Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 369

The Upside Of Being Down

Jonathan Rottenberg suggests that a “keen awareness of what has gone wrong and what can go wrong again can help a person avoid similar stressors in the future”:

In humans the value of low mood is put to the fullest test when people face serious situations in which current problems need to be carefully assessed. We might think of the groom who is left at the altar, the loyal employee who is suddenly fired from his job, the death of a child. If we had to find a unifying function for low mood across these diverse situations, it would be that it functions like a cocoon, a place to pause and analyze what has gone wrong. In this mode, we will stop what we are doing, assess the situation, draw in others, and, if necessary, change course.

A variety of experimental data have shown that low mood confers benefits to thinking and decision making. That lends credence to the idea that mood is part of a conservative behavioral guidance system that impels us toward actions that have been successful in the past—meaning, actions that helped our ancestors to reproduce and spread their genes. One way to appreciate why these states have enduring value is to ponder what might happen if we had no capacity for them. Just as animals with no capacity for anxiety were long ago gobbled up by predators, without a capacity for sadness, we and other animals would likely commit rash acts and repeat costly mistakes. Physical pain teaches a child to avoid hot burners; psychic pain teaches us to navigate life’s rocky shoals with due caution.

Godot’s Godlessness

Rob Weinert-Kendt praises it:

Beckett’s is not the blithe, hyper-confident, 21st-century atheism of Richard Dawkins, or the bland, self-satisfied scientism that constitutes a kind of default worldview in the educated West. It is instead the 20th century’s wounded, elegiac brand of letting-go-of-God—the entirely comprehensible incomprehension of intellectuals who felt poised between the Stygian maw of the Holocaust and the real probability of nuclear annihilation. For all its impish gallows humor, “Waiting for Godot” has, to my ears at least, an unmistakably valedictory timbre; it sounds like the lament of a one-time believer who once took the promise of faith seriously, or at the very least understood its high stakes. Put another way: Beckett’s is a voice that anyone conversant in the stark desert landscape of the Bible—anyone who has, so to speak, sat picking scabs with Job or eaten locusts with John the Baptist—will recognize in a heartbeat.

(Video: scene from Act 1 of a 1987 performance of Waiting for Godot)

From Kids’ Play To Poetry

Leafing through the Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, Sandra Simonds wonders what poets can learn from the form:

The first thing is that sound itself intoxicates and that we connect sound, rhythm, and rhyme to form very early on, probably from infancy. The music of language forms our understanding of the world and that is why it seems so fundemental, in poems, to follow the music and sounds over sense, and to trust that your ear will take you where you want to go. We also learn that language is deeply connected to play—riddles, jokes, nonsense, and, for lack of a better word, fun. But it is also wedded to tragic losses, lost time, lost childhood, the loss of the child itself and the body of the child. Even when we survive childhood, some part of us has fallen through the ice never to return. Children are connected to that loss too. They are constantly warned about strangers, about the instability of their surroundings, constantly reminded about how small they are. As poets, we take that smallness with us into adulthood and turn it into poetry.

Banking On The Postal Service

Last week, a white paper (pdf) from the USPS inspector general revived the idea of letting our post offices offer basic financial services:

The report suggests three types of potential products. First, it proposes a “Postal Card” that could make in-store purchases, access cash at ATMs, pay bills online, or transfer money internationally. Customers with paper checks could cash them at the post office or deposit them through their cell phones, loading them onto their Postal Card. Second, the USPS could offer an interest-bearing savings account, again through the Postal Card, encouraging savings from communities with little in the way of a personal safety net. Finally, the Postal Service could offer small-dollar loans, effectively an alternative to costly payday lending. The fees on all these services would be drastically lower than anything in the marketplace today.

Elizabeth Warren, naturally, loves the idea. So does Waldman:

Some people have referred to this as a “public option” for banking, which is an accurate description, but makes it more likely that Republicans will recoil in horror as they catch the whiff of the dreaded Obamacare about the proposal. But the big banks—the ones with all the power in Washington—should be perfectly fine with it, since they’re not interested in these customers anyway.

Helaine Olen disagrees:

Turns out banks are not actually losing money on low-income Americans.

In fact, the less than wealthy have turned into a nice little profit center for the big banks. If these customers want to stay, the banks make them pay. The median overdraft charge is $34 at large banks and $30 at smaller financial institutions, according to a report from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The result? Moebs Services, a financial research firm, estimated banks took in $32 billion in overdraft fees in 2012.

Salmon doubts the USPS can compete with payday lenders:

Non-banks compete on convenience, not on cost, and tend to be open very long hours; while the Post Office has the advantage that a lot of the underserved go there anyway, it’s still going to have real difficulty competing with Western Union, check-cashing stores, and all the other high-cost non-bank financial-services shops which do exist in the ZIP codes without banks.

