Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 169
August 29, 2014
Death To Monarchs, Ctd
Finally a little good news to offset the bad news in my earlier post about the precipitous decline of the eastern monarch butterfly population. The first is that this year’s population appears to be more robust than last year’s, which plummeted to an all-time low. Monarch watchers at Ontario’s Point Pelee Park, a traditional migratory jumping off point for the butterflies on their way to Mexico, have seen many more monarch butterflies and monarch caterpillars, as has Professor Chip Taylor of the University of Kansas who runs the monarch conservation organization Monarch Watch. Taylor estimates that the numbers could be up by thirty or forty percent, though he points out that even so, the increase won’t offset last year’s precipitous decline.
Awareness of the monarch’s plight has reached the highest echelons of government, which is the other bit of good news. In a letter circulated today, the naturalists Gary Nabhan and Ina Warren who have spearheaded Make Way For Monarchs, an international effort to protect the monarch from, especially, the deleterious effects of habitat destruction, note that “The White House has appointed Fish and Wildlife Director Ashe to head up the ‘high-level working group’ to work with Mexico and Canada on recovery plans, and 14 federal agencies have formed work groups and “communities of practice” to reorient their work plans toward monarch recovery.”
The Executive may not have a plan to deal with ISIS. It may be backing off on immigration reform and pretending it never heard of the Keystone XL pipeline, but at least it understands the value of monarchs.
(Photo by Joel Olives.)
Abortion By Mail
Emily Bazelon profiles doctor and reproductive-rights activist Rebecca Gomperts, who “started Women on Web, a ‘telemedicine support service’ for women around the world who are seeking medical abortions.” Why Gomperts’ work matters:
Almost 40 percent of the world’s population lives in countries, primarily in Latin America, Africa, Asia and the Persian Gulf, where abortion is either banned or severely restricted. The World Health Organization estimated in 2008 that 21.6 million unsafe abortions took place that year worldwide, leading to about 47,000 deaths. To reduce that number, W.H.O. put mifepristone and misoprostol on its Essential Medicines list. The cost of the combination dose used to end a pregnancy varies from less than $5 in India to about $120 in Europe. (Misoprostol is also used during labor and delivery to prevent postpartum hemorrhage, and global health groups have focused on making it more available in countries with high rates of maternal mortality, including Kenya, Tanzania, India, Nepal, Cambodia, and South Africa.) Gomperts told me that Women on Web receives 2,000 queries each month from women asking for help with medical abortions. (The drugs are widely advertised on the Internet, but it is difficult to tell which sites are scams.)
The Slums Of The Future, Ctd
Mumbai slum dwellers everyday's water bucket challenge http://t.co/MPin2ZvPkd—
(@rajennair) August 27, 2014
We know that the world’s slums are growing, but are the world’s major urban centers growing into slums? Joel Kotkin details the massive social, economic, and environmental challenges facing most emerging megacities:
Emerging megacities like Kinshasa or Lima do not command important global niches. Their problems are often ignored or minimized by those who inhabit what commentator Rajiv Desai has described as “the VIP zone of cities,” where there is “reliable electric power, adequate water supply, and any sanitation at all.” Outside the zone, Desai notes, even much of the middle class have to “endure inhuman conditions” of congested, cratered roads, unreliable energy, and undrinkable water.
The slums of Bangladesh’s capital, Dhaka, swell by as many as 400,000 new migrants each year. Some argue that these migrants are better off than previous slum dwellers since they ride motorcycles and have cellphones. Yet access to the wonders of transportation and “information technology” don’t compensate for physical conditions demonstrably worse than those endured even by Depression-era poor New Yorkers. My mother’s generation at least could drink water out of a tap and expect consistent electricity, if the bill was paid, something not taken for granted by their modern-day counterparts (PDF) in the developing world. … Over these environmental problems loom arguably greater social ones. Many of the megacities—including the fastest growing, Dhaka—are essentially conurbations dominated by very-low-income people; roughly 70 percent of Dhaka households earn less than $170 (U.S.) a month, and many of them far less. “The megacity of the poor,” is how the urban geographer Nazrul Islam describes his hometown.
