A Poem For Sunday

"The More Loving One" by W. H. Auden:

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Continued here.

(Image: "Orbiting our galaxy in the lonely depths of intergalactic space, 160+ globular clusters are among the oldest structures we know. They’re composed of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands, of stars, all held together by their mutual gravity," by the European Southern Observatory via Phil Plait)

The Mainstream Shifts

My cover-essay on Obama's historic embrace of full gay equality is now online. It isn't just about one interview:

[It's easy to] be skeptical of Obama’s motives, of how long it took, of whether this is pure and late opportunism. But when you step back a little and assess the record of Obama on gay rights, you see, in fact, that this was not an aberration. It was an inevitable culmination of three years of work. He did this the way he always does: leading from behind and playing the long game.

And Obama's own life-story resonates with the same conflicts of identity that many gay people grow up with:

Barack Obama had to come out of a different closet. He had to discover his black identity and then reconcile it with his white family, just as gays discover their homosexual identity and then have to reconcile it with their heterosexual family. The America he grew up in had no space for a boy like him: black yet enveloped by loving whiteness, estranged from a father he longed for (another common gay experience), hurtling between being a Barry and a Barack, needing an American racial identity as he grew older but chafing also against it and over-embracing it at times.

This is the gay experience: the discovery in adulthood of a community not like your own home and the struggle to belong in both places, without displacement, without alienation.

Eurodämmerung?

Be afraid. This could happen very very swiftly.

An Endorsement For Romney

Go Mitchell!

Has The Welfare State Made Us Complacent?

Charles Murray wonders:

In a world when death can come at any time, there is also a clear and present motivation to think about spiritual matters even when you are young. Who knows when you’re going to meet your Maker? It could easily be tomorrow. If you’re going to live to be at least eighty, it’s a lot easier not to think about the prospect of non-existence. The world before the welfare state didn’t give you the option of just passing the time pleasantly. Your main resources for living a comfortable life—or even for surviving at all—were hard work and family (especially, having children to support you in your old age). In the advanced welfare state, neither of those is necessary. The state will make sure you have a job, and one that doesn’t require you to work too hard, and will support you in your old age.

Romney On Imus On Marriage

A flashback:

Why Religion Resists Evolution

Dan McAdams offers a new theory - that evolution isn't a very good story:

Every great story you can think of—from Homer’s Iliad to your favorite television show—involves characters who pursue goals over time, characters who want something and set out to achieve it. In this sense, the classic biblical creation stories are very good stories. You have a main character—God, the creator—who sets out to achieve something over time. There is purpose and design to what God, the main character, does. God is an agent—a self-conscious, motivated actor. All stories have agents.

Evolutionary theory, however, is not a story in that there is no prime agent, no self-conscious and motivated main character who strives to achieve something over time. For this reason, there is no overall narrative arc or design, no purpose that is being achieved by a purposeful agent. Instead, you have random, mechanical forces—variation, selection, and heredity. Bad story! But, at the same time, extraordinarily brilliant and elegant theory, for it provides a compelling and scientifically testable explanation for life on earth.

Jonathan Gottschall thinks he has a point:

Stories are about a character finding a solution to a problem. Evolution has problems and solutions but no character. As a result, according to Gottschall, "it doesn’t connect as well—especially at the emotional level."

The Creation Of A Human Conscience

It began with meat, according to evolutionary anthropologist Christopher Boehm:

[M]y theory is that you cannot have alpha males if you are going to have a hunting team  that shares the meat fairly evenhandedly, so that the entire team stays nourished. In order to get meat divided within a band of people who are by nature pretty hierarchical, you have to basically stomp on hierarchy and get it out of the way. ... My hypothesis is that when they started large game hunting, they had to start really punishing alpha males and holding them down. That set up a selection pressure in the sense that, if you couldn’t control your alpha tendencies, you were going to get killed or run out of the group, which was about the same as getting killed. Therefore, self-control became an important feature for individuals who were reproductively successful. And self-control translates into conscience.

(Photo: Zhang Huan, Homeland, 2001. Hat tip: Brain Pickings)

The Global Contraceptives War

Melinda Gates is waging it, in accordance with her Catholic faith:

Gates believes that by focusing on the lives of women and children, and by making it clear that the agenda is neither coercive population control nor abortion, the controversy over international family-planning programs can be defused. Right now, she points out, 100,000 women annually die in childbirth after unintended pregnancies. Six hundred thousand babies born to women who didn’t want to be pregnant die in the first month of life.

