Praise, patriotism, partisanship, and pop

The NYT this weekend includes a glowing memoir on the Franciscan Sisters of Mary, on the occasion of Sister Mary Jean Ryan's retirement as chief executive of one of of one of America’s largest networks of Catholic hospitals. The discussion includes their clear-eyed planning for the day (soon to arrive) when the order no longer exists. A friend and I were discussing this sort of thing recently: the difference in organisation and sensibility that allows Catholic groups to be distinctively themselves, while allowing for other ways of being faithfully Christian — something that contemporary Evangelical groups struggle with. There is still a lively tradition of openness in the pews, even in these identity-mongering times, but within the leadership?

A fan of the US military writes in criticism of “support our troops” pieties:

The irony is that our soldiers are the last people who are likely to call themselves heroes and are apparently very uncomfortable with this kind of talk. The military understands itself as a group endeavor. As the West Point professor Elizabeth D. Samet recently noted, service members feel uneasy when strangers approach them to — as the well-meaning but oddly impersonal ritual goes — thank them for their service, thereby turning them into paradoxically anonymous celebrities. It was wrong to demonize our service members in Vietnam; to canonize them now is wrong as well. Both distortions make us forget that what they are are human beings...

The change of tone in the coverage and discussion of Anzac Day, noticeable to anyone over a certain age, springs to mind as an Australian analogue, although the causes may be somewhat different.

An American radio host and author compares contemporary political debate to an auto-immune disease.

And my current nostalgia trip: Glycerine, the greatest hit of the band Bush. I have recently returned to an apartment complex where I was staying in late 1995, through 1996, and this song has been on my mind. Like many pop songs, it would not withstand too close an enquiry into the literal meaning of its lyrics, but as the distillation of a particular mood — masculine yearning, chastened by regret — it is superb. And in contrast to the posturing, braggarty tone of the songs in a male voice that followed it, it is unashamedly pretty. A female cover brings that out, although I do miss the surface roughness of the original:

I could have been easier on you,
I couldn't change though I wanted to.

Death, life, choice, and cost

It sounds paradoxical to link the desire for unlimited medical treatment to the desire for physician-assisted suicide. But the idea that there’s a right to the most expensive health care while you want to be alive isn’t all that different, in a sense, from the idea that there’s a right to swiftly die once life doesn’t seem worth living.

In each case, the goal is perfect autonomy, perfect control, and absolute freedom of choice. And in each case, the alternative approach — one that emphasizes the limits of human agency, and the importance of humility in the face of death’s mysteries — doesn’t mesh with our national DNA.

Ross Douthat on physician-assisted suicide and the American polity.

There have been a string of good articles in the last month on such cases, where deeply-held but ultimately untenable positions come up against life's conditions and boundaries:

Tim Kreider on not pursuing happiness.

Eric Zencey on GDP as an instance of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.

Douthat again, on on the conservatism of Judd Apatow movies:

More than most Westerners, Americans believe — deeply, madly, truly — in the sanctity of marriage. But we also have some of the most liberal divorce laws in the developed world, and one of the highest divorce rates. We sentimentalize the family, but boast one of the highest rates of unwed births. We’re more pro-life than Europeans, but we tolerate a much more permissive abortion regime than countries like Germany or France. We wring our hands over stem cell research, but our fertility clinics are among the least regulated in the world.

In other words, we’re conservative right up until the moment that it costs us...

Concerning that permissive abortion regime, there's this over at First Things:

Prior to the legalization of abortion in the United States, it was commonly understood that a man should offer a woman marriage in case of pregnancy, and many did so. But with the legalization of abortion, men started to feel that they were not responsible for the birth of children and consequently not under any obligation to marry. In gaining the option of abortion, many women have lost the option of marriage. Liberal abortion laws have thus considerably increased the number of families headed by a single mother, resulting in what some economists call the “feminization of poverty.”

