The Atomic Cafe: Lampooning America’s Nuclear Obsession

What vintage bomb survival suits have to do with Dr. Stragelove and Richard Nixon.

The recent tragedy in Japan has triggered a tsunami of terror, founded and unfounded, about the potential risks of nuclear reactors. While there are people better equipped than us to explain the precise implications of the situation, we thought we’d put things in perspective by examining the flipside of these dystopian fears: The exuberant optimism about nuclear power in mid-century America.

The Atomic Cafe (1982) offers clever satire of America’s atomic culture through a mashup of old newsreels and archival footage from military training films, government propaganda, presidential speeches and pop songs — remix culture long before it became a buzzword. From congressmen pushing for nuclear attacks on China to mind-boggling inventions like the “bomb survival suit,” the darkly humorous film revolves around the newly built atomic bomb and pokes fun at the false optimism of the 1950s, showing how nuclear warfare made its way into American homes and seeped into the collective conscience from the inside out.

Though the collector’s edition DVD is a winner, the film — which became a cult classic often referred to as the “nuclear Reefer Madness” and compared to Kubrick’s Dr. Stragelove — is also available for free online in its entirety:

The Atomic Cafe is a poignant reminder that all social reactions, whatever their polarity, are always a complex function of the era’s cultural concerns, political propaganda and media mongering, rather than an accurate reflection of the actual risks and opportunities at hand.

Please note that none of this is meant as commentary on or an effort to invalidate the debilitating human tragedy in Japan. In fact, we’re diverting Brain Pickings donations this month to the American Red Cross in support of the relief efforts there. Our thoughts remain with the people of Japan as they piece their lives back together.

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The Longevity Project: Insights on Life from an 80-Year Study

Immortality has long been humanity’s existential pipe dream, but its holy grail has evaded us scientists and philosophers alike since time immemorial. But as modern science continues to strive for eternal youth, the true secrets of longevity may lie where we least expect to find them. In The Longevity Project: Surprising Discoveries for Health and Long Life from the Landmark Eight-Decade Study, social psychologists Leslie Martin and Howard Friedman dissect one of the most famous studies in the history of psychology to reveal the character traits, habits and mindsets that make some people live longer than others. And the findings are guaranteed to surprise you.

The project is based on an 80-year longitudinal study of that began in 1921, when researchers started following 1,500 then-kids to investigate the habits and behaviors that made them thrive and perish. Its revealing conclusions, rather than didactically overwhelming you with long to-do lists of thing to keep you forever young, help you develop simple patterns that lay the foundation for a healthier, longer life.

The most surprising thing to me in The Longevity Project was the differences that we found for men versus women when they encounter divorce. Divorce certainly is stressful and a bad things for anyone, but men were really able to improve their odds and ameliorating their risks by getting remarried after a divorce. That wasn’t really so much the case for women.” ~ Leslie Martin

Both deeply fascinating and remarkably readable, The Longevity Project is essentially a pop culture mythbuster that offers compelling and counter-intuitive insight into the art and science of being our best selves for the longest possible time.

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Vision Revolution: Why We See The Way We Do

Why do we see the way we do? Since the dawn of humanity’s fascination with the brain, scientists have tried to answer this question. But, as it turns out, much of what they thought to be true was wrong. In The Vision Revolution: How the Latest Research Overturns Everything We Thought We Knew About Human Vision, neuroscientist Mark Changizi — whose work has graced the pages of merchants of culture like TIME, Newsweek, New Scientist and The New York Times — offers groundbreaking insights into the science of how and why we see as we do through thoughtfully curated highlights from breakthrough research, complete with illuminating illustrations and diagrams that visualize his conclusions.

To understand how culture interacts with vision, one must understand not just the eye’s design, but the actual mechanisms we have evolved, for culture can tap into both the designed responses of our brains and the unintended responses.” ~ Mark Changizi

Changizi focuses on four fundamental “why” questions — why do we see in color, why do our eyes face forward, why do we see illusions, and why does reading come so naturally to us — the answers to which will surprise you.

For instance, scientists used to believe that color vision evolved to help our ancestors spot ripe fruit. It turns out, however, that it actually evolved to give us greater insight into the mental, emotional and physical states of other people: People who can see color changes in skin have a competitive edge over those who can’t because they can detect the reddening of rashes and know when others are blushing with embarrassment or purple-faced with exertion. (It’s unsurprising, then, that primates who have color vision are the ones who have no fur or hair on their faces and other instrumental body parts.) Even more interestingly, Changizi reveals that the cones in our eyes are exquisitely designed to see these skin color changes.

Perhaps most fascinatingly, Changizi illuminates the neuropsychology of illusions, which are the result of our brains’ evolutionary need to micro-predict the motion of objects. (You know a baseball is about to hit you in the face before it does, because you can project its trajectory, which allows you to react accordingly.) Simply put, illusions happen when the brain is tricked into believing a static two-dimensional picture has a moving element, projecting that element into the future and seeing not what is actually on the page but what our brain thinks will be there a fraction of a second later.

If our brains simply created a perception of the way the world was at the time light hit the eye, then by the time that perception was elicited — which takes about a tenth of a second for the brain to do — time would have marched on, and the perception would be of the recent past.” ~ Mark Changizi

Deeply fascinating yet absorbingly readable, The Vision Revolution comes as a necessary foundation for better understanding one of our most fundamental tools for navigating the world and, in the process, better understanding ourselves.

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