Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 115

This Is Your Brain On Sleep

Cody C. Delistraty highlights the latest research on sleep’s importance for your mental health:

Getting less than five hours of sleep a night makes people dumber and less able to concentrate, and it can make people more susceptible to false memories, according to a new study published in the September issue of Psychological Science.

Led by Steven J. Frenda of the University of California, Irvine, the study found that of the 193 people tested, participants who slept for less than five hours a night were significantly more likely to say they had seen a news video when they in fact never had. The sleep-deprived group was also more suggestible. While recounting a personal story, 38 percent of them incorporated false information the researchers had given them, whereas only 28 percent of those who had more than five hours of sleep accepted the researchers’ false information in their story retelling. Frenda and his researchers postulate that not sleeping significantly disturbs our ability to encode information.

(Photo: Eddy and Bowie zonked out)

Face Of The Day

Students and family members embrace after leaving Marysville-Pilchuck High School in the aftermath of a shooting on the high school’s campus in Marysville, Washington on October 24, 2014. At least two are dead, including the shooter, according to authorities, with several more wounded. By David Ryder/Getty Images.

Why Do Americans Go Out Sick? Ctd

A reader shakes his head:

The post this morning in which Julia Ioffe blames American individualism for the tendency of Americans to go to work or school sick is missing the fundamental cause. According to a report by the Center for Economic Policy and Research, the United States is the only advanced economy that doesn’t guarantee paid vacation time and is one of only a few rich countries that doesn’t require employers to offer at least some paid holidays. A full quarter of the US workforce receives no paid vacation or holiday time. It shouldn’t be surprising to find that when faced with the prospect of not getting paid or giving up scarce vacation days, American workers choose to show up sick.

Another notes that even businesses with sick-leave policies discourage workers from calling in with the flu:

Many companies pay employees not to use sick time, encourage them to ration it for when things get “really bad,” or actively prohibit its use. For example, they have policies that don’t allow employees to use sick time during their “probationary period” of six months to a year. This makes it seem normal to go about business as usual even when you feel like something the cat dragged in off a pile of hazmat suits.

Another adds, “Even if you get sick leave and using it doesn’t cut your vacation, you’d better not use more than half of it in any given year unless you’re actually in the hospital”:

Because if you do, management will assume that either a) you’re calling in sick when you are not in order to get a paid day off, or b) you’re a slacker who is unwilling to put out a little extra effort in order to get the job done. Either of which is grounds for termination, or at the minimum a bad performance review, which will get you to the head of the queue next time layoffs come around. The job is, obviously, more important than something trivial such as the health of the staff.

Note also that, if your job allows telecommuting, you will be expected to be working from home, even if you stay home because you are sick.

Another illustrates how sick children can be a major factor:

I’ve lived in rural South Texas for 35 years, and my two children attended a public elementary school in a very small town. In order to encourage economically disadvantaged children with limited English skills to get all the way through high school, our area rewards children at the elementary level for “100 percent attendance.” This isn’t strictly a rural phenomenon; I believe our nearest metropolitan area, a city of several hundred thousand people, has a similar practice.

As a result, the number of children who would show up at my kids’ school with fevers and running noses was appalling. Their parents would drop them off with a cheery and proud assurance that this was at their child’s insistence: “They want to win that attendance award!” So civic responsibility was removed from the list of things learned at school early on. Lately, I believe, a regular school nurse has started removing children who are running a fever from class.

And consider the problem of families with working parents. What does one do with a sick child who should be at home in bed when no one is home to care for them and paid child care is out of the question? Indeed, many Americans, with or without children, go out sick because they have no other alternative if they want to pay their bills. These are not the people Julia Ioffe is describing – people who are, indeed, insufferably self-centered and who do more damage showing up for work sick than they realize.

Protestant work ethic? Nah. Just being a self-centered asshole? Could be. Just trying to get by? More likely.

A Poem For Friday

“What the Pencil Writes” by James Laughlin:

Often when I go out I

put in my coat pocket

some paper and a pen-

cil in case I want to

write something down

well there they are

wherever I go and as

my coat moves the pen-

cil writes by itself

a kind of gibberish

hieroglyphic which I

often think as I un-

dress at night & take

out those papers with

nothing written on

them but strange and

meaningless marks is

the story of my life.

(From The Collected Poems of James Laughlin, 1935-1997, edited with an introduction and notes by Peter Glassgold © 1995 by James Laughlin. Used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation. Photo by Oscar Cortez)

Will Ukraine Vote West?

