Nine million Americans took a week off in July 1976, the peak month each year for summer travel. Yet in July 2014, just seven million did. Keeping in mind that 60 million more Americans have jobs today than in 1976, that adds up to a huge decline in the share of workers taking vacations.
Some rough calculations show, in fact, that about 80 percent of workers once took an annual weeklong vacation — and now, just 56 percent do.
That is from Evan Soltas, there is more here. And Evan offers a bit more here.
Let's just watch Dillon Serna's supervolley over and over, shall we?
Some teams in Major League Soccer haven't even had one great homegrown player storm through and become a starter on their team yet. The Colorado Rapids are lucky enough to have two such players, and one of them took the world by storm yesterday with a perfectly executed volley.
Essentially everything else about yesterday's game -- and, if we're extending it a bit, the last three games prior to that as well -- but Dillon Serna's goal was enough to give us something to smile about. Let's just watch that goal a few hundred times a piece and then head over to the Goal of the Week competition so that we can each vote for it another couple hundred times.
It's probably a bad sign that the best things about this year offensively have been wondergoals like this and Jose Mari's physics-killer from earlier in the season, but that's a discussion for another day. For now, LOOK AT THE VOLLEY!
Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos in a film directed by Abdellatif Kechiche. Illustration by Istvan Banyai.
Rumors, rumbles, and other palpitations have beset “Blue Is the Warmest Color” since it showed at the Cannes Film Festival, in May. The jury, chaired by Steven Spielberg, awarded the Palme d’Or to the director, Abdellatif Kechiche, and his two leading ladies. Clearly, this was a work to be reckoned with, but what did it contain? Sex, allegedly, and lots of it: untrammelled, unabashed, and practically unprecedented. We heard that the film was a love story about Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos), a high-school student, and Emma (Léa Seydoux), who is a few years older, and that the dramatizing of that love would make us claw our popcorn into tiny particles. We even heard that the performers had complained of their treatment at the hands of Kechiche. In short, this movie has become a myth, gilded by an NC-17 certificate and crowned by news from Idaho, where depictions of explicit sex may not be combined with an alcohol license, and where patrons of Flicks, an art-house cinema in Boise, will therefore be forbidden to see the film. Heavens! If it’s all too much for Idaho, how will the rest of us cope?
Well, here’s an idea: sit down and watch. And here’s what you will see: a three-hour character study, set in the northern French city of Lille, and spread over several years. The French title is “La Vie d’Adèle—Chapitres 1 et 2,” which is plainer and more accurate, yet more affecting, since it implies that, if life is a novel, there are more chapters in store. I hope so, not because I expect a sequel but because the end of the film makes you long for Adèle to be happy, though you fear that such a day may never dawn. And it is her tale; the affair with Emma lies at the core, but, well before they meet, we see Adèle sleeping with a boy and avidly kissing a girl, and a sad percentage of the movie is spent by Adèle on her own. Having left school, she herself becomes a teacher, of kindergarten and then of first grade, and here’s something else you may not have heard about the film: more time is devoted to the classroom than to the bedroom. The kitchen and the dinner table, too, receive their due. Of course, we know what turns Adèle on, but, as with any fulfilling portrait of a body and soul, we also learn what happens when desire is turned off and other skills and longings come alive: when she carefully spoons a dab of chicken into a triangle of pastry before deep-frying it and serving it at a party; or when, with instinctive tact and patience, she teaches little children how to read. Blue may be the warmest color, but cooler hues can tell an equal truth.
In short, there are—as Spielberg, of all people, will have noticed—more traces of Truffaut here than there are of “Last Tango in Paris.” Over the years, as the shock of Bertolucci’s film has dimmed, so its savage loneliness has deepened, and that is the point, I think, from which Kechiche departs. His earlier work—especially “The Secret of the Grain” (2007), about a laid-off shipyard worker who opens a couscous restaurant—was packed and populous, rife with family squabbles, tested friendships, and tempting feasts. Now he is damming the flow, as it were, and asking the question: what if love gets in the way? How does the wish to be utterly alone with the loved one, and the dread of being alone when the loved one leaves, fit into that wider, more sociable vision? It takes two to tango, but many more to make a dance of life. Hence the unforgettable image of Adèle in the sunshine, at a school gala, leading her pupils in a kind of shuffling conga. Dressed in bright ethnic costume, they are all smiles. But her smile is barely skin-deep; in the previous scene, we saw her in a blazing brawl with Emma—a conflagration that left Adèle stumbling along a nighttime street in feral moans of distress. Right now, a single closeup shows that, though encircled by young spirits, she wants to die.
