Aszilvasy

In theory, genocides are genocides are genocides. And yet, politics finds a way to corrupt even the definition of key words.

Anyone familiar with the facts of what happened to Armenians in Turkey, what Armenians call “The Great Crime,” should be on some level puzzled by this debate.  From 1915 to 1922, Turkey began relocating Armenian citizens, some to concentration camps, and between 600,000 and 1,500,000 Armenians were killed during this process. It was mass murder on a scale that had not been seen yet in the modern world. It was widely recognized at the time it was happening as an atrocity, and the word “genocide” itself was named with these events, along with the Holocaust, in mind.

Yet Turkey calls this the “so-called Armenian genocide,” and has suggested a number of reasons for the deaths of these people that is not their policies. It seems silly they would deny this: it would be better for all to admit their mistakes and move on. But talk to many Americans, and you’ll hardly hear remorse for how Native Americans were treated. In that context, Turkey’s modern stance on is disappointing if unsurprising, but it is refreshing when the Pope calls things what they are:

During a special mass to mark the centenary of the mass killing, the pontiff referred to “three massive and unprecedented tragedies” of the past century. “The first, which is widely considered the first genocide of the twentieth century, struck your own Armenian people,” he said, quoting a declaration signed in 2001 by Pope John Paul II and Kerekin II, leader of the Armenian church.

Unsurprisingly, Turkey has recalled their ambassador in response. Let us hope the Pope sticks to his language and does not back down.

And let us all stand up to language promoting genocide. One would think such language would not exist, at least in any mainstream sources. But one would be wrong, and it is found bubbling to the surface in the place we should least expect it: among the Israeli population.

According to Talking Points Memo, a few days ago a piece appeared online at the Times of Israel making claims such as:

“Jewish divine law makes it very clear: the ‘Palestinians’ not only have no right to any land, but the ‘Palestinians’ are not even human beings and thus have no right to even live at all,” the piece read, describing Palestinians as “worthless subhuman beasts and vermin.”

The Times pulled the piece down, and claimed they were hacked. Given the author’s history, that is quite possible. But back in August 2014 the Times published a non-hacked opinion piece by Yochanan Gordon entitled “When Genocide is Permissible,” since taken down (although available in archive), which ends with these words:

I will conclude with a question for all the humanitarians out there. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu clearly stated at the outset of this incursion that his objective is to restore a sustainable quiet for the citizens of Israel. We have already established that it is the responsibility of every government to ensure the safety and security of its people. If political leaders and military experts determine that the only way to achieve its goal of sustaining quiet is through genocide is it then permissible to achieve those responsible goals?

The author was too cowardly to say the words directly, but it isn’t hard to figure out the answer he intended his readers to draw.

(Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

Sendhil Mullainathan, an economics professor from Harvard, wrote an interesting piece in the New York Times on Friday about his concerns with the finance world. The nuanced piece looks at how much finance gives back to society as a whole, he notes:

It is important to remember that it is not just inventors, teachers or nonprofit workers who provide more social than private value. This is an economic insight as old as Adam Smith: Thanks to the division of labor, in a well-functioning market we can do our own thing and still contribute to the greater good. Inventors may be supervalue-adders, but most of us add value, albeit to a lesser degree. This is a comforting power of markets: We can do good for society simply by doing what we do well.

Mullainathan goes on, though, to note the dangers of “rent-seekers,” who “Instead of creating wealth…simply transfer it — from others to themselves.” I have a good friend who, like Nick Carraway, works in bonds. He is well-compensated, I am sure, but he invests in public services, municipalities, universities…in other words, his decisions do good things. I worry about how bond investments–which must, get paid first of a city’s debts, even before pensioners–might hurt regular people when the municipal government runs the city into the ground, like in Detroit. But I cognitively understand the need for investments to flow into cities.

Mullainathan’s conclusion:

So how should I feel about my students going into finance? I hope they realize that they have the potential to do great good and not simply make money. It may not be how the industry is structured now, but idealism and inventiveness are two of the best traits of youth, and finance especially could use them.

(Photo: Wall Street, Wikimedia)

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Adrienne LaFrance has an interesting article up at The Atlantic this weekend examining the ways Google’s algorithms shape our thought. She found, for instance, in using Google to search for CEOs that all but one image was of a white man except one:

Now, she grants that “Only two dozen Fortune 500 companies have women as top bosses—that’s less than 5 percent of overall Fortune 500 CEOs. And the 10 best paid CEOs in America are all white and male,” but she asks about search-engine algorithms:

Should [they] challenge reality, or simply reflect it? People tend to think about the act of googling something as clinical, technological—decidedly not human. But search engines are designed by humans who have diverse value systems and distinct ways of categorizing their understanding of the world. (Not to mention all of the humans who are uploading and tagging images that Google’s algorithm finds online.)

And those ideas help build algorithms that influence the way tons of information is presented to billions of people. Search engines aren’t just the first place people turn for answers, but very often the only place. But Google, like the oracles that have come before it, can be more opaque than it appears.

Medieval manuscripts are one of my favorite things: the beautiful calligraphy, the wonderful artistry, the fact that you often find some strange and amazing doodles or drawings within the margins, like this:

All this makes the Qatar Digital Library placing medieval scientific texts online for all to see very exciting to me.  But, beyond that, it makes me reflect on what relationship Islam has to violence. The above video from Real Time with Bill Maher begins on a topic near and dear to us Bostonians’ hearts, the Tsarnaev trail. Zakaria’s makes some compelling points, and while I am sympathetic to Maher’s willingness to speak out when so many others are afraid, on the case of Islam necessarily being a religion of violence, I think he’s out of his depth.

A religion that saved and preserved the texts of Plato and Aristotle, and cultivated a wide range of scientific, philosophical, and literary texts of love and peace can’t, by definition, be at its core a religion of ignorance and violence.

(Photo of a water clock design courtesy the Qatar Digital Library)

(Photo of medieval manuscript courtesy of Robert Stanton’s Facebook wall)

Today is the first real spring day in Boston. I can go outside without a jacket, and while it is a little bit chilly, it is not so chilly that I’m worried about needing a jacket tomorrow. April 12th is a late date for this, even up in Boston.

On this glorious day, every year, when my spirits are restored by the sun and my yearning to be consistently outside in the sun is fulfilled, I listen to The Beatles’s  “Here Comes the Sun” off my favorite album, Abbey Road.  I find the song simple, yet powerful. A lullaby that puts to sleep the winters of my discontent.