The Relentless Warmongers
Matt Steinglass at the aimless hawkishness of American foreign policy elites when it comes to the Middle East:
William Kristol, as ever, manages to distill the rot down to its ludicrous essence: “What’s the harm of bombing them at least for a few weeks and seeing what happens? I don’t think there’s much in the way of unanticipated side effects that are going to be bad there. We could kill a lot of very bad guys!” No doubt the Americans could. Drop enough bombs and you are guaranteed to kill some very bad guys, and probably some good guys, as well as a lot of guys who, like most, fit somewhere in between. But simply bombing areas when the emerging powers prove bloodthirsty, and hoping that a better sort of power replaces them, isn’t very promising.
Conor Friedersdorf outlines the many questions interventionists aren’t bothering to ask, let alone answer:
After the decade-long, $6-trillion debacle in Iraq, you’d think Congress and pundits would be pressing the Obama administration for figures:
If the U.S. fights ISIS in Iraq and Syria, what would be the odds of victory? How much would it cost? How many U.S. troops would be killed? How would it effect nearby countries like Iran? And how much of a threat does ISIS actually pose to the U.S. “homeland”? Yet much coverage of Syria is narrowly drawn. Vital questions are studiously ignored, as if they have no bearing on the merits of intervention, while dire warnings are presented with too much hype and too little rigor.
And Steve Chapman remarks on how ISIS’s global threat is, in his view, being wildly oversold:
We are supposed to be impressed that the Islamic State controls a swath of land, which al-Qaida never did. But Ohio State University political scientist John Mueller says that’s not the advantage it appears to be. “The fact that they want to hold territory and are likely to deeply alienate the people in their territory means that, unlike terrorists, they will present lucrative targets while surrounded by people who are more than willing to help with intelligence about their whereabouts,” he told me. It’s often forgotten that al-Qaida proclaimed its own state in Iraq in 2007, but its brutal ways alienated fellow Sunni insurgent groups so completely that they switched to our side. The Islamic State is equally vulnerable to a backlash. As for the prospect that it could hit the homeland, our usual problem in deterring terrorists is that their bombs have no return address. The Islamic State, by contrast, is adorned with a neon bull’s-eye.
White Lady Makeovers
Linda Holmes saves her readers the trouble of watching a new reality show that involves black women making over white ones:
The black women on Girlfriend Intervention, like the gay men who did the work on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, are supposedly being saluted for their (stereotypically) superior style and knowledge and backbone, but are cast as helpers and facilitators for the benefit of, respectively, white women and straight men, valued for what they can offer and required to display sass at all times in sufficient amounts. (Among other things, it’s unfortunate that other than Thomas being the loudest, they don’t much distinguish the four stylists from each other, either.)
Popular entertainment targeted to white women is thick with obnoxiously other-ish fairy godpeople: the gay friend, the keeping-it-real black friend, the Latina neighbor, the wise black boss. There’s always some earthier, real-er, truer person whose task it is to flutter around to provide perspective, to fix what’s broken, and often to embarrass you for your foolishness. This is problematic for white women who don’t care to be cast as badly dressed, helpless dummies who need constant life coaching, but it’s no better for black women who don’t care to be cast as flashy-dressing, finger-waving, fast-talking fixers whose mission is making Cinderella presentable for the ball, or for gay men who don’t care to be asked to tag along on shopping trips.
Holmes spells out why such a show might send the wrong message:
It’s not your black friend’s job to tell you how to believe in yourself and keep your man (the concept of not having a man one is desperate to keep is seemingly foreign to the interventionists); it’s not your gay friend’s job to style you. Friendship is not quite so transactional.
