Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 315

Ukraine’s Candyman Candidate

Polly Mosendz profiles billionaire Petro Poroshenko, now the front-runner in the race for the presidency:

Put simply, he is the Willy Wonka of Ukraine. His company, Roshen, is Ukraine’s leading sweets brand and a household name in Eastern Europe. Roshen produces over 450,000 tons of confections a year, fueling his personal net worth to $1.79 billion. And unlike most billionaires in the former-Soviet bloc, he came by it honestly.

Ukrainian politics are so lathered with corruption that the country has a non-profit organization — “CHESNO” (which translates to ‘honest’) — dedicated to examining the root of politicians’ wealth. Svitlana Zalishchuk, the spokesperson of CHESNO, confirmed that “We [CHESNO] couldn’t find any instances of corruption” in the amassing of Poroshenko’s fortune. In this sense, Poroshenko is the anti-Yanukovych.

In an interview with Poroshenko, Anna Nemtsova takes stock of his style as well as his positions:

[A]s I listened to Poroshenko speaking in his office there were echoes of an old-school Soviet diplomat being very, very careful about what he says. When Poroshenko talks about Putin, for instance, his language is never hateful, always calculated. In a political landscape filled with populist provocateurs, Poroshenko has never played that game, and that may well be why he’s leading all other announced and potential candidates for the critically important presidential elections to be held May 25. …

Poroshenko reminded me that for the last decade and a half his aim has been to bring Ukraine into the European Union while at the same time keeping good relations with Russia. And according to the Ukrainian media Poroshenko’s strong position in the polls comes from widespread hopes that he is the candidate who can find a way to make peace with Russia even now.

Robert Coalson points out that the chocolate baron’s viability as a candidate may be due to this video:

Perhaps the high point of Poroshenko’s performance in the latest political crisis came on March 12. That night, Poroshenko visited the Crimean capital, Simferopol, in a quixotic bid to prevent the peninsula from holding a referendum on joining Russia. Widely seen amateur video showed the stoic Poroshenko walking through the dark streets of the city being hounded by hundreds of chanting, pro-Russian demonstrators:

That night in Simferopol may have elevated Poroshenko to the front ranks in the eyes of many Ukrainians, says Andreas Umland, an associate professor of political science at Kiev-Mohyla Academy. “Him being chased by these pro-Russia militiamen or Russian soldiers—that, perhaps, played a role in making him look credible and a serious politician and not just an oligarch,” Umland says.

But Peter Turchin is not looking forward to an election battle between two oligarchs, Poroshenko and Yulia Tymoshenko, who made her fortune in shady gas deals in the 1990s:

Not anybody who is super wealthy is an “oligarch,” of course. The sources of true oligarchic power must include both a huge fortune and the access to the highest levels of political power. Both Tymoshenko and Poroshenko fit this definition perfectly, since both have been in and out of government, occupying a variety of posts. Since 1999 Tymoshenko has been the Deputy Prime Minister for Fuel and Energy and Prime Minister (twice). Poroshenko hasn’t climbed quite as high as that, but he occupied the two next most powerful posts in the government: Minister for Foreign Affairs and Minister of Trade and Economic Development. Just as Kevin Philips wrote, political power begets economic power, and economic power begets more political power. At least, that’s how it works in oligarch-dominated countries.

“The Men Who Lost America”

That’s the title of a new book by Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, offering an account of the American Revolution from the perspective of Britain’s leaders. In an interview, he claims many will be surprised by his portrait of King George III:

The reader will indeed find many attractive qualities in George III.  He was the first British monarch to have a real interest in science.  He was the greatest collector of art since Charles I.  He knew more about the navy than any king since James II.  He was an intensely religious man who spent long hours with his family in devotion.  He disapproved of the sexual immorality which so common among his contemporaries and he was faithful to his wife unlike George I and George II.

George III has long been the subject of revisionist historians in Britain.   It has almost gone too far.  My portrayal is more nuanced.  George III was not a tyrant who was responsible for the policies that led to the American Revolution.  He had little to do with colonial policy.  However, after the Boston Tea Party, he became the leading war hawk and may actually have helped to perpetuate the war by several years.  He wanted to continue after Yorktown.  It was revelation to me that he felt so passionately that Britain would cease to be a great power if it lost America.

