Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 299

When The Cover Is The Story

According to @RollingStone cover, John Hancock signed the US Constitution… #Merica #History pic.twitter.com/BdwsAned7f

— Lori (@LoriGGFilmz) April 10, 2014

Jill Filipovic suggests that the Rolling Stone gaffe that has fact-checkers around the world snickering shows just how much magazine covers still matter:

Some of us still buy print magazines, but ever more of us are reading the articles on tablets or laptops instead. And the volume of accessible content online far exceeds that at your local newsstand or grocery store checkout. And yet, despite such an enormous quantity of high-quality, cover-worthy imagery, the photos on the covers we can actually hold in our hands are what become online content fodder.

That scarcity may actually be the point. There’s not a widely read website in Internet-town that keeps the same photo on the front page for more than a day, let alone a week or a month. Magazine real estate may be rendered more valuable by virtue of the fact that it’s more permanent – if you have a hard copy of a magazine you can store it away without the fear that you might go to read it one day and find an “Error: Page Unknown” message. And although fewer people may purchase a copy of Rolling Stone over the course of a month than click over to the homepage of a popular website, the eyes on a magazine cover may be more valuable than those on a quickly changing web page.

Even if you only look at magazine covers while waiting to check out at Walgreens or getting your nails done, your eyes are settling on a small handful of options, making each of them resonate more strongly than the hundreds of pictures in your 15 open browser tabs.

By the way, Julia Louis-Dreyfus set the record straight via Twitter:

#TBT John Hancock not part of tattoo.It is a birthmark.1962 photo is proof. Apologies 2 @RollingStone #crackexcuse pic.twitter.com/h9fYXGqBSo

— Julia Louis-Dreyfus (@OfficialJLD) April 10, 2014

Going For Baroque

Stephen Burt identifies a new current in poetry:

[Nearly Baroque] poetry seeks the opposite of simplicity, preferring the elaborate, the contrived, taking toward sound play and simile the attitude of King Lear: “O, reason not the need!” But it can seem just simple enough in its goals. The 21st-century poets of the nearly Baroque want art that puts excess, invention, and ornament first. It is art that cannot be reduced to its own explanation, that shows off its material textures, its artificiality, its descent from prior art, its location in history. These poets want an art that can always give, or could always show, more.

Burt names the movement after Angie Estes, who wrote in a poem titled Sans Serif, “It’s the opposite of / Baroque, so I want / none of it.” He elaborates:

Again Estes summons the Baroque by name, in a poem entitled Ars Poetica:

I once dreamed a word entirely

Baroque: a serpentine line of letters leaning

with the flourish of each touching the shoulder

of another so that one breath at the word’s

beginning made them all collapse.

This word could stand for any of Estes’s poems. In them, as in much Baroque and rococo art, motion is life: nothing will stand still, and nothing stands up on its own. … Estes’s imagined motions, the serpentine curves of her irregular lines, take her not only from artwork to artwork but also from place to place, stitching together in her imagination, within a single poem, “the chasm of the Siq, the city of Petra / carved in its side” in present-day Jordan, “the unclaimed / cremated remains of those known as / the incurably insane at Oregon State Hospital,” and “the lapis lazuli seas of Hokusai seen / from outer space.”

The View From Your Window

Oxford, Ohio, 8.42 am. “Sunday afternoon was 82 degrees.”

In Philosophical Fetters

In a review of François Laruelle’s Principles of Non-Philosophy, Keith Whitmoyer considers the virtues of stepping outside of the philosophical domain:

It seems that most philosophers have taken their turn defining (and defending) the meaning and principles of the philosophical enterprise. What virtually all proposals have in common is that they presuppose that this question can be answered within the domain of the philosophical itself itself. In other words, we mostly have a history of philosophers philosophizing about philosophizing – in a word, meta-philosophy.

Meta-philosophy is, in a sense, founded on the assumption that only philosophy thinks, and therefore thinking about the meaning of the philosophical can only take place within the domain of the philosophical itself. There is something strange about this assumption. It seems as if meta-philosophy catches us in a circle. … Is it really the case that we can answer the question, “What is philosophy?” simply by philosophizing faster, stronger, or better and thus end only by duplicating what we were asking about? The problem with meta-philosophy is that, because we end up only philosophizing about philosophizing, we are never able to take a stand on what this is from the outside. The philosophical itself, because it remains the standpoint of inquiry, never truly succeeds in becoming an object of inquiry.

