Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 260

News To Befuddle Larry Kramer

From Vancouver:

The dedicated HIV/AIDS ward at St. Paul’s Hospital has closed due to a lack of patients.

“It was not that long ago that HIV/AIDS was a death sentence and those who came to this ward at St. Paul’s were here to die,” said Dr. Julio Montaner, director for the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS. “Today, ward 10C will provide treatment, support and care for those living with HIV-related issues. We have worked hard to make this day happen and I commend everyone who has supported our efforts.”

Mental Health Break

Turning an annoying iPhone alarm into a catchy dance beat:

The Best Of The Dish Today

Twenty Summers Introduction from Twenty Summers on Vimeo.

As the summer begins to make DC close-to-uninhabitable for those of us from more temperate zones, I’ll soon be off to Provincetown, for my 21st consecutive summer. That puts me one over Stanley Kunitz’s marker of the Cape escape he loved so much:

Light glazes the eastern sky.

Celia gyrates upward

like a performing seal,

her glistening nostrils aquiver

to sniff the brine-spiked air.

The last stretch toward home!

Twenty summers roll by.

I’m looking forward to two big things: my garden, which should be finally reaching some sort of equilibrium this summer, and taking Bowie, our beloved little triped, to the beach. I got Dusty partly because I’d just gotten a little wharf unit for the summer and figured living there for three months without a dog was a bit of a waste. And since Dusty, the great joy of introducing our two current dogs to the last dregs of sand before the Atlantic has not diminished.

But I’m also psyched about the Twenty Summers program, which will inaugurate this year, with a series of events in the glorious, vaulted barn that Charles Hawthorne built for his painting school in 1907 and Hans Hoffmann subsequently took over. See here for details. The barn’s history was tartly summarized by the Boston Globe thus: “Norman Rockwell studied there. Norman Mailer, renting a house next door, attended parties in the space. Tennessee Williams danced and Jackson Pollock got drunk in the barn.” I’ll merely be part of a day of story-telling there on June 14, around the theme of “coming out.”

Today, I took a delayed whack at Sarah Palin’s re-writing of history and Larry Kramer’s inane views on Truvada. I tried to make sense of the populist revolt in the European elections and we pondered the hopeful emergence of President Poroshenko of Ukraine. Plus: in our renewed effort to highlight the facts of climate change, we worried about the fate of the male turtle; and in the wake of the UCSB nightmare, the male human.

The most popular post of the day was Church Sign Of The Day (a classic), followed by What The Hell Just Happened In Europe? II. Many of today’s posts were updated with your emails, including a key correction to a graph on global gentrification, the story of a potential homicide disguised as suicide, and advice from a few fellow sufferers of wheat allergies. You can always leave any unfiltered comments at our Facebook page and @sullydish.

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

I’m a long-time fan, but you finally tipped me over the edge today by pushing back just a little on the insane self-flagellation of some male bloggers in response to the Santa Barbara tragedy.  Must this nasty little creature really drive us to dispense with masculinity altogether?  Is the condition of the modern American woman so intolerable that all male behaviors must be extinguished to improve it?  It’s a bit, dare I say, hysterical.  Yes, the pick-up artists and the male-rights communities are full of disgusting examples of the worst of masculinity, but particularly so close to Memorial Day, let’s not forget the self-sacrifice and the heroism of the best.

See you in the morning.

Painter Of Darkness

In a review of the Andrew Wyeth exhibition now at the National Gallery of Art, Andrew Ferguson argues that the artist’s work is more “terrifying” than is commonly understood:

Anyone familiar only with Wyeth as his severest critics rendered him – i.e., as a Thomas Kinkade-like lineworker pumping out commercial art fit only (as one critic said) for the homes of retired Republican politicians and the boardrooms of bankrupt banks – will do well to take his time wandering this show. It quickly becomes clear how thoroughly the popular debates of decades past got Wyeth wrong. If these pictures are comforting nostalgia for a simpler past, “illustrations of the good life,” and “kindly sermons,” then I am Marie of Romania. Beneath the frequent prettiness, most of the pictures are just this side of harrowing, not just lonesome and melancholy but portraits of life as it seeps inevitably away. The wind that lifts the lace curtain in Wind from the Sea makes the hair on your arms stand up.

Jamie Wyeth, Andrew’s son and a celebrated artist himself, confesses to being puzzled by the benign view of Wyeth’s work. “My father’s work is terrifying,” he said. It’s not sentimental. It’s luminous! But in a creepy way. There was a lot more to him, in other words, than many of his friends and enemies picked up on – a constant hint, at least, of menace that keeps all of us at a distance from him and his work.

(Image: Wind from the Sea, 1947, tempera on hardboard © Andrew Wyeth. National Gallery of Art, Washington. Gift of Charles H. Morgan)

Because Condescension Needed An Explainer

Soraya Chemaly interviews Rebecca Solnit – who coined the term “mansplaining” – about her new essay collection, Men Explain Things to Me:

The term “mansplaining” has resonated with so many women. It shifted the cultural universe ever so slightly (in a good way). Did you expect this response?  

