Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 114

Generation Sext, Ctd

Amid the continuing debate over teen sexting, Zara Kessler notes that school districts are trying to address the phenomenon:

Sexting teaching materials already exist. There’s “Empowering Students to Engage in Positive Communication: K-12 Curriculum to Combat Student Sexting,” from Miami-Dade County Public Schools. A key message can be quickly distilled from “Secondary Lesson 3″: “Safe Sexting, No Such Thing.” The previous lesson has an accompanying handout, “My Personal Promise to Avoid ‘Sexting,’” with spaces for student and parent signatures. The description of a later lesson notes that it “will help students gain an insight into the perspective of the ‘victim’ of sexting as well as helping those affected stop being victimized.”

Texas has the “Before You Text… Program,” an online course that the Texas School Safety Center states “can be mandated by a judge or used as an educational tool.” Not surprisingly, the program isn’t so fond of the sexting life, asserting, “Even if you only sent one sexting message, others may now have a bad opinion of you,” and “Your family members are eventually very likely to see any images you send electronically.” Just in case the low opinion of peers and family is no deterrent, the program points out that “Embarrassment, humiliation, fear, and betrayal may come back to haunt you.”

The View From Your Window

Blue Ridge, Georgia, 12.22 pm

Data-Driven Dating

OkCupid co-founder Christian Rudder advocates it in his new book Dataclysm:

[On OkCupid] the copy-and-paste [message-sending] strategy underperforms from-scratch-messaging by about 25 percent, but in terms of effort-in to results-out it always wins: measuring by replies received per unit effort, it’s many times more efficient to just send everyone roughly the same thing than to compose a new message each time. I’ve told people about guys copying and pasting, and the response is usually some version of “That’s so lame.” When I tell them that boilerplate is 75 percent as effective as something original, they’re skeptical — surely almost everyone sees through the formula. […] [L]et me tell you something. Nearly every single thing on my desk, on my person, probably in my entire home, was made in a factory alongside who knows how many copies. I just fought a crowd to pick up my lunch, which was a sandwich chosen from a wall of sandwiches. Templates work. […] Innovation is using a few keyboard shortcuts to save […] some time.

In a review of the book, Evan Selinger protests Rudder’s logic:

This passage is disturbing in several respects.

First, Rudder treats the process of communication in purely instrumental terms: it’s a numbers game and to win you’ve got to maximize your response-to-effort ratio. Now, it could be argued that during the early stages of dating, minimal effort is appropriate. After all, people are busy, and they can take a more conscientious and personalized approach to socialization after things go to the next level and it becomes clear what a particular individual is worth. But Rudder doesn’t convey a sense that as relationships deepen so do our responsibilities. Instead, he posits an unnerving equivalence between people and commodities. That’s the second problem: Rudder’s comparison of people to factory goods. Sure, most of us take advantage of mass production and treat artisanal wares as … well … treats. But viewing people, or even delicious sandwiches, as widgets is dehumanizing to anyone, not just Marxists! …

[Another] problem is that Rudder associates innovation with efficiency. This is Silicon Valley dogma: friction is bad because it slows people down and generates opportunity costs that prevent us from doing the things we really care about; minimizing friction is good because it closes the gap between intending to do something and actually doing it. Such a cavalier attitude toward efficiency-enhancing technology creates the impression that at any moment we can slow down and behave more thoughtfully and deliberately. But why assume this is the case when technology companies are providing us with ever-increasing opportunities to do things hyper-efficiently and creating an infrastructure that’s conducive to cut-and-paste culture?

But in an interview last month, Rudder marveled at the way data can pinpoint personal information:

What statistics and other crazy facts about human nature did you discover while researching this book?

Honestly, some of the craziest stuff were things where these guys in the UK looked at Facebook likes and — it’s insane, that from just your likes, forgetting your social network or pictures — that you can tell, with incredible degrees of certainty, shit about you, down to your race, to 95 percent. Which makes sense, if you’re really into Tyler Perry or whatever you can probably make a guess about your ethnicity. But you know, sexuality — it was at 85 percent, and kind of like all the way down to “were your parents divorced,” which is 50 percent.

