Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 236

The Trophy Wife Myth

A new study undercuts it:

To get to the bottom of the trophy wife myth, relationship inequality researcher Elizabeth McClintock analyzed attractiveness ratings, professions and socioeconomic backgrounds of couples from a nationally representative survey. McClintock combed the data for statistical correlations, looking for hints that successful men pair with attractive women.

She found, however, that attractive women weren’t necessarily pairing with rich guys – they were pairing with attractive guys. Like tends to attract like. The biggest statistical predictors of whether two people would get together were how similar they were in their educational background, race, attractiveness and religious views.

As Claire Hannum notes, a lot of previous research on the subject was flawed in a way that seems pretty obvious in retrospect:

In examining couples, [previous] researchers only looked at the women’s appearance and the men’s status and disregarded data on women’s status or men’s attractiveness. They were so certain they’d find a specific result (in this case, proof of exchange relationships) that the studies were skewed. More problematic to the skewed data is the fact that rich people are more likely to be good-looking, and vice-versa. …

Young women who marry these rich old dudes could easily have just as much status as their husbands, like the correlation between wealth and looks hints toward. By overlooking a full half of the equation and not even studying these ladies’ status level, researchers could have missed the fact that plenty of the supposed “trophy wife” marriages were actually matches rather than exchanges.

Jesse Singal observes, “McClintock’s study touches on some extremely important, fundamental questions about how we deal with gender in the social sciences”:

No one study can conclusively disprove the idea of beauty-status exchange, but this one certainly puts a sizable dent in it, and it offers a rather compelling-seeming reason as to how so many researchers could have come to believe this idea in the first place. …

Eli Finkel, a psychologist at Northwestern who studies relationships but who wasn’t involved in this study, expanded on this point in an email. “Scientists are humans, too, and we can be inadvertently blinded by their beliefs about how the world works,” he said. “The studies that only looked at men’s (but not women’s) income and only looked at women’s (but not men’s) attractiveness were problematic in that way, as was the peer review process that allowed flawed papers like that to be published. Fortunately, cases like that are the exception rather than the rule, and science tends to do a good job of ferretting them out. That’s what McClintock has done here.”

Growing Pains

Lee Ellis traverses California’s “Emerald Triangle” – the marijuana-growing counties of Mendocino, Humboldt, and Trinity – and discovers the pressures facing growers like Ethan and Brianna:

Humboldt strictures cap the number of plants allowed per medical user at ninety-nine. “Ninety-nine, you’re fine,” goes the growers’ jingle. If you cultivate the maximum, though, the diameter of each plant’s canopy can’t exceed one foot. Seriously ill residents have their choice of growing a whole field of dainty plants or a handful of mammoths, but, either way, to stay legal they can’t have more than ninety-nine square feet of marijuana canopy. An average [cannabis strain] Longshot specimen has colas—the crowns of the marijuana plant—that, when combined, stretch four feet across, with torsos twice that size. In terms of yield, probably one of Ethan’s plants hit the ceiling on medical, Brianna told me; if this was true, the farm was over the limit by 749 plants.

And yet California, long the marijuana movement’s pacesetter, and a haven for high-capacity growers, finds itself in the perhaps-unwelcome position of losing outlaws like Ethan. Should the state follow Colorado’s and Washington’s leads in legalizing recreational use, as is expected, already-fragile economies in the north—specifically in the “Emerald Triangle” of Mendocino, Humboldt, and Trinity counties, home to some quarter of a million people—could be crippled. The “prohibition premium” that keeps marijuana prices, and those economies, aloft would fall, possibly so precipitously that many growers would lose their incentive and (perhaps ironically) leave for more-punitive regions. In recent years, many growers have reportedly left California for places like Wisconsin and North Carolina—markets where a pound of marijuana might fetch double what it does in the Golden State. Legalization helps keep growers out of jail, but regulation slashes their profit margins.

