Author: Andrew Sullivan

by Patrick Appel

A reader writes:

Costly signaling makes sense as a reason many people give for buying diamonds, although I'm not sure it really works as a defense given all the options of costly things.  More importantly, though, it seems to put the emphasis rather strangely on "signaling," a message which might be partially for your mate (one hopes she knows that message already) but is really targeting anyone else that might see and/or desire her. As such it's little more than designing and using the most ornate branding iron you can.

One alternative to the ring-as-signal model would be making sure your engagement is as memorable as possible. Make it into a story that you will both love to tell, forever. I'm not a fan of the Jumbo-tron marriage proposal – it always seems more egotistical than cute – but if that's your deal, have at. My idea is that you choose a unique time, place, or circumstance, meaningful to you both, of which the ring becomes a symbol and reminder of that moment, be it grand, intimate, sexy, terrifying, or all of the above. Do that and the ring could be made of baling wire; the metal and rock won't matter.

Although, let's be realistic, it'd better be most beautiful baling wire ring you can afford.  All the in-laws are watching.

Another reader, echoing many others, goes after the diamond cartels:

Even conceding that signaling is an useful and important way to spend your money, the signaling done with diamonds is based entirely on a lie. The lie is that diamonds are valuable because they are rare and unique. They are neither. The scarcity of diamond gemstones is completely manufactured by the De Beers cartel controlling the supply.

I'm well aware of this. The Atlantic published the definitive article on the worthlessness of diamonds back in 1982. Another reader:

As a gay man, when it came time to propose to my (now) husband, a diamond solitaire wasn't going to cut it.  First of all, I'm in the camp that shiny rocks pulled from the ground by abused, underpaid Africans is no way to signal one's love for another.  Besides, a diamond ring would look downright silly on his hand.  (He's a quintessential bear.)

So here's what I did instead:  I bought him a beautiful Omega watch and hid it in my luggage as we went off on a Caribbean cruise.  On our second day out, anchored off a lovely cay, I arranged for breakfast to be served on our stateroom's veranda.  I'd made a CD of songs that I felt fit a romantic occasion ("Jackie Wilson Said (I'm In Heaven When You Smile)" "Sweet Happy Life"  "The Best Is Yet To Come" and several others) and had it playing as we sipped our coffee and looked out over the blue, blue sea to a palm-studded isle.  I said a few romantic things about our life together so far, and then told him that I wanted to spend "every second, every minute, every hour and every day of the rest of my life" with him.  Then I pulled the watch from its hiding place and said, "And so you remember that, I'd like you to wear this" and handed him the watch.  He cried, I cried…and we were married six months later, during that brief period when it was legal for us to marry in California.  He's worn the watch every day since.

Unlike the shiny rock, the watch is not only handsome, it's functional, as well.  And buying it didn't enrich the villains at DeBeers.

Another reader opted for travel:

We eloped, so I never had an engagement ring. We always said “we’ll get a diamond ring for our 10th anniversary”. As the landmark anniversary approached, we just couldn’t justify the cost (and guilt) of a diamond ring. We both agreed to use money on travel instead. We’ve been to Europe and Asia a couple of times now, and we’re planning a visit to South America. We’ve built life long memories from these trips. We enjoy the whole process together: the planning, the trip itself, and telling stories about the trip. I don’t miss the ring, and I thank my husband every day for making the world a smaller place for me!

Another reader:

While not wrapped and tied with a gossamer bow, my now husband gifted me with the support (financial and emotional) to quit my full-time job and study for the bar exam almost 3 full years before we were married. By the time he got around to actually proposing (with a vintage family ring, natch) I was already fully convinced of his devotion and commitment to me and our relationship.  People who view expensive diamond rings as THE symbol of true devotion and commitment are the same people who care more about the wedding than the marriage.

Another reader finds all wedding expenses unnecessary;

I don't understand this idea that some kind of expensive gift is required to get engaged, or even married.  I have been married twice, the first to the woman who had my kids, the second to the woman who helped me raise them.  In both cases, I proposed after we had made love and then within days we got a marriage license, blood test, couple rings (a few hundred total), simple civil ceremony (about five minutes), simple reception ($100 apiece), and then went to sleep.  I never have been able to understand why people would spend thousands of dollars on an engagement ring, or thousands (or tens of thousands) on a wedding.  I'm not trying to say that everyone is like me, but surely it's possible to marry and have kids and have a more or less normal life without big rings or big weddings.

Another reader focuses on social signaling:

Diamond engagement rings are best understood not as a signal from one partner to the other, but from both partners to society at large.

I know two brothers who solved the problem of the overpriced diamond in different ways. One took his grandmother's stone, which was respectably large but rendered nearly worthless by a subtle flaw, and gave it to his future wife. The other gave a ring set with a brilliant and valuable sapphire. Both women were delighted – the one because of the diamond's sentimental significance, the other because of the distinctiveness of the sapphire (and the sacrifice its value represented).

