Kate Losse worries about what lurks behind the cool amenities of Silicon Valley workplaces, like cafeterias, craft beer on tap, log cabin-style offices, and more:
Of course, the remaking of the contemporary tech office into a mixed work-cum-leisure space is not actually meant to promote leisure. Instead, the work/leisure mixing that takes place in the office mirrors what happens across digital, social and professional spaces. Work has seeped into our leisure hours, making the two tough to distinguish.
And so, the white-collar work-life blend reaches its logical conclusion with the transformation of modern luxury spaces such as airport lounges into spaces that look much like the offices from which the technocrat has arrived. Perhaps to secure the business of the new moneyed tech class, the design of the new Centurion Lounge for American Express card members draws from the same design palette as today’s tech office: reclaimed-wood panels, tree-stump stools, copious couches and a cafeteria serving kale salad on bespoke ceramic plates. In these lounges, the blurring of recreation and work becomes doubly disconcerting for the tech employee. Is one headed out on vacation or still at the office – and is there a difference?
— Brittany Rose Wright (@MsBrittWright) May 17, 2014
Anna North challenges the myth of a latte-drinking elite:
Kyla Wazana Tompkins, a professor of English and gender and women’s studies who’s a former food journalist and the author of “Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century,” told Op-Talk that “the latte, while it may be attached on a certain level to too much upper-class food knowledge and pretension, it really is no longer an upper-class drink.” She explained: “No matter how many kale salads Starbucks puts in their case, Starbucks is a fast-food purveyor.” The latte, she argued, “is a high-calorie food that’s being pushed in an industrialized way largely to working-class people.” And, she added, “it’s important to think about the explosion of all of these industrialized lattes, all these frozen lattes, all the Frappuccinos, as links to a larger problem of creating cheap, high-calorie, low-nutrition food for working-class people.”
Making latte seem upper class, though, may be to its purveyors’ advantage: “The more that the latte can be attached to expressing a kind of elite class or race or gendered identity, the more profitable it is, no matter how many billions of them get sold by Tim Hortons or at your local gas station.”
… are well-kept. Researchers are still trying to figure out what supercentenarians, or people over 110 years old, have in common:
Supercentenarians come from diverse occupations and social backgrounds. Some drink and smoke, while others abstain from the partying lifestyle; some are religious, others atheists; some have rich networks of family and friends, others are virtually on their own. While centenarians tend to cluster in Sardinia, Italy, and Okinawa, Japan, supercentenarians, on the other hand, have no significant association with any particular geographic area. … But as both [Gerontology Research Group co-founder L. Stephen] Coles’ and [professor Thomas] Perls’ studies on supercentenarians confirm, the one thing that nearly all supercentenarians do have in common is that they have a history of long-lived close relatives. Unlike average longevity, extreme longevity, it seems, largely comes down to genes. “Aging,” Perls says, “is an incredibly heterogeneous trait.”
As he explains, things like diet, exercise, lifestyle and healthcare seem to play a huge role in whether or not someone makes it to their 80s, but by the time they reach their 90s and beyond, those factors become less important. “About 70 percent of average aging is in your hands with health-related behaviors,” Perls says. “But if you get beyond 100, the tables turn and it’s more like 70 percent genetic and 30 percent behaviors.” Women, too, have an obvious edge in this process—female supercentenarians outnumber males about ten-to-one—although scientists have not figured out just why this is so.
The Gerontology Research Group maintains Table E, an online database of supercentenarians, here.
“I think the Israeli people understand now what I always say: that there cannot be a situation, under any agreement, in which we relinquish security control of the territory west of the River Jordan.”
Not relinquishing security control west of the Jordan, it should be emphasized, means not giving a Palestinian entity full sovereignty there. It means not acceding to Mahmoud Abbas’s demands, to Barack Obama’s demands, to the international community’s demands. This is not merely demanding a demilitarized Palestine; it is insisting upon ongoing Israeli security oversight inside and at the borders of the West Bank. That sentence, quite simply, spells the end to the notion of Netanyahu consenting to the establishment of a Palestinian state. A less-than-sovereign entity? Maybe, though this will never satisfy the Palestinians or the international community. A fully sovereign Palestine? Out of the question.
