Author: Andrew Sullivan

Fiona Duncan assesses a new fashion trend called “normcore,” which captures “self-aware, stylized blandness”:

By late 2013, it wasn’t uncommon to spot the Downtown chicks you’d expect to have closets full of Acne and Isabel Marant wearing nondescript half-zip pullovers and anonymous denim. Magazines, too, had picked up the look. T noted the “enduring appeal of the Patagonia fleece” as displayed on Patrik Ervell and Marc Jacobs’s runways. Edie Campbell slid into Birkenstocks (or the Céline version thereof) in Vogue Paris. Adidas trackies layered under Louis Vuitton cashmere in Self Service. A bucket hat and Nike slippers framed an Alexander McQueen coveralls in Twin. Smaller, younger magazines like London’s Hot and Cool and New York’s Sex and Garmento, were interested in even more genuinely average ensembles, skipping high-low blends for the purity of head-to-toe normcore.

Jeremy Lewis, the founder/editor of Garmento and a freelance stylist and fashion writer, calls normcore “one facet of a growing anti-fashion sentiment.” His personal style is (in the words of Andre Walker, a designer Lewis featured in the magazine’s last issue) “exhaustingly plain”—this winter, that’s meant a North Face fleece, khakis, and New Balances. Lewis says his “look of nothing” is about absolving oneself from fashion, “lest it mark you as a mindless sheep.”

Tori Telfer calls the trend both “refreshingly non-ironic” and “incredibly pretentious”:

People have been dressing à la normcore for years — they’re called parents, at least in popular clichés.

They dress like this because they genuinely don’t have time to think about fashion, not because they’ve decided not to care. And of course, fashion is an art form with a rich history, et cetera; implying that fashion is for anti-intellectuals is a pretty ignorant stance to take.

The true irony of normcore, like everything adopted by hipster-ish society, is that once you start to talk about it, it loses its authenticity. Steve Jobs was the apex of genuine normcore — he wore the same thing every day because it was convenient, which freed him up to change the world. But as soon as normcore is labeled, hashtagged, and analyzed, its idealism fails.

Jon Moy, meanwhile, is so annoyed by the trend that he turns to all-caps:

The only thing worse than making the argument that this is some sort of rally against the commodification and label-happy world of high fashion, is saying how you think “normal people” are more stylish than “fashion people”. Let me clear that up for you—STYLISH PEOPLE ARE STYLISH NO MATTER THEIR BACKGROUND. An editorial that features random people caught on Google Maps? Cool. Because if there’s one thing people love, it’s patronizing observations like “OMG normal people are so interesting.” NO THEY AREN’T. NO ONE WANTS TO BE REMINDED OF HOW THEIR LIVES HAVE GOTTEN AWAY FROM THEM AND HOW THEIR JOBS AND FAMILY RESPONSIBILITIES DON’T AFFORD THEM THE TEMPORAL AND MONETARY LUXURY TO OVERTHINK THEIR OUTFITS.

The truest and realest conclusion of Normcore? That we really are all the same no matter what we wear.

When Andrew O’Hagan agreed to ghostwrite Julian Assange’s autobiography in early 2011, he entered into a bizarre relationship with the WikiLeaks founder that did not result in the book either expected. O’Hagan, breaking his silence as a ghostwriter, paints a devastating, though not unsympathetic, picture of a man unsteadily at the helm of a new journalistic era. From the lengthy essay:

[H]e runs on a high-octane belief in his own rectitude and wisdom, only to find later that other people had their own views – of what is sound journalism or agreeable sex – and the idea that he might be complicit in his own mess baffles him. Fact is, he was not in control of himself and most of what his former colleagues said about him just might be true. He is thin-skinned, conspiratorial, untruthful, narcissistic, and he thinks he owns the material he conduits. It may turn out that Julian is not Daniel Ellsberg or John Wilkes, but Charles Foster Kane, abusive and monstrous in his pursuit of the truth that interests him, and a man who, it turns out, was motivated all the while not by high principles but by a deep sentimental wound.

Andy Morris, reacting to the essay, finds “one peculiar detail that sums up his subject’s profound strangeness”:

It isn’t Wikileaks lack of security acumen, the beyond parody working titles of Assange’s book (including Ban This Book: From Swedish Whores to Pentagon Bores) or his tendency to wear a Tesco tracksuit beneath his suit. Instead it is that Assange – the head of Wikileaks, scourge of international governments and self-declared third best hacker on the planet – eats with his hands.

