Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 408

The Paradox Of Appearing Colorblind

In the above video, professor Michael Norton describes a game designed to evaluate people’s openness when talking about race. The game is similar to the classic “Guess Who?”; a participant picks from a set of 12 faces – six black, six white – and the other participant uses yes/no questions to guess which face his or her partner had in mind:

Even though asking if a person was black or white would eliminate half of the contenders, 57% of people did not mention race.  If the other volunteer was African American, they were even less likely to mention it.  In that scenario, 79% didn’t ask if the face they had in mind was white or black.

They reproduced the experiment with children and found that, while little kids would ask about race, by nine or ten, they’d stopped.  The little kids often beat the older kids at the game, given that race was a pretty good way to eliminate faces.

Interestingly, the people who didn’t mention race were probably trying to appear not racist, but their decision had the opposite effect.  The partners of people who didn’t mention race rated them as more racist than the partners of people who did.  Bringing up race was, in fact, a way to signal comfort with racial difference.

Ask Rick Doblin Anything: Studying Hallucinations

In the latest video from Rick, he explains how scientific methods are used to measure the subjective experiences of subjects on psychedelics:

Rick’s previous videos are here. From his bio:

Rick Doblin, Ph.D., is the founder and executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). He received his doctorate in Public Policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where he wrote his dissertation on the regulation of the medical uses of psychedelics and marijuana and his Master’s thesis on a survey of oncologists about smoked marijuana vs. the oral THC pill in nausea control for cancer patients. His undergraduate thesis at New College of Florida was a 25-year follow-up to the classic Good Friday Experiment, which evaluated the potential of psychedelic drugs to catalyze religious experiences.

His professional goal is to help develop legal contexts for the beneficial uses of psychedelics and marijuana, primarily as prescription medicines but also for personal growth for otherwise healthy people, and eventually to become a legally licensed psychedelic therapist. He founded MAPS in 1986, and currently resides in Boston with his wife and three children.

Our extensive coverage of the spiritual and therapeutic benefits of psychedelics is here (or, in chronological order, here). Our full Ask Anything archive is here.

Exeunt The Theocons

The modest Vatican shake-up announced today is striking for a couple of reasons. The first is that the arch-conservative American, Raymond Burke, is no longer a member of the Congregation of Bishops, which has great influence on finding the future leaders of the church. Burke is, after Dolan, the most reactionary of the American bishops, and an architect of the very Benedict XVI policy of putting social and sexual issues at the obsessive forefront of the church’s mission. Only last week, he gave an interview to the hardline Catholic EWTN television channel, saying of the new Pope:

“One gets the impression, or it’s interpreted this way in the media, that he thinks we’re talking too much about abortion, too much about the integrity of marriage as between one man and one woman. But we can never talk enough about that.”

Oh yes you can, as the Pope has explicitly said. Burke is, like Benedict, a fan of ornate vestments and has aired the possibility of denying communion to politicians who do not follow to the letter the hierarchy’s views on faith and morals. It seems to me that the latter is one reason for his being sidelined. If you want to know why, read Evangelii Gaudium, section 47:

The Church is called to be the house of the Father, with doors always wide open. One concrete sign of such openness is that our church doors should always be open, so that if someone, moved by the Spirit, comes there looking for God, he or she will not find a closed door. There are other doors that should not be closed either. Everyone can share in some way in the life of the Church; everyone can be part of the community, nor should the doors of the sacraments be closed for simply any reason. This is especially true of the sacrament which is itself “the door”: baptism. The Eucharist, although it is the fullness of sacramental life, is not a prize for the perfect but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak.

The second reason for this shake-up being notable is an absence. Where is Cardinal Dolan? How odd is it that the Cardinal of New York is basically a non-entity in Francis’ church. Francis has picked another American, Seán Patrick O’Malley, to be part of his new council of eight global cardinals, and has also picked Archbishop Wuerl, a pragmatist in Washington DC, for the Congregation of Bishops. Dolan? Nowhere to be seen.