How times have changed:

Read On »

Mental Health Break

The serenity of surfing:

Missing Mom

Timothy Egan mourns the mother he recently lost:

When the last of your parents dies, as Christopher Buckley wrote in his memoir, "Losing Mum and Pup," you are an orphan. But you also lose the true keeper of your memories, your triumphs, your losses. Your mother is a scrapbook for all your enthusiasms. She is the one who validates and the one who shames, and when she’s gone, you are alone in a terrible way.

Feeling Your Troubles Float Away

Restricted environmental stimulation technique (REST), also known as "floating", is a treatment for various physical, mental and emotional disorders. Matt Stangel tries out a tank of "thrice-filtered water, which is 40 percent Epsom salt and kept at a temperature of 93.5 degrees":

After my third session, beer—a once-favorite beverage—becomes entirely unappealing, along with alcohol in general, a side effect that lasts for weeks after my ninth session. I also notice a marked increase in my overall sense of well-being, while my persistent anxiety disappears completely. Additionally, I begin to write creatively with an uninhibited ease that I haven’t experienced in years. I am astounded by the changes.

(Photo: "Weeki Wachee spring, Florida, 1947," by Toni Frissell, in the public domain via Flickr and the Library of Congress)

Mein Hund

A short history of the dictator's relationship with dogs:

[Hitler] was a romantic—a twisted, demonic romantic of the most dangerously delusional kind, but a romantic nevertheless. Even his brutality grew out of a belief in a racially and culturally pure Edenic state bearing no resemblance to reality. As such, he was a great lover of mystical signs, and he deeply appreciated the fact that his name Adolf translated from Old High German as "noble wolf." Wolves were considered the purer manifestation of dogs’ original warrior nature, and German Shepherds were bred to be closer to their lupine source. Hitler chose to go by the nickname Wolf, which was the basis for the name of his massive military bunker in Poland, the Wolf’s Lair. As a dedicated self-mythologist who read personal meaning into everything, he took this connection to wolves, the "pure" dog, seriously.

The best retort to this comes from a probably too-good-to-check anecdote about a Jewish Holocaust survivor in Austria who chose to call her own dog "Hitler". It became a kind of therapy for her to order the canine fuhrer-substitute around. "Sit, Hitler!" she would command. "Heil, Hitler" became "Heel, Hitler!"

It's the little things ...

(Image of Braun and Hitler with their dogs via Wikimedia Commons)

Face Of The Day

From "Specimens" by Michael Mapes:

[His pieces] are comprised of hundreds of dissected photographs and fragments of ‘personal/biographical DNA’ (such as hair, fingernails, tears, calender dates and geographical references) contained in various forms. ... The encased specimens suggest various narratives, including the nature of captivity and transcendence and the passing of time.

Emily Temple steps back:

The portraits make the viewer feel at once the scientific observer and the observed, both the mad scientist and the shattered subject. 

(Image courtesy of the artist)

Dying To Live

Tim Kreider sees the fear of death as enhancing life:

I’m convinced these are the conditions in which we evolved to thrive: under moderate threat of death at all times, brain and body fully integrated, senses on high alert, completely engaged with our environment. It is, if not how we’re happiest — we’re probably happiest in a hot tub with a martini and a very good naked friend — how we are most fully and electrically alive.

"Thank You Mom"

A charming tribute:

The Praying Sex

According to a 2008 Pew survey "two-thirds of all women surveyed pray daily, while less than half of all men surveyed do." Tanya Luhrmann's theory as to why:

Women pray more because women are more comfortable with their imaginations, and in order to pray, you need to use your imagination. Let me be clear. I am not suggesting that God is a product of the imagination. I am instead noting that to know God intimately, you need to use your imagination, because the imagination is the means humans must use to know the immaterial. This, by the way, is something the church fathers knew well. For Augustine, the road to God ran through the mind. It is our own peculiar era that equates the imagination with the frivolous and the unreal. That is why contemporary Christians sometimes get nervous about the word imagination. But they shouldn't. C. S. Lewis knew so well that the imagination was a path to God that he entitled a chapter of Mere Christianity "Let's Pretend." "Let us pretend," Lewis writes, "to turn the pretence into a reality."

