February 10, 2012, 2:01 pm
By Laurie Essig
So apparently Tim Gunn, style guru and fabulous fashionista, hasn’t had sex for 29 years. And he isn’t afraid to say it. On his new show, “The Revolution,” Gunn said he was going to say it aloud and not be ashamed that he is asexual.
Do I feel like less of a person for it? No… I’m a perfectly happy and fulfilled individual.”
When a friend posted this on my Facebook wall, one of those really uncomfortable conversations began where I ended up sounding like your conservative grandmother about gay people: maybe it’s just a phase, that’s wrong, people really should leave that as their own private shame.
I hate myself for having this response because if there is one thing I know for sure, it is that human sexuality is messy and not easily locked down into neat little boxes to be checked off on a survey. Why can’t some people be happily asexual? Why can’t some couples be happily asexual?…
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February 10, 2012, 8:29 am
By David Barash
Bon Appetit! (Wiki photo)
There are no culinary tours to Costa Rica, and for good reason. So far as I can tell, this small tropical country has nothing special to offer in the way of gustatory delights. Let’s face it, you can’t eat phenomenal biodiversity, mist-shrouded volcanoes, cloud forests, rain forests, pristine beaches complete with warm water, spectacular surfing, and leatherback turtles, a thoroughly nonmilitarized society (when flocks of pelicans conduct their regular flybys, we note that the Costa Rican air force is out on maneuvers), a long and proud history of social democracy, and the world’s happiest people whose national motto is somewhere between “tranquilo” and “pura vida.” But I digress. Now that Frank Bruni is writing (admirably!) about politics for The New York Times, …
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February 9, 2012, 11:02 am
By Michael Ruse
One of the readers of my piece yesterday on Dickens has sent me a list of words that came from Dickens and are now in the English language. These are:
Wellerism, from Sam Weller, Mr. Pickwick’s servant (in Pickwick Papers), meaning making fun of clichés often by taking them literally. For example (when serving lunch): “Now, gen’l'm’n, ‘fall on, as the English said to the French when they fixed bagginets.”
Fagin, from the receiver of stolen goods (in Oliver Twist), meaning an adult who instructs children in crime. Fagin is trying to turn Oliver into a thief. Dickens got the name from a friend when he was working in the blacking factory, but the character is based on the real-life fence Ikey Solomon. I suspect most of us today would feel uncomfortable using the term because of the anti-Semitic undertones (not very “under” in the David Lean film, with Alec Guinness as Fagin…
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February 8, 2012, 3:58 pm
By Laurie Fendrich
Say I am a female Protestant employee hired by a Catholic institution that accepts federal funds (I’m not talking about working directly in a house of worship—I’m imagining a Catholic hospital or university). This institution has advertised for a job, interviewed me, found out I’m Protestant and am not about to convert to Catholicism, and decided they want me anyway. I have the talents they need, so they go ahead and hire me.
As part of my employment at this Catholic institution, I am offered health insurance. That’s the American way, right? After all, we have come up with the wonderful system—the envy of the world—whereby we individuals mostly obtain health insurance through individual employers.
Up until now, most employers’ insurance plans have covered birth control as part of their plans, mostly with no co-pay required of its employees. But this will change if…
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February 8, 2012, 10:20 am
By Michael Ruse
Happy birthday, ol' chum! (Charles Dickens portrait by Matthew Brady, U.S. National Archives via Flickr Commons)
Which are your favorite novels by Charles Dickens? For me, there are what I call the Big Four: Pickwick Papers, David Copperfield, Bleak House, and Our Mutual Friend. I am not trying to justify this list or claim that these are the best (although I would think any list ordering merit would put them high), simply to say that these are the novels that have given and continue to give me the most pleasure.
I suspect that if one were to be dropped from the list of the best, many people would opt for Pickwick Papers. It is a funny sort of novel, appearing in 1836, harking back more to the 18th century than forward into the Victorian Era. (The Queen came to the throne in 1837). It is…
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February 7, 2012, 2:35 pm
By Gina Barreca
Life isn’t always the kind of thing you can celebrate with greeting cards. Valentine’s Day, especially, often evades responsibility for the kinds of events crying out for attention on February 14th especially if they don’t include candy, balloons, and something with sparkles.
Even doggerel should have its day, and we believe its day is February 14th.
For example, one of my brother’s best friends in the world is having surgery on Valentine’s Day. There’s no card for that. There’s nothing you can get where, let’s say, a unicorn is removing somebody’s gallbladder or a teddy-bear is inserting drug-releasing stents below the knee; there’s really nothing for that particular occasion, not even in your fancier stationary stores. So, being the poet he’s always been (under that JD and MBA), he wrote a series of what I believe to be well-crafted poems in celebration of his friend’s…
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February 7, 2012, 2:13 pm
By Carl Elliott
(Still from "Nacho Libre" at Movies Online)
A number of years ago, a university public-relations official approached me with an invitation. Her office was coordinating a series of columns called “Health Talk and You,” which were published in about 50 newspapers around the state. The columns were short, simple, and straightforward – about 500 words, she said. Would I be interested in taking part? Without giving the question much thought, I said yes.
