“Marry ‘Em When They’re Fifteen”

In which the right to free speech for Phil Robertson continues.  Money quote:

Look, you wait ‘til they get to be twenty years-old and the only picking that’s going to take place is your pocket. You got to marry these girls when they’re about fifteen or sixteen and they’ll pick your ducks.

And it appears he practiced what he now preaches. Also: could Sarah Palin please tell me what “picking your ducks” means? Her role model didn’t explain. Update from a reader:

I grew up in the rural north, not Louisiana, but here’s my take. A woman who will pick your ducks means just that; she will pluck the ducks you’ve shot. I did a fair amount of duck hunting with my dad. Plucking the ducks is a messy, smelly job involving boiling water and melted paraffin. My mother wouldn’t do it. I didn’t know any wives/mothers who would. My mother’s attitude was, “You shot ’em, you clean ’em”. Only a woman wholly subservient to her husband would clean his ducks without complaint, the kind you could keep barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen.

When we would travel to Manitoba to some remote hunting camp, there was usually a native woman, dirt poor and uneducated, who for a few bucks would clean ducks for any hunter who didn’t want to do it himself. That’s the only kind of woman I know you’d clean your ducks for you – and even her you’d have to pay.

Quote For The Day II

Obama Expresses Support For Same-Sex Marriage During Television Interview

“Flashback 12/29/12 …. Hard to believe this was 1 year ago today … when I reached a critical milestone of 100 days post transplant … and KJ was finally allowed to come back home. Reading this comforts me and I hope the same for you: ‘If you are depressed, you are living in the past. If you are anxious, you are living in the future. If you are at peace, you are living in the present.’

At this moment I am at peace and filled with joy and gratitude. I am grateful to God, my doctors and nurses for my restored good health. I am grateful for my sister, Sally-Ann, for being my donor and giving me the gift of life.

I am grateful for my entire family, my long time girlfriend, Amber, and friends as we prepare to celebrate a glorious new year together,” – Robin Roberts, capping one helluva gay year.

And yes, this is not news to me; and yes, it’s a huge relief that the woman to whom Obama spoke of his own “evolution” on marriage equality is no longer closeted; and yes, I’m glad for her survival of cancer and her own evolution as a free woman.

(Photo: U.S. President Barack Obama participates in an interview with Robin Roberts of ABC’s Good Morning America, in the Cabinet Room of the White House on May 9, 2012 in Washington, DC. During the interview, President Obama expressed his support for gay marriage, a first for a U.S. president. By Pete Souza/White House Photo via Getty Images.)

A Visionary Artist After The Fact

Reviewing a documentary about Vivian Maier, the 20th-century Chicago street photographer whose work was only discovered after her death in 2009, Noah Berlatsky questions Maier’s posthumous incorporation into the institutional art world:

“People identify with her; they love the story, and then they love the work,” gallery owner Steven Kasher says in The Vivian Maier Mystery, and Kasher’s formulation— “they love the story, and then they love the work”—can mean that buyers love both story and work. But it might also mean that they love the story first, and then love the work because of the story. If that’s the case, people may be paying thousands of dollars not for a particularly striking composition, but for a chance to be part of Maier’s odd narrative—to participate in the story of the secret, humble genius, now revealed. …

My discomfort with the way Maier’s work is presented and used in the film and the art world is in no way a condemnation of the artist herself. She, after all, had no part in her own marketing, and certainly never planned for her images to be seen or lauded. The voice-over towards the end of the film insists that “her compulsion to take pictures was her life,” but that’s the film’s assessment, not hers. It’s a story the film has imposed upon her, for its own purposes. Watching the movie, you get the uncomfortable feeling that a whole lot of people want Vivian Maier’s life to be her pictures so that, in owning or looking at them, both can be consumed.

The Anti-Carb Dogmatist

Dr. David Perlmutter rails against carbohydrates:

The neurologist and president of the Perlmutter Health Center in Naples, Fla., believes all carbs, including highly touted whole grains, are devastating to our brains. He claims we must make major changes in our eating habits as a society to ward off terrifying increases in Alzheimer’s disease and dementia rates.

After reading Perlmutter’s best-selling book on the manifold evils of carbs, and after talking with supporters and critics of the Paleo diet in the medical community, James Hamblin is unconvinced by the anti-gluten crusader:

Even as someone who was seriously skeptical of Perlmutter’s story, after reading his 336 pages—and watching his whole YouTube channel and most every TV appearance—I have found myself hesitating around grain. His message is so ardently and unwaveringly delivered. That is how one-sided pop-science works, though. [Dr. David] Katz wrote a tongue-in-cheek case that the 1974 advent of the Post-it note was the cause of the obesity pandemic, to show how easily correlations can be spun. If I read 336 pages on the evils of Post-its, I might set our office supply room on fire. …

When a person advocates radical change on the order of eliminating one of the three macronutrient groups from our diets, the burden of proof on them should be enormous. Everything you know is not wrong. Perlmutter has interesting ideas that I would love to believe. I’d love it if a diet could deliver all that he promises. There is value in belief. It’s what the Empowering Neurologist literally markets. His narrative comes with the certainty that you are doing something to save yourself from cognitive decline and mental illness, which is probably the most unsettling of disease prospects. With that belief also comes guilt; an idea that something could’ve been done to prevent a mental illness, when in fact it was bigger than us. To think that every time you eat any kind of carb or gluten, you are putting your mental health and cognitive faculties at risk is, to me, less empowering than paralyzing.

