MetaFilter posts tagged with theatlantic

If it's consensual, can it ever be wrong?

MoonOrb — Sat, 18 May 2013 11:58:36 -0800

The panda gangbang took place deep in the basement of the Kink armory, where rivulets of the long-suffocated Mission Creek still trace a path between moisture-eaten columns, and the air hangs heavy with a stony dampness. Emily Witt explores the experiences and motivations of participants in acts of extreme pornography. Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic considers "Is some sex wrong even among consenting adults?" [Language NSFW, possible trigger warnings, as descriptions and language are graphic]

"What If We Never Run Out of Oil?"

the man of twists and turns — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 09:47:03 -0800

Charles C. Mann writes for The Atlantic:

This perspective has a corollary: natural resources cannot be used up. If one deposit gets too expensive to drill, social scientists (most of them economists) say, people will either find cheaper deposits or shift to a different energy source altogether. Because the costliest stuff is left in the ground, there will always be petroleum to mine later. “When will the world’s supply of oil be exhausted?” asked the MIT economist Morris Adelman, perhaps the most important exponent of this view. “The best one-word answer: never.” Effectively, energy supplies are infinite.

Joe Nocera writes in The New York Times: Canada’s Oil Minister, Unmuzzled

When I spoke to him before his speech, Oliver pointed out that Venezuela, which currently supplies the United States around one million barrels a day, has more than once threatened to cut us off. “That would never happen with Canada,” he said. “We honor our contractual obligations.” As a longtime supporter of Keystone, I could only nod my head in agreement.

James Howard Kunstler reacts: We Wish

You could call these two examples mendacious if it weren't so predictable that a desperate society would do everything possible to defend its sunk costs, including the making up of fairy tales to justify its wishes. Instead, they're merely tragic because the zeitgeist now requires once-honorable forums of a free press to indulge in self-esteem building rather than truth-telling. It also represents a culmination of the political correctness disease that has terminally disabled the professional thinking class for the last three decades, since this feel-good propaganda comes from the supposedly progressive organs of the media -- and, of course, the cornucopian view has been a staple of the idiot right wing media forever.

OilPrice: Why Shale Oil is Not the Game Changer We Have Been Led to Believe - Part 1 Design is A Bureaucrat

James Howard Kunstler, perhaps the most vocal and voluble self-styled expert on this profound and lasting change, works in black and muted gray. Even a cursory perusal of Kunstler’s site Clusterfuck Nation reveals imaginary landscapes of dreary eighteenth-century monotones — “a world make by hand,” as Kunstler likes to call it, and powered by Lord knows what. Certainly not petroleum (Kunstler, a member of the peak-oil vanguard, laughs this off as impossible), not even coal or steam. Water, then? Wind? On such particulars Kunstler remains somewhat vague and noncommittal. He occupies himself with the theme of inexorable demise, which he gives the name the “Long Emergency.” “American life will just wind down, no matter what we believe,” Kunstler writes in post from a few years ago.

The End Of Plastic

It also means, I hope, that we get better at recycling and it becomes more cost-effective. It’s not just about crunchy-granola save-the-earth stuff; it really offends my sense of efficiency as an engineer that most plastic just ends up sequestered in landfills. From a materials perspective, so many products are massively overengineered. So I’m hoping to see more cradle-to-cradle design with plastic

An Update On Peak Oil.Peak Oil as seen through the eyes of Arab oil producers. The Guardian: Peak oil theories 'increasingly groundless', says BP chief Reason: Remembering "Peak Oil" Madness and How Free Markets and Human Ingenuity Can Save the Planet NRO: America's Big Fat Advantage - "Why? No other nation has a Constitution whose natural evolution would lead to a free, merit-based society that did not necessarily look like the privileged — and brilliant — landed white-male aristocracy that invented it." 2011 Quake Was Man-Made, Scientists Say 10 Skills To Hone For A Post-Oil Future previously: "There's a whole ocean of oil under our feet!" fracking, previously: 1, 2, 3, 4 oil sands/tar sands, previously: 1, 2, 3

I have a crazy friend who says we dont need zipcodes...is he CRAZY?

Potomac Avenue — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 11:15:14 -0800

On July 1, 1963, The US Post Office introduced the five-digit ZIP Code with a series of PSAs broadcast on national TV. The Atlantic looks at a new report [PDF] that details the history of the now $9.5 billion a year product and its current state of affairs.

