Wednesday 29 December 2010

Wall Street Journal Takes Notice of Boredom


Even the Wall Street Journal Takes Notice of Boredom

December 29, 2010

It was nice of the author of a page one Wall Street Journal article about a December 11 event in London called Boring 2010 to mention The Boring Institute, says Alan Caruba, its founder.

 “Understandably,” said Caruba, “the bulk of the article reflected the event’s theme that boredom might be beneficial, if only to tune out the incessant overload of stimulation everyone experiences these days, but I disagree.”

Caruba, a former journalist and longtime public relations counselor founded The Boring Institute in 1984 as a media spoof and recently announced its annual list of “The Most Boring Celebrities of the Year.”  In the years since then, however, Caruba became an expert on boredom and, today, the Institute maintains a blog with much of it devoted to warning against the dangers of boredom and offering advice on how to avoid it.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the event’s organizer, James Ward, 29 years old, “works for a DVD distribution and production company” and the article focused the event’s seven hours of deliberately boring presentations by twenty speakers to an audience of some two hundred people who actually paid for the privilege.

A London-based public relations practitioner, Hamish Thompson, said, “It is quintessentially English to look at something dull and find it interesting.”

Caruba is more concerned that “Americans at almost every age level sit through countless boring hours in school rooms, in college, attending endless business meetings, and at any one of the thousands of conferences held throughout the year.”

 “Schools are virtual boredom factories and this accounts for an appallingly high dropout rate,” said Caruba, “while most business meetings are widely regarded as a waste of time.”

“Americans are so bored much of the time they seek diversion by paying attention to sports of every description or just mindlessly watching hours of television programming that often borders on the idiotic,” said Caruba.

Other Americans, however, find ways to avoid boredom that are far more beneficial. “Americans are some of the greatest hobbyists in the world and they frequently start or belong to organizations of others who share their particular hobby. Others love the outdoor life as avid walkers, joggers, hikers, mountain climbers, campers, hunters and fishers.”

The downside of American life, said Caruba, “are the many people who turn to alcohol and drugs to avoid having to cope with problems in their lives, creating a host of problems for others around them and for society in general.”

Caruba cites crime in America as often having a basis in boredom. “Aside from the criminal desire to steal, crime offers an element of excitement for those who engage in it as opposed to the routine of a job.”

Caruba, a founding member of the National Book Critics Circle, is encouraged that so many Americans take pleasure in reading. “New technology will encourage more people to read and make books even more accessible,” says Caruba. He posts a monthly report on new fiction and non-fiction at Bookviews.com.

Best known these days as a commentator on politics and issues ranging from energy to national security, Caruba’s daily blog, factsnotfiction.blogspot.com, is shared by national and international news and opinion websites and blogs.

“At any age, from infancy to the senior years, it is essential for everyone to keep mentally engaged with the world,” said Caruba. “Boredom is your mind telling you that you are not feeding it and growing its capacity to learn. Failure to do this will cause your mind to find often self-destructive ways to deal with it.”

Sunday 12 December 2010

Most Boring Celebrities of the Year - 2010

For Release: Monday, Dec 13, 2010
Most Boring Celebrities of the Year
The Boring Institute Revives List After a Long Hiatus

South Orange, NJ – It’s official. Lindsay Lohan is the Most Boring Celebrity of the Year according The Boring Institute.

After a hiatus following 9/11, The Boring Institute is back with its annual list of “The Most Boring Celebrities of the Year.”  Founded in 1984 by Alan Caruba, a public relations counselor, the Institute was active for nearly two decades spoofing celebrities, films, and television shows.

This year’s list is filled with familiar show business names. In reverse order, it is:

10. Kanye West. Or is that Kanye Pest?

9. Mel Gibson. Mel is giving bigotry and misogyny a bad name.

8. Betty White. Older than dirt, but she keeps escaping from the Actor’s Home.

7. Keith Olberman.  He and the five other people watching MSNBC need a personality transplant.

6. Joy Behar.  She is proof that having an opinion is not the same as having an IQ that’s lower than room temperature.

5. Justin Bieber. He’s cute and the little girls adore him. An earlier generation felt the same way about Paul McCartney and now they’re all grandmothers.

