by Patrick Appel

Last week PZ Myers responded to the crimes of Dr. Kermit Gosnell. Myers dismissed the "triumphant mail from anti-choice people claiming vindication":

Gosnell is precisely the kind of butcher the pro-choice movement opposes. No one endorses bad medicine and unrestricted, unregulated, cowboy surgery like Gosnell practiced — what he represents is the kind of back-alley deadly hackery that the anti-choice movement would have as the only possible recourse, if they had their way. If anything, the Gosnell case is an argument for legal abortion.

Michelle Goldberg is in the same ballpark:

by Zoe Pollock

Chris Rovzar urges caution in the media's coverage:

 In the absence of up-to-date images, we've been treated to the same stock images of Giffords's perky, smiling face ... Even with the proper preparation, seeing what she looks like even halfway through her rehab could come as a shock.

by Conor Friedersdorf

In the middle of this deeply weird David Brooks piece – I say that as someone who is very much a fan of the man's work – we get a wonderfully insightful paragraph:

Many members of this class, like many Americans generally, have a vague sense that their lives have been distorted by a giant cultural bias. They live in a society that prizes the development of career skills but is inarticulate when it comes to the things that matter most. The young achievers are tutored in every soccer technique and calculus problem, but when it comes to their most important decisions—whom to marry and whom to befriend, what to love and what to despise—they are on their own. Nor, for all their striving, do they understand the qualities that lead to the highest achievement. Intelligence, academic performance, and prestigious schools don’t correlate well with fulfillment, or even with outstanding accomplishment. The traits that do make a difference are poorly understood, and can’t be taught in a classroom, no matter what the tuition: the ability to understand and inspire people; to read situations and discern the underlying patterns; to build trusting relationships; to recognize and correct one’s shortcomings; to imagine alternate futures. In short, these achievers have a sense that they are shallower than they need to be.

If I might gently critique the balance of the piece: there is limited utility in taking the wealthiest one percent of the population, identifying a particular subculture within that class, and generalizing at length about it. A keen eye is best used elsewhere.

That brings me to the piece I'd like to see David Brooks write. Here's the pitch: "Rebelling Against The Organization." A followup to The Organization Kid in which the author spends time with and writes about twentysomethings who had within their grasp everything the organization kid is taught to seek... and chose to do something different. What led them to unexpectedly jump on that bus? How many of these kids wound up disappointed? Among the happy ones, what did they do right? How did their friends in the meritocratic elite respond?

by Zoe Pollock

Alexis gets the inside scoop on how the Jasmine Revolution was aided by Facebook, and seriously compromised when the country's Internet service providers ran "a malicious piece of code that was recording users' login information when they went to sites like Facebook." Alexis spoke with Facebook's Chief Security Officer Joe Sullivan about their fix and the larger implications:

by Patrick Appel

Douthat expands on his critique:

[Palin's negative are] why there’s more Palin coverage in publications like TPM, MSNBC and Vanity Fair (not to mention, of course, a certain Palin-obsessed Atlantic blogger) than in many conservative outlets: Not because they’re the only places willing to tell the truth about her, but because they’ve built an audience that believes the worst about her, and enjoys wallowing in the fear and loathing she inspires.

by Zoe Pollock

Rick Ungar unearthed this healthcare historical tidbit:

In July of 1798, Congress passed – and President John Adams signed -"An Act for the Relief of Sick and Disabled Seamen." The law authorized the creation of a government operated marine hospital service and mandated that privately employed sailors be required to purchase health care insurance.

But Paul Waldman refuses to rub it in the Tea Party's face:

It's tempting to play the Tea Partiers' game on this if you find the ammunition -- few things are more fun then hoisting your opponents on their own petard -- but it doesn't do much good in the long run. The "originalist" position, whether in law or policy, is just indefensible. No sane person can believe that if we just read the Constitution or find a nugget from something the Founders did, all of our policy choices will have only one answer. And joining in the right's Founding Father fetishism is a mug's game.

by Conor Friedersdorf

When I first moved to DC, I sublet a spot in a three bedroom Woodley Park apartment, where one of my roommates would come home every night after his Teach For America gig, fire up the television set, and watch intently as Keith Olbermann proceded through his nightly show. It was misery. I'd spend my days happily working under Reihan Salam and Graeme Wood, and interacting with Matt Yglesias, Ross Douthat, and Megan McArdle. In spare moments, I'd walk down the hall to the room where back issues are kept to read old James Fallows cover stories. Everywhere there were  brilliant people whose insights challenged me to be smarter.

