Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 415

The Ghost On The Page

Alex Mayyasi explores the economics of ghostwriting and ends up defending the practice:

Jay Leno does not write his own jokes and a team of writers work on sitcom scripts. Even if books have been a more independent pursuit, every writer depends on the help of an editor whose impact on the book – cutting large sections, reorganizing, suggestions plot changes – can be substantial. Researchers are also a regular part of writing a book in both fiction and nonfiction. Ghostwriting may be an extreme case, but every book is a team effort and few writers are responsible for every single word and idea in their books. Is it more deceitful to name someone who did none of the writing an author or to give so much credit to the author in the first place?

A major benefit of ghostwriting is that it allows stories to be told that would not otherwise.

Few major public figures could write books themselves – their stories are only published because professionals step in to write them down. Even if the existence of multiple Justin Bieber memoirs does not feel like a service to the publishing world, it at least helps the bottom lines of the same publishers taking a chance on the next David Mitchell or Cormac McCarthy. It is also an open question whether ghostwriting denigrates the actual writers or celebrates their skill. Nondisclosure agreements and cryptic mentions in the acknowledgements are not signs of respect. But established ghostwriters are recognized as skilled professionals. And while ghostwriters often get asked to write at below a living wage, ghostwriting can also be one of the few ways to make a good salary writing full-time short of being a perennial bestseller.

It can also be quite enjoyable. William Novak described himself as “spoiled” by all the “wonderful people [he’s] worked with.” Michael D’Orso, who dislikes the term ghostwriter but collaborates with major figures, described in an article how “you can’t be more alive than when you’re climbing into other lives in other worlds.” Sally Collings told us that ghostwriting allows her to focus on the writing and editing part that she enjoys without having to deal with the marketing aspects that she does not. “People often ask when I will write my own book again,” she told us. “I feel like I do all the time. I have a secret sense of ownership.”

Keeping An Eye On India

Oliver Turner chides analysts for overstating the Chinese military threat while ignoring similar issues elsewhere in Asia:

India consistently devotes a larger proportion of its GDP to its military than does China; for the past five years it has been the world’s largest importer of weapons, and it is expected to be the fourth largest military spender by 2020. Yet a new Indian aircraft carrier is immediately considered a welcome development, while in the case of China we are grimly told it is “not time to panic. Yet.”

Importantly, the more we assume that China is a probable instigator of hostility and even war, the more we ready ourselves for that eventuality. Indeed, the “China factor” is used to justify efforts by India, as well as Japan, the Philippines, Taiwan and others, to bolster their defense capabilities, leading to increasing tensions across a highly sensitive region. The “China factor” has also been used to rationalize the United States’ recent “pivot” (or “rebalancing”) towards the Asia Pacific. China is becoming a bigger threat, the logic goes, so others should prepare.

Yet we should also recognize the potential effects of an “India factor” in China and that the actions of others will not go unnoticed in Beijing. In consequence we risk trapping ourselves in a self-fulfilling prophecy of Chinese aggression. We may, in other words, end up literally imagining a threatening China into existence and through our ideas and actions become faced by the fictional demon we feared all along.

(Photo: Indian Border Security Force (BSF) recruits march during their passing out parade in Humhama, on the outskirts of Srinagar on December 6, 2013. Some 342 new recruits were inducted into the force which is fighting an insurgency in Kashmir. At least 47,000 people have died as a result of the insurgency in highly militarised Indian Kashmir, according to official count with separatists putting the toll twice as high. By Rouf Bhat/AFP/Getty Images)

The Other Cannabis Cash Crop

Nora Caplan-Bricker discusses how legalization may herald a renaissance for hemp in America:

Colorado’s new law is reaping other changes, too, among them the first legal crop of hemp that America has seen in nearly 60 years. Hemp is a cannabis plant, as is marijuana, but it contains almost none of THC, the component that gives pot its potent effect. Still, hemp—which can be used in “products from rope to auto parts to plastics, shampoo to vitamin supplements”—has paid for the stigma attached to its sister-plant: Though it is legal to buy and sell hemp in the U.S., growing and harvesting it have been prohibited. In every state that discusses legalization, hemp’s economic potential comes up: Data from Canada’s legal hemp industry suggests the crop yields revenue of $390 an acre, and the Hemp Industries Association estimates that products from the forgotten cannabis already constitute a $500 million industry in the U.S., according to The Denver Post. “I think that once people see the value of hemp, it’ll become a no-brainer,” said farmer Ryan Loflin, the Colorado man who has already planted 60 acres of the plant.

