Author: Andrew Sullivan

Sady Doyle provides context for Caitlin Flanagan's case against the hook-up culture:

Hooking up may leave girls unsatisfied and lonely. It may include experiences that are, in Flanagan's words, "frightening, embarrassing, uncomfortable at best, painful at worst." But assuming that these experiences are all consensual—I trust Flanagan wouldn't qualify date rape as a "hook-up," however grim her language may be—we can't know that they are "hurting" girls in any measureable way. Here is what we do know to be hurting girls in a measureable way, however: Their boyfriends.

According to a 2005 survey on teen dating abuse, 13 percent of girls who have been in relationships—girls, that is to say, who have had boyfriends—report being "physically hurt or hit." A startling one in four said that their boyfriends had pressured them to have sex they didn't want. Twenty-six percent reported recurring, and severe, verbal abuse in their relationships. And then, there's this, from a no less august source than the U.S. Department of Justice: "Young women between the ages of 16 and 24 in dating relationships experience the highest rate of domestic violence and sexual assault." The highest. What was that about Boyfriend Stories again?

Ben Carlson has an interview with Nick Carr:

The danger for the young is never developing the mental facility for contemplative thought, whether deep reading or being able to follow a single argument over a long stretch. I worry that we’re training children to be distracted, to confuse getting access to information with intelligence.There seems to be a redefinition of our idea of intelligence itself that is emerging. The emphasis is on how quickly you can find information, rather than what you do with it, how deeply you think about it, and how you weave it into the knowledge you already have.

Carr rounds up reaction to his new book, including an review by Jonah Lehrer:

While Carr tries to ground his argument in the details of modern neuroscience, his most powerful points have nothing do with our plastic cortex. Instead, “The Shallows” is most successful when Carr sticks to cultural criticism, as he documents the losses that accompany the arrival of new technologies. The rise of the written text led to the decline of oral poetry; the invention of movable type wiped out the market for illuminated manuscripts; the television show obliterated the radio play (if hardly radio itself). Similarly, numerous surveys suggest that the Internet has diminished our interest in reading books. Carr quotes Wallace Stevens’s poem “The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm,” in which stillness allows the reader to “become a book.” The incessant noise of the Internet, Carr concludes, has turned the difficult text into an obsolete relic.

And a counter argument by Clay Shirky:

The past was not as golden, nor is the present as tawdry, as the pessimists suggest, but the only thing really worth arguing about is the future. It is our misfortune, as a historical generation, to live through the largest expansion in expressive capability in human history, a misfortune because abundance breaks more things than scarcity. We are now witnessing the rapid stress of older institutions accompanied by the slow and fitful development of cultural alternatives. Just as required education was a response to print, using the Internet well will require new cultural institutions as well, not just new technologies.

Yglesias looks for a deeper lesson in the Army's arrest of a young intelligence analyst accused of leaking the Wikileaks footage:

An alternative investigation might focus not on who leaked classified video of a U.S. military operations, but on the question of why that sort of video should be classified. Certainly I can see why the Army might have preferred to keep it under wraps—in the eyes of many it reflected poorly on their conduct—but it hardly contained operational military secrets. In general, we expect things undertaken by America’s public servants in America’s name on America’s dime to be matters of public record. The security services have, however, largely managed to leverage the legitimate need for some level of operational secrecy into a fairly broad exemption of themselves from this basic principle.

And this is why whistle-blowers matter. That video, in any case, was very illuminating. By disseminating it,  real debate became possible, and many persuasively added perspectives that helped put it in context. It helped me understand the kind of things that war entails, the random events, and sudden decisions that can lead to legitimate self-defense or, in a second, a war crime. I believe that democracies benefit from such revelations. It's what separates us from authoritarian regimes. These soldiers, after all, are operating in our name. Without divulging real secrets, we have a right to know. Because without knowing, we cannot make the decisions about war and peace that an informed public has to make.

Well you knew that already:

Today’s take on the full beard “is very playful,” he says. “You grow it with a scent of masculinity, of maturity and of irony to mean ‘I don’t take myself too seriously.’”

“As gay guys can be more adventurous, they have always been at the forefront of new looks,” says Allan Peterkin, a Toronto psychiatrist and co-author of The Bearded Gentleman… Peterkin thinks the recent shift to a more masculine look may be a bit of a backlash to the gay culture of the 1980s, where everyone was so clean-shaven, top to bottom.

“This new facial hair praise goes across cultures, ages, and reaches straights and gays,” says Peterkin. “It’s kind of a universal expression.”

Tips, role models, videos, grooming advice …. you can't beat beards.org.

"I feel quite certain that a less emotional and less evangelistic atheism would garner far more influence. Atheism has a brand problem.  Lots of the people who do not believe in God refuse to call themselves atheists. Why? Because they don’t want to be associated with proselytizers," – Stephen Prothero, Killing The Buddha.

Taken.

Andrew Revkin considers BP's policy of maintaining ownership of the skimmed oil:

That seems outrageous. Even at 10,000 barrels a day times $75 a barrel, that potential revenue is a tiny fraction of the $23 million a day the company says it’s paying for cleanups and other costs. But to my mind, this is irrelevant. Along with all of its other obligations and penalties, perhaps BP should be required — if only for symbolic value — to contribute to the United States Strategic Petroleum Reserve an amount of oil equal to every barrel now being salvaged from the seabed gusher at its Macondo Prospect well.

A reader writes:

Your reader has stumbled accidentally upon a sort of Christianity practiced by most of the people I know who claim to be so; it saddens me that he thinks it's not present in the US. Perhaps if he started actively looking for it, he'd find more people living their faith around here than he expects to.  

I can't back up this assertion with figures and statistic, but is it unreasonable to assume that a more private, personal faith is by its nature less noticeable than a publicly asserted one? Particularly to someone who's turned off of even discussions of Christianity in public forums, where political and social issues are deemed newsworthy by an increasingly conflict-addicted media? Surely, evangelism and controversial political engagement is more media-friendly than the quiet business of getting on with attempts at charity, mercy and love. Good works don't make headlines, and people serious about living like Christians don't spend a lot of time on camera or in front of microphones. He should go track down some more Christians who aren't spending all their time telling people how Christian they are, and see what they're up to.