Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 140

Talking with — not just to — kids powers how they learn language

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Children from the poorer strata of society begin life not only with material disadvantages but cognitive ones. Decades of research have confirmed this, including a famous 1995 finding by psychologists Betty Hart and Todd Risley: By age four children reared in poverty have heard 30 million fewer words, on average, than their peers from wealthier families. That gap has been linked to shakier language skills at the start of school, which, in turn, predicts weaker academic performance.

But the sheer quantity of words a toddler hears is not the most significant influence on language acquisition. Growing evidence has led researchers to conclude quality matters more than quantity, and the most valuable quality seems to be back-and-forth communication — what researchers variously call conversational turns, duets or contingent talk.

A paper published last week in Psychological Science brings a new dimension of support to this idea, offering the first evidence these exchanges play a vital role in the development of Broca’s area, the brain region most closely associated with producing speech. Further, the amount of conversational turns a child experiences daily outweighs socioeconomic status in predicting both activity in Broca’s area and the child’s language skills.

The study, from the lab of neuroscientist John Gabrieli of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, involved 36 children, ages four to six, from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds. It had three components: First, researchers used standardized tests to evaluate each child’s verbal ability and derive a composite score. Second, the brain of each child was scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while the child listened to very short (15-second) stories. Lastly, adult–child communication at home was evaluated for two days using a state-of-the art recording and analysis system called LENA (Language Environment Analysis) to measure adult speech, the child’s utterances and their “conversational turns” — paired exchanges separated by no more than five seconds.

The researchers confirmed the classic 1995 finding that, overall, kids from wealthier families hear more words. And although their sample was small, they even confirmed the 30-million-word gap between the poorest and richest children. But what correlated most closely with a child’s verbal score was not the number of words he or she heard but the number of conversational turns. And these exchanges were the only aspect of language measured by LENA that correlated with the intensity of activity seen in Broca’s area during the fMRI story session. “We found that by far the biggest driver for brain development was not the number of words spoken but the conversations,” Gabrieli says. And although on average parents with greater income and education have more of these verbal exchanges with their young children, “there’s pretty good diversity,” he notes. In other words, some low-income parents engaged in a lot of conversation with their child and some wealthier parents conversed relatively little.

The researchers calculated that a child’s verbal ability score increased by one point for every additional 11 conversational exchanges per hour.

How exactly exposure to these exchanges alters Broca’s area is a question Gabrieli’s team is exploring in subsequent research. “We know that greater activation in Broca’s area was associated with better verbal abilities overall, so it seems like greater activation is good,” he says. One possibility is back-and-forth communication promotes more connections between brain cells in that region.

The study is a “very, very important” addition to a growing body of work, says developmental psychologist Kathryn Hirsh-Pasek, director of the Infant Language Laboratory at Temple University, who was not involved in the work. “We have known for quite a while that conversational turns — or what in my work we call conversational duets — are very important for building a foundation for language and maybe for learning generally. What hadn’t been done is to link it where we knew it had to be linked — to changes in the brain.”

Verbal exchanges have two components that children must master: temporal contingency and semantic contingency — essentially, understanding the timing of human conversation and how to respond meaningfully. Research, including Hirsh-Pasek’s, has shown children cannot learn this from watching television, although they can learn it via video-chat technology such as Apple’s FaceTime.

Contingent language begins in infancy — well before words emerge — when parents begin “cooing” and “gooing” at their babies, who respond in kind. Socioeconomic differences in this behavior arise during the first year of life, according to a 2017 study of 141 11-month-olds by Michelle McGillion of The University of Sheffield in England and colleagues.

Research in this area has big implications for parents and caregivers. The search is on for interventions that will increase adult–child conversation and boost early language skills, especially for families living in poverty. McGillion’s study, for instance, showed language learning took off for babies in low-income settings when caregivers were given instructions to spend 15 minutes a day engaging their infant by commenting on whatever the baby looked at. Unfortunately, the improvements did not persist at age two with this low-intensity intervention.

Encouraging conversation seems particularly necessary in an era when both children and adults are spending more time with devices and less in face-to-face communication. “The exchanges are not only about words but about feelings, about paying attention to someone else,” Gabrieli observes. Hearing language from television or Alexa, he says, “does very little compared to these exchanges.”

Hirsh-Pasek shares this concern about technology. One 2017 study she co-authored found that when a cell phone call interrupts an interaction in which a parent is teaching a child a new word, the learning is lost.

While we are fiddling with our digital devices, “evolution is screaming at us,” she says. “It’s saying, ‘Hey, in case you didn’t notice, there’s another human in the room — pay attention.’ If we learn better how to follow the eyes of our child and comment on what they are looking at, we will have strong language learners. And language is the single-best predictor of school readiness — in math, social skills and reading skills. It is the foundation for learning.”

