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James Goodman, author of the new book, But Where is the Lamb? Imagining the Story of Abraham and Isaac, unpacks “perhaps the most debated 19 lines in the Bible.” How he describes the three great monotheistic faiths’ approach to the story in Genesis of God’s commanding Abraham to kill his son, Isaac, only to offer a reprieve at the last minute:

In antiquity, Jews understood the story as one of obedience, Abraham’s obedience, on account of which the Jewish people received God’s special blessing.

The early Christians, while hardly gainsaying obedience, folded it into faith: Abraham’s faith that God would keep his promise to make Abraham great through Isaac, even if it meant bringing Isaac back from the dead. In Christian minds, Abraham’s faith prefigured their own, Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son prefigured God’s sacrifice of Jesus, and Abraham’s actual sacrifice, the lamb, prefigured Jesus, who became the true heir of God’s blessing and promise.

Muslims returned to obedience. Their Abraham was the first to submit to God, the exemplar of the Islamic faith. The great Islamic innovation was to imagine that Ishmael not Isaac was the nearly sacrificed son. Not all Muslims accepted that revision, but its virtue should be obvious: Ishmael was the progenitor of the Arab people. Like the Jews and Christians before them, they wanted God’s blessing running their way.

Why the story continues to fascinate:

One reason is surely that so many Jews, then Christians, and Muslims came to believe that the story recounts an actual event, a foundational event, essential to who they are what they believe. But fascination with the story has not been limited to the believers. That’s because the story is remarkable as a story. In a mere nineteen lines, there is both explicit drama and great mystery. Thoughts, feelings, motives, meanings, even dialog lay between the lines, unexpressed. We know what people do, but not why. We ask questions about the relationship between God and men, parents and children, self and sacrifice, authority and disobedience, fear and love, reason and faith. We answer them with new interpretations and new versions of the story. The story sustains itself by turning readers into writers.

(Caravaggio’s Sacrifice of Isaac, 1603, via Wikimedia Commons)

We are getting closer and closer to an environmental marvel:

[Efforts to engineering a glowing tree] has been going on since the mid-1980s, when researchers first successfully transplanted a gene present in fireflies into tobacco plants [seen above]. By now you’d expect to see phosphorescent Marlboros casting an eerie glow in what few dive bars still allow smoking, but progress has been slow.

Things sped up last year after former Bain consultant Antony Evans watched biologist Omri Amirav-Drory give a presentation on the possibilities of using living organisms to produce energy, fuel, plastics, and fertilizers. Evans was inspired by Amirav-Drory’s suggestion that armchair tinkerers, utilizing sophisticated but easy-to-use software and a “biological app store,” might one day assemble the genetic material for producing a “renewable, self-assembled, solar-powered, sustainable street-lamp”—in other words, a bioluminescent oak tree.

Evans and Amirav-Drory launched a wildly successful Kickstarter, but it’s attracted some controversy:

Eventually, around 6,000 of those backers, each of whom pledged at least $40 toward the project, will receive 50 to 100 genetically engineered seeds they can use to grow their own glowing plants. Another 210 backers, who pledged at least $250 apiece, will receive instructions and ingredients that will allow them to conduct further experiments and “transform [their] own plant at home, in [their] lab or at school.” This high-profile effort to democratize bioengineering has not sat well with environmental advocacy organizations such as Friends of the Earth and the ETC Group, which tried to get Kickstarter to remove the Glowing Plant Project from its site and publicly lambasted “the widespread and unregulated distribution of over half a million extreme-bioengineered seeds” to “6,000 random locations across the USA.”

But Evans, at least, appears to maintain a fairly centrist perspective on the prospects of regulating this sector. “Agrobacteria is a plant pest,” he said of the pathogen biologists often use in genetic engineering work, noting that it can transfer DNA between itself and other organisms. “If you were to release your plants and they still had bacterium on them, you could contaminate other people’s plants. That would be a bad thing. That is something that should be regulated. But if we don’t use that agrobacterium, then there’s a much lower risk of causing damage to agriculture.”

Rather, he and his team are attempting to transfer DNA into the seeds via a “gene gun,” a process that “doesn’t constitute a threat of any sort,” according to the Department of Agriculture.