But this year I’m also listening to another piece of music I would never have considered: Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony. Although I knew–and still know–little about music, it was a piece I was vaguely familiar with when I first heard it. Turns out that’s because the work appears in “Itchy and Scratchy and Marge,” a classic episode of The Simpsons. Like so many other late Gen X/early Millennials (hard to know where I fit), most of my familiarity with classical music stems from cartoons, The Simpsons, Looney Tunes, and a few others.

As a teacher of literature, this lack of knowledge has always felt problematic. All the arts interact, and when I read a Wallace Stevens poem I love, such as “Anglais Mort à Florence,” certainly knowing who Brahms is beyond the dry “Romantic composer” I find on Wikipedia would help deepen my understanding of the poet’s sentiment.

To rectify this, I signed up for a free MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) offered by Coursera called “Introduction to Classical Music” taught by Craig Wright from Yale. I hoped it would deepen my understanding of classical music and I could bring it into my classroom effectively. Yet I also had another reason for signing up: MOOCs are a new method of education, touted the web over as bringing about the death of our bloated and aged universities.

I had a lovely experience in the course: I learned a lot and began to appreciate classical music on a deeper level. As much as I did learn, though, I would have gotten more out of being able to ask face-to-face questions of the professor or TAs. As it stands, MOOCs are not going to replace the traditional classroom setting.  According to Anya Kamenetz at NPR, people like me, that is, current or former teachers, make up 39% those who take these courses, and 1-in-5 of those are taking courses they’ve themselves “taught the subject they were studying.” MOOCs aren’t an avenue, at least not yet, for the poor or disenfranchised to get an education; they are another gateway for those already educated to further refine what they know.

This isn’t bad, but it isn’t what we’ve been promised.

Which is no surprise. Every new technology, from writing to the printing press to the television has been (1) touted as changing everything in education, (2) changed some things in important ways, and (3) never dismantled the current model of face to face education in the way of the early proponents. Those in education know this.

I’ve taught online college classes; there is certainly value to them, but no student got what they would have had they sat in my class. Yet, I took what I learned and use Canvas in my English classroom everyday now. And I’m not alone: “83 percent of MIT undergrads are taking a class that uses MITx resources [from edX] in some way.” The internet has improved my teaching, while not (yet!) putting me out of a job.

And at current growth rates (ignoring the fact that no business yet is accepting MOOC credits over the traditional university), it won’t happen for a while. Which is okay.  MOOCs are fun, and I plan on signing up for more. But they aren’t the answer to the problems of education.

Rather than wishing MOOCs would burn down academia (which, to be sure, has its problems) perhaps we should actually work on reforming it and finding ways to make it cheaper and more affordable; stop seeing education as a product and students as consumers, and we’re probably on the right path.

(Photo: Andrew’s, from a cliff around Mohonk, 2003)

(Video: Youtube, Leonard Bernstein conducts Beethoven’s 6th Symphony, 1st Movement)

The Arden Shakespeare Series is my favorite of the many editions of Shakespeare out there. Its depth of academic research is stunning, both in the language and the history of the text. Perusing their collection, as I often do, I came across The Double Falsehood a few years ago. At first, I was surprised. This isn’t Shakespeare. Arden does publish other early modern dramatists, but this was in their Shakespeare series. I assumed, rightly, that this was a curiosity and a part of Arden’s desire to publish some of the rich Shakespeare apocrypha. I didn’t buy it, but I respected the decision.

Perhaps I should have, though, as new research out of University of Texas suggests the play may in fact be Shakespeare’s.  The authors of the study, Ryan L. Boyd and James W. Pennebaker, analyzed the language of 33 Shakespeare plays, 9 by John Fletcher (a frequent collaborator), and 12 by Lewis Theobald (an early 18th century textual editor), and came to the conclusion that

the play’s first half was almost entirely written by Shakespeare, though the second half appeared to be split evenly between Shakespeare and Fletcher.

Only tiny traces of Theobald’s signature were found.

This conclusion intrigues me, because the history of The Double Falsehood logically compelled any sane person to assume it a fake. So much so that I’m still not utterly convinced. There’s a long history of Shakespeare apocrypha: some texts, such as Pericles or The Two Noble Kinsmen, are eventually admitted into the canon; others, such as Sir John Oldcastle or The Birth of Merlin have (rightly) never been accepted as authentic.

What makes The Double Falsehood particularly dubious is it’s history. We know a play called The History of Cardenio (based on Quixote) was performed by The King’s Men (the theater company to which Shakespeare belonged) in 1613. We also have a Stationer’s Register entry from 1653 attributing this to Shakespeare and Fletcher. But, we don’t have a surviving text.

When, in the 1720s,Lewis Theobald undertook to create a new scholarly edition of Shakespeare’s works, he happened to find three lost manuscripts that he claimed were the lost Cardenio.  Three manuscripts which he never let anyone see. The manuscripts which disappeared after his death. Three manuscripts for which the only evidence that exists is his word and the play, The Double Falsehood, supposedly reconstructed by Theobald–a playwright himself–from those manuscripts. Hmm.

According to Alexander Pope, who savaged Theobald as the favored son of the goddess of Dulness in the Dunciad, Theobald was a mere pedant who lacked artistic skill. For whatever it is worth, Theobald’s pedantry allowed him to be a better textual editor than Pope ever was. He was a master of the fine details of Shakespeare’s text.

Given this, and the history, is it not reasonable to still doubt The Double Falsehood‘s authenticity in spite of the endorsement of this study and the endorsement of Arden? I cannot read the method myself, but Fraser McAlpine (real name) from BBC America says that Boyd and Pennebaker

examined how Shakespeare used language functionally (with pronouns and prepositions), and they put various experiences and attitudes (such as emotion, family, religion and feedback from the senses) into content categories and examined the language he used to describe them.

It strikes me as possible that a great textual editor, one who loses himself in the original’s writing, might be able to produce a text that could use “language functionally” in a way similar to Shakespeare, and could definitely mimic “various experiences and attitudes” in a similar manner. I have not read The Double Falsehood, but many who have suggest it doesn’t meet Shakespeare’s character or plot standards. It’s dangerous to try to go too far with the quality of the play, because a number of canon Shakespeare are weak (looking at you, Merry Wives of Windsor)…

In the end, though, given the text’s history, it’s going to take more than a few scholars and one study to convince me.

