The Dish

Readers won’t let go of this thread. One writes:

OMG! How’s about Diamond Dave’s bluegrass version of Van Halen’s “Jump”? And I can’t think of anything the beats Hayseed Dixie doing pretty much anything. Here’s Motorhead’s “Ace of Spades.”

Another writes:

My favorite of all-time: a gorgeous acoustic rendition of Outkast’s “Hey Ya.”

Another:

Don’t forget Popular Science‘s contributing troubadour Jonathan Coulton and his absolutely brilliant cover of Sir Mix a Lot’s “Baby Got Back.”

Another:

Has anyone passed along Ben Folds’ cover of Dre’s “Bitches Ain’t Shit”?  It’s an absolute classic.

And definitely NSFW. Another:

Here’s a lovely acoustic version of NWA’s “Straight Outta Compton” by Nina Gordon.

Of course the Cardigans, the Swedish twee-pop band, made it a point to include a Black Sabbath cover on every album they released.  Here’s “Iron Man.”

And this one doesn’t “soften” much, since the source material wasn’t all that hard to begin with, but a band called The Ukrainians have done an admirable job of covering the Smiths in, well, Ukrainian and traditional instruments.  Here’s “Bigmouth Strikes Again.”

Another:

How do you have four posts on the subject and miss the ultimate example?

See above.

This story hasn't gotten sufficient attention:

The detention of an 83-year-old priest in Brazil for allegedly abusing boys as young as 12 in a case involving lurid videotape and a congressional investigation has added to the scandals hitting the Roman Catholic Church in Latin America. The allegations against Monsignor Luiz Marques Barbosa – and two other Brazilian priests – have made headlines throughout the world's most populous Catholic nation and come amid accusations of sexual abuse by priests across the world. The scandal erupted when Brazilian television network SBT last month broadcast a tape of Barbosa in bed with a 19-year-old that was widely distributed on the Internet. The station said the video was secretly filmed in January 2009 and sent anonymously to the network. It was not clear if the 19-year-old, identified as a former altar boy who had worked with Barbosa for four years, had previous sexual relations with the priest.

This has now become a huge story in Brazil, a critical country for the church. Even in Africa, where the far-right of the church hopes to stanch its collapse in the secular West, the hierarchy is not immune:

After three young men and a boy told police last June an Italian priest had been sexually molesting them for years at a shelter for poor children, the most senior Roman Catholic cleric in Kenya announced the church would investigate thoroughly. Ten months later, nothing has been investigated by the church, its lawyer says, and the Vatican has not been notified. The accused priest, the Rev. Renato Kizito Sesana, continues to run the facility along with other shelters on the outskirts of Nairobi.

The charges remain unproven. But the lack of any response has generated fury in Kenya.

A reader writes:

You and Joseph Epstein both get Epicurus entirely wrong. The point is not to remain detached from life. The point is that, by not fearing death and punishment in an afterlife, you can in fact concentrate on this life and figure out how to make it worth living. Richness and complexity is precisely the goal.

Another writes:

You wrote: "Today, Epicurus would advise us all to get an Internet addiction. Push everything  else out of your mind until you are dead and miserable."

Since Epicurus is a hedonist, for him, anything that makes you miserable is irrational. So if internet addiction makes you miserable, by dint of consistency, to it Epicurus must be opposed. Even if you think Epicurus is wrong (as I do), woefully misinterpreting him for malign purposes is not the proper tact. I try to be nice to dead philosopers; they weren't mean to me and can't fight back.

Another:

The Epstein article you quote gives a strangely lop-sided view of Epicurean philosophy.  Yes, Epicurus urges us to "forget about God, death, pain and acquisition."  However, summing up his philosophy as "utter detachment from life" ignores his beliefs about friendship, which he saw as absolutely vital to happiness:

Of all things that wisdom provides for the happiness of life as a whole, by far the greatest is the possession of friendship. We ought to look around for people to eat and drink with, before we look for something to eat and drink; to feed without a friend is the life of a lion and a wolf. (source)

When it came to friendship, Epicurus was not at all for letting go, but rather holding fast.  He made his friendships the central focus of his existence.  And that strikes me as a good model for how to live today, just as it was in 300 B.C.

For more on Epicurus and friendship, check out the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and Epicurus Wiki.

Some Obama-like trends in voting patterns:

On April 1, as the campaign began, YouGov found Tory support among 18 to 34-year-olds at 37 points, Labour on 31 and the Liberal Democrats on 20.

But the manifesto launches and the first TV debate appear to have prompted a huge switch, reversing the Tories’ 17-point advantage over the Liberal Democrats into a 17-point deficit. Figures produced over the weekend show that young people now put the Liberal Democrats in front on 41, Labour on 28 and the Tories languishing third on 26.

A reader writes:

It might interest you to consider that there are whole orders of Muslims who don’t have any problem at all with visual depictions of the Prophet. It just happens that they’re Shi’a.

I find it fascinating, even as a Muslim myself. We’re worried about getting into an arms race with a part of the Muslim world which, on a lot of matters, is a good deal more practical than the Sunnis. What’s also strange to me is that I didn’t hear anyone complain about visual depictions of the Prophet (or anyone else) for much of my Muslim up-bringing. It was only when the Bosnian imam of our mosque fell in, albeit briefly, with a Sufic fundamentalist crowd that he started to make any mention of not having pictures of anybody hanging in one’s house. As a 14-year old, I told him that simply doesn’t make any sense, since my very devout mother had all sorts of pictures of all sorts of people hanging around our house and it certainly wasn’t with the intention of idolizing any of them. The imam got visibly annoyed at the time; my views remain the same to this day but his, luckily, have matured.

This is the risk of living in a pluralistic society; sooner or later you have to accept the reality of that pluralism (which only works, btw, if that plurality is willing to accept you on equal terms). Otherwise, the only alternative is to isolate, double-down, and become ever more extreme in one’s views.

An insight into the enduring appeal of radio and blogs:

All German terms for radio are derived from a single verb: funken, to spark. I've been trying to understand the continued appeal of radio when there are so many different and more convenient ways to get news and music, and I think it has to do with the idea that we know, when we listen to the radio, that someone, somewhere is alive. Es funkt. There is a spark at the other end, a fire on the hilltop.

A blog, done right, provides this proof the same way radio does. You hear a voice, which means that someone is actually sitting in a booth somewhere talking down the signal to you. And if they take your calls, or read your emails, then they're listening, too. I think blogs and radio are more than the sum of the information or entertainment they provide; they're a source of human comfort.

Eric Barker runs the numbers.

The Harvard Business Review sees some discouraging signs:

$4,600. That's how much less women made than men in their first post-MBA jobs, according to research by Nancy Carter and Christine Silva of Catalyst. And it's not because women tend to start at lower positions than men — though they do start at lower positions than men, on average, that's a separate problem. The research controls for job level and industry. What's more, the salary lines aren't parallel; men's salaries start higher, then rise faster. The gap widens over time, even after controlling for factors like having children or differing aspiration levels.

The new media landscape, on the other hand, looks much brighter.