Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 318

Hanging On To The V-Card

Jon Fortenbury looks at the statistics on virginity:

[M]any individuals who lose their virginities “late” do so for many reasons—not just the stereotypical “can’t get laid” or “super-religious” assumptions. Whether it’s by choice, circumstance, or both, late virginity loss can bring anything from pride to sexual dysfunction for the few Americans who experience it.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the average age Americans lose their virginities (defined here as vaginal sexual intercourse) is 17.1 for both men and women. The CDC also reports that virgins make up 12.3 percent of females and 14.3 percent of males aged 20 to 24. That number drops below 5 percent for both male and female virgins aged 25 to 29 and goes as low as 0.3 percent for virgins aged 40 to 44. …

Statistically, if you didn’t have sex in your teen years, you’re in the minority. But most people I asked in my unscientific poll felt virginity loss wasn’t “late” if the person was still college-aged. Many thought 25 was the first late age. One friend told me that for secular people, “late” is 20 and older, and for religious people, 40 and older. The popular 1999 film American Pie suggests that late is freshman year of college. And the character Jess (played by Zooey Deschanel) on New Girl stated in a flashback in a recent episode, “In three years, I’ll be 25. I can’t rent my first car as a virgin. They’ll know.”

A Beard To Revere

The Dish would be remiss not to post this short doc about a man, Jack Passion, a multiple-time World Champion in the Full Beard Natural category at the World Beard and Moustache Championships:

Passion answered a few questions about his facial hair back in 2012:

What tricks do you have for keeping your beard clean while eating? Are there any foods you’ve sworn off? 

Have you ever seen an Olympic fencing champion wield a sword? I’m like that with napkins. Also, the beard doesn’t just pop out over night; you have time to adjust to it, so nothing is really that difficult to eat without making a mess of one’s face. It’s really hard to eat ice cream cones, but I don’t even like ice cream. A juicy, rare burger might be difficult, but you can always ditch the bun and eat it with a fork and knife. Where there’s a will, there’s a clean beard. …

Obviously, you get a lot of attention for your beard. How do you handle it when you just want to go to the grocery store or what have you without stopping to talk to curious strangers?

Funny you should ask. I was just at the grocery store and like ten people gave me business cards (this is L.A.)! The older I get, the more I value time, and the less I want to waste it entertaining stupid comments like, “Hey, have you seen that show about beards!?” or “Dude! ZZ Top!” Thus, I usually braid my beard and stick the braid down my shirt, and just look like a guy with a pretty big beard but nothing extreme. If I don’t, it’s almost impossible to get through the day going anywhere in public with any kind of efficiency.

If someone recognizes me with my beard braided and hidden, they’re recognizing me, and that’s awesome, so I’m more than happy to chat with them. It’s hard to be more than a beard when the beard is more than your head and torso.

The Not-So-Bitter End

Ted Thompson appreciates John Cheever’s talent for penning convincingly happy endings:

This is one of the things that’s so apparent when you’re reading Cheever: his openness to redemptive beauty. His suburbs aren’t corrupt, awful places. They’re not places that have dark, ugly roots that he’s trying to expose—which is often the basic project in the subgenre of American suburban fiction (and film and TV). Cheever’s world is one that, no matter how buttoned-up it may be, is continuously ruptured by unexpected beauty. For me, finding this on the page was a revelation. You aren’t supposed to write about suburban neighborhoods like that—to acknowledge their beauty, and locate great meaning in it. It’s pretty clear why writers like Jim Harrison spend so much time describing the natural world, but we’ve become almost conditioned to believe that manicured suburban aesthetics are only an illusion to conceal some fundamental rottenness.

In Cheever, this isn’t really the case. No matter how cruel his characters are to each other, no matter how much they disappoint each other or what sins they commit, there’s still a sense that there’s light in his world. It comes through in the way he describes trees so well, and smells and breezes and the ocean. The landscape balances out the torment of the tortured characters within it—and sometimes, that beauty is even enough to save them.

Writing a happy ending that feels meaningful is probably one of the hardest tricks in literature. There’s a lot of comedy out there (particularly in movies and television) that follows that ancient structure of the world falling apart and then being put back together again, but so much of it feels like, okay, those problems were solved and now I can forget about them. You don’t want a literary story to have that effect—you want it to have a resonance with the reader beyond the last page, and I feel like it’s a lot easier to do with tragedy than comedy.

Mental Health Break

That recent video on Wes Anderson’s symmetry gets a kaleidoscope remix:

Wes Anderson // Kaleidoscoped from Luis Enrique Rayas on Vimeo.

