Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 237

Our Dirty Dependence

Plumer recognizes that we’re losing the battle against climate change:

As the world grows, it keeps using more and more energy. And fossil fuels still supply the vast majority of that energy. Oil remains the dominant source of fuel for our cars, trucks, and airplanes. And coal and natural gas are the leading sources of electricity. All told, fossil fuels made up 87 percent of the world’s energy consumption in 2013.

That ratio hasn’t changed since 1999, as the University of Colorado’s Roger Pielke Jr. points out. And Alexis Madrigal takes note that coal reached the largest share of the global energy market since 1970 last year:

Coal consumption was up 3 percent. That’s actually a decline from its 10-year average of growing 3.9 percent per year. … Even in the wealthier OECD countries, “consumption increased by 1.4 percent, with increases in the US and Japan offsetting declines in the EU.”

Do Critics Really Matter?

Donna Tartt’s novel The Goldfinch has sold over a million copies and won a Pulitzer, but it’s failed to win over many high-minded critics. (James Wood, for example: “I think that the rapture with which this novel has been received is further proof of the infantilization of our literary culture: a world in which adults go around reading Harry Potter.”) Evgenia Peretz considers the chasm between grimacing critics and the readers who made the book a bestseller:

[W]e might ask the snobs, What’s the big deal? Can’t we all just agree that it’s great she spent all this time writing a big enjoyable book and move on? No, we cannot, say the stalwarts. Francine Prose, who took on the high-school canon—Maya Angelou, Harper Lee, Ray Bradbury—in a controversial Harper’s essay, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Cannot Read,” argued that holding up weak books as examples of excellence promotes mediocrity and turns young readers off forever. With The Goldfinch she felt duty-bound in the same way. “Everyone was saying this is such a great book and the language was so amazing. I felt I had to make quite a case against it,” she says. It gave her some satisfaction, she reports, that after her Goldfinch review came out she received one e-mail telling her that the book was a masterpiece and she had missed the point, and about 200 from readers thanking her for telling them that they were not alone.

Similarly, [Paris Review editor Loris] Stein, who struggles to keep strong literary voices alive and robust, sees a book like The Goldfinch standing in the way.

“What worries me is that people who read only one or two books a year will plunk down their money for The Goldfinch, and read it, and tell themselves they like it, but deep down will be profoundly bored, because they aren’t children, and will quietly give up on the whole enterprise when, in fact, fiction—realistic fiction, old or new—is as alive and gripping as it’s ever been.”

Jason Diamond expands on Stein’s remarks:

While I ultimately agree with Stein on that point, I wonder about the people buying one or two books a year. Should the books they read next hinge on whether or not the purchase helps to prop up a power dynamic that places “literary lions” in a binary opposition against the rest of the book-buying world? Are things that dire? Does it really take one bad experience to turn them off to fiction forever? And shouldn’t it give us hope that people who are only buying one book a year might be picking up Donna Tartt instead of, say, Dan Brown?

I get that some critics don’t love The Goldfinch. Yet the fact that this one book’s popularity among readers can cause so much controversy exposes not just how little the public pays attention to what we perceive to be “highbrow” literary criticism, but also that American literature is in a really awkward place in which the reputation of a popular, Pulitzer-winning novel is at stake simply because a few critics at a handful of highbrow publications didn’t like it. If this conversation represents where we’re at, what we read, what we like, and who should help guide us toward new titles, then something is seriously amiss.

The Strategic Dumbness Of Vladimir Putin

Although it was his for the taking a year ago, Alexander Motyl believes Vladimir Putin’s ham-fisted approach to Ukraine has cost him a satellite state. I’ve been wondering who would be the first to take a few steps back and look at the costs and benefits of Putin’s treating Ukraine with such contempt and crudeness. “If you treat a bona fide country with a bona fide people with a bona fide identity as your dirty backyard,” he writes, “don’t be surprised if you slip in the mud and fall on your face.” He makes a good case:

Putin’s first major slip was during the 2004 Orange Revolution, when, stupidly, he backed Viktor Yanukovych. That disaster taught Putin nothing, and, nine years later, he made the same mistake during the Euro Revolution. How could a supposedly smart leader back the same loser—not once, but twice? How could that same supposedly smart leader still insist that the loser remains Ukraine’s legitimate president—even after a fair and free election gave a huge mandate to Petro Poroshenko? The sad thing is that, after 15 years in power, Putin still doesn’t “get” Ukraine.

