Year: 2013

There were some great scenes at the nudity protest in San Francisco today. But one photo (hat tip: Petrelis) somehow brought all the elements together:

(Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Nate Cohn imagines the consequences:

If coaches begin to adopt the lessons of advanced football statistics, the changes would be noticeable to even a casual fan: Teams would go for it on fourth down, stop running so much on first down, go for the jugular with a late lead, and take big risks as an underdog in the first quarter. In that sense, statistics might promise more fundamental changes to football than baseball. Fans watching a data-driven baseball manager might not notice any big changes at all, unless they were fans of bunting.

Ruminating on competing interpretations of Robert Frost, Joshua Rothman finds himself compelled by Joseph Brodsky’s darker, brooding portrait of the poet:

Frost, Brodsky writes, in “On Grief and Reason,” his 1994 essay for The New Yorker, “is generally regarded as the poet of the countryside, of rural settings—as a folksy, crusty, wisecracking old gentleman farmer, generally of positive disposition.” He “greatly enhanced this notion by projecting precisely this image of himself in numerous public appearance and interviews”… In reality, Brodsky writes, Frost was a dark, “terrifying” poet, as Lionel Trilling had called him. He was a poet animated by “anticipation,” by a knowledge of “what he is capable of,” by a sense “of his own negative potential.” Frost’s life contained much besides contemplative strolls through the New England countryside, but Brodsky argued that in that countryside, Frost had seen the most profound part of himself. In nature, Frost had painted his “terrifying self-portrait.”

Brent Cox crunches the Super Bowl numbers, adjusting for inflation, on ticket prices and advertising revenues:

From the data, it’s pretty clear that the increasing popularity of football, as it slowly equaled and then surpassed the popularity of that most American of American games, baseball, is reflected in the inflation of associated costs. In the case of the television spots, you can throw in two other factors, first the growth in size and sophistication of the advertising industry over the past forty years, and second, and probably more importantly, the splintering of the television industry. At the time of the first game in 1967, there were three (or two and a half, some would say) national television networks on which to advertise. Additionally, there were no home-use devices that could record television, let alone skip the commercials. As the television industry developed into thousands of channels, and a decreasing audience willing to watch it in real time, the value of advertising on the Super Bowl increased, in terms of the audience it would draw, and in terms of the actual amount of that audience that would sit willingly through the commercials.

Ruth Krause and Helen Whittle lament that the German language “is littered with what some people view as derogatory or discriminatory words,” often connected to antiquated racial or ethnic terms:

In pubs across Bavaria, people order “Negroes” or “Russians,” and receive a wheat beer mixed with cola or lemonade. A traditional restaurant in Kiel is proudly called Zum Mohrenkopf, which translates as The Moor’s Head.

Words such as “negro” and “Moor” have been disdained by the politically correct crowd for years. But “negro kisses” or “Moor heads,” a German adaptation from the Frenchtête de nègre, or “negro head” – referring to candies made from marshmallows, chocolate and wafers – remain firm favorites at children’s birthday parties.

(Photo by Janet McKnight)

Peter Gajdics describes his horrific experiences with the reparative therapy aimed at “curing” his homosexuality:

Three years into the therapy I suffered a physical and mental breakdown precipitated by prolonged, near-fatal doses of five concurrent psychotropic medications, one of the many ways Alfonzo “helped” suppress my libido so that I could “flip over to the other side” (to heterosexuality). When it became clear, despite the medications and near-daily “feeling therapy,” that my same-sex erotic desires were not diminishing, Alfonzo ordered me to bottle my feces and to sniff it whenever I was attracted to a man. “You need to be reminded where homosexual men stick their penis,” he said. “You need to be reminded that homosexual relations are not pleasurable.” When none of that worked—I was still attracted to men, only now all erotic desire seemed to elicit the smell of feces—Alfonzo threatened to hook my genitals up to electrodes. “Without my help,” he told me weeks later, “you’ll probably just get AIDS and die.”

Claire Cameron celebrates Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary, praising the way the novelist “fit his story in between what we know and how we feel,” resulting in a story about Jesus and his followers that powerfully resonates with our own experiences of grief and tragedy:

We know the Bible. In Tóibín’s telling, the writers of the gospel were attempting to tell a story about redemption. When they hear Mary’s version of the crucifixion, they discount it and go on to write about a resurrection instead. We feel a mother who has lost her son. Tóibín’s intimate approach makes Mary feel more credible and human than the other versions of her we’ve come across before, whether they be in a crèche, a church or on a piece of toast. To her, the crucifixion was a horrific tragedy and this intuitively feels right. No parent could see the torture and death of his or her child in any other way.

(Image: “The Madonna in Sorrow” by Giovanni Battista Salvi, via Wikimedia Commons)