Evening Harvest: June 8, 2012
Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is – John Scalzi
You can lose playing on the lowest difficulty setting. The lowest difficulty setting is still the easiest setting to win on. The player who plays on the “Gay Minority Female” setting? Hardcore.
‘Heaven is for real’ and the immature American mind – The Spirited Atheist – Susan Jacoby
The Americans buying the book are the same people fighting the teaching of evolution in public schools. They are probably the same people who think they can reduce the government deficit without either paying higher taxes or cutting the military budget, Social Security and Medicare benefits. In this universe of unreason, two plus two can equal anything you want and heaven is not only real but anything you want it to be. At age four, the inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality is charming. Among American adults, widespread identification with the mind of a preschooler is scary.
Against Chairs
The general trend at most points in Western history has been that upper-class people sit in a certain type of chair – typically the crappiest, most damaging design available at the time – and everyone else tries to imitate them.
So Alain de Botton thinks we need a new kind of porn. Well I’ve got a few ideas for him | Hadley Freeman | Comment is free | The Guardian
While Alain busies himself presumably making movies featuring semi-clothed nymphs being kind to Swiss philosophers, I shall discuss this conveniently publicity-grabbing topic which he so keenly proposes.
German Historian Discusses New Scholarly Edition of Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” – SPIEGEL ONLINE
We view ourselves as something akin to a bomb disposal team. “Mein Kampf” is the rusty old artillery shell, and we’re removing the fuse. The idea is to defuse the book with a new introduction and especially with a thorough scholarly commentary. This removes the book’s symbolic value and makes it what it essentially is: a historical record, and nothing more.
A Year After the Non-Apocalypse: Where Are They Now?
It’s been noted by scholars who study apocalyptic groups that believers tend to have analytical mindsets. They’re often good at math. I met several engineers, along with a mathematics major and two financial planners. These are people adept at identifying patterns in sets of data, and the methods they used to identify patterns in the Bible were frequently impressive, even brilliant. Finding unexpected connections between verses, what believers call comparing scripture with scripture, was a way to become known in the group. The essays they wrote explaining these links could be stunningly intricate.
English 103: Susan Orlean “The American Male at Age Ten”
His father once observed that living with Colin was like living with a Martian who had done some reading on American culture.
The Legend of the Spat-Upon Veteran
“In the face of such data, why would the current president nonetheless repeat the apocryphal myth about spat-on Vietnam veterans? Because—facts be damned—it serves a purpose: to suppress protest and perpetuate the ideology of militarism.”
TSR: This Stuff Rocks! (PDF)
And it got better—puzzle books, rub-off transfers,
even a sleeping bag! I couldn’t believe TSR made all
this stuff and, more than that, couldn’t believe they
ever stopped! This stuff was legend. I mean, I’d heard
it existed, but here it was in the plastic, highly flammable
flesh.
AUDIO: Flannery O’Connor reads “A Good Man is Hard to Find” | Melville House Books
I have found that anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.
Holding hands with Ray Bradbury | Catherine Watson
So I leaned over the table and said, slowly and loudly, “Thank you for telling about Mr. Electrico and the friend who died in his arms.”
Sci-Fi Scribes on Ray Bradbury: ‘Storyteller, Showman and Alchemist’ | Underwire | Wired.com
To this day, I cannot think about certain subjects without using Bradbury as a reference point — subjects like Halloween and circuses and sea monsters and the word “wonder” in both noun and verb form.
Dark Material – Michael Rottman
You get through it, as they say, not over it. With the right joke, we can at least start lurching toward the path out of the forest.