"solved the problems of both journalism and advertising at once"

the man of twists and turns — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 07:21:38 -0800

Does BuzzFeed Know The Secret? The National Republican Congressional Committee seems to think so, since they redesigned their website. But they're just following BuzzFeed's advice. Andrew Sullivan, on sponsored content:

I am accusing those institutions of pushing as far up to the line between advertorial and editorial as can be even remotely ethically justified. I am accusing them of now hiring writers for two different purposes: writing journalism and writing ad copy. Before things got this desperate/opportunistic, the idea of a magazine hiring writers to craft their clients’ ads rather than, you know, do journalism, would have been unimaginable. A magazine was not an ad agency. But the Buzzfeed/Atlantic model is to be both a journalism site and an ad agency.

via: BuzzFeed and the Future of Advertising Previously: A Milestone Year For Media

Fwoosh! Zoom!

Chutzler — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 10:23:00 -0800

"If you spend any time looking for records at flea markets and garage sales, you come to recognize a variety of common vintage records: Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass, Barbra Streisand, box collections of "best of" classical music, the band America. And then there are the rare finds, the albums that you would never expect to exist. My latest find at the Alameda Point Antiques Fair falls into that category ... it became my possession for $2. And now yours, via SoundCloud, for nothing." Sounds of X-15s, Atlas missiles, Nieuport biplanes, and more.

"Exposure Doesn’t Feed My Fucking Children!"

lalex — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 19:02:39 -0800

A Day in the Life of a Freelance Journalist—2013. Summary. The Atlantic responds.

Don't go out and sell your U.S. Steel stock

DynamiteToast — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 08:41:48 -0800

The Land of the Free: How Virtual Fences Will Transform Rural America (originally posted on v-e-n-u-e.com)

The Word of the Father

killdevil — Sat, 02 Feb 2013 06:56:33 -0800

Laws Concerning Food and Drink; Household Principles; Lamentations of the Father [single-link Atlantic]

A Million First Dates: How online romance is threatening monogamy

bearwife — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 12:38:49 -0800

A recent Atlantic article magazine raises the question of whether online dating discourages long term commitment. This is not the first time Atlantic has raised concerns about online dating sites. In 2006, the tone of an article on the topic was neutral. Not so much in 2010, 2011, and more recently. But perhaps we just all need more data.

A Milestone Year for Media

Apropos of Something — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 19:43:14 -0800

On the heels of a recent announcement that it will experiment with online pay models, The Atlantic featured sponsored content today from The Church of Scientology, a post entitled "David Miscavige Leads Scientology to Milestone Year."

Literary magazine throwdown

eviemath — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 20:41:51 -0800

n+1 picks a fight with:

the Atlantic: Every time a plane flies over New York, we think, “Oh my God — is it another Atlantic think piece?” We mean, “an Atlantic think piece about women.” The two have become synonymous, and they descend upon their target audience with the regularity and severe abdominal cramping of Seasonale. “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” “The End of Men,” “Marry Him!” These are articles intended to terrorize unmarried women, otherwise known as educated straight women in their twenties and thirties, otherwise known as a valuable market, if not for reliable lovers then at least for advertisers. Their purpose is to revive one formerly robust man of the house, who for years has been languishing on his deathbed: the cigar-smoking, suspender-snapping, mansplaining American general interest magazine.

Harper's: Women are the internet, and the internet is women. How else to explain male writers’ terror about taking it with them to the office? Women writers may admit they have a hard time working while online, but for men this appears to be a much more profound issue, and in some cases a hardware problem.... Men tear the ethernet cord out of the socket, they hot-glue the socket, they use computers so old they say they were made without a socket. They claim they must avoid the internet so as not to masturbate all over their computers.... But their stories of covering up and gluing shut suggest that for men the internet is in fact the site of a perverse fear of penetration. They have withdrawn into a cult of the unplugged. The magazine for these men is not the Atlantic, which treats the internet like a woman and placates it, but Harper’s, which treats the internet like a woman and ignores it.

the New Yorker (sort-of): So what’s an old magazine to do? Should it be like the New Yorker and just . . . it’s hard to say what exactly the New Yorker does on the internet.

