Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 192

Where Fur Babies Come From

Tim Kreider suspects that Americans’ high spending on their pets “may be symptomatic of the same chronic deprivation as are the billion-dollar industries in romance novels and porn”:

I’ve speculated that people have a certain reservoir of affection that they need to express, and in the absence of any more appropriate object– a child or a lover, a parent or a friend – they will lavish that same devotion on a pug or a Manx or a cockatiel, even on something neurologically incapable of reciprocating that emotion, like a monitor lizard or a day trader or an aloe plant. Konrad Lorenz confirms this suspicion in his book On Aggression, in which he describes how, in the absence of the appropriate triggering stimulus for an instinct, the threshold of stimulus for that instinct is gradually lowered; for instance, a male dove deprived of female doves will attempt to initiate mating with a stuffed pigeon, a rolled-up cloth or any vaguely bird-shaped object, and, eventually, with an empty corner of its cage.

(Photo by Nate Pesce)

Abducted By ISIS

A harrowing account from a 14-year-old Kurd in northern Syria:

They would be taken to the torture room downstairs, one by one. When it was Lawand’s turn, he was first put in a car tire and beaten. Then he was hung from the ceiling by his hands, and beaten again. He could take this punishment for only half an hour before admitting that the list of his YPG relatives was accurate. He was taken back to the cell upstairs, where his time in detention would span 20 days. The kids were allowed to spend an hour each day in the yard; older prisoners got only five minutes. …

When the Muslim holy month of Ramadan began, in late June, Lawand was allowed to leave the prison. He rejoined the other students at a nearby school. The kids were forced to observe the holiday’s daily fast in the July heat. When one was caught taking a sip of water, the militants tied him to the goalposts of a soccer field, making his body into a cross. Then they scalded him with hot water and beat him with sticks.

Some kids tried to escape. One was successful. When the rest were caught, they were put through mock executions, and more torture. Some had knives pressed against their throats for what seemed like an hour.

The Best Of The Dish Today

Sullybait: data from the CDC’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System now proves that New Yorkers are the unhappiest residents of a metro area in America. No: seriously. Huge numbers of people answer the CDC question, “In general, how satisfied are you with your life?” with four options: satisfied, very satisfied, unsatisfied, very unsatisfied. From the results of that, a new study controlled for things like wealth, age, race, education etc. and came to the staggering conclusion that the inhabitants of the Greatest City On The Planet are fucking miserable. Slate‘s Jordan Weissman was skeptical – I mean who wouldn’t be thrilled to live in that magnificent metropolis?

So I decided to check out the research team’s full data set, without all the fancy adjustments. Turns out, New York still takes the grand prize for big-city misery. Based on its raw happiness scores, the metro area was the third unhappiest overall, finishing just above Jersey City, New Jersey (which is basically an extension of Manhattan’s financial district), and ever-woeful Gary, Indiana. Among city regions with a population of at least 1 million, New York came in last. The same pattern held if you adjusted the data for demographic characteristics but not income. Any way you look at the numbers, the New York state of mind appears to be one of personal dissatisfaction.

NYC emerges at #56 in the happiness survey of cities. Washington DC? #5. Just sayin’.

Today, I detailed the rise and rise of eliminationist rhetoric in Israel. For a review of the definitional eliminationism of Hamas, go read Jeffrey Goldberg. Wars are like poultices: they bring all sorts of toxins to the surface.

I also worried about Obama’s possible executive action on illegal immigration; I noted that the GOP cannot muster enough votes for a resolution congratulating the Pope; Rich Juzwiak and I talked about sex without condoms, i.e. the activity formerly known as sex for almost all human history; readers came to the defense of Hillary Clinton’s vacuousness; and if you love beagles, you’ll love this video.

Speaking of beagles, it was a year ago today that we had to put Dusty down. She’s the model for the dog at the top of the page, and a constant presence in my life for fifteen and a half years. Her ashes still sit on the shelf here in Ptown, but the cottage is full of the energy and love of a puppy called Bowie. She shoves the pain instantly away. But every now and again I think of Dusty. And wonder where she is.

The most popular post of the day was The Last And First Temptation Of Israel; followed by Why Sam Harris Won’t Criticize Israel.