Know hope.

Beyoncé’s Marketing Minimalism

Last Friday, Beyoncé stunned her fans and even the music industry by dropping her new album exclusively on iTunes for download, selling 80,000 copies within three hours and reportedly causing the online store to crash. In the first three days, sales hit 800,000. Angela Watercutter considers what Beyonce’s brilliant move means for the future:

She announced the album, posted a “Surprise!” on Instagram and gave fans enough material to keep them busy for days. Then she dropped the mic. Thanks to whatever death-to-snitches plan she had in place, word of the album never got out and nothing leaked. Even the NSA can’t keep a secret that well. In the annals of minimal-marketing marketing, it was a pretty smart move, particularly for an artist who is obsessively discussed on social media but engages with it selectively. (She has pretty active Tumblr and Instagram accounts, but hasn’t tweeted to her 13 million followers since August.)

Of course, this wouldn’t work for every artist. Only someone with albums as highly anticipated as Beyoncé’s can do this. Like her husband Jay Z, who can pretty much guarantee one million people will download his album via a Samsung app, she knows people are going to find her record no matter how she promotes it. So why not let everyone else spread the gospel for you? Or, as one smart tweet put it, “Beyoncé doesn’t need publicity. Publicity needs Beyoncé.”

It’s all very selfie and instagrammy. And perfect. Claire Suddath notes the precedent set by Radiohead and David Bowie, who also released music online with minimal promotion:

But there’s a difference between what Radiohead and David Bowie did and what happened today: Beyoncé is still considered a pop star, and pop music relies heavily on the traditional marketing machine sponsored by record labels. The stars begin with a hit single, hopefully follow it up with another hit single, release an album and perform at some heavily watched live event like the Grammys or on American Idol, launch a world tour, and then reap the profit. They leave it to the rock stars and hip-hop artists to experiment with free downloads and unofficial mixtapes.

Beyoncé is changing all that. Her new album doesn’t have an obvious hit single (her last one, 4, didn’t have one, either) but that seems to be by design. Beyoncé is a polished work of electronic-inspired dance pop—peppered with Jay-Z and Blue Ivy cameos—yet it’s made for a listening world dominated by curated playlists rather than preprogrammed, Clear Channel-style broadcasts. This is the work of an artist who’s graduated beyond the usual pop star marketing machine and started making music that’s free of the three-and-a-half minute hook-heavy formula that makes a big hit. And by forcing everyone to pay $15.99 for the album now, she might be more successful because of it.

James West argues that “this may well be one of the most climate-friendly major studio releases yet”:

Purchasing “Beyoncé” on iTunes instead of as a CD could result in a greenhouse-gas-emissions savings of between 40 and 80 percent, according to a 2009 study for Intel and Microsoft by researchers from a group drawn from Carnegie Mellon University, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Stanford.

“I Have Had It With Long-Form Journalism”

So claims James Bennet, editor of The Atlantic. Not actual long-form journalism – just the word:

[I]n the digital age, making a virtue of mere length sends the wrong message to writers as well as readers. For when you don’t have to print words on pages and then bundle the pages together and stick postage stamps on the result, you slip some of the constraints that have enforced excellence (and provided polite excuses for editors to trim fat) since Johannes Gutenberg began printing books. You no longer have to make that agonizing choice of the best example from among three or four—you can freely use them all. More adjectives? Why not? As a writer, I used to complain that my editors would cut out all my great color, just to make the story fit; as an editor, I now realize that, yes, they had to make my stories fit, and, no, that color wasn’t so great. The editors were working to preserve the stuff that would make the story go, to make sure the story earned every incremental word, in service to the reader. Long-form, on the Web, is in danger of meaning “a lot of words.”

