That’s the question Alex Bellos, a math blogger for The Guardian, set out to answer:
Bellos set up the website http://favouritenumber.net and asked people to cast votes for their favorite numbers and explain why they liked them. More than 44,000 people did. Along the way, Bellos noticed lots of patterns. “Definitely, non-mathematical reasons were more frequent than mathematical ones,” he says. “Dates and birthdays are the most common.” Odd numbers do better, in general, than even ones. In China, 8 is popular because it sounds like “prosperity,” and 4 is unpopular because it sounds like “death.” English has sound-alikes, too: one voter said his favorite was 11, because “it sounds like lovin’.”
Dana Mackenzie counts down the results:
The bronze medal goes to the number 8. Hey, all those Chinese people can’t be wrong!
The silver medal goes to the number 3. That should go over well with fans of the Three Musketeers, the Three Stooges, and the Three Little Pigs.
But the number cited most often as a favorite number is(drum roll, please) …
7.
To be honest, this is hardly a shock. If you go to Las Vegas, you can’t miss the 7’s all around you. “People’s strongest emotional reaction is to the number 7, and this has been true throughout history,” says Bellos. But strangely enough, no one really knows why. “The argument most frequently given, which I think is not credible, is that there are seven visible planets or seven days in the week,” Bellos says. He thinks that we like 7 because it’s the only number between 2 and 10 that is neither a multiple nor a factor of any other. It somehow stands apart from the others.
Miriam Pawel’s new biography The Crusades of Cesar Chavezpaints the labor leader as “a media-savvy pragmatist not averse to dealmaking”:
Yet unlike the hard-headed Anglos who ran the industrial unions, he saw himself more as a spiritual guide than a labour leader. He despaired of the tendency among poor workers he helped to desire colour televisions and golf clubs as they grew richer. He distrusted colleagues who sought pay rises, and rejected them for himself; sacrifice, he urged, must be the mark of the movement. He embarked on regular fasts, both to draw attention to the cause and, in trying times, to strengthen his own fortitude. Gandhi, rather than King, was the role model.
Peter Dreier considers Chavez’s legacy, particularly with regard to the United Farm Workers union:
The UFW served as an incubator of movements. It trained thousands of organizers and activists — boycott volunteers as well as paid staff. Many became key activists and leaders in the labor, immigrant rights, feminist, antiwar, consumer, and environmental movements. There is no progressive movement in the country today that has not been influenced by people whose activism began with the UFW.
Another legacy is the nationwide upsurge of cultural pride and political action by Latinos, most of whom were not farmworkers, that was inspired by Chavez and the UFW. The fruits of Latino activism can be seen in the growing voting power of Latinos in American politics, the thousand of Latino and Latina elected officials at all levels of government, and the growing immigrant rights movement, especially among young people.
But Liza Featherstone is less happy about the effects of Chavez’s work:
[A]s labor writer (and former UFW staffer) Michael Yates has suggested, the most important question should be: Is life for farmworkers in California any better today than it was before Cesar Chavez and the UFW came along? The answer to that, sadly, is no. As Chavez himself acknowledged, during the waning years of the UFW’s power, farmworkers’ children were 25% more likely than other American kids to die at birth. Their parents’ life expectancy was two-thirds that of the rest of the population. Laws protecting their union organizing rights were not enforced. Some drank water from irrigation pipes and lived under trees.
Citing the new documentary Cesar’s Last Fast as well as Pawel’s book, Nathan Heller explores Chavez’s 1988 fast in protest of farmworkers’ exposure to pesticides:
By the thirtieth day of the fast, Chavez had lost thirty pounds. He had renal problems and muscle wasting. His doctors urged him to break his fast. When he wouldn’t, Dolores Huerta and the Reverend Jesse Jackson devised an endgame. Chavez’s friends would pass the fast along: they’d each do three days or so, and the sacrifice would continue. Chavez agreed, and on the thirty-sixth day, a Sunday, he appeared at Mass. He was carried, limp, between the shoulders of his sons. Jackson and Martin Sheen were there, along with the family of Bobby Kennedy. Ethel Kennedy broke off a morsel of blessed bread, and Chavez finally ate. His mother sat beside his nearly lifeless body, weeping and stroking his face.
