The Dish

by Tracy R. Walsh

It’s all in the cheeks:

The Dutch psychologist Corine Dijk gave volunteers a series of photos of people, some blushing and some not, accompanied by tales of their recent mishaps, ranging from appearing overdressed at a party to farting in a lift. The blushers were judged more favorably, despite their indiscretion.

Other research has found that if you blush people are more likely to forgive you, and it can even avert a conflict. When you’re trying to work out who to trust, it makes sense to choose the people who would feel guilty if they did anything wrong. The ideal person is someone who would blush and give themselves away.

Update from a reader:

That blushing article is really troubling (as is the research producing it). Everyone blushes, but not everyone’s blush is visible to everyone. Indeed, this sounds a lot like Thomas Jefferson’s infamous “Query XIV” in Notes on the State of Virginia, in which he aesthetically assesses human beings of European and African descent:

Whether the black of the negro resides in the reticular membrane between the skin and scarf-skin, or in the scarf-skin itself; whether it proceeds from the colour of the blood, the colour of the bile, or from that of some other secretion, the difference is fixed in nature, and is as real as if its seat and cause were better known to us.  And is this difference of no importance?  Is it not the foundation of a greater or less share of beauty in the two races?  Are not the fine mixtures of red and white, the expressions of every passion by greater or less suffusions of colour in the one, preferable to that eternal monotony, which reigns in the countenances, that immoveable veil of black which covers all the emotions of the other race?  Add to these, flowing hair, a more elegant symmetry of form, their own judgment in favour of the whites, declared by their preference of them, as uniformly as is the preference of the Oranootan for the black women over those of his own species.  The circumstance of superior beauty, is thought worthy attention in the propagation of our horses, dogs, and other domestic animals; why not in that of man?

In other words, Jefferson’s eye can’t see the blush. He “sees” like a black-and-white photocopier that would later reproduce complex, verisimilitudinous images of lighter-complexioned people and reduce images and thus the humanity of darker-complexioned people to an undifferentiated dark blop. It doesn’t take too much reason and imagination to see how pernicious and dangerous this all is amid current conversations about how cops see black children as “less innocent and less young than white children.” Jefferson’s beliefs are hardly a relic of the past.

(Gerard van Honthorst’s Smiling Girl, a Courtesan, Holding an Obscene Image, 1625, via Wikimedia Commons)

by Jonah Shepp

Masha Gessen suggests a way for pro-gay companies to support LGBT individuals in Russia and other oppressive countries without damaging their business interests:

Immigration Equality, a legal organization that represents LGBT asylum-seekers in the United States, has recently hired a full-time Russian-speaking paralegal to help with the intake of new clients.

Russian speakers now represent the bulk of the group’s incoming clients, overtaking people from Jamaica, who had traditionally held first place. (To grasp the significance of that information, think how much more difficult it is to get to the United States from Russia than from Jamaica.) The hundreds of Russian LGBT refugees who have come over in the last few months are but the forerunners of a larger looming exodus—these are the people with enough money or self-confidence to leave now. As things get more desperate, as they inevitably will, many more will follow. These people are lucky enough to get legal help from Immigration Equality, but at this point there is no organization that can reliably help them with housing, money, job training, and job placement.

This is where the multinational companies come in. First, they should offer their Russian LGBT employees and their families the opportunity to transfer to the United States. Second, they should create programs to actively recruit, hire, and, if necessary, retrain LGBT refugees who are already in the United States. Such programs should not be limited to Russians: As the civilizational divide along LGBT-rights lines grows ever wider, increasing numbers will face more and more danger in countries all over the world, and they will need a safe haven.

Listen to Masha in a long conversation with Andrew about Russian gays, Putin’s policies, and what we should do about them here. A sample:

After discovering a “spiritual program” that helped lift him out of “an acute psychological crisis,” Marshall Poe advocates for colleges and universities to offer classes in religious practice to their students:

Upon reflection, it occurred to me that all religions, if seriously practiced, do precisely what this “religion” had done for me: They teach you how to live. It is true, of course, that clerics often tell their flocks to believe things that are frankly unbelievable. And some even tell the faithful that if they don’t believe these incredible things they will suffer some harsh penalty, like going to hell. But most clerics of my acquaintance are not very interested in fire and brimstone. Rather, they are interested in making sure those in their care are spiritually fit. The way they do this—and, so far as I know, always have—is to give people a higher purpose and a set of guidelines necessary to pursue that purpose. They bring order to the thoughts and actions of people whose thoughts and actions are naturally disordered. They give people a way of life.

It was in this way that I became convinced that college classes in religious practice might help suffering undergraduates learn to live successfully. The classes would at the very least introduce undergraduates to the idea that there were practical ways to alleviate their suffering. They would plant the seed. Even if the students chose not to follow the practice they had learned, their recollection of it would remain in store for the day they would need it. The day would inevitably come and when it did, they would have someplace to turn for help.

Related Dish on studying theology at university here.

