Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 247

Yes He Did

Chait delivers a reality check:

On January 20, 2009, when Obama delivered his inaugural address as president, he outlined his coming domestic agenda in two sentences summarizing the challenges he identified: “Homes have been lost, jobs shed, businesses shuttered. Our health care is too costly, our schools fail too many, and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.” Those were the four major areas of domestic reform: economic recovery measures, health-care reform, a response to climate change, and education reform. (To the justifiable dismay of immigration advocates, Obama did not call for immigration reform at the time, and immigration reform is now the only possible remaining area for significant domestic reform.) With the announcement of the largest piece of his environmental program last Monday, Obama has now accomplished major policy responses on all these things. There is enormous room left to debate whether Obama’s agenda in all these areas qualifies as good or bad, but “ineffectual” seems as though it should be ruled out at this point.

“An Epic Of The Human Body”

But first, a very NSFW reading of one of James Joyce’s love letters to his wife:

In his about-to-be released  The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses , Kevin Birmingham offers new evidence that the author was going blind from syphilis:

The Harvard scholar decided to “turn over every stone” to find out what might have caused Joyce’s deteriorating vision, compiling references to every symptom and treatment the author had. One item in particular sparked his curiosity: Joyce’s reference in two separate 1928 letters to the injections of arsenic and phosphorous he was receiving.

“It wasn’t too long before I found a medication that fit: galyl, a compound of arsenic and phosphorus that doctors injected multiple times. Galyl was only used to treat syphilis,” said Birmingham.

The drug is obscure, and Birmingham believes Joyce opted for this treatment, rather than the more effective drug salvarsan, because one of salvarsan’s side effects was that it could further damage his eyesight – and Joyce hated the idea of having to dictate his work.

As John Lingan’s review of The Most Dangerous Book makes clear, sex also figured into the obscenity trial that Ulysses sparked:

Fancying his book “an epic of the human body,” he filled it with every conceivable excretion and referenced a panoply of sex acts, from the mundane to the surreal. Moreover, its opening lines, a mock invocation of the Catholic mass over a shaving bowl, announced Joyce’s intention to revel in heresy.

Obscenity was the lifeblood of Ulysses, the proof that it truly comprehended all human experience. “To artists like Joyce,” Birmingham writes, “who considered free expression sacrosanct, censorship epitomized the tyranny of state power. … To publish a gratuitously obscene text—to deny ‘obscenity’ as a legitimate category altogether—was a way to expose and reject the arbitrary base of all state power. It was a form of literary anarchy.”

The novel was eventually published in 1922 by Shakespeare and Company, another literary institution (this one in Paris) run by a strong-willed American woman. Sylvia Beach had opened her store in 1919, and it quickly became the Lost Generation’s literary locus, functioning as a library and mailing address for itinerant artists. Her version of Ulysses, with its iconic blue cover and monolithic title font, was priced up to 10 times higher than the normal rate for a new book, but was nevertheless so popular that she had to remove a copy from her store window to prevent mob scenes.

In a detail that will resonate with anyone who’s tried to make it all the way through Ulysses, James Longenbach notices one of the defenses of the book during the obscenity trial – that no one actually would read it:

John Quinn, a powerful New York lawyer who was a friend of Pound’s and a patron of many modernist writers and painters, represented the editors at the Jefferson Market Courthouse. No passage from Ulysses was read into evidence; the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice argued that it would violate the law to do so, since the book was “so obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, indecent and disgusting that a minute description of the same would be offensive to the Court and improper to be placed upon the records thereof.”

Cannily, Quinn based his defense on the Hicklin Rule (formulated by a British judge in 1868 and still current at the time), which maintained that the “test of obscenity” was whether or not the language in question would tend to “deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences.” Language could not deprave and corrupt, Quinn argued, if nobody read it: “You could not take a piece of literature up in an aeroplane fifteen thousand feet into the blue sky, where there would be no spectator, and let the pilot of the machine read it out and have it denounced as ‘filthy,’ within the meaning of the law.” Quinn was himself an avid reader of Joyce’s prose, but in court he argued that Ulysses was like the entry on “and” in theOED: Who would get through it?

Face Of The Day

A Chinese honor guard prepares for the arrival of Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang during a welcome ceremony outside the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on June 9, 2014. By Wang Zhao/AFP/Getty Images.

