Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 155

Give Millennials A Break

A new Pew study finds that the Internet hasn’t totally eroded the reading habits of Generation Y:

Millennials, like each generation that was young before them, tend to attract all kinds of ire from their elders for being superficial, self-obsessed, anti-intellectuals. But a study … from the Pew Research Center offers some vindication for the younger set. Millennials are reading more books than the over-30 crowd, Pew found in a survey of more than 6,000 Americans.

Some 88 percent of Americans younger than 30 said they read a book in the past year compared with 79 percent of those older than 30. At the same time, American readers’ relationship with public libraries is changing—with younger readers less likely to see public libraries as essential in their communities.

Meanwhile, Susan J. Matt, author of Homesickness: An American History, defends the 22 percent of adults in their 20s and 30s who live with their parents. The idea that young adults should leave home, she argues, only took off in the 20th century:

By mid-century, experts were arguing that tightly bonded families were out of place in America. Sociologist W. Lloyd Warner explained that because the economy required individuals to move frequently, “families cannot be too closely attached to their kindred. . . or they will be held to one location, socially and economically maladapted.” Those who tried to maintain strong kin ties were criticized. In 1951, psychiatrist Edward Strecker, preoccupied with the Cold War and the need for a mobile fighting force, accused American mothers of keeping their “children enwombed psychologically,” failing to “untie the emotional apron string … which binds her children to her.” He dubbed these women the nation’s “gravest menace.”

Today, we continue to believe young adults should leave home. When they don’t, their living choices are chalked up to poor employment prospects. While economic realities surely play a part in their residential choices, the media give short shrift to other motives. The idea that families might be drawn together by feelings of affection is left out of the equation, as is the possibility that this generation wants to become something other than mobile individualists. Yet there’s considerable evidence that millennials hold values that center more on family and less on high powered careers. A recent poll found them far less concerned with financial success than the population at large. They also are closer to their parents, whom they fight with less, and talk with more than earlier generations.

Mental Health Break

All together now:

Why Marriage Equality Lags In China

Li Yinhe, a Chinese sociologist who keeps a popular blog on sex and family issues, compares attitudes toward homosexuality in China and the West:

In your blog you’ve advocated legalizing same-sex marriage. Is that a realistic goal in China?

The attitude toward homosexuality in China is not as absolute as in the West. At least in some earlier eras, there wasn’t an absolute opposition to it. In China it’s never been illegal or outlawed. During the Song dynasty there was a law against homosexual prostitution, but not against homosexuality in principle. It’s more something that might have been considered ridiculous but not a crime.

So the main thing was you do your duty—get married and procreate?

Yes, that’s the key. But maybe more, Chinese people’s view of sex is different than foreigners’. Chinese view it as purely a physical desire. Who your partner is—male or female—or how you express it doesn’t matter. Anal sex or things like that, they don’t think it’s bad. So from this point of view, homosexuality is not such a problem. I read a survey of attitudes about same-sex marriage in 2008: about 10 to 20 percent thought it was absolutely no problem and 10 to 20 percent thought it was absolutely wrong. But the rest—the majority—just didn’t care. By contrast, in the United States, 47 percent were in favor of same-sex marriage and 43 percent were against. Only 10 percent didn’t have a view. For the Chinese it was like this: It doesn’t have to do with me so I don’t care.

For Chinese who do oppose it, what are their reasons?

They think it’s unnatural because homosexuals can’t have children. But I think this view is slowly changing. The main hindrance is there are no rights groups. In the West, you might have members of parliament or prominent people who are gay or lesbian and they can raise the issue of same-sex marriage. In China, no one raises the issue. Most people don’t think it’s a big issue.

