Tag: Premium

Why Giles Fraser loathes the phrase, and other, similar expressions of “self-satisfied cultural superiority”:

Back in 1983, the German anthropologist Johannes Fabian published a brilliant account of how western anthropologists often used the language of time to distance themselves from the object of their study and to secure the dominance of a western Enlightenment worldview.

In Time and the Other he noted there was something fishy about the way early anthropologists went out and studied other cultures, talking and interacting with people in the same temporal space, yet when such encounters came to be written up, the people being studied/talked with tended to be situated back in time. The anthropologist always lives in the present. The people being studied live in the past. It’s what Fabian calls “a denial of coevalness” – a denial that we share the same temporal space with those who have different values or different political aspirations. This denial of coevalness, argues Fabian (very much in the style of Edward Said), is often a political power-play, a discourse of “otherness” that was commonly used to buttress the colonial exploitation of others.

But it’s not just colonialism-justifying anthropologists who play this linguistic/moral trick with the clock. The same thing happens in contemporary journalism all the time. Isis, for example, are often described as “medieval”. Travel to Damascus or Baghdad, and you travel not just to the Middle East but also to the middle ages. In part, this familiar trope is based on the idea that the extreme violence of contemporary jihadis has more in common with the extreme violence of the middle ages. As a comparison, this is most unfair on the middle ages, which is transformed from a rich and complex period of human history into modernity’s “other” – little more than that against which modernity comes to define itself. Forget about the founding of the great cathedrals and universities, forget about the Islamic development of mathematics, forget about Leonardo da Vinci and all of that: in secular salvation myth we are sold the simple story that we have been saved from the dark ages of barbarism and stupidity by the clear moral vision of science, rationality and Apple computers. This is just as much a salvation myth as any proposed by religion – though in this version of salvation it is religion itself that we need to be saved from.

Thomas Kidd praises David Skeel’s True Paradox: How Christianity Makes Sense of Our Complex World, a book he describes as a “remarkable” effort of apologetics:

Skeel’s work is both philosophically weighty and engagingly brief (at 160 pages, I read it in one afternoon). The essence of his case for Christianity (or at least monotheism) is that humans seem inexorably drawn to normative ideas about truth, beauty, and justice, all of which are better explained by a created order than by random materialistic chaos. As a lawyer, he especially notes how people – reformers, activists, and politicians – seem unable to get away from normative ideas of justice, and seek to implement just systems. Paradoxically (one of a number of paradoxes he notes), we have a strong sense of justice and yet seem unable to manifest and or even approximate justice in most societies. This speaks to our innate notions of morality and fairness, yet highlights our inability to overcome the debilitating effects of sin and the Fall.

Barton Swaim emphasizes that Skeel shies away from metaphysical speculation about the universe’s origins, focusing instead on “the world as we actually experience it” – which includes pain and suffering:

The “problem,” of course, is that the presence of evil in human affairs seems to suggest that God, if he is there, is either malicious for causing it or powerless to stop it: In either case, he isn’t “God” in any traditional understanding. Mr. Skeel points out, however, that in order to make the argument, terms like “evil and “malicious” must be imported from a worldview that assumes God’s existence. To make the point vivid, Mr. Skeel charts the final illnesses of two very different men: the contrarian journalist Christopher Hitchens and the less famous but equally accomplished Harvard law professor William Stuntz.

Hitchens was an atheist, Stuntz a committed Christian. The difference between the ways these men wrote about their sufferings is instructive. Hitchens hotly denied that his suffering had any moral significance but found it hard not to describe it in moral terms—writing of the cancer’s “malice” before catching himself: “There I go again.” At another point: “To the dumb question ‘Why me?’ the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?”

Stuntz, by contrast, who lived for a decade with debilitating back pain but died of brain cancer in 2011, readily admitted that there was something wrong with the pain he lived with for a decade. The sense that “my back was not made—that I was not made—to feel like this,” he wrote, “is so real and hard that I sometimes think I can touch it, grasp it.”

