Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 77

The Moral Case Against Zoos, Ctd

Chelsea Wald reflects on Benjamin Wallace Wells’s argument:

[H]ow can we justify keeping animals in zoos? Wallace-Wells asks. His conclusion is that we can’t, and that we won’t continue to try for much longer. I’m not sure I agree. But there are certainly bits and pieces of zoos that could be handed over to technology. The educational aspect of zoos would be relatively easy to make virtual. And since zoo animals don’t really act as they would in nature (even when they’re not psychotic), it’s hard to argue that zoos can convey much about the animals other than how they look. And while many zoos attempt to share a lot of material about conservation, it’s not clear how much of that is getting through to visitors. Certainly, technology that connects people to animals in the wild could reveal far more about the animals’s actual behaviors as well as the need for conservation. If kids just want to see an animal up close, they can go to a farm or get a pet.

But we do lose something, if we lose physical zoos.

The world’s best zoos go to great lengths to help save threatened species. Some animals—like the northern bald ibis—are safe from looming extinction precisely because zoos have developed captive breeding programs. It seems to me that we should at least let the good zoos keep on with that good work (and encourage them to do it better); then we could see some wild animals close up from time to time. The rest of the wild kingdom we could keep in contact with on our devices. Bye-bye, sweet guilty feeling.

Yet I wonder: Even if a nearly zoo-less world would satisfy me ethically, would it satisfy me emotionally? What about that desire to feel something? Could I really make a connection through a GPS tracker or a live cam? Certainly my friends and I have gotten mesmerized by video feeds of animals (think panda cam), but my heart melts extra when I make eye contact with the monkeys at the zoo.

(Photo: A newborn baboon cuddles a plush monkey presented by Fatma Sahin, the mayor of Gaziantep, a southeastern city in Turkey, on November 23, 2014. The newborn baboon was rejected by its biological mother. By Kerem Kocalar/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

Mental Health Break

When Black Friday gets dark – real dark:

More Private, Less Of A Dick

Pamela Stewart, a former private investigator, describes how moral qualms led her out of the profession:

I talked to a few friends in the industry this week and asked if they were considering using drones. They are excited about the possibility. Legislation doesn’t keep pace with technology, so there are grey areas in that blue sky. A private investigator cannot observe you in any place you have a reasonable expectation of privacy, but that doesn’t mean they won’t try. Years ago, a colleague followed a subject to a nudist colony and got video of the subject and others playing volleyball. Everyone in the office watched that video. …

Most of the people who do this work don’t care about you or your privacy. Most of the people being surveilled don’t know how to protect their personal information. And most of investigating bodies don’t care. You are just data. And even if you are doing nothing wrong, you’re just collateral damage in the search for the “truth.”

I want to say I am done. I helped many people get the information they needed to make decisions about their lives or their businesses, but in doing so I devalued myself. While focusing my camera on others, I blurred my own definition of right and wrong. I was a licensed liar and a snoop. It’s a judgmental, and soul-destroying world. From now on, I’ll stick to reading Raymond Chandler and sign off with the words I used in every investigation report: “Surveillance discontinued.”

The View From Your Window

Chicago, Illinois, 3.20 pm

Cultish Consumerism

Derek Thompson notes that “many of the most successful new brands have been looking to an unusual but powerful source of inspiration – religious cults”:

Cults like the Moonies are built on the paradox that we feel most like ourselves when we’re part of a group, says Douglas Atkin, the global head of community at the room-sharing company Airbnb, and the author of the 2004 book The Culting of Brands: Turning Your Customers Into True Believers. “The common belief is that people join cults to conform,” Atkin wrote. “Actually, the very opposite is true. They join to become more individual.”

A number of Bay Area companies have come to incorporate this insight into their marketing strategies.

In 2004, shortly after launching the restaurant-review site Yelp, the founders were struggling to grow the company. They decided to convene a gathering of about 100 power-users. The get-together “was a big success,” Ligaya Tichy, who later served as Yelp’s senior community manager, told me. “Bringing users together to share what they loved about the site led to a huge spike in activity. What we realized is that people aren’t really motivated by companies. They’re motivated by other people. We needed to get the message across: you are what makes this product cool.” The number of reviewers on the site grew from 12,000 in 2005 to 100,000 in 2006.

Even today, Yelp still holds exclusive events for its most prolific reviewers, the Yelp Elite Squad, which a 2011 Bloomberg Businessweek article noted for its “cult influence.” “People have been thinking about the similarities between cults and brands for years,” Tichy says. “Only now you’re really seeing people start to codify these practices with evangelists and groups like Yelp Elite.”

