This is also really important:

Anderson says he hopes their documentation efforts will also become a tool to test out linguistic theories. “One of the things that I see myself being able to do,” he explains, “is provide detailed and adequately confirmed phenomena to the general linguistic community and say, ‘here’s some data, now come up with a new theory to explain this data.’”

During filmmaking, Harrison and Anderson discovered an interesting feature of Sora: Its speakers can incorporate definite and specific nouns into a verb, to create, for example, the single-word jo-me-bob-dem-te-n-ei (”I will anoint my head with oil,” or, literally, “smear-oil-head”). This structure goes against prevailing linguistic models, which argue that the incorporated part of the word (i.e., “oil”) should not be available to the external syntax of the phrase, in which the verb is embedded. “Since 80 percent of the world’s languages aren’t documented,” Harrison says, many of the languages they encounter “confound current [linguistic] theories in interesting ways.”

“The fact that these languages are disappearing,” Harrison says, gives him a sense of urgency. “The tipping point has passed for many languages. There’s only one option for them: Record what you can before they disappear.”

This sounds right to me. I’ve often though that it’d be easier for me not to believe in God than not to be Catholic, and I’m not sure a lot of Protestants can say that about their tradition.  But I know a ton of Jews who can say that about Judaism.

Most who leave Judaism become unaffiliated, rather than converting to another religion; Many continue to identify as Jewish in an ethnic or cultural sense, concluded the study’s author, Tom W. Smith, director of the General Social Survey at the National Opinion Research Center of the University of Chicago.

“Jewish losses are disproportionately to no religion,” he said.

With 76 percent retaining their faith, Jews are more “religiously stable” than Catholics (73 percent); and while eight in ten Protestants remain Protestant, specific denominations retain a much lower percentage of members — as low as 16 percent in one case.

This is such a fun article!  I’ve never really been tempted to have a pet chimp, but I can understnat the attraction to primates.  Anyways, this is most interesting as  a good example of journalism: it’s well-written, non-judgemental, and tells a great story:

A primate involves a much greater commitment than a cat or dog — or it should — because primates are social animals that cannot be left alone for long, and that live for decades: baboons for up to 45 years in captivity, chimps for 60 to 70. Once they have hit puberty, primates can become unpredictable and difficult to control. An adult chimp has seven times the strength of a man, Ms. Truitt says, but even a 24-pound monkey has the reflexes and agility to take down a man.

More fundamentally, Ms. Truitt believes, even the smallest monkeys are wild animals that do not belong in people’s homes.

But many prospective owners are badly informed, and, encountering adorable, docile baby primates with an eerie similarity to human infants, they find it difficult to resist.

Animal dealers, Ms. Truitt says, know that.

“The key to the trade is that these animals have to be removed at birth from the mother, put in diapers, put on a bottle and sold before they start depreciating — which they do, quicker than a Cadillac,” Ms. Truitt says. “By the age of 3, maybe 5 or 7, they reach adolescence and their hormones are telling them to do anything but take commands from humans. They are interested in dominating whatever social group they find themselves in. If it’s a human home, they often go after children first, then teenagers, then mom, and by the time they get to dad, we usually get the call.”

This is great!

adly, though, rebellion is not the outlier stance it once was. Xs are no longer America’s free. By 2009, Xs are neither what Fussell called the “classless class” nor an “un monied aristocracy” with the freedom of the Out-of-Sights, if without the bucks. (Note: tickets to Burning Man start at more than $200.) Today’s Xs do not “occupy the one social place in the U.S.A. where the ethic of buying and selling is not all-powerful.” Thanks to the economic rise, over the past three decades, of what Richard Florida (betraying a wee bit too much admiration) calls “the creative class,” Xs now rule the world. Or, as David Brooks wrote in Bobos in Paradise (Bobos is short for “bourgeois bohemians”): “Dumb good-looking people with great parents have been displaced by smart, ambitious, educated, and antiestablishment people with scuffed shoes.”

This is great analysis:

This makes it sound like the long shadow of Humanae Vitae and the malign influence of the Quiverfull movement are a big part of America’s abortion problem. But if religious-conservative objections to contraceptive use were actually a big part of the cultural background to our abortion and out-of-wedlock birth rate, you’d expect to see some actual evidence of it. For one thing, you’d expect evidence that the Catholic Church’s position on birth control has a significant impact on American Catholic sexual behavior, let alone on sexual behavior in the society at large. But the vast majority of Catholics are already on board with Saletan’s premises. Around 80 percent think the Church should change its teaching on contraception. 88 percent of Catholic doctors prescribe it. As many as 95 percent of married Catholics use it. And I’m pretty sure that the 5-10 percent of Catholics who do obey the Church’s teaching aren’t having all that many abortions.

Moreover, if Saletan’s diagnosis were correct, you’d also expect the pockets of America most influenced by religious conservatism to provide object lessons in the folly of trying to build a culture of life without a culture of contraception. But look at American abortion rates by state: The states with the lowest abortion rates are places like the Dakotas, Utah, Kentucky, West Virginia, Kansas, and Mississippi; the states with the most are places like California, Connecticut, New York, Illinois, and Massachusetts. There are liberal states with low abortion rates (your Maines and Minnesotas), and right-tilting states with higher ones, but by and large the most religiously-conservative states seem to be doing a pretty good job on that whole culture of life business already, despite their failure to recognize the moral imperative of welcoming Planned Parenthood with open arms.