Then I read her email more carefully. I had initially thought I was being asked to write an article. In fact, however, I was being asked to lend my name to an article which the public relations office would ghostwrite, but which would be published under my byline. A reporter would interview me on the topic of my choice and write an article based on the interview….
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February 7, 2012, 11:56 am
By Laurie Essig
I can’t help but be fascinated by the bizarre nature of bad words and naughty gestures. Some words we can’t say because they’re just plain offensive, like the “n” word or now the “r” word. In my house, the “r” word is a point of contention between my daughters since one says it cannot be uttered while the other says it just to annoy her older sister and poke holes in her holier than thou attitude. As you can see, the whole situation is a slippery slope that makes us skate around painful histories and structures that imbue these insults with such power.
What words can be said and what can’t remains a thorny legal and cultural issue and Super Bowl Sunday clearly brought this to the surface. By now, everyone knows that MIA shot up her middle finger while dancing to Madonna’s “Give Me All Your Luvin’.” According to a BBC article,
The middle finger is documented to have expressed insult…
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February 7, 2012, 9:52 am
By Naomi Schaefer Riley
Americans like higher education and American philanthropists like to give to higher education. According to The Chronicle, 19 of the top 50 donors last year gave to colleges, more than to any other cause. “Of those, 10 provided support to institutions that were not their alma maters. Altogether, the 19 donors gave colleges more than $1.5-billion.”
Perhaps the fact that half of these philanthropists did not simply write big checks to their alma maters (though they’re probably doing that as well) is a good sign. Maybe donors are looking more at the quality of the school and the worthiness of its programs than simply giving out of nostalgia because they had a good time at the football games or because that’s where they met their future wives.
Last week, there was more heartening news on this front. Judge Richard Bray, the CEO of the Beazley Foundation, decided to suspend its giving…
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February 7, 2012, 6:25 am
By David Barash
Mommy's baby, Daddy's maybe; only DNA testing can determine (from Wikipedia)
An interesting thing has been happening in Costa Rica, something that points to a social policy which, believe it or not, both liberals and conservatives might endorse. This week, as the local school year begins, there are 12,800 fewer students enrolled than previously, and this despite a continuing influx of Nicaraguans. What’s particularly interesting is the likely reason for this decline: An innovative national law, the “Ley de Paternidad Responsable” (Responsible Fatherhood Act), which took effect in Costa Rica in 2001.
This law, the first of its kind anywhere in the world, identifies paternal obligations in terms of the right of children to know their fathers and to be supported by them and, in so doing, also…
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February 6, 2012, 11:56 am
By Jacques Berlinerblau
False idol?
As I watched the outstretched arms of “the Gronker” (née Rob Gronkowski, the Goliath-sized New England tight end with hands the size of flat-screen TV’s) poised to haul in Tom Brady’s desperation Hail Mary pass at the end time of Super Bowl XLVI, I heard myself–I admit–pronounce the name of God. (Modified by an adjective that I cannot bring myself to admit.)
My hunch is that 120 million or so Americans–believers and nonbelievers alike– were invoking sacred and/or profane words right along with me as time ran down. Why is it that the experience of football is so bound up with religion?
“I mean the Super Bowl,” mused half-time performer Madonna, “is kind of like the holy of holies in America right?” I do think Madonna was on to something. Though perhaps the insight was …
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February 6, 2012, 11:31 am
By Laurie Essig
This semester I am teaching a new (for me) course: “White People.” The course considers the historical formation of whiteness as well as its current cultural and economic manifestations. For me, teaching “white people” is an obvious way to work through some of the key issues of critical race studies: How did our current racial categories form and under what conditions? How are these racial categories intertwined with one another? How does race depend on class, gender, sexuality and often geographic location to make sense?
Of course, when you teach a course called “White People,” you are bound to take some teasing. Someone suggested that it’s a course to “paint white people as bad.” Another friend said I’m just trying to “relieve my liberal white guilt.” But I reject both the claim that all white people are the same and the claim that to critically examine one’s racial position is…
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February 5, 2012, 6:02 pm
By Mark Bauerlein
When I was in 7th Grade, I first heard the terms “definite article” and “indefinite article”–or rather, “l’article indefini” and “l’article defini.” It was in the first French class I took. I hadn’t learned about articles in English Language Arts courses in elementary school, and when I did diagrams of sentences and other grammar exercises in English in 7th and 8th Grade, the basics didn’t stick as well as they did in French class, which I took for the next five years and in college as well.
There’s a lesson. Foreign language study helps with the understanding of native language. It also deepens one’s sense of philology, etymology, phonetics, and idiomatic, slang, and formalized expression in general. To pinpoint a curious word in a text under study in a college literature class such as “deliberate” or “fabulous” and ask the students, “What is the etymology of that word?” a…
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February 5, 2012, 12:11 pm
By Guest Blogger
By Lisa Russ Spaar
Anticipating winter, Rainer Maria Rilke begins the last stanza of his autumn poem “Herbstag” this way:
Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr.
Wer jetzt allein ist, wird es lange bleiben,
wird wachen, lessen, lange Briefe schrieben . . .
