Year: 2013

Alain de Botton outlines it:

In the modern world, the idea of trying to be a ‘good person’ conjures up all sorts of negative associations: of piety, solemnity, bloodlessness and sexual renunciation, as if goodness were something one would try to embrace only when other more difficult but more fulfilling avenues had been exhausted. Throughout history, societies have been interested in fostering virtues, in training us to be more virtuous, but we’re one of the first generations to have zero public interest in this. You’re allowed to work on your body (going to the gym has very high status as an activity), but announce that you’re going to work on being more virtuous, and people will be guaranteed to look at you as if you’re insane.

In response, he created his own manifesto, “Ten Virtues for the Modern Age”. Number one? Resilience:

Keeping going even when things are looking dark; accepting that reversals are normal; remembering that human nature is, in the end, tough. Not frightening others with your fears.

More on Botton’s philosophy here.

There’s a new exhibit of Allen Ginsberg’s photography, “Beat Memories,” that recently opened at the Grey Art Gallery in New York City:

From 1953 to 1963 Ginsberg, armed with a small, secondhand Kodak Retina camera that he bought for thirteen dollars and often tucked into his jacket pocket, shot snapshots that captured, as Sarah Greenough writes, “the playful quality of his close-knit group of friends.” We see Kerouac beneath the Brooklyn Bridge singing blues and chanting the words of Edgar Allen Poe and Hart Crane and making a “Dostoyevsky mad-face” near Tompkins Square Park.

The photographs (and negatives) from the 1950s remained unpublished for thirty years. They were, Ginsberg wrote, “meant more for a public in heaven than one here on earth—and that’s why they’re charming.” After Ginsberg’s papers were given to Columbia University, an archivist there discovered the photos and negatives and contacted Ginsberg. The idea was for Ginsberg to identify the people in the photos, nothing more. But with encouragement from the photographers Robert Frank and Berenice Abbott, Ginsberg, the innovator, the visionary, did more. He had many of his earlier photographs reprinted, adding extensive inscriptions, carefully punctuated and full of parenthetical details.

(Photo © 2012 Allen Ginsberg LLC. All rights reserved.)

Amy Lepine Peterson connects the recent 30 Rock finale to the biblical wisdom of Ecclesiastes:

The answers that Liz and Jack find are incomplete, but that doesn’t mean that 30 Rock doesn’t shine a light on the very truth of the human condition: that there is nothing new under the sun, and that our attempts to attain happiness are often meaningless, a chasing after the wind.

As Christians, sometimes we skip that part. We gloss over the difficult truths about our world, skipping merrily past the existential angst, the broken realities of a sin-marred creation, and going straight to the happy shiny Jesus truth. But what I loved about 30 Rock, when it was at its best, was how it told the truth about the way that success and popularity and work and relationships and money and pleasure and food (with Lemon, always the food) don’t fix us. They’re just band-aids, and what we need is open heart surgery.

Origen, the Church Father who lived in the late 2nd and 3rd centuries, developed a creative approach to deciphering the meaning of the Bible:

In authoring scripture, Origen argues, God has deliberately planted all sorts of interpretive obstacles: problems, difficulties, mistakes, morally objectionable stories, and so forth. These manifold obstacles lead us to press beneath the surface of the text and to search more deeply for its spiritual meaning. Such spiritual exegesis isn’t just a scholarly technique. It requires ascetic purification, the spiritual transformation of the reader. So the problems in scripture…are planted there by God to lead us into the depths of spiritual life, just as a wise teacher might plant mistakes in a class discussion in order to lead the class, gently and unobtrusively, towards the truth.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rq0apHW6Ezw]

In a meditation on the Stoic tradition in ethics, Scott Aikin and Robert Talisse point to a passage from the Encheiridion:

In the case of everything attractive or useful or that you are fond of, remember to say just what sort of thing it is, beginning with the little things.  If you are fond of a jug, say “I am fond of a jug!” For when it is broken, you will not be upset. If you kiss your child or wife, say you are kissing a mortal human being.  For when it dies, you will not be upset.

Their hesitation:

It’s here that we see what’s alien, almost inhuman about the paradoxical tradition in ethics.  It seems that in order to make ourselves invulnerable, we must shed all the things that make us human.  The well-being of a son or daughter, the flourishing of a marriage, the pleasure of friendship.  That naturally makes us happy. And so, too, do children’s hardship, the failure of a marriage, and loss of friends make us unhappy.  To become invulnerable to these losses, it seems we must forgo the benefits, too.