Many of today’s posts were updated with your emails – read them all here. You can always leave your unfiltered comments at our Facebook page and @sullydish. 21 more readers became subscribers today. You can join them here – and get access to all the readons and Deep Dish – for a little as $1.99 month. Gift subscriptions are available here. Dish t-shirts and polos are for sale here – and our premium tri-blend shirts are selling out soon, so don’t delay.

See you in the morning.

(Photo: Stone crosses marking the graves of German soldiers are overtaken by time and and the growing trunk of a tree in Hooglede German Military Cemetery on the centenary of the Great War on August 4, 2014 in Hooglede, Belgium. Yesterday marked the 100th anniversary of Great Britain declaring war on Germany. In 1914 British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith announced at 11 pm that Britain was to enter the war after Germany had violated Belgium neutrality. The First World War or the Great War lasted until 11 November 1918 and is recognised as one of the deadliest historical conflicts with millions of causalities. By Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)

New Dish New Media Update: A Bumper July

Apologies for being a little late on the monthly report, but it’s great news. July saw our traffic at 900,000 unique visitors and over 6 million pageviews. As for revenue, here’s the monthly chart since March:

It was our best month since March, bringing us tantalizingly close to 30,000 subscribers. Revenue in all of 2013 was $851K. Revenue for 2014 with five months remaining is $833K. Revenue in July 2013 was $20K. This July it was $39K – almost double. Thanks to all of you who subscribed last month – especially those treasured Founding Members who came through with their renewals after an email nudge from yours truly.

We’re trying to prove you can build a profitable new media enterprise without surrendering to native advertising. You’re showing how it can be done. So if you haven’t yet, please take a couple of minutes to subscribe. Without you, we couldn’t do any of it.

Grieving In Verse

Alec Wilkinson tells the story behind the poet Edward Hirsch’s long poem Gabriel, written about the death of his adopted son who died from taking a club drug at age 22. Wilkinson describes the work as a creatively updated form of elegy:

Elegies of any length tend to be collections of poems written over the course of years. The most famous elegy, perhaps, is Tennyson’s “In Memoriam A.H.H.,” which is about his friend Arthur Henry Hallam, who died young of a stroke, in 1833. It includes the lines “ ’Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all.” It consists of a hundred and thirty-one poems and an epilogue written over seventeen years. Thomas Hardy’s elegy for his wife is a series of twenty-one short poems called “Poems of 1912-13.” Mallarmé never finished “A Tomb for Anatole,” his long poem for his son who died at eight; it exists only in fragments. The closest thing to “Gabriel,” at least in tone, might be “Laments,” written in the sixteenth century by the Polish poet Jan Kochanowski for his daughter, who died when she was two and a half. There are nineteen laments altogether, most a single page or less, the last telling of a dream or a vision in which she returns to him.

Elegies also tend to occupy a spiritual ground—to accept an order of things, and to assume an afterlife.

They address God respectfully. In the manner of the Jewish poets who began interrogating God after the Holocaust, and even to wonder if there could be a God who could preside over such horror, Hirsch invokes God in order to rebuke him. “I keep ranting at God, whom I don’t believe in,” he said, “but who else are you going to talk to?” From “Gabriel”:

I will not forgive you

Sun of emptiness

Sky of blank clouds

I will not forgive you

Indifferent God

Until you give me back my son.

Finally, elegies typically elevate their subject. Embedded within “Gabriel” is a picaresque novella about a tempestuous boy and young man, a part Hirsch calls “the adventures of Gabriel.” Eavan Boland wrote me in a letter that “the creation of the loved and lost boy” is one of the poem’s most important effects. It represented, she said, “a subversion of decorum: the subject of elegy is meant to be an object of dignity. But here it is just an unruly son, an unmanageable object of fear and love in a contemporary chaos.”

Concealer In A Shade Of Green

Cheryl Wischhover alerts consumers to the rampant greenwashing of the cosmetics industry:

[Former cosmetic formulator Perry] Romanowski recounts a story of some classic “greenwashing.” “It’s done all the time,” he says. “We launched a line called V05 Naturals. We just took our regular formula and squirted in some different extracts, changed the color and fragrance and called it ‘natural.’”

