From Reason I am Here:

The first time I tried cilantro I didn’t realize it; I just thought somebody had emptied a bottle of Old Spice on my pizza in an attempt to poison me. Cilantro tastes like soap to approximately 10% of the people who have had their genotype analyzed by 23andMe. The currently accepted explanation is that those of us who passionately despise cilantro were born with a genetic variant known as a single-nucleotide polymorphism (or SNP, pronounced ‘snip’).

The genome has 3 billion nucleotides (the building blocks, known as A, C, G and T), and 10 million of them are thought to be SNPs. That means that a significant percentage of the population has one letter in a specific location (an A, for example) and everyone else has a different letter at that location. The cilantro SNP is called rs72921001, and apparently, its genomic location lays close to a cluster of olfactory receptor genes that includes OR6A2, the gene most likely to be alerting our brain about the presence of cilantro.

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Michael Lemonick in National Geographic (photo by Mark Thiessen):

It's difficult to pin down when the search for life among the stars morphed from science fiction to science, but one key milestone was an astronomy meeting in November 1961. It was organized by Frank Drake, a young radio astro­nomer who was intrigued with the idea of searching for alien radio transmissions.

When he called the meeting, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, “was essentially taboo in astronomy,” Drake, now 84, remembers. But with his lab director's blessing, he brought in a handful of astronomers, chemists, biologists, and engineers, including a young planetary scientist named Carl Sagan, to discuss what is now called astrobiology, the science of life beyond Earth. In particular, Drake wanted some expert help in deciding how sensible it might be to devote significant radio telescope time to listening for alien broadcasts and what might be the most promising way to search. How many civilizations might reasonably be out there? he wondered. So before his guests arrived, he scribbled an equation on the blackboard.

That scribble, now famous as the Drake equation, lays out a process for answering his question. You start out with the formation rate of sunlike stars in the Milky Way, then multiply that by the fraction of such stars that have planetary systems. Take the resulting number and multiply that by the number of life-friendly planets on average in each such system—planets, that is, that are about the size of Earth and orbit at the right distance from their star to be hospitable to life. Multiply that by the fraction of those planets where life arises, then by the fraction of those where life evolves intelligence, and then by the fraction of those that might develop the technology to emit radio signals we could detect.

The final step: Multiply the number of radio-savvy civilizations by the average time they're likely to keep broadcasting or even to survive. If such advanced societies typically blow themselves up in a nuclear holocaust just a few dec­ades after developing radio technology, for example, there would probably be very few to listen for at any given time.

The equation made perfect sense, but there was one problem. Nobody had a clue what any of those fractions or numbers were, except for the very first variable in the equation: the formation rate of sunlike stars. The rest was pure guesswork. If SETI scientists managed to snag an extraterrestrial radio signal, of course, these uncertainties wouldn't matter. But until that happened, experts on every item in the Drake equation would have to try to fill it in by nailing down the numbers—by finding the occurrence rate for planets around sunlike stars or by trying to solve the mystery of how life took root on Earth.

It would be a third of a century before scientists could even begin to put rough estimates into the equation.

More here.

Alexandra Socarides in The LA Review of Books:

It’s one thing to say that Dickinson’s poems are uncertain, or complicated, or contradictory (all of which they are), but it’s an entirely other thing to compound that uncertainty with my own. In my basement, visitors wanted to connect with me by reciting the first line of a Dickinson poem that clearly summed something up for them. I was happy to let them do that, even if I was a little freaked out by the whole experience.

But, in the end, Dickinson got me, as she always does.

One of the mysterious things about poetry is how a reader can walk away from a poem with what he or she thinks is a clear sense of its message or moral, when really the poem itself says something far more complicated than that. One famous example is Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” which tends to be read as a call for people to strike out on their own independent course, when really Frost marks no substantive difference between the two roads in his poem. (In an episode of the first season of “Orange Is the New Black,” Piper Chapman explains as much to her cellmates, who are highly annoyed by her need to complicate the meaning of the poem for them.) A similar thing happens with “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” The message of this poem is almost always taken to be that it is a mistake to seek fame, that it is preferable to be a nobody than a somebody. Coupled with the knowledge that Dickinson only published ten poems in her lifetime, this poem becomes (often for aspiring writers) a statement of artistic intent, a declaration of the joys of private, anonymous art making and a rejection of publicity. But in order to make this poem into a manifesto on the pleasures of the private world versus the dreariness of the public world, one has to make a variety of assumptions about both Dickinson and poetry.

