Alan Jacobs

A decade or two ago, students learning about, say, Stephen Shore, would head to the library and find a book, or perhaps see some slides projected in a classroom. Now, they sit at a computer and call up some images, which is much worse; because what they’re looking at is only a very rough approximation of what the photographer actually intended. The colors are wrong, the details are missing, the subtleties have vanished. In the absence of those qualities, one tends to focus on content—on what the picture is of or about— effectively rendering all photography a species of photojournalism. The Ansel Adams you see on a computer monitor didn’t make lush, delicately toned nature prints; he took pictures of trees and rocks and stuff.

Religions are poems. They concert our daylight and dreaming mind, our emotions, instinct, breath and native gesture

into the only whole thinking: poetry. Nothing’s said till it’s dreamed out in words and nothing’s true that figures in words only.

A poem, compared with an arrayed religion, may be like a soldier’s one short marriage night to die and live by. But that is a small religion.

Full religion is the large poem in loving repetition; like any poem, it must be inexhaustible and complete with turns where we ask Now why did the poet do that?

You can’t pray a lie, said Huckleberry Finn; you can’t poe one either. It is the same mirror: mobile, glancing, we call it poetry,

fixed centrally, we call it a religion, and God is the poetry caught in any religion, caught, not imprisoned. Caught as in a mirror

that he attracted, being in the world as poetry is in the poem, a law against its closure. There’ll always be religion around while there is poetry

or a lack of it. Both are given, and intermittent, as the action of those birds — crested pigeon, rosella parrot — who fly with wings shut, then beating, and again shut.

Cell phones cannot cause cancer, because they do not emit enough energy to break the molecular bonds inside cells. Some forms of electromagnetic radiation, such as x-rays, gamma rays and ultraviolet (UV) radiation, are energetic enough to break the bonds in key molecules such as DNA and thereby generate mutations that lead to cancer. Electromagnetic radiation in the form of infrared light, microwaves, television and radio signals, and AC power is too weak to break those bonds, so we don’t worry about radios, televisions, microwave ovens and power outlets causing cancer.

Where do cell phones fall on this spectrum? According to physicist Bernard Leikind in a technical article in Skeptic magazine (Vol. 15, No. 4), known carcinogens such as x-rays, gamma rays and UV rays have energies greater than 480 kilojoules per mole (kJ/mole), which is enough to break chemical bonds. Green-light photons hold 240 kJ/mole of energy, which is enough to bend (but not break) the rhodopsin molecules in our retinas that trigger our photosensitive rod cells to fire. A cell phone generates radiation of less than 0.001 kJ/mole. That is 480,000 times weaker than UV rays and 240,000 times weaker than green light!

Even making the cell phone radiation more intense just means that there are more photons of that energy, not stronger photons. Cell phone photons cannot add up to become UV photons or have their effect any more than microwave or radio-wave photons can. In fact, if the bonds holding the key molecules of life together could be broken at the energy levels of cell phones, there would be no life at all because the various natural sources of energy from the environment would prevent such bonds from ever forming in the first place.

learning Greek

I suppose we could just roll over and accept that this is the way the world is going. “Privacy is dead. Get over it,” as Scott McNealy, the co-founder of Sun Microsystems, reportedly once advised. Or we can fight back, to restore some of our lost privacy. We can do this by setting our own standards and sharing them. We can do it by working directly on companies like Facebook, whose ultimate sources of revenue we are. You can use Facebook to shape Facebook.

We can also try to push our governments in at least three ways: to curb their own incursions into our privacy; to regulate overintrusive companies better; and to punish private violations, like the one that drove Tyler Clementi to take his life. The very networking technologies that reduce our privacy can also empower us in the fight back. Unlike the movie, this is genuinely dry, slow and boring stuff; but our future liberties will depend on it.

If you want to be innovative, you need to put yourself into innovative environments: places where lots of contradictory ideas from many disciplines are crossing paths, where institutions and governments don’t over-regulate or conspire to crush new ideas; where existing platforms stand ready to have new platforms built atop them, as TCP/IP, SGML and various noodling experiments over many decades let Tim Berners-Lee invent the Web (itself a platform that many others invent atop of).

