Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 379

A Double Chai For The Dish

But not the one you get at Starbucks:

I’m a founding member, a happy supporter, and a devoted reader. I love that you tried this independent model, I love that you stay committed to it, and I’m pleased that you seem to be succeeding in this endeavor. I renewed at $36. It is twice chai, which is the Hebrew word for life, numerically 18 (so twice chai is 2×18.) May you have continued success and good fortune in your second year!

That $36 renewal price has been pretty popular with our readers, 71 so far. Another:

My first subscription at $19.99 is up 2/4/2014, but I renewed today at $36.  I figure the extra is more than worth it, not only because your content rocks, but you provide both experience and insurance to your paid interns.  A rare thing that needs to be encouraged.

Another:

I was planning to renew at 36 (double chai), but your 420 post was too creative and funny.  So I renewed for $42.00.

Join him and nearly 20,000 others here. Another reader goes in depth with some criticism:

I’m a Founding Member who renewed at a higher level ($36, or the “Double Chai” level for the Bar/Bat Mitzvah crowd). I was very happy to do this last year, for a number of reasons (to name a few): 1) belief in the Dish’s mission; 2) desire to see your new business model succeed; 3) belief that I owed it to you for all the previous years when the Dish was freely available. I have no hesitation about renewing, and I will happily do so. I am, however, deeply conflicted on whether to renew above the standard rate. It’s not the money (I’m very fortunate and can pay more); it’s philosophical, related to the business model.

Let’s be clear: this is a business, not a non-profit. I’ve got no issue with giving an “above scale” donation to NPR, which is run as a non-profit. But if, for example, I love new music from a new band, I don’t respond by saying, “I know your download is $10, but let me pay you $30 instead because I love you that much and want you to succeed.” No, that band is going to give me other opportunities to support their success – live shows, merchandise, etc., so I can support them in line with their business objectives.

In other words, the Dish is asking me to be something like a patron of the arts. But patrons get closer access to the artist, and some kind of recognition. Last year, when the Veronica Mars movie ran its Kickstarter campaign, some people criticized it – why would people give money to Warner Brothers? – but they failed to recognize that every person got something different for their contribution level (a DVD, a poster, a Kristen Bell voicemail message!). Because it’s a business, they felt a need to provide different services at different levels.

The Dish isn’t doing any of that. Now, do I want a Sully voicemail message, a Dish tote bag, or access to rough drafts of your blog posts? No – in general, I don’t want “stuff,” and I feel more than privy to the inner workings of your thought process. But if I give you extra money, why shouldn’t I give extra money to a good teacher? Or simply pay a good service provider more than they ask? Or supplement a friend’s income just because s/he’s a great person who deserves better in life? The list goes on, and for the life of me, I can’t figure out how to justify one versus the other versus any.

One answer, I believe, is simple and scary: The Dish needs more subscribers. Innovative and noble businesses routinely fail, and it’s why marketing budgets exist. Another answer, is this: offer the “stuff.” Personalized messages, conference calls, tote bags, autographed “I Was Wrong” copies – I don’t care. Just give me something, anything, to point to that says I’m not just throwing money at you because I’m rooting for you. If your goal is to establish The Dish as a new type of business, then start behaving like it’s a business and not a pseudo non-profit. Work with us here, and I promise I’ll buy the “stuff” even if I can live without a framed picture of your beard.

Be careful what you ask for.

Actually, the “pay-what-you-want” model was, in fact, pioneered by a band, Radiohead. But it’s been fascinating to read many reader emails about the business model we are trying and ways it could be improved and finessed. All I can say is that we are open to every idea to make this work, and we will continue to refine and innovate as best we can. But we’re devoted to the idea of very gradual change you can believe in. We specifically decided long ago, for example, to start with some basics – like a strong, subscription-based site – and then pursue the intimations of what the web seems to be teaching us about what works. And we’re at a very early stage. So keep the suggestions coming. We’re open to anything. Just not sponsored content, m-kay?

