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The Case For Jacking Up Your Bar Tab

Reihan wants to raise alcohol taxes significantly:

Great Britain has seen a staggering increase in alcohol consumption since the 1990s, much of it among teenagers. Tim Heffernan, writing in the Washington Monthly, has attributed Britain’s binge-drinking crisis to its laissez-faire alcohol market, which has allowed for the vertical integration of the liquor business. America has been shielded from U.K.–style liquor conglomerates by those post-Prohibition regulations that inflate the cost of making, moving, and selling booze, but that’s now changing thanks to big multinationals like Anheuser-Busch InBev and MillerCoors, which are working hand in glove with national retail chains like Costco to make alcohol as cheap and accessible as they can.

Why would I, a great lover of the free enterprise system, want the alcohol market to be more heavily regulated?

Precisely because I’m a believer in the power of the profit motive, I understand how deadly it can be when the product being sold is intoxication. For-profit businesses exist to increase sales. The most straightforward way to do that is not to encourage everyone to drink moderately, but to focus on the small minority of people who drink the most. That is exactly what liquor companies do, and they’ll do more of it if we let Big Liquor have its way. In Marijuana Legalization: What Everyone Needs to Know, the authors estimate that at current beer prices, it costs about $5 to $10 to get drunk, or a dollar or two per drunken hour. To get a sense of what the world would look like if that price fell significantly, go to a typical town square in England on a weekend night, where alcohol-fueled violence is rampant, or to Russia, where the ruling class has used cheap vodka as a tool to keep the population drunk, passive, and stupid for generations.

Kleiman generally agrees but nitpicks:

At some points, I would differ in emphasis. It’s hard to judge how much alcoholism is a cause of the rotten Russian polity and the decrepit Russian economy and society, and to what extent it is an effect, with people drinking because there’s nothing better to do.

Status And Sluttiness

Amanda Hess peruses a sociological study showing that slut-shaming has little to do with actual sexual behavior:

The researchers interviewed more than 50 women (all of them white) from the start of their freshman year and followed them to shortly after their graduations, asking them questions about, for example, their perceptions of ‘‘a girl who is known for having sex with a lot of guys.’’ That question was an unexpected dud, yielding few thoughts from the young women in their sample. Then the college women realized that the researchers weren’t really asking for their opinions about promiscuous women. They were asking for their thoughts about “sluts”—a campus stigma that had almost nothing to do with students’ real sexual experiences, but everything to do with their social class. …

As the sociologists got to know these women, they watched as they stratified into what they defined as “high status” and “low status” social groups, with high-status women typically emerging from affluent homes around the country and rising through the Greek system, and low-status ones coming from local middle- and working-class backgrounds and coalescing into friend groups boxed out of sorority life. They found that the groups had different conceptions of what constituted a campus slut, with the low-status women pinning sluttiness on “rich bitches in sororities,” and the high-status women aligning sluttiness with women they perceived as “trashy,” not “classy.” This class-based construction of the campus slut allowed both groups to deflect the stigma of “sluttiness” onto other women and away from themselves, establish hierarchies among social groups, and police everyone’s gender performance—including their own—along the way.

Olga Khazan’s takeaway is that sluts, like hipsters, are basically anyone you don’t like:

One of the most striking things [sociologist Elizabeth] Armstrong learned was that, despite the pervasiveness of slut-shaming, there was no cogent definition of sluttiness, or of girls who were slutty, or even evidence that the supposedly slutty behavior had transpired. In the study, she notes that though “women were convinced that sluts exist” and worked to avoid the label, some of their descriptions of sluttiness were so imprecise (‘‘had sex with a guy in front of everybody”) that they seemed to be referring to some sort of apocrypha—“a mythical slut.”

“The term is so vague and slippery that no one knows what a slut was or no one knows what you have to do to be that,” she told me. “It circulated around, though, so everyone could worry about it being attached to them.”

The Muse Behind Mad Men

In a Paris Review interview we recently flagged, Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner cites the influence of John Cheever, saying that the writer “is in every aspect” of the show. Elisabeth Donnelly elaborates:

Cheever is the closest thing that Mad Men has to a spirit animal. In his life and in his work, Cheever was a faker, a man trying very hard to fit into a box, and completely aware of it. His spirit infuses the edges of Don Draper’s American story. References abound, of course: Don and Betty lived on Bullet Park Lane — Bullet Park was the title of one of Cheever’s later novels — in Ossining, New York, the suburb where Cheever lived for much of his life. I think Cheever would be delighted to see where Matt Weiner is taking Don Draper, and the flights of profound beauty and weirdness that color Mad Men.