Wall Street is bearish on Trump (again)

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It is a truth universally acknowledged that a politician who desires the presidency must be in want of the good graces of Wall Street. Jane Austen would surely appreciate the fickle romance between the president and his Wall Street coevals, a relationship that has had its ups and downs since the incumbent was but a wee candidate. (Do not speculate which one is Mr. Darcy and which one is Elizabeth Bennet; the metaphor becomes too horrifying when stretched so literally.) And with the departure this week of Trump’s economic advisor, former Goldman Sachs executive Gary Cohn, the Trump–Wall Street relationship has begun to sour again.

Just as Elizabeth Bennet had an early mistrust of Darcy, these two parties started off on the wrong foot. During the campaign days, Trump took pains to paint Hillary Clinton as the Wall Street candidate. “#CrookedHillary is nothing more than a Wall Street puppet!” Trump wrote on Twitter in October 2016, just weeks before Election Day. This was a recurring theme for him:

Crooked Hillary is flooding the airwaves with false and misleading ads – all paid for by her bosses on Wall Street. Media is protecting her!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 22, 2016

Clinton betrayed Bernie voters. Kaine supports TPP, is in pocket of Wall Street, and backed Iraq War.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 25, 2016

“Clinton betrayed Bernie voters. Kaine supports [the Trans-Pacific Partnership], is in [the] pocket of Wall Street, and backed Iraq War,” he wrote in July 2016.

He was right, to some degree: Hillary Clinton was the “preferred candidate” of Wall Street, as Ben Norton wrote in Salon in 2016. This proved true through the end of the campaign; the nonprofit Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks presidential campaign spending patterns, noted the disparity between finance industry donations to the two candidates. By the time the dust had settled, Donald Trump had reaped an estimated $37,873,136 in donations from the “Finance, Insurance and Real Estate Industries,” while Clinton had amassed $117,318,552 from the same industries.

It didn’t take very long after Trump’s win for the tides to turn. (Perhaps unsurprisingly — Trump is a billionaire real estate guy with a Freudian affinity for gold; Wall Street is his people.) Trump appointed oodles of Wall Street insiders to his administration, and the industry grew to love the new president pretty quickly. The liberal-left media was eager to point out the hypocrisy here; just two weeks after Inauguration Day, in February 2017, Steve Benen wrote in MSNBC:

As it turns out, Trump magically transformed soon after winning the election, tapping industry insiders to help run his administration, and even inviting a Wall Street insider to oversee Wall Street. Today, the new president is going even further, delivering on one of the financial industry’s top policy priorities.

That was a fast make-up, wasn’t it? The “top policy priority” Benen referred to specifically was the unmaking of the Dodd-Frank law, which was passed in 2010 in an effort to stave off future recessions akin to the 2008 crisis — which was in part caused by an underregulated finance sector. As the Wall Street Journal noted in February 2017:

President Donald Trump on Friday plans to sign an executive action that establishes a framework for scaling back the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial-overhaul law, part of a sweeping plan to dismantle much of the regulatory system put in place after the financial crisis. […] Mr. Trump also plans another executive action aimed at rolling back a controversial regulation scheduled to take effect in April that critics have said would upend the retirement-account advisory business.

At the same point in time, Trump had appointed the aforementioned Gary Cohn to be his White House National Economic Council Director.

Throughout his first year in office, Trump generally and dutifully did Wall Street’s bidding. Nature may abhor a vacuum, but Wall Street loves a (regulatory) vacuum; the governing economic philosophy of the Trump administration had generally been in line with the general free market fundamentalist wisdom of rolling back any and all federal regulations, lowering taxes on corporations and the rich, and privatizing anything and everything in sight. Trump was good for Wall Street and Wall Street was good to Trump — and the finance fatcats were content to ignore Trump’s unhinged comments and/or xenophobic ur-fascism, as long as the market was bullish.

Which brings us to today, when the two face a lover’s spat. Turns out that Trump’s xenophobia wasn’t all just politically popular bluster — Trump was actually going to follow through on his protectionist promises to enact tariffs. That’s cause for a breakup.

One cannot exaggerate the degree to which the tariffs miffed the free market fundamentalists on Wall Street and those within the Republican Party. Charles Koch of the Koch Brothers, the pursestrings of so many right-wing causes, was apoplectic: “[free trade] has been essential to our society’s prosperity and to people improving their lives,” Koch wrote in response. Paul Ryan, fuming at Trump for betraying his capitalist religion, had to assuage Wall Street’s fears; Barron’s analysts believed that Trump’s tariff suggestion caused a market dip that only recovered later in the day due to Ryan’s sermonizing.

Cohn’s resignation earlier this week seemed symbolic of the end of Trump and Wall Street’s bad romance. Who can blame the spurned lovers on Wall Street? Wall Street abhors unpredictability; it’s bad for business. And Trump is as volatile a lover as they come. He’s also spent his entire life as an entitled, spoiled child used to getting whatever he pleases, beholden to no one but himself and his ego. If he wants to push his protectionist agenda, a few harsh words from Goldman Sachs execs won’t stop him.