The stoic, in maintaining his own inner light, in tending his personal virtue, seems to lose a profound virtue, too.  Let us call this the damage problem. Stoicism is ruinous of the goods we naturally take as comprising the good life.  It’s a kind of scorched earth policy with life, in order to achieve invulnerability.

You’ve probably heard about the new Facebook app, “Bang With Friends,” which allows users to choose the friends they would have sex with and then are notified when those same friends have chosen them. Amanda Hess’ reaction:

The male dominance of hook-up apps is an extension of the gender split in the programming world at large, where women make up just 18 percent of computer science grads and 19 percent of career programmers. At many prominent firms, their representation dwindles to the single digits. A very select few make their way to the top. That’s a problem for virtual hook-up pioneers, who would be smart to heavily favor the female perspective in order to recruit enough women to level the playing field. After Blendr’s 2011 release, Ann Friedman outlined a few ways developers could actually make hook-up apps more appealing to hetero women, like putting the messaging power solely in the hands of female users, or allowing women to publicly endorse their male friends—not to rep their prowess in bed, but to vouch for their capability to treat women like people.

Dan Savage thinks the app shows promise for women seeking sex:

By definition the guys a woman meets through Bang With Friends aren’t strangers. These are guys that the women on the site know. (In theory at least—some people are Facebook friends with strangers.) And while a woman can certainly be victimized, infected, sexually assaulted, or knocked up by a guy she knows, a woman is more likely to… know something about a guy she knows. She’s likelier to have some sense of whether this guy is a good guy or a bad guy, she may know other women he’s been with (or, ahem, she may know the woman he’s currently with), and she may have some friends in common. That last bit is especially important: a sexually impulsive act with someone in your social circle comes with a degree of social accountability. Anonymous hookups do not. And it’s that degree of social accountability that’s key, I think, to making a Grindr for straight people work.

Jordana Rothman surveys the current market for “flairtending”:

Ask almost anyone about flair bartending and Cocktail is what comes to mind: A kind of acrobatic showmanship that just happens to produce an alcoholic beverage — it’s Benihana for the drinking set. In the 25 years since the movie came out, that kind of theatrical bartending has not aged well, as bars have become shrines dedicated to serious drink-making. In the current age of studious bartenders, too much stagecraft is taboo. The mixology movement worships ingredients, classic recipes, and tools. There is no room for extraneous moves designed to please the crowd but have no conceivable impact on the taste of the cocktail.

But the art is not completely dead. Rothman quotes Tobin Ellis, a founder of the Flair Bartenders’ Association:

“At some point it starts to happen naturally. You see people trying to figure out how to stir four cocktails at once, or hold two or three jiggers in one hand. It becomes a question of efficiency mixed with a little bit of style.”

Paul Miller is spending a year without the internet. Pursuing a girl proved difficult:

For me, no internet kept things mysterious and surprising. The most obvious change was that I couldn’t Facebook stalk her. I couldn’t see who she knew, or where she’d been, or whether she trended corny or standoffish in group photos. I could only learn about her through conversation. She drew me a diagram of her family and friends, to help me follow her stories better.

For the first couple weeks, I actually didn’t know her last name. It just didn’t come up, and I didn’t think to ask. Undeterred, my brother used her first name and a few offhand remarks of mine to stalk her online himself. I asked him not to tell me, but he couldn’t help dropping a few revelatory details about her career — I was surprised how little I “knew” about her from my hours of conversation, versus his minutes of Google work.

Previous Dish on Miller’s experiment here and here.

A new study found that mixing alcohol with a diet soda results in higher (BrAC) Breath Alcohol Concentrations than mixing it with normal soda. Allison Aubrey spoke to the author of the study, Cecile Marczinski:

“I wanted to know if the choice of a mixer could be the factor that puts a person above or below the legal limit,” writes Marczinski, who’s a professor at Northern Kentucky University. And it turns out, diet soda might just push you past that tipping point. Marczinski’s study found that the average BrAC was .091 (at its peak) when subjects drank alcohol mixed with a diet drink. By comparison, BrAC was .077 when the same subjects consumed the same amount of alcohol but with a sugary soda.

Joseph Stromberg highlights the reason why:

The researchers believe it’s because the body recognizes regular sodas (which include sugar) as food, which slows down the rate of alcohol absorption into the blood. Diet sodas, on the other hand, only include aspartame, which the body doesn’t treat as food, so the alcohol mixed in gets absorbed much more quickly.