Tag: Premium

Robert Hunt takes aim at Mary Eberstadt’s contention in her recent book, How the West Really Lost God, that the breakdown of the conventional family has led to secularization, offering an alternative account of the institution’s ambiguous place in the Christian tradition:

It is hardly surprising that the biological family is a key assumption of both Jewish and Christian scripture. Yet scripture also understands that the family can also be a broken and even oppressive institution. The most memorable families in the Bible are the most dysfunctional. Indeed, with the exception of Ruth and Boaz all the families in the Bible are dysfunctional. Even Jesus was raised by his stepfather.

It is precisely in God’s care of the widow, the orphan, the childless, the outcast, the adulterer, the prostitute, and even the murderer that God’s full nature as lover and redeemer of the world are revealed.

Thus it is these for whom care is demanded by scriptural ethics, and these are among the first gathered into the family of those who call God father and Christ brother. Only God’s love for all these broken and incomplete families rescues the common trinitarian symbolism from itself being exclusive and oppressive. It isn’t the family that brings (or pace Eberstadt fails to bring) these refugees from the family to God, it is God that makes family a possibility even for them.

The root of this failure in Eberstadt’s analysis may be that she does not consider the role of fictive kinship and its importance in the formation of the early Christian community. Her promotion of the specifically biological family as fundamental to healthy Christianity leads her to ignore the ways that Christians have understood what Jesus means by “being born again by water and the Spirit.” And so she also fails to consider alternative families that are so central to Christian history, and particularly Catholic and Orthodox history. Convents and monasteries, and even though she doesn’t see it, brotherhoods like her oft mentioned Opus Dei are surely as critical to the church as the biological family unit, something which even a sociologist can see and any historian should note.

Previous Dish on Eberstadt’s book here.

In our next clip, Maria and Alexandra discuss the idea that a writer is a “professional observer”:

Meanwhile, on her blog Brain Pickings, Maria quotes Alexandra, a professor at Barnard who specializes in dog cognition:

I am, professionally, an observer of animals — by which I mean nonhuman animals. I actually have been less interested in looking at people… But of course, as it turns out, the human animal is also infinitely more complex than I give us credit for. And I appreciated — a lot — the fact that, at the end of this book, I could take a walk with anybody — it didn’t have to be an expert… — and I became more appreciative of anyone’s perspective. If you can just get somebody to talk about what they see when they’re walking down the street, they will almost inevitably be seeing something different than you. Because they are a different person, and there’s a whole background there. And, actually, I think that is a kind of writerly trick — it’s sitting in the restaurant and making up stories about the people who sit around you… being interested in [them] and being able to imagine, backwards, their stories.

Follow the whole book club discussion here, and email your thoughts and observations to bookclub@andrewsullivan.com. You can listen to the entire conversation from Alexandra and Maria below:

In an interview earlier this year, Lonely Christopher described his debut poetry collection Death & Disaster Series (see above trailer):

It’s a collection of poetry that I wrote while my mother was battling late stage cancer and after she died. It was a very necessary thing for me to write—the only way I knew how to react to what was happening, which seemed so much larger than anything I had heretofore directly experienced. It’s an angry book screaming out for redemption.

Felix Bernstein appreciates how Christopher “depicts a prickly, dangerous, upsetting world that somehow reveals the unthinkably awful without making it palatable”:

Series is a prolonged elegy to Christopher’s mother, who died in August 2011, and was written from the time of his mother’s decline (“Poems in June” chronicling June 2011) to only about a year after her death. This “Death and Disaster Series” does the opposite of the “death and disaster” artworks provided us by Warhol and [Kenneth] Goldsmith: this is not a work that appropriates the banal in order to render it sublime. Rather, this is a work that draws from personal experience in order to make precarious beauties that lack any sort of monumentality in the face of darkness. In that way, his work can be seen to follow the neglected tracks of [John] Wieners, who called what he wrote obsessional, not confessional, poetry.

