Daily Office: Thursday
¶ Matins: The religious women who, by swallowing their concern about abortion, did so much to push health-care reform through enactment are not being replaced; new novices tend echo the conservatism of their male counterparts. Is this the twilight of the activist nun? Noreen Malone is afraid so. (Slate; via The Morning News)
¶ Lauds: It’s nice that everyone can take a good-enough picture, but not for professional photographers, who are watching their business model drown in the sea of inexpensive stock images. Reading Stephanie Clifford’s report in the Times, it’s impossible to tell whether we’re in a crazy transitional moment (one that professional photographers will learn to make work for them) or looking at the future.
¶ Prime: A tour d’horizon of the more interesting econoblogs, posing as a solicitation of manuscripts from the likes of Jeff Miller, Bess Levin, and Mark Cuban: “Ten Financial Bloggers Who Should Write Books,” by James Altucher. We love the appeal to Tyler Durden. (WSJ; via Abnormal Returns)
¶ Tierce: Jonah Lehrer “excites the NAcc,” “inhibits the insula,” and explains why you can go broke saving money at Costco.
¶ Sext: Margaret Atwood, looking for all the world like a close relation of HM the Queen, discusses her Twitter, which she says is rather like “having fairies at the bottom of your garden.” (We wonder how many of her followers can hum along on that one.) (NYRBlog)
¶ Nones: We spotted two pieces about politically-motivated suicide in yesterday’s Times. There was the Op-Ed summary of a study of Chechen terrorist suicides — 42 incidents since 2000. Then there was Lydia Polgreen’s report on political suicides in southern India, many of them apparently prompted by the delay in forming Telangana, India’s 29th state. Both sets of cases support the Chechen study’s principal finding.
However appalling suicide and terrorism are, they demonstrate that nations often forget to earn their sovereignty.
¶ Vespers: Poet August Kleinzahler goes to rehab — as a therapist! At the Tufted Knolls Behavioral Facility, run by the august Dr Horst Himmelfarb, he runs a little workshop.
¶ Compline: James Lovelock, the 90 year-old developer of the Gaia hypothesis, thinks that we’re too dumb to fix the global-warming mess. Without the goad of a catastrophe, at any rate. (Guardian; via MetaFilter)