Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 201

Hangover Helper

Morning-after alcohol misery isn’t so bad, according to Tom Vanderbilt. In a 1995 issue of The Baffler – which opened its archives to the public this week – he reviewed the then-new Skyy vodka “hangover free” advertizing campaign. For him, he says, “the hangover, that much-maligned malady of the engorging classes, [is] the clearest window onto my inner self, the one device through which all my pretensions in the material world are brought to a crashing halt”:

The hangover is a rich but undervalued element in our culture. In the literature of every age it provides a handy narrative device for slowing down the action and bringing the most elevated characters to a place we’ve all been. In Lucky Jim, for example, Kingsley Amis expertly captures the moment as the novel’s cheerfully bumbling protagonist awakens after a sordid escapade:

The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.

Amis, the poet laureate of the hangover, was one of the few to fathom its intricacies and divine its transcendent qualities—to find, if you will, the spiritual in the spirits. The hangover, he wrote once, is no mere physical affliction, but a “unique route to self-knowledge and self-realization.”

This is usually lost on sufferers of the “physical hangover,” obsessed as they are with feeling fresh again. But as they spend the morning shuffling through the Sunday supplements, unable to finish the simplest articles, drinking tomato juice as the sunlight stalks the living room floor, on come those colossal feelings of guilt, inadequacy, and shame—the metaphysical hangover. The best, and really the only, cure for this condition is to simply acknowledge your physical hangover for what it is, rather than attributing these unsettling thoughts to your job or to your relationship. As Amis puts it, “He who truly believes he has a hangover has no hangover.”

Explore The Baffler‘s back issues here.

Animal Kingdom Kink

Eastern Spadefoot frogs dig getting down in the rain:

To avoid predators such as fish, they evolved to consummate their vows in temporary ponds created by heavy rainstorms. “It’s one night of a massive frog orgy,” says [herpetology professor Steve] Johnson. When the downpour starts, male toads emerge from the ground making “vomiting-like” mating calls. The females respond, and the orgy runs through the night, after which the females lay thousands of fertilized eggs in the ponds. Most other toads spend a long time looking for mates, Johnson says, so this behavior is quite unique.

Within a few days, tadpoles hatch in such high numbers that the ponds resemble “boiling water” or a “super-organism that’s moving,” Johnson says. The ponds grow algae the tadpoles feed on. Two weeks after the rainy night, tadpoles become toads, hop away from their birthplaces, and burrow into the ground where they await their turn to party. Johnson says the toads are patient and can wait for the perfect mating conditions for months or years.

Playing Like A Pro

With the recently coming to a close, Vlad Slavov examines the challenges of making a career as a pro gamer:

Without the financial support of a team or committed sponsors, it’s basically impossible to put in the time necessary to refine your skills to the highest level. Juggling pro matches with school or work responsibilities is particularly awkward in the US, where most competitive games are played in the morning. It’s an all-in or all-out affair, and the way the players talk about it reveals the sustained intensity that’s required.

[Career gamer] ppd speaks of “disengaging” in the afternoon after at least six hours of team practice every day. That’s later followed by playing solo or live-streaming matches on Twitch late into the night. [Gamer] UNiVeRsE adds that there’s also no such thing as a holiday from the game: players take some time off after The International, but otherwise The Chinese e-sports teams take the commitment to training to its logical extreme by having the whole team live together under one roof throughout the year. They don’t even consider it proper practice unless all five players are in the same room, working as a team.

The tournament closed “following an epic best-of-five clash between two of China’s biggest teams”; with the victorious five-person team taking home $5 million of the tournament’s $10-million prize pool.

(Photo of Seattle’s KeyArena for the International DOTA 2 Championships on July 18, 2014, by Jakob Wells)

Reign Of Terroir

Dwight Furror assesses the war between “terroirists” and “anti-terroirists”:

Few terms in the wine world are more controversial than “terroir”, the French word meaning “of the soil”. “Terroir” refers to the influence of soil and climate on the wine in your glass. But the meaning of “terroir” is not restricted to a technical discussion of soil structure or the influence of climate. Part of the romance of wine is that it (allegedly) expresses the particular character of a region and perhaps its people as well.

According to some “terroirists”, when we drink wine that expresses terroir, we feel connected to a particular plot of land and its unique characteristics, and by extension, its inhabitants, their struggles, achievements, and sensibility. Can’t you just feel their spirit coursing through your veins on a wild alcohol ride? The most extreme terroirists claim that the influence of soil and climate can be quite literally tasted in the wine. If this strikes you as a bit of, well, the digested plant food of bovines to put it politely, you are not alone. Many in the wine business are skeptical about the existence of terroir claiming that winemakers should make the best wine they can without trying to preserve some mystical connection with the soil. But the issue is an important one because the reputation of entire wine regions rests on the alleged unique characteristics of their terroir, not to mention the fact that the skill and discernment of wine tasters often involves recognizing these characteristics.

