Why do God-believers have more babies than non-religious people? “Since religiosity is to some degree a heritable trait, offspring born to religious parents are not only dyed in the wool of their faith through their culture, but [evolutionary researcher Dr. Michael] Blume believes that they may also be genetically more susceptible to indoctrination than children born to nonreligious parents.”

New York Post columnist Michael Goodwin takes time away from his busy schedule of pretending to be a Democrat so that his constant excoriation of the president will seem like it’s coming from a place of disappointment rather than sheer partisanship to harp on one of the paper’s other obsessions: bike lanes.

Here’s the predictable path of the tyranny of the minority. With the city spending millions to make bike lanes for a relative handful of New Yorkers, collisions between bikes and vehicles are on a record pace. Duh.
Now that The Post has reported the carnage, you can bet the city’s response will be as illogical as the lanes themselves. City Hall zealots will further restrict auto traffic, adding more congestion and emissions, and look to ticket drivers. They also will litter the airwaves with an expensive “education campaign” telling bikers to behave.
Let’s save time and get next year’s news now: still more accidents, higher taxpayer costs and more tickets for drivers.

Coincidentally, Awl pal Felix Salmon has penned a helpful corrective.

Did these people really think that New York would become Copenhagen overnight? The fact is that changing the fast-paced culture of New York is going to take time. As more people start making use of bike lanes, the average speed of cyclists is going to slow down, cycling is going to become safer, and both drivers and pedestrians are going to be more aware of the cyclists with whom they are increasingly sharing precious macadam. We just need to have a bit of patience.

Patience, of course, is not something the New York Post (or, frankly, some other New Yorkers we know) values highly on its list of virtues, so expect plenty more of its pro-car agenda. But Felix makes a pretty good point.

Photo by Spencer Thomas, from Flickr.

How stoned are Killa Kyleon and Curren$y at the end of the video for this remix to Big K.R.I.T.’s latest? Little blips of light are shooting out of their fingers, making trails in the air like sparklers on July 4th. I didn’t even know pot could do that to you. Seriously, though, there are some really good young artists making really good rap music these days. And this song is dope.

A correction in this morning’s Times

A picture caption on Thursday about the wreck of a boat thought to be carrying refugees seeking asylum in Australia misidentified the ocean surrounding Christmas Island, where the wreck occurred. It is the Indian Ocean, not the “South Pacific.”

may remind older readers of one of that paper’s most classic corrections, now almost a decade old.

Because of an editing error, an article on Tuesday about the court case in Chile against Gen. Augusto Pinochet misidentified the ocean into which the military apparently dumped the father of Viviana Díaz, a woman who leads a group of surviving family members. It was the Pacific, not the Atlantic.

Barnes & Noble? Forget what you’ve heard about sales struggles and investor confidence and whatnot: they’re in it to win it. (Photo by Richard Kim.)

by Awl Sponsors

Remember when collaborating on a big presentation meant late nights, coordinating an entire team’ s schedules, and at times, even missing important family events? With Windows 7 + Windows Live, the hassles that come with big presentations and quarterly projects are no longer. Instead, you’ ll have time to be with the people who matter most in your world.

As the ultimate organization tool, Windows Live Essentials gives you access to your documents, photos, and files on all of your devices. Instead of working late at the office, you can create a sales presentation using Microsoft Office, and share it with your colleagues using Windows Live. And, you’ ll always have the latest version in front of you — gone are the days of endlessly emailing versions back and forth.

Need some feedback on your presentation? Windows Live lets you share your documents with anyone you want, and get their input in real-time using Windows Live Messenger. Or perhaps you’ re nervous about the big presentation? The cloud has you covered. HD video chat lets you cut through the nerves and practice your presentation face-to-face.

Now, who thought it could be that easy?

by Mike Barthel

Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” has had a weird history. From the schmaltzy (but great!) original recording through John Cale’s lyrical rearrangement and Jeff Buckley’s radical reduction, it’s become an object of abstract emotional grammar, used less for its words than for its gestalt feeling and its ability to convey meaningfulness even in the absence of actual meaning. Its aesthetic beauty feels so timeless that it’s like being in the same room with the Mona Lisa: you just sense you’re in the presence of something important, and you should pay attention, even if you miss the point of the original object. I had always thought that this progression represented a kind of emotional flattening, a removal of meaning rather than a supplantation of meaning. But Susan Boyle’s version makes it clear that, in the eyes of the world, “Hallelujah” is now about Jesus. Which is weird, since it’s about the Old Testament.

