Month: February 2014

Nevada state officials have decided they can no longer defend the state’s same-sex marriage ban. Lyle Denniston explains what comes next:

The Nevada ban will get a continuing defense in the Ninth Circuit by the Coalition for the Protection of Marriage, the sponsors of the ballot measure against same-sex marriage.  Under a provision of federal rules for appeals, a case can continue to a decision even if the state involved drops out as a defender, leaving only a private party to support the state measure.

Meanwhile, another federal appeals court, the Tenth Circuit, based in Denver, has scheduled two hearings in April on the marriage controversy — on April 10, a hearing on the constitutionality of Utah’s same-sex marriage ban, and on April 17, a hearing on the constitutionality of Oklahoma’s similar ban.  In both of those cases, federal district court judges struck down the bans.

It is unclear at this point which of these cases, or some other case from another federal appeals court, would be the first to reach the Supreme Court.  But it now appears close to predictable that the Justices will be confronted with the underlying constitutional issue sometime later this year, in time for consideration at the next Term opening in October — if the Justices are ready then to take on the question.

Maybe it’s because we have all become inured to “snark” that we’ve come to look down on brutal book reviews. And some are indeed irritating. There are few hatchet-jobs in TNR’s back-of-the-book that aren’t motivated by personal malice, bitter jealousy, or preening self-righteousness. But the classic hatchet-job – written by an arch, disinterested, yet vicious critic – is still a mercy. James Wood can still do this stateside, but it does seem a very English vocation. And as journalism slowly surrenders to public relations, and as criticism cedes to reader reviews, I’m glad that in Blighty, the Omnivore maintains its “Hatchet Job Of The Year” prize:

Camilla Long took the prize last year, for her write-up of Rachel Cusk’s memoir Aftermath, in which she dismissed Cusk as “a brittle little dominatrix and peerless narcissist who exploits her husband and her marriage with relish”, and who “describes her grief in expert, whinnying detail”. Adam Mars-Jones won the inaugural Hatchet for his review of Michael Cunningham’s By Nightfall, in the Observer. “The book’s pages are filled with thoughts about art, or (more ominously) Thoughts about Art,” wrote Mars-Jones.

But this year’s winner is an almost perfect match between reviewer and subject. It’s the brilliant A.A. Gill of the Sunday Times (where I write a weekly column on America) and Morrissey, whose pendulous autobiography was just published with a bulls-eye already attached – it was part of the Penguin Classics collection, up there with Aristotle and Jane Austen. Well, take it away, AA:

Morrissey’s most pooterishly embarrassing piece of intellectual social climbing is having this autobiography published by Penguin Classics. Not Modern Classics, you understand, where the authors can still do book signings, but the classic Classics, where they’re dead and some of them only have one name. Molière, Machiavelli, Morrissey. He has made up for being alive by having a photograph of himself pretending to be dead on the cover.

And the denouement:

There are many pop autobiographies that shouldn’t be written. Some to protect the unwary reader, and some to protect the author. In Morrissey’s case, he has managed both. This is a book that cries out like one of his maudlin ditties to be edited. But were an editor to start, there would be no stopping. It is a heavy tome, utterly devoid of insight, warmth, wisdom or likeability. It is a potential firelighter of vanity, self-pity and logorrhoeic dullness. Putting it in Penguin Classics doesn’t diminish Aristotle or Homer or Tolstoy; it just roundly mocks Morrissey, and this is a humiliation constructed by the self-regard of its victim.

With some cupcake icing added for effect by your humble reviewer.

Felix Salmon declares that the two social media companies “have become the new indispensable [news] bundles — and in doing so have changed the nature of what news is”:

The new dominance of social media in the news business is not depressing at all: it’s excellent news. Just as most news consumers were never avid enough to seek out blogs, most Americans were never avid enough to seek out news at all. They didn’t buy newspapers; they didn’t watch the nightly news on TV; it just wasn’t something which interested them.

But now the news comes at them directly, from their friends, which means that the total news audience has grown massively, even just within the relatively stagnant US population.

Globally, of course, it’s growing faster still — the ubiquitous smartphone is a worldwide phenomenon.We’re at an excitingly early stage in working out how to best produce and provide news in a social world. There are lots of business models that might work; there are also editorial models that look like they work until they don’t. But if you look at the news business as a whole, rather than at individual companies, it’s almost impossible not to be incredibly optimistic. Media used to be carved up along geographic grounds, because of the physical limitations of distributing newspapers or broadcasting TV signals. Now, there are thousands of communities and interest groups that gather together on Twitter and Facebook and share news with each other, which means there are thousands of new ways to build an audience…

One journalist recently told me that it has changed more in the past eight months than it changed in the previous five years, and I think he’s right about that.

