Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 283

Not To Miss A Beat

Megan Keeling profiles Elise Cowen, a female Beat poet who wrote in a community in which “only a few women were recognized as artists, and most were not deemed to possess the talent or creative soul required to produce art”:

Today she is most famous for being Alan Ginsberg’s experiment in heterosexuality, and the typist of his poem “Kaddish.” Beat scholars place her as the footnote in the Legend of Ginsberg: a devoted follower of the poet who lived in his intellectual shadow. Others have written her as a tragic-women-poet figure (she suffered from mental illness most of her life, and committed suicide at the age of 27.) But there is more to her story than that. Her surviving poetry shows a unique perspective on the rigid cultural conformity of the 1950s and also the fringe artistic community of the Beat Generation.

I took the heads of corpses

to do my reading by

I found my name on every page

and every word a lie. …

After her death, Cowen’s family destroyed much of her poetry and writings, describing them as “filthy.” Her poems cover much of the same topics as the male Beats- spirituality, homosexuality, drug use and madness, among many other things. However, as a woman (and a queer one at that) she was too far on the margins even for the Beats. [Author Joyce] Johnson writes: “I’d show her the stories I was writing, but [Elise would] never show me her poems.  ‘I’m mediocre,’ she told me, pronouncing the word in an odd hollow French way.” When her poetry was published, it was largely due to the efforts of her friends, especially Leo Skir, after her death. The first collection of her poems will be published this year.

Previous Dish on Beat literature here, here, here, and here.

Email Of The Day

A reader writes:

I just read your “The Best of The Dish Today” with all its great news about the Dish’s relative financial health and wellbeing. Congratulations, mazel tov, salud, and all those great good wishes.

However, the reason I moused over to your page moments ago was a more somber one, but one that left me feeling deeply grateful to you and your intrepid crew for the work you do creating a space on the web – the fucking web of all places! – that is enriching, thoughtful, and never cynical in that particularly despicable, webby way. Earlier today I received the troubling news that a college student from the tight-knit community I grew up in attempted suicide late last night. He’s a bright, sweet guy, and my dad’s been something of a mentor to him, so the story sent me reeling. A dear friend lost his father to suicide last summer, and if I’m honest, I’ve had depressions that I stubbornly wouldn’t treat that probably brought me closer to thinking about it than I ever care to be again. So the issue’s close to me (as it is for so many).

I thought back a month or so to Jennifer Michael Hecht’s incredible first Ask Anything video and needed to find and re-watch it. Andrew, I wept. As she offered her gratitude to those who choose to stay with us despite their pain, I wept for joy over Jennifer’s compassion, brilliance, and fierce moral intelligence. And I wept for joy that we have in you a man with both the pugnacity to make it in the rough-and-tumble world of media and the sensitivity to recognize the importance of conversations like that one; you’re a rare breed, Sully.

And as I sat there weeping and pondering the mystery of intrinsic, immutable human worthiness (which, to bring in another thread, if Jesus had any point it surely was that), I felt more grateful than ever for the community that you’ve made with the Dish, since, as Hecht’s work on suicide has taught us, community is the whole point, in the end.

Have you ever noticed that for all that the web’s social media networks and listservs and affinity groups and message boards claim to be “virtual communities,” they always fall short? That the web – but not the Dish – is actually terrible at community? I think what others miss and that you haven’t is that you can’t form a real community just by sticking together a bunch of people who like the same stuff or think the same way or have the same friends. Real community isn’t a place at all, but something more like the phenomenon of people experiencing respect and love and admiration for others they might not share much with, or might not even particularly like. Being forced in with people unlike you is a necessary condition. Real community needs dissent and diversity.

And, my god, is that the Dish. When you’re taking a big, clear stand against the hypocrisy of our Church or teaching the tao of meep meep, I could kiss you on your beautiful, bearded mouth. When you’re prattling on about The Bell Curve or getting weirdly defensive about some untenable position you’ve staked out while readers kick your rhetorical ass, I could whack you on your shiny, bald pate. But either way I’m so glad that you’re here and that I get to read your work. That you’ve made a place for so many of us to share in this together is even more amazing. I’d bet a whole lot that the community you’ve made is the one that some readers most want to “stay” for. And I hope you’re damn proud of that.

So all of that’s to say please keep doing what you do. Please keep talking about suicide and the other impossible questions. And more importantly: thank you. For all of it.

(Top photos of Dish readers used with their permission. Bottom photos of Dish staff, clockwise from top-left: Matthew Sitman, Patrick Appel, Chris Bodenner, Katie Zavadski, Brian Senecal, Chas Danner, Alice Quinn, Jessie Roberts (inset), Tracy Walsh, and Jonah Shepp in the center square. Read a bit about each of them here.)

