The Really Big Questions

Unraveling the truth behind why human beings tell stories requires a scientist who can explain science to non-scientists.

Enter E. O. Wilson.

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Wilson is a biologist, but he’s also a storyteller. He’s among the world’s top experts on ants, but he’s also written a raft of best-selling books on popular science, and he’s won a couple of Pulitzer Prizes.

“Storytelling is far more fundamentally human than even human beings realize,” Wilson says.

The mind works by telling stories, according to Wilson.

“The mind is a simulation of experience that’s been lived and recalled, and a simulation of events that would be possible for the future,” he says.

Wilson says people are constantly telling themselves stories. This includes planning various scenarios.

“Then we make choices on which stories we wish to follow,” he says. “And that takes us into the future. But as part of that, we relive the stories in our mind of our past experience.”

The mind, Wilson says, is basically comprised of this storytelling instinct.

“The I, ego, is the key player on center stage always,” he says.

Wilson’s conclusion: “Storytelling (is) not just important for the human mind; it is the human mind.

The human drive to tell stories has a downside, too.

“We have become so good at telling fantasy stories,” he says. “That has, of course, been the genius of the entertainment industry—to generate an endless number of stories.”

Biologist and author E.O. Wilson (left) talks about storytelling with TRBQ host Dean Olsher. (Photo: Flora Lichtman)

“It’s tended to pull us away from having the kinds of experiences in real life that allow the best judgment,” he says.

That lack of real-life experience is evident in one area that’s of particular interest to a biologist like Wilson.

“The loss of interest in nature, natural history and pastoral existence and the whole ensemble of our ancient activities,” he says, “all that is being abandoned increasingly by the intensely urbanized and fantastical storytelling that we can achieve.”

In Wilson’s view, Nemo and Buzz Lightyear might be more villains than heroes.

“Pixar may be the ultimate enemy of human realism,” he says. “I realize that’s an exaggeration, but I think it captures what I was just trying to say.”

Wilson says that as a scientist, he uses tools that have their foundation in storytelling. He teaches his protégés to see their work in terms of archetypes, like finding a lost world or a holy grail.

“Whether it’s a boson that we’re seeking with an accelerator, whether it is the way to connect theoretical electrodynamics with relativity theory, science is full of grails,” he says.

Storytellers have an infinite number of possibilities when they create fictional times, places and contexts. But according to Wilson, branching out from the handful of accepted archetypes is troublesome.

“The ones that want to push beyond the frontiers are having a really tough time actually doing something that appeals to people in a visceral way,” he says. “Why do people so enjoy just running through the same formulas and outcomes over and over, infinitely?”

The secret, Wilson says, may be found in monkeys.

In studies of rhesus monkeys, the animals were confined and shown various objects.

“What they most wanted to see were other monkeys,” Wilson says. “There’s something about the human nature that reflects that.”

Humans will always want to relive their built-in emotions and instincts, Wilson says. And it turns out fiction can help encourage that. Some research shows that reading fiction can increase empathy.

“That’s what a lot of fiction does,” Wilson says. “It stimulates emotions, certainly, and that’s what gives us pleasure.”

Wilson says fiction also increases our skill in personal relationships.

“Cooperative behavior and the ability to read intentions of other people are increasingly believed by social psychologists, I think, to be the essence of human nature,” he says. “And a main source of what makes us so skilled and why we have such big, funny-shaped heads with this absurdly rounded forehead.”

Wilson says stories are part of how we evolved.

“Our heads just expanded as we got better and better and more skillful in storytelling and in making societies work,” he says.

Storytelling also has value in the realm of science, as Wilson teaches with the archetype example. Wilson says scientists and poets think alike.

“That is, creative people in the humanities and the arts think alike at the beginning,” he says. “The phrase I like the best is, ‘The ideal scientist thinks like a poet, writes like a bookkeeper. But he’s still a poet inside.’”

Wilson says in the earliest stages of creative thought, even scientists engage in “poetic excursions,” or fantasy.

“You say, ‘A appears to be somehow connected with B. Let me think up even fantastical connections that might be there, and then I’ll go looking for them,’” he says. “And it’s free-ranging, it’s sloppy, it’s very human.”

After they come up with these “fantastical connections,” Wilson says, scientists take the next step and get out their notebooks.

“It has to be replicable and it has to be testable,” he says. “It has to be done with statistical evaluation of the soundness of the result.”

This is the point, Wilson says, where some potential scientists are discouraged.

“The average person who’s fully intelligent and could know a lot about science, at this point throws up their hands and says, ‘Science is not for me! It’s just too difficult,’” Wilson says.

But it isn’t, at least according to Wilson. It’s kind of like poetry.

“Scientists think like everybody else,” he says. “The best scientists think like the best poets.”

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Tad Hoskins thinks we should face the facts: We’re all going to die. So we should make the necessary preparations. He’s not a morbid guy — just well prepared. That’s why he has his mom’s casket stored in his workshop.

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Spring came late this year to New York Mills, Minnesota. When we visited in April they were having yet another snowstorm, and the ice was still thick on the lakes.

In the summertime, the area is teeming with people from Minneapolis. It’s about a three-hour drive. They stay at cabins and resorts and campgrounds. Only about a thousand people live in the town year-round, and a lot of them work at the big Lund fishing boat factory.

Clear over on the other end of town—six blocks away—Patrick Kilby has a shop. He spends most of his year here, but he lives in Manhattan for two months each winter so he can play Santa Claus at Radio City Music Hall.

“It’s called the Christmas Spectacular with the Rockettes,” he says.

Kilby definitely looks the Santa part. He has the hair, the beard, the physique and the little round glasses.

But instead of making toys for the rest of the year, Patrick Kilby builds and refinishes furniture.

“We do tables and chairs,” Kilby says, “and just about anything you could imagine that needs to be refinished in your house.”

In his shop, Patrick Kilby tightened a screw on Tad Hoskins’s casket kit. (Photos: Chris Julin)

Kilby also runs another business out of this space. It’s called “A Simple Pine Box.”

He makes a few dozen caskets each year. Some people buy them already assembled, and some people buy a casket kit.

The phrase “simple pine box” doesn’t quite do this casket justice.

“Yeah, and that’s what people say,” according to Kilby. “They go, ‘Oh, I was thinking something like just a few boards put together.’”

Kilby says that wouldn’t be something he’d call a “simple box.”

“I would call that a rough box,” he says with a grin.

