Links to Your World, Tuesday September 9

“Today's guys are perhaps the first downwardly mobile—and endlessly adolescent—generation of men in U.S. history.” (Newsweek’s “Why I am Leaving Guyland”)


I love my iPod; I hate the iTunes updates. This guy at Wired tells Apple 5 reasons why.


Musical taste reveals your personality.


Everyone remembers winners: Michael Phelps, Usain Bolt, Tiger Woods. But in her new book, Second Place: Faces of Defeat, photographer Sandy Nicholson captures the emotions of those who came in second. See some photos here.


“Try Our Healing Service: You Won’t Get Better!”
“None of Our Hymns Are Tested on Live Animals.”
And other quirky church signs.


Justin Taylor at Between Two Worlds summarizes John Mark Reynolds’ helpful column offering 10 tips for college students.


On Sarah Palin and Working Moms:

Albert Mohler expresses support but ambivalence over Palin taking the VP candidacy with her duties as a mom.


The NY Times piece that Mohler quotes is worth reading, too: “With five children, including an infant with Down syndrome and, as the country learned Monday, a pregnant 17-year-old, Ms. Palin has set off a fierce argument among women about whether there are enough hours in the day for her to take on the vice presidency, and whether she is right to try.” (“A New Twist in the Debate on Mothers” in the NY Times)


“It's important to understand why, then, Mrs. Palin has hit a nerve. It's not because she's a woman with children trying to do a man's job. It's because she's actually pushing the combination of professional and personal ambitions beyond the sensibilities of this generation of working moms. As women, we may be awed by her, but she's not necessarily a role model for so many professional women who now say they want to do it differently, that they don't want to do 150% of everything all of the time. So what you are hearing is less condemnation than a collective gasp of amazement -- and exhaustion -- at the thought of juggling five children, one of them an infant, and the most extreme example of a job with little or no flexibility. It would make supermom feel feeble.” (BBC anchor Katty Kay and ABC News reporter Claire Shipman)


“Jonah Goldberg at National Review exulted that Sarah Palin was put on earth for two reasons -- to kill caribou and kick butt. And she's ‘all out of caribou.’ Allowing for how much fun such exuberant hyperbole is, social conservatives might still wonder if she presents something of a challenge to their ideals of social order. And she might. She might not. Let's talk about that. But in the meantime, we must not overlook the fact that she presents an absolutely devastating challenge to the feminist narrative for women.” (Douglas Wilson. HT: Between Two Worlds)

Are Evangelicals Up for Grabs this Election Season?

Amy Sullivan has a piece at Time magazine called “Are Evangelicals Sold on Palin?” The standard storyline of this election season has been that evangelicals, particularly the younger, are up for grabs. I don’t know if the storyline is true or, if true, whether Palin has skewered it. Neither does Sullivan, but it didn’t stop her from writing about it.


“[Obama] does not have to win large segments of the evangelical votes. All he has to do is carve off some of votes in certain places. The cosmopolitan vote is the one most up for grabs. A cosmopolitan evangelical is someone who is less interested in converting the country or taking the country back for Christ; they are interested in seeing their faith as attractive. They’re less prone to see the evangelical subculture as their primary point of reference.” (Rice sociologist Michael Lindsay)


But Steven Waldman of Beliefnet says, “The moderate evangelical vote is slipping away from Barack Obama.” He explains why here. This is an excellent assessment.

Maybe the Media Freakshow on Palin is settling down.

Exhibit #1: Check out an even-handed piece in Time called "How Sarah Palin Mastered Politics," about what one supporter calls political "Sarah-dipity."

Exhibit #2: The NY Times piece, “In Palin’s Life and Politics, Goal to Follow God’s Will,” doesn't have the condescending odor of the John Fea opinion piece I referred to on Saturday. However, Mollie at GetReligion doesn’t like it: “That a Christian believes that God has a role to play in her life, in the efficacy of prayer, that the Bible is the word of God isn’t noteworthy, per se. By making it seem so, it says more about the New York Times than it does about Palin.” John Podhoretz at Commentary magazine doesn’t like the piece, either. He says, “The article has about it the wide-eyed wonder that anyone might actually be crazy enough to believe in a Creator Who still plays a role in human affairs.”

(By the way, religion reporter for the Statesman, Eileen Flynn, linked to my blog post on John Fea's Palin comments here. Thanks for the traffic Eileen.)