So much of this film is absorbed in closeups that, in regard to Adèle, it all but lays down a law: watch her lips. We see her asleep and breathing steadily, like a gentle wave, before falling in love; asleep but whimpering when deprived of passion; and awake but softly gasping as she lies back in the sea, on a trip to the beach, with her face to the sky. The film is, to a compelling degree, the history of that face—tearful, sniffing, puffed with dismay, spotted and blotchy on a cold day, suddenly ravishing, and reddening in embarrassment or lust. Now I understand what it means to be in the full flush of youth. When she is still a student, there’s an amazing explosion as a gang of her female friends starts to taunt her for being gay, having glimpsed Emma hanging around outside. The screen is crammed with faces, shouting and contorted, and you realize that, despite all the campaigns for sexual tolerance, in France and elsewhere, nothing will ever tame the hyena-like teen-age habit of snapping at the frailties of others. The shyest member of the pack is always the first to go. Hence the shots of Adèle walking away, no longer listening to the yelps of her contemporaries but making for a newfound land.
And so to bed. A strong feminist case could and will be made against “Blue Is the Warmest Color,” alleging that its most naked aspect is Kechiche’s unblinking gaze. To be blunt, is he not getting off on these women, and arranging them to his own satisfaction? Maybe so, but, in reply, his fans will point to the force and the firepower of the lovers’ intent: a fusillade of cries and clutches, grabs and slaps—a pitch of pleasure so entwined with desperation that we find ourselves not in the realm of the pornographic but on the brink of romantic agony. How can it last? Emma is more worldly and less woundable, but Adèle, like any new recruit to a revolution, believes that it can and must endure. Thus, when the camera rises over the pair of them, locked and prostrated by the eager geometry of soixante-neuf, and floating on a bedsheet of oceanic blue, it is, if anything, a relief to see them as pure bodies, blissed out at full length, and no longer just as heads trapped in closeup and besieged with worries, words, and all the other short-term fripperies that keep us from the epic of love.
If there is anything tacky in this movie, it is not in the main course but in the quality of the appetizers. Like any serious foodie, Kechiche cannot resist a bonne bouche. I am prepared to believe that Adèle doesn’t like shellfish, but does Emma have to convert her by giving a master class in the swallowing of oysters? Wasn’t that already a stale trope by 1963, when Albert Finney and Joyce Redman slithered through their gastronomic duel in “Tom Jones”? Why couldn’t Emma stick to shrimp? Then, there’s the lengthy smooch that she and Adèle enjoy in the open air, on a bench, framed so that the sun twinkles like a star between their mouths; and their trip to a museum, where we focus exclusively on marble derrières and painted nudes, all female, as though no other art could ever matter. Perhaps it doesn’t, to a heart possessed.
These are minor faults, and they serve a purpose, reminding us just how depleted the vocabulary of erotic distraction—verbal and visual—has become, and proving, despite a few stumbles, how determined Kechiche was to make it new. That, I guess, is why he went to such extremes. It also explains the vein of comedy that courses through the film, much of it at the expense of French intellectual tics. Emma, with her gap-toothed grin and her mop of blue-dyed, self-cropped hair, is a painter, trained at the École des Beaux-Arts. (“Are there arts that are ugly?” Adèle asks, which may be the wisest question in the movie.) Emma, who, to judge by the stuff on the walls, is a far lesser painter than Adèle is a teacher, seeks nonetheless to interest her young lover in a world of higher culture and the folks who inhabit it. Adèle, however, is unmoved. “My muse, my inspiration,” Emma calls her, but who wants to be an excuse for art? There’s a fabulous, half-second shot of Adèle glancing aside, at a party, where people are droning on about the distinction between Schiele and Klimt; and, on the same evening, you can tell what she thinks of the Byronic braggart who offers his reflections on orgasm, and on why women “attain different levels of reality.” Philosophers can talk about reality all night; she lives there, with a wildness of which they can only dream.
And that is the story of this film—the most consuming and most exhausting of its kind since “The Dreamlife of Angels,” fifteen years ago. From the moment when Adèle first catches sight of Emma, on a busy crosswalk, the movie restores your faith in the power of the coup de foudre and yet redoubles your fear of its effect; love, like lightning, can both illuminate and scorch. The problems of two little people, it turns out, do indeed amount to a hill of beans. Some hill. Some beans. ♦
Yesterday was Christmas for a certain breed of MLS need. The MLS Players Union released 2014 player salaries for public consumption. The release does not reflect the most labyrinthine aspects of MLS wage rules, like retention funds, allocation money, etc., but I don’t know of another soccer league anywhere that has player wage data like this available mid-season.
I have delved into all the previous MLSPU salary releases before, and I strongly advise that people resist the urge to focus on specifics here. The odds that a player’s salary listed here it’s their exact salary cap cost fall somewhere on a spectrum between unlikely and impossible. Only the first 20 players on the roster count toward the cap, and the MLSPU release does not reflect allocation money, retention funds, former/lending clubs continuing to pay some wages, or special player statuses like Homegrown, Generation Adidas, or especially Designated Player. Almost feels appropriate that on the MLSPU website this file is listed as up to date through April Fools Day. However, we can get a good sketch of which clubs spend most, and of the wage disparities between the top and bottom of each club’s roster.