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Dave Byrne in Boston Review (photo: Alan Lomax, Library of Congress):

The folk revival that emerged in New York in the mid-twentieth century took as its texts two primary sources: the six-volume Anthology of American Folk Music curated by the filmmaker Harry Smith, and the field recordings of John and Alan Lomax, particularly the acetates featuring obscure blues singers and inmates from the prison farms that flourished, if that is the word, in the southern states. Unlike Smith’s anthology, which was culled from a number of traditions and ethnicities, Lomax’s recordings during this period focused almost exclusively on African American music.

After the first recording of “Ain’t No More Cane” in 1933—which we will wander back to—the song goes largely silent, enters a period of dormancy from which it will not emerge for several decades. When it is recorded again and released in 1958, it comes from an unlikely source—Lonnie Donegan, the Scottish-born “king of skiffle.”

Skiffle, an idiosyncratic blend of early jazz, blues, and jug-band music, is closely associated with its mid-century practitioners in the United Kingdom. Its roots, however, lie in African American culture, and the term gained currency in pre-Depression Chicago. But by the early 1940s, the homemade ethos of the music—guitars, banjos, jugs, tea chest, kazoos—was pretty much a done deal.

In the late 1950s skiffle got a second wind in England. Donegan had several huge novelty hits in the idiom, with “Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavour (On the Bedpost Overnight?)” and “My Old Man’s a Dustman.” Donegan immersed himself in American jazz, blues, and forgotten work songs. His keening tenor and frailing banjo on “Ain’t No More Cane” conjure Appalachia more than East Texas, but the verses are terse and spooky. He cuts to the heart of it somehow.

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Mark P. Mills and M. Anthony Mills in City Journal:

How will these technologies transform human communication? The beginnings of an answer can be found in the nearly century-old writings of German critic Walter Benjamin, who came of age during the first information revolution. He belonged, as he put it, to a “generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar” but that “now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds . . . and the tiny, fragile human body.” Among these changes, Benjamin thought, was the loss of an authentic form of human experience—storytelling. Before the telegraph and the printing press, storytellers communicated by word of mouth. Stories imparted practical wisdom and timeless lessons that were seamless and intuitive to the listener. These lessons were preserved in a collective cultural memory. But the era of storytelling was overtaken by the era of information, a wholly new mode of communication revolving around facts, rather than experience. The purpose of facts is to inform, not teach. Information, Benjamin says, is “understandable in itself.” It does not need to be preserved but is “consumed” and forgotten as soon as it becomes “old.” Information is not timeless but timely. The communication of information requires not storytellers but intermediaries. Benjamin’s time saw the rise of an expanding cadre of professional journalists critical to the process of selecting, interpreting, and communicating facts. Moreover, information was not universally accessible; its consumption was subject to social, educational, and financial constraints.

Today, we stand at a historical turning point similar to the one that Benjamin lived through. A generation that went to school in buses driven by human beings will likely live to see a world of vehicles driven by robots. Data sensors and recorders are embedded into machinery, the environment, and even our bodies. Wireless networks share and algorithms sort, analyze, and store the data in virtual collective-memory banks, compiling treasure troves of—as yet—mostly untapped knowledge. More than 80 percent of all data remain beyond the reach of today’s nascent big-data analytics.

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Danny Heitman in Chritian Science Monitor:

On July 4, 1845, Thoreau moved into the cabin on Walden Pond. Soon after, Harvard asked what he had been up to and Thoreau detailed his adventures for his alma mater.

It’s class reunion season across America – the time when alumni of high schools and colleges gather to see how well they’ve fared when compared with their former classmates. And some of us might naturally wonder how we’ll measure up, in terms of professional and personal accomplishments, when we return to our alma maters. For a little bit of courage, we can always consult Henry David Thoreau, who moved into the cabin he built at Walden Pond 169 years ago today, on July 4, 1845. He stayed two years, sustaining himself by taking on odd jobs, but spending most of his time watching nature, thinking, and writing. He left Walden Pond in the autumn of 1847, moving into the home of his mentor and benefactor Ralph Waldo Emerson to help care for the family while Emerson was in Europe. That’s when a letter arrived from the secretary of Thoreau’s class at Harvard, where Thoreau had graduated in 1837. The secretary was sending along one of those “Where Are They Now?” questionnaires, apparently popular even then, in which graduates can brag about how well they’d done since leaving campus.

