Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 382

Moore Award Nominee

“[The extreme conservatives']  problem is not me and democrats, their problem is themselves. Who are they? Are they these extreme conservatives, who are right to life, pro assault weapon, anti-gay, is that who they are? Because if that is who they are, and if they are the extreme conservatives, they have no place in the state of New York. Because that is not who New Yorkers are,” – govern0r Andrew Cuomo, simultaneously illiberal and a gift to the talk radio right.

He has since claimed that his remarks have been “distorted.” But the idea that “pro-life” voters have no place in New York State does not strike me as a distortion, but an insight into the governor’s contempt for those sincerely disagreeing with him over questions to do with abortion.

Where Are All The Black Atheists? Ctd

A reader writes:

Thanks for having the thread on black atheists. I feel like atheism is the third rail of black identity. I have spent most of my life not fitting in neatly with any particular group while getting along well with almost everyone. I’m a black Jamaican immigrant raised by parents who were intellectual and black power-y enough to give both their children African middle names and eschew organized religion. My parents were both raised in religious households but when it came to raising their own children they said they’d “let us decide for ourselves when we grew up.” Suffice it to say, that meant the default context was atheism and, no offense, but religious origin stories are a tough pill to swallow if they haven’t been ingrained long before one develops the capacity for reason.

I almost feel like being an atheist is something I have to hide so people don’t look at me funny.

Being black and atheist has really resulted in feeling fairly alienated from “mainstream” black American culture. I just flat out don’t get, don’t want to get and can’t relate to the level of Christian religiosity that is part and parcel of African-American culture.

That said, I’m not ignorant. I’ve been to black church services and appreciate the role the black church has played in sustaining African-Americans culturally, spiritually, and political throughout a brutal history steeped in white supremacy and black oppression. Still, I am not about that life.

Pretty much none of my close friends slides much past “spiritual” on the religious scale, and I don’t think it’s an accident that of my very closest friends, not one is African-American. I almost feel like a bad black person typing that, even though I know my expression of blackness is just as valid as the “praise Jesus, God is good” version of it. But there’s just so little room for expressing it, it feels taboo.

Long story long, what I’m trying to say is thank you for providing a venue for me to express myself and for showing me enough other people like me to normalize my experience. Like the attorney in the piece said, we need more images in popular culture – like a black atheist version of Will & Grace – to expand the perception of what blackness includes.

Quote For The Day

“To my infinite regret, we never asked anyone knowledgeable enough about transgender issues to help us either (a) improve the piece, or (b) realize that we shouldn’t run it. That’s our mistake — and really, my mistake, since it’s my site. So I want to apologize. I failed. More importantly, I realized over the weekend that I didn’t know nearly enough about the transgender community – and neither does my staff. I read Caleb’s piece a certain way because of my own experiences in life. That’s not an acceptable excuse; it’s just what happened,” – Bill Simmons, new media pioneer, editor-in-chief of Grantland.

For a more thorough piece on how those mistakes happened, read … Grantland’s Christina Kahrl.

Simmons’ account of how a piece came to be published is fascinating. (I have a question: is there anyone at Grantland who is gay and might have had a role in reviewing this piece? Being gay does not mean understanding the issues facing transgender people, but it helps a little. Diversity does have a point in journalism – and not because of lefty abstractions.) Otherwise, I’m struck by the thoroughness and integrity of the public accounting and the sincerity of the apology. I think it’s way better than would have once happened in legacy media. Because it’s personal and real.

Coding Toys For Girls And Boys

“It seems that the more progress we make toward less rigid gender roles,” observes Susan Bailey after visiting a kids’ toy store, “the more extreme the gender coding of toys becomes”:

The toys were far more color coded than four decades ago. Back then bikes, trucks, airplanes and even dolls sported a wide range of bright colors—red, green, yellow as well as shades of blue and rose.  The pink/lavender vs. black/dark navy dichotomy is a division that, among other things, probably helps sales. Teach children and parents the color-code and you double your market.  What little brother will want to settle for his big sister’s pink tricycle?

Earlier this month, C.J. Pascoe and Tristan Bridges argued that “the denunciation of all things pink should not really be our primary focus if we want to move toward a more gender equal world for girls and boys”:

The focus on the push back against pink and, by extension, princess culture is especially surprising when one looks at what is for sale in the boys’ aisle.

Take the first category of offerings for boys at the Toys R Us website for example – action figures laden with a variety of weapons who are designed to defeat the bad guys.  The closest offering for girls is a dolls category – featuring Barbies, the Little Mermaid, and Strawberry Shortcake. None of them are warriors.  None of them have weapons. We see a similar difference even when looking at the exact same category: Girl’s Building Sets vs. Boy’s Building Sets. Girls apparently build houses, salons… and the occasional bridge. Boys? They build Super Star Destroyers and Monster Fighter Vampyre Castle… and the occasional bridge.  To be clear, the “pink aisle” of toy stores is deeply problematic. It encourages a narrow range of passive, primarily family-oriented and appearance-obsessed femininities.  But, as the toys on the (digital and physical) shelves indicate, we are encouraging equally restrictive and arguably more dangerous masculinities -  warriors, space fighters, and ninjas.