Last July, Brendan Borrell attended the James Randi Educational Foundation’s 15th annual “Amaz!ng Meeting,” which he describes as “perhaps the world’s preeminent gathering of self-proclaimed skeptics, people dedicated to debunking and demystifying anything that smacks of the supernatural.” Borrell profiles Leo Igwe, a speaker at the convention who campaigns against witchcraft in Africa:

If any attendees know anything about Igwe, it is for his “Manifesto for a Skeptical Africa,” published on the foundation’s website in October of 2012. In it, he criticizes African societies for their inability to think critically about the traditional beliefs he calls “Stone-Age spiritual abracadabra.” He is in Las Vegas to talk about the resurgence of literal witch-hunts in Sub-Saharan Africa, and the rise of accusations lobbed at children, particularly in countries ravaged by conflict and where levels of education are low. While sorcery has always been a part of traditional belief systems in Africa, the stigmatization of children as witches seems to be a recent invention. In two Niger Delta states alone, Akwa Ibom and Cross River, there have been hundreds of documented cases of children being beaten, burned, beheaded, doused in acid or boiling water, poisoned, or buried alive. Like his self-righteous colleagues in the Western world, Igwe can be mocking and sarcastic, but he also knows he is on a deadly serious crusade.

During his talk, Igwe displays a picture of a Ghanaian man inside a thatch-roofed hut performing a traditional soothsaying ritual with seashells. As he pauses on the image Igwe declares, “Friends, these are the fakers. He uses cowries and throws them on the ground and is staring at them as if there is something he is seeing.” Igwe’s voice rises in pitch, volume, and tempo, and he continues in an exasperated tone: “He is seeing nothing! It’s fake!” There are a few chuckles in the audience, but mostly silence, as if no one is quite sure how to balance their skeptical instincts against their cross-cultural sensitivities. The soothsayer may well be a charlatan, but only Igwe had the right to ridicule him.

The Neil deGrasse Tyson reboot of Cosmos premiered last Sunday. Audra Wolfe counters claims that the show will revolutionize popular support for science, writing dismissively of “Cold War-era fantasies that confuse the public understanding of science with its appreciation”:

It’s a wonderful sentiment, this idea that exposure to the wonders of science will allow people to transcend social, political, and cultural differences. But it’s also obviously wrong, given how much 20th-century warfare depended directly on the products of science. (Historian of technology Patrick McCray has compiled a helpful list of some of the ways that scientists have, in fact, “led armies into battle.”) …

Looking back on the 1980s, it’s hard to say how much public support for scientific research, including the planetary exploration missions so dear to Sagan’s heart, can be credited directly to programs like Cosmos, and how much depended on Congressional support for a space industry that might play some yet-to-be-determined role in World War III. Today, the federal government continues to invest in R&D, but those funds skew toward defense projects, health research, and technology-oriented innovation. Instead of space war, defense R&D focuses on cybersecurity, remote-sensing technologies, and neurowarfare. NASA, meanwhile, limps along. That seems unlikely to change, whether Cosmos scores 5 or 500 million viewers.

But Chris Mooney maintains that “scientific knowledge, and wanting to do something about the problems that science reveals, are inseparable”:

And as soon as you want to change something in the world because of science, you inevitably run up against interests, emotions, and denial. Global warming is the case in point: Just as Carl Sagan worried about nuclear holocaust because of science, so we today worry about the planet’s steady warming. Indeed, that kind of thinking is central to the Cosmos legacy. Asked … about the warming of the planet, Tyson explained the ultimate message of Cosmos: “You are equipped and empowered with this cosmic perspective, achieved by the methods and tools of science, applied to the universe. And are you going to be a good shepherd, or a bad shepherd? Are you going to use your wisdom to protect civilization, or will you go at it in a shortsighted enough way to either destroy it, or be complicit in its destruction? If you can’t bring your scientific knowledge to bear on those kinds of decisions, then why even waste your time?”

So in the end, we should all thank Tyson—as well as Fox, National Geographic, and the show’s many writers and producers—for making the new Cosmos happen. It will contribute immeasurably to the appreciation of science in America and beyond. It will make kids think harder about pursuing science careers by showing them that the cosmos is intensely awesome, and the act of understanding it is downright heroic.

Previous Dish on the series here and here.

(Video: The Verge interviews Tyson about the new Cosmos)

Eva Saulitis describes hiking “streams and bear trails and muskegs and mountains” in Prince William Sound, Alaska. The environment has taken on a different meaning for her since she learned she has an incurable form of breast cancer:

In “King Of The River,” a poem by Stanley Kunitz, he … watches salmon battling up a stream, and the parallel he draws with human life and striving and passion and aging is tight and explicit and maybe even a little overwrought—at least I saw it that way when I first read the poem. I was in my thirties then, and my health was a given. Now the poem reads more like a biblical truth. The great clock of your life / is slowing down, / and the small clocks run wild. These great clocks and small clocks are the very texture of our days on earth.

Yet for most of us, most of the time, they tick on unheard. In the society in which I live, in that other world, across the mountains—far from this wild place where death is explicit and occurs in plain sight, where it is ordinary and everyday and unremarkable—people don’t talk about dying.

People rarely witness the dying of their fellow humans (much less the animals they eat). Special people minister to the dying. Sometimes people in their travail fly overseas and pay strangers to hasten their dying. We have no charnel grounds, only cemeteries shaded by big trees, mowed and tended by groundskeepers. Or we’re handed the ashes of our loved ones, in sealed urns or handsome boxes, to disperse at sea or from mountain peaks.

Facing death in a death-phobic culture is lonely. But in wild places like Prince William Sound or the woods and sloughs behind my house, it is different. The salmon dying in their stream tell me I am not alone. The evidence is everywhere: in the skull of an immature eagle I found in the woods; in the bones of a moose in the gully below my house; in the corpse of a wasp on the windowsill; in the fall of a birch leaf from its branch. These things tell me death is true, right, graceful; not tragic, not failure, not defeat. For this you were born, writes Stanley Kunitz. For this you were born, say the salmon. A tough, gritty fisherman friend I knew in my twenties called Prince William Sound “God’s country.” It still is, and I am in good company here.