Did Chavez have a Christ complex? The question looms behind Pawel’s biography and [Richard Ray] Perez and [Lorena] Parlee’s film. “How did Cesar become such a powerful, brilliant organizer and leader?” the Reverend Chris Hartmire, of the National Migrant Ministry, asks in the documentary. “I think it was fundamentally his Catholic upbringing and his mother’s teachings.” Chavez’s eagerness to take on moral responsibility through physical sacrifice, to lead an expanding moral movement, to be both humble and irreplaceably authoritative has its roots in the founding tropes of the Church. These affinities strengthened his project, as Hartmire suggests; they also slowly eroded it. Through the hard postwar years, farmworkers needed a political and cultural leader. Chavez’s faith helped make his ethical and organizational ambitions clear. But he also aspired to be a spiritual leader, and his efforts there had less stirring effects. Workers, in the end, already had a holy figure they could trust.
Robert Alter insists that Paul de Man was a “total fraud,” praising Evelyn Barish’s biography of the once-central figure in American literary studies. For example, he managed to join the faculty of Bard College with absolutely no qualifications:
How does a new immigrant without credentials get appointed at an American college? De Man produced a fictitious curriculum vitae in which he claimed to hold the “equivalent of your Master’s degree.” He also said he had been an editor at Editions de Minuit in Paris, a prestigious publishing house with which he had had no contact, and that his grandfather was a “founder of the University of Ghent.” Later, in his Harvard years, he would embellish this fictitious autobiography further: the collaborator did not hesitate to represent himself as a man who had fought in the Belgian army and then joined the Resistance, and he claimed several times, both in conversation and in writing, that he was the illegitimate son, not the nephew, of [prominent Belgian collaborator] Henri de Man. This ostensibly odd attribution of paternity worked in two ways for him: he could claim to be the son of one of the leading figures in Belgian politics during the 1930s and into the war; and after his supposed father became Belgium’s Quisling, he could say he was the target of undeserved hostility, which eventually drove him to leave the country.
Alter attempts to reconcile de Man’s work with his personal life:
Was there any continuity between his early entanglements in crimes and lies and the literary theory that made him famous?
Barish, like others before her, proposes a link between his negation of history and his career of deception, between his denial of the continuity of the self and his suppression of his own past (he even forgot his native Flemish!), between his insistence that the written or spoken word never tells anything about the intention of its originator and his assumption of a new identity. This is certainly plausible, but I would also like to suggest a different kind of continuity between de Man’s mode of operation as a literary theorist and his mode of operation as a con man. It has to do with his style. In his writing, abstruseness, bristling abstraction, and a disorienting use of terms make his essays often difficult to penetrate. This was part of the key to his success: to his American admirers, with their cultural inferiority complex, it seemed that if things were difficult to grasp, something profound was being said.
In a lengthy retrospective, Ben Smith and Anita Badejo explore Tom Lehrer’s brief career, larger-than-life legacy, and resolute resistance to stardom:
Lehrer had been a sensation in the late 1950s, the era’s musical nerd god: a wryly confident Harvard-educated math prodigy who turned his bone-dry wit to satirical musical comedy. His sound looked further back, to Broadway of the ‘20s and ‘30s — a man and a piano, crisp and clever — but his lyrics were funny and sharp to the point of drawing blood, and sometimes appalling. One famous ditty celebrates an afternoon spent “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park.” Another cheerful number, “So Long Mom,” dwells on the details of nuclear holocaust. “I Got It from Agnes” is an extended joke about sexually transmitted disease. …
[W]hile his work was widely enjoyed at the time, it was also something of a scandal — the clever songs about math and language were for everyone, but Lehrer’s clear-eyed contemplation of nuclear apocalypse was straightforwardly disturbing. And amid the clever songs about math and language, and confrontational politics, a distinct lack of prudishness:
There’s BDSM, promiscuity, gay Boy Scouts. “If you’re out behind the woodshed doing what you’d like to do, just be sure that your companion is a Boy Scout too,” Lehrer advised in “Be Prepared.” … Lehrer’s father, whose New York circle included figures like the lyricist Irving Caesar, had connected him with every prominent record producer in town. But though he drew their interest, he had too much edge. “They were all afraid of the sick humor,” [Lehrer’s friend David] Robinson said.
Smith goes on to suggest that Lehrer’s “sick comedy was, in retrospect, a sign of artistic life in a conformist era”:
“Done right, social criticism set to a catchy tune always makes politics easier to digest,” said Lizz Winstead, creator of The Daily Show and a women’s rights activist. “You add a layer of humor and you can break down two barriers: One, singing a song over and over leads to repetition of a message, and two, humor creates likability. The more polarizing the issue, no matter what you say, you will have people who do not think you should use humor. He went for the jugular when it was desperately needed [yet] was always hilarious and poignant.”
