Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 40

A Short Story For Saturday

This week’s short story, Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “Job,” was written in 1970 but not translated from Yiddish until 2012, over twenty years after the writer’s death. Here’s how it begins:

Being a writer for a Yiddish newspaper means wasting half the workday on people who come to request advice or simply to argue. The manager, Mr. Raskin, tried several times to bring this custom to an end but failed repeatedly. Readers had each time broken in by force. Others warned that they would picket the editorial office. Hundreds of protest letters arrived in the mail.

In one case, the person in question didn’t even knock. He threw open the door and before me I saw a tiny man wearing a black coat that was too long and too wide, a pair of loose-hanging gray pants that seemed ready to fall off at any moment, a shirt with an open collar and no tie, and a small black spot-stained hat poised high over his brow. Patches of black and white hair sprouted over his sunken cheeks, crawling all the way down to the bottom of his neck. His protruding eyes—a mixture of brown and yellow—looked at me with open mockery. He spoke with the singsong of Torah study:

“Just like this? Without a beard? With bared head? Considering your scribbling, I thought that you sit here covered in prayer shawl and phylacteries like the Vilna Gaon—forgive the comparison—and that between each sentence you immerse yourself in a ritual bath. Oh, I know, I know, for you little writers religion is just a fashion. One has to give the ignorant readers what they truly desire.”

Read the rest here. Interested readers might also check out his Collected Stories. Peruse previous SSFSs here.

Publishing The Torture Report

The small independent publisher Melville House has done it, turning “a five-hundred-and-twenty-eight-page PDF with the slanted margins and blurred resolution of a Xerox made by a myopic high-school Latin teacher” into a more readable text. Alexandra Schwartz, who stopped by the publisher’s offices, offers a glimpse into the process:

“There’s a lot of reasons why this is insane,” [Melville House co-founder Dennis] Johnson said. “We’ve basically shut down the company to do this at the busiest time of the year.” The cost of printing alone, he estimated, would run to six figures, a lot of money for such a small, if scrappy, operation to risk. There’s also the possibility that Americans may feel that a book detailing the chronic and grotesque abuses of its government is not in keeping with the Joy to the World spirit. As Johnson put it, “Torture isn’t something you want to carry over the holiday season.”

Still, Johnson has faith in the power of the book as a physical object—“You can still read the first book ever printed, the Gutenberg Bible. I’ve seen it. It still works! The binding has held up!”—and in the power of the written word to move the masses to action. “They really were reading that at Valley Forge,” he said, of Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense.” “They really did sell a hundred thousand copies of that in what was then a tiny little country. That’s probably the equivalent of—” he paused to do a mental calculation. “Tens of millions of copies today. It really did inspire people to go into revolution!”

The manuscript of the torture report was due to the printer at nine the next morning, a start-to-finish turnaround of less than seventy-two hours. A dozen full-time employees, plus a smattering of freelance proofreaders, copy-editors, interns, and volunteers sat at computers, retyping the government PDF’s tangle of text into Microsoft Word files. Melville House’s office was once a warehouse, and a nose-to-the-grindstone atmosphere—part college library, part North Pole workshop—pervaded the space.

Adam Chandler paid them a visit as well, noting the employees there couldn’t resist giving the report a literary spin:

Place the material before a group of literary minds, and a discourse begins. The report’s reference to Grayson Swigert and Hammond Dunbar, the pseudonyms of the CIA’s contract psychologists who were paid $81 million to help create the interrogation program, recalled “Thomas Pynchon names,” according to some of those gathered.

Other passages in the text were reminiscent of “a John le Carré novel,” “an Oscar Wilde story,” and “a really boring porno.” (The delirious team of about 15 employees and volunteers, which had been working on the project more or less without rest since Tuesday, found this last remark hilarious.)

The report’s linguistic flourishes were noted. “He sang like a tweetie bird. He opened up right away and was cooperative from the outset,” one quote read. One official repeatedly referred to the detainees as “yahoos.”

The first printing of 50,000 sold out in one day, and the publisher is preparing a reprint.

Chess Match Of The Day

Dan Colman explains:

In a pretty neat project, Scott Kildall has looked back at records of Duchamp’s chess matches and created a computer program that lets you play against a “Duchampian ghost.” Just click here, and then click on the chess piece you want to move. It will turn green, and then you can move it with your trackpad/mouse. Enjoy.

