Just Finished Reading Exercised by Daniel Lieberman

Daniel Lieberman's academic title is "paleoanthropologist", a mouthful that I'm confident he's gotten quite well at enunciating...I, though, have some catching up to do.  I first saw him in a YouTube interview on the excellent channel Diary of a CEO and was impressed enough to check out his book Exercised from my public library.  Its premise resounds like Lieberman's interview: humankind evolved not to engage in exercise, but to avoid it. He posits his theory based on his academic research living among different ongoing hunter-gatherer cultures in various parts of the world.  There the people's lives are doubtless physically strenuous, but only when their necessities, such as hunting, demand it.  Otherwise, they seem quite lazy, sitting around and definitely not jogging or weightlifting.  Lieberman says that this is why people in more "advanced" technology-based cultures (such as presumably yours and mine) need to intentionally move our bodies even when labor-saving devices can do most of the physical work for us.  He believes that the advancement of the species through evolution is focused on getting the individual successfully past reproductive age, beyond which their survival into old age becomes more extraneous to the process.  But by assigning special social roles to the elderly that benefit the group's survival, they, too, can achieve long and healthy life spans.  Daniel Lieberman is a big advocate for both resistance and aerobic fitness training, and he himself is a long-distance runner. He also has something to say about the very passive way of sitting for long stretches of time in "advanced" cultures as opposed to the more squatting, fidgety way he observed in his field work of the more "primitive" peoples...our ways lower longevity. I liked both this book of his and his online interview.  Check it out if you have the time or inclination...

Media Outlets Making Money Off the People They Interview for Free

Media outlets make money off the people they interview for free...does this bother you?  It bugs me, although I acknowledge that the overall flow of information might be seriously slowed were they obliged to pay folks for asking them questions and then airing them.  My mind keeps going back to Fox News celebrity Jesse Watters, a likeable young man who made his name on the old Bill O'Reilly show going up and down city streets and exposing the abject ignorance of people at large when they couldn't correctly answer the simplest questions.  Now Jesse is a millionaire and his star only keeps rising...after O'Reilly was canned in disgrace for his sex scandals, Watters has been given his own prime time show on that channel.  I don't know about you, but I for one would never sign any release for a street-side interview with any for-profit news organization, especially those with a reputation for spinning the news in a specific direction and whose stars are soaking themselves in wealth...unless they in turn paid me for my contribution to their profits.   It's one thing to say that paying people to be interviewed would ethically taint objectivity and somehow violate journalism ethics: it's another for companies and their employees to nearly universally practice this behavior...excluding special paid interviews...while always carefully looking after their own financial bottom line.  Sure, it can be argued that with more public figures like government officials the press needs unimpeded access to them without a demand for compensation.  And many artists, athletes, and others aspiring to public fame and wealth see any media exposure...paid or unpaid...as something to be sought after.  But for me...and most of us as well...I don't believe it is proper for others to enrich themselves at our expense...