Patrick Kilby’s caskets are smooth, tightly-fitted rectangular boxes. The lids have beveled edges and there’s a sturdy handle running down each side for the pallbearers to hold onto.

Each kit comes with an Allen wrench. That’s the only tool that’s needed to put the casket together. In fact, if you called this casket something like The Norqvist, you could almost imagine it in an IKEA catalog.

“Right now, it’s unfinished,” Kilby says.

Some people put a coat of finish on the casket. Some don’t.

“What we tell people is if you put two blankets in here and a couple of pillows, that’s all you need for a lining.”

Patrick Kilby made his first casket about eight years ago. That one was for his mother. She was dying of cancer, so Kilby and his siblings had started to make preparations.

“We went and started doing some shopping and trying to figure out, what does this cost?” Kilby says.

They were looking at caskets that ranged in price from $3,500 to roughly $10,000.

“What was available to buy just didn’t seem like it fit somehow,” Kilby says.

Kilby says his mother was “conservative.”

“You would maybe say a salt-of-the-earth kind of person,” he says. “And what was available was real fancy, beautiful caskets. And I know that if my mom saw them she’d say, ‘Don’t bury me in that.’”

Then Kilby’s sister had an idea.

“My sister just off the cuff said to me one day, ‘You’re a woodworker. Why don’t you build a casket?’”

At first, Kilby says, the idea seemed pretty weird. But he agreed to do it.

“Once I started, it felt great,” he says. “It was like I had an opportunity to do make something to honor my mother, but also to honor my family as well.”

When he finished making his mom’s casket, he and his wife put it in the back of their pickup truck. They covered it with a tarp and drove to his sister’s house down in Minneapolis. His sister lived on a busy commercial street called Lyndale Avenue.

That’s when Kilby discovered that some people are freaked out by caskets.

“We opened up the pickup and I pulled it out on Lyndale Avenue, and we just about had a huge accident right in front of us,” Kilby says. “People were like, ‘Whoa, there’s a casket here on Lyndale Avenue.’”

Kilby and his wife thought that was an odd response.

“Some of that experience is what kind of spurred us on to doing this,” he says. “Because we thought, ‘People are that unaware or unfamiliar with looking at it?’ In our Western culture, we don’t like to talk about death.”

But Kilby figured there must be some people who are comfortable thinking about death and looking for ways to prepare for it. So he decided to make some more caskets.

“We sell most of our caskets to people who are Baby Boomers,” he says. “We’ve sold several kits to people that are terminally ill with cancer, and they said, ‘Hey, I want to buy this and put this together for myself before I die.’”

Kilby says the other group consists of people with parents in their 90s.

“They will buy kits from us and say, ‘We’ll just keep these, store these, and when we need one, we got it,’” he says.

That’s what will happen the casket that Kilby is working on today.

He ships casket kits all over the country, but this particular customer lives only 60 miles down the road, so Kilby will deliver the kit in person.

The customer, Tad Hoskins, lives outside the town of Brainerd. That’s where the police chief in the movie “Fargo” lives.

When Kilby arrives, Hoskins is outside his big, multi-vehicle garage tending some habanero beef jerky in his smoker.

“OK, you want to haul it in?” Kilby asks.

He has this casket pre-assembled so Hoskins can get a look at it. The two of them slide it out of Kilby’s van and carry it into the garage. They set it on a couple of sawhorses.

A while back, Hoskins saw one of Kilby’s brochures, and he decided to make a casket for his mom. He’s a carpenter, but he doesn’t have the tools for woodworking. So he decided to buy one of Kilby’s kits.

“When I first proposed it to mom, I said ‘What do you think about this idea?’” Hoskins says. “I talked to her about it and showed her the brochure. She’s like, ‘Yeah, that’s perfect.’ She got excited about it.”

Hoskins says he and his brother might work on the casket together.

“We’ll probably be taking it apart and storing it in a box and waiting until it’s near time,” he says. “And then reassembling it when it’s needed.”

Hoskins’ mom is 80 years old. She’s still living at home with some help from her daughter, but she’s been talking with hospice people lately.

She’s also been leaning on Hoskins to get a casket for her.

“I’m actually going to go see her,” he says. “And I’m going to have pictures on my phone of it, and I’ll just ask her, ‘Do you want to see what it looks like or what?’”

Hoskins thinks his mom will be pleased.

“It’s exactly what she wanted when she saw the photographs in the brochure, so I think she’s really going to like it,” he says. “I don’t know if it’ll upset her or not, but we’ll deal with that when the time comes. Take her out to lunch and make it all better.”

Tad Hoskins says he’s always had a matter-of-fact attitude toward death. He thinks it might be partly because he grew up in a farming and hunting family and he saw a lot of death.

“I’ve got young nieces and nephews, 3 or 4 years old, and they’re out at deer camp,” he says. “They understand the deer are going to die and we’re going to eat them.”

Hoskins grew up with this understanding as well.

“I don’t even remember a time death really upset me,” he says. “I mourned the loss.”

The first person Hoskins lost was his grandpa.

“I was 13 and he was my best buddy,” he says. “I was sad that grandpa wasn’t there anymore. We called him gramps and I was tadpole. We were inseparable. I remember grieving, but it was just like, ‘OK, this is the natural course of life.’”

Hoskins is 53, but he and his wife are already making plans for their own deaths.

They will be cremated, and they’re commissioning Patrick Kilby to make wooden urns for their ashes. They’ll be kits, just like his mom’s casket.

“The urns, of course, will be quite smaller,” Hoskins says. “But again they’d be collapsed down and when the time comes, with a little glue and a screw gun you can zip them together.”

Hoskins says they’re making the decisions now for the sake of their kids. His father died unexpectedly of a stroke more than 20 years ago, and he remembers having to make a lot of tough decisions in a hurry.

“We don’t want anybody to deal with that,” he says. “We just like to be prepared.”

Hoskins says he, his wife and his mom are all alike in this regard.

“We just believe in being prepared,” he says. “That’s why you buy big bags of toilet paper, four containers of ketchup at a time. You want to be prepared. You might have a dinner party, you know?”

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TRBQ paid a visit to the United House of Prayer for All People in Harlem to spend some time with a gospel brass band called the McCullough Sons of Thunder. And we talked with some neuroscientists who study our perceptions of music.

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When the McCullough Sons of Thunder play at the United House of Prayer for All People, you feel it.

