Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 273

Quote For The Day IV

“‘Branding’ as a general term for the way you present yourself to the world has become a popular usage. It implies that, if people see you for what you really are, that’s a failure on your part,” – Mike Kinsley.

Better Not To Get HIV In America

Last night saw the premiere of the HBO version of Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart. It focuses on the very beginning of the epidemic. But in some ways, the American AIDS experience remains as different from the rest of the developed world now as it was back then. The world is transformed medically, of course, but the deeper pathologies of the American healthcare system have sustained more infections than in any other advanced country.

As Michael Hobbes explains in a must-read, America’s decentralized and haphazard patchwork of care is part of the problem:

In the United Kingdom and Germany, if you test positive for HIV, you’ll immediately be referred to an HIV clinic for tests to measure how much of the virus is in your blood and how well your immune system is holding up. Three-quarters of Brits diagnosed with HIV get to this next stage of care within two weeks, and 97 percent make it within three months.

This is not just some nationwide codification of English politeness. Clinics that provide testing are required to get HIV-positive people to the next round of tests or they don’t get fully reimbursed. If you screen positive and skip your viral-load test, you’ll get a call from the clinic asking why you didn’t show up. Some testing centers will walk you straight to the hospital to make an appointment.

In the United States, only 65 percent of people with HIV get linked to a hospital or clinic within three months. A survey in Philadelphia published in 2010 found that the median time between diagnosis and treatment was eight months. The effect of the wait can be devastating. A 2008 study found that gay men who had full-blown AIDS before they were diagnosed were 75 percent more likely to die within three years, even if they got on treatment. For people whose viral load is high and T-cell count is low, getting on HAART is like putting on sunscreen after they’ve already been at the beach for two hours.

(The above chart taken for an accompanying article)

The Best Of The Dish Today

The cascading evidence of climate change that has been presented in various reports in the last few weeks crested today with news that the melting of the Western Antarctica ice sheet is now underway. And it’s a done deal:

“This is really happening,” said Thomas P. Wagner, who runs NASA’s programs on polar ice and helped oversee some of the research. “There’s nothing to stop it now. But you are still limited by the physics of how fast the ice can flow.”

So this was the perfect moment, of course, for Marco Rubio to come out as a proud denialist – even though Miami may be one of the cities most affected by the rising sea levels the Antarctic melt will bring. The Senator is not the brightest bulb in the GOP – his asinine foreign policy feels like a 1980s music video without the charm. But this latest pandering – as well as the ludicrous idea that he has the skills to be president of the US – marks a new low:

“I do not believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it,” the first term senator said Sunday on ABC “This Week,” after being asked by ABC News’ Jon Karl whether humans were contributing to the heating up of the planet. “I do not believe that the laws that they propose we pass will do anything about it, except it will destroy our economy.”

And what is the scientific basis for that “belief”? So far as I can see: zippo. Here’s his version of this for CNN:

I think severe weather has been a fact of life on earth since man started recording history. I understand that there’s a vast consensus of scientists that are saying that human activity is what’s contributing to changes in our climate. I think it’s an enormous stretch to say that every weather incident that we read about or the majority of them are attributable to human activity.

So straw men proliferate as well. And when intelligent, educated right-of-center intellectuals engage in absurdity on the subject, it’s hard to blame the somewhat dim member at the back of the class. I guess it’s worth re-stating. For me, climate change is a baseline test. Are Republicans capable of rationality or are they still busy creating reality?

Today, I explained why a kiss is still a kiss – even if it’s an inter-racial gay NFL one. Putin kept playing his usual war-not-war games, as some of his countrymen whipped themselves up into a full-scale gay panic. (I’m with PJ O’Rourke on the ultimate fate of the little big man in Russian history.) And, for some reason, West Virginians have started naming their daughters “Brooklyn“.

The most popular posts of the day were two on The Gay Sonic Boom – here and here.

Many of today’s posts were updated with reader commentary – read them all here. You can leave your unfiltered comments at our Facebook page and @sullydish.

19 readers became subscribers today. You can join them here. One sends the above photo:

Hope you had a good weekend. I want to share a view from my parents’ window in Oakland. On the right is the Mother’s Day gift I gave to my mom today: a framed print-out of the note I sent to you in January in which I wrote about how she had mailed me copies of The Dish while I was in basic training in Ft. Benning, GA in 2002. The Dish is a gift that keeps on giving.

See you in the morning.