(Video: Lehrer performs “The Vatican Rag” in 1967)
In its insistence on seeing religion as a material phenomenon, the book goes global, making room within its pages for Eastern as well as Western traditions. In less supple hands, this perspective could fall flat, subjecting its author to charges of superficiality. What saves the text from that unfortunate fate is Plate’s control of his material, the firm and steady way in which he builds his case, guiding the reader through quicksilver transitions from one part of the world to another. …
[W]e learn that drums are a “vital source of sonic sacrality” for some, the voice of the devil for others; that bread not only “connects with creation itself,” but that “Christianity would not exist without [it],” and that the “sacred geometry” of two crossed lines can be found among the symbols of ancient China, within Navajo weavings as well as high up in the cathedral nave. Plate’s interpretations, his reading of material culture, are often downright revelatory. I, for one, was surprised to discover that The Old Testament was unusually sensitive to the power of smell. “Not all people through history,” he observes in connection with the ancient Israelites, “have delighted in smoke and scents the way the God of the Torah did.” Although I pride myself on my familiarity with the Torah, I had never thought about its multiple references to frankincense and myrrh in quite this way.
In a blog post offering “a history of religion in 11 objects” last month, Plate contemplated the human need for material things:
Humans are needy. We need things: keepsakes, stuff, tokens, tchotchkes, knickknacks, bits and pieces, junk and treasure. We carry special objects in our pockets and purses, or place them on shelves and desks in our homes and offices. As profane and ordinary as the objects may be, they can also be extraordinary. Some things even become objects of transcendence.
Devout people of faith, across religious traditions, often denigrate material goods, suggesting the really real is beyond what can be seen, felt, and heard. Yet a closer look at religious histories reveals a heart-felt, enduring love for things. Objects large and small, valuable and worthless are there from the beginning of traditions, creating memories and meanings for the devotees who pray and worship, love and share, make pilgrimage and make music.
(Photo of monk lighting incense by Flickr user Wonderlane)
Liat Clark reports that four paralyzed people have “voluntarily and independently moved their legs” for the first time since their injuries, thanks to an experimental spinal implant:
Each of the four men received an epidural implant that delivers currents that mimic signals from the brain. They work in a similar way to myoelectric prostheses, which are grafted on to remaining nerves in the muscles and stimulate these to control movement. In these cases, those wearing the prosthetic can actually move the artificial limb voluntarily, just by thinking about it, because those salvaged nerves are still receiving information from the brain. In this latest study, the candidates could voluntarily move their limbs immediately. This has led to knock-on improvements in their health, from an increase in muscle mass to a reduction in fatigue and stabilizing of blood pressure levels. …
Each recovered and managed to make use of the system so rapidly, it’s speculated that more parts of the nervous system remained intact than previously thought. Not only this, but as the four candidates continued through their training, they needed lower and lower electrical frequencies to instigate movement – the neural pathways were improving and building off of that stimulus to create better routes. They are retraining the spinal cord to think differently.
Sam Maddox offers an account of how it played out for one man:
Kent had the stimulator implanted. A few days later they turned it on. No one expected it to do anything. Researchers were only looking for a baseline measurement to compare Kent’s function later, after several weeks of intense Locomotor Training (guided weight supported stepping on a treadmill). Kent tells the story: “The first time they turned the stim on I felt a charge in my back. I was told to try pull my left leg back, something I had tried without success many times before. So I called it out loud, ‘left leg up.’ This time it worked! My leg pulled back toward me. I was in shock; my mom was in the room and was in tears. Words can’t describe the feeling – it was an overwhelming happiness.”
Barbara Ehrenreich – a trained biologist who, in her latest book, reveals her own brushes with mystical experiences – argues (NYT) that scientists should take such matters seriously:
If mystical experiences represent some sort of an encounter, as they have commonly been described, is it possible to find out what they are encounters with? Science could continue to dismiss mystical experiences as mental phenomena, internal to ourselves, but the merest chance that they may represent some sort of contact or encounter justifies investigation. We need more data and more subjective accounts. But we also need a neuroscience bold enough to go beyond the observation that we are “wired” for transcendent experience; the real challenge is to figure out what happens when those wires connect. Is science ready to take on the search for the source of our most uncanny experiences?
Fortunately, science itself has been changing. It was simply overwhelmed by the empirical evidence, starting with quantum mechanics and the realization that even the most austere vacuum is a happening place, bursting with possibility and giving birth to bits of something, even if they’re only fleeting particles of matter and antimatter. Without invoking anything supernatural, we may be ready to acknowledge that we are not, after all, alone in the universe. There is no evidence for a God or gods, least of all caring ones, but our mystical experiences give us tantalizing glimpses of other forms of consciousness, which may be beings of some kind, ordinarily invisible to us and our instruments. Or it could be that the universe is itself pulsing with a kind of life, and capable of bursting into something that looks to us momentarily like the flame.
