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When a Pride March Means Owning the Shame of Racial and Economic Injustice

…orts from coast to coast. The recent contretemps around the opening of the new REBAR in the old G Lounge space in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood is (again) quite typical. Evidently aware that G had finally, after many years, become a rare welcoming downtown space for people of color, the new management made a point of making REBAR distinctly unwelcoming to African American patrons. With Pride month upon us, I want to call out what should be recog…

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Oh Say, Can You See?:  9/11 Flag Displays and the Flag’s Symbolic Power

…t reported selling 118,000 flags in a single day.” The event even inspired new designs, from the well-known “Flag of Honor” and “Flag of Heroes” featuring the names of the dead to the lesser-known “Thunder Flag,” or Flags specifically commemorating Flight 93, the attack on the Pentagon, or the World Trade Center towers. Such mass-produced flags unique 9/11 artifact flags, such as the one famously raised over Ground Zero by New York City firemen or…

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Freezing Our Way to a Fiery Hell?

…a chaotic system. For businesses tied to the weather-closing status of the New York City Public Schools, there’s yet another ethical element. During one of New York’s worst storms—last year—Mayor de Blasio kept the schools open in horrendous travel conditions. One of the reasons given? Many children get their only hot meal of the day at school. We have to force kids to school so they can eat a square meal? And Zuccotti Park was cleared out years a…

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Zen and the Art of Zombie Killing: A Buddhist Anti-Tech Manifesto

…helps designers use a system of digital triggers and reward loops to hook users, keeping them engaged. It’s a guide to making zombies, not to curing them. There has been backlash to Eyal’s book, mostly focused on consumer protection policies. In Aeon, Cubit co-producer Michael Schulson argues for government regulation of addictive technologies. Slate magazine founder Jacob Weisberg, writing in the New York Review of Books, advocates age restricti…

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The Porn Workaround: How Christian Sexuality Websites Avoid Sin

…are needed to imagine the sexual scene he sets. I interviewed creators and users of Christian sexuality websites and asked whether the sexual nature of the content worried them. Surprisingly, no one seemed very concerned. How are they so confident that these websites are wholesome rather than obscene? The Barna Group has its answer, based on the “Porn Phenomenon” data: “Turns out, it’s more a question of function than form. If it’s used for sexual…

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Via Jokes, ChatGPT Chooses Which Religious Traditions and Figures Deserve Respect — And Therefore What Counts as ‘Religion’

…ah, or Muhammad. With regard to these latter examples, ChatGPT informs the user that it could hurt someone’s religious sensibilities by telling such a joke. But it does not say this with regard to Krishna. At first it seemed to me that there is an ontological difference between Krishna, Muhammad, and Jesus in that the latter two are—or are at least widely understood to be—historical individuals. So to test this hypothesis, I went to ChatGPT and I…

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A Journalist in Church, Hiding in Plain Sight

…ness—common refrains offered up with few palliatives. Back then, God as I knew Him was remote and mediated by the Church—a somber relative of this pastor’s appealingly user-friendly and solution-oriented God. As for the Catholic Mass’s plodding readings and Communion queues, they were an occasion for daydreaming and sinful thoughts—thoughts I agonized in vain to squelch. Which is why I decided, at the age of 16, that I no longer believed unreserve…

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Waterboarding in the Living Room

…sed, then, that in comments responding to the The Smoking Gun article, one user called “rahimali” wrote, “I’m ok with a little waterboarding now and again if it shuts the wife’s cakehole. Maybe waterboarding would cure PMS?”  Although the torture captured on film at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq was presented as aberrant (the behavior of “a few bad apples”), released memos have shown again and again that torture and so-called enhanced interrogatio…

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The Racial Dimension of Trusting in Police Violence

…eir otherwise skeptical view of government. Later, on Twitter, one popular user observed, “It seems as if all you have to do to make some conservatives trust the government is shoot an unarmed black teenager.” Though I am not inclined to attribute such reactions to racism plain-and-simple, they do indicate something about how politics informs our understanding—and approval—of police violence. My understanding of the events in Ferguson has been ver…

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Crowdsourced Catholicism: New iPhone App Lets Users Forgive Sins

…ged like a pinball machine’s top-ten list. The service requires that every user play both Sinner and Saint, and a novice is granted five bits of each one’s currency: Five Horns for confessing, and five Halos for granting penances. One of each is “gifted… every Sabbath day” but for zealots and louts more credits can be purchased for 17¢ apiece. As with fancy chemical aids for our Facebook farms, this money goes straight to the developers. The users…

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