Year: 2013

Allison Meier traces tales of Rat Kings “to the plague years, when rats were spreading the deadly disease, and a whole nest that lived so close they became inextricably twisted together was a horrible omen of death”:

One of the largest “specimens” is kept by the Mauritianum Museum in Altenburg, Germany, and has 32 rats mummified grotesquely together, appearing as if some of the creatures died along the way and continued to be pulled along with the monstrous horde.  This idea of the Rat King is such a viscerally vivid image that it’s creeped its way into culture, such as with the many-faced “Mouse King” in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s novella The Nutcracker and the Mouse King. However, there’s still no proof that the Rat Kings actually exist and are not just cryptozoological hoaxes. But what is more unsettling, a conjoined mess of rats scratching through the dark, or a person gathering up to 32 dead rats and knitting all their tails together with their hands just to freak people out?

(Photo: “Roi de rats” from the Natural History Museum in Nantes, France via Wikimedia Commons)

Owen King, who had to change the name of his book because another author got to it first, considers some of the best and worst titles out there:

The abandoned titles of some celebrated novels are, retrospectively, not merely inconceivable, but inconceivably awful. It is incomprehensible that either The High-Bouncing Lover (The Great Gatsby) or A Failed Entertainment (Infinite Jest) could ever have been seriously considered. Though these examples don’t deserve too much attention except as permanent, soothing exhibits on display in The Museum of the Relativity of Genius, to point out the obvious: the former sounds like a romance novel condemned to eternity in the ten-cent box at the local library sale, and the latter like a warning one would be wise to heed.

In other cases, however, it can be difficult to separate our long-held first impression of a title with a forebear that we learn about later. Dickens’s original working title for Little Dorrit was the entirely acceptable and arguably superior Nobody’s Fault. While I prefer the mirroring double consonants of Little Dorrit and the anchoring of the book to the character that is the swivel for most of the action, I can’t discount the appeal of Nobody’s Fault. This title gestures bitterly toward the novel’s many festering injustices, from the debtor prison system to the feckless “Circumlocution Office.” Nobody’s Fault stings with a single, sharp point, while Little Dorrit expands to touch upon the entire plot. If the title had been different, one would have to read the book somewhat differently.

by Zoe Pollock

Andrew Cohen has reprinted a fascinating profile Carter Phipps wrote of the Catholic theologian John Haught. In it, Haught lays out a beautiful approach to what he calls “evolutionary theology”:

“In the modern world, we feel the tension between two religious vectors or two poles,” he explained to me. “One is the traditional withdrawal from the world—the desire to find peace in some Platonic heaven up there or in some sort of mystical present or some eternal now. Then there’s another pole that comes from being part of a modern world in which political and scientific revolutions have taken place. There is beginning to emerge a feeling that this world—I mean the whole universe, both cosmos and culture—is going somewhere. There is a drama that is unfolding before our eyes, and we wonder if we shouldn’t be part of that. [The Jesuit priest and paleontologist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin] set out to try to find some resolution between these two poles. He saw that there is communion with God and then there’s communion with the earth. But there’s also communion with God through the earth. He resolved the tension by rediscovering the biblical idea that God is not up above but rather up ahead. In other words, everything that happens in the universe is anticipatory. The world rests on the future. And one could say that God is the one who has future in His very essence.”

For Phipps, it’s an appropriate framework for our time:

The consciousness of our age calls out for a God principle that lives not just in the wondrous beauty of nature, or the eternal stillness of the present moment, but in the unknown creative potential that exists in the mysterious space of the future.

(Photo by Luis Argerich)

by Matthew Sitman

Damon Linker points to the “most decisive weakness” in theocon Robbie George’s brief against same-sex marriage – and notes that, really, George’s arguments are more about contraception than gay unions:

Permitting gay marriage will not lead Americans to stop thinking of marriage as a conjugal union. Quite the reverse: Gay marriage has come to be widely accepted because our society stopped thinking of marriage as a conjugal union decades ago.