This is a particularly ripe moment to rethink our terminology (and I should own up to the fact that I still lapse into using the dreaded term myself) because deeply reported narrative and essayistic journalism is suddenly all the rage. Far from fading away, it shows signs of an energy and imagination not seen since the heyday of New Journalism.

Of course James is right. The word “longform” seems to take one of our pleasures and make it one of our duties. But you can see why it has new luster in our listicled, tweeted age. It’s shorthand for “thoughtful”, for writing that is not just typing, or blogging or tweeting. And there is something newly liberating about that – especially when it is not constrained, as long-form almost always was, by the sharp constraints of print on paper. I would say that about a quarter of my work as an old-style magazine editor was trimming pieces to fit. It was great not to have that distracting obsession any more, as I worked on the latest piece for Deep Dish.

But mere length, as Bobbie Johnson notes, is not a good thing in itself, as any honest reader of the pre-Tina New Yorker would have sometimes told you:

If word count is your only yardstick, then it becomes stupendously easy to write really bad long-form. We’ve all read enough overwrought, overlong pieces to know that length is absolutely no measure of quality.

At the same time, long-form is also attached to a certain form. A lot of this sort of writing adopts a particular tone of voice: a sort of detached, flat, word-heavy sound that makes everything sound like a PBS documentary. It’s not a tone I really enjoy, so often draining the emotion from stories and filling it up instead with a sad pomposity. It’s like when you hear a great poet read their most vibrant work out loud and they choose to deliver it in a passionless, intellectual monotone.

The way I see it, though, long-form is not about length or form, but about a mindset. Both the author and the reader come together with one ambition: to weave a story that sucks everybody right in and doesn’t let go until it’s finished. The best long-form is bewitching, captivating and deep — regardless of how long it takes you to get to the end. I’ve read pieces just a few hundred words long that feel more like long-form than others that ramble into the thousands.

Face Of The Day

A man rests during a protest walk by African migrants on a highway on the way to Jerusalem in protest after abandoning a detention facility in the southern Israeli desert on December 16, 2013 near Beer Sheva, Israel. Over 100 African migrants abandoned the ‘open’ Israeli detention center, which opened last week, to march to Jerusalem to protest a law allowing authorities to keep them in open-ended detention until the resolution of their asylum requests are granted or they are deported or volunteered to leave the country. More on the controversy here. By Uriel Sinai/Getty Images.

Cleaning Up The Soap Industry

The FDA has admitted that antibacterial soap is probably no better than regular soap – and may even be bad for you:

In a draft rule that will be published Tuesday in the Federal Register, the agency calls for manufacturers of consumer antibacterial products to begin providing data that shows the ingredients are both safe for daily use, and also more effective than plain soap and water. Deep in the 137-page rule, it also raises the issue that’s most interesting to me: whether the routine use of these products causes bacteria to develop resistance against the active ingredients, and against antibiotics as an unintended side effect.

Kiera Butler relays scientists’ concerns over triclosan, the most common ingredient in antibacterial products:

[T]here is strong evidence that anti-bacterial soaps contribute to antibiotic resistance. In 2004, a team of University of Michigan researchers found that exposing bacteria to triclosan increased activity in cellular pumps that the bugs use to eliminate foreign substances. These overactive excretory systems “could act to pump out other antibiotics, as well,” says Stuart Levy, one of the study’s authors and a leading researcher on antibiotic resistance at the Tufts University School of Medicine. That’s a problem, since troublesome bacteria like streptococcus, staphylococcus, and pneumonia are already evolving defenses against our best weapons. Worse, there aren’t enough new drugs in the production pipeline. Over the past 15 years, the FDA has approved just 15 newantibiotics—in the preceding 15 years, it approved 40. The World Health Organization now views antibiotic resistance as “a threat to global health security.” And while triclosan’s contribution to the problem hasn’t been adequately studied, Levy believes it could be “significant.”

The Best Of The Dish Today

I come to you from the bowels of Deep Dish, where I’m finishing my first ever long-form essay (it’s on Pope Francis and is imminent).

