State of the Species

The problem with environmentalists, Lynn Margulis used to say, is that they think conservation has something to do with biological reality. A researcher who specialized in cells and microorganisms, Margulis was one of the most important biologists in the last half century—she literally helped to reorder the tree of life, convincing her colleagues that it did not consist of two kingdoms (plants and animals), but five or even six (plants, animals, fungi, protists, and two types of bacteria).

Until Margulis’s death last year, she lived in my town, and I would bump into her on the street from time to time. She knew I was interested in ecology, and she liked to needle me. Hey, Charles, she would call out, are you still all worked up about protecting endangered species?

Margulis was no apologist for unthinking destruction. Still, she couldn’t help regarding conservationists’ preoccupation with the fate of birds, mammals, and plants as evidence of their ignorance about the greatest source of evolutionary creativity: the microworld of bacteria, fungi, and protists. More than 90 percent of the living matter on earth consists of microorganisms and viruses, she liked to point out. Heck, the number of bacterial cells in our body is ten times more than the number of human cells!

Bacteria and protists can do things undreamed of by clumsy mammals like us: form giant supercolonies, reproduce either asexually or by swapping genes with others, routinely incorporate DNA from entirely unrelated species, merge into symbiotic beings—the list is as endless as it is amazing. Microorganisms have changed the face of the earth, crumbling stone and even giving rise to the oxygen we breathe. Compared to this power and diversity, Margulis liked to tell me, pandas and polar bears were biological epiphenomena—interesting and fun, perhaps, but not actually significant.

Does that apply to human beings, too? I once asked her, feeling like someone whining to Copernicus about why he couldn’t move the earth a little closer to the center of the universe. Aren’t we specialat all?

This was just chitchat on the street, so I didn’t write anything down. But as I recall it, she answered that Homo sapiens actually might be interesting—for a mammal, anyway. For one thing, she said, we’re unusually successful.

Seeing my face brighten, she added: Of course, the fate of every successful species is to wipe itself out.

by Charles C. Mann, Orion |  Read more:

Photo: Miniature Worlds Digitally Assembled from Hundreds of Photographs by Catherine Nelson | Colossal

Fade to Light

Dementia is a problem around which the curtains are often gently drawn, so when I first met Lowell and Julie, over a year ago, I explained that I wanted to get a peek at what they were “struggling with.”

“Living with,” Julie corrected me. “Some days it’s a struggle, other days not.”

That hopeful pragmatism squares nicely with the Alzheimer Society of Canada’s philosophy. In fact, early on in Lowell’s illness, Julie was asked to apply for the organization’s vacant CEO role, but she decided it would be “too much Alzheimer’s.” Increasingly, we will all feel the deluge. The prevalence in Canada of all forms of dementia—Alzheimer’s is the most common, accounting for nearly two-thirds of all cases—is projected to double from half a million this year to 1.1 million by 2038. Meanwhile, Alzheimer’s has rocketed up the list of diseases we fear most; according to recent polls, it is second only to cancer, and it sits first for those fifty-five and up.

Although Lowell is twelve years older than the oldest baby boomer (and seventeen years older than Julie), he knows he personifies the coming wave. A critical difference is that while many people with moderate, or middle-stage, Alzheimer’s have anosognosia, or impaired insight, Lowell remains alert to his plight. Still, he had trouble understanding my designs—Were we going to write a letter together? To whom?—and Julie had to warm him to the idea of being profiled. On one of my initial visits, Lowell, with a twinkle in his eye, seemed to be rehearsing first lines for a full-blown biography: “Lowell Jenkins grew up in Faucett, Missouri. His childhood was not all blue skies… Lowell Jenkins is a natural-born helper… Lowell Jenkins woke up one night and couldn’t figure out where he was…”

In the summer of 2007, Julie and Lowell moved to another condo in the same building. Not only was the new unit a disorienting mirror image of the old, with the kitchen and bedrooms to the left rather than the right, but a full renovation was under way. Carpets were torn up, the kitchen cupboards had been knocked out, and wires hung down. Lowell sat up in bed and surveyed the rubble: “Where am I? What have we done? ”