We are now half way through the 2010s.  It’s strange to type that, and to think about how recently we were halfway through the 00s.  Given this “milestone,” I am not surprised “best of” lists have already begun to crop up, with the AV Club counting down the Top 100, as of this writing already down to 20.

One of my great blind spots is film. Think of a great classic movie, and odds are I have not seen it: E.T., The Wizard of Oz, Casablanca, Gone with the Wind, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest…the list goes embarrassingly on.¹ 

Much the same holds true for contemporary movies, and so scrolling down these lists elicits mostly blank stares and an occasional gasp of surprise.² But when I came across Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom I smiled.I confess the following without any intended judgement of Anderson’s ability: my taste in film is not particularly good, and Wes Anderson is probably my favorite modern filmmaker. Most of the films I hold dear are quirky, mix comedy and poignancy, have relatively simple plots but beautiful composition, show complicated families, and ultimately have some measure of redemption in the end.³ Wes Anderson’s movies almost universally hit that sweet spot for me. The Grand Budapest Hotel was a triumph; The Royal Tennebaums still cracks me up; The Life Aquatic does everything right.

Of all the films, Moonrise Kingdom, sitting at 23 on this list, probably moved me the most. I watched it and loved it, but part of my devotion to this movie surely springs from Michael Chabon’s beautiful evaluation of it in the New York Review of Books. It’s opening paragraphs transcend a mere appraisal of the film itself.  The whole piece is worth your time, but here is a taste:

Everyone, sooner or later, gets a thorough schooling in brokenness. The question becomes: What to do with the pieces? Some people hunker down atop the local pile of ruins and make do, Bedouin tending their goats in the shade of shattered giants. Others set about breaking what remains of the world into bits ever smaller and more jagged, kicking through the rubble like kids running through piles of leaves. And some people, passing among the scattered pieces of that great overturned jigsaw puzzle, start to pick up a piece here, a piece there, with a vague yet irresistible notion that perhaps something might be done about putting the thing back together again.

Two difficulties with this latter scheme at once present themselves. First of all, we have only ever glimpsed, as if through half-closed lids, the picture on the lid of the jigsaw puzzle box. Second, no matter how diligent we have been about picking up pieces along the way, we will never have anywhere near enough of them to finish the job. The most we can hope to accomplish with our handful of salvaged bits—the bittersweet harvest of observation and experience—is to build a little world of our own. A scale model of that mysterious original, unbroken, half—remembered. Of course the worlds we build out of our store of fragments can be only approximations, partial and inaccurate. As representations of the vanished whole that haunts us, they must be accounted failures. And yet in that very failure, in their gaps and inaccuracies, they may yet be faithful maps, accurate scale models, of this beautiful and broken world. We call these scale models “works of art.”

(Feature image courtesy of artist Alejandro Giraldo.  Buy a copy of his prints here.)

(HT: Laughing Squid)

Gay marriage, that is, of course. Skutt Catholic High School in Omaha, NE is not really firing Matthew Eledge, either. At least not technically. Instead, they are simply not renewing his contract. Way better…

What is the relationship between a teacher’s life outside of school, and their work in the classroom? This certainly pushes into some territory we’ve already touched upon here, and the connection is complex, so I get that a school may have some reasonable concern about what a teacher does outside of class. Particularly things that are illegal.

But there’s a danger here: teachers should not be held to a standard  we do not hold one the average adult to. As far as possible, one’s employment should not reach out beyond its role and into an employee’s private life–that private life has to be brought into the work force for termination to be justifiable. The question comes down to how the teacher’s private life affects a  teacher’s actual job. You know, does it make them a worse teacher inside the classroom?

In the case, though, Eledge’s private life seems to have no effect on his classroom success. Julie Anderson at omaha.com notes:

So a good teacher does nothing illegal outside of the classroom and is losing his job. This is a sad story for all: a celebrated teacher loses his job  due to a position the school disagrees with; a school loses a celebrated teacher due to his personal life; students lose a beloved teacher.

Theoretically, in a public school, this doesn’t happen (it does often); but in a private school, or an a place of at-will employment, this is fair game, no matter how much I wish it weren’t. 

I often wonder why someone who is gay would want to work at a Catholic school, at least those that are more conservative. There are, I know, myriad reasons (faith, only place to get a job), particularly that, once you’re there, you fall in love with the students. Eledge is a Speech and Debate coach of no mean success. That’s enough to keep someone coming back. 

Eledge appears, by all means, to be successful at his job, and he should have little problem finding one elsewhere. It’s sad it would come to this, and starting at a new school, learning a new school culture, is difficult. But since he is currently within a culture that wants him to pretend he’s something he’s not–a culture he has little power to shape–it’s probably best to find a place he will be accepted. The anti-gay leaders of their school may be within their rights, but they are losing the next generation, a generation more accepting of new cultural mores. And that’s probably the best way to deal with this given the fact that the school is religious in identity. It’s simple evolution for the school, and the Catholic church at large: adapt or wither.

(HT: Hemant Mehta)

After learning about the return of Arrested Development I didn’t think my life could get any better.  But moon cities in lava tubes is pretty darn awesome.

Leonard Davis cites Jay Melosh, “a Purdue University distinguished professor of Earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences” as staying  that

the edges of the lava cool as it flows to form a pipe-like crust around the flowing river of lava. When the eruption ends and the lava flow stops, the pipe drains leave behind a hollow tunnel.

“There has been some discussion of whether lava tubes might exist on the moon,” Melosh said in a Purdue press statement. “Some evidence, like the sinuous rilles observed on the surface, suggest that if lunar lava tubes exist they might be really big.”

It seems like  a little bit of groundless speculation at the moment, but awesome groundless speculation, so I’ll allow it.  Especially when paired with the fact that NASA has more or less promised that we are “one generation away [from finding life] in our solar system, whether it’s on an icy moon or on Mars, and one generation [away] on a planet around a nearby star.” Although those may not be “little green men,” it will still be an exciting discovery, even more so when we make it in a lab on a moon city in a lava tube!

(Video: Space.com)

The shooting of Walter Scott in South Carolina this past weekend, and the subsequent release of a video showing the officer (Michael Slager) shooting him in the back as if he were hunting an animal (and completely against his report), has once again brought to the national consciousness institutional violence against minorities.

