Morality: Your Inner Chimp

A fantastic podcast aired on April 28, 2007 and profiled on Chicago's WBEZ This American Life. Listen to more on the Science of Morality.

Turns out, when faced with moral dilemmas, there is a band of chimps in our brains, duking it out. And it requires some alpha chimp arbitration!

clipped from www.wnyc.org Where does our sense of right and wrong come from? We peer inside the brains of people contemplating moral dilemmas, watch chimps at a primate research center share blackberries, observe a playgroup of 3 year-olds fighting over toys, and tour the country's first penitentiary, Eastern State Prison. Also: the story of land grabbing, indentured servitude and slum lording in the fourth grade. Then we'll move from inner chimp to outer. Dr. Frans de Waals lets us watch a chimp fight at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta. And we'll turn our navel-gazing toward the furrier navels of the chimps to learn a little more about this thing called morality: where it comes from, its evolutionary benefit, and why you can't guilt-trip an ape.

Tomsitis: Every time you see a child, you want to give them a pair of shoes

Stumbled across this on Seth Godin's blog. A great model for social enterprise.

Buy one get one free

Brice points us to TOMS Shoes.

I like several things about this approach. The simplicity of the offer, first of all. If you buy a pair of these very inexpensive shoes, he gives a pair to a kid in the developing world for free. No fine print.

Second, Tom has turned the shoe into a souvenir. A post-modern shoe, a shoe for people who don't need shoes, but are happy to wear a statement. This isn't the first pair of shoes most Americans will buy, it might not even be the tenth. But it will be one that people talk about when they're wearing it.

The founder (and chief shoe dropper) is Blake Mycoskie, who, by age 30, has done more than most suburban-bred Texas kids.

From a Jan. 26, 2007 article in Time Magazine, A Shoe That Fits So Many Souls by Nadia Mustafa:

Blake Mycoskie wanted to get away from it all. After founding and running four businesses and losing by a sliver on The Amazing Race, he escaped last January to Argentina, where he learned to sail, dance the tango and play competitive polo. He also visited impoverished villages where few, if any, children had shoes. "I was sitting on a field on a farm one day, and I had an epiphany," says Mycoskie, who had taken to wearing alpargatas--resilient, lightweight slip-on shoes with a breathable canvas top and soft leather insole traditionally worn by Argentine workers. "I said, I'm going to start a shoe company, and for every pair I sell, I'm going to give one pair to a kid in need."

Blake returned to Argentina in October of 2006 with a couple of dozen volunteers to give away 10,000 pairs of Toms shoes along 2,200 miles of countryside. "I always thought I'd spend the first half of my life making money and the second half giving it away," says Mycoskie, who calls himself not ceo but chief shoe giver. "I never thought I could do both at the same time."

See video of Tom's 2006 Agentina Shoe Drop.

They Sure Don't Make Comic Books Like They Used To : Virgin Comics

From Fast Company :

"'If you told parents ten years ago in America that their children would know characters named Yu Gi Oh! and Pokemon as well as they would Spider-Man, those parents would have thought you were crazy -- yet in America today an estimated 30% of major children's animated programming is now Japanese animation,' states Sharad Devarajan, CEO of the New York headquartered Virgin Comics and Animation.

It is the recognition of this ease with which anime transcended its initial status as merely a cult phenomenon outside Japan that formed a fundamental impetus behind the founding of Devarajan's company about two years ago.

Positioning itself to redefine the comic book industry, Virgin Comics touts its mission as the creation of global comic properties that take their basis and inspiration from the east, particularly India, in a manner that resonates with both western and larger eastern audiences alike. It is the progeny of Sharad Devarajan and Suresh Seetharaman -- co-founders of another comic book company, Gotham Entertainment Group in 1997-- along with writer Deepak Chopra and acclaimed director Shekhar Kapur."