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Noam Scheiber’s best guess:

Setting aside the hourly thrust and parry between Democrats and Republicans, here’s how the shutdown is likely to end: Senate Majority Harry Reid is going to strike a deal with his Republican counterpart Mitch McConnell at some point in the next few days. The deal will reopen the government for a medium length of time—possibly till January 15, when the next round of sequester cuts kick in—giving the two sides time to replace the sequester with something more appealing. The deal will also raise the debt ceiling—maybe for as little as a few months, maybe until after the 2014 election. Reid will give up almost no concessions in return for any of this, with the exception of one or two symbolic items, and he’ll probably get some higher-than-sequester level of government funding (a top Democratic priority) for a month or two starting later this year. Pretty much every Democrat in the Senate will vote for the deal, along with at least five and maybe as many as 20 Republicans.

Here’s Reid’s actual proposal today, via Politico:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has privately offered Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell a deal that would reopen the government until mid-to-late December while extending the U.S. debt ceiling until next year, according to several sources familiar with the talks.

The proposal would set up a framework for larger budget negotiations with the House over the automatic sequestration spending cuts and other major deficit issues, the sources said. Moreover, Senate Democrats are open to delaying Obamacare’s medical device tax and a requirement that those receiving Obamacare subsidies be subject to income verification — but they would have to get something from Republicans in return, sources said.

I’d press for a debt ceiling raise beyond the next Congressional elections as a key element of a deal. Beutler notes McConnell’s new role:

Mitch McConnell has suddenly become the lead Republican negotiator and all the action has shifted to the Senate. If McConnell had any confidence that Boehner could pull this off, Boehner would still be at the center of the story. McConnell has a primary challenger. He wants to oppose deals, not cut them. If there were any way for Boehner to get out of the mess on his own, McConnell would have let him try. His return to relevance demonstrates a complete loss of faith in his counterpart.

(Photo: U.S. President Barack Obama meets with Senate Democratic leadership, including Senate Majority Leader Sen. Harry Reid, to discuss the government shutdown and the nation’s debt ceiling in the Oval Office of the White House October 12, 2013 in Washington, DC. The U.S. Government is on its 12th day of a shutdown. By Alex Wong/Getty Images.)

A reader writes:

I know nothing about this case.  But if the professor had fought the allegations, his life would have ruined by everything being aired in public, true or not.  As someone once said after being found not guilty, “Where do I go to get my reputation back?”  I think a reasonable case can be made for an innocent person to walk away from untrue allegations rather than fight them, especially in today’s media atmosphere.

Another:

As a female post-doc in a male-dominated field, I read with interest the article you linked to. I am sure affairs and sexual harassment happen in all work places, but I think there is something about the professor/student, mentor/mentee relationship that contributes to it. I have been hit on/flirted with/sexually harassed (depends on how you define it) by multiple male professors over the years. And I admit I don’t always send entirely clear signals. I have no desire to have affairs with these men (I am gay), but I do sometimes enjoy playing (and trying to win) their game.

It gives me power in the relationship – not because I think I will get special treatment professionally, but because, perhaps in a twisted response to their egos, I like seeing how far I can get them to go. It makes them human; no longer are they “important professors” – just men thinking like men. When it gets too far or just awkward, I put up boundaries and declare myself the winner.

So I can understand the student in the article up to the point of turning her professor in. I recognize my role in the game and am not out to ruin careers or marriages. But I suppose it is a dangerous game to be playing, especially for the professors …

Zach Dorfman leafs through Aaron James’ book on their moral significance:

For him, an asshole is defined by three important qualities, which also serve to differentiate his behavior from other morally repugnant characters such as the jerk, or much more seriously, the sociopath. First, the asshole considers himself — and James and I agree, assholes are almost always men — to possess special privileges or advantages over others.

Moreover, he behaves in a manner that reflects this belief (making the asshole distinct from the mere egoist, who may believe that he is better than others, but for a variety of reasons, does not act on this belief systematically.).