Ukraine protest parties running Darth Vaders in elections. A Death Star being their only hope against the Kremlin. pic.twitter.com/ji8uDT3bSx

— ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) October 22, 2014

Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko is looking forward to a handy victory in Sunday’s elections, despite security concerns and the fact that most residents of separatist-held areas in the east will not be voting:

Poroshenko is seeking a mandate to press ahead with a plan for ending the conflict with separatists in Ukraine’s Russian-speaking eastern regions and establishing an understanding with Moscow while pursuing a course of European integration. Interfax news agency quoted him as saying on Thursday that he expected to be able to begin forming a new coalition by early next week that would be “pro-European, anti-corruption, without liars and populists.”

Stephen Sestanovich also predicts that mainstream, pro-Europe parties allied with Poroshenko will take a plurality or even a majority of seats, while the Communists and right-wing nationalist parties will be marginalized:

Recent polls show President Petro Poroshenko’s bloc likely to get 30% or so of the vote for party lists. (Half of the new Rada, or parliament, will be elected proportionally; the rest will be chosen in single-member districts.) Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk’s People’s Front may get around 11%, and it’s possible that together he and President Poroshenko will command a majority of seats.

On both the left and right, parties hoping to collect protest votes are being disappointed.

This could be the first election anywhere in the former Soviet Union in which the Communist Party falls below the 5% minimum required to win a bloc of seats. Russian spokesmen have spent months screaming about the “fascist” nature of two Ukrainian parties, Freedom and Right Sector, that were prominent in last winter’s big demonstrations in Kiev. Both of these seem likely to get less than 5% too.

Robert Coalson expects the vote to “shatter the old paradigm of a country hopelessly divided between a pro-European west and a Russia-leaning east”:

It is not that the elections will produce a dominant party, but they will produce a solid bloc in favor of European integration and wary of Moscow’s intentions. And Moscow’s old appeals for ethnic solidarity with Ukraine’s Russophone population are increasingly ringing hollow. “The issue of language and identity has been used and misused and abused in Ukraine for many, many years,” says Natalya Churikova, senior editor of RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service. “Ukrainians are much more united in issues of security — and I think the security issue is No. 1 now.”

But Balázs Jarábik has a less sanguine take on the likely outcome:

The mixed electoral system – half of MPs will be elected from single-member district and half from party lists – and the fact that one major party (the Poroshenko bloc) is likely to control the new Rada means that the parliament will be more split than ever, as party blocs will be able to assert less “centralised” will.

It is becoming clear that radicals will hold a significant number of seats in the new Rada. Polls suggest six other parties may enter, including the Radical party, which is composed of celebrities, fighters, singers, civic activists, sportsmen, and lesser-known businessmen. Like [Oleh] Lyashko’s [Radical] party, Batkyvshchyna is highly populist and pro-war: captured Ukrainian female pilot Nadia Savchenko is number one on Batkivshchyna’s candidate list. Her sister is running, too, emphasising the lengths to which Tymoshenko will go to drum up popular support. The right wing Svoboda will also likely to get in as turnout in western Ukraine, where the party’s support is mainly based, is expected to be higher than elsewhere in the country.

And Lucian Kim stresses the risks of holding a vote in the midst of a civil conflict that remains unresolved:

While the elections should help Poroshenko’s ability to push his pro-Western agenda, they will also solidify the division between the regions under Kiev’s control and those now under Moscow’s. The elections won’t take place in Crimea, which Russian President Vladimir Putin annexed in March, as well as large parts of rebel-held areas of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. The separatists have called their own elections for Nov. 2 to lend a whiff of legitimacy to their shadowy, self-proclaimed leaders.

The cease-fire hammered out between Poroshenko and Putin in early September exists in name only, as the rebels try to wrest strategic Ukrainian holdouts, such as the Donetsk Airport, before a more lasting peace takes hold. Civilians continue to get killed in the crossfire. Paradoxically, the more the cease-fire line is respected by the combatants and monitored by international observers, the greater the risk it will become the de facto border of a frozen conflict.

