Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 261
May 27, 2014
The Turning Tide Against Male Turtles
Mike Pearl points to it:
A study published on Sunday in Nature Climate Change gave us the news that climate
change is bringing about a higher proportion of female sea turtles to males, thanks to a seemingly idiotic genetic quirk called temperature-dependent sex determination (TSD), also found in a few other species. Essentially TSD gives the turtles a baseline temperature of 84.2 degrees, at which there are 50/50 odds of being male or female. Beyond a certain threshold of heat, too few males will exist [to] the sustain the population. …
The authors of the study found that in the short term, turtle numbers are actually going to increase. The study looked at one species: loggerheads, on the island chain of Cape Verde off Africa’s west coast, and modeled what’s going to happen to them during 150 years of irrevocable temperature increase. The good news is that the increasing number of female turtles—who do the risky work of carrying the eggs to the island of their birth and laying them in hidden nests—will increase the overall number of turtles for the next 30 years.
(Photo: A Loggerhead turtle hatchling begins its life-long sojourn in the Mediterranean Sea soon after it was freed by Israeli ecologists after being trapped in its 40 cm deep nest at a protected hatchery on Betzet beach, at first light near the northern Israel town of Nahariya on August 24, 2006 . By David Silverman/Getty Images)
May 26, 2014
Face Of The Day
UK Independence Party (UKIP) leader Nigel Farage is interviewed by media as he arrives at the Guildhall for the results of the South East election count on May 25, 2014 in Southampton, England. UKIP, which advocates withdrawal from the European Union, was the top vote-getter in Britain’s European elections, beating both the Tories and Labour. By Matthew Lloyd/Getty Images.
Tweet Of The Day
#yesallwomen pic.twitter.com/Vzq7aB5TlZ
— alyssa. (@narrynicotine) May 25, 2014
Conor has a reflection on this and many others in the wake of the misogyny-fueled rampage near UCSB.
Why Take Vacations?
Pointing to the abundance of research showing that “people who take vacations aren’t any happier, or are only barely so, than those who do,” Jennifer Senior asks the obvious question:
Several reasons: First of all, our happiness often increases before vacations too, and that’s no small thing—never underestimate the hedonic power of anticipation. The positive memories from vacation also seem to occupy disproportionately large tracts of real estate in our minds, even if we weren’t enjoying our holidays at every moment in real time—and who are we, if not the sum of our most cherished memories?
But perhaps more to the point, our bodies appear to crave a respite from real life. While on vacation, we sleep more (about three quarters of an hour extra per night) and better; there’s also good evidence that they reduce our risk of cardiovascular disease and generally improve our long-term health. As de Bloom and her co-authors say in their 2013 paper, “Asking why we should keep going on vacations is therefore comparable to asking why we should go to sleep considering the fact that we get tired again.” Our bodies need them, simple as that.
More Than Pulling Strings
Eric Bass, a puppeteer, explains why the assumptions behind phrases like “puppet government” or “played him like a puppet” misunderstand what the art is all about:
As puppeteers, it is, surprisingly, not our job to impose our intent on the puppet. It is our job to discover what the puppet can do and what it seems to want to do. It has propensities. We want to find out what they are, and support them. We are, in this sense, less like tyrants, and more like nurses to these objects. How can we help them? They are built for a purpose. They seem to have destinies. We want to help them arrive at those destinies.
A simple example: What are the properties of a ball? It rolls, and sometimes it bounces. To put a ball onstage and have it never bounce or roll is a denial of what that ball is. Even if the ball does nothing, it can be said to be waiting to roll or bounce. A figurative puppet’s properties may not be quite so obvious, but they are there, and so is its character.
Analyzing the character will not get us very far. We have to discover who our performing partner is. This is true of its actions, its gestures, and its voice. Our cleverness in thinking of great things for the puppet to do or say will not help the puppet live. They will only draw attention to ourselves. If we try to impose them on the puppet, the piece we are performing will not be about the puppet at all. It will be about us, the manipulator. Or it will be about the conflict between us and our puppet.
The practice of our art, then, requires that we be the exact opposite of a controller. In fact, it requires that we step back and allow our puppets to perform their roles, their actions, their moments of life on the stage. It requires from us a generosity. If we try to dominate them, we will take from them the life we are trying to give them.
