If you don’t wash your hands, your health is at the mercy of the filthiest person in your dorm. If you don’t wear earplugs, your sleep is at the mercy of the dorm’s biggest asshole.
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Men blast granite to build tunnels for a hydroelectric project in Australia, 1963. Photograph by Robert B. Goodman, National Geographic Creative
It’s ironic, I guess, that the strangeness, alienation, and terror that Franzen (sort of) wants to chronicle are busy revealing themselves all day long on the Internet, which Franzen is so determined to reject. An hour on Twitter is a more harrowing and affirming plunge into the ocean of the age than three days reading Purity. Many of us who feel this deeply, who are nearly overwhelmed by the dissonance Franzen’s novels merely frown toward, are on there a lot, and we could possibly tell him something. Or maybe not; in any case, he isn’t listening.
Journalism follies, Catholic edition
Pope Francis has done a big, big thing: he has made it dramatically easier for women who have had abortions to be reconciled to the Church. But take a look at this NBC News headline: “Pope Francis: Priests Can Forgive Abortion If Women Are ‘Contrite’" — as though before this papal statement contrite women could not have received forgiveness!
The distinction between making forgiveness — more accurately, reconciliation and restoration to Communion, but even I won’t be a stickler for that — easier and making it possible is an important one and easy to grasp, but a reputable religion journalist insisted to me on Twitter this morning that such headlines are perfectly accurate and that my questioning them shows my ignorance of Catholic doctrine.
Apparently the BBC doesn’t agree with him, because the headline and article they posted earlier —
Pope Francis temporarily allows forgiveness for women who have had abortions http://t.co/vYWpxK4Tqe pic.twitter.com/fPHis5rJHM
— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) September 1, 2015
— has been revised: “Pope on abortion: Francis relaxes forgiveness rules." Which is a big improvement in accuracy, though at least one, ahem, reputable religion journalist will think it wholly unnecessary.
Why defend the indefensible? The NBC and the original BBC headlines are plainly and simply wrong, and the stories accompanying them are factually wobbly at their best and in several places incorrect. So why say otherwise? An ideological axe to grind? Misplaced professional solidarity?
Who knows? What matters is that religion reporting in the MSM continues to be astonishingly poor, and that won’t be fixed if people in the business who know better won’t be truthful about the problem.
Wes Craven appreciation - Chicago Tribune
As a senior at Wheaton, Craven struggled with the neurological disorder known as Guillain-Barre syndrome. For most of the year he was paralyzed from the chest down, unable to attend classes. "I remember feeling terribly down," he said in the 1997 Tribune interview. "The illness set back my graduation by nearly a year, but the support I received from students and faculty members through that period was so moving to me. People I didn't know came to visit, to pray for my recovery. To me, their thoughts and prayers represented the best side of Christianity. I'll never forget that side of Wheaton College. Never."
Oliver Sacks
He has made a chasm, which not only nothing can fill, but which nothing has a tendency to fill up. Johnson is dead. Let us go to the next best — there is nobody; no man can be said to put you in mind of Johnson.
— Willliam Hamilton. I quote this because Oliver Sacks has died.
One piece of evidence that preregistration can act as a strong corrective comes from clinicaltrials.gov, a registry of publicly and privately funded clinical studies involving human subjects. Before 2000, when the site was established, 57 percent of large clinical trials funded by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute showed a significant benefit of drugs or other intervention, according to a recent analysis published in the journal PLOS One. After the registry was put in place, only 2 percent of such trials found a clear benefit.
The Hunger Games salute
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Thai people protesting a military takeover of their government borrow a gesture from The Hunger Games
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Alan dreams of suya
I woke up in the middle of the night last night with an inexplicable but overwhelming craving for a food that I haven’t eaten in nearly 25 years. Suya: marinated, highly spiced slices of beef cooked over a wood or charcoal fire and served with sliced onions and, when I had it, anyway, plum tomatoes. (It turns out, comically enough, that the Wikipedia page for suya links to an article I published in 1992.) It’s a Nigerian treat, especially favored by the Hausa people in the north of the country, but I first tasted it in the city of Ilorin in the heart of Yorubaland.
It was early evening, and the suya vendor had set up his cart at the side of a road on which the chief government building of Kwara state stood facing the sharia court building, in a kind of standoff. I don’t know that I’ve ever smelled anything more mouth-watering than the aromas wafting from that cart, and though I haven’t thought about the experience in years, probably, when I woke up last night everything about that evening came back to me with an uncanny clarity — spreading the suya on its bed of newspaper out on the hood of a minivan, eating and talking quietly with my friends as others drifted to and from the cart … how wonderful that was. So many moments in life get lost in the jumble of everyday busyness, it’s a gift when something small and sweet makes a gentle return to memory, to presence.