Where America Eats

John Leavitt pens an ode to the True American Diner:

[N]ot all diners are exactly alike. There are vintage sleek bullet diners, modern silver-and-neon highway beacons, converted farmhouses, dusty desert truck stops, low-slung ranch-styles attached to motels, and mansard roof shoeboxes full of fake grapevines that resemble suburbian banks. Somewhere, there is neon. There are always leather or leather-ish clad booths in a True American Diner; without them, it’s just a breakfast joint. …

True American Diners exist in a bubble of no-nonsense egalitarianism; they exist outside socioeconomic distinctions, because there is something for everyone. There are always at least two retired people at the counter; they will never speak to each other or anyone else. Someone is on the run from the law; someone is the law. There are always at least two teenagers in a True American Diner and they are simultaneously talking about nothing and having The Most Important Conversation Of Their Lives. You wouldn’t go there for a special occasion, but you can always go there after one: proms, weddings, or funerals.

Without diners, where would outlaws stop to discuss bank robberies over coffee? Where would strippers go when they get off work? Where would covert agents talk about business with waffles or lovers arrange clandestine meetings? Without diners, are you even sure you’re in America?

(Hat tip: The Browser. Photo by liz west)

Ebola Reaches NYC, Ctd

Doctor Craig Spencer has tested positive for Ebola in NYC. This image shows him last month before his trip to Guinea pic.twitter.com/pYMifgCijp

— Jason Morrell (@CNNJason) October 24, 2014

Noam Scheiber contends that NYC officials clearly lied when insisting “Dr. Spencer acted entirely appropriately and responsibly”:

Despite the fact that Dr. Spencer presented a miniscule risk to anyone around him when he decided to ride the subway, go bowling, and frolic at the High Line Park on Wednesday, he obviously should not have been out and about. His decision to do those things forced the city to shut down and extensively clean the bowling alley in question and dispatch its “medical detectives” all over the city to figure out whom he may have come into contact with. Spencer’s wanderings probably also put a crimp in all the retail establishments along his Wednesday route. And they have generally required the city to manage the suddenly tormented psyches of millions of New Yorkers. It doesn’t seem like asking a guy to hang out in his apartment for a few weeks would have been too much to ask in order to avoid this mess. (On top of which, it’s become our policy in this country to quarantine anyone who had direct contact with an Ebola patient, as Dr. Spencer did repeatedly. Why should someone be exempt from this rule just because the contact happened outside the country?)

So, as I say, we were some lies told last night.

But, he admits, “I kinda think Cuomo et al were right to lie”:

[P]ublicly calling out Dr. Spencer for his failure to self-quarantine could have turned into its own minor disaster. Cuomo, de Blasio, and Bassett were generally pretty effective: They correctly assured people that it’s very difficult to contract Ebola, that all the relevant protocols were followed once Dr. Spencer came forward with his symptoms, that the city had thoroughly war-gamed this scenario. Had they taken the additional step of criticizing Spencer for not isolating himself beforehand, you can imagine that dominating the headlines, drowning out most of what they said, and generally contributing to the very panic they were trying to defuse.

Sarah Kliff, on the other hand, defends Spencer:

Doctors Without Borders has a five-point procedure for doctors returning from West Africa, to monitor for signs of Ebola.

There is no evidence that Spencer failed to follow these guidelines. Nor is there evidence that requiring doctors to quarantine for three weeks, if they are non-symptomatic, would do anything to stop the disease’s spread. “It’s completely unnecessary,” says Harvard University’s Ashish Jha, who has been studying the outbreak. “I’m a believer in an abundance of caution but I’m not a believer of an abundance of idiocy.”

Tell that to Jason Koebler, who visited the same bowling ally as Spencer on Wednesday night:

I know how Ebola is spread. I’ve spent lots of time writing about it and researching it and on calls with the Centers for Disease Control and watching press conferences and interviewing doctors. I know I don’t have Ebola. And still, all I could think about was whether or not I had touched or even seen this guy—only part of it being morbid curiosity. Maybe that’s the power of this thing. I’m a (relatively) rational and highly informed person (on this issue), and still I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t at least a little bit worried.

A reader lays into Spencer:

Why is it that some in the media and public health circles are calling Dr. Craig Spencer a “hero” and celebrating his “brave mission”? MSF [Médecins Sans Frontières] is an amazing organization that does incredible work – but it doesn’t follow that everyone who volunteers for MSF workers is a hero. And we shouldn’t assume that doing good work is always driven by some deep self-less, altruistic, humanitarian motive. Being an MSF volunteer doesn’t make someone Mother Theresa.