Exhausted by day's end, I'd metro back to Woodley Park, eager for a wind down beer, always forgetting that Countdown would be blaring. I didn't care about its politics. But watching gave me that anxious, vaguely pissed off feeling one gets sitting for an hour without air-conditioning in gridlocked freeway traffic, behind a semi and next to a guy blasting Eminem. It was all about the mood. I needed a mindless break before retiring to my room for some freelancing. Instead I came as close as I'll ever be to understanding what the audience felt during the debut of Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring."

My roommate, a sincere liberal and a nice enough guy, got more riled up by the program than I did. His muscles tightened. His blood pressure rose. Sometimes he even muttered to himself under his breath. Then the show ended. I'd switch the channel to a Lakers game or that John Adams miniseries. Fifteen minutes later, my roommate would forget what he was angry about. It seems to me that Olbermann's show often brought out the worst impulses in people: petulance, self-righteousness, and blind anger at "the other side." I appreciate that for others, the experience was different.

Steve Benen at Washington Monthly says this about Olbermann's retirement:

by Chris Bodenner

He's out sick.

by Chris Bodenner

Tablet columnist Etgar Keret recalls a conversation he had with his mother and wife over the uber-popular iPhone game:

“They sacrifice themselves to achieve a greater goal,” I said quickly. “It’s a game that teaches values.”

“Yes,” my mother said. “But that goal is just to collapse buildings on the heads of those sweet little piglets that never did them any harm.”

by Conor Friedersdorf

It's a question I've long pondered, so let me ask Dish readers:

Does your local newspaper act as a watchdog on local government? Any interesting examples of successes or failures? And in places where newspapers no longer serve this function, has anything replaced them? Any ideas for what might?

(Email answers to conor.friedersdorf@gmail.com)

by Patrick Appel

Don Taylor explains why:

In the end, I think Progressives have more at stake on the deficit than do Conservatives, because Progressives believe that government does have a key role to play in modern life. Conservatives are happy to cut taxes but not spending and then say the inevitable deficit proves government doesn't work. Progressives must take up the cause of developing a long range balanced budget or else there will be no room for government action where it is needed in the years ahead. Hopefully the President will begin making the Progressive case for sensible deficit reduction in the State of the Union.

by Conor Friedersdorf

Here is one way Rich Lowry characterized the Obama Administration in a recent column:

It flatly boasts that we are “the greatest nation on Earth.”

If you click through, you'll see the conceit of the column is such that this is used as a dig at the left. Still, On many occasions in the past (mostly uncorrected, like here), writers at National Review have insisted that President Obama rejects American exceptionalism. Perhaps this is the beginning of a more factually accurate opposition.

Elsewhere in the column, Lowry raises some trenchant critiques:

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

It's fine to allow Santorum to use the slave analogy on the grounds that, as Klein puts it, "Santorum truly believes that abortion is murder--at any point after conception, even when the mother's health is at risk (as it was in the case of one of his wife's pregnancies)." I'm good with that extreme extension of logic beyond abstraction. But you must insist, in turn, that he extend the logic in the other direction. If abortion is pre-meditated child murder in all cases, then women who have abortion commit pre-meditated felony murder in conspiracy with doctors. That's first-degree murder.

Stowe, Vermont, 2 pm

by Conor Friedersdorf

That's a subject of disagreement on the right. Here's Matt Continetti:

Now, one chamber of Congress has voted for repeal, more than half the states are challenging the constitutionality of Obamacare’s individual health insurance mandate, and the law remains unpopular. Health care spending and premiums continue to rise, and the president’s claim that the law allows you to keep your health plan has been proven false. Can somebody remind us why the law’s supporters continue to think they have the winning hand?

The truth is that if Republicans in the 112th Congress spent the next two years doing nothing but debating the health care law, beginning to dismantle it, and offering alternatives, they would have real momentum heading into the 2012 election.

