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The Dish would be remiss not to post this short doc about a man, Jack Passion, a multiple-time World Champion in the Full Beard Natural category at the World Beard and Moustache Championships:

Passion answered a few questions about his facial hair back in 2012:

What tricks do you have for keeping your beard clean while eating? Are there any foods you’ve sworn off? 

Have you ever seen an Olympic fencing champion wield a sword? I’m like that with napkins. Also, the beard doesn’t just pop out over night; you have time to adjust to it, so nothing is really that difficult to eat without making a mess of one’s face. It’s really hard to eat ice cream cones, but I don’t even like ice cream. A juicy, rare burger might be difficult, but you can always ditch the bun and eat it with a fork and knife. Where there’s a will, there’s a clean beard. …

Obviously, you get a lot of attention for your beard. How do you handle it when you just want to go to the grocery store or what have you without stopping to talk to curious strangers?

Funny you should ask. I was just at the grocery store and like ten people gave me business cards (this is L.A.)! The older I get, the more I value time, and the less I want to waste it entertaining stupid comments like, “Hey, have you seen that show about beards!?” or “Dude! ZZ Top!” Thus, I usually braid my beard and stick the braid down my shirt, and just look like a guy with a pretty big beard but nothing extreme. If I don’t, it’s almost impossible to get through the day going anywhere in public with any kind of efficiency.

If someone recognizes me with my beard braided and hidden, they’re recognizing me, and that’s awesome, so I’m more than happy to chat with them. It’s hard to be more than a beard when the beard is more than your head and torso.

Joshua Rothman highlights the work of Franco Moretti – founder of the Stanford Literary Lab, dedicated to analyzing texts with computer software – who firmly believes it’s the latter:

The basic idea in Moretti’s work is that, if you really want to understand literature, you can’t just read a few books or poems over and over (“Hamlet,” “Anna Karenina,” “The Waste Land”). Instead, you have to work with hundreds or even thousands of texts at a time. By turning those books into data, and analyzing that data, you can discover facts about literature in general—facts that are true not just about a small number of canonized works but about what the critic Margaret Cohen has called the “Great Unread.” At the Literary Lab, for example, Moretti is involved in a project to map the relationships between characters in hundreds of plays, from the time of ancient Greece through the nineteenth century. These maps—which look like spiderwebs, rather than org charts — can then be compared; in theory, the comparisons could reveal something about how character relationships have changed through time, or how they differ from genre to genre. Moretti believes that these types of analyses can highlight what he calls “the regularity of the literary field. Its patterns, its slowness.” They can show us the forest rather than the trees.

Moretti’s work has helped to make “computational criticism,” and the digital humanities more generally, into a real intellectual movement. When, the week before last, Stanford announced that undergraduates would be able to enroll in “joint majors” combining computer science with either English or music, it was hard not to see it as a sign of Moretti’s influence.

Micah Mattix pushes back:

While Moretti has done some interesting work, the problem with many “scientific” approaches to literature is that too often they don’t begin with a question to be answered or a problem to be solved but are interested simply in proving the validity of a method for merely professional reasons. It’s the difference between a scientist who is fascinated with isotopes and energy conservation and who uses the scientific method to help answer his pressing questions, and one who is interested in the scientific method alone and who chooses to look at isotopes and energy conservation as a means of proving the validity of a method. The results are data dumps no one reads, answers to questions no one is asking or answers to questions that have already been answered.

Rachel Cordasco is skeptical as well, arguing that “books are NOT data, they’re books“:

[F]iguratively pouring mass quantities of books into a big computer and figuring out the average title length in the 19th century or the average number of words in 18th-century novels is not reading- and seems to belittle books, to me. Now, I know it sounds like I’m comparing apples and oranges, but still. We’re still talking about the worlds and words that change us for the better.

Now, I heard Moretti speak on the campus of UW-Madison several years ago, and I was charmed. This dude is just so darn charming. And smart. And suave. But as I looked at his charts and listened to his analysis, I felt chilled. His work was interesting, but his data told me nothing about the books themselves.

For me, distant reading, like close reading and all the other critical theories that offer us different ways in to books, is just another theory of reading. But what I’ve realized, after reaching the other side of academia and launching back into reading for the fun of it, is that only you can decide how you appreciate reading. Ultimately, though, reading is the act of running your eyes across the page and processing the words into images, sounds, feelings, and ideas. We talk to each other about books, we read passages out loud to one another. We lovingly arrange books on shelves or in piles. We download hundreds of them onto our devices. And we immerse ourselves in the stories they tell. So don’t talk to me about data, Franco, my dear. I simply don’t want to hear about it. I’m busy reading.

