• One cheer for cryptozoology: Yes, it’s a form of conspiracy theorizing and delusion. And yes, it promotes the kind of defiantly ignorant crankery that makes people confident they can prove the experts wrong without ever having to study or work or understand what it is the experts know. But it also has the benefit of sending obsessed, curious people out into the world and into the woods to collect their “evidence.”
So what happens when a real scientist examines that “evidence”? Geneticist Bryan Sykes took a closer look at 57 specimens provided by Bigfoot believers from around the world. No surprise: None of them came from Sasquatch. But there’s also this: “Two hair samples, one from Bhutan and the other from Ladakh, India, closely matched the genetic sequence of an extinct Paleolithic polar bear.” The truth is out there.
• “So, how many Palestinians should we kill?” Marc Goldberg asks in The Times of Israel (via), making like Bobby Kennedy in Indianapolis. We can learn to tame the savageness of man and to make gentle the life of this world. Or, I suppose, we can continue not doing that.
• Scot McKnight surveys a new book titled, Faith and Reason: Three Views. My first thought was that something must be missing there. If you have two variables, shouldn’t that produce four possibilities? A but not B; B but not A; both A and B; neither A nor B.
But then I thought about it some more and realized that, in this case, there couldn’t be much point including an essay arguing that fourth view. Come to think of it, I’m not sure how one could argue for the first option either. Making a reasonable argument against reason seems either pointless or self-refuting. …
• “Poor people have it easy.” Wow. (I guess “neither faith nor reason” is a more popular category than I realized.)
• Please ignore that this is from Edward Mendelson’s discussion of W.H. Auden’s response to Isaiah Berlin’s essay on Ivan Turgenev, because that sounds terribly pretentious and I wouldn’t want the high-brow airs of all of that to distract us from the perceptive wisdom here:
Berlin wrote: “The dilemma of morally sensitive, honest, and intellectually responsible men at a time of acute polarization of opinion has, since [Turgenev’s] time, grown acute and world-wide.” Whatever Berlin intended, a sentence like this encourages readers to count themselves among the sensitive, honest, and responsible, with the inevitable effect of blinding themselves to their own insensitivities, dishonesties, and irresponsibilities, and to the evils committed by a group, party, or nation that they support. Their “dilemma” is softened by the comforting thought of their merits.
• What Mendelson diagnoses there is part of the process by which we can lull and flatter ourselves into becoming Very Serious People. Once we count ourselves among “the sensitive, honest, and responsible” — and among the civil, non-partisan, objective, orthodox, fiscally concerned, moderate, high-minded, centrist, mainstream, etc. — we’re in grave danger of becoming the moral equivalent of poor “Lady Florence”:
Florence Foster Jenkins was, and will forever be, the worst singer to appear at Carnegie Hall. And more: She is arguably the worst singer to ever devote herself so wholeheartedly to, and fail so fully at, the craft of singing. …
• “Free Download: They Might Be Giants Play Their Entire First Album Live.” Ooh. Yespleasethankyou.
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