Second, the grounds for this belief are assumed and not argued for. An asshole believes deeply that he alone deserves special treatment, that he is somehow entitled to it. This kind of asshole behavior, as James goes on to show, produces both minor-league assholes, such as the line-cutter or reckless freeway driver, as well as their major-league brethren, such as, say, Donald Trump or Anthony Weiner. (Of course, significant overlap is possible, and minor leaguers rarely disappoint when called up to the big leagues.)

Third, and finally, assholes are “immunized” to the protests of others. An asshole might hear you out, recognizing your complaints as valid in an abstract way, but he never truly listens.

British researchers ran an experiment to gauge the creativity of certain personality types and found that narcissism drives people to take on more creative endeavors:

The participants, a mix of undergraduates and college graduates, took a series of tests to measure the “big five” personality factors: neuroticism, extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. In addition, they provided a self-assessment of their creativity (answering questions like “how innovative do you consider yourself?”), and indicated how many creative activities (out of a list of 34) they had engaged in during the past year. Those activities including “composed a poem” and “choreographed a dance.” …

When the scores were added up, “Narcissism self” was the variable that most strongly predicted not only self-assessed creativity (no surprise there), but also engagement in creative activities.

Jillian Steinhauer underlines that narcissists weren’t proven necessarily more creative, only more likely to try their hand at the arts:

In the end, people with narcissistic tendencies were not only more likely to say they were creative; they also were more likely to do creative things. The personality traits of extraversion and openness also corresponded to increased creative activity, which is telling about what this study really shows: that self-confidence goes a long way. If you believe you’re good enough at something, chances are you’ll do it, even if it’s unstable or difficult, as so many creative pursuits are. And chances are you’ll continue trying to do it even in the face of rejection, which is also required in creative fields like art and writing.

Kera Bolonik puzzles over the ongoing use of laugh tracks in sitcoms, noting that “fake laughter is like a fake orgasm — it’s not infectious”:

In fact, we’ve had them imposed on us since the fifties, when sound engineer Charley Douglass started “sweetening” the audio, inserting laughs at failed jokes, editing down yuks that went on too long, to regulate the comic beats. But what is louder than the din of disingenuous laughter when a joke isn’t funny? It’s a hand hanging in the air, waiting for the high five slap that never comes, that loud silence of one hand clapping. But bad jokes are like tripping over air currents — you’ve gotta catch your fall and keep moving.

Network sitcoms have become less reliant on laugh tracks — Parks and Recreation, Glee, Modern Family, and the new Brooklyn Nine Nine, for example, don’t use them. But these are mockumentaries, musicals, and/or single-camera shows. Laugh tracks tend to signal to an audience that they’re tucking into more conventional fare, by which I mean, a show that, as Joseph Winkler described in “A Sitcom Even a Nihilist Could Love,” features beleaguered straight-man (or woman) protagonist at work surrounded by zany colleagues, and at home, where he or she juggles a fraught relationship with an overbearing or neurotic parent, a partner or an ex (or the ever-present absence of no love life at all), and a resident smart-alecky kid. And the laughs punctuate every sentence like an exclamation point.

(Video: a laugh track-free clip from The Big Bang Theory)

Michael Hanlon reminds us of why human consciousness eludes our understanding:

The problem is that, even if we know what someone is thinking about, or what they are likely to do, we still don’t know what it’s like to be that person. Hemodynamic changes in your prefrontal cortex might tell me that you are looking at a painting of sunflowers, but then, if I thwacked your shin with a hammer, your screams would tell me you were in pain. Neither lets me know what pain or sunflowers feel like for you, or how those feelings come about. In fact, they don’t even tell us whether you really have feelings at all. One can imagine a creature behaving exactly like a human — walking, talking, running away from danger, mating and telling jokes — with absolutely no internal mental life. Such a creature would be, in the philosophical jargon, a zombie.

