Author: Andrew Sullivan

"The Old Dwelling" by Charles Henry Crandall appeared in The Atlantic in June of 1891:

See how the dwelling trembles to its fall, —
    The wondrous house of life, now leased to death
    How softly in and out moves the light breath,
And gently in the tender-memoried hall
Speaks the loved owner, soon beyond recall!
    In the fast-closing windows glimmereth
    A dying glory, as when sunset saith
Good-night, sweet dreams, and faith and hope to all.

Thus, full of enterprise and joyous trust,
    Perched on a sill, serene and plumed for flight,
        A dove will pause, while ruin round it lies.
So, too, dear soul, although the house be dust,
    Yet thou thyself, now free as morning light,
        Canst find another home, ‘neath other skies.

(Image via 3QD by JR, Action in Phnom Penh, House in the Water – close up, Old Station Habitations, Cambodia. 2009)

Says Nick Carr:

By encouraging us to think of sharing as "collaborative consumption" and of our intellectual capacities as "cognitive surplus," the technologies of the web now look like they will have, as their ultimate legacy, the spread of market forces into the most intimate spheres of human activity.

Or perhaps more prosaically put: six years is long enough to do something for nothing. Alan Jacobs is particularly worried about the "commodification of intimacy":

On some level we all know this is happening: no thoughtful person can possibly believe that Mark Zuckerberg’s crusade for “radical transparency” is a genuine Utopian ethic; we know that he’s articulating a position that, if widely accepted, yields maximum revenue for Facebook. But we are just beginning to think about how radically transparent we are becoming, and if Nick Carr is right, we very much need some “web revolutionaries” who really are revolutionary in their repudiation of these trends.

In other words, the problem isn't the businessmen who want to dig around in our brains — of course the business world wants to dig around in our brains: haven't you seen “Mad Men”? — the problem is the failure of influential wired intellectuals to provide the necessary corrective pushback.

I'm not as cynical as Alan is on Zuckerberg. I think he finds online personal transparency liberating – and it can be for many. I'm also puzzled at what wired intellectuals can do to provide pushback. The web is a strange paradox: terribly personal and intimate and yet also infinitely large. You relate to what you read here quite personally – you are often reading it at work or alone, and at this moment, it's between you and me. We could do this for free, of course, and for a long time did. But the commodification of this process allows it to be professionalized. I'm not sure why any intellectual wanting to pay the rent would want to push back on this.

In light of the recent violence at a Syrian Catholic Church in Baghdad, John L Allen Jr proposes a new thesis:

The last decade has witnessed a historic shift from Judaism to Islam as the paradigmatic interfaith relationship of the Catholic Church.

That's not to say Judaism has become unimportant, or that Catholics won't continue to work on the relationship. Islam, however, has become the primary interfaith concern. Not only is Islam where the bulk of the church's time and treasure is being invested, it's the new template for all of Catholicism's relationships with other religions.

Daisy Banks interviews David Biro on his studies in pain. Here they discuss Elaine Scarry's book The Body in Pain:

We are forced to speak of pain in terms of other, more visible objects, ie we are forced to speak metaphorically. The most common metaphor of pain is the weapon. We say, for example, that pain is shooting or stabbing or crushing. 

When you think about it, these words are all being used metaphorically – since most of the time we haven’t been shot or stabbed or crushed but are just imagining that something like this must be happening. So one way of talking about pain is to talk about guns, knives, and hammers, or the damage those weapons can inflict on the human body. There are also other ways to represent pain metaphorically which I discuss in my book. The bottom line is that we have to be exceptionally imaginative when it comes to pain or else it will remain incommunicable and invisible, not only for the sufferer but also for friends and doctors trying to help. 

A reader writes:

My husband and I are raising our sons in the Catholic Church.  We are active in my church, I teach religious education, we perform corporeal works of mercy with our fellow parishioners (our food pantry has added 100 families in the last six months). We are anti-abortion but pro-choice, we support gay marriage and female priests.  We are not alone in our beliefs in the parish and we are often at loggerheads with our rather strict constructionist brethren.

I was quite proud of my sixteen-year-old son, who after completing two years of confirmation preparation wrote his letter to the Bishop telling him quite proudly why he did not want to become confirmed as an adult in the current church. 

He stated his positions on sexual equality, freedom of choice and the treatment of woman as second-class citizens.  He laid out precise logical arguments on how the church was losing its young by neglecting to follow the example of Jesus.  Our Director of Religious Education was also proud of him and uses his letter (with our permission and his name redacted) as an example of the seriousness of the decision of confirmation. She told us how many of the teenagers go through the motions, do it for their parents and then are never seen again. 

Our son attends mass, helps when he can when he is home from college, and works with a local parish near his school.  He still considers himself Catholic but cannot in good conscious swear to obey the tenets of the current church.

I consider him a good Catholic – in fact a better Catholic than I – because I had doubts as a teen but got confirmed anyway because I didn't want to disappoint my parents.  His faith is strong, but his desire to build a better church is what keeps me teaching and trying to live up to his example.  He is the reason that I believe the American Catholic Church will become in the future a separate branch, rather than Roman Catholic.

Charles Q. Choi interviewed archaeologist Brian Hayden on how beer may have aided in the rise of civilization:

Feasts are essential in traditional societies for creating debts, for creating factions, for creating bonds between people, for creating political power, for creating support networks, and all of this is essential for developing more complex kinds of societies… The brewing of alcohol seems to have been a very early development linked with initial domestication, seen during Neolithic times in China, the Sudan, the first pottery in Greece and possibly with the first use of maize.

(Hat tip: Max Read)

Eliza Williams previews a London photography show, Battlespace, presenting an "unsanitized view" of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. From the exhibit's catalogue text:

These photographs were made in Afghanistan and Iraq, but they don’t claim to depict either country. They are glimpses of an alternate reality built upon those countries. The images do not provide a comprehensive account of these wars, or an understanding of these nations or their peoples. They are fragments, seen in off-moments behind the walls of concrete super-bases, or outside them, through night-vision goggles and ballistic eye shields. …

The battlespace is not solely defined by map lines or grid squares, but also in the areas of perception and illusion. … In this shifting, human terrain, there are no facts or truths, only competing agendas. … Unpleasant, complex, or off-message images are filtered by both sides, and war stories are recycled through the echo chamber.

(Image: Battleplans, Operation Rock Avalanche. Afghanistan, 2007. By Balazs Gardi)

Brenna Ehrlich reports on a new web plugin called “The Social Media Sobriety Test” whose motto is, “Nothing good happens online after 1 a.m”:

Set your hours of intoxication, and if you try to sign on to one of those sites during those times, you’ll be asked to pass a test.

I tried it out — about five minutes ago and fully sober — and failed said test …

Ifixit pens a self-repair manifesto:

. … Manufacturers push new models every year with just enough style tweaks to make our last one feel obsolete. They use legal threats to keep repair manuals away from us and deploy so-called ‘security bits’ in new products to prevent us from opening our own things. They have even gone so far as patenting screw heads to keep us out of our stuff.

A primer:

If the burrito tears and they have to add a second tortilla, CONGRATULATIONS, you ordered the proper way.

And if you've impressed the manager so much that he says “That’s a big fuckin’ Burrito” as you’re paying, then not only have you done your job well, but I’d like to go out to lunch with you. It was the proudest day of my life. This manager watches burritos being made all day long, so if you have impressed him/her to the extent of f-bomb dropping, you know you’re good.