Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 279

Tweet Of The Day

Quite why the NYT Public Editor @Sulliview has not weighed in on this is beyond me. It’s a disgrace: dish.andrewsullivan.com/2014/05/07/and… @Jo_Becker @HRC

—
Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) May 07, 2014

C’mon, @Sulliview … You gonna take this from that punk @Sullydish? Fight. Fight! Fight! Fight! #sullyscrap

— Gene Weingarten (@geneweingarten) May 7, 2014

Thanks to Weingarten for joining me in the punch bowl.

The Best Of The Dish Today

You think I’m taking the Lewinsky bait? Glad she’s been able to survive what was a traumatizing experience. But Graydon Carter won’t get a subscription from me. I am, of course, eagerly awaiting Darrell Issa’s inquiry into Lewinsky’s previously concealed role in the Benghazi conspiracy.

Today, I tried to tackle the emerging debate about the role of America in a post-post-Cold War century. We engaged the science and genealogy of race – again; and examined Putin’s new way of war; if you’ve never seen Monty Python’s take on the gay voice, do yourself a favor. And the negotiations with Iran were making tangible progress.

The most popular post of the day remained the late-night podcast I made with Christopher Hitchens in 2006; followed by How To Interview A Politician.

There are now 28,560 subscribers. There are also 37,000 of you who have used up all your free read-ons and still haven’t subscribed. If you’re in the Dish that deep, $1.99 is a pretty small price to pay for the site you read so much. If even a tenth of you subscribed, we’d be past 30,000 subs. So take the plunge tonight (it takes a couple minutes max) and help this model of reader-supported web journalism thrive against the onslaught of sponsored content and constant advertising noise.

And see you in the morning.

(Photo: The Crimea travel poster produced by the USSR’s state tourist agency Интурист (Intourist), 1965 (indianriverposterco.com) via the great Eric Baker.)

Psychedelics As Medicine, Ctd

The evidence showing that MDMA (aka pure Ecstasy) helps people living with PTSD:

How the therapy works:

In the study looking at how MDMA could treat PTSD, the drug was given in conjunction with talk therapy. Patients lay down in a therapist’s office and listened to soothing music with headphones, wearing eyeshades.

They had the option of talking about what they were experiencing, and received counseling before and afterwards to integrate what happened to them while on the drug into their everyday lives. According to [research organization Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS)], 83 percent of the 19 people treated in a recent group had breakthroughs in this MDMA-assisted therapy and showed significant improvement in their PTSD symptoms.

“The MDMA allowed me to be my very, very, very best self, and I got to take care of my most broken self with my best self,” says Rachel Hope, a sexual-abuse survivor who participated in the study. MAPS’ results from this study were encouraging enough to the FDA that it was able to expand its efforts into what’s known in drug-trial parlance as “Phase 2 studies.” It’s now doing the same study with four new groups of patients in South Carolina, Colorado, Israel, and Vancouver.

Previous Dish on the therapeutic promise of MDMA here, here, here, and here.

Our Genetic Moral Code, Ctd

Michael Shermer takes a look at the work of Just Babies author Paul Bloom, who studies how infants and toddlers approach morality:

In Bloom’s laboratory, a one-year-old baby watched puppets enact a morality play. One puppet rolled a ball to a second puppet, who passed the ball back. The first puppet then rolled the ball to a different puppet, who ran off with the ball. The baby was next given a choice between taking a treat away from the “nice” puppet or the “naughty” one. As Bloom predicted, the infant removed the treat from the naughty puppet—which is what most babies do in this experiment. But for this little moralist, removing a positive reinforcement (the treat) was not enough. “The boy then leaned over and smacked this puppet on the head,” Bloom recounts. In his inchoate moral mind, punishment was called for.

There are numerous permutations on this research paradigm—such as a puppet trying to roll a ball up a ramp, for which another puppet either helps or hinders it. Time and again, the moral sense of right (preferring helping puppets) and wrong (abjuring hurting puppets) emerges in people between three and 10 months of age, far too early to attribute to learning and culture. Morality, Bloom concludes, “entails certain feelings and motivations, such as a desire to help others in need, compassion for those in pain, anger toward the cruel, and guilt and pride about our own shameful and kind actions….” Society’s laws and customs can turn the moral dials up or down, of course, but nature endowed us with the dials in the first place. This is why the constitutions of our nations should be grounded in the constitution of our nature.