Face Of The Day

A Florida fisherman caught this 18-foot super-rare goblin shark, by @WhySharksMatter http://t.co/IwkIb2OfLM pic.twitter.com/IZVvg9rCc4

— Gwynn Guilford (@sinoceros) May 2, 2014

Human Science Is Only Human

Jerry Adler reports on how fabricated studies and manipulated data have created a crisis in the experimental social sciences:

Amid a flurry of retracted papers, prominent researchers have resigned their posts, including Marc Hauser, a star evolutionary psychologist at Harvard and acclaimed author, and Diederik Stapel, a Dutch psychologist who admitted that many of his eye-catching results were based on data he made up. And in 2012, the credibility of a number of high-profile findings in the hot area of “priming”—a phenomenon in which exposure to verbal or visual clues unconsciously affects behavior—was called into question when researchers were unable to replicate them. These failures prompted Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize–winning psychologist at Princeton, founding father of behavioral economics, and best-selling author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, to warn in an email to colleagues of an impending “train wreck” in social psychology. …

[T]he current critique of experimental social science is coming mainly from the inside. [Nina] Strohminger, [Joseph P.] Simmons, and a handful of other mostly young researchers are at the heart of a kind of reform movement in their field. Together with a loose confederation of crusading journal editors and whistle-blowing bloggers, they have begun policing the world of experimental research, assiduously rooting out fraud and error, as if to rescue the scientific method from embarrassment—and from its own success.

The Science Of DJing

Virginia Gewin checks in with a couple of scientists who bring data to the dance floor:

It may just seem like people having simple fun at a club, but there’s something deeper going on. “We use the crowd to communicate with each other,” says [DJ Johan] Bollen. “We’re encoding information in the crowd.” Bollen cites a technical term for this: stigmergy, a form of indirect coordination of actions. The term describes, for example, how ant colonies make effective “decisions” in complicated situations, even though each ant’s behavior is very simple. The ants use pheromones to exchange information; the environment serves as their shared memory. Complexity spontaneously emerges from simplicity.

Bollen and [Luis] Rocha are experts on stigmergy—for real.

They DJ by night, but by day they study cybernetics—how people, animals, and machines control and exchange information—at Indiana University in Bloomington. A focus on feedback runs through their both their research and DJing. And while they really just want to orchestrate a raging party, the crowd is, in a sense, an experiment. …

Songs are categorized along two primary dimensions: energy level (bpm) and “valence”—the feeling of the music, consisting of a spectrum of universal emotions, from dark or edgy (cold) to inviting or velvety (warm). At [a] February show, for example, Bollen picked up on the crowd’s vibe, ramped up the energy level, and, at 124 bpm, played “The Feeling” by Eden—a warm, inviting song that signaled that the party was truly underway. “Our research—the notion of feedback and complex systems—informs everything we do,” says Bollen. “A DJ and an audience are a cybernetic system, controlling each other’s state.”

(Video: Live mash-up of “Pop Culture” by Madeon)

Language Doesn’t Make The Man

John McWhorter objects to the notion, first expounded by linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf in the 1930s, that different languages produce different worldviews:

Some languages are more telegraphic than others. For an English speaker, to a large extent, learning Mandarin is a matter of learning how much is unnecessary to still communicate effectively. No articles. No way to express the past tense. It’s quite common not to mark things as plural. The first words of the Bible can be rendered as “Start-start God achieve-make sky-earth.” If we are to suppose that this aspect of Mandarin creates a “worldview”—if two blues means Russians see more blue—then can’t we assume that the Chinese aren’t seeing, well, as much as we are? …

There are many languages in New Guinea and Australia in which there is one word that means eat, drink, and smoke. Are we to designate these people as less attuned to gustatory pleasures than us? They give little evidence of it, and note how distasteful it feels to even suggest it. Or, Swedish and Danish have no single word for what we call wiping. You can rub, erase, and such, and the word they spontaneously give as a translation means dry—but there is no word that means, specifically, what we mean by to wipe. Yet we shall neither tell Scandinavians that they do not wipe nor even imply that the act is less vividly important to them than to the rest of us.

The Terror Report Is Terrifying

Catherine Traywick looks over the State Department’s annual terrorism report, which came out on Wednesday:

All told, the State Department found that worldwide terrorist attacks rose by 40 percent over the past year, from 6,771 in 2012 to 9,707 in 2013. Two-thirds of the strikes occurred in Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and India, resulting in the deaths of more than 11,000 people. A total of 17,891 people died in terrorist attacks in 2013, up from 11,098 in 2012.