Spencer is a physician, who after spending a month volunteering for MSF in Guinea treating Ebola patients then traipsed around New York City. He used public transportation after the outcry and panic at nurse Amber Vinson’s airline flights. (Vinson, by the way, had called the CDC to get permission for her flights.) He went out to a restaurant/bowling alley/dance floor after the very public backlash against ABC Medical Correspondent Nancy Snyderman for leaving the house and sitting in a car while her companion picked up some takeout. (Snyderman never treated any patients for Ebola.)

Maybe he justified this because he had always been careful when treating patients and knew he was not going to get Ebola. Maybe he justified it because he knew that he couldn’t transmit the virus until he was symptomatic. Maybe he thought no one would know. Whatever his justification was really doesn’t matter; at the end of the day, he simply didn’t think the rules applied to him, so he didn’t follow a 21-day quarantine. And he got Ebola.

The result of his hubris is going to be a public health crisis – not rampant Ebola infection, but already overcrowded emergency rooms and doctors offices overrun by nervous A-train commuters who have come down with a fever. A medical professional who incites a public health crisis isn’t a hero; he’s an arrogant narcissist. The kind of narcissist who posts a smug picture on Facebook wearing protective clothing to humble-brag his forthcoming humanitarian trip to West Africa masked as a plea to support MSF.

I hope he gets better, but I’m not going to celebrate his bravery or heroism.

Update from a reader:

The guy risked his life to volunteer for MSF. He willfully chose to expose himself to danger in order to ease the suffering of others. What’s happening now shows how real and serious the danger was. And as a doctor, he knew exactly what was he risking. If that doesn’t make him a hero, what would? We should all pray for him.

One word from a critic jumped out at me: frolic. He was frolicking on the High Line. Like, c’mon dude, try to butch it up a bit.

I ride around on the trains to read. It’s strange, but it’s what I do. I was on the A train on Wednesday night. I rode it to Lefferts Blvd, then back up to 207th st, and then down to 42nd street. So I spent a lot of time on the A train on Wednesday night. It’s a good train for reading, because it runs for a long time and it’s not too crowded.

I don’t think I’m going to get Ebola. Instead, I think: the odds of my getting Ebola are close to zero. But it would be truly awful to die because I wanted to read Robopocalypse. If I do die I hope my family will lie for me. “He just loved Joseph Roth, he talked about him all the time. And now he’s dead because that selfish doctor just had to go out frolicking.”

An ISIS “Lone Wolf” In New York?

Video emerges of hatchet-wielding man charging at NYPD officers http://t.co/S7jQ5VeUTL pic.twitter.com/u9ZGOcJ55l

— Mashable (@mashable) October 24, 2014

Social media posts by Zale Thompson, hatchet-wielding attacker in NY, show he advocated jihad: pic.twitter.com/ek5LklDx4j

— Rukmini Callimachi (@rcallimachi) October 24, 2014

The NYPD is trying to determine whether a man who attacked four rookie police officers with a hatchet yesterday afternoon has links to terrorist organizations:

Police obtained a warrant to search Zale Thompson’s computer for clues about Thursday’s daytime assault in Queens, which left one officer with a serious head injury. Thompson’s activity on social media indicated he was a convert to Islam and included rants about injustices in American society and oppression abroad but offered no clear evidence of any affiliation with terror groups, police said. Thompson charged a group of four officers with the 18-inch hatchet as they posed for a picture by a freelance photographer on a Jamaica streetcorner, striking one officer in the head and another in the arm, authorities said.

But the anti-American sentiments found in Thompson’s social media postings may also be rooted in militant black nationalism:

One law enforcement official said that the investigation, which is in its early stages, has uncovered rants by Mr. Thompson about the United States, along with statements expressing anger about the role of the United States military in the Middle East. But the official said that Mr. Thompson appeared to be more of what he called “a throwback to the old black radical groups in the 1970s” rather than a traditional jihadist, though the investigation has uncovered writings or statements expressing “hatred of America, the need for revolution and the need to punish America.”

Thompson’s Facebook profile has been held up as evidence of his inclinations:

The text in the background is Surat al-Fatiha, the first chapter of the Quran, which Muslims recite regularly in prayer. A reminder from an earlier Dish post today:

ISIS has specifically called for “lone-wolf” attacks against Western countries, and it seems entirely possible that [Canadian assailants] Zehaf-Bibeau and Couture-Rouleau, both reportedly active in jihadist web forums, could have hatched these not-particularly-sophisticated plots on their own. This certainly isn’t cause for comfort, though. Self-starting terrorists are a lot more difficult to track than those with direct ties to international networks.