Previous Dish on Bloom here and here.

Face Of The Day

An Israeli boy plays with an M-16 rifle during a traditional military weapon display to mark the 66th anniversary of Israel’s Independence at the West Bank settlement of Efrat near the biblical city of Bethlehem on May 6, 2014. By Gali Tibbon/AFP/Getty Images.

Book Club: Ask Bart Ehrman Anything

As our first book club discussion winds down, Bart Ehrman has graciously agreed to answer your questions about the book. This book club has its Marshall McLuhan Woody Allen moment – we can summon the author to resolve any remaining issues. So have at it. What would you like to ask Bart? Submit your questions via the survey below (if you are reading on a mobile device, click here). We’ll email your best to Ehrman and await his responses. Avanti:

View Survey

“Just Write, Damn It”

That’s Matt Zoller Seitz’s advice to young people entering the field of TV and film criticism:

I believe that ninety percent of writer’s block is not the fault of the writer. It’s the fault of the writer’s wrongheaded educational conditioning. We’re taught to write via a 20th century industrial model that’s boringly linear and predictable: What’s your topic sentence? What are your sections? What’s your conclusion? Nobody wants to read a piece that’s structured that way. Even if they did, the form would be more a hindrance than a help to the writing process, because it makes the writer settle on a thesis before he or she has had a chance to wade around in the ideas and inspect them. So to Hell with the outline. Just puke on the page, knowing that you can clean it up and make it structurally sound later. Your mind is a babbling lunatic. It’s Dennis Hopper, jumping all over the place, free associating, digressing, doubling back, exploding in profanity and absurdity and nonsense. Stop ordering it to calm down and speak clearly. Listen closely and take dictation. Be a stenographer for your subconscious. Then rewrite and edit.

The Human Stain

Ellyn Ruddick-Sunstein shares the haunting work of photographer Sarah Sudhoff:

[She] traces the physical, bodily evidence left by the dead; for her project At the Hour of Our Death, she gives form to death and the unknown, shooting fabrics stained by the blood and fluids of the victims of murder, suicide, and illness. She follows these material reminders of dead, contaminated and removed from the scene, to a warehouse, where they wait to be disposed of; she knows not the names or [identities] of the dead, constructing strange and poignant narratives with only the colors and shapes left by their passing.

Sudhoff spoke to Alison Zavos about her process in 2011:

You’ve mentioned that you feel deeply saddened when photographing the remains of a persons death. How do you mentally prepare before a shoot and how do you cope afterwards?

I don’t think there is anything someone can do to mentally prepare for dealing with death. Each shoot I have to push myself physically and emotionally to even make the call to see if new material is in. On one hand I dread finding out what jobs the crew is working on yet on the other hand I can’t help but be intrigued by the possibilities. …

Each time I leave a shoot I have a long drive ahead of me. I’ve started taking a change of clothes with me so I don’t have to drive and sit in the outfit I shot the material in. I am usually very careful to cover up and wear gloves however its more of a peace of mind to remove even the possibility of something on me. I typically stop at a gas station to scrub down my arms and face before hitting the road. As soon as I get home, I take a long hot shower and wash all my clothes from the shoot.

See more of Sudhoff’s work here. Watch a short film about the project here.

(Photo: Suicide with Gun, Male, 40 years old)

Should We Save Our Smallpox?

Helen Thompson explains the debate:

This month the World Health Organization (WHO) will meet to decide whether or not to destroy the last living strains of the variola virus, which causes smallpox. Since the WHO declared the disease eradicated in 1979, the scientific community has debated whether or not to destroy live virus samples, which have been consolidated to laboratories in Russia and at the U. S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta. Small frozen test tubes preserve the surviving strains, and most were collected around the time of eradication, though some date to the early 1930s.

Inger Damon, who leads the poxvirus and rabies branch at the CDC, and her colleagues argue in an editorial in PLoS Pathogens … to save the virus from full extinction. According to Damon, retaining the live samples will allow researchers to delve into unanswered questions about the variola virus and to test better vaccines, diagnostics, and drugs. “There is more work to be done before the international community can be confident that it possesses sufficient protection against any future smallpox threats,” they write.

