Lewis, Gonzalez, and Kaufman tracked the public Facebook profiles of about 1,400 college students from a single, unnamed college for a four-year period. They found that, on the whole, tastes in music, movies, and films weren’t especially “contagious.” The exceptions were classical music and jazz--probably, the researchers suggest, because tastes for classical and jazz are “high-status cultural signal[s].”
The best part of the study has to do with students who like alternative or indie music: Their tastes tended to diverge from the tastes of their friends over time. “Students whose friends list tastes in the ‘indie/alt’ music cluster,” the researchers write, “are significantly likely to discard these tastes in the future.” Indie kids, in short, use Facebook to find out what’s too popular, and then “symbolically distance themselves” from their too-mainstream peers.
How doctors die
Why is health care in America so expensive? One of the major reasons is overuse at the end of life. It’s a hard problem to fix: Families don’t want to give up, doctors don’t want to advise against care, and voters are uncomfortable with government guidelines (remember those “death panels”?). According to Ken Murray, a physician and former professor at USC Medical School, we need to learn from the one population who use less medical care than the rest of us: doctors. In an article called “How Doctors Die,” published in the journal Zócalo Public Square, Murray writes:
What’s unusual about [doctors] is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans, but how little. For all the time they spend fending off the deaths of others, they tend to be fairly serene when faced with death themselves. They know exactly what is going to happen, they know the choices, and they generally have access to any sort of medical care they could want. But they go gently.
Physicians, Murray argues, need to be more honest with patients about the limits of modern medicine--and patients need to be more fearless in asking about them before care begins.
What made the ‘20s beautiful
