Over two-thirds of adults in the United States are overweight or obese, and over one-third are obese, according to data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) 2003–2006 and 2007–2008.
And according to the Social Worker, not a single one of them can help it.
A belated cheer for Reading Lolita in Tehran. Azar Nafisi’s book combines memoir with an intimate account of reading for survival in the Mullahs’ Iran. Nafisi is an academic specialising in fiction. She believes passionately in ‘art as a human complication’ (James’s phrase). Complication as we encounter it in the best Western fiction is always intolerable to the orthodox. Some of us have lived through this conflict – in very comfortable circumstances – in respect to the absolutism of the Left, and later of the women’s movement (Ti-Grace Atkinson’s ‘burn all the books’).
Nafisi describes how, in a class discussion of Daisy Miller, one Islamist declares simply: Daisy is immoral and ought to be killed. In this milieu, ambiguity and irony become heretical, to suspend judgment immoral, to doubt, a crime. Continue reading »
Some teachers giving kids the NAPLAN test decided to cheat. Most adults no doubt thought, Yeah well, there’s always a few, and got on with their lives. Not so the Australian Education Union. It’s the stress, you see. Anne Crawford, the Union’s Vice-President:
“I am not saying that Correne did not do this, but in any kind of process the circumstances and the context will make a difference,” Ms Crawford said.
“This is a highly politicised matter. But this should not mean that we have a teacher hung, drawn and quartered without justice.”
Ms Crawford said Ms Woolmer had found this year’s NAPLAN testing “particularly stressful” because of the essential place it now had in assessing school performance.
As it happened, I had just been reading about Abu Ghraib, the Iraqi prison in which the US military humiliated, maltreated and just plain tortured some prisoners. Continue reading »
Moving of the earth brings fears and harms
Men reckon what it did and meant
They did in Donne’s time and in Voltaire’s and in Kleist’s (The Earthquake in Chile). Candide is a response to the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. Such events used to challenge people to make sense of them.
Am I right to think that apart from moral brutes (“God’s judgment!”) we don’t? We do what we can, of course: Chile had better building codes than Haiti, and more money to build, and these things saved lives.
We have an answer to Why? (platelets) but no control and scant capacity to predict. Perhaps we now accept something like the ancient belief in blind fortune.
Grandeur and a bunch of associated qualities (magnanimity, for example) are tricky to deal with nowadays. The Grand Canyon is probably OK, Mount Everest, that sort of thing. But artefacts of human grandeur such as Louis XIV’s Versailles are, rather insistently, reminders of human misery. We can enjoy then as Architecture only by a forced abstraction.
The grand music of Louis XIV’s time -that deliberate, sustained trumpet-and-drum stuff - fares better because of the much weaker link between music and empirical meanings. Only flint-eyed materialists find nothing but court propaganda in Lully; for most people, the stately processions and rituals invoked by the music might as well take place in Ruritania.
But of course to listen to a Te Deum on the radio while doing the gardening is something less than the experience of those who crowded the church to welcome home Louis from one of his homicidal trips abroad.
Is there such a thing as authentic, guilt-free grandeur in music? I hope so. I’m not contemplating a Hymn to Social Inclusiveness, or an Ode to the Health Care Reform Bill.
Here’s the last minute or so of Carl Nielsen’s Symphony #4. Out of context, it just sounds like lots and lots of E major, too much maybe.
In context, that’s grand, I reckon.
Formally, Nielsen’s symphony can be summed up as the process of getting from D minor to E major the hard way. Here’s how it begins.
Throughout the work, the music arouses those feeling-states of stress, confusion, agitation and states of calm, assurance and clarity. (And lots of other less determinate states of feeling, but let’s keep it manageable.) It places these passages in a a drama of overcoming. E major is worked towards, fallen away from, briefly established, more firmly established and finally speaks unequivocally to close the symphony. A completely abstract and arbitrary structure of key centres becomes a physical, emotional and intellectual experience.
Whereas the music of Lully’s time was designed to impress the listener with the might and dignity of the king and his court (by extension, the glory of France) this symphonic grandeur invites every listener to go on the journey, work through the struggle and to exult in the feeling of achievement. In that sense, it is a document of democracy. Behind Nielsen of course stands Beethoven. The “Inextinguishable” bears a family resemblance to Beethoven’s Fifth, Brahms’s First and all the other 19th century works that progress from stormy minor-key first movements to triumphant endings. But I seem to find a particular satisfaction in the works written late in the symphonic tradition, In Mahler, Sibelius, Nielsen, Magnard – even Elgar.
Want to donate to Haiti, but worried about your money passing through the hands of (ugh) believers? The Richard Dawkins Foundation will care for your needs. A whole bunch of impeccably atheist organisations has agreed to collect money, then pass it on either to Doctors Without Borders (Médecins sans Frontières) or to International Red Cross.
But why not donate direct to one of those two organisations? In the words of the website
When donating via Non-Believers Giving Aid, you are helping to counter the scandalous myth that only the religious care about their fellow-humans.
You are also helping to promote aggressive bigotry. Assisting hypocritical opportunists. Oh and because neither Doctors without Borders or International Red Cross is a development agency you are making a default choice about effective help – Haiti’s needs will not go away any time soon.
But it’s your money.