Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 259

Amazon’s Hit List, Ctd

Polly Mosendz analyzes Amazon’s escalating war with publishing giant Hachette:

As Amazon works to negotiate prices for e-books with Hachette, they are exercising a number of powerful tactics: pulling pre-orders, buying less inventory, extending shipping time, and not offering promotional pricing. You can still buy Hachette books from Amazon, it will just take longer and cost more. In a statement released today, Amazon said that if book buyers don’t like it, they’re welcome to shop elsewhere. They are flexing their business muscles. They’ve used that muscle before, and they’ll do it again.

Hachette’s authors are understandably upset, because this fight is hurting their sales. Now the seller is reminding Hachette and their authors why they wanted to do business with them in the first place: Amazon moves books. Negotiating for acceptable terms is an essential business practice that is critical to keeping service and value high for customers, both in the medium and long-term. Amazon is squeezing Hachette with all their might, because, as they said in statement today, “when we negotiate with suppliers, we are doing so on behalf of customers.”

Richard L. Brandt argues that the dispute will end well for consumers:

Jeff Bezos is once again using ruthlessly self-serving tactics to pressure book publishers into lowering prices. In an attempt to force Hachette to lower its wholesale price of e-books, Bezos has started delaying delivery of some hard- and soft-cover Hachette books and raising prices on others. Will his move further weaken book publishers, which are already operating under whisper-slim margins and are looking to e-books to save them? As the author of three books myself, all published by mainstream publishers, I worry about that myself.

But I very much doubt that will be the outcome. The ultimate winner of this battle will be buyers and readers of books. If Bezos wins this battle, I would bet that publishers and book authors may just come out ahead as well. And, yes, Amazon most certainly will, too.

But Jeremy Greenfield imagines “a scenario where [Amazon] controls three-quarters of all book sales in the U.S.”:

Long-time industry consultant (and partner in Digital Book World, my employer) Mike Shatzkin explained to me what would happen next:

Let’s say Amazon goes to 70 percent and they’re basically the pipes for everything and they’re indispensable and you can’t publish a book without them. So, what do they do then?

If they’re still trying to maximize profits, we’ll still have lots of romance books and James Patterson will still write his books. But serious nonfiction books won’t get published. Those are the books that will go first.

Nonfiction books, like Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, are expensive and risky to produce and rarely sell well, yet many of these books drive intellectual thinking in the U.S. Robert Caro’s latest book on Lyndon Johnson The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson took nearly a decade to write—and that means investment and risk.

Jack Shafer has decided to close his Amazon account:

[W]hile Amazon may have captured my wallet, its recent behavior has convinced me to take my business elsewhere. As long as the company’s high-pressured negotiating tactics served my interests — lower prices, expansive selection, superb service — I was on board. But the company has erred in this dispute. It would have been okay with me if it had hard-balled the publisher by refusing to discount its books or even insisted on selling them at a premium. In that case, I could do what I usually do — make individual decisions about where to buy stuff based on price and availability.

But by essentially banishing many Hachette titles from its stock, Amazon, which ordinarily puts its customers first, has put them last, telling them they can’t buy certain titles from it for any price. If Amazon prevails in this clash, will it put me and my material needs last whenever a supplier resists its will? I don’t know for sure, but I can guess.

However, Martin Shepard, a small publisher, gives Amazon “a four star review for not only their efficiency and work they do, but for leveling the playing field”:

In truth, everyone wants more of the pie. We’ve been publishing literary fiction for 35 years, and in the past found that the chain bookstores took few if any of our titles, that distributors like Ingram demanded bigger discounts from us than they charged the conglomerates, or that despite winning more literary awards per title than any other publisher in America we could not match the print review coverage afforded to authors of the five big conglomerates. But we’re not calling these other organizations Mafia inspired or asking for government intervention. Surely one  must come to recognize that all these companies are—and should be—free to set their own terms based on their bottom-lines, and publishers like Hachette might consider tempering their  complaints about Amazon’s discrimination or restraint of trade. Jeff Bezos didn’t create Amazon for Hachette, and Hachette isn’t forced to use Amazon for distribution. What is Amazon anyway, other than an incredibly successful on-line store that sells almost every product  one can think of. …

I always have a lingering suspicion that when one of the large publishing cartels complains they are being treated unfairly by Amazon, it’s probably good for most all of the smaller, independent presses.

