Month: April 2013

Nathan Bransford thinks they will soon be reality:

The screen will be in front of our eyes. We’ll blink to or wave our hands or just think about the page turning or it will just know somehow and it will turn. And let me tell you this: I, for one, welcome our coming hands-free-books overlords. Yes yes, the turning of the pages. Yes, the tactile experience of holding something in your hands as you’re reading.

Me? I’ll be sprawled out on a hammock or easily riding a subway or sweeping my floors or tripping over the sidewalks trying to read and walk down the street. Who knows! I just know I’ll be able to read more if I don’t have to have something in my hands to do it.

In his new book, Deserter, Charles Glass focuses on the AWOL soldiers of WWII:

The British gave deserters an amnesty in 1953, but America never has. Theoretically, deserters who are still missing are still wanted. I was keen to do some comparisons of second-world-war desertion rates with Iraq and Afghanistan but the Ministry of Defence won’t tell me, or anyone else, how many deserters there are. From that point of view it is still taboo.

In his review, Neal Ascherson looks at the punishments doled out for deserting:

In the first world war, the British shot 304 men for desertion or cowardice, only gradually accepting the notion of “shell-shock”. In the United States, by contrast, President Woodrow Wilson commuted all such death sentences. In the second world war, the British government stood up to generals who wanted to bring back the firing squad (the Labour government in 1930 had abolished the death penalty for desertion). Cunningly, the War Office suggested that restoration might suggest to the enemy that morale in the armed forces was failing. President Roosevelt, on the other hand, was persuaded in 1943 to suspend “limitations of punishment”. In the event, the Americans shot only one deserter, the luckless Private Eddie Slovik, executed in France in January 1945. He was an ex-con who had never even been near the front. Slovik quit when his unit was ordered into action, calculating that a familiar penitentiary cell would be more comfortable than being shot at in a rainy foxhole.

His fate was truly unfair, set against the bigger picture. According to Glass, “nearly 50,000 American and 100,000 British soldiers deserted from the armed forces” during the war.

(Image from Wikimedia Commons)

Not as well as it does in fiction:

In the movies and on TV, it just takes a few pushes on the chest and, voilà! The victims cough a few times and they’re back to their old selves. Doctors understand that this is rarely the case. When CPR “works,” a more likely scenario is that the person ends up in the hospital receiving even more interventions and suffering from some kind of brain damage, [George Lundberg, editor at large for MedPage Today] says. … Even in the very best case scenarios, only about half of victims survive to be discharged from the hospital — and that’s when CPR is enhanced with advanced technology (AEDs) and highly trained personnel at the ready. Most importantly, those success rates happen only when CPR is given to the victims the technique was intended for — people experiencing sudden cardiac arrest.

This weekend on the Dish, we provided our usual eclectic mix of religious, books, and cultural coverage. In matters of faith, doubt, and philosophy, Gary Gutting urged us to put love first, Wesley Hill contemplated the crucified God, and Matthew Sitman defended Christian Wiman’s new religious memoir. Damon Linker considered the theocons’s case against same-sex marriage, Scott Galupo analyzed the compartmentalization of the fundamentalist mind, and Andrew Cohen revisited a brilliant essay on God and evolution. Lauren Winner realized doubt is essential to the religious life, The Economist mused on the footwear of the faithful, and Rachel Johnson paid a visit to a kibbutz she spent time at in her youth. We also featured a video series from John Corvino about the morality of homosexuality, including what the Bible really says about the matter, here and here, while Marc Ambinder reminded us of the tragic lives that still await many gay teenagers. In the latest installment of The Mind Report, Charles Randy Gallistel made the case that we don’t really know how memories are stored.

In literary and arts coverage, Elizabeth Wurtzel pondered the fate of the rock star, Michael Leary unpacked Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder, and Christina Pugh argued for the conservatism of poetry. Michael Kimmage found Philip Roth to be the last of a dying breed, Justin Ellis applauded the NYT’s serendipitous poetry, and Doug Allen explained his minimal social media presence. Rodney Welch read a mediocre play by Nabokov, Patrick Feaster found a way to recover the audio of old records, and Alexander Huls described the profound impact of the special effects developed for Jurassic Park. Read Saturday’s poem here and Sunday’s here.

In assorted news and views, Emily Urquhart chronicled her daughter’s albinism diagnosis, Joseph Stromberg provided the science behind the smell of rain, and women proved to be thought the hornier sex for much of history. Rose Surnow profiled a novel approach to matchmaking, Colin Lecher examined your sense of smell’s role in dating, and the demand for American sperm increased. William Breathes reviewed pot dispensaries in Colorado, Seth Masket wondered where the Youtube politicians were, Bijan Stephens was pessimistic about his post-Yale job prospects, and Josh Horgan thought the social sciences are still struggling to find their place in the shadow of the hard sciences. MHBs here and here, FOTDs here and here, VFYWs here and here, and the latest window contest here.

– M.S.

(Photo by Flickr user oveth)

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.