It’s certainly true that a more charismatic Archbishop is going to help get the word out about priesthood.  Although we’re going to need a lot more than that.  Still, it’s a good start:

Recruiting young men to make the commitment to become priests is a complex process that involves guidance by priests as well as the self-explorations of the candidates, said the Rev. Luke M. Sweeney, director of vocations at St. Joseph’s. An important if intangible factor is how a candidate imagines himself in the future, a priest in full — and his bishop can be an important role model.

“Whenever he met with them, Cardinal Egan did an excellent job of connecting with our seminarians,” Father Sweeney said. But Archbishop Dolan brings “a different skill set” to that meeting.

“Each man brings to the job his own abilities, and Bishop Dolan is obviously blessed with a particular ability to reach out and inspire potential recruits,” Father Sweeney said.

On Monday evening, after a vespers service at St. Joseph’s chapel in which Archbishop Dolan addressed the seminarians as “the future of the priesthood I love,” many of them stood around gaping with what seemed a mixture of curiosity and awe as he held court in a scrum of television cameras and sound booms, answering questions from reporters.

This stuff is pretty intense.  Is it eugenics?  That’s what people like the Pope are saying.  It all depends, I suppose, on how you define abortion, but I think it’s close, anyways.

The Pope said, “A new mentality is insinuating itself that tends to justify a different consideration of life and personal dignity based on individual desire and individual rights.

“There is thus a tendency to privilege the capacities for work, efficiency, perfection and physical beauty to the detriment of other dimensions of existence that are not held to be valuable.”

Alex Schadenberg, the chairman of the International Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, attended the event. He said that the Pope was aiming his remarks at a rising trend of “genetic screening, eugenic abortion - of all types, and eugenic attitudes towards people with disabilities that are leading to euthanasia and medical discrimination related to end-of-life care”, reports LifeSiteNews.

Figures show that in many Western countries, 95 per cent of unborn children diagnosed with Down syndrome are aborted. A new screening technique is also being developed that may make it possible to diagnose if an unborn child has autism, raising fears that such children will be at greater risk of abortion.

Yes global warming is happening.  Yes we need to do something.  But how much of something is up to debate.  From the NYTimes:

Dr. Pielke, a professor in the environmental studies program at the University of Colorado, is the author of “The Honest Broker,” a book arguing that most scientists are fundamentally mistaken about their role in political debates. As a result, he says, they’re jeopardizing their credibility while impeding solutions to problems like global warming.

Most researchers, Dr. Pielke writes, like to think of themselves in one of two roles: as a pure researcher who remains aloof from messy politics, or an impartial arbiter offering expert answers to politicians’ questions. Either way, they believe their research can point the way to correct public policies, and sometimes it does — when the science is clear and people’s values aren’t in conflict.

But climate change, like most political issues, isn’t so simple. While most scientists agree that anthropogenic global warming is a threat, they’re not certain about its scale or its timing or its precise consequences (like the condition of California’s water supply in 2090). And while most members of the public want to avoid future harm from climate change, they have conflicting values about which sacrifices are worthwhile today.

He’s still kind of a Catholic.  Kind of.  At any rate, he’s inspiring:

The allusion to the church of his boyhood is significant. While Heaney is no longer a believing Catholic, he acknowledges Catholicism as a continuing influence, above all on his sense of the value of “passive suffering”: “But the idea that your own travails could earn grace for others, for the souls in purgatory, for instance, was appealing: my mind worked on those lines all right, my sense that there was value in selfless endurance.” Indeed, the “discipline” at St. Columb’s, “when all’s said and done, was essentially a preparation for religious vocation.” Even in the more worldly environment of Queen’s College, Belfast, Heaney recalls ruefully, “everybody was provided with their own inner priest.”

The inner priest survives in Heaney the poet not in any dogma or doctrine, but in his sense that it is his duty to fortify, to offer consolation. His strongest statement of this principle comes in his essay “Joy or Night,” where he considers Philip Larkin’s exceedingly unconsoling poem “Aubade”: “Being brave/Lets no one off the grave./Death is no different whined at than withstood. ” Heaney endorses Miosz’s criticism that Larkin has defaulted on the poet’s obligation to be “on the side of life.” “‘Aubade,’” Heaney writes, “does add weight to the negative side of the scale and tips the balance definitely in favor of chemical law and mortal decline. The poem does not hold the lyre up in the face of the gods of the underworld.”

Sort of.  More than they used to.  But there’s still a big disconnect in the Canon.  This is a smart review, though, that shows it might be changing:

Great Literary American Novel Syndrome is a surprisingly persistent condition, despite the increasingly obvious likelihood that no work of art can sum up a nation as heterogeneous as ours without neglecting somebody. And in the end, critical reputation might become a moot point; substantive book reviews are a vanishing phenomenon, and the guardians of the citadel are fading away on every front. The last generation of old-fashioned androcentric Great American Novel practitioners will die out with Philip Roth; it’s difficult to picture a new version of that crew gaining a foothold in a marketplace where the vast majority of those who buy and read fiction are now women. Furthermore, in my (admittedly limited and anecdotal) experience, literary men under 45 are as likely to idolize Joan Didion or Flannery O’Connor as Norman Mailer or John Updike.