Vox: Why small talk is so excruciating

The problem, of course, is that small talk precedes big talk in the normal course of human affairs. Most people feel the need to get comfortable with one another before they jump into the deep end of serious conversation or ongoing friendship. Which means if you hate and avoid small talk, you are also, as a practical matter, cutting yourself off from lots of meaningful social interaction, which is a bummer. Also, research shows that more frequent small talk, even among those who identify as introverts, makes people happier. Also, despite recent advances in technology, small talk remains an unavoidable part of many basic life tasks. [...]

For all its ubiquity, small talk hasn't come in for a ton of academic study. The first theoretical account is generally traced to anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski, in his 1923 essay "The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages." He noted that a great deal of talk "does not serve any purpose of communicating ideas" but instead "serves to establish bonds of personal union." Malinowski termed the exchange of such talk "phatic communion" ("phatic" from the Greek phatos, for "spoken"). It is speech as social bonding rather than communication. [...]

In the 1970s, however, sociolinguistics became more attuned to the everyday forms of speech that, after all, constitute the bulk of our verbal communication. And feminist sociolinguistics in particular noted that a dismissive attitude toward speech that establishes and maintains relationships — as opposed to task-oriented or informational speech — was of a piece with patriarchal disrespect for traditionally female roles. Think of the derogatory implications of the term "gossip," which is, after all, social talk about social dynamics.  [...]

Malinowski was wrong — small talk is not just important for those seeking companionship (or avoiding silence). It's also important in a whole range of social, commercial, and professional settings. It weaves and reweaves the social fabric, enacting and reinforcing social roles. Think of the different varieties of small talk between doctor and patient, vendor and customer, employer and employee. Each has its own rhythms and rules. And of course the character of small talk differs from place to place, culture to culture. For example, silence, contra Malinowski, is not viewed as threatening or uncomfortable in all cultures.

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The New Yorker: How Martin Luther Changed the World

The fact that Luther’s protest, rather than others that preceded it, brought about the Reformation is probably due in large measure to his outsized personality. He was a charismatic man, and maniacally energetic. Above all, he was intransigent. To oppose was his joy. And though at times he showed that hankering for martyrdom that we detect, with distaste, in the stories of certain religious figures, it seems that, most of the time, he just got out of bed in the morning and got on with his work. Among other things, he translated the New Testament from Greek into German in eleven weeks. [...]

He was apparently a galvanizing speaker, but during his first twelve years as a monk he published almost nothing. This was no doubt due in part to the responsibilities heaped on him at Wittenberg, but at this time, and for a long time, he also suffered what seems to have been a severe psychospiritual crisis. He called his problem his Anfechtungen—trials, tribulations—but this feels too slight a word to cover the afflictions he describes: cold sweats, nausea, constipation, crushing headaches, ringing in his ears, together with depression, anxiety, and a general feeling that, as he put it, the angel of Satan was beating him with his fists. Most painful, it seems, for this passionately religious young man was to discover his anger against God. Years later, commenting on his reading of Scripture as a young friar, Luther spoke of his rage at the description of God’s righteousness, and of his grief that, as he was certain, he would not be judged worthy: “I did not love, yes, I hated the righteous God who punishes sinners.” [...]

Guided by those convictions, and fired by his new certainty of God’s love for him, Luther became radicalized. He preached, he disputed. Above all, he wrote pamphlets. He denounced not only the indulgence trade but all the other ways in which the Church made money off Christians: the endless pilgrimages, the yearly Masses for the dead, the cults of the saints. He questioned the sacraments. His arguments made sense to many people, notably Frederick the Wise. Frederick was pained that Saxony was widely considered a backwater. He now saw how much attention Luther brought to his state, and how much respect accrued to the university that he (Frederick) had founded at Wittenberg. He vowed to protect this troublemaker. [...]

Luther’s anti-Semitism would be a moral problem under any circumstances. People whom we admire often commit terrible sins, and we have no good way of explaining this to ourselves. But when one adds the historical factor—that, in Luther’s case, the judgment is being made five centuries after the event—we hit a brick wall. At the Nuremberg trials, in 1946, Julius Streicher, the founder and publisher of the Jew-baiting newspaper Der Stürmer, quoted Luther as the source of his beliefs and said that if he was going to be blamed Luther would have to be blamed as well. But, in the words of Thomas Kaufmann, a professor of church history at the University of Göttingen, “The Nuremberg judges sat in judgment over the mass murderers of the twentieth century, not over the delusions of a misguided sixteenth-century theology professor. . . . Another judge must judge Luther.” How fortunate to be able to believe that such a judge will come, and have an answer.

