“City of Good Intentions”: I review a local history show

Last updated on: July 7, 2016 at 7:48 pm By Eve Tushnet

at the Anacostia Museum: Sometimes it seems like the nation’s capital is really two cities: dateline Washington and hometown DC. The current show at the Smithsonian’s Anacostia Community Museum, “Twelve Years that Shook and Shaped Washington: 1963 – 1975,” is an attempt to bridge the gap–or at least to give official Washington’s view of unofficial DC. The show is one of those “social history” grab-bags: a display about public colleges here, a selection of dashikis there. We get morsels of... Read more

I Don’t Believe in Modern Love (But I Do Love “Modern Manners”)

Last updated on: July 6, 2016 at 3:44 pm By Eve Tushnet

Recently revisited Modern Manners: An Etiquette Guide for Rude People, my favorite PJ O’Rourke. I think what makes it work is the mix of elements. It’s mostly corny humor, like the extended segment on food fights (“Use a raw oyster to show someone what a French kiss would be like if she’d married a reptile”). There’s also a lot of witticism: a lot of peppy, preppy cynicism. But mixed into all that there is just enough genuine insight (the bit... Read more

“Inside Japan’s Booming Rent-a-Friend Industry”: The Week

Last updated on: July 6, 2016 at 3:11 pm By Eve Tushnet

isn’t the “ohh those kooky Japanese!” story I feared. All the many reasons you might hire a friend: There’s a word in Japanese, gaman, that translates roughly as “stoic forbearance in the face of the unbearable.” It’s a deep-seated Japanese value, this idea that you suck it up no matter what. A lot has been happening lately. Anxiety and depression spiked after the Fukushima nuclear disaster. The country itself is shrinking, its population plummeting and aging rapidly. And there’s the... Read more

Who Is Doing Good Ministry to Corrections Officers?

Last updated on: July 6, 2016 at 2:26 pm By Eve Tushnet

Last Saturday was the feast of Sts Processus and Martinian, patrons of wardens, guards, and prison police. Legend says that they were the jailers of St Peter and St Paul, who were converted when the apostles were miraculously freed (Acts 16). This got me wondering. In certain Christian circles we hear a lot about prison ministry. Visiting prisoners is one the basic Catholic corporal works of mercy. Pope Francis has been phenomenal when it comes to loving the prisoners in... Read more

From “Modern Manners”

Last updated on: July 6, 2016 at 11:29 am By Eve Tushnet

A brief predivorce period is favored because it’s best for final separation to take place before the romance is gone from a marriage. Otherwise the couple are likely to have no regrets. (Having no regrets is a common, even popular, modern condition. It is nevertheless to be avoided. Having no regrets is what robs modern alcoholism of its poignancy. It has also ruined modern verse.) Read more

Movie Must-Watch Notes: Abuse of Power Comes as a TOTAL Surprise!

Last updated on: July 7, 2016 at 7:59 pm By Eve Tushnet

OK, first of all I have to tell you that I saw Tickled and I want you to go see it without knowing much about it. I went in knowing that it was a documentary about “competitive endurance tickling” and the filmmaker uncovers… something? a weird thing? the story is weirder than it sounds? So I assumed it would be a story about a subculture, maybe about how we build community or identity off of inexplicable and sometimes sad things.... Read more

What Might Apology and Amends to LGBT People Look Like? I’m at Vox

Last updated on: July 1, 2016 at 1:13 pm By Eve Tushnet

doin’ my thing: On June 26, while flying back from a trip to Armenia, Pope Francis told a reporter that he agreed with Cardinal Reinhard Marx of Germany: The Catholic Church owes an apology to gay people. The Pope’s comments were short but rambling — not as deft and pithy as his well-known statement from an earlier airplane interview, “If [gay people] accept the Lord and have goodwill, who am I to judge them?” — but even the best apology... Read more

From “Modern Manners”

Last updated on: July 1, 2016 at 11:55 am By Eve Tushnet

The drug XTC had a brief vogue in the 80s but quickly went out of fashion because it made you love everybody. Loving even one 80s person was repulsive enough; loving more than one was actually medically dangerous. Read more

“If the Church Were a Haven”: Wesley Hill

Last updated on: June 30, 2016 at 11:25 am By Eve Tushnet

at First Things: Or I think of a story I’ve heard Shane Claiborne recount, in which a frustrated young lesbian woman confided her discomfort with traditional Catholic sexual ethics to Mother Teresa. Afterwards, the young woman came to Claiborne beaming. What had Mother Teresa said to cause such joy? Claiborne wondered. It turned out, instead of rebuffing the woman’s questions or offering an easy solution to her uncertainty about whether or not to embrace celibacy, Mother Teresa had mostly listened—and... Read more

From PJ O’Rourke, “Modern Manners: An Etiquette Book for Rude People”

Last updated on: June 30, 2016 at 10:49 am By Eve Tushnet

Heroin and the other “downs,” natural and synthetic, are not polite. These drugs effectively eliminate the painful aspect of existence, which, nowadays, is almost all of it. Pain, such as a pain in the ass, is the thing that commonly alerts us to the presence of other people. Interaction with others is what manners are all about. Don’t take “downs.” Try to be “down on life” instead. Read more