Curbed: The ‘free love’ utopia behind your forks and knives

In the 1940s, it wasn’t sex that sold—it was love. When Oneida, a silverware manufacturer, took out ads, instead of focusing on forks and knives and serving spoons, they showed a passionate embrace between a woman and man returning from war.

“Dare to dream...dare to cut yourself a slice of heaven. Some day you’ll have it...the storybook house, the crackling fire...and on your table your treasured Community,” stated one ad for Oneida’s Community Plate flatware. The “Back Home for Keeps” ads were so popular that they became the subject of a 1945 LIFE magazine article that called them “a new kind of pin-up craze.”

The irony is these ads were selling monogamous, possessive love—the exact opposite of what the founders of Oneida stood for. Long before making flatware, Oneida was a religious commune founded on polyamory.

Oneida was founded in 1848 by John Humphrey Noyes, a former theological student who believed that paradise could be found on Earth through nontraditional sexual and familial structures. This included communal child raising; “complex marriage,” a term Noyes invented to describe how all Oneidans were married to one another; and sexual rituals, like male continence. Noyes built an enormous mansion in upstate New York for his “family” and amassed hundreds of followers. For years, the community succeeded. But after Noyes died, the community pivoted—into a thriving business.

In this episode, host Avery Trufelman speaks with Paul Gebhardt, creative director and senior vice president of design at the Oneida Group; Ellen Wayland-Smith, author of Oneida: From Free Love Utopia to the Well-Set Table and descendent of the Oneida Community; and Kate Wayland-Smith, resident of the Oneida Community Mansion House.

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The New York Times: The Nuns Who Bought and Sold Human Beings

Historians say that nearly all of the orders of Catholic sisters established by the late 1820s owned slaves. Today, many Catholic sisters are outspoken champions of social justice and some are grappling with this painful history even as lawmakers in Congress and presidential candidates debate whether reparations should be paid to the descendants of enslaved people. [...]

And while she would like to see the order’s history of slaveholding incorporated into the curriculum of the schools they founded, few of those schools have publicly acknowledged their origins, she said, despite the extensive research that has been done.

“Not one of the school websites has anything about enslavement,” said Sister Dillard, who was also a member of the society’s committee on slavery, accountability and reconciliation. “We’ve whitewashed our history.” [...]

The Jesuit priests, who founded and ran Georgetown, for instance, were among the largest slaveholders in Maryland. And as women began to enter the first Catholic convents in the late-18th and early-19th centuries, some brought their human property with them as part of their dowries, historians say. (I stumbled across this history during my reporting on Georgetown.)

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BBC: Tomorrow's Gods: What is the future of religion?

We take it for granted that religions are born, grow and die – but we are also oddly blind to that reality. When someone tries to start a new religion, it is often dismissed as a cult. When we recognise a faith, we treat its teachings and traditions as timeless and sacrosanct. And when a religion dies, it becomes a myth, and its claim to sacred truth expires. Tales of the Egyptian, Greek and Norse pantheons are now considered legends, not holy writ. [...]

Now that we’re actually in the 21st Century, Berger’s view remains an article of faith for many secularists – although Berger himself recanted in the 1990s. His successors are emboldened by surveys showing that in many countries, increasing numbers of people are saying they have no religion. That’s most true in rich, stable countries like Sweden and Japan, but also, perhaps more surprisingly, in places like Latin America and the Arab world. Even in the US, long a conspicuous exception to the axiom that richer countries are more secular, the number of “nones” has been rising sharply. In the 2018 General Social Survey of US attitudes, “no religion” became the single largest group, edging out evangelical Christians. [...]

The pattern Pew predicted was of “the secularising West and the rapidly growing rest”. Religion will continue to grow in economically and socially insecure places like much of sub-Saharan Africa – and to decline where they are stable. That chimes with what we know about the deep-seated psychological and neurological drivers of belief. When life is tough or disaster strikes, religion seems to provide a bulwark of psychological (and sometimes practical) support. In a landmark study, people directly affected by the 2011 earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand became significantly more religious than other New Zealanders, who became marginally less religious. [...]

So the nones mostly represent not atheists, nor even secularists, but a mixture of “apatheists” – people who simply don’t care about religion – and practitioners of what you might call “disorganised religion”. While the world religions are likely to persist and evolve for the foreseeable future, we might for the rest of this century see an efflorescence of relatively small religions jostling to break out among these groups. But if Big Gods and shared faiths are key to social cohesion, what happens without them?

