Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 404

The Great Pub Purge

London has lost 1,300 of the iconic taverns over the past decade. Feargus O’Sullivan explores why:

Lying at the heart of some of Britain’s most expensive neighborhoods, these pubs were always sitting ducks for developers. But it’s not only the comet-like rise of London residential property values that is causing the disappearances. While the smoking ban and high beer taxes haven’t helped, it’s actually the pub industry’s tough practices that are giving local boozers the greatest problems.

Under the British system, the pub “landlord” (in British pub terminology, this actually means a manager that rents a premises, rather than an owner) must buy their booze from the company they rent the pub from. With no competition, the prices they pay are generally inflated, meaning that even if landlords trim their profit margins, beer still comes out pricier than it otherwise needs to be. While pub companies turn a profit, individual landlords are pushed to the wall. The pub companies then sell off under-performing premises, even though pubs wouldn’t actually be unsustainable if landlords got a better deal.

Admittedly, this pressure has thinned out some dead wood. …. But now the lure of residential property profits is so great that not even landmark pubs are safe from the wave of closures. Indeed, the high ceilings and quirky historic fixtures of old pubs in general are just the sort of thing that make property speculators drool. Pub conversions are all over London now – you can find them for sale, for rent, even on Airbnb.

Previous Dish on the decline of English pubs here. A long thread on American pubs here.

(Photo: London’s now-shuttered Prince of Wales pub is set to be replaced by a Tesco. By Jon Curnow)

Growing A Legal Market

Keeping tabs on Colorado’s newfangled marijuana industry isn’t an easy task:

Savvy business owners know that keeping an eye on the pot is about much more than merely complying with state law. Diligence discourages employee theft, pinpoints choke points in production procedures, and helps calibrate inventory to consumer demand. As [Pure Medical Dispensary owner Frank] Quattrone puts it, “You want to know where your assets are.”

Still, [Hank] Hasler [who enforces marijuana growing regulations] believes it’ll be a while before every Colorado marijuana business operates like Quattrone’s. “Right now, I am seeing less enforcement than I expected,” he says. He’s seen marijuana operations with no business records whatsoever other than a moldy stack of harvest sheets, a pot shop illicitly growing its product on the roof of a strip mall, and a grower who insisted all she had to list on her product labels for cultivation ingredients, as required by law, were “sunshine and love.”

Martin Lewis, who has a piece on the environmental problems with marijuana farming, wishes growers used more sunshine:

Growing sun-loving plants in buildings under artificial suns is the height of environmental and economic lunacy. Outdoors, the major inputs—light and air—are free. Why then do people pay vast amounts of money to grow cannabis indoors, regardless of the huge environmental toll and the major financial costs? The reasons are varied. Outdoor cultivation is climatically impossible or unfeasible over much of the country. Everywhere, the risk of detection is much reduced for indoor operations. Indoor crops can also be gathered year-round, whereas outdoor harvests are an annual event. But the bigger spur for artificially grown cannabis appears to be consumer demand. As noted in a Huffington Post article “indoor growers … produce the best-looking buds, which command the highest prices and win the top prizes in competitions.” In California’s legal (or quasi-legal) medical marijuana dispensaries, artificially grown cannabis enjoys a major price advantage, due largely to the more uniformly high quality of the product.

(Photo by David McNew/Getty Images)

Choosing To Use?

Theodore Dalrymple argues that addiction isn’t a disease:

To take only one point among many: most addicts who give up do so without any medical assistance—and most addicts do give up. Moreover, they do so at an early age. The proximate cause of their abstinence is their decision to be abstinent. No one can decide not to have rheumatoid arthritis, say, or colon cancer. Sufferers from those diseases can decide to cooperate or not with treatment, but that is another matter entirely. Therefore, there is a category difference between addiction and real disease.

The pretense that a non-disease is a disease may actually hinder people from deciding to behave better: they will instead wait for their medical savior, as Estragon waits for Godot. Whether this hope is justified or not, the pretense will certainly involve much public expense, just as would fitting out an expedition to discover unicorns somewhere in the world.

To treat addicts as people to whom something has happened rather than as people who have decided to do something is to infantilize them. It is another small step in the transformation of the population into wards of government.

A doctor in the comments section pushes back:

I understand the frustration with categorizing a choice-based malady with other conditions that seem to occur for now reason. But as a doctor, I see lots of people with diabetes, hypertension, or cancer that was caused by their choices.

Drug abuse and addiction are simply on the continuum of diseases, whether self-induced or otherwise. True, rheumatoid arthritis is good old-fashioned all-American disease, but drug abuse, while less pure, still encompasses all the standard attributes of disease. The issue is that due to neurochemical changes caused by the initial exposure to, say, methamphetamine, the victim may lose the ability for further decision making. Thus they induced an essentially incurable disease state in themselves. Calling it a disease helps when it comes to the science of studying it and trying to provide the afflicted with better tools to fight it.