The Best Of The Dish Today

To mark today’s 200th window contest, we put together a new – and improved! – gallery archive to view all of the old contests. As an added bonus, when you click on any of the images in the gallery, you’ll be taken to a slideshow, which could be a fun way to play old contests, especially for our newer readers. Check them both out here.

The entire window view phenomenon on the Dish – and I know it’s the favorite feature for many of you – began a long time ago now, when I was thinking late one night about how to convey some of what I was absorbing from the in-tray. So many readers from so many parts of the globe – and yet they cannot really see each other!  The highdea was just to get a view from the window from readers across the country and the planet. Digital photos were easy to take and easy to email. Too easy, it turned out, as within a few days – I was doing the blog solo at that point and was awash in jpegs – I was begging for readers to stop. But you didn’t. Here’s how the feature played out over those first few weeks. We eventually made a coffee table book of the best views from all 50 states and 80 countries, which Chris Bodenner edited.

The first-ever contest is here. The idea was sparked – like most best things on the Dish – by a reader, who liked to “guess where the photo was taken from (at the country level at least) before scrolling down to see the caption.” See how the contest first evolved here. You can discover a few amazing contest-related coincidences here and here (even today’s view had a happy accident). In due course, VFYWC imitators started popping up all over the web, including the NYT and CNN. Llewellyn Hinkes-Jones built a zoomable VFYW game, which likely inspired the Google Maps version, GeoGuessr. Pete Warden created an interactive map and rotatable globe of window views. Data-cruncher Jay Pinho analyzed the feature in the depth. We marked our 100th contest by recognizing two grand champions, Mike Palmer and his teammate Yoko. But the undisputed all-time champ is, of course, Doug Chini. His tips for winning the contest are here.

But the genius of the VFYWC lies with Bodenner. He created the contest, curates it, loves it, and has made it the mini-artform it is. Chris is also in charge of all the reader threads, so the contest came naturally to him. He makes it look easy, despite the hours of absorbing and editing down hundreds of emails each week. He doesn’t seem to sleep much, which is a mercy since the contests can take up to six hours to compose. Recently, Chas is shouldering more of the work.

Now the plug. This amazing little thing comes out of this blog and its community, and that blog has only one source of income, its readers. So if you’ve gotten something out of the Window Views or sleuthing through the contest each week, or just enjoy watching others figure it out, and haven’t yet subscribed, do Chris and Chas a favor and do it here. It’s our only way of paying for such work – and for the delight and intrigue and bafflement it produces – along with the scenes of surpassing normality that punctuate our coverage of a troubled world each day. So subscribe! Or buy a gift subscription for someone you want to play the contest with.

Elsewhere on the Dish today, our NSFW Saturday post, “Bottoms Up“, continued to draw the most traffic by far. (Yet only 11 of you publicly liked the post on Facebook. Own up to it, pervs!) Other popular posts included Fox actually taking the lead on calling torture torture, Rand Paul getting under the skin of neocons, and cannabis becoming more and more of a sacrament. Our big Truvada thread continued here. And you can read unfiltered comments at our Facebook page and @sullydish.

See you in the morning.

(Top image: All 200 VFYW contests, composed by Special Teams. Bottom image: A beagle in Adams Morgan.)

Looking Back At The Boston Bombing

Ian Crouch visited a memorial to the Boston marathon bombing, which occurred a year ago today:

Last week, to mark the anniversary of the attacks, the Boston Public Library opened an exhibition called “Dear Boston: Messages from the Marathon Memorial” at its main branch, in Copley Square. The centerpiece is a collection of more than a hundred pairs of running shoes that had been left at the makeshift memorial. One pair has the word “Boston” on the left toe and “Strong” on the right. Another has a baseball set in each heel. Another features a tag with the number 26.2, the standard distance, in miles, of a marathon. The rest are just plain running shoes—an array of brands in a rainbow of colors, the kinds you see shuffling along the ground on a normal race day. Once shiny and gleaming, they are now dulled and frayed by use, and by the days they spent out in the weather last year.

Other items are a reminder of the simple, handcrafted objects that distinguished the memorial’s impromptu inspiration. The four white crosses are set in a row. Behind glass, scraps of paper communicate outrage and despair. There are signs with quotations from figures ranging from Martin Luther King, Jr., to Jerry Garcia (“Don’t tell me this town ain’t got no heart”). Notes and cards and posters from far-flung places: Istanbul, Morocco, the Philippines. Certain phrases recur, in pencil or pen or marker: “No more hurting people.” “Peace.” “Hope.” “We will finish the race.”

