Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 11

The Hunker Mindset, Ctd

A lot of readers can relate to this state of mind:

​My daughter, who is a graduate student in England, says that the rush to buy bread, milk, and eggs before a storm is referred to there as “the French toast panic”.

Another suggests a different meal:

On one level, I can see this as a reasonable approach; with those three staples, you can make a reasonable meal of toast and omelet, providing you have power or a working cooking surface (like a propane grill). You can even keep them fresh in a power outage by simply putting them out in the snow by your door.

I think the urge to get these particular supplies is strongest in a certain age group: those who grew up in the Depression through the early 1950s, when such commodities were delivered daily to your door … and a major storm could halt deliveries for a few days.

A few more readers sound off:

It’s not about hunkering down. It’s about milk, bread, and eggs being items that have to be bought frequently.

I don’t need to make the pre-storm run on canned goods because I already have them. We have tons of soups and other canned goods because we stock up on those at Costco precisely because they have a long shelf life. Milk doesn’t have a long shelf life, so I run out of it and do need to pick some up every week. Plus my picky two-year-old might fight me on the non-perishable items, but she will always drink milk, so I know she is at least getting some nutrients.

Another turns south:

Watching the cable news channels yesterday afternoon, I seriously kept getting the urge to run out and buy emergency supplies … and I live in Palm Springs. It reminded me of my time living in Miami and the contagious panic-shopping people would do before hurricanes. I had gone to the drugstore on my lunch break (on a gorgeous sunny afternoon) and they were completely out of toilet paper. When I asked the cashier why, she replied “Because of Frances.” I said “Who is Frances?”, thinking it was a woman who hadn’t shown up for her shift or something. “No! The hurricane!” she told me. Frances was still at least three days out in the Caribbean, but people were already panicking … not just buying a few supplies, but stocking up like it was the apocalypse. Of course, I spent the afternoon driving to various stores until I found some TP for myself.

Update from a reader:

I am glad to know that I am not the only person with the hunker mindset. And I admit storms aren’t the only thing that cause me to panic. All I have to do is read a post-apocalyptic novel, which not only makes me feel inadequately stocked, but completely ill-prepared for a dramatic lifestyle change. After finishing Station Eleven (an account of the world after a devastating flu wipes out 99% of the population) and the last segment of David Mitchell’s Bone Clocks (which describes in vivid detail the struggles of living in a society where there is no power), I desperately needed a trip to Costco to buy every basic good I could find. I’m embarrassed to admit I did “hunker down” buying extra batteries, extra soap, extra ibuprofen, extra Neosporin, extra toilet paper – never mind that most of this stuff will go bad in a few years, and be depleted in no time if there ever really is a societal breakdown (assuming I don’t get raped, pillaged and murdered first).

My husband just shakes his head at me (rightly so). But, no doubt – it made me feel better even though I know the feeling of being “safe” is only illusory.

And Then They Came For The Gays

Liam Hoare reflects on yesterday’s 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitiz:

Whether at the cement plant in Sachsenhausen, the underground V2 rocket factory in Buchenwald, or the stone quarry at Flossenbürg, homosexuals were subject to deadly assignments and a scarring, bone-shattering system of punishments. Sixty percent of gay internees died in the camps.

For those who remained alive, humiliation was an inevitable part of daily life. The Polish LGBTQ rights activist Robert Biedroń notes that homosexuals in the camps “were forced to sleep in nightshirts and to hold their hands outside the covers,” ostensibly in order to prevent masturbation. In Flossenbürg, homosexuals were required to visit female prostitutes—Jewish and Roma prisoners from a nearby camp—as a form of treatment. “The Nazis cut holes in the walls through which they could observe the ‘behavior’ of their homosexual prisoners,” Biedroń writes.

(Photo: Mug shot of homosexual Auschwitz prisoner August Pfeiffer, servant, born Aug. 8, 1895, in Weferlingen. He arrived to Auschwitz Nov. 1, 1941, and died there Dec. 28, 1941. From the State Museum of Auschwitz, Oswiecim, Poland)

The Meaning Of ’90s Sitcoms, Ctd

Readers keep the thread going:

In discussing how the sitcom Friends dealt with homosexuality, it is important to note Episode 11 of Season 2, which was titled “The One With The Lesbian Wedding”. It’s funny that even though it was 1996 there was no mention of “commitment ceremonies” or “domestic partnerships”. It was a wedding, plain and simple, no questions asked.

