Religion Dispatches
…les, Book of the Unknown: Tales of the Thirty-Six (Random House, 2009), he spins off the Talmudic idea of the Lamedh-Vov—that, at any moment in time, there are thirty-six saint-like souls on Earth who are anonymous (even to themselves) and link humanity to God. His new book is Virtual Words, just out from Oxford University Press, evolved from his Jargon Watch column in Wired. Though he’s received some blessing from the scientific world—a geneticis…
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…are subject to evolution, too. It’s possible that natural selection has encoded different behavior patterns in men and women. These differences could show up in proclivities toward certain behaviors. I say possible with a key reservation: even if these proclivities were there, we’d probably be terribly equipped to discern them. There’s no question that male and female roles are deeply conditioned by culture, by physical differences, and by power—…
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…xtreme forms of Christian nationalism. And so the narrative that the media spins, and even some evangelicals, is to classify everybody in the same category, including yours truly.” Panelist Michael Brown said that, while they don’t deny that “abuses” and “aberrations” occur, they want to “burst the bubble of this fictitious NAR conspiracy”—by which he may be referring to the aggressive religious and political ambitions and activities described by…
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…o Trump. “This is how I explain it to people in the US. Like Trump, Ortega spins everything to his political advantage. The government was barely recovering from the pension crisis of 2018 when this pandemic hit. The economy was just starting to bounce back, and the government wanted to stick to its plans. They told doctors not to wear face masks in emergency rooms so as not to scare people. At first there were TV campaigns to wash hands, but no o…
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…, Clinton is typical of her oft-maligned profession. She bends, shades, or spins the truth on numerous occasions, sometimes for reasons we might applaud, but at other times out of self-interest or a counterproductive penchant for secrecy (see the entry in her biography under “emails”). Here her husband may well have served as a model. Bill Clinton left such a long trail of tale-telling that Christopher Hitchens was able to title his 1999 denunciat…
Read More…lame on the shooting on the left. Sarah has an earlier post on some of the spins Special Guest is promoting here. Today, the booking site is promoting Ted Shoebat, who says that being an atheist leads one to commit mass murder. “It’s actually very simple,” Shoebat was quoted in Special Guest’s promotion, “When God is not in your life, evil will seek to fill the void.” And who is Shoebat? As Sarah wrote in a post in August: …(He) is the son of “ex-…
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…into his jaded frame of mind. He describes his high school as “Auschwitz,” spins out racist conspiracies involving the local lumber yard, ridicules his town, his state, his neighbors and their elected representatives, claims expertise on the energy industry as well as what he describes as both sides of the issue of sexuality. Yet while the hours he spent talking to Reed provide plenty of hints of his fragile mental health and underlying depression…
Read More…untry was “lost” or what taking it back would actually mean, this rhetoric spins a narrative of a fallen nation as well as a prophecy of a redeemed and perfected one. It is precisely the troubled loners—those who find nothing of value in the present order—who become the most invested in these prophecies. Scholars who study apocalyptic movements long have noted that radical political movements such as Marxism and Nazism are founded on prophecies of…
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…ur encounters with these creatures, and with various other ne’er-do-wells, spins the book off into so many directions it’s hard to keep track of them. Depending on which choices you make, the House of Danger houses a counterfeiting ring, a secret organization for international peace, a paranormal hotbed of ghosts left over from the 1887 prison riot, or a spearhead of an alien invasion. Whatever happens, there’s never a dull moment. The disregard f…
Read More…ommonwealth both in terms of the ownership of the asset and in terms of the common good of widespread open access. Sometimes free isn’t really free….
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