Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 258

Epic Longing

Joan Acocella detects a melancholic strain in J.R.R. Tolkien’s recently released translation of Beowulf:

When Beowulf goes to meet the dragon, the poet tells us fully four times that the hero is going to die. As in Greek tragedy, the audience for the poem knew the ending. It knew the middle, too, which is a good thing, since the events of Beowulf’s 50-year reign are barely mentioned until the dragon appears. This bothered many early commentators. It did not bother Tolkien. The three fights were enough. Beowulf, Tolkien writes in his essay, was just a man:

And that for him and many is sufficient tragedy. It is not an irritating accident that the tone of the poem is so high and its theme so low. It is the theme in its deadly seriousness that begets the dignity of tone: lif is læne: eal scæceð leoht and lif somod (life is transitory: light and life together hasten away). So deadly and ineluctable is the underlying thought, that those who in the circle of light, within the besieged hall, are absorbed in work or talk and do not look to the battlements, either do not regard it or recoil. Death comes to the feast.

According to Tolkien, Beowulf was not an epic or a heroic lay, which might need narrative thrust. It was just a poem—an elegy. Light and life hasten away.

Katy Waldman sees a shared sensibility linking translator and text:

Tolkien’s assessment of the Beowulf poet is revealing:

“It is a poem by a learned man writing of old times, who looking back on the heroism and sorrow feels in them something permanent and something symbolical.” Tolkien himself was a “learned man” who, gazing on ancient things, felt acutely, even as he brought worlds of erudition to bear on his responses. Probably, the project of scholarship refined and deepened those responses. Nostalgia and regret, so central to Beowulf, are presumably familiar mental states for someone who spends much of his time sifting through the past. So the new translation seems especially attuned to transience and loss, from Beowulf’s premonitions before he fights the dragon (“heavy was his mood, restless hastening toward death”) to a gorgeous passage about the last survivor of an ancient civilization burying his gold.

Meanwhile, Jeremy Noel-Tod reminds us of the critical role Tolkien played in securing Beowulf’s place in the canon:

Almost lost to fire in 1731, the contents of the tattered 10th-century manuscript were first published in 1815.  For over 100 years, The Beowulf, as it was known, was regarded as a valuable historical source by scholars, but held no interest for critics seeking narrative skill or poetic subtlety.

J.R.R. Tolkien changed all that. “Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics” (1936), a paper he delivered to the British Academy shortly before the publication of The Hobbit, strapped a patriotic rocket to the poem’s reputation. It was, Tolkien argued, the work of “a mind lofty and thoughtful”, “a greater man than most of us” and (importantly) “an English man”, whose Christian-era evocation of a pagan past “moves in our northern world beneath our northern sky”. Tolkien’s critical championing of Beowulf was a manifestation of his desire – partly born out of the trauma of the Great War – to create an English treasure-chest of North European mythology. This found a literary home in Middle Earth, the fictional land elaborated by the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Creative Destruction Is So Cute, Ctd

A reader joins the conversation:

I’m starting to think that the first thing that self-driving cars replace won’t be cars. It will be buses. There is already self-driving public transportation on rails, like the Docklands Light Railway in London, so self-driving public transportation on rubber tyres can’t be that far away. The capital cost of a bus is already substantial, so adding the cost of an automated driver will be a much smaller percentage increase than on a regular private car, but bus drivers are usually reasonably well-paid for manual labor, so there are significant cost savings from automating them away.

The first city to decide to replace all their bus drivers with automation will probably be a failure, but the third or fourth will save a fortune by no longer employing drivers, which will allow for the bus service to be cheaper and available for much more of the evening. Jitneys (mini-buses with semi-flexible routings, like a cross between a bus and a taxi) are very restricted by the expense of drivers, and could be widely available in low-density areas, like exurbs and farming regions, perhaps offering much more travel freedom to teens and others who can’t drive themselves around.