“People in magazine articles say he doesn’t eat, but he had three helpings of lasagne that night and he ate both the baked potato and the jam pudding with his hands,” explains O’Hagan. “He turned from being very open and engaged to being removed and sort of disgusted.” Later in the piece O’Hagan is more blunt: “Julian scorns all attempts at social graces. He eats like a pig.”

This habit is telling for many reasons. It reveals Assange to be a man who clearly has absolutely no regard for what people think of him. A man who doesn’t care if there is a perceived “right way” of behaving or any other mitigating factors that have to be considered beyond your own pleasure. It reveals him to be a man who people rarely say “No” to. It shows him to be somewhat separate, even alien.

Paddy Johnson recommends a companion piece:

While very little of the biographical information that was supposed to be published in the autobiography made it into O’Hagan’s piece, some of that information can be found in the e-flux interview between curator Hans Ulrich Obrist and Assange. One gets a better sense of Assange’s personality as a hacker, (at least three paragraphs are dedicated to his teenage years hacking), and his values as informed by early web culture. O’Hagan’s interpretation of these values—Assange’s lauding of young hackers, for example, is seen as an inability to work with others as equals—only adds to the interview. Often, Assange represents himself exactly as O’Hagan describes him.

The two pieces are good companions. Readers get a clearer sense of the scope of Wikileaks projects and their relationship to the media. When described by Assange, we see that relationship is often shockingly sophomoric. When described by O’Hagan, we understand what’s informing Assange’s particular brand of vision, and why it can be so dangerous.

Joshua Rothman tries to explain the “fraught and mysterious thing” known as academic writing, drawing distinctions between that field and journalism:

[J]ournalism … is moving in a populist direction. There are more writers than ever before, writing for more outlets, including on their own blogs, Web sites, and Twitter streams. The pressure on established journalists is to generate traffic. New and clever forms of content are springing up all the time—GIFs, videos, “interactives,” and so on. Dissenters may publish op-eds encouraging journalists to abandon their “culture of populism” and write fewer listicles, but changes in the culture of journalism are, at best, only a part of the story. Just as important, if not more so, are economic and technological developments having to do with subscription models, revenue streams, apps, and devices.

In academia, by contrast, all the forces are pushing things the other way, toward insularity. As in journalism, good jobs are scarce—but, unlike in journalism, professors are their own audience. This means that, since the liberal-arts job market peaked, in the mid-seventies, the audience for academic work has been shrinking.

Increasingly, to build a successful academic career you must serially impress very small groups of people (departmental colleagues, journal and book editors, tenure committees). Often, an academic writer is trying to fill a niche. Now, the niches are getting smaller. Academics may write for large audiences on their blogs or as journalists. But when it comes to their academic writing, and to the research that underpins it—to the main activities, in other words, of academic life—they have no choice but to aim for very small targets. Writing a first book, you may have in mind particular professors on a tenure committee; miss that mark and you may not have a job. Academics know which audiences—and, sometimes, which audience members—matter.

On a similar note, Josh Marshall describes realizing, as a grad student, that academia wasn’t for him:

Once when I was trying to figure out what I was doing I headed up to [professor and historian Gordon S.] Wood’s office to discuss it with him. Wood was generous and kind and always encouraging to me but rather distant as an advisor. At one point in our conversation, he laid it on the line. “You need to decide whether you’ll be satisfied with writing for an audience of two or maybe three hundred people.”

Clearly, the correct answer to this was “yes.” And as Wood said it, then and now I have the sense he thought posing it in this way would get me back on track with a focus on the scholarly community we were a part of. But hearing it so starkly, in my mind my response was something more like, “Holy Crap, no way! That’s definitely nowhere near enough people. And worse yet, I know some of those people. And I definitely don’t want to write for them.” …

All the incentives of academic life drive against having the time, the need and in many cases the ability to communicate with a larger public. In some cases, that’s as it should be. In others, it’s about the straitened nature of academic life, specialization driven by bad job prospects, an over-abundance of Phds, and a deep, deep conventionality driven by risk aversion rooted in all of the above.

