Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 263
May 25, 2014
A Service For Body Donors
Southwark Cathedral in London holds one annually:
For some people, donating their bodies for medical research is a way of telling the world that they do not want a religious ceremony or a funeral of any kind. The donor may be saying, in effect: “Once my body has served its main utilitarian purpose, let it serve one more purpose and then be disposed of quietly and anonymously…” In fact, making a gift to medicine doesn’t preclude a dignified or religious act of disposal. As is explained by the London Anatomy Office, which serves the needs of seven medical schools, donated bodies will eventually be released, and loved ones then have a choice: they can either arrange a private funeral themselves, or allow the medical school to conduct an act of cremation at which a chaplain will conduct a short service unless otherwise requested.
Still, for many donors’ next of kin, the annual cathedral service seems to offer a welcome chance to say “farewell” and “thanks” in a beautiful and historically resonant place, where a religious community was established nearly a thousand years ago to meet the needs, both spiritual and medical, of both travellers and local people.
Louis C.K.’s “Great Mystery”
In an NPR interview last week, Louis C.K. unpacked the comments he made, critical of some atheists’ certainty that God doesn’t exist, during his opening monologue when he hosted SNL in March (seen above):
[S]omething I’ve learned over the years is that when you talk about religion, you want to talk to religious people. Even if you’re talking about something that’s contrary religiously or provocative, a religious audience is a better audience for that. If you talk to a bunch of cool atheists in leather and suede, you know, sucking on their vape sticks or whatever they’re doing, they’re not going to get it because they don’t even think about God. It’s not even on their radar, you know? So they’re – but if you tell religious people, I don’t know if there’s a God, I don’t think there’s a heaven, where’s God’s ex-wife, these things, they have a connection to it that means something. …
I feel like the math in my head tells me that we’re just – that everything is just science and randomness and patterns but the main thing I feel is that it’s a great mystery. I feel like I need to be humbled before the mysteries of life. I have no idea what’s caused all of this.
In response, Chris Stedman questions C.K.’s understanding of what atheism entails:
This isn’t the first time C.K. has offered confusing statements about atheism; in a 2011 Reddit Q&A he said both “I’m not an atheist” and “I don’t ‘Believe in god,’” and suggested that he does not consider himself an atheist because he doesn’t know for sure that there is no God.
It seems that a lot of this confusion boils down to differing definitions of atheism. If atheism means knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that there are no gods, then C.K. is right. But that definition of atheism doesn’t fit most of the atheists I know. In fact, it runs up against something many atheists value: Doubt.
As an atheist, I never want to be too certain about what I believe. I strive to continually test and retest my assumptions, comparing them against new information and data as I encounter it. My atheism is curious, reflecting both a willingness to be wrong and a constant desire to learn.
So let’s clear the air: Being an atheist does not require absolute certainty. It doesn’t mean you rule out the possibility of divine or supernatural entities existing. Instead, it is the position that such a possibility is unlikely, and that the case for God hasn’t been adequately made yet.
May 24, 2014
Stoners Sans Stigma
Micah Hauser appreciates that the “sly, genre-busting” web series High Maintenance depicts potheads as regular people:
[T]he protagonist, an unnamed pot dealer known only as “The Guy,” cycles around New York City delivering his wares to the people. To call him a protagonist, though, is not really accurate — he’s more like a reference point. Each episode focuses on a particular customer, and by extension, their living space, which is where all of these deals go down. …
The show is funny, but not in the ways we’re conditioned to expect from stoner-leaning media. There are no 3-foot bongs, no cross-joints, no late-night expeditions to Shake Shack, no burnouts philosophizing about space and time, man. (Full disclosure: there is some giggling.) These are ordinary people who live ordinary lives and happen to smoke weed. Some of them should probably smoke less — the husband in the newest episode, “Rachel,” bums around all day getting high instead of working on his second book — and some use it to escape particular problems or moments of stress, but most are unremarkable, functional adults. Zero judgment is passed (on the weed smoking, anyway). It’s just part of people’s lives, and the act of smoking and purchasing weed is treated no differently than getting a drink at a bar — an activity portrayed without ceremony in basically every television program in history. Welcome to the 21st century.
Previous Dish on High Maintenance here.
A Stardust Is Born
PBS’s excellent Blank on Blank series animates a 1988 interview with David Bowie, who describes his alter-ego, Ziggy Stardust, as “half out of sky-fi rock and half out of the Japanese theater”:
Meanwhile, Prospero’s C.G. reviews the Bowie exhibit at Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin:
Fascinated by the early-20th-century German expressionists of the Brücke movement, whose works he frequently went to see, Mr Bowie began painting in Berlin and gained inspiration and motivation for his music. … The exhibition takes visitors through the career of an artist who was constantly reinventing himself. Flickering video screens, quirky costumes, handwritten documents, soundtracks and interviews provide a kaleidoscope of impressions. Thanks to Christine Heidemann, the curator of the show’s new Berlin section, 60 items have been added to the retrospective to give a broader idea of what went on during Mr Bowie’s stint in the German city between 1976 and 1978.