The reasons O’Shaughnessy believes the British lost to the upstart Americans:

They initially believed that resistance would be largely confined to Massachusetts.  They greatly underestimate the ability of ordinary citizens to be able to confront a professional army.  However, their greatest error was in assuming that the majority of Americans supported Britain.  Their views while mistaken were defensible since were encouraged in their beliefs by loyalist Americans.  This was indeed a civil war and a foreign war in which it was difficult to interpret popular opinion when the situation was fluid and when many did not openly express their sympathies.  The contempt for citizen soldiers was held most strongly by officers who had served in America during the French and Indian War.  It may have been partly a product of imperial and social superiority but it was also a more modern vice of professional elitism and the belief that regular citizens could not be trained to the standards of those who had made the army a lifelong career.

(Video: An interview with O’Shaughnessy)

Faces Of The Day

What an honor! Thanks for the #selfie, @BarackObama pic.twitter.com/y5Ww74sEID

— David Ortiz (@davidortiz) April 1, 2014

A Middle-Schooler’s Idea To Save The Federal Government $136 Million, Ctd

Suvir Mirchandani suggested the government cut ink-use by changing the font on printed documents. Typographer Thomas Phinney runs through various problems with the 14-year-old’s plan. A big one:

Many of the documents that account for a substantial percentage of the government’s overall printing costs are printed on a printing press, using offset lithography. For offset printing, the percentage of the cost of that is associated with ink is in fact much smaller than for laser or inkjet printing. But it isn’t a fixed percentage, either, due to the large proportion of the cost that is associated with setup. It will be a higher percentage for short runs, and lower for long runs. Additionally, because of the huge cost of owning printing presses, many or most offset litho jobs will be printed out of house, using third-​​party printers.

So, for in-​​house printing-​​press printing, the savings will be a much smaller proportion than the quoted 26%. For outside printers, they will not charge based on minor variations in ink usage; they just check things like whether it’s a page of text vs graphics. Either way the savings will be less.

David Graham adds that the government has already made solid progress eliminating its printing costs:

Take the annual federal budget. In the 1980s, GPO says it was printing around 130,000 copies every year. This year, that number was down to 25,000 copies. At 250-plus pages apiece, that adds up quickly. Meanwhile, getting access to the document is easier than ever. The budget gets about 500,000 views online every year, and there’s a mobile version, too. Officials have made similar reductions in the print run for other documents, such as the Congressional Record and Federal Register, and they have started using more recycled paper.

Mental Health Break

Canine fruit ninjas:

Which Children’s Books Are Best?

A new study found that books with anthropomorphized animals may teach children fewer facts:

Over two experiments, the researchers tested preschool- and kindergarten-aged kids’ knowledge of a few obscure animals—cavies, oxpeckers, and handfish—by reading books about the animals with them and then asking questions. Some books contained realistic pictures and descriptions, some cartoon drawings and humanized language (e.g., “mother cavy tucks her babies into bed in a small cave”), and some a mix.

While all kids learned something about the three animals from whichever book they read, those who read the realistic books ended up with a better factual understanding of the creatures. Those who read the anthropomorphized books didn’t learn as much and also had a harder time reasoning about the animals.

Study author Patricia Ganea talked about how the results have been misinterpreted:

People have gone crazy out there. They think we are saying, don’t read books that interweave fantasy with reality. That’s not the message from this.

It’s if you want your children to learn more facts about animals, it would be better to use books that are more realistic. Of course parents should read a variety of books to their children. Fantasy is important for their imagination and their cognitive development. … I think [this study is important] because it may have implications for our use of picture books as a tool for science education. Studies say picture books are an excellent tool for giving kids knowledge about the world. You can have a five- or six-year-old learn important biological concepts. So our work suggests if you want to establish foundations for a more accurate scientific understanding of the world early on, you use factual books.

Katy Waldman defends talking animals:

Sometimes, an overly anthropomorphic view of animals can be harmful, as when people get mauled by bears because they regard them as cuddly human friends in bear suits. But to the extent that humanized characters are both more accessible to and more likely to inspire empathy in young readers, I don’t see how they could be construed as bad for kids, the animal kingdom, or even science.