 

Why does using a period in a text message make you sound insincere or angry?

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When it comes to texting, the period, full stop, point — whatever you call it — has been getting a lot of attention.

People have begun noticing slight changes to the way our smallest punctuation mark is deployed, from declarations that it’s going out of style to claims that it’s becoming angry.

What they’re actually noticing is written language becoming more flexible, with texting possessing its own set of stylistic norms (sometimes informally called “textspeak” or “textese”).

The period is merely one example of this shift, a change that has opened up new possibilities for communicating with written language. Just as we have different styles of speaking in different situations, so do we have context-dependent styles of writing.

Reading between the periods

Though periods can still signal the end of a sentence in a text message, many users will omit them (especially if the message is only one sentence long). This tendency now subtly influences how we interpret them.

Because text messaging is a conversation that involves a lot of back-and-forth, people add fillers as a way to mimic spoken language. We see this with the increased use of ellipses, which can invite the recipient to continue the conversation. The period is the opposite of that — a definitive stop that signals, as linguistics professor Mark Liberman has explained, “This is final, this is the end of the discussion.”

For some, this can appear angry or standoffish.

Earlier this year, psychologist Danielle Gunraj tested how people perceived one-sentence text messages that used a period at the end of the sentence. Participants thought these text messages were more insincere than those that didn’t have a period. But when the researchers then tested the same messages in handwritten notes, they found that the use of a period didn’t influence how the messages were perceived.

In a 2007 study by linguists Naomi Baron and Rich Ling, multi-sentence text messages often had punctuation to indicate where the sentences stopped, but only 29 percent of these texts had punctuation at the very end of the message. The reason, Baron and Ling explain, is that “the act of sending a message coincides with sentence-final punctuation.”

Situational switches

But of all the things to feel when seeing a period at the end of a text message — why insincerity?

The answer could have something to do with a term used by linguist John J. Gumperz: “situational code-switching,” which is when we change how we talk depending on where we are, who we’re talking to or how we’re communicating.

A common example is the way we talk in a job interview versus at a bar with friends. Typically, a speaker will use much more formal language in an interview than when hanging out with peers. If you talked to your friends the same way you talked during a job interview, it would probably give a stilted, distant feeling to the conversation.

Scholars originally investigated situational code-switching in spoken language because spoken language was used in both casual and formal settings. In the past, written language was almost always tinged with a level of formality because it was associated with permanence in books and written documents.

However, now that text messaging and social media have given their users an outlet for casual written language, differences between writing styles can be seen.

The use of the period is one example of situational code-switching: When using one in a text message, it’s perceived as overly formal. So when you end your text with a period, it can come across as insincere or awkward, just like using formal spoken language in a casual setting like a bar.

A different form of sincerity

Another example of language change in casual written forms is the repetition of letters. Communication scholar Erika Darics has observed that the repetition of letters or punctuation marks adds intensity to messages (“stopppp!!!”). She writes that this creates “a display of informality through using a relaxed writing style.”

Linguist Deborah Tannen described a similar phenomenon, noting that repeated exclamation points in a message can convey a sincere tone, like in the following text message:

JACKIE I AM SO SO SO SORRY! I thought you were behind us in the cab and then I saw you weren’t!!!!! I feel soooooooo bad! Catch another cab and ill pay for it for youuuuu

Note that this message does not contain a message-final period, since that may convey insincerity that would contradict the apology being presented. Instead, the sender uses the non-standard long vowels in “soooooooo” and “youuuuu” as well as five exclamation points at the end of one sentence.

Compare this to a standardized version of the text message:

Jackie, I am so sorry. I thought you were behind us in the cab and then I saw you weren’t. I feel so bad! Catch another cab and I’ll pay for it for you.

This more formal version, according to the arguments made by Tannen and Darics, reads more like a work email sent to a colleague than one to a friend sincerely and fervently apologizing for a transportation mishap.

It’s a bit counterintuitive, but using formal language may undermine the sincerity of the apology; in order to convey the “right” message, it’s important to know the proper protocols. This may explain why some people’s text messages seem stilted or awkward: they’re used to writing with a formal style that doesn’t translate to the casual medium.

Will texting erode our writing skills?

In the media, there’s been a fair amount of debate about whether texting – or using overly casual language – can “ruin” someone’s writing ability. (Examples include the LA Times, the BBC and The Daily Mail, to name a few.)

However, past research into situational code-switching in spoken language has shown that a person’s ability to code-switch can signal social competency, can affirm one’s sense of identity or membership in a community and may be an indicator of high intellectual ability in children.