Raining On Your Food Parade

New York's Wine & Food Festival welcomes Meatopia, a meat-lover's paradise. http://t.co/8yAeaE5paQ pic.twitter.com/C3vqBO0D8k

— ForbesLife (@ForbesLife) August 26, 2014

Andrew Simmons frowns at food festivals:

Some food festivals trumpet sustainability as a pillar of their mission, but this is self-evidently ridiculous. While biodegradable forks made from potato starch are popular, at the end of the day, napkins, plates, and discarded food billow out of garbage cans. Piles of trash sprout wherever attendees feel like starting them. Just because the heritage-breed pigs everyone’s tucking into were raised on chestnuts, doesn’t mean that the event is somehow expanding the crowd’s understanding of food systems. Responsible animal husbandry is great, but the very notion of encouraging a few relatively privileged people to dramatically overindulge—and then leave piles of garbage behind for janitors to clean up—seems unsustainable.

A Short Story For Saturday

This week we’re featuring another reader-suggested short story, John Cheever’s “The Death of Justina,” which was a recurring favorite in our recent “Reading Your Way Through Life” thread. It hooks you from the start:

So help me God it gets more and more preposterous, it corresponds less and less to what I remember and what I expect as if the force of life were centrifugal and threw one further and further away from one’s purest memories and ambitions; and I can barely recall the old house where I was raised, where in midwinter Parma violets bloomed in a cold frame near the kitchen door, and down the long corridor, past the seven views of Rome-up two steps and down three-one entered the library, where all the books were in order, the lamps were bright, where there was a fire and a dozen bottles of good bourbon locked in a cabinet with a veneer like tortoise shell whose silver key my father wore on his watch chain. Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos (no less) and we can accomplish this only by the most vigilant exercise of choice, but in a world that changes more swiftly than we can perceive there is always the danger that our powers of selection will be mistaken and that the vision we serve will come to nothing. We admire decency and we despise death but even the mountains seem to shift in the space of a night and perhaps the exhibitionist at the corner of Chestnut and Elm streets is more significant than the lovely woman with a bar of sunlight in her hair, putting a fresh piece of cuttlebone in the nightingales’s cage. Just let me give you one example of chaos and if you disbelieve me look honestly into your own past and see if you can’t find a comparable experience.

Keep reading here. For more, check out The Stories of John Cheever. Browse previous SSFSs here.

Have We Outgrown Growing Up?

A.O. Scott sounds the death knell for adulthood in American culture, arguing that shows like Girls, Broad City, and “a flood of goofy, sweet, self-indulgent and obnoxious improv-based web videos” signal that “nobody knows how to be a grown-up anymore”:

It is now possible to conceive of adulthood as the state of being forever young. Childhood, once a condition of limited autonomy and deferred pleasure (“wait until you’re older”), is now a zone of perpetual freedom and delight. Grown people feel no compulsion to put away childish things: We can live with our parents, go to summer camp, play dodge ball, collect dolls and action figures and watch cartoons to our hearts’ content. These symptoms of arrested development will also be signs that we are freer, more honest and happier than the uptight fools who let go of such pastimes.

I do feel the loss of something here, but bemoaning the general immaturity of contemporary culture would be as obtuse as declaring it the coolest thing ever. A crisis of authority is not for the faint of heart. It can be scary and weird and ambiguous. But it can be a lot of fun, too. The best and most authentic cultural products of our time manage to be all of those things. They imagine a world where no one is in charge and no one necessarily knows what’s going on, where identities are in perpetual flux. Mothers and fathers act like teenagers; little children are wise beyond their years. Girls light out for the territory and boys cloister themselves in secret gardens. We have more stories, pictures and arguments than we know what to do with, and each one of them presses on our attention with a claim of uniqueness, a demand to be recognized as special. The world is our playground, without a dad or a mom in sight.

Adam Sternbergh appreciates the prompt to reconsider what maturity means today:

The best part of any essay about changing cultural notions of adulthood is that it encourages us, again, to revisit what adulthood means, exactly. To some, it’s men in suits and smoking and not being able to do what you want anymore, because propriety. For others, it’s a continuing suspicion of cultural pleasure that would make the Puritans proud. To my eye, watching Seth Rogen grapple with responsibility in Knocked Up is a much more honest engagement with the meaning of maturity than watching Woody Allen grapple with a 17 year-old Mariel Hemingway in Manhattan, a presumably more “grown-up” film.