Putin’s most egregious blunder was to coerce Yanukovych into rejecting the Association Agreement with the European Union last fall. That strategic error led to the demonstrations in Kyiv, Yanukovych’s downfall, the emergence of a pro-Western, democratic Ukraine, and Russia’s transformation into a rogue state and sponsor of terrorism. That’s bad enough. Worse, Putin’s move was premised on his belief that the agreement would remove Ukraine from Russia’s sphere of influence. Sure, it would have provided Ukraine with a foothold in Europe, and, yes, it would have diminished Ukraine’s international isolation in the long run, but a Yanukovych-misruled Ukraine would have remained firmly ensconced in Russia’s backyard for a long time to come.

(Photo: Patrik Stollarz/AFP/Getty Images)

How Not To Help Women In The Workplace

The evidence on executive quotas is mixed, at best:

The most comprehensive study to date, led by Marianne Bertrand of the University of Chicago, shows that at least in the short term, they’ve had little effect beyond the obvious: placing more women on boards. In Norway, the quotas have not led to an increase in the overall number of female executives, to a decrease in the gender pay gap, to a boom in the number of young women pursuing careers in business, or to more family-friendly workplace policies.

Increasing the number of women on boards can have multiple benefits. Several studies have shown that diversity on boards improves decision-making and profits, yet women are often not considered for boards simply because they are not part of the old boys’ club. But the quotas’ limited effects show that just getting some women at the top doesn’t remove all the obstacles blocking other women from the upper echelons.

Recent Dish on female executives here.

Will Amazon Set The Mobile Market On Fire?

Christopher Mims thinks not:

The central problems with the Fire, the factors that will kill its sales as surely as they have held Windows Phone to single digit market share in North America, are these:

1. People are loath to switch from the phones they already have, and in the process abandon all the apps and media they’ve bought.

2. The North American market for smartphones–and especially the market for high-end smartphones like the Fire – is heavily saturated, which means there are hardly any new users out there who might adopt the Fire as their first phone.

3. Fire can’t access the existing pool of Android apps. It’s missing critical ones like Uber (Bezos says it’s coming) and Snapchat (no word on when it will appear).

Yglesias worries that the new Fire Phone is too high-end for its own good:

Jeff Bezos’ company has a unique opportunity to come into the smartphone space with a strategy that’s not symmetrical to what other people are doing. Amazon’s phone is first and foremost a physical extension of Amazon-the-store. That argues for a strategy built around a cheap, zero-margin phone that aims to undercut the existing market leaders.

Instead, Amazon seems to be trying to beat the market leaders by adding a bunch of snazzy 3D features to what we’ve come to expect from a high-end smartphone. They’ve even gone out of their way to slightly exceed iPhone 5S specs as far as I can tell. The only price edge Amazon is offering is one year’s worth of Prime membership for free. But this, too, seems backwards. Rather than making Prime a benefit of phone ownership, why not make a cheap phone a benefit of Prime membership?

Manjoo concurs:

For Amazon, a company whose previous devices have had innovative pricing plans that often involved selling devices at cost, the Fire phone’s uninspired price tag is a surprising disappointment. The world needed a great, cheap smartphone.

But Vauhini Vara is tickled by some of the high-end features:

[I]t can do a bunch of charming tricks that are, in fact, like something out of a futuristic “Dick Tracy.” It can change the perspective in games in response to your head movements, make images appear almost as if they were in 3-D (though it isn’t actually 3-D, as some had predicted it would be), and scroll through the content on a Web page – say, a newspaper article – when you tilt it. … People seem to be finding its phone’s newfangled features pretty cool – cool enough, maybe, to get them to switch over from the iPhones and Samsung Galaxies that, after all, haven’t offered much in the way of new whiz-bang gadgetry over the past couple of years.

