Slate eBook Club - Best of 2003

by Slate. com

  4. Misc.

  Here's what's really undermining the sacredness of modern marriage: soap operas, wedding planning, longer work days, cuter secretaries, fights over money, reality TV, low-rise pants, mothers-in-law, boredom, Victoria's Secret catalogs, going to bed mad, the billable hour, that stubborn 7 pounds, the Wiggles, Internet chat rooms, and selfishness. In fact we should start amending the Constitution to deal with the Wiggles immediately.

  Here's why marriage will likely survive last week's crushing decision out of Massachusetts: Because despite all the horrors of Section 4, above, human beings want and deserve a soul mate; someone to grow old with, someone who thinks our dopey entry in the New Yorker cartoon competition is hilarious, and someone to help carry the shopping bags. Gay couples have asked the state to explain why such privileges should be denied them and have yet to receive an answer that is credible.

  The decision to make a marriage "sacred" does not belong to the state—if the state were in charge of mandating sacredness in matrimony, we'd have to pave over both Nevada and Jessica Simpson. We make marriage sacred by choosing to treat it that way, one couple at a time. We make marriage a joke by treating it like a two-week jungle safari. There is no evidence that gay couples are any more inclined toward that latter course than supermodels, rock stars, or that poor spineless bald man on Who Wants to Marry My Dad? There's good evidence that most of them will take the commitment very seriously, as do the rest of us. There will be more "sanctity" in marriage when we recognize that people of all orientations can make sacred choices. Good for Massachusetts for recognizing that truth.

  Canine-11

  Why Americans are obsessed with "rescuing" dogs.

  By Jon Katz

  Posted Tuesday, June 3, 2003, at 7:46 AM PT

  I was walking in a nearby park recently when an enormous mutt—a Lab/shepherd mix, from the looks of it—came bounding down the wooded path, plowed into my belly, and knocked me down, touching off a spirited tiff with my two border collies.

  As I clambered to my feet, a middle-aged man came chugging up, agitated and out-of-breath. He began belatedly scolding the genial and oblivious dog, whose name was Bear, explaining that Bear was a rescued dog, "probably abused." So the guy—who introduced himself as Stan—didn't want to train him to come, sit, or stop ricocheting into people, not yet; Bear had been through so much heartache already. He did lecture Bear—"no," "bad dog," "why don't you listen to me?"—long after the fact and well beyond the point of usefulness.

  Finding Bear was no cinch, it turned out. Stan told me he had combed animal shelters for months but found that in the Northeast, at least, the number of abandoned and adoptable dogs has fallen in recent years; new leash laws had resulted in fewer lost and straying dogs, and a sharp rise in neutering and spaying meant fewer dogs running around period. Stan didn't want to simply buy some fancy purebred pet, he explained, not when there were so many creatures in need. He preferred to save one from misery, possibly even death.

  So Stan went online and located Bear not in New Jersey, where we lived, but in a "foster home" in Alabama, via a rescue site listed on Petfinder.com. The demand for "rescued" dogs is so great that groups often have to scour faraway rural areas these days to find abused dogs for people to adopt.

  Bear was transported north, by volunteer "transporters" located via mailing lists on the Net, and delivered to a local New Jersey "fosterer" for evaluation. "Screeners" check possible homes and new owners. Stan and his home and family were thoroughly evaluated before he was permitted to bring Bear home. "Believe me," he said with some pride, "it was easier for me to buy a house than to get this dog." The screeners returned more than once and let him know they would be back periodically. He signed a document promising to care for the dog and to never let the dog walk off-leash.

  Now he was crazy about the dog, he confessed. It seemed to me that at least part of that feeling stemmed from his pride in having spared the animal a grim fate.

  How did he know that Bear had been abused? I asked. "You can just tell," Stan assured me. "It's obvious. If you come near him with a leash or collar or stick, he looks terrified."

  I'd heard such stories countless times. It needs to be said that there are innumerable and well documented stories of horrific abuse inflicted on dogs. At a Brooklyn shelter I visited a few months ago, I saw dogs that had been burned almost to death, abandoned, starved, poisoned, nearly drowned, beaten, and horribly mauled after being used as training fodder for fighting dogs. Rescue volunteers go to extraordinary lengths to save and care for these dogs.

  But many professional trainers and dog lovers have become wary. They often roll their eyes when people explain that their dogs have been abused, seeing that as an excuse for obnoxious or aggressive behavior and as a way to avoid the effort of training. Many also sense a need for some dog owners to see their pets as suffering victims, rather than animals.

  Pet behaviorists will tell you that it's usually impossible to know what dogs have actually been through, since they can't tell us. Dogs who are simply adjusting to new homes or poor training frequently show the same behaviors as ill-treated dogs: cowering, trembling, eliminating, shying away from the unfamiliar.

  But dogs, like so many other things, are a mirror of the society we—and they—live in. And a growing number of Americans not only need to rescue a creature, but to perceive those creatures as having been mistreated. Somehow, our dogs have joined us in our culture of victimization. Since we can only guess what has happened to them, they are blank canvases on which we can paint anything we wish. Add to this the fact that millions of dogs are indeed abandoned or maltreated and do need homes, and it becomes clearer why animal rescue is a booming social phenomenon.