(Hat tip: Prufrock. Photo by Wolfgang Lonien)
Sex And The Single Soldier
In What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France, Mary Louise Roberts recounts the unsavory activities of the good boys of the Greatest Generation. Jennifer Schuessler reviews the book (NYT):
The book cites military propaganda and press accounts depicting France as “a tremendous brothel inhabited by 40 million hedonists,” as Life magazine put it. (Sample sentences from a French phrase guide in the newspaper Stars and Stripes: “You are very pretty” and “Are your parents at home?”)
On the ground, however, the grateful kisses captured by photojournalists gave way to something less picturesque. In the National Archives in College Park, Md., Ms. Roberts found evidence — including one blurry, curling snapshot — supporting long-circulating colorful anecdotes about the Blue and Gray Corral, a brothel set up near the village of St. Renan in September 1944 by Maj. Gen. Charles H. Gerhardt, commander of the infantry division that landed at Omaha Beach, partly to counter a wave of rape accusations against G.I.’s. (It was shut down after a mere five hours.)
In France, Ms. Roberts also found a desperate letter from the mayor of Le Havre in August 1945 urging American commanders to set up brothels outside the city, to halt the “scenes contrary to decency” that overran the streets, day and night. They refused, partly, Ms. Roberts argues, out of concern that condoning prostitution would look bad to “American mothers and sweethearts,” as one soldier put it. Keeping G.I. sex hidden from the home front, she writes, ensured that it would be on full public view in France: a “two-sided attitude,” she said, that is reflected in the current military sexual abuse crisis.
Fiona Reid also reviews the book:
GIs arrived on French soil with preconceived sexual fantasies and an ingrained belief in the decadence of French women. This prejudice was reinforced in the early days of liberation as women suspected of sexual liaisons with Nazi soldiers were paraded, shaven-headed, through the streets while other (equally available) young French women eagerly greeted their American liberators with public kisses. Clearly there was romance but there was also abuse. Sex may have been given freely in the initial heady days of liberation, but it quickly became a commodity and US soldiers were soon associated with prostitution and soaring rates of sexually transmitted disease. Those who argue that prostitution does not necessarily degrade should pay close attention to the language of Panther Tracks, a GI newspaper, on this topic: “An especially vivacious and well-rounded harlot might demand a price of 600 francs. However the price scales downwards for fair merchandise and mediocre stock. Some fairly delicious cold cuts can be had for 150 and 200 francs.” By conceptualising French women as “cold cuts”, GIs grew used to accepting subservience from all women and from the entire highly “feminised” French nation.
In a review last month, Robert Zaretsky considered the racial implications:
A veritable army of infected women, overwhelming France’s shattered medical facilities, was one tragic legacy of this cultural collision. An even more tragic and disturbing legacy, though, was that of rape by American soldiers. The crime was almost always, due to the institutionalized racism of the American Army and racial prejudices of French civilians, associated with blacks: of the 152 soldiers tried for rape in France, 139 were black. Segregated and relegated to service duties like food and laundry services, black soldiers had more contact with French civilians. This presence of black soldiers in the rear lines fused with racial stereotypes, widespread among both Americans and French, that blacks were “hypersexualized.” When one adds stark linguistic and cultural divides to these stereotypes, as well as the traumatic experience of war and liberation, blacks were frequently accused of crimes they never committed.
Inevitably, a segregated army that numbered thousands of officers from the American South rarely questioned these accusations. Roberts’s meticulous review of the rape trials reveals a fatal pattern of racial prejudice with accusers and the military courts. Along with chocolate and cigarettes, Jim Crow turned out to be another welcome American import.
David Ellwood finds parts lacking:
It is a devastating tale, written with rare fluency and style and meant to pull down for ever the sacred images of the ‘good war’ and America’s armies as being full of unsullied heroes, risking their lives to bring liberation, relief, hope and democracy. Unfortunately it also presents a blinkered view, restricted in effect to what happened in two regions in northern France in parts of 1944 and 1945. … Depravity was not the whole story. In most places Americans were also seen as carriers of a model of modernity. The medium of their technology alone carried a message: the soft power of hard metal.