Why there’s no end in sight to the problem’s intransigence:

Nearly a quarter of a century ago, Daniel Dennett wrote that: ‘Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery.’ A few years later, [David] Chalmers added: ‘[It] may be the largest outstanding obstacle in our quest for a scientific understanding of the universe.’ They were right then and, despite the tremendous scientific advances since, they are still right today. I do not think that the evolutionary ‘explanations’ for consciousness that are currently doing the rounds are going to get us anywhere. These explanations do not address the hard problem itself, but merely the ‘easy’ problems that orbit it like a swarm of planets around a star. The hard problem’s fascination is that it has, to date, completely and utterly defeated science. Nothing else is like it. We know how genes work, we have (probably) found the Higgs Boson; but we understand the weather on Jupiter better than we understand what is going on in our own heads. This is remarkable.

In a review of Newton and the Origin of Civilisation by Jed Buchwald and Mordechai Feingold, Jonathan Rée takes note of the scientist’s attitude toward religion:

Apart from trying to please his readers, Sir Isaac – as he became in 1705 – also sought to reassure them about his theological opinions. He was known to have ducked out of ordination in the Church of England, which was formally a condition of his professorship, and his reputation as a divine genius had a whiff of blasphemy about it. He had avoided any discussion of God or creation in the Principia (in the first edition, that is, where God is mentioned only once), and could not pretend to be interested in priests, rituals or religious ceremonies. On top of that there were well-founded rumours that he regarded the doctrine of the Trinity as a papist fabrication. But if his version of orthodoxy differed from that of the established church, there could be no doubt about his reverence for the Bible. To anyone wondering about the truest form of Christian worship, his advice was clear:

‘search the scriptures thy self,’ he said, with ‘constant meditation upon what thou readest, & earnest prayer to God to enlighten thine understanding’. He was convinced the Bible was, essentially, a sacred text, and he sought to honour his maker by studying it closely, every day, sometimes for hours on end. He read it repeatedly, in English, Latin, Greek and Hebrew, weighing every word, syllable and letter. ‘Mr Newton is really a very valuable man,’ as John Locke put it, ‘not onely for his wonderfull skill in Mathematicks but in divinity too & his great knowledge in the scriptures where in I know few his equals.’

Newton read the Bible with the same exactness he brought to his mathematical inventions or his experiments with prisms, and with the same disregard for tradition and common sense: he always refused, as one critic put it, to acknowledge ‘any one’s having ever consider’d the same Things before him’. He fled from controversy in religion as he did in mathematics, but he was convinced that his discoveries in the two domains supported each other, maintaining that the leading doctrines of the Principia – heliocentrism and universal gravitation – had formed part of the primitive biblical religion from which all others derived, and were explicitly endorsed by Moses before being passed to the Greeks and winning general assent in ‘the earliest ages of philosophy’. Mathematics could thus unite with the biblical narrative to proclaim the reasonableness of Christianity.

On the 40th anniversary of The Exorcist, Noel Murray ruminates on the film’s unique significance in the religious South, where he grew up:

The popularity of The Exorcist had the effect of popularizing exorcism itself—or at least that was what I heard around my school, where there were rumors of parents setting their children on fire because they thought their kids were possessed.

Give some credit (or blame) for this to [writer William Peter] Blatty’s studiousness, and [director William] Friedkin’s gifts for documentary like realism, which lent The Exorcist plausibility. Even though the demon in The Exorcist isn’t Satan—and isn’t even part of Christian mythology—the film does reinforce the idea that there are dark forces at work, requiring the righteous to remain vigilant. …

I’ve identified this mentality with the South, because that’s the part of the world I know best (and love, honestly). But The Exorcist is set mostly in Washington, D.C., and is heavily Catholic. The Catholic strain of devil paranoia differs from Southern Baptist devil paranoia. (Wine-drinking vs. teetotaling may have something to do with that.) Some religious people see The Exorcist as merely metaphorical, capturing the spiritual rootlessness of the 1970s, while others see it as much more black-and-white, and love it for that. Down here, we’ve worked “wariness of Satanic influence” into a way of life far removed from the more academic approaches of the fictional Father Karras and the real Father Gallagher. Down here, we stew in it.