Alan Jacobs

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If you want to be a New Atheist, first and foremost, you need to possess an unrelenting desire to help. The desire may seem at times cruel, but you have to start focusing on a higher good: the goal here is to get the cannibals to put down their wafer and wine glass. It’s not for your wellness, but for the good of mankind. As Georgetown University professor John Haught wrote in his diagnosis of the New Atheists, ‘To know with such certitude that religion is evil, one must first have already surrendered one’s heart and mind to what is unconditionally good.’ The New Atheists may wrap themselves in torn one-liners and haggard scientism, but beneath their cynical swaddle there lies a charming Perfectionism. Charming insofar as it is usually in the body of admittedly sinning and struggling men—if you want to be a New Atheist, you’re going to be a man—so the Perfectionist tendencies will be transporting you from a particularly devilish here to a right-minded necessary there. 'Religion must die,’ Maher argues, 'for mankind to live.’ Their descriptions of religion may be flat-footed, but it’s all for an endgame that surpasses their previous personal struggles. They are not converting you to their model lives (every New Atheist will happily tell you of wayward days with hookers or Hezekiah), nor to their model educations (every New Atheist parlays a populist revolution). Rather, they are converting you—as swiftly as possible, as dramatically as possible—to their ontology of the now. Apocalypse is coming, and although the New Atheists name the source and form of this apocalypse differently, if you want to be a New Atheist, you had better pull on your Oneida pants and start shoveling in an Adventist diet, because these are some millennial folk. 'The irony of religion,’ Maher remarks at the end of Religulous, 'is because of its power to divert man to destructive forces the world actually could come to an end.’

I propose we abandon the Internet, or at least accept the fact that it has been surrendered to corporate control like pretty much everything else in Western society. It was bound to happen, and its flawed, centralized architecture made it ripe for conquest. Just as the fledgling peer-to-peer economy of the Late Middle Ages was quashed by a repressive monarchy that still had the power to print money and write laws, the fledgling Internet of the 21st century is being quashed by a similarly corporatist government that has its hands on the switches through which we mean to transact and communicate. It will never truly level the playing fields of commerce, politics, and culture. And if it looks like that does stand a chance of happening, the Internet will be adjusted to prevent it.

The new Aston is beautiful. Chest-squeezing, arrythmia-inducing, stunningly gorgeous. I had occasion to park our willow-green-metallic test car next to a Porsche Panamera Turbo—one of the Aston’s direct rivals—and the Porsche looked like Harold Bloom in a thong… .

But in terms of industrial design, the Rapide’s beauty is illicit because it fails to account for the inconvenient bits of protoplasm that will occupy it. Design, after all, is applied aesthetics. If you’ve ever had occasion to think to yourself, ‘People are stupid,’ well, Aston’s chief of design, Marek Reichman, seems to agree… .

But, seriously, acceleration, tight rear seats, outward visibility, Pep Boys-quality navi system, Austrian papers? None of it matters. The way this car looks people would buy it if it smelled like a rotting corpse.

If one censors Mark Twain’s use of the word, why not censor the black writers who use the term? Whose characters use the term? My new book, Barack Obama and The Jim Crow Media, The Return of the Nigger Breakers, uses a term in the title that that was employed in slave times to refer to workers whose specialty was breaking unruly slaves. One was Edward Covey to whom Frederick Douglass was sent to be broken. This account appears in Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, an 1881 classic which includes the word ‘nigger’ at least ten times.

Like Douglass and other 19th Century authors, Twain used the words with which he was surrounded and to insist that he omit words is not only to put a gag on his characters but a gag on the Age. Instead of doing a gotcha search on Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, I recommend that its critics read it.

saint preserve us . . . from microfilm

Of course, the model that Zuckerberg is hoping to replace isn’t the Peel show but the search engine. If Zuckerberg gets his way, Facebook recommendations will replace Google searches as the main route by which we navigate to websites. This would hardly be a paradigm shift; more a tidying up, combining what are currently two steps into one. With a search engine, you have to know more or less what you’re looking for before you begin: there’s an implied recommendation preceding most things we type into Google. What Zuckerberg’s betting on is that those recommendations will increasingly be made online, with a direct link, so the work you now ask Google to do will already have been done.

As for the first question, why people are so unfussed by Facebook’s lack of privacy, it must in part be because the site fosters the illusion that you’re among friends. The success of Facebook implies that most people are more comfortable thinking of the internet as an extension of their offline lives, where everything and everyone they are likely to encounter is already known to them. Which is all very well, but it does mean that the overweight kids in glasses get bullied there too.

Here’s what’s happening, as I see it. My students aren’t unique but represent a portion of the millennial generation: at least moderately intelligent, reasonably well-educated young people. When they write in a formal setting—for a class assignment or for publication in a blog or a magazine—they almost always favor length over brevity, ornateness over simplicity, literalness over figuration. The reasons, I hypothesize, are a combination: the wandering-the-house-in-the-dark factor, hypercorrection brought on by chronic uncertainty, and the truth that once people start talking or writing, they like to do so as long as they can, even if the extra airtime comes from saying ‘myself’ instead of 'I.’

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A study in The Journal of the American Medical Association found that brightening lights in dementia facilities decreased depression, cognitive deterioration and loss of functional abilities. Increased light bolsters circadian rhythms and helps patients see better so they can be more active, said Elizabeth C. Brawley, a dementia care design expert not involved in the study, adding, ‘If I could change one thing in these places it would be the lighting.’

Several German nursing homes have fake bus stops outside to keep patients from wandering; they wait for nonexistent buses until they forget where they wanted to go, or agree to come inside.

And Beatitudes installed a rectangle of black carpet in front of the dementia unit’s fourth-floor elevators because residents appear to interpret it as a cliff or hole, no longer darting into elevators and wandering away. 'They’ll walk right along the edge but don’t want to step in the black,’ said Ms. Alonzo, who finds it less unsettling than methods some facilities use, bracelets that trigger alarms when residents exit. 'People with dementia have visual-spatial problems. We’ve actually had some people so wary of it that when we have to get them on the elevator to take them somewhere, we put down a white towel or something to cover it up.’