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The Atlantic: When Rich Places Want to Secede

A major reason cited for the crisis? As Catalan protesters cried, “Madrid nos roba”—“Madrid is robbing us”—by which they mean the federal government is taking more than it gives in transfer payments. Catalonia, the northeastern region that includes Barcelona and holds 16 percent of the Spanish population, accounts for about a fifth of Spain’s $1.2 trillion economy and about a quarter of all Spanish exports and industry. Most crucially, it pays Madrid $12 billion more in taxes per year than it gets back.

As a relatively rich region with its own independence movement, Catalonia's not alone: A small set of secession movements in historically productive areas, most visibly in Europe, say they’d be better off on their own, and more are pointing to Catalonia's example to regain momentum. Belgium’s Flanders region, one of the birthplaces of modern commerce and the host to a separatist party that made gains after the global financial crisis, boasts a GDP per capita 120 percent higher than the EU average. If the German state of Bavaria were its own country, as the Bavarian Party wishes, its economic output would crack the top 10 of EU member states, according to its government. And last weekend, two deep-pocketed northern Italian regions that are home to each Milan and Venice, passed nonbinding referenda for greater autonomy. In Europe, resentments of paying to cover less productive countrymen are longstanding, but recently they seem to have intensified as a swirl of nationalist sentiments has swept the continent. [...]

Erin Jenne, a professor of international relations at Central European University, agrees. Economic inequality is one of a few factors that can keep independence movements simmering, but they won’t boil over without a catalyst—usually some external circumstance like a major political crisis, or an offer from another country to provide military support to a region with separatist aspirations, she said. After all, inequality between regions is baked into the entire concept of modern nationhood—if subsidizing poorer parts of a country were motivation enough to split off, every region would have done it by now.

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Jacobin Magazine: Against Conspiracy Theories

To be blunt, this is hokum. It’s true that Kennedy made a few decisions that angered one faction or another of the national security establishment; almost every president does at some point. But overall, Kennedy was a gift to that establishment, a militaristic, anticommunist hawk dressed up in the soft garments of trite, inspirational liberalism. Kennedy perpetuated the myth of a US-Soviet “missile gap” to win the 1960 election, despite almost certainly being informed it didn’t exist. (To be fair, there was a missile gap — it was just in the United States’ favor). Once in office, he then sharply increased military spending, expanded the US nuclear arsenal, and stationed nuclear-armed missiles around the world.  

The Cuban missile crisis could have been avoided had Kennedy put a stop to the CIA’s ultimately disastrous Cuban regime change operation, including multiple assassination attempts against Castro. Sure, he resisted some of the most extreme elements of the national security establishment, but Kennedy was a reliable Cold Warrior. And while there’s evidence he had private doubts about Vietnam, so did almost every policymaker involved in that catastrophe. As it happens, Kennedy initially expanded the US presence there, despite his personal ambivalence.  [...]

To some extent, this conspiracy theory is a funhouse mirror reflection of the Bush administration’s very real dishonesty and depravity. But it’s also a bizarre distraction from the administration’s very real, behind-the-scenes wrongdoing around September 11 — from the fact that Bush was on vacation all of August while warnings of an attack came in (some of which were simply ignored) to the administration’s very real conspiracy to lie its way into the Iraq War. In fact, to some extent the nuttiness of the inside-job theories helped delegitimize such critiques.

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IFLScience: Prominent British Ex-Politician Claims Pollution Is Making People Transgender

Another day, another outdated, outmoded, and anachronistic politician saying something ridiculous and offensive. This time it's the turn of former Chairman of the British Conservative Party, Lord Norman Tebbit, who has written in a national newspaper that he thinks pollution is making people transgender.

In a comment piece in The Telegraph, the 86-year-old Peer, who it is worth noting has a pretty detailed record of speaking out against LGBT+ rights, claims that the rise in people identifying as transgender is possibly down to the increase in pollution, and that science backs him up. I fear this might be overkill, but science really doesn’t. [...]

Predictably, this isn’t the first time that a British politician has come up with some bat-shit explanation for the increase in people identifying as LGBT+. Only earlier this year a Liberal Democrat (yeah, the irony isn’t lost on us either) parliamentary candidate Susan King claimed that “there are a lot of feminising hormones getting into the environment and that has to be taken into consideration; it's affecting people's sexuality, basically.”

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