Mental Health Break

The most adorable throwdown you’ll see all day:

The Best Of The Dish Today

If you hoped the HBO Chad Griffin documentary might not be as egregiously wrong and slanted as Jo Becker’s breathless hagiography, it looks like you’ll be disappointed. See the above screen shot of the final moments, just emailed to me. As a factual matter, so far as I know, no lawsuits have been filed in those states based on the Perry decision, while 24 have been filed based on the Windsor/DOMA decision. So both Becker and HBO made a bet on the wrong case – but keep pretending they didn’t. HBO won’t send me a screener – although they did get their PR flak to call me up to see if I was going to be mean about it. I’ll wait and see the thing before passing judgment, but that screenshot made my stomach lurch. And I had to splutter when I saw this correction from the Huffington Post in a review of the trailer:

CORRECTION: A previous version of this post incorrectly stated that the Supreme Court ruled Proposition 8 unconstitutional. The Supreme Court itself ruled that the private parties that appealed the case to the justices did not have standing to do so after the state of California had bowed out.

Somehow, I think Chad Griffin will find a way to get the world to forget that.

By the way, the “Do I Sound Gay?” kickstarter project has two more days to go and hasn’t reached its target, if you want to help out. Read about it here in our thread on the topic.

The most popular post of the day was my New York Shitty Update. Readers are going to let me have it soon enough, but I hope it’s somewhat clear I have my tongue in my cheek a bit on this. I’m not denying New York’s stunning cultural, business, media and financial depth. I’m just pointing out the vast gap between the city’s self-image and what most sane people would think of living here. My piece on Europe’s red-blue divide was runner-up again.

Many of today’s posts were updated with your emails - read them all here.  You can always leave your unfiltered comments at our Facebook page and @sullydish. And today we posted for the first time in a while a poll to “Ask Andrew Anything” – submit your questions and vote on them here. 20 more readers became subscribers today. You can join them here for a little as $1.99 month. It’s how we keep this show on the road.

See you in the morning.

Where The Wild Things Could Go

Emma Marris urges national parks to create “nature play areas,” where kids can “go off trail, climb trees, collect specimens, and generally leave as much trace as they want”:

Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods, agrees that parks should make room for kids to play. “If kids don’t have some kind of connection to nature that is hands-on and independent, then they are probably not going to develop the love of nature and vote for parks and the preservation of endangered species,” he says. “Unless you know something you are unlikely to love it.”

There’s some research to back up this intuition. One 2010 study in the journal Children, Youth and Environments found that among people who ended up dedicated to nature and conservation, most had a childhood filled with unstructured play in nature, some of which “was not environmentally sensitive by adult standards; rather, it included manipulation of the environment through war games, fort building, role playing of stories in popular children’s adventure books and movies, and the like.”

Drones That Get Down

Ben Valentine spotlights the work of Eleven Play, a Japanese dance group that incorporates drones into their performances:

Surrounded by an all-white stage, sprinkled with black computer monitors facing the audience, the three dancers and their accompanying drones put on a mesmerizing and eerie display. The result is stunning. … Much like Alexander McQueen’s haunting use of robotics in performance, Eleven Play’s dance is not without a sinister side. At the beginning, the dancers appear in control, or at least in mutual dialogue with the drones. We see the dancers pushing and pulling the drones, as if conducting them. The drones are what one would want in a good dance partner, they follow the music and they’re responsive to your body, they just happen to be flying robots.

Yet at the performance’s 1:56 minute mark, there is a shift, and the drones become menacing and the dancers visibly fearful. Simultaneously, with the projection appears to become the drones’ conductor — a commentary on the problems of control in a largely algorithmic machine. The drones start dancing to their own beat, and the human dancers become superfluous. This is not a hyperbolic point either; the US has already relied on algorithmically determined drone strikes based solely on phone metadata.

Amber Frost is also impressed:

At first the dancers interact cautiously and experimentally with the drones, then the machines become more active and more threatening. With no control over the increasingly volatile technology, the women flee the stage in fear. In the end, the only ones left dancing are the drones themselves. It’s beautiful and dramatic and there’s a trippy light display and flying robots—what more could you want?

Bob Dylan, Curator

We already introduced Dish readers to David Kinney’s new book, The Dylanologists. Chris Francescani highlights the incredible sleuthing of one superfan, a New Mexico DJ named Scott Warmuth, who has shown that Dylan’s 2004 memoir, Chronicles: Volume One, is “full of fabrication, allusion, and widespread appropriation of material from a vast and surprising spectrum of sources” – and so are many of his songs:

Dylan’s Chronicles, one of five finalists for the prestigious National Book Critics Circle Award for biography or autobiography, appears to sample everything from Ovid and Virgil to Twain, Hemingway, H.G. Wells, a March 31, 1961 issue of Time magazine, and scores of other far-flung source material—even self-help books.

