Christina and Caesar Bargas join revellers as they gather on Princes Street ahead of the New Year celebrations on December 31, 2010 in Edinburgh, Scotland. It is expected that around 80,000 people will attend the festivities in Scotland's capital. By Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images.
by Zoë Pollock
In Brooklyn, Erica Sackin prepares for the coming apocalypse:
Think about it. Why else would we eschew “real” jobs for things like baking, bartending or making coffee, all of which are, I might add, entirely end-times-proof professions? (You think people won’t need coffee after the world ends? Or a drink? Trust me, when those four horsemen ride in you’ll be begging for some of our small-batch-hand-distilled whiskey. Begging.) Living without health insurance? That’s stupid! Unless… you need practice for when things like hospitals and co-payments disappear in a rain of hellfire from the gods. …
Remember when you were all laughing at us for wearing skinny jeans, only to be reading about them in the pages of Vogue the following year? Remember when the same thing happened with leggings, bangs and listening to Arcade Fire? Well this is like that, only with more fire and damnation.
by Conor Friedersdorf
A reader writes:
Hands down, it would be "Grace," from the late Jeff Buckley.
Back in 1994 when this album was released, I was, a month shy of 32 years old, still determined to make a career out of music. I'd had some success as a singer/songwriter, publishing a few songs for film/TV and being hired to sing on a few soundtracks and demos. I was pretty confident of my talents and believed I'd eventually catch my break. Initially, when Jeff's album came out, I was bowled completely over by Buckley's passion as a singer, lyricist, and guitarist. The album was my favorite guitar album of all time that did not feature any sort of a guitar solo.
As I listened more and more to the music, to Buckley's angelic voice, to the song structures, however, I slowly realized that, even after spending six months in 1994 and 1995 writing and recording the best songs I'd ever composed, I would never reach the level of talent he had. I developed serious doubts about my future in the business, and, while other factors (like the end of my first marriage) contributed to my decision to retire from music and make some real money, I cite "Grace" as the "one last nail" in the red glitter coffin in which my music career was finally laid to rest. But, since Buckley's death, I've gotten to see how his talent has been exploited (at first innocently by his bandmates and his own mother, but then cynically by impresarios like Simon Cowell who purchased the publishing rights for all versions of the song "Hallelujah"). That exploitation represented for me how disgusting the music business truly is and how, in hindsight, I feel fortunate to have walked away from it to do something else.
by Conor Friedersdorf
A reader writes:
Without a doubt, the movie that has most shaped my life is The Great Escape (1963). I view it not as a simple recounting of a Second World War prison escape, but as a larger parable for difficult times in one's life.
Through choice or circumstance, people find themselves forced to show up for unpleasant jobs; find themselves trapped in unpleasant circumstances. What The Great Escape teaches me is that even when seemingly stripped of all resources, confined and repressed, it is not only possible but obligatory to resist, plan, improvise, and tunnel your way out. Even escape from the camp does not guarantee success: for many, if not most, it can lead to failure, recapture, execution. But it still remains a duty to make the escape attempt. It doesn't hurt that it has a catchy main theme, either. I listened to that plodding tuba and the rattle of the drums every night for three years in law school, every night before I took the bar, and I have returned to it again as my morning alarm while deployed as a judge advocate in support of Operation New Dawn. Military life can be oppressive enough at times (though nowhere near the level faced by the real individuals represented in The Great Escape!). Nevertheless, it's a constant reminder to me: however hard I think I have it, during the nights, I'm tunneling out. I'm free.
by Conor Friedersdorf
A reader writes:
Although I don't agree with Objectivism as a philosophy, and I recognize the glaringly obvious flaws of Rand's political ideas, its influence on me was very personal. And the other people I know who absolutely swear by her work, for most of them it is also a personal debt, not a political or philosophical one (I've personally never met a self-described objectivist in my life).
I grew up in an upper-middle class family in the suburbs of just-another-middle-American city. I was very smart. And like many kids born in my position, I became spoiled and bratty as I got older. Everything in my early life came way too easily – whether it was acing my math tests, or getting the new toy I wanted – and as a result, I entered my young adult years with a severe sense of entitlement. The world owed me something and I'd be damned if I ever had to work for it. I was a perennial underachiever, and any egging by my professors or parents to achieve more or do something magnificent or productive with my talent, I met with disdain and arrogance. How dare you tell me what to do? If things went wrong, it was never my fault because I didn't try to begin with. If things went right, it was result of my pure genius and talent even though I didn't try. I moped through the first 20 years of my life like this, avoiding failure and generally being an asshole about it.
Then I read Atlas Shrugged one spring break. I know it's really cheesy to say this, but became a new person overnight. It ignited a sense of responsibility and self-control in me that I had never been aware of. Instead of lecturing me about the virtues of achievement and taking responsibility and using your talent for good like my parents did, it SHOWED the virtues to me through Hank Rearden and Dagny and Francisco and Galt. Suddenly, I felt ashamed that I had gone through my whole life the way that I had. People have a responsibility to give life and society everything they've got. That's the message I got. And I had been scoffing at that moral imperative from day one.