Around the same time, he was showing uncharacteristic agitation while riding the subway, and when they started planning a trip to Russia he became strangely reticent, though he had visited there many times before on cross-cultural exchanges tied to his teaching. Julie knows now that she rationalized the more subtle changes. “Things happen as you get older,” she said. “You do get older.” But Lowell’s disquiet about the new condo was of a different scale. Such was her struggle to pacify him that in the days following they booked the appropriate tests. “He asked before we knew,” Julie said: “‘Do you think I have it?’ ”

They will knock on our doors,” Dr. Serge Gauthier says about the baby boomers. “All of them, I’m sure.” He is director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Unit at the McGill Centre for Studies in Aging, in Verdun, Quebec. The question, he says, is what to tell the individual keen to know his or her risk: “Does everyone who is forgetful need a PET scan? No—but who does? ”

Age is the risk factor that encompasses the other big ones: family history and genetics, gender (twice as many women as men get Alzheimer’s), cardiovascular disease, and diabetes. Evidence is gathering to support what ought to be an intuitive leap between brain health and heart health. Alzheimer’s can cause cerebral bleeding and vice versa, and aerobic activity three times a week has been shown to slow the rate of shrinkage in the hippocampus.

“If you’re preventive about heart attacks in your fifties and strokes in your sixties, you may reduce the risk of dementia in your seventies,” Gauthier says. “That’s a lot of bang for your buck.”

Further motivation is that there is no magic bullet in the offing; not a single new Alzheimer’s drug has been approved in the past nine years. Dr. Judes Poirier, the centre’s former director, says if anything positive has come from the “miserable failure” of recent drug trials, it is the new attention being paid to the idea of “simply and humbly” keeping dementia at bay. Delaying onset by two years would drop the rate of incidence by 33 percent within a generation, and a delay of five years would cut it in half. “If we delay it by ten years, something else will kill you,” Poirier says. “This is the beauty of Alzheimer’s.”

by Dave Cameron, The Walrus |  Read more:

Image: Amy Friend

The Civil Wars

h/t lyrics:

chen chi-kwan.
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Remembering Moe Norman - The 'Rain Man' of Golf

People have asked me why Moe and I got along so well. I reply by noting that many have called me a champion of idiosyncrasies. I have always loved people who would come along with unusual styles and could beat your brains in. I have taught people not to change their style, but to nurture it and show how it could be an asset. I hate people who rebuild something like that and ruin individuality.

Moe had an unusual, brilliant style that I deeply admired. In turn, he also admired and respected what I did. We had a mutual respect.

Moe had some difficulty trusting and relating to people. If someone came up to Moe for an autograph, he would turn away. If I told Moe that the person was a very good player, he would sign the autograph. He only talked to people who could play — if I told him so. He knew then that they respected him and were not there to ridicule him.

When I would ask him if people should copy his swing, he would laugh. “How can anyone copy my swing? They would come and take you away,” he would say. “You can’t be me. Everyone is copying everyone else. Be yourself; don’t try to be me. You can’t be me.”

The first time I met him was during one of my free clinics. He was in the audience. After I finished what I thought was a perfect display of shotmaking and shot-shaping, he approached me. “Do you know who I am?” he asked. “Yes, Moe Norman,” I said. He replied, “How would you like me to come next week and show you how a ball should really be hit?” I told him to come on. We did clinics together for the next 18 years.

He was very comfortable hitting balls. He was uncomfortable around people he didn’t know. Hitting balls was his life; no one could do it better. After hitting balls, he would withdraw, getting lost in his own world where no one else could disturb him.

Moe never gave any credence to putting. “There’s no skill in that,” he would say. “Hitting pins in regulation — that takes skill.”

Moe once told me that during a practice round for the Canadian Open, he was playing with Canadian golf great George Knudson. Moe offered to play for $5 per pin hit in regulation. George agreed with a laugh, thinking that no one hits pins in regulation. After three holes, Moe had hit three pins, and George walked back to the clubhouse.

On the first hole of a practice round, a 230-yard par 3, the media assembled around Moe and teased him about his putting. Moe pulled a club from his bag, struck the ball perfectly, and turned to the reporters, saying, “I’m not putting today.” The ball rolled into the hole for a hole-in-one. It was one of 17 holes-in-one that Moe hit.