“We play this music from our souls, sweating,” says band director Elder Edward Babb. “Tie is wet, shirt is wet, even my socks are wet. And so we give our body, our soul and our spirit to render this music.”

The Sons of Thunder rehearse in a small meeting room. The ceiling is low, the lights are fluorescent—and none of that matters. The moment they start playing, the room is filled with the electricity of their music, and their movement.

One player has just come from his job working for the MTA, and he has to change out of his uniform. He is especially on fire, dancing ecstatically while the band plays.

Elder Edward Babb has been with the Sons of Thunder from the beginning. (Photo: Flora Lichtman)

The band of a dozen or so men was organized 52 years ago.

“I was 17 going on 18 at the time,” says Elder Babb. “We’re still there. Our sousaphone player, the ripe age of 84. Our bass drum beater wasn’t here tonight, but he’ll be 95 this year.”

The six of them who compose the band’s “nucleus,” as Babb calls it, have been there for all 52 years.

The thunderous power of this band highlights how music can move the listener—physically and emotionally. We felt shivers when they played.

Psyche Loui, a neuroscience researcher at Wesleyan University, calls this sensation “chills.”

“Goose bumps or goose flesh or skin orgasms,” she says. “Those are all sort of terms that have been used to define chills. But in our experiments, it has to do with an intense aesthetic experience that people get when they are perceiving some art that’s really subjectively kind of emotional.”

In other words, she says, it’s an emotional response that becomes physical.

Psyche Loui does research into other areas of music psychology, beyond chills. She’s interested in music perception and cognition. That means she studies why some people can’t sing and some can.

Wesleyan University psychologist Psyche Loui investigates how music can give us “chills.” (Photo: Olivia Drake/Wesleyan University)

“That has led me down a path of looking at individual differences in music,” she says.

One obvious difference in people’s perception of music is in preference and taste.

“There are some people who will really, honestly say that some pieces of music like Justin Bieber are really, really, really moving to them,” she says. “And then there will be some people who say, ‘There’s something about a Rachmaninoff piano concerto that’s really doing it for me.’”

Just as there are differences in taste, Loui says there are also differences in the extent to which music affects people.

“A lot of people will report that they do get these strong emotional responses to music,” she says. “And then on the other hand, there are people who never seem to respond to music emotionally.”

Loui says her most interesting findings have to do with the structural differences in the brains of those two groups—the unmoved group and the “chill” group.

The brains of people in the chill group, she says, have a stronger connection between the auditory areas and the emotion-processing areas.

Psyche Loui is not the only researcher who is interested in how music puts us in a state of mind that is best described with hypercolloquial terms. Petr Janata at the University of California at Davis is interested in how we “groove” to music.

His definition of groove: “It’s the pleasurable urge to move that’s elicited by music.”

Neuroscientist Petr Janata studies how music, motion and emotions map in the brain. (Photo: Karin Higgins/UC Davis)

But for Janata, it goes deeper than that.

“I believe a similarly important part of the definition is this sense of unity that people feel with the music or people who they’re engaged in the music with,” he says.

Janata says sometimes it’s hard for people to take his study of “groove” seriously.

“It generally conjures up associations of bad hair and bad clothes from the ’70s,” he says. “I think whenever you take a term from folk culture, and then try to establish that as a scientific concept that one can study rigorously, it meets with some raised eyebrows.”

He says he’s not so much about the word itself.

“At the end of the day, I think ‘groove’ is only one word that one might use for trying to understand a phenomenon that’s multifaceted and requires a fair amount of explanation,” he says.

One thing he likes about “groove,” though, is that it’s easy for people to understand.

“It’s important to connect with constructs that people out there in the world identify with,” he says. “And so it’s important then to use language or labels for things that more or less people know what you’re talking about.”

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Pinning down a definition of music is harder than it sounds.

A song composed by a human easily fits into the category of music. But what about a song composed by a bird? Or the rumble of a freight train?

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Steven Pinker is a cognitive scientist at Harvard, and he’s written best-selling books about evolutionary psychology and language. He says music is tied to language.

“Music has a set of rhythms within rhythms that can align uncannily with those of speech,” Pinker says.

There’s an ongoing debate about whether music is “adaptive” — whether it serves a direct evolutionary purpose. Steven Pinker doesn’t think it does.

He’s argued that music is a happy byproduct of some other evolutionary adaptation. That idea stirred up some controversy when he first wrote about it in the 1990s, and it still does.

Pinker thinks there’s probably a strong connection between music and our use of language, but there are other possibilities as well. In his book “How the Mind Works,” he laid out six hypotheses for what music draws on. Language is only one of them.

Others are rhythm and motion; environmental sounds; emotional calls like moaning, laughing or weeping; and habitats like babbling brooks and chirping birds.

Pinker says his sixth hypothesis is that music draws on something we don’t yet understand, having to do with how the brain processes periodic patterns and rhythms.

“So I don’t think it is just language,” he says. “But I think it’s pretty closely tied to language.”

If music is linked to language in our brains, one might think we use music to “tell” something to each other. But Pinker doesn’t believe that’s true. He doesn’t think music “tells” us anything, but it’s certainly capable of stirring our emotions.

“Think of movie soundtracks,” he says. “Not the score of a musical like ‘Oliver’ or ‘The Sound of Music,’ but just the kind of movie where there’s always something in the background.”

Pinker is referring to the almost sound-effect like way music is used in film. Strings play during sad scenes, cymbals and drums during suspenseful scenes.

“And there’s a cacophony during the chase scenes,” Pinker says. “Is that music? You would never just listen to it. It doesn’t have much in the way of resolution or rhythm or melody, but it clearly yanks our emotions around.”

Pinker says music has some elements of language, but it’s limited in many ways. Music, like language, has syntax — patterns and rules in the way it’s formed. But Pinker says it doesn’t share the semantic aspect of language — communicating a specific meaning, all on its own.

“It’s certainly impossible to narrate an actual plot using melody alone,” Pinker says.

Words, Pinker points out, can spin out tales and stories in a way that music simply can’t.

“A man falls in love with a woman but she’s involved with another man because the man is better connected and comes from a more respectable family,” he says. “You just listen to a piece of music and if you don’t hear the lyrics, you’d have no way of guessing that.”

Even if music doesn’t tell a specific story, Pinker says there’s intense mental activity associated with it.