Animal Elders

Virginia Hughes marvels at a new paper that compares how 46 species – including humans – grow old:

For folks (myself included) who tend to have a people-centric view of biology, the paper is a crazy, fun ride. Sure, some species are like us, with fertility waning and mortality skyrocketing over time. But lots of species show different patterns – bizarrely different. Some organisms are the opposite of humans, becoming more likely to reproduce and less likely to die with each passing year. Others show a spike in both fertility and mortality in old age. Still others show no change in fertility or mortality over their entire lifespan.

That diversity will be surprising to most people who work on human demography. “We’re a bit myopic. We think everything must behave in the same way that we do,” says Jones, an assistant professor of biology at the University of Southern Denmark. “But if you go and speak to someone who works on fish or crocodiles, you’d find that they probably wouldn’t be that surprised.

What the new study didn’t find, notably, is an association between lifespan and aging.

It turns out that some species with pronounced aging (meaning those with mortality rates that increase sharply over time) live a long time, whereas others don’t. Same goes for the species that don’t age at all. Oarweed, for example, has a near-constant level of mortality over its life and lives about eight years. In contrast, Hydra, a microscopic freshwater animal, has constant mortality and lives a whopping 1,400 years.

This is a problem for the classical theories of aging that assume that mortality increases with age, notes Alan Cohen, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec. “The traditional idea is that this is what most things do, and that there were a few weird creatures out there that were exceptions,” he says. “But there are actually a lot of exceptions.” The question that the classical theories try to answer – How could aging evolve? – is no longer the most interesting question, Cohen adds. “What we really need to explain is why some things age and some don’t.”

(Photo by Stephanie Carter)

An Ice Cold Imagination

Reviewing a new collection of interviews, Richard Brody takes a shot at Hannah Arendt’s most famous work, Eichmann In Jerusalem. Brody writes, “Arendt’s charge that Eichmann suffered from a ‘lack of imagination’ is actually the essential flaw of her own book”:

Her mechanistic view of Eichmann’s personality, as well as her abstract and unsympathetic consideration of the situation of Jews under Nazi rule, reflect her inability to consider the experiences of others from within. … [In her 1964 interview with Günter Gaus,] Arendt explains that what she found most intolerable in Germany at the time [of her escape in 1933] wasn’t the overt hostility of anti-Semites but the compromises of “friends”—of fellow-intellectuals—with the Nazi policy of Gleichschaltung (“coördination”), the conformity of all German institutions to the Nazi party line: “Among intellectuals Gleichschaltung was the rule, so to speak,” she says. Arendt doesn’t ascribe their compromise to any personal failings, like cowardice or careerism, but, rather, to the particular flaws inherent in intellectualism:

I still think that it belongs to the essence of being an intellectual that one fabricates ideas about everything. No one ever blamed someone if he “coordinated” because he had to take care of his wife or child. The worst thing was that some people really believed in Nazism! For a short time, many for a very short time. But that means that they made up ideas about Hitler, in part terrifically interesting things! Completely fantastic and interesting and complicated things! Things far above the ordinary level! I found that grotesque. Today I would say that they were trapped by their own ideas. That is what happened. But then, at the time, I didn’t see it so clearly.

This is an astonishing passage, for several reasons.

First, Arendt reveals the ground for her belief that Eichmann was no ideological Nazi but, in fact, was just a blind functionary. Not being an intellectual, he couldn’t have had “ideas” or “terrifically interesting things” to think about Hitler, and, therefore, he couldn’t have “really believed in Nazism.” … It’s a strange badge of intellectual honor to ascribe true belief in Nazism solely to intellectuals, and it is yet another sign that the passions and the hatreds on which the movement ran were essentially beyond Arendt’s purview. Second, her charge against the intellectual class—that they invent “completely fantastic and interesting and complicated things” and get “trapped in their own ideas”—is the perfect description of her own heavily theoretical and utterly impersonal view of Eichmann.

Previous Dish on Hannah Arendt here, here, and here.

(Image of Arendt on a stamp via Wikimedia Commons)

The Latest Sign Of Martian Life

Land O’Lake: I found evidence for an ancient freshwater lake on Mars. Details: http://t.co/Ide83zfOgZ pic.twitter.com/FvcOC1Drom

— Curiosity Rover (@MarsCuriosity) December 9, 2013

It’s been a good week for the rover:

The lake, found at a spot called Yellowknife Bay in the Gale Crater, existed around 3.6 billion years ago and could have lasted for hundreds of thousands of years. The Curiosity rover’s analysis discovered sedimentary rocks with evidence of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and sulfur, elements that suggest the lake could have sustained life. The findings were published Monday in a series of six papers in the journal Science.