James Jorden pans the new opera about the rise and fall of Anna Nicole Smith. He grants that the spectacle “may not be up to much as a work of art, but there’s some very smart craft here”:

As the focus of the piece narrows in on the central character, both text and music take on a deliberate simplicity, with easy, obvious, single-syllable rhymes and Copland-esque folksy melodies trying to communicate in terms Anna might understand. The seductive little waltz song performed by the food in Anna’s oversize refrigerator is a clever touch: Operatic heroes from Tannhäuser to Tom Rakewell fall for sexy close-harmony women’s choruses, so why shouldn’t Anna succumb to the charms of cheeseburgers and gooey pies?

A little later, Anna’s son, Daniel (Nicholas Barasch), overdoses. Silent in life, he emerges from his body bag to croon a hip little pop tune whose lyric is simply a rundown of all the drugs the coroner found in his bloodstream. The grisliest part of the joke is that the kid was so pumped full of chemicals that a second verse is necessary to complete the list.

If the rest of Anna Nicole had risen consistently to the level of wit in these two numbers, it might have been a masterpiece. As the work stands, though, it’s utterly dependent on strong individual performances, and in casting the show New York City Opera mostly succeeded brilliantly.

Justin Davidson was totally unimpressed:

Opera is not really the supercilious genre its haters think it is, but if it were, this wannabe potboiler would be an egregious example.

There was something deeply distasteful on opening night about a gala audience in Brooklyn chortling at the primitiveness of Texas rustics and their comical drawl. [Composer Mark-Anthony] Turnage has expressed his fear that he unintentionally singled out its protagonist for mockery. He needn’t have worried. The opera paints over its fundamental misogyny by spraying the entire cast with scorn. There’s not a smidgen of tenderness or sympathy for anyone here — not for the unctuous lawyer, the toothless cousin, the doddering billionaire, or the assortment of grunting males, all cheered on by a Schadenfreude Chorus of contempt. Anna’s mother, who tries to act as the opera’s moral center, gets treated as a censorious grotesque.

Mitchell Sunderland slams the show’s viciousness toward Smith, insisting “it’s wrong to dismiss her as a joke or someone who was just floating through life like a Soviet prostitute in a Russian socialist realist novel.” Joe Dziemianowicz, on the other hand, commends the narrative as a seedy Cinderella story:

The two-hour opera is streaked with humor. But it goes deeper as an indictment of fame. Smith, an early reality TV star, is hounded by media and prying eyes. She’s followed by dancers in black unitards with cameras stuck on their heads — “Equus” meets “Mummenschanz.” Hers was a life observed, constantly. But never by Smith herself. She careened from one moment to the next — never even a little in control. Fittingly, Smith’s venomous mother, Virgie (a terrific Susan Bickley, who reprises her role from the London run), almost gets the final say. Her late aria turns her daughter’s story into a cautionary tale.

But fortunately, the creators do Smith right. They give her the last word in a line that’s naughty and nice. And exactly right.

Jesse Bering reminds us that “for the longest time … to be a pervert wasn’t to be a sexual deviant; it was to be an atheist.” Not until the late 1800s did the sexual connotation of “pervert” take hold:

The provenance of the term in [scholar Havelock] Ellis’s work is still a little hard to follow, because he initially uses ‘perverts’ and ‘perversions’ in the sense of sexual deviancy in a book confusingly titled Sexual Inversion (1897). Co-authored with the gay literary critic John Addington Symonds and published after Symonds’s death, the book was a landmark treatise on the psychological basis of homosexuality. In the authors’ view, ‘sexual inversion’ reflected homosexuality as an inside-out form of the standard erotic pattern. That part is easy enough to understand. Where the language of Ellis and Symonds gets tricky, however, is in their broader use of ‘sexual perversions’ to refer to socially prohibited sexual behaviours, of which ‘sexual inversion’ (or homosexuality) was just one. Other classic types of perversions included polygamy, bestiality, and prostitution. The authors adopted this religious language not because they personally believed homosexuality to be abnormal and therefore wrong (quite the opposite, since their naturalistic approach was among the first to identify such behaviours in other animals) but only to note that it was salient among the categories of sexuality frequently depicted as ‘against what is right’ or sinful. Theirs was merely an observation about how gays and lesbians (‘inverts’) were seen by most of society.

