Amy Westervelt talked to professor Frederic Luskin, who has spent ten years leading forgiveness classes at Stanford, about the importance of pardoning everyday transgressions: ‘Even the stuff that forgiveness was supposed to be good for – stuff like murders … it’s so rare,’ he told me. ‘More important is can you forgive your brother-in-law for being annoying? Can you … Continue reading Why It’s Big Of You To Forgive The Little Things
You can take out a subscription to #CharlieHebdo here: https://t.co/n1LqP83Hnh I’m doing it now – let’s all do it #SubscribeToCharlieHebdo — Johann Hari (@johannhari101) January 7, 2015 A reader writes: Here’s something I’d like to contribute re: the massacre. First, I went to high school with the daughter of one of the victims, a long time … Continue reading France’s South Park
by Will Wilkinson Here is one of the most spectacular shifts in public opinion in our lifetime. What explains this? Don’t ask the psychologist and social scientists who study political opinion. They don’t know. One family of influential theories says that our political opinions are “motivated” by certain deep-seated emotional needs. According to one version, … Continue reading Belief And The Atomism Of Social Change
How are you related to all those supposed cousins of yours, anyway? Nathan Yau created the above chart to have you covered at family gatherings: Here’s how it works. Figure out the common ancestor between two relatives. Then select the relationship of the first relative to the common ancestor in the top row. Move down … Continue reading It’s All Relative
Some remaining thoughts from readers regarding the grand jury decision and aftermath: Your correspondent compared Ferguson to Benghazi: There’s a narrative of racist-white-cop-kills-harmless-black-kid, and no matter what uncomfortable fact intrudes, like that so many “witnesses” admitted they didn’t actually see what they told the media they saw, the narrative must go on. Because racism. You know, … Continue reading What To Make Of Ferguson? Ctd
If you haven’t already, take some time this weekend to read David Remnick’s article on Israeli President Reuven Rivlin, the shaky status of the two-state solution, and the resurgent chatter about an alternative. Remnick explores the history of the one-state idea and interviews a wide range of Israeli and Palestinian figures – from Sari Nusseibeh to Caroline Glick – … Continue reading The Two-State Dissolution?
In a review of Joana Bourke’s The Story of Pain, Arthur Holland Michel considers how we find words for our suffering: We “can express the thoughts of Hamlet,” wrote Virginia Woolf in 1930, “but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.” Even acute agony is … Continue reading It’s The Pain Talking
by Dish Staff The sex-worker-as-daughter debate, which Elizabeth launched, continues. Two readers cite two different missing pieces from the conversation thus far. One writes: I am amazed by the Every Sex Worker Might be Somebody’s Daughter thread’s blind spot: not one person brought up the men who do sex work. Escorts and male performers in … Continue reading Every Sex Worker Is Somebody’s Daughter, Ctd
by Freddie deBoer I’ve developed something of a reputation as a socially liberal critic of today’s social liberalism. I got an email from a Dish reader who asked me to flesh out where I’m coming from. I guess what it all comes down to, for me, is that social liberalism was once an alternative that … Continue reading Where Online Social Liberalism Lost The Script
by Dish Staff Elizabeth’s post about sex workers as the theoretical “daughters” of those opining on the topic continues to cause a stir. Adam Ozimek argues against thinking of adults in this way, no matter the issue at hand: Whether you’d want your kid to do something is a terrible, selfish, and self-centered way to think about policy. You … Continue reading Every Sex Worker Is Somebody’s Daughter, Ctd