According to this release, yes, the guaranteed compensations of Clint Dempsey, Michael Bradley, Jermain Defoe, Landon Donovan, Robbie Keane, and Thierry Henry are higher than those for the full rosters of art least 12 of the 19 clubs in MLS. Those six (1.1% of players on club rosters) make 28.5% of the league’s full player wages. Also, the lowest salary reported, $36,500 made by 54 different players, is 0.5% of the highest, Dempsey’s $6,695,189.00. Of course, those players all bring in merchandising, ticket sales, and headlines that the grunts don’t. It would not be surprising if MLS and club accountants file some portion of the big player expenditures under marketing, instead of wages.
About a month ago I showed that total salaries have been a very poor predictor of league points going all the way back to the first MLSPU release in 2007. That’s not to say they are irrelevant, but their influence is overwhelmingly more subtle on the field than in big European leagues, which some have joked might as well be played on a balance sheet.
Figures like this are sure to be a major topic of conversation in upcoming collective bargaining negotiations between MLS and its Players Union. The current CBA expires after this season, and most of the expected points of contention are related in small or total ways to salary disparity. The players will want higher minimums, free agency, and a big boost to the salary cap, while the league will likely seek to maintain as much of the status quo as they can in the name of profitability and stability. Fans of the league would be well-served by becoming at least passingly familiar with the wage dynamics at play as MLS heads toward this critical juncture. Hopefully the above visual will clarify the issues for some.
[Robin Williams] has been with us—and next to us, and above us—for more than 40 years, not just on the screens of multiplexes, but in our living rooms and in our lives. There’s Good Morning, Vietnam, on Netflix. There’s Mrs. Doubtfire, on TBS. There are those reruns of his stand-up on Comedy Central. There are all those clips on YouTube. …
We refer to our actors—the big ones, at least—as “stars.” We do that mostly because it’s a convenient cliche. But we do it as well because celebrities have a kind of cosmic constancy in our lives. The people we put on our screens—the people we elevate and exaggerate, the people whose likenesses we watch, huddled together in darkened rooms—form their own kind of firmament. Ancient humans used the stars to navigate the world; we ask our own stars to do similar work. We look to them not necessarily to guide us, but to orient us.
What are your thoughts about Mrs. Doubtfire? How funny is the Genie? Do you think that “words and ideas can change the world“? However you answer those questions, they will reveal something about you and your place in the universe.
A bit more down to Earth, Alyssa reflects on Williams’ remarkable range, which “resonated in radically different ways”:
Williams excelled in bring out the strength in characters who initially appeared weak, and in bringing dignity to people mired in hopelessly undignified situations. He also slyly exposed the weakness and selfishness in people who seemed to be strong, even when he was only acting with his voice. As the Genie in Disney’s gorgeous animated movie “Aladdin,” Williams beautifully captured the dilemmas of a being who had access to tremendous power, but had to manipulate other people to get closer to his own heart’s desire. He was critical to making the movie more than kids’ stuff.
[Williams] didn’t just play a huge role in the lives of children; he was a malleable, adaptable comedian who could cater to audiences young and old, gay and straight. Take his outré turn as gay Miami nightclub owner Armand Goldman in Mike Nichols’ The Birdcage (a personal favorite), which saw him shift from flamboyant scenery-chewer to composed pseudo-Republican parent at the drop of a hat. Or as Joey, the sleazy, besieged used car salesman in Cadillac Man.
A good glimpse at Robin’s range:
But Damon Linker sees the darker edge of that versatility:
In his manic and maniacal stand-up routines no less than in his greatest dramatic acting, Williams danced on a tightrope over the abyss.
He behaved like a man desperately trying to distract attention from an emptiness within himself. The possibility that he ended his own life leaves me feeling terribly sad. But it also feels somehow fitting, like the confirmation of a half-acknowledged hunch — or the fulfillment of an awful prophesy barely perceived or understood.
On stage Williams could be exhilarating, and exhausting, as he hurtled through a kaleidoscopic array of characters, some impressions of famous people, most of them conjured from the depths of his own slightly deranged and riotous imagination. In well over an hour of frenzied free-association, Williams would careen through the world, making bizarre connections, heaving forth fragments of ideas and clumps of observations from what must have been a tortuous unconscious.
When it was over, I was invariably worn out by laughter — but I also felt slightly unnerved, aware on some level that I’d just been entertained by one man’s utterly distinctive form of self-abuse. It was less a comedy routine than a comedic seizure.
That spectacular energy came from “not just natural genius,” Willa Paskin points out, “but also cocaine, drugs, emotional pain”:
At his best, and also at his worst, there was something uncontrollable about Williams. Even perfectly in control of his body, of his impersonations, of his timing, he seemed powerless—or scared—to stop being a fount of funny, to turn it off. His non-stop energy often had a childlike quality to it—Peter Pan in Hook; an overgrown boy in Jack; even Mork, who like all Orkans aged backwards—but also something more substantial, more dangerous, and more unhinged. … Performers’ deaths, especially the unnatural ones, often color, at least for a little while, their work. Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab” is not a song you could listen to the same way after she drank herself to death.
