Author: Andrew Sullivan

Helen Thompson characterizes the holiday plant as “basically a vampire,” calling it “a parasite that spends its days sucking the ‘lifeforce’ from trees round the globe”:

Mistletoe’s parasitism starts with poop and exploding berries. Mistletoe bushes clump on branches like something out of a Dr. Seuss book. Their parasitism is airborne. Birds eat their berries, which are coated in gluey material called viscin. The birds poop all over the forest, and thanks to the viscin, the mistletoe seeds in said poop stick to branches. Once firmly attached to the branch, mistletoe sprouts and drills down into the branch until it reaches the tree’s veins. It sticks a haustorium (basically a straw) in and sips the tree’s mineral and water cocktail.

Another group of mistletoes, dwarf mistletoes, does things a bit differently. In a dramatic twist on mistletoe reproduction, their seeds explode, literally. The blast zone can reach up to 15 feet. Seeds stick to saplings and wedge themselves into the tree’s innards, infecting the entire tree, and sprouting sometimes years later. These guys are full parasites, taking sugar, water, and minerals from the tree. “Dwarf mistletoe is freaky, freaky, freaky stuff,” says David Watson, an ecologist at Charles Sturt University in Australia. “Its [shoots] look like miniature asparagus.”

Eventually, the mistletoe bush grows, blooms, and forms berries, and the cycle begins anew.

For a more festive take on the plant, check out the below Broad City webisode, which follows Abbi’s pursuit of her first below-the-mistletoe kiss:

In his sci-fi series Black Mirror, the great Brit Charlie Brooker uses his mordant wit to send up technologically-dependent modern life. The series’ newest episode, White Christmas, is a holiday special critics are hailing as “about as festive as being bludgeoned to death by a stocking full of coal, but … also an unerringly brilliant piece of lo-fi sci-fi.” Louisa Mellor sums up the episode’s central conceit:

Taking Google Glass to its logical conclusion, the world of White Christmas is populated by augmented humans whose Z-Eye implants let them control and share what they see. It’s in this kind of technological advance – one that doesn’t seem far off in the realm of possibility but that has the potential to shatter human relationships – that Black Mirror specialises.

The episode features John Hamm as Matt, who makes a living off such advanced tech. Sam Wollaston thinks Brooker’s “dystopia isn’t outrageous, it’s plausible, and all the more terrifying for it. Less sci-fi, more like now after a couple of software updates”:

Matt’s day job … – working for Smartintelligence, a company that, accompanied by Rossini’s Thieving Magpie overture, extracts “code” from people under anaesthetic, stores it in a widget called a cookie before implanting it into a simulated body, which is what happens to Greta (Oona Chaplin) – well, that’s basically human cloning. There’s probably a company in South Korea that’s about five minutes away from doing that. There’s a company in South Korea that thinks it can clone a woolly mammoth from a piece of 40,000-year-old frozen mammoth meat; putting people’s code inside plastic eggs like this, before turning them into slaves, has got to be easier.

Yes slaves. Because this isn’t just about the technology, it’s about the issues – very real world ethical issues – surrounding the technology. It’s about slavery and morality and torture and separation and access to children as well as the technology, and what the technology does to us. It’s about people, which is its real beauty. Along with all the razor-sharp wit, the nods and the winks, it manages to be a very human story.

Willa Paskin also finds the episode eerily relevant:

In “White Christmas,” wearable tech has advanced beyond the rudimentary stages of Google glass and become Z-eyes, irremovable implants that let you take pictures and record things and, if you must, “block” other people. As used in “White Christmas,” blocking makes the person who is blocked and the person who has done the blocking look like grey, fuzzy outlines to one another. They can’t hear each other or communicate, and the blocked party has no recourse.

The terminology suggests a lineage with blocking someone on Facebook or Twitter.  But here in 2014 we tend to understand blocking as essentially protective: It insulates people from unwanted attention and (often misogynistic) threats—though of course it also keep ex-friends and other irritants out of your feed. While Black Mirror understands the protective quality of blocking—the episode expressly deals with some messy, vile misogyny—it is more concerned with the ways blocking can be abused. In “White Christmas,” blocking is largely something women do to men in lieu of communicating with them. It’s the technological equivalent of sticking one’s fingers in one’s ears, an all-powerful silent treatment that can, sometimes, take on draconian legal backing.

If that sounds a bit wrong-headed, “White Christmas,” like the most disturbing episode of Black Mirror that exists, the similarly titled “White Bear,” asks questions about what we are willing to do to the least worthy amongst us: the convicted, the guilty, the criminal. When technology makes it easy to ignore, ostracize, manipulate, and torture the worst of us, might not the rest of us comply?

Merry Christmas.

Lisa Miller analyzes why “Bridget’s” self-loathing Christmas cards are such a social media hit:

Bridget’s cards won their internet moment not just because they’re clever and funny, but because they articulate that thought and the way it can become so explosive during the holidays: All this jollity rings false to me. Everyone, no matter what their relationship status, feels a little like Bridget this time of year — outcast, exiled, discontent; her cards capture a sentiment heartfelt enough to catch the attention of millions of newsfeed browsers but also noncontroversial enough to bypass the conformity threshold. Hark! Bridget has tapped our inner misfit, which emerges in a guffaw like a genie from a bottle. Isn’t that a gas?

Meanwhile, Sarah Condon ponders yuletide misery from a theological point of view:

Whether or not we realize it, we pointedly deny the harsh realities of our lives this time of year. I know I do. The moment we remember Jesus coming into the world is the same moment we hold up our perfectly posed Christmas photos. To the one who came to save us we say, “See how good we look? We are totally pulling this off.”

Only, we are not pulling it off, not even remotely. We are disappointed in our children, our spouses, the world, and ourselves. We deny our feelings of loneliness and inadequacy. We scurry to hide them. And the season provides some pretty amazing crutches for our denial: Jim Beam, party mix, and online shopping. All of a sudden, it becomes easy to make failure look like success. To make heartache look like mildly hungover.

Isn’t it odd that, more than any other time of year, Christmastime is when we want everyone to know just how glorious our lives are? I’m already bracing myself for the post-Christmas newsfeed. We can all gather round the old iPhone and sing a hymn of Sanctification by Gift Giving. For the record #besthusbandever #fairtrade and #santarocks are my own self-righteous picks for the season.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. We are actually allowed to admit that we are screwed up, yes, even at Christmas. Let the record show, St. Paul already gave us the bones in Romans 7: I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.