Jamelle Bouie at Slate has an article up that everyone should really read. It elides the irrelevant question of Officer Slager’s personal feelings on race, and focuses on institutional issues.  His conclusion:

When people claim that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, they are stretching the facts a bit. Turkey, which has in recent years oriented itself more towards Europe, borders Syria and has been a secular democracy October 29, 1923. The secular bit can surprise some people, since the CIA Factbook claims the population is 99.8% Muslim, but the government in theory respects freedom or religion and more or less what we in the US call the Establishment Clause.

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, though, is an Islamist, and his conservative AKP party has been in control of Turkey since 2002, with him leading the party directly since 2003. Those who grew up in a secular, liberal Turkey have descried the ways Erdoğan have pushed through Sunni-shaped government initiatives. One major way he’s shaping the future of Turkey is through faith-based initiatives in education:

Turkey’s nominally-secular education system. Examples include a plan to build mosques in 80 different state universities, and a scheme to convert one Istanbul university into a centre for Islamic learning. This month, a government-backed education council recommended extending compulsory religious classes to all primary school pupils, as well as adding an extra hour of obligatory religious classes for all high school students. That decision came in spite of a ruling in September by the European Court of Human Rights, which ordered Turkey to stop the existing one-hour-a-week compulsory religious classes for middle- and high-school pupils.

Compulsory education classes are a no-no in a secular society, and I think of that every time people talk about mandating the Bible in our schools. How might those same people feel if it were Qur’an instead? That should be enough to tell you it is not sound policy.

But college students in Turkey are pushing back against the programs that use government funds to build mosques on university campuses. Some make sense: a push for Buddhist temples. Some are just awesome:

According to Turkish online newspaper, Hurriyet, a number of students at Dokuz Eylül University in the western province of Izmir have demanded a Jedi temple be built on their campus.

A petition on Change.org, illustrated with a screenshot from the film Star Wars: Episode II: Attack of the Clones, had received over 5,000 signatures at the time of writing. “To recruit new Jedi and to bring balance to the Force, we want a Jedi temple,” the petition read, in reference to the Jedi knights from the popular Star Wars films.

Obviously posting this on Change.org is going to do little to change the Turkish government’s policy, but bringing to light the ways Erdoğan and his AKP party are subverting the noble secular democracy founded by Atatürk cannot hurt.

And it’s good for a laugh.

(Photo via Change.org)

(HT: Hemant Mehta)

NPR had an article up a few days ago on cheeses made from nuts. The process, generally done with almonds, is pretty amazing:

At Kite Hill, the cheese-making starts with grinding the nuts with water and then separating out the solids to make almond milk.

“And at that point forward, it’s almost exactly the same process as dairy cheese-making,” says Kite Hill’s CEO Matthew Sade, whose line includes a crusted Brie-like cheese and a smooth chevre-like cheese. Sade cultures the almond milk withLactobacillus acidophilus, bacteria that has assisted cheese and yogurt makers for ages by turning the sugar in the milk into lactic acid. It’s part of the key to giving good cheese its tang.

Once cultured, the milk forms curds, which settle into a molded shape. At this stage, the cheese can be aged for several days or weeks. Kite Hill’s “soft-ripened” cheese actually develops a bitter rind very much like that on a piece of Brie. The soft interior is creamy, with a tart cheesy bite and a distinct essence of almond. Kite Hill’s fresh cheese is tart, cool and smooth, like mild goat cheese.

 

Over at the New York Review of Books, Tim Judah has a fascinating report on poetry in the area in dispute between Ukraine and the separatists looking to create “Novorossiya.”  The whole piece is worth reading, and he does a great job looking at how it has fundamentally, and likely irrevocably, split the citizens.

He focuses on two poets: Olena Maksymenko and Anna Iureva. Before the conflict, Maksymenko was a traveling journalist; after it broke out, she became a vocal opponent of the Russians. This got her into trouble:

Close to the border between Crimea and the mainland of Ukraine she was detained by men she described as “just guys with guns.” They were, she said, Cossacks, Berkut (the name of the former Ukrainian riot police, many of whom had been called up from regions loyal to Yanukovych to try to control the protesters at the Maidan), and Russian soldiers. They threatened to kill her. They pointed a gun at her and pulled the trigger, though it was not loaded, hit her, and chopped some of her hair off. “They said I was an agent of the USA and they tried to get information from me about other journalists. Three days later, I was released,” she told me.

But the war turned Iureva against Ukraine because of the damage they did.

Anna said she would like to go home but “fighting is constant there,” and anyway, she did not want to return while Pervomais’ke was still under Ukrainian control. “They did a lot of harm to us,” she said. “How many people have they killed? How many homes have they destroyed?” Then she took me into a side room where her family and others slept in cramped bunk beds. It was incredibly hot; her forty-three year-old granddaughter, who has Down’s syndrome, was sitting right in front of a fan heater. Anna showed me a tin, with oil and wick, which they used for light when the electricity went off, because they had run out candles. She said it gave off a horrible, choking smoke.

The whole article demonstrates the complex nature of warfare and the complex ways we all interpret the same data.

There is a fierce battle being waged in America’s public schools, from pre-kindergarten right on through university education, which centers on what – exactly – an education is for.  Governor Scott Walker’s recent scuffle with the University of Wisconsin and it’s more than a century old mission “The Wisconsin Idea,” which says that a part of the university system’s mission is to “search for truth,” highlights at least a part of what that fight is about.

Tom Ashbrook hosted a discussion recently (above) on the dying liberal arts, and much of the discussion focused, predictably on the liberal arts usefulness in obtaining gainful employment.  The discussion pointed out that there is a long history in this country of studying the liberal arts as the basis for all future studies, of the earning power of liberal arts students evening out or even surpassing their STEM counterparts over the long-haul.

Good as those arguments are, they are only a part of the story, and, as far as I’m concerned, the less important part.  The purpose of an education is not ONLY or even MOSTLY to get a job and to earn a living, though that may be one of the legitimate ends of education.  However, the primary purpose of an education is (or should be) primarily to be able to foster participation in a democratic government (and thus to advocate and secure for oneself all of the benefits of living in this society) as well as the ability to think, perceive, and enjoy life and the many things that it offers.  The ability to think broadly, to think critically, to express one’s thoughts clearly, articulately, and persuasively, and to take in new information, and perspectives, are not passé.  They are as necessary in the 21st century as the were in the 18th century and will be in the 24th century.

For Americans to turn their backs on this type of world-broadening education is to deny ourselves exactly that which has made us such a success.  Other countries look to the United States and envy our creative culture.  It’s something worth fighting to maintain and the liberal arts are central to doing so.

