Month: April 2011

Deborah Jerome considers the time it takes for mourners to return to society:

We want to acknowledge the griever’s pain, because we also know it as our own. We offer our hand, our clumsy platitudes, a cup of broth. But at some point we itch to move on to our lives, and leave the mourner to move on to his or hers. Not out of callousness, but out of the knowledge that in the end, grief is a lonely and entirely personal place. What we wish for the grieving is that they learn to pull away from the wild, unruly currents of mourning and rejoin us, knowing that nothing we say can really matter, because we know grief’s dark allure. In grief we sound the depths of our love. In that regard, it’s a private privilege. Society has no place there.

 

Jerusalem, Israel, 4.50 pm

Mark Vernon has his doubts about positive psychology and its inventor, Martin Seligman, who has a new book out, Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding Of Happiness And Well-being:

Has Seligman now got a decent account of the role of pain in life, which is to say it can't always be mitigated as it's the flipside of love? Has he got deeper understandings of qualities like hope, which is more about gritty courage than mere optimism; or friendship, which is not just about camaraderie but the relatively rare experience of truly knowing someone and being known by them? And what about meaning: will any old meaning do, so long as it delivers purpose (despots have that in spades), or will he engage in some moral philosophy and admirable struggle with the ambiguities? Aristotle also didn't shirk from the fact that life is tragic. The individual who flourishes is, sooner or later, still the individual who dies – though with luck, or blessing, dies well.

 

Roger Ebert takes comfort in the vastness of what we don't know:

There is more than one way to see. A leaf turns to the light. A chimpanzee selects a piece of fruit. A fish sees a smaller fish. An eagle sees a rabbit. A dolphin rescues a sailor. A dog welcomes us home. While all of these actions are guided by a process falling under the general heading of Intelligence, humans seem to be fairly unique in our ability for conscious thought. We see, we know, and we know we know.

This is a blessing and it carries a price. To know you live is to know you die.

… I read articles about astronomy and physics. It doesn't matter to me how much I understand. Their buried message is always the same: Somewhere out there, or somewhere deep inside, there are mysteries of which we perceive only vague shadows, and there are possibly more mysteries within those shadows, continuing indefinitely.

(Photo: Puddles and gasoline portraits from the series Pavement Trees by Ingrid Nelson)

"You have a face sweeter than boiled grape juice. It looks as if a snail had walked across it, it shines so much. And prettier than a turnip and teeth as white as parsnips, so much so that you could entice the Pope. And eyes the color of a medicinal brew and hair whiter and blonder than a leek so that I'll die if you give me no relief,"- Michelangelo, from one of his many poems featured in a new book, Michelangelo: A Life on Paper.

Behold the Holle Cropper, one of the many amazing Grand National Pigeons:

Alexander Chee admires the erotic novels of James Salter because "his kind of sex writing is about you, the reader, in a way a fantasy isn’t":

It seems to me that the writers we love most are those who manage to capture something we ourselves have thought and rejected, for being forbidden, dangerous, elusive, something that if we made room for it would undo something else we want to keep, so we force it away—literature as a catalogue of rejected thoughts. For the way they can hold onto what the rest of us would put away as dangerous, they become heroes, the ones who emerge with the one thing we hoped to keep secret, but know we need.

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Psyblog collects ten studies on the ways in which nonsexual touch helps us get what we want:

In one study, strangers who were touched lightly on the arm were more likely to help an experimenter pick up things they had dropped (Gueguen, 2003). The percentage of people who helped went up from 63% to 90%.

Mike Ananny downloads Grindr, the gay meet-up app, and notices that "Sex Offender Search" is listed first under related and relevant apps:

In the best case, people see the link as ridiculous, questions where it might have come from, and start learning about what other kind of erroneous assumptions (social, legal and cultural) might underpin the Registered Sex Offender system. In a worse case, they see the link and think "you see, gay men are more likely to be pedophiles, even the technologies say so." Despite repeated scientific studies that reject such correlations, they use the Marketplace link as "evidence" the next time they're talking with family, friends or co-workers about sexual abuse or gay rights.

The point here is that reckless associations — made by humans or computers — can do very real harm especially when they appear in supposedly neutral environments like online stores. Because the technologies can seem neutral, people can mistake them as examples of objective evidence of human behavior.

 

Neil Steinberg, in assessing the absurd controversy over the J.Crew ad, digs up a childhood photo and says of the figure on the far left and far right:

[He's] the famed macho writer, world traveler, big game hunter, marlin fisherman, boxer and boozer. A poster boy for masculinity if ever there was one, alas.