4. Miley Cyrus. It’s painful watching Miley navigate her teenage years. We wonder what it will be like to go through menopause with her.

3. Lady GaGa. Take away the weird fashion statements plus weird makeup and what do you have? Boy George.

2. Snookie. Cute nickname and not much else. The rumor that people from New Jersey have an attitude is true.

1. Lindsay Lohan. Fresh from rehab, let’s hope America’s most famous drug and alcohol addict stays clean so Charlie Sheen can regain the title.

“We’re not saying that these celebrities are themselves boring people,” says Caruba, “but that the overwhelming media coverage and exposure gets very boring, very fast.”

Caruba is widely known as a daily commentator via his popular blog, “Warning Signs” where he casts a wary eye on politics, popular culture, and other topics. The Boring Institute maintains a blog at http://theboringinstitute.blogspot.com.

--END--

Contact: Alan Caruba @ acaruba@aol.com

Wednesday 24 November 2010

Boredom Begins at School

Boredom begins at school
 By Albert Nerenberg, Special to the Gazette April 25, 2010

Is there a place where boring people is deliberate? That would be our schools, says The Boring Institute's Alan Caruba, where we train young people to be bored and to bore others.

MONTREAL – The Boring Institute was created in 1984 to salute achievement in total boredom. Originally it was a publicity stunt: Founder and publicist Alan Caruba, would announce the most boring celebrities and TV shows of the year, often to great acclaim. Amazingly, Caruba soon wouldfind himself the go-to person for expertise on boredom.

What is it? Where does it come from? That's easy, says Caruba. Boredom begins in school. The original Boring Institute.

For almost two decades, Caruba's lists of the dreary, the dull and the over-exposed would blaze across major media. For example, in 2002, the Boring Institute named Anna Nicole Smith, Ozzy Osbourne, Martha Stewart and even Osama bin Laden among the year's top boring celebrities. “Pretty well anyone could do this if they had the time. But I’m the one who does it,” Caruba told an interviewer at the time.

The Boring Institute’s announcements were a hit. Caruba would find himself on major American TV and radio shows merely pointing out the obvious: As people they may not be boring, but there’s only so much you can take of Kim Kardashian, Brad Pitt or Kate Gosselin. The truth is the Boring Institute didn’t really exist outside of Alan Caruba’s house in Maplewood, N.J. But in the course of running the institute, something weird happened to Caruba. He soon became something of an authority on boredom, possibly because no one else was. There has been very little formal research into the issue.

“I never planned to become an expert on boredom. I started out just trying to have a little fun,” he said.

Caruba would be inundated with media requests to talk about the relationship between boredom and major issues like depression, suicide and the high-school dropout rate.
He quickly came to the shocking, perhaps unboring conclusion: Boredom’s no joke.
“I realized when doing this that boredom is actually a very serious problem. Boredom kills people, probably a lot of people,” he said in an interview.

“If you look into it, you’ll find some of society’s most serious problems have boredom at (their) root,” he said.
“Many people commit suicide simply because they’re bored. If you look deeper at almost any suicide, you usually find boredom is a factor. Boredom drives drug and alcohol addiction, and divorce.”

Few advocate boredom, and probably any of us could find ourselves boring people unintentionally. But is there a place where boring people is deliberate? That would be our schools, he says, where we train young people to be bored and to bore others. You don’t have to go far to find a kid who will tell you school is boring with a capital “B.” But maybe that’s because they’re kids?

“Learning can be some of the most exciting experiences anyone can have. Schools manage to turn it into a form of mental torture,” says Caruba. “I would say almost any child eventually finds school incredibly boring. But isn’t boredom subjective? You may hate math but I may love it. Some kids do say they enjoy school. And aren’t efforts being made to make school more stimulating? “I think we all spot boredom the minute we are exposed to it,” said Caruba. “Whether it’s a boring speaker, a boring author, or a boring teacher.”

Surprisingly, some educational reformers contending with elevated school dropout rates across North America echo Caruba’s views.

While the usual issues have been raised to explain the crisis – overcrowding, teacher stress and diverging student needs – one issue is conspicuously absent: the boredom factor.

