Human Nature

Pro-Life, Pro-Choice Progress

William Saletan — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 14:18:00 GMT

Recently, pro-life and pro-choice thinkers met at Princeton University for a frank, open-minded discussion of their differences and possible areas of collaboration. It was a useful conversation, illuminating several steps each side could take to advance a common agenda. Here are the takeaways for pro-lifers—and for pro-choicers.

Sodomy and Orgasms: Alternative Theories

William Saletan — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 14:19:00 GMT

Well, shame on me. Not for talking about sodomy—that taboo seems to be fading fast—but for doubting that women love it. These women are now coming forward to affirm that they're into it for their own pleasure, thank you very much. And they aren't alone. Bloggers, blog readers, and Slate commenters are offering lots of other theories to explain the orgasm data.

More here.

Sodomy and Orgasms

William Saletan — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 12:56:00 GMT

In 1992, 16 percent of women aged 18-24 said they'd tried anal sex. Now 20 percent of women aged 18-19 say they've done it, and by ages 20-24, the number is 40 percent. In 1992, the highest percentage of women in any age group who admitted to anal sex was 33. In 2002, it was 35. Now it's 46. ...

Check out the orgasm data. Among women who had vaginal sex in their last encounter, the percentage who said they reached orgasm was 65. Among those who received oral sex, it was 81. But among those who had anal sex, it was 94. Anal sex outscored oral.

More here.

The Invisible Roommate

William Saletan — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 02:24:00 GMT

Like countless college freshmen before him, Tyler Clementi needed a place to make out, but he had a roommate. So he asked his roommate to clear out of their Rutgers dorm room for a couple of hours. The roommate, Dharun Ravi, obliged him. But Ravi left something behind: his computer. It had a webcam and an Internet connection. That's how Ravi got back into the room. He never touched the door or window. He just tapped into the webcam from a friend's computer down the hall.

Today's freshmen are grappling with something much stranger than being gay. They're growing up in a world where people are with you even when they aren't.

More here.

Stem-Cell Throwback

William Saletan — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 15:58:00 GMT

The stem-cell ruling, issued Monday by U.S. District Chief Judge Royce Lamberth, says that federal funding of research using cells derived from destroyed embryos violates federal law. Pro-lifers are ecstatic. "Court Strikes Down Obama Administration Stem Cell Policy," crows Americans United for Life. But this ruling goes way beyond Obama. It voids Bush's stem-cell policy, too. And it does so on flimsy grounds with sloppy reasoning.

More here and here.

Stem cell - United States - Embryo - Stem cell controversy - Royce C. Lamberth

Is Donald Duck a Pervert?

William Saletan — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 04:38:00 GMT

We've seen this pattern before: an allegation of groping, followed by a bunch of other people recalling similar abuse. The initial charge makes the rest of the claims credible. But sometimes the allegations, and even the triggered memories, are false. That's what happened to Tigger. Don't let it happen to Donald Duck.

More here.

Donald Duck - Business - People - Men - Violence and Abuse

The Oil Spill's Ironic Ending

William Saletan — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 04:30:00 GMT

In early May, BP began drilling a relief well to stop the leak. Two weeks later, under orders from the government, it initiated a second relief well. The second well now extends 15,874 feet below the water's surface, and the first has reached a depth of 17,864 feet—just 100 feet from its destination. The point was to kill the leak by pumping mud and cement into the bottom of the troubled well. But now that the cap is in place, BP and the government are considering a "static kill"—pumping in the fatal mud from the top. Three months of drilling for nothing.

More here.

Oil Spill - BP - Cement - Government - Water

Ability, Heredity, and "Race"

William Saletan — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 16:46:00 GMT

There's nothing unusual about dismissing race as social construct. Racism watchdogs do it all the time. But they do it precisely to deny hereditary differences between blacks and whites. The authors of this study are affirming hereditary differences. That's what they mean by "survival fitness in different parts of the globe during thousands of years." Evolution in Europe and evolution in Africa produced different results.

More here.

Evolution - Africa - Heredity - Racism - Web Design and Development

Sex, Food, and Shame

William Saletan — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 19:09:00 GMT

Knee-jerk denunciations of shame, sin, and disgust are a tired and shallow kind of feminism. The food analogy makes that pretty clear. You can try to paint every moral criticism of porn or sexual extremity as an attack on women, but when the same criticisms are offered against men in eating contests-mindless orgies, commercial exploitation, abuse of the body-it's time to open your mind to the possibility that, no, this isn't just about patriarchy or controlling sex.

More here.

