Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 45

“Why Do People Feel So Rushed?”

The Economist explores the question:

Part of this is a perception problem. On average, people in rich countries have more leisure time than they used to. This is particularly true in Europe, but even in America leisure time has been inching up since 1965, when formal national time-use surveys began. American men toil for pay nearly 12 hours less per week, on average, than they did 40 years ago—a fall that includes all work-related activities, such as commuting and water-cooler breaks. Women’s paid work has risen a lot over this period, but their time in unpaid work, like cooking and cleaning, has fallen even more dramatically, thanks in part to dishwashers, washing machines, microwaves and other modern conveniences, and also to the fact that men shift themselves a little more around the house than they used to.

The problem, then, is less how much time people have than how they see it. Ever since a clock was first used to synchronise labour in the 18th century, time has been understood in relation to money. Once hours are financially quantified, people worry more about wasting, saving or using them profitably. When economies grow and incomes rise, everyone’s time becomes more valuable. And the more valuable something becomes, the scarcer it seems.

Face Of The Day

A red-faced macaque baby monkey plays in its box at a zoo in Hangzhou, in eastern China’s Hangzhou province on December 28, 2014. The baby monkey, born two months ago, quickly became popular for its restless movements that resembled a gymnast, local media reported. By STR/AFP/Getty Images.

Talking Through Touch

Clive Thompson explains why we may soon be able to feel who’s texting us:

Haptic technologies have begun to flourish recently—tools that buzz, vibrate, or otherwise “communicate information through people’s skin,” as haptics pioneer Karon MacLean, of the University of British Columbia, puts it. Automakers like General Motors are producing drivers’ seats that vibrate in the direction of an impending collision. Apple’s new smartwatch can deliver taps of different intensity to your wrist to communicate everything from a new message to GPS directions. Haptics, it appears, is the next way we’ll interact with information—and each other. …

[T]o me, the most interesting use of haptics won’t be “hey, go check this out” alerts. It’ll be the potential to spawn a new mode of communication. People are extremely good at distinguishing among many different signals written on their skin. Google wearables designer Seungyon Claire Lee tested what she called BuzzWear, a wristband that vibrated three small buzzers in 24 different patterns. With 40 minutes of training, her subjects were able to distinguish among them with 99 percent accuracy. In another study, MacLean played patterns onto people’s fingertips via a smartphone game—and found they could remember them weeks later. “It was like learning new words, like learning verbal language,” MacLean says.

Thompson imagines that the “alphabet of haptics could become the next emoji, a way of supplementing our traditional language—email, text—with expressive flourishes.”

Has The Tide Turned Against ISIS?

Taking stock of the conflagration in Iraq and Syria at year’s end, Wayne White sees the jihadist group on the defensive:

Despite the jitters many have concerning the sweep of Islamic State forces, the view from the IS capital of Raqqa is hardly rosy. Still stalled in front of embattled Kobani, IS could not stop a sweeping Iraqi Kurdish, Yazidi, and Iraqi Army drive across northern Iraq to take Sinjar Mountain (again rescuing Yazidi refugees) and wrest from IS much of the town of Sinjar by December 21. Back in mid-December, the Pentagon also confirmed that an air strike killed Haji Mutazz, a deputy to IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, as well as the IS military operations chief for Iraq, and the IS “governor” of Mosul. Meanwhile, daily coalition air strikes grind away at various targets within IS’s “caliphate” (now increasingly wracked by shortages).

The implications of ISIS’s retreat from Sinjar are significant; Khales Joumah reports that the group’s grip on Mosul may be weakening as a result:

In the city of Mosul itself it seems as though ISIS is at a loss. Members of ISIS are still on the city’s streets but most of the foreign fighters appear to have gone.

The ones left on the streets tend to be younger, local fighters some of whom don’t even seem to be 25 yet. Some of the fighters on the streets admit that they’ve been forced to withdraw from Sinjar but only very quietly.