Educational reformer Jeffrey Wilhelm, professor of English education at Boise University, is the co-author of Reading Don’t Fix No Chevys. A few years ago, Wilhelm decided to go back to school. As part of a long detailed study, he and another professor spent months following 52 high-achieving, average and troubled high-school boys through their daily school routine. Wilhelm said they were stunned by the experience.

“The first thing that astonished us when shadowing kids through school was … how absolutely boring it was,” he said in an interview. “I can tell you with authority that boredom in schools is a serious problem. Everything from bullying to dropping out happens because we are boring kids. Boredom is an underestimated force in education.” Ironically, the real-world challenges facing the young generation are anything but boring. They’ll be expected to contend with such gargantuan challenges as climate change, technological adaptation and supporting the massive retiring baby-boomer generation.

Is boredom really so bad? According to new research, it sounds like boredom can kill you.

In a study published in February, researchers at University College London analyzed surveys, conducted between 1985 and 1988, of the boredom levels reported by 7,500 civil servants, age 35 to 55. Last year, they noted those who had said they were bored were 37 per cent more likely to have died by the end of the study, April 2009.

The actual boredom probably didn’t kill them, the researchers said at the time. But people who report feeling bored more may be at higher risk for other factors like “excessive drinking, smoking, taking drugs and low psychological profiles,” according to the report by Annie Britton and Martin J. Shipley, who work in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health. However, in an email Britton explained the study itself was “to see whether there was a statistical association between self-reported boredom and risk of death during follow-up.”

This is not a major study, she said, even though the public seems to want one. Britton said the authors have been “amazed by the media interest.” A response to the study on Psychology Today’s online site, by Todd Kashdan, professor of psychology at George Mason University, is titled: “Science shows you can die of boredom, literally.” “This means that death by boredom is right up there,” he writes, with known killers like smoking and high blood pressure. Yet “nobody is talking about boredom.”

But as Kashdan notes, “Boredom might not be the direct culprit. Someone who is bored is unlikely to be motivated to maintain a healthy lifestyle.” The study it turns out is a bit preliminary. A couple of professors were staring out the window one day when they decided to analyze data from an old study. So it’s by no means a formal scientific study of the impact of boredom, which scandalously has still never been done.

So while the current science of boredom is a little flimsy, Kashdan said in an interview, one way to understand boredom is to look at its opposites – engagement and interest.
“We know that novel, engaging, curious activities reverse the cognitive decline of old age for example,” said Kashdan, who has just come out with a book on curiosity called Curious. “We can extrapolate that extensive levels of boredom could have the opposite effect.” McGill University professor of education Jon Bradley puts the blame squarely on political oversight of the education system.

“Teachers haven’t made it boring,” he said. “Politicians have made it boring. Every time there’s a crisis in education, we engage in a kind of fundamentalism. We say: ‘We’ve got to get back to basics.’ In every other profession we rely heavily on new research.

Education is the only profession where we go: ‘What happened 50 years go is better.’ ” As a result, said Bradley, educators often move in the opposite direction of what research is telling us about learning, particularly the young science of play.

“For children, play and learning is one and the same. Play is how children learn,” he said. “Meanwhile we take all the fun out of school. Phys-ed is gone, woodworking is gone, art is gone, music is gone. Then we pile on dull, dreary textbooks. We’ve removed play. We’ve demonized it and we’ve turned (play) into sports, the purview of jocks.” Perhaps because the concept of boredom is a recent innovation, it’s not heavily contemplated. The concept of boredom first appeared in print in a letter in 1768 by the Earl of Carlisle who mysteriously complains that his friends “are to be bored … by Frenchmen.”

Since the 18th-century, the twin concepts of “boring” and “interesting” have quickly exploded into Western consciousness. But boredom is still mainly seen as a trivial but necessary social evil, and somehow maybe even good for young people.

The study of boredom starts to get interesting when modern neuroscience kicks in.
In 2008, Mark Mintun, a professor of radiolology at Washington University in St. Louis, released a study based on scans of bored brains. He made a surprising discovery. The brain is highly active when disengaged or bored, consuming only about five-per-cent less energy than when active. We might think bored brains are turned off, but in fact they may be churning away, the study of the fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) scans suggests.

