Author: Andrew Sullivan

Quote For The Day

“For who knows not that Truth is strong, next to the Almighty? She needs no policies, nor stratagems, nor licensings to make her victorious; those are the shifts and the defences that error uses against her power. Give her but room, and do not bind her when she sleeps, for then she speaks not true, as the old Proteus did, who spake oracles only when he was caught and bound, but then rather she turns herself into all shapes, except her own, and perhaps tunes her voice according to the time, as Micaiah did portrait-of-john-miltonbefore Ahab, until she be adjured into her own likeness. Yet is it not impossible that she may have more shapes than one. What else is all that rank of things indifferent, wherein Truth may be on this side or on the other, without being unlike herself? What but a vain shadow else is the abolition of those ordinances, that hand-writing nailed to the cross? What great purchase is this Christian liberty which Paul so often boasts of? His doctrine is, that he who eats or eats not, regards a day or regards it not, may do either to the Lord. How many other things might be tolerated in peace, and left to conscience, had we but charity, and were it not the chief stronghold of our hypocrisy to be ever judging one another?

I fear yet this iron yoke of outward conformity hath left a slavish print upon our necks; the ghost of a linen decency yet haunts us. We stumble and are impatient at the least dividing of one visible congregation from another, though it be not in fundamentals; and through our forwardness to suppress, and our backwardness to recover any enthralled piece of truth out of the gripe of custom, we care not to keep truth separated from truth, which is the fiercest rent and disunion of all. We do not see that, while we still affect by all means a rigid external formality, we may as soon fall again into a gross conforming stupidity, a stark and dead congealment of wood and hay and stubble, forced and frozen together, which is more to the sudden degenerating of a Church than many subdichotomies of petty schisms.

Not that I can think well of every light separation, or that all in a Church is to be expected gold and silver and precious stones: it is not possible for man to sever the wheat from the tares, the good fish from the other fry; that must be the Angels’ ministry at the end of mortal things. Yet if all cannot be of one mind–as who looks they should be?–this doubtless is more wholesome, more prudent, and more Christian, that many be tolerated, rather than all compelled,” – John Milton, Areopagitica; A speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing, to the Parlament of England.

When Faith Is Not An Escape

In a personal essay, Laura Turner reveals the way her “anxiety frequently blossoms at the intersection of uncertainty and powerlessness,” resulting in the fear that she “can never feel at home.” How that connects to her religious faith:

The common misperception of religion as a crutch would have us believe that people are faithful because they want to escape the problems of the world and the realities of everyday life. But my faith tells me the importance of staying put. In one way it asks me to grow roots, but in another it is nothing deeper than what the words say: Stay put. Sit with the worries and fears and discomfort. Recognize it as a part of you and of the world. Recognize you can’t run from it, as much as you want to.

When I am anxious, I am filled with a powerful wanderlust that makes leaving home so tempting and makes it seem like travel will allow me to escape my churning mind. I hold the lesson of my faith in one hand and my desire to bolt in the other. I try to make sense of them. My discomfort surfaces when I have to navigate the world of adulthood for too long. Maybe I should go somewhere so utterly familiar that it does not challenge me, or else somewhere so new that it jolts me out of myself.

There’s an old hymn, Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing, with these lyrics: “Prone to wander, Lord I feel it, prone to leave the God I love.” When I get tired and the inspiration to travel—to plan another trip, to look impatiently forward to what is next on the calendar, to move out of the present moment—strikes up (and partly I blame that on God for making the world such a very interesting place to explore) that lyric “prone to wander” hits me hard. I find myself thinking that maybe running away is like leaving God. Sometimes I want to run backward, back to a deeper set of roots I did not put down myself, back to my parents’ house where everything is easy and safe. And this, I think, is maybe like leaving God too.