Maura’s Johnston’s take on Boyle’s version — from that writing and a subsequent e-mail correspondence these thoughts spring — attracted some interesting comments! Here is my favorite:

You bet I’m happy to be in Susan Boyle’s audience. Per this list, on the one hand the words of the verses don’t matter because the beauty of the word Hallelujah means praise to God and that’s what the host of Angles sang to the shepherds on that glorious night. And, you can be sure that was a big luscious chorus. On the other hand the words do matter because in spite of sin one can humbly ask for and receive forgiveness. Then be free to sing praises to God uplifting the soul to thankful worship of love with the word Hallelujah. After all this is the meaning of Christmas. The Gift is after all a Christmas album that tells “The Story” and sings praises to God. Susan Boyle has put Christ back into Christmas. She weaves all these songs all together to say so. The song Hallelujah with the true meaning of the word is only one thread in this tapestry.

Well! For those of you familiar with the song, this take will come as something of a surprise. Cohen himself has encapsulated the song’s meaning as being about the many different kinds of hallelujahs, an explanation which one might note does not include the word “Jesus.” Same for the song itself, which sticks pretty closely to Old Testament stuff: King David, Samson, the Ten Commandments (“you say I took the name in vain”), Genesis (“there’s a blaze of light in every word”), and so on. And also fucking! Boyle’s version doesn’t explicitly call out the J-dogg either, but as Maura notes, it does everything it can to avoid the verses in favor of the one-word chorus. She gives full shrift to David and Bathsheba but then only does half of the “baby I’ve been here before” verse, omitting the key “it’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah” line that’s been leaned on so hard in the past to create that sense of mournfulness.

All of this would be weird if she was trying to create another iteration of Buckley’s paean to attractive sadness. But she’s not. She’s trying to create a Christmas song, and those are less about meaning than about creating a mood; the approach of referencing the Bible and moving straight into the catchy chorus is not so different from, say, “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” or “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” or whatever. But, of course, those are rooted firmly in the Gospels. “Hallelujah” represents a kind of Christmas Creep for the Old Testament itself. What’s happened to Cohen’s song is the same thing that’s happened to Jews in America: they have become, in the eyes of Christians who don’t actually know any Jews, sort of proto-Christians.

Of course, as my future in-laws like to say, worse things have happened to the Jews. Generally speaking, America is probably the best country in which to be Jewish (at least among countries that aren’t Jewish theocracies), which you can blame in some part on Americans’ cheerful ignorance of Judaism. Not that this ignorance is honorable, necessarily. Growing up in rural New York State, I was not aware until sometime in my twenties that one of my friends in high school actually was Jewish, much less what that implied about her celebration of various holidays. (I also did not realize until fairly recently that she probably had a crush on me, which will tell you something about my high school experience.) Now that I have been to a small liberal arts college and spent ten years dating a member of the tribe, I have become aware of just how little many Christian Americans (or, in the case of me and my parents, culturally Christian/religiously atheist Americans) know about Judaism. Oh sure, we know it exists — after all, it’s right there on the census form along with Zoroastrianism! But many of us don’t know how it works, exactly. For instance, as I have forced my girlfriend into contact with the goyim, here are some things that have been thought in regard to her Judaism:

• That it would be polite to send her a card for Passover.
• That I would not be allowed into a synagogue.
• That it is really sad she is not with her family for Christmas.
• That we are actively celebrating Hanukkah.

I’ve become culturally Jewish enough now to find these mostly amusing (I strongly relate to the dentist on that one “Seinfeld” episode), and certainly beneficent confusion is preferable to anti-Semitism. (And it runs both ways: for the first few years of our relationship, I was repeatedly told that I was Catholic.) But this sort of ignorance is what allows the weird relationship between American evangelicals and Judaism to sustain itself, and Boyle’s cover plays directly into this sort of thing. I’ve always seen the way megachurchers regard Jews as kind of like how the head of the Cobble Hill car service in Motherless Brooklyn thought of lesbians: as people who are “wise and mysterious and deserve respect.” With the increased interest in the Bible as a literal document free of any historical or cultural context has come a respect for Jews as the most important figures in Bible I: The Quickening. Given that most Americans don’t spend much time around Jews, in the popular imagination they have become living historical artifacts, like a Shroud of Turin that eats latkes.

And so as context is sheared away, anything smacking of contemporary Christian values has become nominally about Jesus. That’s what all those “Hallelujah” covers have accomplished. By making a song about different kind of transcendence (joy, orgasms, triumph) just about suffering, the tune became eligible to qualify as a Song About Jesus, who also suffered attractively. Cohen’s solidly Jewish song is being used the same way Michele Bachmann or Glenn Beck use stories about American history: to emphasize the importance of faith over mere humanism, the quality I always thought was at the root of “Hallelujah.” Clearly, that’s the message the commenter above got from the song, and as wrong as she is, she’s also, in her way, entirely right. Maybe Jesus wasn’t Cohen’s point, but it was certainly Boyle’s point.

