André Brocatus was here...

Desalination is the process of generating freshwater from brackish or saltwater, usually through the process of reverse osmosis. While this can be a very useful tool in water shortages, it also has some pretty huge drawbacks--reverse osmosis requires a lot of energy, requires chemical treatment of the water, and produces concentrated brine as a waste product which can be harmful to aquatic ecosystems.

TIL Muji launched a limited edition car, the Muji Car 1000, in 2001. It was a stripped down, debadged Nissan March, and was sold only online, in an edition of 1,000. Except the seller of this example, in Kanagawa, says Muji actually only sold 170. Rare? Fail? Or both?

She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.

She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.

81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves. On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.

The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.

Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision. She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.

Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.

The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.

She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it. Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.

Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.

When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.

The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.

When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.

The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes. The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.

You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.

The old men were by far the most diverse bunch. Old billionaires wear whatever the fuck they want. One man wore a maroon, velvet, three-piece suit and a paisley cravat, and he must have been sweating in it, but I couldn’t tell because he had doused himself in a cologne that I’m going to call “A Million, Billion Different Kinds Of Fruit, by Calvin Klein.” There were two shaven-headed men of Caucasian descent, wearing black hakama robes and some kind of pendants. They had white socks and sandals, and from the way people were bowing to them, I’m guessing they were some kind of religious officials, but I can’t be quite sure. Whatever faith they practiced, it wasn’t Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Baha’i, Taoism, Shinto, Confucianism, Voodoo, Wicca or the Dreamtime Faith of the Aboriginal Shamans. If I had to guess, I would say they were either members of the Illuminati, or we are living in the Matrix and they are priests from the remaining human city in the real, outer world.

I don’t know what religion they were from. Do we get why that’s scary? Aside from the fact that a vast chunk of my education centered on world religions and mythology, religions really want you to know about them. That’s their whole business model. They tell you why things are the way they are and then you give them money. So the fact that there’s a religion that I’m too poor to know about is deeply troubling.

These rich old billionaires were the kindest, sweetest old gents. In conversations I overheard more than once, a man worth more than my entire extended family (which is Irish and therefore vast and mighty) talked about another man at the party as “just being the sweetest soul,” or referred to a cupcake at a certain café as “sinfully seductive.” And I realized, these men may have been cutthroat sharks before, or they may have inherited their fortunes, but none of that matters now. They won. They won life. They are lions that, having killed enough gladiators, are now left gloriously alive to become old and toothless. The host of the party had an entire wall covered in plaques and trophies. I read most of them, and still couldn’t tell you what he did for a living. Because whatever he had done, he certainly didn’t need to do it anymore. His accomplishments referenced his humanitarianism, his civic heroism and his contributions to culture and civilization. So whether or not this man had worked at Bain Capital gutting companies in the American Heartland didn’t matter, because he had rescued a bunch of Tibetan art and now he was kissing other billionaires on both cheeks and saying, “Tom, I’m in love with you!” because who gives a fuck, I’m rich!

I watched these crazy old holiday wizards and their jeweled scarab wives, their Oxford sons and Cambridge daughters, and thought to myself, “This is the most fun I’ve ever seen anyone have. Louis the XVI would've shit a brick if he'd ever thrown a party this good. This is… so great. This is… completely fucked.”

I began to notice that people were looking at me funny. For a moment I became scared that they realized I was poor. Perhaps I had used the wrong fork, or a moth had flown in lazy spirals out of my wallet, or my toes had popped out of the holes in my shoes. But then I realized it was my expression that was drawing looks. I looked flabbergasted and astounded. And they didn’t.

That’s when I realized it. These motherfuckers weren’t going to the best party of their lives. They weren’t even necessarily going to the best party of their week. Who knows? Maybe one of these plutocrats was sneering at the lack of a third fortuneteller. “No augur divining mysteries from the movement of birds? No oracle breathing poison and screaming prophesies? You call this a Christmas Party!”

Well fuck that!

My latest books cartoon for The Guardian's books pages.

i’m not talking about gender affirming posts for trans guys designed to offset actual dysphoria. i’m talking about the more general ones like “you’re still Manly if you have depression” or “taking care of your health/asking for consent/cooking/etc is actually Super Masculine because xyz”

it’s the same phenomenon as people reassuring straight men that Physical Affection Isn’t Gay, like yes you’ve identified the symptoms of the problem, that men won’t discuss or do certain things bc they are terrified of not seeming Manly Enough™ but it isn’t getting to the root of the problem

which in this case is that patriarchy draws a line around women and anything associated with women and calls it tainted, lesser, weak, foolish, crazy, worthless. And so men don’t want to be associated with those terrible Womanly things because maybe that would mean that they were just as tainted, lesser, weak, foolish, crazy, or worthless as women are.

and insisting that some of these ‘tainted’ things are actually Manly After All doesn’t solve the root problem. even if you succeed there will always be other important things men are cutting themselves off from because they don’t want to be tainted by the association with women.

so like even if your only priority is men being whole and healthy people, even if you don’t give a shit about women, if your goal is to make it okay for men to cry and be vulnerable and seek help and live full and happy lives as complete human beings who aren’t constantly dividing and subsuming and destroying vital pieces of themselves they don’t think are Manly enough –

if you want to let men just live without the pressure to constantly prove themselves Manly Enough –

targeting misogyny is just the only viable way to do that.

hegemonic masculinity requires a ‘lesser’ thing to set itself up in opposition to, something that’s hated and despised and demeaned that men have to be trained to try to not be like. Without misogyny the whole thing collapses. There’s no pressure to be Manly™ if there’s no shame in not being a man.

That seems fairly pointless from a liberation standpoint; it challenges nothing, and adds very little. Men in this perspective are still entitled to power over women, but the things they must do to maintain that power are slightly different and perhaps a little less violent.

The idea that men are and must be masculine, the concept of gendering certain traits as Manly and others as Womanly, is inherently a patriarchal construction and any attempt to expand these categories or salvage some kind of healthy way to use them is doomed.

Courage, integrity, kindness, all these things people are currently championing as “healthy masculinity” - these traits can and do exist in people of all genders. When we urge men to behave in prosocial ways, it’s ultimately counterproductive to appeal to their desire to identify with hegemonic masculinity, because we’re still, in that case, working with and upholding the gender hierarchy.

Men are capable of doing good without being rewarded with the power that comes with a higher station in the gender hierarchy, and it is both unnecessary and counterproductive to promise this reward by identifying good behaviours as “masculine”.

It is unnecessary and counterproductive to gender the traits required to engage with others in a positive way. And it’s ultimately more useful to think of ourselves as human beings trying to live our values, instead of trying to redefine divisive and hierarchical gender roles into something healthy and progressive.