(Video: Sufjan Stevens sings “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing”)

Houellebecq’s Nightmare, Ctd

We recently noted that the massacre at the offices of Charlie Hebdo coincided with the publication of Michel Houellebecq’s latest novel, Submission, which had been featured on the satirical weekly’s cover. In a recent interview with The Paris Review, Houellebecq spoke about why he believes the novel’s premise – a Muslim candidate is elected President after defeating the the far right candidate Marine Le Pen – is a thought experiment worth conducting:

Well, Marine Le Pen strikes me as a realistic candidate for 2022—even for 2017 … The Muslim party is more … That’s the heart of the matter, really. I tried to put myself in the place of a Muslim, and I realized that, in reality, they are in a totally schizophrenic situation. Because overall Muslims aren’t interested in economic issues, their big issues are what we nowadays call societal issues. On these issues, obviously, they are very far from the left and even further from the Green Party. Just think of gay marriage and you’ll see what I mean, but the same is true across the board. And one doesn’t really see why they’d vote for the right, much less for the extreme right, which utterly rejects them. So if a Muslim wants to vote, what’s he supposed to do? The truth is, he’s in an impossible situation. He has no representation whatsoever. It would be wrong to say that this religion has no political consequences—it does. So does Catholicism, for that matter, even if the Catholics have been more or less marginalized. For those reasons, it seems to me, a Muslim party makes a lot of sense.

In a helpful review of the novel, Steven Poole asserts that its real aim is not to offer “a splenetic vision of the Muslim threat to Europe or a spineless ‘submission’ to gradual Islamic takeover”:

Some in France have already complained that the novel fans right-wing fears of the Muslim population, but that is to miss Houellebecq’s deeply mischievous point. Islamists and anti-immigration demagogues, the novel gleefully points out, really ought to be on the same side, because they share a suspicion of pluralist liberalism and a desire to return to “traditional” or pre-feminist values, where a woman submits to her husband – just as “Islam” means that a Muslim submits to God.

But Soumission is, arguably, not primarily about politics at all. The real target of Houellebecq’s satire – as in his previous novels – is the predictably manipulable venality and lustfulness of the modern metropolitan man, intellectual or otherwise. François himself happily submits to the new order, not for any grand philosophical or religious reasons, but because the new Saudi owners of the Sorbonne pay much better – and, more importantly, he can be polygamous. As he notes, in envious fantasy, of his charismatic new boss, who has adroitly converted already: “One 40-year-old wife for cooking, one 15-year-old wife for other things … no doubt he had one or two others of intermediate ages.”

The Muslim Heroes Of The Paris Attacks

You already know about Ahmed Merabet, the Muslim cop who died confronting the killers outside the Charlie Hebdo offices. But now there’s another Muslim hero to emerge from the mayhem this week:

A Muslim employee of a kosher grocery store in Paris is being hailed as a hero for hiding several customers in a walk-in freezer to save them from a violent gunman. Lassana Bathily, 24, led the others into the basement of his workplace, Hyper Cacher, when Amedy Coulibaly opened fire on Friday, according to French media. … “I opened the door, and several people came in with me. I turned off the lights, I turned off the freezer, and they got into the freezer,” Bathily told local station BFMTV.  “I told them to calm down, to not make noise. If he knows we’re here, he can come down and kill us.” …

The people he saved expressed profound gratitude after the violence was over, he said. “When they got out, they congratulated me,” Bathily told the station. “They said, ‘Honestly, thank you for having thought of that,’ and I said, ‘You’re welcome. It’s nothing, that’s life.’”

A Story About Putting Kink In Context

Dan Savage shares how smashing birthday cake into a college student’s face taught him empathy for straight people:

This story also appears in Dan’s 2005 book The Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage, and My Family. For more info on Bawdy Storytelling, which hosts shows in LA, San Francisco and Seattle, go here. Previous live storytelling on the Dish can be found here.

The Mysterious World Of Female Ejaculation, Ctd

It just got a little less so:

Researchers are now saying that squirting is essentially involuntary urination.