Rebecca Hains joins the discussion, saying she’d “like to see a movement that … challenges marketers to put an end to the incessant pink-washing”:

By “pink-washing,” I’m specifically referring to the instances where marketers or toy makers create a product that is pink for no reason other than to make it as girly as possible. After all, there’s nothing wrong with pink–it’s a perfectly nice color–but there IS something wrong when it’s a) promoting sex role stereotypes and b) basically the only color found in little girls’ worlds. They deserve a full rainbow of colors. …

The Let Toys Be Toys movement is doing terrific work challenging the status quo in the UK. By calling for toys to be desegregated–grouped by theme or interest type, rather than by gender—they’re empowering parents and children to think outside of the pink and blue boxes that marketers have been placing children into. I’d really love to see a comparable movement here in the U.S. and Canada.

(Photo of gender toy divide in Toys “R” Us by Brian Sawyer)

In Defense Of The 8-Hour Workday

Noting its disappearance among tech workers, Nathan Pensky advocates a return to form:

Since the “digital revolution” (we really need a better term), many entrepreneurs have adopted irregular hours. A concept sometimes cited in tech entrepreneur circles asserts that people are most productive and creative working according to Ultradian rhythms, in three-hour blocks, with a half-hour rest in between. Another popular concept, pioneered by Hungarian psychology professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, known as “Flow,” describes optimal working conditions as a measure of attention. An interesting aspect of both of these concepts is that they designate how workers are most productive, not necessarily what workers need to be healthy. …

But isn’t the 8-hour day based on an arbitrary number? Perhaps. But the need for limitations on work hours has never more apparent. And it’s not just tech. According to a 2009 survey by the Harvard Business Review, 94 percent of professionals surveyed worked at least 50 hours a week or more. And the 2013 State of the American Workplace report conducted by Gallup found that up to 70 percent of the American workforce feels unengaged (read: demotivated and unsatisfied). Acknowledgement of the importance of the 8-hour workday, or at least some sort of limitation on work time, is not some ploy for lazy people, nor even one for compassion, really. It’s a humanist argument for productivity within the boundaries of reality.

Tracking Feathered Foes

Aviation experts are turning to radar to prevent bird strikes like the one that brought down Flight 1549 into the Hudson River five years ago:

America’s Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) reports that there are about 10,000 such strikes a year to the country’s non-military aircraft, costing more than $957 million in damage and delays. The worldwide figure is estimated by the European Space Agency to be $1.2 billion. Moreover, though relatively few people have been killed in accidents caused by bird strikes (research by John Thorpe, former chairman of the International Bird Strike Committee, recorded 242 deaths between 1912 and 2004), the potential for something horrible to happen is real. …

At the moment, attempts to deal with the problem mostly involve efforts to cull flocks of the larger species – geese in particular – in the vicinity of airports, and also the use of bird scarers to try to drive off those actually sitting near runways. As the figures suggest, these approaches do not work well. There may, however, be a better way.

For a decade or more the air forces of several countries have used radar to track birds which might threaten their aircraft. Now, similar systems are being considered for civilian airports. If they work, the old methods of trying to scare birds away, or cull them, can be abandoned.

The longest-running study of the use of radar to prevent bird strikes was started three decades ago, in Israel, by Yossi Leshem of Tel Aviv University. It has helped the Israeli air force reduce the number of strikes it suffers by two-thirds. Dr. Leshem began his research using a mixture of powered gliders, drones, ground-based bird watchers and radar to build up data on the flocks that migrate over Israel in the spring and autumn. From these observations he has worked out the meanings of different sorts of radar blips, and can thus tell what is going on ornithologically from radar alone. The upshot is a system which can follow individual birds that weigh as little as ten grams and are as far away as 20 kilometers (12 miles). He can track birds the size of pelicans and geese at a distance of 90 kilometers (56 miles). Moreover, knowledge of the weather, and of how birds have behaved in previous years, allows him to predict what they will do next, so aircraft can be routed above them.

(Photo of US Airways Flight 1549 by Dan Iggers)

Rethinking Our Roads

Eric Jaffe highlights Marlon Boarnet’s argument that “that the Interstate Highway System should have been two distinct systems: one running between cities, and another running within them”:

Boarnet argues that one branch of the Interstate Highway System should have been reserved entirely for intercity roads. These would be highways running through remote areas with cheap land and sparse populations, so it would make sense to prioritize traffic flow and vehicle capacity. Paying for this branch with a pooled fuel tax would also make sense, because the benefits of low-cost transport and trade redound on everyone.

