Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 138

A Slightly Less Horrible Humanity

A new paper suggests that Stanley Milgram’s 1963 “obedience” experiments – which, infamously, involved volunteers delivering what they believed to be painful electric shocks to strangers on the instructions of an authority figure – might not be as damning as previously thought. Josie Glausiusz runs down what was found when the paper’s authors revisited the Milgram archive at Yale, noting that the participants were not “passive conformists blindly following malevolent orders, but rather ‘engaged followers’ who identified with the noble goals of Milgram’s research”:

Forty-four percent of respondents were “very glad” to have participated in the study. Sixty-four percent indicated that, once the experiment was over, it had not bothered them at all. One volunteer wrote, “I am very delighted to be apart of this project. … I sure hope my efforts, and cooperation have been somewhat useful.” Another replied, “I did not like the idea of giving the shocks, but had complete confidence in the instructor and the nature of the experiment.” While the experiment had prompted depressing thoughts and nightmares in some, others expressed satisfaction that they had been “of some small help,” and a firm belief in “experiments that will help to understand people.”

[Alex] Haslam and colleagues’ statistical analysis of the responses revealed that participants were “highly engaged” in the science, seeing it as a social good to which they were pleased to contribute. Milgram himself had convinced them of this when he wrote to them, at the conclusion of his study, that “the experiments you took part in represent the first efforts to understand [obedience] in an objective, scientific manner.” Their investigation, the researchers say, “supports the view that people are able to inflict harm on others not because they are unaware that they are doing wrong, but rather because—as engaged followers—they know full well what they are doing and believe it to be right.”

A Short Story For Saturday

The critic Dwight Garner recently contended that reading Donald Antrim’s books “is like driving 90 miles an hour while in third gear, in the back seat of a jalopy the author has stolen, while he disposes of his drugs by throwing them out the window.” That sounded like an endorsement to us, so this weekend’s short story is Antrim’s “The Emerald Light in the Air,” which appeared in The New Yorker earlier this year. Here’s how it begins:

In less than a year, he’d lost his mother, his father, and, as he’d once and sometimes still felt Julia to be, the love of his life; and, during this year, or, he should say, during its suicidal aftermath, he’d twice admitted himself to the psychiatric ward at the University Hospital in Charlottesville, where, each stay, one in the fall and one the following summer, three mornings a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, he’d climbed onto an operating table and wept at the ceiling while doctors set the pulse, stuck electrodes to his forehead, put the oxygen meter on his finger, and then pushed a needle into his arm and instructed him, as the machines beeped and the anesthetic dripped down the pipette toward his vein, to count backward from a hundred; and now, another year later, he was on his way to the dump to throw out the drawings and paintings that Julia had made in the months when she was sneaking off to sleep with the man she finally left him to marry, along with the comic-book collection—it wasn’t a collection so much as a big box stuffed with comics—that he’d kept since he was a boy. He had long ago forgotten his old comics; and then, a few days before, he’d come across them on a dusty shelf at the back of the garage, while looking for a carton of ammo.

Read the rest here. This selection provided the title for Antrim’s latest collection, The Emerald in the Light Air: Stories, which the Dish profiled here. Check out previous SSFSs here.

Face Of The Day

Gannon Burgett explains the process behind Seung Hwan Oh’s project Impermanence:

[I]t’s a series of microbe-mauled portraits that hardly resemble what they were originally captured as. Seung-Hwan gets these results by immersing developed film into water and then adding in various collections of microbes. Over the course of a few weeks, months or years, the microbes destabilize and eat away at the silver halide particles in the emulsion. The final images are what remains of the organic process taking place, where the dyes and emulsion run off and change color over time.

Stephanie Chan comments:

It’s an interesting approach to photography that takes a normally still medium and adds a dimension of something active, live, and dynamic. When you view Oh’s photographs, the question is no longer the significance of what is depicted; instead, what catches your eye is the tension between what is shown and what is already lost. Though art is naturally created to be consumed, in this case, the art itself is the act of consumption, the parts of the photographs that have been literally eaten away by a relentless force of nature. The result, in Oh’s word, can be witnessed as something that is “entangled creation and destruction that inevitably is ephemeral”.

See more of Oh’s work here.

Love Letters From A Literary Great

Reviewing Letters to Vera, Philip Hensher marvels at what Vladimir Nabokov’s correspondence with his wife reveals about his talents as a writer:

The letters are full of rapturous comment, of course, but their substance, and the reason they are so absorbing, is Nabokov’s intense interest in the world around him. He knows that when you are in love, the slightest detail of the beloved’s world and days are interesting: what he might have learnt, through writing these letters, is that the specific is always interesting for readers, too. All through those 1926 letters, he remembers to tell Véra what he has eaten — it’s slightly comic, because Vladimir is not an adventurous eater, and it becomes a litany of good plain food — ‘lamb chop, and apple mousse… meatballs with carrot and asparagus, a plain brothy soup, and a little plate of perfectly ripe cherries… broth with dumplings, meat roast with asparagus and coffee and cake… chicken with rice and rhubarb compote’. The point is that Véra will be interested, because it’s her man eating his meals far away from her; we are interested because the writer evokes and specifies.