 

The Best Of The Dish Today

Today, the vice-president who almost single-handedly broke the US military, bankrupted the country, trashed America’s moral standing and failed to secure a single WMD called president Obama the “weakest in my lifetime.” There are times when you really wonder if the man has any self-awareness at all.

So today, we analyzed the foreign policy of the man who inherited this broken country and has steered it with grit and grace ever since. Unlike the Cheney of 2000 – 2009, Obama is a classic conservative realist, and his aversion to shooting first looks like it is paying dividends in Ukraine. I went another round on the Kinsley-Sullivan spat; this video of a heroic triped dog made me tear up; and we discovered – surprise! – that Silicon Valley is mainly staffed by white and Asian dudes. Also: way cute baby bears. And debunking cute cars.

The most popular posts of the day were both about my whining about New York City’s rank incompetence, ugliness and unliveability. Go figure.

Many of today’s posts were updated with your emails – read them all here.  And you can always leave your unfiltered comments at our Facebook page and @sullydish.

17 more readers became subscribers today. You can join them here. One writes:

Your reader wrote: “I can’t wait ’til you get to Provincetown and chill the fuck out for a while”. I laughed out loud. Because I don’t think that even Provincetown will necessarily meet your exacting standards of living, if memory serves. I think Jim Newell at Wonkette said it best back on July 27, 2009:

HEROIC PUNDIT RETURNS, COVERED IN POOP: You people loved Andrew Sullivan so much when he came this close to seizing the throne of Iran, last month, but then he went on vacation, leaving his blog to numerous bloodthirsty tyrants named Conor. But now he is back, and stone cold covered in shit: “This has been a bust of a summer this year on the Cape: almost no sun, an economic depression that is killing businesses and crippling real estate, and vicious hate crimes from some locals. Oh, and the sewer broke over July 4, with poo coming up out of the drains and showers and toilets. Good times.” Ah, summer with the Sullivans.

See you in the morning.

An Accounting Of American Racism, Ctd

Readers sound off on the controversial subject:

Though I haven’t thought it through in any detail, in principle, I’m open to the idea of reparations for slavery and would be perfectly willing to see my hard-earned tax dollars used for it. But I always remember that US history harbors not one, but two monstrous racial crimes. Of course African-American slavery is one, but the genocide (or ethnic cleansing, if you prefer) and dispossession of the American Indian is the other, and it is just as terrible. How would we pay reparations to them? For every square inch of this land. How much would that tab be?

Another adds more complexity:

What’s interesting about this idea is that reparations would be paid by “America,” not “White America.” So, not only would the Vietnamese Boat Person have to chip in, but so would middle-class blacks, in the form of federal taxes.

J.D. Vance asks about whites who weren’t slaveowners:

[Coates] makes no mention of the 75 percent of the southern white population that didn’t own slaves, their wages so depressed by slave labor that they lived in arguably the most unequal society in world history—with slave owners earning a median of $23,000 per year while other whites fetched about $1,500. Nor does he cite the North’s two-to-one advantage in per capita income, evidence of its superiority in every economic pursuit that didn’t require enslaved workers. There’s no mention of the literature showing that slave labor sustained the Southern economy but also retarded it. How can we decide whether reparations are due, or which portion of American society should pay them, without untangling this economic story?

Another reader doesn’t see how reparations could be carried out:

I don’t have an issue with the idea of our government providing reparations to a specific group of people for institutionalized discrimination, but in this case I think there are insurmountable practical problems. Intellectuals like Ta-Nehisi Coates love to focus on the question of whether or not reparations are deserved while avoiding the hard questions like how much is enough and who should receive them.

Assuming some set amount could be agreed upon, who should receive the reparations?

Descendants of slaves? Most people would have a difficult time proving their lineage. Even if you could prove you were descended from slaves, how much should they receive? Should someone who is half black and half white get as much as someone is who isn’t “mixed”? How about someone who may have very light skin color and European facial features? How about people who are descended from more recent immigrants?