A few more readers delve deeper into that episode and others:

Yes, Chandler at times goes too far in some of his jokes and comments – and actual living. But he also has an incredibly endearing relationship with Joey that he is never afraid to express – largely through hugs, but also through actual words. Their love may not be sexual, but it is real, and unconditional – a bromance not really rivaled until JD and Turk on Scrubs. I know it’s not the same – but Friends does show a tight, healthy friendship between two guys without fear of homophobic reactions. And Chandler continues to evolve, especially after he gets married, embracing his less-than-“manly” side and not making the same kind of jokes.

Also, Friends was the show that featured a gay wedding – and did not play it for laughs.

Ross even had to talk this former wife into going through with the ceremony after her parents didn’t support it. And then, he walked her down the aisle. Yes, Phoebe did have one laugh line during the ceremony, and yes, Chandler also has his comment, but the relationship was presented as real and loving throughout the entire series. Carol and Susan raised Ben (based on the number of scenes Ben was in with Ross, we can only assume that Carol and Susan had main custody), and that was never, ever brought up as a bad or weird or odd thing. It just was. The harshest comments about Carol and Susan came with a jealous Ross who was still in love with Carol. But, again, he’s the one who convinced her to go through with the ceremony.

Watch a great moment with Susan and Ross above. Another reader:

Friends put forward a “new” type of family long before Modern Family was a gleam in anyone’s eye. It showed Ross as being hurt and confused, but ultimately loving and respectful. It showed incredible sympathy for Carol, who was clearly understanding of the pain she caused Ross, but also confident and free. AND, most importantly, it showed sympathy and respect for Susan, who could have easily been portrayed as the lesbian homewrecker. All of this in 1994 – you know, the same year President Clinton was fighting to make the military safe from gay men and women coming out of the closet.

So yeah, Chandler and Joey make a few jokes (anyone who honestly thinks these two were written as models for how men should behave should really step away from their TVs for a while). And maybe we shake our heads at them now, the same way we do Eddie Murphy routines, Mel Gibson movies, and countless others. But to write that piece with no acknowledgement whatsoever about what Friends did in showing gay characters at a time when it was not as safe (or profitable) to do so, is just wrong.

Another notes about one of the creators of Friends:

I personally know David Crane. He is an out, proud gay man, and always has been. I met him BEFORE Friends was created. That show is homophobic? Bullshit.

The View From Your Blizzard

Littleton, Massachusetts, 9.20 am. Many more below:

Malden, Massachusetts, 11.30 am

Framingham, Massachusetts, 9.10 am

Cambridge, Massachusetts, 12.20 pm

Topsham, Maine, 11.30 am

Concord, New Hampshire, 9.38 am

Portland, Maine, 3.17 pm

Hull, Massachusetts, 9.30 am

“Okay, fine, it’s not really the view from my window. Just a cranky NYer. Martial law for 8″ of snow – thanks, de Blasio.”

The Most Quoted Experts

Justin Wolfers charts the recent dominance of economists:

There’s an old Bob Dylan song that goes “there’s no success like failure,” and it’s a lesson that’s been central to the rise of the economics profession. Each economic calamity since the Great Depression — stagflation in the 1970s, the double-dip recession in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the 1991 downturn — has served to boost the stock of economists. The long Clinton boom that pushed unemployment down to 3.8 percent was good news for nearly all Americans, except economists, who saw their prominence plummet. Fortunately, the last financial crisis fixed that.

Today, the profession is so ubiquitous that if you are running a government agency, a think tank, a media outlet or a major corporation, and don’t have your own pet economist on the payroll, you’re the exception.

The Expiration Date On That URL

Jill Lepore discovers that the “average life of a Web page is about a hundred days”:

No one believes any longer, if anyone ever did, that “if it’s on the Web it must be true,” but a lot of people do believe that if it’s on the Web it will stay on the Web. Chances are, though, that it actually won’t.

In 2006, David Cameron gave a speech in which he said that Google was democratizing the world, because “making more information available to more people” was providing “the power for anyone to hold to account those who in the past might have had a monopoly of power.” Seven years later, Britain’s Conservative Party scrubbed from its Web site ten years’ worth of Tory speeches, including that one. Last year, BuzzFeed deleted more than four thousand of its staff writers’ early posts, apparently because, as time passed, they looked stupider and stupider. Social media, public records, junk: in the end, everything goes.

Which is why the Wayback Machine exists:

The Wayback Machine is a Web archive, a collection of old Web pages; it is, in fact, the Web archive. There are others, but the Wayback Machine is so much bigger than all of them that it’s very nearly true that if it’s not in the Wayback Machine it doesn’t exist.