Step By Snowy Step

Last February, Sonja Hinrichsen and 60 snowshoe-equipped volunteers patterned the above piece of land art, Snow Drawings at Catamount Lake, in Colorado. She passed along a slightly edited version of a recent interview she gave to My Modern Met:

Your pieces can be destroyed within days, weeks, or even hours, so there’s a really interesting sense of temporality or ephemerality about them, isn’t there?

It could snow the next night, and it’s all gone. Snowdrifts are a big issue in some areas, too. I’ve done some pieces in Wyoming which was tricky because there’s so much wind and the snow is so light, and dry. So the snow drifts and simply fills in the footsteps. There was a situation where I was working alone and, looking back, realized that it was all going away as fast as I was creating it. There are a lot of challenging elements with this work: there has to be enough snow to cover the landscape completely, and also the snow has to be right. If it’s too fluffy it’s difficult.

When we created the piece in Colorado in 2013 it had been snowing for three days in a row right before we started. So there was a lot of fresh snow on top of the lake. It didn’t have time to settle before we went out there. So it was hard work, because even with snowshoes – which are supposed to keep you on top of the snow – we were sinking in knee-deep. It was quite a workout, and I was worried my volunteers would not stay for very long. But they were so enthusiastic and the piece came together really well. It was amazing. Had the conditions been easier, maybe we would have covered the entire lake, but with the conditions as they were, we were still able to create a pretty impressive piece.

See more of Hinrichsen’s work here.

Reading Into Reading Campaigns

Emmett Rensin and David Shor criticize public efforts – like Hillary Clinton’s Too Small to Fail campaign – that suggest reading to your kids will make them smarter. They explain why their preferred method of educational reform is simply “called ‘giving money to people'”:

Here’s a story about Norway. On August 21, 1969, massive oil reserves were discovered under Norway’s sovereign waters in the North Sea. Previously poor regions became suddenly wealthy as the petroleum boom–later bolstered by a natural gas discovery–poured new income into the region. But the wealth wasn’t spread evenly—not every Norwegian in the north could get in on the action. Suddenly there were the makings of a great natural experiment (PDF). Researchers wanted to see what the impact of sudden cash infusions–a significant environmental change–had on previously poor students, as compared with their still-impoverished peers. The influx of money bested almost every other popular solution to the education gap: students in suddenly-well-off families saw an average of 3 percent increase in absolute IQ and a 6 percent increase in college attendance. The results were as good as the best American charter schools at a fraction of the cost and logistical hassle.

Another set of circumstances conspired to demonstrate the same principle in the United States. During the course of a long longitudinal study, the calculation of the Earned Income Tax Credit–an essentially unconditional cash transfer to poor parents–changed several times, allowing researchers to plot the causal achievement impact of cash transfers on a curve of multiple benefit levels (PDF). These results were even more significant: for a mere $3,000 given annually to the parents of poor children, the data suggests a 7 percent increase in expected student test scores. That’s a relatively low number, too: $8,000 annually wouldn’t double the impact, but it would get us well clear of 10 percent, and still cost less than comparable alternatives. Other studies back up the same thesis, though they don’t quite have the same fun stories.

The Best Poems From The Year

[Re-posted from December 22. Today is the last day to take advantage of The Poetry Society of America’s holiday membership drive. Please consider supporting their work here. Review all of our poetry picks from 2014 here.]

There isn’t another political or current affairs blog I know of that has poems suddenly poking up all over the place. It’s one of the things I’m proudest of here at the Dish – because it makes the implicit point that wisdom comes in many guises and that there are more ways to understand life than explainer-journalism. All of this is very fine and dandy in theory, but none of it would be possible in practice without our Poetry Editor, Alice Quinn. In the world of poetry, Alice is a legend. Her impeccable taste and depth of knowledge, her passion for the form, and her dedication to its survival and its necessity are the stuff of literary lore. And sometimes it seems not only that she knows a poet’s work, but that she actually knows him or her, and is or was a friend. So when I think of how we can sustain the kind of culture that the now-dying liberal arts magazines once did, I hope the integration of poetry into blogging is one small sally into the prevailing winds.

Alice was Knopf’s poetry editor from 1976 – 1986 and the New Yorker’s poetry editor for the next twenty years, and is now the executive director of the Poetry Society of America. And, every Christmas, we invite our poetry-loving readers to express their appreciation by joining the Society. This year, they are running a special year-end membership campaign from now until January 2nd. While supplies last, anyone who joins at the basic membership level gets a signed, limited-edition broadside of “Frogs” by Gerald Stern with an extra $10 donation. Any donation is tax-deductible – and for a short time, you also get a beautiful broadside in the bargain.

Sign up for your membership here.

Taking A Stand On The Can, Ctd

A reader responds to our recent post on bathroom graffiti:

Oh, I think you’ve started a whole new thread here. My personal favorite, from an old-style English public convenience: “Here I sit broken-hearted; paid a penny and only farted.”

Another sends the above photo: “Here is my favorite from a mirror at Telegraph Beer Garden in Oakland, from ‘parents'”. Another reader:

Do I have what it takes to turn this one into a thread? Let’s find out. I want to add another dimension to why people scrawl bathroom graffiti, which is group identity.

When I’m in the bathroom at a trendy or well-known bar or club, I often notice a big difference in tone and quality of the wall scrawling, compared to the average truck stop or gas station. Jokes that are actually funny, bits of poetry, or even running conversations are much easier to find. It seems like patrons want to demonstrate the value of their establishment in the kinds of things they write. Sometimes the jokes are so good that I wonder if some of the paid staff were instructed to write them to contribute to ambience.

Spontaneous case in point: at my small, very bookish liberal arts college, someone penned, in the grout between the tiles above a urinal, a pun playing off of the word “grout.” Other students found this so delightful that they started contributing additional grout puns along other parts of the grout. “Grout Expectations,” “The Grout Books,” etc. After a few years of many people adding more puns, it got to the point where you had to be very lucky, or have a very full bladder, to successfully think of a new one before your purpose at the urinal was spent.

Eventually, the grout puns spread to other men’s rooms on campus. I never discussed these puns aloud with anyone at school, but it was clear that all of the male students knew about them and that many of us contributed at one point or another. (I never found out if they spread to the women’s rooms.) How can one explain this popular, leaderless explosion of puns on the unlikely word “grout”? How else but that it nicely conformed with our self-conception as a student body of being clever, non-conforming nerds who read too many books?

Face Of The Day

A Pakistani Hindu groom wears a traditional cap at a mass-wedding ceremony in Karachi on January 2, 2015. Some 50 Hindu couples participated in the mass-marriage ceremony organised by the Pakistan Hindu Council. By Asif Hassan/AFP/Getty Images.

Do Cops Treat Blacks And Whites Equally? Ctd

A reader close to the question responds:

Of course there are racist cops – there are racists in every profession – but I don’t think cops as a whole are more racist than other professionals. As a white male cop, I’ve been accused of being a racist by black people and Hispanics and of reverse racism by whites.

On multiple occasions I’ve pulled black people over because their brakes lights, taillights, or headlights are out; it’s one of the more common reasons to stop someone. Most times you are following the car and don’t even know the race or sex of the driver. On several occasions, after explaining why they’ve been stopped, they tell me what a racist I am and they know their lights work. When that happens, and if it’s safe, I’ll have them exit their car and show them which light(s) is out. Even after I prove I’m not racially profiling, they insist I’m still a racist.

One of those times involved a black cop from Camden, NJ.

Every single one of his rear lights was out and he thought I was a racist for stopping him. Once, before I was even a cop, I was shopping at Target, browsing the DVD section. There was a middle-aged black man in the same area. After a few minutes we both walked away. About 5 minutes later, I happened to find myself near the same man browsing the electronics section. Apparently the man assumed I was store security and was purposely following him because he was black. He approached me, made a comment I no longer remember, and left the store angry.

Finally, I once stopped an older white male for multiple reasons. As soon as I walked up to him, he accused me of stopping him because he was white and saw him as a chance to raise money for the town through tickets. He was irate and told me I should stop real crimes.

The truth is, people perceive racism when there is none in order to avoid taking responsibility for their actions. While off duty, I’ve been pulled over at gunpoint and have been treated like crap and yelled at for no reason by cops. Every time it was my fault because I had committed a traffic violation.

Why We Mishear Lyrics

Maria Konnikova explains:

Human speech occurs without breaks: when one word ends and another begins, we don’t actually pause to signal the transition. When you listen to a recording of a language that you don’t speak, you hear a continuous stream of sounds that is more a warbling than a string of discernable words. We only learn when one word stops and the next one starts over time, by virtue of certain verbal cues – for instance, different languages have different general principles of inflection (the rise and fall of a voice within a word or a sentence) and syllabification (the stress patterns of syllables) – combined with actual semantic knowledge. …

A common cause of mondegreens, in particular, is the oronym: word strings in which the sounds can be logically divided multiple ways. One version that [Steven] Pinker describes goes like this: Eugene O’Neill won a Pullet Surprise. The string of phonetic sounds can be plausibly broken up in multiple ways – and if you’re not familiar with the requisite proper noun, you may find yourself making an error. In similar fashion, Bohemian Rhapsody becomes Bohemian Rap City. Children might wonder why Olive, the other reindeer, was so mean to Rudolph.

Speaking of mondegreens, or misheard song lyrics, many readers submitted examples of them during our long-running thread on eggcorns:

The classic one is from Purple Haze, where Jimi Hendrix sings “Excuse me while I kiss this guy.” Or Elton John’s famous chorus “Hold me closer, Tony Danza.” Hotel California has that great line about the “warm smell of fajitas, rising up through the air.” And I swear in the Rush song “Free Will,” Geddy Lee sings “You can choose a bathysphere. I will choose free will.”

I’m sure some of your readers can find a few more.

To say the least:

My favorite is my aunt Anne’s version of a Beatles refrain: “She’s got a tic in her eye/she’s got a tic in her eye/she’s got a tic in her eye/and SHE DON’T CARE!”

Another:

Whenever someone slipped up in our house, we just sang the Rolling Stones hit: “I’ll never leave your pizza burning.”

Another:

I suppose I was fantasizing about threesomes when I heard the line from The Young Rascals’ “Groovin'” that goes “life will be ecstasy/you and me endlessly” as “you and me and Leslie.”

Another:

As a longtime radio DJ, I have a lifetime of mondegreens from our request line. For example: “Hey, man, let’s hear some Kiss, ‘I Wanna Rock & Roll All Night, And Part Of Every Day!'”

And I recall reading in Art Linkletter’s book Kids Say The Darndest Things that he heard a child singing “God Bless America” that included, ” … stand beside her, and guide her, through the night with a light from a bulb.”

Another

My cousin Erika thought that “America the Beautiful” was about her. (She’s now a speech and language pathologist. Funny how that works.)

Another from that song:

“O beautiful for spaceship guys…”

Another patriotic tune:

The last line of the Star Spangled Banner starts “O’er the land of the free”, yet almost everybody sings it, “for the land of the free”. The line refers to the flag (which is the point of the song) flying OVER (poetically contracted) the land of the free and home of the brave, not flying for it. Get it right people; it’s the National Anthem for goodness sake!

And another:

In my elementary school we sometimes sang “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” in the mornings along with the Pledge of Allegiance. I always thought the “of thee I sing” part was “of the icing”, as in the icing on the cake.

From Down Under:

I’m reminded of a line in Australia’s national anthem, which goes “Our land abounds in nature’s gifts.” My dad always sang, “Our land abounds in nature strips”. In Australian English, that’s the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the road, which you find all over suburbia.

Another cautions:

If you value your sanity, do not get sucked into the “mishearing” mire. In the San Francisco Bay Area where I used to live, we had a columnist who started writing about mondegreens several years back, and after inviting reader submissions, it quickly degenerated into what has become an annual bacchanalia of really bad puns. Be forewarned!

This will probably be the only batch of reader submissions we’ll post, since a thread on misheard song lyrics would be never-ending flood to the in-tray. But here’s one more:

In Winter Wonderland, I thought the line “we’ll conspire as we dream by the fire” was “we’ll perspire as we dream by the fire.”

Lastly, a reader looks to the origin of the word:

The mondegreen takes its name from the misheard last line of a 17th century ballad, where the last two lines are “They hae slain the Earl o’ Moray, And laid him on the green”, but an American author heard “They hae slain the Earl o’ Moray, And Lady Mondegreen.” There’s a great Wiki discussion of the term here. And there are billions of entertaining examples here.