This isn’t the first time scientists, or Curiosity rover for that matter, has found evidence of large bodies of water on Mars. But it is one of the first times scientists have specifically outlined an environment in which life could have survived.

The lake would have been “suitable for a wide range of microbial lifeforms” – specifically, oddball microbes known as chemolithoautotrophs:

Chemolithoautotrophs do not need light to function; instead, they break down rocks and minerals for energy. On Earth, they exist underground, in caves and at the bottom of the ocean. … “For all of us geologists who are very familiar with what the early Earth must have been like, what we see in Gale really doesn’t look much different,” Curiosity chief scientist Prof John Grotzinger told BBC News.

Joseph Stromberg sees the latest discovery as “yet another vindication of Curiosity’s mission, which is to determine the planet’s habitability.” NASA also has good news for anyone hoping to see the Gale Crater firsthand:

The risk of radiation exposure is not a show-stopper for a long-term manned mission to Mars, new results from NASA’s Curiosity rover suggest. A mission consisting of a 180-day cruise to Mars, a 500-day stay on the Red Planet and a 180-day return flight to Earth would expose astronauts to a cumulative radiation dose of about 1.01 sieverts, measurements by Curiosity’s Radiation Assessment Detector (RAD) instrument indicate. To put that in perspective: The European Space Agency generally limits its astronauts to a total career radiation dose of 1 sievert, which is associated with a 5-percent increase in lifetime fatal cancer risk.

“It’s certainly a manageable number,” said RAD principal investigator Don Hassler of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., lead author of a study that reports the results in the journal Science. A 1-sievert dose from radiation on Mars would violate NASA’s current standards, which cap astronauts’ excess-cancer risk at 3 percent. But those guidelines were drawn up with missions to low-Earth orbit in mind, and adjustments to accommodate trips farther afield may be in the offing, Hassler said.

Leaving The Fundamentalist Bubble

Kathryn Joyce interviews members of the ex-homeschooler movement – which consists largely of individuals who where raised by fundamentalist families:

The closest parallel to transitioning from strict fundamentalist families to mainstream society may be an immigrant experience: acclimating to a new country with inexplicable customs and an unfamiliar language. “Mainstream American culture is not my culture,” says Heather Doney, who co-founded Homeschooling’s Invisible Children with [Rachel] Coleman. Doney, who grew up in an impoverished Quiverfull family in New Orleans, felt for years that she was living “between worlds,” never sure if her words or behavior were appropriate for her old life or her new one. She didn’t understand what topics of discussion were considered off-limits or when staring at someone might be disconcerting. She couldn’t make small talk, wore “oddly mismatched clothes,” and was lost amid pop-culture references to the Muppets or The Breakfast Club. When public-school friends talked about oral sex, she thought they meant French-kissing.

More than a decade later, Doney still finds herself resorting to a standard joke—“Sorry, I live under a rock”—when people are taken aback by her. “It’s a lot easier to say that,” she says, “than to explain that I was raised hearing that you’d be allowing demonic influences into your house if you watched Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I feel like an expat from a subculture that I can never go home to, living in one that is still not fully mine.”

Chris Jeub disputes Joyce’s “hasty generalizations”:

Joyce’s book Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement (which I’ve read) attacked Bill Gothard’s ATI, Doug Phillips’ Vision Forum, and other groups who saw it their duty, I suppose, to populate the world with a patriarchal society. Her latest book The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking and the New Gospel of Adoption (I haven’t read this one) apparently exposes abusive adoptive parents and builds a sinister case against the adoption movement.

I see a routine here. It appears that Joyce generalizes an entire population of people by focusing on the heartbreaking abuse of some. A skilled debater sees through this. In debate lingo, this is called anecdotal evidence, poor argumentation that is only surface deep in proper persuasion. Emotional appeals will work for some, but to really persuade most people, debaters know enough to dig deeper, gather evidence with substance to help build the case that will change minds and hearts and even influence legislation.

Joyce’s article has no statistics, no cited convictions, no vindictive story beyond one-sided testimonials. She digs deep into the “extremist roots of fundamentalist homeschooling,” as if public education didn’t have its own extremist roots in its history. At best this article uncovers civil unrest in homeschool families. Civil unrest is a worthy topic, by the way, but this article can be read as an indictment on the entire homeschool movement.

