More on them, here:

A big reason bad dreams offer insight into the architecture of dreams generally is that, as a host of studies have shown, most of our dreams are bad. Whether research subjects keep dream journals at home or sleep in research labs and are periodically awoken out of rapid eye movement, or REM, sleep — the stage most often associated with dreaming — the results are the same: about three-quarters of the emotions described are negative.

Moreover, said Robert Stickgold, a sleep researcher at the Harvard Medical School, we are ridiculously industrious dreamers, spending 60 to 70 percent of somnolence dreaming or in a dreamlike state called sleep mentation, which works out to three hours nightly spent in a state of anxiety or frustration as we show up late for tests or walk barefoot over broken glass because our shoes have melted.

Even bona fide nightmares are more common than most of us realize. Ask people to recall spontaneously how many nightmares they had in the last year, and they might say one or two, said Mark Blagrove, a dream researcher at the University of Wales in Swansea. Ask them to keep a dream diary, and they will report nightmares once or twice a month.

No.  They’re wrong, darn it.  And so AIDS moves on…

The rapid spread in Latin America of the virus that causes Aids is made worse by the Roman Catholic Church’s stand against using condoms, a UN official said.

Indigenous religion is so interesting!

The annual celebration of Venezuela’s Maria Lionza religious cult draws thousands of pilgrims to a mountain in Venezuela’s Yaracuy state to pay homage to an Indian goddess. The religion is a centuries-old blend of West African animism, indigenous spirituality and Catholicism, and includes elements of Caribbean Santeria, brought by Cuban immigrants to Venezuela in the 1960s. But it is also uniquely Venezuelan, depicting its deities not through saints but through historical figures. At the top of the hierarchy is Maria Lionza herself, who legend has it was born to an Indian chief in the 1500s and had supernatural powers. Today she is portrayed as a light-skinned, green-eyed woman riding a tapir with her arms outstretched.

Cairo is the same as Mexico City–I lived there for five months, and my lungs got worse in just that time.  The State Department says you can’t live there for longer than two years, I heard.

Air pollution is so bad in Cairo that living in the sprawling city of 18 million residents is said to be akin to smoking 20 cigarettes a day. According to the World Health Organisation, the average Cairene ingests more than 20 times the acceptable level of air pollution a day.

A 2002 World Bank report estimates that pollution causes 2.42 billion dollars worth of environmental damage each year, about five percent of Egypt’s annual gross domestic product.

Industry is to blame, in part, the worst offenders being factories that burn mazot for power. Mazot is the heavy oil left over after more valuable fuel products have been extracted from crude oil; when burnt, it emits substantial amounts of the greenhouse gases said to cause global warming.

Er.  I appreciate this work here, but doesn’t it seem like a lot of gymnastics?  What if we just admit that religious texts were less inclusive than we are now?

Keynote speaker Mary C. Boys, a professor of practical theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York, said that though writers of the Gospels differ in their accounts of Jesus’ passion and crucifixion, all cite Jews as primarily responsible for his death.

She finds two texts especially troublesome — one in which Pontius Pilate, the Roman procurator, says, “I am innocent of this man’s blood,” and the crowd answers, “His blood be on us and our children!”

“This is troubling because Imperial Rome had far more to do with the death of Jesus than the Gospels reflect,” she said. “Even more troubling is the way in which early Christian teachers built upon this charge as the rivalry with Judaism widened and deepened.”

Rabbi Mark S. Diamond, executive vice president of the Board of Rabbis of Southern California, which co-sponsored the event with Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Conn., said all people of faith need to “take ownership of their most difficult texts, wrestle with them — not run away from them — but confront them, where appropriate, set them in their proper historical context.

Shocked.  Shocked!

John Tierney talks about.  Here are some possible answers:

I asked Professor Solove why Internet gossip is more negative and malicious than regular gossip. His reply:

1. The people gossiped about are often strangers. Thus, there is often little other context for knowing them.

2. When gossip about a particular person becomes viral across the Internet, the people spreading the gossip often do not know the person involved.

3. The types of incidents that generate gossip that travel far and wide across the blogosphere are often ones that are negative, where the person gossiped about did some bad or rude things.

4. The audience for the gossip is different. Learning gossip about a friend is different than reading gossip about a stranger. With a friend, there’s a context; you know other information about the person. But gossip about a stranger lacks this greater context.

5. Some gossip is hard to classify as positive or negative. A discussion about a sexual encounter between X and Y, for example, might be positive in some circles (or at least not negative). But perhaps later on, X or Y might regret having the information out there on the Internet. It’s different when the gossip is just circulating among friends — such gossip would be quickly forgotten, and it wouldn’t be accessible to everybody. And among friends, this piece of gossip might not have any negative consequences at all. But suppose X or Y no longer want a record of their sex lives to be known by anybody who dates them, or to their families, or children, etc. The gossip can become negative later on. Gossip is good and bad depending upon the context and the use to which the information is put.

from David Denby:

How is it possible that the kind of squalor and dissolute behavior that would be intolerable in our own lives and the lives of our friends is often fascinating, even enjoyable, in a movie? The cynical answer is that our enjoyment is based on relief: this mess is happening to someone else, not to us. Yet it can’t be as simple as that. After all, a moviegoer’s imaginative life is voracious. From day to day, we may be as cautious and calculating as possums, but at the movies we want to see everything, including the worst. We may even feel a tiny sense of duty to see the worst, though the pleasure derived from looking at meanness is likely more aesthetic than moral. If we sense, This is right, this is the way things are, we know that we’re in the hands of an artist.

I’m not sure what’s new in this article, but it’s a useful summary.

But like all democratic revolutions, the transformation of marriage and family life has been messy. More choices mean new opportunities for success, but also new opportunities for failures, and new temptations to reach beyond one’s grasp. We have solved many old problems, but in the process created some new ones.

For example, on average, parents invest more emotional energy and financial resources in their children than ever before, but children whose parents cannot or will not make such investments face new vulnerabilities. Young people have greater mobility and personal freedom than in the past, but their independence can turn into isolation after they become parents.

From the NYReview of Books.  Read ‘em!