The “peace-process” is and always was a sham. Greater Israel, if Netanyahu and his supporters have their way, will exist for ever. It seems to me that this is a fact that American policy should not have to absorb.
(Photo: German fans celebrate as they watch the 2014 FIFA World Cup Finals at a nightclub on July 13, 2014 in Palma de Mallorca, Spain. By David Ramos/Getty Images.)
“My first words of my impression of being on the surface of the Moon that just came to my mind was ‘Magnificent desolation.’ The magnificence of human beings, humanity, Planet Earth, maturing the technologies, imagination and courage to expand our capabilities beyond the next ocean, to dream about being on the Moon, and then taking advantage of increases in technology and carrying out that dream – achieving that is magnificent testimony to humanity. But it is also desolate – there is no place on earth as desolate as what I was viewing in those first moments on the Lunar Surface.
Because I realized what I was looking at, towards the horizon and in every direction, had not changed in hundreds, thousands of years. Beyond me I could see the moon curving away – no atmosphere, black sky. Cold. Colder than anyone could experience on Earth when the sun is up- but when the sun is up for 14 days, it gets very, very hot. No sign of life whatsoever.
That is desolate. More desolate than any place on Earth,” – Buzz Aldrin, responding to a Redditor in an AMA this week.
Surveying the history of ideas about Hell, Kathryn Gin Lum looks back to a time when Americans seemed especially prone to question its existence:
By the time of the American Revolution in the late 18th century, colonists were arguing not just over the wisdom of waging war against England, but also over the justness of eternal punishment. Attracted by Enlightenment ideas, some members of the founding generation critiqued the British monarchy and the Calvinist God as tyrannical dictators both. As Jefferson put it: ‘It would be more pardonable to believe in no god at all, than to blaspheme him by the atrocious attributes of Calvin.’ Some freethinkers departed from the concept of hell as literal and eternal fire and brimstone in favour of a temporary hell where individuals would be punished in proportion to their crimes before being admitted to heaven. Others abandoned hell entirely, arguing that a loving and merciful God would save all of creation for heavenly bliss.
Why belief in Hell endured – and still remains the majority belief in the United States:
[I]n the new, monarchless US, defenders of hell argued that the threat of eternal punishment was necessary to ensure the morality of citizens. Even a temporary hell, they claimed, would give humans leave to commit socially harmful transgressions, from lying to cheating to murder, since they would still eventually end up in heaven after paying for their crimes. Indeed, the social argument in favour of eternal hell anticipated the arguments we hear today in favour of the death penalty. Both are supposed to serve as ultimate deterrents against crime.
Matthew Paul Turner unpacks the peculiar theology informing the new HBO show The Leftovers, which is premised on the sudden disappearance of 2% of the world’s population:
Believe it or not, the Rapture, as many evangelicals understand it today, is an idea that’s less than 200 years old, one part of an eschatology invented in the 1830s by John Nelson Darby, a British Bible teacher and devout member of the Plymouth Brethren. As a theologian, Darby constructed an entire Biblical interpretation known as Dispensationalism, an evangelical futurist expounding that, among other things, suggested that God’s relationship with humanity varied according to dispensations, or periods in history.
According to Darby, God’s epic timetable—from Adam and Eve to the apocalyptic end—is split up into seven non-uniform eras. For instance, Darby’s first era—the dispensation of innocence—started with Adam and Eve and lasted only as long as the first biblical pair lived in the Garden of Eden. The second era—the dispensation of conscience—began right after God evicted Adam and Eve from the Garden and ended when Cain murdered Abel. Darby said the sixth era—the dispensation of grace—started with the crucifixion of Jesus and would not end until Jesus rescued all Christians from earth, making the way clear for the Great Tribulation—seven years of torment and pestilence—to begin.
After watching the pilot episode, however, Brandon Ambrosino picks up on the nuances of the story being told:
[A]s [series creator Tom] Perrotta has insisted, his rapture isn’t the Christian one. Yes, he said, people will use the word “rapture” because it’s the one they’re familiar with when it comes to explaining mass disappearances. But he hopes Leftovers is able to “disconnect [the rapture] from its religious context,” which he thinks is too “purposeful and clear,” and lacking in “nuance and grief.”