I can’t help but think of how beaten up the liberal arts have been over the past couple of decades, and comparing them to that guy in the cart in Monty Python . . . “I’m not dead, yet.”

While my areas of expertise¹ lay primarily in British Literature, The Great Gatsby was the first book I truly loved. As do many who read the book at that time of life, I felt I was Gatsby, trying desperately to fake my way into the good graces of my longed for paramour. Gatsby was a tragic hero. About 10 years later, I taught the text to high schoolers, and Gatsby (the character, not the text) felt sad, not noble; hollow, not profound.  He was a last gasp of Romanticism, shown to be a fraud, and yet Gatsby also serves as a stand-in for all of us. We all hide our true self, to some extent; we all die profoundly unknown. Few books adapt with age and remain powerful, and Gatsby is one of those for me.²

Yesterday was the 90th anniversary of the novel’s publication.  In honor of that, I share a great interview from Fresh Air between Terri Gross and Maureen Corrigan, author of the So We Read On, about the history, reception, and continued evolution of meaning of Gatsby.  An interesting highlight on the novel’s reception:

The popular reviewers read it as a crime novel and thought for the most part that it was maybe just OK. There’s a famous headline for a review of The Great Gatsby that came out in the New York World, and the headline reads, “Fitzgerald’s Latest A Dud.”

Oh my god.  Look at this image.  Seriously.  This is, no joke, one of the most terrifying pieces of art I’ve ever seen. It makes me reflect on the fate of man more deeply than the Inferno or King Lear.  Were that what was meant to do, this work of art would be in the annals of great works of the grotesque.

Sadly, it was meant to honor the late Lucille Ball, and “Scary Lucy” (as it’s rightly called) does no justice to her. As Bill Chapel points out, people hate the statue because:

it doesn’t resemble Ball. That, along with other elements — “vacant eyes” and a “nightmare” grin are often mentioned — make the bronze statue too much to bear for fans who recall Ball’s unique charm and wit.

Thankfully Dave Poulin, the artist, recognizes the horror of the piece, and is seeking to rectify it.  Since the original is horrific, any outcome is better than what we have, unlike the disaster that befell Elías García Martínez’s Ecce Homo fresco:

(Feature Photo Courtesy of The Post-Journal/AP)

“Wealth maketh many friends; but the poor is separated from his neighbour” (Prv 19:4)

So it seems that that the Kansas legislature has read this part of scripture not as a lesson about the fickleness of our fellow man, but instead as a literal direction of how we should treat the less fortunate.

When the story first appeared in my Facebook news, I was skeptical.  But not too skeptical…my feed flows with posts vociferating against the poor.To paraphrase friend from another site, it behooves us to be skeptical in a “post-truth” world. So I decided to look into the actual law (which is at the end of the this post).

From the beginning, it isn’t exactly my cup of tea:

All adults applying for TANF shall be required to complete a work program assessment as specified by the Kansas department for children and families, including those who have been disqualified for or denied TANF due to non-cooperation, drug testing requirements or fraud.¹

Fraud? I can understand denying Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) for not having a family or something. Non-cooperation. Okay. I understand the desire for “work assistant programs” even if I think they may do more harm than good, that’s the story for another time. But “drug-testing requirements“?  These are the sorts of “common-sense” policies that cost money and catch few people.  It’s just bad policy (here, here, and here for a brief overview).

When will such drug tests be run? Well:

Under such program of drug screening, the secretary for children and families shall order a drug screening of an applicant for or a recipient of cash assistance at any time when reasonable suspicion exists that such applicant for or recipient of cash assistance is unlawfully using a controlled substance or controlled substance analog. The secretary for children and families may use any information obtained by the secretary for children and families to determine whether such reasonable suspicion exists, including, but not limited to, an applicant’s or recipient’s demeanor, missed appointments and arrest or other police records, previous employment or application for employment in an occupation or industry that regularly conducts drug screening, termination from previous employment due to unlawful use of a controlled substance or controlled substance analog or prior drug screening records of the applicant or recipient indicating unlawful use of a controlled substance or controlled substance analog.²

Some of the drug testing seems logical, if you’re going this way. Termination from a previous job due to a positive test. But “recipient’s demeanor” gives the state a ton of leeway.

But even that, as much as I think this is absurd, is not the worst part. Far from it.

The bill gets even more exacting on the poor.  According Bryan Lowry at Kansas.com, it limits lifetime benefits to 36 months.  Don’t get sick! Well, perhaps this matters less, since the law in the state is already 48 months, which was 12 months fewer than the federal law.

But the worst part is what the state disallows TANF recipients from doing with their money:

No TANF cash assistance shall be used to purchase alcohol, cigarettes, tobacco products, lottery tickets, concert tickets, professional or collegiate sporting event tickets or tickets for other entertainment events intended for the general public or sexually oriented adult materials. No TANF cash assistance shall be used in any retail liquor store, casino, gaming establishment, jewelry store, tattoo parlor, massage parlor, body piercing parlor, spa, nail salon, lingerie shop, tobacco paraphernalia store, vapor cigarette store, psychic or fortune telling business, bail bond company, video arcade, movie theater, swimming pool, cruise ship, theme park, dog or horse racing facility, parimutuel facility, or sexually oriented business or any retail establishment which provides adult-oriented entertainment in which performers disrobe or perform in an unclothed state for entertainment, or in any business or retail establishment where minors under age 18 are not permitted. TANF cash assistance transactions for cash withdrawals from automated teller machines shall be limited to $60, as adjusted by the consumer price index {$25}, per transaction and to one transaction per day. No TANF cash assistance shall be used for purchases at points of sale outside the state of Kansas.³

I bolded and underlined the most egregious, at least to me.  Want to take your kids to a swimming pool or movie theater?  Sorry, poor kids can’t do that in Kansas. Cool down at Schlitterbahn Waterparks? Nope.

Want to prepare for your job interview by getting your nails done? Illegal. Want to cheer on the Kansas Jayhawks or Wichita State Shockers? Sucks to be poor. Jesus turned water into wine, but you can neither get a ring to get married nor buy a glass of wine. Good luck finding a ring in a Cracker Jack box…oh wait, you can’t go to the Kansas City Royals game.

Cruises are also funny, because, as Aimee Patton (a local Kansan) says:

I’m really glad that the KS GOP put that in place.  It was completely necessary to point out to poor people that they can’t spend their money cruising.  I went to Carnival Cruise Lines website and the cheapest cruise I could find was a $294/person trip to the Bahamas.  I’m no math wiz, but that totals to $1,176 – far more than the $497 per month for a family of four that people receive on government assistance.

