Quick shorts
- I will some time, honest, write a proper review of Oliver Morton’s book Eating the Sun. For the moment I just want to say that it is the first pop science book I have read since The Extended Phenotype where I started again at the beginning after I had reached the end. Somewhere around page 200 it takes off into some really virtuoso passages which I must scan in and post. There is a particular way in which science, like art, can make the familiar world strange and new; there is a third, distinct skill in suggesting that scientific thrill in words, and Oliver has now mastered that. Wonderful stuff.
- From the Sublime to the Southern Baptist. There is an autopsy report here on a former assistant to Jerry Falwell, whose death seems to have been scripted by Carl Hiaassen.
- David Sloan Wilson has a paper out looking at genetic correlations for sexual extravagance. This needs proper treatment too. I’ve snagged the PDF but not talked to him.
- Barbara Ehrenreich puts the boot into the younger Templeton:
John M. Templeton Jr., the president of the foundation, turns out to be one of the funders of Freedom’s Watch, the new rightwing group which has been running pro-war commercials conflating Al Qaeda with whomever it is we’re fighting in Iraq. You may have seen the one in which a veteran complains that stopping the war now would render the loss of his legs meaningless, much like the universe itself.
This is not John Templeton Jr.’s first or only venture into rightwing politics. In 2004, he started the group Let Freedom Ring, aimed getting out the evangelical Christian vote for George Bush. He recently joined the Romney campaign’s National Faith and Values Steering Committee, a group which includes an anti-abortion activist and a fellow from the Heritage Foundation.
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Aldridge’s death — and the fascinating case of the Roberts family — seem part of what looks like an implosion on the xtian right in the US as its hypocrisy once more bursts out of bounds.
The irony is that he used a condom, the only safe thing about the whole get-up.
What I wanted to know about Barbara Ehrenreich’s piece is whether Martin Seligman really announced, ‘I’ve decided my theory of positive psychology is completely wrong, so I’ve put forth a different notion.’ Call me ham-fisted, but you can never quite tell what is fact, irony or fabrication in her comment. I couldn’t find any reports of Seligman’s intervention on the net, which presumably means he hasn’t renounced postive psychology. But I’d be interested to know if anyone can help.