But they have only love (sort-of) for the Paris Review:

Anyway, we were very upset, and to add insult to injury our dog lost the Halloween contest to two little gerbils reading tiny dictionaries, but then we realized we could just take a Xanax and read the Paris Review.

And if that's not enough to click on the link, there's this:

This complete mischaracterization of the nature of daily existence is the basis for MacArthur’s belief that eventually print will triumph over the internet. “In the long run, I think I’ll be vindicated, since clearly the [online] advertising ‘model’ has failed and readers are going to have to pay . . . if they want to see anything more complex than a blog, a classified ad, or a sex act.” (“Sex act!” We can’t help it, the phrase makes us fantasize: MacArthur is prone on a chaise lounge, and he’s not alone. There’s another person in the room, and it’s his analyst, who’s having a field day with that phrase, “sex act.”) So that’s where the women are: having sex on the internet.

"Where sex is work, sex may just work differently" & "the WEIRDest people in the world?"

flex — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 08:07:07 -0800

When sex means reproduction, certain proclivities may simply not be part of cultural models of sexuality: "Barry and Bonnie Hewlett had been studying the Aka and Ngandu people of central Africa for many years before they began to specifically study the groups' sexuality... [T]he Hewletts conclude, "Homosexuality and masturbation are rare or nonexistent [in these two cultures], not because they are frowned upon or punished, but because they are not part of the cultural models of sexuality in either ethnic group.""

Is the strong cultural focus on sex as a reproductive tool the reason masturbation and homosexual practices seem to be virtually unknown among the Aka and Ngandu? That isn't clear. But the Hewletts did find that their informants -- whom they knew well from years of field work -- "were not aware of these practices, did not have terms for them," and, in the case of the Aka, had a hard time even understanding about what the researchers were asking when they asked about homosexual behaviors. The Ngandu "were familiar with the concept" of homosexual behavior, "but no word existed for it and they said they did not know of any such relationships in or around the village. Men who had traveled to the capital, Bangui, said it existed in the city and was called 'PD' (French for par derriere or from behind)." ... The finding with regard to homosexuality is perhaps not that surprising. As the Hewletts note, other researchers have documented cultures where homosexuality appears not to exist. If homosexual orientation has a genetic component to it -- and there is increasing evidence that it does, in many cases -- then it would not be surprising that this complex human trait (one that involves non-procreative efforts) would be found in some populations but not others. Moreoever, sexual behavior -- whether homosexual, heterosexual, or any other type -- is never simply genetically determined in humans. Humans are born with sexual potentials that will manifest differently in different cultural settings. So, about heterosexuality, the Hewletts note that Western cultures' valuing of sleeping through the night probably limits Western heterosexual couples' interest in having sex multiple times between dusk and dawn. In our culture, the work we have to do by day may overtake "the work of the night." It's also worth noting that Western science specifically distinguishes between three components of sexuality: desire, behavior, and identity. While the Hewletts' research suggests that homosexual behavior and identity are foreign to the Aka and Ngandu, it's entirely possible that homosexual desire does exist in these groups, at least for some of their members (so to speak). A culture that recognizes such desires -- and especially a culture that does not condemn them -- and especially one that involves large groups where homosexually-inclined people can find each other -- is the type where such desires will become openly apparent.

Jesse Bering covers similar ground (with different details) in Slate - Does homosexuality exist in every human society? Sex and Searching For Children Among Aka Foragers and Ngandu Farmers of Central Africa (PDF, 19 pages) - "[Barry Hewlett] has conducted research with these groups of Aka and Ngandu for over 35 years, and [Bonnie Hewlett] has conducted research with them for over 10 years." *wikipedia - Aka people *The Guardian: Are the men of the African Aka tribe the best fathers in the world? Both the Atlantic piece and the Slate piece reference "a much-discussed 2010 Behavioral and Brain Sciences paper called "The WEIRDest people in the world?" in which the authors argued that far too many sweeping claims about "human nature" are drawn exclusively from samples of Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies." The Weirdest People In The World? (PDF, 68 pages)

Short abstract: Broad claims about human psychology and behavior based on narrow samples from Western societies are regularly published in leading journals. Are such species‐generalizing claims justified? This review suggests not only that substantial variability in experimental results emerges across populations in basic domains, but that standard subjects are in fact rather unusual compared with the rest of the species—frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, categorization, spatial cognition, memory, moral reasoning and self‐concepts. This review (1) indicates caution in addressing questions of human nature based on this thin slice of humanity, and (2) suggests that understanding human psychology will require tapping broader subject pools. We close by proposing ways to address these challenges.