Studies like the recent work of psychologists Gene Ouellette and Melissa Michaud have shown that the use of text messaging and “textese” has little relationship to how someone will score on spelling, reading and vocabulary tests. Meanwhile, a study out of California State University found little use of “textisms” in formal letter writing assignments completed by students. This observation supports work like a study by psychologist Beverly Plester and colleagues, who found that an increased use of textese was correlated with higher scores on verbal reasoning ability tests. They suggested that the preteens in their study were able to “slip between one register of language and another, as they deem it appropriate.”

This shows that frequent and fluent users of casual written language can often readily code-switch: they know to put that period at the end of every sentence in a formal writing assignment. Some educators are even beginning to incorporate lessons about formal and informal writing into their classrooms, which can help students identify those situations that require the use of different styles.

Instead of ignoring or deriding the variation in written language, embracing the change in language – and the ability of speakers and writers to code-switch — can lead to better communication skills in all contexts.

Knowing when a period might indicate insincerity is just one of them.

Lauren Collister, Scholarly Communications Librarian, University of Pittsburgh

Steve Bannon: “Let them call you racists” at French National Front event

Steve Bannon (Credit: AP Photo/Brynn Anderson)

Steve Bannon is no longer in the White House or with Breitbart News Network, but that doesn’t mean he’s stopped spreading far-right propaganda. Indeed, he’s taken it to an international level. On Saturday, according to CNN, Bannon spoke at a French National Front Party and told the crowd to be proud of being called racists.

“Let them call you racists,” he told the crowd, via CNN. “Let them call you xenophobes. Let them call you nativists. Wear it as a badge of honor.”

He also told rally attendees that “history is on our side” and that “the globalists have no answers to freedom.”

“You’re part of a worldwide movement bigger than France, bigger than Italy,” he also exclaimed, according to

Bannon has kept a relatively low profile in the last month. He was reportedly in Rome, Italy, for the election last week.

In February, CNN reported that Bannon spent several hours over two days with special counsel Robert Mueller’s team, according to a source “familiar with the inquiry.” The source also said Bannon was expected to be questioned about the firings of FBI Director James Comey and National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. Bannon answered all questions, according to CNN. Sources also told NBC Bannon spent a total of “some 20 hours” in conversations with Mueller’s team.

Following the rally, CNN asked Bannon to comment on the most recent round of departures from the White House–presumably such as Donald Trump’s Chief Economic Adviser Gary Cohn, who announced his resignation last week.

“I think President Trump has been pretty straightforward in saying, hey, when we first started, some of these advisers are what he would call globalists, and he’s clearly pivoting to more economic nationalism,” Bannon told CNN.

Trump reportedly did call Cohn a globalist, but said he stilled liked him, according to Politico.

“He is seriously a globalist. There’s no question. In his own way, but you know what, he’s a nationalist. He loves our country,” Trump said of Cohn.

Bannon’s international tour comes at a time where his future in U.S. politics is unknown –especially since his former friend and colleague, Trump, turned his back on him after Michael Wolff’s book, “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House” was published.

Michael Wolff is a total loser who made up stories in order to sell this really boring and untruthful book. He used Sloppy Steve Bannon, who cried when he got fired and begged for his job. Now Sloppy Steve has been dumped like a dog by almost everyone. Too bad! https://t.co/mEeUhk5ZV9

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 6, 2018

Will #MeToo impact Bill Cosby’s retrial?

Bill Cosby (Credit: AP/Matt Slocum)

This week Bill Cosby, accused of sexual assault by more than 50 women, returned to court for hearings to determine if new or additional evidence will be allowed during his retrial for sexual assault charges.

In the era of #MeToo, where a series of allegations, typically three or more, has often made the difference between the presumption of guilt and the presumption of innocence, prosecutors are asking the judge to permit the testimonies of 19 additional Cosby accusers. This number still represents just a fraction of those who have come forward with allegations.

Last year Cosby was tried for sexually assaulting Andrea Constand in 2004. For the last 13 years, Constand has maintained that the comedian drugged and assaulted her. In previous testimony, Cosby admitted to having sexual relations with Constand, but said it was consensual. During this original trial, Montgomery County Judge Steven T. O’Neill allowed only one other accuser to testify. And after the  jury deadlocked in June, a mistrial was declared.

The retrial, set to begin in April, regardless of new evidence, will likely be inflected with new meaning, as it comes at a time when women and men are demanding the entertainment industry address systematic sexual harassment and violence by some of the the most powerful men in the business — a fraternity which Cosby once certainly belonged. The prosecution and the defense are acutely aware of the weight of this reckoning.

“With the current atmosphere, it’s going to be hard enough to get the jury to focus on the trial at hand,” defense lawyer Becky James said Tuesday, warning of a hemorrhage from #MeToo into the courtroom. “But bringing in additional accusers — especially 19 of them — in that environment would be highly prejudicial.”