Thoreau had little to show for his decade away from an exclusive Ivy League school – little, that is, by the yardstick that most of the world used to measure success. He had no spouse, no regular employment and only a handful of possessions. But Thoreau was confident enough in his peculiar sense of purpose to fill out the questionnaire matter-of-factly. Asked to state his occupation, he suggested that he was something of an overachiever, having not one job, but many: “I am a Schoolmaster – a Private Tutor, a Surveyor – a Gardener, a Farmer – a Painter, I mean a House Painter, a Carpenter, a Mason, a Day-laborer, a Pencil-Maker, a Writer, and sometimes a Poetaster.” Later in the questionnaire, Thoreau elaborated on his professional ambitions – or lack thereof: “I have found out a way to live without what is commonly called employment or industry attractive or otherwise. Indeed my steadiest employment, if such it can be called, is to keep myself at the top of my condition, and ready for whatever may turn up in heaven and earth.

More here.

From Chapati Mystery:

Here is a short made by Arpita Kumar, being screened at PBS ONLINE FILM FESTIVAL.

Here is what Kumar told us about the short: I made My Dear Americans during my Project Involve fellowship at Film Independent in Los Angeles. We were asked to pitch short film projects focused on the theme of traditions. I thought it would be interesting to focus on an American tradition but from the point-of-view of an outsider. I chose to build a narrative around the 4th of July tradition since it’s the most American and patriotic of the holidays. And, I decided on a Sikh couple as the outsiders largely because around that time there was a shooting in a Sikh Gurudwara in Wisconsin. The white supremacist perpetrator associated the Sikhs with Osama Bin Laden and it shocked me that there was such ignorance about the Sikh community still. It had been more than a decade since 9/11 and the backlash continued. I realized that we cannot do much about the ignorance of others. What we can do is change our reaction to their ignorance. And, that inspired the film and the actions of the wife, Tejpreet. I arrived in the U.S. eleven years ago with the unbearable enthusiasm of Baldev – the husband in the film – for all things American. Over the years, the enthusiasm has not tapered but my mind has gained a more complex understanding of national identity, displacement, and the idea of home. The film is a window into that mindscape. Additionally, every time I start a film I give myself a challenge and for this one it was to tell a story with as little dialogue as possible. Watch and let me know if I succeeded. Also, vote.

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Owen Bennett-Jones in The LRB (image from wikimedia commons):

In its recent propaganda video, Clanging of the Swords: Part 4, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (Isis) presented a tightly edited series of grotesque executions. Thirty-eight people were filmed being killed: one man was shot as he ran through the desert trying to escape gunmen in a 4×4; another was trapped in his car; one was at home when Isis broke in and beheaded him in his bedroom. It’s hard to believe that what you’re watching really happened until the relentless inhumanity is interrupted by an occasional human moment. At one point a gunman walks down a row of kneeling young men with their hands tied behind them. He aims a pistol at the back of each man’s head, fires, watches the body slump forward in a pool of blood, moves on to the next in line and repeats the exercise. Then, one of his victims has the idea of trying to save himself by anticipating the shot and, a split second too early, falls forward, pretending to be dead. Needless to say, the ruse doesn’t work. There is also footage of Isis gunmen driving through a town when, for no apparent reason, they stick their Kalashnikovs out of the car windows and fire at two men walking along the pavement. One is hit and collapses. The car moves forward, and the Isis fighters keep firing as their victim lies motionless on the ground. Presumably they want to make sure he’s dead. As they drive away the second pedestrian – amazingly still unharmed – runs for his life in the other direction.

More here.

R.L.G. in The Economist (via Tunku Varadarajan):

SEVERAL weeks ago, Johnson discussed his debate with Nicholas Ostler about the lingua franca of the future. Johnson thinks that English has a very long run ahead of it. Mr Ostler sees English’s time as coming to an end, to be replaced by machine-translation tools that will remove the need for people to learn to speak, read and write a lingua franca. But we agreed that whatever the long run might look like, the next few decades are set. No language has anything like a chance of displacing English.

Interestingly, about two-thirds of English-speakers are not first-language speakers of English. To put it another way: English no longer belongs to England, to superpower America, or even to the English-speaking countries generally. Rather, English is the world’s language. What happens to a language when it becomes everybody’s? Shaped by the mouths of billions of non-native speakers, what will the English of the future look like?