Why did the famously eloquent atheist Hitchens find it hard to express the wrongness of the disease that was killing him, while Stuntz, whom we might have expected to question God’s intentions—or even his existence—had no such trouble? Mr. Skeel thinks he knows the answer. The Christian God does not simply allow or disallow suffering—he himself suffered, in the person of Jesus Christ, and uses suffering to renew his children’s character.

Samuel G. Freedman details the fascinating friendship that informs the book. For the last few years, Skeel, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, has ranged over the arguments in True Paradox during many conversations with an atheist colleague, Patrick Arsenault:

Their ensuing discourse roved over free will, determinism, the emergence of human language, the reasons for circumcision, the human capacity for love. They traded links to magazine articles and citations from books, with Dr. Arsenault particularly steering Professor Skeel to the work of the experimental psychologist Steven Pinker. After Professor Skeel finished his first draft in November 2013, Dr. Arsenault line-edited the manuscript.

Amid all the respect and comity, though, the atheist and the apologist ducked no fights, especially concerning Professor Skeel’s belief that God endowed humans with humanity. Dr. Arsenault asserted in one email that men and women “are not so different from those unconscious computers.” In another, he suggested that human beings, far from being the most advanced form of life, would pale next to bacteria in terms of survival under duress. As for love, Dr. Arsenault attributed his ardor for his wife to “a neuronal change induced by mutual oxytocin release.” He referred to Professor Skeel’s God only with a lowercase g.

The effect of the emails, the coffee chats and edits was to sharpen Professor Skeel’s arguments and to encourage him to reckon with the findings of scientists like Dr. Pinker. “True Paradox” became a book of engagement rather than avoidance.

For two years now, we’ve covered the debate over the papyrus fragment, dubbed “The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife,” that was unveiled by historian Karen L. King of Harvard Divinity School. Joel Baden and Candida Moss update us on the emerging scholarly consensus – that it’s probably a forgery, even if the materials used to construct it are ancient – and try to explain why it’s garnered such attention:

A great deal rides on this question of Jesus’s marital status. Over the centuries, and up to the present, how people have answered this question has served as a cipher in discussions about clerical celibacy. If Jesus spurned marriage, the argument goes, so too should all priests. And if Jesus chose only men as his apostles, so too should the Church. Iconoclastically minded commentators, however, insist that the idea of a celibate Jesus is a later Catholic conspiracy—the product of a male-led Church and a succession of dry, turgid councils—that’s long been used to keep the laity, and women in particular, in check. Dan Brown made a fortune peddling this very idea in The Da Vinci Code, published in 2003.

What has become clear today, thanks to the scholarship of Karen King and others, is that in the messy early Church—ripe with pretensions of order, brimming with disordered diversity—people actively debated the role of women as leaders.

People have been speculating about Jesus’s romantic life since at least the second century A.D., too. In a noncanonical text from that period known as the Gospel of Mary, for example, Peter says to Mary Magdalene, “Sister, we know that the Savior loved you more than all other women.” The second- or third-century Gospel of Philip gets somewhat more explicit, calling Mary his “companion,” and describing Jesus as having “loved her more than all the disciples” and having “kissed her often on the mouth.”

The New Testament pays notable attention to women. The story of Jesus’s life begins with the Virgin Mary holding the newborn child, ends with both Marys stationed at the cross, and along the way suggests that women followed Jesus and helped finance his mission. A woman named Junia is described in Paul’s Letter to the Romans as “prominent among the apostles,” and another, named Phoebe, is called a “deacon.”

(Image: The Three Marys at the Tomb by Peter Paul Rubens, via Wikimedia Commons. Mary Magdalene is, notably, in red.)

PZ Myers wants to retire the ubiquitous term:

It vexes me. The official definition says the Bible Belt is the deep South, but that makes no sense. Dwight Moody, of the influential Moody Bible College, was from Massachusetts. William Riley, the pastor who invented fundamentalism, was from … Minneapolis. Saddleback Church is in Orange County. New Saint Andrews College and Doug Wilson are in Idaho; Mars Hill, before its founder’s meltdown, was based in Seattle. The burned over district? New York.