*Toronto Star - Why we're the weirdest people in the world *NYT - A Weird Way of Thinking Has Prevailed Worldwide *Big Think - The Weirdest People in the World? *Public Library of Science - Reflections on the WEIRD Evolution of Human Psychology

Next year it will start around Halloween.

OmieWise — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 12:46:09 -0800

From the Atlantic's In Focus:2012: The Year in Pictures "Collected here is Part 1 of a three-part photo summary of the last year, covering its first four months. Be sure to come back tomorrow for Part 2 and Thursday for Part 3. The series will total 135 images in all."

"If I was to die, today or tomorrow, I do not think I would die satisfied till you tell me you will try and marry some good, smart man that will take care of you and the children"

the man of twists and turns — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 07:28:35 -0800

Author Jon Meacham has a new book out on Thomas Jefferson. It is reviewed in the New York Times: Cultivating Control in a Nation’s Crucible

But this book does not address its principal concern, power, until Jefferson has accrued some. When it comes to the force that he wielded as a slaveholder, Mr. Meacham finds ways to suggest that thoughts of abolition would have been premature; that it was not uncommon for white heads of households to be waited on by slaves who bore family resemblances to their masters; and that since Jefferson treated slavery as a blind spot, the book can too.

At the same time, Henry Wiencek has written a "scathing assessment of America’s third president," and the two books together have kicked off some controversy. Wiencek's article in Smithsonian, The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson

The very existence of slavery in the era of the American Revolution presents a paradox, and we have largely been content to leave it at that, since a paradox can offer a comforting state of moral suspended animation. Jefferson animates the paradox. And by looking closely at Monticello, we can see the process by which he rationalized an abomination to the point where an absolute moral reversal was reached and he made slavery fit into America’s national enterprise.

In Salon, Meacham claims "I’m not letting Thomas Jefferson off the hook"

And if someone as monumental in our memories as Jefferson can be seen as someone trying to work out real problems in real time, making compromises, settling for half a loaf when you might want a full loaf, then I think that should give us a kind of confidence and a kind of hope that we can overcome the seemingly insuperable obstacles that lead us to think of politics as contentious and frustrating.

And in Slate, Anette Gordon-Reed replies to Wiencek: Thomas Jefferson Was Not a Monster: Debunking a major new biography of our third president.

The book's tone and presentation betray a journalistic obsession with “the scoop.” Getting the scoop can be the life’s blood of journalism. It does not work so well for writing history, which is not always (or almost ever, really) about discovering things previously unknown. This sensibility leads Weincek astray in a number of ways. To begin with, it compels him to write as if he had discovered, and was writing about, things that had not been discovered and written about before. In truth, all of the important stories in this book have been told by others.

Wiencek responds in Smithsonian: The author of a new book about Thomas Jefferson makes his case and defends his scholarship

I am not surprised that Gordon-Reed disliked my book so much, given that it systematically demolishes her portrayal of Jefferson as a kindly master of black slaves. In The Hemingses of Monticello, she described with approval Jefferson's "plans for his version of a kinder, gentler slavery at Monticello with his experiments with the nail factory." Gordon-Reed cannot like the now established truth that the locus of Jefferson's "kinder, gentler slavery" was the very place where children were beaten to get them to work. At first I assumed that she simply did not know about the beatings, but when I double-checked her book's references to the nailery I discovered that she must have known: A few hundred pages away from her paean to the nail factory, she cited the very letter in which "the small ones" are described as being lashed there.

On 30 NOV, Paul Finkleman in a New York Times Op-Ed countered with :The Monster Of Monticello

Neither Mr. Meacham, who mostly ignores Jefferson’s slave ownership, nor Mr. Wiencek, who sees him as a sort of fallen angel who comes to slavery only after discovering how profitable it could be, seem willing to confront the ugly truth: the third president was a creepy, brutal hypocrite.

David Post at Volokh Conspiracy writes: Why Don’t People Get It About Jefferson and Slavery?

This is truly outrageous and pernicious and a-historical nonsense. The truth is that few people in human history did more, over the course of a lifetime, to “place the road on the road to liberty for all” — and indeed, to eliminate human slavery from the civilized world — than Jefferson.