One more email from a reader, who is actually leaving the double-chai club:

I was a founding member last year at $36/year. When I heard you were going independent, I signed up ASAP as I’ve been reading The Dish for a few years, but I wasn’t sure what the new Dish would look like. Over the past year, your updates have kept me thinking about the virtue of paying for quality online content. After college, I made the decision to start paying for my music to support artists. The WSJ and NYTimes forced me to decide whether online content was worth it, and I started paying for my news.

I appreciate your model with The Dish and think you’re doing the right thing by paying your interns and providing health insurance for your staff. Our society has forgotten that if it’s worth it to us; we need to pay for it. Paying for the value of what you consume keeps one from over-consuming … and over-consuming leads one to undervalue what they should value more highly.

So, I’m now on the auto-renew plan at just over $100/year. It’s what I pay for my grad-student subscription to the WSJ, and I get just as much from The Dish as from the Journal.

Mercy, Grace, Peace, and Joy to you and your team in 2014.

And with you.

Finding, Ctd

A reader writes:

I enjoyed your review of the new TV show “Looking”, and I’m right there with you on your criticism of Philadelphia and Jeffrey and your praise for Weekend.  I’m guessing we might agree on the bulk of gay films and TV shows out there.

Do yourself a favor and check out the new French film Stranger by the Lake [trailer here]. It’s a fantastic drama that just happens to take place within a specific sub-culture of the gay male population, but the story asks questions which can just as much be asked of anyone gay or straight: what are the risks of love and sex, and why do we take them?  It’s honest and intelligent, but the bottom line is that it’s just plain entertaining as hell. I promise I’m not a troll working for the film’s publicity department.  I’m just a film nerd always looking for good cinema that portray gay characters with honesty and respect and doesn’t treat us like fashion accessories.

Another sends the above trailer:

If you are looking for a more authentic account of gay life, try the film Keep the Lights On.

It’s about a relationship that finally goes south because of one partner’s meth addiction, but overall it’s totally free of all the things that make you cringe. Ira Sachs, the director, has another film at Sundance right now, Love is Strange, which in some respects eerily resembles the case recently covered on The Dish about the teacher in the Pacific Northwest who lost his job when he got married. Anyway, I think you’ll find that Keep the Lights On beautifully represents a couple plagued by many troubles, none of them necessarily related to being gay.

Another looks back a decade:

I’m surprised you haven’t mentioned Six Feet Under in your discussion of gay men in the media. The character of David Fisher (played by Michael C. Hall) was portrayed in such a compassionate, human way – we see him break up with his long term boyfriend because of his inability to come out; engage in a period of self-destructive behaviour; and eventually grow up, become emotionally healthier, come out, and form a family. For me, following the life of this character, which is written and acted so naturally (indeed, all the relationships in this show are astonishing for how natural and right they feel, even when they’re dysfunctional or falling apart) that it really hammered home the idea that ALL people have the right to form a family with whomever they choose.

Another reader:

I hear ya. There’s a lot of bad gay-themed drama out there, stuff that thought it could pull in an audience just because it was “gay-themed”, in a world where there wasn’t much in the way of gay-themed art; stuff that tried so hard to be “representative” or “sensitive” that it forgot to have characters (“Take Me Out” and dozens of others too forgettable to name); stuff that relied on the titillation factor of getting its characters naked (“Party”, “Naked Boys Singing,” “Take Me Out”); stuff that thought being shocking was enough (“Taxi Zum Klo,” “F*cking Men”); stuff where the gay men acted more like suburban couples from the Mad Men era (“Love, Valour, Compassion” – ugh!).

And, yeah, as brilliant as the British “Queer as Folk” was, I couldn’t get past the first episode-and-a-half of the American series.

In fact, in all my years of seeing gay-themed theatre in Chicago, I can think of just two plays so good I could recommend them to anyone without reservation. In the 1990s, “The Expense of Spirit” by Michael Barto, and from this decade, “The Homosexuals” by Philip Dawkins (a terrific young playwright with a half-dozen plays of diverse styles and themes under his belt – three of which were being performed simultaneously by different theatre companies in Chicago a year ago).