In the latest video from the Zealot author, he considers the negative response to his book as well as claims that he cherry-picked his research:

Readers have contributed their own criticisms as well. One warns that Zealot is riddled with historical inaccuracies, quoting from one of Christianity scholar Bart Ehrman’s many posts challenging the book:

Aslan maintains that the fundamental charge against Jesus, leading to his death, is one that in fact never appears in any of our sources. He argues that because Jesus was zealous for the land to be returned to Caesar, this was “enough for the authorities in Jerusalem to immediately label Jesus as a lestes,” that is as a bandit/zealot opposed to the political forces in control of his land.  This then is what led to his arrest and crucifixion.

And what’s the evidence that Aslan cites for the authorities designating Jesus as a lestes?  None.  And why?  Because there is none.  In none of our accounts of Jesus arrest, trial, and crucifixion is he ever called a lestes, by the Jewish authorities, by the Roman authorities, by his friends, by his enemies, by the Gospel writers, by himself, by anyone.  So why does Aslan maintain that this is how Jesus was described by his enemies as the reason for killing him?  Because it is central to his thesis.  It is in fact his thesis.

Another reader addresses Reza’s claim that Jesus was a revolutionary:

Jesus also opposed the different approaches that various other Jewish groups adopted to confront Rome: the Pharisees, the Essenes, the Temple cult and Herod, and the Zealots. He opposed collaboration with the values of Rome, but also armed attacks against them – which was also a kind of collaboration! These were the ways Israel had betrayed God’s will centuries earlier, leading to its conquering by Babylon. If it kept going down this road, he felt, they’d face the same divine judgment, this time at the hands of Rome.

Jesus was thus more revolutionary than the others because he insisted – contrary to all Jewish notions of the messiah – that Israel’s goal was not to gain its own nation with a political king. Rather, it’s mission was for the whole world – God’s promised land was the entire earth, not just Judea. He took that mission on himself. He offered God the obedience of the ideal Israel. Likewise, Israel’s means for achieving God’s purpose was not to be armed revolution – violence was the tool of their oppressors, after all, and against God’s will. Jews were to stand for God’s desire for reconciliation, and thus were to practice love of enemy to the point of death – even as they struggled zealously to stop their enemies from committing injustice.

Again, Aslan’s right that Jesus called for radical social justice – the inverting of social and economic relationships. But this critique was aimed at both the Jewish state as much as the Romans. And a key component of this new society was the laying down of the sword and the welcoming of the outsider and the enemy. His was a revolution of love – love of God and other.

He also responds to Reza’s assertions about the role Paul played in forming Christianity:

Aslan presses the old saw that Paul “invented” Christianity by turning Jesus’ social movement that fixated on the kingdom of God and the salvation of the poor into a religious group that worshiped him as the Son of God. He wants to cleave the two so as to put distance between Jesus and the church. Again, there is a critical distance, for sure. But belief in the divinity of Jesus did not develop gradually. Larry Hurtado has demonstrated that the claim that Jesus was God did not evolve after decades of pagan influence and philosophical speculation. It existed as an existential part of the community within a few short years of his death/resurrection. From the beginning, Jesus was associated with the devotion reserved for the One God. This never had happened with any of the prominent figures in Judaism before. Hurtado uses historical tools to demonstrate the inexplicability (at least in terms of history) of this event. These were strict monotheistic Jews who exploded in worship of Jesus soon after his death. No other historical factors can account for this change, except that something happened to those people.

And that something happened to Paul, too. He went from being a zealous Pharisee in conflict with this new Jewish movement, to adopting its very core belief that Jesus was the chosen one of God, resurrected and alive as Lord. And, contrary to Aslan, Paul did not seek to pacify Jesus to make him more palatable to Romans and his Gentile listeners. Quite the opposite. Michael Gorman argues persuasively in books like Reading Paul that the Apostle desired to create Christian communities that would exist as counter-cultural enclaves within the Empire. Where the state proclaimed Caesar as Lord, these house churches proclaimed the Crucified Christ as the only Lord. Where Rome exercised slavery, violence, and subjugation of women, these communities were places of freedom, equality, and love among all races, sexes, and classes. There was a political aspect to all of this, even as it was religious. Such a movement was in accord with what the historical Jesus sought to bring about.

It’s worth remembering, too, that Paul’s writings are the earliest texts in the New Testament. If the Gospels highlight more of Jesus’ message of justice for the poor, they came through oral tradition added to the existing Passion narratives, and at a later date. Paul wrote just a few years after Jesus and he’s already developed a high Christology. He didn’t deviate from the message of the first generation of Christians. Both the message of Jesus as God and God’s love for the poor were part of the oral tradition and immediate reaction to Jesus.