Which is kind of intense, because it’s not a demographic fact about you, it’s just something that happened in your life history, especially because likes have only been around for five years. That’s not very much time. I’m 39, so I was starting to realize I knew kids whose parents had been divorced around maybe ’85 or whatever, and they were into Ozzy Osbourne, Judas Priest. I remember this one kid, I went to his house and he wanted to stay up all night and watch the Ozzy Osbourne concert on HBO… The kids I knew who were from stable, more normal households back then were into REM or whatever. You can see it in life, but it’s cool that they were able to actually pull it away from a “this one guy one time” into a thing that’s more legit.

Live-Streamed From Your Work, It’s Not Saturday Night

Surveying four decades of criticism chronicling how SNL has lost its edge, Ian Crouch posits that the Internet has sounded the true knell for the show:

The final death of “S.N.L.” … may coincide with the death of live television itself. “S.N.L.” has faced challenges from other shows in the past, but, now, everything that is funny anywhere, at any time, is a challenge. On television, Comedy Central’s “Key & Peele” and “Inside Amy Schumer” can make the sketches on “S.N.L.” look slapdash and tame; the topical sharpness of John Oliver’s “Last Week Tonight” often makes Weekend Update seem meek and scattered; and surreal shows like “Drunk History” and “Nathan for You” produce moments of left-field oddity that rarely make it past “S.N.L.” ’s dress rehearsals.

And that’s just what’s on television, never mind the surfeit of great series and amateur comedy creations on the Web. Many of these are carefully shot and meticulously edited, giving them a polish that surpasses what can be managed on a weekly, live stage show. And, like with “S.N.L.,” we can watch them whenever we want. And so, as fewer people arrange their lives to be on the couch on Saturday nights, the limitations of the live form begin to seem less thrilling, and more like a liability.

Coincidentally, the YouTube ad attached to the above video from Key and Peele featured an old SNL duo:

Cannabis For Kids

Kate Pickert investigates the world of medical marijuana for children. She focuses on the Stanley family, who began selling “Charlotte’s Web” – a strain high in CBD but low in THC – through their Colorado business after the mother of a girl with epilepsy approached them:

For the girl, Charlotte Figi, the results were remarkable, according to her parents. Charlotte went from hundreds of seizures per day to almost none. Once a writhing, immobile, non-verbal child, she suddenly began walking and talking. … After the CNN documentary [the Stanleys] were featured in [see above] —which is controversial among pediatric neurologists—the brothers were inundated with requests for the drug, which at the time was only available in Colorado, where medical marijuana has been legal since 2000 and where recreational marijuana was legalized in 2013. The brothers, who sell Charlotte’s Web at the same price as [California medical marijuana advocate Ray] Mirzabegian—5 cents per milligram—say they have a waiting list of more than 12,000 families, with many relocating to the state to access the product. Five cents a milligram may sound like nothing, but the 17 acres of the strain they harvested in September are poised to produce $23 million worth of oil. …

Meanwhile, to eliminate a chunk of their waiting list and lower costs, the Stanley brothers have decided to test the limits of existing drug laws. They still sell THC-rich pot through their medical marijuana dispensaries, but are now calling Charlotte’s Web something else: “hemp.” The plant is less than 0.3 percent THC, which meets the federal legal definition of hemp and mirrors concentrations of hemp oil already available in U.S. grocery stores that is imported from abroad. Calling the plant “hemp” means the Stanleys can grow far more of it and, they think, legally ship Charlotte’s Web across state lines, with the first bottles of oil scheduled to leave Colorado in November. Under a federal law proposed in June by Republican Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, making and shipping CBD-rich oil within the U.S. would be explicitly legal. For now, however, shipping domestically produced hemp oil from state to state is, at best, a legal gray area.

