Since you have all been very good (and as I will be offline for most of the weekend), this week’s links post is early.
2. The Moment When Nobel Prize Winner Peter Higgs Learned That His Particle Had Been Found
3. Nuclear Fusion Milestone Passed at US Lab
4. This is the Average Man’s Body
5. A Married Mom and Dad Really Do Matter: New Evidence From Canada
6. In Conversation: Antonin Scalia
7. And some thoughts on Scalia’s Cancelling of his Washington Post Subscription
9. Five Global Health Concerns
10. The Broken Lives of Fukushima
11. Analogies
12. Should We Keep the Trinity Out of the Gender Debate? – I left a lengthy comment beneath this one
13. Beyond the “Right to Privacy”: A New Look at the Surveillance Debate – Part 1, Part 2
14. Joyce, Tolkien, and Copyright
15. To Fix Wikipedia’s Gender Imbalance: A Big Editing Party?
16. The Woman Who Changed America’s Social Fabric … With Actual Fabric
17. Why Malcolm Gladwell Matters (And Why That’s Unfortunate)
18. Interview with Gladwell on his return to faith
19. Does Faith = Hate? – Rod Dreher on same-sex marriage and religious liberty
20. Colin Coward and Peter Ould on the definition of homophobia
21. Magic Trick: Chris Brown and the Disappearing Child Sex Abuse – I posted a comment on this related post
22. Age of Internet Empires: One Map With Each Country’s Favourite Website
23. Age-ism, Transhumanism, and Silicon Valley’s Cognitive Dissonance
24. Modernity as Collective Recognition of Original Sin
25. Actual Complaints Received by Thomas Cook Vacations
26. How to Build a 2,073-Foot Skyscraper
27. Oops: Azerbaijan Released Election Results Before Voting Had Started
28. 14 Google Tools You Didn’t Know Existed
29. A Lost City: Photos of Bucharest’s Past
30. Theology Without Metaphysics
31. Where Philosophy Comes From, Philosophy’s Shadow, What’s Wrong With Buber? – Peter Leithart is posting on Rosenstock-Huessy
32. The Gospel and Public Life – A discussion between Ken Myers, Oliver O’Donovan, and Matt Lee Anderson. I would have loved to have attended!
33. Boiling Kids – Interpreting Exodus 23:19b
34. Lewis Carroll’s Nyctograph
35. Carbyne Could be Strongest Material Yet
36. One in Ten Young Americans Has Committed Sexual Violence
37. For Evangelicals and Others Considering Eastern Orthodoxy
38. Genepeeks Firm to Offer ‘Digital Baby’ Screen for Sperm Donors
41. Interventions and Discourse of the Son – Leithart on Badiou
42. DR Congo: Cursed By Its Natural Wealth
43. The New Narcotic – On pornography
44. Clergy Who’ve Lost Their Faith Due to Patriarchy
45. Pass the Garum – Classic Roman cooking blog
46. Inequality in the distribution of wealth in the UK – Interesting to compare with this video of America’s inequality
47. BBC to Reveal a Number of Missing Doctor Who Episodes
48. 150,000 Piece Lego Model of the Battle of Helm’s Deep – More for the Lego fans here
49. Tendulkar to Retire After 200th Test
50. Why Sex Really Matters
51. The Pony Thief: Dealing with Thieves in Denmark
52. Intro to Drums
53. Elemental Iceland
54. Human Mammal, Human Hunter
Alastair's Adversaria 
Ara Norenzayan, one of the guys behind the WEIRD paper, has a new book out on the origins of religion. There is a nice short interview with him here. Book is here
Looks very interesting. Thanks for the link!
In the middle of reading it. You’ll certainly have to read the section on how “mean gods equal nice people.”* It’s quite the book.
*It’s not that simple, of course.
Thanks so much for the Elemental Iceland video. My husband and I traveled there this summer and it really is that beautiful and amazing!
It really is beautiful, isn’t it! I would love to travel there sometime. 🙂
I thought the income inequality links were interesting. One of the interesting bits for me was the complete lack of quantification in the american presentation. Since this is a question of quantities, it says something to me either about the author or the author’s perception of his audience that he isn’t willing to use numbers.
The question of “what do you think income distribution should be” is puzzling to me. That’s a fairly complex topic, and not one I would have expected the general public to have any sort of informed opinion on. A bit like asking the general public what they think ideal hemoglobin levels should be.
There are lots of interesting but unasked questions within that topic (at least within those links–I know there’s a whole academic field of studying these things). Which societies have the most and least unequal distributions? How did those results come about? What laws affect those numbers? What cultural beliefs affect those numbers? Is happiness correlated with more equal societies? Is there an ideal distribution? How much fluidity is there between the groups–i.e. is the makeup of one quintile more or less the same people from one decade to the next or do they keep switching?
I quite agree. The reasons for high incomes can be quite complicated and I really don’t trust the general public to have processed the different variables involved. For instance, many people with high incomes had to give many years of their lives, risk costly failure, and pay expensive fees in order to train to a very advanced level. The high wages that they now command need to be seen against this background. The questions that you ask are important too.
Pickett and Wilkinson’s The Spirit Level is the book that is most commonly recommended. However, I think that many who write in these areas too easily conflate unequal societies with un-integrated societies, two rather different things. Having a large differential in income needn’t mean that those with lower incomes have no stake in the society, nor that society has little stake in poorer individuals. I suspect that the lack of integration into a common good is the more problematic issue in many cases.
Hi Alastair,
for a comment on what Amanda Hess left out when she wrote the article about the 1 in 10 Young Amricans have committed sexual violence see this comment I made over at Feminist Critics: http://www.feministcritics.org/blog/2013/08/01/consent-open-thread-for-fall-2013-noh/#comment-601469
or a more general look at that JAMA paper in this post on my blog: http://tamenwrote.wordpress.com/2013/10/09/new-study-prevalence-rates-of-male-and-female-sexual-violence-perpetrators/
Thanks for the links: I’ll take a look.