The Best Of The Dish Today

The heart of the president’s tribute to Nelson Mandela was about moral responsibility. “Mandela makes me want to be a better man,” he said, focusing on the core personal dynamics of justice. In the end, what saved South Africa from both racial tyranny and revolution was not an ideology, but Mandela’s character, impish and yet restrained, radical and yet also forgiving. It’s the gestures you remember almost as much as the full, long history, with the summation being the attendance of his former prison guards at his inauguration. Maybe it’s because of Pope Francis’ spontaneous gestures of caritas, but I’m reminded rather starkly again how the power of simple acts of generosity and magnanimity should never be under-estimated.

And yes, sometimes you can miss the obvious: how conceivable was it in the mid-1980s that a two-term biracial American president would give a eulogy to the first black president of South Africa in the early 21st Century? Not very. But here we are.

I wondered if Sy Hersh is, once again, onto something, with his charges of cherry-picking intelligence before a proposed strike against Syria’s dictator? Susan Boyle was diagnosed with Asperger’s – which definitely makes sense of her extreme talent and her struggle to channel it. Ross Douthat detected a tipping point in Obama’s presidential reach; and the Chinese wondered where we get our panda obsession from.

I’m a little woozy from a routine medical procedure so forgive the relative lack of provocations today. Better to stay mum when on Vicodins.

The most popular posts of the day were “Who’s Afraid Of The Truth?” and “Coming Out Of The Year.”

I should add one thing about the post about Max Blumenthal’s reporting on extremist tendencies in Israel. The most troubling word to me in the video he put together was “infiltrators.” African migrants aren’t just illegal immigrants or unwelcome visitors – they’re deemed “infiltrators.” Malign motives are thereby broadly assigned to an entire group of people, and those motives are apparently the destruction of the Jewish state. That loaded word was used by some nasty racist demagogues in the film – but also, significantly, by the Israeli prime minister himself. I found it a deeply disturbing insight into how he sees the world, especially as we reflect on Mandela’s magnanimity and refusal to think in racial or ethnic categories.

See you in the morning.

Engulfed By Grief

Popova highlights a passage from Joan Didion’s 2005 memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, written after the death of her husband of 40 years:

Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect the shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes.

In the version of grief we imagine, the model will be “healing.” A certain forward movement will prevail. The worst days will be the earliest days. We imagine that the moment to most severely test us will be the funeral, after which this hypothetical healing will take place. When we anticipate the funeral we wonder about failing to “get through it,” rise to the occasion, exhibit the “strength” that invariably gets mentioned as the correct response to death. We anticipate needing to steel ourselves for the moment: will I be able to greet people, will I be able to leave the scene, will I be able even to get dressed that day? We have no way of knowing that this will not be the issue. We have no way of knowing that the funeral itself will be anodyne, a kind of narcotic regression in which we are wrapped in the care of others and the gravity and meaning of the occasion. Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.

Update from a reader:

I know that a lot of people, widowed especially, identify with Didion’s magical thinking perspective where grief is concerned, but it’s dangerous at worst and simply unhelpful at the least to assume that grief shares more than just a handful of touchstones for everyone. I couldn’t read her book. It didn’t resonate with my experience as far as losing a spouse went. I never thought my husband would show up one day and wonder why I’d taken over the closet. I never mourned our lost future because he’d succumbed to a terminal diagnosis and I’d put away our future long before he died.

And I always moved forward because it was the only route I knew that would ensure my survival. I didn’t have time to be crazy. I had a toddler, a full time job and a life that I couldn’t outsource.

There were dark days and angry ones and days when I was just so tired of it all that I cursed my husband out for leaving me stuck to deal with it while he bounced around on clouds without a care, but I laughed too. Found joy. Started dating and before the first year had passed met the guy who is now my husband.

Yeah, it sucks, but it’s not forever in the bottomless-pit way Didion would have us believe. We don’t all lose our minds.

(Photo by Ibai Acevedo)

The Misery Of Miscarriage, Ctd

Another big round of personal emails:

I have closely read each and every miscarriage post, out curiosity and compassion. I am a single 30-year-old male who is now absolutely paranoid about the possibility of not being able to have kids one day, which I very much want to (more than I want to get married, but that’s another story). One of your recent posts mentioned guilt on the mother’s part – I would imagine the mind can be awfully cruel and somehow blame oneself for a miscarriage. But it raised another question: is the viability of an embryo totally dependent on the mother’s health? Or does the father’s sperm count/quality play any role? It feels like it would be best for couples not to know who is to “blame” in these situations.