And here's Reihan Salam:

Realistically, it is hard to see PPACA vanishing from the face of the earth. This means that Republicans and Democrats will have to work to fix the subsidy regime, to replace community rating with a cheaper form of risk adjustment, and return to the drawing board on Medicaid. The one silver lining is that PPACA did secure a notional commitment to reducing Medicare expenditures, though it didn't provide a reliable mechanism for doing so. An optimist could say that while the last Congress did a great deal of damage, it did take a serious political hit that might make it easier for future legislators to put Medicare on a sustainable footing.

I continue to be skeptical that Obamacare will significantly improve our health care system, and ambivalent about whether we get where we need to be via "repeal and replace" or amendment. I know a lot of Daily Dish readers supported the president's bill, and I'm glad it expands access to insurance and ends recission. But I just don't see how it fixes many of the problems discussed here, here, here and here. If you take a look at those links – and whatever your take on health care, they're all exceptional pieces of journalism – you'll get a good sense of what I'd do differently. Also recommended: this piece on end of life care by Atul Gawade. That is the conversation we ought to be having, not this nonsense about "death panels."

by Zoe Pollock

Ed Yong gleans a larger lesson about teaching from a new study by Elizabeth Bonawitz:

Through two experiments with pre-schoolers, Bonawitz has found that teaching can be a “double-edge sword”. When teachers provided specific instructions about a new toy, children learned how to play with it more efficiently. But the lessons also curtailed their exploratory streak. They were less likely to play with the toy in new ways. Ultimately, they failed to find all of its secrets. ...

Context clearly matters. When the apparently knowledgeable teachers in the experiments provide a seemingly complete lesson about the toy, the children deduce that there is no more to learn. If the lesson is interrupted, or if the instructor seems like a novice, the child deduces that there is more to discover. Bonawitz thinks that these abilities start from a very early age, when children are still in pre-school or kindergarten.

by Patrick Appel

As an exercise, David Frum wrote an imaginary SOTU speech for Obama. One strong passage:

When my administration arrived in office in January 2009, we confronted the worst economic collapse since the 1930s. We did our best to estimate the depth of the crisis ahead. We got it wrong. As bad as we thought the recession would be, it was worse. We prepared for a fifty-year flood. We got a hundred-year flood. We thought our measures would cap unemployment at about 8 percent. Despite our measures, unemployment has reached almost 10 percent. Unemployment remains almost 10 percent.

by Zoe Pollock

Scott Horton interviewed father and son Charles and Gregory Fried about their book, Because It Is Wrong—Torture, Privacy and Presidential Power in the Age of Terror. Horton asked why they paired torture with privacy and surveillance:

[After 9/11] the general public, and even the informed public, reacted as if both transgressions were equally serious and equally deserving of condemnation. Indeed, there may have been a markedly greater tolerance of torture than of surveillance—maybe because few of us expect to undergo torture, but all feel our phones or Internet may be tapped into. This gets things exactly wrong. It is morally obtuse, an example of law fetishism, to equate the two just because they are both illegal. Torture is illegal because it is wrong and electronic surveillance is wrong—when it is—because it is illegal.

by Zoe Pollock

Roger Ebert receives a prosthetic chin and comes to terms with his lack of a real one:

by Patrick Appel

The reason why:

There doesn’t seem to be any obvious reason to suppose this is true, but it probably is. We are all more likely to become friends with someone who has a lot of friends than we are to befriend someone with few friends. It’s not that we avoid those with few friends; rather it’s more probable that we will be among a popular person’s friends simply because he or she has a larger number of them.

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

I thought since you were on the subject you might want to hear the interpretation out of the mouth of God himself, Bill Watterson.  From "The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book":

by Patrick Appel

2012 polls are fairly meaningless at this point in the cycle, but this is still remarkable:

There are vast differences in how the various different potential GOP contenders fare against Barack Obama in Texas. Mike Huckabee is very popular in the state and would defeat Obama by 16 points, a more lopsided victory than John McCain had there in 2008. Mitt Romney is also pretty well liked and has a 7 point advantage over the President in an early hypothetical contest, a closer margin than the state had last time around but still a pretty healthy lead. A plurality of voters have an unfavorable opinion of Newt Gingrich but he would lead Obama by a 5 point margin nonetheless. It's a whole different story with Palin though. A majority of Texas voters have an unfavorable opinion of her and she leads the President by just a single point in a hypothetical contest.

by Chris Bodenner

A troubling sign out of Tunisia:

Tunisia’s interim government abruptly shut down the country’s oldest and most popular private television network on Sunday evening, in an apparent violation of its pledges to respect freedom of expression after the ouster of the authoritarian president Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali.