Earlier coverage of Luhrmann's book here. More on the neuroscience of prayer here.

Ask Maggie Anything: What About Religious Exemptions?

Previous videos of Maggie Gallagher here, here, here, here, here and here. "Ask Anything" archive here.

Why Not Give Up On Fiction?

Robin Hanson rounds up studies on fiction distorting our understanding of the real world. He challenges atheists:

A few days ago I asked why not become religious, if it will give you a better life, even if the evidence for religious beliefs is weak? Commenters eagerly declared their love of truth. Today I’ll ask: if you give up the benefits of religion, because you love far truth, why not also give up stories, to gain even more far truth? Alas, I expect that few who claim to give up religion because they love truth will also give up stories for the same reason. Why?

Obama's Christianity, Ctd

Jay Michaelson expands on the religious message in Obama's marriage announcement:

[His announcement] says that values like introspection, compassion, and justice support, rather than oppose, equality for LGBT people. We can interpret Leviticus, Romans, and Corinthians ten ways from Sunday. But what we can’t ignore are the calls to justice and compassion.

Rachel Held Evans calls on evangelicals to change their tactics:

When asked by The Barna Group what words or phrases best describe Christianity, the top response among Americans ages 16-29 was "antihomosexual." For a staggering 91 percent of non-Christians, this was the first word that came to their mind when asked about the Christian faith. The same was true for 80 percent of young churchgoers. (The next most common negative images? : "judgmental," "hypocritical," and "too involved in politics.") ... So my question for those evangelicals leading the charge in the culture wars is this: Is it worth it?

Nicholas Beaudrot shakes his head:

The once near-universal brand of American Christianity is being associated with an ever-shrinking size of the American public. Like Burger King and Axe Body Spray, you may wake up one day and find that the overwhelming majority of the public has simply tuned out everything you have to say. Now, it's always possible that the leaders of the major American churches may want it this way. But for those who don't, the window of opportunity where people might be willing to consider a more relevant form of modern Christianity is closing.

Ed Kilgore reminds us that Obama's former church supports marriage equality:

So Obama has pretty strong authority for saying there’s no conflict between his faith and support for same-sex marriage. Indeed, he’s now removed the conflict, so I would hope that conservatives who are forever demanding respect for their own religious motives for thinking the way they do will show Obama a little respect in exchange. But I’m not holding my breath.

Jonathan D. Fitzgerald surveys the reaction on the Christian right.

(Photo of the Washington National Cathedral by Laura Padgett)

The View From Your Window

Paris, France, 12 pm

A Diary For God

Kaya Oakes recounts how she learned to find the sacred in the every day:

Ignatius taught the Jesuits to end each day doing something called the Examen. You start by acknowledging that God is there with you; then you give thanks for the good parts of your day (mine usually include food); and finally, you run through the events of the day from morning to the moment you sat down to pray, stopping to consider when you felt consolation, the closeness of God, or desolation, when you ignored God or when you felt like God bailed on you. Then you ask for forgiveness for anything shitty you did, and for guidance tomorrow.

I realize I’ve spent most of my life saying "thanks" to people in a perfunctory, whatever kind of way. Now when I say it I really mean it, even if it’s to the guy who makes those lattes I love getting in the morning, because I stopped and appreciated his latte-making skills the night before. If you are lucky and prone to belief, the Examen will also help you start really feeling God in your life.

Embracing The Darkness

Kathryn Schulz sees the beauty in staying up all night:

Of the many radical rearrangements of knowledge brought about by the Copernican revolution, my favorite is one that most people today take for granted but that, back then, blew everybody’s minds. It is this: The universe is dark. Before Copernicus, the cosmos was presumed to be awash in infinite, celestial light. Look at the brilliant blues on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (Renaissance painting lagged behind Renaissance astronomy), or read Dante, who declared that beyond the spheres of the planets lay the "Luminous Heaven." With the shattering of geocentrism came the realization that we do not look through night’s darkness into infinite day, but through daylight into infinite darkness.

(Painting by João Figueiredo via But Does It Float)

The View From Your Window

Columbia, Maryland, 11.15 pm

When He's Just Not That Into Sex

Michael Ian Black speaks from experience:

Male libido is assumed to be a constant, quivering thrum. For some men, maybe it is. But for me, as much as I enjoy the old in-n-out, the rubba-dub-dubba, the squeak-n-bubble, I have never craved it the way our culture has led me to believe I should, not even during my fabled Horny Years from ’91 to ’95. Except for those moments when I was in the first throes of a new love, sex has never subsumed me. Yet every cultural message I receive has led me to believe it should. Consequently, my lack of nymphomaniacal tendencies has always left me feeling embarrassed and emasculated.