Euro Trip

Bored with exploring Mars, Lee Billings urges scientists to seek life on Jupiter’s moon Europa, which likely holds “double or even triple the amount of water in Earth’s oceans”:

After the revelations of Galileo, a minor cottage industry arose among planetary scientists estimating the volume of Europa’s ocean and the thickness of overlying ice, all in hopes of pinning down what sort of life might exist in that dark watery world – and how accessible it might be to future probes. After more than a decade of debate, the general consensus is that Europa’s abyss is more than 100 kilometers deep. … Whether the ice is thick or thin, the key question facing astrobiologists is really whether sufficient free energy exists within Europa’s sunless depths to support a biosphere – for life, if it is anything, is hungry. If scant useful energy is available beneath Europa’s ice, as many researchers suspect, the ocean could at best be a sparsely populated habitat for alien microbes. But if energy is plentiful, Europa could boast rich ecosystems of complex multicellular organisms – perhaps even something as magnificent and fearsome as Earth’s predatory deep-sea giant squid.

He adds:

Many scientists suspect such sea floor oases were where our planet’s life first emerged from inanimate matter. If the overlying ice crust is thin and mobile enough, useful energy could also trickle down from above, via heat and ejecta from the occasional cometary impact, or from the upwelling mineral salts that oxidize at the surface before slowly filtering down through fractures in the ice. It increasingly seems that, unlike Mars, which, just maybe, might have been able to support a robust biosphere deep in its geological past, Europa probably offers a rich haven for extraterrestrial life right now.

(Photo: Europa, a moon of Jupiter, appears as a thick crescent in this enhanced-color image from NASA’s Galileo spacecraft. By NASA/JPL/University of Arizona)

Your Moment Of Octopus

Our eight-armed friend gets out of a jam:

Tamsin Woolley-Barker reminds us what makes the creature so spectacular:

Three-fifths of his neurons are in his arms. He has nerve cells and “eyes” all over his body. Like an eight-legged brainiac Mr. Potatohead, he is an inside-out neocortex covered in cameras. He sees through his skin, and thinks with it too. Each skin-neuron triggers a muscle connected to a tiny, pigment-filled, light-reflecting skin sac, flattening and stretching it to make a patch of that color. As many as two hundred of these sacs, each with its own muscle and brain cell, can fill an area of skin the size of a pencil eraser. It’s a shimmering pixel display that is also watching you.

Previous Dish on all things octopus here.

(Hat tip: The Hairpin)

A Journey, Not An Escape, Ctd

IbogaLife, an organization in Costa Rica, seeks to help addicts transition from heroin to sobriety through a powerful psychoactive drug, ibogaine, which is derived from a Central West-African bush called iboga. Abby Haglage describes visiting IbogaLife ceremonies, where she witnessed a young woman named Grace undergo the treatment:

In the first stage of the ibogaine trip, which lasts four to eight hours, users experience fantasies like walking on water, through fire, or flying. In the next stage, which can last anywhere from eight to 48 hours, users contemplate—usually with images from childhood—the meaning of what they saw. It is during this time that many discover the underlying reasons for their addiction, and, ideally, work through them.

So Grace trances, we watch, the Bwiti music plays. She howls afraid, we play instruments to keep her calm. For many minutes, she’s frozen and silent. The faces of the village soft and solemn around her. Then suddenly, without warning, terror invites itself. Her eyebrows furrow with pain, her mouth falls open in shock, her hand reaching out to be saved. For the next few days, this is her reality.

A week after the ceremony, Haglage talked to Grace about her visions, which she described as “more uncomfortable than scary”:

Finding these things, seeing them, wasn’t easy. “My whole body was on fire. I was in so much pain,” she says. But living through them seems to have changed, at least for now, the way she sees the world. “What this did, it gave me a perspective. That was the whole point of my trip I think, perspective,” she says. “Decisions are not good or bad, but what you hold them up against. I have a choice if I want to keep using and that’s fine, but if I do, it’s going to suck. This is the only life I have, as far as I know, and I’d at least like to give it a shot.” …

As for the trip? “I wouldn’t recommend it to somebody who is trying to have fun,” she says dryly. “If you want your body to explode into 1,000 pieces and rebuild itself into something beautiful, then yeah—but don’t expect it to be pleasant.”

Previous Dish on ibogaine here and here.

The Game Blame

Jesse Walker looks back on the history of moral panics about addictive, violent, or sexually explicit video games:

In December 1993, Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.) convened a Senate hearing on violent video games. His opening statement described some high-profile crimes—a girl abducted from a slumber party, a mass shooting on a commuter train—then declared that “violence and violent images permeate more and more aspects of our lives, and I think it’s time to draw the line. I know that one place where parents want us to draw the line is with violence in video games.”

As the senator slid back and forth between describing real and virtual violence, he argued that these “so-called games” lead to real crimes: “Instead of enriching a child’s mind, these games teach a child to enjoy inflicting torture.” Lieberman and his colleagues singled out some specific releases by name. Denouncing the martial-arts title Mortal Kombat, the senator noted that the Sega version of the game featured splattered blood and decapitation; the Nintendo version did not include those elements, he conceded, but “it is still a violent game.” The politicians also attacked Night Trap, a previously obscure interactive horror movie that Sen. Byron Dorgan (R-N.D.) described as an “effort to trap and kill women.” In fact, the aim of the game was to rescue the women, not to attack them. (After the hearings, sales of Night Trap shot up.)