J. Cohn hopes that Williams’ death raises more awareness of depression and the risk of suicide:
Although we’re accustomed to hearing about artists and their hidden “demons,” Williams was such an effervescent, joyous presence that his struggles could put into sharper relief just how life-altering and devastating mental illness can be. If he couldn’t conquer it on his own, who could? The lesson would be one last, great contribution from an artist who made so many already. …
We’ve come a long way since the days when we treated the mentally ill as freaks—covering up and denying their problems, holding them singularly responsible for their conditions, or locking them up far away in institutions. We’ve also learned a great deal about the interaction with addiction—and the extent to which both afflictions can have deep genetic roots or be shaped by experience very early in infancy and childhood. But we still treat it as a second-class disease. It’s evident in the choices we make as a society and, too often, in our actions as individuals. The stigma, though far less potent, lingers.
So many comics I know seem to struggle with the demons of self-hatred and self-destruction. While my physically self-destructive days ended when I got sober, the thought of suicide has always been there, as an option, behind a glass that I could someday break in case of an emergency. I glamorized the idea of constructing my own exit. …
The funniest people I know always seem to be the ones surrounded by darkness. And that’s probably why they’re the funniest. The deeper the pit, the more humor you need to dig yourself out of it.
(Photo: A makeshift memorial for Robin Williams is set up in front of a home in Boulder, Colorado on August 11, 2014. The exterior of the house was used in the opening credits for “Mork & Mindy,” the comedy based in Boulder that catapulted Williams’ career. By Marc Piscotty/Getty Images)
Many videos and photo projects promise a glimpse of life inside North Korea "as you've never seen it", but I believe this video by JT Singh and Rob Whitworth actually delivers the goods. It's one of those 3-minute time lapse portraits of a city that are in vogue, with the North Korean capital Pyongyang as its subject.
Time lapse videos are interesting because they show movement over long periods of time. The Western conception of North Korea is of a place frozen in time, so the time lapse view is highly instructive. (thx, jeff)
Update: Sam Potts, who travelled to Pyongyang and North Korea in 2012 and took these photos, finds this "deeply fake as filmmaking". From his Twitter acct:
Re the time lapse of Pyongyang video, it feels deeply fake as filmmaking, to me. Thus I mistrust it as a document of what real PY is like. You don't see any of the details to that reveal, even in PY, how very poor a country it is. Some of those buses didn't have tail lights. They had blocks of wood painted red to look like tail lights. And the library computers are incredibly poor quality.
Gizmodo's Alissa Walker also noted the propaganda-ish nature of the video. At the very least, the video is a dual reminder of the limitations of time lapse video in showing the whole story and of how manipulative attractively packaged media can be.
so, who's seen frozen? we finally took the plunge since all of conrad's friends know it by heart. it definitely had some merit, but it didn't blow me away. just watching conrad watch the romantic scenes was completely worth it. he has no idea what's happening, but he knows SOMETHING is happening.
Jennifer Lee, who co-wrote and directed “Frozen” with Chris Buck, has chosen her next project: “A Wrinkle in Time.” Lee will write the bigscreen adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s book for Disney in which children travel through time and visit strange worlds in order to find their missing scientist father. Published in 1962, “Wrinkle in Time”... Read more »
i would love to ask a couple of follow-up questions on that. sheesh.
Not many Americans, according to an Economist/YouGov survey:
Just one in four Americans – and one in three women – call themselves feminists today. But that’s before they read a dictionary definition of feminism. Even then, 40 percent of Americans in the latest Economist/YouGov Poll – including half of all men – say they do not think of themselves as a feminist, defined as “someone who believes in the social, political and economic equality of women.”
Women are more than twice as likely as men to say they are feminists at first, although only a third of women describe themselves that way. The gap remains about the same when people read the dictionary definition. Once that happens, identification increases dramatically: half of men and two-thirds of women say they are feminists.
Roxane Gay confronts her ambivalence about the term in an excerpt from her new book, Bad Feminist:
There are many ways in which I am doing feminism wrong, at least according to the way my perceptions of feminism have been warped by being a woman. I want to be independent, but I want to be taken care of and have someone to come home to. I have a job I’m pretty good at. I am in charge of things. I am on committees. People respect me and take my counsel. I want to be strong and professional, but I resent how hard I have to work to be taken seriously, to receive a fraction of the consideration I might otherwise receive. Sometimes I feel an overwhelming need to cry at work, so I close my office door and lose it. I want to be in charge, respected, in control, but I want to surrender, completely, in certain aspects of my life. Who wants to grow up? …
The more I write, the more I put myself out into the world as a bad feminist but, I hope, a good woman – I am being open about who I am and who I was and where I have faltered and who I would like to become. No matter what issues I have with feminism, I am a feminist. I cannot and will not deny the importance and absolute necessity of feminism. Like most people, I’m full of contradictions, but I also don’t want to be treated like shit for being a woman. I am a bad feminist. I would rather be a bad feminist than no feminist at all.