Prosecutors countered, “The truly unique nature of [Cosby’s] sadistic sexual script is manifest in the similarities between the acts he enacted with Ms. Constand and the 19 other women,” Assistant District Attorney Adrienne D. Jappe said. She said, with each woman and case, Cosby came into their lives as a mentor, and then would offer them drugs and assault them.

This back and forth played out ahead of the pretrial hearings as well. In court filings, the defense team wrote that the current climate is “increasingly hostile, and the jury pool is likely to be infected with prejudice.” Montgomery County District Attorney Kevin R. Steele filed in response that Cosby, “after casting blame on everything but his own conduct and everyone but himself, now claims Harvey Weinstein is to blame for his continued prosecution.” He also added that as in Hollywood and in media, the tally of women accusing Cosby is central to the case against him.

O’Neill said he did not feel restricted by his past ruling to admit only one additional accuser’s testimony and that his decision would entail “exhaustive” research, according to the Philadelphia Daily News. He is expected to decide as early as next week on the question of how many, or if any, of Cosby’s other accusers will be allowed to testify in April.

The defense’s scapegoating of #MeToo is not unprecedented. Since its tidal wave crashed into the mainstream, there has been considerable backlash against the movement. For every celebration of Time’s Up and for all the very public popular support for women coming forward, there has been equal protest about a “witch hunt” and the elimination of “due process.”

Only a handful of men have actually faced serious consequences for their actions, and by serious, I mean they’ve been fired from the powerful positions that facilitated the abuse they committed. These men — Harvey Weinstein, Matt Lauer, Kevin Spacey, Bill O’Reilly, Charlie Rose — were the ones accused of sexually harassing or assaulting multiple women and exhibiting patterns of abusive behavior. The Establishment writer Ijeoma Oluo explained, “if there’s anything these stories show, it’s that these men in their years of open abuse were given more than just due process  —  but the women, many of whom had tried bringing this abuse to those in authority years before, were given no process at all.”

The outcry, in many spaces, has been met with a knee-jerk reaction to restore the hierarchy and prioritize the accused over the victim. For some, the considerable, often overwhelming, number of stories did not illuminate a pervasive culture of sexual violence, but a moral panic for fear of casting away the men at the center, especially if they are creative and regardless if they are harmful.

This was demonstrated at the Oscars Sunday when Kobe Bryant, accused of rape in 2003, was awarded an Oscar, as was Gary Oldman, accused of domestic violence. My colleague Mary Elizabeth Williams wrote: “Sunday’s victory lap for men who’ve faced accusations of abhorrent violence against women make it clear that for much of the industry, it’s still less #TimesUp and more business as usual.” The most significant consequences we have seen thus far is the damage and in some cases, likely destruction of the legacies of these accused predators.

It is true that a public reckoning is is increasingly likely these days. As soon as Bryant was presented with an Oscar, social media brought up his rape accusation and lawsuit — but as a way to show that so little has actually changed. They say a rape allegation will ruin a man’s career. It usually never does.

That is why the alarm from Cosby’s defense team about this “increasingly hostile” climate and the prejudice that #MeToo will bring to the case is, at best, overly dramatic. If the public has a more complete understanding of criminal sexual behavior, that is progress, not bias. And if Cosby is convicted this time around, it won’t be because #MeToo panic unfairly crept into the courtroom and swayed a jury, but precisely because of due process.

Trump’s military parade will happen, but no tanks: report

(Credit: Getty/Alex Wong)

It turns out President Donald Trump will get his military parade after all. The parade is set to take place on November 11, Veterans Day 2018, in Washington.

Recall that Trump had reportedly told Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that he wanted “a military parade in Washington similar to the Bastille Day parade he witnessed in Paris in July.” An unnamed military official told the Post that the “marching orders were: I want a parade like the one in France. . . . This is being worked at the highest levels of the military.”

According to reports in the New York Times and CNN, Trump’s wish has been granted, but it won’t be as Bastille-like as he may have wanted.

“This parade will focus on the contributions of our veterans throughout the history of the U.S. Military, starting from the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 to today, with an emphasis on the price of freedom,” the memo with the news reported, via the New York Times.

The parade will also “highlight the evolution of women veterans from separate formations in World War II to today’s integrated formations.” It’s also expected to have Medal of Honor veterans march, and there will be reenactments, period uniforms, and  “old guard fife and drum.”

While there will be a “heavy air component”–presumably lots of aircrafts–but there won’t be tanks, just “wheeled vehicles only.”

“Consideration must be given to minimize damage to local infrastructure,” the memo said.

According to CNN, the route will run from the White House to the Capitol.

The cost of the event hasn’t been officially disclosed, but an anonymous U.S. official told NPR that the Department of Defense could spend up to $50 million on the parade.

Trump’s proposed parade has already been widely criticized when news first broke about the idea; now that it has been confirmed, many are voicing their concerns on Twitter once again.

Well, looks like the plans for our parade for the dictator and moving forward. Does anything feel normal anymore? https://t.co/Nqa9H6dLal

— Amy Siskind (@Amy_Siskind) March 9, 2018

The midterm elections are Nov. 6.

