Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 2551

The View From Your (Former) Window

The Boulder, Colorado Dish reader who contributed the View From Your Window on August 16 emails an updated version:

Roads are still closed up to my house for a few more
days.  I couldn't stand it anymore so I hiked in to get a look at what
is left.

Boulder Colorado - Colorado - United States - Wildfire - Fourmile Canyon

The Year 1919 Or 1920

Nine years after 9/11, George Packer looks at the path we've taken since:

Crazy,murderous violence hasn't spread across the land. But unreason, cheeredon by cable news, has won the day. We have undeniably gone sour oninterfaith tolerance. We have turned inward in sullen exhaustion. Thestaggering chain of consequences and characters that followed9/11—Kabul, Tora Bora, Daniel Pearl, John Yoo, Bagram, Guantánamo,Baghdad, Sergio Vieira de Mello, Madrid, Falluja, Abu Ghraib, NickBerg, London...

Freeing You From The Burden Of Pressing Enter

Alexis Madigral weighs the pros and cons of Google Instant, which displays search results as you type. Here are "two pretty glaring downsides":

First, it is a visually intense experience, possibly even anoverwhelming one. Tech journalist John Pavlus described it as "likehaving a websearch seizure. [The:] screen explodes with noise as youtype." Second -- and this is more subtle -- I worry that Googleis driving more traffic to the most statistically probable searches.The most-trafficked ways of...

Conservative Degeneracy Watch

Yuval Levin is one of the right's brightest intellectual stars. He has written intelligently on many subjects and although I don't know him, he seems the kind of person conservatism will need if it is to recover. So imagine how one feels reading a paragraph like the following:

Democrats, as the president's chief of staff Rahm Emanuel explained in 2008, have sought to use the ongoing economic crisis to achieve all kinds of unrelated goals: health care policy they have craved for decades...

The Liberal Psyche

Chait is exasperated with liberals' disappointment over Obama, "a president with the most effective progressive record in more than four decades":

Liberals tend to imagine progress occurring in a blaze of populistglory, but almost inevitably it requires grubby compromises withpowerful and unseemly interests. Medicare, Social Security—they wereall half-measures that involved a devil's bargain. In 1949, ArthurSchlesinger identified the "doughface"progressive tendency as a discomfort with the...

Will The House Flip?

Silver gives odds:

Republicans have a two-in-three chance of claiming a majority of House
seats in November, the FiveThirtyEight forecasting model estimates. And
their gains could potentially rival or exceed those made in 1994,
when they took a net of 54 seats from the Democrats.

Republican - FiveThirtyEight.com - Democratic - United States - Politics

Home News

Yesterday, Dish executive editor Patrick Appel, took his girlfriend, Katie Rooney, of many years across the dunes in Provincetown to the Atlantic coast and asked her to marry him. She said yes. It's a day of great joy here at the Dish, and Chris, Conor, Zoe and I want to extend our love to them.
















Provincetown Massachusetts - Provincetown - Massachusetts - United States - Travel

"Heart Speaks To Heart"

Eamon Duffy has written a brief, helpful summation of Catholicism in the UK, on the eve of the Pope's visit:

Catholics were for centuries the hated other, against whom a single
national identity might be forged for the disparate Protestant peoples
of the archipelago:
Confound their politics, Frustrate their knavish tricks, as the British national anthem has it (in a verse usually tactfully omitted nowadays).

That demonization was assisted in Victorian England by the flooding of the...

Quote For The Day II

"Overreaction is the Terrorist's Friend: Even in major cases like this, the terrorist's real weapon is fear and hysteria. Overreacting will play into their hands," - Glenn Reynolds, September 11, 2001.

Watching Instapundit's descent through those years to his current position is a poignant example of how our emotions have destroyed our reason in the years since. I do not exempt myself from this. But I have tried to regain some perspective and make amends for some of my over-reaction.

And yet ...

Money And Happiness

Money can buy happiness, but it caps off at $75,000:

"Beyond $75,000 in the contemporary United States, however," the researchers say, "higher income is neither the road to experienced happiness nor the road to the relief of unhappiness or stress, although higher income continues to improve individuals' life evaluations." So richer people think their lives are better overall—another important measure—but their emotional well-being is no higher. (To understand the difference, think of it...