A Poem For Saturday

Dish poetry editor Alice Quinn writes:

Counterpoint Press has just published an important anthology, Modernist Women Poets, edited by Robert Hass and Paul Ebenkamp, featuring the work of sixteen avant garde artists born near the close of the nineteenth century and forging their way in the transformative early years of the next. A number of them are famous still—Gertrude Stein. H.D., Marianne Moore, Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy, and a little less so, Laura Riding. But many have slipped out of view in spite of the consistent or intermittent devotion of scholars.

In her preface to the book, C.D.Wright introduces the group, “Only one was born in the South and stayed rooted in her native state. Only three of them had children. Five of them preferred women to men. Most traveled extensively or relocated far from their origins. Many of them lived long and calamitously and struggled with poverty, disease, divorce, and, in one instance, rape and likely incest. Two died very prematurely, one of tuberculosis and one of scarlet fever ….Within a wide span of intensity and yield, they all felt compelled to write poetry.”

We’ll focus on three this weekend, starting with Angelina Weld Grimke, daughter of the second African American to graduate from Harvard Law School. With the exception of a few years separation, Grimke, born in 1880, lived with her father until he died in 1930. Her mother committed suicide when she was a child. It is said that her father insisted she renounce her love of women in favor of their bond, and the wistfulness of the delicate, deliberate poem below seems to speak of that unfulfilled longing.

“Grass Fingers” by Angelina Weld Grimke:

Touch me, touch me,

Little cool grass fingers,

Elusive, delicate grass fingers.

With your shy brushings,

Touch my face—

My naked arms—

My thighs—

My feet.

Is there nothing that is kind?

You need not fear me.

Soon I shall be too far beneath you,

For you to reach me, even,

With your tiny, timorous toes.

(From Modernist Women Poets: An Anthology © 2014 by Robert Hass and Paul Ebenkamp. Reprinted by permission of Counterpoint Press. Photo by Kitty Terwolbeck)

When NSFW Is Your Work

Now that Facebook, YouTube, and their ilk employ some 100,000 “content moderators” who spend their days on the lookout for gore and porn, Adrian Chen suggests “it’s worth pondering just what the long-term psychological toll of this work can be.” He considers the case of “Rob,” a onetime moderator for YouTube:

For the first few months, Rob didn’t mind his job moderating videos at YouTube’s headquarters in San Bruno. … But as months dragged on, the rough stuff began to take a toll. The worst was the gore: brutal street fights, animal torture, suicide bombings, decapitations, and horrific traffic accidents. The Arab Spring was in full swing, and activists were using YouTube to show the world the government crackdowns that resulted. Moderators were instructed to leave such “newsworthy” videos up with a warning, even if they violated the content guidelines. But the close-ups of protesters’ corpses and street battles were tough for Rob and his coworkers to handle.

So were the videos that documented misery just for the sick thrill of it. “If someone was uploading animal abuse, a lot of the time it was the person who did it. He was proud of that,” Rob says. “And seeing it from the eyes of someone who was proud to do the fucked-up thing, rather than news reporting on the fucked-up thing – it just hurts you so much harder, for some reason. It just gives you a much darker view of humanity.”

Mental Health Break

Get some cleaning done this weekend, if you can:

Introducing The Reality Novel

We used to work through social problems with novels, writes Tim Parks, but what if we’ve now entered the era of “reality fiction”?

Readers have become so canny about the way fiction works, so much has been written about it, that any intense work about sexuality, say, or race relations, will be understood willy-nilly as the writer’s reconstituting his or her personal involvement with the matter. Not that people are so crass as to imagine you are writing straight autobiography. But they have studied enough literature to figure out the processes that are at work. In fact, reflecting on the disguising effects of a story, on the way a certain set of preoccupations has been shifted from reality to fiction, has become, partly thanks to literary criticism and popular psychology, one of the main pleasures of reading certain authors. What kind of person exactly is Philip Roth, Martin Amis, Margaret Atwood, and how do the differences between their latest and previous books suggest that their personal concerns have changed? In short, the protection of fiction isn’t really there anymore, even for those who seek it.