(Photo by Flickr user eggrole)

Mental Health Break

NSFW is all you need to know:

Prose For The Road

Reviewing Patrick Leigh Fermor’s posthumously published The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos, Daniel Mendelsohn samples the charms of the man “considered by some to be the greatest travel writer of the twentieth century”:

The author’s chattiness, his inexhaustible willingness to be distracted, his susceptibility to detours geographical, intellectual, aesthetic, and occasionally amorous constitute, if anything, an essential and self-conscious component of the style that has won him such an avid following. It has more than a little in common with the “centrifugal lambency and recoil” he found in Central European design, the “swashbuckling, exuberant and preposterous” aesthetic that he so extravagantly admired in a picture of Maximilian I’s knights, which he came across one night while leafing through a book on German history in the luxurious apartment of a charming girl he met and ended up staying with in Stuttgart. (The strange new city, the chance meeting, the aesthetic reverie, the hints of money and eros: this would prove to be the pattern of the young man’s progress across the continent.)

It is indeed odd that, among the many classical authors to whom Leigh Fermor refers in his writing—none more famously than Horace, verses of whose Soracte Ode the author found himself swapping, in Latin, with a German general he had kidnapped on Crete during World War II, a famous incident that was later turned into a film starring Dirk Bogarde—Herodotus does not figure more prominently. There is no writer whose technique Leigh Fermor’s more closely resembles. Expansive, meandering, circular, it allows him to weave what is, after all, a relatively straightforward tale of a youthful backpacking hike into a vast and highly colored tapestry, embroidered with observations, insights, and lessons about the whole panorama of European history, society, architecture, religion, and art.

When Leigh Fermor died in 2011, David Bentley Hart paid enthusiastic tribute to his writing:

He was…a man of boundless erudition: a classicist, a linguist, an historian, deeply and broadly read, widely and wisely traveled, with impeccable taste in literature and the arts. As it happens, his formal education was of the most irregular and intermittent kind. He was sent as a boy to a “progressive school” (which was something of a nudist colony), had a good private tutor for a while, got himself expelled from Canterbury’s King’s School, was drummed out of Sandhurst before beginning studies, and never attended university. And yet few men of his time could match him for breadth of learning.

Early on in life, he acquired a passion for Greece and all things Byzantine (in part, under the influence of Robert Byron). He even celebrated his twentieth birthday by staying at the Russian monastery of St. Panteleimon on Mt. Athos, and his book Roumeli includes some of the most illuminating writing on Orthodox monasticism in English. (Even Leigh Fermor’s close friends seem uncertain whether he had any particular religious convictions, but he definitely had a fascination with the monastic life.) And for a great deal of his life, he kept his home in southern Greece.

In the end, Leigh Fermor will chiefly be remembered for his prose , which has few credible rivals in modern English letters. He was an exacting and excruciatingly slow writer, by all accounts. He could polish a single sentence obsessively, draft upon draft, for months on end. Nothing went to print before it met his highest standards, which were already far higher than most of his contemporaries could hope to achieve. He also spent a great deal of his life living rather than writing. The result is that, when one adds up the sum of his published works, one sometimes cannot help but feel he was a little parsimonious towards his readers.

Dreher recently discovered Leigh Fermor as well, and offers similar praise, especially for his A Time of Gifts. Check out his excerpt-heavy posts on the man here, here, and here.

A Short Story For Saturday

The opening paragraphs of Leo Tolstoy’s 1885 story, “Where Love Is, God is“:

IN A CERTAIN TOWN there lived a cobbler, Martin Avdéiteh by name. He had a tiny room in a basement, the one window of which looked out on to the street. Through it one could only see the feet of those who passed by, but Martin recognized the people by their boots. He had lived long in the place and had many acquaintances. There was hardly a pair of boots in the neighbourhood that had not been once or twice through his hands, so he often saw his own handiwork through the window. Some he had re-soled, some patched, some stitched up, and to some he had even put fresh uppers. He had plenty to do, for he worked well, used good material, did not charge too much, and could be relied on. If he could do a job by the day required, he undertook it; if not, he told the truth and gave no false promises; so he was well known and never short of work.

