An Open Letter to CEO Jeff Smisek On United Airlines’ Blasphemous Safety Video
Please, for the love of the primordial, preliterate covenant of sound: leave George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” alone.
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Cleansing Monsters: Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter retells the story of America, laying the blame for many of the worst episodes on vampires. Does this history let us off the hook?
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Meditation is Very Relaxing, Says New York Times
The kosher Buddhism presented in “Buddhists’ Delight” is basically relaxation. Not so relaxed that we forget about our liberal political commitments, but relaxed enough that we don’t check our Blackberries when they buzz.
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Religious Freedom Gets Hollywood Treatment
Just in time for the election comes the film version of Mexico’s Cristero War, depicting brave rebels risking it all for religious freedom. Only problem with the story: it’s not really true.
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The Fitna Debacle: Extremists Gone Wild
Dutch lawmaker Geert Wilders’ widely condemned Islamophobic video is a travesty—but overreaction just distracts us from our common concerns.
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A Year After the Non-Apocalypse: Where Are They Now?
No giant earthquake rippled across the surface of the earth but I wanted to know what happens next. If you’re absolutely sure the world is going to end on a specific day, and it doesn’t, what do you do? How do you explain it to yourself? What happens to your faith in God?
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What if Israel Were in Germany? An Alternate History
In The Mirage, 9/11 is actually 11/9, the day when Christian fundamentalists from Texas slammed airliners into Baghdad skyscrapers, sparking a war on terror that rages across a nearly unrecognizable North America. Will Americans go for a book where the world power is the United Arab States and the lead characters are almost all Arabs and Muslims?
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Eat, Pray, Kill: The Basic Brutality of Eating
When it comes to the consumption of meat, our human hands have long been dirty. This isn’t a discouragement to stop striving for the good. But a moral proposal that promises to wash our filthy fingers spotlessly clean—in seconds flat—is suspect. Because they will still be dirty. The pressing moral question, of meat, becomes: given that human hands are obviously soiled, what can be done with these polluted tools?
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Another “Hot Text” For the War on Women: Rosemary’s Baby
Roman Polanski’s 1968 horror flick—among others in the ’60s and ’70s—may provide some surprising insights into the GOP’s “War on Women.”
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Where the Wild Things Aren’t Just Jewish
Maurice Sendak lived in the shadow of the Holocaust, yet he refused to claim that identity and chosenness solely for the Jewish people.
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