Nabokov is such a great letter writer because he wants to interest, not just pour out his emotions. These letters must have been a joy to receive. He keeps his eyes open, and concentrates on recording what he sees:

Alongside the paths coloured stripes are daubed on beech and oak trunks, and sometimes simply on the rocks, like little flags to show the way to this or that hamlet. I noticed too that peasants put red earflaps on their percherons and are cruel with their geese, of whom they have plenty: they pluck off their breast feathers when the geese are still alive, so that the poor bird walks around as if in a décolleté.

Love, and intense care for what will interest his readership of one, directed Nabokov’s writing, and shaped it for the future. The clarity of observation here about a moment of terrible animal sadness holds in it the flash of insight at the beginning of Lolita, the parable about the monkey learning to draw and producing an image of the bars of its own cage.

Mental Health Break

The classic battle of dog vs hose gets the classical treatment:

Can You “Age Out” Of Addiction?

Maia Szalavitz looks at research that suggests many people do. She protests the idea that we should treat addiction as a progressive disease that only gets worse over time:

According to the American Society of Addiction Medicine, addiction is “a primary, chronic disease of brain reward, motivation, memory and related circuitry.” However, that’s not what the epidemiology of the disorder suggests. By age 35, half of all people who qualified for active alcoholism or addiction diagnoses during their teens and 20s no longer do, according to a study of over 42,000 Americans in a sample designed to represent the adult population.

The average cocaine addiction lasts four years, the average marijuana addiction lasts six years, and the average alcohol addiction is resolved within 15 years. Heroin addictions tend to last as long as alcoholism, but prescription opioid problems, on average, last five years. In these large samples, which are drawn from the general population, only a quarter of people who recover have ever sought assistance in doing so (including via 12-step programs). This actually makes addictions the psychiatric disorder with the highest odds of recovery. While some addictions clearly do take a chronic course, this data, which replicates earlier research, suggests that many do not.

She continues:

So why do so many people still see addiction as hopeless? One reason is a phenomenon known as “the clinician’s error,” which could also be known as the “journalist’s error” because it is so frequently replicated in reporting on drugs. That is, journalists and rehabs tend to see the extremes: Given the expensive and often harsh nature of treatment, if you can quit on your own you probably will. And it will be hard for journalists or treatment providers to find you.

The Other Dylanologists

Five Swedish scientists are competing to see who can sneak the most Bob Dylan references into their publications. Scott Neuman has more:

As Sweden’s edition of The Local reports, it all started back in 1997, when John Jundberg and Eddie Weitzburg, two professors from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, published an article on flatulence titled “Nitric Oxide and inflammation: The answer is blowing in the wind.” … A few years later, two others scientists, Jonas Frisen and Konstantinos Meletis, picked up the riff in a research paper on the ability of non-neural cells to generate neurons, which they called “Blood on the Tracks: A Simple Twist of Fate” …

That’s when, The Local says, a librarian spotted the Frisen and Meletis article and pointed it out to Jundberg and Weitzburg. The four scientists decided to make a bet: Whoever could squeeze the most Dylan song references into articles before retirement gets a free lunch at a restaurant in Solna, north of Stockholm, where the university is based. A fifth inductee, Kenneth Chien, a professor of cardiovascular research, joined the group when the four others discovered his classic title: “Tangled up in blue: Molecular cardiology in the postmolecular era.”

The Guardian says: “With five competing rivals, the pace of Dylan references accelerated: Lundberg and Weitzberg’s “The Biological Role of Nitrate and Nitrite: The Times They Are a-Changin’,” in 2009; “Eph Receptors Tangled Up in Two” in 2010; “Dietary Nitrate – A Slow Train Coming,” in 2011.”

Connecting Online

James Poniewozik has mixed feelings about nostalgia over the Internet:

News outlets have always loved the convenience of anniversaries, of course; we’re in the middle of experiencing the 50th birthday of everything that happened in the ’60s. But lately we’ve been buried in “Wanna Feel Old?” listicles and “___ Turns 20″ features. (Some of them, I fully admit, written by me.) A lot of this material is aimed at millennials (see the outpouring of love for cultural landmark Saved By the Bell), but I wouldn’t want to overstate this as a generational phenomenon. My own people, Gen Xers, grew up on Happy Days and gave the world the Schoolhouse Rock Live! musical. Premature nostalgia may just be our general way of dealing with our society’s extended nether-zone between childhood and independent adulthood.