The report attributed much of the violence to sectarian strife in Syria, Lebanon, and Pakistan, which have been riven by brutal fighting between the countries’ religious and ethnic populations. Iraq has been hit particularly hard, with Sunni militants slaughtering thousands of Shiite civilians, but Syria’s brutal civil war has begun to morph from a rebellion against Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad to ongoing communal violence between the country’s Alawite and Sunni populations. Islamist militants in Syria, the report says, are increasingly “motivated by a sectarian view of the conflict and a desire to protect the Sunni Muslim community from the Alawite-dominant [Assad] regime.”

Providing the above chart, Zack Beauchamp digs deeper into what the report has to say about Iraq and Syria:

“The [country] that accounts for nearly half of the increase in the two years is Iraq,” Gary LaFree, the University of Maryland researcher whose institute compiled the raw data for the State Department, told me. Moreover, since attacks in Iraq were more frequent and deadlier than in the other 9 nations with the most terrorist attacks, it’s responsible for much larger percentages of the increases in deaths and injuries.

LaFree told me his numbers undercounted attacks in Syria, as it’s hard to verify responsibility for any one attack in the midst of a civil war. But the State Department sees a classic al-Qaeda pattern. “Thousands of foreign fighters traveled to Syria to join the fight against the Assad regime,” the 2013 report warns. According to State’s counterterorrism coordinator, Tina Kaidenow, “we’re concerned over the long term that [Syria] will attract individuals who will be radicalized.”

How Reliable Are Online Reviews?

Josephine Wolff investigates:

While the cacophony of voices may be overwhelming, the percentage of customers who write reviews is actually quite low. In a 2014 study that analyzed data from a private apparel retailer’s website, [MIT professor Duncan] Simester found that only about 1.5 percent of customers, or 15 out of 1,000, write reviews. “And these customers aren’t representative, they tend to buy more niche items,” he says. Simester also discovered that about 1 in every 15 reviews of an item—about 5 percent—are written by people who haven’t purchased it. “And the problem is the other 985 customers rely on the reviews written by these 15 people.”

Some reviews, in fact, may be entirely false. Others may be planted by businesses to burnish their own reputations or tarnish those of competitors. … Bing Liu, a professor of computer science at the University of Illinois, who has studied review sites, estimates that roughly 30 percent of all reviews online may be fraudulent.

When Mental Illness Is A Gift, Ctd

Elyn Saks, author of The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness, shares her thoughts on the connection between creativity and a mental illness like her schizophrenia:

The book she mentions is Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament. Yesterday’s introductory videos from Saks are here. Readers continue the thread:

I’ve struggled with severe panic and anxiety issues for years. I take an SSRI every day and have for probably a dozen years. If I go off of it four or five days, I’m in real trouble. It is not a pleasant feeling.

However, if I am off for a few days, that second and third day give me a huge burst of creativity. In college when I had a big paper due, I would start the outline on day one, put together some paragraphs on day two, and then on day three I would bang out 20 pages effortlessly. This is something I stopped doing years ago. It wasn’t healthy mentally or physically. But there is something to it.

Another who struggles with mental illness:

A quick comment about mental illness being some sort of gift from someone who has been wrestling with PTSD, a mild form of bi-polar disorder and a dissociative disorder for decades. Like so many things that are out there that can give you a temporary ability to exceed your relatively normal operating envelope, there are negative tradeoffs – many of which lead to agonizing self-destruction behaviors. This is very well known, but I think bears repeating. Glamorizing and romanticizing the occasional exceptionally high-functioning moment while ignoring the agony and constant struggle each day usually is just continues to marginalize those of us who suffer from profound and usually very difficult to diagnose disorders.

China’s Demographic Timebomb

An aging population, rapid urbanization, and a skewed sex ratio could spell trouble down the line for the world’s largest country:

China is different from the other aging countries of the world in that a) it is not yet fully developed, b) most of its population is still poor, and c) it has the highest sex ratio in the world.

By 2055, China’s elderly population will exceed the elderly population of all of North America, Europe and Japan combined, and this is exacerbated by the now declining working-age population. China’s impressive economic growth has been facilitated by its expanding working-age population: The population ages 15-64 increased by 55 percent between 1980 and 2005, but this age cohort is now in decline due to the declining fertility rate. In 2012, the working age population declined by 3.5 million and is expected to continue to decline unless there is a dramatic shift in China’s fertility rate.

Aging will have a negative effect on economic growth through higher pension and healthcare costs, fewer low-income jobs, increased wage depression, slowing economic growth and job creation, declining interest from foreign investors, lower entrepreneurship, and higher budget deficits. Labor force declines also translate into lower tax revenues for governments, and if these governments are tempted by deficit financing, global financial stability may be compromised, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) Commission on Global Aging.