The Nappy Cat Chronicles

• Her most ardent fans regard her as an oracle. If she mentions the title of a book, it goes to No. 1. If she says she uses a particular wrinkle cream, it sells out. At Oprah’s retail store in Chicago, women can purchase used shoes and outfits that she wore on the show. Her viewers follow her guidance because they like and admire her, sure. But also because they believe that Oprah, with her billions and her Rolodex of experts, doesn’t have to settle for second best. If she says something is good, it must be. Newsweek: Why Health Advice on ‘Oprah’ Could Make You Sick
• It would at first appear that the two stories are inconsistent: The state of Minnesota is forcing Daniel Hauser into chemo because he isn’t old enough to decide his own course of treatment, and because his parents’ claimed moral opposition to chemotherapy is irrational. Yet at the same time, the state will forbid Hauser from smoking marijuana to offset the effects of said chemo because, despite research showing marijuana’s clear benefits in that area, the state has a moral obligation to prevent people from smoking marijuana. Science should trump belief. Except when it doesn’t. Radley Balko: Who’s in Charge of Your Health?
• Arguing that “the great forces of modernity – technology and democracy, choice and freedom – are all strengthening religion rather than undermining it”, they go on to claim that one version of modernity is spreading nearly everywhere. “The world is generally moving in the American direction, where religion and modernity happily coexist,” they write. At this point the authors – one Catholic, the other atheist, we are told – emerge as missionaries for the American Way, and the argument becomes distinctly implausible. New Statesman: God Is Back book review

• It’s hard to argue that Ms. Barreiro was forced into bankruptcy by crazed subprime mortgage lenders in 1998. Greedy bankers certainly didn’t keep her and her first husband from paying their taxes. Megan McArdle
• Obama did not shut down the practice of torture, Nairn observes, but “merely repositioned it,” restoring it to the American norm, a matter of indifference to the victims. “[H]is is a return to the status quo ante,” writes Nairn, “the torture regime of Ford through Clinton, which, year by year, often produced more U.S.-backed strapped-down agony than was produced during the Bush/Cheney years.” Noam Chomsky
• If there were any doubts about the once-mighty party’s hilarious new role in American society, they vanished in recent weeks, as the Republican leadership’s attempt to stop the passage of Barack Obama’s budget turned into one of the most half-assed public-relations campaigns in congressional history. Matt Taibbi
• They were aided by testimony from Ray Bohlin, a molecular biologist who left science to start a fundamentalist ministry, and Don Patton, who parades a doctorate from what appears to be an Australian diploma mill and gained notoriety claiming fossil evidence that dinosaurs and humans walked side-by-side. Seed

(Image courtesy of The Big Picture.)

• Like other fundamentalist movements it’s not necessarily something that’s old and traditional but more a reaction against modern developments…They deliberately tweak feminist truisms or feminist titles of books, like Our Bodies, Ourselves, and say, “Our bodies are not ourselves”– our bodies belong to God. A woman’s calling in life is not to decide for herself; her highest calling is to be a submissive wife and mother. RH Reality Check Interviews: Kathryn Joyce, Author of Quiverfull
• At least, cut off from the irritations of literary London, he was free to grapple unencumbered with the new novel. “Smothered under journalism,” as he put it, he told one friend, “I have become more and more like a sucked orange.” 1984: The masterpiece that killed George Orwell
• The district wanted to fire a high school teacher who kept a stash of pornography, marijuana and vials with cocaine residue at school, but a commission balked, suggesting that firing was too harsh. L.A. Unified officials were also unsuccessful in firing a male middle school teacher spotted lying on top of a female colleague… Los Angeles Times
• Americans are testing the waters of a new kind of religious complexity. This isn’t the New Age spirituality of The Secret or the rabid atheism of Ivy League intellectuals. It isn’t the over-the-top bar mitzvah or quinceañera. This is the steady, patient movement of citizens who are searching for the center again… How Do Americans Really Feel About God?

• The lie of virginity — the idea that such a thing even exists — is ensuring that young women’s perception of themselves is inextricable from their bodies… Jessica Valenti, The Purity Myth
• [A] lot of conservative books are not intended as literature so much as commodified extensions of their authors’ personalities. To suggest that these books were scholarly would be to taint their carefully cultivated everyman appeal with a stain of elitism. The Daily Beast
• But, while banking has become a hypertrophied monster, we still need to understand how the industry got so big in the first place in order to right-size it. And although bad policy and regulatory somnambulism have something to do with it, much of the industry’s growth has been driven by major changes in the economy… The New Yorker

• Andrew Sullivan’s story is inherently implausible. How did an HIV-positive gay Catholic conservative from the poky English town of East Grinstead end up as one of the most powerful writers in America? Intelligent Life Magazine
• People who hated history in grade school view the subject as a collection of facts. In a certain sense they are right: Historians trade (in part) in verifiable events that no person can own or copyright… The Chronicle Review
• “I wouldn’t fuck Sandra Bernhard with Bea Arthur’s dick.” The New York Observer

• In different ways, most of Ian McEwan’s novels and stories are about trauma and contingency, and he is now best known as the great contemporary stager of traumatic contingency as it strikes ordinary lives. In The Child in Time, a child goes missing… London Review of Books
• So, I’m in L.A. for the weekend, and I just got back from touring the single most amazing place I have ever been: the Michael Jackson auction collection at the Beverly Hilton. AND MY LIFE WILL NEVER BE THE SAME. Slog: News & Art
• In van Houtryve’s hotel room, propaganda played in an endless loop on the three TV channels. North Korean biographers, striving to make Kim his more revered father’s equal, insist a swallow foretold his birth and attribute a spate of superhuman characteristics to him—the ability to manipulate time among them. Defectors have described him as… Foreign Policy

• Retribution and revenge are the most important driving forces in Niko’s life. GTA IV sets up a clear dichotomy between two modes of conduct, one that can be aligned with Niko’s point of origin, the “Old World,” and the other embodied in the supposed promise of immigration, the “New World.” Open Letter Monthly
• So whom did they hope to kill? Everyone — including friends. USA TODAY
• What Jane Austen could never have foreseen – and might have had some trouble comprehending – was her transformation, in the 190 years following her death at the age of forty-one in 1817, into a writer of mass popularity, a global phenomenon, whose six completed novels are among the best-known, best-loved works in the English language. Literary Review

• “I’m trying to run a tight ship,” Will Oldham said when he came to the door. By which he meant “Don’t be late again.” The New Yorker
• Like a lot of believers, I knew that there were parts of my belief that wouldn’t stand up to analysis. But that was fine. I didn’t need to analyse them. I only lost faith when I was forced to… Douglas Murray
• On average, white evangelical Protestants make their “sexual début”—to use the festive term of social-science researchers—shortly after turning sixteen. Among major religious groups, only black Protestants begin having sex earlier… The New Yorker

• Understanding Quiverfull, the antifeminist, conservative Christian movement that motivates popular reality-TV families like the Duggars… Newsweek
• Instead of idealizing man, the new humanism denigrates God and attacks the belief in God as a human weakness. My parents too thought belief in God to be a weakness. But they were reluctant to deprive other human beings of a moral prop that they seemed to need… Roger Scruton
• It’s over — we’re officially, royally fucked… Matt Taibbi