Month: October 2010

My old friend Douglas Coupland has adapted his Predictions for the Next Decade for the NPR audience:

In the future, we'll try to live near a subway entrance. In a world of crazy-expensive oil, it's the only real estate that's going to hold its value, if not increase.

In the same way, you can never go backward to a slower computer. You can never go backward to a lessened state of connectedness. Enjoy lettuce while you still can, anything else that arrives in your life from a truck, for that matter. For vegetables, get used to whatever it was they served in railway hotels back in the 1890s: jams, preserves, pickled everything.

In a roundup of some of the more disturbing prison statistics out there, Joe Windish quotes from Michelle Alexander's new book, The New Jim Crow:

There are more African Americans under correctional control today — in prison or jail, on probation or parole — than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.

"Balm," by Virginia Woodward Cloud first appeared in 1902:

After the heat the dew,
    and the tender touch of twilight;
The unfolding of the few
    Calm stars.
After the heat the dew.

After the Sun the shade,
    and beatitude of shadow;
Dim aisles for memory made,
    And thought.
After the Sun the shade.

After all there is balm;
    from the wings of dark there is wafture
Of sleep, — night’s infinite psalm, —
    And dreams.
After all there is balm.

Simon Schama assesses taxidermy in British art over time:

While the bestiary has long been close to the heart of British modernism, its obsessions have generally been not horsey but sheepish and cow-eyed, with an ironic yen for exploring the weird connection between butchery, sacrifice and salvation enshrined in Christian iconography.

Damien Hirst’s “Saint Sebastian, Exquisite Pain” (2007), for example, with its bovine, arrow-pierced martyrdom, has all kinds of precedents, not just in the multiple piercings of Piero del Pollaiuolo’s 15th-century Sebastian but also in Rembrandt’s “Flayed Ox” of the 1650s, the latter a meaty martyrdom for the Calvinists, the carcase strung out on its wooden cross like an even more animal version of the younger Rembrandt’s Passion paintings with their tragically beastly torment and howling.

“There is a kind of tragedy about all those pieces,” Hirst has said of his bisected and formaldehyded animals, and, however laconic he comes across, almost all of his strongest work taps into that most forgotten but deepest strain in British culture – its ancient perfervid religiosity.

(Image from an old Hirst exhibition)

Eileen Reynolds reviews Chocolate Wars: The 150-Year Rivalry Between the World’s Greatest Chocolate Makers, by Deborah Cadbury:

The story she tells is really about Quakers, and about one family’s continuous struggle to reconcile religious values—pacifism, austerity, sobriety—with the indulgent nature of their product and the ruthlessly competitive capitalism of the world in which they made their fortune.

John Cadbury, who founded a tea-and-coffee shop in Birmingham in 1824, practiced a brand of “Quaker capitalism” that valued hard work and “wealth creation for the benefit of the workers, the local community, and society at large,” rather than large profits only for the entrepreneurs themselves. Debt was seen as shameful, advertising as dishonest. His descendants came to create a thriving chocolate empire—but not without confronting challenges to their values.

John Scalzi contemplates all the things he doesn't have to think about today.

 Adam Kirsch reviews Robert Alter's translation of The Wisdom Books, "new renderings of the books of Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes—possibly the most challenging and perplexing works in all of Scripture":

[T]hey are also the Biblical books that speak most directly to the modern, skeptical, secular reader. If the Torah is revelation—an ostensibly factual account of God’s actions and commandments—the Wisdom Books are a kind of counter-revelation: an emphatically human expression of the impossibility of knowing God or believing in His justice.

Peter Steinfels urges American bishops to acknowledge and address dwindling numbers in the Catholic church:

[O]ne out of every three adult Americans who were raised Catholic have left the church. If these ex-Catholics were to form a single church, they would constitute the second largest church in the nation. One in three. Think about it.

This record makes the percentage of bad loans and mortgages leading to the financial meltdown look absolutely stellar. It dwarfs the bankruptcies of General Motors and Chrysler. Thomas Reese, SJ, the former editor of America, recently described this loss of one-third of those raised Catholic as “a disaster.” He added, “You wonder if the bishops have noticed.”

Well, take a look at this statistic:

Catholics overwhelmingly support legal recognition of homosexual unions. 41% of white Catholics, and 46% of Latino Catholics, support same-sex marriage, while an additional 36% of white Catholics, and 22% of Latino Catholics, support same-sex civil unions. Only 19% of white Catholics, and 30% of Latino Catholics, are faithful to Catholic teaching, which opposes the legal recognition of homosexual unions. Overall, 37% of Americans support same-sex marriage, 27% support civil unions, and 33% oppose the legal recognition of homosexual unions. In 2006, only 26% of Americans supported same-sex marriage.

And yet opposition to this is perhaps one of the most strenuously defended positions of the current hierarchy.

(Image by Belgian artist Fred Eerdekens via Flavorwire)

A reader notes one incident in which, contra my impression, they were used against US troops:

A roadside bomb thought to contain deadly sarin nerve agent exploded near a U.S. military convoy, the U.S. military said Monday. It was believed to be the first confirmed discovery of any of the banned weapons that the United States cited in making its case for the Iraq war. Two members of a military bomb squad were treated for “minor exposure,” but no serious injuries were reported.

The chemicals were inside an artillery shell dating to the Saddam Hussein era that had been rigged as a bomb in Baghdad, said Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the chief military spokesman in Iraq. Early indications suggest that two chemical components in the shell, which are designed to combine and create sarin during flight, did not mix properly or completely upon detonation, a U.S. official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. Kimmitt, however, said a small amount of the nerve agent was released.

This is consistent, of course, with the general findings in the Wikileaks doc dump that they were degraded left-overs from the earlier Saddam era, and not part of an ongoing stockpile program as we were all told.