The amount would also be an issue. I could see someone like Coates being satisfied with a symbolic official letter of apology and acknowledgement from the government along with $1.00, but I think most people would say “you owe us more than that, this isn’t good enough, you’re trying to weasel out of paying us.” For Coates reparations may mean “spiritual renewal,” but I’d bet if you asked most of your every day people on the street what “reparations” means, most of them would say a significant payout and nothing less.

Another reader wonders what reparations would mean for his family:

As the white adoptive father of two mixed race kids, I’m trying to figure out who would owe who what under TNC’s call for reparations. We have no information about their birthfathers, so I can’t be sure of their background, or indeed if one of my sons is even part-black or some other admixture. Will we have to submit them for genetic screen to determine just how black they are? Do we get an added bonus if he has Native American background as well (as many folks who see my oldest think)? Will we lose the bonus if my younger ends up half Pacific Islander rather than African (as we also think)?

Institutionalized racism has taken a horrible toll on far too many Americans, but I honestly don’t see how this is supposed to work.

Lastly, Damon Linker focuses on Coates’ larger mission:

[I]t would be a very good thing for Americans to do the hard and truthful work of reconciling “our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.”

But that, I’m afraid, is exceedingly unlikely to happen, precisely because (as Coates also notes) it would require that America become nothing less than “a new country” with a radically different form of patriotism — one much more like the national culture that has developed in Germany in the decades since its total defeat in World War II. That is a culture self-consciously devoted to collective self-examination and atonement for the sins of the country’s past.

Coates is surely right that the development of a more complicated, ambivalent form of national self-love “would represent America’s maturation out of the childhood myth of its innocence into a wisdom worthy of its founders.” But I, for one, see little evidence in the American past or present to indicate a widespread willingness to leave behind childhood myths, to grow into maturity, and to accept that the United States is somewhat less unambiguously good than we would prefer to believe.

Recent Dish on reparations and the associated debate here, here, and here.

The Case For Eating Bugs, Ctd

Hal Hudson envisions how bug eating could become more popular:

Paul Rozin, who studies the psychology of disgust at the University of Pennsylvania, says new and unusual foods tend to make their way into popular culture from the top down, starting with those who can afford to dine in expensive, adventurous restaurants.

Sushi is one example of this trend. The idea of eating raw fish was largely foreign to people in the US before the 1960s, but now sushi restaurants can be found almost anywhere. “Sushi originally started with Japanese businessmen in Los Angeles. It was just a local ethnic thing for them, but then they would invite their American counterparts,” says Rozin. “It’s true of most unusual cuisine – people who are wealthy and adventurous do something, and then it becomes trendy.”

Hudson details some efforts to make insects more flavorful:

Chefs around the world are hard at work experimenting with insects to make new and appetizing foods. Nordic Food Lab – a non-profit spun out from Danish restaurant Noma – began a project to make insects delicious to the Western palate in May last year. Their chefs believe that making insects tasty could spark a wave of interest in entomophagy (see “Taste test“).

Nurdin Topham, now head chef at Nur in Hong Kong, was involved in the work, and noticed that the flavor of the insects changed depending on what they had been fed. “The diets that the insects were fed made quite a significant difference to the quality, taste and freshness, in the same way as shellfish or prawns,” he says. “There was a definite difference.”

Indeed, Tiny Farms in Austin, Texas, is already doing this. It uses a process called gut loading – in which crickets are fed certain flavored or nutrient-rich foods just before they are killed – to rear crickets that taste like honey and apples, or that are high in vitamin C.

Previous Dish on entomophagy here.

(Photo: Salted crickets mashed with huitlacoche and wrapped in homemade tostadas over tomatillo sauce, finished with pomegranate seeds. By Flickr user Carnaval King 08)

Faces Of The Day

Wang Zilong and Li Yang of Hong Kong compete in the Latin section of the British Open Dance Championships at the Winter Gardens in Blackpool, England on May 28, 2014. The festival covers a nine-day period with professional and amateur couples competing in Ballroom and Latin competitions. By Nigel Roddis/Getty Images.

The Great Wiki Hope?

Carl Miller suggests that Wikipedia could be a model for policymakers:

[R]ealizing digital democracy is hard. Iceland’s attempts to do so for their constitution descended into acrimony. As Matthew Hindman has argued, the Internet hasn’t really broadened political discourse much at all – rather it has empowered a small set of elites. While hundreds of thousands of people blog about politics, only a handful of these blogs are actually read. Anyone can be on Twitter, but celebrities and journalists are more likely to be followed than you or me …

Amid these challenges, Wikipedia stands out as a twinkling beacon of hope. …

The English version [of Wikipedia] alone is 60 times larger than the last great repository of human knowledge in the English language, the Encyclopedia Britannica, and nearly as accurate. But it is also a model for how to turn an elite-driven process into a democratic one. Britannica is written by 100 full-time editors and a few thousand contributors. Wikipedia has 21,395,915 accounts on Wikipedia and 270,000 are active on a monthly basis. It has achieved something that mainstream politics has cause to envy: the routine, active engagement of hundreds of thousands of willing volunteers of often radically different background and opinion to create something used, supported, and trusted by millions. There is an exciting opportunity here: to see whether Wikipedia and Wikipedians can teach us how to improve engagement with formal politics.

Can You Use It In A Sentence?

Just in time for tonight’s Scripps National Spelling Bee finals, Ben Blatt runs the numbers on which words are most likely to knock a contestant out of the running:

Thanks to the folks at the National Spelling Bee (who sent me complete records for the last decade) and Merriam-Webster (which provided their pronunciations), I’ve been able to compile statistics on all of the words that have been spelled correctly (there are 5,042 of them) and incorrectly (1,409) during the traditional oral rounds. (I didn’t look at words that were part of the bee’s written test.) So, what’s most likely to throw a speller off?

You might suspect that longer words are more likely to trip up contestants. The two longest words in the data set were 17 letters apiece: triboluminescence and idiosyncratically, both of which sent their spellers home. But long words aren’t always so tricky. Five of the eight 16-letter words were spelled correctly, Michelangelesque and sphygmomanometer among them. And of the two shortest words to appear in the spelling bee in the last 10 years, gbo and rya, only the former was spelled correctly.

Reuben Fischer-Baum uses Google Ngram to show that the winning words have gotten more obscure over the years, from “therapy” in 1939 to “cymotrichous” in 2011:

Of the 15 rarest winners in bee history, 11 have come since 1995 … [The] five top words stumped Google Ngram, and didn’t appear in the corpus at all in the year prior to the bee. “Esquamulose”—meaning “not covered in scales“—wins rarest word, period; it doesn’t appear in the corpus for any year, from 1800 to 2008 (a word has to appear in at least 40 books to show up in the database). Appropriately, “esquamulose” was only a winning word in a technical sense. The 1962 contest ended in a tie after both finalists failed to spell it correctly, the first and only time that the bee has ended in such as way.

The Need For Nowness

In case you missed it, Elizabeth Minkel is bothered by “ICYMI”:

I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve seen someone apologize for sharing something “old” that was published 48 hours prior. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve seen something interesting and completely un-timely and thought about sharing it, only to stop myself when I noticed it had been published a year or two ago. And I’ve lost track of the number of times when I’ve seen a piece – or, for that matter, written a piece – that seems to fall flat because it came out a week or two after the bulk of an internet maelstrom.

“In Case You Missed It” makes the feeling explicit. It’s hard for a lot of us to fight the compulsion to stay up-to-the-minute – in reality, it’s impossible, but it somehow seems achievable. ICYMI makes staying connected feel like a constant game of catch-up, like finding things at a slower pace warrants some kind of disclaimer.

