Month: August 2012

Life at just under seven feet, according to Tom Breihan:

When you're this tall, it becomes a deeply entrenched part of who you are. You become separate, or at least you think of yourself that way. At loud parties, you need to find a stool if you want to hear anything anybody says; otherwise, you're a disembodied head floating a foot above the crowd. Your clothes will not fit as well as other people's clothes, and you will be acutely aware of that fact at all times. In certain American cities, large crowds of children will just bust up laughing when they see you coming. (Baltimore, you are forever my home and I love you, but sometimes fuck you.) And if you spend enough time looking at the Wikipedia pages of past famous giants, you will start to think of yourself as doomed.

On the other hand, people remember your name, it's easy to get bartenders' attention, and you can almost always see well at concerts, though your sightlines usually come at somebody else's expense. It's a bargain that your genetics made for you.

(From the series 'From Below' by Michael Rohde)

During his stay in Cuba, Hemingway spent (pdf) some time moonlighting as a spy. He insisted on "patrolling the waters on the north coast of Cuba in his cabin cruiser, the Pilar, in search of Germans":

While other American sailors were volunteering their boats and their time along the East Coast to spot U-boats, Hemingway’s concept of operations went further. He would pretend to be fishing, wait until a German submarine came alongside to buy fresh fish and water and then attack the enemy with bazookas, machine guns, and hand grenades. Hemingway would use Basque jai alai players to lob the grenades down the open hatches of the unsuspecting U-boat.

Unfortunately, he never got the chance to try it out:

The Pilar’s war cruises lasted from the second half of 1942 through most of 1943. Although Hemingway patrolled diligently for much of the time, he only spotted one German submarine, which sailed away on the surface as he approached.

(Hat tip: Joshua Keating)

I'm back after a truly wonderful deep dive into silence and sleep and swimming and biking out here at the end of the Cape. I understand some developments have occurred in the electoral race since I took my annual fortnight breather. I hope to gather some thoughts for tomorrow. But a major shout-out, first up, to the Dish team – Patrick, Chris, Zoe, Matt, Gwynn and Chas. Thanks so much for channeling dishness so skillfully for two weeks in high election season. It's going to be a fascinating fall campaign – far more interesting than it looked two weeks ago. Can't wait to dive in.

by Zoë Pollock

Gustavo Lacerda's series Albinos will take your breath away. Heba Hasan marvels:

Known for the absence of pigment in their skin, hair, and eyes, people with albinism are often subjected to ridicule, and in parts of Africa, are commonly kidnapped, killed, and dismembered by witchdoctors who believe their bodies possess magical properties. In a series that we spotted on Design Taxi, Brazilian photographer Gustavo Lacerda celebrates the grace of people suffering from this congenital disorder in poignant and thought-provoking poses. Playing with lighting and color saturation, Lacerda’s subjects appear ethereal and hauntingly beautiful.

by Matthew Sitman

This year's election should feature millions of evangelical protestants voting for a GOP ticket comprised of a Mormon and a Roman Catholic. Andrew Hartman revisits the unsurprising reason for Republicans' ecumenical politics:

It’s the culture wars, stupid. That is, the culture wars are the reason that the American right—including conservative white evangelicals—is fine with the GOP's relatively newfound love of religious diversity. As James Davison Hunter pointed out more than two decades ago in his now classic book, Culture Wars, religious Americans gave up their sectarian prejudices in order to form political and ideological alliances in the culture wars. Conservative evangelicals came to love, or at least tolerate, conservative Catholics, Jews, and even Mormons.

These “orthodox” Americans, to borrow Hunter’s language, found that they had more in common with each other than they did with “progressive” Americans, more even than with progressive coreligionists. This was also, remarkably, true of most Protestant fundamentalists, those whose identities were formed earlier in the twentieth century by sectarian strife and doctrinal dispute. Many fundamentalists, for example, believed that the election of JFK signaled the end times in 1960. And yet, the vast majority of fundamentalists eventually came around to the view that conservative Catholics were their spiritual allies against the secular humanists who ushered in legal abortion.

Recent Dish coverage of the culture wars here.