I look forward to seeing “Looking” (but since I don’t have cable, that won’t happen until it’s available on DVD).

A Symphony From The Heart Of The City

Stephen Walsh praises Brian Moynahan’s Leningrad, a book on how the siege of the city influenced the work of composer Dmitri Shostakovich:

Shostakovich, a native of Leningrad/St Petersburg, was in the city for the first few weeks of the siege, and by the time he was flown out in early October 1941 he had composed the bulk of three movements of his Seventh Symphony. He already saw it as a symbol of the city’s defiance, and in Moscow he told an interviewer: ‘In the finale, I want to describe a beautiful future time when the enemy will have been defeated.’

It had become a Leningrad Symphony in all but name. Its composer had been photographed on the roof of the Conservatoire in a fireman’s outfit hosing down a (non-existent) conflagration. Now, in his absence, Leningraders struggled to concerts played by emaciated, half-dead musicians in freezing halls. Music had become an emblem of that peculiar Russian ability, honed through centuries of repression and hardship and in the end disastrously underestimated by Hitler, to slow down their mental metabolism almost to a standstill and survive like aesthetically tuned cattle in conditions that would drive others to breakdown and insanity.

How else to explain the successful performance of the Seventh Symphony that following August? It was a full-blooded 70-minute work for an orchestra of more than 100, performed by a radio band reduced by death and infirmity to a mere handful of sickly regulars, augmented by military-band players from the battlefront and by whatever extra wind and string players could be drafted in from the city’s dilapidated musical substrata, and directed by a conductor — Karl Eliasberg — who could himself barely hold a baton or stand upright.

Gavin Plumley discusses the piece with Semyon Bychkov, a conductor born in Leningrad shortly after the siege who is now conducting the symphony:

The first image that comes to Bychkov’s mind while preparing is that of his mother, as a giddy school leaver on 22 June 1941, 11 years before he was born. “Throughout the country, graduation balls are taking place for those finishing high school. It’s a big celebration. In Leningrad, it’s the White Nights,” he says, referring to northern Russia’s famed twilit season, “so the city is bursting with young people, by the river, partying, celebrating. Some are dreaming of university or going to the conservatoire. The future is very beautiful and very mysterious.” It’s a scene described, in effect, in the lusty opening bars of the symphony. “That first stride has a real sense of energy and optimism,” Bychkov notes, “and when the second theme comes, it’s a dream put into sound.”

Update from a reader:

The documentary Russia’s War: Blood Upon the Snow features the story of the Leningrad symphony (available thanks to Youtube, from 19:49 to about 22:14).  It also contains absolutely staggering and heartbreaking footage (at 20:48) of a repeat performance held 25 years after the premiere, held in the same concert hall, with the same musicians and the same original audience members, each sitting in their original spot. The hall is almost empty, as nearly all the original attendees have since died – many of them, undoubtedly, among the million or two Leningraders who died during the siege.

(Video: Shostakovich plays a fragment of his Seventh Symphony in 1941)

A Well-Adjusted Psycho

James Fallon, a neuroscientist diagnosed as a psychopath, discusses his idiosyncrasies:

I treat strangers pretty well—really well, and people tend to like me when they meet me—but I treat my family the same way, like they’re just somebody at a bar. I treat them well, but I don’t treat them in a special way. That’s the big problem.

I asked them this—it’s not something a person will tell you spontaneously—but they said, ”I give you everything. I give you all this love and you really don’t give it back.” They all said it, and that sure bothered me. So I wanted to see if I could change. I don’t believe it, but I’m going to try.

In order to do that, every time I started to do something, I had to think about it, look at it, and go: No. Don’t do the selfish thing or the self-serving thing. Step-by-step, that’s what I’ve been doing for about a year and a half and they all like it. Their basic response is: We know you don’t really mean it, but we still like it.

I told them, “You’ve got to be kidding me. You accept this? It’s phony!” And they said, “No, it’s okay. If you treat people better it means you care enough to try.” It blew me away then and still blows me away now.

