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Adelle M. Banks reports that the military will now allow serving members to identify as humanists:

More than two years after first making his request, Army Maj. Ray Bradley can now be known as exactly what he is: a humanist in the U.S. military.

“I’m able to self-identity the belief system that governs my life, and I’ve never been able to do that before,” said Bradley, who is stationed at Fort Bragg in North Carolina and works on supporting readiness of the Army Reserve’s medical staff. Lt. Col. Sunset R. Belinsky, an Army spokeswoman, said Tuesday (April 22) that the “preference code for humanist” became effective April 12 for all members of the Army. …

The change comes against a backdrop of persistent claims from atheists and other nonbelievers that the military is dominated by a Christian culture that is often hostile to unbelief. In recent years, activists from the broad spectrum of freethinking organizations have demanded equal treatment as the tradition-bound military grapples with the growth of the spiritual-but-not-religious population.

Jason Torpy explains the importance of the decision:

For many atheists in the military, identifying as a humanist is a positive expression of their values. The unintended consequence of religion vs. non-religion debate results in only two options: belief in a god (usually the Christian one) or belief in nothing. Humanists believe in many things—reason, compassion, empathy, and service for others, as exemplified by Humanist Society Celebrants or charitable organizations like Foundation Beyond Belief.

In addition, recognizing “Humanist” as an answer to the religious preference question is a step toward recognizing humanist chaplains in the military. Religious service members have long enjoyed the benefit of talking privately with a chaplain, and humanists should be afforded the same access to a leader who is training in counseling and understanding of humanist and non-religious viewpoints. Many major religious and non-religious leaders are in full support of a humanist chaplain in the military, even when the House of Representatives rejected the idea.

Our previous coverage of humanist chaplains is here and here.

Today Pope Francis declares Popes John XXIII and John Paul II to be saints, the first double papal canonization in Church history. To give Dish readers added context about the event, Byliner has unlocked The Secret World of Saints by Bill Donahue (not the insufferable one from the Catholic League). It’s an in-depth look at the canonization process, which John Paul II streamlined:

When he became pope in 1978, John Paul II was keenly aware that the saint-making process was malleable. A playwright in his early days, he also recognized the theater inherent in sainthood, and he saw that, by minting new saints, he could endear the Church to its growing flock in Africa, Asia, and South America. And so, in 1983, he simply changed the rules. He did away with the devil’s advocate—suddenly there was no longer an official naysayer hovering over each sainthood cause. He also reduced the number of miracles needed for sainthood. For centuries, four miracles had been required of non-martyrs. John Paul cut that number to two.

In his twenty-six-year papacy, John Paul canonized 482 people—more than had been named during the preceding five centuries. He beseeched local dioceses to recommend saintly candidates so that Catholics everywhere might feel that they live amid exemplars of holiness. He specialized in mass canonizations (among them, the 120 Martyr Saints of China, canonized in one fell swoop in 2000) and in sanctifying people of color—for instance, Josephine Bakhita, a Sudanese-born slave.

Both of these popes also benefited from exceptions to the established path to sainthood, especially John Paul II, whose canonization only nine years after his death sets a modern record:

John Paul’s record sprint to sainthood started during his 2005 funeral Mass, when chants of “Santo Subito” or “Sainthood Now” erupted from the crowd. Bowing to the calls, Pope Benedict XVI waived the typical five-year waiting period before a saintly investigation can begin and allowed the process to start just weeks after his death.

The rest of the process followed the rules: John Paul was beatified in 2011 after the Vatican certified that a French nun suffering from Parkinson’s disease was miraculously healed after she prayed to him. A Costa Rican woman whose inoperable brain aneurism purportedly disappeared after she prayed to John Paul was the second miracle needed for canonization. …

John XXIII was beatified in 2000 after the Vatican certified that the healing of an Italian nun suffering from a gastric hemorrhage was miraculous. Pope Francis, very much a spiritual son of John, waived the Vatican rule requiring a second miracle so that John could be canonized alongside John Paul.