And Timothy B. Lee believes Amazon made one shrewd move:

The Fire Phone includes an app called Firefly that helps users identify things they point their cameras at, from books to paintings. For some items, Firefly will present useful information, like the Wikipedia page for a famous painting. If it’s an item Amazon sells, Firefly will let you click to buy it.

This should terrify brick and mortar retailers. They have long worried about “showrooming,” the practice where customers will find a product in a physical store (like Best Buy or Home Depot) but then order it from Amazon where the price is lower. Showrooming isn’t new – journalists have been writing trend pieces about it for years. But Firefly promises to make the process effortless.

GIF Of The Day

It’s about investing in the pot industry. And someone at Bloomberg Businessweek has obviously been spending time in Colorado.

The Battle Over Iraq’s Oil, Ctd

David Unger checks up on the battle over the Baiji oil refinery, Iraq’s largest:

An Iraqi government spokesman told Reuters midday Thursday that the refinery was in their “complete control,” but other reports cite witnesses and refinery employees as saying Sunni rebels remain in command. The jihadists, led by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), likely aim long term to use revenue from fuel sales to finance terror operations across the region.

The Baiji refinery supplies motor fuel for northern Iraq and can process around 310,000 barrels a day, fed by oil fields in the autonomous Kurdistan region. It also fuels a nearby power plant that provides electricity for Baghdad, which already suffers from outages. … The flow of oil to the refinery is already off-line, according to Thamir Uqaili, an oil and gas consultant who worked in Iraq for the Iraq National Oil Co. and Iraq’s Ministry of Oil for over 40 years. If it remains damaged or off-line, it will create a shortage of products that cannot be replaced quickly, Mr. Uqaili writes via e-mail.

Frank Verrastro and Sarah Ladislaw look at what the Iraq crisis, in combination with other world events, means for world oil markets:

At present, the combination of the loss of Libyan, Nigerian, Venezuelan and Iranian oil production for various reasons, the uncertainty surrounding Russia’s gambit in Ukraine and the prospects for further reductions (seasonal maintenance, hurricanes, etc.) as we enter the second half of the year point to potentially tighter markets and higher prices (EIA’s Short term energy outlook for  June identified some 2.6 mmb/d of unplanned supply disruptions from OPEC sources and an additional 720 mmb/d of non-OPEC volumes).

Further, since Iraq was expected to contribute a large portion of near term incremental OPEC increases, sustained or enhanced violence would undoubtedly limit investment and volumes going forward.   And while Saudi Arabia still maintains over a million barrels per day of spare capacity and could offset some of the loss of larger Iraqi volumes, a complete loss of Iraqi exports would require more drastic measures – like the release of strategic stocks – in order to prevent prices from spiking.

From Steve LeVine’s viewpoint, it means a return to Saudi oil:

Until a couple of years ago, some Saudis spoke of adding yet another 2.5 million barrels a day of capacity, giving them 15 million in all. But if there ever were such plans officially, they have been shelved since the recent US shale revolution added millions of barrels a day to US production. In April, the US produced 11.2 million barrels (paywall) of oil and gas liquids a day, the most since 1970. It has been said that, four decades after the Arab oil embargoes, the US will soon become an oil exporter and no longer beholden to the Persian Gulf, and specifically Riyadh.

But a series of geopolitical disruptions including in Libya and Nigeria have canceled out those gains. And after the upheaval in Iraq analysts now believe that such disruptions will remain a factor for many years. If that is the case, Saudi Arabia’s oil will again be central to the global economy. Specifically, the world may need Riyadh to invest the billions necessary to increase its production capacity to 15 million barrels a day.

James West notes that the US is much less dependent on Iraqi oil than it was a decade ago:

But the U.S. is still tied to global oil markets, and that means what happens in Iraq can have an economic impact here. One thing every expert I spoke to agreed on is this: Even with decreasing oil imports, the U.S. is inextricably linked to world markets. That means that if the situation in Iraq continues to deteriorate, the U.S. economy may not be immune.