The military parade is Nov. 11.

Let’s make sure Donald Trump’s dress-up-as-a-dictator day gets ruined by a historic blue wave.

— Adam Best (@adamcbest) March 10, 2018

Here’s an idea for @realDonaldTrump – instead of spending twenty million on a military parade or twenty billion on a wall, let’s invest in our students and teachers instead. https://t.co/zYF6sk3Htu

— Andrew Weinstein (@Weinsteinlaw) March 10, 2018

 

“Swordfishtrombones”: The soundtrack to Tom Waits’ inner gothic freak show

(Credit: AP/Bloomsbury Publishing/Salon)

Excerpted from “Tom Waits’ Swordfishtrombones” by David Smay (Continuum, 2007). Reprinted with permission from Bloomsbury Publishing.

In an otherwise favorable review, Robert Christgau accused Tom’s post-“Swordfishtrombones” songwriting of an overrated “American grotesquerie.” This charge is easily refuted since Tom’s freak show has an international flair as often as it features two-headed snakes bobbing in a murky jar in a Kansas sideshow. Despite [his wife] Kathleen’s complaint that he compulsively subtracts body parts from his characters, Tom doesn’t exploit the grotesque so much as inhabit it.

Anybody who’s had to endure a creative writing class knows the tedium of workshopping somebody’s exercise in Southern Gothic Lite. Without something like Flannery O’Connor’s mordant wit or moral clarity, trotting out a parade of dwarves, cripples and the occasional holy idiot just substitutes easy color and sensation for plot and character.

I’m going to take a bold critical stance here and argue that fiction and songs are discrete cultural expressions with distinct formal elements. (Though it is a common enough mistake, which can be disastrous when Motörhead fans show up at an Alice Munro reading. Frankly, I blame Lemmy and his New Yorker subscription; “Ace of Spades” is laced with allusions to Munro’s “Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You.”) Let me posit it this way. Fiction enters the eye and takes a circuitous route through the brain, which only gets to the heart after sustaining an almost dreamlike immersion. Whereas songs enter the ear and start jerking around with your heart or hips immediately, only rarely bothering to engage the brain. A poorly written story will just bore you, but a bad song inspires real ire and resentment that something so stupid is affecting you. It’s not so strange that cheap music is potent; that’s what cheap music does.

I emphasize this point because I think Tom’s grotesques work differently in song than they would in fiction. Certainly the outré imagery helps conjure some bizarre and freaky landscapes, but they don’t inflate the music the way they can in fiction. What they allow him, though, is another layer of metaphor, a point of personal insertion into the songs that isn’t dependent on confessional lyrics or reportage. There’s a reason why the Eyeball Kid has Tom’s birthday. The carnival air, the foreign backdrops, the dwarven and the misshapen have less to do with how he sees the world than how he sees himself.

In “Shore Leave” Tom stretches just beyond the lyrical territory that he’d established with his Asylum albums, but musically, vocally, even emotionally, this song marks a change. There’s a beautiful turn in the lyric after he’s set the scene when he says, “And I sat down and wrote a letter to my wife.”

I like to think I got more angry with “Swordfish” . . . More fractured. I sorta reached an impasse, y’know. Lookin’ back I can see I had governors on a lotta the things in my head. Had to shake ’em off. Uh, be a little more honest with myself. I sorta provided a commentary on things in my old songs now I kinda escape into the song more. More extreme I guess.

That’s it exactly. He enters the song in a way he didn’t before. And on the coda, when he shifts into a previously unimaginable falsetto to howl “Shore leave! Shore leave!” like a wounded animal, you know you’re hearing a new Tom Waits.

When Tom wants to conjure a mood that’s when he reaches for his boo bams. When they began to work on “Swordfishtrombones” Victor Feldman took Tom to meet Emil Richards, a veteran session percussionist who had worked on innumerable tiki music albums of the fifties and sixties, as well as Hollywood soundtracks. They wandered through Emil’s huge collection of instruments from around the world, selecting African talking drums, and aunglongs and bell plates. Tom had already had a chance to see and hear a junkyard orchestra in the “Used Carlotta” section of “One from the Heart” and he wanted to go further. He wanted each song to sound like a little soundtrack—not just the score but the sound effects too.

In each of the three albums of the Frank Trilogy, there is at least one song set in a place associated with international spy intrigue: Hong Kong, Singapore, Istanbul. I think it was liberating to let his imagination wander further afield than East St. Louis or Minneapolis.

I keep circling back to the notion of a necessary distance in these songs. In “Shore Leave,” “Singapore” and “Telephone Call from Istanbul” each character is far from where he wants to be. The extremity of the physical space from Hong Kong to Illinois, from the port of call to Singapore, from Istanbul (where his baby called from) to the “Mediteromanian hotel” marks some form of emotional longing. Tom wears his heart on his map.