When asked what these two popes were known for, Rachel Zoll explains their divergent reputations – but also notices the shrewd politics behind Pope Francis canonizing them together, which she describes as “balancing the ticket”:

One is Pope John XXIII who served from 1958 to 1963 and he’s known for his modernizing reforms of the church, bringing it out into the modern world. And the other is Pope John Paul II, who served from 1978 to 2005 when he died. And he’s known for, obviously a lot of things, but he also helped uphold orthodoxy and doctrine, and was seen in a way as putting some control around, or course corrections around, the reforms that John Paul XXIII had put in place.

There’s a left-right divide in the church and it is very wide. And by bringing these two men together for canonization at the same time, he’s saying a lot of different things. He’s saying one isn’t–there not at odds with each other, that they’re more on a continuum of how they led the church and also, that there’s room for everybody. This is a big message of his pontificate, that he wants all people of different views to be welcome in the church.

George Weigel makes a similar observation, but in the context of the Second Vatican Council, which began at John XXIII’s prompting:

Pope Francis’s bold decisions to canonize Blessed John XXIII without the normal post-beatification miracle, and to link Good Pope John’s canonization ceremony to that of Blessed John Paul II, just may help reorient Catholic thinking about modern Catholic history. For what Francis is suggesting, I think, is that John XXIII and John Paul II are the twin bookends of the Second Vatican Council—and thus should be canonized together.

Zooming out, Michael Lipka and Tim Townsend remind us that a pope becoming a saint is “a rarity in modern times”:

Roughly 30% of all popes are saints. Starting with St. Peter, traditionally regarded as the first leader of the church after Christ’s death, 52 of the first 55 popes became saints during Catholicism’s first 500 years. In the last 1,000 years, just seven popes have been made saints, including the two being canonized on Sunday.

You can purchase The Secret World of Saints as a Kindle Single here.

Damon Linker claimed last week that possibly “the most daunting obstacle to getting the nones to treat traditional religion as a viable option is the sense that it simplifies the manifest complexity of the world.” Millman quibbles:

I do think that pluralism poses a fundamental challenge to traditional religion. But it’s not the pluralism of modes of knowledge that poses a challenge, but the pluralism of identity. It’s not that traditional religion can’t “handle” natural selection, or psychopharmacology, or biblical source-criticism; it’s certainly not that it can’t explain the evil of the Holocaust. It’s that traditional religion – Abrahamic religion, anyway – demands that you identify yourself definitively as an adherent. It demands an unequivocal commitment. And contemporary young people, according to all the evidence, are very wary of making commitments like in any walk of life: in love, in work, or in terms of religious identity.

Picking up on similar themes, David Session offers advice to millennials facing this pluralistic world, claiming that “whatever earnestness and work ethic millennials may have, they face seemingly endless indistinguishable choices, and respond with defeated detachment—indecision.” What they should do:

All we have to do is start living different ways, a little at a time. Start committing to people, places, things. Say yes to your friend’s party Saturday night, and go anyway even when something better comes up. Join an organization that fights for an issue you care about, and keep going even when the meetings are long, boring, and seem pointless. Fight for someone below you, anyone: immigrants, minorities, the homeless, the incarcerated, whoever; you’ll realize you had more in common with them than you thought. Commit to a person or people; stay in the same city with them, live with them, marry them. Join a union, especially if you’re the only member under 50; if there isn’t one where you work, start one. If you can find one that hasn’t retreated into spiritual apoliticism or reactionary traditionalism, I don’t even care if you take up a religion.

The point is to build human ties, add little by little to your network of solidarity, make it thicker and stronger. It won’t be enough, but it’ll be a start.

Roy Klabin talked to “Viktor” – a marijuana distributor who makes an estimated $24,000 to $32,000 per month – about the underground drug economy:

Having a trusted third party transport the weed is the least risky way to get it into the marketplace. “Because you have somebody coming to you, on your terms, paying cash. Boom. Immediately, in one deal, all your illegal weed has just turned into cash. Farmers are eager to offload in bulk, so as buyers we entice them by offering to buy the biggest quantities. The more bulk you buy, the more leeway you have with price.” According to Viktor, it’s a buyer’s market. “There are plenty of people making weed. In California and Colorado, they got more weed than they know what to do with.”