This is stirring stuff: a strong defense of open networks, shared ideas, serendipity (he even cites Boing Boing as a counter to doomsayers who say that the net’s directed search creates a serendipity-free echo chamber) and minimal control over ideas so that they can migrate to those who would use them in ways their “creators” can’t conceive of. These are axioms for many of us who grew up with the Internet and the Web, but to see these axioms defended with reference to history, paleontology, evolutionary biology, urban planning, and other diverse disciplines is heartening indeed.

Playing video games is a revolt against life. All art forms, even the polite ones, are escapist in that each answers some fundamental objection to the world and its limits. Novels let you know, granting access to inner lives and narrative arcs otherwise hidden and guessed at. Films let you see, permitting you to stare at the world and its inhabitants as long and as hard and as many times as you want. The gratification provided by video games is particularly sweet because the objection that drives them is more urgent. What they offer is purpose. To play them is to live in a world with knowable rules and achievable goals: to ask, Dear God, what should I do with my life? And be greeted with a tutorial, a pre-mission briefing, and a shot at a high score.

What we have in Hipster Christianity is a jaded ethnography written by someone who spent a youth-group-lifetime trying to be one of the cool kids. As such, it seems he can only imagine someone adopting a hipster lifestyle in order to strike a pose. This is confirmed by a crucial turn in the book: McCracken identifies the “birth of the Christian hipster” in 2003, “when the first issue of Relevant magazine was released” (88). Well, this explains quite a lot. Did I mention that McCracken was also a longtime contributor to Relevant magazine? If Relevant magazine is the epitome and embodiment of Christian hipsterdom, then pretty much everything McCracken says makes sense. Relevant magazine is simply the latest in a long line of evangelical subcultural production: derivative, secondary, reactionary, and dependent on wider cultural trends, all with the hopes of showing that following Jesus doesn’t really require one to be a loser. Indeed, the magazine’s very title is a signal that this is just the continuation of the seeker-sensitive project of the megachurch. Its edgy rendition of evangelical faith doesn’t really displace the fundamental, core values of a constituency still comfortable with the status quo of bourgeois American individualism, consumerism, nationalism, and militarism. In other words, being a Relevant-hipster is the sort of thing you can add to your life without really disrupting the rest of it. It’s a style, not a way of life… .

When McCracken, in a remarkably cynical flourish in the vein of “Stuff White People Like,” catalogs the authors that Christian hipsters like (Stanley Hauerwas, Ron Sider, Jim Wallis, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Wendell Berry, N. T. Wright, G. K. Chesterton, and others; 97), he does so as if people could only “like” such authors because it’s “cool” to do so. But perhaps they’re just good. McCracken seems unable to really accept what Paste magazine editor Josh Jackson emphasizes: “It’s not about what’s cool. It’s about what good” (92). And if that’s true, then it should be no surprise that Christian colleges and universities are shapers of Christian hipster culture: if McCracken is lamenting the fact that Christian colleges are producing alumni that are smart and discerning with good taste and deep passions about justice, then we’re happy to live with his ire. The fact that young evangelicals, when immersed in a thoughtful liberal arts education, turn out to value what really matters and look critically on the way of life that has been extolled to them in both mass media and mass Christian media—well, we’ll wear that as a badge of honor.

picture books

David Abrams, new Kindle owner and speculator about the future of reading:

While I might initially object to the distraction of video clips in the middle of fiction narrative, I have…

I have no phone and no internet connection in my office. And the days when the BlackBerry comes along because I have to expect some call or something, are likely to be days when I don’t work well. There’s a larger point here too, in that everybody talks how great it is that we have all this information, but to write fiction you don’t need information, or you need a very little bit, you need one per cent of the information that’s flooding in, and the imagination shrivels in the face of this intense radiant wall of information that you get. Certainly, you get so anxious trying to work, that having an open internet portal gives you the ways of dealing with that anxiety in not very productive ways. It’s a kind of exquisite self torture to deprive yourself [of email] in that way, but I think it’s necessary to do large works that require you to hold a lot of things in your head at once.