Female ejaculate is technically the small amount of milky white fluid that’s expressed when climaxing, New Scientist explains. Squirting, on the other hand, results in a much larger gush of a clear fluid, which comes from the urethra, the duct where urine is conveyed from the bladder. The findings, which combine biochemical analyses with pelvic ultrasounds, were published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine on Christmas Eve.

More details from that New Scientist piece:

To investigate the nature and origins of the [milky white fluid purportedly from the Skene glands], Samuel Salama, a gynaecologist at the Parly II private hospital in Le Chesnay, France, and his colleagues recruited seven women who report producing large amounts of liquid – comparable to a glass of water – at orgasm. First, these women were asked to provide a urine sample. An ultrasound scan of their pelvis confirmed that their bladder was completely empty. The women then stimulated themselves through masturbation or with a partner until they were close to having an orgasm – which took between 25 and 60 minutes.

A second pelvic ultrasound was then performed just before the women climaxed. At the point of orgasm, the squirted fluid was collected in a bag and a final pelvic scan performed. Even though the women had urinated just before stimulation began, the second scan – performed just before they climaxed – showed that their bladder had completely refilled. Each woman’s final scan showed an empty bladder, meaning the liquid squirted at orgasm almost certainly originated from the bladder.

A chemical analysis was performed on all of the fluid samples. Two women showed no difference between the chemicals present in their urine and the fluid squirted at orgasm. The other five women had a small amount of prostatic-specific antigen (PSA) present in their squirted fluid – an enzyme not detected in their initial urine sample, but which is part of the “true” female ejaculate

As a parting thought, Salama “believes every woman is capable of squirting ‘if their partner knows what they are doing'”. You can head to YouTube for that. Previous Dish on the subject here. Update from a reader:

Thank you for officially ruining female ejaculation for me. I cringed when I read the first sentence of your post and realized that all those years I was getting peed on and loving it. Dammit. Good thing I was always coming from swim practice and had my swim goggles handy!

Another:

I would dearly love to read the grant proposal for that research. Especially the informed consent form.

The World’s Best Beer Pong Player

Is a robot:

But the major innovation is how the machine grips the ball:

In the video above, you’ll see that the mechanized arm picks up each ping-pong ball in a green sphere. That sphere is known as a Versaball and it’s filled with sand. When the Versaball is pumped with air, the sand granules can move around freely and form an impression around the objects on which the sphere is placed. Once the ball is in place on top of an object, the system sucks the air out of it, causing the sand grains to tighten around the object, thereby allowing it to be lifted.

David Pescovitz covered this technology last year:

Many of tomorrow’s robots may have more in common with beanbag chairs and bouncy houses than the hulking industrial arms in factories today. Breakthroughs in the nascent field of soft robotics, in which steel skeletons and power-hungry motors make way for textiles, are beginning to move from the laboratory to the startup world. Imagine an octopuslike robot that can squirm through rubble at a disaster site but has the strength to pull bricks off an injured person. Or a machine that can safely place an elderly person in bed. Several companies are working on these problems, frequently working from research sponsored by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), the Pentagon arm that seeks and funds futuristic technology. “Soft robotics has the potential to influence all kinds of robotic and machine design,” says Gerald Van Hoy, an analyst at market research firm Gartner. “It’s a key development in the evolution of robotics.”

When Date Night Is Fright Night

Alice Robb rounds up research on what a love of scary movies suggests about their watchers. Among her findings? Scary-movie aficionados are more likely to “be a man accompanied by a frightened woman”:

In an experiment in the 1980s, a team of psychologists led by Dolf Zillmann had 36 male and 36 female undergraduates watch a horror movie in opposite-sex pairs; each viewer had to evaluate their companion’s desirability before and after the movie, and answer questions about their experience of the film. Men were most likely to enjoy the movie when paired with a woman who was distressed by it, and least likely to enjoy if the woman was unperturbed. It didn’t make the woman more attractive, though: both men and women judged their companions as less desirable as “working mates” if they showed distress.

