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As Stephen King releases a sequel to The Shining, entitled Doctor Sleep, Laura Miller defends the longstanding grudge that King and his fans hold against Kubrick’s adaptation:

A key difference between the two versions is the prominence of alcohol, which is more or less incidental in the film. In King’s novel, booze is the key that unlocks the monster inside a regular guy, and the beast’s first victim is the regular guy himself. The most significant thing about any character in King’s fiction is how he or she responds to such monsters, whether they come from within or without. That’s surely the chief reason why he detests Kubrick’s portrayal of Wendy as a gibbering victim; King’s Wendy chooses to be a heroine.

King is, essentially, a novelist of morality. The decisions his characters make — whether it’s to confront a pack of vampires or to break 10 years of sobriety — are what matter to him. But in Kubrick’s “The Shining,” the characters are largely in the grip of forces beyond their control. It’s a film in which domestic violence occurs, while King’s novel is about domestic violence as a choice certain men make when they refuse to abandon a delusional, defensive entitlement. As King sees it, Kubrick treats his characters like “insects” because the director doesn’t really consider them capable of shaping their own fates.

Jason Bailey, taking on King’s criticisms in the above video, emphasizes the creative differences between film and print:

[I]n defending King, Salon’s Miller accidentally makes the more interesting point: “The two men represent diametrically opposed approaches to creating narrative art. One is an aesthete and the other is a humanist. Kubrick was a consummate and famously meticulous stylist; King’s prose is workmanly and his novels can have a shambolic bagginess.”

King’s great novels work because they put us into the heads of his characters, because they convey psychological as well as external struggles, because their inner monologues can pour forth out of his prose. It’s part of what makes him a great writer. It’s also why there have been so many lousy films based on Stephen King books — because all of that is lost in the translation. And Kubrick would have been a lousy novelist, his meticulous detachment resulting in, we could presume, so pretty turgid and lifeless writing. But luckily, he was a filmmaker, and his gifts as an aesthete are what made him such a singularly fine one.

Previous Dish on the gulf between the book and the film adaptation here.

Matthew Reis covers the ever-raging debate between scholars over whether to leave Shakespeare in his time or harness his plays for the ideologies of today:

Shakespeare is such a vast cultural icon in the English-speaking world that every new school of critical analysis and jargon soon gets applied to him, so we’ve had lots of Christian and Marxist Shakespeares, psychoanalytic, deconstructed and postmodern Shakespeares, and postcolonial and queer Shakespeares. At the same time, more traditional scholars continue to bring to bear Elizabethan or Jacobean social history on the plays, which can run the risk of turning Shakespeare into something antiquarian, requiring prior knowledge of the rhetorical handbooks, property law or theological disputes of his times. …

“What I am bothered about”, [scholar Brian Vickers] explains, “is looking at a historical phenomenon through a present-day lens. The lens is a distorting glass focusing in on some issues in a particular play and totally excluding others. The plot of Othello is set in motion by the jealous and resentful Iago, who hates Othello and sets out to destroy him using Desdemona as the tool. The first generation of feminist critics seized on the play as an instance of Shakespeare’s misogyny and started with Act Three. That seems to me a partial, distorting reading of the play: if you can’t register the presence of Iago, who creates all the destruction and ends up destroying everybody, including himself, you are not reading, you’re imposing a particular scheme, only interested in the harm that men do to women – not who causes it, not the anguish and agony Othello goes through.”

English professor David Mikics links the rise of Wikipedia to a decline in student writing:

Wikipedia, which is against style on principle, crushes the individuality of student voice. For the kids in my class, this is what knowledge sounds like: balanced and bland, never indignant or provocative or committed—the voice of the crowd, the everyman. Student essays still occasionally contain remarks that sound jaunty, or freewheeling, or tragic, or ironic. But there are far fewer of these liberated moments than there were before Jimmy Wales gave us Wikipedia’s pasteurized version of scholarship.