Injury To Insult
As the tallest staffer (6’4″) here at the Dish, feels like I should be the one to steer us into the airline legroom debate that’s flared up this week. For the uninitiated, on Monday a Newark-to-Denver flight was diverted after a scuffle broke out between two passengers when one used a $21.95 device called a Knee Defender to prevent the other’s seat from reclining. In short, a laptop’s airspace was temporarily defended, a little plastic cup of water was thrown, and an airplane full of helpless bystanders was annoyed when the flight had to land to eject the combatants. Then another recline-related fracas happened yesterday with a similar result. Anyway, because the Internet exists and we lucky few get paid to put things on it, a civility war has broken out between pro and anti-recline advocates. In one corner were tall people like Bill Saporito:
I don’t travel with a Knee Defender, but I do travel with knees. Just being an airline passengers makes everyone cranky to begin with. Being 6 ft. 2 in. and long of leg, I’m in a near rage by the time I wedge myself into a coach seat. And now you want to jam your chair back into my knees for four hours? Go fly a kite. It’s an airline seat, not a lounge chair. You want comfort, buy a business class seat. What’s surprising is that there haven’t been more fights over Knee Defender. Or perhaps these incidents haven’t been reported. I’ve gotten into it a few times with people in front of me who insist that the space over my knees is theirs, as if they have some kind of air rights. And I’m sure I will again.
In the other corner, the air-libertarians going on about the “social contract”:
Buying a Knee Defender is cheating. It is like insider trading, but worse, because not everyone expects to get rich. Everyone does expect to recline.
Christopher Ingraham notes that most Americans probably agree with that. Here’s Barro examining an economic angle:
When you buy an airline ticket, one of the things you’re buying is the right to use your seat’s reclining function. If this passenger so badly wanted the passenger in front of him not to recline, he should have paid her to give up that right. I wrote an article to that effect in 2011, noting that airline seats are an excellent case study for the Coase Theorem. This is an economic theory holding that it doesn’t matter very much who is initially given a property right; so long as you clearly define it and transaction costs are low, people will trade the right so that it ends up in the hands of whoever values it most. That is, I own the right to recline, and if my reclining bothers you, you can pay me to stop. We could (but don’t) have an alternative system in which the passenger sitting behind me owns the reclining rights. In that circumstance, if I really care about being allowed to recline, I could pay him to let me.
Rejecting that argument, Damon Darlin stands up for knee defense:
The problem seems akin to people walking on a 48-inch city sidewalk with those ridiculous 54-inch-wide golf umbrellas. Or is a better analogy the range wars of the American West in which cattlemen try to stop the farmers until Shane fights back with his ivory-handled Colt revolver? Using a Knee Defender may seem uncivil, but it is not: It just evens the playing field. Instead of having the guy in front of you slam the seat back and wait for $50, as Mr. Barro suggests, with a defender you can now negotiate.
“It gives you the chance to be human beings,” says Ira Goldman, the inventor of the Knee Defender, who has seen traffic to his online store rise 500 times above average since an altercation last weekend on a United flight involving his device. “Do you want the conversation to start before the laptop screen is cracked or after it is cracked?” he asks. “Like Max Bialystok and Leo Bloom in “The Producers,’ the airlines sell 200 percent of that space.”
The airlines have also failed to establish property rights for armrests, but there is a generally understood code for that: The person in the aisle has room to stretch, the person in the window seat has the fuselage to lean against, and the person in the middle has nothing, so he or she gets the armrests.
And of course human beings tend to peacefully navigate these small disputes with alarming regularity, from fitting our cars into a Jersey-bound tunnel to, you know, not getting your plane diverted for any reason, ever. But Dan Kois points out the real ridiculousness of economy airline seats:
Obviously, everyone on the plane would be better off if no one reclined; the minor gain in comfort when you tilt your seat back 5 degrees is certainly offset by the discomfort when the person in front of you does the same. But of course someone always will recline her seat, like the people in the first row, or the woman in front of me, whom I hate.