His deeper message:

To me, sex isn’t even about sex. Fundamentally, it’s about acceptance, having somebody desire you enough to allow you to envelop them and wanting that person to envelop you in return. 

Recently Black also critiqued Hollywood's version of love:

Read On »

The Art Of Sexting

Some are less savvy than others:

Sarah Nicole Prickett craves a good sext:

Consider what’s required in a formal sentence: the rhythm of punctuation, of course, but also knowing when to start, when to stop. Consider too the devastating effects of a well-timed ellipsis; read some Bataille. Erotic grammar is good grammar. Sexting has sped up seduction, but if you write it right, it can still torture.

I have a long-distance lover now and our text exchanges are fragmentary and agonizing and great. We met in person and had sex in person which helps fill in the ellipses, and I still always want to have sex in person, especially because we can’t. But wanting is sometimes as close to ecstasy as having.

Read On »

A Poem For Saturday

"It is not so much that I miss you" by Dorothea Grossman:

It is not so much that I miss you
as the remembering
which I suppose is a form of missing
except more positive,
like the time of the blackout
when fear was my first response
followed by love of the dark.

Bryan Nash Gill describes his piece, "Compression Wood, 2011, 76 years printed," seen above:

The term compression wood describes trees that grow abnormally in the forest. This growth may result from heavy snow or uprooting, or simply from the tree reaching for sunlight. The seashell-like pattern of this block implies that the tree was bending in the direction of the top of the print.

(Artwork: courtesy of Bryan Nash Gill, author of Woodcut, Princeton Architectural press NYC 2012)

Mourning Fictional Deaths

Shoshana Kessock wonders why fans become so incensed when creators such as Avengers director Joss Whedon and Game of Thrones scribe George R.R. Martin kill off main characters:

I believe the discomfort comes down to the base fear of death and uncertainty that people face every day. Death is a subject that makes people uncomfortable. It doesn’t surprise me then that people would have such emotional reactions to fictional character death. They come to fiction to be taken away from the concerns of their everyday life. When confronted with the sudden death of a beloved character, viewers and readers are jarred into dealing with the uncertainty of life in their fiction and that can be unnerving. Look at reactions to the first murder in Psycho, or the death of Cedric Diggory in Harry Potter as examples outside of Martin and Whedon if you will, as they’re not the only writers who use the tactic to drive the emotional point home. 

Face Of The Day

From an amazing collection of vintage mug shots comes Eugenia Falleni, aka Harry Crawford:

When ‘Harry Leon Crawford’, hotel cleaner of Stanmore was arrested and charged with wife murder he was revealed to be in fact Eugeni Falleni, a woman and mother, who had been passing as a man since 1899. In 1914, as ‘Harry Crawford’, Falleni had married the widow Annie Birkett. Three years later, shortly after she announced to a relative that she had found out ‘something amazing about Harry’, Birkett disappeared.

Algae: Low-Fat Of The Future?

Sarah Zhang profiles Solazyme, a company that set out to grow algae that converts sugars into ethanol but instead stumbled upon a version that "made a pretty healthy fat similar to olive oil but with a consistency fit for use in cookies and ice creams":

The result is Almagine, a bright yellow powder made from dried algae ground up into tiny one-micron pieces. It tastes a little like pie dough right after the butter and shortening has been cut into the flour. Substitute Almagine for some of the butter, eggs and flour in a chocolate chip cookie recipe, and you get the buttery, chewy feel of the original with 40 percent less fat and cholesterol.

Read On »

Bush's 2004 Pollster

You want to read what one of the GOP's most respected pollsters told Republican candidates and operatives last week about what to say about marriage equality and gay rights in general? The Dish got the memo.

Mental Health Break

Stop-motion under the sea:

"Bounce Bounce" by Hilary Hahn and Hauschka from Hayley Morris on Vimeo.

Malkin Award Nominee

“Call me cynical, but I didn’t think his views on marriage could get any gayer,” - Rand Paul on president Obama.