  The dog rescue movement is relatively new. A generation ago, a person in need of a pet went to a breeder or to a local dog pound. There, he or she "adopted" rather than "rescued" a dog. There was and is no numerical shortage of abandoned dogs: The Humane Society of the United States estimates that between 8 million and 10 million enter the U.S. animal shelter system each year, with about 5 million unable to find homes and euthanized. It's worth noting that nobody really has any idea how many of these are actually abused.

  But this hardly matters. Rescue workers have become the special forces of the dog world: dedicated, fearless, driven, intensely organized, wily, and resourceful.

  The Internet has propelled and shaped this movement. Type "dog rescue" into Google, and more than 700,000 references pop up. Rescue groups have formed for almost every breed in almost every city and state, some with scores of members, fund-raising campaigns, sometimes their own vans, plus badges, caps, T-shirts, and bumper stickers. Through this national network of sites and lists, dogs can be rescued, re-rescued ("re-homed" is the preferred term), and transported all over America. Thanks to sites like the online clearinghouse Petfinder, any dog in need of a home can be eyeballed by anybody in the country with a computer. Last week, Petfinder had nearly 100,000 "adoptable pets" on its Web site, with sophisticated software that permits potential adopters to search databases for the pet: What breed? What age? What color? Housebroken? Deaf, blind, or injured?

  Rescue fantasies are familiar to therapists, who see them particularly in people who were themselves mistreated or ached for escape from loneliness and alienation.

  Some rescue workers have encountered people they call "hoarders" or "compulsives"—that is, rescuers with a dozen or more dogs. Hoarders are especially drawn to hopeless cases, dogs that are severely injured or especially aggressive. They are often confident that they can "flip" the dog around. And sometimes, they simply can't say no.

  Rescues can also provide an outlet for thwarted political inclinations. Social problems seem overwhelming, government remote. People can't easily stop a war or even get a stop sign installed on their blocks. But as a neighbor of mine explained, "I can't seem to do much for people these days, so the least I can do is rescue a dog." In sophisticated cities and their suburbs—New York, Washingto
n, San Francisco—where everything makes a political statement and children are always being taught "values," it means something to have rescued a dog as opposed to having simply bought one.

  Something buried in the psyches of certain dog-owners needs to alter animals' fates and leads them to see those animals as having suffered. Owners of rescued dogs I have talked to tend to have holes of one sort or another in their lives: "Saving" an "abused" dog can sometimes fill that hole. It makes the owner a hero: a literal savior. It makes the owner necessary: This poor abused creature can't possibly live without the person who saved it from misery and death. And it gives the owner a willing, and ever grateful, target of endless love.

  But while the lavish and forgiving affection showered on rescued dogs may be psychologically satisfying for the pet owner, it isn't always good for the animal. Seeing a dog as a victim in need of rescue, too traumatized to be confined or to learn simple commands and behaviors, actually impedes proper care. It undermines a dog's ability to be well-socialized, to live happily in a home, and to coexist with humans in general. Dogs like to be trained. It calms them, gives them a sense of order. When we respond to them in terms of our own needs, rather than theirs, we do them no favors.

  Love by the Numbers

  Can a few differential equations describe the course of a marriage?

  By Jordan Ellenberg

  Posted Wednesday, April 16, 2003, at 11:28 AM PT

  I have always believed in numbers, in the equations and logics that lead to reason. But after a lifetime of such pursuits I ask, "What truly is logic?" … It is only in the mysterious equations of love that any logical reasons can be found.

  —Russell Crowe playing mathematician John Nash in A Beautiful Mind

  It's a nice thought—that some things, like love, are beyond the reach of mathematical techniques, or even, as this speech suggests, that mathematical truth is in the end subservient to the truths that love tells.

  On the other hand, there's John Gottman. Gottman, a professor of psychology at the University of Washington, is probably best-known for the so-called "Love Lab." Here, couples get strapped into a bundle of physiological sensors, settle down in front of a one-way mirror, and have themselves a fight, while Gottman's researchers record their every criticism, apology, eye twitch, and pulse spike. By watching a couple for 15 minutes, Gottman says, he can predict success or failure of a marriage with 85 percent accuracy. And in a new book, The Mathematics of Marriage, his research group—which includes mathematician James Murray—argues that a marriage can, in fact, be modeled by a surprisingly simple ensemble of equations.

  Can the speech from A Beautiful Mind be so wrong? Is the difference between endless love and a quick divorce no more than a numbers game?

  Not quite. Just because marriage is amenable to mathematical analysis doesn't make it completely predictable, let alone logical. After all, the weather is subject to mathematical rules, too. And on the April day I'm writing this, there are 3 inches of snow on the ground. What kind of math allows such wild results?

