magic circle

Karl Giberson has a well-reasoned article in Salon called "What's wrong with science as religion", in which he argues that, though militant atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have essentially made science (since he includes Hitchens, "reason" might be a more accurate, albeit broader and less precise, term) their new religion, science could never really replace religion. It doesn't seem like that's what anyone was calling for exactly--Dawkins et all seem more interested in reacting to and arguing against the idea of religion than creating a new one. Still, though the odd slide from reason to atheistic religion isn't exactly new, it's refreshing to see the argument appear again. A taste:

Wilson, along with Atkins, Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and others, persuades us that science has, for thinking people, discredited religion. Nevertheless, they are quick to borrow from a religion they reject and take delight in using biblical metaphors. And as their science evolves to meet the "mythopoeic requirements" of their minds, it increasingly resembles religion.

"What is Art?" Part 1

Tolstoy says,

Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them.

(Link)

"character matters"

Perhaps Monica Goodling had grown tired of more standard interview questions when she started asking applicants to the Justice Department slight variants of Stephen Colbert's standard question to congresspeople: "George W. Bush--great president or the greatest president?" Goodling, who attended Regent University Law School (a school, according to Dean Jeffrey Brauch, that is "committed to the proposition that there is truth--eternal principles of justice--about the way we should practice law and about the law itself. We believe character matters. We talk openly about how an attorney can have integrity and humility in a profession that challenges both"), asked applicants what it was about George W. Bush that made the applicant want to serve him. According to the New York Times, Goodling scanned resumes for “abortion,” “homosexual,” “Florida recount,” or “guns.” She also made notes that ensured the applicant was sufficiently conservative on, as she put it in her interview notes, "god, guns + gays."

Goodling displayed her commitment to "eternal principles of justice" in many ways. In one exemplary case, she propagated "unfounded rumors" that an applicant was gay and having an affair with her superior, Margaret Chiara, one of the nine U.S. Attorneys fired without explanation.

The applicant did not get the job.

(Monica/Angela picture via Swampland.)

(Link to NYT article)

touching on mass culture

Some people find Maggie Gyllenhaal very attractive; some might even consider her the most attractive lady alive, ever, in the history of the world. If anyone wants to argue otherwise, the video below doesn't make their task very easy. At one point, she even stumbles onto exactly what Leslie Fiedler was talking about in What Was Literature?! And, though it's hard to believe, she still seems very warm and genuine; she actually listens to the questions and doesn't answer like an entertainment robot. If someone can be successful in the entertainment industry and still retain at least an aura human emotion, they have something special. (Apologies for the advertisement.)

"But guess what? I didn't write Falconer, so I'm a disgrace to everyone who loves me."

Economies have waxed and waned since The Onion had something as good as "How Come No One Celebrates My Alcoholism Like John Cheever's?".

Vice recently published a detailed account of Cheever's final binge.

A taste of the fun:

Back home he demanded a drink, and when his family protested, he asked if he might take a valium instead; given the go-ahead, he swallowed three and poured himself a drink. During the Christmas feast, a hush fell over the table as he tried to eat peas: Time after time, suspensefully, the trembling fork ascended, only to spill its savory burden at the crucial moment. At last, a spoon was suggested. “I regret to tell you,” said Cheever (putting the fork aside), “that you have a father who is dying.”

who's on first?

In the middle of a long and understandably frustrated post about their recent controversial cover, New Yorker writer and sporter of longer hair than you probably expected, Hendrik Hertzberg, writes this sentence:

Andy Borowitz, whom I ran into the other day at a New Yorker softball game, remarked casually to me that the cover had a “P.O.V.”—point of view—“problem.”

Ah, to see that game in action.

oasis

It seems like the Pope Benedict XVI really took Wall-E to heart. According to the BBC, he told World Youth Day that "In so many of our societies, side by side with material prosperity, a spiritual desert is spreading - an interior emptiness, an unnamed fear, a quiet sense of despair." He went on to say that "The world 'needs renewal.'" These statements resonate, for some people, as deeply true. However, whether something as densely organized and hierarchical as Roman Catholicism provides the answer remains an open question. Still, hearing such thoughts spread wide by a more-or-less respected figure warms, in an odd way, the dialectical heart.

(Link)