I travel a lot, all over the country, and everywhere I go, North and South, East and West, people tell me they’re living in the Bible Belt. Worse, they’re prone to tell me that their local religious fanatics form the “buckle of the Bible Belt”. Everywhere. The whole damn country. I’ve heard it in Oregon and Ohio, as well as Florida and Texas.

It’s not a belt. It’s a great fat corset, wrapped all around the USA, and it’s covered with elaborate chains and straps and buckles and fasteners. Some people use the term “Bible Belt” to disparage the South, others use it to refer to any entrenched collection of rabid believers, and it’s no longer useful at all. Stop using it!

Less anecdotally, back in 2012, Gallup released a map of the country’s “religiosity belt,” below:

In a post about Gallup’s findings, Richard Florida remarked on how religiosity related to political affiliation:

The map charts state-by-state differences in Gallup’s Religiosity Index, which is based on respondents’ answers to questions about the importance of religion to their everyday lives, and how often they attend religious services. …

Gallup notes the relationship between religious intensity and American voting patterns, with the most religious states generally skewing Republican and the least religious trending Democrat. Our own analysis bears this out. We found a substantial positive correlation between religiosity and the percent of state residents that voted for McCain (.67) and consider themselves conservative (.78), and a substantial negative one between religiosity and the percent of residents who voted for Obama (-.64) and consider themselves liberal (-.75).

Tony O’Neill suggests “the once-taboo idea of using marijuana as a tool for people who want to stop using more dangerous drugs is catching on”:

This Substance.com article by Philippe Lucas of the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) sets out some of the evidence for this “substitution effect;” more research is ongoing. While it’s true that some people can get addicted to marijuana—as with any pleasurable drug or experience, like sex or shopping—the reduced harms here compared with an addiction to alcohol, say, or painkillers are obvious. Most of us who use marijuana in this way don’t get addicted. …

“Certainly, I have clients who use it in this way,” says Dr. Adi Jaffe when I ask for his professional opinion on the pros and cons of using marijuana as a tool to wean off other drugs. Jaffe is a UCLA-trained addiction expert, the man behind All About Addiction and a regular contributor to Psychology Today. He draws from his personal experiences with meth addiction when working with his clients at Alternatives Addiction Treatment in Los Angeles. “When you think about it, this is classic harm reduction methodology,” he continues, “replacing a more harmful and dangerous drug with a lesser one to improve coping while reducing consequences. Harm reduction literature in general supports this idea as a positive step in recovery. If someone struggles with anxiety, they need something to help with it, whether that be neurofeedback, talk therapy or weed.”

Meanwhile, Joe Berkowitz describes how “Nuggets,” the above short film, “succinctly captures the heartbreaking reality of addiction”:

Created by German animation studio, the video begins with an adorable kiwi bird casually strolling along before stumbling upon a golden nugget. The bird’s interest is piqued and so he ingests the liquid inside. It’s instant euphoria, and with it, the kiwi can suddenly fly for a short while. As anyone who’s ever had any golden nuggets of their own can attest, what happens after he finds the next one is not the same. It doesn’t last as long, and the landing is more of crash. Nevertheless, now the bird is no longer casually strolling, but running to get the next hit—with ever-diminishing returns. … [The film] puts into perspective the plight of the addicted person, inviting viewers to feel empathy for them instead of contempt.

Matt Besser, co-founder of the Upright Citizens Brigade, chats with Megh Wright about the enduring appeal of cult comedian Andy Kaufman:

[H]e wants to alienate, he wants to fool as many people as possible, and he does the same kind of thing in that Letterman clip [above], which is at one point he says “I don’t know why you’re laughing.” I’m paraphrasing, but he pretty much says “I don’t know why you’re laughing because what I’m saying is serious,” and you can hear the laughter drop out and nervous and uncomfortable tittering, and he does it on both the Letterman clip and that Fridays clip of trying to go into this personal story and it’s all bullshit. I think he talks about his wife in both of them and he doesn’t even have a wife. He’s talking about getting a wife and getting a divorce and on the Letterman bit he’s pretending to be sick, he comes out and he just wants people to believe it, and to me that’s such a weird specific kind of comedy, and part of why you should enjoy this is knowing that other people are not enjoying this.