  To get some ideas, switch to a simpler problem. Suppose you put a marble down on a lumpy surface. What happens? It depends where you put the marble. If the marble is on a slope, it'll roll in whatever direction offers the steepest descent. But if you balance the marble at the top of a hill or place it at the bottom of a valley, it stays put. The progress of the marble is governed by a differential equation, which means, more or less, that the change in the marble's position is predictably determined by the marble's position at the moment.

  [And now, the two-paragraph summary of a semester's course in differential equations. I ask my technically minded readers to forgive the many oversimplifications and omissions here, which are meant to get us quickly to the point of the exercise.]

  Differential equations describe all kinds of natural phenomena, from epidemics (the change in the number of infected people depends on the number of currently infected people) to the orbits of the planets (the motion of a planet depends on the gravitational force on it, which in turn depends on the location of other planets, which in turn depends on the original planet's position, and so on). Some differential equations, like the ones governing the marble, yield predictable and regular results. Others, like those for the weather, are more chaotic. As another popular movie once put it, paraphrasing Edward Lorenz, a butterfly flapping its wings in Taiwan can set off a hurricane in Houston. More prosaically: Small changes in the state of the system can make for drastic, unforeseeable changes in the system's long-term behavior. Now things are starting to sound like marriage!

  The first question we ask about any differential equation we meet is: What are the states of the system in which the system does not change? Such a state is called an equilibrium. For an epidemic, an equilibrium might be a low but stable incidence of the disease. The equilibria of the marble are the bottoms of valleys and the tops of hills.

  The example of the marble brings home the fact that not all equilibria are alike. Put a marble at the bottom of a bowl, and it's likely to stay there. But balance it atop a hill, and any perturbation, however slight, will send it rolling down. The first kind of equilibrium is called stable, the second unstable. Stable equilibria are important because they're the places where the system "likes" to end up. Drop a bucket of marbles in a landscape; after a while, you'll find a lot at the bottoms of valleys, few if any balanced on peaks.

  Gottman and his collaborators believe that the development of a marriage is governed—or at least can be described—by a differential equation. On the face of it, this makes sense: The amount of negative emotional expression a husband directs at his wife undoubtedly contributes to changes in her reciprocal feelings. But is this change entirely determined by the current state of the marriage? That seems hard to swallow; but The Mathematics of Marriage argues that just such an assumption yields results that match well with Gottman's decades of clinical data on couples.

  The idea that marriages obey differential equations might not be so scary; after all, this only seems to say that the course of a marriage is as regular, in the long term, as weather.

  But Gottman is quite specific about the differential equations he has in mind. And according to these equations, marriage isn't like the weather. It's like the marble.

  Marriages, Gottman's group says, have equilibria. Where they are and what they're like depend on the characteristics of the individuals and of the marriage. Some couples may have all their stable equilibria in states where the marriage is desperately unhappy; luckier couples may have all their equilibria in agreeable states. And some couples—the most interesting ones, from the point of view of marital therapy—have both happy and unhappy equilibria.

  This model has one flaw that should be obvious. The marble, once it's at a stable equilibrium, doesn't move. But a marriage, as we know, can shift in an instant from blissful to miserable and vice versa. If the cold equations are the whole story, how can this be?

  The answer to this question is the most interesting idea in The Mathematics of Marriage. The key idea is that the differential equations describing the marriage can change with time. The results are easiest to envision in marble world. Imagine a landscape with two equilibria—one ("happy marriage") in the bowl of a volcano, and the other ("screaming-and-throwing-plates marriage") in a deep valley. Both are stable equilibria for the marble; where the marble ends up depends on its starting position ("wedding day"). Suppose the marble ends up in the volcano. And suppose that, with time, the bowl begins to fill in with dirt, growing shallower and shallower. Now the center of the bowl remains an equilibrium, and the marble stays put, until a certain critical moment is reached—the dirt piles higher than the bowl's rim, and the peak of the volcano switches from concave to convex. At that moment, the equilibrium ceases to be stable, and the marble rolls down to the unhappy valley. Likewise, a marriage, under the pressure of quite gradual changes in circumstance, can suddenly collapse. What's more, returning the circumstances to their prior state sho
uld not be expected to repair the marriage; digging a new hole in the volcano won't make the marble jump out of the valley!

  The mathematical formalism addressing such phenomena, catastrophe theory, was extremely faddish not so long ago; as a result, attempts to apply catastrophe theory are often met with automatic skepticism. But the Gottman group's appeal to catastrophe in the marriage model seems to me quite reasonable, at least in principle. And, as honest theoreticians must, they offer empirical predictions, which can be confirmed or rejected by experiment—for instance, that a marriage is less likely to succeed when the spouses are individually more prone toward negative emotional expression.

  The theory's attractiveness is hard to deny. It neatly presents marriage as a process both mathematical and unpredictable, both stable and prone to catastrophe. Even the John Nash character in A Beautiful Mind would have to agree—love is like that.

  Oh, No: It's a Girl!

  Do daughters cause divorce?

  By Steven E. Landsburg

  Posted Thursday, Oct. 2, 2003, at 6:29 AM PT

  If you want to stay married, three of the most ominous words you'll ever hear are "It's a girl." All over the world, boys hold marriages together, and girls break them up.