Don’t Drive Stoned And Drunk

Balko proclaims that “Colorado’s poster boy for ‘stoned driving’ was drunk off his gourd.” Kleiman chimes in:

The involvement of alcohol is hardly surprising. Drunk driving is much more dangerous than stoned driving, and the combination is worse than either drug alone.

In a followup, Kleiman asks, “what are the actual risks of stoned driving?”:

The answer, from what seems to be a well-done case-control study, is that driving stoned is hazardous, but much less hazardous than driving drunk. (A relative risk of 1.83 – meaning that driving a mile stoned is about as risky as driving two miles sober – strongly suggests that cannabis-impaired driving is a problem, but also that it isn’t much of a problem; the relative-risk number for alcohol is over 13.) On the other hand, the same study shows that adding cannabis or other drugs to alcohol substantially worsens the odds: alcohol-and-something-else has a relative risk of 23.

Given those numbers, and the technical difficulty of identifying cannabis-impaired driving (because impairment doesn’t track cannabinoid levels in blood nearly as well as it tracks alcohol levels) I’d propose the following rule: anyone who tests positive for cannabis on a mouth swab (which detects use within the past few hours) should be considered guilty of impaired driving if that person’s BAC is detectably different from zero. All that means is that, if you’ve been toking and drinking, you need to wait as many hours as you’ve had drinks before getting behind the wheel.

Is They Right?

Transgender activist and author Janet Mock tries to convince Colbert to substitute “they” for “he” or “she”:

Meanwhile, linguist Gretchen McCulloch gets technical about why the singular “they” became nonstandard in the first place, arguing that it’s time to rescue the all-purpose pronoun from Middle English obscurity:

[I]n the late 18th century, grammarians started recommending that people use he as a gender nonspecific pronoun because they was ostensibly plural…. Many excellent writers proceeded to ignore them and kept using singular they, just as English-speakers had been doing for some four hundred years by that point, although … a whole bunch of style manuals did end up adopting generic he. That is, until they started facing pushback in the 1970s from people like the incredibly badass Kate Swift and Casey Miller, who you should go read about right now.

Recognizing that it’s useful to have a gender-neutral (aka epicene) pronoun but that many people are uneasy with both generic he and singular they, various creative people in both language reformer and nonbinary activist camps from the 1850s to the modern day have developed and advocated for an assortment of options.

While some invented epicene pronouns never made it past 1850s obscurity (heesh) and others are deliberately more fanciful (bun, bunself), a few made it to relative popularity particularly in certain communities, including ey, eir, em (the Spivak pronouns) and xe, xir, xem, both with a variety of spellings. It’s pretty hard to change the most common words in a language though, so at the moment the only one that has really wide use is our old friend singular they.

Despite this occasional lingering sense of unease around it, these days reputable usage guides endorse singular they for a whole host of reasons and institutions from Facebook to the Canadian Government are increasingly accepting of it, so maybe in another couple hundred years we’ll have finally forgotten about this foolish vendetta.

Not Any Udder Milk

David Despain observes the breast milk energy drink phenomenon:

Far away from government oversight or official scrutiny, hundreds of gallons of breast milk flow through online classifieds, according to one of the leading online facilitators, OnlytheBreast.com. The site officially caters to mothers who want to sell their “liquid gold” (their language, not ours) to other women, but about a third of the requests for milk on the site are posted by men. The demand has set off an arms race among the 10 percent of women willing to sell their milk to the other sex. One St. Louis provider catering to athletes boasts that her milk is best because she adheres to a “Paleo-style diet with added grass-fed butter,” only organic foods, and a daily regimen of supplements including charcoal and probiotics.

The “breast is best” believers drink this stuff up. They say they the milk is more nutritious than anything you can get from a cow, best for body building, the secret to fighting off disease, and a sure-fire way to boost energy levels. It’s the energy drink of the future, New York Magazine reports.

It’s too bad it’s soggy logic—on all counts, says Bo Lonnerdal, a professor of nutrition and internal medicine at University of California at Davis. “I don’t see much sense in it all,” she says. “It doesn’t provide more energy than other drinks with the same energy content.”

Marcotte is among the dubious:

Of course, the fact that this appears to be a male-only endeavor that involves boobs suggests that maybe, just maybe, all this talk about health and fitness is just a cover story. One of the men [Chavie] Lieber spoke with was refreshingly honest on this front: “All I’ll say is it’s a fetish for me.” And the discussion on Bodybuilder.com took a turn toward the pornographic, with men posting pictures of women pumping milk and making jokes about getting aroused thinking about it. I suspect these guys are never going to be convinced that eating a steak is as, uh, energizing as drinking breast milk.