Since 2003, when a Minnesota schoolteacher came across lines from Dylan’s 2001 album Love and Theft in an obscure biography of a Japanese mobster, the legendary songwriter has faced accusations of plagiarism. His subsequent album Modern Times also borrowed liberally from the work of Henry Timrod, a Civil War-era poet from Charleston, South Carolina.

But Kinney, following Warmuth, doesn’t view this as a straightforward act of plagiarism. Ian Crouch explains:

Warmuth’s reading of Dylan’s memoir has revealed that Dylan’s “appropriations were not random. They were deliberate. When Scott delved into them, he found cleverness, wordplay, jokes, and subtexts.” The thefts that Dylan made were part of the story—he had, as Kinney writes, “hidden another book between the lines.”

Kinney remarks on an especially intriguing section of “Chronicles,” in which Dylan seems to be explaining the method behind his guitar playing. Dylan writes, mysteriously, “You gain power with the least amount of effort, trust the listeners to make their own connections, and it’s very seldom that they don’t.” If this sounds inscrutable as musical technique, that’s because it is lifted from a self-help book about gaining influence over others called “The 48 Laws of Power,” by Robert Greene. This, then, is a cunning bit of dark humor: Dylan purports to explain the magic behind his music, but he’s really just revealing how susceptible devoted fans are to this kind of florid nonsense.

This unpacking of Dylan’s memoir, and the increased scrutiny given to his recent albums, is a reminder that Dylan’s work has always been spurred on by his own fannish, idiosyncratic obsessions. Michael Gray, who has written extensively about Dylan’s songwriting, tells Kinney, “You want him to be this lone genius who came from another planet. He never pretended to be. He’s created something out of something else.” Dylan’s earliest songs borrowed chords and lyrics from traditional folk songs; he has lifted lines and licks from the blues; he has repurposed and reassembled the Bible, press clippings, English poetry, the American songbook, and a half century of cultural comings and goings to create a kind of ongoing, evolving musical collage. Dylan is an archivist and a librarian in addition to being an artist.

For more, check out Popova’s selection from a 1991 interview with Dylan about songwriting here.

Time To Punish Maduro?

via @WolfJostin: #Venezuela This is how they dialog in Maduro's Gov't pic.twitter.com/E7KE26gFiS @GeneSharpaei @AnonyOps @NaranjaRA

— Maria V Segreto (@mariave888) May 28, 2014

José R. Cárdenas wants sanctions against Venezuelan officials involved in human rights abuses:

By its own admission, the [Obama] administration believes that if it acts unilaterally in Venezuela, it would “bilateralize” the conflict; that is, it would give the Venezuelan government a new drum to bang in its ongoing cacophony of anti-American rhetoric, thus diverting attention away from the protestors’ grievances. That, however, is giving credence to a problem that doesn’t exist. The view that sanctioning human rights observers will somehow make Venezuelans think any less of skyrocketing inflation, rampant street crime, and shortages of everything from electricity to basic consumer goods is as divorced from reality as is the Venezuelan government’s belief it can beat its people into continued submission.  …

As the saying goes, when you exhaust all your other options, you may as well do the right thing. The crisis in Venezuela has churned for four months now because the government hasn’t had to face any costs for its truculent behavior. The Obama administration has an opportunity to change that equation through the principled application of sanctions against behavior no one who wants what is best for the Americas should accept.

The State Department appears to have backed down from its opposition to a bill that would do just that:

“I’m not saying that the State Department loves it,” Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the Miami congresswoman who introduced the bill, said on Tuesday. “But this time they’re not actively against it. …

Ros-Lehtinen’s bill, which would freeze assets and ban entry to the U.S. for people found guilty of human rights abuses against Venezuelan protesters, passed the House Foreign Affairs Committee earlier this month despite a campaign by the State Department to pause the bill and its counterpart in the Senate. Ros-Lehtinen hopes to pass it by a voice vote on Wednesday.

Roberta Jacobson, the State Department’s assistant secretary of state for western hemisphere affairs, had argued that the Venezuelan opposition had said they were against the bill — something Venezuela’s opposition coalition, known as MUD, later denied. The opposition has engaged in talks with the government aimed at resolving months of political unrest that have resulted in the deaths of more than 40 people.