Previous Dish on non-violent psychopathy here, here, here, and here.

Is Facebook Dying?

A study suggests so:

By drawing similarities between Facebook’s rapid adoption and the proliferation of an infectious disease, researchers at Princeton have devised a model that predicts Facebook will lose 80% of its users by 2017.

“Ideas, like diseases, have been shown to spread infectiously between people before eventually dying out, and have been successfully described with epidemiological models,” write authors John Cannarella and Joshua A. Spechler in an article recently posted to the preprint database arXiv. The basic premise is simple: epidemiological models, the researchers argue, can be used to explain user adoption and abandonment of online social networks, “where adoption is analogous to infection and abandonment is analogous to recovery.”

Mashable thinks this logic is fundamentally flawed:

It all starts with ideas — or rather, the notion that ideas are like diseases. Ideas “have been shown to spread infectiously between people before eventually dying out, and have been successfully described with epidemiological models,” the study says. That sounds rational until you consider all the ideas that have spread and stuck — such as democracy, electricity and the theory of evolution.

John Aziz criticizes the study for comparing Facebook to MySpace:

MySpace died as it became clogged up with spam, was neglected and misunderstood by its new corporate owner, and after its users migrated to other social networks, particularly Facebook.

Facebook doesn’t necessarily face any of these problems. While Facebook has introduced advertising and while spam is a problem, Facebook has done a reasonable job at fighting spam. It has thus been far less intrusive than the huge quantities of spam that infested MySpace in its dying years. Another big difference: At Facebook, founder Mark Zuckerberg remains in charge, and the company is making profits.

Faces Of The Day

A vendor plays with a ball he is selling at the Divisoria market in Manila on January 23, 2014. By Noel Celis/AFP/Getty Images.

The Jury Is Out On Heightened Scrutiny

This week the 9th Circuit ruled that jurors cannot be excluded for being gay. Mark Joseph Stern analyzes the meaning:

In one sense, the court’s ruling was inevitable. In 1986, the Supreme Court found that attorneys couldn’t dismiss jurors based exclusively on race, holding that both defendants and jurors themselves have a right to a racism-free voir dire. Ten years later, the court extended that principle to female jurors, adding a new justification to the mix: Justice Harry Blackmun proclaimed that gender stereotypes are “rooted in and reflective of historical prejudice” and thus serve no valid purpose in jury selection. Anti-gay stereotypes are, of course, rooted in similar “historical prejudice”—a “deplorable tradition of treating gays and lesbians as undeserving of participation in our nation’s most cherished rites and rituals,” in the words of the 9th Circuit. The court, then, had no choice but to shield the jury box from these irrational prejudices.

Yet in another sense, Tuesday’s decision is a critical and novel development in the legal battle for gay rights. The Supreme Court protected blacks and women from prejudiced peremptory challenges because they’re both constitutionally protected classes; in other words, any law that discriminates against them is subject to heightened judicial scrutiny. But the court has never actually declared gays a protected class.

Why heightened scrutiny matters:

Judge Reinhardt called for “heightened scrutiny” in such discrimination cases – a move that shifts the burden of proof off of the plaintiffs, and potentially makes challenges to employment protection policies or state bans on same-sex marriage, for example, easier to win.

“The difference is night and day,” said James Esseks, director of the American Civil Liberties Union Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender & AIDS Project. Under heightened scrutiny, “any law that treats gay people differently is presumed unconstitutional; it no longer gets the benefit of the doubt.”

Noah Feldman thinks the court probably went too far:

Equality for gay people is a pressing imperative of civil liberties. But progress has been achieved so far without relying on a forced legal analogy to discrimination against blacks and women. Those forms of discrimination have structural economic roots that make them particularly persistent and pernicious. Homophobia, by contrast, is a nasty social attitude that can be eventually reduced to the point of this disappearance — and when it is gone, gay people will be truly equal. That day is coming, with the help of the courts and common sense. Heightened scrutiny can be reserved for those people who really need it.

The Robots Took Er Jerbs!