Which brings me to one of my biggest pet peeves in all of this:

The word “natural” is meaningless. There’s no regulation of that word, unlike the designation “organic” for food products. Any cosmetics company can use it at any time in any context – they can throw some aloe into something that has three different parabens and formaldehyde in it and call it “natural.” But at the same time, we need to remember that natural doesn’t always mean safe. The impending EU perfume ingredient ban, which has the fragrance industry in a tizzy, includes several natural ingredients, because they have a high potential for causing serious allergic reactions.

Jacob Brogan sees more misleading eco-marketing in the denim industry:

Recent months have found Levi’s CEO Chip Bergh trying to show that durable pants can make the planet last a little longer… According to Levi’s, the total carbon footprint of a pair of blue jeans is a little smaller than one created by a year’s worth of daily cellphone calls. They claim that fully 58 percent of the climate change impact of a given pair of jeans comes after the consumer purchases them.

But Brogan thinks not washing jeans has more to do with fashion than environmentalism:

It might be green to wash your jeans less often, but really caring about the environment means caring about tomorrow. Any environmentalism based on a trend is bound to focus solely on today.

Has The Animal-Rights Movement Overlooked Fish?

Biologist Culum Brown suggests so:

Every major commercial agricultural system has some ethical laws, except for fish. Nobody’s ever asked the questions: “What does a fish want? What does a fish need?” Part of the problem comes back to the question of whether fish feel pain. But for the last 30 years, the neurophysiologists have known that they do, and haven’t even argued about it. …

I think, ultimately, the revolution will come. But it’ll be slow, because the implications are huge. For example, I can’t think of a way to possibly catch fish from the open ocean in a massive commercial way to meet demand that would be anyway near our standards for ethics if we think of them like other animals. Currently, you go out, you catch a bunch of fish, you crush most of them to death in a net, you trawl them up from the bottom of the sea – which causes barotrauma for most of them – you dump them on a deck, half suffocate to death, the ones you don’t want get thrown overboard and die anyway, and the ones you keep go on ice, just to preserve the flesh for market reasons.

How do you do that in a way that has the fish’s interests involved to any degree? You can’t. So it’s not surprising that there is some fierce opposition to this idea. It would mean a massive change in the way we do things.

(Photo of Tokyo’s Tsukiji Fish Market by Flickr user Cranrob)

What It’s Like To Be Drawn Down

A military officer serving in Afghanistan reports on how soldiers like him are experiencing the winding down of the war:

For the thousands of service members still working here, the realities of serving in a shrinking military resonate. Gone are the days of job stability as the effects of military drawdowns echo across the services. Like surplus gear, a couple services are getting rid of people too. In the past few weeks, the military has laid off some troops and sent them home early to begin an immediate transition back into civilian life. Others face career uncertainty and stagnation as promotion rates continue to drop for both enlisted and officers. In many ways we’re serving in a post-war military in the middle of war.

Other hints at the changing war are less ominous, but obnoxious nonetheless. Many Americans imagining life in Afghanistan picture remote outposts where battle weary soldiers live with Spartan conditions and constant firefights. That’s a reality for a minority of combat troops, but far from what life is like for most of us. The truth is that the long wars of occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan have produced sprawling bases with various amenities including shopping areas that resemble run-down suburban strip malls. It’s true that you could die from a rocket attack while enjoying your sandwich at a Subway in Afghanistan, but the reality of the war is that you get used to both the rockets and the skewed comforts of home.

When the fast-food restaurants shut down it’s a sure sign that the end of war isn’t far behind.

Trophy Children, Ctd

The popular thread continues. A fan of participatory awards writes:

I love this reader: “I don’t know, maybe because the world IS unfair and we’re realists and not delusional purveyors of utopian fantasy?” Calm down, buddy. These are children. With children, we (collectively) are absolutely purveyors of utopian fantasy. See: Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, all dogs going to heaven, et al.

Another reader:

I don’t understand why so many people assume “all the kids get a trophy” means “the kids who excel get the same recognition as the kids who don’t.” All three of my nieces, who are excellent swimmers, have a stack of ribbons, medals, and awards in their bedroom for their specific accomplishments in the pool. One of them has won awards as swimmer of the year and has recognition for breaking multiple club records.

But I’m glad that the other kids, the ones who are struggling to learn strokes, the ones who are there for the exercise, also get a trophy. Because honestly, they deserve some recognition too, and a bit of a chance to brag to adoring aunts. They finished a season, and in a world of 7:00 a.m. pool practice, that’s not the easiest thing for a 10-year-old. Life is not a zero-sum game, folks.