After watching the pilot, I can see that Perrotta was true to his word: his series is not about the rapture that Christians have been obsessing over for a century or two. For that matter, The Leftovers isn’t even a show about a rapture — it’s a show about loss. Which is to say, it’s not a show about an event, but a show about the people left in the wake of that event. As Perrotta explained to the Times, that is a universal theme that should resonate with both religious and non-religious viewers: “We’re always being left behind, we’re always living in a world where there are these spaces where people we knew and loved used to be.”
Still, the religious — and, in my opinion, deeply biblical — influence of the narrative is still lurking throughout the show. In some moments, this influence is blatant, in other moments it’s merely winked at.
Are our present joys linked, in some inextricable way, to “some mass atrocity that was committed in the past”? Philosophy professor Peter Atterton considers (NYT) how historical injustices affect our existence today:
Nietzsche once surmised that anyone who had ever wanted to relive a moment of joy was committed to affirming the idea of reliving the entirety of his or her life up to that point. Why? Because Nietzsche, a dyed-in-the-wool determinist, believed that the present instant of joy is made possible by all the events in one’s past that caused it. As he lyrically put it, “All things are enchained with one another, bound together by love.” For Nietzsche this is a splendid thing, for it gives us the power to redeem the past. … I had always solaced myself with Nietzsche’s idea of looking back at one’s life and affirming all of it, even the bad parts, which are indispensable conditions for whatever happiness my life currently contains, until one day it dawned on me that if I am to say “yes” to those events in the past that caused me to suffer but which are causally necessary for my life’s being lived as I live it now, then I must also say “yes” to those events that have caused others to suffer as well.
But who can do this? Who can maintain in good conscience that the Holocaust or slavery was justified because otherwise he or she, or anyone else currently living for that matter, wouldn’t have been born. (Nietzsche notoriously maintained that the only justification of the French Revolution — including the Reign of Terror — was that it produced Napoleon.) Whose natural narcissism is so extreme that he or she can justify the unjustifiable suffering of innumerable innocent lives? The Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas was more discerning: “What is most natural becomes the most problematic. Do I have the right to be? Is being in the world not taking the place of someone?”
I love at eventide to walk alone
Down narrow lanes o’erhung with dewy thorn
Where, from the long grass underneath, the snail
Jet black creeps out and sprouts his timid horn.
I love to muse o’er meadows newly mown
Where withering grass perfumes the sultry air,
Where bees search round with sad and weary drone
In vain for flowers that bloomed but newly there,
While in the juicy corn the hidden quail
Cries “wet my foot” and hid as thoughts unborn
The fairylike and seldom-seen landrail
Utters “craik craik” like voices underground,
Right glad to meet the evening’s dewy veil
And see the light fade into glooms around.
Looking back at the writing and publication of his book The Life You Save May Be Your Own, Paul Elie recalls the advice he received from the editor and poet Jonathan Galassi – “Go deeper. You need to go deeper”:
I asked him what he meant, and he explained, roundabout but in such a way as to draw clear lines between the literary text and all the other kinds of writing that washed up against the pilings of our office. What I’d written was too journalistic. It made too much of superficial connections. It was boosterish in style—it was trying to put the idea of a “school” of American Catholic writing over on us instead of trusting the material. And (again, all this was conveyed indirectly) it didn’t get to the bottom of what made these people a school, or what made them Catholic writers, or what made them Catholics at all, or why what they believed mattered to them or us.
Roger Straus liked it too—and Jonathan and FSG signed up the book. And day and night for a thousand days and nights I sought to go deeper, starting by moving my point of entry into the story back nearly half a century—to the moments where those four writers themselves turned, in their different ways, to literature and to religious belief in their own efforts to go deeper. And somewhere in the middle of those thousand days and nights, I concluded that the experience of depth—intellectual, emotional, spiritual depth—is the central literary experience. It is what makes literature literature, and what makes us read literature, and write it.
“Go deeper.” It’s not advice a writer can outgrow or set aside as unnecessary. Augustine asked, “Who understands his sins?” Likewise, what writer can truly say, “I’ve gone deep enough”?
The Dish 