the science of the thing.

Does it have to be? That’s the question. Must story always traduce science? This is what Central Square Theater’s “Emilie” is about.

And if you can tell a story about whether “storifying” is a problem in science, then obviously stories aren’t all bad. But are we making a mistake to get the concept of “science theater” all hung up on stories anyway? Maybe stories aren’t the way to do science theater. Casey is right that tales of great discoveries that are realized to be such in the moment, and scientists with bigger-than-life personalities, and vivid yet comprehensible-to-the-layperson arguments are thin on the ground in real science.

But both science and theater operate under the rubric of demonstration. Scientists have to show their results. They set the stage for a thing to happen, and watch to see if that thing does happen, and try their best to make it happen in a way that will convince everyone else that they, too, saw the same thing, and it means what the scientists said it meant. If that’s not show business, I don’t know what is. There has to be something in that.

Sunday column: Never Mind That, Go See This Play Edition

Today’s column is online here, and it’s a scorcher–I don’t often come down hard on Letter Writers, even when they’re wrong, but I did on this one. You just don’t argue a teenager into taking less money than she thinks is fair to babysit your kid for a whole day. That’s just wrong:

But I’m not fussed that you didn’t know the current market rates. What I am fussed by is that you verbally bullied a teenager into giving up an entire Saturday for an amount of money that she clearly felt wasn’t worth it. Oh yes you did. Don’t you play all innocent with me. When an adult dumps a whole load of facts over a kid’s head like a verbal ice bucket challenge, that’s bullying?—?the polite, civilized kind that leaves the victim feeling like the bad guy. Have you read any of the studies about how women don’t negotiate their salaries as aggressively as men do? The next time you’re sitting down over the latte and cronut that you bought with the $16 you saved by haggling a teenager down to minimum wage, you might want to catch up on that literature. And ask yourself where, exactly, young women get the notion that their labor isn’t worth much and that assertiveness doesn’t pay off. And ask yourself if that’s the world you want your daughter to grow up in.

I’m glad people are still talking about the ice bucket challenge. That’s the problem with writing a hip, “now” advice column that has a four-week-advance deadline–I do sometimes throw in pop-culture references and hope that we’re still doing that thing, or no one has found out anything horrible about that instant celebrity, in three more weeks when the column runs.

What I really want to talk about, though, is Actors’ Shakespeare Project’s freaking gorgeous production of “Comedy of Errors,” which we saw last night (and which also illustrates the character-eroding dangers of treating one’s household help poorly). Director David Gammons conceived the play as the production of a small number of off-hours circus sideshow performers–sisters Ariana and Luciana, for example, are played by a pair of “conjoined twins,” Sarah Newhouse and Richard Snee. (Yes, Richard. Because it’s a madhouse circus!) It’s hilariously funny–there is usually more going on onstage than you can fully take in–and surprisingly moving. Mostly, though, it’s breathtakingly inventive and fun to watch–the showbiz hilarity of “30 Rock” with the creepy vibe of Tom Waits and Amanda Palmer layered over it.

If you’ve never seen a Shakespeare play before because you thought it would be boring, or that you wouldn’t understand the language–go see this one. The actors are all playing characters who also think that about Shakespeare, see! So it’s all extremely clear and vividly illustrated.

Basically, with this production, ASP just did for Shakespeare what Joss Whedon did for horror movies in “Cabin in the Woods.”

I’m going to shut up about it now and leave you with a picture and a link to the tickets page.

Photo by Stratton McCrady Photography

Dramatic readings from science reports, and other events

So many science events! Tonight, Mr. Improbable will be doing “Improbable Dramatic Readings — brief public readings from bizarre — yet genuine — scientific studies” at 7pm at Porter Square Books. Per Mr. I:

The studies — which we will treat as if they are dramatic literature written for actors to perform — are things I wrote about in my new book This Is Improbable Too.

The guest readers are:

Robin Abrahams (“Miss Conduct” columnist, and assistant opera director at the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony)

Jean Berko Gleason (Boston University Professor Emerita of Psychology, creator of the Wug Test, and deliverer of the “Welcome, Welcome” speech at the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony)

Gary (pork-up-his-nose) Dryfoos (Majordomo at the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, and new Internet celebrity and press darling because of his photogenic demonstration, at the recent Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, of how and why doctors stuffed cured pork up a patient’s nose)

We did a similar event at Harvard Bookstore earlier this month, with Harvard physics professor Melissa Franklin, BU prof Corky White, and Emperor of Ice Cream Gus Rancatore–and me–as guest readers. Here’s the WGBH film of the event!

The outstanding science play “Emilie: La Marquise du Chatelet Defends Her Life Tonight” continues at Central Square Theater this weekend through October 5.

On Monday I’m going to an afternoon lecture on “Science/Fiction: Dramatic Arts as a Medium for Translating Science” by Benjamin Morris, a member of the Catalyst Collaborative at MIT. This talk is part of the Science, Technology and Society series at Harvard, also featuring a lecture on “Ecologies of Paradox: A Typology of Scientific Surprise in the Anthropocene” later next month. I can’t wait to go to that one.

Next weekend, MIT presents Hacking Arts 2014:

“In a world… that increasingly values sensory experiences over physical things, interactions between the arts and technology are producing more moving, interactive, personal and immersive experiences than ever before. To extend these capabilities and inspire new advances in the creative industries, we present… Hacking Arts”

This looks fantastic–dig this crazy schedule for Saturday, featuring all kinds of lectures and live performers–but it’s Yom Kippur, dammit. But you, you should go ahead and go. I’ll stay here and atone. In the dark.

Coming up–

Tickets to BAHFest, the Festival of Bad Ad Hoc Hypotheses, are on sale and selling quickly, so get yours now! BAHFest, coming to Boston on October 19, is one of the best nights of science comedy I’ve seen. I’ll be seeing it again this year, as a judge, onstage, so come say hello afterward.

Finally, the Cambridge Science Festival is accepting submissions for its 2015 Festival, running April 17-26. Proposals are due December 5:

The Cambridge Science Festival team is busy planning our 9th annual festival! Every year, awesome people, companies, labs, businesses and organizations host events and programs to celebrate science, technology, engineering, art, and math (STEAM) at the festival. Now is your chance to join us! Submit proposals for lectures, performances, activities, exhibits, tours, debates, workshops, or creative new ideas we’ve never imagined.

We look for events that offer audience appeal and technical feasibility while we also consider site availability and funding. You are encouraged to involve community organizations in the planning and production of your events so that we can make sure as much of the community is involved in and benefits from the festival as possible. Don’t worry, the whole process is curated so that we can ensure the highest quality festival.

So, hey! Come join us!! There’s a heck of a lot of really cool science out there and it’s time we celebrated the good stuff!! Submit an event or contact us with questions and ideas!

Miss Conduct needs your workplace questions!

I’m doing a special column for an upcoming issue on “Best Places to Work,” and am looking for office-etiquette or career-planning questions. You can leave them in comments or email them to missconduct@globe.com.