Rebecca Makkai also explores similarities between the show and Cheever’s fiction:

Cheever’s stories often end not with action but in a tangential and meditative fugue; Weiner’s episodes end with music, arguably the filmic equivalent. The perfect discord of Betty eating ice cream to the strains of “Sixteen Going On Seventeen” ended a dark Season 5 episode better than any cliffhanger, any plot development, could have. As with a Cheever story, we haven’t wrapped things up neatly – to do so would be an insult to the complexity of what has come before – but we’re given a tonal riff on the story, plus time to absorb it all. We’ve already seen the splash of the rock in the pond, and now we’re watching the ripples. At the end of Cheever’s “A Country Husband,” the protagonist stands in his garden after a series of social and marital humiliations, and watches a neighbor dog prance “through the tomato vines, holding in his generous mouth the remains of an evening slipper.” A lesser writer might have stopped there, but Cheever takes off for outer space: “Then it is dark; it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains.” If, next spring, “Mad Men” ends on a note half that strange and sublime, I’ll be satisfied.

Mental Health Break

A bitchin’ rendition of “Billie Jean” on beer bottles:

Join The Club!

Book clubs are nothing new, observes Nichole Bernier, but “what is new, however, is that book clubs’ appetite for reading — and the power of their consumption — is becoming a publishing influencer”:

Paula Hubert, founder of Book Movement, left a career in the literary department at William Morris to monetize the marriage of book clubs and authors online. “I saw that book clubs were creating these bestsellers, and publishers were desperate to get at them but nobody could connect them,” she says. Her website now has 35,000 clubs as members, and offers book promotions and giveaways, author interviews, book of the month designation, and ads in its email newsletters. Similarly, TLC book tours is a paid online vehicle to reach readers – but in this case, via book-reviewing bloggers, whose audience is avid book club readers.

One drawback:

The elephant in the living room is the cost of this marketing. For most authors who haven’t achieved bestselling status, the onus falls on them to pay for these promotions, or to convince their publisher to do so. For many, this is a final financial straw in an artistic career that was supposed to have been about putting words on the page, but morphed into social media management by day and visits to book clubs by night.

There’s still time to catch up with the Dish’s second Book Club selection, On Looking by Alexandra Horowitz. Read about the book here and buy it here.

Face Of The Day

Andre Levy’s coins take on alternate identities:

Brazilian artist and designer Andre Levy has developed an interesting, playful new pastime: painting coins. In the series, which he calls Tales You Lose, Levy uses the mini-structures of the coin’s portraits or figures to create his own, partially or fully obscuring the faces of presidents and kings to recreated the likenesses of superheroes and pop-culture icons.

See more of his work here and here.

A Short Story For Saturday

This weekend’s selection is a relatively obscure short story from Marilynne Robinson, “Connie Bronson,” published in the 1986 Summer-Fall issue of The Paris Review. How it begins:

I had one friend named Connie Bronson who lived two houses up the street from me and was one year younger than I and two grades behind because she had had brain fever. She had blood-red hair and a freckle-spattered face, and was called Bones by the boys at school, who regarded her with intense loathing and in bad weather often spent whole recesses devising other, more terrible epithets for her.

All of this was a source of great sorrow to her mother, who took a job in a drugstore so that Connie could have piano and tap-dancing lessons, and gave parties for her on every pretext, ordering huge cakes from the bakery encrusted with coarse, dusty frosting and blowsy sugar-roses, calling the mothers of each of the children in Connie’s class to be sure that the parties were well-attended.

She had once even bought the girl a pony which, since her means were limited, was very old and sickly and ill-tempered, and was put up for sale again a few weeks later because it bit Connie’s hand, breaking her little finger, which, though it was set and re-set, healed veering outward at the first knuckle. This, of course, cast a shadow over those of her mother’s hopes that rested with the piano lessons, and provided another theme for the inventions of the little boys at school.

Keep reading here. For more of Robinson’s fiction, check out one of her most loved novels, Gilead. Previous SSFSs here.

Should Washington Rank Colleges?

Jonnelle Marte brings us up to speed on the debate:

In August, President Obama announced a new college ratings system that will factor in cost and student debt. The White House also made a push last year to give families better access to information through the College Scorecard, an online tool that lists data on employment, default rates and graduation rates for each college.

But some researchers and education advocates say the new rules don’t go far enough. While the information being compiled on career training programs is exactly the kind of information they say should be available for families comparing colleges, advocates say that information should be made available for all college degrees, not just vocational programs.

Robby Soave has his doubts about the plan:

In a statement that likely set zero college administrators at ease, a White House advisor clarified that this policy would only hurt the bad universities:

“He is not interested in driving anybody out of business, unless they are poorly serving the American people,” said Cecilia Muñoz, the director of the White House Domestic Policy Council. “In which case, I think he’s probably pretty comfortable with that.”