Martin had always been a good man; but in his old age he began to think more about his soul and to draw nearer to God. While he still worked for a master, before he set up on his own account, his wife had died, leaving him with a three-year old son. None of his elder children had lived, they had all died in infancy. At first Martin thought of sending his little son to his sister’s in the country, but then he felt sorry to part with the boy, thinking: ‘It would be hard for my little Kapitón to have to grow up in a strange family; I will keep him with me.’

Read the rest here. For more check out Great Short Works of Leo Tolstoy. Previous SSFSs here.

Face Of The Day

Luisa Whitton photographs the future:

London-based photographer Luisa Whitton devoted several months to documenting the efforts of scientists who are striving to create robots that are nearly indistinguishable from humans. The results are as fascinating as they are unsettling.

Whitton says that the goal of her project, titled What About the Heart?, is to “subvert the traditional formula of portraiture and allure the audience into a debate on the boundaries that determine the dichotomy of the human/not human. The photographs become documents of objects that sit between scientific tool and horrid simulacrum”

See more of Whitton’s work here.

Failing The Screen Test

When F. Scott Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood, he took screenwriting seriously – which was a serious mistake, Richard Brody argues:

Much to his credit and much to his misfortune, he was unable to sell out. He didn’t condescend to the movies, but took them seriously—so seriously that he made the mistake of thinking that screenwriting was writing, and that it could take its place in his oeuvre, which, in turn, would mark the cinema with his original artistry. In the introduction to Fitzgerald’s screenplay for his story “Babylon Revisited,” the novelist and screenwriter Budd Schulberg (who fictionalized their relationship in the novel “The Disenchanted”) explained:

Instead of rejecting screenwriting as a necessary evil, Fitzgerald went the other way and embraced it as a new art form, even while recognizing that it was an art frequently embarrassed by the “merchants” more comfortable with mediocrity in their efforts to satisfy the widest possible audience. …

In short, Fitzgerald was undone by his screenwriting-is-writing mistake. It’s a notion that has its basis in artistic form. Look at Fitzgerald’s books: they are stylistically pellucid, following on the great realistic tradition, brushed only lightly by the wings of self-consciously interventionist, modernist formalism (as in the list of party guests in “The Great Gatsby”). By contrast, William Faulkner, who went to Hollywood in the early nineteen-thirties, had no such illusions about screenwriting—in part because his sinuous and syntactically profuse writing bore so little relation to the lens-like transparency of a screenplay’s overt storytelling.

How, then, could Fitzgerald have sold out successfully? Brody proposes an alternate history: “Had Fitzgerald only been born half a century later, he … might have made the successful transition to a television-series showrunner.”

Previous Dish on Faulkner’s Hollywood detour here.

Can Female Candidates Save The GOP?

Maybe not:

Since 1980, presidential campaigns have on average produced a 15-point gender gap. That is, the difference between Democrats’ advantage among women and Republicans’ advantage among men is generally 15 points. So, for example, Democrats win women by 8 points and Republicans win men by 7 points: 8+7=15. …

Now, using 15-17 points as the baseline gender gap, we looked at eight marquee Senate races between 2006 and 2012 in which Republican nominated a female candidate. According to exit polls and the last available pre-election polls (where exit polls were not available), the average gender gap for women in these eight races was … wait for it … about 15 points (14.5, to be exact).

John Sides isn’t so sure:

At least one piece of academic research offers a somewhat different conclusion. In a 2005 article entitled “Women for Women?,” political scientist Craig Brians examined voter behavior across 300 different House races from 1990-2002 in which female and male candidates squared off.

Brians found a modest tendency for female voters to support female candidates more than male candidates: 55 percent of women voted for the female candidate while 45 percent vote for the male candidate. Men’s votes were split 50-50.

