Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 328
March 19, 2014
Ask Dayo Olopade Anything
Sarah Rothbard introduces us:
Nigerian-American journalist Dayo Olopade spent two years traveling through 17 African countries. But
it’s still difficult for her to talk about the continent[:] 800 million people live in Africa, most of whom she has not met. Nonetheless Olopade, author of The Bright Continent: Breaking Rules and Making Change in Modern Africa, is trying to reorient Western views of the continent. Six of the world’s 10 fastest growing economies are located in sub-Saharan Africa. Twenty-three African countries are now middle-income, she said, with their feet on the first rung of the ladder toward posterity. And over 300 million people make up Africa’s emerging middle class. They earn 10 times the poverty benchmark of $2 per day. Right now, unbeknownst to the West, Africa is incredibly dynamic and energetic. It is young—70 percent of the population is under 30 years old—and increasingly urban, with 50 cities of more than a million people and more than half the continent living in urban, cosmopolitan settings.
Dayo believes one of the reasons that Africa’s progress often goes unnoticed is because of “poverty porn”:
Many of the images that come out of Africa—from commercials featuring celebrities speaking on behalf of hungry children to Toms shoes—come from sources with business models that rely on people feeling badly about Africa. Poverty porn also exists at an institutional, global level. Olopade was shocked to see a poster that won a United Nations-sponsored contest depicting the torsos of leaders of the G-8 nations as skinny, African kids waiting in line at a refugee camp from the waist down.
The caption: “‘Dear World leaders. We are still waiting.’” But in Africa, “people, in my experience, wait for no one,” said Olopade, recounting the astonishing amount of commerce that takes place in the middle of traffic on the roads of Lagos, Nigeria. From your car, you can buy everything from mobile phone airtime to live animals. Congested roads aren’t an opportunity for self-pity but for marketing.
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As Seen On Chinese TV
Moira Weigel, an American, spent a month working at a Shanghai TV station “to learn how rising China spins its story to itself”:
The Department of Propaganda may not have had any mysterious purpose in renaming itself a Department of Publicity. It had become an association of what were effectively PR companies, like ICS, making advertisements—if not for individual products, then for the high life available in China’s booming coastal cities. Slicker than CNN, more aggressively confident than CNBC, it was our own publicity apparatus refracted back to us—in a country where largesse and wealth still carried the scent of overall growth, rather than sour, curdled privilege. … What I found was not propaganda in the grim midcentury sense. Rather than apparatchiks, we had presenters in miniskirts, faces dewy with an aerosol spray that held their makeup and made them all smell like flour. The scripts I read were not injunctions to follow Mao Zedong Thought but ejaculations of positivity about new products.
Like Red Bull, perhaps:
Christopher Beam, the very white American seen in the video, talks about his performance:
When I signed up for “You Can,” I figured I would dance so badly that it would expose the singular awfulness of Chinese television. Not that it needed my help: Flip through the channels at any given moment and you’ll see a predictable combination of World War II epics (Chinese good, Japanese bad), Korean soap operas, Korean-inspired Chinese soap operas, plus a slew of identical-looking talk/dating/talent shows, the most popular of which are Chinese copies of foreign programs. While most networks run like businesses, the party still has final say over content—a system that discourages risk-taking. And when foreigners go on television, it’s often as the proverbial “trained monkey,” the strange Other to be gawked at. I thought that by embracing that role and pushing it to the extreme, I could somehow transcend it.
He didn’t; he lost; his dance never aired. But it’s YouTube gold.
A Bang-Up Job, Ctd
Megan Garber reminds us that the big Big Bang news hasn’t yet been through peer review:
Scientists are, like the rest of us, impatient. They are, much more often than the rest of us, justified in this. Imagine dedicating your career to learning something new about the mechanics of the world—the gravitational forces exerted on a cell membrane, the flappings of a bee’s wings, the earliest churnings of the cosmos—and then imagine actually finding that thing. Now imagine that, instead of doing what every impulse would guide you to do (share that news with everyone you know/share that news with everyone you don’t know/shout that news from the rooftops or at least your Facebook page) … you are made to wait. And wait. And wait. Until, many months later, your work has been deemed acceptable for proper publication.
… The Big Bang news is simply emblematic of a larger trend. As the philosopher David Weinberger puts it: “Scientific knowledge is taking on properties of its new medium, becoming like the network in which it lives.”
Lawrence Krauss puts the significance of the discovery, should it hold up, in layman’s terms:
If it turns out to be confirmed by other experiments, think about what this discovery implies for our ability to explore the universe (besides the other remarkable implications for physics): when we use light to look out at the distant universe, we can only see back as far as three hundred thousand years after the Big Bang, when the universe cooled sufficiently to become transparent to light. But gravitational waves interact so weakly that even waves produced less than 10-35 seconds after the Big Bang can move through space unimpeded, giving us a window on the universe at essentially the beginning of time.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the current result is in some tension with earlier claimed upper limits from other experiments, so we will need to wait for the results of a host of other experiments currently operating that can check this result.