I've been battling a brutal bout of bronchitis for some time now, and I'm finally going to have to take a day or so of total bedrest to get the better of it. I'll do all I can to live-blog the SOTU Tuesday night, but Patrick, Chris, Zoe and Conor will be holding down the fort until then. Apologies. But working with the pair of lungs I've got right now isn't terribly wise at this point. --- Andrew.

Abbas Milani recounts the resilient cultural history of Iran:

More than once in Iran’s history, after the country was vanquished by outsiders—from Arabs to Mongols—the culture of the conquered survived and eventually molded the customs of the victors to its own pattern. It is hard to imagine that the 1979 revolution will be an exception to this enduring reality. ...

In Tehran alone, 3 million people marched in remarkable discipline to demand their democratic rights. Their slogan pithily captured in a mere four words the hundred-year-old dream of modernity and democracy in Iran. Using thugs and guns, prison and torture, the ayatollah has so far succeeded in intimidating the people back into their homes. But a critical look at the past shows the bleak future of Khamenei and other champions of despotism. Violence can only delay but not destroy the rights of man in a nation that has embraced the cultural ethos of modernity. The hushed, brutalized quiet of today is at best a prelude to the liberating storms of tomorrow.

Robert Krulwich marvels at the visual tricks of Kokichi Sugihara:

Sugihara uses no editing tricks. His props are cardboard and glue, no special effects. All he does is find the precise angle where our brain assumes an impossible act. In this case, he chooses the angle that makes down-sloping planes look like up-sloping planes. Then he changes the angle and you see how he did it. (Or more correctly, how you did it.)

Robert Draper reports on Afghanistan's drug trade:

"We have two forms of money here: poppy, and American dollars," says a beardless 33-year-old Helmand farmer named Rehmatou as he leaves the Marine base with his fertilizer. "This is our economy. The Taliban aren't pressuring me—that's just a story you see on TV. I grow for myself. I smuggle for myself. The Taliban are not the reason. Poverty is the reason. And they'll keep growing poppies here—unless they're forced not to. Force is the solution for everything. As we say in Pashtu, 'Power can flatten mountains.'

Kottke is excited about a new nature series:

The Blue Planet, Planet Earth, Life. These BBC nature series have all neglected to showcase our planet's most amazing animal. Human Planet is an upcoming nature series about human beings.

Dan Ariely wonders why we accept our physical limitations but don't want to account for our cognitive ones:

Imagine that you’re in charge of designing highways, and you plan them under the assumption that all people drive perfectly. What would such rational road designs look like? Certainly, there would be no paved margins on the side of the road. Why would we lay concrete and asphalt on a part of the road where no one is supposed to drive on? Second, we would not have cut lines on the side of the road that make a brrrrrr sound when you drive over them, because all people are expected to drive perfectly straight down the middle of the lane. ...

What I find amazing is that when it comes to designing the mental and cognitive realm, we somehow assume that human beings are without bounds. 

Spurred by a Michael Kinsley column, Douthat mulls our fallen nature:

However wrongheaded you believe your ideological opponents to be, laying “all that ails the world” at their feet represents an absurd politicization of human affairs, and a spur to the most self-deluding sort of utopianism. After all, what ultimately ails the world is its inherent imperfectibility — its fallen character, if you’re a Christian; its irreducible complexity and tendency toward entropy and dissolution, if you’re a strict materialist.

December in Toronto from Millefiore Clarkes on Vimeo.

Minutes before boarding the plane to Toronto Millefiore Clarkes' boyfriend handed her the challenge of documenting her six-day journey. This is the result.

Ferrah Merali shines a light on Palestinian rap:

Rap in Israel-Palestine is its own animal, tied up in all the complexities of the region’s larger conflict—including, for example, discrimination against Palestinians from Arab countries. The Middle East’s Arab nations have historically been loath to allow Palestinians to settle on their soil, in an effort to force Israel to recognize the refugees’ right of return to their ancestral lands. Arab-Israeli artists complain of another prejudice: Middle Eastern record companies won’t sign them because they hold blue Israeli identity cards and passports.