Boredom is likely a state of unacknowledged anxiety, said Wilhelm. A number of studies have linked ongoing rumination, the constant rethinking of things, with depression. And it’s pretty clear that almost no one reports enjoying the feeling of being bored.
But isn’t a little boredom a fact of life, and particularly a fact of young life when there’s just a lot to learn? Maybe. But it’s a little disturbing that contemporary psychologists often link boredom with depression.

So how is it that our education system seems to be dedicated to boring, depressing and stressing children? No teacher actually gets up in the morning saying: “Today, I’m going to bore the crap out of a bunch of young people.” But that’s what often happens.
Former Manhattan schoolteacher, John Taylor Gatto, author of the recently published critique of compulsory education, Weapons of Mass Instruction, has an explanation. It’s not just the kids who are bored.

“I became an expert in boredom,” writes Gatto of his 30 years of teaching students in top Manhattan schools. “The teachers were every bit as bored as (the students) were.”
Gatto described the cynical dance of well-meaning teachers whose enthusiasm would eventually be destroyed by the dull stares and nodding-off of students.

He said it’s not the fault of the students, the teachers or even the administration. It’s the entire machine. The Boring Institute.

Modern North American compulsory education is based on an obscure 19th-century militaristic Prussian model of standardized education, Gatto said. The idea was to prepare most students for jobs that were likely to be regimented and naturally, dull. That system has remained unchanged and essentially unchallenged for decades. Kashdan, who is an advocate for dramatic reform of the education system, concurs.

“People have forgotten how antiquated the system is,” he said. “That system has persisted despite the fact that we’re in a different economy now. Schools as factories no longer make sense. There’s no reason to bore people. I’m not saying we need clowns and balloons and popcorn to entertain people.” The boringness of education is looked on as an intractable and mysterious problem, but that’s not true, said Wilhelm. New science of cognition is increasingly at odds with standard education.

The ban on playing that begins most school days naturally “runs counter to optimum learning,” said Wilhelm.When human communities feel safe, children’s play breaks out. It stands to reason that when play is banned, stress breaks out.

Wilhelm said the intensely boring experience of school passes through clear stages.
First the kids are isolated:“Studies show that children like to work together,” he said. “School is the only place where you’re made to work alone. Kids are smarter when they work together and have more joy.” Then comes the droning:

“When you lecture at kids,” he said. “You’re working against basic human needs. One kid summed up education this way: ‘Guess what the teacher already knows,’ ” he said.
Then test time: “Then we discourage them by testing stupid stuff,” said Wilhelm. “What do teachers mark? The errors,” he said.

“That’s really motivating,” he said sarcastically. Imagine if, as an adult, people were constantly pointing out your errors in driving, working and carrying on a conversation, Wilhelm said. You’d probably go bonkers.

Could the right to drone exalted at the Boring Institute explain why so many adults are such accomplished bores?

“No wonder kids are bored,” Wilhelm said. “When you see people who are really learning, they do it with joy and utter engagement. Kids are not naturally bored. They want to be engaged. The great tragedy of education is that we could teach the same stuff in a slightly different way and it would be interesting.” So what’s the alternative? Amazingly, said Wilhelm, there are working and successful alternatives that are not so distant, abstract or impossible.

“Even people who hate school will say they had one teacher who was great who taught them enormous amounts,” said Wilhelm.

Wilhelm studied the “one great teacher” phenomenon.“It tends to be the music teacher or a coach, or something along those lines,” he said. “It’s not that those teachers were any better than the others, it’s that those specific classes often involved direct engagement – playing an instrument, putting on a play, building something, or competing.” That stuff is real with real consequences. The rubber hits the road. There’s risk and payoff, and the learning comes alive. “That is the key to ‘unboring’ education,” said Wilhelm, and is central to what’s called the Inquiry Model.

“This has never been tried on any large scale in the U.S. or Canada,” he said. “The places that have tried it in New Zealand and Finland are having huge amounts of success. That’s been my career. I believe you can make this happen with tremendous results.” Teachers have little freedom to innovate because of constant pressures from the curriculum. Administrators are under pressure to improve grades, and soon the kids are staring out the window and biting their nails.