(From Richard Stith's Her Choice, Her Problem: How Abortion Empowers Men.) Back at the Times, RD muses on how the issue might have played differently, if Ted Kennedy had shared some of his sister Eunice's qualms about the practice.

On a happier note, a couple of books reflect, forty years on, on what was special about Woodstock. The answers may surprise you.

Redheads, bugs, the LHC, and all that

In praise of the spleen
On the pain of being a redhead
Olivia Judson on your microbial fellow-travellers
xkcd on intercepting asteroids heading towards Earth

Newspapers have gone pleasingly quiet on the Large Hadron Collider, since the run plan was announced earlier this month. It beat the pessimistic, “if at all” tone of reporting just three days earlier. Given previous loud public statements about scheduling, one could argue that we only have ourselves to blame — but it's pretty hard to take some of the free commentary, such as this piece of farfetching on the connection between the LHC and an abandoned Mayan temple. Really. “And like Xunantunich, the collider these days is silent, if not abandoned,” we are told. Stephen Weinberg's response as quoted in the article, “I don’t see it in quite those apocalyptic terms,” is a marvel of understatement.

Meanwhile, yet another tendentious proposal for peace between science and religion has been launched. It is not noted for its theological insight. “Most scientists and most religious believers refuse to be drafted into the fight,” the writer says. Speaking as a scientist and a Christian, I also refuse to be drafted into this sort of attempt at peacekeeping. One problem with peacekeeping forces is that they can have their own agendas; and they are prone to being tone-deaf.

Finally, a chef writes on making “organic” and other small farms more robust against disease:

Healthy, natural systems abhor uniformity — just as a healthy society does. We need, then, to look to a system of food and agriculture that values and mimics natural diversity. The five-acre monoculture of tomato plants next door might be local, but it’s really no different from the 200-acre one across the country: both have sacrificed the ecological insurance that comes with biodiversity.

What does the resilient farm of the future look like? I saw it the other day. The farmer was growing 30 or so different crops, with several varieties of the same vegetable. Some were heirloom varieties, many weren’t. He showed me where he had pulled out his late blight-infected tomato plants and replaced them with beans and an extra crop of Brussels sprouts for the fall. He won’t make the same profit as he would have from the tomato harvest, but he wasn’t complaining, either...

Leaving behind childish things (and also some things of value)

A.O. Scott has written some excellent pieces recently, on films for teenagers (reflecting on the place of John Hughes' movies), as opposed to the current practice of treating the audience like kids;

a propos of which, Molly Ringwald has written a brief reflection on John Hughes as Peter Pan. It's plausible and, all things considered, rather sad. (I also note that, while she's no prose stylist, Ringwald can actually write.)

Meanwhile, in the world of non-moving pictures, photojournalism is in trouble, if not actually dying.

Re the small screen, I enjoyed this comment in the New Yorker, on The United States of Tara:

Collette is impressively convincing, even though I’m not entirely sure what I’m being convinced of.

Going off-message

On Sarah Palin and her enemies:

A Sarah Palin who stepped down for the sake of her family and her media-swarmed state deserves sympathy even from the millions of Americans who despise her. A Sarah Palin who resigned in the delusional belief that it would give her a better shot at the presidency in 2012 warrants no such kindness.

Either way, though, her 10 months on the national stage have been a dispiriting period for American democracy.

If Palin were exactly what her critics believe she is — the distillation of every right-wing pathology, from anti-intellectualism to apocalyptic Christianity — then she wouldn’t be a terribly interesting figure. But this caricature has always missed the point of the Alaska governor’s appeal ...

Over the last few months I have been enjoying the columns of Ross Douthat, the New York Times' new resident conservative: to give a recent selection, here he is offering a critical take on the US Supreme Court, and on using the Constitution to regulate abortion; giving a sane synopsis of where things stand for America in Iraq; and asserting that the basis of affirmative action (if any) will have to shift from race to class.