There’s another aspect to Tom’s foreign adventures which isn’t that evident until you’re watching his movie “Big Time” with the band’s Louis Prima arrangement of “Telephone Call from Istanbul” and the fez-wearing band member and the lounge singer patter. It looks a lot like the lounge music revival that would begin about four years later in the early nineties—a revival that depended as much on exotica (faux tropical and Middle Eastern melodies) as it did on Rat Pack ring-a-ding. And there are places where “Big Time” also reminds you of They Might Be Giants or long forgotten world music bands like 3 Mustaphas 3—also about four years away. Something about the new arrangements built on Ralph Carney’s sax, I think, plus the usual dips into accordion, swing and congas. Now lounge and world music and TMBG are not your usual reference points for Tom Waits, but he could’ve easily moved in that direction from “Big Time.”

I note this not because I think Tom should’ve zigged toward Buster Poindexter instead of zagging toward “Bone Machine” (another radical reinvention that still defies comparison). I just want to underscore how attuned Tom was to the musical undercurrents in the late eighties. Because his imagery draws from a mythical America between the World Wars, because he has so many acknowledged musical forebears, because his vision is so singular and distinctive, people still tend to think of Tom as a man out of time.

Tom Waits does not sit around listening to Leadbelly 78s all day. He’s an impurist, and his ears are always open. He watches Missy Elliott videos on MTV, listens to Paul Revere and the Raiders on the oldies station, buys Rage Against the Machine imports for his kids, tapes Gavin Byars off the radio and drops a few bills for the mariachi band standing outside the taqueria. His son, Casey, is a huge rap fan, so Tom Waits listened to a lot of rap music in the nineties. Then he went off and listened to his Leadbelly 78s.

Why it’s so important for kids to see diverse TV and movie characters

Chadwick Boseman as T'Challa / Black Panther in "Black Panther" (Credit: Marvel Studios)

The hype surrounding “Black Panther” has been as hyperbolic as any feat its characters might perform, with the film being praised for its layered story and what’s been described as its “Afrofuturist” cast. And “Black Panther” will be joined by “A Wrinkle in Time,” another film with blockbuster potential and an interracial cast.

But no matter how much money or how many awards films like “Black Panther” and “A Wrinkle in Time” amass, our research strongly suggests another reason they’re important: Children need a diverse universe of media images. And for the most part, they haven’t had one.

Some progress, but . . .

In the 1970s, Boston University communications professor F. Earle Barcus began publishing the results of content analyses he had conducted on children’s television. His findings showed large disparities between the numbers of male and female characters and between the numbers of white and non-white characters. In a 1983 study, Barcus analyzed over 1,100 characters in 20 children’s television programs and found that only 42 were black. Just 47 others belonged to some group other than white.

Since then, researchers have consistently found that the animated worlds children see on television are out of sync with their real environments.

Over the past seven years, we’ve continued studying this topic at the Children’s Television Project (CTV) at Tufts University, documenting images of different races, gender and ethnicities in the most popular children’s animated series. We’ve also taken steps to try to understand why stereotyped portrayals still exist well into the 21st century. Finally, we’re starting to develop ways to study and collect data about how children process the images they’re exposed to on TV.

In order to categorize the images children see, we’ve developed a system for coding the race, ethnic identity, gender and age of primary and secondary characters in children’s animated television shows. We’ve also included a sociolinguistic component to the analysis, because we know that children are absorbing both sights and sounds as they process media.

The good news is that the world of children’s animated television is more diverse than it used to be. For example, we’ve found that female characters account for just under one-third of all characters. Discouraging as this may appear, it’s a significant improvement from the 1:6 ratio that F. Earle Barcus had previously found, and better than the 1:4 ratio that communications professors Teresa Thompson and Eugenia Zerbinos found in the 1990s.

There’s more racial and ethnic diversity, too. Black characters account for 5.6 percent of our total sample of over 1,500 characters. (A study conducted in 1972 by researchers Gilbert Mendelson and Morissa Young for Action for Children’s Television found that over 60 percent of the TV shows in their sample had no racial minority characters at all.) There are many more Asian or Asian-American characters (11.6 percent), though this likely due to the prevalence of a few popular cartoons featuring mostly Asian characters such as “Legend of Korra.”

The bad news is that there’s still a ways to go. African-Americans represent an estimated 13.3 percent of the U.S. population. Meanwhile, Hispanic or Latinos make up 17.8 percent of the population, but we’ve found Latino characters only made up 1.4 percent of our sample.

Furthermore, stereotypes persist in both how characters are drawn and how they talk, with “bad guys” using non-American accents and dialects. We see this in characters like Dr. Doofenshmirtz from “Phineas and Ferb” or Nightmare Moon on “My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic.”