Previous Dish on the digital humanities here, here, and here.

Thinking through the question of when creative influence becomes plagiarism, Rachel Hodin comes to this conclusion: “All we can say for sure is that it’s not only fair to take ideas and inspiration from others, it’s necessary for the survival of art”:

As humans, we take ideas, information, and insight from others every second of our waking days, and more often than not, this process is subconscious. For this reason, we have no authority to claim the right and wrong ways of drawing influence from others; all we can do is observe, and take note. And it’s worth noting that both Hemingway and Fitzgerald were influenced by Tolstoy. Hemingway “took on board every technique that Tolstoy ever devised,” except he never took on Tolstoy’s themes when they weren’t true to him: “He could never imagine himself as a weak [man], and the idea of a strong man weakened by an emotional dependency was not within his imaginative compass.” Whereas Fitzgerald had no qualms about taking Tolstoy’s themes. And while there’s no clear answer as to why, Hemingway’s approach, when compared to Fitzgerald’s, just seems more genuine — and all the more so when you consider the fact that Fitzgerald’s writing never came close to anything Tolstoy ever wrote.

In a 2007 Harper‘s essay plumbing similar themes, Jonathan Lethem connects art to the idea of a “gift economy,” arguing against those who view “the culture as a market in which everything of value should be owned by someone or other”:

Artists and their surrogates who fall into the trap of seeking recompense for every possible second use end up attacking their own best audience members for the crime of exalting and enshrining their work. The Recording Industry Association of America prosecuting their own record-buying public makes as little sense as the novelists who bristle at autographing used copies of their books for collectors. And artists, or their heirs, who fall into the trap of attacking the collagists and satirists and digital samplers of their work are attacking the next generation of creators for the crime of being influenced, for the crime of responding with the same mixture of intoxication, resentment, lust, and glee that characterizes all artistic successors. By doing so they make the world smaller, betraying what seems to me the primary motivation for participating in the world of culture in the first place: to make the world larger.

Access to Lethem’s article is free for Dish readers this weekend, courtesy of Byliner. Related Dish on the subject here.

In an excerpt from his new biography of the late writer, Adam Begley suggests the reason why John Updike’s fiction could draw liberally from his own experiences:

Part of what allowed Updike the freedom to indulge his autobiographical impulse was his relationship with his mother, the elderly widow who tugged at Ecenbarger’s sleeve in the Shillington public library, eager to talk about her son, the famous writer. To say that Linda Grace Hoyer Updike encouraged her only child and nurtured his precocious talent is to understate and simplify an unusually close and complicated relationship. She helped him to become a writer (and he, when the time came, helped her, getting ten of her short ­stories published in The New Yorker), offering him yards of advice and unstinting praise from the moment he set pen to paper. She was, as he put it, “an ideally permissive writer’s mother,” meaning that he was free to write exactly what he pleased, no matter how painful to his family. When the biographer Ron Chernow, who went to see Linda Updike in Plowville in the early ’70s when he was a young journalist eager to write about Updike, asked her how it felt to pop up as a character in her son’s fiction, “she paused and said, ‘When I came upon the characterization of myself as a large, coarse country woman I was very hurt.’ She said she walked around for several days, brooding—and then she realized she was a large, coarse country woman.”

Commenting on Begley’s treatment of Updike’s 1977 novel, Marry Me, Peter Quinones notices one area where all is not revealed – Updike’s affairs:

It is, like much of Updike’s fiction, a thinly disguised account of actual events – in this case, his affair with Joyce Harrington.  To me, Begley’s account of this situation alone would make his book worth reading, but it leads into another area – one that I’m sure  future biographers of Updike will dive into with much gusto:  Begley’s decision to let Updike’s many lovers remain anonymous, with two exceptions – the aforementioned Harrington and Martha Bernhard, who eventually became his second wife.  He also  chooses to let the Ipswich, Mass. couples who were the models for the Tarbox couples in Couples remain anonymous.  Begley writes that he let the lovers remain unnamed in order to protect their privacy and, also, in order to encourage them to tell him about their encounters with Updike.  However, there isn’t very much in the book in the way of these encounters at all, a curious turn of events.  In any case, I’m willing to bet that future generations of Updike fans and researchers will want to puncture all this anonymity, whether justifiably or not.  It just seems like too broad an avenue of potentially important research.

