Placebos to give us the illusion of control

I learned recently that in elevators in the US built after the early nineteen nineties, the door-close buttons do not work. They are there as a placebo, to give people a sense of control. What’s more, they are not the only placebos in our lives.

The head of the National Elevator Industry, Karen Penafiel, confirmed to The New York Times in a recent article that functional close-door buttons have been phased out since the passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act in 1990 (Door open buttons still work). Federal law requires that the doors stay open long enough for those with crutches or a wheelchair to get in the elevator.

“The riding public would not be able to make those doors close any faster,” Penafiel told The Times.

And the newspaper notes this is not the only example of placebos “that promote an illusion of control but that in reality do not work.”

Signs may tell pedestrians to push a button and wait for the walk signal, but The Times reports that most of those buttons were deactivated more than a decade ago as computer-controlled traffic signals became more popular.

Additionally, some workplaces have installed “dummy thermostats,” according to The Times, and that has cut down on complaints about the temperature in the office.

So why does placebo technology exist? It all comes down to mental health, one local expert says.

“Perceived control is very important,” Harvard University psychology professor Ellen Langer tells The Times. “It diminishes stress and promotes well being.”

I wonder how many other placebos exist that I am unaware of.

I have long felt that the only people who use the door-close buttons are the chronically impatient since at best you only save a few seconds. They are the same people who get mad and honk at because you actually stop at a stop sign instead of rolling through or when you slow down when the traffic light ahead turns yellow so that you can stop without sharp braking, while they want you to accelerate through the light so that they can follow. They are the same people who, although someone has already pressed the elevator call button or the walk signal, will press it again, as if the people already waiting are dolts who have nothing better to do than stand around.

I am relieved to hear about the elevator door-close inactivation. There have been occasions when I am already in an elevator and someone comes running saying “Hold the elevator!” I try to push the door-open button but, because it is right next to the door-close button, by accident press the door-close one and am mortified when the doors close before the person can enter, thinking that that person will think I am a jerk and deliberately closed the door on them. At least now I know that I did not make it close faster as if I maliciously wanted to keep the latecomer out, but was merely inept.

The politics of Zohran Mamdani’s father

I had not known much about Zohran Mamdani’s family who were not in the forefront of his successful campaign for mayor of New York City but his father Mahmood Mamdani is a professor of colonial studies at Columbia University and he was interviewed by Evan Goldstein for The Chronicle of Higher Education after the election.

Long before Mahmood Mamdani’s surname became ubiquitous in national politics, it loomed large in the field of postcolonial studies. In several major books, he explored the enduring effects of colonialism — specifically, how various political and legal statuses, such as “citizen” and “subject” (the title of his 1996 book) explain various inequities and power differentials in postcolonial societies. Last month, Harvard University Press published his new book, Slow Poison. Mamdani tells the story of post-independence Uganda through the lens of two national leaders — Idi Amin and Yoweri Museveni — and his own experiences as a scholar at the Makerere Institute of Social Research, in Kampala, and as a member of the country’s minority Asian population.

Mamdani has been on medical leave from Columbia University — “back issues,” he said — though he plans to return to teaching next fall. He does so with trepidation, given some of the provisions of the deal Columbia struck in July with the Trump administration.

For an hour, Mamdani spoke quietly, indulging in long pauses, and discussed the relationship between politics and scholarship, the protests that convulsed Columbia last year, and how the FBI introduced him to the work of Karl Marx.

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The Republican war on arithmetic

Trump and Republicans have no qualms about using false numbers about everything including the economy and the effects of tariffs to justify their action. But sometimes those numbers are so obviously false that one wonders how they could say them with a straight face.

Take for example, Trump claiming that he has reduced prices. He throws around random large numbers for the size of the reductions , saying that they are 500%, 1000%, 5000%, and so on, adding that “No one has seen numbers like that”. There is a good reason that no one has seen numbers like that since anyone who is even barely numerate would know that you cannot reduce the price of anything by more than 100% since a reduction of 100% would make it free.

You would expect that Mehmet Oz, who used to be a heart surgeon (and reputedly a good one) before he went on to become a TV personality peddling all manner of dubious health advice, would know better. But this newly minted Trump fanboy tried to explain away Trump’s absurd numbers using absurd arguments.
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The pettiness of Trump never ends

We are used to politicians and government officials having sign language interpreters alongside when they deliver important messages so that the hearing impaired could also benefit from what is being said. But I had missed the fact that Trump had canceled them for his events.

Now a federal judge has ordered that they be brought back.

A federal judge has ordered the White House to restore real-time American Sign Language interpretation at all press briefings conducted by President Donald Trump or press secretary Karoline Leavitt.

U.S. District Judge Amir Ali said the Trump White House’s decision to end ASL interpretation illegally excluded deaf Americans from crucial updates from the government on matters of war, the economy and public health. And evidence shows, Ali noted, that closed captioning and transcripts are insufficient alternatives.
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Sometimes a sandwich is just a sandwich

Recall the case of the man who was prosecuted by the federal government for throwing a sandwich at a CBP agent. Yesterday, he was acquitted by a jury.