Is Literary Criticism An Art Or Science?

Joshua Rothman highlights the work of Franco Moretti – founder of the Stanford Literary Lab, dedicated to analyzing texts with computer software – who firmly believes it’s the latter:

The basic idea in Moretti’s work is that, if you really want to understand literature, you can’t just read a few books or poems over and over (“Hamlet,” “Anna Karenina,” “The Waste Land”). Instead, you have to work with hundreds or even thousands of texts at a time. By turning those books into data, and analyzing that data, you can discover facts about literature in general—facts that are true not just about a small number of canonized works but about what the critic Margaret Cohen has called the “Great Unread.” At the Literary Lab, for example, Moretti is involved in a project to map the relationships between characters in hundreds of plays, from the time of ancient Greece through the nineteenth century. These maps—which look like spiderwebs, rather than org charts — can then be compared; in theory, the comparisons could reveal something about how character relationships have changed through time, or how they differ from genre to genre. Moretti believes that these types of analyses can highlight what he calls “the regularity of the literary field. Its patterns, its slowness.” They can show us the forest rather than the trees.

Moretti’s work has helped to make “computational criticism,” and the digital humanities more generally, into a real intellectual movement. When, the week before last, Stanford announced that undergraduates would be able to enroll in “joint majors” combining computer science with either English or music, it was hard not to see it as a sign of Moretti’s influence.

Micah Mattix pushes back:

While Moretti has done some interesting work, the problem with many “scientific” approaches to literature is that too often they don’t begin with a question to be answered or a problem to be solved but are interested simply in proving the validity of a method for merely professional reasons. It’s the difference between a scientist who is fascinated with isotopes and energy conservation and who uses the scientific method to help answer his pressing questions, and one who is interested in the scientific method alone and who chooses to look at isotopes and energy conservation as a means of proving the validity of a method. The results are data dumps no one reads, answers to questions no one is asking or answers to questions that have already been answered.

Rachel Cordasco is skeptical as well, arguing that “books are NOT data, they’re books“:

[F]iguratively pouring mass quantities of books into a big computer and figuring out the average title length in the 19th century or the average number of words in 18th-century novels is not reading- and seems to belittle books, to me. Now, I know it sounds like I’m comparing apples and oranges, but still. We’re still talking about the worlds and words that change us for the better.

Now, I heard Moretti speak on the campus of UW-Madison several years ago, and I was charmed. This dude is just so darn charming. And smart. And suave. But as I looked at his charts and listened to his analysis, I felt chilled. His work was interesting, but his data told me nothing about the books themselves.

For me, distant reading, like close reading and all the other critical theories that offer us different ways in to books, is just another theory of reading. But what I’ve realized, after reaching the other side of academia and launching back into reading for the fun of it, is that only you can decide how you appreciate reading. Ultimately, though, reading is the act of running your eyes across the page and processing the words into images, sounds, feelings, and ideas. We talk to each other about books, we read passages out loud to one another. We lovingly arrange books on shelves or in piles. We download hundreds of them onto our devices. And we immerse ourselves in the stories they tell. So don’t talk to me about data, Franco, my dear. I simply don’t want to hear about it. I’m busy reading.

Previous Dish on the digital humanities here, here, and here.

Face Of The Day

Photographer Hiroshi Watanabe captures Japanese theater traditions:

Particularly interested in forms of theatricality, Watanabe sought to capture individual performers within the traditions of Sarumawashi, Noh, Ena Bunraku and Kabuki.  Stylized human actors, monkeys, masks and puppets become the subject matter of Watanabe’s striking and powerful photographs.  Though the traditions come from different regions and periods of history, they are tied together by Watanabe’s eye.

A 2009 profile quoted Watanabe’s philosophy of photography:

I don’t want to tell the viewer what to see. I believe in subtlety. I don’t believe in barking at the viewer. Of course it is my vision, but this is what I think is perfect about photography; it is flexible but also subtle… There is always an element that appears in the final frame, it can be very small but if you look closely you can find it. I challenge the viewer to find what I see. If they really look at the expressions, poses and the composition, they will really find something intriguing both visually and socially.