I highlighted “video arcade” because, what, are we in 1995? Do these exist in Kansas? Because, if so, that might be the only reason to go there if you don’t have an abiding love of prairies or college basketball.

Oh, and that strikethrough?  Yeah, the Kansas legislature apparently originally thought families should be able to take out only $60 a day. Then they thought better of it, and cut it down to $25.

I’m focusing on Kansas, but a bill in neighboring Missouri (HB 813) would apparently ban food stamps from being used to purchase, among other things, seafood, cookies, steak, chips, soft drinks, and energy drinks.

See for yourself, and let us know if there’s anything I missed:

Download (PDF, 266KB)

(HT: Addicting Info)

The above supercut of “All of Sterling Archer’s Literary References” by Press Play‘s Serena Bramble demonstrates the range of references creator Adam Reed’s mind.  And it only scratches the surface of the literary references: Reddit’s page on it unearths a number of others Bramble either didn’t have time for or missed (very easy to do with this show).  Reddit user Centrifugal_Horse unearths one of the more esoteric ones:

Many of us have seen the 60 Minutes above (Killing Cancer) which investigates Duke University’s groundbreaking experiments in immunotherapy, namely, treating brain cancer with genetically modified polio and getting results.  The results in the video look amazing, and it was a particularly heartening, I’d imagine, to those who have cancers without effective treatments.

But first, some things to keep in mind:

This is not the first time in the last decade that 60 Minutes aired an segment that suggested a potential cure for cancer. While John Kanzius’s treatment ideas (radio-wave cancer treatment) are even now still showing some promise, the American Cancer Society went out of their way to fisk the show for being “terribly misleading for patients whose lives may be hanging in the balance.” CBS went so far as to use the word “cure” in the title of their article–although there was that question mark at the end of their article heading, which, as we all know, solves everything.

It was too early then to get our hopes up (and Mr. Kanzius has since died), and it too early now. There have been positive results in the Duke trials, but they are only in Phase I.  There are typically IV phases.

Another problem is money.  There needs to be some research funding coming in.  Here, it seems, there is objectively good news:

Investors who have paid attention to the news coming out of labs have been rewarded in the past few months. If the index had started on Jan. 1, it would be up about 28 percent year-to-date, Loncar said. That compares with about a 12 percent gain in the NASDAQ Biotechnology Index, a more broadly diversified set of stocks that includes cancer immunotherapy. Although Loncar isn’t an investment advisor and has no business relationships with the companies in the index, he does personally invest in some of them.

This is good, but it, as Arlene Weintraub from Forbes notes, for all the excitement it is generating, one potential problem is the free market:

How can a company make money on a one-time treatment? That’s an open question, though it’s certainly not the first time it’s been asked in oncology. The University of Pennsylvania is working on a treatment that involves removing the white blood cells from cancer patients, using a modified HIV virus to re-engineer them, then infusing them back into the body, where they proceed to attack cancer cells. Novartis is backing the project and expects to file for FDA approval by 2016.

Here is where my cynicism kicks in. These drugs have promise. They were done at research institutions not entirely outside the free market, but largely free of it.¹ Yet now we need to hope some wealthy people decide to invest in it. And if they do, they need to make money off of it. Which means it won’t be cheap. Health care shouldn’t be beholden to the free market in the same way other goods and services are, because it isn’t other goods and services. It’s life and death.

After being a little saddened by Duke’s win last night (I guess I’m glad it wasn’t Kentucky), I must have seen Gene Parmesan because I just screamed with excitement.

According to TV producer Brian Grazer (about 24:28 into this Grantland interview), Arrested Development will be returning for 17 more episodes.

We don’t intend this space to be a review of TV shows, at least not yet.  Instead, we want it to be a place to talk about culture. But nothing warms my heart more than yelling “NO Touching!” at students, or warning them that if they don’t work harder they’ll earn a crocodile in spelling (begins with a ‘c’).  The show is in my blood the way Keats’ poetry is, or the music of the Beatles is.

And, while many were not pleased with Season 4, I thought it was a brilliant dare, often better than Season 3.

HT: AV Club

(Featured Photo Courtesy of 20th Century Fox Television / Via tumblr.com)

James Chapman, a British graphic designer, has been making these nifty cartoons of everyday sounds and sharing them on his Tumblr.  I always find the ways different cultures hear sounds interesting, and not just the sound of a chicken:

There’s something strangely familiar about so many of the sounds Chapman identifies, yet they don’t seem quite right to my ear.  Check out his other work.  One last parting, on the sound rain for this Boston day that promises afternoon showers:

What does a state do when it doesn’t have access to the drugs it uses to kill people?  Apparently, given Utah’s respect for human life, it shoots them.  And what happens if, God forbid, the state runs out of bullets?  Perhaps the government of Utah should sharpen that guillotine they’ve got stashed in the closet for emergencies?

One would think that we, as a species, would have rejected the death penalty by now.  Instead, we seem to cling to the power of death at all costs.  Perhaps the good people of Utah should consider how different the beheadings carried out by ISIS really are from the “civilized” firing squad Utahns support with their tax money.  Out of sight and out of mind; we pretend that just because it isn’t broadcast over the Internet that the American culture of death is far distant from ISIS’s culture of death.

Supporters of the law suggest that the firing squad is more humane than lethal injection.  How different is this, really, from the sentiment that, “Beheading is not torture, people die instantly,” argued by the spokesperson of the Norway-based Prophet’s Umma?  The American Right and the Islamic Right have more in common than they might wish to concede.  The moral position must be a rejection of both and a commitment to respect for human life qua life.

As the recent controversy over some old jokes made by the new host of The Daily Show, Trevor Noah, illustrate, comedy has a funny way of igniting people’s passions.

As a friend once told me, their sibling would tease them mercilessly.  When the breaking point finally came, the inevitable “back off,” or worse, the retort is frustratingly effective – “don’t be so sensitive.”  The response is brilliant in its ability to fight off any counter.  As soon as someone tries to prove that they’re not just being sensitive, it appears as though they’re being too sensitive and the sibling wins.  To not fight suggests that the accuser is correct, or at least feels that way.