Gorby agrees that the audience for news is growing rapidly and believes that this is “a fantastic business opportunity.” But Derek Thompson examines research on what is actually being shared on Facebook. It mostly isn’t news:

Independent studies of virality conducted out of Wharton, the National Science Foundation, and the University of South Australia have all reached the same conclusion. The stories and videos most likely to be shared, emailed, and posted on Facebook aren’t necessarily the newest stories, but they are the most evocative. The most famous of these studies, by University of Pennsylvania professors Jonah Berger and Katherine Milkman, concluded that online stories producing “high-arousal emotions” were more viral, whether those emotions were positive (e.g.: happiness and awe) or negative (e.g.: anger or anxiety).

The News Feed is perhaps the world’s most sophisticated mirror of its readers’ preferences—and it’s fairly clear that news isn’t one of them. We simply prefer stories that fulfill the very purpose of Facebook’s machine-learning algorithm, to show us a reflection of the person we’d like to be, to make us feel, to make us smile, and, most simply, to remind us of ourselves.

Yes, but that just suggests that the entire model of “news” – in which nothing that isn’t new should be part of journalism – is archaic. There is nothing new today that cannot be better understood without reference to yesterday. And now that we have an entire universe of content to use, mashup, recreate, re-tell and re-purpose, our task is to provide something actually new: a conversation about the world that brings past, present and future into a platform that engages our hearts as well as our minds. It’s what we find ourselves doing at the Dish every day. And it is empowered by the passion and loyalty of the Dish community, but also, increasingly, by Facebook and Twitter – as our readers reach out to new readers and they reach back to us.

A reader writes:

Although I usually thoroughly enjoy the challenges to my assumptions you often enunciate in your postings, I was dismayed to see you write in your post “Christianists on the Left?” that tired old argument:

[T]here is no disputing Jesus’ teachings about the poor. But Jesus had no teachings about government‘s relationship to the poor, no collective admonitions for a better polity.

Jesus had no need to address our odd dichotomy between personal and collective responsibility. He knew his Isaiah well; indeed, one might say that his teaching and life was living commentary on Isaiah, and it is with Isaiah that he began his preaching in Luke 4. And in Isaiah 58, the command to do works of justice is a collective command, addressed not just to individuals, but to the nation of Israel. What Jesus calls one to do, he calls the community to do, just as Isaiah did. Need we go into the Pauline doctrine of the Christian community as body of Christ?

So let’s stop this nonsense that Christianity is only about one’s individual acts. It is about a community living in a way that is totally incomprehensible to “the world”. Now, you can argue that such a community is of necessity different from and not to be confused with any secular polity, but a community it is, and as a community it must take responsibility to follow the commands given in Isaiah 58, and by Jesus himself.

Another:

I’m a North Carolina teacher, and I’ve participated in one of the Moral Monday marches. I carried a sign with Isaiah 10:1-2 (“Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees, to deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people, making widows their prey and robbing the fatherless”). I’m a pretty big proponent of separation of church and state, but I don’t really see how Moral Monday is participating in Christianism.

I stand in agreement with Marcus Borg that the separation of church and state is not the separation of religion and politics – that all of our policy decisions are rooted in morality. Jimmy Carter was right when he said that one of the biggest mistakes the Democratic party made was ceding Christians to the right. All of this is to say that, for 30 years or more, the Republican party has been claiming as its divine duty the enacting of certain policies that are quite contrary to the Bible – or at least part of it.

I view the Moral Monday movement as a fine prophetic “Deuteronomic” counterpoint to the “Levitical” emphasis on sexuality that seems to be the primary hangup of the most vocal “Christianists” (see Walter Brueggemann for more on the Deuteronomy/Leviticus divide). The Bible has both interpretive strains, and it’s about time some other people with a religious sense of justice speak up. Martin Luther King, Jr. and other civil rights leaders certainly used the exhortations of scripture to move the nation toward the type of just society described in Isaiah, Deuteronomy, and Jeremiah.

And please, Dreher, et. al., don’t resort to an Ad Hominem Tu Quoque when people speak up for justice. If those in the state house in Raleigh claim to be enacting Christian principles, stop ignoring the part of our tradition exhorting us to systemic justice.

Another reframes the debate somewhat:

I’ve been a believer most of my life and a recovering fundamentalist for nearly half of it. That said, I’ve wondered if the “rend to Caesar” passage still applies in our day and age. Rome was a dictatorship; we’re a democracy. The people make the laws in our society, not a corrupt despot. I realize that Jesus only advocates for individual behavior, but maybe this changes the rules a bit? Perhaps the admonition to care for our neighbor can apply to the government because it is believers who (theoretically) make up that government. Rendering unto Caesar means rendering unto ourselves.

(Painting: a detail from Titian’s “The Tribute Money” when Jesus responds to a coin with Caesar’s head on it.)