A look into the past can give us an idea. English is of course not the first language learned by lots of non-natives. When languages spread, they also change. And it turns out, they do so in specific directions.

For example, a 2010 study by Gary Lupyan and Rick Dale found that bigger languages are simpler. In more precise terms, languages with many speakers and many neighbours have simpler systems of inflectional morphology, the grammatical prefixes and suffixes (and sometimes “infixes”) that make languages like Latin, Russian and Ancient Greek hard for the foreign learner. Contrary to educated people’s stereotypes, the tiny languages spoken by “stone-age” or isolated tribes tend to be the world’s most complicated, while big ones are less so, by this metric.

What Messrs Lupyan and Dale found through a statistical look at thousands of languages, John McWhorter, a linguist at Columbia University, found in a detailed study of just five. In his 2007 book “Language Interrupted”, he asked why certain big, prestigious languages seem systematically simpler than their ancestors and cousins. English is simpler than German (and Old English); modern Persian is a breeze next to Old Persian and modern Pushtu; modern spoken Arabic dialects have lost much of the grammatical curlicues of classical Arabic; modern Mandarin is simpler than other modern Chinese languages; and Malay is simpler than related Austronesian languages. Mr McWhorter’s conclusion, in simple terms, is that when lots of adults learn a foreign language imperfectly, they do without unnecessary and tricky bits of grammar. (Most languages have enough built-in redundancy for grammars to be more complicated than they have to be.) Modern Mandarin is a perfect example of a language almost completely devoid of inflectional morphology, all those prefixes and suffixes. All languages have their complexities, but Mr McWhorter believes that Mandarin, English, Persian, Malay and Arabic dialects are all clearly simpler than they used to be.

What, then, can we predict English will lose if the process goes on?

More here.

Nigel Warburton in Aeon (Queuing for food in Haiti. Photo by William Daniels/Panos):

It is a cliché to say that the internet has transformed the nature and speed of our links with people around the world, but it is true. I no longer need to rely on national news reporting to learn about what is happening around the globe: I can discover citizen journalists Tweeting, blogging, or uploading their stories to YouTube, and I can get access to Al Jazeera or Fox News as readily as I can to the BBC. This connection is not merely passive, delivered by journalists who alone have access to the people in far-off lands. I can, through comments on blogs, email, Facebook, and Twitter, interact with the people about whom the news is being written. I might even be able to Skype them. I can express opinions without having them filtered by the media. And it isn’t only facts and angles on the news that we can share. We are connected by trade and outsourcing in ways that were unimaginable 10 years ago. Our fellow workers and collaborators might just as easily live in India as in London.

In Republic.com (2001), the American legal scholar Cass Sunstein expressed the fear that the internet would make us more entrenched in our own prejudices, because of our ability to filter the information that we receive from it. We would find our own niches and create a kind of firewall to the rest of the world, allowing only selected angles and information: the ‘Daily Me’, as he put it. Racists would filter out anti-racist views, liberals wouldn’t need to read conservatives and gun freaks could have their stance on the world confirmed. That risk might still exist for some. Yet even within conventional media, new voices are being heard, their videos and Tweets providing first-person, human stories with an immediacy that no second-hand report could achieve. And this is happening on a scale that is breathtaking.

One source of evil in the world is people’s inability to ‘decentre’ — to imagine what it would be like to be different, under attack from killer drones, or tortured, or beaten by state-controlled thugs at a protest rally. The internet has provided a window on our common humanity; indeed, it allows us to see more than many of us are comfortable to take in. Nevertheless, in principle, it gives us a greater connection with a wider range of people around the world than ever before. We can’t claim ignorance if we have wi-fi. It remains to be seen whether this connection will lead to greater polarisation of viewpoints, or a new sense of what we have in common.

In recent years, two Princeton-based philosophers, Peter Singer and Kwame Anthony Appiah, have presented competing views of our human connectedness. For Singer, it is obvious that suffering and death from lack of food, shelter and medical care are bad, no matter who endures them or where they are located. If we could prevent such things occurring, he maintains, most of us would. Singer does not couch his arguments in terms of cosmopolitanism, but he does want to minimise suffering on a world scale. His utilitarian tradition gives equal weight to all those who are in need, without privileging those who happen to be most like us.

More here.