Like Kois, I too have a “shall not pass” policy when it comes to the chain reaction of reclining-seats. I know what it’s like to get up at the end of a flight and have my knees buckle underneath me because they’ve been cut off from my circulatory system by a seat-back for six hours. So I refuse to recline my seat if there is ever a person (of any height) behind me. I try to break the chain. And I also fetch top-shelf cans for elderly women at the grocery store, and try to stand relatively still at rock concerts so the people behind me can expect a consistent viewing angle. Tall people aren’t all ogres, nor do we naturally excel at basketball, nor do we like having to special order our size-15 shoes, nor enjoy suffering mild concussions by accidentally walking into door frames. But back to the legroom, Kois has another good point to make about airline seats:
The problem isn’t with passengers, though the evidence demonstrates that many passengers are little better than sociopaths acting only for their own good. The problem is with the plane. In a closed system in which just one recliner out of 200 passengers can ruin it for dozens of people, it is too much to expect that everyone will act in the interest of the common good. People recline their seats because their seats recline. But why on earth do seats recline? Wouldn’t it be better for everyone if seats simply didn’t?
Reclining seats have been with us as long as airlines began making human passengers a priority. In the 1920s and 1930s, people were an afterthought; planes were meant to carry airmail and cargo, and any humans who wanted to come along were welcome to pay an astronomical fare and sit in wicker chairs. … In the beginning, reclining seats—along with footrests and in-seat ashtrays—were designed as part of airlines’ commitment to deluxe accommodations, as captains of industry in three-piece suits sipped martinis on board, stretching their legs one way and tilting their seats the other.
The seats persisted, even as airlines moved to the tiered service model we know now, which required packing more and more customers into economy in order to keep RPK (revenue per kilometer) high. “They didn’t want to give up the idea of luxury altogether,” Hill notes. But these days, flying is simply an ordeal to be survived. In the era of cheap tickets and passengers crammed onto flights like sardines, reclining seats make no sense.
That I totally agree with. We’re not talking about La-Z-Boys here, the additional comfort of a reclined economy seat is minuscule – more of a placebo at this point – and faux courtesies like this are especially aggravating when you consider the worsening state of economy airline travel. The prices go up. The legroom goes down. That free extra bag isn’t free anymore, and sometimes neither is the first one (and you better pre-weigh both bags at home). Used to be that tall folk like me could do some extra legwork to secure an exit or bulkhead row, but then the airlines figured that out so on came the extra fees for those seats, or the economy-plus sections that inched you $50-100 closer to the first class curtain.
On that note, I’m no Marxist, but one thing I have always hated about flying is how it feels like the Victorian class system’s last stand, one of the only situations where your place in society is explicitly and unapologetically stratified by how much money you don’t have (and yes, of course I realize this is a quintessentially First World argument, and that many people can’t afford to fly at all, etc). But seriously, for most people, first and business class are offensively more-expensive, designed to cater only to the very rich and those privileged enough to be traveling at some corporation’s expense. Save the Jetblues and Southwests of the world, there’s no recourse to this scrunched-in relegation. In-seat TVs are about the only thing in my lifetime that’s made flying coach more tolerable (streaming romantic comedies, the real opiate of the masses).
Unfortunately, I think we’re likely stuck with reclining seats and, for some of us, squished knees. After all, airlines couldn’t possibly get away with subtracting anything else from economy, could they?
[S]ome airlines, including Allegiant and Spirit, have installed non-reclining seats. Result: no more altercations (plus they could squeeze in some more seats on the planes). Other airlines, including Delta and American, are installing articulating seat pans on some of their planes in which the seat moves forward as it tilts back, so you essentially are taking away legroom from yourself instead of the guy behind you.
Progress. At least until the rise of the sardines.
By the way, Mark Orwoll, whose piece I just excerpted, also contributes this helpful etiquette list in order to avoid getting an air marshall involved in your seating arrangements:
Never recline during meal service. When the rolling food trays come out, seats go upright.
Don’t recline fully unless it’s a night flight and people are sleeping.