Heads up that we will soon discontinue the highest-quality tri-blend version of the t-shirts, so if you are planning to get one, order now before it’s too late! Full details on all of our shirts here. More satisfiedcustomers keep sounding off:
I bought the lone Howler t-shirt as I agreed with your take on the insider-ness of it … plus it avoids the potential awkwardness of a “secret Dish-shake”, that would logically involve either rubbing noses or sniffing each other’s rear ends.
A very reluctant reader:
I won’t be buying a t-shirt. I need you to know that it’s not you. I do this with just about every online T-shirt merchant these days. We fat people, we exist. I ain’t saying this to get sympathy. I run on the treadmill three times a week and look over and say to myself, damn, I’m a sexy man. Thank God for mirrors at the gym! Suits my inner narcissist, so suppressed everywhere else. And I can rock the Growlr/Scruff circuit with the best of them.
Anyway, us fat people, we exist, and we sometimes like to buy clothing. Shocking, I know, that fat people might want to put on clothes, given how fantastically sexy we are as a collective. Yet for some reason, merchandisers don’t like to provide clothes for us. That “Haters Gonna Hate” t-shirt from BustedTees? I bought the 3X, super excited, only to get a shirt that from other merchandisers would have only been an XL and I now only get to where on Bear Night at Jackhammer, when, you know, I’m trying to be SUPER SEXY.
So, while I’d love to get a Dish shirt for the nights at the club, I won’t be. Because I would like you to know that I encourage people as much as I can to provide me with shirts in sizes I can wear just grocery shopping and not when I’m trying to titillate the chubby chasers. And it breaks my heart that these apparently attractive shirts are being offered in conjunction with a merchandiser that displays zero interest in providing a range of sizes for people with larger bodies. Thanks for all you do, otherwise!
But the two polo shirts – in navy blue and white – actually run larger than the typical shirt, and sizes go up to XXXL. While the reader has concerns over the slimmer flit of BustedTees’ own shirts, which have a similar fit to our American Apparel t-shirts, the polos are made by a different company, Port Authority. We made it so that all sorts of Dish readers – from skinny hipsters to bulky bears, from gym-going millennials to golf-playing seniors – have a shirt option that works for him or her. Speaking of her, a reminder that we have women’s sizes in both t-shirts, rather than the generic “unisex” sizes. And speaking of bears like the one above:
My partner and I recently returned from Provincetown. It was Bear Week. We passed you several times in front of the Wired Puppy. He had just ordered a Dish Shirt, and I asked, “Wouldn’t it be great if there were something we could have worn ‘every day’ during that week that would let all the Dishheads and fellow bears know who we were?” The tees and polos are a great idea, but we just don’t want to wear the same shirt every day. A hat, on the other hand, with the same logo would be very convenient. Any chance of that happening? We might even buy several.
We’ll consider hats too, but not for a while. Mugs are coming next.
If we are looking for a remedy, a greater interest in strict religions would help many of the poor a lot — how about Mormonism for a start? Just look at the data. Many other religions prohibit or severely limit alcohol, drugs and gambling. That said, this has to happen privately rather than as a matter of state policy…..
It has to be the individual’s fault. There are the deserving and undeserving poor, and it can not be systemic.
Will Tyler argue that the agnostic, aethestic or liberal Christian dominated areas of the Northeast are economic hellholes compared to the Southern Baptist Belt and counties with high concentrations of Southern Methodists?
Will Tyler argue that America in 1932 was a hedonistic waste land strewn with lazy layabouts, but something happened after September 1939, and more specifically during the Summer of 1940 that made America, or at least America’s mass unemployed see some religious revival during these time periods that led to rapid mass employment?
Did America suddently get more religious in 1996 compared to 1991 as the Slackers/Gen X were now getting stock options instead of making great music?
No, he is trying to blame the poor while not looking at his theory that there is no such thing as demand sided recessions. It is so much easier to blame the poor for being poor instead of saying that inadequate demand means inadequate jobs which means “job attractiveness improvement” becomes an ever increasingly expensive positional game of crab bucket politics.
Nah — can’t have that thought as it could call into question too much….
Safety first (Denver Post file)Tickets made available to the general public for the Great American Beer Festival vanished in a flash for the third consecutive year, with most tickets for the
Alongside the release of its new app for Android today, the new NPR One app has just arrived on the App Store for iPhone users.
NPR One is the new audio app that connects you to a stream of public radio news and stories curated for you… Great storytelling and rigorous reporting that informs, engages, inspires and surprises—from the ends of the earth to your own city or town—available to you whenever, wherever.
