Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 257
May 30, 2014
The Life Of The Novel
William Deresiewicz muses on it:
More than with any other form of art, the relationships we have with novels are apt to approach the kind we have with people. For a long time, novels were typically named after people (Tom Jones, Emma, Jane Eyre), but that is not the crux of it. What makes our experience of novels so personal is not that they have protagonists, but that they have narrators. Paintings and photographs don’t, and neither, with rare (and usually unfortunate) exception, do movies or plays. Novels bring another subjectivity before us; they give us the illusion of being addressed by a human being.
They are also exceptionally good at representing subjectivity, at making us feel what it’s like to inhabit a character’s mind. Film and television, for all their glories as narrative and visual media, have still not gotten very far in that respect, nor is it easy to see how they might. The camera proposes, by its nature, an objectivist aesthetic; its techniques are very crude for representing that which can’t be seen, the inner life. (“I hate cameras,” Schmidt quotes Steinbeck as having remarked. “They are so much more sure than I am about everything.”) You often hear that this or that new show is like a Dickens novel. There’s a reason that you never hear one likened to a novel by Virginia Woolf or Henry James.
Face Of The Day
Flying instructor David Schnaible (R) teaches wind tunnel flying to nine-year-old Liam Harrison at the iFly indoor skydiving facility in Rosemont, Illinois on May 29, 2014. Guests at the facility are introduced to the sensation of free-fall skydiving as they are lifted into the air by fans that generate an upward draft from 80 to 175 miles per hour inside a 14-foot-wide circular chamber. The company operates about 30 similar facilities around the globe that are used for military and competitive skydiver training as well as recreation. By Scott Olson/Getty Images.
Antibiotics Are Messing With Us
… in ways we don’t even realize. Debora McKenzie reviews Martin J. Blaser’s Missing Microbes, which explores the manifold effects these drugs have had on our bodies:
Missing Microbes is partly about [the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria]. But it is mainly a story you may not know, about the damage antibiotics do when they actually work. There have already been reports that antibiotics may cause obesity by disrupting gut bacteria that play a role in nutrition. Farmers use antibiotics to fatten livestock; we’re not so different, it seems. This book explains that such microbial disruption is widespread, often irreversible, and surprisingly damaging.
Antibiotics may also have made us taller. And by disrupting immune reactions, they may be involved in modern plagues such as diabetes, allergies, some cancers, maybe even autism. … We evolved with loads of microbes, especially in our gut; our bacteria outnumber our own cells 10 to 1. These complex communities are the delicately balanced results of long evolutionary struggles. We disrupt them at our peril.
Yet every time we take a typical antibiotic, we carelessly wipe out masses of innocent bacterial bystanders. Experiments in mice and epidemiology in humans implicate these losses in autoimmune disorders such as asthma, type 1 diabetes and Crohn’s disease. Meanwhile, babies delivered by Caesarian section are not colonised by the right bacteria, from their mother’s birth canal. And gut microbes affect nerves and immunity in ways that have led researchers to investigate potential links to autism.
But, after watching Blaser’s interview with Jon Stewart, Derek Lowe finds Blaser’s advocacy of narrow-spectrum antibiotics – which target specific families of bacteria – misguided:
The market for a narrow-spectrum agent would necessarily be smaller, by design, but the cost of finding it would … be greater, so the final drug would have to cost a great deal per dose – more than health insurance would want to pay, given the availability of broad-spectrum agents at far lower prices. It could not be prescribed without positively identifying the infectious agent – which adds to the cost of treatment, too. Without faster and more accurate ways to do this (which Blaser rightly notes as something we don’t have), the barriers to developing such a drug are even higher.
And the development of resistance would surely take such a drug out of usefulness even faster, since the resistance plasmids would only have to spread between very closely related bacteria, who are swapping genes at great speed. I understand why Blaser (and others) would like to have more targeted agents, so as not to plow up the beneficial microbiome every time a patient is treated, but we’d need a lot of them, and we’d need new ones all the time. This in a world where we can’t even seem to discover the standard type of antibiotic.
Not Your Father’s Global Uprising
Kalev Leetaru used data from the Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone to determine how the global wave of protests over the past three years measures up to the historical trend. As it turns out, today’s protest-happy world is not quite so unprecedented as the conventional wisdom would have it:
The number of protests each month is divided by the total number of all events recorded in GDELT that month to create a “protest intensity” score that tracks just how prevalent worldwide protest activity has been month-by-month over the last quarter-century (this corrects for the exponential rise in media coverage over the last 30 years and the imperfect nature of computer processing of the news). To make it easier to spot the macro-level patterns, a black 12-month moving average trend line is drawn on top of the graph to help clarify the major temporal shifts.