Don’t recline suddenly and forcefully. You might spill your rear neighbor’s Bloody Mary or damage her Macbook Pro (it almost happened to me!).
I’ll add a #4: Before you recline, see if there’s an uncomfortable tall person behind you, and if so, have mercy – they might help you get your bags down when the plane lands.
August 28, 2014
An Apple A Year
What do I (think I) know about the new iPhone 6? That it’s going to have a bigger screen. That’s it’s going to have two bigger screens since there will be two models. That the model with the even bigger screen is not going to be available right away. That both screens are going to be made from “stronger than steel” sapphire glass. That it is going to have rounded edges, just like the old days. That it is going to have a whole new operating system. That it will be able to measure my heart rate and count my steps. That it will be my e-wallet. That it is being unveiled on September 9th. That it is going to be cool. Really cool. So very cool that something on the order of 80 million people will ditch their previously really cool phone and buy one of these new, cooler, ones.
What do I know about the new iPad? That’s going to have a bigger screen. Way bigger than the iPad mini, which the company was finally compelled to produce after Samsung, Asus and Google showed that a segment of the population wanted to downsize. And it was great. But this new iPad is going to be greater. Literally. By about four inches greater. Why is bigger better? Bigger is always better, except when smaller is better. (Let’s hear it for the diminutive 11 inch MacBook Air on which I am typing this!)
What do I know about the new iWatch? That Apple hired a marketing executive from an actual watch company, which must mean that it is finally about to enter the wearable tech sector. That the iWatch is going to be announced along with the new iPhones on September 9th. Maybe.
And how do I know these things? I couldn’t tell you, exactly. There is an ambient quality to “information” about new Apple products. They swirl through the atmosphere. They are traded like bits of intelligence among children anticipating Christmas morning. Apple hardly needs a marketing department. The marketing department is us. This, among other things, is the legacy of Steve Jobs.
And since Jobs studied zen, here is a koan in anticipation of September 9: Why do Apple products cost more? Because they do.
As Leonid Bershidsky points out:
As long as the Cupertino company is able to sell millions of devices at prices that reflect nothing but the brand’s cachet, it doesn’t have to care about its shrinking market share: it will continue to skim the cream while rivals sweat every dollar.
And, he goes on:
After receiving hundreds of insulting messages every time I have the gall to question Apple’s superiority, I am convinced its products are cult objects made in heaven as far as its fans are concerned. Apple adherents don’t care about the Samsung provenance of the “revolutionary” 64-bit processors in their phones: to them, anything the company touches is sanctified, be it a Qualcomm camera module or a Bosch accelerometer.
Apple would be stupid not to use this incredible — and, after three years without a truly innovative product, inexplicable — competitive advantage. Its devotees will believe anything: That a $1,200 phone costs so much because it has a sapphire screen, because it’s bigger than before, simply because it’s the new iPhone. Tell them that using sapphire only adds about $15 to the cost of the phone, or that the Galaxy S5’s 5-inch screen costs $63 compared to $41 for the iPhone 5s’s 4-inch one — not a major difference considering the fat margins — and they will shrug: Apple wins.
(Image: Apple’s press invite to its Sept. 9th event.)
Golden Age of Radio, Ctd
So many great responses to my musings on audio documentaries yesterday with lots of suggestions: Radioopensource.org, with the inimitable veteran Christopher Lydon and his equally inimitable producer Mary McGrath; 99% Invisible, hosted by Roman Mars; On the Media, which is probably the most useful sustained media criticism in American journalism, Hardcore History with Dan Carlin, which was new to me; and Stuff You Missed in History Class were among the many vote-getters.
I wanted to take the chance to plump for a show I’m always trying to get people to listen to, because I think it exemplifies what radio can do so well. Even though I’m not obsessed with popular music, I listen to Sound Opinions every single week without fail. It comes from WBEZ in Chicago, just like This American Life, and it’s executive produced by the same guy, Tory Malatia. And it’s very simple: two talented music critics, Greg Kot and Jim DeRogatis, review a couple of new records, maybe host a short live concert, and often dissect some classic album or genre. (This week it’s a thoughtful take on the new wave of the 80s for any Duran Duran fans out there). It hits the perfect middle ground between geeky-obsessive and overly broad and obvious: that is to say, between the Internet and TV. It’s companionable, smart, and a wonderful hour. I keep pitching it because I don’t want it to ever go off the air.