“That’s why we enjoy music so much,” he says. “But the interesting thing is, it’s very hard to pin down what it is.”

Music theorists like Deryck Cooke have tried to work out emotional “semantics” for music.

“He was kind of ridiculed by his fellow music theorists, because whatever claim he made, they’d find a counterexample,” Pinker says.

Pinker believes that there is something to Cooke’s research, though. He says Cooke did as well as possible, given the nature of the topic.

“It’s very slippery what the meaning of music is,” he says. “People can distinguish happy and sad and upbeat and calm and so on.”

Pinker says the emotional reaction music provokes is easy enough to gauge.

“But then when it comes time to pinning down exactly what it is,” he says, “it’s very hard to put it into words.”

Americans don’t seem to have much trouble with violent death at the movies. But real death is a different story. Slow, lingering death from old age, funerals, embalming, cremation – these are not really dinner table conversation. A group called The Order of the Good Death is trying to change that. The Order wants to “prepare a death-phobic culture for their inevitable mortality.” Producer Catherine Winter spent some time with members of the Order in Seattle, and rode with a dead woman on her last trip, to the crematorium.

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By Catherine Winter

I don’t think I’m morbid, but I do think about death. I’ve been thinking for years that when my loved one dies, I don’t want to hand him over to a funeral home. I don’t want anyone messing with his body who doesn’t realize how awesome he is. I want him to be well loved until he’s ashes, and even after that.

Until recently, I hadn’t told anyone I was thinking about this. I didn’t want friends to think I’m creepy. Death isn’t generally welcome at the dinner table.

But death is starting to have a much busier social life. Death is getting invited to parties. It has web sites and Twitter feeds. Death is even sort of hip among some people in a surprisingly young crowd, 30-somethings who are not likely to face their own death any time soon.

There are death salons and death cafes. There’s a project called Let’s Have Dinner and Talk about Death. There’s a group called The Order of the Good Death, whose members include writers, artists, historians, morticians, a medical librarian, and even a “death midwife,” who will help you do home death care.

“Just like we had the home birth movement in the ’70s,” says writer Bess Lovejoy, a member of the Order of the Good Death, “there’s starting to be more people dying at home, home funerals, taking care of the dead at home.”

Mortician Jeff Jorgenson agrees.

“People used to care for their dead,” he says. “People are starting to realize that they can care for their dead.”

Jeff Jorgenson is a green mortician in Seattle and a member of The Order of the Good Death.

Jorgenson is a member of the Order of the Good Death and the owner of Elemental Cremation and Burial, which bills itself as Seattle’s only green funeral home.

He says he tries to let families take over as much of the process of caring for dead people and holding funerals as they are comfortable doing. Recently, he worked with a family that had a funeral for their mother in her home.

“Just through the entryway was her dining room table, and the dining room table was actually the perfect spot for her,” Jorgenson says. “So we just put her there.”

Jorgenson says he wishes that happened all the time.

“Because that’s a family that’s embracing it,” he says. “They’re creating a ritual for themselves. That is magical.”

Jorgenson says that family even drove the body to the cemetery themselves. But most people don’t want to do that. Many people don’t realize it’s even an option. Jorgenson gets a lot of questions about what you can legally do with a dead body.

Like, do you have to have the body embalmed?

“No you don’t need to embalm anyone,” he says. “I don’t know of a jurisdiction in this country where it is legally required — under most circumstances.”

He’s also been asked whether you can flush cremated remains down the toilet. Not a good idea, he explains on his web site:

The human remains are more sizable than you may think, and are not fluffy ash.  If you choose to flush them, it’s likely that it will be tedious and you may incur a plumber’s bill larger than the crematory bill.  From the environmental perspective, keep in mind that you are going to be flushing the toilet quite a few times.

Jorgenson says some questions come up repeatedly, like can you bury a corpse at home? (No.) And some questions come up less often, like can you send cremated remains into orbit? (Yes.)

He’s working with the founder of the Order of the Good Death, mortician Caitlin Doughty, on a video series called “Is it Legal?” In the first installment they discuss whether you can have a Viking funeral, in which you put the corpse on a boat and set it alight.

Doughty delivers the bad news: “No! It’s totally not legal because you’re not allowed to set a corpse on fire in a municipal waterway and have some random scorched foot wash up on a kid playing with his toy sailboat a week later.”

You can’t have a backyard pyre, either.

Still, there are a lot of things you can do. You can do the washing and dressing of your loved one’s corpse. You can transport the body yourself. You can be there when your loved one goes into the retort – the chamber where the body is cremated.

But Jeff Jorgenson doesn’t expect home death care to put guys like him out of business any time soon. There are parts of dealing with the dead that are difficult if you’re not a professional, like filing all the paperwork and transporting the body.

Jorgenson took me along with him one day when he picked up a body, an elderly woman who had died that morning after a long illness.

He has a van and a gurney – equipment most of us don’t have – and he knew where to go: the back door of the hospital, by the dumpsters and the loading dock. Live people go in the front doors of hospitals, but the dead come out the back.

He wheeled the gurney through industrial-looking hallways to the morgue. It was not at all like the big gleaming rooms you see in movies. It was small, with three slide-in coolers. A sign told hospital workers not to store their lunches in there.

A hospital worker met him there, and the two of them chatted brightly, as though he had come to deliver flowers, or pick up laundry. Then they opened a cooler and pulled the woman out.

Jeff Jorgenson picks up a body at a Seattle hospital.

She was zipped into a rubbery bag. Somehow the sound of that rubber being moved around, knowing what was in the bag, caused me a wave of nausea. It got worse when they zipped open the bag to make sure Jorgenson was taking the right person. The woman’s face was waxen and her hands were swollen. I had to look away while they checked the ID band on her wrist.

Jorgenson told me later than people don’t tend to look their best when they die. He also told me later that she was still warm when he moved her to his gurney, which made that nausea rise again. She was too heavy for him to move by himself, so he used a mechanical lift. He put a quilt over her, signed many pieces of paper, said a cheery goodbye to the hospital worker, and wheeled her out to the van.

As we drove away, Jorgenson was still breezy, pointing out landmarks like the Medical Examiner’s office, a trauma center, and Vital Statistics. I was still shaky, feeling the presence of the silent person lying right behind our seats.

“I’ve never been in a van with a dead person before,” I told him.

“Most people haven’t,” he pointed out.

“I find it creepy,” I admitted.