Many items refer to Iggy Pop, whom Mr Bowie lived with. At first the two shared a huge, slightly run-down flat in an old building in West Berlin’s bohemian borough of Schöneberg, then and now home to a large gay community. But Mr Bowie eventually threw his friend out—Mr Pop is said to have done a bit too much fridge-raiding—and found him a flat in the back of his building. Other highlights include letters from 1978 revealing a short correspondence between Mr Bowie and Marlene Dietrich about “Just a Gigolo”, an unsuccessful film in which Mr Bowie played a gigolo who works in a brothel run by Dietrich’s Baroness (her final appearance on screen). According to Mrs Heidemann, Mr Bowie and Dietrich never actually met in person, since his scenes were shot in Berlin (pictured) and hers in Paris.
The Coloniser’s Cocktail
Nina Caplan finds that, despite the all the pages written about the British Empire, “one great culprit in the colonisation project rarely receives its fair share of blame: gin.” How the gin and tonic helped shape history:
Without quinine, malaria would have felled the conquerors; without gin to alleviate
the bitterness of this highly effective anti-malarial, the soldiers would have refused to down their medicine.
The Spanish went to the Andes and found the cinchona tree, the bark of which turned out to contain an acrid but exceptionally useful substance. The British planted the tree in their Indian colony and attempted to sweeten that bitter bark with sugar, water and lemon: the resulting “tonic” turned out to be much more palatable when dosed with gin. Halfway down my second Pahit, I still can’t work out which is more peculiar: that those long-ago soldiers needed booze to persuade them to protect themselves from an often fatal disease? Or that a spirit so lethally popular that a quarter of mid-18th-century Londoners averaged a pint of the stuff a day was enlisted to save the lives of those same poor people—the ones who became foot soldiers in the Imperial British Army? The ability to withstand malaria helped Britain to conquer half of Africa and keep India subjugated (more or less). So much misery, engendered by one of the world’s most inspired taste combinations.
(Photo by Armando Alves)
How To Make Money In Porn
Having found a niche in the crowded world of online pornography, X-art.com still had tens of thousands of fans shelling out money for its movies. Quietly, the Fields were also making some extra money in another way: by becoming the biggest filer of copyright-infringement lawsuits in the nation. In the past year, their company Malibu Media LLC has filed more than 1,300 copyright-infringement lawsuits – more of these cases than anyone else, accounting for a third of all US copyright litigation during that time, according to the federal-litigation database Pacer – against people that they accuse of stealing their films on the Internet.
Today, they average more than three suits a day, and defendants have included elderly women, a former lieutenant governor, and countless others. “Please be advised that I am ninety years old and have no idea how to download anything,” one defendant wrote in a letter, filed in a Florida court. Nearly every case settles on confidential terms, according to a review of dozens of court records. Malibu Media’s attorney, Keith Lipscomb, said that most defendants settle by paying between about $2,000 and $30,000. The income earned by all the suits represents less than five per cent of Malibu Media’s profits, Lipscomb said.
The Comedians Of Conservatism
Frank Rich looks beyond Dennis Miller to Greg Gutfeld, “a signature personality on two daily Fox News shows … : The giggly The Five (in late afternoon) and the fiercer Red Eye (scheduled by Roger Ailes in the stunt time slot of 3 a.m.)”:
Gutfeld is more of a wisecrack artist than a comedian and, like Miller and other comics on the right, is careful to label himself a libertarian, so damaged is the conservative brand. But if you listen to Gutfeld on Fox or read his recent best-selling manifesto, Not Cool, he seems much more of a standard-issue conservative and, in keeping with that, older than he actually is (49). His targets are the usual shopworn suspects, some of whom are so far removed from the main arena of 21st-century liberalism that comic complaints about them are deadly on arrival: Rachel Carson, Yoko Ono, Hurricane Carter, Howard Zinn, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Oliver Stone, and even Dan Quayle’s old fictional bête noire, Murphy Brown. In Not Cool, Sean Penn gets 18 references, and even Robert Redford merits nine. Like much of the right, Gutfeld can’t stop fighting battles from the 1960s that are increasingly baffling to post-boomer audiences. It’s as if the clock stopped with the Vietnam War. …
If there’s one universal rule of comedy, it is, as Gutfeld himself has said, that “it’s hard to be funny without being truthful.”
But when he jokes that politically correct Americans are relabeling Fort Hood terrorism “workplace violence” and that they would rather use the term “unlicensed pharmacists” than “drug dealers,” he seems to lack any firsthand knowledge of conversation as practiced on the ground in present-day America. His examples of p.c. speech sound instead like the typically outrageous anomalies unearthed by Fox News. He needs to get out of the studio and meet some young people.