“Living in occupied Palestine, having the blue ID, we feel like we don’t have an identity,” says Safa Hathoot of Arapiat, the first all-woman Palestinian hip hop act. “Here in Israel people treat us like a Palestinian, and outside Israel, they treat us as Israeli.”

Brett McCracken praises Mike Leigh's new film, Another Year:

We live in a time when “authenticity” is equated with those things or those people who are forthright in their brokenness and messiness, while stable, happy people are sometimes looked upon with skepticism, as if their lack of apparent problems makes them phony or untrustworthy. Our jadedness leads us to a sort of self-reinforcing stasis of raw brokenness, because this is what we believe. This is what we know. But what we really need are models of goodness & virtue in our lives… figures of hope who can motivate us out of the cycle of dreary cynicism.

Another Year offers a great example of such people–a happily married, flourishing couple who love people in need but don’t pander to them. They stand firm in their principles without condescending to those struggling around them...

A young boy holds a milk pot on his head before taking part in the Thaipusam procession on January 20, 2011 in Singapore. Thaipusam is a Hindu festival celebrated mostly by the Tamil community. Devotees will pray and make vows when the prayers are answered. They fulfill the vows by piercing parts of their body such as their cheeks, tongues, and backs before carrying a 'Kavadi' on a four kilometre journey of faith. By Chris McGrath/Getty Images.

Kenan Malik critiques it:

There are two ways over the past half-century in which we've stopped treating people as citizens. One is through racism. The racist says "you're not a citizen, you don't have full rights in this society because you have a different skin colour, you are foreign", etc. The second is multiculturalism. The multiculturalist says: "we treat you not as an individual citizen, but as a Muslim or a Hindu or a Sikh or a black". The irony is that multiculturalism developed as an attempt to combat the problems created by racism. But it has recreated many of the problems by treating people not as citizens but as members of groups, and by formulating public policy in relation to those groups and not in relation to the needs of individual citizens.

(Hat tip: 3QD)

"Life" by John Masefield first appeared in The Atlantic in January 1916:

What am I, Life? A thing of watery salt
Held in cohesion by unresting cells
Which work they know not why, which never halt;
Myself unwitting where their Master dwells.
I do not bid them, yet they toil, they spin
A world which uses me as I use them.
Nor do I know which end or which begin,
Nor which to praise, which pamper, which condemn.

So like a marvel in a marvel set,
I answer to the vast, as wave by wave
The sea of air goes over, dry or wet,
Or the full moon comes swimming from her cave
Or the great sun comes north; this myriad I
Tingle, not knowing how, yet wondering why.

(Photomicrograph of "the microscopic blood vessels that carry nutrients to neurons in the brain, obtained with a scanning electron microscope, by Alfonso Rodríguez-Baeza and Marisa Ortega-Sánchez, collected in the new book Portraits of the Mind: Visualizing the Brain From Antiquity to the 21st Century)

From Tony Woodlief's heartfelt meditation on fatherhood:

Lately I have wrestled with bouts of panic. I fear I am too far behind, already, in this father’s race. I am apart from them more than I want. This is how our lives will be for the next several years. They used to ask when my traveling will be done, and now they don’t. They have been fishing more with other fathers than with me. They have been to Boy Scouts with other fathers, but not with me. This is our life into any future I can foresee, not that I have ever seen the future well.

Sometimes I panic, and then I despair. Your life stretching out before you holds a series of choices, and what you don’t realize until you are older is how quickly those choices can accumulate and choke off possible futures. If you are not care-filled and prayer-filled and intentional, your days may pile up with more regret than hope.

Jeff Mason mulls its meaning:

It is thinking of nothing in the sense of not categorizing things or making calculations about them. It is neither having abstract truths before one’s imagination, contemplating symbols or images, nor attending to sensations. ‘Single-minded’ mindfulness is neither engaged in the world, nor apart from it. It does not tell itself stories, valuing or negating, wishing or hoping, but receives and accepts whatever is going on as long as it continues; allowing thoughts and feelings, words and images, to exist as soon as they arise and to let them go as soon as they are ready to leave.

"With the death of that person everything was gone. You are alone then. First you also want to die. Then you search. You had turned all the people you also had in life into something less important during your life. Then you're alone. You have to cope," - Thomas Bernhard, Austria's postwar writer, on losing his "Lebensmensch" or "life companion."