Corey Robin at Crooked Timber asks: Thomas Jefferson: American Fasicst? and examines his letters to conclude:

Jefferson was not a liberal hypocrite, a symptom of his time. He was the avant garde of a group of American theorists who were struggling to reconcile the ideals of the Declaration with the reality of chattel slavery. His resolution of that struggle took the form of one of the most vicious doctrines of racial supremacy the world had yet seen. That is his legacy, or at least part of his legacy. He was by no means the only one to take this route, but he was one of the earliest and easily the most famous. He is the tributary of what would become an American tradition.

Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic responds to Post: Slavery Is A Love Song

This is a letter that I often turn to. It was written to Laura Spicer by her husband, who was sold away, much as Jefferson sold people away. After emancipation she repeatedly tried to rekindle their love, despite the fact that the husband had now remarried and formed another family. In this letter the husband tells us what it means to be among the refuse of history:

Coates reacts to a "predictable" defense of Jefferson

In TK, Jefferson's protege Edward Coles--knowing of Jefferson's brilliant anti-slavery writings--wrote to enlist him in the cause of ridding Virginia of slavery. Coles thought to begin this effort by manumitting his own slaves. Jefferson not only declined to help Coles, but told him he was wrong to try to free his own

Henry Wiencek writes about the 'rumpus' on his blog, while Jon Meacham was interviewed on The Daily Show on 14 NOV: aired segment and full interview.

"Which is another way of saying that Facebook is George Costanza's worst nightmare: It enforces, second by second, the collision of worlds."

flex — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 10:54:43 -0800

Are Your Facebook Friends Stressing You Out? (Yes.) - "The finding, which is similar to one determined last year, is nice as a headline: It's both unexpected (friends! stressing you out! ha!) and ironic (the currency of the social web, taking value rather than adding it!). What's interesting, though, is the why of the matter: the idea that, the report theorizes, the wider your Facebook network, the more likely it is that something you say or do on the site will end up offending one of that network's members... Unsurprisingly, per the study's survey of more than 300 Facebook users, 'adding employers or parents resulted in the greatest increase in anxiety.'"

Facebook's power, and its curse, is this holistic treatment of personhood. All the careful tailoring we do to ourselves (and to our selves) -- to be, say, professional in one context and whimsical in the other -- dissolves in the simmering singularity of the Facebook timeline. The circumstantially mediated relationships typical of IRL interactions -- you see your boss at work, your friend after work, your mother-in-law at Thanksgiving -- are mediated instead by one overarching, and overpowering, circumstance: Facebook. Suddenly, Work You is the same as Family You is the same as Friend You (is the same as Gym You is the same as Cooking Class You is the same as Trip to Thailand You is the same as Road Trip You is the same as Words With Friends You is the same as Happy Hour You). The You itself -- which is to say, you yourself -- gets flattened, condensed, homogenized. Contextual personhood gives way to comprehensive personhood. You become, for better or for worse, universal. Which: stressful! Because, as liberating as it is to erase the divides that separate formerly fractured identities -- as nice in theory and in practice as it is to live an all-purpose, one-size-fits-all existence -- the mingling comes with costs.

*Michael Zimmer - Facebook's Zuckerberg: "Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity" *Steve Cheney - How Facebook is killing your authenticity *Kieran Healy - Actually, having one identity for yourself is a Breaching Experiment previously on MeFi *The Five Stages of Facebook Grief: "Facebook's popularity is based on the reality that human beings are social creatures. Staying connected with people we know is innate to us. But maintaining separate social groups that we don't want to clash is also innate." *Redefining the you that is you: You Are Not Your Name and Photo: A Call to Re-Imagine Identity.

Phillip Marlow's throbbing core of misogyny

Brandon Blatcher — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 13:32:31 -0800

Ta-Nehisi Coates discusses male mythology, biology and Raymond Chandler's Private Dick

What's gonna happen outside the window next?

cthuljew — Sun, 18 Nov 2012 13:51:19 -0800

Noam Chomsky on Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong

The Beautiful Blackboards at Quantum Physics Labs

moonmilk — Sun, 28 Oct 2012 21:18:25 -0800

The Beautiful Blackboards at Quantum Physics Labs (from The Atlantic)

Photographs of Robots

tykky — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 13:53:26 -0800

Robots at Work and Play (a photo gallery from the Atlantic).