Eric Larson profiles Rebekah Gregory, whose leg was severely injured in the blast. She has undergone 16 surgeries and is now considering amputating the leg:

In the appointment room today, Dr. William McGarvey, Rebekah’s orthopedic surgeon, looks away from the window and asks her to stand. Reluctantly, slowly, she does. Tears spring to the corners of her eyes; her body begins to shake. The skin on her leg, between the scars and stitches, turns purple. She sits back down.

Resting, standing and sleeping — it doesn’t matter, she says. Everything hurts, “like an 11 on a scale of one to 10.”

She’s been taking pain medications regularly — Tylenol 3, Cymbalta and Celebrex — but admits they’ve only been temporary solutions. Minor distractions, at best, from the seemingly endless pain.

The main problem is Rebekah’s foot is drifting inward. The bomb destroyed tissues and bones, and because of where they’re missing, the tendons have nowhere to attach. As a result, they’re pulling from the inside of her ankle.

There’s still shrapnel from the bomb inside her leg. Sometimes, she says, a small piece of metal or BB will lodge out of her calf while she’s sleeping.

(Photo: Runner’s shoes are laid out in a display titled, ‘Dear Boston: Messages from the Marathon Memorial’ in the Boston Public Library to commemorate the 2013 Boston Maraton bombing. Last year, two pressure cooker bombs killed three and injured an estimated 264 others during the Boston marathon, on April 15, 2013. By Andrew Burton/Getty Images)

Regenerative Medicine Is On A Roll

First lab-grown vaginas, now lab-grown noses:

The biomedicine team at the University of Basel has reported the first ever successful nose reconstruction surgery using cartilage grown in the laboratory. The team took cells from five patients’ nasal septums and then grew the cells on a collagen scaffold. The engineered cartilage was then shaped and implanted. The patients were all aged between 76 and 88 and had all lost significant tissue in surgery for skin cancer. … A year after the reconstructive surgery, all five patients said they were satisfied with their ability to breathe and the cosmetic appearance of their nose.

Victoria Turk notes that while the method isn’t coming soon to an operating theater near you, it’s still exciting:

Unfortunately, it’s still a very specialist procedure, which means patient satisfaction isn’t the only factor to consider. The authors wrote in their discussion, “One important question to be addressed in future studies is the cost-effectiveness of a cell-based treatment when compared with the harvest of autologous native tissues,” and added that engineering tissue is a high-cost process.

Nevertheless, it’s a significant breakthrough that has obvious implications outside of this specific nasal surgery. … Suddenly, growing personalised organs from our own cells doesn’t seem quite so futuristic. Now we’ve got vaginas and noses down, you can count on scientists to be working on everything in between. Next step: functioning replacement organs-in-a-box.

Meanwhile, as an addendum to the vaginal-implant breakthrough, Kat Stoeffel interviewed a woman who might get one:

When did you find out you didn’t have a vagina?

I was diagnosed when I was 16 years old because I hadn’t gotten my period but the rest of my body was fully developed. My pediatrician didn’t know what was going on and sent me to a radiologist so I could get an MRI. They scanned and realized I missing my uterus, and through a gynecological exam, also missing the vaginal canal. From there I was sent to an MRKH specialist.

One of the reasons MRKHS gets sensationalized in the news, I think, is that we use the word “vagina” so loosely that the uninitiated can only imagine a Barbie blank space.

That’s the thing. MRKH is basically a genetic mutation, and the genes responsible for external sex organs and internal one are different. So the external ones develop completely normally, everything’s fine and functions the right way, that mutation causes the absence of the internal sex organs. It’s important to know that MRKH can present itself in many different ways, actually. There are some cases where women are actually born with a vaginal canal but no uterus, some women have skeletal issues or kidney problems.

Face Of The Day

Mark Murrmann appreciates the work of Chris Hondros, the renowned photojournalist who was killed alongside Tim Hetherington in Libya in 2011:

Though he published thousands of photos, one of Chris Hondros’ best known images remains seared in my mind: a young Iraqi girl crying, covered in the blood of her parents who were just killed by the US soldiers towering over her. I first saw it in the New York Times—a shocking story with a mesmerizing image. I was just finding my way in the world of photography at the time, thinking maybe I wanted to be a war photographer. Hondros’ photos stood out for his ability to capture moments of clarity in tense, difficult situations. …

Testament, a new offering from powerHouse Books, stands as a retrospective of Hondros’ work, and also reveals him as a skilled writer and speaker who often talked publicly about his profession and the impact of photography, especially war photography, on society. Excerpts of his writings, speeches, and interviews are interspersed with the photos, giving a better idea of the man, and where he was coming from as a photographer. It’s this extra stuff that makes Testament much better than just another collection of great photos from horrific situations. Proceeds from sales of the book, incidentally, go to the Chris Hondros Fund, established to support the work of conflict photographers and spread awareness of issues that arise from reporting in war zones.