But another reader not only found Zealot convincing, but that it bolstered his overall faith in people:

I’ll start off with a little background. I’m the son of a Walsh and a Callahan – both, obviously, very Catholic. I was the kid who wanted to become a priest, and imagined blond, blue-eyed Jesus scowling whenever I felt guilty about some minor transgression. I can’t remember the exact turning point, but it may have been when Father Moriarty berated a girl with cancer for not taking her hat off in Church. Or when my friend who was getting interested in Buddhism, but still taught CCD, was banned from attending Mass. In any case, I drifted from the Church.

As it stands now I’m just not a person who accepts any aspect of the supernatural. But I’ve still got a deep cultural grounding in Catholicism and I’m very interested in religious history. So when my folks gave me a gift certificate to the Strand for Christmas, I bought Reza Aslan’s book.

I loved it. I found it entirely credible, and it made sense of a lot of things I’d read that didn’t quite seem to add up. And it actually made me more positive toward Christianity (or, at least, toward Christians). The fact that the Church took the teachings of “a Jewish itinerant preacher swept up in apocalyptic fervor” and turned them into a message of universal love, peace, equality, and forgiveness is an incredibly optimistic statement on humanity. And not even modern humanity! This was an era where people were nailed to a post for political dissent! How crazy is that?

I don’t think I’ll ever be a Christian again, because at a fundamental level God doesn’t make sense to me. But understanding what Jesus was actually about makes the Gospel interpretation of his message fill me with a bit more hope for people.

Watch all of Reza Alsan’s videos here. Our full Ask Anything archive is here.

The thread continues:

Although I am a Christian, I generally sympathize with the desire of atheists not to have religion assumed or forced upon them in various ways. But I have to respond to the reader who was embarrassed by Christian exhortations … at a Catholic funeral service. Perhaps one could argue that a funeral (or a marriage), bringing together many disparate friends and relatives of the deceased should be a more neutral occasion than a regular church service, but just how sensitive to the feelings of the irreligious do we need to be in our own houses of worship? Atheists who cannot deal with calls for affirmation of belief in a church probably need to think very hard about going into them in the first place.

Another is also incredulous:

Your reader actually suggests alternative things the priest could have said to allow the believers in the church to acknowledge their love of Jesus without embarrassing the non-believers in the room. Because that’s who’s important here – not the Catholic woman who died.

Not the Catholic family who grieves for her. Not the friends and fellow congregants who are there to to pay their respects. But the non-believing brother-in-law, who chose not to inform his wife’s family of his beliefs, who chose to attend the funeral knowing it could get all Catholic in there (it being a church) and who lacked the common sense to realize that maybe just standing at that moment would prevent causing pain to his wife and injury to his marriage.

How would a better understanding and acceptance of atheism among the general populace have changed that moment?

A “non-theist” reader argues that the nonbeliever had less of a reason to remain sitting than a hypothetical Jew or Muslim would:

If he had an alternative religious belief, I could understand his refusal to participate (and I’m sure his in-laws would have too). But as an atheist – one who is “without god” – there’s nothing sacred that would be profaned by his participation in this instance.

I have no particular problem going along with religious gestures that don’t especially harm me, and don’t contravene any particular moral code I have, if it helps people in situations like this. In fact, because I tend to think of religion as a social phenomenon – as something that gathers together a community, regardless of the truth or falsity of the metaphysical claims behind it – I am happy to go along with these kinds of acts. That’s the rational response – the one that tries to understand the needs that these beliefs serve, rather than getting hysterical over the fact that other people have them.

Another shifts gears:

I think we need to make another distinction among atheists: by region. It was immediately clear to me that your first batch of readers to respond are not from the Northeast. I grew up in Connecticut and live in New York City, and the persecution or ostracism of atheists here is practically nonexistent. The most you will get is some disapproval expressed behind closed doors. I remember my pastor saying once that atheists had no moral framework, and I thought it was the most offensive thing I’d ever heard in my (fairly liberal) church. On the other hand, I frequently had to bite my tongue growing up Christian when friends would openly mock Christian beliefs and traditions. So I can relate to the idea of the new atheist; what I would call the evangelistic atheist. But I imagine things are very different in the South, where religion is taken for granted and is much more a part of public life.