Talking To Strangers, Malcolm Gladwell

Gladwell's book contains many good stories, but is rather misnamed, as many of the examples he provides are not about talking to strangers, but misreading people. As a psychiatrist, I often wonder if someone is being truthful or not, particularly when evaluating drug use and suicidal and violent intentions. It was comforting to realize that this is a hard task, and that some people are indeed mismatched, and that experts in interrogation can get it wrong, and also disconcerting. We are taught that suicide is difficult to predict, and that is true. There are lists of risk factors, the primary one being a history of suicide is most likely to predict future suicide. The software algorithm that predicted whether an accused person would show up to their hearing made sense to me, that focusing on risk factors without meeting the person had a better predictive rate than the judge.

Overall, I think there are situations where it pays to be a bit more skeptical than the default truth mode that he doesn't adequately introduce, and I don't think he drew many convincing conclusions. For instance, I agree that drinking too much will make judging other's intentions hard, but I don't think he talked about necessary cultural changes enough, though he mentioned the native tribe that with culture, had people drinking to excess with no issues. The victim of Brock Turner was right, alcohol did not rape her. Gladwell is right that it did make her more vulnerable, but there were many drunk people who didn't rape anyone that night, and I don't think he emphasized this enough.

Le Tote Review - is the dry cleaning process toxic?

I recently tried Le Tote and was super excited about my first box, however, I began to wonder how the clothing was dry cleaned, as the site says:


A little about our cleaning process:

- All clothing items are thoroughly washed, steamed, and checked over twice by our Quality Assurance team before being packed and shipped.

- We use hypoallergenic, unscented detergent on all garments

I can tell you, the clothes have a scent, a pleasant scent, but they are not unscented.  Also, it says on the site that some items are dry cleaned.

Cleaning

All Products will be professionally cleaned and delivered ready to wear for each consumer. We tumble wash and / or dry clean and inspect each product with the utmost care, but use of the product is at your own risk and Le Tote, Inc. shall not be held liable for any health-related complaints associated with a product rented from our site.

This concerned me, because dry cleaning can be bad for the environment, and there is a common agent called tetrachloroethylene, PERC, which may cause miscarriage. Le Tote offers maternity rentals, it is unknown if the amount of the chemical left on clothing is significant, however, I asked the company about this on the phone, by email, on twitter, and on facebook, and only got this reply:

Thanks for reaching out! Your membership fee includes complimentary dry cleaning and steaming of all garments and sterilization of all accessories. All items then go through our Quality Assurance department.

After being checked in, all garments are sorted by their fabric weight and washed according to specific classifications to ensure thorough cleaning without damaging the item.

Once they are washed and dried, clothing items are steamed before being quality checked and re-shelved.

We launder all items with EcoLab detergent. EcoLab detergent is hypoallergenic and cleans without using hazardous chemicals while saving industrial laundry customers as much as 3 million gallons of water a year! After being checked in, all garments are sorted by their fabric weight and washed according to specific classifications to ensure thorough cleaning without damaging the item.

Okay...so, how do you dry clean them? I never got an answer, but it was easy to cancel my subscription and get a refund for my one and only box.

I love you like a love song baby

I was listening to, “I love you like a love song baby,” by Selena Gomez, in my car the other day.  Initially, I thought, “how stupid, a love song can’t love.”  Is her love like the love expressed in other love songs, or does she love love songs?  Or does she indeed love, like a love song, a thing?

And the lyrics. 

"There’s no way to describe what you do to me,

You just do to me, what you do

…

You are magical, lyrical, beautiful, You are…

And I want you to know baby."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8BKcpIeHn0

There’s no way to describe what he does, he just does what he does?  I took this to mean, just seeing him say, eating a sandwich, makes her heart flutter, but I read the lyrics to my boyfriend, and he thought it was something sexual, which makes sense too.  She lets us fill in the blanks.

Which is dangerous.  I once heard a story: four young men in the south during the 60s were driving in a town, and they heard the radio announcer say that a local high school had been recently integrated, and that there was a crowd of people protesting.  “What, I can’t believe it, let’s go over there right now,” they all said.  They drove up to the area, and two went to the side protesting the integration, and two went to the side supporting the integration.  They had all thought they were outraged by the same idea, but no one explicitly said what outraged them.

Back to Selena.  The more I listened to the song on the radio, the more I knew exactly how Selena Gomez felt. She was in teenage love, overwhelmed, and god, he just did what he did, he was just so, so, exactly….yeah.

But I plan to practice the discipline of actually using words.