I immediately returned to school – a crappy small state school that I half-assed my way into – made straight A's, transferred the next year to a prestigious private school in the Northeast, graduated Summa Cum Laude, started my own business and have never looked back. And again, this is so corny, but it's true: I can point to that book as the moment it began. Sure, Ayn Rand is wrong about a lot of stuff. Of course the characters in the novel are totally idealized and unrealistic. But for me and where I was, it lit a fire under my ass that has never gone out. And I can unequivocally say that I'm a much better person for having read it.
"Aubade" by Terese Svoboda first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in July, 1998:
Sinews here and there,
his legs twined at desk
and all of him bare,mousing around, click,
so the child won't wake.
Sinews, his sex thickbut laptopped, glasses
found then lost then
a child flushesand my hands on him
count only as clothes,
as information.Sinews, I say, sotto voce,
and he smiles into
his screen. At me?(Image of Nightcam by Jake Ziemann)
by Zoë Pollock
Yes, there's an app for that.
by Conor Friedersdorf
This seems right to me:
Too often, people think about politics by starting from the assumption that there will be post-political utopia in which everything is frozen into place, then reasoning backwards from how that utopia looks.
I'm less sure about this:
…constitutional thinking constitutes a form of pernicious dreaming about the post-political utopia. Like what if the constitution really did entrench conservative policy preferences? What would happen then? We’re imagining that the structure of mass and public opinion are the same, and so is the structure of interest group politics. But suddenly most of the stuff progressives want to do is unconstitutional. What happens next? Do progressives all go home and just give up? That doesn’t seem realistic. Do progressives stage a violent revolution, arguing that it makes no sense to let the dead hand of the 18th century block social justice in the 21st? That doesn’t seem desirable.
There is always a constitutional amendment. And besides, constitutional problems often constrain means more often than ends, and apply only to public policy. There are other methods of changing society and addressing problems, and in a free country, those levers are more likely substitutes for free-wheeling wonkyness than violent revolution.
by Conor Friedersdorf
In an op-ed on ROTC and college campuses, Colman McCarthy recalls a conversation he once had with a long time Notre Dame president:
When I suggested that Notre Dame's hosting of ROTC was a large negative among the school's many positives, Hesburgh disagreed. Notre Dame was a model of patriotism, he said, by training future officers who were churchgoers, who had taken courses in ethics, and who loved God and country. Notre Dame's ROTC program was a way to "Christianize the military," he stated firmly.
I asked if he actually believed there could be a Christian method of slaughtering people in combat, or a Christian way of firebombing cities, or a way to kill civilians in the name of Jesus. Did he think that if enough Notre Dame graduates became soldiers that the military would eventually embrace Christ's teaching of loving one's enemies?
The interview quickly slid downhill.
It's a thorny question, isn't it? I have a very high opinion of the ethics curriculum at Notre Dame, so as an American, I'd celebrate if the military ranks were filled with more recruits who'd gone through it. But if I were an orthodox Catholic professor, I'd probably conclude that the War on Terror runs afoul of Catholic just war theory in various ways, and instruct my students that if they enlist in the military, they may be ethically obligated to disobey direct orders and incur serious punishment. McCarthy goes on:
These days, the academic senates of the Ivies and other schools are no doubt pondering the return of military recruiters to their campuses. Meanwhile, the Pentagon, which oversees ROTC programs on more than 300 campuses, has to be asking if it wants to expand to the elite campuses, where old antipathies are remembered on both sides. It should not be forgotten that schools have legitimate and moral reasons for keeping the military at bay, regardless of the repeal of "don't ask, don't tell." They can stand with those who for reasons of conscience reject military solutions to conflicts.
They can stand with Martin Luther King Jr. and his view of America's penchant for war-making: "This madness must cease," he said from a pulpit in April 1967. Even well short of the pacifist positions, they can argue the impracticality of maintaining a military that has helped drive this country into record depths of debt. The defense budget has more than doubled since 2000, to over $700 billion. They can align themselves with colleges such as Hobart, Earlham, Goshen, Guilford, Hampshire, George Fox and a long list of others that teach alternatives to violence. Serve your country after college, these schools say, but consider the Peace Corps as well as the Marine Corps.
I disagree.
If a Quaker school wants to take a campus wide stand for pacificsm, I'd support them, but the Ivy League and other elite schools hold themselves up as communities of free inquiry that encompass faculty and students with extreme disagreements about matters like just use of force, the categorical imperative, the appropriateness of our military as currently sized, and many other matters besides. Taking an administratively-imposed campus wide stand against ROTC programs would be inconsistent with the larger mission these institutions articulate.
The Dish 