A Shot At Democracy For Tunisia

Noah Feldman previews the upcoming legislative elections, the country’s first since ratifying its new constitution in January. The main contenders are the ruling Ennahda party, which espouses a moderate form of political Islam, and Nidaa Tounes, a secular party whose main appeal to many voters “is that it isn’t Ennahda”:

What will happen Sunday? Polls are relatively unreliable, but in general they have the two parties running close with Nidaa perhaps somewhat ahead. For Ennahda, the best result would be to win a plurality, then form a governing coalition with Nidaa or smaller secularist parties. … If Ennahda does win a plurality, expect the party to keep its promise of not running a presidential candidate. Ennahda knows that with a legislative plurality and the president from his own party, it would be too powerful and might well provoke a response.

If Nidaa wins a plurality, however, the situation will become more complicated.

Nidaa might well believe that it could form a coalition without Ennahda. Nidaa would have significant momentum to win the presidential contest — at which point [Nidaa leader Beji Caid] Essebsi would find himself an 88-year-old with a serious secular mandate. The temptation to use undemocratic means and get rid of Ennahda as a viable political force could be hard to resist. The result would be a disaster for Tunisia’s hopes of becoming a functioning democracy.

While the country has made great strides in democratization, the Arab Spring’s only genuine success story isn’t without its blemishes, David Kirkpatrick reports, at least not when it comes to combating radicalism:

[I]nstead of sapping the appeal of militant extremism, the new freedom that came with the Arab Spring revolt has allowed militants to preach and recruit more openly than ever before. At the same time, many young Tunisians say that the new freedoms and elections have done little to improve their daily lives, create jobs or rein in a brutal police force that many here still refer to as “the ruler,” or, among ultraconservative Islamists, “the tyrant.” Although Tunisia’s steps toward democracy have enabled young people to express their dissident views, impatience and skepticism have evidently led a disgruntled minority to embrace the Islamic State’s radically theocratic alternative. Tunisian officials say that at least 2,400 Tunisians have traveled to Syria and Iraq to join the group — other studies say as many as 3,000 — while thousands more have been blocked in the attempt.

Walter Russell Mead isn’t surprised by that:

For the most part, the Western media met the Arab Spring with unbridled enthusiasm, envisioning a sudden joining of the path to development, democracy, and peace that much of the world has been on since 1991, or sooner. But whether in 17th century England or late 19th-early 20th century Eastern Europe, the path to prosperity and modernity has been anything but smooth and easy, and democracy and religious extremism have often gone hand in hand. Contrary to the facile understanding of the world which seemed to undergird a lot of the reporting on the Arab Spring, not all violence is the result of misunderstandings, repression, or poverty, not all poverty is the result of just having the ‘wrong’ political system in place, and sometimes, especially for religious reasons, people really and earnestly want to kill each other.

Dalibor Rohac connects extremism in Tunisia to the country’s economy:

The political violence may have multiple roots, but Tunisia’s poor economic performance is clearly one of them. In recent years, many strikes and protests over economic conditions have taken a violent turn and led to attacks on local police stations, for example. …

Because of a vibrant tourism sector and economic links with Europe, Tunisia has relied less on government ownership and industrial planning than other Arab countries and has long enjoyed the presence of many foreign investors. Still, its economy faces significant barriers to competition and market activity. Tunisia ranks 87th on the most recent World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report, compared to 32nd in the 2010–2011 edition. Its poor performance is driven mainly by its underdeveloped goods, financial, and labor markets, which are paralyzed by heavy-handed regulation.

Lastly, back to the election, Asma Ghribi is concerned that many Tunisian voters won’t turn out Sunday:

Despite voter registration campaigns and efforts by the High Electoral Commission, known by its French acronym ISIE, voter registration has been relatively low. Samira Marai, a former member of the National Constituent Assembly (NCA), the elected legislative body that drafted Tunisia’s constitution, said people have lost faith and confidence in politicians.

“I get people telling me all political parties are only eager to serve their own interests and not their constituents,” added Marai, who is affiliated with the secular Afek Tounes party. “There is a crisis of trust.” According to her, a major reason for the sense of disillusionment among many Tunisans is the failure of progressive parties to unite, leaving the secular political camp fragmented and chaotic. “We [secular parties] should have come together under the leadership of one party. We could have done it. But the problem in Tunisia is that every political party thinks it is strong enough to win enough votes.”

She’s probably right.

Mental Health Break

Some gender-bending family fun: