Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 154

Quote For The Day

“When the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains it was between seven and eight o’ clock and then I was in time again, hearing the watch. It was Grandfather’s and when Father gave it to me he said I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it’s rather excruciating-ly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father’s. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools,” – William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury.

(Photo of Faulkner’s Underwood Universal Portable typewriter by Gary Bridgman)

Mental Health Break

Playing with fire never looked so beautiful:

Seeing The Glass As Half-Empty

As a species, we’re prone to it:

Negative events affect us more than positive ones. We remember them more vividly and they play a larger role in shaping our lives. Farewells, accidents, bad parenting, financial losses and even a random snide comment take up most of our psychic space, leaving little room for compliments or pleasant experiences to help us along life’s challenging path. The staggering human ability to adapt ensures that joy over a salary hike will abate within months, leaving only a benchmark for future raises. We feel pain, but not the absence of it.

Hundreds of scientific studies from around the world confirm our negativity bias: while a good day has no lasting effect on the following day, a bad day carries over. We process negative data faster and more thoroughly than positive data, and they affect us longer. Socially, we invest more in avoiding a bad reputation than in building a good one. Emotionally, we go to greater lengths to avoid a bad mood than to experience a good one. Pessimists tend to assess their health more accurately than optimists. In our era of political correctness, negative remarks stand out and seem more authentic. People – even babies as young as six months old – are quick to spot an angry face in a crowd, but slower to pick out a happy one; in fact, no matter how many smiles we see in that crowd, we will always spot the angry face first.

Face Of The Day

Sage Sohier captured the expressions of people being treated for facial paralysis:

Sage Sohier spent three years at a facial nerve clinic, photographing people in the beginning stages of treatment of facial paralysis for her series “About Face.” The portraits of men, women, and children of all ages and ethnicities with varied causes and visible extents of paralysis are striking. Looking directly into the camera, directly at the viewer, the patients smile.

Sohier adds:

Most people I photograph are acutely aware of their imperfections and try to minimize them. Some have confided in me that, in their attempt to look more normal, they strive for impassivity and repress their smiles. They worry that this effort is altering who they are emotionally and affecting how other people respond to them.

See more of her work here.

War Stories

During World War II, book publishers began to mass-produce cheap copies of their most valuable hardcovers, selling them to the army for pennies. Yoni Appelbaum looks back at which titles made a particular impression on GIs:

No book generated more passion among its readers than A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, a gritty coming-of-age novel. On a Pacific island, a lucky soldier given a new copy “howled with joy,” but knew he’d have to sleep on top of it if he hoped to hang onto it long enough to finish it. A 20-year-old Marine “went through hell” in two years of combat, but wrote from his stateside hospital bed that the book had made him feel human again. It might, he conceded, be “unusual for a supposedly battle-hardened marine to do such an effeminate thing as weep over a piece of fiction,” but he was now making his way through the book for the third time. In France, the colonel commanding an anti-aircraft battalion being shelled by German artillery found one of his soldiers reading the book between explosions. “He started to read us a portion … and we laughed like hell between bursts. It sure was funny.” The tough West Pointer later found a copy of his own, and was tempted to pull it out and read it while wounded and pinned down by enemy fire. “It was that interesting,” he recalled, in a letter to the publisher.

Appelbaum goes on to describe how the publishers’ wartime gamble helped the industry flourish after troops came home:

Suddenly, anyone who wanted to could fill a shelf with books. Paperbacks lost their stigma. The Armed Services Editions succeeded in “conditioning the younger generation to be perfectly at home with books in paper covers.” The new technology, initially feared and scorned, proved to be the industry’s salvation. Many readers first hooked with paperbacks later purchased hardcovers, fueling sales and providing the old-line publishing industry with a vastly larger market for its wares.

Talk Yiddish To Me

Tanya Basu asks what the future holds for the Ashkenazi language:

Joseph Berger, a religion reporter for The New York Times, explores [the future of Yiddish] in his book, The Pious Ones: The World of Hasidim and Their Battles with America, published Tuesday. In it, Berger recounts meeting Rabbi Hertz Frankel, the principal of a Satmar girl’s school in Brooklyn, home to the largest concentration of Yiddish speakers in America, along with a large population of Orthodox Jews. Frankel comments on how secular Judaism has contributed to the death of Yiddish and a simultaneous loss of traditional Jewish identity:

The secular community is dead, dead, dead. There’s no Yiddish press, no Yiddish theater [not quite accurate since there is one still-vibrant group, the National Yiddish Theater-Folksbiene]. Dead, dead, dead. There were hundreds of Sholem Aleichem schools, Peretz schools. Where are they? How many Yiddish books are being published? The secular people dominated everything and now they’ve lost. Hasidim are pushing everyone to be more religious, more Jewish.

Rabbi Frankel’s bemoaning of the potential extinction of Yiddish illuminates a greater issue: The language has become synonymous with Orthodox Judaism and has lost its meaning within the secular parts of the faith. It’s a dying language among mainstream Jewish Americans but a thriving one among the Hasidim, who speak the language almost exclusively.