Alissa Wilkinson also sees Scott’s point:

Growing into a full humanity requires cultivating virtues that temper one another. Some are associated with adulthood—courage, tenacity, autonomy. Others are more closely associated with childhood—curiosity, humility, generosity. So, yes: only engaging in “juvenile” culture could shape us in bad ways. … But only engaging in “grown up” culture can, too, as can reflexively defending sophisticated products and rejecting simpler ones.

As Scott points out, the kind of culture creative output that results from our cultural shift doesn’t merely mean we end up with “juvenile” culture and fart jokes and boy-men and girl-women. It also means we end up with a lot of “childish” culture. Or maybe “childlike” is a better term. We get things that test the edges of the accepted in playful ways. We have stories that find wonder everywhere. We experience pleasing blows to our self-importance. And sometimes, if we are paying attention, we are even returned to a time when things like faith, and hope, and love came easily.

The Dark Side Of Cop Cams

Jacob Siegel worries about what happens to the footage:

Think of it like this: The police will have moved their evidence into a private warehouse staffed by private security guards and administrators. These private guards can see the boxes the evidence is stored in, how many and when they come in, but they’re not supposed to look inside. And instead of only keeping evidence related to criminal matters, this private warehouse is storing a bottomless pit of routine interactions between cops and citizens. Going 50 in a 35? Got stopped because you fit the description, but quickly released once the cops realized you weren’t the person they were looking for? There’s going to be a video of you in a private corporation’s digital records.

This isn’t abstract.

In Michael Brown’s case, outrage that the teenager’s fatal shooting wasn’t recorded was paired with a video released by Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson, showing the teen appear to push a clerk and leave a store with a box of unpaid-for cigars. It shortly emerged that the officer who shot him had no knowledge of that earlier crime, and many accused the police chief of releasing the video to smear a dead man. The same massive evidence trove body cameras create can, if used selectively, humiliate and indict average citizens.

Also, Matt Taylor points out, cameras don’t always prevent police abuse:

Presumably, your average beat cop is less likely to go on a power trip and beat a vulnerable person senseless if he thinks he might have to explain the video to a grand jury afterward. But slapping cameras on police officers’ lapels is no panacea, and presents all sorts of tricky questions about privacy in this era of unchecked state surveillance. Besides, we know that, by way of example, cops in Albequerque, New Mexico, went ahead and killed a mentally ill homeless man on tape last year despite the officers’ cameras. Remember, Rodney King was beaten on tape (and so was Garner, for that matter)—for all the good it did him.

Previous Dish on cop cameras here.

(Photo: New York City Public Advocate Letitia James displays a video camera that police officers could wear on patrol during a press conference on August 21, 2014 in New York City. By Andrew Burton/Getty Images)

What Do Smartwatches Mean For News?

Dan Shanoff wonders:

“Glance” is the name of the feature of the Apple Watch that let Watch-wearers skim through a series of not-quite-notifications. Maybe they are notifications, but only as a subset of a new class of ultra-brief news.

“Atomic unit” was a helpful metaphor, but we’re now talking about the proton/neutron level. Glance journalism makes tweets look like longform, typical news notifications (and even innovative atomized news apps) look like endless scroll, and [Zach] Seward’s

Face Of The Day

A Bahraini girl holds a placard during an anti-government protest in the village of Sitra, south of Manama, on September 12, 2014. “Ongoing violations of the rights to freedom of expression, peaceful assembly and association, and the targeting of human rights activists in Bahrain remain of serious concern,” Ravina Shamdasani, the spokeswoman for the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said in a statement on September 5. By Mohammed Al-Shaikh/AFP/Getty Images.