And both rings get noticed. The diamond tends to draw admiring glances, whispered 'ooh's, and the occasional, "Is that real?" The sapphire attracts a different sort of attention. "How interesting," people say, "is that your engagement ring? What kind of stone is that?"

A ring is an inherently public display. It's not like placing a picture of your lover in a locket. And an engagement ring is a public announcement of attachment, and to some inevitable extent, of wealth and resources. For a spouse content with the private knowledge that the hunk of blue glass on her ring is actually a sapphire (or for one who moves exclusively within the rarefied circles familiar with valuable gemstones) such a stone can serve the same functions as a diamond. But the chief virtue of the overpriced carbon crystal is its ready legibility. There are myriad gifts that can signal sacrifice and commitment from one partner to the other, but it is the diamond ring that most efficiently broadcasts that signal to society at large.

by Patrick Appel

Yglesias advocates more legal immigration:

Adam Ozimek offers up some quantitative research on the scale of the effect citing research from Albert Saiz (PDF) indicating that “[i]mmigration inflows equal to 1% of a city’s population were associated with increases in average or median housing rents and prices of about 1%.”

One way to especially take advantage of this effect and politically frame it as housing stabilization policy would be to create a special new class of visa specifically for people who purchase homes in the United States.

Count me in. Felix Salmon lists other economic benefits.

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

I've been having an interesting time reading your musical posts.  As someone who prefers higher liturgy to "low church," but who also harbors more sympathy for low church theology than high liturgy's more elitist theological constructions, I'm torn on the issue.  But there is one thing I would stress to your reader who objects to the "can church be hip?" thread and draws distinctions between a more consumerist entertainment-driven spiritual music and a more liturgy-and-tradition strain of Christian worship and practice.

Quite simply, I think there is a big difference between music designed for church and popular music with spiritual overtones: but I think that, in the right liturgical spaces, certain songs can become sacred, even if intended as "entertainment." 

Since your reader is truly Christian, I assume he or she grants that the hidden hand of Providence operates somewhere in this, and that music can and does reach from itself into the lives of people — and communities — in ways that can be hard to fathom but are intensely real.  For instance, Sufjan Stevens wrote "Vito's Ordination Song" with much of the fundamental imagery surrounding scriptural faith.  It resonates with Revelation's words about the bridegroom coming and there being a feast and a celebration, with Jeremiah's language of being known even before birth, Father and Son imagery, a crown laid up and made for you, ready for you to take — it's all there.

This is the sort of song that can be used and utilized in a church service, but carefully, carefully, because people tend to be the sort of animals for whom aesthetic nitpicking matters quite a great deal.  Music and words that are not intended for a church often get play in church quicker and easier if their style is similar to "church music" even if their words are blended scripture and secularity even more than Sufjan Stevens' songs.  Take, for instance, Ralph Vaughan Williams' famous Symphony No. 5, "Dona Nobis Pacem."  This piece, while it contains myriad religious imagery, is not entirely religious: its libretto is largely Walt Whitman poetry, and even parts of a speech from the House of Commons during the Crimean War.  Yet there is something in it so powerful that I have seen churches perform it in their regular worship services, powerfully and movingly.  The same might be said for Rene Clausen's recent piece "Memorial," for victims of September 11th, which contains aspects of Muslim, Buddhist, Jewish, and Christian prayer-chants.  While beautiful, it seems the sort of thing that many theologians might object to within the parameters of a specifically Christian worship service.

Which is all to say; the reason these pieces work in church, despite being made for other places, is related to their style, not their substance.  If opposition to deeply Christian, deeply scripturally resonant stuff like Steven's Vito's Ordination song was truly rooted in concerns about substance, there would be no reason to reject it without also rejecting the pieces mentioned above (not including The Messiah, of course).  I happen to believe all three, Memorial, Symphony No. 5, and Vito's Ordination Song to be uniquely suited to meaningful Christian worship for centuries to come, but the key is in the word "uniquely."  They must be deployed in stylistically pleasant ways, or they will point people toward obsession with all sorts of things that aren't God — even if what they are becoming obsessed with is their own brand of liturgical snobbery, mine included.

Today on the Dish, we followed the Beck backlash; parsed polls for November; and reflected on the Big Question of the best way to engage people who disagree. Politicians weren't as important as parties; Christianity in America made a splash; and the Heritage Foundation's newest hire doesn't quite gel with its ideals.

We played with the Rubik's cube of Pakistani politics; and wondered sarcastically about what will happen to all the Mexican police officers fired for their ties to drug cartels. Ambinder previewed Obama's address tonight; we asked after Atlas; and according to Churchill, sometimes appeasement was necessary.