David Noriega compares South Florida’s pro-sanctions Venezuelan-American community to the Cubans of Miami, who have spend decades lobbying for tougher anti-Castro policies:

There were about 250,000 Venezuelans living in the United States in 2012, according to census data, of which almost 65,000 are American citizens. But what defines the population is not its size but its political cohesion: The vast majority of Venezuelan immigrants have arrived in one way or another as a consequence of the rise to power of Hugo Chávez, whose regime was marked by aggressive wealth redistribution, expropriations of private enterprise, and other measures that negatively impacted the wealthier sectors of Venezuelan society.

“Compared to, say, Mexicans or Dominicans or other Latino populations, these are almost exclusively people from the middle class and upper middle class,” said David Smilde, a senior fellow and Venezuela expert at the Washington Office on Latin America and a professor at the University of Georgia. “This is a diaspora of people who are very anti-Chávez and now anti-Maduro, whose interests have been touched upon, who fear the rise of a dictatorship, or who have been victims of some kind of political persecution.”

Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction

Kalliopi Monoyios is an illustrator who bristles at questions about how much of her work is digital. She ponders perceptions of machine-aided art:

[I]f a machine could draw on its own, would it be able to produce images that move us in the same way that images made by a thinking, feeling human do? It would seem that a fair number of people hold the view that art produced by a machine could never hold a candle to “hand-drawn” images, despite their being enamored with animated films and hyper-realistic video games. In the same way that love still feels real and powerful and fraught with meaning even with the knowledge that it is, at its core, just a chain of chemical reactions, a drawing rendered by a machine can stir something deeply human even if you are aware of its mechanical origin.

She goes on to point to illustrations produced by Iron Genie (seen above), a harmonograph constructed by the artist Anita Chowdry:

Why was Chowdry, who clearly has the skills to create delicate and elaborate drawings with her own two hands, compelled to make an instrument to draw for her?

While it’s amusing to think she might have burned out on creating herintricate and exacting rosettes, the reality is quite different. In her own words,

The immediate appeal of the Harmonograph to me is that you can witness the unfolding of natural dynamic geometries that have always existed independently of our aesthetic sensibilities. We cannot draw them ourselves without the aid of mechanical devices. They have existed long before we discovered them, before we even began to understand the physics that drives them, before we had the language to define them in mathematical terms.

They are a part of the dynamics of the universe – they have existed long before us, and perhaps that is why we find it so hypnotic to watch the drawings unfold before our eyes as the swinging pendulums drive the movements of the pen and paper… in our own slick, virtual, digital age in which we feel less and less in control, a venerable analogue machine with simple workings that we can see, understand, and touch, offers a reassuring physicality.

Loose List Sinks Spook

Over the weekend, the White House accidentally let slip the name of the CIA’s top official in Afghanistan in a list e-mailed to news organizations:

The White House recognized the mistake and quickly issued a revised list that did not include the individual, who had been identified on the initial release as the “Chief of Station” in Kabul, a designation used by the CIA for its highest-ranking spy in a country.

The disclosure marked a rare instance in which a CIA officer working overseas had his cover — the secrecy meant to protect his actual identity — pierced by his own government. The only other recent case came under significantly different circumstances, when former CIA operative Valerie Plame was exposed as officials of the George W. Bush administration sought to discredit her husband, a former ambassador and fierce critic of the decision to invade Iraq.

Jonathan Tobin expresses outrage, decrying what he sees as a partisan double standard:

Let’s remember that what occurred this past week was far worse than anything that happened to Plame. Plame was, after all, serving in an office in Virginia and, while classified, was no secret. By contrast, the CIA station chief whose name was released is in peril every day in Kabul. He is serving on the front lines of a shooting war and the release of his name in this indiscriminate manner may well have compromised his effectiveness if not his safety.

The White House has, in fact, ordered an investigation. And Ambers counters that, while the Plame leak compromised a number of vital intelligence operations, this one has less dangerous implications:

Station chiefs of major CIA stations are generally known, at least by name, often by sight, to rival intelligence agencies almost from the get-go. Certainly, the station chief, in working with a number of different agencies in Afghanistan, would have to accept that his degree of freedom to control his cover is probably tiny at this point. When the CIA appoints chiefs of stations, the agency generally understands and accepts the risk that the identity, and perhaps the person’s cover history, might be exposed. Occasionally, this can lead to compromised operations, although generally, enough time has elapsed between these officers having actively run agents and operations (as opposed to having managed them) that the risk is — again, to the use the word — acceptable. The more dangerous consequence is not so much that rival spooks figure out the name of the CIA’s man or woman in a certain country. It’s that the country or targeted entity can use this information to pin a target on the person’s back, which is exactly what elements of the Pakistani government did during a dispute about drones and intelligence-sharing a few years back.