Already malleable enough to qualify as a kind of consensus composition, “Hallelujah” has been transformed again, this time from a song whose lyrical meaning had been stripped away to one whose meaning and context have been entirely transformed, almost obliterating the original. I can’t imagine Cohen is too bothered by this; after all, what more could a Jewish songwriter dream of than writing the new “White Christmas”? And maybe we listeners shouldn’t be too worried, either. After all, if we know anything about the song, we know that it a master of disguise, and just when you think its story is finished, it moves again. Hallelujah, the king is dead; long live “Hallelujah.”

Mike Barthel heard there was a sacred chord.

39. King Kong
38. In These Shoes?
37. Here Comes That Man Again
36. Patrick
35. Children Of The Revolution
34. Miss Otis Regrets/Just One Of Those Things (with the Pogues)
33. He Never Mentioned Love
32. Maybe It’s Imaginary
31. Walking Down Madison
30. Dancing In Limbo
29. Don’t Go Home
28. What Do Pretty Girls Do?
27. You Know It’s You
26. Wrong Again
25. Tomorrow Never Comes
24. Terry
23. Last Day Of Summer
22. All I Ever Wanted
21. As Long As You Hold Me
20. La Forêt De Mimosas
19. My Way Home
18. You And Me Baby
17. Days
16. Treachery
15. Complainte Pour Ste. Catherine
14. He’s On The Beach
13. Fairytale Of New York (with the Pogues)
12. Caroline
11. A New England
10. Can’t Stop Killing You
9. Halloween
8. Don’t Come The Cowboy With Me, Sonny Jim!
7. Free World
6. Angel
5. There’s A Guy Works Down The Chip Shop Swears He’s Elvis
4. Innocence
3. Soho Square
2. They Don’t Know
1. Titanic Days

Here Are Some Quippy Amusing Women

Awl pal Molly “Molls” McAleer has assembled a list of 20 funny ladies to follow on the Twitter. It includes Awl pals Julie Klausner and Molly Lambert, so it’s probably pretty solid.

by Abe Sauer

The December 4th Star Tribune article begins, “It isn’t easy being CEO of a public company.” The business section’s ode to Minneapolis-based Target CEO Gregg Steinhafel, which describes the executive as “always classy,” was a public display of affection Minnesotans stereotypically avoid.

The author makes little mention of the recent revelations of gay-friendly Target’s long-standing support for many of the most openly anti-gay politicians. Of these donations, the Star Trib says only, “The worst one could say about this incident is that Steinhafel may have been naive. But he admitted his mistake and reaffirmed the company’s long-standing support for gay rights.”

According to documents filed with the FEC in October 2010, Target continued donating to a bevy of anti-gay politicians even after Steinhafel apologized and committed to reforming the review process for future political donations. These donations even included some of the same anti-gay politicians the company had already been criticized for supporting.

On Aug 5, 2010, facing an outbreak of bad publicity over reports of Target’s political giving both in the 2010 election and beyond, Chairman, President and CEO Gregg Steinhafel released a statement. In it, he apologized for how the company’s decision had affected many “in a way I did not anticipate.” Steinhafel wrote that “… later this fall, Target will take a leadership role in bringing together a group of companies and partner organizations for a dialogue focused on diversity and inclusion in the workplace, including GLBT issues.” It being late fall, we reached out to check in on Target’s prioress.

“As previously indicated, we’re taking a thoughtful and planful approach to this issue. Target is engaged in ongoing dialogue, both internally and externally, with a variety of leaders and expects to have more to share soon regarding our plans.” That’s the extent of the details a Target spokesperson would give us on Target’s “leadership role.”

Target did confirm that “consistent with past practices” it will be a sponsor for 2011’s Twin Cities Pride. Maybe not so consistent with past practices will be the reception the retailer gets from participants. Twin Cities Pride confirmed discussions with Target as a sponsor, though donation amounts have not yet been discussed. A Pride spokesperson added that the event organizers are “carefully considering the input we’ve received from the community and we’re working with Target to figure out how to best move forward in a way that is mutually beneficial for all parties involved.”

Twin Cities Pride may receive more input following revelations about Target’s political giving after the August 5 letter from Steinhafel. In that apology, the CEO stated, “Going forward, we will soon begin a strategic review and analysis of our decision- making process for financial contributions in the public policy arena.”