Moe broke all the rules of conventional golf mechanics. He held the club in the palms of his huge hands. I always said he had no wrists, only arms with hands. He used an abnormally wide stance; most players, even pros, would whiff while trying to address the ball in his footprints. He started the club at least a foot behind the ball. He reached for the ball, extending his arms as far as they would go, arms and shaft on a single axis. He faced the ball at impact, his feet flat on the ground. His arms did all the work. His body seemed to react to his powerful arm swing.

We went to Bay Hill to do a clinic for a medical company. Moe didn’t know the way from Daytona, so he said he would follow me in his car. We started onto I-95 heading for I-4 and Orlando. When I looked in my rear-view mirror, I didn’t see Moe. I slowed down to 50 mph. Finally, I spotted him in his car, going 45 max. Truck drivers were honking and yelling. But Moe had the volume turned up so high in his Cadillac that he was oblivious to the noise. When we finally got to Bay Hill, the noise from his radio was deafening. Science and math tapes were blaring from his tape player, with the volume turned up as high as it would go. He was in a world all his own.

When we got there, we went looking for the practice area where the clinic would be held. Arnold Palmer came toward us in his cart and said, “Hi. How are you, Moe?” Immediately, Moe shot back, with an obvious reference to Palmer’s lack of accuracy off the tee: “I haven’t had a thorn bush stuck up my ass for the last seven years. How about you, Arnie?” Palmer cracked up. He knew that Moe was never in the bushes.

Over 41,352 people attended our clinics. How do I know? Moe counted every person who ever attended a clinic. He knew the exact number of balls we hit and how many tees we used each time.

by Craig Shankland, Athlon Sports |  Read more:

Woman at the Café, by Antonio Donghi (Rome 1897 - Rome 1963), 1932
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Ask Someone Who Recently Went to Rome

What's the shortest amount of time someone could/should/would reasonably spend there? Like a really long weekend wouldn't be enough, right?

I've actually done both — the first time I stayed three nights and this time six — and I can tell you there is never too little or too much of Rome. I know that sounds ridiculous, but it is truly one of those cities that expands and contracts to fit your plan. New York is this way, where you can hop in for a 24-hour party and hop back out, but if you sit still for a minute, you start to picture yourself living there.

Okay, you could probably read this anywhere, but I'll give you my tiny synopsis of Rome: the central part of Rome — the part in this free map someone inevitably hands you almost the second you step off the plane (okay, not really, they have them at the train or bus or shuttle ticket window as you leave the airport) — that part is all walkable and made up of little tiny self-contained neighborhoods with pedestrian squares called "piazzas" that you can find just by opening your eyes. If you're only there for two days, hit a monument or two, eat some great meals, wander aimlessly, do a little shopping, and call it a perfect weekend.

On the other hand, Rome is so old that there layers upon layers of things to see. Depending on your level of interest in antiquity/the Middle Ages/the Renaissance/modern art and design/FOOD, you could be there forever and ever, amen. It was also recommended that we try a day or overnight trip to Florence or Naples or Sorrento by train. Supposedly those are very easy, but we were too lazy to be bothered.

Is everyone in Rome always wearing really great jeans? Or did I just make that up in my head?

Jeans, sure, but the suits? Oh MY god, the suits. I think my husband almost left me for about 100 men in suits and I would not have blamed him. Just gorgeous, gorgeous suits. And overcoats. And scarves. Like this, no kidding.

I noticed three stand-out looks for women, aside from suits, which many wear as well:

1. Cuffed jeans, Tod's style cool loafers or brightly-colored oxfords, button-down or silk tank, a spiffy blazer, scarf. Hair all wild and curly and bold glasses.

2. Eileen Fisher, only probably handmade by "textile artists" in Italy, so better.

3. Flowery dresses, again with a blazer and a scarf. Long, straight hair. A hat. Sunglasses. Perpetually 29 years old. Riding a bike or Vespa. These were everywhere.

I just want to hear about the food. What was the first thing you ate when you got there, and what was the last thing?

The very first thing was, haha, this croissant and espresso at the train station/bus shuttle stand at the airport. EVERYTHING IS BETTER IN ROME, did I say that yet? Everything. That is why "Made in Italy" used to mean it was special. You should see the leather gloves and hats. Anyway, even train station croissants are better. Roman croissants are a little orangey and they are topped with sugar.