Meanwhile, Jack Goldsmith finds it odd that the press has so far been scrupulous about not printing the station chief’s name, but is happy to publish classified information about intelligence and surveillance methods:

I believe the answer is that journalists still tell themselves that they will not publish a secret that, as Bart Gellman put it in a 2003 lecture (not on-line), “puts lives at concrete and immediate risk.”  And publishing the name of a covert operative may appear to put a life at concrete and immediate risk more obviously than publication of a method of infiltrating a communications system.  It is interesting that Gellman – who represents mainstream elite journalistic opinion on this matter – included in his 2003 list of too-risky disclosures not just the “names of clandestine agents,” but also “technical details that would enable defeat of U.S. weapons or defenses.”  I think it is fair to say that eleven years later, and post-Snowden, technical details concerning communications intelligence operations related to U.S. weapons or defenses are no longer considered remotely unpublishable.  I expect that journalists today would argue that such disclosures do not put lives at concrete and immediate risk. …

Let us concede for purposes of argument that Snowden-like revelations do not cause concrete and immediate risk to lives.  The real question is: Why privilege “concrete and immediate risk” to lives over diffuse and indirect risk to lives?  The harms to lives from disclosing communications secrets are harder to see because they are usually diffuse and probabilistic rather than concrete and immediate.  But they are no less real.

Scapegoating Sugar?

David Despain criticizes the new Katie Couric-narrated documentary about youth obesity, Fed Up, for its single-minded focus on added sugar, while largely ignoring other factors, such as exercise:

While added sugars are a significant part of the problem because they are widely used to make food appetizing, they are far from the whole problem, says Dr. David Katz, director of Yale University’s Prevention Research Center and listed as a member of the scientific advisory board for Fed Up. “In terms of overall health outcomes, the evidence overwhelmingly indicates the conjoined importance of what we do with our forks and what we do with our feet,” he says.

If Dr. Katz is straightforward in his criticism, he is joined by many other nutrition experts and organizations who have taken a harder line against the film. Angela Lemond, a registered dietitian nutritionist and AND spokesperson, says that the film’s minimizing of the benefits of exercise is “truly unfortunate” and “irresponsible,” noting that sugar is a quickly absorbed source of carbohydrate that is crucial for exercise performance. Moreover, the film’s focus on sugar as a major factor in contributing to obesity is a “biased view” not shared by the majority of objective scientists, says James O. Hill, a professor of pediatrics and medicine at the University of Colorado, Denver and an ASN spokesperson. “Research is clear now that adding sugar to a diet and taking away the same number of calories does not cause weight gain or any other of the outcomes attributed to sugar in this film,” Hill says.

Michael O’Sullivan finds that the film could have done more to address a deeper issue at work, noting that federally mandated nutrition labels don’t include the “daily value” percentage for sugar:

[T]he real problem isn’t sugar, but sugar education. If consumers only knew that the stuff is not just addictive, but poisonous — one of the film’s experts calls it a “chronic, dose-dependent” liver toxin — they might make better choices at the checkout counter. Unfortunately, “Fed Up” doesn’t seem to recognize the problem of food deserts, which can hamstring even the best-intentioned efforts to teach people how to eat right. (For an exposé of the food desert phenomenon, in which many communities simply don’t have options other than buying processed foods, I strongly recommend the 2012 documentary “A Place at the Table.”)

Celebrities appearing in “Fed Up” include former president Bill Clinton and former FDA commissioner David A. Kessler, both of whom bemoan the lack of government foresight on obesity and diabetes. (Opponents of so-called nanny state efforts to regulate, say, soft drink size are given short shrift.) But it’s author-activist Michael Pollan who delivers the film’s most succinct message when he says that the single best way to improve one’s diet is simply to cook what you eat. And no, that doesn’t mean microwaving a Hot Pocket.

Paula Forbes faults the documentary for ignoring economic inequality’s role in making Pollan’s suggestion difficult to put into practice:

In fact, it is on this point that the film stumbles into blitheness. Michael Pollan at one point states home cooking can be cheaper than fast food as well as being healthy. This he holds, uncontested in the film, as proof that all we need to do is cook ourselves. But he misses the point.

It’s not just about money, it’s about time. The US Congress just defeated a bill that would raise the minimum wage to $10.10. This means the federally mandated minimum wage remains $7.25. (And guess who lobbied against the increase?) Who is going to crisp that kale, who will visit the neighborhood farmers market — which Pollan suggests is a panacea — that will magically appear in the food deserts of New York and Newark and in the poor precincts of Baltimore not to mention Tuscaloosa and Kokomo, if you’re working 70 hours a week to make ends meet?