To try to understand why stereotyping persists, we’ve interviewed some of the people who write, direct, cast and provide vocal talent for children’s animated programming. While we haven’t completed this part of the study, it seems that economic pressures compel the creators of children’s animated programming to rely on stereotyping as a kind of shorthand.

For example, one director of a popular children’s animated show told us, “If something’s worked before, you tend to just use it again,” even if that “something” is stereotyped. An African-American voice actor reported being in auditions where he was told to make something sound “urban,” a code word for a more stereotyped African-American dialect.

Kids, quick to judge

But the real question is why this all matters.

Studies from many fields have shown that it’s important for children to see characters who not only look like themselves and their families, but also sound like them.

There’s a relationship between low self-esteem and negative media portrayals of racial groups, in addition to an association between poor self-esteem and the paucity of portrayals of a particular group. Others have found that media misrepresentations of ethnic groups can cause confusion about aspects of their identity among children of these groups.

In our study of how children process the sights and sounds of animated worlds, we developed a method in which we show children images of diverse animated faces and play voices that use different dialects. We then ask kids to tell us if the person is a good person, a bad person, or if they can’t tell. We follow this up by asking them why they think what they do.

Though we’re not far enough along yet in our research to provide definitive answers to our questions, we do have some preliminary findings.

First and foremost, kids notice differences.

We’ve found that first- and second-grade children, when presented with a variety of drawn cartoon character faces they haven’t seen before, have no problem sorting them into “good” and “bad” characters.

In fact, many children have clearly developed ideas and are able to tell us lengthy stories about why they think a particular character might be a hero or villain with minimal information. Sometimes this seems to be based on their belief that a character looks like another media character they’ve seen. They’ll then make the assumption that a face they’re shown looks like “a princess” or “someone who goes to jail.” With the lack of diversity in the world of children’s television, it’s not surprising that kids would make associations with so little information. But it’s also a bit alarming – given what we know about the prevalence of stereotyping – that children seem so quick to make attributions of who’s good and who’s evil.

It’s important that children not only have a diverse universe of characters but also that these characters have diverse characteristics. It’s okay for characters to have non-American accents, but good guys – not just bad guys – should have them too. The heroes can be male and female, and non-white characters don’t have to be relegated to the role of sidekick: They can assume leading roles.

This brings us back to why these new films are so groundbreaking. Yes, “Black Panther” is demonstrating that a film about a black superhero can shatter box- office records. Yes, “A Wrinkle in Time” is the first $100 million movie directed by a woman of color.

But beyond all that, these films break the mold by showing the complexity and variety of black male and female experiences.

If more movies, TV shows and animated series follow suit, perhaps we will finally move beyond the underdeveloped and stereotyped characters that children have been exposed to for far too long.

Julie Dobrow, Senior lecturer, Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development, Tufts University; Calvin Gidney, Associate Professor, Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development, Tufts University, and Jennifer Burton, Professor of the Practice, Department of Drama and Dance, Tufts University

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“Pharma Bro” Martin Shkreli gets 7 years behind bars

(Credit: AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

Martin Shkreli, the widely-reviled pharmaceutical industry financier who became known as “Pharma Bro” after buying the patent for an HIV drug and raising the price 5,000 percent, was sentenced to seven years in prison Friday for defrauding investors.

Prosecutors argued for a sentence that was double that, while the defense requested 18 months or less. Shkreli, reportedly, sobbed before the judge, cutting a remorseful figure absent of the supercilious, headline-grabbing antics that made him into “the world’s heel,” in his words.

“The only person to blame for me being here is me,” he said in federal court in New York. “There is no government conspiracy to take down Martin Shkreli. I took down Martin Shkreli with my disgraceful and shameful actions.”

“This case is not about Mr. Shkreli’s self-cultivated public persona,” the judge explained, “nor his controversial statements about politics or culture.”

But the 34-year-old’s reputation preceded him. Shkreli first made headlines when he was the CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals and hiked prices of the lifesaving HIV drug Daraprim to a whopping $750 per pill — a move that, while not illegal, made him widely reviled, a cartoonish caricature of evil that he reveled in.

Shkreli was convicted of a separate securities fraud case last year. Aside from his prison sentence, for which Shkreli received credit for the six months he has already served, he was fined $75,000 and will have to forfeit $7.3 million in personal assets and in a brokerage account. Shkreli previously purchased a one-of-a-kind record album by hip hop legends The Wu-Tang Clan, the sole copy to have been produced, for $2 million; that album will be included in the forfeiture once Shkreli has a chance to appeal, the judge said.

Shkreli has been incarcerated since September, when the judge revoked his bail after he told his online followers he would pay $5,000 to anyone who could secure a lock of Hillary Clinton’s hair. Previously, Shkreli had been booted from Twitter for harassing a female journalist.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Jacquelyn Kasulis argued that Shkreli deserved a harsh sentence not because he is “the most hated man in America,” according to the Chicago Tribune, but because he was convicted of a serious crime.