Not to be confused with its NPR News apps already available for iPhone and iPad, the new app offers users a more personalized experience by providing a curated stream of news based on your preferences. It also focuses solely on audio streams rather than mixing written stories like its full news app. It does so by curating stories from public radio stations around the country while mixing in local station news:
*Features*
– A personalized stream of NPR and local station news and stories
– Skip, rewind, pause and share
– Search for your favorite shows, stations and podcasts
– International, national, regional and local content
– A simple, intuitive interface
In a profile of William T. Vollmann, Tom Bissell paints a vivid picture of an author whose interests range from war reporting to sex work to government surveillance (he was once suspected of being the Unabomber). He quotes Vollmann pondering mortality:
Vollmann stressed that in writing Last Stories, he really wanted to face up to death’s psychological challenges. Death, he said, “is nothing, and therefore the only way we can engage with nothing is to personify it … to invent.” For Vollmann, facing up to the inevitability of death involves remembering the orange he ate in his Bosnian rental while his friends sat dead in the front seats. “It was a hot day,” he said. “I was really thirsty. I ducked down and I was peeling one of these oranges and thought, ‘This is probably the last thing I’m ever going to eat.’ ” Twenty years later, when he gets upset about something, he wills himself to remember that orange and the strange reassurance it offered. Any type of permanent consciousness in the afterlife would, he believes, inevitably devolve into torture, and there would be no parting orange to leaven it. Consciousness is to our mortality what beer is to Homer Simpson: the cause of, and solution to, all our problems.
“Where does consciousness come from?” Vollmann asked, and it took me a moment to recognize he really was asking. I told him I didn’t have the faintest idea. Neither did Vollmann. “It makes no sense to me. None of it makes sense. It’s all preposterous, no matter how I look at it.” I reminded him that his first novel, You Bright and Risen Angels, seems to suggest that the collectivist social intelligence of insects might be preferable to the disquieting solitude of human intelligence—and it was possible that Vollmann spent more time alone in his head than any other living American writer. “Maybe,” he said, “it’s not so bad to be a social insect.”
The in-tray remains full of your insights. One reader writes:
Your first reader’s reaction - that it’s troubling the Court made a point to protect only an evangelical Christian belief – is really interesting. This whole case hinges on construing the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and RFRA was a direct legislative response to very similar reasoning in Smith v. Oregon.
In that majority opinion, Justice Scalia said Smith had no constitutional right to exercise the religious practice in question (use of peyote in a Native American ritual). Or rather, he said the state of Oregon’s interest in preventing abuse of peyote outweighed Smith’s religious freedom. He made a point of saying part of the balancing act was the fact that the religion Smith adhered to was not widely practiced, and therefore very few people’s religious rights were trammeled by Oregon’s law.
The dissent put the question to Scalia: what happens if a state outlaws use of sacramental wine in the interest of preventing alcohol abuse? Scalia’s explicit reply was: oh please, that will never happen because Catholicism, and other denominations, have so many adherents. Such a law could never be supported democratically, so the issue would never arise. He stood the Religion Clauses on their head; they weren’t there to protect religious minorities from the democratic will of “overweening majorities”; they were there to do just the opposite. Many, many people found that outrageous, and Congress (very much including Democrats) passed RFRA as a direct rebuke to Scalia’s opinion.
So, Hobby Lobby is now the second modern case I know of that singles out a widespread religious practice for protection, while denying it to similar practices of smaller faiths. And this case did it while being decided on the basis of legislation passed as an explicit disavowal of that first case. That’s a nifty bit of bendy logic to pull off, and a bit of a “fuck you” to the legislative branch.
Another reader reiterates the fair and important point that this was not about contraception as such, but contraception believed to be a form of abortion:
You stated: “The notion that the executive branch has the right in wartime to seize an American citizen and torture him into incoherence strikes me as a more important question than whether someone can have access to free contraception if her employers disapprove.”
What this ignores, and what most of the responses to the SCOTUS ruling on the Hobby Lobby case ignores, is that the thing that makes this more important to the religious right is that these people think the morning-after pill kills babies (and they believe this even of intrauterine devices); whereas the enemy who is tortured into incoherence is (1) still alive, in most cases, and (2) the corporate entity may be paying for it at a remove, but their taxes are not labeled as “for torturing prisoners.” I’m not defending their crazy views, mind you; but unless we realize that they really, really think this, and that’s what they’re upset about, I don’t see any way of effectively putting this to rest, the way we pretty much have done with blood transfusion refusers and snake handlers.
I hope at least some liberals grasp that being required to finance something you believe to be murder is a legitimate area of conscientious objection.
Elsewhere at Mother Jones, Dana Liebelson collects the eight best lines from Ruth Bader Ginsburg's dissent in the Hobby Lobby case. Here's what I consider the most telling passage from Samuel Alito's majority opinion:
Kinda reminds you of Bush v. Gore, doesn't it? Alito takes pains to make it clear that his opinion shouldn't be considered precedent for anything except the narrowly specific issue at hand: whether contraceptives that some people consider abortifacients can be excluded from health plans.
I think it's important to recognize what Alito is saying here. Basically, he's making the case that abortion is unique as a religious issue. If you object to anything else on a religious basis, you're probably out of luck. But if you object to abortion on religious grounds, you will be given every possible consideration. Even if your objection is only related to abortion in the most tenuous imaginable way—as it is here, where IUDs are considered to be abortifacients for highly idiosyncratic doctrinal reasons—it will be treated with the utmost deference.