The Dish recently featured Updike’s poetry here, here, and here. Update from a reader:

I just want to thank you and the Dish staff for featuring so much John Updike lately. I’m a huge fan of the late master’s and had the honor of meeting him a few years at the Book Expo America in D.C. (where he shared the dais with a young and freshly-minted U.S. Senator named Barack Obama). Of course, because I’m me and prone to tremendous bouts of asshattery when confronted with my literary heroes, I visibly terrified the gentle and always-smiling Updike by inexplicably asking if he had read Augusten Burroughs’s essay “Killing John Updike.” Even that famous and face-creasing beatific smile of his couldn’t dispel the discomfort I’d caused him, and so I slunk away miserably, happy with my autographed copy of Terrorist and glad I didn’t get the chance to open my stupid mouth near a future U.S. president.

(Video: Jeffrey Brown interviews Updike in 2003)

For researchers, the question is no joke:

Marc Bekoff, University of Colorado–Boulder professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and author of The Emotional Lives of Animals, believes [animals do have a funny bone]. In fact, he thinks we’re on the cusp of discovering that many animals have a sense of humor, maybe even all mammals. The idea that animals can appreciate comedy isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds, considering some of the other groundbreaking discoveries scientists like Bekoff are making about animal behavior: They have found dogs that understand unfairness, spiders that display different temperaments, and bees that can be trained to be pessimistic.

As Bekoff points out, Darwin argued that the difference between human and animal intelligence is a matter of degree, not of kind. Or as Bekoff put it, “If we have a sense of humor, then nonhuman animals should have a sense of humor, too.”

A similar sentiment inspired psychologist Jaak Panksepp to enter his lab at Bowling Green State University in Ohio one day in 1997 and tell undergrad Jeffrey Burgdorf, “Let’s go tickle some rats.” The lab had already discovered that its rats would emit unique ultrasonic chirps in the 50 kilohertz range when they were chasing one another and engaging in play fighting. Now the researchers wondered if they could prompt this chirping through tickling. Sure enough, when the researchers began poking at the bellies of the rats in their lab, their ultrasonic recording devices picked up the same 50 kilohertz sounds. The rats eagerly chased their fingers for more. Soon, as the news media trumpeted the existence of rat laughter, people the world over were opening up their rat cages and engaging Pinky and Mr. Pickles in full-scale tickle wars.

One country is learning the hard way:

Germany is in the middle of one of the most audacious and ambitious experiments a major industrial economy has ever attempted: To swear off nuclear power and run Europe’s largest economy essentially on wind and solar power.

There’s just one problem – it’s not really working.

The energy transformation, known as “Energiewende,” was meant to give Germany an energy sector that would be cleaner and more competitive, fueling an export-driven economy and helping to slash greenhouse-gas emissions. On that count, the policy has floundered: German emissions are rising, not falling, because the country is burning increasing amounts of dirty coal. And electricity costs, already high, have kept rising, making life difficult for small and medium-sized businesses that compete against rivals with cheaper energy. …

Business groups representing small and medium firms wring their hands over Germany’s high energy costs while Brussels frets that Berlin is subsidizing big German industry with rebates on inflated energy bills. Foreign leaders, and plenty of pundits, blame the Energiewende for Europe’s inability to answer Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Utilities, meanwhile, are bleeding money, slashing investments, and shutting down power plants.

Keating has more on the country’s troubles:

Despite Angela Merkel’s government’s focus on green energy, the country’s coal use actually hit its highest level since 1990 last year. With no conventionally extractable natural gas on its own, some are also recommending that the government consider hydraulic fracturing in Germany, which the government currently opposes on environmental grounds.

All of Merkel’s government’s goals—shifting to renewable energy, weaning the country off Russian gas, reducing the risk of nuclear accidents—have been admirable, but doing them all at once raises some questions about how exactly the country plans to keep the lights on in the medium-to-long term. It would be an unfortunate irony if coal and fracking ended up being the beneficiaries of Merkel’s green energy push.

Part of your paycheck goes to religious schools:

Taxpayers in 14 states will bankroll nearly $1 billion this year in tuition for private schools, including hundreds of religious schools that teach Earth is less than 10,000 years old, Adam and Eve strolled the garden with dinosaurs, and much of modern biology, geology and cosmology is a web of lies. Now a major push to expand these voucher programs is under way from Alaska to New York, a development that seems certain to sharply increase the investment.

Public debate about science education tends to center on bills like one in Missouri, which would allow public school parents to pull their kids from science class whenever the topic of evolution comes up. But the more striking shift in public policy has flown largely under the radar, as a well-funded political campaign has pushed to open the spigot for tax dollars to flow to private schools. Among them are Bible-based schools that train students to reject and rebut the cornerstones of modern science.