Genes And IQ: An Update, Ctd

A reader quotes me:

“There’s not a huge debate about the heritability of IQ, but a huge amount of debate about how much intelligence can be tied to genes and how much to the environment.” You’ve been careful in the past not to let IQ stand as a proxy for intelligence, so I’m not sure why you absolutely conflate them here. Also, you have a false dichotomy here: genes and environment are not separate influences. Gene expression is mediated by the “environment”.

A well-known example of this is the desert locust, which has a solitary (grasshopper) and gregarious (locust) forms which were, at one time, thought to be different species. Which form develops depends on the social environment of the insect during its development (specifically, the gregarious form develops when its hind legs are often stimulated by other individuals due to crowding.) A particular pair of individuals, one solitary and one gregarious, may have exactly the same genome, but exhibit severe morphological differences upon full adulthood, and these differences are controlled entirely (or nearly entirely) by the genome.

And genomic expression is far more complicated than you make it sound.

There is rarely a straight gene-to-trait pathway of expression. A gene might regulate the expression of another gene, which turns off a separate gene and turns on two more, one of which slows down the expression of the first gene, another of which causes a side effect that … etc, etc. It’s a bewildering tangle of interactions that permeates the cell and well beyond. Do you think it’s possible to document the whole ecology of a rain forest: all of the interactions and feedback loops between plants, insects, animals, the air, the soil, bacteria, worms, sunlight, wind and weather, ocean currents, river sediment, etc, etc? Trying to find which genes affect intelligence is like trying to find particular Amazonian fish species that are responsible for global warming.

Another quotes the article I cited:

“A copy of each variant accounts for only 0.3 points on a standard IQ test (with a mean of 100 and standard deviation of 15).” With 126K points, the margin of error for something with a standard deviation of 15 and a 95% confidence interval (meaning that we’re 95% sure that this isn’t just chance) is about 2*15/355 = 0.085 IQ points, so at least the 0.3% looks to be statistically significant, although just barely, since the margin of error is more than 1/4 of the entire effect. And the connection to IQ (as opposed to years of schooling) was based on a sample of 24,000, where the margin of error would be 2*15/155 = 0.2 IQ points, or nearly the entire effect. So, I’m not sure whether these results are statistically significant – the algorithm for mapping the 126K data points of years of schooling through the 24K data points of IQ isn’t specified.

Worse, however, what they did is identify 6 variants that were associated with additional years of schooling. If I told you that several of those variants were associated with Ashkenazy Jews, for example, I would have just found an expensive way of saying that Jews as a group spend more time in school than average. Correlation really doesn’t equal causation. My guess is that they found some genetic markers that are associated with some ethnic groups, and then “discovered” that those ethnic groups spend a little more time in school on average.

The author in the end says “We haven’t found nothing.” But that’s most likely exactly what they found.

Another also scrutinizes the statistics:

I was rather surprised that you went there again:

What to make of this with respect to our cultural and political debate about genes and intelligence? For me, some relief that the area is so complex, and varied, and hard to decipher that we may have more time ahead before these things become more knowable, and thereby may avoid any of the worst social implications for longer than some of us feared.

As a scientist (albeit one completely unfamiliar with the field in question), a result that shows such a minuscule effect, well within the variance in the response of the system is equivalent to there being no effect at all. You should probably become more familiar with statistics but such a result essentially means that there is absolutely no correlation whatsoever between specific genetic markers and cognitive abilities. Such a small effect (an order of magnitude smaller than normal variance in IQ) is very likely the product of the random nature of the sample. Your statement seems to suggest that things are really complicated. They are not, at least when it comes to the conclusions of this study; there are no meaningful correlation between genetic variants and IQ.

Without knowing the literature at all, I am willing to bet that there are studies that find much larger correlations between socio-economic factors and IQ scores. Based on IQ scores of whites vs other groups, I am willing to say that such effects are perhaps an order of magnitude larger than the effects in this study.

Let it go (to quote from Frozen) ...