But if you’re really set on unusual alternatives, there’s always “ass milk“:

Two things that may surprise you. One, you can milk a donkey (and yes, it’s also sometimes called ass milk). Two, people love the milk.

Over the past couple of months, Jean-Michel Evequoz, a chef and teacher at Les Roches International School of Hotel Management in Switzerland, has been experimenting with donkey’s milk, with a view to figuring out just how well it lends itself to traditional European cuisine. Thus far, he’s made a simple panna cotta, a “mousse au chocolat blanc” and he’s working on an emulsion of donkey’s milk and wild flowers to complement a poached lobster. “The milk works very well in a number of recipes,” says Evequoz, “and when you add in sugar and chocolate in particular, the taste is amazing.”

Evequoz is one of a small yet growing number of donkey milk aficionados in Europe, all of whom are instrumental for what’s become a sort of renaissance of both the milk as well as the animal that produces it.

Previous Dish on breast milk here, here, and here.

A Super-Sized Startup

Uber’s latest funding round broke Facebook’s record:

Will Oremus comments:

[N]o one has the foggiest idea how much Uber will be worth once it matures. Anyone who tells you that he does is not to be trusted. Investors are looking at a company whose possible outcomes range from “the Amazon of the transportation industry” to “the Webvan of the 2010s.” (Amazon, in case you were wondering, has a market cap of about $150 billion.) They’re taking semieducated guesses that attempt to capture both the sky-high upside and the steep downside of its prospects. Less than a year ago, the guess was around $3.5 billion. Today it’s $17 billion. Welcome to Silicon Valley circa 2014.

Mark DeCambre’s take:

Bloomberg notes that, at $17 billion, Uber rivals the valuation of well-established, publicly traded companies such as car rental firm Hertz Global and retailer Best Buy. Critics aren’t necessarily buying Uber’s valuation. “Uber’s uber-valuation is a stretch given Uber’s numerous legal and regulatory challenges not fully discounted in Uber’s $17 billion valuation,” said PrivCo president Sam Hamadeh via email. Maybe Hamadeh has a point: Uber is said to be battling more than a dozen lawsuitsstemming state and local agencies aiming to limit the company’s car-sharing business. However, that hasn’t driven investors away.

Yglesias ponders Uber’s worth:

Right now, Uber is in a fight with Florida regulators and taxi incumbents. If Uber wins, it will poach market share from existing Miami-area cab companies. But it will do more than that. It will significantly increase the number of taxi rides that people in the Miami area take.

And that is the fundamental Uber value proposition. That by making it much easier to drive a cab to make money on the side (you just need a decent car and time on your hands) and much more convenient to hail a cab, you can greatly increase the size of the paid rides market.

Mark Rogowsky makes similar points:

So long as you look at Uber as a taxi replacement, you’ll see it as something less than it’s already becoming in its early markets: A transportation app. In San Francisco, for years the taxi commission didn’t want to issue more medallions for additional cabs because there was ostensibly no real demand for them (As of last year, the city had 1,600 taxi medallions). Yet just 4 years after Uber’s launch, there are often well over 1,000 rideshare vehicles on the road during peak times.

Wait, what? Surely all those additional cars aren’t making any money, right? Actually, they are. In fact, demand is so strong Uber is guaranteeing drivers $40 an hour in gross fares throughout the summer during prime time (the company takes a 20% commission and $1 per ride for insurance, so drivers make less than the nominal amount — but typically far more than they would driving a taxi).

The Best Of The Dish This Weekend

Some small part of me wants to see the instant-demonizers of Bowe Bergdahl proven horribly wrong. The likelihood, of course, is that the story of the still-mysterious soldier will produce only more ambiguities. But these little nuggets complicate the culture war paradigm in which a POW has been framed:

“He’s said that they kept him in a shark cage in total darkness for weeks, possibly months,” said one American official. CNN reported Friday that Sergeant Bergdahl said he was held in a metal box or cage, but the officials on Saturday offered new details. He was kept there apparently as punishment for one or possibly two attempted escapes, as first reported by the Daily Beast website last week and confirmed by an American official.