Once we got into town and settled, we stumbled around and found a tiny piazza — these are every few streets, an empty block that is usually bordered by restaurants with outdoor seating and some touristy stores — for homemade pasta and a glass of wine. I had the fettucine all'Amatriciana. Standard pastas like that one, cacio e pepe (cheese and pepper), and carbonara are done decently at a lot of little restaurants, so try a bunch. The last thing I ate was pizza at 4 A.M. Hardly any place is open then, so you take what you can get.

And what was the best thing, and the worst thing?

The worst was that pizza, but that's just because it was old. There are so many "bests" in Rome. We tried a few Time Out recommendations and both were amazing: at Roscioli I got fresh burrata with local anchovies that had been caught this spring, and at Matricianella I had the best gnocchi of my life. One night we splurged and had dinner at a fancy restaurant we saw on No Reservations. The decor and service were dreamy, and the veal was out of control, but in hindsight, no more satisfying than the panino we'd share at whatever cafe in the morning. Mmm, melty cheese. And we also found some excellent food on our own just by chance. I wish I could remember the names of some places, but who cares? A lot of the fun is finding them. The streets — just the look of them, all skinny and wind-y, and cobblestoned, and closed in by three- and four-story terracotta apartment buildings with flower boxes in the windows — they draw you in against your will and you spend hours wandering, so just go with it.

Two food-related things make Rome one of my favorite places. The first is that all cafes — and there are, in my estimation, as many as two per block — are also bars. WHAT? Yes, a cafe is a bar and a bar is a cafe. And second, from roughly 4-5 P.M to 7-9 P.M., at many bars and restaurants, they have a happy hour called "aperitivo." One we went to more than once for the scene — particularly fashionable, older, local businesspeople chatting heatedly in Italian — is Ciampini. "Aperitivo" is a selection of appetizers, either brought to the table or buffet-style, that come free with a cocktail or wine purchase. Often it's just pistachios and salami and cheese and olives. Which, I don't know why I just said "it's just" because that was all awesome? But some places go all-out. At Casa & Bottega I had a Negroni with focaccia, quiche, crostini, grilled sqaush, and a barley salad. Just go door-to-door asking, "Aperitivo?"

by Jane Marie, The Awl |  Read more:

Tim Dolby. Sardines 21st century
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Bruce Cohen. Untitled (Pink Balcony) 2008

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Human Rights Campaign Acceptance Speech: Lana Wachowski

OK. Phew. Haven’t given a speech ever. [applause] OK, OK, I get it -- you’re very encouraging, I love you.

So I’m at my hairdresser's. [laughter] He’s gay, go figure. I say yeah, the HRC wants to give me an award. Award for what? I say, "I guess for kind of being myself." He’s like playing with my hair and looking at me and he’s like, “Yeah, I guess you make a pretty good you.” And I was like, yeah, “Yeah, well there wasn’t a lot of competition.” And ‘cause he's a catty bitch he said, “Yeah, it’s a good thing -- just imagine if you had lost.” [laughter]

I’ve been going to this hairdresser who’s this gorgeous lovely man for almost six years. He knows everything about my family, how close I was to my grandma, how I met and married the love of my life. He did the hair for our wedding three years ago, he’s seen the drunken pornographic pictures of our honeymoon in Mykonos. But he doesn’t know that I directed The Matrix trilogy with my brother Andy. [applause] So he knows all about who I am but he doesn’t know what I do.

Conversely, I was recently out to dinner with a mixture of friends and strangers who were all very excited to meet a “Hollywood” director, but all they want to do is ask about Tom Hanks, Keanu Reeves and Halle Berry, and throughout the dinner they repeatedly refer to me as “he” or one of the “Wachowski Brothers,” sometimes using half my name, “Laaaaaa,” as an awkward bridge between identities, unable or perhaps unwilling to see me as I am, but only for the things I do.

Every one of us, every person here, every human life presents a negotiation between public and private identity. For me that negotiation took a more literal form in a dialogue between me, Andy,Tom Tykwer -- our new brother by love, who’s just gorgeous -- with whom we directed our latest movie, Cloud Atlas. (Thanks for the plug; go see it.) Several months ago we were sitting in this Berlin club amid beer soaked haggardness in a space not intended to be inhabited by people and sunlight trying to decide if we should shoot this introduction to a trailer for our movie that was supposed to be posted online. Tom Hanks was supposed to do it but became unavailable.