In order to make a postal bank work, it needs to be a postal bank: it has to be able to take market share away from existing banks. That in turn means that the existing banks will fight tooth and nail to prevent such a thing from ever seeing the light of day.

The Beautiful Creations Of Disturbed Minds

On Sunday, I argued that Woody Allen’s “art and his craft is so extraordinary in its range and scope and creative integrity that it escapes the twisted psyche that gave birth to it.” Gracy Olmstead disagrees:

There are many artists, it is true, who lived with little to no morals. But there seems to me an important difference between the person whose sins are voluntarily indulged in, and the person who takes advantage of the young, the vulnerable, and the voiceless. This seems to be too horrific to ignore. Perhaps I am too sensitive. But I do not want to douse my mind in the artistic thought of a man with such inexcusable inclinations and actions. … Art changes us: it affects our perceptions and our world views. Can we really trust ourselves—our minds, eyes, and ears—to Allen’s hands?

Eric Sasson wants journalists to stop assuming that Allen is guilty of molestation:

Woody Allen’s defenders point out that he was never charged with molesting Farrow, and a team of child-abuse specialists concluded that she hadn’t been molested. His detractors note that a state attorney at the time said there was “probable cause” to charge Allen, but that he chose not to prosecute the case to avoid traumatizing the young girl. There are plenty of reasons to doubt both sides. For journalists to “react” to Farrow’s letter without acknowledging those doubts does the public a disservice, and for them to question the morals of those who remain in doubt does journalism itself a disservice.

Rebecca Buckwalter-Poza, on the other hand, considers why the rich and famous often get away with these types of crimes:

Celebrities are particularly effective at discouraging victims and witnesses from cooperating with law enforcement and prosecutors in cases involving sex crimes against underage victims. Their testimony is critical to securing a conviction, but the alleged victims and their families are understandably reluctant to weather public scrutiny and a high-profile trial indefinitely and at uncertain cost for an unknown outcome.

Earlier Dish on Allen here and here.

Clinton’s Achilles Heels, Ctd

Drum agrees with me that Hillary’s achievements are underwhelming. He spots another possible weakness:

[B]y 2016 she will have been in the public eye for 24 years. That’s unprecedented. In the modern era, Richard Nixon holds the record for longest time in the public eye—about 20 years—before being elected president. The sweet spot is a little less than a decade. Longer than that and people just get tired of you. They want a fresh face. That’s largely what happened to Hillary in 2008, and it could happen again in 2016.

Carpenter’s misgivings:

I’m less concerned with Hillary’s rationale for running than I am for my own sanity.

For the next three years she’ll play it safe on the ever-Clintonian middle ground, which for the last three years has been exhaustively played out by Obama. The reasons for the latter are many, and some are valid. My complaint about Hillary is that the exciting promise of new and aggressive management will be lacking.

Linker fears we’ll have a match-up between Jeb Bush and Clinton:

 Since 1980, when I was 11 years old, a Bush or a Clinton has run for president or vice president in eight out of nine contests (with Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign being the only exception). Unless Hillary Clinton surprises everyone, 2016 is guaranteed to make it nine out of 10, which is bad enough. But the idea of the Republicans running a third Bush against her — it’s almost too much to bear.

Or rather, it’s almost enough to make me wonder why we don’t just scrap the pretense of the United States being a democracy at all and instead embrace the truth — that, at least when it comes to the nation’s highest office, we’re now a nepotistic oligarchy.

It’s a national embarrassment.

Executive Power Politics

Noam Scheiber worries that Obama’s executive action agenda could backfire politically:

[These unilateral maneuvers'] only real value is signaling that Obama believes he can exert his will on the economy without Congress and is working really hard to do that. But if that’s the effect, then they only exacerbate Obama’s dilemma by further persuading voters he has influence over the economy we just agreed he doesn’t have.

Now maybe the economy will improve on its own, in which case no foul. As I said earlier, the chances that it will are reasonably good. But if the economy doesn’t improve, or god forbid it worsens, the new approach will be a disaster. It will stick Obama with an even larger share of the blame than he’d otherwise come in for. Since the point of a political strategy is to shape voters’ perceptions of events in a way that makes them look more favorable to you, not less, this doesn’t strike me as a step forward.

From a historical perspective, Posner argues, Obama’s embrace of executive power is neither unusual nor worrisome:

The president is kept in check by elections, the party system, the press, popular opinion, courts, a political culture that is deeply suspicious of his motives, term limits, and the sheer vastness of the bureaucracy which he can only barely control. He does not always do the right thing, of course, but presidents generally govern from the middle of the political spectrum.

Obama’s assertion of unilateral executive authority is just routine stuff. He follows in the footsteps of his predecessors on a path set out by Congress. And well should he. If you want a functioning government—one that protects citizens from criminals, terrorists, the climatic effects of greenhouse gas emissions, poor health, financial manias, and the like—then you want a government led by the president.