Meanwhile the established conservative at the Times, David Brooks — really, as a friend of mine remarked in a nice distinction, the resident Republican — found it in himself to call for Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation two months ago ... a sign of how unsupportable the Republican party line has become over the last year. (The fact that he went off-message and criticised the McCain-Palin ticket during, rather than after last year's election, was an early indicator that the game was up.) This week, less than ten of the GOP senators found it in themselves to agree.

In other off-topic news, Barbara Ehrenreich points out that people who were already poor have been hit by the downturn, even if they're not making the news;

a UN official talks about what's right with Japan;

a reporter presents a good-news story on orphanages in Tanzania;

and Matt Bai writes on Obama's sense of humour.

Seven green things

The Southern Lights (Aurora Australis), with the earth illuminated by moonglow, in an amateur photograph by one of the astronauts on board the shuttle Discovery in 1991: from an article in the NYT Lens blog on photography by astronauts.

On non-high-tech ways of being environmentally responsible:
By modifying cattle feed
By putting succulents on city rooftops
By recycling obsolete electronics
By implementing bus rapid transit systems (if the conditions are right)

However, on the political front, working one step at a time is apparently not good enough for some activists (perhaps this can serve as an effective definition of the term “activist”)

On standards in scientific journals:
Physical Review Letters draws a line in the sand, and not before time

Engaging with difficulty

A.O. Scott has been making a plea for maturity and engagement, in the form of a moral protest against a recent film:

Really, “Away We Go” is about the flight from adulthood, from engagement, from responsibility, even as it cleverly disguises itself as a search for all those things. But the dream of being left alone in a world of your own making, far from anything sad or icky or difficult, is a child’s fantasy.

Stirring stuff. Likewise concerning topics on which it is difficult to talk sensibly, or well, consider the following:

an insightful and sane essay on the Wikipedia revolution;

a meditation on work and thought in the trades, versus the office;

and a report on the frontline of a change of medical practice in the States.

Concerning health care, one of the avowed goals of the Obama presidency, it is good to see that there has been at least some attempt to learn from past mistakes:

It has been 16 years, in fact, since another young, freshly inaugurated Democratic president with a Democratic Congress tried to remake the architecture of health care, and the catastrophe that followed is generally cited as the main deterrent to thinking big about anything in the capital. The plan Bill Clinton took to Congress then, running to more than 1,000 pages of impenetrable new regulations, wasn’t what you’d call politically savvy, but the strategy used to sell it was even worse. Having been elected as the latest in a series of outsider presidents after Watergate, ex-Governor Clinton seemed to believe he had been sent by the voters to purify the fetid culture of Washington; he installed a boyhood friend as his chief of staff and stocked his White House with loyal Arkansans and campaign aides ready to overrun a fossilized Congress. His wife, the current secretary of state, developed the health care plan largely without taking House and Senate leaders into her confidence, instead dropping it at the doorstep of the Capitol as a fait accompli. Ever jealous of its prerogative, Congress took a long look, yawned and kicked the whole plan to the gutter, where it soon washed away for good — along with much of Clinton’s ambition for his presidency.

The first senator elected directly to the Oval Office since 1960, Obama has an entirely different theory of how to exercise presidential power, and he has consciously designed his administration to avoid Clinton’s fate. After winning the office with the same kind of outsider appeal as his predecessors, he has quietly but methodically assembled the most Congress-centric administration in modern history ... Obama seems to think that the dysfunction in Washington isn’t only about the heightened enmity between the parties; it’s also about the longstanding mistrust between the two branches of government that stare each other down from twin peaks on either end of Pennsylvania Avenue.

How people continue to regard Obama as a pushover and a mere talker escapes me.

I have also been enjoying, together with the occasional cringe-moment, the president's Cairo address. A well-taken Middle Eastern appreciation, along the lines of “Yes, but ...”, can be found here. David Brooks also has some characteristically tendentious but insightful comments on the tensions in Obama's approach.