Andy and I have not done press or made a public appearance including premieres in over 12 years. People have mistakenly assumed that this has something to do with my gender. It does not. After The Matrix was released in ‘99 we both experienced this alarming contraction of our world and thus our lives. We became acutely aware of the preciousness of anonymity -- understanding it as a form of virginity, something you only lose once. Anonymity allows you access to civic space, to a form of participation in public life, to an egalitarian invisibility that neither of us wanted to give up. We told Warner Bros. that neither one of us wanted to do press anymore. They told us, “No. Absolutely not. This is non-negotiable. Directors are essential to selling and marketing a movie.” We said, “OK, we get it. So if it’s a choice between making movies or not doing press, we decided we’re not going to not make movies.” They said, “Hang on. Maybe there’s a little room for negotiation.”

As I grew older an intense anxious isolation coupled with constant insomnia began to inculcate an inescapable depression. I have never slept much but during my sophomore year in high school, while I watched many of my male friends start to develop facial hair, I kept this strange relentless vigil staring in the mirror for hours, afraid of what one day I might see. Here in the absence of words to defend myself, without examples, without models, I began to believe voices in my head -- that I was a freak, that I am broken, that there is something wrong with me, that I will never be lovable.

After school I go to the nearby Burger King and write a suicide note. It ends up being over four pages. [laughter] I’m a little talkative. But it was addressed to my parents and I really wanted to convince them that it wasn’t their fault, it was just that I didn’t belong. I cry a lot as I write this note, but the staff at Burger King has seen it all before, and they seem immune. [laughter]

I was very used to traveling home quite late because of the theater, I know the train platform will be empty at night because it always is. I let the B train go by because I know the A train will be next and it doesn’t stop. When I see the headlight I take off my backpack and I put it on the bench. It has the note in front of it. I try not to think of anything but jumping as the train comes. Just as the platform begins to rumble suddenly I notice someone walking down the ramp. It is a skinny older old man wearing overly large, 1970s square-style glasses that remind of the ones my grandma wears. He stares at me the way animals stare at each other. I don’t know why he wouldn’t look away. All I know is that because he didn’t, I am still here.

Years later I find the courage to admit that I am transgender and this doesn’t mean that I am unlovable. I meet a woman, the first person that has made me understand that they love me not in spite of my difference but because of it. She is the first person to see me as a whole being. And every morning I get to wake up beside her I can’t begin to tell you how grateful I am for those two blue eyes in my life.

by Lana Wachowski, Holleywood Reporter | Read more:
Photo: EW.com

Keep a green tree in your heart and a singing bird will come. 

- Chinese Proverb

[ed. Not necessarily.]

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If Smart Is the Norm, Stupidity Gets More Interesting

Few of us are as smart as we’d like to be. You’re sharper than Jim (maybe) but dull next to Jane. Human intelligence varies. And this matters, because smarter people generally earn more money, enjoy better health, raise smarter children, feel happier and, just to rub it in, live longer as well.

But where does intelligence come from? How is it built? Researchers have tried hard to find the answer in our genes. With the rise of inexpensive genome sequencing, they’ve analyzed the genomes of thousands of people, looking for gene variants that clearly affect intelligence, and have found a grand total of two. (...)

But is the genetic cup really empty, or are we just looking for the wrong stuff? Kevin Mitchell, a developmental neurogeneticist at Trinity College Dublin, thinks the latter. In an essay he published in July on his blog, Wiring the Brain, Dr. Mitchell proposed that instead of thinking about the genetics of intelligence, we should be trying to parse “the genetics of stupidity,” as his title put it. We should look not for genetic dynamics that build intelligence but for those that erode it.

The premise for this argument is that once natural selection generated the set of genes that build our big, smart human brains, those genes became “fixed” in the human population; virtually everyone receives the same set, and precious few variants affect intelligence. This could account for the researchers’ failure to find many variants of measurable effect.

But in some other genetic realms we do differ widely, for example, mutational load — the number of mutations we carry. This tends to run in families, which means some of us generate and retain more mutations than others do. Among our 23,000 genes, you may carry 500 mutations while I carry 1,000.