(Photo by Hiroshi Watanabe, whose work the Dish has also featured here and here)

Anxious About Our Influences

Thinking through the question of when creative influence becomes plagiarism, Rachel Hodin comes to this conclusion: “All we can say for sure is that it’s not only fair to take ideas and inspiration from others, it’s necessary for the survival of art”:

As humans, we take ideas, information, and insight from others every second of our waking days, and more often than not, this process is subconscious. For this reason, we have no authority to claim the right and wrong ways of drawing influence from others; all we can do is observe, and take note. And it’s worth noting that both Hemingway and Fitzgerald were influenced by Tolstoy. Hemingway “took on board every technique that Tolstoy ever devised,” except he never took on Tolstoy’s themes when they weren’t true to him: “He could never imagine himself as a weak [man], and the idea of a strong man weakened by an emotional dependency was not within his imaginative compass.” Whereas Fitzgerald had no qualms about taking Tolstoy’s themes. And while there’s no clear answer as to why, Hemingway’s approach, when compared to Fitzgerald’s, just seems more genuine — and all the more so when you consider the fact that Fitzgerald’s writing never came close to anything Tolstoy ever wrote.

In a 2007 Harper‘s essay plumbing similar themes, Jonathan Lethem connects art to the idea of a “gift economy,” arguing against those who view “the culture as a market in which everything of value should be owned by someone or other”:

Artists and their surrogates who fall into the trap of seeking recompense for every possible second use end up attacking their own best audience members for the crime of exalting and enshrining their work. The Recording Industry Association of America prosecuting their own record-buying public makes as little sense as the novelists who bristle at autographing used copies of their books for collectors. And artists, or their heirs, who fall into the trap of attacking the collagists and satirists and digital samplers of their work are attacking the next generation of creators for the crime of being influenced, for the crime of responding with the same mixture of intoxication, resentment, lust, and glee that characterizes all artistic successors. By doing so they make the world smaller, betraying what seems to me the primary motivation for participating in the world of culture in the first place: to make the world larger.

Access to Lethem’s article is free for Dish readers this weekend, courtesy of Byliner. Related Dish on the subject here.

Our Obsession With Economic Growth

Kate Raworth challenges it:

She argues that “inequality is really, quite extraordinarily at the heart of the way economies are growing.” Lane Kenworthy parses research on income inequality:

As best I can tell from the available data, income inequality hasn’t reduced economic growth. It hasn’t hindered employment. It may or may not have played a role in fostering economic crises, including the Great Recession. It hasn’t reduced income growth for poor households. It may or may not have contributed to the weakening of household balance sheets by encouraging too much borrowing. It may or may not have reduced equality of opportunity. It hasn’t slowed the growth of college completion. It either hasn’t reduced the increase in life expectancy or the decrease in infant mortality or, if it has, the impact has been small. It looks unlikely to have contributed to the rise in obesity. It hasn’t slowed the fall in teen births or homicides since the early 1990s. It may or may not have weakened trust. It doesn’t appear to have affected average happiness. In the United States it has had little or no impact on trust in political institutions, on voter turnout, or on party polarization. And while it may have boosted inequality of political influence, we lack solid evidence that it’s done so.

On the other hand, income inequality has reduced middle-class household income growth. It very likely has increased disparities in education, health, and happiness in the United States. And it has reduced residential mixing in the U.S.

Bring Back The Firing Squad?

Physician Matt McCarthy considers it:

I am against capital punishment, but I understand that it’s not going away anytime soon and we must figure out a way to minimize suffering as long as it continues. … A compelling case can be made that based on efficacy, diffusion of responsibility, and inexpensiveness, death by firing squad is a better option [than lethal injection]. (Or perhaps the guillotine.) Some organs would remain intact for donation, and although it might appear grisly, it’s quick, and it is the only method of execution for which we already train people. Interestingly, in states that have offered both shooting and hanging—which also fulfills many of the above criteria—inmates usually opt for the firing squad. One could argue that if properly done, lethal injection would be more humane than either of these methods, but we can no longer expect that it will be properly done.

Previous Dish on the contemporary use of firing squads here.

[Note: the original version of this posted incorrectly suggested that McCarthy was in favor of physicians becoming involved in executions, in order to minimize botched lethal injections.]

A Poem For Friday

A third set of landays, or folk couplets, from the women of Afghanistan:

May God make you into a riverbank flower

so I may smell you when I go to gather water.

*

Of water I can’t have even a taste.

My lover’s name, written on my heart, would be erased.

*

I could have tasted death for a taste of your tongue

watching you eat ice cream when we were young.

Earlier landays on the Dish here and here.

(From I Am the Beggar of the World: Landays from Contemporary Afghanistan, translated and presented by Eliza Griswold, photographs by Seamus Murphy, to be published in April 2014 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. LLC. Text copyright © 2014 by Eliza Griswold. Photographs copyright © 2014 by Seamus Murphy. All rights reserved.)