Blogwatch: Sex-starved terrorists? Deadly New York City? Don’t be so sure.
Sex and the Single Terrorist: Henry, at Crooked Timber, contrasts good and bad evolutionary psychology methodology.
Also at Crooked Timber, Is there a fire truck gene? points out a list of children’s books which would have been useful to me if I hadn’t found it right after I’d finished buying all the nephew and niece Christmas presents. If you’re still shopping, maybe you could use it, and the outside the toy box blog where it appears.
Release & Re-Entry on the revolving prison door and what to do about it.
Episcopal Life focus on church blogosphere.
Human Costs of Immigration Raids.
A slightly older one that I forgot to link earlier: What The AP Didn’t Tell You About “Doctor Immigration”.
Land rights for sex workers from Bangladesh Colony in Kozhikode.
Cloning humans: how religions view it. Buddhist countries like it better than Christian ones.
Ex-Gay Watch does a critique of the Jones and Yarhouse study here, here, and here.
Katha Politt’s Norman Mailer R.I.P. is critical of his misogyny and reminds us how serious an offense was his stabbing of his second wife. But because he once gave me blueberries for a scavenger hunt when I was a child, I’ll excerpt the part that’s most complimentary to Mailer.
One of the great things about books, especially when they are of a previous generation, is that you don’t have to swallow them whole — you can take what you want and leave the rest. If you are a writer yourself, you might even see a signpost in what strikes you as mostly a swamp. Take, for example Mailer’s third-person depiction of himself as a major jerk ,obnox and social climber– “the Novelist” worries endlessly about what to wear to the big march , about his literary status and whether Robert Lowell respects him; he pisses on a restroom floor because he’s too drunk to find the toilet in the dark, gives an incoherent ranting speech that it turns out nobody could hear, spends a lot of mental energy wondering how to schedule his arrest at the Pentagon so that he can be back in New York in time for a glamorous party, and gets so tied up in egomaniacal knots that when he finally bunks down in jail for the night, in stead of having a historic prison-memoir moment he is unable to address a word to the reputed young genius in the next bed — Noam Chomsky. It’s all pretty funny. But who is telling you this story that reflects so poorly on “the Novelist’s” claims to moral seriousness, political commitment, and fitness for the leadership position he longs to hold? Norman Mailer. Norman Mailer the narrator knows perfectly well –at least in Armies of the Night he does — what an anxious, obsessive, narcissistic, fantastical, insecure, over-the-top, ridiculous person ” Norman Mailer” is. The writer sees what the character doesn’t see. The expression of that double consciousness is a masterpiece of style.
Tradition has it that the gospel of Mark is based on the reminiscences of the apostle Peter, as told to Mark, who had accompanied him and acted as interpreter. I like to think, when I read in that gospel yet another account of the foolishness of Peter, that it is Peter himself, reminding us of what a ridiculous, over-the-top person “Peter” is. And that, though less educated than Mailer (or us), Peter does know how to tell a good story of which he is the butt.
Lee on All theology is animal theology and The political Christian.
Every kid in the Arabic-speaking goes to a madrassah. Madrassah is Arabic for school. Running about screaming about the horrors of Senator Obama having attended a madrassah is on a par with worrying that Senator Clinton attended junior high. It’s silly, it’s childish, and it makes us look like idiots in the eyes of the Arabic-speaking world. So stop it.
Stick’em Up: the homicide rate in New York City is declining.