The other branch of the system would be made up of intracity roads, those running within the city limits. Given the high cost of land and density of population in cities, creating sufficient road capacity and swift vehicle flow would become a pipe dream, so the wiser aim would be transport balance. The logical way to finance these roads, given the great demand for space on them, would be with direct user fees — ideally priced to reduce congestion.

The two systems could even be governed separately. A national authority could oversee the intercity system, deciding on route location and managing maintenance programs. Meanwhile, the intracity system could be organized by metropolitan authorities capable of designing the network to fit local needs. Some level of coordination would be needed at the city limits, of course, but that partnership should give both systems equal importance.

The View From Your Window

Toronto, Ontario, 5.14 pm

A Sense Of Scents

Jessica Love observes “something of a lexical void when it comes to words for smells” in English.  She notes a new study that compares English with Jahai, a language spoken among certain Malaysian groups:

The researchers confirmed the Jahai olfactory lexicon by comparing the performances of Jahai speakers and English speakers on two different tasks: color-naming and scent-naming. Color-naming required individuals to describe 80 different colored chips as best they could, while scent-naming required them to sniff odors extracted from lemons, turpentine, smoke, and the like, and do the same. As a group, the English speakers all tended to agree—and pithily—on color terms, just as we’d expect given how strongly color terms are encoded in English. But they were stumped by scents, offering disagreeing, and long-winded, responses. Jahai speakers, on the other hand, experienced much less difficulty describing the odors, finding them just as codable as colors (though interestingly, they showed poorer agreement on color terms than English the speakers did).

Ben Thomas :

Just as English has precise color terms like “mauve” and “cerulean,” Jahai has highly precise terms for smells – such as cŋεs, “the smell of petrol, smoke and bat droppings,” itpɨt, “the smell of durian fruit, Aquillaria wood, and bearcat,” pʔus “a musty smell, like old dwellings, mushrooms and stale food,” and plʔεŋ, “a bloody smell that attracts tigers.” English speakers, meanwhile, tended to rely on broader smell terms like “smoky,” “sweet,” “piney” and so on.

An Unsettling Bestseller

Mein Kampf is rising to the top of e-book bestseller lists:

Mein Kampf hasn’t made The New York Times nonfiction chart since its U.S. release in 1939, the same year Germany invaded Poland, and its print sales have fallen steadily ever since. But with a flood of new e-book editions, Hitler’s notorious memoir just clocked a banner digital year. One 2012 English-language version is currently the number one Propaganda & Political Psychology book on Amazon. Another digital selection is a player in the Globalization category. …

The first Kindle edition of Mein Kampf surfaced in late 2008, selling for $1.60. Shortly after that, another version popped up for $1.58 and rocketed up Amazon’s Legal Thrillers chart, then suddenly vanished in March 2009, along with a slightly pricier rival version, after a blogger at CNET acknowledged its burgeoning success. At the time, Amazon did not respond to CNET, which found it “unclear who uploaded the Kindle Edition of Mein Kampf.” Nevertheless, the e-book behemoth removed the virtual versions while continuing to offer a range of cloth and paperback printings, the overwhelming majority of which sold poorly if at all.

Stephanie Butnick wonders about the sudden rise:

For one thing, it’s a lot easier to click open the Kindle version instead of whipping out a print copy of Mein Kampf on the subway.

The book is so notorious, even the most curious readers probably wouldn’t bring it to the checkout counter at Barnes and Noble. As Vocativ points out, the book’s popularity falls in line with the 50 Shades of Grey model: readers are much more likely to stealthily download the online version, just to see what’s inside.

And maybe it’s time they did. The book itself, published a decade before World War II, is frighteningly frank about Hitler’s plans. In it, Hitler details his intentions to eliminate the Jews, also suggesting the German Reich expand by taking some of Russia’s land. As Marc Tracy noted back in 2010, while the book outsold the Bible in Germany as Hitler rose to power, no one seems to have actually taken a look inside.

Jason Heller links the book’s resurgence to a new study that suggests there’s a formula for successful books:

Thankfully, literature is not a science. Yet the writing and selling of literature increasingly is. Thanks to a proliferation of analytics, it’s easier than ever for publishers to track, graph, and therefore do their desperate best to predict market trends. Judged on that cold scale of downloaded units, Mein Kampf—which has come roaring back recently thanks to a high volume of e-book sales—might now be considered a good book.

I won’t go so far as to say that reducing the richness of books to ones and zeroes, and then judging them on such a scale, is tantamount to literary eugenics. But it does raise a question about what it means for a book to be formulaic, and whether that’s a good or bad thing. Or whether those kinds of questions even mean anything anymore.