Dining on Sacred Cow
Mind the Seams
This said, a few days ago, my faith in online platforms as seamless extensions of humanity was faced with a crisis of tangled wires and mislabeled files. Recoil if you must, but like many of my peers, I’m in the midst of the career recruiting season and engaged in the online dating world. Both pursuits of a better life require abstraction into profiles, reduction to essential tidbits, and careful curation of flattering perspectives.
On Living Forever
Not to speak of the tremendous gains in average life expectancy made over the last few years, radical life extension is no longer the fringe interest of a few high-tech narcissists. In a private competition sponsored by the Methuselah Foundation, genetic researchers engineered a house mouse to perdure for five years, a dramatic improvement over Mus musculus’ average lifespan of one and a half to two. Following the assumption that aging is above all a material process with discrete genetic and biochemical components, we can be sure that it’s possible—in more than theory—to reverse-engineer and manipulate a process that has bounded and shaped every creature’s existence from time immemorial.
Living World Music
My brother, an all-American devotee of the Chili Peppers and The Doors, insists that I’ve forced a taste for world music. Whenever my car stereo choices get too sappy or too thuggish, too fast or too slow, I’m met with the familiar passenger-side refrain: “You wouldn’t like this if it were in English.”
White Israelis, Brown Palestinians
In her brief column, Amani Al-Khatahtbeh poses a standard pro-Palestinian argument about conditions on the ground in Gaza, well within the expected range of opinions that populate my heated, Middle East-heavy news feed. What stands out most is a peculiar claim about American media coverage of the conflict: “We are basically being told, ‘It’s OK that our largest-funded ally is killing all those brown people—they asked for it.’”
For Gary Johnson
Living in Cambridge, I will probably have to deal with weeks of Barack Obama As Sexual Experience, professors and punks alike dumbly smiling on the street, their heads held high for no reason other than that the Messiah has come again. This is not to say that I’d prefer a Republican victory: I have little patience for light beer, prayer circles, or live ammunition.