Several bloggers, fellow fans of the Archbishop of Canterbury, have been reminding me of his Cairo speech five years ago, on the different but related topic of respectful dialogue between Christians and Muslims on the nature of God: on what is agreed, as well as on the disagreements, and on being careful to distinguish the two.

Second thoughts

Work trips put one behind on reading, and on blogging. Here are some things I've been looking at in the last six weeks or so, concerning, in some way, re-thinking a received position.

From the New York Times:
Mary Beard, on Roman book trade and culture
Looking back on decisions about prisoner interrogation
When “bad advice” is the best advice
On the off-brand presidency
On a recognition Israel doesn't need
On the decline of Christian communities in the Middle East

Web comics:
xkcd on changing the rules
PhD Comics on research topics guaranteed to be picked up by the news media

Blogs:
Byron Smith on dying with dignity
Scot McKnight on justification and the New Perspective on Paul: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 and ... [one needs to be patient to do anything more than skim these]

Food for thought:
From an NYT op-ed opposed to the drone-war being fought in Pakistan, a comment with resonance for anyone opposed to extremist behaviour, including myself (let the reader understand):

Governments typically make several mistakes when attempting to separate violent extremists from populations in which they hide. First, they often overestimate the degree to which a population harboring an armed actor can influence that actor’s behavior. People don’t tolerate extremists in their midst because they like them, but rather because the extremists intimidate them. Breaking the power of extremists means removing their power to intimidate — something that strikes cannot do...

And from the LRB, Jenny Diski, in a (subscription-required) article on schooling, reflecting on teaching as a young idealist in the early 70s, in an inner-city comprehensive:

The lack of oversight, and of targets, must send a chill of horror through any modern manager of a school, and with some reason: it was pretty haphazard, and who was to say that only good teaching would or did come of the laissez-faire system? The line between liberty and libertarianism is very indistinct, and the desire to dismantle bureaucracy and social inequity leaves open the possibility of chaos, and creates endless opportunities for individual self-aggrandisement. But it seems to me that the risks were worth taking, now that we've seen the dismal results of our 20-year-long experiments with centralised targets, management echelons and paper-based accountability.

Genes, hobbits, plutonium, telescopes, a moon, and an obituary

A view of the planet Neptune, and its giant moon Triton, from a distance of 3.75 billion kilometres, taken by the New Horizons spacecraft, en route to the dwarf planet Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. Image details can be found on this page at the NH website.

This image is featured in honour of Venetia Burney Phair, a retired economics and maths teacher, who died recently at the age of 90; and who, as a girl of 11, gave Pluto its name. One of the instruments on New Horizons --- designed, built, and operated by students --- was earlier named in Mrs Phair's honour.

In other space science news, the shuttle Atlantis is due to launch on Monday for the final mission to repair and service the Hubble Telescope. Because of the extra danger in missions to the Hubble, the shuttle Endeavour will be on standby as a rescue vessel, in case anything goes wrong. Some years ago, when NASA tried to rule out such missions because of the danger to the crew, it wasn't just the scientific community that objected: some of the astronauts did too ...

Other articles:

On the genetic analysis of common diseases

On “hobbits”: the black swans of palaeontology ... and their flat feet

On why the Americans are going to make more plutonium 238 (hint: not for bombs), how they will use it more efficiently when they have it, and why Stirling engines are the bees' knees

Spring readings

Good advice that I'm still struggling with:
On practical ways to end email bankruptcy, and then stay solvent

Interesting articles in the New York Times:
In defense of secrecy
Why imaging should not replace dissection in medical training
On abandoned boats in the US
On the return of wine-on-tap
On earthquake prediction,
and Why young buildings failed in old towns
Why anarchy on land means piracy at sea
The superbug of the moment
Last voyage for the keeper of the Hubble

On blogs:
recently I've been reading Byron Smith on The cost of dying;
discussing church as A good place to doubt, with Michael Jensen;
Christian obedience, work, and rhetoric, with Chris and friends;
and Le Guin, and The Jane Austen Book Club, with Natalie

On freedom of speech and religious freedom:
The US Supreme Court tells people to get real

In the category of news that's too melodramatic for fiction:
Judges plead guilty in scheme to jail youths for profit

A rather random list ...