I’m not the first to complain about the unrelenting pace of information online, or the method of its delivery.

“The Stream,” the chronological endless scrolling nature of the present web—one new notification, one new notification – rose to prominence about five years ago. Alexis Madrigal wrote beautifully about our sense of time online last December, the valorization of “nowness,” how the next tweet inherently trumps what came before it: … We feel overwhelmed because we crave endings, and the Internet has no end. “And now, who can keep up?” Madrigal writes. “There is a melancholy to the infinite scroll.” ICYMI is a tacit acknowledgement of that psychological finish line, always being moved an inch more out of reach – I can feel it now, chipping away at me.

The Dish makes a habit of posting new material as quickly as possible after its publication, to bring you the freshest yet most comprehensive take on an issue. If we get around to certain pieces too long after their publication date, we often pass on them. But that drive towards nowness is balanced by our constant linking back to material from the archives, to feature the old alongside the new.

Who Works In Silicon Valley?

You’ll find the whole spectrum of humanity, from white guys to Asian guys to – well, that’s about it:

The industry has been known to have a serious diversity problem. But on Wednesday, we got a peek at just how bad it is. Google released statistics about the make-up of its work force: Men and Asians are overrepresented, and women and blacks are drastically underrepresented as compared to the overall United States work force. Most startling: Just 17 percent of Google’s technical employees are women and just 1 percent are black. In the software industry over all, according to the Labor Department, 20 percent of engineers are women and 4 percent are black.

At the entire company, when nontechnical roles are included, women account for 30 percent of employees. That is 17 percentage points below the share of women in the work force, and about equal to women’s representation among lawyers, surgeons and chief executive officers.

This chart really drives the data home:

Alison Griswold adds, “In a blog post addressing the statistics, Google tries to defend its figures by putting them in a broader context”:

“Women earn roughly 18 percent of all computer science degrees in the United States. Blacks and Hispanics make up under 10 percent of U.S. college grads and collect fewer than 5 percent of degrees in CS majors, respectively,” writes Laszlo Bock, Google’s senior vice president of people operations. It’s a fair point: The systematic education barriers to increasing diversity in tech are great. But that doesn’t mean companies like Google can’t strive to do better. (Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer has been among the prominent female executives to call for more women in tech.) Bock adds that Google is “miles from where we want to be” and wants to be more candid about its diversity issues.

While disappointed by the numbers, Victoria Turk cheers the company for disclosing them in the first place:

As the company admitted in a blog post, “We’ve always been reluctant to publish numbers about the diversity of our workforce at Google. We now realize we were wrong, and that it’s time to be candid about the issues.” Hear, hear. While the numbers might not be too optimistic, it’s great to hear a tech company—especially one with the import of Google—at least own up to their record on diversity and recognize the need to improve.

And to be sure, Google is not the only tech company with this problem. As Josh Harkinson argues, Silicon Valley is “actually doing worse than it was a decade ago, diversity-wise”:

Google is far from the only Silicon Valley firm that has been tight-lipped about its demographics. Though large companies are legally obligated to report race and gender stats to the federal government, tech firms such as Google, Apple, and Oracle long ago convinced the Labor Department to treat the data as a “trade secret” and withhold it from the public. Mike Swift of the San Jose Mercury News sued the department to get the numbers. In 2010, following a two-year legal battle, he ultimately settled for stats for a handful of the Valley’s largest companies. Swift’s data went through 2005.

To get an update, I filed a Freedom of Information Act request a few months ago asking the Labor Department for its latest race and gender data on the top 10 firms. In order of largest to smallest by market capitalization, it now consists of Apple, Google, Oracle, Cisco Systems, Intel, Gilead Sciences, eBay, Facebook, Hewlett-Packard, and VMware. When I reached out for comment, most of these companies didn’t get back to me. Google responded that it intended to make its stats public, as it now has.

The data I obtained provides some much-needed context for Google’s diversity numbers.

(Chart via Quartz)