“For quite some time I thought it was creepy,” Jorgenson told me. “But it moved from creepy fairly early on to an honor. Not everyone gets to do this. I’m really lucky.”

I told Jorgenson that I had only seen one other dead person in my entire life. He was shocked.

“Really?” Jorgenson said. “That’s something that I tend to forget. People don’t see dead people.”

I said I wondered what that says about our culture. Surely in the past we weren’t so removed from death. It wasn’t so hidden.

“I think our connection to death right now is at a low point,” Jorgenson said.

He’d like people to get reacquainted with death. He said death is one “end of a life’s journey.”

“We’re very acquainted with the other end,” he said. “Everyone’s got a video camera in the birthing room. We’ve embraced birth, but I think that ultimately, in our generation, we’re embracing the notion that, yeah, we need to have more dialog about this and we need to be more involved.”

Jorgenson says he thinks it’s unkind not to think about your own death, not to leave instructions for the people you leave behind. People often tell him, “I don’t care, I’m not going to be here.”

“Think about your family, for god’s sake,” he says. ”Don’t be so selfish that you put that on other people to decide. Make it a dialogue. It’s tough to be left behind.”

He knows from experience. His mother died last year. He cared for her for the last six months of her life. And he took care of her after she died.

“I told her I’d be there through the cremation, and so when it came time, I went down there,” Jorgenson says. He tears up at the memory. “And I said goodbye to her and put her into the retort and cremated her.”

He says it was really, really hard. But it was also cathartic.

“I think that in our busy lives and our lack of acceptance of death, we’ve forgotten that caring for our dead is healing,” he says. “I don’t profess that any of this is going to be fun for anyone. It’s not. Death isn’t fun. And at the same time, knowing that you’ve cared for your loved one is pretty priceless.”

The Order of the Good Death would like to inspire more people to care for their own dead. But spending a morning with Jeff actually had the opposite effect on me.

I had been thinking that if my sweetheart dies before I do, I’d want to be the one to clean him up and dress him. Now, I’m not so sure. I hadn’t really thought about how heavy a body is. And I didn’t realize how squeamish I am. After we took the dead woman to the crematorium, I was kind of shaky for the rest of the day.

But I hope Jeff will be glad to know that he made his point about making your wishes known. Just so no one has to guess what to do with me when I’m gone, here it is, for the record: Please donate any usable parts, and then cremate me. Nothing fancy, whatever’s cheapest. And please toss my ashes into Lake Superior.

I checked. It’s legal.

Get Podcast 4 — Sharing with strangers

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Why do people share? In this episode we hear from Yochai Benkler about his research into people who write Wikipedia articles, and we meet Sam Harnett who moonlights giving people rides — and recording their stories.

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Any given day, in any given place, someone is giving away something of value. Money, time, expertise.

Some even give their knowledge away. Millions of people spend hours writing entries and checking facts for Wikipedia about black holes, Bolivia and Justin Bieber—and that’s just the B’s.

And they do it for nothing.

In fact, sometimes people are more likely to do something for free than for money.

Yochai Benkler is a professor at Harvard Law School and the co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. He studies how people share and cooperate.

“Let’s imagine you volunteer to clean up the park,” Benkler says. “It’s a way for you tell yourself, ‘I’m a good person.’ It’s a way for you to tell your neighbors, ‘I’m a good person.’”

Now imagine that the city decides to pay everyone who helps $50.

“Suddenly you scratch your head,” he says. “And you say, ‘Well if I go, am I really doing it for the $50 or am I doing it because I’m a good person?’”

Yochai Benkler is co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard.
(Photo: Joi Ito)

Benkler says at this point people will often find a different, unambiguously good activity to achieve the sense that they are a good person.

The same dynamic is at play when you start getting paid for a hobby, like music or painting.

“There are ways in which adding money doesn’t necessarily destroy the pleasure and the quality of the interaction, but it requires a lot of care,” Benkler says. “We have a complicated relationship with money. To some extent we need it, to some extent we need to be outside of it.”

When it comes to information sharing, like open-source software and Wikipedia, public recognition can also be a factor. Benkler says different people respond to different motivations for this kind of sharing.

“Some really seem to care and be responsive more to social recognitions,” he says. “Others seem as though they couldn’t care less. … Others are going to be willing to give for no reason at all, simply because it’s the right thing.”

Benkler says whatever the flaws and limitations of something like Wikipedia, it’s important to remember that 13 years ago, anyone who predicted the extent of its success would have been laughed out of the room.

“Wikipedia is essentially an impossibility,” he says. “It is something that the economic models that were dominant from the late ’50s until the last decade simply predict wouldn’t exist.”

But it does exist. And more. Benkler calls it “an enormously important part of 21st century life.”

Benkler says this teaches us something important about society.

“People can manage their affairs without necessarily the force of law, without the authority of contract, without the forcing power of property,” he says, “but rather by getting together and negotiating their relationships.”

That is just the sort of thing that Sam Harnett is trying to do.

During the day, Harnett is a reporter at public radio station KQED in San Francisco. At night, he moonlights giving people rides.

Harnett is signed up with a rideshare company. He uses his own car and people request rides via smartphone.

Harnett is a little different from most drivers, though. He brings along his audio gear so he can interview his passengers. Then he turns their stories into a podcast called “Driving with Strangers.”

“They get in the car and I explain to them the show, hand them a couple index cards of questions, and then they pick the questions they want to answer and I record them,” he says.

Harnett’s questions vary.

“Some of them are pretty innocuous,” he says. “Like, ‘Have you ever had an odd job?’”

Sam Harnett moonlights as a rideshare driver in San Francisco. (Photo submitted)

Even that one gets some interesting responses.

He once had three people in his car who worked in a local dungeon as dominatrices. Another woman worked in a bong factory.

Other questions, Harnett says, are a little deeper. Questions like, “Have you ever uncovered a secret?” or “Have you ever had a near-death experience?”

“I was attacked by somebody close to me very, very unexpectedly and left for dead,” one passenger says.

“I didn’t remember anything until coming to in the ambulance,” says another.

Still a third recounts a harrowing tale: “The entire time the guy had the gun pressed against the back of my head as they were duct taping my hands and feet.”

Harnett says he believes people tell him these intimate stories because, basically, he’s just a guy giving them a lift.

Scholars say people’s relationships change if they exchange money. They say paying someone “increases social distance.” When no money changes hands, there’s less social distance.

That’s what Harnett thinks, too.