“The cost to the United States of a big oil shock … will be lower than they were [in the past],” [John] Duffield said. “Our main vulnerability is not so much the direct impact on oil, but the impact on the rest of the world’s economy, if there’s a big oil supply disruption.” He added that “as long as the world oil market is pretty highly integrated, the U.S. is vulnerable to an oil supply disruption in the Middle East or the Persian Gulf, regardless of the amount of oil it imports from the region.”

The Best Of The Dish Today

So here’s a reason to be cheerful: this fantastic vignette of American democracy alive and well in Mississippi. It’s a Coffee Klatch of octagenarians at Kroger’s in support of Chris McDaniel, and a Democrat walks by:

“How, with no seniority and a promise simply not to get along with anyone, will you accomplish any of the things you want to accomplish?” shouted John Davis, a 77-year-old retired teacher who was shopping at Kroger’s grocery when he noticed Mr. McDaniel about to begin a meet and greet session with about a dozen local retirees.

“What have they accomplished lately by putting us in debt?” shot back Mr. McDaniel, who outpolled Mr. Cochran in the June 3 primary but is facing in a June 24 run off because he did not break 50%.

Mr. Davis, with finger-wagging emphasis, retorted, “What have they accomplished? They have accomplished airports. They have accomplished roads. They have accomplished schools.’’

Shit is going down. The Democrat is really way too loud and won’t sit down, but it only gets a little bit tense:

“Dissent is a good thing in this country but you don’t do it in that manner,” said Mr. McDaniel. He found a way to turn the confrontation into a dig at Mr. Cochran, who has refused to meet his primary opponent in a debate and has been criticized by Mr. McDaniel for not talking more about issues. Mr. McDaniel said of Mr. Davis, “He said more about his positions than Thad Cochran has said in his entire campaign.”

One woman praised Mr. McDaniel for maintaining his composure but told him to be tougher if he gets elected to the Senate. “When you get to Washington, don’t be that nice,’’ said Geri, who asked that her last name not be used.

The video is awesome too. Or maybe I’m just sick of Sunni and Shia and seeing some ancient Southerners have it out at Kroger’s is a balm.

So, anyway, it was Neocon Hathos Day on the Dish and you can get your dose of Cheney here. Kristol here. NPod here. Their unnerving fondness for Hillary Clinton here.

I threw up my arms at the CIA’s latest hopes for a war in Iraq and Syria, while trying to make sense of the resilient resistance to the most important breakthrough in HIV prevention in two decades. Oh, and Boies and Olson are channeling Jo Becker. In some cases, it doesn’t get better, does it?

Plus: the challenges of standing for a month for fitness’ sake; and what taking a simple walk is like if you have autism. Major ’80s nostalgia here.

The most popular posts of the day were Obama Caught Another Terrorist And The Right Can’t Handle It, followed by Have the Cheneys Finally Jumped The Shark?

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. 15 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.

See you in the morning.

(Photo: the triped this evening.)

Don’t Fear The Reaper

Reviewing Victor Brombert’s Musings on Mortality, a collection of essays on how a number of literary figures approached death, Joseph Epstein recounts Montaigne’s advice for considering your eventual demise:

Putting death out of mind as best one can is a mistake, or so Montaigne thought. Wiser, he felt, to think constantly about death, not so much to confront it—how, in any case, would one do that?—but to get used to the idea of its ineluctability, and also of the suddenness with which it may visit. “How can we ever rid ourselves of thoughts of death,” he writes, “or stop imagining that death has us by the scruff of the neck at every moment.” Better to familiarize oneself with the idea. “Let us deprive death of its strangeness,” he wrote, “let us frequent it, let us get used to it; let us have nothing more often in mind than death.” Montaigne himself claims regularly to have been besieged by thoughts of death, “even in the most licentious period of my life.”

… All learning, he believed, was to make us ready for the end, to prepare us for death. “To Philosophize Is to Learn How to Die” is the title of his essay, and major statement, on the subject. He hoped that when death finally did appear, “it will bear no new warning for me. As far as we possibly can we must have our boots on, ready to go.”

Face Of The Day

England fans look on as Uruguay scores their first goal against England as seen on the screen set up at Word Cup FIFA Fan Fest on Copacabana beach June 19, 2014 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. England lost. By Joe Raedle/Getty Images.