I’m taking a few days off from work this week. Yesterday was my last day until Monday. I’m staying in town, but I decided it was time to take time off.

Today I saw a matinee of Glengarry Glen Ross on Broadway. I had hoped to see The Constant Wife, but that wasn’t available at the TKTS booth, and I’m not supposed to see The Pillowman without Matt. I enjoyed it, although my seat was in the last row of the orchestra, and I can’t remember ever having more trouble hearing dialogue than I did today, though it was better during Act II. I’d never seen the movie or any other production of the play, so the story was brand new to me. FAN-fucking-tastic acting from Liev Schreiber and Alan Alda.

Other things I will do this week include getting a library card and a new Social Security card and vegging out. Perhaps I’ll go to a museum tomorrow.

I’ve been reading The Path to Power, the first volume of Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson, and I’m starting to get bored. I’ve been reading it for almost three weeks now and I’m only a third of the way through the book. I really don’t want to be reading this for the next month and a half. I don’t seem to be in much of a reading mood anyway, but maybe I’ll go the Strand and pick up something different. I’ll see.

Anyway, over and out.

The latest issue of The New Republic has a good and very long refutation of “intelligent design.” (I discovered this by looking at the Blogad on my sidebar – plug, plug!) There’s also a shorter piece on the subject by Leon Wieseltier, although he loses me when he starts quoting Maimonedes.

My friend Andy occasionally blogs in support of intelligent design, but he gets me all confused when he does this, because I’m not sure his definition of intelligent design is the same as the definition that other people give it. (I mentioned this confusion in a comment on his blog last week.) Andy believes in intelligent design and evolution, but most believers of intelligent design seem to blur the issue. See this from yesterday’s USA Today, in which supporters of intelligent design seem to both reject evolution and support it within the same piece (and see the sidebar). (And jeers to USA Today for presenting intelligent design as a legitimate alternative to evolution. Again, see sidebar.)

Basically, I don’t see how you can believe in evolution without believing in natural selection. Evolution without natural selection isn’t “evolution.” That may be semantic, but it’s important. According to evolutionary theory, human beings will eventually evolve into one or more other species. If God directs evolution, then you believe God will eventually direct us to evolve into another species. In other words, humanity is just one step along an endless evolutionary path. That doesn’t jibe with the idea of humanity being favored by God over all other species.

Much of the confusion stems over the imperfection of language. See the confusion over “homosexuality,” wherein one person might say he “disapproves of homosexuality” and means that he disapproves merely of homosexual conduct, whereas the hearer might think the speaker is referring even to same-sex arousal. Unless both people are defining a term in the same way, they’re not going to get their points across to each other.

Anyway, to quote one of Wielseltier’s less-confusing sentences:

It is impossible, of course, not to marvel at the complexity and the beauty of the natural order; but marveling is not thinking. The mind may recoil from the possibility that all this sublimity came into being by accident, but it cannot, on those grounds alone, rule the possibility out, unless it is concerned only to cure its own pain.

What Makes People Gay?

From last Sunday’s Boston Globe magazine.