Whatever the explanation, though, online sharing and social media have positively weaponized nostalgia.

Others are nostalgic for life offline:

In an era where people flock to Facebook to find friends or communicate solely via text, a growing niche of entrepreneurs is building businesses that help people meet the old-fashioned way: in person.

As digital connections have blossomed, so too has a sense of loneliness among some users. Patrick Janelle, a founder of Spring St., is one of them. He said he started the society, in part, because his digital life, which includes an Instagram account with about lacked the human contact he craved.

Guests now depend on him, not a computer algorithm, to do the social sorting for them, betting his parties will create an atmosphere that fosters meaningful relationships. “I want to be remembered for bringing these people together,” said Mr. Janelle, of the get-togethers he plans with his Spring St. partner, Amy Virginia Buchanan. He added: “It resonates right now because there is a mystery and surprise, and you are discovering new things.”

Cody C. Delistraty, meanwhile, insists on the authenticity of online relationships:

The question, then, is whether these relationships in the virtual world are still the same as relationships pursued in the real world or is there a fundamental difference, as Baudrillard would have claimed? Can we still call love “love” if it’s passing through a screen?

For the past decade, Paul J. Zak, a professor of neuro-economics at the Claremont Graduate University who sometimes goes by “Dr. Love,” has been conducting studies on how relationships maintained over social media differ from relationships in real life. What he has found is that there’s hardly any difference at all.

“It’s as if the brain doesn’t really differentiate between you posting on social media and you being there in person,” he told me. “We’re such hyper-social creatures that we have a large release of dopamine when we’re with other people. But we can also get that release through Twitter or any social media, really.”

Face Of The Day

People clean the face of a protester after he was sprayed with pepper spray during a pro-democracy protest in the Kowloon district of Hong Kong on October 4, 2014 in Hong Kong. Thousands of pro-democracy supporters continue to occupy the streets surrounding the city’s financial district. By Thomas Campean/Getty Images.

Waiting Years For A Trial

Arrested at sixteen, Kalief Browder was imprisoned at Rikers Island for three years without ever being convicted of a crime. His case was eventually dismissed. From Jennifer Gonnerman’s excellent coverage of the injustice:

In order for a trial to start, both the defense attorney and the prosecutor have to declare that they are ready; the court clerk then searches for a trial judge who is free and transfers the case, and jury selection can begin. Not long after Browder was indicted, an assistant district attorney sent the court a “Notice of Readiness,” stating that “the People are ready for trial.” The case was put on the calendar for possible trial on December 10th, but it did not start that day. On January 28, 2011, Browder’s two-hundred-and-fifty-eighth day in jail, he was brought back to the courthouse once again. This time, the prosecutor said, “The People are not ready. We are requesting one week.” The next court date set by the judge—March 9th—was not one week away but six. As it happened, Browder didn’t go to trial anytime that year. An index card in the court file explains:

June 23, 2011: People not ready, request 1 week.

August 24, 2011: People not ready, request 1 day.

November 4, 2011: People not ready, prosecutor on trial, request 2 weeks.

December 2, 2011: Prosecutor on trial, request January 3rd.

The Bronx courts are so clogged that when a lawyer asks for a one-week adjournment the next court date usually doesn’t happen for six weeks or more. As long as a prosecutor has filed a Notice of Readiness, however, delays caused by court congestion don’t count toward the number of days that are officially held to have elapsed. Every time a prosecutor stood before a judge in Browder’s case, requested a one-week adjournment, and got six weeks instead, this counted as only one week against the six-month deadline. Meanwhile, Browder remained on Rikers, where six weeks still felt like six weeks—and often much longer.

In an additional post, Gonnerman highlights Rikers’ use of solitary confinement on teens – a practice the jail has promised to phase out:

Jail officials say that there are now fifty-one inmates in solitary confinement between sixteen and seventeen years old. By January 1st, that number should be down to zero, if jail officials follow through on their promise. Meanwhile, the months that Browder spent locked in the Bing left him with his own theories about the power dynamics of solitary. In his view, its very setup insured that guards who wanted to dole out extra punishment to inmates—deprive them of the phone or rec or even food—could get away with it. Among the general jail population, Browder said, “they’ll do their job, because they know the inmates will jump on them. But in solitary confinement, they know everybody is locked in, so they curse at us, they talk disrespectful to us, because they know we can’t do nothing.”

Jon Walker connects Browder’s case to the war on drugs:

A very big reason the justice system is overwhelmed and conditions at our prisons are so terrible is due to overcrowding from the drug war. According to the FBI’s nationwide statistics, “The highest number of arrests were for drug abuse violations.” … This doesn’t just hurt people caught up in the drug war and their families. It harms everyone who needs to use the justice system including the victims and those accused of all other crimes. The drug war has so overwhelmed our system of justice that it is has effectively destroyed the constitutional right to a speedy trial.