Scaffolding familiar traits onto alien subjects is a powerful way to promote learning, one that children do naturally from the age of 12 to 24 months. And imaginative play—the type where you pretend a badger gets jealous of her baby sister—has cognitive benefits: “If you want your children to be intelligent,” Albert Einstein once said, “read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”

Ask Dayo Olopade Anything: Africa’s Aid Problem

In our second round of videos from the Nigerian-American author of The Bright Continent, Dayo addresses the distorted influence that foreign aid has on African countries:

In a followup, she considers the impact of Chinese investment in particular, as well as how the “colonial hangover” affects the African aid dynamic:

A summary of Dayo’s book from Kirkus:

Distinguishing “lean” from “fat” economies, the author, a Knight Law and Media Scholar at Yale, observes that Africa is perhaps uniquely well-prepared for a future marked by scarcity. In a time when global food needs are expected to rise by 70 percent by 2050, “African agriculture holds an obvious value proposition for the rest of the world—one that defeats local poverty and hunger at once.” In other words, making [Africa] a world breadbasket will both enrich the continent and keep people from starving. Yet, as she notes, there are numerous structural impediments to effecting this green revolution, not least the lack of irrigated farmland and of the technology needed for irrigation, to say nothing of larger problems such as inefficiency and corruption.

African nations, she argues, can overcome these difficulties. For example, she cites the case of the region of Somalia known as Somaliland, which, against all the odds, has in the last two decades “held four peaceful rounds of elections, established a central bank, printed its own currency, and built an elaborate security apparatus.” Announcing a distaste for the word “development,” Olopade writes persuasively of the need for Western-style aid that is adapted to local customs and institutions, allowing for a mix of traditional and modern, market-based solutions to address challenges such as the lack of credit and the uneven distribution of resources. For all those challenges, she argues, the various “maps” of Africa—technological, commercial, agricultural, natural—all point to a wealth of possibilities to help “build wealth, strengthen formal institutions, and aid the least fortunate.”

Buy the book here.

(Archive)

Why We Love Sad Songs

Greg Kot notices their widespread appeal:

Consider that of the nine best-selling songs of all time, most brim with melancholy, if not sadness and despair. Bing Crosby’s White Christmas, Elton John’s Candle in the Wind, Whitney Houston’s I Will Always Love You, Celine Dion’s My Heart Will Go On,– to paraphrase Elton, sad songs not only say so much, they sell really, really well.  But do listeners really prefer melancholy music, and if so why?

He flags a study that offers some answers:

The researchers found that that sad music has a counterintuitive appeal – it actually makes people feel better. Sad songs allow listeners to experience indirectly the emotions expressed in the lyrics and implied by the (usually) minor-key melodies. The sadness may not directly reflect the listener’s own experiences, but it triggers chemicals in our brain that can produce a cathartic response: tears, chills, an elevated heartbeat. This is not an unpleasant feeling, and may explain why listeners are inclined to buy sad songs and why artists want to write or sing them.

Ebola Is Back, Ctd

In an analysis of nearly 40 years of “lessons learned” since the first Ebola outbreak, Laurie Garrett stresses the importance of avoiding infected animals:

[T]he index case – the initial person contaminated with the Ebola virus – is usually a hunter or villager who recently spent time deep in a tropical forest and came into contact with an animal carrying the virus. In Yambuku, the index case was a hunter; in Kikwit he was a charcoal-maker who spent a week burning wood in the forest to sell in town; in a prior West African outbreak, the index case was a family that killed and ate an ailing chimpanzee. Stopping the spread must include cutting off contact between forest animals and human beings, especially tropical fruit bats that harbor the virus without harm to themselves, and the monkeys and apes that eat the bats or fruit that they chew on, contracting Ebola in the process.

Unfortunately, climate change makes it increasingly difficult for humans to maintain that distance:

Across Africa, typically shy bat species pollinate the trees of the rain forests as they nocturnally scour for fruit. As the heat increases in the upper canopies of forests, due to climate change, and as humans increase their logging operations, the bat populations are now under great stress. When distressed by such environmental changes, animals are more likely to venture near human habitation in search of food, and come down from the upper tiers of forests into tree levels filled with predatory monkeys and chimps.

Recent Dish on the new outbreak here.

Meme Of The Day

Katie Hosmer captions:

Instagrammer Ilana Wiles (@mommyshorts) is behind this new trending hashtag, #babysuiting, that has mommies dressing their little ones up in goofy ensembles that are much too big for the childrens’ tiny, bald heads. Since her own daughters are a bit too old and mobile for the project, Wiles began the series with her 3-month-old nephew. She then continued to friends’ houses and dressed up any baby she could find as a teensy little executive. Since then, the hashtag has continued to develop with other Instagrammers joining in on the fun.

The Daily News talked with Wiles:

“Originally, I wanted to dress them up to look like the characters in Mad Men but women’s clothing really didn’t work,” she told the Daily News. “The suits were much funnier. Something about the big padded shoulders made them all look like that scene in Beetlejuice with the shrunken head.”

More images here.