Author: Andrew Sullivan

Scott Adams shares his view of stress:

My theory is that stress is a universal constant. If you have less of it at any given moment, then other people must be taking on more to balance things out. For example, let's say you go on vacation. While you're on the beach, your coworkers are trying to handle their own workload plus the projects you left behind. You haven't reduced stress; you've simply transferred it to your coworkers. And if you work alone, as I do, you can frontload your stress to get ahead of deadlines, but you can't reduce the total amount.

And what if your deadline is always 20 minutes away? Have a great week off, Patrick.

The Prop 8 ruling prompts Ayelet Waldman to describe her summer reading:

I reread another book, A Happy Marriage, by Rafael Yglesias. (father, incidentally, of Matthew). This book, published last year, is a devastating and beautiful novel about a long marriage, one that goes through periods of great passion, and periods when it seems love is gone. The novel is structured around the dying and death of the wife, Margaret, from cancer, and is told from the point of view of the husband. We see these two when they are impossibly young, in their very early 20s, and decades later, when he cares for her as she dies.

I have been very lucky in my marriage, and in my husband, but this book taught me about loyalty and love, about what can happen to a marriage, and what it means to commit through the ebbing and recurring of passion. In fact, I think I'll start recommending this book to friends who confide in me an urge to end their marriages. It's a beautiful example of how love can bloom again, even if you're absolutely convinced that your marriage has become a desiccated husk. Like I said, I've been very lucky, but I can imagine that there might come a time when I need such inspiration, and I'm grateful to Yglesias for providing it.

(Video via Serwer)

Lake Crescent, Washington, 5.58 pm

Terry Teachout ponders David Mamet's conversion to a "libertarian-flavored conservatism." And, yes, Mamet's drift away from right-thinking liberalism does give his plays a kind of grit and realism lacking in, say, the ideological propaganda of a Kushner:

“As a child of the 60’s,” he wrote in the Village Voice, “I accepted as an article of faith … that people are generally good at heart.” It was this credo that he specifically repudiated in that same essay:

I do not think that people are basically good at heart; indeed, that view of human nature has both prompted and informed my writing for the last 40 years. I think that people, in circumstances of stress, can behave like swine, and that this, indeed, is not only a fit subject, but the only subject, of drama.

But that people can behave like swine means they have a choice. It seems to me that that choice is what underlies great drama. Shakespeare is not grim; and his realism is leavened with great humor and hope. Teachout believes that Mamte's visceral and crude defense of everything Israel informs this worldview:

The battles in which Mamet's characters are engaged, as one of them remarks in American Buffalo, the most archetypical (and artful) of his portraits of American life, are zero-sum games in which only one player can win: 'it's kickass or kissass, Don, and I'd be lying if I told you any different.'… The only difference between Mamet then and Mamet now is that he has decided that government intervention can do little or nothing to ameliorate the effects of these struggles, and that men do better to work out their differences through the operation of free markets."

Except, one supposes, for war. And it is Mamet's contradiction between a libertarian trust in leaving people alone and a super-Zionist belief in the forever war that makes him so interesting a writer.

Ed Yong profiles a group of animals called bdelloid rotifers. The have evolved asexually for between 40 and 100 million years:

They live in an all-female world in which mothers give birth to daughters who are genetically identical clones. No males have ever been found. Many animals, including aphids, sharks and Komodo dragons, can reproduce asexually from time to time but sex is still their default setting… Bdelloids are the tiniest twigs on a tree of life that is otherwise dominated by sex.

What would Aquinas make of that?

A reminder from Jon Rauch:

Jonathan Rauch – FIRE’s CFN 2010 from The FIRE on Vimeo.

Natalie Wolchover is a scientist turned science writer who blogs over at Facto Diem. Here's part of her post on handedness:

What causes the brain to sometimes switch up or mix around? There is no clear consensus on the matter, just a lot of interesting hypotheses. First of all, left-handedness is barely genetic. A child of two left-handed parents has only a 26% chance of being left-handed: higher than the 1-in-10 incidence in the general population, but not that much higher. Some scientists think left-handedness is caused by more testosterone than usual flooding the fetus at a critical moment during gestation. This would explain the higher incidence of left-handedness in males than females, and it could also relate to the putative evidence of a correlation between handedness and sexual orientation. However, the way in which testosterone influences brain lateralization isn't established.

From the Oxford University Press blog:

Henry James was a man of many words. But when it came to selecting just a pair that he would define as the two most beautiful words in the English language, he chose the words, summer afternoon.

Enjoy. The humidity lifted here today – and it's beautiful. I can even breathe!

Dave Carter reports from the road:

As a study of the exotic, it's hard to beat the average truck stop. Taken as a group, truckers are an eclectic bunch. There are a huge number of veterans like yours truly, for whom trucking has enough similarities to a deployment to make it a comfortable fit. There are the cowboy types, complete with hats, belt buckles, pointy-toed boots, and a steely-eyed stare that would turn the Marlboro Man into a first class bed wetter. We have biker types complete with chained wallets and leather everything. We've got couples who decided to tour the country together, and people who elected to escape the Dilbert hell of the office cubicle and acquaint themselves with manual labor. Walking into most truck stops for the first time, you might wonder if you had stumbled upon a Village People convention, or chastise yourself for not bringing any Halloween candy. You could rope us off and charge admission just to watch.