Elsewhere, August 31, 2010

Clinging to life, Albert Camus, Philadelphia’s “Blogging Tax,” Christopher Hitchens, redesigning the dollar, 4AD turns 30, Russell Moore on Glenn Beck, and Alan Jacobs on online discourse.

Elsewhere: A collection of interesting links and articles that I’ve come across in the last week or so. Follow me on Twitter for more of the same.

The Fight of Our Lives:

This level of denial renders daily care, doctor-patient conversations, and treatment decisions much more difficult than they already are. Desperate patients cling to life-sustaining treatment even as it destroys their quality of life. Some doctors will continue to offer treatment as long as the patient is willing to endure it. The patient and their families exist in an emotionally painful and physically exhausting state between denial and acceptance with the long-shot hope of a cure always just out of reach like a mechanical rabbit on a dog track. And they run after it on and on into futility.

Saved by an Atheist:

…the biggest influence on my spiritual journey was the novels and philosophy of Albert Camus, a French existentialist of the 1940s and ’50s — and an atheist. C. S. Lewis warned, “A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.” Camus should have been safe territory for me, but as I like to say now, I was saved by an atheist.

[…]

Though Camus, who died 50 years ago this year, wasn’t the “high and dry nineteenth-century type” of atheist, nor did he return to Christianity, I’ve maintained a similar fondness toward him. He saw the world coldly, not as he wished it to be, but as he found it. He was brutally honest, yet hopeful. He was moral, in the sense that he believed in right and wrong and worked for what was right. His disbelief remained an obstacle in his search for meaning, but Camus continued to look for reasons to hope, to find meaning in life.

5 Myths About Philadelphia’s Blogging Tax’:

The city of Philadelphia has been under fire on the web for what’s been called a “blogging tax,” a new business tax under which several local bloggers have been billed on business revenue earned on their sites. As a blogger who lives in Philadelphia — and the newest member of the Wired.com team — I feel I have to dispel some myths guiding the “WTF?” reaction many writers had to this story.

But I also want to point to some larger problems beneath the surface. This problem is much bigger than blogs in my city.

Firefly’s cancellation was Joss Whedon’s “greatest grief” (via):

That trip ended back in the office just in time to hear that the Fox Network had cancelled Firefly before its first season had even been completed. As Whedon later recounted, he now had his answer to the question posed in the car. “Oh! So, uh, just once more. OK!”

But it wasn’t just once more. And he knew it. Since that ugly LA afternoon, Whedon, now 46, with an Emmy on the shelf and an Oscar nomination in the drawer, has tallied up a few more examples of why no sensible person should go into the film and television business. And why he can’t stop. Obsessive? “People who aren’t obsessive go home at the end of the day and don’t think about their work,” Whedon says. “I’ve read about them.”

The cancelled Firefly (“still the greatest grief I have about my career”) begat his first film as director, the Firefly “sequel” Serenity. It didn’t do Batman business but as a space-western with wit and social consciousness it made money and, along the way, gave him another young female character who — literally and metaphorically — kicked arse.

Christopher Hitchens’ Greatest Hits (via):

Hitchens has made a sideline of offering some of the most delicious skewerings of people in the public sphere to appear in print over the past 20+ years, and he has no problem putting revered feet into the fire. On the Penn and Teller episode devoted to questioning the accepted saintliness of Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama and Gandhi, Hitch was a natural choice as a guest as he was probably the only mainstream pundit who had bashed all three in print.

Here then is a collection of excerpts from Hitchens’ columns in Slate, Vanity Fair and some of his books that shows the Crown Prince of Pillorying at work.

Dowling Duncan’s interesting ideas for the Dollar ReDe$ign Project (via):

Why the size? We have kept the width the same as the existing dollars. However we have changed the size of the note so that the one dollar is shorter and the 100 dollar is the longest. When stacked on top of each other it is easy to see how much money you have. It also makes it easier for the visually impaired to distinguish between notes.

Why a vertical format? When we researched how notes are used we realized people tend to handle and deal with money vertically rather than horizontally. You tend to hold a wallet or purse vertically when searching for notes. The majority of people hand over notes vertically when making purchases. All machines accept notes vertically. Therefore a vertical note makes more sense.

4AD, the record label that gave birth to indie cool, celebrates 30th anniversary:

Next month sees the release of a new 4AD album, Halcyon Digest, by American band Deerhunter, yet the only sign of such a feat of endurance for a small company working in the most ruthless of creative industries will be the little “3X” that appears at the end of all 4AD album catalogue numbers this year. Minimalism has always been 4AD’s style.

God, the Gospel, and Glenn Beck:

A Mormon television star stands in front of the Lincoln Memorial and calls American Christians to revival. He assembles some evangelical celebrities to give testimonies, and then preaches a God and country revivalism that leaves the evangelicals cheering that they’ve heard the gospel, right there in the nation’s capital.

The news media pronounces him the new leader of America’s Christian conservative movement, and a flock of America’s Christian conservatives have no problem with that.

If you’d told me that ten years ago, I would have assumed it was from the pages of an evangelical apocalyptic novel about the end-times. But it’s not. It’s from this week’s headlines. And it is a scandal.

Why has Internet discourse devolved into a “war of every man against every man”?

I have thought a lot about why people get so hostile online, and I have come to believe it is primarily because we live in a society with a hypertrophied sense of justice and an atrophied sense of humility and charity, to put the matter in terms of the classic virtues.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think this just applies to online interactions these days, though those interactions do seem to have a higher likelihood of devolving into nastiness.

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