You know, I had a wonderful conversation about a month ago with a young Ph.D candidate at UC Berkeley. I’ve been a little bit squeamish about the word “mansplaining,” because it can seem to imply that men are inherently flawed, rather than that some guys are a little over-privileged, arrogant, and clueless. This young academic said to me, “No, you don’t understand! You need to recognize that until we had the word “mansplained,” so many women had this awful experience and we didn’t even have a language for it. Until we can name something, we can’t share the experience, we can’t describe it, we can’t respond to it. I think that word has been extraordinarily valuable in helping women and men describe something that goes on all the time.”

She really changed my opinion. It’s really useful. I’ve always been interested from how much our problems come from not having the language, not having the framework to think and talk about and address the phenomenon around us.

Looking beyond the titular essay, Sady Doyle praises the volume for its scope and ambition:

It’s rewarding just to see the license Solnit gives herself to explore the territory, to pit Sontag and Woolf against each other in one essay and los desaparecidos against the effacing of women’s matrilineal ancestry in the next. …

A writer’s authority is a strange thing, a hybrid of expertise and sheer arrogance. It helps to have an encyclopedic knowledge of facts. But the key to being a good essayist, rather than a good Wikipedia editor, is the willingness to claim the authority of one’s opinions; to say that you know what matters, and why it matters, and (here’s the tricky part) why everyone should listen to you and (preferably) pay you for the privilege.

The right to that kind of self-confidence has always been denied to women. By allowing herself such a wide range of subject matter and approaching it with such confidence, Solnit suggests that the key to defeating mansplaining is not just identifying the problem or giving it a catchy new name, but insisting on women’s right to do a little explaining themselves.

(Image from the Mansplaining Paul Ryan tumblr)

Mike Kinsley’s Unforgivable Prose!

I was hoping to duck the latest Kinsley-Greenwald skirmish because I like both of them personally and admire both professionally. But Margaret Sullivan has forced the issue. The NYT public editor actually writes that Kinsley’s tone was unworthy of the “high standards” of the NYTBR. More tedious thumbsuckery please! And really, was her sense of humor surgically removed at some point? If you can read the first few paragraphs of that review and not have something of a smile flicker around your chops, you have. As for the notion of sneering – it can’t be for this, can it:

Maybe he’s charming and generous in real life. But in “No Place to Hide,” Greenwald seems like a self-righteous sourpuss, convinced that every issue is “straightforward,” and if you don’t agree with him, you’re part of something he calls “the authorities,” who control everything for their own nefarious but never explained purposes.

This is about how Greenwald comes across in the book under review. It is qualified by Mike’s acknowledgment that he has never met Glenn in real life. I really don’t see how that’s some kind of offense, worthy of the school monitor’s attention. It’s part of a litany of dissident characters Kinsley beautifully and hilariously evoked.

Then there is Sullivan’s contention that the review somehow argues that the press has no role in uncovering state secrets – which is why she actually thinks the review should have been spiked. And yet here’s Kinsley’s second fricking paragraph:

There are laws against government eavesdropping on American citizens, and there are laws against leaking official government documents. You can’t just choose the laws you like and ignore the ones you don’t like. Or perhaps you can, but you can’t then claim that it’s all very straightforward.

What Kinsley is criticizing, if I’m reading him right, is the simplistic idea that no conflicts are involved here. It is not axiomatic that all government secrets must be exposed without legal consequences, Kinsley argues, unless we suspend the rule of law entirely or obey it when we like it and not when we don’t. That’s a rather limited point. It assumes merely that there may be a genuine government interest in keeping some things secret, as well as a genuine public interest to know what’s being done in our name. And that these are necessarily sometimes in conflict. But Kinsley is also pretty emphatic about what the press should do: “the process of decision-making — whatever it turns out to be — should openly tilt in favor of publication with minimal delay.” How can anyone read that review and conclude as Sullivan does that

Mr. Kinsley’s central argument ignores important tenets of American governance. There clearly is a special role for the press in America’s democracy; the Founders explicitly intended the press to be a crucial check on the power of the federal government, and the United States courts have consistently backed up that role. It’s wrong to deny that role, and editors should not have allowed such a denial to stand.

Seriously: can she read? Yes, Mike has a low view of journalism. But so low it’s unprintable? So low that the editors should have refused to allow him to express his opinion? Pious piffle.

On the deeper subject at hand, I should add that I am closer to Glenn’s position than Mike’s, but certainly see it as a tough call and a difficult dilemma. The way the US government has acted – especially since 9/11 – has pushed me into the dissident camp. That Obama presided over a vast apparatus of domestic spying – after being elected to roll back parts of the war on terror – is proof positive to me of the need for Glenn’s work. But that’s a contingent judgment about a particular period of time. It’s not an eternal truth. And government is not an eternal evil. And journalists, while having a special and vital role in a democracy, are also not above the law.