There was no doubt as to the facts of the case. Sean Charles Dunn flatly said, “I did it. I threw the sandwich.” It was clear that the government tried to make the case into a warning to anyone to not show disrespect to any of its ICE or CBP thugs, after a viral video of the incident made them a laughing stock.

A grand jury in DC declined to indict Dunn in August on a felony assault charge, but he was eventually charged with a misdemeanor. The case moved ahead in federal court, with US district judge Carl Nichols acknowledging the strange case and saying the trial would be short “because it’s the simplest case in the world”.

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Pelosi leaves, time for Schumer and Jeffries to also go

Former speaker Nancy Pelosi has announced that she is not going to run for re-election to her San Francisco congressional seat in 2026. As speaker, while she was a shrewd tactician and had the skills to keep a boisterous caucus together on some major issues such as Obamacare and protecting some safety net issues, she was typical of the party’s old guard of neoliberals, very solicitous to Wall Street interests, unwilling to take on the oligarchy, or to make even the mildest criticisms of any atrocity that Israel committed. This made her out of step with the current generation and it was definitely time for her to go.
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Republicans flailing in the aftermath of Tuesday’s losses

As usually happens, the hot takes by the losers following a bad election loss like what Trump and the Republicans suffered on Tuesday tend to be somewhat extreme. Although they lost everywhere, it is Mamdani’s win that seems to have struck a real nerve and it is not hard to see why. The defeats in the governors races in Virginia and New Jersey, though by much larger margins than anyone expected, were to largely centrist candidates who did, however, lean into the fact that running against Trump was a good idea, something that Mamdani demonstrated throughout his surprising race that took him from 1% in the polls a year ago to winning over 50% of the vote on Tuesday. For example, 71% of people who voted for Mikie Sherrill for governor of New York Jersey said that it was a vote against Trump.

What must bother them is that Mamdani did not at all shy away from all the attempts to ‘other’ him, to make him look like ‘not one of us’. Instead he embraced it. As he said defiantly in his victory speech, “I am young … I am Muslim. I am a Democratic socialist. And most damning of all, I refuse to apologize for any of this.” Republicans are making a big mistake if they think that Mamdani won because of those qualities. New Yorkers may be more progressive than the nation as a whole but they are not that progressive. I think he won despite those things being a handicap and if Republicans focus on those things and don’t look closely at what made Mamdani’s message such a winning one that it neutralized all those deficits, they will be making a big mistake. Mamdani’s achievement was in seizing upon the issues that New Yorkers cared about and refusing to be sidetracked by attacks on his biography. Others could have done what he did but he was the one who saw the opening and seized it. The fact that he is charismatic and energetic and presents a vision of youthful energy and change undoubtedly helped.
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Voters give the finger to Trump and Republicans

Tuesday saw Democrats sweep the board in every election, winning easily even in races that were expected to be close or even where Republicans were expected to win.

The headline win was by Zohran Mamdani for mayor of New York City defeating Andrew Cuomo by 50% to 41%. The turnout was the highest since 1969 and Mamdani got over one million votes, the first person to do so. The total votes cast was two million, almost double the 1.1 million who voted in the last mayoral election four years ago, which shows extraordinary enthusiasm. Opponents had thrown everything at Mamdani, including the fact that he was a Muslim and saying he was a Communist. His outspoken condemnation of Israeli genocide earned him the enmity of the Israel lobby and AIPAC, who tried their hardest to defeat him. Also against him were the elites, those who live in the city as well as those who have business interests in the city but live in the wealthy enclaves on Long Island. They raised huge sums of money to try and stop him, and failed.

In his speech, Mamdani did not shy away from the socialist label, even quoting socialist Eugene Debs who said ‘I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity’. He had a message for Trump and defied his threats, saying “Hear me, President Trump, when I say this, To get to any of us, you will have to get through all of us.” He added, “The conventional wisdom would tell you that I am far from the perfect candidate… I am young, despite my best efforts to grow older, I am Muslim. I am a Democratic socialist. And most damning of all, I refuse to apologize for any of this.”
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TV review: Maigret (2025)

Georges Simenon was a prolific author who wrote a large number of novels featuring the French detective Jules Maigret. There have been many dramatic incarnations of this iconic character as this article discusses. About a year ago, I reviewed the 2016 British TV series Maigret starring Rowan Atkinson in the title role.. That series stayed close to the original in terms of period and the way that Maigret, his wife, and his supporting team were portrayed.

Now there is yet another version of the Maigret series, again called simply Maigret, that makes quite dramatic changes, while still keeping him as a chief inspector in Paris. For one thing it takes place in the present time so this Maigret has all the modern technology at his disposal. Maigret himself and his wife have been transformed from a sedate couple in their mid-fifties where the wife is a homemaker, to a hot young couple where his wife now works as a medical professional. Maigret’s team, all white men in the original, while retaining their old names, has also become younger and gender and ethnically diverse, with the addition of an insubordinate and insolent inspector who is jealous of Maigret and thus provides some internal tension within the team. The actor who plays Maigret, Benjamin Wainwright, has a disconcerting physical similarity to the actor who plays the annoying goofball Jonah Ryan in the comedy series Veep which I found a bit disconcerting at first, but that feeling soon passed.
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