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This story, A H Jacobs on a spiritual journey I began a year ago. My quest has been this: to live the ultimate biblical life. Or, more precisely, to follow the Bible as literally as possible reminded me an awful lot of that clueless bloke who decided to 'live as a woman' for a week, going solely, as far as one could see, on the basis of a rather superficial reading of chicklit. If you're wondering whether 'Is my blindness to spirituality a defect in my personality' might it not be a good idea to, you know, talk to people who do have a spiritual life rather than unilaterally set yourself up a (rather geeky?) list of rules to follow which are likely to piss off those of your nearest and dearest who are not actually with the programme on this endeavour? I can see that there are practices which might possibly put one in a more spiritual frame of mind, but I'm not sure this sounds like the way to go about it.
On cults: Experience:I was a member of a free sex commune. The only thing that surprised me a bit about this was the date, because to me these are such a 70s kind of thing. Am not surprised that in a situation where 'everybody belongs to everybody else' sexually, what people lust for is more exclusive relationships. Am creeped by the sharing extending to herpes. And on reflection, not, perhaps, that surprised that it was less of a male wet-dream fantasy than narrator probably envisaged.
Food history is so where it's at these days: Matthew Fort on a national treasure trove at the British Library:
my CD of the week, which goes under the zingy title Food Stories and features extracts from oral history interviews, produced by that cutting-edge label the British Library. OK, so it's not likely to challenge In Rainbows or This Is The Life in the album charts, but its 27 tracks will be worth listening to long after Radiohead and Amy MacDonald have taken their place in the, er, British Library.
All of British food is here - social history, culinary history, restaurants, reminiscence, campaigning, school dinners, high life, low life and life in the middle, going back almost 100 years.
Richard Sennett on the craftsman in us all. I particularly {heart} this line: 'innocent confidence is weak'. Sing it.
Mothers are increasingly going out to work, fathers are doing the childcare - it looks like equality, but what about the chores? Kate Hilpern finds out what's really going on behind those John Lewis curtains. Actually, it's sociologist Caroline Gatrell who finds out, and has come up with some v interesting inf, especiall:
her finding that these fathers "cherry pick" the time they spend with their children. "Dads aren't just spending more time with their kids; they're spending more one-to-one direct time with them," she explains. "This is the critical bit for me - men's desire to have an equal parenting role does not extend to child-related domestic chores such as washing clothes or packing lunchboxes."
Indirect childcare is tedious and does not further fathers' power in the household, she explains. "With one exception, all the mothers I spoke to found themselves responsible for most child-related domestic work."
Eleanor, a senior education manager, told Gatrell, "What's really important is what has to be done every single day to keep the family ticking over. Women still bear the brunt of that, even women in professional jobs, because women are thinking ahead all the time. I'm thinking, 'We haven't got any bread for the sandwiches in the morning; we've run out of loo-roll.' I make sure that the school uniforms are washed and ironed and all that sort of stuff - the boring detail of everyday life."
A worrying consequence for women such as Eleanor, says Gatrell, is that while fathers get more quality time, mothers get less. She's just too busy around the house. "The people I spoke to also said that they don't have a lot of time for one another, and the women said they had no time whatsoever for themselves," she adds.
Another sociologist gets down with the detail:
As a young sociology student at the University of Chicago in 1989, Sudhir Venkatesh decided it would be interesting to study poverty in one of the most deprived neighbourhoods of the city and turn his findings into a dissertation. He ended up spending the next seven years hanging out with the Black Kings gang and the assorted crack dealers, tenants' leaders, prostitutes, pimps, local activists, cops and foot-soldiers associated with them, gaining their confidence enough to be made - light-heartedly - gang leader for a day.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on the joy of reading the late Nigerian novelist Cyprian Ekwensi.
Those library collections of dodgy literature:
In Britain, this store is called the Private Case. In France, it is L'Enfer, the "hell" of the library, and the French have decided to open theirs up. In a moodily lit, blood-red space, there are over 350 items - manuscripts, books, engravings, lithographs, prints, drawings, photos and films - collected since the 1830s, when works considered "contrary to good morals" were separated from the main library and cast into L'Enfer.
This book sounds interesting: Mary Hoffman is captivated by Mary Finn's story of a girl's quest through 18th-century India, Anila's Journey
Dept of Not Enough Eeeeuw in the world: An architectural school was at the centre of a row last night after it emerged that students were required to design a fully operational torture device.