(Whoever now has no house, by now will not build.
Whoever is alone now will stay alone,
will wait up, read, write long letters . . . )
Gaston Bachelard, who calls winter the “oldest of the seasons,” writes in The Poetics of Space: “Although at heart a city man, Baudelaire sensed the increased intimacy of a house when it is besieged by winter. In Les paradis artificiels he speaks of Thomas de Quincey’s joy when, a prisoner of winter, he read Kant, with the help of the idealism furnished by opium. The scene takes place in a cottage in Wales. ‘Isn’t it true that a pleasant…
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February 5, 2012, 10:07 am
By Michael Ruse
I think since I started writing for Brainstorm, this is the longest period I have been without making a contribution. The reason is very simple. This last week the little unit I run down here at Florida State has been undergoing what is known as a “Quality Enhancement Review.” My tiny Program in the History and Philosophy of Science has been looked at by an outside examiner, by high-level university officials, and is also being mulled over by a committee of strangers instigated by something known as the “Graduate Policy Committee.”
Frankly, the whole experience has been a bit like having someone film your colonoscopy, knowing that before you recover from the anesthetic the whole procedure will have been posted on YouTube. I have been squiring people around campus to talk to folk, who close the door firmly and leave me sitting outside in the corridor, an object of pity by a…
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February 4, 2012, 6:42 am
By David Barash
Laurence Olivier (left) as Richard III, and Ralph Richardson as Buckingham. All I know about Richard III I learned from Shakespeare; you gotta problem wid dat? (image from Wikipedia)
To what extent, if at all, is it useful/feasible/desirable to use fiction to teach nonfictive material? And to what extent, if at all, is it currently being done?
I just finished reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Talk about bleak! McCarthy makes Samuel Beckett seem like a cockeyed optimist, even though—like Beckett—he often astounds (as in his “Border Trilogy” and Blood Meridian) with unexpectedly luxuriant prose. In addition to being impressed with The Road’s masterful and evocative simplicity, I couldn’t help noticing how it could serve—although unintended by the author, I’m sure—as a primer of one…
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February 3, 2012, 3:37 pm
By Laurie Fendrich
Early this morning, I posted my thoughts on why the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation’s decision to cut most of its funding to Planned Parenthood was a sad thing for women. The cancer fund-raising charity has now apologized and retracted its decision. Planned Parenthood is again eligible for (although I must note, not in any way guaranteed) grant money from Komen.
Nancy Brinker, Komen’s chief executive, posted the following statement on the cancer foundation’s Web site: “We want to apologize to the American public for recent decisions that cast doubt upon our commitment to our mission of saving women’s lives.” The statement went on to say, “We will continue to fund existing grants, including those of Planned Parenthood, and preserve their eligibility to apply for future grants.” It included these critically important words: “We will amend the criteria [for grant…
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February 3, 2012, 9:01 am
By Laurie Fendrich
So let’s say you so loathe Planned Parenthood for the fact that 3 percent of its services go to abortions that you don’t give a fig about the reasons why the Susan G.Komen for the Cure Foundation, the leading breast cancer advocacy organization in America, ended its long partnership with Planned Parenthood. You’re just plain happy.
Or let’s say you buy into the fantasy that poor women can easily find someplace other than Planned Parenthood to go and get mammograms–which save lives by detecting breast cancer in its earliest stages. Or let’s say you even buy the argument of Komen’s founder and chief executive, Nancy G. Brinker, who held a news conference yesterday (desperately trying to contain the damage caused by the decision) insisting that Komen’s decision had “nothing to do with abortion or politics.” Throwing around the smack of “mission” statements and “out…
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February 3, 2012, 2:18 am
By Michele Goodwin
For quite a while, I’ve been concerned about how norms change in countries where human rights abuses persist despite international interventions, treaties, and the promulgation of laws. Sometimes cultural traditions are so deeply entrenched that “law” does not seem to matter.
For example, last week, an Afghan woman was found dead shortly after giving birth to her third daughter. Police believe that her mother-in-law assisted in the murder, by aiding her son as he strangled his wife to death. For months, the victim lived in fear that she would die if another girl were born into her family. It’s illegal to murder, but the instincts surrounding family honor, tradition, and birthing boys mattered more to the family that murdered the young mother.
According to local authorities and friends of the 22-year-old woman (only known as Estorai), she knew that her husband…
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February 3, 2012, 1:10 am
By Jacques Berlinerblau
Remember that young phenom who rocked the 2004 Democratic National Convention with the refrain “we worship an awesome God in the blue states!”? Well, in style, at least, he was nowhere to be found at yesterday’s National Prayer Breakfast. Indeed, listening to President Obama deliver his remarks I was struck by the dirge-like joylessness of his oration.
In substance, however, his speech quietly drove home many of the core-beliefs of the ever-mobilizing, ever-regrouping, ever-coming-in-second-place American Religious Left. Listening carefully to Obama’s sedate address, one could detect a rather tenacious, albeit sometimes disheveled, defense of the principles that Progressives of Faith live by:
We are not separationist secularists: The president has been distancing himself from separationist secularism since as far back as The Audacity of Hope. And he did so again…
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