Another commenter:

Dr. Dalrymple. I”ve read most of your books and many of you articles, and I agree with all of them except this one. When you see the destructive power of addiction among both rich and poor, educated and uneducated, and the powerlessness of otherwise intelligent people, it’s hard for me to understand how you view this as essentially a “will power” issue. You’re wildly off base. I’m very disappointed. This is a wholly unsupported thesis. No facts or numbers to justify your rash claim. Highly unusual for you.

But an addiction counselor agrees with Dalrymple:

I retired after spending 25 years counseling alcoholics and drug addicts. IMHO, advances in neuroscience show that there is definitely a physiological component to substance abuse. There are some people who just like doing drugs and alcohol and have no desire to quit, but they are a definite minority. There is a another definite minority who do quit and make it stick, they do not relapse. Then there is the large majority who want to quit but keep relapsing. Some of that may be that they are too lazy to follow a treatment regimen, but for most of these people the problem is that they come from family and social backgrounds that are not supportive of their efforts to stay clean and sober. And no medical intervention can cure laziness or a dysfunctional family/social environment. So government efforts to treat addiction like a physical disease are doomed to failure. But this will only be apparent much useless expenditure of the taxpayers’ hard earned money.

Previous Dish on addiction here and here.

Mental Health Break

Another under-appreciated Christmas carol:

How Fiction Evolves

Is “keeping the brand alive” bad for books? Esther Bintliff contemplates the pros and cons of literary franchises:

[M]ost of us like to think that writers create something unique, that characters belong to the authors who created them. We can feel cynical about the financial interests lined up behind literary franchises and spin-offs. Yet the phenomenon of characters outliving their authors has been around for a long time. The foundations of literature itself, after all, are in iterative storytelling. By the time Homer came to write The Iliad, “he was writing it for an audience that already knew the story,” says Marina Warner, professor of literature at the University of Essex. “So I think the actual stratagem [of franchises] is an ancient way of approaching stories; you have a rapport with your audience before you even start, you don’t have to establish the characters. And then, when you take a step that is unexpected or that springs a surprise, that can be very pleasurable for the audience.”

Warner points to the character of Odysseus as an ancient, untethered version of a modern franchise character like James Bond. “Odysseus turns up again and again, until he reaches a modern apotheosis in James Joyce’s Ulysses, as the common man. It’s a step that some characters take, like Frankenstein or the creature – they sort of walk out of the book and take on this extra dimension, that allows them to live on.” For Warner, whether a protagonist outlives their original author is not just a financial decision, but hinges on whether the character possess the qualities that allow them to resonate outside their own era.

Face Of The Day

David Rosenberg captions:

At the end of 2012, photographer Ernest Goh collaborated with the Canadian charitable organization, Veterinarians Without Borders (VWB) on a project to vaccinate dogs and cats (and one monkey) against rabies. Goh traveled with VWB to roughly two to three villages daily in rural Laos to document the process that invited pet owners to receive the rabies vaccination free of charge. After the vaccination process, Goh invited the owners to pose for a portrait with their pets. From the images, he created a series titled simply “Pet Owners of Laos.”

(Photo by Ernest Goh.  See more of his work here and here.)

A Short Story For Saturday

The opening paragraph of Anton Chekhov’s 1889 story “The Bet“:

It was a dark autumn night. The old banker was walking up and down his study and remembering how, fifteen years before, he had given a party one autumn evening. There had been many clever men there, and there had been interesting conversations. Among other things they had talked of capital punishment. The majority of the guests, among whom were many journalists and intellectual men, disapproved of the death penalty. They considered that form of punishment out of date, immoral, and unsuitable for Christian States. In the opinion of some of them the death penalty ought to be replaced everywhere by imprisonment for life. “I don’t agree with you,” said their host the banker. “I have not tried either the death penalty or imprisonment for life, but if one may judge a priori, the death penalty is more moral and more humane than imprisonment for life. Capital punishment kills a man at once, but lifelong imprisonment kills him slowly. Which executioner is the more humane, he who kills you in a few minutes or he who drags the life out of you in the course of many years?”

Peruse a collection of Chekhov’s short stories here. Previous SSFSs here.