... of things I've been reading while trying to stop obsessing about the change of government in the US.

The New York Times:
On why Big Pharma is not the only villain in the drugs business
On telling the Holocaust like it wasn’t
On one of our basic needs: Instruction in manners
On single-mothers-by-choice, and the second child
On the joys and pains of being an animal
On rude placenames in the United Kingdom
On the wording of the presidential oath

Stanley Fish:
On Barack Obama's prose style
On academic freedom: Finkin and Post's book, and an extreme case

On less serious subjects: you may have seen the news that Ricardo Montalbán died a few weeks ago; the NYT obituary reproduced my favourite quote about him, from a review of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan:

With his fierce profile, long white hair, manful décolletage and Space Age jewelry, Mr. Montalbán looks like either the world’s oldest rock star or its hippest Indian chief ... Either way, he looks terrific.

And in a bout of unashamed nostalgia, I looked up Willow Tree on YouTube: a 1990 song from the folk/acoustic/world/whatever band Not Drowning, Waving. The video is not much chop, but the song is superb: I don't remember anything quite like it, for capturing a certain kind of adult longing for childhood --- that part of childhood, at least, that you would want to revisit.

So we swing
On the big willow tree
We all glide through the air
On the branches that hang
We all know just where we want to be ...

Four belated reassessments

From the New York Times:
On the Age of Neo-Remorse
On the unintended consequences of housing regulations

From the London Review of Books:
Ross McKibbin on the wider implications of the financial crisis:

The second inescapable obligation [on any responsible government] is the return of housing to its proper function: as providing places to live in rather than to speculate on. The relationship of housing to politics in both Britain and the United States is not fully understood even by those who transformed it. They don’t understand it because that would require confronting awkward facts about Anglo-American democracy. Fundamentally, private housing has become a compensation for the increasingly gross maldistribution of income. Inadequate incomes mean that large numbers of people don’t have access to the style of life that has always been the ultimate justification of neoliberalism and to which, reasonably enough, they now believe they have a right. What does give them access to it (in the short term) is credit. But credit has to be secured, and that’s what housing does. However, it works only if house prices keep rising and people have enough income to repay debt.

And from the cinema vault: I have finally seen Scent of a Woman. I missed the film when it came out, and despite my love of Al Pacino, I've avoided it since, believing the rumours about its over-the-topness and cornball. Well: it's better late than never. The worst part of the movie by far is the prep-school framing material --- the sub-Dead-Poets assembly scene is not only over-the-top, it's cheap --- but the body of the film is terrific. Pacino brings real charm and depth to the part, and over such a range ... it really does belie the idea of a one-note “Hoo-wah!” period. (The expression is a staple of his character here; perhaps this has fed the stereotype.) And the tango scene is delightful.

All this time, there's been a very strong NYT review of the film, too. Well, that review was right: and the conventional wisdom can go hang. OK, so Pacino should have got an Oscar for the Godfather films, rather than for this. But let's take the movie on its merits.

Apart from the election

In spare moments this last month, when not following the presidential election, I have been reading Byron Smith on studying ethics

and the New York Times:
On tainted milk ... 150 years ago
On Warren E. Buffett and the market crisis ... 101 years ago
On the seen versus the unseen, in health (read to the end ...)
On French Muslims in Catholic schools
On the Popularity of Steampunk (following a link)
On a long-serving Republican retiring from the House
On developing a healthier food economy
On letting the bedbugs bite, and on blood, more generally;

its columnist David Brooks, on “The Class War Before Palin”;

and the magazine, discussing When Judges Make Foreign Policy, including the following wonderful snippet:

The Bush administration, through its characteristic combination of boldness, historical ambition and operational incompetence, has given sovereignty a bad name, much as it has for unilateralism. But the constitutional principle here is actually one that most liberals also fully embrace: namely, the principle of democracy.