In order to become a broker, Viktor explained, you have to get an in with a farmer—which is no small feat. “It’s easier to befriend distributors than farmers. If you’re a farmer, you’re protecting everything about yourself. Even if you were going to have a visitor, you’re going to black bag their head all the way up. You don’t want them knowing how to get there, remembering anything about where you’re at. If the wrong person finds out about your million-dollar pot farm, they’re going to come up there and kill you. There’s no witnesses, because it’s in the middle of nowhere.”

Meanwhile, Matt Honan investigates the high-tech future of growing and selling pot:

Start with indoor farms, which are massively energy-intensive. Their high-pressure sodium lights, which themselves require large amounts of electricity, can send temperatures soaring. Yet marijuana plants need to stay cool and dry. Traditionally, growers have handled this dilemma by using electricity-gulping HVAC compressors. Colorado company Surna saw opportunity here. It has introduced an energy-efficient climate-control system that uses chilled water. The system pipes a circuit of cooling water through the grow and can even extract water directly from the indoor air to regulate humidity. “This plant is from Afghanistan. It wants to be on a windy hill in semi-arid conditions,” says Surna CEO Tom Bollich. “That’s one thing we can do that traditional HVAC can’t—we can give you 40 percent humidity and 75 degrees.” If Bollich’s name is familiar, it could be that you know him from his previous gig: CTO of Zynga. “I moved on from that, did several startups and moved around, and started looking into the cannabis industry,” he says. “It was the next gold rush, honestly.”

(Photo by Miguel Peixe)

Joe Cosarelli explores the peculiar fame of YouTube personalities:

The rough edges of the Real Housewives, even, read as prepackaged and fake compared with the intimacy of a girl staring directly into the camera and cataloguing her latest shopping spree in more detail than you might have thought possible. Or of Jenna Marbles, a basic blonde with extra sass who tells her 13 million YouTube subscribers (more than Katy Perry, Miley Cyrus, or Taylor Swift) what’s going on in her life. Many teenagers today (girls and boys) find this a lot more interesting than what’s on television—not least because by watching, clicking, and commenting, they are the ones making performers into stars.

As with modern art, the thought “I could do that too” is in many ways more compelling than “I could never do that.” And entry to this new star system is as simple as signing up for YouTube, Twitter, Vine (the six-second-looping video service owned by Twitter), Tumblr, Instagram, or, most likely, all of the above.

But just because anyone can post a video doesn’t mean that anyone can build an audience. And the system for becoming internet-famous is just as brutal—maybe more so—than Hollywood. Offline, after all, there are gatekeepers, but also a whole system of talent management: huge marketing budgets propping up a star’s brand. Online, it’s pure click-driven democracy—your worth can be measured precisely, to the fan, so almost definitionally, the people who are racking up big followings are doing something really (though often bizarrely) impressive.

Charles Pulliam-Moore thinks many bisexual men need to be more open about the difference between their sexual and romantic desires:

Of all of the bi guys I’ve known over the years, the majority of them have been what I would describe as bi-sexual but hetero-amorous. That is to say that while they’d certainly get into some sweaty bro-on-bro action at the frathouse, guys simply couldn’t provide the kind of emotional satisfaction necessary for a romantic relationship.

From what I can tell from a handful of informal conversations my research, it would seem as if the bisexual/hetero-amorous thing is rather common but rarely articulated in those terms. It doesn’t seem to be unique to bisexual men, either. Whether people aren’t differentiating between their carnal interests and emotional needs or simply aren’t considering them as being distinct from one another is unclear. Either way, I think it’s a major source of much of the hostility that bisexual people tend to receive–particularly from gay men. …

Rather than being equally capable of loving and fucking equally I suspect that most bi-identified people find themselves leaning towards one sex/gender vs. the other for different kinds of fulfillment. That in and of itself isn’t a problem. It’s the not telling people that causes issues.

