The Dish

A reader writes:

I just saw Barack Obama speak in Washington Square – and I was underwhelmed.

Obama spouted cliches at the crowd: Hope, Optimism, A Better America. You could tell that people wanted to like him, but he wasn’t giving people a reason to connect with him.

What Obama is missing is what Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton knew — or actually, what they were: they saw issues not as abstract ideas or slogans, but as people. The high point of Obama’s speech was an anecdote about a day he spent shadowing an SEIU health care worker. He talked about her pride and her pain, her fears and her dreams. He made "hope" concrete – not an idea, but a person.

Obama can only win if he makes this connection with people, empathizing with their hopes, and telling the stories that show what kind of a person he is. His biggest strength is his personality. Nobody actually likes Hillary — they may think she’s strong or effective, but she isn’t winning on empathy. The media has succeeded in killing off Edwards’s chances, too: whenever he tries to empathize, they call him a hypocrite. Obama’s the only one who can embody ordinary America like Reagan did, like Clinton did, like FDR did…and someone needs to tell him, quick.

Pinker-bait: are memories formed in early childhood "lost," or is it that we don’t have the words to express them?

The Employment Non-Discrimination Act may be unraveling in the Congress because of the inclusion of transgendered people in its protections.

A screed against restroom hand-dryers. My feelings entirely. Larry Craig may feel differently. They’re great white noise.

She reassures. All the Democrats and McCain now oppose Bush’s use of torture.

The richer you are in the world, the likelier you are to have sex with more people and to avoid condoms. A study of repressed Indians and horny, bare-backing Norwegians.

If we were all a lot richer, would we all be a little skinnier? Some thoughts on Cuba’s new anti-obesity campaign.

The Dems go on the offensive.

Cool stop-motion animation:

Oliver Sacks channels Sam Harris:

Music doesn’t represent any tangible, earthly reality. It represents things of the heart, feelings which are beyond description, beyond any experience one has had. The non-representational but indescribably vivid emotional quality is such as to make one think of an immaterial or spiritual world. I dislike both of those words, because for me, the so-called immaterial and spiritual is always vested in the fleshly — in "the holy and glorious flesh," as Dante said.

So if music is not directly representative of the world around us, then what’s inspiring it? One has the feeling of the muse, and the muses are heavenly beings. This feeling is very, very strong with Cicoria, the surgeon in my book who was hit by a bolt of lightning. He felt that he was actually tuning in to the music of heaven — that he had God’s phone number. I can’t avoid that feeling myself when I listen to Mozart. I feel differently about Beethoven. I think of Beethoven as a sweating Prometheus, a terrestrial figure.

I intensely dislike any reference to supernaturalism, but I think there can be profound mystical feelings which do not have to call on fictitious agencies like angels and demons and deities. The whole natural world is bathed in wonder and beauty and mystery. The feeling of the holy, the sacred, the wonderful, the mystical, can be divorced from anything theological, and is conveyed very powerfully in music.