If Wieners obsessively tried to write the most embarrassing thing he could think of, Christopher betters him with even more guttural honesty:

“My boyfriend fucked me tonight without a condom / or lubricant; my anal wall started bleeding and / he cut open his dick before he came / and I shit blood.” But even within the goriest of passages, there is often a delicate treasuring of the poet’s personal glimpses of beauty.

In another recent rave review, Joyelle McSweeney also picked up on the contradictions in Christopher’s verse:

The lushness of Lonely Christopher is a contradictory flora, both decorated and plain, but always intensely voiced, dramatic, forceful, and red-hued. This is a poet who can write “I love a boy’s cock/it make me think of AIDS/it gets me off.” and who can end a volume by writing, simply, of his dead mother, “I love you, Susan”, while in the same volume producing ruffles and flourishes and lacings (and lashings) of language, of decadent aesthetic pleasure. My favorite poems in the volume are the ones which do both, deploying an admirable directness and a delectable oddness….

On the heels of Amanda Hess’ defense of ogling World Cup athletes, Esther Breger contends that the BBC America sci-fi show Orphan Black “embodies that female gaze better than anything else on television right now”:

In sex scenes, the camera glances past [Tatiana] Maslany’s body to linger on beefcake abs. Sarah’s two love interests, Paul and Cal, take on the role of Bond girls – objectified eye candy who spend their time helping our heroine or betraying her. Paul is a Ken Doll, and Cal is Your L.L. Bean Boyfriend come to life. Even when she uses sex as a distraction – jumping Paul when he begins to suspect her identity last season– Sarah isn’t a femme fatale or vixen. The focus is her desire, not his. When Paul has sex with Rachel this season, he’s like a stallion at a livestock auction. She commands him to undress, inspects his body, appraises his teeth, pours him a glass of wine and won’t let him drink it.

Meanwhile, a reader squeals over the previous post:

So I’m an ardent World Cup fan, I love the game, and “explosion at the mancandy factory” is now my new favorite line! I have been struck by how HOTHOTHOT almost all of the goalkeepers have been this year. (¡OCHOA! Be still my heart! Being a soccer nerd, the fine playing just adds to the hotness exponentially) But can we talk about the man hugging??? It’s one of the most beautiful things in a sport that is full of beautiful things! Now, where are my smelling salts?

Another changes the mood:

As a straight guy who was told at a young age that I was “not cute enough to date”, I take extreme umbrage at the assumption that men do not have their self-esteem thrown for a loop based on the objectification of the male body.

The problem is that a guy who is not considered physically attractive is basically expected to “suck it up” and deal with it.  We’re told to go to the gym, as if all the blame rests on the individual.  No one would dare suggest such a thing about feminine beauty.

There is nothing that can be done about the inherent objectification that goes in with sexual human beings.  It’s like male masturbation; anyone who says “no” on the survey is lying.  However, the idea that men do not somehow suffer as a result is crazy.  This should at least be acknowledged by women, or else it’s simply exercising privilege – the privilege to look at men like meat while forcefully fighting against looking at women like meat.

Another is on the same page:

Thank you for highlighting the very recent and prolific objectification of World Cup athletes. I don’t necessarily have a problem with it per se, but I do have a problem when it’s by Jezebel or other feminists outlets who self-righteously and consistently claim that women should not be judged by their bodies – but say it’s perfectly okay to do it to dudes. The obvious double standard is infuriating; how can objectifying one population be sexist and disgusting, but objectifying a different population the exact same way is perfectly kosher? That’s crap. Pick one or the other, judge or don’t judge and stick to it. I don’t care which as long as you are consistent about it.

This strongly echoes your discussion thread a while ago where women shared their stories about not being attracted to short men. Many posts were defensive about their sexual preference (i.e., that’s just who I am), but when they were challenged by a guy who said (along the lines of) if this were a bunch of guys talking about women’s weight or bust size they would be called misogynists. The very next poster said “as they should be.” I think it’s this point that you say “and the beat goes on!”