Mental Health Break

Kids who need the bar of soap:

Kids Cursing In Movies Mashup from Avaryl Halley on Vimeo.

The Name’s Bond. @JamesBond

Have smartphones and Facebook ended the golden age of the spy novel? Charles Cumming worries that it “may be that technology strips the spy of mystique”:

Once upon a time, spies like [John le Carré's] Alec Leamas could move across borders with ease. Passports were not biometric, photographs were not sealed under laminate, and there were no retinal scanners at airports (which, incidentally, can’t be fooled by fitting a glass eye or wearing contact lenses manufactured by ‘Q’ branch). … Nowadays, travelling “under alias” has become all but impossible. If, for example, an MI6 officer goes to Moscow and tries to pass himself off as an advertising executive, he’d better make sure that his online banking and telephone records look authentic; that his Facebook page and Twitter feeds are up to date; and that colleagues from earlier periods in his phantom career can remember him when they are contacted out of the blue by an FSB analyst who has tracked them down via LinkedIn. The moment the officer falls under suspicion, his online history will be minutely scrutinised. If the contacts book on his Gmail account looks wrong, or his text messages are out of character, his entire false identity will start to fall apart.

“All of this has affected storytelling,” continues Cumming, who describes how he circumvented the issue as a novelist himself:

If a character can be reached or tracked by phone, it follows that he or she can be warned of impending danger, or rescued from peril. In my novel A Foreign Country, it was necessary to set a crucial sequence deep in the English countryside so that the principal characters were thwarted by feeble mobile reception. Likewise, unless a character knows to remove the battery from their phone (something, incidentally, that can’t easily be done with an iPhone) he or she can be followed 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Even when switched off, a phone emits a signal that can be picked up by GCHQ and others. The phone’s position can be then be pinpointed to within a few feet by “triangulating” the signal to the nearest satellite or mobile phone mast.

The View From Your Window

Stockton, CA, 5.35 pm

Fractions Are Hard!

Kevin Drum is most amused by this anecdote from Elizabeth Green’s NYT essay about math education:

One of the most vivid arithmetic failings displayed by Americans occurred in the early 1980s, when the A&W restaurant chain released a new hamburger to rival the McDonald’s Quarter Pounder. With a third-pound of beef, the A&W burger had more meat than the Quarter Pounder; in taste tests, customers preferred A&W’s burger. And it was less expensive. A lavish A&W television and radio marketing campaign cited these benefits. Yet instead of leaping at the great value, customers snubbed it.

Only when the company held customer focus groups did it become clear why. The Third Pounder presented the American public with a test in fractions. And we failed. Misunderstanding the value of one-third, customers believed they were being overcharged. Why, they asked the researchers, should they pay the same amount for a third of a pound of meat as they did for a quarter-pound of meat at McDonald’s? The “4″ in “¼,” larger than the “3″ in “⅓,” led them astray.

The Holy Land From On High

Megan Garber captions:

The orbiting space station—itself a symbol of international cooperation and, in that, global unity—passed over Israel and Palestine as it orbited Earth’s surface yesterday. It was nighttime on that side of the planet, as one human habitat passed over another; everything was dark save for the man-made lights studding the land. And save for one other thing, too: explosions. The flashes of bright light—brighter than the other ones—that are distantly visible evidence of human bloodshed. “From #ISS we can actually see explosions and rockets flying over #Gaza & #Israel,” [Astronaut Alexander] Gerst tweeted. He then shared the image above. He noted, as he did so, that it was his “saddest photo yet.”

Bibi’s Strategy, Ctd

Larison is unconvinced by Rich Lowry’s cheerleading for Israel in the Gaza war, which Lowry attributes entirely to Hamas’ “depraved indifference to the safety of Gazans”. If Lowry is right about Hamas’ aims, Larison argues, that actually illustrates why Israel going to war hurts its own interests in the long term:

The summary is misleading at best, but even if we accept all of it as true it doesn’t make Israel’s current military operation defensible. Hamas may want war and civilian casualties, and it is fully responsible for everything that it does, but that doesn’t justify Israel in giving them what they want. Nothing could better sum up the irrationality of defenders of the current operation than the argument Lowry is offering here. We’re supposed to accept that Israel’s government mustn’t be faulted for what it’s doing, because Israeli forces are inflicting death and destruction that predictably redounds to Hamas’ political benefit. According to this view, Hamas is the only one to be blamed for the consequences of the military overreaction that has stupidly given Hamas an unwelcome boost. This is little better than the foreign policy equivalent of saying “the devil made me do it,” as if it that made everything all right.