Also, as Jonathan Bernstein noted last week, the functions of the three branches of government have never been clear-cut: 

Congress does things that look an awful lot like executing the laws (think oversight, and the Senate’s role in the nomination process) and even in some cases judging; the courts do things that look an awful lot like making and executing the laws; and, yes, the executive branch does things that look an awful lot like legislating and judging. In other words, separated institutions — president, legislature, courts — sharing the powers of legislating, executing the laws, and judging.

Those aren’t newfangled modern ideas; they’re really inherent in the way the Constitution is written, and they took root early in the republic as politicians learned to work according to the rule book that James Madison and others gave them. “Separation of powers” has always been just a very misleading description of how the U.S. political system is designed.

(Chart from The Fix.)

Cannabis And Schizophrenia, Ctd

In a review of A New Leaf: The End of Cannabis Prohibition, Jerome Groopman questions the alleged link:

Perhaps the most controversial and important concern around cannabinoids is whether they increase the risk of psychoses like schizophrenia. This question is most germane for adolescents and young adults. A number of studies reviewed the health records of young people in Sweden, New Zealand, and Holland who reported cannabis use, as compared to the records of those who did not. A combined or metaanalysis of results from nearly three dozen such studies linked cannabis use to later development of schizophrenia and other psychosis.

The limitation of such observational studies is that they may suggest an association but in no way prove a causal link. Indeed, the medical literature is littered with observational studies that were taken as meaningful but later overturned when randomized placebo-controlled trials were conducted. Here the Women’s Health Initiative comes to mind. This was a randomized study, using placebos as controls, that reversed some four decades of thinking about the alleged benefits of hormonal replacement therapy among postmenopausal women in preventing dementia and heart disease. No one is likely to conduct a randomized controlled trial of thousands of teenagers, assigning one group to smoke or ingest cannabis and the other group to receive placebos. The issue of marijuana as a cofactor in the development of schizophrenia and other psychosis will therefore remain unresolved.

My take on the subject is here.

Mental Health Break

Why can’t we get figure-skiing at Sochi?

Last Call For Renewals!

[Re-posted from earlier today]

Today is the Dish’s first anniversary of going independent on our own site with our own company. We launched for real on February 4, 2013. And that’s when I, along with a large swathe of you, started my subscription. Today it expires, and sooner or later, if you haven’t yet renewed, you’ll have the irritating prospect of being blocked by our meter system. We always promised transparency so here’s the state-of-play of the last thirteen months as of this lunchtime:

As you can see, we matched January 2013′s total in January 2014. Actually, we beat it by a smidgen last Friday night. That’s a pretty extraordinary result and an amazing start for the year. But it’s not enough to sustain us for the year ahead with even last year’s budget and February remains a critical month for us, as you can see from the graph above. More to the point, we know there are many of you out there who subscribed last January and February and who’ve understandably been putting off renewing until you absolutely have to. I get that, because it’s the kind of procrastination I’m pretty good at myself. But the moment when you actually have to renew in order to avoid any future interruptions is now here. Today is the last day you can simply renew your subscription and never get your reading intercepted by our meter. After today, you can still subscribe, of course, but you’ll have to start again as a new subscriber.

So if you’ve been procrastinating on this but always intended to renew – and we totally understand why – count this as a friendly nudge to get it over with. It’s a truly simple and quick process, and you can get it done in a couple of minutes tops. Take a moment to ask yourself what the Dish is actually worth to you over the year – and plug it into the renewal box. It’s still only a minimum of $1.99 a month or $19.99 a year – but many renewing subscribers have picked price points more tailored to them. It could be the double chai option of $3.60 a month; or a pledge to support our coverage of the marijuana legalization debate at $4.20 a month; or a decision to back this new model for online journalism by upping your subscription to $100 a year (541 hardcore Dishheads have so far); or just a simple renewal at the same minimum price as last year. Our most popular price point right now is $25 a year; but the $50 a year is our fifth most popular, and our average price this year is still around $37.

We’ll leave it to you to create a price point tailored to you. And we’re thrilled to have you along for the ride at whatever price point you can afford. But today is the last day you can simply renew and avoid any future hassles or interruptions.

So renew here! Renew now! And make sure your Dish reading experience is never interrupted again.

Update from a new subscriber:

Yes, I was a straggler. Part of it was procrastination. Part of it was just wanting to push you to the edge (sorry!). Part of it was money struggles. But today I put fifty bucks into your till because, frankly, you’re irritatingly worth it. And I really don’t want to miss Deep Dish.

Keep up the good (yet sometimes infuriating) work. Thanks to you, Andrew, and the entire team. You help keep me sane.