It’s always heartening to see someone with a scientific education talking sense about these things.
Most scientists think they absolutely should discard anomalous results. But then we remember that it requires an actual experience to make this shift. If it had been someone else’s experience Ehrenreich would doubtless be using exactly the same reductionist terms as other atheists and scientists. It wouldn’t be an experience at all – just something that a person says who hasn’t had a proper scientific education and doesn’t know any better.
In the end, though, Ehrenreich’s expanded thinking is not just a response to her own experience, it’s also limited by it. It permits her to make a tentative step outside the confines of reductionist science, which to her is daring enough. But it doesn’t stop her being dismissive of the idea of a ‘caring’ God.
This is surprising in a way. I assume she’s read the literature of mystical experience, in which case she will have read of many, many cases of people who had a sudden revelation every bit as powerful as hers, but who, unlike her, felt swept up in the loving embrace of a God of love, that permeated every cell of their being, and convinced them for the rest of their days that love is the real stuff of the universe. Why does she think that the meaning she derives from her experience is valid, when the meaning that others have derived from theirs – clearly in the same class as hers – is not?
Meanwhile, Ross doubts (NYT) the numinous would benefit from more scientific scrutiny:
The trouble is that in its current state, cognitive science has a great deal of difficulty explaining “what happens” when “those wires connect” for non-numinous experience, which is why mysterian views of consciousness remain so potent even among thinkers whose fundamental commitments are atheistic and materialistic. (I’m going to link to the Internet’s sharpest far-left scold for a good recent polemic on this front.) That is to say, even in contexts where it’s very easy to identify the physical correlative to a given mental state, and to get the kind of basic repeatability that the scientific method requires – show someone an apple, ask them to describe it; tell them to bite into it, ask them to describe the taste; etc. – there is no kind of scientific or philosophical agreement on what is actually happening to produce the conscious experience of the color “red,” the conscious experience of the crisp McIntosh taste, etc. So if we can’t say how this ”normal” conscious experience works, even when we can easily identify the physical stimulii that produce it, it seems exponentially harder to scientifically investigate the invisible, maybe-they-exist and maybe-they-don’t stimulii – be they divine, alien, or panpsychic – that Ehrenreich hypothesizes might produce more exotic forms of conscious experience.
Juliane Hammer reviews Denise A. Spellberg’s Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an, which uses Jefferson’s ownership of a two-volume English translation of the text as an entry point into understanding the Founders’ complicated views on Islam:
Spellberg lays out how Jefferson came to acquire a copy of the [George] Sale translation of the Qur’an, which significantly contained an introduction, written by Sale, to Muslim history and law. She juxtaposes Jefferson’s negative views of Islam with his early arguments for Muslim civil rights and presents the tension between this latter argument and the presence of West African Muslim slaves which, by virtue of their racial classification and their status as unfree members of society, would not have been included in Jefferson’s consideration of Muslims as potential citizens. Jefferson and John Adams appear as political rivals in negotiations over North African piracy—talks which Jefferson carried out in part with the Tunisian ambassador in London. Spellberg emphasizes that Jefferson wanted to define the piracy problem and the ensuing conflict with North African states in explicitly political and economic terms and avoided reference to religion at all cost.
Around 1788, in the discussions leading up to the final form of the U.S. Constitution, Muslims, or at least imagined Muslim citizens, became a point of debate in regards to the religious oaths required of political office holders. Those opposed to Protestantism as the de-facto state religion argued for the inclusion of Catholics, Jews, and Muslims as political leaders; some even pushed for full religious inclusion and political equality for religious minorities.
In an interview about the book last year, Spellberg argued that Jefferson was “theorizing for a future that included Muslims — not in spite of their religion, but because of it and because of his notion of universal civil rights”:
Jefferson was unique in many ways. He criticized Islam as he did Christianity and Judaism. He talked about Islam as a religion that repressed scientific inquiry — a strange idea he got from Voltaire that wasn’t right — but … was able to separate his principles about Muslim religious liberty and civil rights from these inherited European prejudices about Islam.
He did the same thing when arguing for the inclusion of Catholics and Jews, actually. He had not very good things to say about either Catholicism or Judaism, but he insisted that these individual practitioners should have equal civil rights. … [Jefferson] resisted the notion, for example, that Catholics were a threat to the United States because of their allegiance to the pope as a foreign power. There were many Protestants who would have disagreed with him about Catholics, and many who would have disagreed with him about Muslims.