The Birth Of Creativity

In an interview, the painter Kathryn Lynch describes how having children has impacted her art:

Children grow you. Painting is responding to life and being a mother expands who you are andnoname what you respond to. If you make more life rub up against you, you have more of a world to make art from. I like what Charlie Parker says: “If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.” I feel like my paintings are better and bigger because of my children. You respond to whatever is in your life, and the people you have in your life feed your painting. Perhaps I am painting my children. I think I am putting everything and everyone I know in my work.

Because I saw myself first and foremost as an artist, I never thought I wanted children. The desire to be a mother came out of the blue at age thirty-six. Perhaps that I paint makes me more animal than intellect.

The two fastest paintings I ever did, and which I felt were some of my strongest paintings, were done two weeks after each child was born. My children brought out my lioness. When I went to paint after giving birth, it was easy to give birth to a painting, the paint just knew where to put itself on the canvas. In those moments I realized that my painting, and my ability to paint, was very directly related to events and occurrences in my life.

(Image: Mother and Child by Kathryn Lynch. For more of her work, visit her website here. Her painting will be featured at the Metro Show in January 2014)

How Nostalgia Helps Us

Nicholas Hune-Brown looks into research on the sentimental sensibility:

[A] study by Krystine Irene Batcho in The American Journal of Psychology examined the ways in which the nostalgia-prone cope with difficult situations. Batcho tested undergraduate subjects to see how predisposed to nostalgia they were before presenting them with a survey designed to see how they would react to stressful scenarios.

Batcho found that the nostalgia-prone were more likely to cope using helpful strategies, rather than dysfunctional ones. Counteracting the stereotype, the nostalgia-prone didn’t withdraw or go into denial: they sought social support and expressed emotions. The nostalgic had a deeper sense of connectedness to the past, and reflecting on earlier times could bring to mind coping strategies they had used before. Nostalgia proneness, Batcho concluded, came with real emotional and social benefits.

Our Genetic Moral Code

Back in November, in an interview with Sam Harris, Paul Bloom explained the thesis of his new book, Just Babies:

Certainly some morality is learned; this has to be the case because moral ideals differ across societies. Nobody is born with the belief that sexism is wrong (a moral belief that you and I share) or that blasphemy should be punished by death (a moral belief that you and I reject). Such views are the product of culture and society. They aren’t in the genes.

But the argument I make in Just Babies is that there also exist hardwired moral universals—moral principles that we all possess. And even those aspects of morality—such as the evils of sexism—that vary across cultures are ultimately grounded in these moral foundations.

A very different misconception sometimes arises, often stemming from a religious or spiritual outlook. It’s that we start off as Noble Savages, as fundamentally good and moral beings. From this perspective, society and government and culture are corrupting influences, blotting out and overriding our natural and innate kindness.

This, too, is mistaken. We do have a moral core, but it is limited—Hobbes was closer to the truth than Rousseau. Relative to an adult, your typical toddler is selfish, parochial, and bigoted. I like the way Kingsley Amis once put it: “It was no wonder that people were so horrible when they started life as children.” Morality begins with the genes, but it doesn’t end there.

In an excerpt from his book, Bloom explores how toddlers make moral choices:

Children tattle. When they see wrongdoing, they are apt to complain about it to an authority figure, and they don’t need to be prompted to do so. In one study, 2- and 3-year-olds were taught a new game to play with a puppet; when the puppet started to break the rules, the children would spontaneously complain to adults. In studies of siblings between the ages of 2 and 6, investigators found that most of what the children said to their parents about their brothers or sisters counted as tattling. And their reports tended to be accurate. They were ratting their sibs out, but they were not making things up. …

Part of the satisfaction of tattling surely comes from showing oneself to adults as a good moral agent, a responsible being who is sensitive to right and wrong. But I would bet that children would tattle even if they could do so only anonymously. They would do it just to have justice done. The love of tattling reveals an appetite for payback, a pleasure in seeing wrongdoers  (particularly those who harmed the child, or a friend ofthe child) being punished. Tattling is a way of off-loading the potential costs of revenge.

Another excerpt looks at the other side of morality:

Not all morality has to do with wrongness. Morality also encompasses questions of rightness, as nicely illustrated by a study of spontaneous helping in toddlers, designed by the psychologists Felix Warneken and Michael Tomasello. In one condition of the study, the toddler is in a room with his or her mother present. An adult walks in, his arms full, and he tries to open a closet door. Nobody looks at the child, or prompts him or her or asks for help. Still, about half do help—they will spontaneously stand up, wobble over, and open the door for the adult.

This is a small example for a small individual, but we see this kindness writ large when people donate time, money, or even blood to help others, sometimes strangers. This behavior too is seen as moral; it inspires emotions like pride and gratitude, we describe it as good and ethical. The scope of morality, then, is broad, encompassing both the harsh, judgmental elements and the softer, altruistic elements.