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openDemocracy: Going back somewhere: nostalgia and the radical right

The figureheads of Brexit – Nigel Farage, Jacob Rees-Mogg, and now the newly-appointed Prime Minister Boris Johnson – are self-consciously figures of British political nostalgia. As James Meek has written, perceptively, Rees-Mogg the politician embodies a ‘steak-and-kidney pudding Edwardian Britishness’; a performance that is consciously meant to evoke a lost time on the edges of cultural memory. With his simultaneous invocation of nanny and the Morris Minor, the Victorian age and the 1920s, Rees-Mogg is a perfect embodiment of what the French critic Roland Barthes famously termed a mythology. [...]

‘This country wants nostalgia’, mused the poet and musician Gil Scott Heron in 1981, reflecting on the election of Ronald Reagan. The American electorate had voted, he thought, ‘to go back as far as they can – even if it's only as far as last week’. In this analysis, the destination of our backwards gaze is less important to this type of politics than the fact that it’s backwards we’re facing. Indeed, for Scott-Heron, this gaze peered at a fictive, mythologized vision of America, one akin to the B-movie landscape in which Reagan had made his name. Yesterday was, for Scott-Heron, ‘the day of our cinema heroes riding to the rescue at the last possible moment’, the ‘man in the white hat or the man on the white horse’. It is, tellingly, the ‘white’ cowboy that saves America at the last moment; the figure riding into our vision from out of screen shot is an idealized image of Anglo strength. ‘Come with us back to those inglorious days when heroes weren’t zeros, before fair was square, when the cavalry came straight away and all American men were like Hemingway’. Hemingway’s projected vision of white masculinity – the great white hunter – has been undermined since, of course. Actually, it was undermined by Hemingway himself, in his own writing and career. Inscribed into the Hemingway mythos are the elements of its own collapse. It is a self-consciously stagey vision of the hard-shooting, hard-drinking, hard-fighting frontiersman, a hammy performance of American maleness. [...]

In other words, the electorate are engaged at some level in a fictive transaction, where we know that what we intend to buy is indeed a counterfeit. ‘Put your orders in America,’ Scott-Heron proclaims, ‘And quick as Kodak your leaders duplicate with the accent being on the dupes’. In a song that’s about cinema and authenticity, the Kodak reference speaks of a world in which value can be quickly and cheaply reproduced. Everything about this kind of politics, then, is fake, all is surface; and at some level its supporters know they are buying the cheap copy Rolex. ‘We’re starring in a B-movie, and we would rather have had John Wayne’, sang Scott-Heron in 1981. The point about the B-movie analogy is that the form makes no real attempt to refer to a ‘real world’ beyond its borders. [...]

Taken together, these seemingly innocuous emblems and rituals – foods, images, phrases – may hide a more sinister purpose, providing feel-good cover for dangerous new forms of ethno-nationalism, protectionism and racism. Neo-fascists are nostalgic nowadays; the Italian radical right group CasaPound have reconstructed fascism as what Pietro Castelli Gattinara and Caterina Froio have characterized as a ‘hybrid communication style’. Images of Mussolini and Fascist iconography mingle with references to cultural figures sympathetic to fascist ideas, or those who might be termed proto-fascist – Ezra Pound, obviously, but also Marinetti, D’Annunzio, Sorel, Knut Hamsun, Yeats, and Nietzsche. The effect is a strange collage of nostalgic nods to the years of the Fascist ventennio and to ‘pop culture’.

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The Atlantic: Why Trump Supporters Hate Being Called Racists

As speakers mounted their defenses of the president, it seemed apparent that supporters were cheering them on as a means of affirming not just Trump, but also themselves. Because to accuse a politician of holding virulent racist beliefs is also, if only implicitly, to condemn his or her voters of harboring those same tendencies.

And that’s what the rally-goers I spoke to last night seemed most nonplussed by—not so much that Trump had been roundly condemned in recent days as a racist, or a bigot, but that they, by virtue of association, had been as well. But rather than distancing them from Trump, the accusations have only seemed to strengthen their support of this president. To back down, they suggested, would be to bow down to the scourge of political correctness. [...]

When I asked Roseanna and Amy whether they would join in a “Send her back!” chant were it to take place that night, both women said no, but out of deference to Trump. “He apologized for that, so I think us as Trump supporters will respect him for that,” Roseanna said. She then shared her thoughts on the chant’s target, Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, who came to America as a refugee from Somalia.

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FiveThirtyEight: Why So Many House Republicans Are Retiring, And Why More Could Be On The Way

And given the high number of Republican retirements from the House in 2018 — at least 23, according to our count — which marked the most “pure” GOP retirements (in other words, excluding those who left to seek another office) since the 2008 election, we wanted to better understand what is driving Republican retirements this year. So here’s a look at how the members voted (including how often they were in line with the president’s stated position), the makeup of their districts and the margin by which they won reelection in 2018: [...]