Saj Mathew explains why the Argentine short story writer and essayist Jorge Luis Borges disdained soccer:

His problem was with soccer fan culture, which he linked to the kind of blind popular support that propped up the leaders of the twentieth century’s most horrifying political movements. In his lifetime, he saw elements of fascism, Peronism, and even anti-Semitism emerge in the Argentinean political sphere, so his intense suspicion of popular political movements and mass culture—the apogee of which, in Argentina, is soccer—makes a lot of sense. (“There is an idea of supremacy, of power, [in soccer] that seems horrible to me,” he once wrote.) Borges opposed dogmatism in any shape or form, so he was naturally suspicious of his countrymen’s unqualified devotion to any doctrine or religion even to their dear albiceleste.

Soccer is inextricably tied to nationalism, another one of Borges’ objections to the sport. “Nationalism only allows for affirmations, and every doctrine that discards doubt, negation, is a form of fanaticism and stupidity,” he said. National teams generate nationalistic fervor, creating the possibility for an unscrupulous government to use a star player as a mouthpiece to legitimize itself. In fact, that’s precisely what happened with one of the greatest players ever: Pelé. … Governments, such as the Brazilian military dictatorship that Pelé played under, can take advantage of the bond that fans share with their national teams to drum up popular support, and this is what Borges feared—and resented—about the sport.

Sarah Albers, on the other hand, offers a more positive take on the sport’s cultural impact – at least for Americans:

At the Wall Street Journal, Jeremy Gordon called the World Cup a “global ritual.” And it would seem so. But, more importantly, it is a national ritual: it is a means for people from all around the country to connect, an opportunity so rarely afforded us anymore. William Leitch of Sports on Earth says that we “can talk all we want about a globalized society, … but that has always seemed more true in theory than in practice. In real life, we search out our own.”

And I think that this cuts to the heart of the issue: it is through sports that Americans, so wary of religion, race, and politics, can finally have confidence that we are among “our own.”

Ikea is raising its average minimum wage for American employees to $10.76 per hour, a 17 percent increase. Jordan Weissmann is encouraged by the news:

Notably, Ikea isn’t raising prices on its furniture to pay for the raise. Instead, the company’s management says it believes the pay hike will help them compete for and keep talent, which is of course good for business. The Gap used a similar justification when it announced it would raise its own minimum to $10 by 2015.

Which I think hints at something about what would likely happen if the U.S. raised the federal minimum. The conservatives who argue that higher pay floors kill jobs also tend to assume that businesses are already running at pretty much peak efficiency. According to this logic, forcing companies to spend more on labor will lead to less hiring. But left-leaning economists see it differently. They tend to argue that increasing wages can lead to savings for business by reducing worker turnover, for instance, and forcing managers to make better use of their staff.

But Bouie is less than thrilled:

[I]t’s worth noting that there’s less than meets the eye to Ikea’s promise to hew to local and municipal minimum wage hikes.

Most Ikea stores are located in suburbs, as opposed to urban centers. The Ikea near Charlotte, North Carolina, for instance, is located on the outskirts of the area, as is the Ikea near Seattle (in Renton) and the one in Dallas (near Frisco). By virtue of geography, these stores will avoid city-mandated wage hikes. What’s more, for as much as Ikea and similar stores might be good for workers, their overwhelmingly suburban locations makes them isolated from large numbers of potential workers who lack employment opportunities in their own areas and neighborhoods.

But Danny Vinik details one way Ikea is taking geography into account in a big way:

[The company] added a smart twist: They will tie the wage level in each store to the cost-of-living in the surrounding area, meaning Ikea workers in Pittsburgh will receive a different hourly wage than those in Woodbridge, Vermont.

At first glance, this may seem unfair. Those workers in Woodbridge and Pittsburgh are doing the same jobs. Why shouldn’t they receive the same pay? But Ikea has the right idea. The minimum wage is an arbitrary interference with the free market. Most economists justify it, and most Americans support it, because they want to make sure low-wage workers have an adequate standard of living. But living standards vary widely across the country.

Much more Dish on the minimum wage here.