Dan Savage thinks this is spot-on:

I get letters every day from guys who tell me that they’re confused about their sexual identities. They go on to explain that while they enjoy fucking men and women, they only fall in love with women. Sex with men? Great! Relationships with men? No thanks. These guys are bisexual in the bisexual-but-heteroamorous sense. But these guys invariably go on to tell me that they can’t be bisexual—because aren’t bisexuals supposed to be capable of falling in love with men and women equally? Isn’t that what everyone says? Here’s an example:

I’ve been reading your calls to bisexuals to come out to their friends and families, and think it’s a great idea. Here’s my conundrum: I’m not sure I technically classify as a “bisexual.” I’m a 40-year-old guy who strongly prefers sex with women over men (percentage wise I’m 70/30). I’ve had sex with dudes in the past (five or six times), and loved it, though I’ve never had the same emotional attachment and attraction that I’ve had with women. Most people seem to think that bisexuals are equally attracted to both genders—sexually and emotionally—like they could decide by flipping a coin. So what do you think? Am I bisexual, “heteroflexible,” or just a juicy boner hobbyist?

This guy is bisexual, obviously, but heteroamorous. But the most popular definition of bisexuality circulating out there—someone who is equally attracted to both genders—doesn’t cover guys like him.

Check out the Dish’s long-running thread on bisexuality here.

Michael Lipkin attempts to pinpoint the German writer’s guiding philosophy through a reading of his third novel, Elective Affinities:

His great ambition, in his life and in his art, was to take the indefatigable work ethic of the bourgeoisie and apply it not to business, but to life itself, as only an eighteenth-century aristocrat could. [Elective Affinities characters] Eduard and Charlotte don’t bother composing music or writing novels. The object of their artistic aspiration—as their fascination with botany, landscape architecture, and tableaux vivants attests—is reality itself. Considering that by the novel’s end two of the main four characters are dead, it might be persuasively argued that Elective Affinities is a meditation on the vanity of our desire to mold reality to our liking. But no matter how grim the plot, Goethe’s narrators are never shaken in their values. There is no surer sign that we are to admire one of his characters than when we learn that, through tireless labor, they have restored some room or building that has fallen into disuse, or that, by applying their considerable expertise, they have revealed the beauty dormant in a grove of plane trees or a garden path.

The great mystery, then, is that despite its fixation on death, loss, and the inscrutability of fate, Elective Affinities never wavers in its optimism.

At no point does the narrator ever concede his claim to the final truth of life, which he offers to the reader piece by piece, in one brilliant aphorism after another. (To take just one example: Ottilie’s famous observation that no one is more fully a slave than when they believe themselves to be free.) It’s easy to confuse Goethe’s Stoic acceptance of life’s vicissitudes for a lack of feeling. But in his first work to his last, renunciation has always gone hand in hand with emotion—as when Ottilie, in a sign of devotion to Eduard, hands him the portrait of her father she wears around her neck. For Goethe, true happiness is not simply a religious or ethical abstraction, but something palpable and real. Art’s ambition, as Goethe saw it, was to still the rush of the world to reveal those vertiginous instants when all of eternity seems to be gathered into what is nearest at hand, and, no longer ruing the past or fearing the future, we finally feel at peace. The highest feeling in Elective Affinities is not ecstasy, but serenity.

In a review of Adam Begley’s new biography Updike, Hermione Lee describes the essence of the late author’s fiction:

In one of his last stories, “My Father’s Tears,” he quotes from Emerson: “Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact.” Emerson is there too at the front of Self-Consciousness: “We are persuaded that a thread runs through all things….” And it is the ordinary, banal things that Updike tenderly cherished and made fresh on the page. As he said of himself, and as Begley rightly emphasizes, he is the artist of middleness, ordinariness, in-betweenness, who famously wanted “to give the mundane its beautiful due.” For over half a century—even though his own life moved far away from “middleness”—he transformed everyday America into lavishly eloquent and observant language. This—even more than his virtuoso writing about sex, his close readings of adultery and husbandly guilt, his tracking of American social politics, his philosophizing on time and the universe—is his great signature tune. No wonder that some of the narrators in his stories are archaeologists, or that he’s so interested in vanished cities, ancient civilizations, and extinct species.