Besser and Wright further discuss what makes the above Letterman clip so outstanding:

MW: There’s sort of an inverse reaction going on between what the audience laughs at — Kaufman just sitting there awkwardly — and what they don’t laugh at, which is the whole made-up story about his recent divorce and everything. Usually with bits like that there’s a buildup to a big laugh, but it seems more like the opposite with him.

MB: It’s great. My favorite moment maybe out of all these clips is the one where, I think it’s the Letterman one, but it’s the one where he’s talking about getting a divorce and then he turns to the audience and goes “I don’t know where you guys are coming from,” and he’s incredulous like “What’s wrong with you people? I’m telling you about my divorce and you’re laughing at me?” It goes against every comic instinct to tell an audience to stop laughing, and that’s just fucking hilarious.

In an earlier post, Josh Jones also praised Kaufman’s Letterman appearances:

Kaufman sends Letterman into a fit of stammering “uh, oh… ums” and the audience into fits of laughter by looking like he’s just stumbled in from a psych ward and isn’t sure exactly where he is or why. When he finally opens his mouth to speak, at nearly two minutes into the interview, he seems lost, dazed, almost childlike. Which everyone thinks is hilarious, because, well, it’s Andy Kaufman. It must be performance art, right? No matter which Andy Kaufman appeared before an audience, they always had the sense there was another one, or several, underneath, whether they knew his act or not. But you could never know if you’d hit bedrock. …

One might say Andy Kaufman invented trolling, the art of riling people up by impersonating idiots, crazies, and abrasive jerks. And he got away with it for one simple reason; he was authentic—all of his characters had some kind of endearing vulnerability, even at their most deranged.

Emily Eakin covers the increasing popularity of fecal transplants. The logic behind them:

It’s possible that no Americans have gut microbiomes that are truly healthy. Evidence is mounting that over the course of human history the diversity of our microbes has diminished, and, in a recent paper, Erica and Justin Sonnenburg, microbiologists at Stanford, argue that the price of microbial-species loss may be an increase in chronic illness. Unlike our genes, which have remained relatively stable, our microbiome has undergone radical changes in response to shifts in our diet, our antibiotic use, and our increasingly sterile living environments, raising the possibility that “incompatibilities between the two could rapidly arise.”

In particular, the Sonnenburgs stress the adverse effects of a standard Western diet, which is notoriously light on the plant fibre that serves as fuel for gut microbes. Less fuel means fewer types of microbes and fewer of the chemical by-products that microbes produce as they ferment our food. Research in mice suggests that those by-products help reduce inflammation and regulate the immune system. Noting that rates of so-called Western diseases—including heart disease and autoimmune disorders, all of which involve inflammation—are thought to be much lower in traditional societies, the Sonnenburgs write, “It is possible that the Western microbiota is actually dysbiotic and predisposes individuals to a variety of diseases.”

Currently, OpenBiome, “a nonprofit stool bank founded last year by graduate students at M.I.T., ships more than fifty specimens each week to hospitals in thirty-six states.” But that might not last:

In the past year, orders for OpenBiome’s stool have increased at a rate of about eighteen per cent a month. Its success has unnerved biotech companies that are developing stool-based enemas and capsules—or, as they’re known in the field, “crapsules”—for eventual sale on the commercial market. “OpenBiome is selling an unapproved drug without any kind of F.D.A. clearance, so in my opinion they’re breaking the law,” Lee Jones, the C.E.O. of Rebiotix, a company in Minnesota that is developing an enema for the treatment of C. difficile, told me. “They may parade as a nonprofit, but what they’re doing is selling a product to be used on patients.”