Decades of litigation have established that public schools cannot teach creationism or intelligent design. But private schools receiving public subsidies can — and do. A POLITICO review of hundreds of pages of course outlines, textbooks and school websites found that many of these faith-based schools go beyond teaching the biblical story of the six days of creation as literal fact. Their course materials nurture disdain of the secular world, distrust of momentous discoveries and hostility toward mainstream scientists. They often distort basic facts about the scientific method — teaching, for instance, that theories such as evolution are by definition highly speculative because they haven’t been elevated to the status of “scientific law.” And this approach isn’t confined to high school biology class; it is typically threaded through all grades and all subjects.

Check out several “science lessons from the Bible” here.

(Image via Stallion Cornell)

More readers sound off:

Regarding your posts on sticks and stones, and the difficulty of pronouncing LGBT, I suggest LUGBUT. Works for men, women, and transexuals. And it has a plural: LUGBUTS.

Another variety:

I’m sort of fond of the name my wife’s college pro-tolerance came up for themselves: The Giblets (from GBLT, because why not). OK, I’m not fond of it, but at least it rolls off the tongue, and it sounds potentially lewd besides, which is a plus.

Another adds, “I prefer GQ BLT – it sounds like a delicious designer sandwich, which is incredibly meta.” A more serious take from our Facebook page:

Homosexual has an important place in our lexicon; I frequently use it to describe people who have sex with (mostly) men, but do not identify a gay. Gay implies homosexual orientation with self-acceptance. I’m gay, but Ted Haggard is homosexual.

A fussbudget notes:

Your reader speaks imprecisely and you reinforce the imprecision. “LGBT” is not an acronym; it is an initialism. An initialism is a word made up of the first letters (usually) of other words, like an acronym, but unlike an acronym, not pronounced as a word itself. RADAR, SCUBA, NATO and SNAFU are acronyms. CIA, LGBTQIA and USA are initialisms. There are many explanations out there – here’s one. The several print dictionaries I have lying around my university library office do not make the distinction, but it is important to those of us who were toilet trained by the age of one and who like things just so. Picky-picky.

Update from a pickier reader:

Excuse me for out fussbudgeting the fussbudget, but radar, scuba, and snafu are no longer acronyms. Dictionaries now define them as nouns. They have morphed from acronyms into words over the years. That’s why they are no longer spelled in all caps. Your reader is correct that NATO is an acronym. NASA, NAFTA, UNICEF, POTUS, TARP, and OPEC are also acronyms. They are written in all caps and pronounced as if a word.

Jonathan Mahler says “an earthquake has just rocked the shaky edifice of the NCAA”:

Peter Sung Ohr, a regional director of the National Labor Relations Board, ruled that Northwestern University’s football team can unionize. This is a big, big deal.

If the ruling is upheld by the NLRB in Washington, and the various courts to which the university and NCAA would then appeal, it will be a revolution. As members of a union, the Wildcat players could, for example, insist on having independent concussion experts on the sidelines during games. They could demand that Northwestern cover medical expenses related to sports injuries, as well as pay the full costs, including expenses, of attending college. And now that the NLRB has certified Northwestern’s union, you can expect plenty of other college athletes to follow suit. The ruling might already apply to all private FBS schools, including major ones such as Notre Dame and Stanford. The logical next step would be for college athletes at such schools to join together to form a single players union — much like those for professional athletes.

McArdle weighs in:

It’s long been an open secret that football players at schools with major sports programs are something closer to an employee of the athletic department than to a member of the student body. Many of them aren’t capable of college work, and those who are aren’t necessarily encouraged to do any. The fiction that they’re students is maintained only by NCAA rules that forbid outright compensation of players, and “gifts” that are just compensation in disguise. You can argue, and I would, that these rules mostly benefit the colleges, not the “students.” I understand that the players get something out of the deal. But they would get a lot more if it weren’t for a legalized cartel that’s actively suppressing their wages. Given these realities, it’s hard not to cheer the NLRB. But it isn’t clear how much allowing football players to unionize will accomplish, as long as the NCAA is still allowed to make rules against paying them.

Erik Loomis takes the long view:

Now, this is far from the end of the road. Northwestern is going to appeal and the NCAA is going to back them up all the way. After all, the free labor they take from athletes is at stake. So who knows what is going to happen. But a couple of quick key takeaways. First is the speed of the decision. Usually, these cases are a long, drawn-out process (often a problem of the NLRB, making it an increasingly ineffective agency for workers operating in real time with house payments and such). This case began only two months ago. This means that for the regional director, it was an obvious and easy decision. He declared these athletes workers because they received compensation, even if did not receive a paycheck Second, this continues to chip away at the NCAA. Every time players sue or argue for rights, the NCAA cartel weakens. Every time they win or even gain a partial victory, NCAA power declines even more.

