Richard Dawkins and other New Atheists are often criticised for failing to understand that being religious is not about beliefs – but about cultural practice and social participation. Yet criticising New Atheists for their “false beliefs” makes precisely the same mistake and reduces this culture to its propositional statements and knowledge claims. In fact, people are brought together and tied together by their different kinds of non-religious positions, and to criticise one of these cultures, the New Atheism, on the grounds that it does not appreciate that religion is a team sport is to miss the point that atheism, too, is a team sport.Obsessing about how coherent the arguments of New Atheists are – rather than noticing how popular the movement is; the emotional feelings of recognition that some readers have in response to it; how people discuss New Atheism with each other and use it to help articulate shared non-religious positions – is to do precisely what critics would have the New Atheists stop doing. You don’t have to share the New Atheists’ beliefs to treat their culture with some respect – and be interested not in whether its claims are correct but in why people are drawn to it and what is underlying the anti-theist prejudices that are sometimes expressed in these claims. The notion that cultural and social investments are more important than beliefs is fine, but it has to cut both ways.
From 1999-2001, while living in London, I would go on epic, overambitious book-buying sprees, telling myself I was heading into town to “write in a cafe” only to return with bags laden with books from the hipper end of the US literary canon, perhaps hoping that the sheer fact that I owned them would turn me into the writer I wanted to be. When I think of the way my book shelves looked when I was 23, I realise they perhaps were no more about me than they were about a stranger I subconsciously imagined would one day visit my house. This stranger was an uncommon combination of extremely tasteful, hugely judgmental and ridiculously attractive.I waited very patiently for this stranger for quite a while, only for the finicky bastard not to show. Somewhere along the way, I became a more honest book owner: I now know that nine times out of 10 I’ll enjoy a book about a dysfunctional family or the comedies of small-town American life more than I will one about a drug addict or rock star. I don’t hold on to books I didn’t enjoy – even those that critical wisdom told me I “should” have – and I no longer keep a copy of Gravity’s Rainbow around the house for hypothetical purposes.
In the midst of a spring practice that, by all accounts, is going well, Nick Saban received a contract extension with an immediate bump in salary to $5.3 million, an increase of $550,000 over what he would have made in 2012 under his old contract. The extension could keep Saban in Tuscaloosa until 2020, at which point he will be making $6 million. And should he stay for the duration of the contract, he will have pocketed a total of $44,983,333.86 from the good citizens of the nation’s ninth poorest state, 16.1 percent of whom are living below the poverty line.But he wins football games….
Meanwhile Gov. Robert Bentley announced that general funding to the Department of Public Safety and other state agencies would be cut by 10 percent because of revenue shortages. Public Safety director Hugh McCall said he hopes to avoid layoffs of state troopers and other employees.
It is, one would assume, what the market will bear.
Exactly two things have made air travel safer since 9/11: reinforcing the cockpit door, and convincing passengers that they need to fight back. Everything else has been a waste of money. Add screening of checked bags and airport workers and we are done. All the rest is security theatre. If we truly want to be safer, we should return airport security to pre-9/11 levels and spend the savings on intelligence, investigation and emergency response.
Scenes from The Golden Beetle (1907, dir. Segundo de Chomón), a 3-minute fantasy trick film notable for its spectacular use of color, which was done by hand. Online here.(via)
My dear Francesco, I have lately kept praising the age in which we live, because of the great, indeed divine gift of the new kind of writing which was recently brought to us from Germany. In fact, I saw a single man printing in a single month as much as could be written by hand by several persons in a year… . It was for this reason that I was led to hope that within a short time we should have such a large quantity of books that there wouldn’t be a single work which could not be procured because of lack of means or scarcity… . Yet — oh false and all too human thoughts — I see that things turned out quite differently from what I had hoped. Because now that anyone is free to print whatever they wish, they often disregard that which is best and instead write, merely for the sake of entertainment, what would best be forgotten, or, better still be erased from all books. And even when they write something worthwhile they twist it and corrupt it to the point where it would be much better to do without such books, rather than having a thousand copies spreading falsehoods over the whole world.
Some people argue that Damien Hirst is a great artist. Some say he is an execrable artist, and others put him somewhere more boring in between. They are all missing the point. Damien Hirst isn’t an artist. His works may draw huge crowds when they go on show in a five-month-long blockbuster retrospective at Tate Modern next week. But they have no artistic content and are worthless as works of art. They are, therefore, worthless financially.If you want a pickled shark in a tank, you don’t have to pay the $12m Steve Cohen paid for the one selected by Hirst. You only pay that much for the artistic content that Hirst has added to it. If there isn’t any, what are you buying? You could argue that you are buying an investment. But that depends on people in the future valuing the artistic content in your shark even more highly than you do. If they don’t, what are you left with? A shark in a tank, which is what you bought.
You cannot hide what you’re listening to from your friends on Rdio. You cannot have a private pinboard on Pinterest. You cannot hide your favorites on Twitter. You cannot delete titles from your Netflix history. (Netflix isn’t shared on Facebook right now, but it’s not for lack of wanting to.) Spotify freaks out a little bit when the social thing isn’t working and harangues you constantly to connect it to your social networks (even though it, admirably, has a private mode). Washington Post Social Reader shares whatever article you’re reading in real time, unless you dive deep into Facebook’s settings and decide to only share with yourself (which is kind of weird, to think about it that way; there is no not sharing, just sharing by yourself).
I love this macro more than most macros.