Preppies needed help to survive; the codex won one over the screen; and the official Oxford English Dictionary may be the internet's most recent casualty. Apatow and Serwer defended Apatow's mockery of American masculinity and we tackled domestic violence in pop culture. We mined maternity leave and the defense of diamonds; and McArdle seconded Bering on monogamy and jealousy while Dan Savage disagreed. FOTD here; cool ad watch here; Yglesias award nominee here; MHB here; VFYW here; VFYW contest #13 winner here; and your many suggestions for mapping future contests here. On the elite professions front, we touched on Scalia's choices and heard from dating coaches; civil servants in the shadows; attorneys; pastors and prostitutes.

–Z.P.

by Conor Friedersdorf

The reader writes:

My profession involves more listening than people imagine, and certainly more than people imagine from the "celebrity pastors" who get most of the media attention.  I am a pastor, serving a 100-member liberal Protestant congregation in a small city in northern California, outside the Bay Area.  Although I do prepare and deliver a sermon every week, much of my time is spent listening.

I listen to people and the story of their lives.  I am attentive to the trends in our community, such as our unemployment rate, affordable housing, and environmental concerns.  I listen to ancient voices preserved in sacred texts, not just my own Bible, but other texts, too, and contemporary voices in poetry, literature, drama.  I make it a point to listen to people whose views are different from mine, sometimes seeking them out.   Because I pray, and praying is for me more about listening than it is about talking, I listen for God in all these things.

Lately, what I've been hearing, is anxiety about the economy, anxiety that has not subsided in two years, and seems to be calcifying into a normal way of living for many people.

I want people to know that my master's degree includes significant work in counseling and spiritual care of people.  I want them to know that pastors like me, who are engaged with real people in real communities, are not trying to be famous, rich, or even influential in politics.  Pastors like me are trying to help people find meaning in life.  The "celebrity pastors" who grab the headlines are making my job more difficult every day.

by Zoe Pollock

A reader writes:

I think you misread Farrell's piece. While giving Pius some credit for dealing with the issue of evolution, Farrell's main point was the caveat you mention second: modern biology shows man descends (as do virtually all species) from a population, not a single individual (or couple), and this contradicts Pius's assertion that the doctrine of original sin requires "a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which, through generation, is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own" (full text of Pius's Humani Generis here). Far from being prescient, Pius, as interpreted by Farrell, was thus wrong about what would be learned subsequently. Farrell is a bit off in not realizing that Pius was mostly concerned with addressing a 19th century idea (polygenism; not held by Darwin) that held that modern Homo sapiens has several independent origins (we didn't), and not with addressing modern evolutionary theory. I'm also not sure that Farrell's theologically correct: it's not self evident to me that common ancestry through populations violates the doctrine of original sin, although it might– I'll leave that for Catholic theologians to decide.

The late Stephen Jay Gould dealt with these exact issues in an essay he published in 1997. While Farrell notes briefly John Paull II's statement on evolution from 1996, "Truth Cannot Contradict Truth," Gould regards John Paul's statement as a significant revision to Pius's position. Gould's own summary of his essay:

Pius had grudgingly admitted evolution as a legitimate hypothesis that he regarded as only tentatively supported and potentially (as I suspect he hoped) untrue. John Paul, nearly fifty years later, reaffirms the legitimacy of evolution under the NOMA principle [=non-overlapping magisteria– Gould's term for how religion and science can coexist harmoniously, which he takes to be a quite Catholic point of view] —no news here—but then adds that additional data and theory have placed the factuality of evolution beyond reasonable doubt. Sincere Christians must now accept evolution not merely as a plausible possibility but also as an effectively proven fact. In other words, official Catholic opinion on evolution has moved from "say it ain't so, but we can deal with it if we have to" (Pius's grudging view of 1950) to John Paul's entirely welcoming "it has been proven true; we always celebrate nature's factuality, and we look forward to interesting discussions of theological implications."

by Conor Friedersdorf

Alan Jacobs is still reading Infinite Jest:

Wallace is a writer of riffs, and I have often been frustrated by my inability when using the Kindle to get a sense of just how long the riffs are. It helps to know whether this is going to be a relatively brief one or whether it will go on for pages: having that knowledge enables the reader to adjust the quality of his or her attention accordingly. Again and again while Kindling my way through IJ I have been forced into awareness of how much my reading practices rely on this spatial awareness: not just knowing how far I am into a book (since the Kindle always shows you where you are in percentage form), but knowing when the next chapter or section break is coming. It turns out that that kind of knowledge has always been very helpful to me, especially when I am reading a difficult or otherwise challenging book — but I never knew how helpful until now.

One aspect of the codex I like is the sense of progress I get comparing the thickness of what I've already read to what I've yet to read. The Web equivalent is that bar on the right margin, but especially when reading a lengthy article, it is often misleading about how much is left.

by Patrick Appel

Apatow fires back at Christian Lorentzen. Money quote:

There certainly are a lot of dick jokes in Funny People but there is no way to portray comedians without having them tell a lot of those types of jokes. If I was a hundred percent accurate I would have doubled the dick joke count. The only thing more troubling than making jokes about the male penis would be to be serious and honor the male penis.