This is not a ruling that upholds religious liberty. It is a ruling that specifically enshrines opposition to abortion as the most important religious liberty in America.
this is also part of the reason that our landlord in gettysburg works to provide clean cook stoves in developing countries. women collecting wood for their stoves face similar dangers.
Neil Padukone connects the high incidence of rape in India to its urban design choices:
Most of New Delhi is built according to what urban planners sometimes call “single-use” design: sections of the city are devoted almost exclusively to one use (industrial, institutional, retail, or residential) and separated from each other by open space, roads or other barriers. … This is in contrast to “mixed-use” planning, which carefully integrates residential, retail, institutional, and cultural spaces into the same area—areas that are easily accessible by walking, bicycle, or mass transit.
There are many reasons planners favor mixed-use design, including smaller carbon footprints and increased access to economic opportunity. Easy and efficient access to work, leisure, home, and childcare makes juggling responsibilities much easier, particularly for women. But one of the most important benefits of mixed-use planning is what the urbanist Jane Jacobs famously called “eyes on the street.” If an area is used for multiple purposes, there will always be somebody—a homemaker, shopkeeper, pedestrian, peddler, or office worker—keeping a passive watch, inadvertently but effectively policing it 24 hours a day. Street vendors, for example, may be the most perennial pairs of eyes that monitor any streets, and even police have tapped this human resource.
Two girls who were gang-raped and murdered in Uttar Pradesh last week were attacked while going to relieve themselves in a field at night. Hayes Brown discusses how the absence of private toilets poses a serious safety problem for women in the poorest parts of the world:
Some critics have said that the focus on sanitation as an issue ignores the larger issue of rape and deterring men from assaulting women in the first place. As an article from First Point India explains, however, nobody is arguing that “the sole reason for sexual violence is the lack of a loo. It is an undeniable fact, however, that the absence of a safe toilet adds to the vulnerability of women. And there are numbers to show it.” The First Point article cites a BBC report in which “a senior police official in Bihar said some 400 women would have ‘escaped’ rape last year if they had toilets in their homes.”
Diksha Madhok pushes back on that alleged link with the above chart:
[I]f a toilet shortage is fueling rape in India, then their presence should lead to lesser crimes against women. But data analyzed from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) show that there is no inverse relation between rape and toilets. Quartz India compared the states with the highest and lowest toilet density against their rates of rape, defined as those reported per 100,000 women.
The state of Mizoram has one of the lowest number of households without toilets. Yet, the rape rate against women remains a stubborn 21, much higher than the national average of 4.26. Meanwhile, only 20% of households in Jharkhand have a toilet, but its rape rate is one-fourth of Mizoram’s.
Yesterday, there was a wall of Tesla patents in the lobby of our Palo Alto headquarters. That is no longer the case. They have been removed, in the spirit of the open source movement, for the advancement of electric vehicle technology.
Tesla Motors was created to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport. If we clear a path to the creation of compelling electric vehicles, but then lay intellectual property landmines behind us to inhibit others, we are acting in a manner contrary to that goal. Tesla will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology.
Damn good move for a damn good reason. It's impressive to watch this company in action.
Update: I read that last line quoted above again and perhaps "abandoned" is too strong a word. Glenn Fleishman notes on Twitter:
They did not abandon their patents. They aren't apparently even licensing them. They are stating they won't sue except defensively. The devil is in the details. Twitter released a complete framework of their policy when they announced the same thing.
Hopefully Musk and co. will clarify what they mean by "in good faith".
Maybe it’s the sea air up here on the Cape but I spent last night again watching Fox News. It was like slipping into an alternative universe. Sure. I expected criticism of the president and a few outrageous zingers – but not the picture of reality that seemed to undergird the entire enterprise. But here’s the gist: the president is a lawless dictator, abetting America’s Islamist foes around the world, releasing Taliban prisoners to aid in his own jihad on America, fomenting a new caliphate in Iraq, and encouraging children to rush the Mexican border to up his vote-count, while effectively leaving those borders open to achieve his “fundamental transformation of America.”
I watched Megyn Kelly, who is regarded as more centrist than Sean Hannity. You could have fooled me. The guests were Brent Bozell, far right veteran, and Andy McCarthy, pro-torture activist touting his book calling for Obama’s impeachment. The only pushback Kelly provided to a relentless stream of hysteria was to ask whether the president sincerely wanted another terror attack on America – since it would hurt his approval ratings. And that provided the only qualification to the picture of a Jihadist in the White House determined to destroy the America he loathes. The “chaos” at the border and the emerging caliphate in Iraq may have been merely the unintended consequences of fecklessness rather than a deliberate attempt to destroy everything valuable in the United States.
At no point was any context provided to make sense of any of this. So, for example, it is axiomatic for Fox viewers that Obama has presided over a massive wave of illegals flooding the country. The truth is quite different:
If you compare [Bush's and Obama's] monthly averages [for deportations], it works out to 32,886 for Obama and 20,964 for Bush, putting Obama clearly in the lead. Bill Clinton is far behind with 869,676 total and 9,059 per month. All previous occupants of the White House going back to 1892 fell well short of the level of the three most recent presidents.