One of the most striking features of this timeline is the sharp rise in global protest activity beginning in January 2011 as the Arab Spring washed over the Middle East, followed by a steady state of elevated protest activity over the following three years. In short, the Arab Spring indeed appears to have kicked off a 25 percent increase in protest activity around the world. This elevated level of protests appears to be stabilizing after a period of slight decrease, suggesting a future in which citizen protests play a larger role in global politics. However, it is important to put the current protests in historical context: The uprisings of recent years are still less prevalent than they were through most of the 1980s. In fact, the elevated protest activity of the last three years is only noticeable because it comes on the heels of two decades of relatively reduced protest action.
Democracy, Sold To The Highest Bidder
Kenneth P. Vogel is disturbed by the rise of political mega-donors:
In past elections, most major donors boosted candidates or causes closely aligned with the Democratic or Republican establishments. Now it’s just as likely that the biggest checks will be spent bucking the system (witness the Tea Party movement). At a time when wealth is increasingly coalescing in the bank accounts of the richest 1 percent of American citizens, members of this mega-donor community—and the consultants who spur them on—are wresting control from the political parties and their proxies. In a perverse kind of way, the new system is more democratic, but only for those with the cash to buy in.
The 2012 election was a tipping point in this evolution—the first in the modern campaign finance era in which independent groups like those powered by the mega-donors spent more money, $2.5 billion, than the political parties themselves (which spent $1.6 billion). Some of the implications of this trend will likely take years to become apparent, but it has already profoundly reshaped the political landscape. The parties are losing the ability to pick their candidates and set their agendas, as fewer and fewer politicians rely on the financial support of their party to win. In fact, it can be preferable to have the backing of a sugar-daddy donor or a group with deeper pockets willing to spend unlimited cash to fight the party.
The Ugly Reality Of Lethal Injection
In December of 2006, Florida botched the execution of Angel Diaz. Ben Crair obtained medical examiner autopsy photographs:
In Diaz’s case, the execution team member—Florida never disclosed this person’s name or qualifications—did not struggle to locate veins in both forearms. However, this person, either unknowingly or wantonly, pushed the catheters through both veins and into subcutaneous soft tissue—an error that is known in medicine as “infiltration.” As a result, the drugs flowed between layers of soft tissue in Diaz’s arms rather than into his bloodstream.
This created large chemical burns. On the right arm, the burn zone was 12 by 5 inches, with numerous blisters (or “bullae,” as they’re known medically) and a sloughing off of superficial skin. On the left arm, the burn zone was 11 by 7 inches. The blisters, according to the autopsy report, were filled with “watery pink-tinged fluid.” By the time the autopsy began, the medical examiner noted there had been “extensive skin slippage,” revealing white and pink subcutaneous skin.
(Photo: Diaz’s left arm.)
And You Thought Your Job Search Was Tough
Michael Bérubé documents his efforts to find steady employment for his 22-year-old son Jamie, who has Down Syndrome:
What is Jamie capable of doing for a living? Our first checklist filled us with despair: factory work, nope; food service, nope (not fast enough); hotel maid service, nope; machine and auto repair, nope. (Though Jamie expressed interest in auto repair — not a moment of astonishing self-awareness.) With one agency, Jamie had two CBWAs followed by detailed five-page write-ups: one doing setup for conferences and meetings (tables, chairs, A/V), the other doing shelving at a supermarket. Neither went well. He had trouble stacking chairs, dealing with the duct tape for the A/V setup, and attaching skirts to tables. At the supermarket he had trouble with the U-boat, the device that carts dozens of boxes out into the aisles — and besides, they were only hiring graveyard shift.
The result?
For two months, it was basically YouTube in the basement, as Jamie gradually realized (with what I think was a kind of horror) that I hadn’t been kidding about that part. Finally, the local sheltered workshop for people with disabilities offered him an 8:30-2:30 slot twice a week — and then three times a week.
On top of that, I sent out a few emails and got him an afternoon of volunteering once a week at the children’s museum. And most recently, another agency set up a six-month trial volunteering at the Y, doing janitorial work twice a week in two-and-a-half-hour shifts. If the trial goes well, we are told, he will be hired. They like him enormously at the Y. The only question is whether he will learn how to do the vacuuming, sweeping and cleaning on his own; right now, the people at his agency are very generously and carefully supervising him minute by minute. …
I knew Jamie would not grow up to be a marine biologist [as he'd once dreamed]. And I know that there are millions of non-disabled Americans out of work or underemployed, whose lives are less happy than Jamie’s. I don’t imagine that he has a “right” to a job that supersedes their needs. But I look sometimes at the things he writes in his ubiquitous legal pads when he is bored or trying to amuse himself — like the page festooned with the names of all 67 Pennsylvania counties, written in alphabetical order — and I think, isn’t there any place in the economy for a bright, gregarious, effervescent, diligent, conscientious and punctual young man with intellectual disabilities, a love of animals and an amazing cataloguing memory and insatiable intellectual curiosity about the world?