As you can see, these retirements have come from very different corners of the GOP. All but one of them has voted overwhelmingly with Trump during the 116th Congress, but the members range from being quite moderate to fairly conservative, based on the ideological measure DW-Nominate. And although the partisan lean of all these districts is at least somewhat Republican, the retirees also experienced a mix of results in 2018, ranging from extremely narrow wins to easy victories. But broadly speaking, these retirements fall into three main groups — those who have disagreed with the president, those who faced tough reelection odds and those who would likely lose their seniority status. Some members, of course, fall into more than one category. [...]

Of course, these early retirements don’t necessarily signal a wave of future exits. But considering we’re still many months away from passing the deadlines to run for federal office in all 50 states, the retirement train may keep chugging along in the coming weeks. Other rumored potential retirees include veteran members like 17-term Michigan Rep. Fred Upton, who also voted to condemn the president’s tweets. More possible retirees include the two other Republicans holding onto seats Clinton won in 2016 — New York Rep. John Katko and Pennsylvania Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick. In fact, Fitzpatrick, who also voted to condemn Trump’s tweets, already has a prospective primary challenger lining up to take him on for being insufficiently pro-Trump. There’s also the fact that the last time a party flipped the House in a presidential cycle was in 1952. With that history in mind, as well as the misery of minority status in a hyper-partisan atmosphere on Capitol Hill, don’t be shocked if more Republicans decide to exit stage right.

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The Guardian: He, she, or ... ? Gender-neutral pronouns reduce biases – study

According to the report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, those who used gender-neutral pronouns for the cartoon task were more likely to use non-male names in their short story. The gender-neutral pronoun also appeared to improve positive feelings towards LGBT people. The word hen, the researchers believe, helped to combat mental biases that favoured men, and raise awareness of other genders.

Sabine Sczesny, a professor of social psychology at the University of Bern, said the research was further evidence that gender-inclusive language could reduce gender-biases and “contribute to the promotion of gender and LGBT equality and tolerance”. [...]

“From at least the mid-nineteenth century onwards, new coinages have attempted to provide English with a grammatically uncontroversial gender-neutral singular pronoun and related adjectives,” said Jonathan Dent, senior assistant editor at the OED. “American writers of the 1860s and 1870s gave us (s)he or s/he and ze, while hir, first suggested in the form hier in 1910, was embraced by the Californian Sacramento Bee newspaper, which used it as an alternative to him or her and his or her between 1920 and the late 1940s.

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The Guardian: Why are thirtysomethings lonely? Because society doesn’t value friendship

Millennials aren’t just the poorest generation; they are also the loneliest. According to data from YouGov, 30% of millennials (those born between 1982 and 1999) say they always or often feel lonely, compared with 20% of Gen X and 15% of baby boomers. Also, 22% of millennials say they have no friends, which is a significantly higher percentage than those in older generations. [...]

Our culture is based around celebrating romantic and familial milestones: engagements, weddings, christenings. We are not taught to venerate or celebrate friendship in the same way we are romantic relationships. We are not taught that friendships can be just as complex, if not more so, than romantic couplings; that losing a friend can be as heartbreaking as losing a lover. So, when we get to a point in our lives when our friendships start to change, there is no wonder it can feel so lonely.

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The Atlantic: The Death Rattle of White Supremacy

Like a number of other recent attacks, at least two of these incidents appear to be connected to an ideological infrastructure that nurtures and mainstreams hate against people of color. The El Paso shooter allegedly wrote a four-page note to explain his deadly rampage. The author of the manifesto claimed that he was inspired to target Hispanics after reading the manifesto of the Christchurch, New Zealand, terrorist who attacked two mosques and killed 51 people in March. He wanted to kill Hispanic immigrants as an “act of preservation” to reclaim his country from “destruction,” he explained. He referred to Hispanics as “invaders with high birth rates” and expressed his fear of “shameless race mixers,” “the threat of the Hispanic voting bloc,” and the “cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by invasion.”

The manifesto expresses extreme versions of a fear that has also been expressed by prominent political figures. President Donald Trump used invasion to describe a caravan of immigrants trying to cross the border. The Fox News host Tucker Carlson has called immigrants “invaders” who “pollute” the country and make it dirtier. In the past few weeks, President Trump told four congresswomen of color, all U.S. citizens, to go back to where they came from. He stood onstage at a campaign rally while the crowd chanted “Send her back!” for 13 seconds. He retweeted Katie Hopkins, a British extremist who has called migrants “cockroaches” and called for a “final solution” for Muslims. Some Trump supporters now openly flash white-power signs in front of cameras. [...]

As America becomes a majority-minority country, the nation will experience more racial anxiety, which was the primary reason many voters went for Trump in 2016. If you have been in power your whole life, equality looks like oppression. Some white Americans feel that people of color are “replacing” them with each success, each publication, and each promotion. Those who have historically been marginalized, excluded, or cast as permanent sidekicks, though, finally feel that we have the chance to taste the American dream, which in my home tastes like goat biryani.

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