In another review of Begley’s book, Louis Menand defends Updike from his critics:

The most persistent and mindlessly recycled criticism of Updike’s work is that he was infatuated with his own style, that he over-described everything to no purpose—that, as several critics put it, he had “nothing to say.” But Updike wasn’t merely showing off with his style. He wasn’t, as all those critics were essentially implying, masturbating. He was transubstantiating.

There was nothing secret about this. He explained what he was up to many times. “The Old Testament God repeatedly says he wants praise, and I translate that to mean that the world wants describing,” he once explained to an interviewer. In the preface to the collected Rabbit novels, “Rabbit Angstrom,” he talks about “the religious faith that a useful truth will be imprinted by a perfect artistic submission.” “The world is the host,” he has a character say in one of his short stories; “it must be chewed.” Writing for Updike was chewing. You can dismiss this conception of the literary vocation as pious or old-fashioned, but, if you do, you are dismissing Joyce and much of literary modernism.

Elon Green asked Begley for his thoughts on Updike since completing the biography:

Did he ever suffer for his art? Was the process really as frictionless as it appeared?

I don’t think he suffered for his art. I think he worked for his art. It depends on how meta you want to get. There was a tragedy about Updike, in some ways, that was also the engine that fueled his work, which is that he lived his life behind a scrim of observation. He was a writer, observing, so whenever he was living he was also observing. And that’s great for the work and not so great for the life. So there are times when he suffers, if you will, from the consciousness that he will never be able to suffer without it being grist for his writerly mill.

Was there anything in Updike’s life that allowed him to turn off the detachment that was necessary for him to live and observe at the same time?

Volleyball, Sunday sports and maybe fucking. Obviously, on some level he observed the carnal act, because he spent a lot of time writing about it, but maybe what he liked so much about the carnal act to begin with was that it was a moment or two of switching off the old impression-gathering device.

Previous Dish on Updike here. The Dish has also featured poetry by Updike here, here, and here.

(Video: Updike offers advice to writers in a 2004 interview)

A reader quotes me reacting to Huyler:

“Blood money?” “Evil act?” I have to say I find that rhetoric appalling.

Wow, Andrew, you really started to move to the right lately. So you think $1,000 versus $10 is not blood money? Basically what you are saying is that it is OK for US to finance this whole drug business because based on all recently published facts we pay the most, double in most cases, than the rest of the world. So we are financing this with huge deficits and 30M+ uninsured who cannot get any of these life-saving drugs. And to you it just requires re-balancing? These prices make no sense.

And many drugs are not invented in the US by “starving” PhDs and CEOs; many come from Europe, and they still cost a whole lot more here. This is not about re-balancing. This is about our healthcare system that stinks and makes no sense. And you seem to defend it.

I wrote back: “I’ve always had this position. I’d be dead without the evil drug companies.” The reader follows up:

I certainly can appreciate the struggle you have been dealing with. I myself suffer from multiple sclerosis, and while MS is not as deadly as HIV, I have been taking three big drugs over the last 12 years and all of them cost at least $25K a year.

And then I look at prices in Europe, and they are half that. And two out of three came from Europe. This is why I strongly believe our healthcare system finances the world and CEOs bonuses, which are not that small. We are the only ones who continue to pay astronomical prices.

Are the companies evil? I did not say it. But what they do to the USA is evil. We basically have Medicare for the rest of the world and pay for the difference. And everyone but regular citizens make money. In return we get high insurance premiums. There is absolutely no relationship between prices here and Europe.

Another reader, who “works in consulting in health economic modeling,” also goes back and forth with me:

You say that Dr. Huyler’s outrage at the $1,000 a day pricetag is unjustified and that this revenue supplies future drug development. While I have mixed feelings on this argument (pharma companies throw out this response every time, I don’t know whether I believe it anymore), I have another question for you: what is a fair price? It’s currently $1,000 a day; what about $2,000? $10,000?