A Poem For Friday

“Known to Be Left” by Sharon Olds:

If I pass a mirror, I turn away,

I do not want to look at her,

and she does not want to be seen. Sometimes

I don’t see exactly how to go on doing this.

Often, when I feel that way,

within a few minutes I am crying, remembering

his body, or an area of it,

his backside often, a part of him

just right now to think of, luscious, not too

detailed, and his back turned toward me.

After tears, the chest is less sore,

as if some goddess of humanness

within us has caressed us with a gush of tenderness.

I guess that’s how people go on, without

knowing how. I am so ashamed

before my friends—to be known to be left

by the one who supposedly knew me best,

each hour is a room of shame, and I am

swimming, swimming, holding my head up,

smiling, joking, ashamed, ashamed,

like being naked with the clothed, or being

a child, having to try to behave

while hating the terms of your life. In me now

there’s a being of sheer hate, like an angel

of hate. On the badminton lawn, she got

her one shot, pure as an arrow,

while through the eyelets of my blouse the no-see-ums

bit the flesh no one seems now

to care to touch. In the mirror, the torso

looks like a pinup hives martyr,

or a cream pitcher speckled with henbit and pussy-paws,

full of the milk of human kindness

and unkindness, and no one is lining up to drink.

But look! I am starting to give him up!

I believe he is not coming back. Something

has died, inside me, believing that,

like the death of a crone in one twin bed

as a child is born in the other. Have faith,

old heart. What is living, anyway,

but dying.

(From Stag’s Leap: Poems by Sharon Olds, copyright © 2012 by Sharon Olds. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Photo by Dave Walker)

A Win For Retail Workers

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors gave a holiday gift to city retail workers on Tuesday, unanimously approving a package of measures “aimed at giving retail staffers more predictable schedules and access to extra hours”. Claire Zillman elaborates:

The ordinances will require businesses to post workers’ schedules at least two weeks in advance. Workers will receive compensation for last-minute schedule changes, “on-call” hours, and instances in which they’re sent home before completing their assigned shifts. Businesses must also offer existing part-time workers additional hours before hiring new employees, and they are required to give part-timers and full-timers equal access to scheduling and time-off requests. …

San Francisco’s proposal takes sharp aim at employers’ tendency to schedule workers’ hours with little notice—a practice especially prevalent in retail. Earlier this year, University of Chicago professors found that employers determined the work schedules of about half of young adults without employee input, which resulted in part-time schedules that fluctuated between 17 and 28 hours per week. Forty-seven percent of employees ages 26 to 32 who work part time receive one week or less in advance notice of the hours they’re expected to work, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Bryce Covert cheers:

The bill’s passage comes at a time when erratic schedules are increasingly wrecking havoc on people’s lives, particularly in retail. Nearly half of part-time workers and just under 40 percent of full-time ones only find out their schedules a week or less in advance. In a survey of more than 200 retail employees in New York City, nearly 40 percent said they don’t get a set minimum of hours they’ll work each week and a quarter are required to be on call for shifts, often finding out just hours ahead of time that they’ll have to go to work. Many say schedules are posted on Saturdays for workweeks that start on Sunday. Workers also show up just to be told to go home thanks to computer software that uses algorithms to determine if there are too many employees compared to sales volume — McDonald’s employees have sued the company over its use of exactly this technology. At the same time, workers often struggle to get enough hours to survive. There are 7 million people in the country working part time who want to be full-time, an increase from 4.5 million in 2008.

Josh Harkinson zooms out:

Several states, including California and New York, already have “reporting pay” laws that require employers to pay workers extra if they send them home early from a shift. Last year, SeaTac, an airport town between Seattle and Tacoma in Washington, became the first in the country to require employers to offer additional hours to part-time workers before hiring new employees. But San Francisco’s Worker Bill or Rights goes much further than these efforts, and labor organizers expect it to help catalyze similar worker rights laws elsewhere.

Jobs for Justice, the group that lobbied for the San Francisco bills, is pushing similar measures in the Washington, DC, and Boston. Minnesota and New York are considering tighter regulations of “on call” shifts. Those two states and Michigan may also adopt laws that would bar employers from discriminating against part-time workers who request more stable schedules. The Service Employees International Union is pushing for a mandatory 30-hour workweek for security and janitorial workers in multiple states.