Parks goes on to consider the thoughts of David Lodge, who wrote recently in Lives in Writing that “as he gets older he finds himself more interested in ‘fact-based writing’ than in fiction and goes on to offer an account of the lives of eleven writers, most of them novelists”:

Lodge explains his new interest in fact rather than fiction in his typically low-key manner, as merely “a common tendency in readers as they age, but it also seems to be a trend in contemporary literary culture in general.” Very casually, without any further elucidation, that is, Lodge has suggested that both as individuals and as a culture we can expect to grow out of fiction. It was a phase. All the same, the facts that Lodge turns out to be interested in, when we turn to his recent novels or to Lives in Writing, are the lives of people who wrote fiction—Kingsley Amis, Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, Anthony Trollope—and what interests him is how these people transformed their personal concerns into novels. …

So has fiction now outlived one of its sustaining purposes? That is the question Lodge, Dyer, Coetzee, Knausgaard, and many other writers are posing (one thinks in particular of David Shields’s madly provocative Reality Hunger). It could be we are moving towards a period where, as the writer “gets older”—as Lodge has it, carefully avoiding the positive connotation of “matures” or the negative of “ages”—he or she finds it increasingly irrelevant to embark on another long work of fiction that elaborately reformulates conflicts and concerns that the reader anyway assumes are autobiographical. Far more interesting and exciting to confront the whole conundrum of living and telling head on, in the very different world we find ourselves in now, where more or less anything can be told without shame. Whether this makes for better books or simply different books is a question writers and readers will decide for themselves.

A Natural Subject

Antonia Wilson praises Patterns From Nature, a new collection of “largely unseen, kaleidoscopic and abstract works” by the 20th-century photographer Horst P. Horst:

The book draws from the original 1946 publication of the same name, along with presenting a larger selection of unpublished images from the photographer’s archive. The series is distinctly set apart from the high glamour that his is predominantly known for, as a revered figure of the fashion industry, who worked for Vogue and House & Garden for sixty years, documenting couture, celebrities and interiors. …

The original book presented a series of straight, close-up, black-and-white shots of botanical specimens, including plants, shells, and minerals, naturally lit and often experimental in composition … “For the most part, the pictures found here [are] of common objects daily passing before our eyes. Nothing has been added to enhance them. They are photographed without artificial arrangements and special effects, in their own setting and in their paper light. Direct or diffused sunlight coming from above caresses their surface and in some instances dew or rain brings relief into their fine texture,” Horst writes.

Meanwhile, Ben Pentreath revisits a different side of Horst’s work, reviewing his 1965 volume, Vogue’s Book of Houses, Gardens, People:

Horst’s subjects are at ease with him and he with them. Through his lens, we see the rich, powerful or artistic – “the beautiful people” as [Vogue editor Diana] Vreeland called them – relaxing in their own spaces, smiling, apparently unaware at all of the immortality that Horst’s all-seeing camera was to bestow upon them, and equally appear unaware of their often staggering wealth and privilege. …

Many of Horst’s photographs are shot through softly focused foreground flowers, or candlesticks, silver or glass, as if to impart a mood of artlessness. We just happen to be here, looking in at this world, Horst seems to say: enjoy it while it lasts. Perhaps it is this sense of fragility that makes Houses, Gardens, People so poignant and enduring. There is the quality of the hastily taken image that belies the extent to which Horst composed his interior photographs, often rearranging furniture and entire rooms. Do we find here something of the mood of the voyeur of our own age, artist Alison Jackson, who goes to extraordinary lengths, with the help of celebrity lookalikes, to create views that look utterly casual? Maybe – but while Jackson’s subjects are fake, Horst’s are real.

(Image usage courtesy Merrell Publishers of London & New York)