An Annual Dry Spell

dish_drynuary

John Ore explains Drynuary, the tradition of giving up alcohol for the month following New Year’s:

Make no mistake: If you like drinking, Drynuary is hard, and it’s supposed to be. I’m not particularly religious, but I appreciate the Lenten aspect of giving up something I enjoy for an extended period of time just to say I can. (My birthday falls during Lent, so no way am I giving up drinking then.)

Drynuary forces us to consider the the role alcohol plays in our everyday lives, especially when its absence is the most obvious or stark. My wife and I don’t hibernate for a month, sipping herbal teas and avoiding glances at the stemware and the three neglected beers left in the fridge. There are still the NFL playoffs, and the college football championship, and concerts and recreational beer-league ice hockey. Our first Drynuary we met friends at a sports bar to watch football, and the amount of club soda we downed led to plenty of speculation that we were expecting. Ive been the designated driver for post-snowboarding pub crawls and I’ve had to explain to business associates why I’m not having wine with dinner while traveling for work. Half of the point of Drynuary is to live your life as you normally do, just without drinking.

For last year’s Drynuary, Jolie Kerr created a guide for the uninitiated:

If it’s so hard, doesn’t that mean you have a problem?

Yes and no. But more no than yes. Think of it this way: If you decided to give up chocolate for a month—or sourdough bread, or Irish butter, or picking at ingrown hairs, or whatever it is that you love most in this world—it would probably suck. You would probably say, “Gosh, this is hard!” Would that mean you had a problem with chocolate or sourdough bread or Irish butter or picking at ingrown hairs? Maybe. But probably not.

And what about the health effects of a month on the wagon? Amy Guttman looks at what happened when staffers at New Scientist experimented with foregoing drinking for five weeks:

Dr. Rajiv Jalan, a liver specialist at the Institute for Liver and Digestive Health at University College London, analyzed the findings. They revealed that among those in the study who gave up drinking, liver fat, a precursor to liver damage, fell by at least 15 percent. For some, it fell almost 20 percent.

Abstainers also saw their blood glucose levels — a key factor in determining diabetes risk — fall by an average of 16 percent. It was the first study to show such an immediate drop from going dry, Dr. James Ferguson, a liver specialist at Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham in England, told us last year.

Update from a reader:

I really enjoyed your post on Dryanuary. As it happens, I do the same thing – go 30 days or more without consuming any alcohol – but I do it in August, instead of January. I like to joke that I am “giving my liver a break” before football season starts, but it’s become a tradition that I’ve maintained for over a dozen years now.

I originally gave it the boring name of “abstinence month,” but several years ago a friend of mine my friend started calling it “Tomadan,” a portmanteau of my first name and the Islamic holy month of fasting. And the name has since stuck so that now all my friends understand “Thomas can’t drink with us tonight because he’s on Tomadan.”

It’s not always easy. There are times when the Texas heat is such that there is nothing more I want than an ice cold beer. But I’ve always managed to resist, and at the end of the month I come away with a feeling of satisfaction that makes that first beer of football season taste so much better.

Plus, I’m a little thinner and my wallet is a little fatter.

(Photo by Flickr user Apionid)

Quote For The Day

“I love short stories because I believe they are the way we live. They are what our friends tell us, in their pain and joy, their passion and rage, their yearning and their cry against injustice. We can sit all night with our friend while he talks about the end of his marriage, and what we finally get is a collection of stories about passion, tenderness, misunderstanding, sorry, money; those hours and days and moments when he was absolutely married, whether he and his wife were screaming at each other, or sulking about the house, or making love. While his marriage was dying, he was also working, spending evening with friends, rearing children; but those are other stories. Which is why, days after hearing a painful story by a friend, we see him and say: How are you? We know that by now he may have another story to tell, or he may be in the middle of one, and we hope it is joyful,” – Andre Dubus, “Marketing,” in Broken Vessels.