For some people, the possibility that the laws of physics might illuminate even the creation of our own universe, without the need for supernatural intervention or any demonstration of purpose, is truly terrifying. But Monday’s announcement heralds the possible beginning of a new era, where even such cosmic existential questions are becoming accessible to experiment.
Mental Health Break
Wes Anderson really loves his symmetry:
Wes Anderson // Centered from kogonada on Vimeo.
March 18, 2014
Transplanting Technology
Regulations in the US prohibit the recycling of implanted medical devices after their owners die, but Frank Swain reports that there’s “a growing trend to recover them for use in the developing world”:
At $4,000 for a pacemaker and $20,000 for an ICD [internal cardiac defibrillator], a second-hand implant is the only way that millions of people will be able to afford this life-saving equipment. In the UK, charity Pace4Life collects functioning pacemakers from funeral parlours for use in India. In a similar effort, the journal Annals of Internal Medicine recently published the results of a US programme called Project My Heart Your Heart, which found that 75 patients who received second-hand ICDs showed no evidence of infection or malfunction. The group are now applying for FDA approval to send recycled heart devices overseas.
Back in Nashville, Standing With Hope has adopted a similar approach by shipping prosthetic limbs to Ghana.
Chart Of The Day II
Derek Thompson covers the growth of music streaming:
This is at least the third destructive wave for the music industry in the last decade and a half. First, Napster and illegal downloading sites ripped apart the album and distributed song files in a black market that music labels couldn’t touch. Second, Apple used the fear and desperation of the record labels to push a $0.99-per-song model on iTunes, which effectively destroyed the bundling power of the album in the eyes of millions of music fans (even though country album sales are still pretty strong). For a decade, music sales plummeted. Third, digital radio and streaming sites got so good that now many music fans wonder why they need to buy albums in the first place. So, they don’t.
The Poisons In Our Pantry
James Hamblin sinks his teeth into the so-called “silent pandemic” of toxins hidden in our everyday items. A team of researchers identified a dozen common poisons - such as ethanol, lead, and mercury - that leech IQ points:
The greater concern lies in what we’re exposed to and don’t yet know to be toxic. Federal health officials, prominent academics, and even many leaders in the chemical industry agree that the U.S. chemical safety testing system is in dire need of modernization. Yet parties on various sides cannot agree on the specifics of how to change the system, and two bills to modernize testing requirements are languishing in Congress. [Mount Sinai's Philip] Landrigan and [Harvard's Philippe] Grandjean’s real message is big, and it involves billion-dollar corporations and Capitol Hill, but it begins and ends with the human brain in its earliest, most vulnerable stages. …
Economist Elise Gould has calculated that a loss of one IQ point corresponds to a loss of $17,815 in lifetime earnings. Based on that figure, she estimates that for the population that was six years old or younger in 2006, lead exposure will result in a total income loss of between $165 and $233 billion. The combined current levels of pesticides, mercury, and lead cause IQ losses amounting to around $120 billion annually—or about three percent of the annual budget of the U.S. government.
Low-income families are hit the hardest. No parent can avoid these toxins—they’re in our couches and in our air. They can’t be sweated out through hot yoga classes or cleansed with a juice fast. But to whatever extent these things can be avoided without better regulations, it costs money. Low-income parents might not have access to organic produce or be able to guarantee their children a low-lead household. When it comes to brain development, this puts low-income kids at even greater disadvantages—in their education, in their earnings, in their lifelong health and well-being.
Beard Of The Week
Hans Madsen from Yorkton, SK here for the tournament. Best fan beard, ever! #NB pic.twitter.com/8RBxykUi6S
— Matt Bingley (@mattybing) March 15, 2014
A reader passed it along:
I thought you might want this as a Beard of the Week. My colleague Matthew Bingley took the photo while covering the World Women’s Curling Championship in Saint John, New Brunswick.
Previous BOTWs here.
The Wear And Tear Of Police Work
Nineteen years after her friend Sangeeta Lal was murdered by her ex-boyfriend, Erika Hayasaki connected with Brian Post, the police officer who responded to the shooting. Over the years, the beat has taken a serious toll on Brian’s health:
In squad rooms full of cops, Brian would compare blood pressure meds with his colleagues. Most, if not all, of the police he knew with more than 10 years of service were dealing some kind of medical or psychological issue.
At night, Brian would hide his drinking from his wife. He went from sipping whiskey, to downing cheap 100-proof vodka.
“You see nothing but bodies, I swear, dead people,” he said. “Car accidents, hangings, suicides, murders, SIDS deaths.” He remembered a diabetic who killed himself by overdosing on chocolate. And then there was the conversation with a tongue-pierced meth user with an enlarged heart who had told Brian, “I’m white trash until the day I die.” He assaulted people in a parking lot and died in custody after deputies restrained him. The next day, Brian found himself close to fainting after viewing the autopsy photos of the same kid’s esophagus, and pierced tongue.
“I was so angry at this one woman for dying, that I yelled at her,” he said. “I just didn’t want to see another dead body…I should have recognized at that point, it’s time for me to back up.”
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