When, in a year or two, Rebiotix submits its enema to the F.D.A. for approval, it will have spent tens of millions of dollars on research and trials—costs that are typically factored into a drug’s retail price. OpenBiome charges two hundred and fifty dollars for a treatment, which just covers its costs. “This is a highly unusual situation,” Peter Safir, the lawyer, said. “There’s no question that in the United States we want our drugs approved. We want the F.D.A. to say a product is safe, effective, and is manufactured according to good practices, and that costs a lot of money. But here you’ve got an almost identical competitor that is virtually giving it away, without F.D.A. approval.” Once a company like Rebiotix obtains approval to sell its stool therapy, he went on, it could pressure the F.D.A. to shut down OpenBiome.

Previous Dish on fecal transplants here.

Meet the Black Seadevil, an elusive anglerfish recently captured on film for the first time:

If the anglerfish’s toothy jaw and dead-eyed stare creep you out, take some comfort in the fact that this female fish is just three and a half inches long. Its dainty size, plus its preferences for the dark deep-sea, helps explain why sightings are so rare. “This is the first time we’ve captured this fish on video in its habitat,” says senior scientist Bruce Robison of the Monteray Bay Aquarium Research Institute in a statement. “Anglerfish, like this Melanocetus, are among the most rarely seen of all deep-sea fishes.”

There are more than 200 species of anglerfish, and while some can grow longer than three feet, most are less than a foot, reports National Geographic. The females of all species, however, carry a fishing-pole-like spine topped with a glowing “lure” made of flesh. This feature earns the fish its name, as it uses the lure to attract prey close enough to be snatched up its toothsome jaw.

Erin McCarthy offers a clarification about the sometimes brutal sex lives of anglerfish:

You may have heard how some anglerfish reproduce via the males fusing their bodies to the females’ until they essentially become one; the male loses his eyes, fins, teeth, and some internal organs and, from that point forward, lives off of the female, providing sperm when she’s ready to spawn. Those fish “are members of the suborder Ceratioidei, [or] deep sea anglerfishes, in which some species are known to reproduce by that means,” [American Museum of Natural History curator John] Sparks says. Still, that’s not the norm for those fish—scientists have so far only found parasitic males in 5 of 11 ceratioid families, according to Sparks—and it’s probably not what happens when humpback anglerfish mate, either. “That has not been found—yet—in this species,” Sparks says. “In the family this species belongs to, only loosely attached, non-parasitic, males have been found on females—they still retain their teeth, etc.”

Browse a gallery of other odd-looking anglerfish here.

The Believer asked a bevy of writers about why and what they read. And where:

Alice Bolin: I read in bed or outside on the bench at my boyfriend’s house. I love reading outside.

Teju Cole: Everywhere. How long does it take to pee? Twenty-five seconds? I like to have something in hand even while doing that. (Don’t look at me that way, it’s not such a tricky skill.)

Darcie Dennigan: At a coffee shop is best. That way, if I’m reading something good, something worth reading, it will be ok—I’ll be safe, there will be people around, my life won’t be totally changed because there’s the world going on right there and I can step back into it.

Jordan Ellenberg: I try to quit working at around 11:30 so I can read in bed for a half hour before sleeping. It’s the main time I read. But planes, too, when I’m on one. I’m actually writing this to you on a plane right now and just before I took out my laptop and started answering these questions, I was sort of vaguely alternating between the opening pages of The Man Without Qualities (used paperback, bought I don’t remember when) and the opening pages of Alan Mendelsohn, The Boy From Mars (on my phone). Airplanes are for disorganized reading, the bed for organized reading.

Graham Foust: In a chair or on a couch somewhere. In airports and bars. On the bus.

Ruth Graham: I read books in bed, overwhelmingly. Both in the morning and at night. Unless I’m truly engrossed in a book, I find it hard to concentrate on them in other places. Plus, being in bed is so comfy, why not spend more time there?

J. Robert Lennon: On the sofa, in the evening, with my wife. Sometimes in bed, too. I wish there was a train that could take me to work; I’d read on it for sure. I read on planes. Every once in a while I’ll designate a day just for reading and will do it all day long, wherever I happen to be. That’s a rare treat though.

(Photo by Aurelien Breeden)