Month: April 2013

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.

by Matthew Sitman

Wesley Hill struggles with the German theologian Jurgen Moltmann’s approach to “the death of God”:

Moltmann drew on Elie Wiesel’s story (found in Night) of the dying boy in Auschwitz, hanging from a gallows. Someone in the crowd witnessing the execution said, “Where is God?” And another voice replied, “He is there, hanging on that gallows.” God is dead, in other words. Or if God is not dead, he deserves to be. Moltmann takes that story and says, in effect, “Yes, that is exactly right. God has come to Auschwitz, through his death in Jesus Christ. God has suffered with us. God has died with us.” Only such a God—only a God who suffers—can be believed in.

If you wish to read the Gospel of Mark that way, then many people, Moltmann included, think that you need to marginalize Luke’s Gospel. Hans Urs von Balthasar, while, in my view, treating these issues far more subtly than Moltmann, saw this clearly. Luke’s Gospel has no cry of dereliction. Instead of screaming out in agony, Luke’s account has Jesus’ final words as: “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” And therefore, it seems, Luke’s Gospel isn’t as well suited as Mark’s is for meeting the challenge of protest atheism. Here’s von Balthasar: “Christ’s cross… must not be rendered innocuous as though the Crucified, in undisturbed union with God, had prayed the Psalms and died in the peace of God.” In other words, we cannot continue to allow Luke’s version of the story to be read alongside Mark’s as though a harmonization were possible. At least, not anymore. Not after the Holocaust.

This passage from Walter Moberly helped Hill see the problem differently:

[O]ne should not so romanticize the process of moral and spiritual struggle that the Lukan depiction of Jesus as one who maintains apparent serenity and trust amidst suffering is downgraded; as though an anguished and in some ways vacillating struggle for faith is intrinsically superior to a steadily trusting faith; or as though a steadily trusting faith did not involve its own kind of moral and spiritual struggle.

Michael Leary unpacks Terrence Malick’s latest film, To the Wonder:

[T]he great scandal of To the Wonder is its utter sense of the present. It takes place in a generic version of now, rather than in a mythic version of the past. But then there is also Ben Affleck lumbering across most of his frames doing that thing with his jaw to indicate terse, conflicted male. Olga Kurylenko bounds through rapid changes of camera position and exquisitely framed patches of light and shadow similar to the dance of Q’orianka Kilcher through the dappled forests of The New World. But here the rustle of grass and reed are traded for the track of sunlight across freshly laid carpet and the swish of blinds and bedsheets. …

I had the uncanny sense while watching the film that Malick has caught up with history itself, his past forms of sacred curiosity deployed in our very midst. It is disconcerting to have his cinema erupting in our contemporary tense of the everyday, as if he is pushing his sense of history as myth into the prophetic mechanics of the present.

by Matt Sitman

Scott Galupo holds up the latest right-wing folk hero, Dr. Ben Carson, as an example of it. How Galupo reconciles Carson’s brilliance as a neurosurgeon with his creationist views:

For the vast majority of human beings, even modern cosmopolitan professionals, beliefs about the geologic timescale, the processes of biological adaptation, paleontology, cosmology, etc. exist comfortably outside the scope of their core competencies. I get twitchy when scientific illiteracy creeps into the top ranks of our political class, but, at the same time, I’m forced to recognize that a country in which only four in 10 people believe in theory of evolution seems to function pretty well on an everyday basis.

by Matthew Sitman

In another video in support of his book, What’s Wrong with Homosexuality?, John Corvino takes on Biblical literalists:

Watch his companion video on the Bible and homosexuality here. Earlier videos by John here.

by Patrick Appel

Explained:

[O]ne of the main causes of this distinctive smell is a blend of oils secreted by some plants during arid periods. When a rainstorm comes after a drought, compounds from the oils—which accumulate over time in dry rocks and soil—are mixed and released into the air. The duo also observed that the oils inhibit seed germination, and speculated that plants produce them to limit competition for scarce water supplies during dry times.