I have to say it’s a strange feeling. I’ve never been on a deadline for a long-form piece that wasn’t someone else’s deadline – with Tina on the phone, or James worried about the latest draft or Adam, coming up with a cover-line. You feel unprecedented freedom – there was a point at which this ghastly stomach flu I’ve been shitting through could have prompted me, the editor, to move the pub date, for me, the writer. “See? I can do that now!” But then there’s professionalism. So, no, I didn’t. I plowed on. As long as I restricted my life to shitting, writing, sleeping, a bowl of soup, shitting, writing and sleeping, then it was doable. There’s still the agony of the first edit and the fact-check and the copy-edit – but when they’re all done by your own colleagues, and you’re really grateful for them, it feels different somehow. Not so much an imposition as a mitzvah.

And when all you have to do to publish is press “publish”, and no printed version of the piece will ever arrive in anyone’s mailbox, it also feels different. Not blogging exactly – it’s a much more considered and lengthy (10,000 words) piece for that. But not quite an article for, say, TNR or the Atlantic or Newsweek, either. I don’t have to punch every card on the “magazine profile” page; I don’t have to make it accessible for millions; I just have to make it as good a piece as I can for the 33,000 of you who are subscribers. And that’s a real difference as well. It feels like I know you; and that you’ve been reading the Dish this year on the new Pope. I can write for the same audience I write for every day, and yet on a larger canvas. It feels like the continuation of a conversation. Which is to say it’s been a great way to wind up this first year at the Dish: an old thing become new again.

Today, we covered the success of the Pentagon in securing a huge budget coup with spending still at the Bush-Cheney mid-2000s level. Eisenhower wept.

The American poor now get tropical diseases; the UN continues to back Prohibition; Atlanta’s commutes make people fat; and Michelangelo’s slaves still mesmerize.

The most popular post of the day was How Anti-Christian Is Fox News? Runner-up was this haunting new poem.

See you in the morning.

Defeating The Gun Lobby

Robert Draper thinks it can be done:

Yet even as the votes in the chambers still favor the N.R.A., gun-control advocates have some cause for optimism. Time does not seem to be on the N.R.A.’s side. According to data compiled by the nonpartisan National Opinion Research Center, between 1977 and 2012 the percentage of American households possessing one or more guns declined by 36 percent. That decline should not be surprising. Tom W. Smith, director of the research center, says: “There are two main reasons, if you ask people, why they have firearms: hunting and personal protection. Now, from external sources like the federal Fish and Wildlife Service, we know the proportion of adults who hunt has declined over the decades. And since the ‘90s, the crime rate has fallen. So the two main reasons people might want to have a gun have both decreased.”

Mark Follman looks at recent gun laws:

The real action after Newtown was not in the nation’s capital—it was in most statehouses around the country, where no fewer than 114 bills were signed into law, aiming in both political directions. America has warred over its deep-rooted gun culture on and off for decades, and Newtown set off a major mobilization on both sides.

A Poem For Monday

This weekend we featured poems from debut collections. Here’s one more, “According to Scholars, Everything” by Roger Reeves, from his volume King Me, published by Copper Canyon Press:

—so long these days: the nineteenth century,

the twentieth century, the novel,

and now the night: prince of flowers: boatless

oars at the edge of a cold beach: sometimes,

we are asked to prove who we are: stranger

in the house of strangers: here, I remember

the white bee making a black zero above

our heads, the hairs of a gray cat pulled

from the back of our throats, placed on a dish

that would bear nothing more remarkable

than this: refuse: fat moon: peach pit: lamplight

spilling its affliction over our feet:

your hand and now your mouth starting a gash

below my nipple, a gash I do not wish closed.

(From King Me © 2013 by Roger Reeves. Reprinted with kind permission of Copper Canyon Press. Photo by Shaer Ahmed)