Month: August 2011

Michael Harris marks the 30th birthday of HIV/AIDS. He describes a moment a few years ago when a former lover, Charles, found out he was positive:

The intense relief I felt when my own test came back negative was mingled with guilt. Why Charles and not me? (By his own account, he had always used condoms.) I suppose it’s nothing compared with the survivor’s guilt the older generation underwent during the ’80s and ’90s; in British Columbia, the epidemic became so severe that, on average, a person died every day of AIDS. Daily funerals, concentrated in so specific a demographic, had a crippling (if galvanizing) effect on gay culture, and it’s no wonder that my generation has so often inspired a war vet’s exasperation in gay guys even five years older than we are.

Anna Simpson imagines a more ethical and sustainable sex industry:

According to stereotypes, men who pay for sex are on a power trip. But in the vast majority of cases, says Belinda Brooks-Gordon, author of The Price of Sex: Prostitution, Policy and Society, the reality is very different. For many johns, "mutuality is part of the attraction. . . . Sex workers [actually] get bored by constant interrogation [from clients] about their well-being."

… Brooks-Gordon’s research has convinced [Sally Uren, deputy director of the UK sustainable-development organization Forum for the Future] that there is huge latent demand for an ethical sex industry. Not only do most clients want to feel wanted, she says; many would be relieved to know that the sex workers starring in their favorite porn film, dancing onstage at their club, or available through their escort agency are there by consent, are paid a decent wage, and have access to services that promote health and welfare. Potentially, she says, it offers a pretty progressive working model: "Self-employment, flexible working hours, the option of working from home—what more could you want?"

Blaire Briody profiles Dirty Girls Ministries, which attempts to "cure" women of masturbation and porn-watching:

Dirty Girls member Amy Christine Proctor, a self-described addict and a flight attendant from Colorado, started masturbating while she was visiting chat rooms on AOL. Unmarried and a virgin at 30, Proctor has struggled with her sexual identity since puberty, believing her same-sex thoughts are a sin. Last year, she says, she was masturbating almost daily, sometimes twice a day. To rehabilitate herself, she became an active member of Dirty Girls Ministries and started driving two hours to attend a 12-step program for sex addicts called Heart to Heart. But when she realized the masturbation was stemming from underlying sexual-identity issues, she switched to a program called Where Grace Bounds that deals with “sexual brokenness and homosexuality,” while remaining an active member of the Dirty Girls forums.

Christina Seely photographed the 43 brightest cities as determined by NASA's map of Earth at night. The US, Western Europe and Japan use around two-thirds of the world’s resources and create about half the world's CO2:

More often than not, urban light is unnecessary and often unappealing. At the same time electric light is used to enhance the identity of cities. It’s used outline the Eiffel Tower in Paris, or the bridges in the San Francisco Bay Area, or to accentuate the changing maple leaves in Kyoto in the fall. When it’s thought of as beautiful, we are looking at it and considering the city as place. When it’s thought of as pollution, we are looking beyond it and considering what it it might be blocking out, what we are no longer connecting to—natural night, natural rhythms.

(Photo: Metropolis 35°00’N 135°45’E (Kyoto))

Nicholas Carr finds yet another reason to bemoan the Web:

In the first quarter of 2011, the average American watched 4 hours and 33 minutes of streaming video a month on a computer, up a whopping 34.5 percent from year-earlier levels. That same average American watched an additional 4 hours and 20 minutes of video on a mobile phone, up 20 percent from Q1 2010. You no longer need a couch to be a couch potato.

Hämeenlinna, Finland, 8.31 pm

Steve Ells, founder of Chipotle, talks about why they switched to 100% humanely raised pork:

People are raising pork in a way that is really not sustainable. It's not pleasant for the animals – and not pleasant is a real understatement. It's really brutal. It's like torturing the animals. The stench is terrible. They're crowded in there and going crazy and biting each other's tails and biting the metal bars. They're in their own waste, which is liquefied and put in these holding lagoons outside of these warehouses. And that poses all of these contamination problems – the stench in the air is just terrible and it's not anything anyone would really want to live around.

And then there's this problem of all the antibiotics that have to be used when animals live in that kind of close confinement-to keep them healthy and promote growth. And that has a slew of health ramification for humans in that we're creating super-bugs that are resistant to antibiotics. And on top of all that, the pork doesn't taste very good.

Mark Bittman recently addressed sustainable farming:

"If the cost of food reflected the cost of production," says [farmer Brenna Chase], "that would change everything." And this is undoubtedly true. But though sustainably produced food is too expensive for some, conventional food doesn’t reflect either the subsidies required to grow it or the huge environmental or health care costs it incurs. Once it does, sustainable food would appear far more competitive.

A rhyming supercut of movie quotes:

David Liss notices that popular culture no longer depicts magic as a learned art:

Magic has gone from being an open system to a closed one. Their massive popularity make the Harry Potter novels and films the most glaring example, but it’s everywhere, and has been for decades now: TV shows like Charmed and Wizards of Waverly Place, books like those of Laurell K. Hamilton and Charlaine Harris. More often than not, magical practitioners are born, not made. Magic is an exclusive club. You can watch and be envious, but you can’t join.

Alyssa Rosenberg connects this development to contemporary understandings of power and powerlessness.

This is exactly what he needs to do: lose the caution, stiffen the sinews and take on the know-nothings:

When we take a position that isn't willing to embrace evolution, when we take a position that basically runs counter to what 98 of 100 climate scientists have said, what the National Academy of Science – Sciences has said about what is causing climate change and man's contribution to it, I think we find ourselves on the wrong side of science, and, therefore, in a losing position….I can't remember a time in our history where we actually were willing to shun science and become a – a party that – that was antithetical to science. I'm not sure that's good for our future and it's not a winning formula.

Here he is on the GOP's recent economic brinkmanship:

Well, I wouldn't necessarily trust any of my opponents right now, who were on a recent debate stage with me, when every single one of them would have allowed this country to default. You can imagine, even given the uncertainty of the marketplace the last several days and even the last couple of weeks, if we had defaulted the first time in the history of the greatest country that ever was, being 25 percent of the world's GDP and having the largest financial services sector in this world by a long shot, if we had defaulted, Jake, this marketplace would be in absolute turmoil. And people who are already losing enough as it is on their 401(k)s and retirement programs and home valuations, it would have been catastrophic.

Keep it up. Huntsman has a prophetic role in this campaign if he chooses to adopt it: the truth-teller. His chances are so slim, he loses nothing by speaking this candidly. At the very least, he lays down a distinctive marker for 2016. At the very most, he could break out in New Hampshire if Romney falters.