“’Avengers’ Destruction to Manhattan Would Cost $160 Billion, Disaster Expert Estimates (Exclusive)”

Do you ever have one of those moments when you’re walking down the street and you’re passing a person on a cellphone who is in deep conversation about some Very Important Deal, oblivious to the rest of the world due to the urgency of his — and it’s generally a he — activities, and you are stunned by a wave of sadness as you contemplate how the miracle of evolution has resulted in our becoming a species afflicted with mammoth self-importance and an almost deliberate denial of the reality that pretty much none of what we do will ever really mean anything, that what waits for us is oblivion and yet we’re somehow so wrapped up in all these Moments and Feelings that we use to validate our sense of self? Even the suffering and sadness of these occasional realizations is ultimately unimportant: we are all in a taxi to the tomb, and the contemplation that irrefutable fact does nothing to blunt its essence. It means nothing. None of it. Still, it’s hard not to be aware of it on a day like today. Good Lord, what is up with all this rain and gloom? But I have good news for you: the weekend looks sunny! I mean, you’re still going to die, but there is at least a brief spot of brightness on the horizon.

Photo by SVLuma, via Shutterstock

Who has tattoos? Chefs and congresspeople. So, basically, scumbags.

I am told that Robin Roberts is likely to discuss same-sex marriage with President Obama today, who may clarify his position on the issue.

— Michael Barbaro (@mikiebarb) May 9, 2012

So maybe, just maybe, your Christian boyfriend president is going to abandon his values and do an about-face on gay marriage, in the wake of yesterday’s disgusting North Carolina marriage vote. Won’t you be so happy then, true believers? This is a thing I will be happy to be wrong about. Guess we’ll see! It’s all between him and his God now.

Soon Penn Station will be marginally less horrible. Oh, and by soon I mean they’re saying 2016, so, uh, don’t hold your breath. And yes, I am aware some contrarians pretend to prefer Penn in its current incarnation, but this isn’t Slate and we’re all adults, so let’s just admit that they are wrong. It’s a hellhole with intermittent air conditioning. Anyway, see ya in 2016, unless the project takes longer than expected, which it almost certainly will.

“Claiborne observed everything when he was reviewing, but ultimately he judged restaurants by what came out of the kitchen. As this idea caught on, it became harder to confuse the country’s best restaurants with the ones that were merely favored by the aristocracy. A different hierarchy in dining, ordered by creativity and excellence in cuisine, was slowly taking shape under the guidance of a new aristocracy: an aristocracy of taste. Today, we call members of this aristocracy ‘foodies.’”
 — I wish we didn’t, as that word only makes me think of children’s pajamas, which are distinctly unappetizing, and which I am sad to learn that they also make for adults. But Pete Wells’ writes a nice history of the New York Times dining section, which debuted under the auspices of Craig Claiborne 50 years ago this month.

“Ongo,” founded in 2009, was going to be the centralized newspaper paywall system. Companies like the Washington Post, the New York Times Company and Gannett poured in a few million dollars to find a solution to delivering ad-free news to people who would pay for it. They launched their product in January of 2011, and at the end of this month, they will close their doors (and, as you do, lay off their employees). Here’s the now-former CEO, Dan Haarmann, on his way out the door, talking to Nieman Journalism Lab: “I hate advertising in my news. I cannot stand people trying to send me a mortgage or a credit card. I’ve got two kids, so when a Dora ad pops up on an article next to interest rates, it just kills me. Not only is it a waste of space but it’s a distraction. The way that interstitials and some of the advertising is pushing through reading experiences even on paid sites, I think, is egregious.” Above: an amazing screenshot of the front page of one of his clients, McClatchy’s Miami Herald, from the other day.

When A Medieval Knight Could Marry Another Medieval Knight

by Eric Berkowitz

Despite the risks, devotional relationships between men were common in Europe [during the Middle Ages], at least among the literate, and many of these affairs must have included sex at some point. Knights, aristocrats, and especially clerics left expansive evidence of their intense passions for male lovers, relationships that often ended in side-by-side burials. A letter from a respected monk–scholar in Charlemagne’s court named Alcuin (circa 735–804) to a beloved bishop shows how thick those relations sometimes became:

I think of your love and friendship with such sweet memories, reverend bishop, that I long for that lovely time when I may be able to clutch the neck of your sweetness with the fingers of my desires. Alas, if only it were granted to me, as it was to Habakkuk, to be transported to you, how would I sink into your embraces . . . how would I cover, with tightly pressed lips, not only your eyes, ears, and mouth but also your every finger and your toes, not once but many a time.

While this epistle is unusually erotic, it reflects the intimacies that existed among men everywhere. Assuming, as we must, that at least some of these men’s sexual longings were fulfilled, the next question is the extent to which intimate homosexual relationships were tolerated. Love was one thing, sodomy another. If male hustlers on the Rialto were burned to death and other European sodomites were being cut to ribbons, could long-term, loving relationships among men ever be permitted?

