I mean, I saw Roger & Me when I was, like, a little kid. I was so young I couldn’t handle the rabbit scene; we fast-forwarded. But I was young, and I kept getting in trouble for standing up to bullies in school, and for watching the news and talking about it, and for saying Vietnam was wrong in Social Studies class. People kept picking on me. And my mom sat me down, and she told me to watch this video, Roger & Me. Because this was about a man who stood up to people. He didn’t have anything in the world, hardly, but a simple little tool to make his voice heard. And he did it. He looked at how awful things were, and then he went to that man’s office, and he stood outside waiting for the man to come down. How powerful it was, the wait. What a simple thing he was asking, just to talk. How perfectly that summarized the cruelty, that the man wouldn’t even come down and talk to him, after doing all that damage. All that damage, to all those people, and he couldn’t just have a conversation. I remember Roger & Me. And I watched TV Nation, with my mom — she was proud of me, that I got so many of the jokes — and later, I was in high school when the Columbine thing happened, and I knew the weird kids who got kicked out of school for wearing South Park t-shirts and listening to Marilyn Manson, and I was eighteen when Bush v. Gore was happening, and it irritated me that Moore was stumping for Nader because we couldn’t afford to lose this one, but when I heard he might come to our school, I was still excited. We all were. Bowling for Columbine was an event, everybody went together. Fahrenheit 9/11. Those were movies you had to see. I grew away from him, as I grew up; I started to feel like some of his points were dishonest or intellectually lazy; I stopped laughing at the jokes. But those movies, when we were so scared that we were eighteen and just barely adults and from the beginning of our adult lives this ugliness had overtaken us and might never leave: Those movies were what hope looked like. Just that people would pay to watch them. Michael Moore got my stepdad to stop voting Republican. His movies did that. And it started with Roger & Me, with this one man, who had nothing in the world almost but one little tool to make his voice heard, and a sense of humor that made his voice more listenable, one guy cracking jokes into a cheap camera and asking the man in the tower just to come down. Just to come down and talk.

That’s what Michael Moore still is to me, maybe, though it’s embarrassing to admit it and I don’t like his recent work at all. Because eventually I became a blogger, started this little blog that no-one ever read — just me, with almost nothing but my one tool to make my voice heard — and it started, like, growing. And people started reading it. 3,000 people a day: That’s a little number, but there was a time when I couldn’t imagine ever being read by 3,000 people. Ever. I just got my tool and I made my jokes and people started listening and in some weird way, I don’t know, I thought a little about Roger & Me. I thought maybe the fact that kids had grown up and become adults and seized their own tools and their own voices in the time since he’d made that first movie would inspire him, make him proud.

So now I’m outside the tower and I’m telling you, Michael Moore, I’ve known you my whole life, my mom showed me your movie to prove that it was a good thing to stand up to the bullies, we watched every episode of TV Nation together, I got to stay up late, I was in high school when Columbine happened and I was eighteen years old and voted in my first Presidential election and I watched everything get taken away, and you were what hope looked like. Michael Moore, I’m outside the tower, we all are, and I know because I’ve talked to my friends about it that I’m not the only one who had this happen. I’m not the only one you meant this much to. We’re outside, all the people who relied on you, and we’re asking you just to come down. Just to talk. Just to prove that these little voices matter, that you really did mean it, that you should wait outside Roger’s office because for a man to do all that damage and not speak to a sufferer of it is a terrible thing, for a person to wait outside for the man in the tower with just his one small voice was the right thing to do, I’m just asking you, we’re outside, come down. We sound angry. We sound angry because we are angry, because you did a bad thing, several terrible things, over and over again and on TV, and you should apologize. And I mean, Keith Olbermann, honestly, didn’t mean that much to me. I didn’t expect anything better from him. But from you. But from Roger & Me… We’ve been standing outside all day, I’ve been called a whiny bitch and a liar and stupid and an insult to real rape victims as though I was never sexually assaulted my own damn self, I’ve been told to “fuck off and die” with like five exclamation points, I’ve been asked why I’m not “in the kitchen” because that’s always new and witty, I’ve been called so many names, all day, and it’s cold and I can’t sleep, and I’m still waiting. So please, please, please prove that you believed that story. Prove that we were right to believe it with you. We loved the story, we needed the story, please, please, make the story end better this time. Make Roger come down. Please, please, please come down.

I mean, he’s coming, right?

Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world’s top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers - often implicitly - assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these “standard subjects” are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species - frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior - hence, there are no obvious a priori grounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions of human nature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close by proposing ways to structurally re‐organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges.

Beauvoir repeatedly stresses that our chances for happiness often turn on our capacity for canny self-objectification. Women are — still — heavily rewarded for pleasing men. When we make ourselves into what men want, we are more likely to get what we want, or at least thought we wanted. Unlike Sartre, Beauvoir believed in the possibility of human beings’ encountering each other simultaneously as subjects and as objects. In fact, she thought that truly successful erotic encounters positively demand that we be “in-itself-for-itself” with one another, mutually recognizing ourselves and our partners as both subjects and objects.

The problem is that we are inclined to deal with the discomfort of our metaphysical ambiguity by splitting the difference: men, we imagine, will relentlessly play the role of subjects; women, of objects. Thus our age-old investment in norms of femininity and masculinity. The few times that Beauvoir uses the term “bad faith” she’s almost always lamenting our cleaving to gender roles as a way of dealing with what metaphysically ails us, rather than, à la Sartre, scolding women for doing the best they can in an unjust world.

The goal of “The Second Sex” is to get women, and men, to crave freedom — social, political and psychological — more than the precarious kind of happiness that an unjust world intermittently begrudges to the people who play by its rules. Beauvoir warned that you can’t just will yourself to be free, that is, to abjure relentlessly the temptations to want only what the world wants you to want. For her the job of the philosopher, at least as much as the fiction writer, is to re-describe how things are in a way that competes with the status quo story and leaves us craving social justice and the truly wide berth for self-expression that only it can provide.

Lady Gaga and her shotgun companions should not be seen as barreling down the road of bad faith. But neither are they living in a world in which their acts of self-expression or self-empowerment are distinguishable, even in theory, from acts of self-objectification. It remains to be seen whether philosophers will be able to pick up the gauntlet that’s still lying on the ground more than half a century after Beauvoir tossed it down: whether we can sketch a vision of a just world seductive enough to compete with the allures of the present one.

To drive home the importance of good rules to economic growth, Romer sometimes shows a photograph of Guinean teenagers doing their homework under streetlights. The line of hunched, concentrating figures presents a mystery, Romer says; from the photo it is clear that the teens are not dirt poor, and youths like these generally own cell phones. Yet they evidently have no electric light at home, or they would not be studying by the curbside. “So here is the puzzle,” Romer declares: Why do these kids have access to a cutting-edge technology like the cell phone, but not to a 100-year-old technology for generating electric light in the home? The answer, in a word, is rules. Because of misguided price controls in the teenagers’ country, the local electricity utility has no incentive to connect their houses to the power grid. Their society lacks the rules that make technological advance meaningful.