(Washington, DC) Apparently, if you walk into a Russian club in Brooklyn or Cleveland on a Saturday night, you will see two or three gigantic parties seated in the dining room, each around a towering flower arrangement of a different color. The guy who bought that bouquet–and all the guests’ meals–is a big cheese.

On the streets of downtown Lisbon, I saw groups of teenagers: cheerful, friendly-looking kids. I have no idea what combination of clothes, interests, and idioms allow a teenager to hang out with one of those groups or become its leader, but I am sure the recipe for inclusion is very precise and difficult to master.

If I blew all my savings on a vast banquet, everyone would think I was weird. And I (evidently) don’t care about clothes. But I’ll labor for weeks or months to write a piece that can appear in one obscure scholarly journal instead of another, and then take great pride in adding it to my CV.

We are a funny bunch of primates, aren’t we?

(Washington, DC) At today’s Street Law board meeting, we watched “The Response,” a movie that Sig Lobowitz wrote, based on the transcripts of real Guantanamo Bay military tribunals. The first part is a tribunal hearing, very skillfully acted using composite text from several real trials. The second part envisions the tribunal privately deliberating the case. That portion is based on interviews and other research, but not transcripts. I won’t give away the end, because the plot is compelling, but it is cleverly contrived to make the audience deliberate.

“The Response” was shortlisted for the 2010 Academy Awards. Street Law is the “educational distributor” of the film and provides accompanying curricular materials, appropriate for high school, college, and law school.

I suppose a very strong critic or US policy might complain that the movie legitimates the US system because the military tribunal is depicted as genuinely wrestling with difficult issues. It is not a kangaroo court in the movie. The military lawyers are shown as serious and reflective people. On the other hand, all the major criticisms of the tribunal process–including its dependence on testimony obtained under torture–are fully and fairly aired.

I’ve been talking a lot lately with immigrants and practitioners who work with immigrants who are worried about obesity and are trying to develop programs that address the obesity epidemic. These conversations remind me that several years ago, I helped lead a group of high school kids–almost all new immigrants from Africa and Central America–in community research on that very issue. They made a short video that is quite engaging. Their website is down, but I found their product on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. You can click the little icon to make it play at full-screen size.

(Hartford, CT) I am here for a board meeting of the Paul J. Aicher Foundation, the fiscal agent of Everyday Democracy, which brought Study Circles to the US. On Thursday, I’ll be in DC for a board meeting of Street Law, Inc., which provides legal and democratic education to teenagers in the US and other countries. And then on Friday, I’ll stay in DC for the board meeting of the Charles F. Kettering Foundation, which studies deliberation and democracy in the US and abroad and originally launched National Issues Forums, among other experiments. It will be a week of listening, learning, and voting on budgets …

I am sympathetic to Kord Campbell, the addicted multitasker who is profiled in today’s long New York Times article entitled “Your Brain on Computers: Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying a Mental Price.” He and I are exactly the same age, we have similar family structures, and I, like Campbell, acknowledge an Internet addiction. A little dose of dopamine quite noticeably surges in my brain whenever I see a positive item of economic news, a favorable poll, or evidence that someone has read something of mine.

The research on multitasking predictably focuses on its consequences: What does the behavior cause? The scientific jury is out, but there are troubling suggestive findings regarding the impact on cognitive abilities and stress. This research is interesting but will never be adequate, because studying consequences begs the one really important question. So what if multitasking raises stress, and stress shortens life? So what if multitasking rewires the brain so that we can no longer concentrate on a novel or our kids’ homework? The primary question is: What should we do with our lives? If everything is just a means to something else, there is no basis to say that it matters how long we live or what we do with our time.

Obviously, I have no grounds to tell anyone else what is important in life. For myself, three ways of being loom large: Caring for other people and being cared for in return; becoming absorbed in another person’s world through fiction, film, or nonfiction prose; and immersing oneself in some creative activity. The last is what Mihály Csíkszentmihályi calls “flow,” and I like this operational definition: when you’re in “flow,” you are so absorbed you forget to eat lunch.

None of these ways of being is fully compatible with multitasking. You might be checking email 37 times/hour (the national average) in order to care for others, but that isn’t likely. Certainly, you are not immersed in another person’s world or in a creative activity.

I have no methodology for selecting the three most intrinsically valuable activities. I did not derive them from a deeper or broader principle, although that might be possible. They could easily be mere prejudices or subjective preferences on my part. Still, the fact that I cannot tell you what to admire and value does not mean that there is no right answer to that question. And even if we disagree about which ways of being are most intrinsically valuable, I think we can agree that checking your email 37 times an hour isn’t one of them.

(It disturbs me that I literally checked my email several times while I composed this blog post.)