Rich reviews Jeff Dunham – whose act with the puppet “Achmed the Dead Terrorist” can be seen above – more favorably:
The gifted ventriloquist Jeff Dunham, as commercially successful a conservative comedian as there is (and one of the most successful touring comedians in the country, period), is best known for Achmed the Dead Terrorist, a puppet given to one-liners like “Where are all the virgins that bin Laden promised me?” Achmed can be funny, not least because he is a goofy, not hectoring, comic creation. And Dunham has a worthy comic nemesis in terrorism, much as Mel Brooks found in Hitler. The trouble with this material is its inevitable shelf life as 9/11 and its ensuing wars keep receding into the rearview mirror of American memory. There’s a reason why the playwright George S. Kaufman long ago said that “satire is what closes on Saturday night.”
Upwardly Immobile
Gentrification may be the talk of the town (no matter which town), but Richard Florida highlights new research showing that most urban neighborhoods that were poor 40 years ago are still poor today. The study “compared neighborhood-level poverty rates in the country’s 51 largest metro areas in 1970 and 2010.” It found that “very few high-poverty neighborhoods in 1970 dramatically reversed their fortunes over the next four decades”:
Entrenched poverty was just about the most constant thing about these neighborhoods. By 2010, fully two-thirds of these poor neighborhoods, 750 tracts in all, were still beset by chronic and concentrated poverty in 2010. Overall, their populations shrunk 40 percent over those forty years, as many of those who were able to move out did. On the other hand, only a small fraction of neighborhoods had turned around in a way that approximates what we call gentrification. Just 105 tracts, or about 10 percent, saw their poverty rates fall below 15 percent, meaning a smaller proportion of their residents lived in poverty than in the nation as a whole. The populations of these tracts grew by about 30 percent over this same period.
But wait, it gets worse:
The authors traced the fate of what they call “fallen star” neighborhoods – tracts that had below-average poverty rates in 1970 (less than 15 percent), but more than 30 percent of their residents living below the poverty line by 2010. More than 1,200 of these tracts shifted from low to high poverty during this time, contributing to an overall increase in the number of neighborhoods of concentrated poverty. Today, 10.7 million Americans live in 3,100 extremely poor neighborhoods in and around America’s largest city centers.
In other words, for every single gentrified neighborhood, 12 once-stable neighborhoods have slipped into concentrated disadvantage.
Mental Health Break
Last night’s highly anticipated meteor shower was bust, so here’s a consolation prize:
Rollin Bishop has the details:
Professional photographer Thomas O’Brien has compiled footage of seven years worth of meteor showers filmed around Aspen, Colorado into a single, beautiful time-lapse video. The video includes footage of the Perseid, Geminid, and Leonid meteor showers. O’Brien has also compiled a series of tips on how to photograph meteor showers in anticipation of the Camelopardalids, a meteor shower that’s expected to hit late tonight as the Earth passes through the debris trail of the comet 209P/LINEAR.
When The Principal Controls The Press
Two intrepid high school students in Michigan, Madeline Halpert and Eva Rosenfeld, tried to combat some of the stigma against depression by using their positions as managing editors of their school paper to write about the struggles of others. They even went so far as to get consent forms signed by the parents whose names they would include in the piece. Yet their principal, like so many others, blocked them from publishing the article (NYT):
As we were putting the stories together, the head of our school called us into her office to tell us about a former college football player from our area who had struggled with depression and would be willing to let us interview him. We wondered why she was proposing this story to us since he wasn’t a current high school student. We declined her suggestion. We didn’t want to replace these deeply personal articles about our peers with a piece about someone removed from the students. After we asked her why she was suggesting this, she told us that she couldn’t support our moving forward with the articles.
From an administrative perspective, this made some sense. It is her job to protect the students to the best of her ability. She believed that the well-being of those who shared their experiences — and most important, their names — would be put at risk because of potential bullying. She also mentioned that she had consulted a mental health professional, who told her that reading about their own depression could trigger a recurrence in some of the students and that those who committed to telling their stories might regret it later.
Our school has a very tolerant atmosphere, and it even has a depression awareness group, so this response seemed uncharacteristic. We were surprised that the administration and the adults who advocated for mental health awareness were the ones standing in the way of it. By telling us that students could not talk openly about their struggles, they reinforced the very stigma we were trying to eliminate.
I’m not certain that this is any better than those who ban books from school libraries. To be sure — there’s a wide maturity and experience gap between a 14-year-old freshman and an 18-year-old senior. But high school students, in my experience, are remarkably capable of rising to the challenge and treating any number of sensitive topics with grace. Unfortunately, in my few years as a counselor at a summer camp for high school journalists, I’ve heard far too many stories of principals refusing to give them the benefit of the doubt. I only wish Halpert and Rosenfeld had named names.
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