The Dish

In a recently unlocked essay, Alexander Landfair traces the history of Facebook’s policies on deceased users. He contemplates the digital afterlife more broadly:

Death is a problem not only for Facebook but also for all the major landmarks of the Internet landscape: Google, Twitter, Amazon and Yahoo, the last of these being the only company in that list to include a death clause in its “terms of service.” Though the U.S. government encourages every citizen to create a “social media will,” the concept of digital executors is a legal gray area generally not recognized by law. Only one state, Oklahoma, has passed legislation allowing one’s legal executor to lawfully access one’s online accounts. And even for Oklahomans, to bequeath your Flickr password to your next of kin, for example, is technically illegal—as it violates Yahoo’s terms of service contract. Though criminal, it is currently the only way to preserve your online photo albums after death. Across the pond, Europe’s highest courts are currently hearing important cases regarding le droit à l’oubli—or the “right of oblivion”—that will decide the extent to which individuals determine the fate of their online identities. More broadly, the legislation will help the world determine what it means to “be online” and whether one can ever leave the Internet once one steps foot inside.

Previous Dish on the subject here.

(Hat tip: Tess Malone)

Philip Roth is not a Jewish writer. Meditation for prisoners. Primates through the looking glass. How Richard Dawkins is more utterly certain about his beliefs than Sean Hannity. Hotter cyclists win. And Cinderella on Tinder (genius).

Oh, and the habits of straight guys on dating and hook-up apps:

With a lot of guys I could just, I wrote gibberish, just pounded on keyboard for a minute and sent it and the vast majority of them responded with that sounds great, what are you doing on Friday?

Not that gay guys are any better.

The most popular post of the weekend was The Language Of Certainty In Atheism, followed by “With My Daddy In The Attic.”

See you in the morning.

From “Jail Poems” by Bob Kaufman (1925-1986):

I am sitting in a cell with a view of evil parallels,
Waiting thunder to splinter me into a thousand me’s.
It is not enough to be in one cage with one self;
I want to sit opposite every prisoner in every hole.
Doors roll and bang, every slam a finality, bang!
The junkie disappeared into a red noise, stoning out his hell.
The odored wino congratulates himself on not smoking,
Fingerprints left lying on black inky gravestones,
Noises of pain seeping through steel walls crashing
Reach my own hurt. I become part of someone forever.
Wild accents of criminals are sweeter to me than hum of cops,
Busy battening down hatches of human souls; cargo
Destined for ports of accusations, harbors of guilt.
What do policemen eat, Socrates, still prisoner, old one?

(Reprinted from Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry, edited by Charles Henry Rowell © 2013 by Charles Henry Rowell. Used by kind permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation. Photo of Kaufman in San Francisco, circa the 1950s, via the City Lights blog)

“An earlier version of this article used an incorrect term for an experiment in which women sniff the unwashed T-shirts of men. Selecting the T-shirts of men with genes markedly different from their own is not a form of assortative mating, which is the choosing of similar genes, not different ones,” – New York Times.

They have the gay men’s chorus in Russia?

Tim Wu describes the Oji-Cree, “a people, numbering about thirty thousand, who inhabit a cold and desolate land roughly the size of Germany.” Though the Oji-Cree lived healthful and relatively and tech-free lives until the 1960s, they have since rapidly adapted to modern advances like electricity:

[I]n the main, the Oji-Cree’s story is not a happy one. Since the arrival of new technologies, the population has suffered a massive increase in morbid obesity, heart disease, and Type 2 diabetes. Social problems are rampant: idleness, alcoholism, drug addiction, and suicide have reached some of the highest levels on earth. Diabetes, in particular, has become so common (affecting forty per cent of the population) that researchers think that many children, after exposure in the womb, are born with an increased predisposition to the disease. Childhood obesity is widespread, and ten-year-olds sometimes appear middle-aged. Recently, the Chief of a small Oji-Cree community estimated that half of his adult population was addicted to OxyContin or other painkillers.

Technology is not the only cause of these changes, but scientists have made clear that it is a driving factor. In previous times, the Oji-Cree lifestyle required daily workouts that rivalled those of a professional athlete. “In the early 20th century,” writes one researcher, “walking up to 100 km/day was not uncommon.” But those days are over, replaced by modern comforts. Despite the introduction of modern medicine, the health outcomes of the Oji-Cree have declined in ways that will not be easy to reverse. The Oji-Cree are literally being killed by technological advances.

Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee’s short documentary “Path of Freedom,” above, shows us how inmates at the John J. Moran Prison in Rhode Island have embraced meditation. Producer Dorothée Royal-Hedinger wrote about what she saw while filming behind bars:

The hour-long meditation class was a place many prisoners felt they could be themselves. Their mindfulness practice, they stressed, was not an escape, but rather a tool that helped them come to terms with the reality of their situation. One prisoner explained, “Once you come to prison, your life keeps tumbling and tumbling and it’s like a never-ending wall that won’t stop building…unless you find a way to get over that wall, or at least in front of it.”

The meditation course gives the prisoners the space to confront their guilt, remorse, grief, and anger; it also opens up the possibilities of making positive choices, no matter how small. As one prisoner expressed, “Someone has given us an opportunity to meditate and connect ourselves. That’s golden.”

(Hat tip: Paul Rosenfeld)

Jason Brennan ponders the limits of morality:

My worry here is that ought implies can, and it may well be that people can’t bring themselves to do certain things. Agency isn’t all or nothing. Just as some people might compulsively engage in certain behaviors that they cannot control, so many of us might have an equivalent inability to do certain things that morality might otherwise require. It’s not just that we are unwilling to these things, but that we are unable to be willing to do these things.

Of course, people are different. [Philosopher] Peter Singer is willing to give more to charity (not as much as he says he should, though) than most people, including me. But that doesn’t show that everyone could give as much as Singer. Everyone’s psychology is a bit different. Perhaps Singer is a few standard deviations to the right of the curve when it comes to psychological ability to give to others. Perhaps some other people quite literally cannot will to give. For them to give 50% of their income to charity is physically impossible, because their brains just don’t work that way. You might as well ask them to jump to the moon.

In an interview, Phillip Roth explains why he refuses to label himself an “American-Jewish writer”:

[Q]: Many consider you the preeminent Jewish American writer. You told one interviewer, however, “The epithet ‘American Jewish writer’ has no meaning for me. If I’m not an American, I’m nothing.” You seem to be so much both. Can you say a little more about your rejection of that description?

[A]: ”An American-Jewish writer” is an inaccurate if not also a sentimental description, and entirely misses the point. The novelist’s obsession, moment by moment, is with language: finding the right next word. For me, as for Cheever, DeLillo, Erdrich, Oates, Stone, Styron and Updike, the right next word is an American-English word. I flow or I don’t flow in American English. I get it right or I get it wrong in American English. Even if I wrote in Hebrew or Yiddish I would not be a Jewish writer. I would be a Hebrew writer or a Yiddish writer. … If I don’t measure up as an American writer, at least leave me to my delusion.