The Inquiry Method was popularized in the 1940s by John Dewey, an American education reformer. Dewey believed optimal learning and human development occur when people are confronted with substantive, real problems to solve. Wilhelm said the Inquiry Model works under the following assumptions:

 Engagement is a “basic.”  Kids working together.  Solving real problems. n Less emphasis on grading and testing. n Teacher is less lecturer, more facilitator. n Kids are apprenticed into knowledge. “Take Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare,” Wilhelm said. “No kid is excited about it. But if you say we’re going to study what makes and breaks relationships, something that matters to them, suddenly they’re engaged.“ It’s simple, said Wilhelm:

“We can teach the same stuff, but teach it within a framework that meets human needs for engagement.” The Inquiry Method isn’t the only idea generating excitement in educational reform. “Kids have greater cognitive development when they exert themselves physically in a playful manner,” said Kashdan.

Gatto notes the real tragedy of school is all the unfulfilled potential.

Almost all kids enter the system immensely curious. But after a few years in the Boring Institute, most kids are nodding off, texting their friends or disappearing inside their own brains. Soon they only really care about grades. For many even that, too, dissipates and dropping out starts to feel like a relief. In time. they’ll be learning everything there is to know about Kim Kardashian, Brad Pitt and Kate Gosselin.

Education creates a society in which only a small minority seems to possess great talent, ability or even genius. People who teach kids sometimes discover otherwise, writes Gatto: “Genius is as common as dirt.”

© Montreal Gazette

Tuesday 5 October 2010

How to Lower Your IQ: Watch the History Channel

By Alan Caruba

Have you watched the History Channel lately? Seen any history on it? I have this theory that you actually lower your IQ watching it.

I love history, any history, read it all the time. I am especially fond of the late Israeli diplomat and author Abba Eban’s comment that “History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.”

As you have probably deduced by now, I am very unhappy with the pabulum and low-brow offering of programs aired on the History Channel. I am most irked by shows that have absolutely nothing to do with history.

To wit, “Ice Road Truckers”, “Pawn Stars”, “Swamp People”, “Stan Lee’s Superhumans”, “American Pickers”, along with “Sharp Shooters” and “UFO Hunters.”

These programs are utterly devoid of anything a moderately educated person would deem to be of any historical value.

Most, but not all, History Channel shows have little to do with history, events and personalities from the past. Take, for example, the channel’s obsession with the end of the world. It offers us programs such as “Armageddon”, a biblical, not historical event, along with “Bible Code, Predicting Armageddon.” Then, for good measure, it throws in “Life After People”, a program that describes what the Earth will be like just as soon as the human race goes extinct.

It also dabbles in the stuff usually associated with shamans tossing chicken bones and shiny pebbles on a mat in order to foresee the future. The “Nostradamus Effect” offers to explain his “predictions” which, not surprisingly, have been used to explain wars and other easily predictable events like floods and earthquakes.

Only on occasion does the History Channel actually broadcast history. There is an excellent series, “America—The Story of Us”, that I can recommend, but it is an exception on a channel more likely to air “Sex in the Ancient World” than anything you’d want a younger member of the family to watch.

Years ago in the 1960s, Newton Minnow, a former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, gained everlasting fame when he described television was “a vast wasteland.”

Actually, his entire quote from a speech to members of the National Broadcasting Association was as follows: “When television is good, nothing — not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers — nothing is better. But when television is bad, nothing is worse.”

“I invite you each of you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there for a day without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.”

Today, I have well over a hundred channels from which to choose. I clearly do not have to watch the History Channel, but I would like to if it ever gets around to broadcasting anything resembling history.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Sunday 19 September 2010

How to Turn School into an Exciting Learning Experience


Back to School Tips from The Boring Institute

"The number one complaint about school is that it is boring," says Alan Caruba, the founder of The Boring Institute. "It is frequently the excuse given for dropping out." By contrast, says Caruba “School should be an exciting, learning experience.” Over the years the Institute has developed the following advice to help students get the most out of the school experience.

1. Go with the flow. What could be easier than to show up on time, do what is asked of you, and take full advantage of the learning opportunities school offers?

2. Go to bed! Staying up late to watch TV or "hang out" drains your brain of the power that it needs to learn anything. Begin the day, as well, with a good breakfast.

3. TV sucks out your brain. The more TV you watch, the less exercise your brain gets. Only watch programs you really like. Turn it off and you will discover how much time you have for other activities.