A new book, My Prizes, collects "the background and circumstances of reception of nine literary prizes that Bernhard was awarded between 1963 and 1980, followed by some of the speeches he delivered on those occasions."

(Photo by Flickrite Candida.Performa)

Adam Frank distills the "spirituality vs science" debate:

Morgan Meis picks apart the opening lines of Richard III, "Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this son of York":

Maybe the discontent that comes to us in winter is in the realization that every moment of joy is but a brief resting point on the greater journey toward oblivion. Or maybe that's too grand. Maybe the discontent in winter is the discontent about the fleeting quality of the present. Nothing holds still for very long, after all. Nothing that feels good stays good for very long. Even in Los Angeles, the perfect sunny day turns to night; a feeling of contentment is replaced by anxiety somewhere along the line.

If there is a greater contentment to be found, then, it is in the contentment of discontent. It is in the willingness, maybe, to have your winters and to have them in their dreariness and decay, neither surrendering completely to that discontent nor pretending to solve it.

St. Peter's Anglican Church, Speightstown, Barbados, 2 pm

Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine, thinks it's beside the point whether the "universe has a purpose":

A reader writes:

I've been following your Calvin and Hobbes/Fight Club posts, so I thought I'd share this series of essays. The author, Richard Beck, is a psychology professor at Abilene Christian University. He presents a thoroughly worthwhile exploration of the theology of Watterson's world.

They all say the same thing, according to David McCandless:

The bulk of the words in horoscopes (at least 90%) are the same. That’s not a full, proper statistical analysis. (If you are a statistician and you want to do a proper analysis, please get in touch) The cool thing is, once you’ve isolated the most common words, you can actually write a generic, meta prediction that would apply to all star signs, every day of the year.

Continuing the thread, Scott Adams envisions a future where digital composites of people can live forever online:

You'd run a program in the background that monitors your Facebook changes and all of your email conversations. Together with your photos, your resume, and all of your shopping and entertainment preferences, the program running in the cloud could piece together an avatar of you. ... Artificial intelligence will get to the point where all you need to do is seed it with an individual's personality and it will do the rest. People of the future will be able to have extended conversations with loved ones who have passed. The generation who personally knew the departed might detect slight flaws in the personality of the digital copy, but to the third generation, great granddad's ghost would appear as real as anyone they know.

He's then informed that such a company already exists.

Jeffrey Young profiles MIT's Sherry Turkle, author of Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other. On the future of robot companionship:

During her research, Turkle visited several nursing homes where resi­dents had been given robot dolls, including Paro, a seal-shaped stuffed animal programmed to purr and move when it is held or talked to. In many cases, the seniors bonded with the dolls and privately shared their life stories with them.

"There are at least two ways of reading these case studies," she writes. "You can see seniors chatting with robots, telling their stories, and feel positive. Or you can see people speaking to chimeras, showering affection into thin air, and feel that something is amiss."

A 12 year old explains the facts of life to her mother:

The Internet is a very beautiful thing if used properly.

When a person loves a funny video very much, he or she may want to share it with someone special to them. This is called linking and if done properly, it can bring people together in a very special union of love: usually the love of sneezing animals, or bed intruders, or Bill O'Reilly having a temper tantrum. But it's important to be sparing when you send your links. You don't want to become the neighborhood outbox, constantly forwarding yourself around. Nobody wants that kind of reputation. Trust me, you do not want to be known as a "spammer."

Presidential candidate Manuel Alegre, supported by the socialist party and the extreme-left, kisses a red flower after a campaign rally in downtown Porto on January 21, 2011, a day before the first round of presidential elections. Alegre receives 22 to 25.6 of the vote according to the polls published by Portuguese media. Recent polls indicate a majority of Portuguese continue to support incumbent president. By Miguel Riopa/AFP/Getty Images.

Tracy Clark-Flory interviews Sheril Kirshenbaum, author of The Science of Kissing:

Certain parts of the female anatomy, especially with our primate ancestors, were enhanced with red, and it especially had to do with the female being ready to reproduce. As our ancestors began to walk upright, rather than males being attracted to the female's posterior, they began to focus on the breasts and the lips -- they call this "genital echoes." In research on lip color, men consistently choose the women wearing the bright red lipstick as the most attractive -- there's this power to making the lips slightly redder. There's a lot of evidence to back up the existence of the makeup industry.

Kirshenbaum also connects kissing to breastfeeding: