Year: 2013

One of the more hilarious statements from the White House’s petition website:

The construction of the Death Star has been estimated to cost more than $850,000,000,000,000,000. We’re working hard to reduce the deficit, not expand it.

The Administration does not support blowing up planets.

One thing we have never heard on his week-long ratings-seeking descent into Jerry Springer land is any sane, reasonable, calm and credible figure who can marshal facts and arguments against gun control. Don't get me wrong. I cannot fathom why assault weapons are somehow integral to either hunting or resistance to an Obama-led coup. But I do know that there are intelligent points to be made – about how gun control cannot truly work in a country with as many legal guns as the US, how the country's history and constitution make it incomparable to a place like Britain, how mass confiscation is impractical and could make matters much worse, etc, etc.

We absolutely should have this debate – in as reasonable and calm a fashion possible, if only out of some shred of respect to the twenty murdered children in Newtown and their families. Instead we got a rolling freak-show designed entirely for ratings, since Morgan has never actually practised anything but gutter tabloid journalism and once sent an email to a policeman aggrieved by Morgan's disgusting contempt for the privacy and dignity of anyone in public life: "fame and crime sends most of the usual rules out of the window." Hence the phone hacking which forced the closure of the newspaper, The News Of The World, he once edited, and his being fired from the second tabloid he edited for publishing fake photographs of supposed prisoner abuse by British soldiers.

If you want to have an idea of the sheer level or hatred and contempt for the man in his native Britain, check out this interview with Ian Hislop, the inspired editor of the British muck-raking and satirical magazine, Private Eye. Because Hislop offended Morgan on a TV show, Morgan put the Mirror on a six-month crusade to try and find every conceivably embarrassing detail of Hislop's private life, and had photographers camped outside his house:

Michael Moynihan reminds us of Morgan's record:

A quick look at Morgan’s oeuvre, which includes stints at the News of the World, which was shuttered during the phone hacking scandal, and the Daily Mirror, from which he was fired for publishing fake photos of British soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners, and one understands that Morgan is incapable of nuance. Take his description of supermodel Kate Moss, whom he dismissed as a "drunken, foul-mouthed, ill-mannered, paranoid Croydon girl with a cocaine- desecrated hooter and spots." Her ex-boyfriend Pete Doherty, former guitar player in The Libertines, a seminal British post-punk band, is a "filthy talentless junkie who can’t sing." …

This is not an argument about the wisdom of owning an AR-15 or the judiciousness of outlawing certain high-capacity clips, but of the silliness of the Drudge and Morgan-style debate, which has abandoned reason for moral outrage. To disagree with Piers Morgan is to argue in bad faith, to be opposed to common sense, to be an uncaring, unfeeling tool of the gun lobby. Former CNN host Larry King, who Morgan replaced in 2011, told the Huffington Post this week that the show was now "all about the host," where "the guest becomes the prop to the host."

Update from a reader:

Aren’t you a little late to the party? No discussion of gun control? … haven’t you seen the tremendous takedown of this arrogant poseur by Ben Shapiro? It was masterful. Ben owned him, just demolished him. You can check it out here – it’s all over the internet tubes.

Megan Garber considers just how much writing we put into our emails over the course of a year:

Here's one estimate: 41,638 words. That's per the personal assistant app Cue, which integrates services like contacts, calendars, and especially email — and which recently released data based on a sampling of its users in 2012. While the average number of email messages each user received last year was (a relatively modest) 5,579 — and the average number of those messages each user sent was (an also modest) 879 — the output of words sent was comparatively colossal. To put those 41,638 discrete pieces of communication in perspective, that word count, in the aggregate, is roughly equivalent to a novel that is 166 pages in length. (The industry standard for page length is 250 words per page.) Which makes the average Cue user's email output slightly greater than The Old Man and the Sea (127 pages long), slightly less than The Great Gatsby (182 pages), and just about equal to The Turn of the Screw (165 pages).

Mark Galli searchingly meditates on the perils and promise of Christian parenting:

[T]he fact that children are often oppressed in religious households suggests that there is indeed something in religion which tempts parents in this way. That temptation is the inherent human fascination with law and control. People become religious for many reasons, good and bad. One for many is that their lives are completely out of control morally and socially, and they see in religion a way to bring order to the chaos. Religion as inner police. Such adherents are attracted to religions, or denominations within religions, that accent discipline and obedience. This happens — surprisingly — even in Christianity.

This is surprising because the New Testament message is about freedom from law, and being grounded in grace. "For freedom Christ has set us free," proclaimed Paul in his most profound exposition of grace. The fact that even some Christians fail to grasp the radical nature of God's unconditional love suggests just how deeply we humans are embedded in a world ruled by law, expectations, duty, control and obedience. We naturally imagine that Christianity is just a nicer form of this basic reality. The message of grace is so radical that it is simply hard to hear it for what it is.