“I feel like in a regular cab, the interaction is so much more of a business transaction,” he says. “People get into the back seat. There’s cash that’s exchanged directly.”

In the rideshare model, Harnett says, the money is handled on a smartphone and the passenger sits in front. In fact, the people who participate in this program are almost expected to have a conversation.

“I was thinking at first, ‘Wow, if I got into a cab and they kind of put me on the spot and asked me to tell a story I don’t know if I would do it,’” Harnett says.

He was worried his first passenger would ask to get out at the next corner.

“But it ended up being the opposite,” Harnett says. “People would get in and I feel like it was almost a relief to get these questions as sort of an icebreaker, as opposed to having to strike up a conversation.”

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Money can make you happy. Especially if you give it to someone else. A growing body of research shows that giving  money to other people is more likely to make you happy than keeping the money. In this episode, Michael Norton from the Harvard Business School tells Dean about his fascinating research into sharing and generosity.

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Why do people share? It’s so complex, there’s a science to it.

“We do amazingly generous and kind things and we feel gratitude toward people and we give gifts and we help,” says Michael Norton, a professor at the Harvard Business School. “There’s an emerging kind of science of understanding how fundamental it is to humans to not just act in our own interest, but actually act in the interest of others’ happiness.”

Norton studies whether money can make us happy. And it turns out that it can—but in surprising ways.

In one study, Michael Norton and his colleagues decided to test whether people get more happiness from spending money on themselves, or spending money on other people.

“In the very first experiments we would go out on campuses and go out in public places and give people envelopes filled with cash,” Norton says.

They would tell some people to spend the cash on themselves by 5 p.m., and they would tell others to spend it on someone else.

“Then we called them up that night and asked them how happy they are,” Norton says.

Michael Norton’s research indicates that, sometimes, money can buy happiness. Especially if you spend it on someone else. (Photo: Harvard Business School)

Time and time again, not just in North America but all over the world, the researchers saw generally the same result when people spent the money on themselves.

“They’re not less happy than they were,” Norton says. “It just doesn’t do anything. It doesn’t change their day and it doesn’t change their happiness.”

But when people gave that money away, he says it seemed to make them happier in the course of the day.

He also says the people who bought things for themselves bought very different things than those who gave to others. The college students in the first group, he says, bought things like makeup and books.

People who gave the money away, though, spent it more creatively.

“They gave money to homeless people,” Norton says. “They gave money to street performers. One woman bought a stuffed animal for her niece.”

And there was one more trend that crossed over both the “giver” and the “keeper” groups.

“When we give undergrads $5, they kind of run to Starbucks and buy coffee with it,” he says.

There still a difference between the groups, though. Some people drank the coffee themselves and some people handed it off to someone else.

“You think it’s got to be better to drink coffee than to give it to somebody else, because coffee’s great,” Norton says. “But your seventh coffee of the day probably isn’t going to change your day that much. … But people who buy coffee and give it away to somebody else actually get happier.”

Norton acknowledges that ego can play a factor in all of this. In fact, we get the most happiness out of giving when we feel that we’ve had an impact on someone else.

“It’s not quite just being egotistical but it is related, actually,” he says. “It’s this feeling that I as a human being am making a difference in someone else’s life. That seems to be the thing that really, really makes us happy.”

Norton says the issue of whether it’s therefore selfish to give is really a metaphysical question.

“My guess is there’s 73 different reasons why we do it,” he says. “And some of them are these kind of moral higher reasons and some are probably very basic things like, ‘If I buy you lunch maybe you’ll buy me lunch tomorrow.’”

He says when he works with charitable organizations, he tells them to use social incentives as well as higher-order motivations like being a good person. Basically: Make sure people know they’ll get credit for giving.

“It may not be as cleanly altruistic as some of us kind of dispositionally want giving to be,” he says. “But it’s going to make people give more, and in the end giving is the act that actually truly helps other people. Whether you feel altruistic or not, the true measure in my mind of altruism is, was someone benefited on the other end?”

Norton says research on giving in other species beyond humans is emerging now.

There is evidence, for instance, of other species helping one another. And several species of monkeys are very sensitive to fairness. This suggests that they are aware of inequity between themselves and others, Norton says, which in many ways is a precursor to giving.

“The early evidence is that in fact other animals do feel some sort of benefit from giving, or at least they engage in that behavior,” he says. “The problem is that we can’t give them 100-point scales and ask them to fill it out, so we need to be creative in how we measure the outcomes.”

Norton says some new research looks at the extent to which monkeys will “pay it forward.” The idea is to look at how they treat the next monkey after they have either been shown generosity or greed by a previous monkey.

“What we find is that when monkeys have been treated generously by a previous monkey—they’ve been given a good allocation of a treat—they pay that forward to another monkey,” Norton says. “They’re generous if someone was generous to them.”

But if they’ve been treated poorly by a previous monkey, watch out. They pay that forward, too.

“So when the world is being generous I’m going to be generous to the next person as well, or the next monkey as well,” Norton says. “But when the world is being greedy… I’m making sure that I’m going to be greedy toward the next person.”

Norton says we often overlook traits in animals that can be seen as generosity.

“Ants live in enormous cooperative societies and have amazing sacrifices where they literally give their life all the time for the colony,” he says. “We don’t tend to see that as generosity because it doesn’t feel like these human decisions that we make to be generous.”

Norton says he wants his research used in a very practical way. These are not just abstract ideas to him. He even tries to get people to organize their credit card statements into lists.

“Imagine those were categorized into groups that said basically: these are things that are good for my wellbeing, these are things that are neutral and these are things that are bad. How am I doing, how was last month for my wellbeing, and should I change things up for the month coming?”

Norton says there are things people can buy, like experiences, that bring more happiness than buying stuff.

Buying a coffee for a stranger has also been known to work.

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TRBQ pays a visit to the marriage market in Shanghai to talk with parents who are looking for mates for their adult children, and host Dean Olsher talks with scientists about brain scans of people who are in love. The question is, does “love” mean the same thing in different cultures? And it appears the answer is yes. And no.

Additional reporting for this podcast was provided by Rebecca Kanthor and Xie Yifan in Shanghai.

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Every weekend in Shanghai, hundreds of parents flock to what’s called the Marriage Market, looking for love. Or at least marriage.

They’re not looking for themselves, though. They’re trying to find mates for their children.