“For the first time you can sense the feelings of fear and frustration in ISIS’s fighters,” one Mosul doctor, who had been seeing ISIS casualties come in, told NIQASH; he had to remain anonymous for security reasons. “As the number of dead and wounded from among their ranks increases, they look more and more like they’ve lost confidence in their leadership.”

Juan Cole also stresses the importance of Sinjar’s liberation:

Historians refer to polities that exist on both sides of a mountain range, united by passes, as a “saddlebag empire.” These were common in South Asia, where southern Afghanistan and Punjab were often part of the same kingdom despite the barrier of the Hindu Kush mountains. What I have called the ‘neo-Zangid’ state of the Daesh unites the area from Aleppo to Damascus, across Mt. Shinjar , just as had the medieval ruler `Imad al-Din Zangi. It is a sort of contemporary saddlebag empire.

But now not only have the Peshmerga taken the Mt. Shinjar area away from Daesh, helping rescue the besieged Yezidis but they have at the same time cut the supply routes between the terrorist group’s Syrian capital, Raqqa, and its Iraqi power base, Mosul. If you take shears to a saddlebag, it can’t straddle the horse’s back any more and will fall down.

Still, hold off on the celebrations for now. As Loveday Morris reports, the humanitarian situation in Iraq remains grim:

U.N. officials acknowledge that the assistance is insufficient. The U.N. response plan for displaced Iraqis remains only 31 percent funded, while the World Food Program has stopped procuring supplies for the displaced because of a lack of money. That means the distribution of boxes of food to families, the only assistance many get, will end by February unless emergency funding is found.

“It’s not that we can do more with less; it’s that we don’t have anything and the needs on the ground are immense,” said Barbara Manzi, the outgoing Iraq representative for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, which is overseeing the organization’s response to the displacement crisis.

(Photo: Smoke rises as Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL) fighters burn tires to obstruct the sight of warcraft during clashes with Peshmerga forces in Sinjar district of Mosul, Iraq on December 22, 2014. Peshmerga forces stage attacks against ISIL to liberate ISIL occupied Sinjar. By Emrah Yorulmaz/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

Inside The Russian Media Bubble

Walter Laqueur asserts that for a “considerable time the element of fantasy in Russian political discourse has been strong (and growing stronger), not only at the popular level but in official statements.” Not surprising, exactly, but the details he marshals are remarkable:

A Russian citizen watching television in the evening will be exposed to the historical programme of Nikolai Starikov (to mention but one representative of this genre) which “prove” in convincing detail that the Russian revolutions of 1917 were engineered by the British secret service (the question of whether Somerset Maugham played the decisive role in this context is left open), and that Hitler too was an agent of MI5 or MI6 but did not really want to attack the Soviet Union. He was egged on, however, by Churchill and Roosevelt.

This will be followed by a documentary demonstrating that Trotsky was the father of German Nazism (this also happens to be the title of the series).

If the viewer still has an appetite for sensational revelations, he can switch to yet another series dealing with the connection of the “German patriot Martin Heidegger” and the Balfour Declaration. Retiring to bed with a good book he may well chose the immensely popular Maxim Kalashnikov (no relation of the weapon designer) maintaining that while the present Russian generation is pretty hopeless, a new generation of heroes could be produced in record time, following the pioneering work done by the SS Ahnenerbe in the study of the Aryan race which will put right everything that is wrong or imperfect in contemporary Russia.

The Stalinist system came to Russia 90 years ago and with it the frequent belief in manifestly untrue assertions. This practice has been more pronounced in some periods than in others. It has been denounced on various occasions by experts, but it has by no means been rejected. If in recent years there has been increased sympathy, even a certain longing, for the Stalin period in Russian history, it should not be surprising that this includes the readiness to believe manifestly untrue assertions. President Putin himself argued not long ago that Stalin was no worse than Oliver Cromwell.

Face Of The Day

A member of the Indonesian Air Force looks out the window from a C-130 Hercules aircraft over the Java Sea during search and rescue operations for missing AirAsia flight QZ8501 on December 29, 2014. By Bay Ismoyo/AFP/Getty Images.