Last-Minute Christmas Shopping: Give The Gift Of The Dish! Ctd

[Re-posted from earlier today]

A reader gets in the spirit:

Hooray on being able to gift subscriptions! I just bought one for my 73-year-old, former Catholic nun mother who loves your blog and has been following in non-subscriber status. I’m pretty accustomed to hearing her say to me, “Well, here’s what ANDREW said about that”, so this will be a treat for her. I’ve been reading your blog since the start and was one of the immediate subscribers and love it. Now my mom and I will be able to make it an official family activity to dish on The Dish.  Thank you for all of the awesome stuff that you write. Your long-form piece on Pope Francis made me cry, and I mean in a really, really good way. Happy Christmas in a totally not hathos-causing way.

In case you missed the details: Tinypass, our e-commerce partner, just released an updated version of our gifting service, in time for Christmas. Now you can schedule the delivery of a gift subscription to the day. Just buy it now and have it automatically emailed to your friend or family member on Christmas Day. You can also add a personalized message to the gift email. Just go here to fill out a quick form for a one-year gift subscription – which, remember, is a one-time purchase that won’t recur next year. The price is just $19.99 – or more if you want to give a little extra to the Dish this year. Another gift-giver writes:

I’m a long-time reader and was an early and enthusiastic subscriber, but it wasn’t until I read and listened to the latest Deep Dish that I finally got off my butt to send several gift subscriptions to friends who I know will just LOVE the essay on Pope Francis and the wide-ranging conversation with Dan Savage.  It was really self-interest on my part – this volume of Deep Dish is provoking so many thoughts and ideas that I need smart people to talk to about it all!  What better way, I figured, than to give gift subscriptions to some of my smart, thoughtful friends?  I hope other Dish heads are feeling so inspired – it’s such an easy gift (takes no time at all!), for a friend and for the Dish.

Another:

I’ve just purchased two gift subscriptions. One for my father, one for my brother. These two people are the ones who were most responsible for my own intellectual and worldview development as I was growing up, and I couldn’t be happier to share back with them my favorite daily source of intellectual exercise – the Dish.

And finally, if you’re one of our 35,000 Dishhead free-riders who maxed out the meter but haven’t subscribed yet, why not give yourselves and us a present? Subscribe here for as little as $1.99 a month. Update from a recovering free-rider:

Sigh. I finally gave in, and subscribed today, after resisting right from the beginning of the year – not out of procrastination, but for philosophical reasons. I realised that I’ve been reading The Dish since 2004, that it was one of the blogs that kept me sane during the Bush years, that it helped me adjust to American life significantly (like Andrew, I am a British person born in the early sixties, Oxbridge educated, came to maturity during the Thatcher years, met and fell in love with an American, and moved here ten years ago). Since that time, I’ve read The Dish several times a day, and it’s been one of the bookmarks on my web browser/mobile phone browser that always gets transferred straight away from device to device. And yet I felt unwilling to fork over the modest sum of just under twenty dollars a year when asked to fund the new venture.

Why? Because, wonderful as it is, The Dish’s marvelous commentary is still largely based on stories that originate elsewhere. It’s like the best opinion page on the planet, but if I wasn’t paying for the news sources that dig up those stories in the first place, it didn’t seem right to spend the money on a blog either. Well, one solution is to pay for both, which I have done (New York Times is getting a subscription, too).

The main reason that made me change my mind is, quite simply, Deep Dish. Longer pieces that are related to the blog but more closely resemble magazine journalism, e-books like the Iraq War penance – that is absolutely worth paying for.

Finally, you’ve heard this many times before, but it’s the fact that I don’t always agree with you that keeps me coming back. You’ve created a unique space on the Internet, and I am now happy to contribute a little cash to keep it going.

Cracking Open The Classical Canon

Frank J. Oteri bemoans “the Great Man myth that still permeates classical music and which has also found its way into the new music claiming its lineage from that tradition”:

Until we rid ourselves of the notion that the best music of all time was created by a handful of men who lived an ocean away from us and who all died more than a century before any of us were born, we will never have programming that truly reflects the vast array of musical creativity all around us. It’s the same myth that locks American repertoire out of most programming at opera houses and symphony orchestras as well as music by anyone from anywhere who is currently alive. When a work by someone who is alive, American, or female (or a combination of those attributes) is played, it’s inevitably a single work wedged in between the obligatory performances of works by Great Men.

Some progress:

Sound and Music, the national agency for contemporary music in the United Kingdom, is attempting to make a difference. … Under the leadership of its new Chief Executive, Susanna Eastburn, the organization makes clear in its criteria that “it expects applications to its multiple composer programmes to include women composers and that there would need to be an exceptionally good reason why this was not the case to secure funding.”

(Video: A performance of “Nocturne,” a piece by Lili Boulanger)

Face Of The Day

A meerkat plays with a Christmas present at Hanover Zoo on December 20, 2013. Keepers at the German zoo gave the some of the animals presents containing festive treats. By Nigel Treblin/Getty Images.