That kind of total sensory deprivation, and isolation is a form of torture … practiced by the Taliban and the US, a merging of values only made possible by the dark soul of Dick Cheney. Then there’s Bergdahl’s own resistance to the promotion awarded him in captivity – and used by the Palinites to attack one of those they usually defer to as generic heroes:

“He says, ‘Don’t call me that,’ ” said one American official. “ ‘I didn’t go before the boards. I didn’t earn it.’ ”

A tortured POW who tried several escapes who rejected any honors … well that isn’t quite the treasonous hippie the hard right wants to attack. And yes, attack:

Late Saturday, the F.B.I. said the Bergdahl family in Idaho had received threats. Federal agents, working with state and local law enforcement authorities, were “taking each threat seriously,” an F.B.I. statement said. Officials declined to give other details.

This weekend, we featured the poetry of Patrizia Cavalli – check out this terse account of loving someone you cannot really love. It’s a pretty good description of the relationship between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, thirty years his junior, but still somehow his full equal.

We grappled with the chimera of “happiness” – with a lovely, and very grown-up video from Adam Phillips and a haunting revisit of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s confusion on the subject.

We asked the following questions: should God be a stop-gap for when our understanding of the world fails? (No, according to Bonhoeffer.) Is it possible to feel empathy for non-practicing pedophiles? (It should be.) Are conservative churches finally going the way of liberal ones … and for the same, secularizing reasons? (Of course they are.) What do Augustine and O.J. Simpson have in common? (Confession.)

Plus: Tolstoy on life and faith; and the sacredness of salmon-fishing.

The most popular posts of the weekend were The Palinite Tendency and Bowe Bergdahl, followed by Compassion for Pedophiles.

It was a gorgeous June weekend on the Cape, where I am now ensconced for my annual – and 21st! – full summer in Provincetown. When I first get here each year, it’s always the same … just fighting every day to stay awake. Something about the place taps something deep inside and says: you’re home now; you can let your guard down; and rest. But not until Bowie has explored every cranny of the beach.

See you (and her) in the morning.

After The World Leaves

Jade Doskow photographs the remains of World’s Fair sites. In an interview, she explains the project:

For each site, research and development before the shoot plays a major role. Who were the key players — architects, designers, political figures — coordinating the fair? What important architecture was conceived and constructed specifically for it? Did this exposition permanently affect the reputation of that city (like the Eiffel Tower of the 1889 Exposition)? Is the remaining fair architecture still a monument, is it abandoned, is it repurposed, or was it demolished? These are all concepts that I consider very carefully before actually traveling to a shoot.

When I get to a site, I spend about 3-5 days shooting, scouting the area with an original fair map and retracing where the original structures would have once stood. The resulting images have come to show a wonderful variety and indicate the ultimate arbitrariness of urban preservation and collective cultural memory; in Paris, I photographed the Eiffel Tower; in Philadelphia, some lovely Victorian toilet buildings from 1876; and in Chicago, the empty place on the shore of Lake Michigan where the enormous 1893 Manufacture Liberal Arts building once stood.

See more of her work here.

“A Priest Of Eternal Imagination”

James Joyce elevated the role of writers by describing them in such terms. But he was less reverent toward actual priests:

James Joyce didn’t have much use for priests; he thought that priests like ["The Sisters" character] Father Flynn had lost their sight, their ability to focus their spiritual eye. Joyce’s characters often say things like, “We are an unfortunate priest-ridden race and always were and always will be till the end of the chapter. … A priest-ridden Godforsaken race” (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man). Like the rest of the Dubliners [in Dubliners], Father Flynn experiences his epiphanies, but is unable to reflect upon them, to know them. This is a task for artists.

In My Brother’s Keeper Stanislaus Joyce wrote of James: “He believed that poets in the measure of their gifts and personality were the repositories of the genuine spiritual life of their race and the priests were usurpers.” If the priests ever knew eternal truths, the artist know[s] them now. The artist not only sees epiphanies, but makes them manifest by turning them into art. The artist, for Joyce, stands in the shadows with eyes and ears wide open, “like the God of the creation,” remaining “within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.” Because artists have the gift of seeing they are especially called to notice epiphanies and, moreover, “to record these epiphanies with extreme care” as [Joyce's character] Stephen Hero says. A writer, thought Joyce, is a kind of priest, “a priest of eternal imagination.” By collecting epiphanies the writer is “transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life.”