Prompted by a new study predicting that as many as half of all American jobs might be lost to computers and robots in the next few decades, Derek Thompson stops to consider how our view of automation is changing:

We might be on the edge of a breakthrough moment in robotics and artificial intelligence. Although the past 30 years have hollowed out the middle, high- and low-skill jobs have actually increased, as if protected from the invading armies of robots by their own moats. Higher-skill workers have been protected by a kind of social-intelligence moat. Computers are historically good at executing routines, but they’re bad at finding patterns, communicating with people, and making decisions, which is what managers are paid to do. This is why some people think managers are, for the moment, one of the largest categories immune to the rushing wave of AI.

Meanwhile, lower-skill workers have been protected by the Moravec moat. Hans Moravec was a futurist who pointed out that machine technology mimicked a savant infant: Machines could do long math equations instantly and beat anybody in chess, but they can’t answer a simple question or walk up a flight of stairs. As a result, menial work done by people without much education (like home health care workers, or fast-food attendants) have been spared, too.

But perhaps we’ve hit an inflection point.

As Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee pointed out in their book Race Against the Machine (and in their new book The Second Machine Age), robots are finally crossing these moats by moving and thinking like people. Amazon has bought robots to work its warehouses. Narrative Science can write earnings summaries that are indistinguishable from wire reports. We can say to our phones I’m lost, help and our phones can tell us how to get home.

Kenneth Anderson is skeptical that the coming advances in AI will destroy human jobs without creating new ones:

The “this time is different” view seems to me overstated – as so often the case with AI, as Gary Marcus has noted. One should never rule out paradigm shifting advances, but so far as I can tell, the conceptual pathways as laid down for AI today are not going to lead – even over the long-run – to what sci-fi has already given us in imagination.  Siri is not “Her” – as even Siri herself noted in a recent Tweet.  For the future we can foresee, in the short-to-medium term, we’ll be more likely to have machines that (as ever) extend, but do not replace, human capabilities; in other cases, human capabilities will extend the machines.  The foreseeable future, I suspect, remains the process (long underway) of tag-teaming humans and machines.  Which is to say (mostly), same as it ever was.

The significant new job categories (I speculate) run toward skilled manual labor of a new kind. The “maker movement”; new US manufacturing trends toward highly automated, but still human-run and staffed factories; new high technology, but still human-controlled, energy exploitation such as fracking; complex and crucial robotic machines under the supervision of nurses whose whole new skill sets put them in a new job category we might call nursing technologist – these are the areas of work that point the way forward.

Drum zeroes in on why people would rather not think about the potential AI future:

Conservatives don’t like the idea that it almost inevitably will require a much more redistributive society. Liberals don’t like the idea that it might make a lot of standard lefty social programs obsolete. As a liberal believer, I’ll put myself in the latter camp. I’m not willing to give up on the standard liberal social program because (a) I might be wrong about AI, (b) if I’m not, we’re still going to need variations on these programs, and (c) we still have to deal with the transition period anyway. I assume conservative believers might feel roughly the same way.

A Fiscal Hawk With Expensive Taste

In an 14-count indictment, prosecutors tell the tale of the bizarre, years-long relationship that former Virginia governor Bob McDonnell and his wife Maureen had with Jonnie Williams, the CEO of a pharmaceutical company peddling an anti-inflammatory diet supplement. The first couple accepted gifts from “JW”, as he’s referred to in the indictment, of everything from $15,000 for their daughter’s wedding to golf trips, vacations, and loans to prop up the couple’s rental properties. Perhaps one of the weirdest highlights of the indictment (and there’s plenty of weird there) is a proposal to test Williams’s cure-all supplement on Virginia civil servants:

In August 2011, following an email from Bob McDonnell to Virginia’s secretary of health, Maureen McDonnell met at the Executive Mansion with Williams and one of the secretary’s senior policy advisors. At that meeting, according to the indictment, Williams discussed the idea of having Virginia government employees use Anatabloc, Star Scientific’s anti-inflammatory dietary supplement, “as a control group for research studies.” This wasn’t the only time this kind of idea came up. In October 2011, according to the indictment, Maureen McDonnell accompanied Williams and a research scientist who consulted for Star Scientific to a company event in Grand Blanc, Mich. … The scientist later emailed Maureen McDonnell a summary of their discussions. In it, he suggested it might be useful “to perform a study of Virginia government employees… to determine the prevalences [sic] of autoimmune and inflammatory conditions.”