Feminism - Patriarchy - Sexuality - Advice - Politics of Sexuality

Major League Eating

William Saletan — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 11:49:00 GMT

Fifty years from now, when historians are looking for a moment that captures the depravity of our age—the gluttony, the self-destruction, the craving for worthless fame—it won't be bathhouses, Big Love, or AdultFriendFinder. It'll be Joey Chestnut stuffing that 68^th hot dog down his unresisting gullet, live on ESPN.

More here.

Major League Eating - Joey Chestnut - ESPN - Big Love - Takeru Kobayashi

Kagan's Abortion Spin

William Saletan — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 15:02:00 GMT

Fourteen years ago, to protect President Clinton's position on partial-birth abortions, Elena Kagan doctored a statement by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. ... All of us should be embarrassed that a sentence written by a White House aide now stands enshrined in the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court, erroneously credited with scientific authorship and rigor. Kagan should be most chastened of all. She fooled the nation's highest judges. As one of them, she had better make sure they aren't fooled again.

More here.

Elena Kagan - United States - United States Supreme Court - Abortion - Intact dilation and extraction

Blood and Bigotry

William Saletan — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 13:24:00 GMT

According to the FDA, men who have had sex with men "are, as a group, at increased risk for HIV, hepatitis B and certain other infections." To protect blood recipients from this risk, their blood must be excluded. This kind of group-based screening is a longstanding practice in blood regulation. Over the years, we've prohibited donors on the basis of nationality as well as sexuality. There's nothing wrong with such categorical exclusions, according to the FDA, as long as they make the blood supply safer. But if that's true, why not screen donors by race?

More here.

Food and Drug Administration - HIV - Men who have sex with men - Health - Blood

The Folly of Deepwater Drilling

William Saletan — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 13:25:00 GMT

From the comfort of your home or office, through the magic of Web video, you can watch the disaster unfolding on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico. What you're seeing—a leak that has spewed more than 36 million gallons of oil into the Gulf since April 20—is taking place a mile below the water's surface. The temperature there is just above freezing. The pressure is 2,300 pounds per square inch. ... You can see the spewing oil, but you can't touch it. None of us can. We've opened a hole in the earth that we can't close.

More here.

Gulf of Mexico - Business - Water - Oil - Pressure

The Memory Doctor

William Saletan — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 13:33:00 GMT

Do you trust your memories? Would you send a defendant to jail based on the recollection of a single witness? If an adult woman suddenly remembered her father molesting her 20 years earlier, would you believe it?

These are some of the questions raised in Slate's eight-part series, The Memory Doctor. The series focuses on Elizabeth Loftus, a psychologist who has challenged the reliability of eyewitness testimony and recovered memories of sexual abuse. From the introduction:

Loftus set out to prove that such memories could have been planted. To do so, she had to replicate the process. She had to make people remember, as sincerely and convincingly as any sworn witness, things that had never happened. And she succeeded. Her experiments shattered the legal system's credulity. Thanks to her ingenuity and persistence, the witch hunts of the recovered-memory era subsided.

But the experiments didn't stop. Loftus and her collaborators had become experts at planting memories. Couldn't they do something good with that power? So they began to practice deception for real. With a simple autobiographical tweak—altering people's recollections of childhood eating experiences—they embarked on a new project: making the world healthier and happier.

To begin reading The Memory Doctor, click here. Or you can start with Slate's memory-editing experiment, which kicked off the series.

Elizabeth Loftus - Sexual abuse - Memory - Memory Doctor - Slate

How Slate Edited History

William Saletan — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 13:31:00 GMT

In 1984, George Orwell told the story of Winston Smith, an employee in the propaganda office of a totalitarian regime. Smith's job at the fictional Ministry of Truth was to destroy photographs and alter documents, remaking the past to fit the needs of the present. But 1984 came and went, along with Soviet communism. In the age of the Internet, nobody could tamper with the past that way. Could they?

Yes, we can. In fact, two weeks ago, Slate did. We altered four images from recent political history, took a fifth out of context, and mixed them with three unadulterated scenes. We wanted to test the power of photographic editing to warp people's memories.

To read the results of our experiment, click here.

Winston Smith - George Orwell - Soviet Union - Ministry of Truth - Communism

Cutting Corners

William Saletan — Tue, 04 May 2010 13:44:00 GMT

Kevin Williamson, the deputy managing editor of National Review, has written a curious blog post at NR's "The Corner." He says yesterday's Slate piece about partisan echo chambers ignored close-mindedness on the left. He calls me "a liberal guy" who "can find almost nothing to criticize other than the (tendentiously described, if not outright mischaracterized) intellectual shortcomings of those who hold opinions other than his own."