But in the short term, questions remain:

Ivan Maisel, of ESPN, raises a smart series of concerns. There is, for example, a potential problem of scope. Ohr’s decision covers only scholarship players on the football team. What about athletes who play other sports? “The workload of the college athletes in non-revenue sports is also extreme,” he writes. “They also sign that contract to perform services. They are subject to the control of the coaches, and in return for payment. By these criteria, they deserve to join the union, too.” And the decision covers only men. Women’s sports often lose money. Does that mean that the female athletes in these sports are students, rather than employees, and thus undeserving of union protection?

Meanwhile, Bloomberg editors urge schools to give their athletes “union-busting scholarships”:

[T]he ruling was based on the fact that an athletic scholarship can be withdrawn if a player opts to quit a team. This gives the school too much leverage – whether or not courts ever decide that it makes the student an employee.

The NCAA should solve this by making a simple change that would be good for students and schools alike: Require that all athletic scholarships be granted for four years. Then, if a student-athlete lost interest in a sport, or decided the team requirements were too demanding, he or she could quit and still finish college on scholarship. Incredibly, the NCAA began allowing such multiyear awards just two years ago, and while some schools have begun offering them, few do – and only to a small number of high-level prospects.

Alyssa mulls over commercialism and sports more generally:

The idea that elite college athletes are amateurs who devote their college careers to playing sports for nothing but love is of a piece with a larger contradiction in the way American audiences approach athletic competition. Professional sports are an absolutely giant business. In 2012, Major League Baseball signed three television deals covering eight years of broadcasts for $12.4 billion, bragging that the figure represented “more than a 100-percent increase in annual rights fees to MLB over the current arrangements.” But when athletes themselves dare to follow the examples of their owners and their leagues and prioritize their contracts over loyalty to any given city, fans can go ballistic: Witness the frustration vented at Robinson Cano when he left the New York Yankees for the Seattle Mariners.

If we make sports the embodiment of American ideals, it makes a certain amount of sense, however irrational it is, that we want athletes to focus on something other than money. It would be too uncomfortable to acknowledge that the games we set up as objects of worship are really just a way for us to venerate a few talented people for extracting the highest possible compensation in exchange for their gifts.

America’s urban populations are on the rise:

New Census data released Thursday further suggests that within the last year (from July 1, 2012, to July 1, 2013), virtually all of the country’s population growth took place in metropolitan areas, with a significant chunk of it even further clustered in and around the largest cities. Over that year, the number of people living in metropolitan America increased by 2.3 million, a figure that reflects both natural growth and in-migration. The population in what the Census calls “micropolitan statistical areas” – smaller population centers with a core of fewer than 50,000 people – grew by a mere 8,000 souls. As for the rest of the mostly rural country, the population there dropped between 2012 and 2013 by 35,000 people. Those areas are neither attracting new residents nor producing many of their own, a sign of the exodus of young adults who might be having their own children now.

But, as Ben Casselman notes, some cities have been more fortunate than others:

Eighteen US metro areas had unemployment rates of 12 percent or higher in 2012, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and all but three of them saw a net decline in migration – that is, they saw more people move out than move in. These cities are overwhelmingly in inland California, where the collapse of the housing bubble left deep and lasting scars. … Meanwhile, at the opposite end of the spectrum, cities in regions with strong job markets are gaining residents. Oil and gas states dominated the list of fastest-growing cities: Six of the top 10 were in Texas, North Dakota or Wyoming, where an oil and gas boom has brought unemployment rates below 5 percent.

Meanwhile, geographer Jim Russell reminds readers that population decline doesn’t have to signal doom:

[The conventional wisdom is that] negative net migration is bad, always bad. To say otherwise makes you a blind civic cheerleader guilty of moving the goalposts in order to gild a turd. Pittsburgh is dying. Seriously, how could outmigration be a good thing? That means 10,000 more people left than arrived. Almost certainly, people did move to a dying city. In this case, 20,000 young adults with college degrees moved into the urban core. Meanwhile, 30,000 suburban residents without a high school diploma retired and moved to Phoenix. The workforce grows and gets younger. The workforce gets smarter and per capita income increases. … Just because the net migration number is negative doesn’t mean there is brain drain. A shrinking population doesn’t always indicate a dying city.