Buy the book here. A photo essay of many of Testament‘s images here.

(Photo: Joseph Duo, a Liberian militia commander loyal to the government, exults after firing a rocket-propelled grenade at rebel forces at a key strategic bridge in Monrovia, Liberia on July 20, 2003. It’s the cover-photo for Testament - photographs by Chris Hondros/Getty Images, text by Chris Hondros, published by powerHouse Books.)

If America Had Scandinavia’s Tax Rate

Jonathan Cohn celebrates tax day by calling for higher taxes:

[T]axes in the U.S. are among the lowest in the developed world. The average for countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an organization of rich countries, is higher. And in countries like Sweden, Norway, and the Netherlands countries, the average is much higher. In those nations, taxes account for more than half of total national income.

That level may sound scary but, as many of us have written before, you could make a good case that the people of Scandinavia and Northern Europe know what they are doing. They are far more secure, thanks not only to national health insurance but also to generous provision of child care and unemployment benefits. And despite the high tax burden, their economies have historically been strong—in part, because the combination of investment and a secure safety net makes people more comfortable with a dynamic, ever-changing economy. The wonks used to call this economic model “flexicurity.”

Douthat pushes back:

Cohn concedes the very general point that we can’t simply impose Swedish structures on the United States and call it a day, but he doesn’t address the more specific problem suggested by that concession:

Namely, that a lot of liberal proposals essentially ask us to assume that American government — the quasi-imperial government of a vast, diverse, immigrant-heavy continent of three hundred million people — can somehow, in some future dispensation, approach the efficiency of welfare states administered on a much smaller scale and for a much more homogenous population. Which is to say, they wave away one of the central problem with existing public outlays in the U.S., which in other contexts they’re happy to highlight — the absence, in core areas like health care and education, of a clear link between increased spending and better outcomes. Or else they acknowledge the link, but assert that the best way to reform our kludgeocracy is to pursue greater efficiency in program design while simultaneously pouring more money into the system overall — using a heaping-full of sugar to make the medicine go down, if you will. (This was the basic theory of Obamacare, and also of more bipartisan reforms like No Child Left Behind.)

It isn’t a crazy theory, but I think it’s reasonable to worry that in a system as inefficient and cross-pressured as ours, the sugar simply offsets or counteracts the medicine’s effects. And that possibility makes a strong case for holding the tax burden constant while seeking de-kludge-ification, rather than pre-emptively handing more money to bureaucracies and programs that aren’t exactly being managed with Nordic efficiency, and aren’t showing the most impressive of results.

Mona Chalabi provides some perspective with the above chart:

On individual taxes as a percentage of GDP, U.S. rates are consistent with the OECD average. But when it comes to corporations, the overall U.S. tax rate (2.3 percent) falls below the median (2.7 percent) and the average (3 percent):

The Destruction Of Syria’s Economy

Joshua Keating highlights it:

Even at an annual growth rate of 5 percent, which seems extremely optimistic, it would take Syria 30 years to get back to its pre-war GDP, according to a recent analysis by Jihad Yazigi, a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations who writes about the country’s economy on his website, the Syria Report.

Aryn Baker looks at the broader picture:

[T]he economic toll will not be limited to Syria alone. There are more than 2.5 million Syrian refugees in neighboring Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Turkey, and even though international aid agencies help host countries, it is rarely enough to make up for the infrastructural burdens. And the refugees are likely to remain in place until they have something worthwhile to go back to, which could take years. “How are we going to get these people back to their villages in Syria, to rebuild what has been destroyed?” asks Sami Nader, an economist and professor at Lebanon’s St. Joseph University. “All the factories are destroyed; where will they work?” According to the United Nations, there are now more than one million Syrian refugees registered in Lebanon, making up a quarter of the country’s population. Lebanon’s own economy, beset by insecurity and political volatility, was already on the verge of bankruptcy, says Nader. “This Syria situation could just push us over the edge.” The cost of war isn’t just immeasurable. It doesn’t know borders, either.