The answer, paradoxically, is yes. In the period up to roughly the thirteenth century, male bonding ceremonies were performed in churches all over the Mediterranean. These unions were sanctified by priests with many of the same prayers and rituals used to join men and women in marriage. The ceremonies stressed love and personal commitment over procreation, but surely not everyone was fooled. Couples who joined themselves in such rituals most likely had sex as much (or as little) as their heterosexual counterparts. In any event, the close association of male bonding ceremonies with forbidden sex eventually became too much to overlook as ever more severe sodomy laws were put into place.

Such same-sex unions — sometimes called “spiritual brotherhoods” — forged irrevocable bonds between the men involved. Often they involved missionaries about to set off on foreign voyages, but lay male couples also entered into them. Other than the gender of the participants, it was difficult to distinguish the ceremonies from typical marriages. Twelfth-century liturgies for same-sex unions, for example, involved the pair joining their right hands at the altar, the recital of marriage prayers, and a ceremonial kiss.

Same-sex unions were denied to monks to the same extent that men in monastic orders were forbidden to marry women, but other clerics who were allowed to marry took part. One thirteenth-century Ukrainian story tells of the deacon Evagrius and the priest Tit, whose “great and sincere” love for each other led them to a same-sex union. Unfortunately, that love found its limits, and the men had a bitter falling out. When Tit later fell ill, some monks brought Evagrius to his sickbed to help the couple reconcile before the end. Evagrius refused and was struck dead, and Tit recovered. Even had Tit and Evagrius made up and lived happily ever after, they would never have produced natural offspring, which was the main difference between same-sex unions and traditional marriages. Yet the couple’s barrenness did not impede sanctification of their relationship by the church. One version of the liturgy had the priest recite:

O Almighty Lord, You have given to man to be made from the first in Your Image and Likeness by the gift of immortal life. You have willed to bind as brothers not only by nature but by bonds of the spirit . . . Bless Your Servants united also that, not bound by nature, [they be] joined with bonds of love.

It is difficult to believe that these rituals did not contemplate erotic contact. In fact, it was the sex between the men involved that later caused same-sex unions to be banned.

With the widespread criminalization of homosexual relations starting in the thirteenth century, the marriages of men in church could not last. The Byzantine emperor Andronicus II decreed in 1306 that, along with incest and sorcery, sex between men was prohibited. He added: “If some wish to enter into ceremonies of same-sex union, we should prohibit them, for they are not recognized by the church.” No Latin versions of the ceremonies survive — presumably they were destroyed — and several of the surviving Greek texts appear to have been defaced over time by disapproving churchmen. By the sixteenth century, Montaigne would write of a “strange brotherhood” in which Portuguese men in Rome “married one another, male to male, at Mass, with the same ceremonies with which we perform our marriages, read the same marriage gospel service and then went to bed and lived together.” They were burned to death.

Given that men could no longer marry in a church without risking punishment, and that long-term love between men was not going away, something less inflammatory had to take the place of matrimony. In England and many Mediterranean societies (especially southern France), the new institution for same-sex unions was the affrerement (“brotherment”) contract. Affrerement was not designed specifically to accommodate same-sex love relationships; it was adapted to permit such couples to live together in peace. An affrerement was a written agreement between two people to form one household and share un pain, un vin, et une bourse (“one bread, one wine, and one purse”). In Italy, the contracts used a similar phrase: a une pane e uno vino. The reference to sharing the same bread and wine was meant to signify that the people would share all their property in the years to come.

Eric Berkowitz’s new book Sex And Punishment, out today from Counterpoint, is a fascinating survey of how legal systems over the millenia have attempted to regulate and police sex. In this excerpt, a discussion of the once-wide acceptance of same-sex unions between men in Europe of the Middle Ages.

Eric Berkowitz is a writer, lawyer and journalist. He has a degree in print journalism from University of Southern California and has published in The Los Angeles Times and The Los Angeles Weekly, and for the Associated Press. He was an editor of the West Coast’s premier daily legal publication, The Los Angeles Daily Journal. He lives in San Francisco.

“Last week, the Internet lit up upon the release of a University of Massachusetts — Amherst study that found white 9-month-old babies were worse than white 5-month-old babies at telling apart African-American babies.”
 — I don’t know how I missed this Internet conflagration last week, but I am thankful to whatever animating spirit helped it pass me by. In any event, if you’re scoring at home, babies are not racist, according to the researcher who conducted the study. Dogs, on the other hand, are still guilty of anti-Semitism.

“Dogs yawn even when they only hear the sound of their owners doing the same, researchers have found. A study found that nearly half of all dogs yawned when played a recording of a human being making such a noise. But when the yawn played belonged to their owners, the canines were five times more likely than if the voice belonged to a stranger.”