To prove the point, Williamson then quotes me—and carefully removes the parts where I criticized the left. Check it out:

Williamson's clipped quote #1:

6. Conservatives who see the epistemic-closure conversation as a political threat describe politics as a "team" contest. ...

What Williamson clipped out after the ellipses:

I've seen the same dynamic on the left, where internal critics are dismissed as "concern trolls."

Williamson's clipped quote #2:

7. Some writers have turned the epistemic-closure conversation into a debate over which party is more smug. Conor Friedersdorf, a blogger at the American Scene, aptly mocks their hypocrisy: "There may be a problem in our thinking, but the important thing to focus on is that the other guys are worse." [Jonah] Goldberg, a perpetrator of this blame-deflecting tactic ....

What Williamson clipped out after the ellipses:

is right about one thing: Epistemic closure isn't unique to any era or faction. It's a problem "for all human associations and movements." Challenging your community's delusions is your responsibility, whether that community is CPAC or Jeremiah Wright's church.

Another line Williamson clipped out:

Then MSNBC booted guest host Donny Deutsch off the air after he used two MSNBC anchors to illustrate left-wing rage.

As a longtime fan of Rich Lowry, Ramesh Ponnuru, Jonah Goldberg, and other writers at NR, I'd like to believe that these omissions are just oversights or unavoidable casualties of excerpting a longer article. But I'm having trouble mustering that defense for Williamson. He clipped quote #2 in the middle of a sentence to hide from NR readers the fact that the next words were an endorsement of Goldberg's observation that close-mindedness is not just a conservative problem. In so doing, he also neatly removed my criticism of Jeremiah Wright's church. Having done this, he derisively and dishonestly titled his post, "Because Liberals By Definition Cannot Be Closed-Minded."

None of the ellipses in what I've written above are mine. They're all Williamson's.

I challenge Williamson or the editors of NR to defend his use of the ellipses.

Jonah Goldberg - Conservatism - Politics - Jeremiah Wright - National Review

Sexting and Adultery

William Saletan — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 12:32:00 GMT

Everyone with an Internet connection now knows plenty about Tiger Woods' sex life. But we don't know it from a bimbo getting caught in a hallway. We know it from his texts. He treated his phone as a private channel, a place where he could hide his darkest thoughts from the world. Instead, the phone manifested and published them. His trysts are gone. His marriage is on the rocks. But his texts? They're immortal.

More here.

Human sexual behavior - Tiger Woods - Golf - Sports - Marriage

Eggonomics 101

William Saletan — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 12:20:00 GMT

For every 100-point increase in average SAT score, women at a college are offered an average of $2,350 more for their eggs. There's no mystery about what's going on here. It's the logic of the marketplace. At the grocery store, you pay more for bigger chicken eggs. At colleges, you pay more for smarter human eggs.

More here.

Chicken - Grocery store - Web Design and Development - Business - Cooking

When Virtual Reality Kills

William Saletan — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 18:18:00 GMT

The Korean couple left their real daughter at home, alone, while they spent their days at an Internet café. Or rather, they spent their days in cyberspace. Once a day, they returned to the physical world to feed their daughter powdered milk. Then they went back to the world they cared about.

One day, after a 12-hour stint online, they visited the physical world and found their baby dead.

More here.

Virtual reality - Korean language - Cyberspace - Milk - Companies

Abortion, Guns, and Racial Hypocrisy

William Saletan — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 16:42:00 GMT

There's something odd about the billboard campaign against aborting black babies. The child who appears beside the text is fully born. Abortion doesn't kill such children. What kills them, all too often, is shooting. If you wanted to save living, breathing, fully born children from a tool of extermination that is literally targeting blacks, the first problem you would focus on is guns. They are killing the present, not just the future. But the sponsors of the billboards don't support gun control. They oppose it.

More here.

Abortion - Gun politics - Child - Gun Control - United States

Human Nature

Pro-Life, Pro-Choice Progress

Sodomy and Orgasms: Alternative Theories

Sodomy and Orgasms

The Invisible Roommate

Stem-Cell Throwback

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Is Donald Duck a Pervert?

The Oil Spill's Ironic Ending

Ability, Heredity, and "Race"

Sex, Food, and Shame

Major League Eating

Kagan's Abortion Spin

Blood and Bigotry

The Folly of Deepwater Drilling

The Memory Doctor

How Slate Edited History

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Cutting Corners

Sexting and Adultery

Eggonomics 101

When Virtual Reality Kills

Abortion, Guns, and Racial Hypocrisy