Author: Dish Staff

by Dish Staff

New research suggests you’re better off chatting up fellow commuters than staying mum:

The investigation began with rail and bus commuters travelling into Chicago. Dozens of them were recruited into one of three conditions – to engage in conversation with a stranger on the train, sit in solitude, or simply behave as they usually would. Afterwards they mailed back a questionnaire in which they answered questions about the experience. Their answers were compared to the predictions made by other commuters, who instead of fulfilling one of these three conditions, imagined what kind of experience they’d have had if they’d taken part.

The returned questionnaires showed it was those commuters who were instructed to strike up conversation with a stranger who’d had the most positive experiences (sitting in solitude was the least enjoyable, with behaving as normal scoring in between). Surprisingly perhaps, chatting with a stranger didn’t come at the cost of self-reported productivity. These findings contrasted starkly with the predictions made by the commuters who imagined taking part – they thought that being asked to engage with a stranger would have been the least enjoyable of the three conditions. [Researchers Nicholas] Epley and [Juliana] Schroeder said this provides evidence of a “severe misunderstanding of the psychological consequences of social engagement”, thus providing a clue as to why, despite being social animals, we so often ignore each other.

(Photo of NYC subway via Rebecca Wilson)

by Dish Staff

A reader writes:

I am writing to say that I will miss Elizabeth Nolan Brown and Phoebe Maltz Bovy when their guest-blogging tenure is over. I am sure there are plenty of laments thrown your way about their female- and youthful-centric topics, but I have to say that the Dish has turned into a far more interesting version of Jezebel this week.

I am by no means a libertarian, save in one area: feminism. And as such, I have agreed with pretty much everything Ms Brown has written on the matter. I was bobbing my head throughout her piece on prostitution. And I loved how Ms Bovy takes a seemingly superficial topic like fashion and spins it toward an essay on cultural appropriation.

So thank you for inviting them this week, and you can be sure that I will seek out their blogs to read more of their writing.

It’s been a joy having them on the blog this week. And Phoebe will continue her role as a Dishtern, so you may see her writing again soon. For more on the two women, check out their intros. Read all of Phoebe’s posts here and all of Elizabeth’s posts here.

(Photos: Phoebe on the left, Elizabeth on the right)

by Matthew Sitman

“For me … it’s part of a larger question, which is ‘Why are things the way they are?’ That’s what we scientists try to find out, in terms of deep laws. We don’t yet have what I call a final theory. When we do, it might shed some light on the question of why there is anything at all. The laws of nature might dictate that there has to be something. For example, those laws might not allow for empty space as a stable state. But that wouldn’t take away the wonder. You’d still have to ask, ‘Why are the laws that way, rather than some other way?’ I think we’re permanently doomed to that sense of mystery. And I don’t think belief in God helps. I’ve said it before and I’ll repeat it. If by ‘God’ you have something definite in mind – a being that is loving, or jealous or whatever – then you’re faced with the question of why God’s that way and not another way. And if you don’t have anything very definite in mind when you talk about ‘God’ being behind the existence of the universe, then why even use the word? So I think religion doesn’t help. It’s part of the human tragedy: we’re faced with a mystery we can’t understand,” – physicist Steven Weinberg, responding to the eponymous question of Jim Holt’s Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story.

by Dish Staff

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The above film, Nahkon Pathom, Thailand, is among the winners of the Smithsonian’s 2014 In Motion video contest. A description of the short documentary:

Women in Thailand cannot become officially ordained buddhist monks; Chatsumarn Kabilsingh, age 68, is determined to reverse this tradition. Biel Calderon’s video details Kabilsingh’s spiritual journey after leaving her job as a professor at a renowned Thai university in 2000, being ordained a full bhikkhuni (the word for female Buddhist monks) in Sri Lanka, and returning to her home country to improve the position of Thai women in religion.

by Dish Staff

Emma Green looks at a study indicating that, unlike in previous generations, a college education no longer correlates with less religiosity:

“The core finding is that the association between graduating from college and religious disaffiliation has changed drastically across generations,” said Philip Schwadel, the study’s author and a professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. For people who were born in the 1920s and ’30s, the godless-college-grad stereotype is somewhat true: They were twice as likely as their uneducated peers to be religionless, not identifying with a particular church or synagogue or other religious institution.

But over time, that trend changed. “For those people who were born in the 1960s, there’s really no difference between the college-educated and the non-college-educated in terms of their likelihood of disaffiliating from religion,” Schwadel said. “And for those born in the 1970s, it’s actually the non-college-educated who are relatively likely to disaffiliate.”

This may have happened for a few reasons, Schwadel said. “The growth in college education may have led to a different population of people going to college.” In the 1920s, only elites attended universities; especially at a time when religiosity was almost uniformly part of American life, it makes sense that this very small group of top intellectuals were the most likely to reject religion. Now that higher education has gotten somewhat more economically diverse and a lot more widespread, though, it seems natural that intellectual diversity at the university level has grown, too.

by Dish Staff

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As Daniel D’Addario sees it, the recently launched channel reinforces “nasty stereotypes about atheism – smugness, gleeful disregard for others’ beliefs – to a degree that’s close to unwatchable”:

AtheistTV frames atheism as a perpetual reaction against a conquering force. And that reaction isn’t reasoned debate. It’s unattractive nihilism. … One hardly needs to be religious to see the rhetorical flaws in Andy Shernoff, the frontman of punk band The Dictators, describing himself as “a little like Martin Luther King” before asking the audience “Ready for some sarcasm? Ridiculous ideas need to be mocked.” That Shernoff’s performance indulges straight-up homophobia and misogyny in a frankly mean-spirited song about giving Jesus oral sex is just a fringe benefit of being a radical truth-teller who doesn’t care whom one offends. Beyond the catharsis of mockery, what can AtheistTV offer? What alternative does it provide? Leaving aside even the question of winning over believers, how can it even keep atheists watching if it’s just a perpetual drumbeat of calling Jesus “the zombie Jew”?