The Spiral Of Silence
When I read this Pew report last week, about how social media does not foster meaningful dialog about public policy among people who might not share one’s own view, I can’t say that I was surprised. Researchers, interested in finding out if Facebook and Twitter encouraged people to engage with each other on divisive current events, interviewed slightly less than 2000 Americans, asking them if they would share their views about Edward Snowden’s NSA revelations with their social media “friends.” Apparently, in the pre-Internet olden days, people were shy about voicing an opinion on controversial topics when they weren’t sure of the viewpoint of their listeners. This reticence was deemed “the spiral of silence.” Might social media turn that around?
The survey reported in this report sought people’s opinions about the Snowden leaks, their willingness to talk about the revelations in various in-person and online settings, and their perceptions of the views of those around them in a variety of online and off-line contexts. This survey’s findings produced several major insights:
• People were less willing to discuss the Snowden-NSA story in social media than they were in person. 86% of Americans were willing to have an in-person conversation about the surveillance program, but just 42% of Facebook and Twitter users were willing to post about it on those platforms.
• Social media did not provide an alternative discussion platform for those who were not willing to discuss the Snowden-NSA story. Of the 14% of Americans unwilling to discuss the Snowden-NSA story in person with others, only 0.3% were willing to post about it on social media.
• In both personal settings and online settings, people were more willing to share their views if they thought their audience agreed with them. For instance, at work, those who felt their coworkers agreed with their opinion were about three times more likely to say they would join a workplace conversation about the Snowden-NSA situation.
That people behave on social media much the same that they do in other parts of their lives probably should not surprise us. Social media is a platform; most likely it doesn’t change our instinctive behaviors when a real name is put to an opinion. (The kinds of behaviors encouraged by social media anonymity is another thing altogether.)
Writing about the Pew study, Jamie Condliffe observes:
Our social networks are increasingly powered by algorithms designed to feed us news that aligns with what we want to see and hear. It’s only natural that the upshot of that kind of tuned information delivery would make us worry about sharing opinions that were out of step.
It seems counter-intuitive–if we’re getting only what Facebook things we want to get based on everything they know about us, which is a lot, shouldn’t we assume we are always among friends? But it makes sense. We’re worried about losing friends, which is to say that we’re worried our number of friends will diminish.
What’s peculiar about the Pew study is how the questions were asked. Though the survey took place in the months after Snowden’s revelations, the subjects were asked will you and would you… not did you. Using the conditional to report on behavior that already might or might not have happened tends to make the whole exercise, well, an exercise.
It turns out, too, that the spiral of silence does not only extend to individuals. Take this week’s revelation about the NSA’s Google-like search engine that shares something on the order of 850 billion data points such as private emails obtained without a warrant from ordinary American citizens among numerous government agencies. This is a big deal for many reasons, not the least of which is that it may enable the FBI or the DEA to illegally obtain evidence and cover their tracks while so doing. Yet the mainstream media almost uniformly ignored the story. When I searched ICREACH today, only the online tech media had picked it up and run with it. Is it possible that the mainstream media is afraid of losing friends, too?
Face Of The Day
A soldier inspects a woman with an infrared thermometer for signs of fever, one of the symptoms of Ebola, at a checkpoint in Nikabo, a village in Kenema, Sierra Leone, on August 27, 2014. According to the World Health Organization, the outbreak has now killed more than 1,500 people across four West African countries, including at least 120 healthcare workers. Photo by Mohammed Elshamy/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images.
Also, a reader passes along this heartbreaking update on Saah Exco, the ten-year-old Liberian boy we featured last week on the Dish.
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