Victoria McNally in The Mary Sue (via Jennifer Ouellette ):

Yesterday, Wizards of the Coast released a set of free-to-download “basic rules” for the upcoming fifth edition of Dungeons and Dragons, with the idea of putting this new version of D&D into “as many hands as possible.” This in itself is pretty rad, but the actual text of the rules are surprisingly inclusive to non-binary players and characters in a way that hasn’t shown up in an official guide before.

According to the website, the basic rules PDF “runs from levels 1 to 20 and covers the cleric, fighter, rogue, and wizard, presenting what we view as the essential subclass for each. It also provides the dwarf, elf, halfling, and human as race options; in addition, the rules contain 120 spells, 5 backgrounds, and character sheets.” Which is awesome, but we’re interested in particular with Chapter 4: Personality and Background (about 33 pages into the PDF), where the rules have this to say about the role that gender identity and sexual orientation might play for your character:

More here.

Deborah Solomon at The New York Times:

Of all the American artists of the 19th century, James Abbott McNeill Whistler was probably the talkiest. In the 1870s, when he painted his famous portrait of his mother, he was living in London, a high-strung expatriate who saw fit to issue mission statements on what seemed like an hourly basis. “Art should be independent of all claptrap,” he declared, believing he had stripped painting of sentimentality and moral uplift and the other trademarks of Victorian culture.

Yet “Whistler’s Mother” — or “Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1” as the painting is actually titled — would come to be celebrated as just the opposite. Today, it is viewed less as an audacious art-for-art’s-sake experiment than as an apotheosis of American motherhood. As most everyone is aware, it portrays Anna Whistler in stark profile, sitting on a hardwood chair in her long black dress. Her face appears somber and a little tense beneath her white lace bonnet.

more here.

David L. Ulin at The LA Times:

What makes the best alternate histories effective is how plausible they are. Just look at Philip K. Dick’s 1962 masterpiece “The Man in the High Castle,” with its vision of America divided after having lost World War II to Germany and Japan. Or Norman Spinrad’s “Russian Spring” (1991), in which a know-nothing politician becomes president on a platform of jingoism and foreign intervention (sound familiar?) when an anti-American mob in Paris riots at the U.S. Embassy.

The key, Philip Roth once suggested of his own “The Plot Against America” — which posits the slow drift of a particularly nativist fascism after Charles Lindbergh wins the 1940 presidential election — is to keep the focus realistic.

“I told myself,” Roth explained, “the simplest thing to do — and perhaps the best thing to do — was to change just one thing: that is, the result of the 1940 election. Have Lindbergh run and win. But leave everything else in place.”

As a result, his imagined America, much like Dick’s or Spinrad’s, is one we recognize despite (or even because of) the differences, a place where the World Series is still played and certain constitutional safeguards, albeit diluted, remain.

more here.

Melissa Harrison at the Financial Times:

To be a feminist seems so natural to me now that it’s hardly worth mentioning: the logical end point for everyone, surely, who wants to live a just, compassionate and moral life. But it doesn’t seem very long ago that I was going to striptease classes, working for a magazine with scantily clad women on the cover and attending lap-dancing clubs with my then boyfriend. Had you asked, I would probably have said I was a feminist then, too.

My understanding of the world, and of myself, has changed a great deal since I was in my twenties – and so has feminism. Those years came for me at the intersection of two things: my own, incomplete journey towards maturity, and a brief period in which liberation seemed to mean aping the freedoms of men.

Things are very different now. Much of the west is experiencing what’s been dubbed the “fourth wave” of feminism – following the first, which secured the vote and changes to property rights a century ago, the second, in the 1960s and 1970s, and third, in the early 1990s. Perhaps each generation must reinvent feminism for itself, for while some things have improved for some women, new pressures and injustices have taken their place – and new voices, new heroines, must be found to counter them.

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Benjamin Moser in The New York Times:

A religion whose followers believe that the Earth was created somewhere in the neighborhood of the planet Kolob, and that the Garden of Eden was created somewhere in the neighborhood of Kansas City, Mo., would seem to have so fortified itself against mockery that there’s no sport in scorning it. In this respect, Mormonism is an honest reflection of its founder, a man who offers such an easy target that providing even a partial list of his myriad and exotic transgressions feels too easy, like a distasteful piling on. That founder was Joseph Smith, a teenager who grew up in western New York. In the 1820s, Smith began to “translate,” from tablets he kept wrapped in a tablecloth, a series of visions that became the Book of Mormon, a turgid sci-fi novel that nonetheless managed to sway a nucleus of converts. Unfurling a vision of a restored Christianity that placed America at the center of the world, and offering the possibility of a perfected soul both here on Earth and, after death, in a multitude of heavens, Smith also managed to be so provocative that he and his followers found themselves hounded, in a series of increasingly dramatic upheavals, from New York to Ohio to Missouri to Illinois.