Man’s Best Cancer Detector?

Maybe you should let dogs sniff your junk after all:

Researchers used two professionally trained dogs to test their ability to detect prostate cancer from a pool 677 people. One group of participants was cancer-free; the other group ranged from individuals with low-risk tumors to those whose cancer had metastasized to other tissues. The two dogs sniffed urine samples, and identified signs of prostate cancer with a combined 98 percent accuracy. In a few cases, the dogs identified cancer when it wasn’t there — called a false positive — accounting for the remaining 2 percent of cases. That success rate represents a vast improvement over the standard Prostate-Specific Antigen test, which has a false positive rate as high as 80 percent, Bloomberg reports.

But some specialists have their doubts:

A debate currently is raging over whether prostate cancer is overdetected and overtreated, given that most men develop the cancer late in their life and end up dying of other causes. Those who are treated for prostate tumors often suffer problems such as impotence and incontinence, leading some doctors to argue that it might be better to leave prostate tumors undetected.

“Screening for prostate cancer is a very controversial area, and while I would like to think dogs could solve that problem, I don’t think that’s a possibility,” [Charles] Ryan said. “That said, it’s fascinating to think as a scientist these things are out there and actually exist.”

Face Of The Day

Politicians should not do sport-related photo-ops. Exhibit A: Alex Salmond and a football – pic.twitter.com/KnYrkbJK7J

— alexmassie (@alexmassie) May 27, 2014

Iran Cannot Begin To Make A Nuke

That’s the upshot of the latest report from the IAEA:

Iran has neutralized most of its stockpile of higher-grade enriched uranium that could be turned quickly into the core of a nuclear weapon, the U.N. nuclear agency said Friday, leaving the country with only about a fifth of what it would need for such a purpose. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said in a in a quarterly report that Iran now has less than 90 pounds of the material. The report also said Tehran was meeting all other obligations under an agreement reached four months ago in Geneva that serves as a prelude to a comprehensive deal now being negotiated.

I wonder why that isn’t front-page news: an obvious sign that diplomacy has worked so far with a previously unmovable regime, and a promising basis for a broader, bigger agreement. On that front, George Perkovich, director of Carnegie’s Nuclear Policy program, nonetheless doubts an agreement will be in hand by July 20. What then?

Map Of The Day

A giant of the design world died today:

An avowed modernist, [Massimo] Vignelli is also famous for having said, “If you can design one thing, you can design everything.” And even if you aren’t a design nerd, you’ve been looking at Massimo’s work for decades now, especially if you live or lived in New York: together with his wife Lella, he branded American Airlines, Ford, and Bloomingdales with the logos we know them for today. They also designed Fodor’s travel guides, furniture you’ve probably sat on, and plastic housewares you’ve probably used. The two were recently featured in the documentary Design Is One, which if you can get a hold of, is delightful.

Graphic designer Michael Bierut was a young mentee of Vignelli:

Today there is an entire building in Rochester, New York, dedicated to preserving the Vignelli legacy. But in those days, it seemed to me that the whole city of New York was a permanent Vignelli exhibition. To get to the office, I rode in a subway with Vignelli-designed signage, shared the sidewalk with people holding Vignelli-designed Bloomingdale’s shopping bags, walked by St. Peter’s Church with its Vignelli-designed pipe organ visible through the window. At Vignelli Associates, at 23 years old, I felt I was at the center of the universe.

Joe Cascarelli, quoting from the NYT writeup of Vignelli’s death, provides background on the iconic map seen above:

[W]hen the Metropolitan Transportation Authority released his new subway map in 1972, many riders found it the opposite of understandable.

Rather than represent the subway lines as the spaghetti tangle they are, it showed them as uniform stripes of various colors running straight up and down or across at 45-degree angles — not unlike an engineer’s schematic diagram of the movement of electricity.

What upset many riders even more was that the map ignored much of the city above ground. It reduced the boroughs to white geometric shapes and eliminated many streets, parks and other familiar features of the cityscape.

It was replaced by 1979. “Look what these barbarians have done,” Vignelli said of the map in 2006. “All these curves, all this whispering-in-the-ear of balloons. It’s half-naturalist and half-abstract. It’s a mongrel.”

Examining the 2008 update, he added, “We belong to a culture of balloons. [The designers] grow up with comic books, and this is what happens. There’s balloons all over the place. It’s ridiculous.”

But of his 1972 creation — a “diagram,” he called it, because maps are for geography — Vignelli said, “Of course I know Central Park is rectangular and not square. Of course I know the park is green, and not gray. Who cares? You want to go from Point A to Point B, period. The only thing you are interested in is the spaghetti.”

For more Vignelli quotes, Popova plucked many from interviews he gave to Debbie Millman for her book, How to Think Like a Great Graphic Designer, as well as her podcast, Design Matters.