Work Hard, Play Hard, Pray Hard is a collection of music from 1923 to 1936 that includes "songs of labor and occupation, hardship and loss; dance tunes, comic numbers, and novelties that provided distraction and fun; and the hymns and sacred pieces that reached beyond the raw material of daily existence for something enduring." John Jeremiah Sullivan considers his own secular appreciation of gospel music:

I felt the peculiar mixed admiration that non-believers get in the presence of great religious music, equal parts awe and alienation. You’re transported by the song, but you observe it from the outside—picturing the singers, their faces full of impenetrable faith. That congregation wasn’t singing to me, except insofar as they hoped to save me, to save passing motorists who might dial in their program. Yet there was a feeling, on my end at least, of overlap. For two or three minutes we shared the sensation of reverence itself, of bowing before something magnificent. For me, the thing was the music alone. 

In a positive review Pitchfork touched on the fortuitous discovery of the music:

The bulk of the sides on Work Hard, Play Hard, Pray Hard were salvaged by guitarist and nascent archivist Nathan Salsburg. Nearly three years ago, a friend of Salsburg's called to say that he'd stumbled upon a trove of old and abused records in the home of a Kentucky man who died a week earlier. That night, Salsburg dug through boxes of ketchup bottles and old 78-rpm records in a dumpster outside of the late man's home, steadily realizing that he'd found more than the standard collection of grandparent vinyl. Despite his early skepticism, Salsburg knew that the records amassed by Don Wahle– an enigma with an almost entirely unknown backstory, aside from the dilapidated boxes of music and record catalogue receipts Salsburg rescued– transmitted tales of folk and country music in America that were either previously obscure or altogether untold. … When [Wahle] died, they almost passed along with him.

Sample more of the songs here. 

(Above: Easter Day by The Dixon Brothers, which is among the songs featured on Work Hard, Play Hard, Pray Hard)

Daniel Baird wonders:

The trouble with retributive justice is that a literal reading of the “eye for an eye” passage leads to morbidly comical conclusions and boundless forms of cruelty. In many situations, it is not even clear what an appropriate equivalent means: one rabbi noted that if a blind man puts out someone’s eyes, it is impossible to blind him in return. In the case of extreme crimes, such as Bernardo’s or Breivik’s, or horrors as immense as the Holocaust, no punishment could compensate for the victims’ suffering. Jesus’ direction “Ye have heard that it hath been said, an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, that ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also” is not so much a criticism of the rabbinical courts of the Second Temple period, which were notably humane (crucifixion was a Roman practice, and capital punishment was used sparingly under the Pharisees). Rather, it was a way of pointing out that retributive justice can devolve into vengefulness as destructive as the crime itself.

David Mikics profiles literary critic Harold Bloom, capturing how a "cataclysmic midlife crisis" generated his most enduring work, The Anxiety of Influence:

For months, he was stricken with insomnia and unable to read. What saved him, when he could read again, was Emerson, the inescapable American Romantic thinker. Emerson is the apostle of the self that, no matter how severe the blows of fate it suffers, returns to its own light and recovers its strength. The pessimistic angel with whom Emerson competes for Bloom’s soul is Sigmund Freud, the 20th century’s far darker believer in fundamentally ironic lives: We do not—we cannot—know the truth about what we’re doing, Freud insists. Whether we are daring or cautious in our loves, these loves cannot sufficiently transform us. Every bout of eros leads us back to the parents whom we first struggled with, and who always win the battle. From this point on, Bloom became locked between Freud and Emerson in agonized, fruitful tension.

The site Gilded Birds asks an array of thinkers to discuss a seminal object of beauty. In a recent installment, the philosopher Joshua Cohen chose New York City's Central Park, claiming that its "hard to think of other places that so fully combine beauty with being public":

The ambition of the designers, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, was to give people the experience of being in the Adirondacks. Wealthier New Yorkers in the middle of the nineteenth century could afford to go the Adirondacks. The Park was designed to give people who couldn’t get there that same experience of being in nature. So the park provides an experience of beauty and is also, as you say, driven by a remarkable intellectual idea: the democratic idea of an experience of beauty for the people. Moreover, you have the extraordinarily obsessive and creative execution, down to the finest detail, of that intellectual idea.

It's also a feat of engineering:

First, because the park is two and a half miles long, the Central Park Commission said that there had to be four cross-streets that connected the east and west sides of Manhattan. … It was done in 1858, ten years before dynamite was invented. Central Park is filled with very old, hard rock, so they had to use gunpowder to create the transverses. In fact it took more gunpowder to build Central Park than was used by both sides in the battle of Gettysburg.

(Photo of one of Central Parks bridges, no two of which are identical, via Wikimedia Commons)