Byron York wonders why the hell McDonnell didn’t have the patience to wait for the perfectly legitimate corruption that awaited him after he left office:

A former governor can make a lot of money. He can cash in on the influence he still has after leaving the statehouse. But if the indictment is correct, the McDonnells, in debt and wanting to drive Ferraris and wear Rolexes and play golf at swanky courses, couldn’t wait, even four years, for the payoff. And that is the story of United States v. Robert F. McDonnell and Maureen G. McDonnell.

The petty sleaze is what does it for Amy Davidson:

Like the maddest sort of sex scandal, the greed is both unbounded and imaginatively constrained. A catering bill? Two golf bags? It’s like hearing about a politician sexting or seeing a prostitute and asking oneself, He gave it all up for that? … It’s the sort of scandal that, in all its tackiness, can be an indicator of a deeper mess—a gold Oscar de la Renta canary in the political coal mines.

The McDonnells’ reputations may be ruined, but making the charges stick will be much harder:

It’s all very distasteful. But Bob McDonnell has a strong argument when he says he didn’t do anything illegal. It’s acceptable under Virginia law for politicians to accept gifts, if they are properly reported. And while the McDonnells both did things aimed at helping Williams’ business (such as having a launch party at the mansion and endorsing the supplement), it’s very, very hard to prove there was a quid pro quo. McDonnell did not push legislation to help Williams or, according to the indictment, participate in some direct and obvious payback.

Needless to say, the Republican’s misdeeds contrast pretty strongly with his political positions:

Perhaps another lesson is that fiscal conservatism is a myth for many who spout it most vociferously. The man who campaigned on fiscal-minded sobriety, largely charmed the commonwealth with his soft-spoken political style, and achieved hugely popular reforms on kitchen-table issues—including mass-transit reform, pension reform, and education—was fundamentally incapable of walking the walk when it came to his own life: He successfully governed like a sober fiscal conservative while he opted to live like he was Lord Grantham.

Which Alec MacGillis thinks hurt the Republican brand:

[I]t’s precisely McDonnell’s remaking of himself into a pro-business conservative that makes his indictment on federal corruption charges so potentially damaging to the Republican Party. The party’s establishment leaders, and their associated boosters in the conservative press and think tankery, have tried hard to differentiate responsible, business-minded Republicans who care only about cutting taxes and blocking the expansion of Medicaid from Paleolithic social-issues conservatives like Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock who prattle on about “legitimate rape” and pregnancies from rape being “something that God intended to happen.”

Mark Kleiman believes the lesson here is about the American obsession with wealth and status:

One of the many problems that flows from increasing inequality of income and wealth is that the standards of the rich become the ruling standards. Mrs. McDonnell obviously felt that she would be disgraced if she appeared at her husband’s inaugural ball in the sort of dress an honest public servant’s wife could afford, when all the fundraisers’ wives – to say nothing of the female fundraisers – would be wearing a large fraction of the median annual household income. Does that excuse her committing extortion to get an Oscar de la Renta dress? Of course not. But it testifies to a corruption of manners that goes far deeper than corruption in office.

A Tuned-Up Bike

The mechanics of the above audio:

It’s hard to believe that all of those sounds are made by a bicycle. Some of them are strictly the the byproduct of the bike’s mechanical operation, like the sound it makes when you release a brake lever. Others are created when you play different parts of the bike with a musical accessory.

For example, Johnnyrandom records the low-pitched flutter of a pick scratching on a spinning wheel, and tunes the bicycle’s spokes so he could play them with a bow like a string instrument. After capturing the sounds with a portable recorder, the different sounds were arranged and sequenced using software.

A short video on the artist’s process here.