The Music Of An MRI

A beautiful thing:

Here’s the way I understand [how an MRI works]: the body is made of mostly water, and each human tissue contains its unique quantity of water. Normally, the protons in each water molecule are spinning around at random, but if you put them inside a giant magnetic field, they’ll come to attention and point in the same direction. Once you’ve got them all lined up, you fire a radio frequency at them (woodpecker, jackhammer, heartbeat), which knocks them out of alignment. Then you turn the sound off and let the protons come back into their orderly magnetized lineup. And—the crucial part—in the process of re-aligning, they send back little radio waves of their own. Those sounds are what get translated into images.

So here it is: with all our technological advances, the best way to see inside a body is music and rhythm. (Whether or not Dubstep qualifies as music is another topic.) Take an xray of the atoms and molecules in the fleshy matter of the human frame, and you’ll get a vague idea of what might be there; fire some music at those suckers and you’ll get a clear image of precisely the way things are.

What Killed Hats?

Robert Krulwich, whose father was a hat designer, points to highways as the culprit:

Until cars became the dominant mode of personal transport, there was no architectural reason to take your hat off between home and office. With Dwight Eisenhower's interstate highway system came cars, and cars made hats inconvenient, and for the first time men, crunched by the low ceilings in their automobiles, experimented with hat-removal, and got to like it.

(Image via Wikimedia Commons)

You Want Keynesianism? Vote Romney!

A counter-intuitive take from Joe Weisenthal:

We'd love to hear someone say with a straight face that Republicans, if given full power, would seriously stick to their principles of limiting government. Opposing deficits is strictly the purview of the opposition party.

So the Keynesian choice is Romney.

The one thing Republicans truly know how to do: spend through the roof and lower taxes.

Cupcakes Are The New Cocaine

Vaughan Bell vents:

Anything that is either overused, pleasurable or has become vaguely associated with the dopamine system is compared to cocaine. In fact, here is a list of things claimed to be as addictive as the illegal nose powder in the popular press:

Read On »

Top GOP Pollster to GOP: Reverse On Gay Issues

[Re-posted from last night.]

Below is a remarkable document. It's a memo circulated by Jan van Lohuizen, a highly respected Republican pollster, (he polled for George W. Bush in 2004), to various leading Republican operatives, candidates and insiders. It's on the fast-shifting poll data on marriage equality and gay rights in general, and how that should affect Republican policy and language. And the pollster's conclusion is clear: if the GOP keeps up its current rhetoric and positions on gays and lesbians, it is in danger of marginalizing itself to irrelevance or worse.

Read the bluntness of this. This is the GOP establishment talking to itself. And the Republican pollster who arguably knows more about the politics of the gay issue than anyone else (how else to explain the Ohio campaign of 2004?) is advising them in no uncertain terms that they need to evolve and fast, if they're not going to damage their brand for an entire generation:

Yep, it's a classic "talking points memo":

The last paragraph is, to my mind, the most remarkable. It's advising Republican candidates to emphasize the conservative nature of gay marriage, to say how it encourages personal responsibility, commitment, stability and family values. It uses Dick Cheney's formula (which was for a couple of years, the motto of this blog) that "freedom means freedom for everyone." And it uses David Cameron's argument that you can be for gay marriage because you are a conservative.

And the walls came tumbling down.

(More legible transcript of the memo below:)

Read On »

Correction Of The Day

A beaut from the NYT:

An earlier version of this post included a photo published in error. It showed Andrew Garfield, the actor who played Eduardo Saverin in the movie "The Social Network," not Mr. Saverin himself.

Implosion Is The New Explosion

Forrest Wickman notices a trend:

When the opening action set-piece of The Avengers ends with the destruction of a remote research facility, the structure goes out not with a bang but more of a cool sucking noise. Meanwhile, in the first trailer for The Dark Knight Rises, Bane is set not on exploding a football stadium full of thousands of people so much as imploding it. In the second Dark Knight Rises trailer, released last week, rather than sending a bridge up in a fiery blast, a few tactical detonations send it neatly collapsing into the water. We appear to be entering a boom in Hollywood implosions.

His theory as to why:

It evokes the most indelible image of 21^st-century destruction, the one filmed on September 11^th, 2001. The most frightening visual from that day was not the planes exploding into the towers, but the towers falling in on themselves. 

(Video: Planet Vulcan getting sucked into a black hole in the latest Star Trek)