The updated Federal Election Commission database coughed up filings that Target went “forward” by continuing to make significant political donations, the majority of which went to anti-gay equality politicians.

After Steinhafel’s August 5 letter, Target’s Political Action Committee, helmed by the former right hand of Senator Thune, Matt Zabel, recorded $41,200 in federal election activity. Of that total, $31,200 went to anti-gay rights politicians or PACs supporting those candidates.

Supporters of gay equality did get some money. In September, Target PAC gave $1,000 to Chuck Schumer. It also sent a whole $500 to Keith Ellison, the Minnesota Congressman that anti-gay leader Bradley Dean accuses of supporting LGBT rights as a way to bring Sharia law to America.

But donations such as $1,000 to Kelly Ayotte (reported on September 22), who opposes both gay marriage and same sex adoption, are far more the norm.

That same day, there is a record of a donation by Target PAC to Spencer Bachus, who voted to ban same-sex adoption. Michigan’s David Camp, who, in addition to supporting a Constitutional Amendment banning same-sex marriage, voted against protecting gays from job discrimination based on sexual orientation, also reported money. Through October, Target PAC thousands of dollars in donations were recorded to Michael Crapo and Dave Reichert, both supporters of anti-gay Constitutional amendments, and Rob Portman, a supporter of banning gays from adopting. Portman’s position on other gay rights won’t surprise. On October 4, a donation was reported: $2,000 to David Dreier, whose position on gay rights is quite a bit of theatre.

After the Steinhafel statement, Target PAC’s money also flowed to other PACs, including $8,500 to Every Republican is Crucial PAC, Freedom and Security PAC and the Majority Committee PAC, all three supporters of both Michele Bachmann and Roy Blunt.

Most surprising though are Target’s post-apology donations to John Kline and Erik Paulsen, two vehement anti-gay equality candidates. Part of the July outrage over Target’s political giving included these same two candidates.

On September 22, Target PAC recorded a donation to Erik Paulsen. Paulsen, a former Target employee and a favorite of Focus on the Family’s James Dobson, recently voted against the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell repeal. He has also come out against classifying anti-gay attacks as hate crimes. His position on gay marriage is as expected.

Paulsen’s opponent, Jim Meffert, told Minnesota Public Radio, “I support full marriage equality for all couples.” Meffert lost in a landslide.

Also on September 22 comes word of a maximum donation — $5,000 — to Kline. Kline’s voting record is more than the run of the mill “protect marriage” stuff. Kline’s gay-hostilities include voting against prohibiting job discrimination based on sexual orientation and against treating anti-gay attacks as hate crimes.

Just one year ago, Kline went beyond his legislative duty and added his name as a plaintiff to a lawsuit filed against the District of Columbia Board of Elections and Ethics demanding a voter referendum on banning gay marriage. Signatories appearing with Kline included John Boehner, Eric Cantor, John Boozman, and Michele Bachmann. The suit was submitted by Pat Robertson.

In fact, Target was so eager to help Kline that this $5,000 maximum donation was in addition to the $2,500 Target gave to Kline’s primary campaign — a primary race in which the incumbent candidate had already amassed a $500,000 war chest and ran basically unchallenged.

We asked Target to explain these donations. They chose not to provide any answers. But not surprisingly, the retailer did not bring up its Human Rights Campaign Corporate Equality Index rating. That’s probably because the 2011 Index notes that Target has been “penalized under Criterion 6 for a large-scale public blemish to their recent records, namely, for failing to take any corrective action in response to significant community concerns.”

Poor Gregg Steinhafel. Despite all the suffering, the Star Trib describes, he ranks only 126th in executive compensation. How, really, can a man support a family on $8 million anymore? It’s a lucky thing for him he has citizens like Bill George at the Trib sticking up for his (and his hand-picked executive team’s) management of the Target brand. It’s a glowing piece that even the mildly suspicious might dismiss as holiday season circular quid pro quo. But it’s worse than that.

The author, Bill George, is also a Harvard Business School professor and, as he
notes mid-puff piece, in addition to his time as a board member of Exxon Mobil and Goldman Sachs, he served on Target’s Board of Directors from 1993 to 2005.

His Trib bio also notes he is the author of 7 Lessons for Leading in Crisis. That book just happens to count Gregg Steinhafel as one of its profiled “leaders.”

Update: Kelly Ayote’s opposition of gay marriage and adoption in New Hampshire did not directly result in her resignation, but to run for Senate.

Abe Sauer is working on a book about North Dakota. Contact him at abesauer [at] gmail.com.