Corporeal Appropriation

Cultural appropriation in fashion isn’t limited to the clothes themselves. Stacia L. Brown takes issue with a Vogue article on “the era of the big booty”:

The ways in which black women and their bodies are discussed in mainstream, predominantly white media matters. “Vogue” isn’t the only publication to frame conversation like this poorly. Just this month, The New York Times published a piece on “natural hair” titled, “Curls Get Their Groove Back.” It’s a multi-paragraph missive about the “new” trend of white women eschewing hair-straightening and “cultural bias” against white women with curly hair. One line is given to the discussion of black hair.

Back in April, Carimah Townes argued along similar lines:

In an article comically entitled “Rear Admirable,” Vanity Fair showcases social media sensation Jen Selter, who skyrocketed to fame after posting photos of her butt on Instagram. The pictures used in the spread include a backside shot of Selter in a black corset, and another of the model in 1940s-inspired, fishnet lingerie. The accompanying text describes Selter as a “member of a rapidly rising subset of Instagram stars: young women unfraid to share their deeply bronzed, sculpted figures.”

The takeaway message is that showing off curves in a public way is not only a new phenomenon, but looking darker, “or bronzed,” is the new way to be beautiful. It’s a breath of fresh air to see curves and darker skin tones applauded by a world-renowned publication, but disappointing that Vanity Fair used a white Jewish woman to convey a newly-accepted norm.

America’s Creepiest Home Videos

Richard Metzger spotlights The Memory Hole, a deeply weird video project thought by some to “have been culled from over 300,000 VHS tapes housed in a basement storage space belonging to the producers of America’s Funniest Home Videos“:

It’s very Gummo meets Un Chien Andalou meets like Andy Milligan meets Tim and Eric. The producers are aspiring to get either David Lynch or Werner Herzog to host the show as a computer generated character. The pilot they’re currently shopping around Hollywood is probably the hottest thing since Jackass started making the rounds on VHS in the late 90s. Everybody wanted to see that tape and the same thing seems to be happening for The Memory Hole‘s sizzle reel which already has quite a reputation.

The Memory Hole is a terrifyingly REAL glimpse into the dark heart of America in the later part of the 20th century… it’s also a gut-busting, hilariously “new” form of comedy.

More weirdness here and here.

A Poem For Saturday

Dish poetry editor Alice Quinn writes:

Copper Canyon Press has just released a new book by Jericho Brown, welcomed by Pulitzer-Prize winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa, who is not given to exaggeration, as follows:

Jericho Brown’s The New Testament chronicles life and death, personal rituals and blasphemies, race and nation, the good and the bad, as well as illuminating scenarios of self-interrogation and near redemption. The lyrical clarity in this poignant collection approaches ascension. And here the sacred and profane embrace … The New Testament is lit by signifying, an anthem of survival and jubilation.

We’ll post three poems from this stunning book in the days ahead.

“Romans 12: 1″ by Jericho Brown:

I will begin with the body,

In the year of our Lord,

Porous and wet, love-wracked

And willing: in my 23rd year,

A certain obsession overtook

My body, or I should say,

I let a man touch me until I bled,

Until my blood met his hunger

And so was changed, was given

A new name

As is the practice among my people

Who are several and whole, holy

And acceptable. On the whole

Hurt by me, they will not call me

Brother. Hear me coming,

And they cross their legs. As men

Are wont to hate women,

As women are taught to hate

Themselves, they hate a woman

They smell in me, every muscle

Of her body clenched

In fits beneath men

Heavy as heaven—my body,

Dear dying sacrifice, desirous

As I will be, black as I am.

(From The New Testament © 2014 by Jericho Brown. Used by permission of Copper Canyon Press. Photo of Jericho Brown by John Lucas)

Anti-Drug Propaganda

Leonid Bershidsky warns of its dangers:

Perhaps propaganda is the most dangerous drug of all. The U.S. Congress appeared to understand the potentially corrosive effects back in the 1970s and 1980s, when it banned the dissemination on U.S. soil of government-funded media such as Voice of America, partly in an effort to prevent domestic propaganda (the ban is no longer in force). The no-holds-barred war of lies between the governments of Russia and Ukraine shows propaganda machines maintain their deadly effectiveness even today.

Governments’ power to influence public opinion should be restricted as tightly as the most dangerous drugs, and free media – where they still exist – need to pay special attention to how they relay government messages. Otherwise, when officials grow older and decide something was done wrong, their wisdom will fall on deaf ears.

Drug Czar Michael Botticelli recently stated that the marijuana legalization movement “sends the wrong message, particularly to the youth of our country.” But Jon Walker believes the real problem is the message sent by the government’s draconian drug policies:

To begin with there is the fact that the federal government keeps marijuana a schedule I drug, classifying it as having no accepted medical value despite significant evidence that it provides relief to patients with a range of conditions. By doing this the federal government is telling our young people that it is okay to completely disregard science if you don’t like the results. It also lets young people know their government doesn’t thinks relieving the suffering of the sick should be a priority.

The government also continues to spend billions of dollars and has arrested millions of Americans in our decades-long marijuana prohibition war, yet it has completely failed to stop marijuana from being widely used. From this young people learn the important lesson that you should never admit you made a mistake, no matter how expensive or destructive that mistake has been.