Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 2716

The Nanny Trade

Reihan thinks servants and nannies are the low-skill professions of the future:

As more skilled women enter the workforce, and as the labor market position of millions of less-skilled workers deteriorate, we'll see more servants and nannies in middle-class homes. While this future might seem disturbing at first, there is no reason to believe that these armies of servants and nannies won't earn decent wages. But let's just say that this isn't the future most of us envision for our children.

...

The Slow Death Of Cap-And-Trade, Ctd

Plumer thinks the EPA will step in to fill the void:

Note that this is all likely to be costlier than a cap-and-trade systemdevised by Congress. There's not the same flexibility. One tool at theEPA's disposal, for instance, is the ability to require new powerplants to adopt what's called "Best Available Control Technology" forpollution. But having the EPA pick and choose technologies is a lotless flexible and efficient than putting a price on carbon and lettingthe market sort out the...

Quote For The Day

"In Dwight's "Travels in New England" it is stated that the inhabitants of Truro were formerly regularly warned under the authority of law in the month of April yearly, to plant beach-grass, as elsewhere they are warned to repair the highways.... In this way, for instance, they built up again that part of the Cape between Truro and Provincetown where the sea broke over in the last century.... Thus Cape Cod is anchored to the heavens, as it were, by a myriad little cables of beach-grass...

A Poem For Sunday

Was America ever the world

we grew up with? Didn't it stop being that somewhere in the fifties - after Truman?


wheat, the music of wheat, Robert Flaherty, James Agee, Dorothea Lange?

Or just before: the American parades clashing down two avenues
when Charles Ives would stand somewhere in the middle so he could
listen to two different...

Poz Face

Michael Petrelis chronicles the impact of long term retroviral therapy on the faces of those who have survived HIV a long time -  by boldly posting his own above. I am lucky not to have been too affected by this, but some loss of fat in the face and accumulation of fat on my back or deep in my gut - the "elephant hump" and "protease paunch" - is something I've learned to live with (and counter with the only drug that seems to work, the prohibitively expensive serostim).

Michael notes how s...

Mental Health Break

Ezra Klein, for the win: "I think that if I were a famous singer, I'd spend most evenings going to karaoke joints and performing my own songs incognito":

Undercover Karaoke with Jewel from Jewel
















Karaoke - Jewel - Singing - Ezra Klein - Funny Or Die

How Money Can Make Us Unhappy

Jonah Lehrer reflects on a new study over at his new blog:

The Liege psychologists propose that, because money allows us to enjoy
the best things in life – we can stay at expensive hotels and eat
exquisite sushi and buy the nicest gadgets – we actually decrease our
ability to enjoy the mundane joys of everyday life.

But the more I have stayed in expensive hotels, the more I long for my own bed. And the fancier food I eat, the more I yearn for a burger and fries. And nothing beats Nabisco...

The Language Of Faith

Thornton Wilder once wrote these prophetic words:

"The revival in religion will be a rhetorical problem -- new persuasive words for defaced or degraded ones."

This seems to me to be a much more potent problem than many of us believers grasp. Sometimes, I think of faith as like looking at an old and famous painting for so long that it becomes impossible to see it any more. By see it, I mean see it with eyes fresh to its core meaning, open to its ambiguities and associations, and prepared to b...

Facts Infused With Morality

Edge held a seminar on morality. Here's Joshua Knobe:

Over the past fewyears, a series of recent experimental studies have reexamined the waysin which people answer seemingly ordinary questions about humanbehavior. Did this person act intentionally? What did her actionscause? Did she make people happy or unhappy? It had long been assumedthat people's answers to these questions somehow preceded all moralthinking, but the latest research has been moving in a radicallydifferent direction. It...

The Evolutionary Case Against Monogamy, Ctd

Jessa Crispin reviews Sex At Dawn. She found it lacking:

If there's something to take from Sex at Dawn, it issimply that there are thousands of ways to be sexual creatures, as wellas the reminder that societal norms flux with time for a reason. Didagriculture (and monogamy) come with some baggage? Absolutely. But didit also make us literate and productive, technologically advanced andromantic? Hell yes. It is possible that this particular mode of beingno longer serves us, but neither will...