Face Of The Day

A reader flags it:

This little dog needed some help off I-680 freeway today. We're glad he's safe. #CHP #Safe #Dog #DogTreats pic.twitter.com/RTuyB6fdPg

— CHP Contra Costa (@320PIO) May 10, 2014

Beats, By Apple?

It’s rumored that Apple is considering shelling out upwards of $3 billion to acquire Beats Electronics, which, in addition to its ubiquitous headphones, runs a music streaming service. Bob Lefsetz doesn’t see the point:

Tim Cook is an operations guy, he’s clueless, the company has no vision and this is evidence of it. Steve Jobs was famous for saying one thing and doing another, decrying this and then doing exactly that. Anybody with a brain knew that streaming was eclipsing downloads. Except at Apple, where they were adhering to Jobs’s philosophy. But it turns out Apple had no Plan B, no streaming service ready to be launched when necessary. It’s like they never read Clayton Christensen’s “Innovator’s Dilemma,” despite it being vaunted in the tech press for over a decade. If you rest on your laurels, you’re gonna be history tomorrow.

Derek Thompson, on the other hand, thinks buying Beats would be a smart move:

What’s iPhone’s Next Little Thing? Why not: the most popular premium headphones in the world (plus a promising streaming service)?

Headphones? Sure, headphones. Besides clothes, there are five things on my person each time I step out of my apartment: keys, wallet, watch, phone, and headphones. Apple already makes a best-in-class phone and is working on a best-in-class connected watch. But for reasons I won’t even guess, it makes weirdly fragile plastic headphones. Owning the most popular premium headphone manufacturer means Apple is an iWatch away from producing the top high-end version of just about everything I carry around with me when I walk, besides a wallet (which is going to the cloud anyway) and keys (which, who cares). The implications of dominating the high-end ambulatory consumer market in a world where everything is going to mobile seem profound.

Joshua Brustein puts the potential purchase in perspective:

Apple wants to build the best version of whatever device people start using next. If it decided that it wanted to do that through acquisitions, it would likely spend a few billion dollars on, say, the purchase of Fitbit in order to go deeper into wearable computers. Or Apple could make the same bet by scooping up a bunch of engineers from Nike’s defunct FuelBand division.

But Apple hasn’t shown much interest in buying its way into the future. Even if it does spend big on Beats, Apple will look pretty much the same at the end of the day.

Gorby argues that there’s “one good idea in the Apple-Beats deal: and that’s making big acquisitions”:

Beats’ main asset is it’s brand. It’s got a great brand, and it’s a great business success. That’s how it can sell mediocre headphones and make fat margins. Again, more power to them. Great. But Apple is a one-brand company. Its strength is its brand. Taking on a new, separate brand makes absolutely no sense. And if Apple wants to fold Beats into its brand, why buy them in the first place? Why not just make its own headphones. …

The technology landscape changes extremely fast, let’s face it Tim Cook is not the visionary that Steve Jobs was, and Apple has $100 billion in cash that it just doesn’t know what to do. It should make very big acquisitions. Just not Beats.

Mastering The World Of Mad Men

In a Paris Review interview, Mad Men creator Matt Weiner discusses what unites the show’s various outsider characters:

The driving question for the series is, Who are we? When we talk about “we,” who is that? In the pilot, Pete Campbell has this line, “Adding money and education doesn’t take the rude edge out of people.” Sophisticated anti-Semitism. I overheard that line when I was a schoolteacher. The person, of course, didn’t know they were in the presence of a Jew. I was a ghost.

Certain male artists like to show that they’re feminists as a way to get girls. That’s always seemed pimpy to me. I sympathize with feminism the same way I identify with gay people and with people of color, because I know what it’s like to look over the side of the fence and then to climb over the fence and to feel like you don’t belong, or be reminded at the worst moment that you don’t belong.

Take Rachel Menken, the department-store heiress in the first season of Mad Men.

She’s part of what I call the nose-job generation. She’s assimilated. She probably doesn’t observe the Sabbath or any of these other things that her parents did. That generation had a hard time because they were trying desperately to be buttoned-down and preppy and—this is my parent’s generation—white as could be. They were embarrassed by their parents. This is the story of America, this assimilation. Because guess what, this guy Don has the same problems. He’s hiding his identity, too. That’s why Rachel Menken understands Don, because they’re both trying desperately to be white American males.

Of all of them, Peggy is my favorite. I identify with her struggle. She is so earnest and self-righteous and talented and smart, but dumb about personal things. She thinks she’s living the life of “we.” But she’s not. And every time she turns a corner, someone says, “You’re not part of ‘we.’ ” “But you all said ‘we’ the other day.” “Yes, we meant, ‘we white men.’ ”