Border crossings and shifts

the man of twists and turns — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 23:12:22 -0800

Who Draws The Borders Of Culture?(NYTimes) Cultural border, as opposed to national borders, are funny things. One country can contain many (Coke vs. Soda. Vs. Pop, previously and previously-er). Cultural borders often appear as food and drink choices, like sweet tea, forms of alcohol, or BBQ sauce. Different types of borders can run together and separate, like Protestant vs. Catholic vs. Orthodox and Romance vs. Germanic vs. Slavic, or climate and the extent of vineyards, or prevailing family structure. A region, like Brittany, can be defined in more ways than one. The place where zones meet gives rise to the edge effect in ecology, and source of conflict for humans. National borders can be odd things, slicing through people's lives. Even national borders that no longer exist bear down on the present - in what used to be the Habsburg Empire or the colonial divisions of Africa. Borders are not static, not even the ones on the map.

What Will the 'Phone' of 2022 Look Like?

paleyellowwithorange — Fri, 14 Sep 2012 21:43:00 -0800

What Will the 'Phone' of 2022 Look Like? "Is the iPhone 5 the last phone? Not the last phone in a literal sense, but this is the apotheosis of this device we would call a phone...It's not clear to me that there is any such device as the phone in 2022. Already, telephony has become a feature and not even a frequently used feature of those things we put in our pockets." The Atlantic's Alex Madrigal looks at the future of mobile communications, discussing input methods, form factors and technological limits (including energy storage, bandwith and privacy issues).

What Kind of Book Reader Are You?

rollick — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 08:57:39 -0800

What kind of book reader are you? More types of book reader.

The Physics of physicality

the man of twists and turns — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 01:07:59 -0800

WIRED has been running a fascinating series: Olympic Physics: Can Runners Benefit From Drafting?, Scoring the Decathlon, New [Swimming] Platform Is No Chip Off The Old Block Air Density And Bob Beamon's Crazy-Awesome Long Jump, How The Hammer Throw Is Like A Particle Accelerator and is also Exciting and Artisitc The Social Psychology of Relay Racing

Both the 4×100-meter relay and the 4×400-meter relay require speed, endurance and great depth of talent on the team. But the relays also are a fascinating laboratory for social science, bringing to two of the field’s most interesting observations to the fore: the Köhler effect, and the social-loafing effect.

Modern penthathlon gets 'more modern' with frikkin' lasers. With the end of the Games, The US Team won 46 gold medals,' the most in a non-boycotted game since 1904.' With so many golds, What if US female Olympians were their own country? There are also 30 other questions remaining.There is: The Olympics most painful moments, in GIFs(Mashable, slideshow). And for the distance, a detailed analysis of the Women's Marathon. And a look at The Ancient Roots of Iran's Wrestling and Weightlifting Olympic Dominance. Usian Bolt adds to his legend with straight 100m and 200m wins. Finally, an Olympics Cartoon review(slideshow) The Olympics wasn't always about sport, in fact, 'In the modern Olympics’ early days, painters, sculptors, writers and musicians battled for gold, silver and bronze'

Body Integrity Identity Disorder

Sticherbeast — Thu, 19 Jul 2012 10:20:40 -0800

Body Integrity Identity Disorder is when a subject feels that he or she would be happier living as an amputee. This raises several questions: should amputation be offered as a treatment to people suffering from Body Integrity Identity Disorder? Or, should the alien limb be integrated into the body image? To what extent is the disorder psychological or neurological? Regardless, further research is needed. That said, in talking about newly categorized disorders such as BIID, do we spread "semantic contagion"? [previously]

Interesting aspects of the American Civil War

Brandon Blatcher — Sun, 08 Jul 2012 06:57:59 -0800

Ta-Nehisi Coates, a senior editor at The Atlantic, recently touched on a couple of interesting aspects of the American Civil War. First, Racism Against White People briefly looked at how Southern intellectuals argued that Northern whites were of a different race. Then a subthread in the comments on that post spawned an investigation of American Exceptionalism in History and the notion of preserving democracy in the context of the American Civil War. After all, "if a government can be sundered simply because the minority doesn't like the results of an election, can it even call itself a government?" Definitely check out the comments of both posts.