The recent Dish thread on Down Syndrome is here.
The Many Meanings Of Wikipedia
Todd W. Schneider dug through Wikipedia to discover the terms with the highest degree of ambiguity:
Have you ever found yourself looking up John Smith on Wikipedia, only to discover that there are 205 different John Smiths with Wikipedia pages? It’s a testament to the breadth of knowledge on Wikipedia, but it can also be kind of annoying: what if you just want to know the real deal about the English explorer John Smith’s encounter with Pocahontas?
I found myself in the above situation recently, and decided that it’d be interesting to know what is the longest disambiguation page on all of Wikipedia. John Smith has 205 entries, which seems like a lot, but maybe there are other generic terms that have even more Wikipedia entries?
St. Mary’s Church (584 pages) was the winner, followed by the Communist Party (569 pages) and Aliabad (520 pages). Meanwhile, Mona Chalabi created a big chart of Wikipedia’s most edited entries:
Many of these subjects are controversial, such as No. 24, global warming, and we can imagine Wikipedia editors in a never-ending tug-of-war. Others pages simply cover sprawling subjects — when will the No. 6 entry, “list of total drama characters,” be complete?
George W. Bush has been by far the most contested article among Wikipedia editors: Through September 2013, the page had been revised 45,273 times. That’s three revisions for every word in the article.
Not surprisingly, Bush isn’t the only political figure to attract factual controversy. The Wikipedia entry on Barack Obama has been revised 23,514 times — just slightly ahead of Adolf Hitler (23,499 revisions). Ronald Reagan, Abraham Lincoln and Bill Clinton all make it into the top 100 (Sarah Palin falls just short, in 104th place).
The American Way Of Punishment
A few weeks ago, David Cole reviewed Robert A. Ferguson’s Inferno: An Anatomy of American Punishment:
“Inferno” ranges widely to offer a fascinating “anatomy of American punishment,” drawing on such diverse sources as Kant, Ursula K. Le Guin and Jack Henry Abbott, among many others. (In one of Le Guin’s stories, Ferguson writes, a utopian society “depends for its happiness on one innocent desperate child imprisoned in horribly cramped, filthy conditions at the center of its city.”) Ferguson surmises that people have a drive to punish, that we are generally unable to understand the pain and suffering of others, and that America’s traditions support an especially virulent “logic of severity.”
Richard Posner found much to agree and disagree with in the book. He believes that the “only realistic solution to deplorable prison conditions is to reduce the number of prisoners”:
Sentences even for serious crimes are too long.
A bank robber, convicted of his latest bank robbery at the age of thirty, may find himself sentenced to life in prison. Yet like other crime that is violent or potentially so (many bank robberies are committed by unarmed criminals who hand the teller a threatening note, or brandish a fake gun, yet even robbery by note frightens bank employees and customers and can end in a dangerous high-speed chase), bank robbery tends to be a young man’s crime, one that criminals age out of. Our thirty-year-old bank robber will be unlikely to commit bank robberies, or for that matter other serious crimes (he may have no aptitude for criminal activity other than robbery), after he turns fifty. Then the only possible social benefit from imprisoning him for the rest of his life will be to deter others from committing bank robberies. But if we bear in mind that potential bank robbers, like most violent criminals, tend not to be intelligent or imaginative, and often have serious problems of impulse control, we may wonder whether the incremental deterrent effect of threatening a potential bank robber with a sentence of more than fifteen or twenty years will be great enough to offset the direct and indirect costs that the much longer sentence will impose on the criminal justice system.
Burnout is a general characteristic of a career in crime; and it is not limited to violent crimes. Often a criminal will realize after having served several prison sentences that crime really doesn’t pay, and he will either find lawful work or live on welfare, charity, and cadging from relatives and friends, in lieu of continuing a life of crime.
Likewise, Balko observes that “crime statistics show that arrest rates peak at around age 20, then quickly drop in the decades that follow“:
One easy way to ensure that criminals re-offend is to make it as difficult as possible for them to integrate into society upon their release — be it through registries, restrictions on where they can live and work or parole programs that keep them buried in fines and chained with restrictions.
The [National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers] recommends specific policy changes to address these problems. But the more important message from this report is to get people thinking about the very idea of redemption. One NACDL suggestion, for example, is to make criminal records less public, which would make it more difficult for employers to discriminate against ex-prisoners. That’s also the thinking behind the “ban the box” movement, which is trying to get prohibitions on putting the criminal history question on job applications.
But here’s a more radical thought: Maybe we start to see, say, a couple of drug convictions not as a reason to dismiss a job applicant out of hand but as an opportunity to display humanity — perhaps to give that person extra consideration.
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