Quick Review: Despicable Me

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I recently saw Despicable Me – I know I’m a little late to the game as this movie was released over a month ago. But I had read some good reviews and was interested in seeing it for myself. Some quick thoughts:

1. I don’t think the film will stick in my memory for long. A lot of it felt like an extended cartoon one might see on TV. Some of the characters, like Gru and Vector, are over the top. The three children alternate between being interesting and mawkish. It was somewhat entertaining but ultimately forgettable.

2. I know there are some funny scenes but I hardly laughed during the movie. Perhaps I wasn’t in a laughing mood…or perhaps the movie isn’t really that funny. Also, we were in a theater with about 10 other people so any semblance of group laughter was missing.

3. The small minions became tiresome. Sure, they may look cute but they started wearing on me after a while. I feel like if movies have to resort to characters like this to keep people interested, the story probably isn’t that great.

4. The music in the film is interesting, alternating between orchestral music and quirky modern numbers. Pharrell Williams of The Neptunes was involved and helped the score develop into something much more varied than a typical animated film.

On the whole, I was not impressed. Not terrible and not great with what seemed like too many switches between styles and ideas, this film settles into the land of average animated films.

(Overall, the movie was well-received by critics: it is 79% fresh (112 fresh out of 142 total reviews) at RottenTomatoes.com.)

Evaluating Scottie Pippen as “window into your [pro basketball] soul”

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I recently had a discussion with a colleague about Scottie Pippen, who is entering the Basketball Hall of Fame. My colleague, a long-time Detroit Pistons fan, could not help himself from laughing when I suggested that Pippen was one of the best 25 NBA players of all-time. Miffed, I used my own years of watching Pippen play for the Bulls, Bill Simmons’ ranking in The Book of Basketball (these rankings were the best part of the book – Simmons has Pippen at #24), and stats from basketball-reference.com to make my argument.

Apparently this interaction was not as isolated as I thought. Kevin Arnovitz at Truehoop writes that Pippen was a polarizing player and “how you feel about Scottie Pippen is window into to your soul as a fan of the pro game.”

Shared religious activity enhances marital relationships

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New sociological research suggests that certain kinds of shared religious  practices among married couples leads to better relationships:

[F]or all groups, shared religious activity – attending church together and especially praying together – is linked to higher levels of relationship quality.

The findings were particularly significant for African-American couples (and to a lesser extent, Latinos), according to sociologist and co-author W. Bradford Wilcox:

“Without prayer, black couples would be doing significantly worse than white couples. This study shows that religion narrows the racial divide in relationship quality in America.”

But not all religion is beneficial for marriages:

Couples holding discordant religious beliefs and those with only one partner who attends religious services regularly tend to be less happy in their relationships, the researchers found.

The findings make sense: couples who share a religious perspective and activities benefit while those who don’t share perspectives or activities suffer. The most interesting finding seems to be that about African-American and Latinos benefiting from shared religious activity: the authors suggest such activity helps overcome stress minorities experience.

Deciding who is really rich

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As the American government considers changes to the tax brackets, James Surowiecki of the New Yorker says this involves an important question: how much money does one have to make to be rich?

While the administration has suggested being rich starts at $200,000 income per year, Surowiecki describes why it is not so simple:

Judging from surveys of how Americans describe themselves, most of the privileged don’t feel all that privileged. Why is that? One reason is the American mythology of middle-classness. Another is geography: in a place like Manhattan, where the average apartment sells for nine hundred thousand dollars, your money doesn’t go as far. And then there’s a larger truth about how wealth is getting concentrated in this country. As the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez have documented, people who earn a few hundred thousand dollars a year have done much worse than people at the very top of the ladder.

Indeed, wealth and income is often relative: if you made $150,000 a year but lived in a neighborhood and mainly associated with people who made around $1,000,000 a year, you might feel poor. The same concept is used to describe various levels of poverty: the relative poverty of the United States versus the absolute poverty experienced in Third World nations. Americans are notorious for feeling like they are middle-class, even if they clearly are not.

At the same time, I find it slightly difficult to believe that $200,000 doesn’t make one rich. Of course, one has choices about how to spend that money. Making $200,000 in Manhattan is not the same as the making that money in Nebraska. However, it should cover all of one’s expenses. Those making over $200,000 are still part of a small and elite group: according to the Census Bureau, in 2006 3.5% of American households made over $200,000 a year.

Surowiecki suggests the solution is to create separate tax brackets for the rich and “super-rich.” If the tax rates are changed, this seems reasonable to me – though it complicates the tax code.

How large is too large for football?

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The NFL has some large players, particularly on the offensive line where it seems like all the linemen are at least 6’3″ and 300 pounds.The game has evolved from one with fairly normal people to one where players have to be behemoths or physical specimens at each position.

Mississippi walk-on lineman Terrell Brown is even bigger: 6’11” and 390 pounds. This is huge, massive. A couple thoughts:

1. Can one even be a good football player at this size? I imagine if he locked up with a defensive player, Brown could win on size alone. But how difficult is it to move all that weight? I could imagine some smaller defense players could make it difficult as they run around him.