Alex Beam’s “American Crucifixion” recounts the peregrination of these pariahs. Before they finally evacuated to the Great Salt Lake Valley, which was then part of Mexico, they thought they had found a safe haven in Nauvoo, Ill., the most elaborate of Smith’s foundations. Thence, from all over the United States, Canada and the British Isles, the Mormons flocked. At one point, the city’s population may have surpassed Chicago’s. But Smith’s gift for outrageousness prevailed, and in June 1844 a mob lynched him and his brother. Smith was 38 years old. It is understandable that Mormons saw the grisly murder of their prophet as a crucifixion. But in Beam’s telling, Smith emerges as a flamboyant frontier L. Ron Hubbard, which is far from being entirely Beam’s fault. This was a man who was not only considered by his followers “president pro tem of the world” but also had himself crowned “King, Priest and Ruler over Israel on the Earth”; who pranced around Nauvoo in a “cerulean officer’s tailcoat,” as Beam puts it, “dripping with weighty gold braid and epaulets, topped off with a black cockade chapeau that was adorned with a black ostrich feather”; and who added 14 chapters to the Book of Genesis.

People hated him.

More here.

Fawzia Afzal-Khan in Counterpunch:

Ayad Akhtar’s The Who and the What: A Feminist Reclamation of Islam?

“Absolutely fantastic!” is what Ingrid, a young Puerto-Rican woman sitting next to me ….said of Akhtar’s latest work, his second play to be performed at Lincoln Center’s Claire Tow Theatre in New York City, which I saw June 27^th 2014 during a sold-out 4-week run. “What makes it so?” I probed further. “Well,” she obligingly smiled, “it’s so realistic in its portrayal of these characters, and the actors are so convincing.” A young Pakistani-American friend of her’s sitting on the next seat over chimed in, “Yes, but I think what makes it a really important play for me is that it raises issues we Muslims need to confront and discuss.”

The title of the play points to the limitations in our own questioning to “get at” texts by asking “who” and “what” types of questions of them. Asking, as Muslims generally do (or Christians, or Jews for that matter)—“what does the text[in this case, the Quran] actually say”—is to go down a literalist dead end. Orthodox Muslims attempt to delimit and “authenticate” the “what” (the meaning) of the Holy Book, by trying to establish its veracity through a chain of the “who”—i.e by establishing the “truth” or “authenticity” of the interpreter/translator of the Prophet’s words and thus, of the Quranic text itself. Such a “dead-end” is what even culturalist, liberal Muslims are guilty of when we choose some hadith as true and discard others based on some factitious chain of command and dissemination over centuries, as though there was a way of “getting at” the “truth” of what the Prophet said or didn’t say, and which verses of the Quran thus seem authentic revelations of God or not. Instead, Akhtar is suggesting a different approach to Islam beyond a reductive exegetical one, which is unfortunately the kind held on to in the play by the central character, a Pakistani immigrant to the USA named Afzal, who has made a success of his life here by going from being a cabbie to owning a cab company, bringing up his two daughters after his wife passes away, in material comfort and raising them as “good “Muslims.

More here.

Emma Green in The Atlantic:

“Nothing is more annoying in the ordinary intercourse of life than this irritable patriotism of the Americans,” wrote a grumpy Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America after he visited the United States from France during the 1830s. He described a phenomenon he might have called hashtag patriotism, had he been on Instagram:

There is a patriotism which mainly springs from the disinterested, undefinable, and unpondered feeling that ties a man's heart to the place where he was born. This instinctive love is mingled with a taste for old habits, respect for ancestors, and memories of the past; those who feel it love their country as one loves one's father's house. … It is itself a sort of religion; it does not reason, but believes, feels, and acts. Some nations have in a sense personified their country…

This is a helpful way to understand American spirit in the era of the meme: Everyday things, like beer, take on vague symbolic meaning that is almost apolitical—it's comfort in the familiar, a symbol of a place where you instinctively know you belong, regardless of any reservations you might have about it. Flaws and all, this is our nation to claim, our country to mock; it's a meme all of our own, even if it would have annoyed dead, French political philosophers.

Happy birthday, America.

More here.