Most mutations have no effect. But those that do are more likely to bring harm than good, Dr. Mitchell said in an interview, because “there are simply many more ways of screwing something up than of improving it.”

Open the hood of a smooth-running car and randomly turn a few screws, and you’ll almost certainly make the engine run worse than before. Likewise, mutations that change the brain’s normal development or operation will probably slow it down. Smart Jane may be less a custom-built, high-performance model than a standard version pulling a smaller mutational load. (...)

We also inherit — through genes yet to be identified, of course — a trait known as developmental stability. This is essentially the accuracy with which the genetic blueprint is built. Developmental stability keeps the project on track. It reveals itself most obviously in physical symmetry. The two sides of our bodies and brains are constructed separately but from the same 23,000-gene blueprint. If you have high developmental stability, you’ll turn out highly symmetrical. Your feet will be the same shoe size, and the two sides of your face will be identical.

If you’re less developmentally stable, you’ll have feet up to a half-size different and a face that’s like two faces fused together. Doubt me? Take a digital image of your face and split it down the middle. Then make a mirror-image copy of each half and attach it to its original. In the two faces you’ve just made — one your mirrored left side, the other your right — you’ll behold your own developmental stability, or lack thereof.

Both those faces might be better-looking than you are, for we generally find symmetrical faces more attractive. It also happens that symmetry and intelligence tend to run together, because both run with developmental stability. We may find symmetrical faces attractive because they imply the steadiness of genetic development, which creates valuable assets for choosing a mate, like better general fitness and, of course, intelligence — or as Dr. Mitchell might put it, a relative lack of stupidity.

by David Dobbs, NY Times |  Read more:

Illustration: Lars Leetaru

Nadav Kander. Yangtze – The Long River
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Dan McCaw, Waiting
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Inside the New Hipster Megachurch

When Jess came to the University of Washington as a freshman, she was a feminist economics major whose postcollege goal was to land a position at an organization dedicated to social entrepreneurship. Now in her early 20s and just a few years out of college, she is married, looking forward to a life as a homemaker, and involved full-time at the Seattle-based Mars Hill Church, one of the hippest, fastest-growing, and most conservative evangelical churches in the nation.

Mars Hill might as well be named Mark’s Hill, after its founder and leading pastor, Mark Driscoll. Its home campus is a 40,000-square-foot warehouse in Seattle’s Ballard district, the neighborhood where hipsters go to raise families.

The church’s blend of pop culture and strict Calvinist doctrine allows congregants to occupy a unique, rebellious niche between middle-aged conservative Christians and their secular liberal contemporaries. Mars Hill members talk about sex, drink alcohol, get tattoos, and swear. They listen to Fleet Foxes; they love Star Wars and graffiti art. They also believe homosexuality is a sin, men are meant to lead, and wives must submit to their husbands as the church submits to God.

Mars Hill is part of a movement of “emerging churches” struggling to keep Christian faith relevant in the postmodern world. They typically meet in nontraditional locations (coffee shops, concert venues, living rooms), sermonize through rock music, and connect to their congregants via Facebook and Twitter accounts. Lauren Sandler, author of the 2007 book Righteous: Dispatches from the Evangelical Youth Movement, calls them the “Disciple Generation...[an] ever-growing population of people ages 15 to 35 who are equally obsessed with Christ and with culture as a means to an evangelical end.” Cloaking the gospel in pop culture is a model most often associated with televangelists of the 1980s, like the Lakewood Church’s Joel Osteen, who modeled churches after shopping malls, playing on capitalist culture to make God’s message palatable. Mars Hill is not a commercial center, but an indie concert where the Kool-Aid comes with a PBR chaser.

A writer for the Christian blog ConversantLife.com called Driscoll, with his stocky frame, six o’clock shadow, and torn jeans, “the original cussing hipster pastor.” It’s Driscoll’s snarky straight talk about everything from oral sex to yoga to God’s eternal wrath that has ignited passion in the hearts of his millennial disciples. After Driscoll and his wife, Grace, founded the church in 1996 in their Seattle home, it grew at a rate of about 60 percent a year—all the more notable when you consider that Seattle is one of the most left-leaning cities in a state that, according to a 2004 Gallup poll, ranked as the third least religious in the nation after Oregon and Idaho (Washington dropped to eighth in 2012). Mars Hill now has more than 5,000 members, with campuses in Portland, Orange County, and Albuquerque. In the late 1990s, Driscoll founded Acts 29, a “church planting” network that trains men who wish to open churches; this led to the creation of the Resurgence, an online training resource with links to sermons, blog posts, music, and forums—essentially, a Mars Hill starter kit. Affiliates of the church are now spread out all over the world, with disciples everywhere in between.