Sometimes they come without telling their kids what they’re up to. Some line the sidewalks, with descriptions of their sons and daughters on white pieces of paper. Some walk along, browsing the selection.

In China, this practical view of love is common. Americans, on the other hand, have a kind of romantic ideal about getting swept off their feet. But does that mean Chinese people feel different things when they say they’re in love?

One of the parents at the Marriage Market identifies himself as Mr. Lan. He is hoping to find a spouse for his son.

“Here, we can find the information of single women who have a pretty high educational level,” he says through a translator. “These are girls who obtain undergraduate or master, or even doctoral degrees. They have limited time outside of work. They don’t even have time to look for a spouse, so their parents have to come.”

Parents post CVs for their children in hopes of finding a suitable spouse. (Photo: Xie Yifan)

The parents exchange information about their kids’ age, height, income. They discuss whether the prospective groom owns an apartment. Personal ads hang in neat rows on walls in the park. Most are just words, not pictures.

Lan believes people should worry about character first, and looks second.

“You wouldn’t marry a girl from the barbershop because she’s pretty,” he says. “You have to consider whether the family will accept the choice. Because falling in love isn’t simply the matter of two people, it concerns the whole family.”

This is an old and widespread idea: that marriage is about uniting families. It’s not just about love—and maybe not about love at all.

Historian Stephanie Coontz says Westerners tend to take for granted that love should come before marriage, but really it’s a recent notion. She says for centuries, around the world, marriage was an economic and political transaction.

“For example, in ancient China the word for love connoted a very socially disrespectable relationship,” she says. “Falling in love before marriage in India was considered an actively antisocial act.”

Marrying for love, she says, was selfish. You were supposed to put your family’s needs first.

Coontz says some of our current ideas about romantic love stem from southern France, where aristocrats developed the conventions of courtly love. Even to them, though, marriage wasn’t about love.

“Actually, they believed that the only true love could occur outside marriage,” Coontz says. “Since marriage was an economic and political arrangement and a mercenary institution, the truest love was an adulterous love.”

This idea of courtly love has gotten a lot of attention from scholars. In fact, they used to argue—and some still do—that the whole concept of romantic love was invented by European troubadours in the Middle Ages. Until recently, it was widely believed that people outside of the West did not even feel romantic love.

Researchers have since endeavored to find out if that’s true.

Anthropologist Edward Fischer teaches at Vanderbilt. He co-authored an influential paper about love in 1992. He and a colleague surveyed studies of 166 different cultures.

“We looked for evidence of romantic love,” Fischer says. “And that could have been love poetry, or elopements, or just general descriptions of what we would consider to be romantic love.”

Fischer says they found romantic love in an overwhelming 88.5 percent of cultures. In the cases where they didn’t find it, the anthropologists studying them hadn’t even mentioned or asked about love.

Their conclusion: It’s very likely that romantic love is found in all cultures. Fischer says this answer just leads to a new question.

“Is the love people feel in those cultures the same as the love Westerners feel?” he says. “If you ask people in other cultures about love, they often describe it differently from Westerners. In China and other eastern countries, surveys have found that people are more likely to stress the negative aspects of love than Westerners are. Things like jealousy and heartbreak.”

In Shanghai, if you stop people in the park or outside a department store and you ask them about love, you hear a lot about communication and working at love.

You hear about duty. Responsibility.

This is the general sentiment from Jessie Chen, a 24-year-old accountant in Shanghai.

“Being involved in a romantic relationship is a lot like having a job, actually,” she says. “Because first of all you have to trust your colleague/your lover to be good at what he is doing. Secondly, the other person has to trust myself to do my job well. Both of them are very risky, can be risky. Having a job is risky; having a romantic relationship can be risky.”

Another researcher, Mona Xu, wanted to know if the cautious, responsible way Chinese people respond to surveys about love means they don’t fall in love the way Westerners do. Xu is a psychology professor at Idaho State.

“It’s really difficult to know,” she says. “Are people accurately reporting their experiences, and there’s this drastic difference between how Westerners experience love and how Easterners experience love? Or is it that culture is influencing how people talk about it, or how familiar they are with even being asked these questions?”

To find out, Mona Xu decided to look at the brains of Chinese people.

She based her study on work that had already been done in the U.S. and England. Scientists recruited people who said they were madly in love and put them in an MRI machine to see what happened in their brains when they thought about their sweetheart.

What they found was activation in parts of the brain associated with thinking, but also in parts that are associated with craving, motivation, addiction and euphoria. That leads Mona Xu to a fairly clinical definition of love.

“It is a motivated goal state driven by a desire for union with another person that is often emotional in nature,” she says.

Some researchers call love a basic human drive, like the sex drive. Based on that premise, almost everyone would be expected to have it.

Xu expected that when she looked at the brains of Chinese people in love, they would look like the brains of Westerners in love—and she was right.

“We found that they’re almost identical,” she says.

Xu’s study lends support to the idea that love is love no matter where you are, even if culture influences how we talk about it and think about it and feel about it.

And of course, culture can change.

It’s changing in China, in fact. Educated young women are marrying later. And as millions of people move to cities, they lose the social networks that might have helped them find spouses. That’s why marriage markets have sprung up in recent years.

Instead of working with neighbors and relatives to broker marriages, parents have to negotiate with other parents who are strangers, or with matchmakers like Zhou Yun.

“Things were a lot more simple back then,” Zhou Yun says. “People were quite innocent.”

She says things were simpler when she was young. Now, it’s harder to find a spouse.

“In contemporary China, young people put a lot of emphasis on material conditions,” she says. “They are quite picky.”

Some people at the park say young people are getting new ideas about love from friends who’ve studied overseas, or from studying overseas themselves. Some do seem to be adopting a more Western, more Hollywood idea of love.

Suzette Xu is 30 years old. She grew up in Shanghai, but she sounds a bit like a Westerner when she talks about love. To her, it’s about finding the dream guy, not about responsibility.

“Once you’ve felt the kind of feeling when you’re in love with someone, it’s addictive, really addictive to me,” she says.

She’s eager to take a chance on love.

“Every single chance that I can possible take,” she says. “So I can fall in love with someone.”

Suzette Xu says being in love is like eating tiramisu.

“Because it’s creamy,” she says. “It’s sweet with a little bit of bitterness.. It’s a very pleasant thing. I can’t wait to have more!”

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We look at brain scans of people who are madly in love. We talk with the neuroscientists who did the scans. And we talk with writer A.J. Jacobs, who compares his love for his wife to a ride on a Segway.

