Month: July 2010

Galway, Ireland, 8.36 am

Toby Jones profiles Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah:

While making small social and economic concessions, the king is in fact turning the clock back in Arabia, using his popularity to confront clergy and restore the kind of unchecked authority his family enjoyed in the 1970s. Although the royal family has been the preeminent political force in the Arabian Peninsula since the early 20th century, its supremacy was challenged in 1979 by the spectacular siege of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, which marked the rise of a generation of Islamist rebels. The kingdom's leaders responded by co-opting its radical critics. In doing so, they greatly expanded the power of the religious establishment.

"Thirty years on, it is this bargain that Abdullah has begun to dismantle. And he is succeeding. Indeed, Abdullah's most important domestic accomplishment so far has been the strengthening of his and his family's grip on power."

"You may be certain that the world is heading for destruction, but it's a good thing, a moral thing, to behave as though there's still hope. Hope is as contagious as despair: your hope, or show of hope, is a gift you can give to your neighbour, and may even help to prevent or delay the destruction of his world,"- Primo Levi, 1985

Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá have a new book on the evolution of sexuality. They argue – duh – that monogamy is unnatural:

Biologists distinguish sexual monogamy from social monogamy. As DNA testing has grown cheaper in recent years, we’ve learned that most species formerly classified as “monogamous” (primarily birds) are socially monogamous, but not sexually so. In other words, they form pairs that cooperatively care for that season’s brood of young, but the male may well not be the biological father. Applied to humans, we argue that a more flexible approach to sexual fidelity can increase marital stability and thus lead to greater social and family stability.

In a Q&A with the authors the open relationships of some gay couples are discussed:

First of all, they’re both men, so they both know what it’s like to be a man. They both know from experience that love and sex are two very different things, and it seems that for women the experience of sexuality is much more embedded in narrative, in emotion, in emotional intimacy. But also it’s really hard to judge what women would be like if they hadn’t been persecuted for the last five or six thousand or ten thousand years for any hint of infidelity.

Gay men in the United States have also by definition gone through a process of self-examination. The whole process of coming out is a process of integrating sexuality into your life in a way that takes courage, and it’s not something that happens naturally. I think gay people have an advantage because they’ve already gone through a process of saying: "Look, my sexuality is what it is. I’m not ashamed of it. I’m going to live openly and in accord with it." That puts them on a different level than most heterosexual people who are able to pass along and pretend that they fit into the normal parameters.

Jonah Lehrer praises the Wii:

For decades, video game designers have been obsessed with visual realism, as if the eyeball was the key to our emotional brain. But accurate graphics have diminishing returns. At a certain point, we don't need more pixels – we need more physicality. For the first time, video games are taking advantage of their specific medium, exploiting the features that other entertainments (such as movies and novels) are missing. No other form of culture, after all, depends on the verb "to play". (We play video games – we don't watch or read them.) But here's the thing about playing: it's much more captivating when the play itself is a physical act, when we play not just with the mind but with the body.

Mark Larson reflects on learning of a friend's death over Facebook:

Coming from a generation that grew up with Facebook and lived in a world in which relationships weren’t official until they were on the social networking site, in a strange way finding out about a friend dying in war via Facebook made it more real. You could still go to his profile and see the pictures he’d posted of the nights he spent out before deploying or the hundreds of posts on his wall from grieving friends trying to send a message one last time. In this way such a profile acts as a public memorial, and a welcome one, since its existence reminds all those in his social circle precisely what is at stake in a war that has zero effect on their day-to-day lives.

Leonhart finds a study comparing the current downturn to the 1982 recession:

Strikingly, for nearly every age group the unemployment rate is higher today than it was during the worst of the early 1980s recession.

And DiA isn't impressed by the Obama administration's attempt to put a positive spin on today's underwhelming job report:

The average voter is most likely to have job opportunities as a ready heuristic about the state of the economy, not the manufacturing production index. For the White House to frame a fairly depressing report about people's lived experiences as a sign of "continued healing" strikes one of those dissonant notes that we thought Barack Obama, the great communicator, would avoid as president.