We wondered whether there might have been a surge of undocumented immigrants that explained the increase, but there wasn’t. During the first two years of Obama’s tenure, the Pew Hispanic Center estimated the illegal immigrant population nationwide at 11.2 million, compared to an average during Bush’s eight-year tenure of 10.6 million. And illegal immigration actually peaked late in Bush’s second term, at which point the recession hit and the numbers declined under Obama. Such patterns do not explain the 57 percent bump in monthly deportations that we found under Obama.
That data simply refutes the notion that we are somehow living in an era of lawlessness and massive illegal immigration. If a Republican president had done as much, he’d be a hero on Fox.
Look: I know I may be a total sucker for even hoping to see some semblance of fairness and balance on Fox. But it’s still shocking to see programming designed not to uncover reality, but to create a reality in which no counter-arguments are ever considered, and in which hysteria is the constant norm. MSNBC is almost as bad, of course, but with CNN as the new Discovery Channel, the entire possibility of a balanced newscast has disappeared from cable – and from the lives of most Americans. Again, this is not new. But as it continues, it intensifies. And as it intensifies, the possibility of governing all of the country recedes into the distance.
This is a civil war without violence. And we are two countries now.
The U.S. won't have a pristine field when they play Portugal.
The United States will meet Portugal in Manaus for their second World Cup match on June 22 and while the talk for all matches at the Arena de Amazonia has been able the heat and humidity, the field may be the biggest obstacle. With the venue set to host its first World Cup contest in three days, and the U.S. in 11 days, the pitch is a mess, with the head groundsman saying, "Frankly, Manaus is in bad shape."
"We've started to implement an emergency plan to try to save the field and improve it as much as possible, but I don't think it'll be in good condition," by the weekend, he told The Associated Press.
According to the groundsman, growing and maintaining a quality grass pitch in Manaus is just nearly impossible because of the city's extreme weather. It can be very hot and humid, as well as dry, and it's hit by monsoons. Such is the nature of having a city in the middle of a rainforest.
The result is a pitch that is sandy, patchy and generally awful.
It's a good thing that the U.S. still has their uber physical way of play because they may have to rely on that against Portugal. Playing the ball on the ground doesn't appear to be the smartest way forward in Manaus.
okay, we all know anne laurie is really annoying. and this is really not a big deal but it drives me crazy which words she decides to make the link to the linked article. like in the first sentence, "comprehensive guide" rather than "streaming the world cup." she always does that for some reason.
(Warning: vuvuzelas begin at 0:19!)
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The Washington Post has what looks to be quite a comprehensive guide to streaming the World Cup (also a link to the complete TV schedule, and links to the Google & Outlook calendars Reddit users have written to make sure you don’t miss a match).
If you are watching at home (or possibly in your local bar) you can use your official FIFA World Cup caxirola. But you can’t bring them to the matches, per the New Yorker’s Ian Crouch:
…[T]he Brazilian musician Carlinhos Brown proposed an alternative noisemaker to the vuvuzela for his country’s turn as the host of the World Cup, which begins next week. Last year, Brown unveiled a brightly colored plastic rattle that he called the caxirola, named after the caxixi, a traditional Brazilian woven instrument filled with seeds. The mass-produced plastic version lacked its inspiration’s charm, but it had a few things going for it. Researchers found that the caxirola produced a decibel level significantly lower than the vuvuzela’s. Played together, caxirolas indeed made a joyful, mostly pleasant noise, percussive rather than droning like the South African horns. And like the vuvuzela, it’s fun to say: ka-shee-role-ah…
… A year ahead of the World Cup, the caxirola was a newer, better vuvuzela.
Until Brazilian soccer fans got their hands on them, that is…
Temperatures hovering in the upper 20s at Winter Park early Monday morning served as a chilling reminder to Ride the Rockies cyclists of the blizzard at Berthoud Pass the previous day that brought Day 1 of the 29th annual cycling tour in Colorado to a premature end for many of the 2,000 registered cyclists.
I just listened to this astonishing podcast on pedophilia. It’s an interview with an admitted pedophile who has yet to act on his attraction. It also discusses his inability to find a therapist to work with him. The podcast is about 27 minutes and is not the type of interview you will ever hear on mainstream media. Naturally, I thought this would be perfect for The Dish. Truly fascinating stuff.
Another adds:
I hope pedophiliac research gets the funding it deserves. It’s sad to think of all those people who need help but have nowhere to get it, and all those children who become victims as a result.
sometimes like to buy clothing. Shocking, I know, that fat people might want to put on clothes, given how fantastically sexy we are as a collective. Yet for some reason, merchandisers don’t like to provide clothes for us. That “Haters Gonna Hate” t-shirt from BustedTees? I bought the 3X, super excited, only to get a shirt that from other merchandisers would have only been an XL and I now only get to where on Bear Night at Jackhammer, when, you know, I’m trying to be SUPER SEXY.