New converts often discover Mars Hill by stumbling upon Driscoll’s sermon podcast. For evangelists, who essentially devote their lives to making Jesus go viral, social media has literally been a godsend, and it’s what Mars Hill does best. In addition to Driscoll’s podcast, the church has a presence on nearly every social media platform, from Facebook to Pinterest to Instagram, as well as a YouTube channel and an iPhone app that launched back in 2009. The church’s website has an entire music section devoted to Mars Hill’s indie worship bands; in May, Driscoll announced the church’s plans to start a record label. A church with an online presence is nothing new, but Mars Hill’s statistics would make a small media company jealous: as of May 2012, it had 43,245 “likes” on Facebook, more than 10 million views on YouTube, and 39,356 Twitter followers.

In the early 1990s, fresh out of college, Driscoll saw a problem with the state of Christianity: There were no men. In a 2006 interview with the organization Desiring God, Driscoll said, “Church today, it’s just a bunch of nice, soft, tender, chickified church boys. Sixty percent of Christians are chicks, and the forty percent that are dudes are still sort of chicks.” The main reason Driscoll himself had a hard time accepting Christianity was that he couldn’t bring himself to worship “a gay hippie in a dress.” But as he read about Jesus and Elijah and Paul, the gospels started to appeal to him—and he saw a way for them to appeal to other self-proclaimed macho men. “I’ve gotta think these guys were dudes. Heterosexual, win-a-fight, punch-you-in-the-nose dudes.” This revelation became the foundation for his narrative of a masculine, tough-love Christianity. “If you want to win a war, you have to get the men,” Driscoll preaches in a 2006 promotional film on church planting called A Good Soldier.

by Alison Sargent, Alternet | Read more:

Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com/cardiae

Why Are States So Red and Blue?

Regardless of who wins the presidential election, we already know now how most of the electoral map will be colored, which will be close to the way it has been colored for decades. Broadly speaking, the Southern and Western desert and mountain states will vote for the candidate who endorses an aggressive military, a role for religion in public life, laissez-faire economic policies, private ownership of guns and relaxed conditions for using them, less regulation and taxation, and a valorization of the traditional family. Northeastern and most coastal states will vote for the candidate who is more closely aligned with international cooperation and engagement, secularism and science, gun control, individual freedom in culture and sexuality, and a greater role for the government in protecting the environment and ensuring economic equality.

But why do ideology and geography cluster so predictably? Why, if you know a person’s position on gay marriage, can you predict that he or she will want to increase the military budget and decrease the tax rate, and is more likely to hail from Wyoming or Georgia than from Minnesota or Vermont? To be sure, some of these affinities may spring from coalitions of convenience. Economic libertarians and Christian evangelicals, united by their common enemy, are strange bedfellows in today’s Republican party, just as the two Georges — the archconservative Wallace and the uberliberal McGovern — found themselves in the same Democratic Party in 1972.

But there may also be coherent mindsets beneath the diverse opinions that hang together in right-wing and left-wing belief systems. Political philosophers have long known that the ideologies are rooted in different conceptions of human nature — a conflict of visions so fundamental as to align opinions on dozens of issues that would seem to have nothing in common.

Conservative thinkers like the economist Thomas Sowell and the Times columnist David Brooks have noted that the political right has a Tragic Vision of human nature, in which people are permanently limited in morality, knowledge and reason. Human beings are perennially tempted by aggression, which can be prevented only by the deterrence of a strong military, of citizens resolved to defend themselves and of the prospect of harsh criminal punishment. No central planner is wise or knowledgeable enough to manage an entire economy, which is better left to the invisible hand of the market, in which intelligence is distributed across a network of hundreds of millions of individuals implicitly transmitting information about scarcity and abundance through the prices they negotiate. Humanity is always in danger of backsliding into barbarism, so we should respect customs in sexuality, religion and public propriety, even if no one can articulate their rationale, because they are time-tested workarounds for our innate shortcomings. The left, in contrast, has a Utopian Vision, which emphasizes the malleability of human nature, puts customs under the microscope, articulates rational plans for a better society and seeks to implement them through public institutions.