The Wayback Machine is a robot. It crawls across the Internet, in the manner of Eric Carle’s very hungry caterpillar, attempting to make a copy of every Web page it can find every two months, though that rate varies. (It first crawled over this magazine’s home page, newyorker.com, in November, 1998, and since then has crawled the site nearly seven thousand times, lately at a rate of about six times a day.)

The Internet Archive is also stocked with Web pages that are chosen by librarians, specialists like Anatol Shmelev, collecting in subject areas, through a service called Archive It, at archive-it.org, which also allows individuals and institutions to build their own archives. (A copy of everything they save goes into the Wayback Machine, too.) And anyone who wants to can preserve a Web page, at any time, by going to archive.org/web, typing in a URL, and clicking “Save Page Now.”

What’s In A Political Slogan?

Election guru Larry Sabato finds that slogans are often “simplistic and manufactured, but the best ones fire up the troops and live on in history.” His unsolicited advice for Hillary and Jeb:

The last time she ran for president, then-Sen. Clinton used “The Strength and Experience to Bring Real Change.” That was workmanlike—and boring. At least for the ’16 Democratic contest, she’d be better off with “Let’s Make History Again” coupled with the Helen Reddy tune “I Am Woman.” Don’t forget, about 57 percent of Democratic presidential primary voters are women.

For the general election, if President Barack Obama continues his recent climb in the polls, Clinton might adopt “Keep a Good Thing Going” or—to drive Republicans nuts—she might steal the 1982 Ronald Reagan midterm mantra, “Stay the Course.” If Obama’s popularity nosedives again, Hillary might want to revamp Bill Clinton’s 1992 anthem from Fleetwood Mac: “Don’t Stop Thinking About the Nineties.”

As for Jeb, he might want to try out “Not My Brother’s Keeper”—at least subliminally. He truly needs to be more Jeb than Bush as he attempts to achieve a historically unprecedented family three-peat. The word “conservative” needs to be prominent, given that so many voters in the GOP base think he isn’t. Terms to be avoided at all costs: immigration, common, and core.

Rupert Myers recently looked at political slogans, running down the best and worst of American and British ones of the past few decades. One of the best? The Thatcher-era indictment, “Labour isn’t working”:

[In] 1979, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party turned to Saatchi & Saatchi for the campaign slogan and poster [seen above] widely regarded to be one of the finest examples of a successful political slogan. Punchy, operating on more than one level, this is a rare example of an attack ad which works. It’s short, it’s sharp, and it draws contrast between the choices facing the electorate. Imitated by the Republicans in 2012, the slogan “Obama isn’t working” was less successful, a reminder that slogans don’t just have to work as a standalone message, but be dressed for the political climate.

This Extraordinary Pope, Ctd

Wow. Transgender man writes to the Pope after getting rejected from his church. On Saturday, the Pope met with him. http://t.co/hb73WbsUwB

— Gabe Ortíz (@TUSK81) January 26, 2015

A reader puts it well:

It seems to me that this is pretty big Pope news; he had a private audience with a transgender man and his fiancee. It’s inconceivable that such a meeting would have occurred with either of the two previous Popes. Which is a pretty sad indictment of them, in that Jesus clearly would have had such a meeting.

Mental Health Break

Moving forward, backwards:

The Exaggerated Benefits Of Bilingualism

Maria Konnikova examines the research of Angela de Bruin:

De Bruin isn’t refuting the notion that there are advantages to being bilingual: some studies that she reviewed really did show an edge. But the advantage is neither global nor pervasive, as often reported.

Where learning another language does pay dividends:

One of the areas where the bilingual advantage appears to be most persistent isn’t related to a particular skill or task: it’s a general benefit that seems to help the aging brain. Adults who speak multiple languages seem to resist the effects of dementia far better than monolinguals do.

When Bialystok examined the records for a group of older adults who had been referred to a clinic in Toronto with memory or other cognitive complaints, she found that, of those who eventually developed dementia, the lifelong bilinguals showed symptoms more than four years later than the monolinguals. In a follow-up study, this time with a different set of patients who had developed Alzheimer’s, she and her colleagues found that, regardless of cognitive level, prior occupation, or education, bilinguals had been diagnosed 4.3 years later than monolinguals had. Bilingualism, in other words, seems to have a protective effect on cognitive decline. That would be consistent with a story of learning: we know that keeping cognitively nimble into old age is one of the best ways to protect yourself against dementia. (Hence the rise of the crossword puzzle.) When the brain keeps learning, as it seems to do for people who retain more than one language, it has more capacity to keep functioning at a higher level.