It looks like chromosomal abnormalities from either partner can cause miscarriage, as well as damaged sperm. Another reader:

I was reading this post at work today when my 7-week-pregnant wife called to tell me she started bleeding and is being sent to the emergency room. Now I am writing while we wait for an ultrasound and hoping for the best. If thing go badly, these series of post will have been helpful in dealing with the grief, knowing we are not alone. Thank you.

He follows up:

After a four-hour stay in the ER, it turned out that the bleeding was caused by a fairly common occurrence of the egg sack pulling a piece of the uterus lining away during the implantation process. It usually heals on its own and everything is fine, but sometimes it keeps pulling away and eventually detaches leaving the the fetus cut off from the uterus. We’re ok for now, but have to keep watching.

Another reader:

After 40 years of marriage and three healthy children, this still stands as the single most loving thing my husband ever did for me:

he forced the hospital to give him the fetus so he could bury it under a tree in our yard.  We had brought the tiny one-inch body into the hospital with us, wrapped in toilet paper, to show what had happened suddenly at home. What followed was an emergency D&C and an overnight stay for me, and he went home with our two year old daughter.  That’s that, I thought.  Nothing is in my control.  But when he picked me up in the morning, he related his having had second thoughts upon getting home and his subsequent big loud angry argument with staff in the hospital hallway over whether it belonged to him or to them.  He had won.

From another woman who experienced miscarriage:

I was devastated. I’d already picked a name for the baby, it already had a nickname with my co-workers, and it had all seemed so right. The 24 hours I had to wait until I could have the D&C seemed like an eternity. After reading one of the stories you posted, I am grateful that I did not have to go to a strange doctor to have the procedure done. Given how common D&Cs are for reasons totally unrelated to abortion – later in life, I had several simply to treat excessive menstrual bleeding – I’m stunned by the notion that OB-GYNs are not being taught to perform this procedure as a matter of course.

As overwhelming as my grief felt those first few months after the loss, as real as that “dream baby” seemed to me, my experience only increased my fervent support of reproductive freedom. Only once I had been pregnant did I truly understand the countless changes that occur to a woman’s body even at the earliest stages of pregnancy. Only once I knew my pregnancy was doomed did I know how intolerable it could be to “wait for nature to take its course.”

Another:

Contrary to one of your readers who was reassured when she was rushed past all the pregnant ladies for her post-miscarriage D&C, I quite a different situation.  After arriving at the hospital for a D&C, not only wasn’t I shuffled away from the pregnant ladies, but to wait for my procedure I was put in a double room with a young woman in active labor!

I spent the first five minutes silently cursing the hospital and feeling deeply sorry for myself, but then I started noticing that the young woman was definitely not having an easy time of it.  She was quite young, certainly not out of her teens, and all alone.  Clearly no one had coached or mentored her on what to expect because she was handling her contractions all wrong, and in doing so making everything a lot harder on herself than it needed to be.

I spent the next hour doing my best to teach the young mom to be what I could remember of the Lamaze method (thanks Elizabeth Bing!).  Slowly, she learned to work with the contractions, to focus, and to calm herself.  When the nurse came to get me, she expressed regret that I’d had to be placed there in that room.  I told her, and believe to this day, that it was one of the best things that ever happened to me – not only did the experience take me right out of my own misery, but I was able to pay forward what I was taught, helping a stranger make the most she could of a tense, scary and painful situation.

One more:

First, to echo many, thanks for airing the stories of miscarriage.  These are stories that for all kinds of reasons need to be heard and aired to better understand the varied realities and experiences of women and men who go through miscarriage.

My personal experience aligns with a few of your readers – a missed miscarriage followed by a D&C – though my grief was slight because I had two children already and knew the statistics that as many as 1 in 3 pregnancies actually end in miscarriage.  I think the lack of information around reproduction, and the ability to know you are pregnant only three weeks after conception, have combined to cause far too much grief.  Our culture fears discussing conception and reproduction because it is so intertwined with the myopic politics of abortion, but that leaves the average woman without the knowledge your PhD reader has.

Lastly, the statistics – up to 1 in 3 pregnancies end in miscarriage – and being a practicing Catholic make me wonder at the apparent wastefulness of miscarriage.  The platitudes about not knowing God’s plan or God only giving you what you can handle don’t seem quite enough.  Is the obsession with life beginning at conception, and the silent suffering around the common experience of miscarriage, just one more example of the Church’s (and much of our culture’s) refusal to really know and understand women and their biology?  What would the Church’s teaching on life look like if it were informed by these stories, and the biological realities of one of the most complicated/least understood things the female human body does? How might that teaching then be pastoral instead of dogmatic and actually minister to women and their bodies in the world?