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Head to your local university library, and you’ll find shelves of books on courtship and marriage in history and literature, and even more books about sex. But scholarly books about love? Not so much.

If you want to read about love, you’ll find a lot more in the self-help section of the local bookstore. Books on why people fall in love with the people they fall in love with. Books on how to win love, how to keep love alive, and how to get over heartache.

These questions have fascinated the public for centuries, but only recently have they begun to seem like questions worthy of the attention of academic researchers. Historians, anthropologists, English literature professors, and even neuroscientists have started taking love seriously.

Neurologist Lucy Brown says when she started studying love in the mid 1990s, work like hers was uncommon. Studying love was seen by many scholars as trivial – or too difficult.

“It seemed kind of an amorphous thing, romantic love,” Brown says.

In fact, the first time Senator William Proxmire gave out one of his famous Golden Fleece Awards, bestowed on researchers he saw as wasting government money, it went to a scholar studying passionate love.

But that was back in the 1970s. Brown says love has gained respect.

“The attitude is changing tremendously, and there are more people studying it now,” she says. “This is now in the mainstream psychological literature that this is important to do.”

Neuroscientist Lucy Brown talks with TRBQ host Dean Olsher in her home office on City Island in the Bronx.
(Photo: Catherine Winter)

Brown is a professor of neurology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. She uses an MRI machine to study the brains of people who are in love. She’s found that when people who are madly in love think of their sweethearts, many parts of the brain are activated, but one thing all her study subjects had in common was activation in a “primitive” part of the brain just above the brainstem.

“People who have just gotten a shot of cocaine show activation in this exact same region,” she says. “This passion is part of one of our deepest most important reward systems.”

She says this helps explain why love seems so addictive. And she says it supports her hypothesis: Romantic love is a drive, part of the human system for securing a mate. The other two parts of that system are lust and attachment love, which show up in different parts of the brain and, Brown and her colleagues argue, make people behave differently.

Brown’s research partner, Rutgers University anthropologist Helen Fisher, argues that the romantic love drive is even stronger than the sex drive.

“You know, if you ask somebody to go to bed with you and they say, ‘No thank you,’ you don’t kill yourself,” Fisher says. “But around the world people live for love, they pine for love, they kill for love, and they die for love – for a very important reason. It is with this person that you will form a pair bond and raise your children as a team and pass your DNA on into tomorrow.”

Anthropologist Helen Fisher says romantic love is a biological drive at least as powerful as the sex drive.
(Photo: Catherine Winter)

People around the world fall in love. That assertion of Fisher’s might seem logical today, but it used to be quite controversial. In fact, there are still scholars who believe that romantic love was invented by European troubadours in the Middle Ages, and that people outside of the western tradition don’t experience romantic love.

“We decided to see if that was true,” says anthropologist Ted Fischer, who teaches at Vanderbilt University.

In 1992, he and William Jankowiak, an anthropologist at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, co-authored an influential paper. They did a survey of anthropological research on 166 different cultures around the world.

“We looked for evidence of romantic love, and that could have been love poetry, or elopements, or just general descriptions of what we’d consider to be romantic love,” Fischer says. “And we found it in an overwhelming majority of cultures.”

Edward Fischer is an anthropologist at Vanderbilt. (Photo: Daniel Dubois)

Fischer says the few places where they didn’t find evidence of love, the anthropologists who did the original studies weren’t looking at factors like the ones he and Jankowiak were looking for. So elopements or love-related suicides might have occurred and just not been noted.

“So we thought it’s very likely romantic love is found in all cultures,” he says.

Jankowiak and Fischer defined romantic love like this: “an intense attraction that involves the idealization of the other person, the beloved, in an erotic context but with the expectation of enduring into the future, so not a momentary lustful infatuation.”

Jankowiak says by that definition you can’t be in love with two people at once. He has studied polygamous cultures, and he believes even when a man is supposed to love all of his wives equally, he can’t do it. There’s always a secret favorite. Jankowiak calls this “illicit monogamy.”

Jankowiak and Fischer’s paper made a big splash, and today it’s widely accepted that people in cultures outside of the west experience romantic love.

But perhaps not all romantic love is the same.

“When you look at cross-cultural research of romantic relationships, you get these very striking cultural differences,” says Xiaomeng (Mona) Xu, a psychology professor at Idaho State University.

Idaho State psychology professor Xiaomeng (Mona) Xu. (Photo: Idaho State University)

For example, people in some Asian countries tend to describe love in more negative terms than westerners do. In countries with a tradition of arranged marriage, falling in love is disruptive and dangerous. Falling in love is arguably about pleasing yourself, and some cultures put more emphasis than westerners do on serving your family or your community.

When asked about love, many people in China will talk about duty and responsibility, rather than Hollywood-style romance.

“The sorts of cross cultural differences that come out of self-report questionnaires would suggest that easterners for example really don’t feel passion, really don’t think about love as a positive thing,” Xu says.

“It’s very pragmatic,” Xu says. “It’s based on thinking about whether or not this person is going to fit into your family and if they’re going to be a good financial choice, etc.”

And yet there is love poetry in China, and songs about love that show deep passion. Xu says the surveys don’t ring true.

“The issue is that all of these studies are done using self report,” Xu says. “So it’s really difficult to know: Are people accurately reporting their experiences and there’s this drastic difference between how westerners experience love and how easterners experience love, or is it that culture is influencing how people talk about it?”

Xu headed the first study to look at the brains of Chinese people who were in love and compare their brain scans with those of people in the US and England.

“We found that they’re almost identical,” she says.

Xu says what differences they found may just have been because her team was using a stronger scanner than earlier studies had used.

This research provides support for what Xu had guessed was the truth: that “how we go through process of love can be very culturally defined” but the “actual experience” of love is not so different from culture to culture.

Xu and her colleagues say that love research is still in its early stages, and there are many more questions. They want to know more about how romantic love differs from love for children, or love for pets. And they’d like to know whether animals experience something like human love.

Xu says some researchers are training dogs to sit still in a scanner. The problem is, you can take a scan of a dog’s brain, but it’s hard to know what the dog was thinking about at the time.

*     *     *

Lucy Brown and Helen Fisher also studied brain scans of people in China. Here’s a short video they made explaining their findings about love in China.

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TRBQ Podcast #2 — Love in Shanghai

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