Rethinking Autism Research

John Elder Robison believes it’s about time:

Research into the genetic and biological foundations of autism is surely worthwhile, but it’s a long-term game. The time from discovery to deployment of an approved therapy is measured in decades, while the autism community needs help right away. If we accept that autistic people are neurologically different rather than sick, the research goal changes from finding a cure to helping us achieve our best quality of life.

One way to do so, he suggests, is to “put autistic people in charge”:

The fact is, researchers have treated autism as a childhood disability, when in fact it’s a lifelong difference. If childhood is a quarter of the life span, then three-quarters of the autistic population are adults. Doesn’t it make sense that some of us would want to take a role in shaping the course of research that affects us? If you’re a researcher with an interest in autism—and you want to really make a difference—open a dialogue with autistic people. Ask what they want and need, and listen.

Meanwhile, Stephen S. Hall examines how genetic mutations appear to contribute to autism spectrum disorders. He consults researcher Evan Eichler, who suggests “it’s like autism is the price we pay for having an evolved human species”:

Copy number variations in one specific [genetic] hot spot on the short arm of chromosome 16, for example, have been associated with autism. By comparing the DNA of chimpanzees, orangutans, a Neanderthal, and a Denisovan (another archaic human) with the genomes of more than 2,500 contemporary humans, including many with autism, Xander Nuttle, a member of Eichler’s group, has been able to watch this area on the chromosome undergo dramatic changes through evolutionary history known as BOLA2 that seems to promote instability. Nonhuman primates have at most two copies of the gene; Neanderthals have two; contemporary humans have anywhere from three to 14, and the multiple copies of the gene appear in virtually every sample the researchers have looked at. This suggests that the extra copies of the BOLA2 gene, which predispose people to neurodevelopmental disorders like autism, must also confer some genetic benefit to the human species. …

In other words, the same duplications that can lead to autism may also create what Eichler calls genetic “nurseries” in which new gene variants arise that enhance cognition or some other human trait.

A Poem From The Year

“Grass Fingers” by Angelina Weld Grimke:

Touch me, touch me,

Little cool grass fingers,

Elusive, delicate grass fingers.

With your shy brushings,

Touch my face—

My naked arms—

My thighs—

My feet.

Is there nothing that is kind?

You need not fear me.

Soon I shall be too far beneath you,

For you to reach me, even,

With your tiny, timorous toes.

Please consider supporting the work of The Poetry Society of America here.

(From Modernist Women Poets: An Anthology © 2014 by Robert Hass and Paul Ebenkamp. Reprinted by permission of Counterpoint Press. Photo by Kitty Terwolbeck)

The Rise Of Mixed-Race Families

Keli Goff contends that “we are not a nation at war over race. We are a nation suffering growing pains”:

For starters, the number of interracial married couples reached an all-time high in 2012, three years after President Obama took office, jumping from 7 percent in 2000 to 18 percent. Those numbers don’t include those who are dating or cohabitating, an indication that the number of interracial couples is actually higher, as American marriage rates are at an all-time low.

And while a majority of Americans may not be in interracial relationships, a large number of Americans are now either related to someone or know someone who is in one or has been in one. Furthermore, mixed race children are the fastest growing population in the country. Someone who once may have been less evolved on race relations could very well now have a grandchild, niece, nephew, or godchild who is of mixed race, which will likely spark an evolution of some sort. That evolution can be seen in Gallup’s tracking of national attitudes on interracial relationships. In 1958 4 percent of Americans approved of such couples. By 1997 half of Americans approved, and by 2012 the number was 87 percent, a steady year-to-year increase in the years since the Obama presidency began.