Alex B. Berezow lists other reasons to keep the virus samples. Among other arguments:

[E]very once in a while, there is a smallpox scare from historical samples. What was thought to be a 135-year-old smallpox scab turned up in a museum in 2011. It ended up not being smallpox (but possibly a related virus known as Vaccinia). Still, the possibility of smallpox viruses surviving in old human tissue samples is a real enough threat. In an e-mail interview with RealClearScience, Dr. Inger Damon, the lead author of the PLoS Pathogens article, wrote, “The virus is highly stable when frozen; periodically the question of viable virus existing in corpses buried in the northern permafrost is posed, but remains unanswered.”

The View From Your Obamacare: Women’s Health, Ctd

A reader quotes another:

I am very frustrated with this comment:

Access to medical, dental, and mental care are true human needs. Obamacare should have focused on meeting all those needs, including the mental and dental coverage that too many employers had failed to make available, instead of opting to cover the pill. Except for its palliative uses, the pill is not a form of healthcare.

First, I would ask, why is this an either/or situation? Why pit this one benefit against other benefits? Physical, mental, dental, and reproductive health are all essential human needs. In fact, I would also add vision coverage, as those of us with very bad vision know we cannot operate in the world without the help of optometrists. Shouldn’t we be advocating for a more holistic approach to healthcare and not elevating one type of care over another?

Secondly, I must strongly disagree with the claim that “The pill is not a form of health care.” This is simply erroneous. I know a number of women who take birth control for reasons unrelated to preventing pregnancy.  Most of them use it to treat very painful periods or endometriosis. I know one person who uses it as estrogen therapy to treat Turner Syndrome, a genetic condition resulting from a missing X chromosome. In fact, only 42 percent of women use the pill only for contraceptive purposes, according to a 2011 study by the Guttmacher Institute. Maybe your reader does not consider those uses to be a form of healthcare, but most doctors would.

Finally, even preventing pregnancy is healthcare.

Pregnancy is not an illness, but it is a condition that affects a woman’s health. Pregnancy can put some women at great risk, because they have other health problems. For the rest of us who do not currently want to be pregnant, it is a relatively safe and easy method for us to prevent pregnancy – a method that does not require us to rely on a partner’s willingness to wear a condom. Of course, in theory we should all be having sex with partners who are willing to participate in safe sex, but we know that relationship are very imperfect and sometimes dysfunctional or even abusive. The pill is a way for a woman to have autonomous control over their reproductive health. It is a way to prevent a change in one’s health.

Another speaks from personal experience:

Did you notice that health-insurance companies made not a peep about covering birth control? And that they very quickly figured out a way to cover employees of religious hospitals, universities, and other religious employers with separate birth-control policies that would allow the institutions to save face? It is long-run cost savings for them.

I am prescribed “birth control,” which costs $100 a month and does prevent pregnancy – which, as I am 48 years old, is a good thing for me and for all my fellow policyholders. A pregnancy at this point in my life would surely be a very expensive prospect. But more than that, my “birth control” prescription ended the debilitating deluge of menstrual blood that began in my mid-40s, likely caused by the same condition that required my mother to have a hysterectomy at age 48. So my insurance company and fellow policyholders are shelling out $1,200 a year to prevent pregnancy and to prevent an expensive hysterectomy and the subsequent recovery time, which would cost many thousands more.

I expect to be taking this preventive “hysterectomy control” prescription into my early 50s, when my body should end the deluge on its own, thus avoiding an expensive surgical procedure for my insurance company and fellow policyholders, as well as keeping me on the job rather than suffering through the monthly challenge or the surgery that would have been required to stop it. Those savings can eventually be used to pay for expanded coverage of things like dental care – or at least they should.

Another ties the personal issue to a political one:

If Hobby Lobby prevails, their female employees with menorrhagia would have no choices for treatment except surgery – which leaves you unable to later get pregnant and comes with risks not present with the other medical options. “Birth control” is not just birth control. Would a male legislator who had lived one week out of every month bleeding uncontrollably still think it reasonable to deny women access to this treatment?

(Photo by Yoon S. Byun/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)