Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 2760

How Bias Bends Fact, Ctd

by Patrick Appel

Digby reflects on this article:

It turns out that our brains are designed to create "cognitiveshortcuts" to cope with the rush of information which I'm guessing ismore important than ever in this new age. I'm also guessing one ofthese "cognitive shortcuts" is trusting in certain tribalidentification and shared "worldview" to make things easier to sortout, which is why things are getting hyperpartisan and polarized inthis time of information overload. (And sadly, one of the...

The Evolutionary Case Against Monogamy, Ctd

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

I came of age in an era when, as a friend put it, "everyone was supposed to sleep with everyone, and did."  (The infamous "sixties," though for me it was offset into the seventies.) In the midst of all that pressure, ignorance, and confusion, I fell into a long-term relationship that we (a young man and I) defined as "open."  We also defined me as being immature, ignoble, and unpleasant for being jealous and possessive.  There were a couple of decades where I...

The Daily Wrap

Today on the Dish we welcomed our two guest-bloggers for the week: David Frum and Dave Weigel. 

Weigel honored Nate Henn, the American who died in the World Cup bombing (and who happened to grow up with Weigel in Delaware). He also filed a dispatch from Anchorage, featured a new profile on John McCain, undermined a right-wing myth about the New Black Panthers and Obama's DOJ, gave a platform to a conservative critic of the GOP's fiscal record, and dug up a bit of trivia about a popular...

Why you don't see people booing John McCain

by Dave Weigel

Joe Hagan keeps up New York's remarkable record of turning every profile into a mini-"Game Change" of revealing quotes and moments with this monolith on John McCain. The moment that's getting the most attention comes which McCain gets irritated at Scott Brown for his advice on how to win elections (my guess: "run against Martha Coakley"), but there's hardly a dull graf in this thing. For example:

By setting himself up against [former congressman and free money from the...

How Fear Infects

by Patrick Appel

TNC connects the Oscar Grant case to the cop who pulled a gun during a snowball fight:

"Fear" is the common defense for officers who abuse the
state-sanctioned right to brandish lethal force, excusing everything
from the killing of Amadou Diallo to pulling a gun in the middle of a
snowball fight. The question, however, remains--If you scare this easy,
why are you a cop?

My old friend Julianne Hing has the best write-up on the Oscar Grant verdict, by far. Adam Serwer is in the...

Why Your Publisher Won't Answer Your Email

by David Frum

Those of us who work even occasionally with the quaint world of publishing often wonder: why is it that our publishers are so hard to reach? Partly it is our own fault for attempting to use email rather than typing out our communications on an IBM Selectric and posting them in the US Mail, the way they did in the good old days. 

But there is also this additional impediment, as a literary friend explains:

It's summer, and publishers take the summer off, starting about April 15 and...

Face Of The Day

by Chris Bodenner

A Bosnian
woman mourns over the coffin of a relative during preparation for mass
burial at the Potocari memorial cemetery near Srebrenica on July 11,
2010. Sunday marked 15 years since the Srebrenica
massacre of nearly 8,000 Muslims by Bosnian Serbs, the darkest episode
of the violent break-up of Yugoslavia. By Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP/Getty Images.

Yugoslavia - Potočari - Srebrenica massacre - Serbs of Bosnia and Herzegovina - Mass grave

Why Obama Isn't Another FDR

by Patrick Appel

Beinart's pithy argument:

The more fundamental difference between the Obama era and its New Dealand Great Society predecessors is this: Back then, progressives did notdefine the left end of the political spectrum. In the 1930s and 1960s,America featured honest-to-goodness alternatives to capitalism,home-grown radical movements that scared the crap out of the Americanestablishment and sent some of its denizens scurrying into arms ofreformers like FDR and LBJ. Because our entire...

How Bias Bends Fact

by Patrick Appel

Joe Keohane's article on the fact that "facts don't necessarily have the power to change our minds" is making the rounds:

These findings open a long-running argument about the politicalignorance of American citizens to broader questions about the interplaybetween the nature of human intelligence and our democratic ideals.Most of us like to believe that our opinions have been formed over timeby careful, rational consideration of facts and ideas, and that thedecisions based on...

Young Guns (go for it)

by Dave Weigel

This is really just trivia, but if no one else has pointed it out -- is it unusual for three members of the House Republican leadership to write a book inspired by, and using the same photo as, a 2007 Weekly Standard cover package? I assume somebody (hopefully Justin Raimondo) could make an amusingly tortured case about what this reveals about the Power of NeoCons; I choose to think that the Standard simply nailed it. Its 2007 pieces still sound right today. Fred Barnes on Eric...