But other academics are considering ways to improve the free encyclopedia. This year, the University of California, San Francisco will offer a class that gives credit to fourth-year medical students for editing Wikipedia articles. Dr. Amin Azzam, who will teach the course, explains:

When you look at [the quality of the articles], the fraction of high-quality information on Wikipedia in the medicine-related topics is significantly lower than other domains of Wikipedia. I think a large part of that is because we in the medicine community have not been embracing this model of democratized information. But when you realize that this is where all the world goes for information first, I think we’re missing an opportunity. Why don’t we contribute to improving the quality of information that the public has access to, and that the public goes to? So that’s why I became passionate about this model. I started realizing that this was a much bigger way to make a much bigger impact on public health.

As the New York City Opera heads toward financial ruin, Russell Platt takes stock of the industry’s troubles. Greg Sandow focuses on orchestras and their ever-older audiences:

[N]ow we see what a systemic crisis means.  Because from the aging and shrinking of the audience follows every other problem that we’re having. Declining ticket sales. Declining funding. Performing arts centers (as the New York Times reported back at the start of the 1990s) booking fewer classical music events, because the audience for them was starting to fall. …

Maybe the current orchestra crisis shows us this danger starting to be real, meaning that it’s hitting now, and isn’t just something we project into the future. So many managements arguing with their musicians, over dividing a shrinking financial pie, the result (no matter how it plays out in each situation) of an overall drop in demand, and drop in funding (which of course is tied to the drop in demand), while expenses continue to rise.

Previous Dish on the struggling classical music industry here.

And into CERN, the international physics laboratory:

Putting together a Street View tour of one of the largest and most expensive science projects in history wasn’t a particularly easy task; the mammoth detectors and tunnels of the collider took two full weeks to photograph. “Every three meters, they took a six-sided panorama of the tunnel,” CERN photographer Max Brice told Symmetry Breaking. “Then we had to figure out the coordinates of every image. It came out to 6000 points for us to track.” This was in 2011; stitching everything together into the finished product took an additional two years.

Luke Westaway takes in the views:

The ATLAS particle detector experiment can be explored, as well as the tunnel that makes up the Large Hadron Collider, plus CERN’s ALICE, CMS, and LHCb experiments. Virtually traversing the dense labs is an atmospheric experience – cramped Half Life-esque tunnels and metal walkways abound, as well as ominous signs that warn of radiation and dangerous magnetic fields.

(Photo: The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS), a general-purpose detector designed to investigate a wide range of physics. Via Google.)

Marc Tracy parses a new study that suggests that, despite popular belief, Jewish life in America is not in decline:

[A]s Jews increasingly tolerate intermarriage and focus on other signifiers—pride, religious participation, and above all child-rearing—some good news appears. Ninety-four percent of U.S. Jews are proud to be Jewish, says Pew, and three-quarters feel a “strong sense of belonging to the Jewish people.” Seventy percent attended a Passover Seder, and more than half fasted during Yom Kippur. Fewer than 20 percent are not raising their children Jewish to at least some extent; 59 percent are raising them Jewish by religion, although, again, this number is insanely divergent depending on whether the marriage is all-Jewish (96 percent) or interfaith (20 percent).

“The most important finding is that contrary to the lachrymose narrative of a declining, disappearing, vanishing Jewish population, there are many more people who say that they are Jewish, claim Jewish identity, and the vast majority [who] say it is their religion,” Leonard Saxe, a Brandeis professor and prominent Jewish-American demographics expert who consulted on the Pew survey, told me Tuesday.

Jessica Grose takes a different interpretation of the study, stressing that actual religious observance has dropped significantly:

[A]s we get further and further away from virulent anti-Semitism (according to the Pew Survey, 15 percent of American Jews say they have been called offensive names or snubbed in a social setting because they are Jewish, and Jews think other groups, like gays and Muslims, face more discrimination than they do), perhaps it is not surprising that fewer Jews are religious. Other people do let us forget who we are. Plus we don’t have to believe to be Jewish: Judaism, unlike Christianity, is passed down through blood. It’s also difficult to convert to Judaism, and we welcome questioning. Not exactly a recipe for creating generations of faithful devotees.

Gabriel Roth doesn’t despair:

For my grandchildren, the fact that some of their ancestors were Jewish will have no more significance than the fact that others were Welsh. That will be a real loss. But we should be realistic about what’s being lost and what isn’t. Here are some of the things I cherish about Jewishness:

unsnobbish intellectualism, sympathy for the disadvantaged, psychoanalytic insight, rueful comedy, smoked fish. Those things have been thoroughly incorporated into American upper-middlebrow culture. Philip Roth and Bob Dylan and Woody Allen no longer read as “Jewish” artists but as emblematic Americans; their influence is as palpable in the work of young gentiles as young Jews.

The loss of Jewishness as a meaningful identity in America is the kind of loss that occurs when individuals are free to engage in the pursuit of happiness. It’s the loss of something that has great meaning to many people and an important place in history but that is, essentially, tribal.

To that point, Douglas Rushkoff suggests  that “if we want to promote Judaism and its practices, we might need to transcend our rather primitive misconception of Judaism as a race”:

It was Pharaoh who first called the Jews a “people”. The notion of a Jewish bloodline didn’t emerge until the Inquisition as a justification for executing even those Jews who had converted. And it was Hitler (repurposing a bit of Jung) who called the Jews a race.

As I look at history and the Torah, Judaism isn’t really a religion at all, but a path beyond religion. It was developed by the equivalent of recovering cult members, as a way beyond the idolatry and death worship of Ancient Egypt. Instead of “believing” things, a disparate amalgam of tribes (those mythic sons of Jacob), developed a living myth together – as well as a system of law that could be amended as civilization evolved. Everything from the Sabbath to the US Constitution came out of these insights and this continuous process of revision and renewal.

By applying the techniques of the census taker to the Jewish people (a practice actually forbidden in Talmud – we’re not allowed to count ourselves) the would-be protectors of Judaism are practicing a dangerous game with diminishing returns.

In our final video from Martha Shane and Lana Wilson, they recall how their perceived inexperience ended up being an asset in the filming of After Tiller:

The documentary, which features the four remaining doctors who still perform third-trimester abortions in the wake of George Tiller’s assassination, opens today in Los Angeles and Toronto. It will continue to play in New York until October 8 and then open in many more cities across the country. Trailer here. Martha and Lana’s previous Dish videos are here. Our “It’s So Personal” series, in which readers share their experiences with late-term abortion, is here. Another reader writes:

I worked on a response to your abortion dissent, but a followup reader said it so much better than I ever could:

Is abortion ever immoral? This pro-choice advocate says: Of course it is. But there are many immoral things that are not illegal, and imposing the blunt instrument of the law on a complex moral decision is not going to help people make better choices. The sooner pro-life activists take legal bans off the table, the sooner we can have productive talks about effective programs to help people make better moral choices about abortion and reproductive issues generally.

I have a story to go with that comment.

Many years ago I lived in a house with multiple roommates. We selected a seemingly charming, successful graduate student to fill a vacancy, but within months it was clear she was seriously disturbed.  Any number of things (e.g., polite requests to clean up weeks worth of dirty dishes or to allow someone else to watch TV) triggered abusive, screaming diatribes and implied threats of violence.  We were so freaked out we all decided to move until one brave soul convinced us to band together and boot her out.  She smashed holes in the walls the day she left. If it happened today, I’d worry that she’d return with a gun.

During the year this woman lived with us, she had two abortions.  She also told us she was sloppy with contraception and had had several abortions in the past. It’s easy to argue that these abortions were immoral, but should that translate into law?  Do we want to force a woman like this (who might be unwilling to give up a child) to bear unwanted children at risk for serious abuse?  I’m uncomfortable when the left discusses abortion in terms of rights and when the right discusses it in terms of morality. It’s so much more complicated than that.