It is David Reynolds who explained best just why the GI’s behaved so often in their uncontrolled way, a question Roberts never gets to the root of, even as she insists that the US army was unique in its attitudes to sex. Freedom to spend, eat, drink, smoke and to buy women anywhere, anytime was not the casual thoughtlessness of a power new to total war. Instead it was the key technique chosen by the general staff and Congress to hold together armed forces which were not fighting to defend home and hearth; a huge, raw mass of young individuals in uniform from a land with scarce military traditions and a strong commitment to citizen democracy. The American under arms was an extraordinarily privileged being compared to those all around wherever he (or she) went to war. Probably it is still so, but over time the Pentagon has found other ways to motivate its personnel beyond the promise of unlimited money, food and sex. The unhappy Normans (and plenty of others) paid the price for the start of this learning process.
Beard Of The Week
A biker takes part in the annual Rolling Thunder ride in Washington, DC on May 25, 2014 as the US marks Memorial Day to remember the men and women who died while serving in the United States Armed Forces. By Mladen Antonov/AFP/Getty Images. Previous BOTWs here.
When Your Next Step Could Be Your Last
Byliner has unlocked Brian Mockenhaupt’s The Living and the Dead: War, Friendship, and the Battles That Never End for Memorial Day, which follows three soldiers in Afghanistan – Tom, Ian, and Jimmy – and the way battle shapes their lives. Here’s a glimpse of the gripping story Mockenhaupt tells:
With the mine detector, his rifle, ammunition, grenades, body armor and helmet, two radios, the bomb jammer, water, and medical supplies, Ian carried close to 90 pounds, more than any other Marine in the patrol.
He could handle the load: at five foot seven, he had weighed 150 pounds when he entered the Marines in 2007, but he had since bulked up to 205. He figured carrying extra weight would increase the patrol’s overall effectiveness—a weaker and overloaded Marine falling behind put everyone at risk. Besides, that way other Marines couldn’t complain about their lighter loads, or not being able jump across canals with the awkward weight.
Ian turned south, onto a tree-lined road that split two muddy fields. In a month the fields would be thick with waist-high poppy plants.
Tick tock.
Fifty yards up, the road crossed a canal just in front of a large, high-walled compound to the left.
“Muller,” Tom said, “slow it up a bit.” The patrol had stretched out after the Afghan soldiers, farther back, stopped to question a farmer. Tom and Matt picked up their pace and closed the distance with Ian, who worked the mine detector back and forth.
Tick tock.
Holly sniffed the air, five feet behind Ian, as he stepped onto the dirt bridge that spanned the canal.
Tick tock.
Tick.
Matt still can’t figure out how Holly wasn’t killed.
For the rest of the holiday weekend, you can read the rest here. Purchase The Living and the Dead as a Kindle Single here.
The Final Commercial Frontier?
Rachel Riederer is skeptical of space-mining ventures:
These new companies talk about space in a way that sounds unfamiliar to the civilian ear accustomed to the reverent tone of planetarium field trips; rather than the vastness of space, the companies emphasize its accessibility. Moon Express calls the moon “the eighth continent.” Planetary Resources wants to “bring the solar system into humanity’s sphere of influence.” Experiencing awe is fun. It’s even more fun to imagine a world of outer-space abundance in which we don’t have to worry about fossil fuels and everyone can afford a platinum case for their iPhone. And there is great potential for resource extraction in space, though these ventures will carry great upfront costs and plenty of uncertainty about whether they will actually come to fruition. Many deadlines and timeline estimates are fast approaching or have passed already.
What’s misleading about these projects isn’t that they’re subject to budget problems and delays, but that they come couched in overblown rhetoric about their potential to radically alter human life, to do away with the notion of scarcity and deliver us to a future of plenty and peace. It’s a pattern that has become familiar in Silicon Valley: develop a plan for a business that will do something cool and make a lot of money, but describe it instead as something that will change the world.
Previous Dish on extraplanetary resource exploitation here, here, here, and here.
Andrew Sullivan's Blog
- Andrew Sullivan's profile
- 153 followers
