Death Porn Body Nonsense
The ostensible purpose of some images is to teach us something about life and death, but, Mary Valle asks, what else is going on when we seek out images of sick women’s bodies. Continue Reading →
Tag: death
"The Myth is the Mystery":Reflections on Annie Jacobsen's Area 51
by David Halperin
1.
Why, folklorist Thomas Bullard has asked, are UFOs in this country “at once so popular and so despised?” It’s a good question; the hubbub over Annie Jacobsen’s best-selling Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base is the latest demonstration of how good it is. “Oh, I’ve got to read that book,” a waitress said when she saw me with Area 51, and from our conversation it became clear that it was the Area 51 of UFO legend, not the real Area 51 of Cold-War dread (to which most of Jacobsen’s book is devoted) that had drawn her interest. UFOs, a.k.a. “flying saucers,” have zoomed around our cultural skies for more than sixty years. They’ve survived innumerable debunkings, their fascination undimmed. Evidently they’re saying something, communicating something, that needs to be heard. What?
This is the real “UFO mystery.” It’s a cultural, a psychological, even a religious mystery, the sort of thing a religious studies professor like myself might well take an interest in. I can’t claim personal immunity from the subject. Back in the 1960s I myself was a teenage “UFOlogist.” I believed fervently in UFOs, though not necessarily (at least at first) that they came from outer space. I thought solving their mystery to be the greatest and most important challenge facing the human race. Continue Reading →
“The Myth is the Mystery”:Reflections on Annie Jacobsen’s Area 51
by David Halperin
1.
Why, folklorist Thomas Bullard has asked, are UFOs in this country “at once so popular and so despised?” It’s a good question; the hubbub over Annie Jacobsen’s best-selling Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base is the latest demonstration of how good it is. “Oh, I’ve got to read that book,” a waitress said when she saw me with Area 51, and from our conversation it became clear that it was the Area 51 of UFO legend, not the real Area 51 of Cold-War dread (to which most of Jacobsen’s book is devoted) that had drawn her interest. UFOs, a.k.a. “flying saucers,” have zoomed around our cultural skies for more than sixty years. They’ve survived innumerable debunkings, their fascination undimmed. Evidently they’re saying something, communicating something, that needs to be heard. What?
This is the real “UFO mystery.” It’s a cultural, a psychological, even a religious mystery, the sort of thing a religious studies professor like myself might well take an interest in. I can’t claim personal immunity from the subject. Back in the 1960s I myself was a teenage “UFOlogist.” I believed fervently in UFOs, though not necessarily (at least at first) that they came from outer space. I thought solving their mystery to be the greatest and most important challenge facing the human race. Continue Reading →
TechNoLove
Jonathan Franzen takes to the New York Times op-ed page to proclaim that — oh yes, indeedy — technology is killing love. Blackberries aren’t birds, birds are part of the environment, the environment is love, and love means facing death directly, or something like that:
To speak more generally, the ultimate goal of technology, the telos of techne, is to replace a natural world that’s indifferent to our wishes — a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts, a world of resistance — with a world so responsive to our wishes as to be, effectively, a mere extension of the self.
Let me suggest, finally, that the world of techno-consumerism is therefore troubled by real love, and that it has no choice but to trouble love in turn.
Avoiding Death and God
A new report at the International Journal of Social Economics has found that the decline in number of the faithful in developed countries can be attributed to longer lifespans; we don’t worry about death so much any more. (Thanks to CBS for the report summary.) Continue Reading →
Science, Increasingly a Matter of Belief
Tom Junod, in the latest issue of Esquire writes (link below):
We are not going to live forever. We are not going to have our life spans scientifically amplified to biblical lengths. We will not be able to take pills that will give us the musculature of superheroes or allow us to gorge ourselves while enjoying the health benefits of starvation. We will reach our limits, and, with some hard-won variation, those limits will be — they will feel like — the same limits we humans have always had. We will remain human where it counts, in our helpless and inspiring relation to our own mortality.
Does this sound obvious? It shouldn’t. Indeed, what I should have said from the start is that I believe that we are all going to die, in that science increasingly believes otherwise — and science increasingly has become a matter of belief. Its logic, once pointed at the eradication of disease and infection, is now inexorably pointed at aging and death, which is to say the ultimate questions that were once left to religion. Over the past six years, I’ve written several science stories for Esquire’s annual Best and Brightest issue, and most of them were about scientists who began contending with a particular disease but wound up contending with aging and death as disease — as something that can be cured.
(h/t Andrew Sullivan at The Atlantic) Continue Reading →
Death Comes for the Ayatollah
The New York Times reports that Lebanon’s Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, a Shiite Islam holy figure with a world following, has died. He’s been called Hezbollah’s mentor. He was 75.
For more on the Grand Ayatollah read here, here and here or read his facebook page here. Continue Reading →
Digital Death Day
“The Digital Death Day attendees were not all entrepreneurs working out their promising business plans. (And some of those business models make good sense. LegacyLocker, DataInherit, AssetLock, and Deathswitch are all new companies offering sensible and useful services, on the order of providing Web locations for safe password storage, or promising to notify interested parties at the time of your death.) There were funeral directors present – digital technology is playing more and more of a role in bereavement, with Facebook walls functioning as memorials and slide shows and other media-borne mementos important. The city of Hong Kong, thedigitalbeyond recently reported, has turned to online memorials to help deal with a shortage of burial plots.” — Robert Roper in “Life After Death, In Digital Form” at Obit Magazine Continue Reading →
City of Life and Death
There wasn’t a dearth of death in Benares; as one walked or drove on its streets, small groups of men bearing the dead on biers kept passing by with little fanfare about the nature of their procession. I saw many more dead bodies in three days in Benares than I had seen in the preceding thirty years. Unlike other Indian cities, this one does not go out of its way to separate and shield the living and the dead from one another. The two categories of bodies form a continuum; life and death remain in conversation with one another. — from “City of Life, City of Death” by Ananya Vajpeyi at Killing the Buddha. Read the entire post here. Continue Reading →
I Think I Know Jack.
by Paul Creeden:
Dr. Jack Kevorkian is the subject of You Don’t Know Jack, an HBO film, which premiered on the cable network in April. Al Pacino plays “Dr. Death,” as Kevorkian was dubbed in 1956 after he performed, in his role as a pathologist, a photographic survey of the pupils of dying patients. Kevorkian has a documented fascination with death and with helping people accept their deaths as an opportunity for medical advancement and he was reportedly fired from a pathology job in 1958 for suggesting that prison inmates be encouraged to volunteer their organs for medical experimentation. Continue Reading →