And Daniel Byman argues that Israel’s strategy of heavy-handed deterrence often ends up producing the opposite outcome:

Because Israel is arguably the most casualty-sensitive country in the world, deterrence is even harder. With nuclear weapons and carpet-bombing off the table, Israel needs to go in on the ground to achieve its objectives — but ground operations can lead to Israeli casualties that actually undermine its deterrence.

In 2011, it traded over 1,000 prisoners for Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier captured by Hamas in 2006. Israel has even traded high-level prisoners for the bodies of its dead soldiers. As a result, the body counts for successful deterrence are often staggering and highly disproportionate: In the 2008-2009 Cast Lead operation, Israel killed more than 1,200 Palestinians and suffered only 13 losses of its own — roughly a 100-1 ratio. This, of course, makes Israel look even more callous.

Brent Sasley doesn’t think much of Netanyahu’s stated goal of “sustainable quiet”:

As far as I can tell, “quiet” is defined as a number of rockets, preferably not by Hamas, so long as they don’t cause any damage, certainly don’t kill any Israelis, and there’s nothing else that requires a bigger Israeli response. That, I think, is the goal.

Now, my concern is that Israel doesn’t have a strategic agenda for the region as a whole, which means it doesn’t have a strategic goal in this operation. Not a Bibi problem, it’s an Israel problem. There’s a history to it — that’s how Israel developed, it’s been forced on the defensive, it thinks reactively instead of proactively, and so on. Those are all important explanations, but it goes beyond that. After a certain point, it becomes a cop-out to say “Israel just can’t think long-term.”

Now, some people say that there is a strategy — that horrible term “mowing the grass,” or I guess a “war of attrition” is a more sophisticated way of saying it. That’s a holding pattern, as far as I can see. Israel doesn’t have a national security strategy, it’s never really articulated one.

So what Hamas has to gain by firing rockets is more political than anything else:

Israeli officials say the system has intercepted more than 80 percent of the incoming rockets it targeted during this conflict, with most others missing their targets or landing in empty space. But Jeffrey White, a defense fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, says Hamas reaps benefits from showering Israel with missiles, even if they don’t hit their targets. “Their ability to disrupt life in Israel is big, because every time they fire a volley of rockets, sirens go off and everyone runs for shelter,” White says. “School gets closed, life gets disrupted, it puts people under a lot of strain.”

The strikes could have economic effects as well, as evidenced by this week’s decision from the Federal Aviation Authority to halt all flights into Israel after a long-range missile landed near Ben Gurion airport outside Tel Aviv — a decision that White describes as “a huge development.” (The ban was lifted late Wednesday, after the FAA said it was satisfied with safety measures that Israel implemented.)

Goldblog, however, is more concerned about Hamas’s tunnels than its rockets:

Israelis appear adamant that any cease-fire agreement reached between the parties must eradicate the threat of these kidnapping tunnels, at a minimum. Anything short of this will fail to bring any stability to the region. Hamas, which is incapable of envisioning peace and reconciliation in the manner of advocates for a two-state solution, and which has already rejected multiple calls for cease-fires, is demanding that Israel and Egypt (which has Gaza’s southern border blockaded as well) reopen both Gaza’s borders and its ports.

This would be insanity. For years, Hamas leaders demanded that Israel allow them to import concrete in order to build homes for Gaza’s poor. We now know where so much of this concrete went — into the tunnels that run under Israel’s border, and into bunkers and bomb shelters for Gaza’s ruling elite. (The civilians of Gaza, the ones exposed to Israel’s bombardments, do not benefit from these exclusive bomb shelters).

Overall, Mitchell Plitnick contends, Hamas is sort of winning:

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has been working to help find a ceasefire formula. In the past, Hamas would disavow Abbas’ authority to negotiate for them, but they have not done so this time. That’s because Abbas is arguing for Hamas’ terms for a ceasefire. That makes Abbas, rather than any Egyptian or Turkish leader, the contact point between Hamas and Israel. It also symbolically demonstrates that the Palestinians have a unified government — Abbas is presenting himself as the leader of all of Palestine, including Gaza, without saying so or ruffling any of Hamas’ feathers.

Israel’s goal in starting this round of fighting was to destroy the unity deal between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. Thus far, the opposite seems to have materialized. Abbas is in agreement with Hamas’ goals, and is apparently fully representing them. That represents a major failure for Netanyahu.

Previous Dish on Netanyahu’s political and military strategy in the Gaza war here.