Meanwhile, Marcotte notes the considerable challenges that female candidates of all parties candidates face:

After performing 45 interviews with experienced candidates and officeholders and holding multiple focus groups with other politicians and staff members, the [Institute for Women's Policy Research] found that women had smaller networks than men to access for funding, faced sexist nonsense while campaigning, and had far less support on the homefront than male candidates, who can often depend on a wife who devotes herself to his career full time.

One thing the researchers did not find is that women lack ambition. “Ambition is not an issue or a deficit with these women,” Denise L. Baer and Heidi Hartmann, the study’s authors, write. “Most women self-recruited for their first office or campaign, and only one in four say others recruited them for their first office.”

Previous Dish on Project GROW, the GOP’s attempt to recruit more female candidates, here.

Why Does Academic Theology Skew Liberal?

Michael Peppard grapples with the question, offering this answer – “under the current conditions, few conservatives want to become professors”:

[A]cademic theology shares a similar model for research as the rest of the university: one must consistently produce new knowledge about the world; the process of double-blind peer review is the gold standard; notions of scientific repeatability in analysis are also applied to the “data” of theology and religion. Theology as done in the university is usually investigative, exploratory, and boundary-pushing. …

Which conservatives, then, are likely to find a calling to the academy, as it is currently organized? I would say those who are substantively conservative (e.g., have conservative topics of inquiry, scholarly conclusions, or policy prescriptions for society) can in most cases find a successful and happy spot in the academy, as Matthew Woessner’s research has found. But that substantive conservatism will probably need to be combined with a liberal temperament that continually seeks newness and a research procedure that challenges at least some authoritative traditions in ways that secular peers recognize.

Dreher nods, wondering if this explains the ideological tilt of his own profession, journalism:

I think that succeeding in journalism requires a high degree of questioning authorities and institutions, and that liberals are in general more predisposed to do that. The problem with this is that newsroom liberals are in general highly disinclined to question their own assumptions.

Should Dinner Reservations Be For Sale?

Julia Moskin mulls over the issue:

Who owns a restaurant reservation? Is it the restaurant, having set aside a table as a courtesy for a particular guest? Is it the guest, who made the reservation and can use it – or not – at will? Or is it the entrepreneur who pays workers to frantically redial reservation lines at the moment when prime tables are made available, snagging them under false names and marking them up for sale?

This is the crux of the restaurant industry’s current debate over selling reservations for cash, a smoldering issue being reignited by mobile apps that do just that.

Tyler Cowen defends the practice:

When restaurants don’t charge for reservations, they tend to hold back tables for regular customers, celebrities, very attractive people and the politically and socially well connected. You might be dying to go to that restaurant for a special birthday or anniversary, but you’ll simply be unable to get in. Money is ultimately a more egalitarian force than privilege, as everyone’s greenbacks are worth the same.

But Marina O’Loughlin is skeptical of its value:

The sell is the promised democratization of a notoriously exclusive system: I have experienced it first-hand, calling and being rejected under an alias, and then getting a warm welcome and prime-time table when I phone back with the name of a well-known pal. … But paying before you even glance at the menu simply provides yet another barrier to entry.

Meanwhile, restauranteur Alex Stupak thinks the issue is a no-brainer:

From my perspective the price that comes with booking the table is simply to discourage a no show. If anyone understands anything about the economics of restaurants they would know that a few tables are the difference between profit and deficit. …

Selling tickets to dinner, as some restaurants have done, and pricing based on time and other factors, are brilliant ideas, and certainly precedented in other industries. If you show up five minutes late for a flight, that plane is gone. People do show up 45 minutes late to reservations and look at us as inhospitable if the table is no longer available. Paying in advance could minimize, if not eliminate, this phenomenon. The trick for restaurateurs, is to become a brand so desirable and unique that people are willing to go down these roads to get in.