But Alana Semuels is slightly skeptical:

Vermont was one of the first places in the country to try to get a handle on inconsistent scheduling. … But the experience of Vermont indicates employers might not be getting the message. Even if wage-and-hour laws change, companies still operate on the same profit margins. And store managers are even more pressured to keep a lid on labor costs while dealing with the ups and downs of consumer demand, said Jennifer Swanberg, a professor of Social Work at the University of Maryland. They get data every week about sales for the previous week and how many hours they might need to staff for the upcoming week, and they need to be cautious about committing to too many hours. “The supervisor is often the person being squeezed between what senior management wants and what they have to do day-to-day,” she said.

It Means The World

Adam Frank suggests we should all be grateful for “this corner of the universe as embodied in the unlikely blue world we call home”:

A quick review of our solar system makes it clear that good planets are hard to find. The sun hosts eight worlds, at least six large moons, countless asteroids and countless comets. Of all those bodies there is only one place with warm oceans and blue skies and cool breezes and rainfall. And, of all the sun’s children, there is only one place where life has run riot.

It’s easy to take the Earth — and its ceaseless buzzing of wings and legs and fins — for granted. It’s easy to forget its staggering beauty or its almost incomprehensible strangeness in the near vacuum of interstellar space. But in its subtle coupling of air, ice, water and rock, our planet is nothing short of a miracle.

There are, likely, much worse places in the cosmos to try and eek out a lifetime. Places with less color, less majesty, less warmth, less coolness, less joy, less wonder. So, no matter what your year has been like — no matter what you may have lost — there is always the Earth.

A Poem For Thanksgiving

“First Thanksgiving” by Sharon Olds:

When she comes back, from college, I will see

the skin of her upper arms, cool,

matte, glossy. She will hug me, my old

soupy chest against her breasts,

I will smell her hair! She will sleep in this apartment,

her sleep like an untamed, good object, like a

soul in a body. She came into my life the

second great arrival, fresh

from the other world—which lay, from within him,

within me. Those nights, I fed her to sleep,

week after week, the moon rising,

and setting, and waxing—whirling, over the months,

in a steady blur, around our planet.

Now she doesn’t need love like that, she has

had it. She will walk in glowing, we will talk,

and then, when she’s fast asleep, I’ll exult

to have her in that room again,

behind that door! As a child, I caught

bees, by the wings, and held them, some seconds,

looked into their wild faces,

listened to them sing, then tossed them back

into the air—I remember the moment the

arc of my toss swerved, and they entered

the corrected curve of their departure.

(From Blood, Tin, Straw: Poems by Sharon Olds © 1999 by Sharon Olds. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Photo by Tom Wachtel)

High From A Holiday Spice?

Deborah Blum separates fact from fiction when it comes to having fun with nutmeg:

In the 1965 book, “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” the activist describes purchasing it from inmates in a South Carolina prison, concealed in matchboxes, and stirring it into water. “A penny matchbox full of nutmeg had the kick of three or four reefers,” he wrote.

Toxicologists say that description is somewhat misleading, an overly romantic account of nutmeg’s generally unpleasant effects. It takes a fair amount of nutmeg — two tablespoons or more — before people start exhibiting symptoms. These can include an out-of-body sensation, but the most common are intense nausea, dizziness, extreme dry mouth, and a lingering slowdown of normal brain function. Dr. Gussow said nutmeg experimenters have compared it to a two-day hangover.

“People have told me that it feels like you are encased in mud,” said Dr. Edward Boyer, professor of emergency medicine and chief of the division of medical toxicology at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. “You’re not exactly comatose, but you feel really sluggish. And your remembrance of events during this time period is incomplete at best.”

Dreher actually tried it:

Teenage Home Experiment here. Let’s say you are a 17-year-old boy living in a residential high school in Natchitoches, Louisiana, and you and your friends are bored out of your minds.

And let’s say that one of your friends has a copy of The Anarchist Cookbook, which has a few paragraphs in it about how you can get high on nutmeg. You and your buddy might be the kind of people who say, “Dude, you can buy that stuff at the supermarket.” And you might even be the kind of people who will ride their bikes through the rain to the Brookshire’s store after dinner, buy a box of McCormick’s ground nutmeg, and take it back to the dorm to eat.

If you’re me, you mix it with Equal to make it slightly more palatable. It tastes like spicy dirt. We must have eaten two or three teaspoons each, then sat around waiting to get high.

And waiting.

You’ll want to read the rest here.