4. You can learn it. Your brain has an extraordinary power to learn virtually anything. Trust it. Always ask for help when you need it.

5. School equals $uccess. School opens the door to success. Good grades really do count.

6. Get the reading habit. To succeed at anything, reading is essential. And fun, too!

7. Develop test-skills. You can learn how to take a test, any test. Then prepare well for each one.

8. Choose school-friendly friends. Avoid people who will find any excuse to avoid learning anything.

He's Never Bored with Boredom


Alan Caruba created The Boring Institute in 1984, but put it on hiatus following 9/11. Primarily a media spoof, the Institute was famous for its annual list of “The Most Boring Celebrities of the Year.”

Caruba felt that the mood of the nation was such that its annual spoofs of celebrities, movies, and televisions were inappropriate at the time.

The Institute is back as a blog and Caruba anticipates sharing the fun of those earlier years that included many radio and television interviews as well as profiles in The New York Times and other leading publications.

One of its events was an annual “Anti-Boredom Month” each July, created to focus attention on the role boredom plays in people’s lives.

In 1984, Caruba had no plans to become the nation’s expert on boredom, but the success of the spoof generated a great deal of mail asking for advice on how to overcome and avoid boredom. His research led him to take a longer, more serious look at this common problem.

“Now, when people say they’re bored to death,” says Caruba, “I tell them they are a lot closer to the truth than they suspect.” Serious boredom is an early warning signal of depression says Caruba, who notes that ten million or more Americans suffer from depression.

“About ten percent of them will commit suicide and those that do come most frequently from the age groups of teenagers and senior citizens.” Suicide is the eighth leading cause of death in America.

So, for Caruba, real boredom is no laughing matter. “I began to find links between boredom and crime, since most crime is committed by young people. Then there’s the link between boredom and the decision to drop out of school. Put them together,” says Caruba, “and you will discover that an estimated eighty percent of everyone in jail today is a school dropout. As often as not, the trouble began because they were bored.”

Boredom plays a role in the widespread addictions to drugs and alcohol says Caruba. “What worse way can you think of to avoid being bored than to get high on something that makes you dependent and can put you in jail for using or misusing it?”

Bored people make bad decisions because they’re bored. “When they finally get themselves clean, they always say the same thing, ‘What was I thinking of?’ and the answer is they were not thinking. They were bored!”

Marriages get in trouble over two issues, money and sex. “It’s the boredom in the bedroom,” says Caruba “that gets one marriage partner or both looking for satisfaction elsewhere.” Couples need to work at keeping their passion for one another for mutual satisfaction and there are a variety of factors that often interfere with this. When sex becomes boring to one partner, however, the marriage is in serious need of salvaging. “There are many things a couple can do to reinvigorate their sex lives, but they both need to want it.”

To help people who want answers on how to overcome and avoid boredom, The Boring Institute offers a guide, “Beating Boredom”, available exclusively on its blog site.

“The top three things people must do,” says Caruba, “is get the reading habit, pursue hobbies, and be a joiner. Reading, says Caruba, “feeds the mind in a way nothing else does.” Just watching television is “a good way to fall asleep if you have insomnia, but it does little to overcome boredom. Most films fail to satisfy these days in just the same way.” Books, however, involve the reader at their deepest level.

A veteran book reviewer, Caruba reports on the latest in fiction and non-fiction books on his blog http://.bookviewsbyalancaruba.blogspot.com.
Reading is one of his favorite pastimes.

Hobbies are essential to happiness says Caruba. “I don’t care if you collect toy soldiers or climb mountains, just so long as you do it with passion.” The power of sports such as golf, tennis, bowling, hiking, fishing or hunting all speak to the need people have for something outside the demands of school or a job. One can also be a passionate observer, taking in a baseball, football, basketball or hockey game, enjoying the pleasure of being among others who share your enthusiasm.

Being a joiner means getting out of one’s apartment or home to be involved with people who share your interests. Caruba is a big advocate of volunteering one’s time to help others. “There are few forms of personal satisfaction that come close to knowing you’ve made a different in someone else’s life by helping them in some way. Being involved with civic, business, professional, spiritual, arts and other organizations pays big personal dividends.”

The Boring Institute is headquartered in South Orange, N.J.