2. Can one remain healthy while playing at this size? Linemen take a beating and it seems like tall athletes, like Yao Ming, have special issues.

3. What will his future life be like if football doesn’t work out? Offensive linemen bulk up quite a bit to play football but this is not the weight one would want to stay at for a lifetime.

Brown has a long way to go before these questions are answered – he is just a walk-on who apparently played at a community college and is not listed on recruiting sites. I’d be curious to see how his football future plays out.

The attractiveness of professors

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The Chronicle of Higher Education takes a look at how the attractiveness of professors affects their career. Some of the highlights of the article:

Research shows that attractive people do better in life. They are treated better by teachers, doctors, even strangers, and are more likely to be hired and promoted than those who are less attractive. But in academe, being hot has a downside: Professors who are considered too good-looking can be cast by their peers as lightweights, known less for their productivity than for their pulchritude…

Although research shows that students give better teaching evaluations to professors they think are attractive, good looks can also be a burden in the classroom.

An interesting factor to keep in mind when assessing student evaluations.

Sociologist peeks behind the curtain of Vatican II

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Vatican II was a momentous movement in the modern history of the Catholic Church. However, how some of these decisions were made was not public knowledge.

Sociologist Melissa Wilde, with a team of researchers, obtained unprecedented access to Vatican II voting records in the Vatican Secret Archive. Their recent paper in American Sociological Review, “Religious Economy or Organizational Field? Predicting Bishops’ Votes at the Second Vatican Council” provides some answers about the voting patterns of the council. Some of the key findings:

They concluded that in places where the Roman Catholic Church enjoyed a stable monopoly as the state church, religious leaders were almost impervious to outside influence and opposed to most kinds of change. In areas in which Catholicism was not the established faith but where the religious field was stable, however, leaders of other religious institutions were a crucial source of influence on Catholic bishops who attended and voted at Vatican II.

Essentially, in places where the Catholic Church was not the state-supported religion, Catholic leaders were more willing to consider reforms that could make them more attractive in the religious marketplace. Or that is my quick interpretation based on this quick overview…I’ll need to read the complete article.

Interesting glimpse at unprecedented data.

Cathy coming to an end

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Cathy, the long-running comic strip, is coming to end in early October, as its creator, Cathy Guisewite wants to spend more time with her family. I’ll admit to often skipping this comic as I read the comic page in the Chicago Tribune – it often seemed too whiny and stereotypically feminine with a lot of talk about food, weight, and swimsuits.

But as I read the story about the close of the comic strip, I was reminded that Cathy is still a relative oddity on the comics page. There are still very few comics about female characters or strips drawn by females. While I would read these two strips, “For Better or For Worse” is retired and “Sally Forth” is not terribly popular (and not carried by the Tribune). Broom-Hilda doesn’t cut it (not really any content here) nor does Brenda Starr (a serialized strip that features an attractive star). ”

Cathy at least has a perspective about women that seems more real:

Critics have called “Cathy” anti-feminist, and while Guisewite didn’t reject that claim, she said certain stereotypes about women are the most fun to write about.

“The subjects like weight and style and look are these microcosms of all the extra expectations that are placed on women,” Guisewite said. “As women have become more powerful and stronger, it has become a lot more complicated for women to feel good about themselves. I like to think that ‘Cathy’ is the voice for women who can’t say, ‘I feel stupid about something silly, but it still really ruined my day.'”

Another commentator added:

Said John Glynn, 42, vice president of rights and acquisitions at Universal Uclick: “Cathy really broke a lot of ground in the ’70s. … She was talking about what a real woman goes through and the real-life concerns of women, and that I think was something very different for the comics section.”

So where are the comic strips by women or about women? A Zits-type strip about a teenage girl would have a lot of material to mine. Another comic strip about an adult woman, married or unmarried, could cover a lot of ground. Or are typical comic readers not interested in female leads?

NPR on New Orleans: Still a long way to go

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In a story that has slowly faded away, NPR looks again at New Orleans. The verdict: “the city’s health is much improved” but there is still much to be done. Top on the list of things to do: encourage economic growth that will continue to draw new residents and redevelopment.

Experiments in the social sciences

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Jim Manzi writes in City Journal about using experiments in the social sciences to help make decisions like whether the economic stimulus in the United States was successful. Manzi writes:

Another way of putting the problem is that we have no reliable way to measure counterfactuals—that is, to know what would have happened had we not executed some policy—because so many other factors influence the outcome. This seemingly narrow problem is central to our continuing inability to transform social sciences into actual sciences. Unlike physics or biology, the social sciences have not demonstrated the capacity to produce a substantial body of useful, nonobvious, and reliable predictive rules about what they study—that is, human social behavior, including the impact of proposed government programs.

Manzi provides an overview of experimentation and discusses using randomized field trials. An interesting look at how we know – and don’t know – about the social world.