If folk tales simply spread by diffusion, like ink blots in paper, one would expect to see smooth gradients in these variations as a function of distance. Instead, researchers found that language differences between cultures create significant barriers to that diffusion
These barriers are stronger than those for the exchange of genes — a message that might be crudely expressed as: “I’ll sleep with you, but I prefer my stories to yours.”
I would note four. Bernard Lewis’s “What Went Wrong,” Michael Oren’s “Power, Faith, and Fantasy,” Natan Sharansky’s “The Case for Democracy,” and a somewhat older one: the Hebrew Bible.The whole interview is interesting. He asserts, for instance, that Israel's unilateral strike on the Syrian nuclear plant in 2007 avoided war and spurred negotiations. Because both the U.S. and Israel declined to crow about (or even acknowledge responsibility for) the strike, Assad was able to save face without responding to it. Because the strike made Syria fear the U.S. and Israel, it inspired Assad to come to the bargaining table. Yes, sometimes that happens for reasons other than that we made someone love us.
[A] society that suddenly stops having children suffers from cultural despair. The same cultural despair that curtains off the future for families afflicts policymakers. Cultural pessimism is a great motivation for strategic adventures. A nation that fears that it may have no future may be willing to risk everything on the roll of a dice. Iran has one last big generation of military age men, the ones who were born in the early 1980s before the great weapons. Nothing but the use of force would stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, with dreadful consequences. With Iran on the verge of building a nuclear bomb, we have hit crunch-time. Will the foreign policy establishment connect the dots in time?This is a sore subject for me, as you can imagine. I wonder if we've managed the transition well in our own country to a culture in which no one need be fertile unless he or she chooses. How are the incentives for childbearing different now? When the choice whether to reproduce or not becomes unconstrained, what makes fathers willing to support their children and their children's mothers? What makes mothers willing to raise the children? You'd think it would be obvious, but the demographics tell us it's anything but. When people acquire choices for the first time, there can be a scary period in which we find out what new motives will operate, and what we have to offer each other to make it all keep working.
America, once doomed because it had no more oil, is now even more doomed because it has too much:And what are the "real underlying problems" the country needs to be solving? The usual: "building human capital and promoting sustainable economic growth." The "other drivers of long-term prosperity, such as education and infrastructure." (Ah, infrastructure: code for "turn over all your money for boondoggles and pork.") What's more, although it will be wonderful to convert oil- and coal-burning plants to clean shale gas, that will only make people lose interest in climate change without eliminating enough CO2 to save the world.
It looks like the United States is showing the early symptoms of a particularly nasty case of the Resource Curse. The dreaded syndrome, also known as Hugo Chávezitis, tends to strike countries when they tap into large finds of oil, gas, or other valuable natural resources. Although such bonanzas clearly have their advantages, the influx of new wealth often leads countries to neglect real underlying problems or the requirements of long-term growth simply because they can spend their newfound riches to paper over their troubles.
Borneo and Sumatra are two of the most bio-diverse regions of the world, yet they have the longest list of endangered species."Yet"? That's just what you'd expect, isn't it?
The garish similarities between Look’s 1960 piece and Esquire’s 2013 profile reveal a disheartening lack of progress in between. Male writers have had decades to remedy themselves, but still write jejunely about women, accentuating one isolated, exploitable trait (attractive, rebellious, sweet, rude, slutty, rich) for the sake of producing more easily understood subject matter. Until they learn (or at least try to learn) how to write about female subjects in a way that does not purposefully weave paternalistic generalizations into every paragraph, I propose a moratorium on this stagnant approach to literary writing. Let’s allow women to write about women for a little while. Maybe then we can swap the prevalent illusions of femininity for realistic portraits of women as complex human characters.I hadn't realized there was a ban on women writing about women. I assume the suggestion is really that only women should write about women. (Especially when a magazine's readership is as obviously interested in complex human portraits as that of Esquire!)
"Our study suggests that the more heterosexual men, especially less educated heterosexual men, watch pornography, the more supportive they become of same-sex marriage," Indiana University Assistant Professor Paul Wright told Secrets.On this argument, then, rampant use of pornography = increasing social justice. One can, of course, frame the same facts about how pornography is changing our society in a rather different light -- but that would be "judgmental," I suppose.
Explaining the findings of the analysis published in the authoritative Communication Research journal, Wright said, "Pornography adopts an individualistic, nonjudgmental stance on all kinds of nontraditional sexual behaviors and same-sex marriage attitudes are strongly linked to attitudes about same-sex sex. If people think individuals should be able to decide for themselves whether to have same-sex sex, they will also think that individuals should be able to decide for themselves whether to get married to a partner of the same-sex."