Cognitive scientists have recently enriched this theory with details of how the right-left divide is implemented in people’s cognitive and moral intuitions. The linguist George Lakoff suggests that the political right conceives of society as a family ruled by a strict father, whereas the left thinks of it as a family guided by a nurturant parent. The metaphors may be corollaries of the tragic and utopian visions, since different parenting practices are called for depending on whether you think of children as noble savages or as nasty, brutish and short. The psychologist Jonathan Haidt notes that rightists and leftists invest their moral intuitions in different sets of concerns: conservatives place a premium on deference to authority, conformity to norms and the purity and sanctity of the body; liberals restrict theirs to fairness, the provision of care and the avoidance of harm. Once again, the difference may flow from the clashing conceptions of human nature. If individuals are inherently flawed, their behavior must be restrained by custom, authority and sacred values. If they are capable of wisdom and reason, they can determine for themselves what is fair, harmful or hurtful.

by Steven Pinker, NY Times |  Read more:

Illustration: Leif Parsons

Souls Migrating Through Time

[ed. I'll admit, I've tried reading Cloud Atlas a couple of times and just gave up. Even this review hardly makes it seem less baffling. See also: The Huge, Ridiculous World of 'Cloud Atlas'.]

In 1849 a businessman on a Melville-esque sea voyage in the South Pacific battles a mysterious illness and shelters a runaway slave. In 1936 Robert Frobisher, a penniless young composer, flees Cambridge for Edinburgh to join the household of a vain and temperamental maestro. Four decades later an alternative-press journalist risks her life investigating safety problems at a nuclear power plant.

In our own day a feckless book publisher finds himself trapped in a nursing home. Sometime in the corporate, totalitarian future a member of the genetically engineered serving class, a fast-food worker named Sonmi-451, is drawn into rebellion, while in a still more distant, postapocalyptic, neo-tribal future (where Sonmi is worshiped as a deity), a Hawaiian goatherd. ...

That last one is a little more complicated, involving a devil, marauders on horseback and the possibility of interplanetary travel. It is also where the spoilers dwell. In any case, these half-dozen stories are the components of“Cloud Atlas,” David Mitchell’s wondrous 2004 novel, now lavishly adapted for the screen by Lana and Andy Wachowski and Tom Tykwer.

“Cloud Atlas” is a movie about migratory souls and wayward civilizations, loaded with soaring themes and flights of feeling, as vaporous and comprehensive as its title. Big ideas, or at least earnest intellectual conceits, crowd the screen along with suave digital effects and gaudy costumes. Free will battles determinism. Solidarity faces off against domination. Belief in a benevolent cosmic order contends with fidelity to the cruel Darwinian maxim that “the weak are meat the strong do eat.”

Describing this movie, despite its lofty ambitions, can feel like an exercise in number crunching, and watching it is a bit like doing a series of math problems in your head. How do three directors parcel six plots into 172 minutes? (And how much might that cost?) Which actor — most of them inhabit several roles, in some cases changing gender or skin color as well as costume, accent and hairstyle — tackles the widest range of characters? What is the correlation between a musical phrase and a comet-shaped birthmark? How many times does Hugo Weaving sneer?

Maybe the achievement of “Cloud Atlas” should be quantified rather than judged in more conventional, qualitative ways. This is by no means the best movie of the year, but it may be the most movie you can get for the price of a single ticket. It blends farce, suspense, science fiction, melodrama and quite a bit more, not into an approximation of Mr. Mitchell’s graceful and virtuosic pastiche, but rather into an unruly grab bag of styles, effects and emotions held together, just barely, by a combination of outlandish daring and humble sincerity. Together the filmmakers try so hard to give you everything — the secrets of the universe and the human heart; action, laughs and romance; tragedy and mystery — that you may wind up feeling both grateful and disappointed.

by A. O. Scott, NY Times |  Read more:

Jay Maidment/Warner Brothers Pictures

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