Another:

The parallel I can think of in adult sports is running a marathon.

In most marathons, everybody who finishes gets a medal. My Boston Marathon medal is one of my proudest possessions. It is a memento of my training and accomplishment – yes, the accomplishment of losing a race to 10,000 people or so.

But another doesn’t see the need for such tokens for anyway:

Why not get rid of trophies altogether? Winners know they won. Talented singers know they crushed it. Nobody needs a trophy or a medal. I’d argue that not handing out trophies at every turn would teach a better lesson – life isn’t about the destination (a trophy), but the journey (working hard, staying committed, having fun). What’s so wrong with playing sports for the sake of playing sports? Or singing for the sake of filling the world with beautiful music? Or studying for the sake of expanding one’s mind?

Another looks at an underlying divide in this debate:

It seems that this debate is a ridiculous argument between two extreme world views: one being that we should only reward excellence and never mediocrity, and the other that we should never reward excellence lest someone’s feelings get hurt. I don’t know of anyone who actually makes the latter argument, but the former seems to be an article of faith for some who get offended whenever they see Everyone Winning a Prize.

I consider both viewpoints to be ridiculous. Growing up, I was the chubby, slow kid who got picked last in sports but who blew out the curve in academics, so I’ve seen this from both sides. There’s nothing inherently wrong in acknowledging participation. Most of the kids who participate in an activity – say, youth soccer – spend quite a bit of time doing it. If the coach buys ‘em a $2 trophy for showing up to practices and games, what’s horrible about this? If everyone on the team got an award proclaiming each of them to be the MVP, now that would be silly as hell, but participation awards are for participating: no more, no less. The kids who play organized soccer get them, those who stay home and play with their XBox, don’t.

Now, if recognizing excellence were banned – especially in a competitive context, where excellence is actually demanded – that would be a problem. But the quasi-Randian assertion that participation should not be recognized, and that the spoils should only go to the victor, is to me a bit obnoxious – the sort of vainglorious self-aggrandizement that often comes from those who excel at something (or have children who do) and expect the world and dog to come and kiss their ass. Two of my kids are very good at soccer, but I find the attitude that the weaker kids on the team should be treated like garbage because they don’t score as many goals to be morally offensive. And I make sure my boys know that being assholes to their less-skilled teammates will not be tolerated.

Mourning The Middlebrow

A.O. Scott laments the passing of the Book-Of-The-Month-Club era:

[I]t is hard to look back at the middlebrow era without being dazzled by its scale, complexity and size, and without also, perhaps, feeling a stab of nostalgia. More does not always mean better, but the years after World War II were a grand era of more. … High culture became more accessible, popular culture became more ambitious, until the distinction between them collapsed altogether. Some of the mixing looks silly or vulgar in retrospect: stiff Hollywood adaptations or comic-book versions of great novels; earnest television broadcasts about social problems; magazines that sandwiched serious fiction in between photographs of naked women. But much of it was glorious.

Still, he suggests we live in the shadow of the middlebrow, “even as the signs of its obsolescence multiply”:

The middlebrow is robustly represented in “difficult” cable television shows, some of which, curiously enough, fetishize such classic postwar middlebrow pursuits as sex research and advertising. It also thrives in a self-conscious foodie culture in which a taste for folkloric authenticity commingles with a commitment to virtue and refinement. But in literature and film we hear a perpetual lament for the midlist and the midsize movie, as the businesses slip into a topsy-turvy high-low economy of blockbusters and niches. The art world spins in an orbit of pure money. Museums chase dollars with crude commercialism aimed at the masses and the slavish cultivation of wealthy patrons. Symphonies and operas chase donors and squeeze workers (that is, artists) as the public drifts away.

Tyler Cowen shakes his head:

My view is a lot of people never wanted middlebrow culture in the first place, at least not in every sphere of their cultural consumption. The Internet gave them more choice, they took it, and much of middlebrow culture lost its support base. Consider one area where the Internet still doesn’t play that much of a role and that is theatrical productions. You can watch plenty of theatre on YouTube, but it’s not such a close substitute to seeing the show live. And if you look at Broadway theatre, it seems more relentlessly and aggressively middlebrow than ever before. Ugh, that is why I stopped going.