Between five and six decades ago, to be precise. That’s when the birth control pill — first made available to consumers for the treatment of menstrual disorders in 1957 and approved by the FDA for contraceptive use three years later — began to transform sexual relationships, and hence marriage, in the United States. Once pregnancy was decoupled from intercourse, pre-marital sex became far more common, which removed one powerful incentive to marry young (or marry at all). It likewise became far more common for newlyweds to give themselves an extended childless honeymoon (with some couples choosing never to have kids).

In all of these ways, and many more, the widespread availability of contraception transformed marriage from a conjugal union into a relationship based to a considerable degree on the emotional and sexual fulfillment of its members — with childrearing often, though not always, a part of the equation. And it is because same-sex couples are obviously just as capable as heterosexual couples of forming relationships based on emotional and sexual fulfillment that gay marriage has come to be accepted so widely and so quickly in our culture.

Daniel McCarthy elaborates:

There is, of course, a good reason why even Robert George and Charles Cooper don’t argue that heterosexuals who cannot bear children may be denied access to the institution of marriage: because marriage is not only about children, and in fact the West has a long history of balancing priorities between marriage-as-about-children (proles) and marriage-as-about-love-between-two-people (fides)—until now, specifically a man and a woman. Carle Zimmerman’s Family and Civilization, oft-cited here, sketches that history. Although the relative weights of proles and fides have shifted over time, both have been definitive components of the ideal until now.

One weakness of the traditionalist argument has been its failure to adhere strictly enough to proles. But the failure to give fides its due has perhaps contributed at least as much to the rout. Can anything other than marriage, if homosexuals are to be excluded from that, accommodate fides? Would any alternative be acceptable to others who cannot bear their own children—“domestic partnerships” for the aged? The question answers itself.

by Matthew Sitman

In the midst of a lovely celebration of her music-filled life, Elizabeth Wurtzel ponders it:

I wonder if there will ever be another rock star. Probably not. Axl Rose was the last one in the sense of having a drug problem, dating a centerfold, showing up onstage at Madison Square Garden two hours and 15 minutes late to an audience that continued to sit and wait. No one would sit and wait anymore. Too exhausted.

And the whole point is to post that it happened on Facebook, not to have the experience. Kurt Cobain was an anti-rock star. That was good too. Eminem: maybe. Jay-Z is a businessman—it’s not that he isn’t talented, but he is a professional, the kingpin of an entertainment conglomerate. The opposite of a rock star is a professional. He is the platform and the content. And really, ideally you are the platform, even if that makes you inanimate: People now form lines around the corner not to buy a new album but because a new iPhone is out. Then they use it to send text messages mostly, or to do something they could have done two devices ago, but in any case the wait begins at 4:45 a.m. Which is to say that the party is over. Or maybe standing there as the dark of night becomes the light of day and the Apple Store opens for business is the fun part. Steve Jobs was weirdly both a rock star and a professional, so it figures he would check out before this got any worse.

by Matthew Sitman

Charles Randy Gallistel is a cognitive psychologist at Rutgers who challenges the entire way that neuroscientists have been trying to understand the brain. In this clip, he makes the case to Jonathan Phillips of Yale that the we really don’t know how memories are stored:

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Watch the entire video here, and subscribe to The Mind Report here.

by Zoe Pollock

Emily Urquhart chronicles her daughter’s albinism diagnosis:

I see lots of other kids wearing sunglasses, and we live in an age of UV-proof clothing and SPF awareness. Visually impaired or sighted, we all carry technological devices that facilitate our everyday tasks. Sadie is beautiful and smart and ridiculously funny, and most importantly she is loved. Her network starts with her two smitten parents and expands across family and friends, a team of doctors, and a beloved dog that waits with tail-thumping enthusiasm at the nursery door every morning. Her fans include the Ph.D.-wielding mamas in our baby group, her sitters, the besotted employee at our local grocery store, and our postal worker, who for a year delivers weekly packages to the little blond girl at number sixty-two.

Before Sadie came along, smug parents would tell me that you can only really know love when you have a child. I interpreted this to mean the love you feel for your child, which I now know is vast and indefinable. But I wonder if they meant it in a greater sense. It is the love we receive that astounds me. You never know how much people care about you until you fall apart a little and everyone picks you up, piece by piece, and puts you back together again.