"AGAINST THE AMERICAN JESUS": My review of Ross Douthat's Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics. Also, I will be blogging at TAC's group blog, State of the Union, mostly talking about arts-and-culture. Look for more on Damsels in Distress later today/tonight.

And come see me tonight in Denver!

I GOT MYSELF A GUN/AND I CAN SHOOT DOWN EVERYONE/THINKING I JUST INVENTED SOME RELIGION:

Pinker’s attempt to ground the hope of peace in science is profoundly instructive, for it testifies to our enduring need for faith. We don’t need science to tell us that humans are violent animals. History and contemporary experience provide more than sufficient evidence. For liberal humanists, the role of science is, in effect, to explain away this evidence.

more (via A&LDaily)

She was searching his eyes now--looking perhaps for the flickers of some silent story, an inner late late show.
--John Hersey, Too Far to Walk

"THERE ARE BAD TIMES JUST AROUND THE CORNER." The Twilight Struggle proved to be a bit of a just-before-dawn Struggle, but if you ignore everything explicitly about Communism (...I know) this is a really great bracer. Everybody dies eventually; you might as well die ornery. There's no duty to retreat.

THE REAL WORLD: CHINESE GULAG. Last night we stumbled upon the Laogai Research Foundation's Laogai Museum, a very quick walk north from Dupont Circle. LRF was founded by Harry Wu, the fearless man who exposed the Chinese gulag system. We're visiting the museum soon, and if you're in DC, you should too. I'll tell you more about it once we've been inside.

(Post title is because of the bizarre coincidence that the museum is housed in the former Real World: DC rowhouse.)

THIS IS YOUR LIFE: GENOCIDE EDITION:

I take This American Life for granted and often it can seem too familiar and predictable. Some of the more famous voices on the show grate on me, and the giggles, awkwardness and teenager-y cuteness can feel contrived; sometimes I just want them to sound like grownups. Yet, not so rarely they come through with something pretty great that you wouldn’t hear elsewhere. Jogging the other day I listened to this pretty amazing piece about a few episodes of This Is Your Life from the 1950s that brought the show’s usual approach to the challenging realm of atrocity survivors. TIYL was of course a hugely popular show with an audience of many millions; it was hosted by Ralph Edwards, who also taught Sunday School and was one of those 1950s reassuring voices of a benevolent status quo.

The This American Life piece (btw, it occurs to me that the show’s name must be indebted to This is Your Life — duh, I guess) is about a couple of jaw-dropping episodes in which Edwards brought (under false pretenses — guests were almost always surprised) on the show, to be confronted by friends and associates from their past, first, a Holocaust survivor (according to This American Life host Allison Silverman, the first person to discuss her experiences in the camps on American television), second, a Hiroshima survivor.

more, including footage from the Holocaust survivor's episode. Via Ratty.

The town happens to be asleep right now, the mayor has problems with his heart and lies spread-eagled in his bed, his dentures in the glass of water beside him; in musty rooms omnipotent fathers sleep in nightshirts beside their wives. In the woods above town animals are waking. The actor is saying: Sad to say, you don't know real vodka. The real pure stuff turns everything you see a blue color.
--The Rebels

THE COLD WAR, FORGIVENESS, AND CHAMPAGNE BECAUSE OF AWESOME.

I WANT ASSAULT RIFLES AS LONG AS THEY'RE FREE; I WANT YOUR LOVE: It's been many years since I've run a contest on this blog. But in honor of what's happening right now in Tunisia, in Egypt, and in every country where people watch those scenes and dream of freedom--especially those countries where the American mainstream media response is, "But we liked your dictators!"--I will print any awesome rewritings of "Bad Romance" in which the two parties are the US and her client states. I don't care who is whom.

(I won't, and I wish this were obvious, print anything which doesn't understand why Israel happened. Huge hint: It's about England and the USA at least as much as it's about the Holocaust. If you don't understand why Israel's existence as a religious state is the result of Christian Western NIMBYism from Hell, then I don't really know what to do with you.)

Joe Biden says, “Mubarak has been an ally of ours in a number of things. And he’s been very responsible on, relative to geopolitical interest in the region, the Middle East peace efforts; the actions Egypt has taken relative to normalizing relationship with – with Israel. … I would not refer to him as a dictator.”

Lady Gaga says, "You're not a criminal as long as you're mine."

There was in 1959 a song of brief fashion but lasting receipts. "The fun is over," it said with exact precision and continued: "The Comandante arrived and commanded it to stop."
--Mea Cuba

If anything, the twentieth century has been marked by the apotheosis of the state, including liberal states.
--Paul W. Kahn, Putting Liberalism in Its Place

To be 1890 in 1890 might be considered almost normal. To be 1890 in 1922 might be considered almost queer.
--Carl Van Vechten, quoted in Decadence and Catholicism

“THE TWENTIETH CENTURY? I COULD PICK A BETTER CENTURY OUT OF A HAT!”: Ch 4: Prosser on the transition from “invert” to transsexual, via analysis of The Well of Loneliness and the parallel shift from sexology to psychoanalysis. I admit I didn't get much from this chapter despite my general interest in how our understandings of sexuality and gender shifted between (say) 1840 and 1940, but people more interested in either Radclyffe Hall or critiques of psychoanalysis might get a lot from this section.