Yet another problem solved by XKCD
You might thus assume that superhero comics, the original properties on which these franchises are built, are in flush times. They aren’t. The upper limit on sales of a superhero comic book these days is about 230,000; just two or three series routinely break into six digits. Twenty years ago, during the comic industry’s brief Dutch-tulip phase, hot issues of “Spider-Man” and “X-Men” sold millions.Where this audience went is a bit of a puzzle, especially because comics, broadly speaking, are respectable as never before. Good cartoonists’ books are reviewed in the quality papers and nestled on readers’ shelves next to comic-book-inspired novels by Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem. Even the University of Chicago, where fun goes to die, recently held a three-day conference to which it invited brilliant cartoonists like Chris Ware and Daniel Clowes.
If no cultural barrier prevents a public that clearly loves its superheroes from picking up a new “Avengers” comic, why don’t more people do so? The main reasons are obvious: It is for sale not in a real bookstore but in a specialty shop, and it is clumsily drawn, poorly written and incomprehensible to anyone not steeped in years of arcane mythology.
Collaboration … is not quite the same as open, unattributed, dynamically generated poetry. The question as we move forward is, can true, open source poetics be accomplished? Can a poem’s quality, beauty, value to its community be its most important features, rather than the famous name of its author?I think the answer is yes, and to test that hypothesis I’ve registered wikipoetics.org. Nothing is there yet. My intention is to establish a truly collaborative workspace for poets and, in fact, anyone to participate in the creation of meaningful, culturally significant poems. Like Wikipedia, each entry–each poem–will have a title and a refereed method for registered users to edit/contribute. Occasionally, anthologies will be published as ebooks, available for download at a nominal cost. I’ve enlisted Patrick Herron at Duke University’s John Hope Franklin Center to help build and promote wikipoetics.org.
Would anyone else like to contribute to the project? Consider this an open request.
Maps, [Tom Koch] cogently explains, “make arguments about disease, their pattern of incidence, and their method of diffusion. They are workbenches on which we craft our theories about the things that cause health to fail, imaging data collected in this or that disease outbreak. They are not, as some might argue, either mere representations of the world or simple illustrations of work completed in other media.”During the great plague epidemics of the Middle Ages, for example, maps played a key role in the public health responses of the day including the quarantine. With the realization that the path of the Black Plague pandemic of 1347-1348 was identical to the human network of trade, the ruling government of Venice developed a way to impede that spread by halting the movement of goods and people into its port for a period of forty days, hence quarantine or quarantenaria. During the seventeenth century, cordon sanitaires were developed across Europe thanks to the practice of disease mapping. Borders of armed guards prevented potentially plague-ridden travelers from entering a specific area and sequestered regions were delineated to house those who were stricken with the disease. And while such an approach may sound terribly antiquated, if not outright cruel, modified versions of these “non-pharmaceutical interventions,” as the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now terms them, not only played a major role in attenuating the terrible influenza pandemic of 1918, they also helped save lives during the more recent H1N1 flu pandemic in 2009.
The idea that the Baby Boom generation, of all generations, would willingly hasten their own exit from this mortal coil in order to save someone else (their children, the government, future generations, etc.) from trouble and expense flies in the face of pretty much everything we know about that particular cohort’s habits and inclinations. This isn’t to say that there won’t be more support for assisted suicide as the original “Me” generation grows ever-less-gracefully old. But it will be a supplement, rather than a corrective, to the demand for ever-more-expensive medical interventions that Wolff’s article laments — a minor accompaniment to the major theme of life extension by any means and at any cost. There isn’t necessarily any deep conflict between the desire for any and every form of medical intervention when you still want to live and the desire for assisted suicide when you’ve given up the fight. Instead, the two desires intertwine somewhere deep within the modern psyche, because both spring from the same quest — for a perfect mastery over death, which aims for immortality but then eventually settles for the ability to choose the exact timing of our final exit.
When somebody says what sounds like “it’s only religion that keeps us from behaving like savages” I think: that person is afraid he will behave like a savage. And if he is turning to religion to save him from himself, he will find no salvation. He must first know himself, because only by that route can he allow himself to be saved (and I use “allow himself” deliberately; even if you don’t believe in God, and believe that all these dynamics are happening inside an individual person, there is such a thing as getting out of your own way). Religion may or may not help in that process; that, I think, varies between individuals. But there’s no short-cut. My text on this topic, as I think I’ve mentioned before, is Tolstoy’s short novel, Father Sergius….Arguing that people “need” religion strikes me as an enormous waste of time. It will not convince anyone who really believes otherwise, and the people it does convince will have been convinced out of fear. And fear is a cancer; it is no stable ground for faith. The only thing – literally the only thing – to do if you care about your faith – including the faith that you don’t need God to be good, if that’s what you believe – is to live it, for its own sake. If you do that, you don’t need to do anything else. If you don’t do that, nothing else you do matters.
Noah Millman. I think Noah is exactly right about this. If you argue that the social order can only be sustained by a shared body of religious beliefs, you are implicitly but necessarily (a) making religion the instrument by which some other good is to be acquired, and (b) making an empirical claim for the value of religion that could conceivably be disproved. In regard to point (b), you’re just inviting people to try to come up with some alternative, non-religious means of creating desirable social or personal conditions — conditions that you’ve deemed to be desirable a priori. Religion then follows these a priori commitments rather that establishing them.
Shared religious commitment might be a strong, useful glue for the social order. Indeed I think it is likely to be, depending on which religion you’re talking about. But that’s no reason to believe in it. Follow this path and you’ll find it well-worn: it leads to a view embraced by so many intellectuals over the centuries: I have no religious belief, but I think it good that others in my society do.
The more central claim—that stories increase our empathy, and “make societies work better by encouraging us to behave ethically”—seems too absurd even to argue with. Surely if there were any truth in the notion that reading fiction greatly increased our capacity for empathy then college English departments, which have by far the densest concentration of fiction readers in human history, would be legendary for their absence of back-stabbing, competitive ill-will, factional rage, and egocentric self-promoters; they’d be the one place where disputes are most often quickly and amiably resolved by mutual empathetic engagement. It is rare to see a thesis actually falsified as it is being articulated.