You get my point. Assigning a “fair price” requires assessing the value of the product, which I don’t see in these articles. And I believe this is something the UK health system gets right; the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) performs reviews of pharmaceuticals and their potential value. The panels of experts review the data, including how cost-effective the drug is, and arrive at a decision whether to recommend the drug.  The FDA, on the other hand, only considers whether the drug is effective.

And how innovative is Britain’s drug sector? The engine for innovation is in the US private sector. The reader responds to those points:

Are these companies located solely in the US? No, they’re all multi-national. Yes, the original research to find it was done in the US (New Jersey, I believe), but how much of these profits go back to that specific step of the drug development process?

You also avoided the key question: why is it $1,000/day, other than “because they can charge that”? Without digging too deeply, it looks like California did something along those lines (pdf):

For many comparisons with the previous standard of care, we estimate that the incremental cost required to achieve one additional SVR [Sustained virologic response] with newer treatment regimens is greater than $300,000. While the cost per additional SVR” is not a common measure of cost‐effectiveness in the literature, the costs per SVR generated in this analysis are generally higher than those previously published for telaprevir versus PR ($189,000),118 alternative regimens of PR versus standard PR therapy ($17,000‐$24,000),119 and even highly active antiretroviral therapy in HIV patients ($1,000‐$79,000)

Another quotes me:

“But the trade-off is that the innovation that occurs outside the NIH – and the bulk of all drug research is done by the pharmaceutical industry – would inevitably suffer.” You are repeating “factoids” that you have apparently encountered somewhere – factoids that are dead wrong. I’m in the drug industry, so don’t dismiss me as a crank.

The reality is that much of the seminal work that leads to breakthrough drugs is not done by the drug industry but rather research supported by NIH. Just one example that is especially relevant to you – AIDS drugs. The fundamental work that resulted in the discovery of these drugs and their eventual development by companies such as Merck and Abbott was actually funded by the NIH. Where the US government screwed up was giving sweetheart deals so that drug companies that ended up doing the clinical development that resulted in a successful filing to the FDA. The US taxpayer should have gotten more in return.

Yes, the fundamental basic research was done by the NIH. But you think we’d have the variety and sophistication and constantly innovating treatments without the private sector’s profit incentive? Another combines two threads:

In this post, you say, “But the trade-off is that the innovation that occurs outside the NIH – and the bulk of all drug research is done by the pharmaceutical industry – would inevitably suffer.” But in a post also published that morning, you quote Madrick as saying:

Similarly, [economist Robert] Gordon called the National Institutes of Health a useful government ‘backstop’ to the apparently far more important work done by pharmaceutical companies. But Mazzucato cites research to show that the NIH was responsible for some 75 percent of the major original breakthroughs known as new molecular entities between 1993 and 2004.

So which is it? I warrant that NIH does little drug development work, which is quite expensive, but in terms of basic research and background work, NIH does the lion’s share (and removes a lot of the risk) for Pharma … and then government foots the bill for the massive costs of new pharmaceuticals.

Again: major original breakthroughs do not equal specific treatments for specific drugs through clinical trials to FDA approval. Both the NIH and the US private sector matter. Another adds:

The public interest doesn’t end with NIH’s basic research. Pharma ends up wasting R&D talent and money on heartburn or hair-loss that could otherwise go to cancer or diabetes research. If the US took the social good into account when negotiating a fair margin, we could use our considerable market clout to incentivize companies to produce far more cures for diseases like Hep C, and less in the way of new-and-improved Viagra, or some twisted-molecule version of Lipitor that has virtually the same clinical outcomes.

I think expecting the market to do all of this is as foolish as expecting the government to distort the market and get better results. I know I have a bias here, but it is the bias of someone with a major health challenge. This system has performed miracles in a manner not seen elsewhere in the developed world. I don’t want to change it much.