This is why, in so many areas of life, a quick wit can be the sharpest knife in the block.  The powerful can be cut down quickly, and to respond only lends credence to the original criticism.  But the same power exists when wielded at those who are powerless.  It’s why we cringe a little bit less when Jerry Seinfeld makes a Jewish joke, for example, than if Pat Robertson did.

And therein lies the problem.  Comedy is as sharp and effective a tool regardless of it’s aim.  It can be a great tool for bringing down the powerful, but it can also be an effective tool for keeping the powerful in place, or rubbing the powerless’ noses in it.

In his recent series of tweets, Patton Oswalt launched on a 53-Tweet diatribe defending the right of comics to make jokes about whomever, wherever, and bemoans people being too sensitive, or too politically correct – denying comedians access to all of the tools of their craft.  In a response which has seen next to no traction, former editor of The Onion, Joe Garden rebuts Oswalt and reminds us that criticism, regardless of the medium, is healthy and offers the opportunity for personal growth.

Making jokes at the expense of the weak and powerless is to defend the system that makes them that way, on top of being not more interesting than shooting fish in a barrel.  That said, the context matters, the subject matters, and the source matters.  In the end, the words of Mother Jones ring as true for social activism as they do for comedy.  The role is to comfort the afflicted, and to afflict the comfortable.

If anyone keeps silent about the truth, he is lying.¹

Mad Men returned this past Sunday with a wonderful episode, “Severance”. Throughout the episode, I was consistently amazed at Elisabeth Moss’s wonderful portrayal of Peggy Olson.  Moss captures the difficulty of being a bright woman who has had to sacrifice a personal life for a professional one, who has had to be degraded to be promoted, who has learned the communicate with men only to be isolated from women. She brings real nuance to the role.

Yet Anna Silman at Salon brings up a salient point: as a prominent member of Scientology, why do we overlook Moss’s involvement in what Going Clear demonstrated to be (as Joshua Alston put) an organization of “institutionalized cruelty and avarice” run by a “megalomaniacal, paranoid, and physically abusive” leader?

At first thought, this question seems absurd. Do you demand every Christian answer for every sin of Christianity? Generally not–although Muslims have certainly been asked to do so. We implicitly understand that the lay members of the church may believe the tenants of the church but worship at a flawed church. Christians have it particularly easy here. Catholics have the Pope, but there’s a long history of the common man ignoring his decree; and other sects don’t have a clear leader. Different sects allow radicals to isolate themselves, and those more moderate to participate in society.²

But,  when we do challenge people to justify their beliefs, those people are generally figureheads in some way: politicians running under the banner of their faith or celebrities peddling faulty facts. But Scientology is different: it relies on having connections to the stars, to the media. It needs people like Moss, or Cruise, or, for that matter, Beck out there in the public. For a religion that had a merely about 25,000 members in 2008, celebrities are people to whom recruiters can point. Going Clear is particularly rough on Cruise, but I’m not sure why it should be much easier on someone like Moss who has the advantage that, “unlike ‘Hollywood’s creepy uncle’ Travolta  or accepted loony Tom Cruise, Moss is cool.”³. Her stunning acting ability defangs our concerns. Watching her work, what she stands melts into her role.

We do this often with the creative types. We still read Pound, Eliot, and a host of other writers and artists who stood for awful things. We can separate their art from them as people.

But they’re dead. It is right to forgive the dead. Moss is not. She is still out there acting and implicitly–or explicitly–promoting Scientology. Were it simply a matter of dogma, I could overlook it.  Not one of us is free of foolish thoughts. But her beliefs have power and help to engender the machine of her church. Speak out against it, and she could bring change.

Yet Moss doesn’t publicly discuss her Scientology often. When she does she often skirts its real problems, speaking vaguely about personal freedom being “very important concept in my religion” and suggesting that “[m]any of [her] church’s stances and concepts are grossly misunderstood by the media.”  Her words defend her more liberal views on homosexuality: while the church denies that they condemn homosexuality, L. Ron Hubbard was pretty explicit about his condemnation. The power of her opinion is blunted by her refusal to acknowledge the church’s complicated views. She would prefer, as we all would deep down, to remain silent and shy away from controversy. But when faced with knowledge of how the church is actually operating, the only moral action is to speak out against abuses within the churches.

In silence, she shouts her support.

But here I am, still watching Mad Men, still marveling at her ability to embody a complex character, and still enjoying the art. Which I guess says something about arts ability to reach beyond the self? About our need to see each other as more than the sum of our beliefs? Or about my willingness to justify my actions?

The Local Europe with some interesting field work in Northern Sweden:

I’m looking to integrate this as quickly as possible into my everyday vernacular.

HT: Language Log.

As the above photo linking Nicholas Cage to an unrelated 19th century men is just one example of our culture’s fascination with finding doppelgängers. To some people–dating at least as far back as Keats lamenting that Newton “unweaved” the “awful rainbow” and certainly further– science has all but banished wonder. For the religious minded, miracles may serve as a replacement; but for those more secular, doppelgängers serve much the same point. There is something uncanny about them, that seemingly defies our best logical attempts to explain them. They are almost outside of science.

NPR’s story today on Neil Richardson and John Jemison is worth a read (or a listen).  The similarities between the two unrelated men is interesting although hardly unique:

“We started swapping life stories, and that’s when the really spooky bit happened, when we found that there were so many similarities in our lives,” Jemison says.

Both studied at the College of St. Mark and St. John in Chelsea in the 1960s. Both went on to become religious education teachers. Both still sing in choirs; they bank at same bank.

“We’ve both got sons who play the didgeridoo,” says Richardson.

But those coupled with how similar they look, though, is particularly fascinating.  And, of course, the fact that they feel they look nothing alike.

Certainly, it’s just random chance, although Richardson ends the piece quoting Hamlet: “There’s more to Heaven and Earth than in your philosophy, Horatio.”

(Photo: Youtube)

While I, for one, am not eager to welcome our coming drone overlords, creative people are always going to do pretty awesome things with new technology.  Calder Wilson tied fireworks to a drone and then used long exposure to get shots like this:

Check out more of his stuff at his website.

(Story and photos via: Geeks are Sexy)

Apparently, in many German towns dancing–yes dancing!–is illegal over the Easter weekend:

From Thursday through Sunday, it is illegal to dance in public in 13 of the 16 states in Germany from the days between Thursday, known in the Christian religion as Maundy Thursday, through Sunday, Easter Day. In some states, the ban extends to the Monday after Easter.