They were the outsiders, whose inclusion represented the furthest reach of toleration and rights. So for Jefferson and others — and he was not alone in this, although it was a minority — for him to include Muslims meant to include everyone of every faith: Jews, Catholics and all others. And to exclude Muslims meant that there would be no universal principle of civil rights for all believers in America.
(Image via Wiki: “Oil painting of Decatur Boarding the Tripolitan Gunboat during the bombardment of Tripoli, 3 August 1804. Lieutenant Stephen Decatur (lower right center) in mortal combat with the Tripolitan Captain.” Dennis Malone Carter’s painting is located at the Naval Historical Center, Department of the Navy.)
Tom Whipple finds himself making repeat visits to Mount Athos, home to 1,400 monks who tend the “vestal fire” of the Orthodox church:
Athos is a place where a bearded octogenarian who has not seen a woman in 60 years can venerate the bones of a two-millennia-dead saint, then pull out a mobile phone to speak to his abbot. Where a pilgrim with a wooden staff in one hand can have a digital camera in the other. And where, in the dim light of dawn matins, I can look on a church interior that would be instantly recognisable to a pilgrim from five centuries ago. …
To understand Athos you have to accept it is magic. Not in the sense that the supernatural actually occurs: at least, not so far as I am concerned. But here people really believe in magic. Every monastery, even the lowliest, has its “miracle icons”. In one there is an ancient painting of the Virgin, saved from the iconoclasm of early Orthodoxy, that reputedly screamed out in pain when the monastery was set on fire. Still blackened from the ordeal, she receives medallions and offerings from people who want her help.
Reflecting on a recent visit, he wonders what calls him to Athos:
Of one thing I am sure: my motives have nothing to do with spirituality, except in the very loosest sense. Why, then, do the monks let me come?
They are not stupid; they know that not all pilgrims are as pious as they pretend to be. But providing hospitality to guests is their calling. Besides, they would say that God knows why I am here better than I do. Other places are pretty, other places are unusual, yet like many I keep returning.
On my last night, I go to the shower. I drop my towel on the way to the cubicle. I bend to pick it up, and when I return there is a monk standing in front of me. “Do think”, he says, “about the true religion.”
Maybe I will, someday. But at the time I remember what a pilgrim called Marcellus told me the last time I was here, over the dregs of a bottle of ouzo. He too was a regular, but not especially holy, visitor. He, however, knew why he came: “We have lion reserves, elephant reserves, monkey reserves,” he said. “Why not monk reserves? Why not let monks live in their natural habitat, an endangered species preserved for the world?” He smiled, pleased with the analogy, and poured another glass.
[K]illing time in a Barnes & Noble one hot south Louisiana afternoon, I opened a copy of Dante’s Inferno, the first of his Divine Comedy trilogy, and read these words (the translation I cite in this essay is by Robert and Jean Hollander):
Midway in the journey of our life
I came to myself in a dark wood,
For the straight way was lost.
I read on in that first canto, or chapter, and stood with Dante the pilgrim as wild beasts—allegories of sin—cut off all routes out of the terrifying wood. Then, to the frightened Dante’s aid, comes the Roman poet Virgil:
‘It is another path that you must follow,’
he answered, when he saw me weeping,
‘if you would flee this wild and savage place.’
So Dante follows Virgil—and I followed Dante. I did not know it in that moment, but those were the first steps of a journey that would lead me through this incomparable 14th-century poem—all 14,233 lines in 100 cantos—through the pits of Hell, up the mountain of Purgatory, beyond space and time to the zenith of Paradise—and out of my own dark wood of depression.
Dreher describes how that journey begins with a tour of Hell – and how we can learn to see ourselves in Dante’s vivid depictions of sin:
The Inferno is not an exhaustive taxonomy of sins (though it sometimes feels like it), but rather an allegory of the condition of sinfulness. For Dante, the worst sins are not those of the appetite—Lust and Gluttony, for example—but sins against the things that make us most human. In Dante’s spiritual geography, Hell is like a vast pit mine, with least corrupt sins punished near the top, the middling sins—sins of Violence and sins of Fraud—punished in the central regions—and the foulest sin of all—Treason—punished at the bottom, where Lucifer dwells.
Dante uses this categorization as a method of exploring the nature of sin as a perversion of the Good. To give oneself over wholly to lust, gluttony, or greed is damnable, but not as damnable as the higher—or rather, lower—sins, which involve not only the disordered bodily passions but also disordered passions of the mind.
The pilgrim Dante comes slowly to recognize elements of each sinner’s fault in his own character. The purpose of this tour of the infernal regions is to awaken the pilgrim to the reality of sin—how it separates men from God, from their better natures, and from each other—and of his own responsibility for the disorder in the world and in his own soul.
The Dish 
