Sunday morning roundup

Civilians caught in the South Sudanese crossfire don't particularly know or care what the conflict is supposed to be about.

Russia's getting more business-friendly (which is something but not much).

Meet Seattle's elected socialist.

How do you represent your demons?

One way to think about demons (if you happen not to believe in supernatural evil) is that they are a way of representing human hatred, rage and failure — the stuff we all set out to exorcize in our New Year’s resolutions. The anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere, who grew up in Sri Lanka, got a Ph.D. from the University of Washington and, eventually, a job at Princeton, once remarked that all humans deal with demons. (He was quoting Dostoyevsky’s “Brothers Karamazov” — “In every man, of course, a demon lies hidden.”) The only question, he said, was whether the demons were located in the mind, where Freud placed them, or in the world. It is possible that identifying your envy as external and alien makes it easier to quell.

Even life-coaches themselves admit that they pretty much advise the obvious, but sometimes the obvious needs to be pointed out. And they really can reconcile science with spirituality:

Ms. Beck interjected that the biggest mistake you can make is to accept your beliefs without challenging them, without applying the scientific method to see if they are, in fact, true. And many of the men, she said, were assuming that they had to do things a certain way: ignore passion in favor of safer bets, act stoic amid inner turmoil, run on an upward trajectory of success and money acquisition at any emotional cost. But these are not rules. These are just theories that haven’t been tested. And, because the way we do anything is the way we do everything, there’s no way she was going to ignore the metaphor from this pile of feces.

“You have to poke the poop,” Ms. Beck told the men. “You can’t just make assumptions about it. There’s no substitute for poking the poop.”

Timothy Egan's words to leave behind.

Cracked rounds up some super-sarcastic Amazon reviews for you.