Enough Said seems to be one of them:

After watching [writer-director Nicole] Holofcener’s work, you may find yourself thinking about how frequently characters in movies seem to have been assigned their jobs at random, merely in order to give them something to do. Who can remember what the women in Bridesmaids do when they’re not preparing for the wedding? … The fact that they have credible (if not necessarily gratifying) jobs is by no means the only way in which Holofcener’s men and women seem more like people we know, or might know, than do most of the one-dimensional figures we have grown accustomed to seeing on screen. She’s not afraid to let her characters be at once flawed and appealing, strong and weak, damaged and healthy, generous and self-centered; even the most clear-sighted must cope with disabling blind spots. They seem like human beings, and if they behave heroically, as they often do, theirs is the sort of heroism that enables an ordinary person to get through an ordinary day without needing to defuse a ticking bomb or save their families from a spectacular, special-effects apocalypse.

Andrew O’Hehir pegs down Holofcener’s style:

Gandolfini fits surprisingly well into the universe of Holofcener, a bracingly intelligent and exacting writer-director who’s made just five features in her 17-year career, all of them searching for a sweet spot partway between Hollywood female-centric comedy and audience-repelling art-house eccentricity.

She’s a little bit Eric Rohmer, a little bit Woody Allen (OK, a lot of Woody Allen) and a little bit of second-wave feminist autobiography with an overlay of self-lacerating wit. I’m still inclined to say that her best movie was the merciless 2006 “Friends With Money,” which was disastrously mismarketed as a mainstream comedy, but I won’t argue with those who carry the torch for “Walking and Talking,” her 1996 debut. On first viewing, I conclude that “Enough Said” is irresistible, and demands a second (and third) viewing right away.

Dana Stevens is impressed by the director’s sense of comedic timing:

Holofcener has a trick of ending nearly every scene on a big laugh—a rhythm that some will critique as a sitcom-like tic, though there are often complex dramatic moments embedded in the jokey exchanges. For example, after Eva [Julia Louis-Dreyfus]  and Albert [Gandolfini] finally have sex (the run-up to which is both excruciatingly awkward and surprisingly hot), she confesses as they lie naked in bed, “I’m tired of being funny.” “So am I,” he responds. It’s a raw moment of intimacy between two scared but hopeful middle-aged people, and Holofcener just leaves it there for a moment, with admirable delicacy. Then, just as the scene is about to end on a note of tenderness, Eva breaks the mood with a joke: “But you’re not funny.”

That wisecrack works only because the two lovers in Enough Said so clearly value their ability to make each other laugh. The quest to crack up one’s beloved is a crucial aspect of romantic relationships that most movies barely pay lip service to. But Holofcener’s razor-sharp dialogue-–and Gandolfini and Louis-Dreyfus’ loose but perfectly judged delivery—capture the way that banter and teasing can both build trust between lovers and tear it down.

Previous Dish on the subject here and here.

Lee Siegel reflects on how becoming an author made him a more generous appraiser of others’ work:

Having become an author of books myself, I now find that the shoe is most definitely on the other foot. I once dismissed as maudlin the protest that one shouldn’t harshly disparage a book because the author poured the deepest part of herself into it. What, I replied, has that got to do with defending civilization against bad art and sloppy thinking? Nowadays the abstractions of aesthetic and intellectual criteria matter much less to me than people’s efforts to console themselves, to free themselves, to escape from themselves, by sitting down and making something. In my present way of thinking, mortality seems a greater enemy than mediocrity. You can ignore mediocrity. But attention must be paid to the countless ways people cope with their mortality. In the large and varied scheme of things, in the face of experiences before which even the most poetic words fail and fall mute, writing even an inferior book might well be a superior way of living.

Isaac Chotiner shakes his head:

Siegel should take a deep breath, re-read this paragraph, and ask himself if he really wants to live in a world without negative cultural criticism. He should also explain whether he is willing to review books at all, since accepting a book reviewing assignment should entail a willingness to be honest about the book. I am happy for Siegel that he has started writing books himself, and thus, according to his logic, begun wrestling with mortality. But people write books for all sorts of reasons, not all of them so wince-makingly self-serious. And since no one can read every book, it’s worth having critics around to be honest about which ones are worth our time, and to help explain their larger importance, even if doing so makes those critics occasionally sound mean.

The social network is increasingly relying on “deep learning,” where artificial intelligence develops the ability to read between the lines:

In the context of your Facebook day-to-day musings, the idea is the AI software would be used to better determine the meaning behind your ramblings. For instance, it could pick up on a note of sarcasm, such as “yes, all I need today is another fun piece of news about an impending birth/engagement/wedding” and thus put an end to the constant stream of age-related adverts for baby clothes, wedding bands and such like.