White House officials claim to be increasingly concerned about rising student debt levels, as is the general public. Certainly, college administrators—especially those who work at taxpayer-subsidized universities that spend millions of dollars on fancy stadiums and luxury hotels—should expect a reckoning. But it’s hard to believe the federal government could cobble together a central database with valid insights about which colleges deserve to be driven out of business. Constructing such a system is probably a little harder than rating a blender.

But Rebecca Schuman is ready to give the ratings a chance:

[H]ere’s why I still hope Obama’s plan will work. The very fact that the ratings’ most vocal detractors are college presidents—who often rake in millions while their students crumble under debt—should tell us Obama is onto something. North Virginia Community College president Robert G. Templin Jr. claims we shouldn’t “take a sledgehammer” to the American higher education system across the board. I say that a system that currently survives on nearly three-quarters contingent faculty laborhas more than earned a sledgehammer—or at least a thorough audit from the body that’s providing a healthy percentage of its revenue. And that’s why I’m truly baffled at colleges being so affronted at this apparent government intrusion. If you funded an industry through $150 billion in loans, wouldn’t you demand some accountability?

Tom McKay considers the stakes:

[C]ollege rankings would give you, your children and your friends and relatives more information when applying, including whether or not your institution gets graduates jobs or is competitively priced. However, the real meat of the system would be congressional approval to tie loans to the ratings. If it works, it will help students pull through college and land jobs more easily. It could also help alert applicants to schools with advertising campaigns that are misleading or outright lies. If it’s a mess, it could harm already-struggling schools, many of which serve minority students.

Maya Angelou RIP, Ctd

Gary Younge fears that with the death of Angelou, “America has not just lost a talented Renaissance woman and gifted raconteur. It has lost a connection to its recent past that had helped it make sense of its present”:

At a time when so many Americans seek to travel ‘color blind’ and free from the baggage of the nation’s racial history, here she stood, tall, straight and true: a black woman from the South intimately connected to the transformative people and politics who helped shape much of America’s racial landscape. A woman determined to give voice to both frustration and a militancy without being so consumed by either that she could not connect with those who did not instinctively relate to it. A woman who, in her own words, was determined to go through life with “passion, compassion, humor and some style,” and would use all those attributes and more to remind America of where this frustration and militancy was coming from.

Joshua DuBois stresses her impact on others:

Perhaps more than anything else, Dr. Angelou was a teacher – ”a teacher who writes,” as she would say. She taught little black girls to do all of the things that no one expects little black girls to do. She taught little black boys to love themselves, and look beyond their own front porch to the hope of a broader horizon. And she taught every single one of us to make good use of pain, and weave that pain in as yet another plot line in our own, triumphant, stories.

Forrest Wickman notes Angelou’s profound influence on hip-hop:

Over the decades, each new generation of rappers has referenced Angelou’s poetry, often in reference to their shared struggles. When Nicki Minaj faced opposition as an up-and-coming female rapper, she rhymed about it in a song called “Still I Rise,” presumably after Angelou’s poem about hate directed at black women. She wasn’t the first to name a song after Angelou’s poem. On Tupac’s own “Still I Rise,” he rapped, “I was born not to make it, but I did/ The tribulations of a ghetto kid/ Still I rise.”

Angelou also had an effect on Shakur in person. In an interview with George Stroumboulopoulos, Angelou remembered meeting Shakur, though she didn’t know who he was (“I don’t know six-pack,” she remembers joking at the time, in reference to 2Pac’s name), and conveying to him how important he was to the black community. According to Angelou, her message to him made him weep.

A reader passed along a video of Angelou telling that story to Dave Chapelle – watch it here. Meanwhile, John McWhorter steps back from a weighty review of her work with mixed feelings:

Angelou’s writings are the product of a worse and blissfully bygone America. White readers who feel enlightened enough about race issues to have wearied of being lectured about them may be put off by these books today. And a black person likely would not, and really should not, write a memoir in this style today. I must admit a guilty relief that the last volume ends in the late 1960s. …

During a fracas with white school administrators in The Heart of a Woman, Angelou asks: “How could the two women understand a black mother who had nothing to give her son except a contrived arrogance?” “Contrived arrogance” is exactly what Angelou seeks to give her readers. An outsider today might read this as the same kind of lordly superciliousness that my roommate sensed in Odetta. But contrived arrogance was once a useful and even natural form of defense against bigotry.

But Alyssa, comparing I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings with another modern-day classic, Casablanca, comes to the contrary conclusion:

If you read the former or watch the latter after first being exposed to their many imitators, it is easy for both to seem like cliches. But while Casablanca entered the flow of the culture, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings changed the course of that river, letting new tributaries feed into it, providing new jetties from which readers who did not see themselves in much literature could set sail in its waters.

The View From Your Window

Yangon, Burma, 6.34 pm