International law, as even its staunchest defenders must acknowledge, often fails to accord with democratic principle...

I have also been enjoying (thanks AJB for the link) John Cleese, on genes

Times for avoiding work

When avoiding work in the past few weeks, I have been reading the New York Times

On chemotherapy for pregnant women with cancer
On real heroes, and fake stories, from September 11th
On memories of containment
On the tyranny of diagnosis
On weeping for the Rosenbergs, even though they were guilty

and David Brooks (one of the NYT's two resident conservatives),
On why experience matters, breaking with Republican message discipline for once, to tell us what he actually thinks before, rather than after, the election.

When avoiding all of the depressing news, I have been watching the muppets sing Danny Boy

Lately ...

... I have been grateful to my small band of loyal blog-readers, who have had very little encouragement from my side. In my defence: as well as doing my job, I took a whole week off work (including three days fully off the grid) for the first time in about a year. Along the way, I managed to watch two very good and very different films that I have been meaning to see for years: United 93 and The Company.

I have also been reading xkcd on Google Maps and teleportation;

two stimulating and accessible articles on why the early appearance of life on earth tells us very little on how “likely” life is, and whether we are alone in the universe: one on priors, and one on conditioning, matters that should forever be labelled “Handle With Care”;

Geoffrey Wheatcroft, in the Guardian back in May, on why it's unkind to 1968-ards to ask “where are they now?”;

and from the New York Times:
how trolls think people should just get over being hurt by words;
why there's merit in putting expert witnesses in a hot-tub;
and Judith Warner, writing against transparency:

For if public figures, purported leaders, “owe” us anything, it’s some kind of role modeling in the sphere of public discourse. They should not feed our basest appetites for dirt. They shouldn’t encourage us in the ugly side of our national quest for the ostensible truth in all things political – that tendency we have, that we hold in common with other spiritual heirs of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, to get the whips out and flay alive those who reveal themselves in ways that don’t jibe well with the public mood.

Behind the Times

Coping with jetlag, and avoiding vast piles of mail after my travels in recent months, I've been catching up on some reading. Here are the highlights.

From the New York Times:
On reintroducing worms
On low birthrates
On quoting Bob Dylan in legal opinions
On energy-efficient production in Japan
On suicide prevention, and survivors
On why 'We have to have a talk about Barack Obama'
On the (exceptional) American practice of excluding evidence
On satire, and the New Yorker cover

Olivia Judson's NYT-hosted blog also has an excellent post on getting rid of the term 'Darwinism', for the sake of evolutionary studies. This is the third in a series celebrating Charles Darwin: the first and second posts are also good.

From Leszek Kolakowski (thanks, Laurence, for the link):
How to be a Conservative-Liberal-Socialist

And from the London Review of Books:
Hugh Pennington on why the unburied dead don't spread disease, and why it's harmful that people (and governments) believe that they do

The subscription section also includes Rosemary Hill's review of the recently published translation of Hermann Muthesius' 1904-05 Das englische Haus , which is an excellent read; and Muthesius sounds full of insights.

Why, Muthesius wonders, do the English leave town planning to be ‘handed over to the lowest order of intelligence’, creating incoherent city centres? Why do they bother to experiment with blocks of flats which don’t suit the national temperament and would, if multiplied, mean ‘the demise of one of the best aspects of the English heritage’? English children will never thrive in them. Today, as the Modernist-inspired tower blocks come down and public housing looks again to low-rise and terraces, and as Birmingham, Manchester and other cities attempt to redeem their centres from the ravages of the postwar planners, it is the great-grandchildren of Muthesius’s subjects and indeed the great-grandchildren of their cooks and butlers who are remaking the English house. We watch property programmes on television night after night ...