Facebook’s news feed currently runs on an algorithm that determines rankings and selections according to three things:

whether you’ve shown interest in a post from a specific member before, how the post has fared so far and how you’ve responded to posts of a similar nature in the past. Of course, if it isn’t able to pick up on nuances in language, in either your or your friends post, it’s impossible to correctly determine your authentic likes and dislikes.

Meghan Neal sounds a note of caution:

Technology Review reported that deep learning technology could figure out the emotions in status updates or events even if they aren’t explicitly shared, recognize objects in photos, and even predict how people will likely behave in the future. The implications of that level of knowledge and insight are many, and scary.

To some extent, it’s happening already, just with the traditional machine learning that Facebook currently uses to improve user experience and develop new features. The news recently broke that Facebook knows traits and details about you that you never told it—like if you’re gay, or a Democrat.

Betcy Jose questions why the international community is standing up to chemical weapons in Syria but not the targeting of civilians:

Today, civilian immunity arguably ranks among the most important norms that the global community wants to protect. And that is what makes discussions about Syria’s alleged use of chemical weapons so puzzling. Much of the debate about U.S. military strikes stressed the importance of preserving the taboo on chemical weapons, which were banned in part because of their indiscriminate nature: They are difficult to control and can harm civilians who are not the intended targets.

But in Syria’s case, it appears that the Syrian regime aimed to kill civilians with its alleged chemical attack on the suburbs of Damascus last month. Hardly anyone concludes that the civilian deaths were simply collateral damage in an operation meant to take out the rebels. Therefore, examining the civilian deaths through the lens of the norm against the use of chemical weapons is wrongheaded. Civilians died because Syria violated the taboo against deliberate attacks on civilians.

Charli Carpenter offers her theory:

I wonder if the answer is that the taboo is so strong not primarily due to the specter of dead civilians, but rather the way that weapons of this particular type threaten international order and state sovereignty. If that were true, it would be less puzzling that it would provoke such a disproportionate reaction – although no less morally problematic. … [The ban is] perhaps stronger because it satisfies what Ward Thomas calls a “power-maintenance function” in international society:

Norms are not only socially constructed but also geo-politically constructed. Weapons or practices that have the potential to close the gap between the strong and weak states in international society are more likely to be restricted than those that reinforce the relative advantage of strong states; and the more directly a norm reflects the interests of strong states, the stronger the norm will be.”

By contrast, the civilian immunity norm – while admittedly foundational to the contemporary laws of war -is perhaps weaker in political practice because it is built primarily on moral principles – the responsibility of the strong to [make] sacrifices on behalf of the weak.

Due to concerns that rowdy comments are skewing readers’ perceptions of science reporting, Popular Science has shut down its comment section. Derek Thompson approves the move:

Like a narrow Supreme Court opinion, PopSci‘s defense was case-specific, without presuming to tell other sites they should follow along. Comments “erode the popular consensus” on scientifically validated topics, LaBarre wrote, such as climate change and evolution. It’s perfectly legal to wonder aloud on your Facebook page whether dinosaur bones are real or placed there by a spiritual entity to test our faith. But it’s not quite the discussion a site like PopSci wants to cultivate under a column by a world-renowned paleontologist. “The cynical work of undermining bedrock scientific doctrine is now being done beneath our own stories within a website devoted to championing science,” LaBarre wrote eloquently.

Will Oremus objects:

[T]he magazine seems a bit too ready to enshrine scientific findings as gospel rather than thinking critically about their implications.

In one of the two studies, subjects exposed to a comments section studded with ad hominem attacks came away with “a more polarized understanding” of nanotechnology than those who read polite comments. But does that prove that readers would be better off with no comments section at all? I don’t see how it could, given that the researchers didn’t even address that question.

I happen to know that only because I clicked through to the New York Times op-ed cited by Popular Science, which in turn linked to the study in question. Incredibly, Popular Science itself didn’t see fit to link directly to either of the studies it cited as justification for its anti-comments stance. And for the second of the two studies, it provided no link at all, nor did it mention the title, the authors, or the name of the publication—no way, in short, for readers to examine the source material and draw their own conclusions. I guess Popular Science doesn’t trust its readers with original sources, either.

The reasoning behind the Dish’s own lack of a comments section is here.