The holiday laws, known as Tanzverbot, have varying degrees of restrictions and enforcement in each state. Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria anti-dancing laws are known to be the most restrictive with dancing completely outlawed during the entire weekend. In Berlin, the country’s party capital, dancing is illegal on Good Friday from 4 a.m. to 9 p.m.

I knew Footloose was based on a true story, but who knew it was happened for a weekend in Germany?

This is the sort of thing that should make people think twice before making fun of the U.S. for some of its absurd Blue Laws.¹

HT: Hemant Mehta

No.  The answer is clearly no despite the clickbait article titles(here, here, and many other places…including, I guess, this site). But the internet is abuzz with this question in the wake of Dr. Fredric Brandt’s apparent suicide.  Martin Short’s Dr. Franff (seen above) is clearly a parody of overzealous dermatologists.

Some in the know, though, thought they saw a connection between Short’s Dr. Franff and Dr. Fredric Brandt, who worked with celebrities such as Madonna. And, indeed, as Emily Smith at Page Six‘s post shows, there does seem to be a connection. And Dr. Brandt himself recognized the connection  was apparently quite upset.  His publicist told Page Six:

“The show definitely deeply hurt him, he was being made fun of because of the way he looks.

“It is mean, and it was bullying. But the show was not the reason for his depression, and it was not the reason he would take his own life.”

Two things about this.

First, despite headlines, a TV show did not cause this man’s suicide.  His publicist admits it herself. He had a mental illness.

Second, he wasn’t bullied. The distinction between comedy and bullying is a fine one: on school yards all over the country class clowns get their first laughs at the expense of those who don’t fit in. But the question at hand here seems strange; the average American isn’t going to make the connection between the show and the man. The public at large has not watched the show (although it is worth your time; Fey does a great job here) and has little to no knowledge of this particular dermatologist. I have never met this man, but such a connection suggests a lack of this awareness; perhaps he didn’t realize how little Fame and Rumor travelled outside his coterie. It’s unfortunate that this would weigh on a troubled conscience.

The fight against aging has been both glorified and pilloried in our culture for years. The desire to halt the process through cosmetic surgery, as it stands now, is quixotic–the height of vanity–and our culture has duly mocked it.

This poor man had clearly had deeper mental issues than his desire for youth. But beyond this, that desire, too, so endemic in our society, is itself a form of mental illness.

Matt Welch summarizes the Indiana pizza disaster thusly:

1) Family owners of small-town Indiana pizzeria spend zero time or energy commenting on gay issues. 

2) TV reporter from South Bend walks inside the pizzeria to ask the owners what they think of the controversial Religious Restoration Freedom Act. Owner Crystal O’Connor responds, “If a gay couple came in and wanted us to provide pizzas for their wedding, we would have to say no….We are a Christian establishment.” O’Connor also says—actually promises is the characterization here—that the establishment will continue to serve any gay or non-Christian person that walks through their door.

3) The Internet explodes with insults directed at the O’Connor family and its business, including a high school girls golf coach in Indiana who tweets “Who’s going to Walkerton, IN to burn down #memoriespizza w me?” Many of the enraged critics assert, inaccurately, that Memories Pizza discriminates against gay customers. 

4) In the face of the backlash, the O’Connors close the pizzeria temporarily, and say they may never reopen, and in fact might leave the state. “I don’t know if we will reopen, or if we can, if it’s safe to reopen,” Crystal O’Connor tells The Blaze. “I’m just a little guy who had a little business that I probably don’t have anymore,” Kevin O’Connor tells the L.A. Times.

Basically, someone walked into a pizza shop and asked these people what they thought. Ideas I disagree with, but these were people more or less minding their own business. They didn’t say they were going to refuse service. They said they wouldn’t do a gay wedding. Now they have shut down their business and their family continues to face harassment.¹

Two things to make absolutely clear:

1. This is still a form of discrimination;
2. Who gets pizza at a wedding?

What bothers me about this, though, is that it all seems to lack thought and compassion.  Let’s think about this for a minute: what has won people over to the gay rights movement? Exposing people who have either implicit or explicit issues with the gay community to real, loving gay people and responding to discrimination and hate with compassion.  This is what has worked, not flooding a family’s business with phone calls harassing them and crashing their Yelp with unrelated pictures. And it is not only a select few people: mainstream sources are egging them on and finding enjoyment in the family’s suffering.  Jenny Kutner at Salon headlines her piece “Yelp users hilariously revolt against Indiana pizza shop that refuses to cater same-sex weddings.”

I don’t find the above image mocking the woman’s teeth “hilarious” that was uploaded onto Memories Pizza’s Yelp page. It is repulsive and base. And part of what I distresses me most is that those harassing Memories Pizza overlap with those who rage at Trevor Noah for his jokes at the expense of overweight women. If making fun of overweight people is taboo, why is it okay to make fun of this woman’s appearance?²

Additionally, by consistently calling these people–and yes, harassing them–all you do is validate their sense of victimization. Do I think Christians, the most numerous and powerful religious group in the country, are victims? No. But this gives them a ready-made avenue to feel this way. And again, the whole things is absurd: who wants pizza at a wedding?

As I was writing this, Nathaniel Frank at Slate came to many of the same conclusions, and I think gave it much better context:

But here’s the thing: Millions of people still haven’t thought about it. And even when they do, according to a growing body of research, their biases can lie beyond their own awareness. As I’ve described here and here, prejudice is largely unconscious. This applies especially to homophobia (though it also helps explain the crushing persistence of American racism long after the overwhelming majority of polite society has deemed it unacceptable). To cite just one example of the research on this phenomenon, Yale University psychologists were able to measure people’s self-perceptions of their views on homosexuality and then empirically measure their actual levels of tolerance. There was a significant gap between the two. The resulting point should be obvious but seems not to be in our cultural discourse: What people say (such as, “I don’t discriminate”) is often quite different from what they actually do or think—and not always because they’re being deceptive but, rather, because they’re being delusional.

The Indiana law, particularly with the right of businesses to discriminate in the state, I would hope would lose a lawsuit. But until a lawsuit brings this down, or the state repeals it due to financial pressures, people should voice their opinion and let the business be run into the ground by the free-market.

What people have done instead is return discriminatory ideas (not even actions) with actual hate. I obviously don’t know the family from Memories Pizza, but my guess is that they have had little meaningful interaction with gay people. This is their first, and certainly it isn’t changing their mind. There are children in this family, and this is their interaction with the pro-gay community.

It’s hardly a way to change hearts and minds.