Sony Bucks Pyongyang, Bags A Few Bucks

If the North Korean regime had hoped to stop anyone from seeing The Interview with its cyberattack on Sony and unsubstantiated terrorist threats, they didn’t quite pull it off. After initially deciding to pull the film, Sony backtracked and released it online on Christmas Eve. The Interview pulled in nearly $18 million over the holiday weekend, including $15 million online:

According to Sony, more than half the online revenue came from the Google Play Store and YouTube (both owned by Google), and after being limited to U.S. residents in its first few days, the online release was later expanded to Canada. Sony reports that the film has been downloaded or streamed more than 2 million times so far. The 331 theaters that screened the film generated significantly less revenue, with a reported $2.8 million in ticket sales. Many of the larger theater chains declined to screen the film due to Sony’s decision to make it available online on the same day as the theatrical release.

While that’s hardly a good take for a major Hollywood release (its total production costs were somewhere in the $100 million range), it sure beats the zero dollars it would have made had Sony capitulated and pulled the film entirely. Still, Ian Morris observes, the studio could have made more money had it not limited the digital release to the US and Canada:

According to various sites, BitTorrent downloads on public trackers were at nearly 1 million viewers after 24 hours. Those numbers exclude private trackers and places like newsgroups, IRC and “locker” based copies (those hosted on Dropbox or similar sites). Factor all those in, and it’s plausible that more people pirated the movie than paid. … Of course, you’ll never stop piracy, but blocking the film from being watched in other English-speaking countries is just foolish. Sony could, perhaps have doubled its money if it had allowed non-US residents to watch the film. And even if this had penalties with distributors, it feels like this might be the ideal time to try the model out anyway.

Todd VanDerWerff sees The Interview as “an important test of whether movies can now sustain themselves with day-and-date releases in theaters and at home”:

And though that $15 million weekend was undoubtedly boosted by curiosity seekers drawn by the controversy around the film, it’s still an incredibly impressive number. A Marvel superhero movie, which requires a much larger opening weekend than that, probably won’t be using day-and-date releases soon, but it stands as an increasingly viable alternative for smaller budget projects. … Of course, the big question in online releasing is how studios will balance the potential for money made there against the needs of movie theaters, which are still necessary to open big studio tentpole films, at least for the time being. And by so utterly outperforming theatrical sales with online sales, The Interview has also shown why theater owners are so worried.

So what, then, was Pyongyang’s game? Shortly before the holiday, Suki Kim advanced a compelling theory:

This scandal seems to be following the usual course designed by North Korean propagandists, where the more serious and consequential story gets buried behind the sensational headlines that benefit no one more than the North Korea regime. What is being overshadowed this time is the one thing Pyongyang desperately wants the world to ignore. The United Nations’ General Assembly recently voted, by an overwhelming majority of 116 to 20 (with 53 abstentions), to refer North Korea to the International Criminal Court, and the U.N. Security Council met on Monday and voted in favor of adding North Korea’s human rights issues to its agenda over the objection of China and Russia. … I am not sure how much Kim Jong-un really cares about being facetiously killed by actors in a Hollywood comedy, but it appears that he doesn’t want to have an arrest warrant issued against him by an international court the crimes against humanity.

Sony’s last-minute decision to release the film after all should give some comfort to Flemming Rose, who had linked the initial decision to pull the movie to the worldwide trend of “grievance fundamentalism” (a subject the Dish knows all too well):

In today’s grievance culture, with its identity politics and cultivation of the victim, the grievance lobby has succeeded in shifting the fulcrum of the human rights debate from freedom of speech to the necessity of countering hate speech; from the individual pursuing individual liberties to the individual being aggrieved by the liberties taken by others. That shift becomes counterintuitive, the logic increasingly absurd. Those aggrieved by free speech are defended, while others whose speech is perceived as offensive to such a degree that they are exposed to death threats, physical assault, and sometimes even murder are deemed to have been asking for it: “What did they expect offending people like that?”

Thus, perpetrators are transformed into victims, victims into perpetrators, and it’s impossible to know the difference. The distinction between critical words and violent actions, between a picture and a violent reaction, between tolerance and intolerance, between civilization and barbarism is being dissolved.