 

by Matthew Sitman

Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, reviews Marilynne Robinson's recent essay collection, When I Was a Child I Read Books. He especially focuses on her recovery of the term "liberal" – as an adjective, not a noun:

These essays are pure gold. Written with all her usual elegance, economy, and intellectual ruthlessness, they constitute a plea for recovering the use of "liberal" as an adjective, and, what is more, an adjective whose central meaning is specified by its use in scripture. "The word occurs [in the Geneva Bible] in contexts that urge an ethics of non-judgmental, nonexclusive generosity" – and not a generosity of "tolerating viewpoints" alone, but of literal and practical dispersal of goods to those who need them.

Psalm 122 is, you could say, the theme song of this vision, and it is a vision that prompts Robinson to a ferocious critique of the abstractions of ideology – including "austerity" as an imperative to save the world for capitalism. She offers a striking diagnosis of the corrupting effect of rationalism: rationalism as she defines it is the attempt to get the world to fit the theory; and because the world is never going to fit the theory, the end-product of rationalist strategies is always panic.

Previous coverage of Robinson's work here, here, here and here.

by Zoë Pollock

In another dispatch from his year of living without internet, Paul Miller touches on something I totally experience, even when talking with loved ones:

The other day I was at my coffee shop, about to make an order, when I got into a conversation with another regular. And then, a few minutes in, I felt a familiar internal tug. A chime inside said it was "time to get back." It's one of the last vestiges of my former mental patterns. I get a vague feeling on occasion that it's been a little while since I've looked at my instant messages, checked my email, scrolled through Twitter, or refreshed The Verge front page. "Someone on my computer must miss me," it seems to say. It's a combination of a fear of missing out, and a hope of being missed.

But nobody on my computer misses me anymore. I let out a small sigh. It hurts to be inessential. And then I was back in the moment. 

 

by Matthew Sitman

Charlie Jane Anders argues that "science fiction doesn't just illuminate philosophy — in fact, the genre grew out of philosophy, and the earliest works of science fiction were philosophical texts." She describes the nature of the genre this way:

Science fiction is a genre that uses strange worlds and inventions to illuminate our reality — sort of the opposite of a lot of other writing, which uses the familiar to build a portrait that cumulatively shows how insane our world actually is. People, especially early twenty-first century people, live in a world where strangeness lurks just beyond our frame of vision — but we can't see it by looking straight at it. When we try to turn and confront the weird and unthinkable that's always in the corner of our eye, it vanishes. In a sense, science fiction is like a prosthetic sense of peripheral vision.

And that, for Anders, is what philosophy at its best does, too – provide thought experiments that helps us to see our situation with fresh eyes. Unsurprisingly, it all goes back to Plato:

Plato is probably the best-known user of allegories — a form of writing which has a lot in common with science fiction. A lot of allegories are really thought experiments, trying out a set of strange facts to see what principles you derive from them. As plenty of people have pointed out, Plato's Allegory of the Cave is the template for a million "what is reality" stories, from the works of Philip K. Dick to The Matrix. But you could almost see the cave allegory in itself as a proto-science fiction story, because of the strange worldbuilding that goes into these people who have never seen the "real" world. (Plato also gave us an allegory about the Ring of Gyges, which turns its wearer invisible — sound familiar?)

by Matthew Sitman

Kenan Malik provides an 18-point guide to the logic behind religious freedom, and tries to establish what it should mean in the contemporary world. Especially interesting is the way our current situation differs from the era in which the principle first emerged:

Today, we live in very different world from that in which concepts of religious freedom first developed. Religion is no longer the crucible within which political and intellectual debates take place. Questions of freedom and tolerance are no longer about how the dominant religious establishment should respond to dissenting religious views, but about the degree to which society should tolerate, and the law permit, speech and activity that might be offensive, hateful, harmful to individuals or undermine national security. We can now see more clearly that religious freedom is not a special kind of liberty but one of a broader set of freedoms. If we were to think about religious freedom from first principles today, it would not have a special place compared to other forms of freedom of conscience, belief, assembly or action.

by Zoë Pollock

Fire breathing slowed down to 2000 frames per second:

Some background:

The world record for simultaneous fire breathing was set in 2009, when 293 students in Maastricht breathed fire together. The highest flame ever was 8.05 meters, set last year in a Las Vegas warehouse. Fire breathers even have their own association in North America – the NAFAA – that regulates safety. Basically, before you try this, slow motion or not, you should probably consult someone who knows what they’re doing.