Month: February 2010

The Redesign, Ctd

by Andrew Sullivan

I know I’m on vacation, but since this debate has started with some sparks (see Fallows here and here, TNC here, Goldberg here and here, Ambers here), just a few words. I never saw the whole redesign before it was launched and I was not included in the process at all. It has all sorts of bells and whistles which people tell me are great – including a new “content management system” and something called Disqus which is a way cool commenting device with avatars and such.

I don’t like what was done to my own page much, as I have said, but I signed off in advance (except for the abrupt removal of the Dish’s search engine). The unnecessary new fonts, the loss of framing for the photos, the exploitation of the Dish as a relentlessly throbbing promotional tool for the Wire (a Dish duplicate with more staffers) has interrupted its flow and made it less easy to read. The biggest loss is the absence of the boxes of the most recent posts for the other bloggers. Now, you cannot use the Dish as a hub for the other bloggers (which was probably part of the point) but I fear it will reduce their traffic – and will certainly make me miss good stuff I otherwise would have clicked on.

Certainly at no point was I ever asked what I would like to see improved on this page. My requests over three years, often suggested by readers – for a continued-reading feature that does not require a new page (the new one sends you into a mass of prose where it’s very hard to find where you left off), for a much more user-friendly search function, for one-click running summaries of long threads (torture, gay rights, Obama, health reform, Window views) etc, have all been turned down, even as just three people produce 300 posts a week to the point of exhaustion and generate between 55 and 60 percent of the Atlantic.com’s entire traffic.

But in this redesign, we should be grateful for the usual neglect. Our page is by far the least messed up – and priority for undoing the blog-messes rightly goes to those poor souls like TNC whose blog has been all but, in the words of one of his readers, “spiked“. Maybe it takes actually seeing a design live and online that brings this into focus (because TNC approved the changes beforehand). But that’s because a blog is inherently a live process and conversation and anyone who actually understands blogging’s intimate relationship to its readership – and the critical importance of conversation to the endeavor – would never have dreamed of turning it into a series of headlines. That’s what worries me deeply. Not the inevitable transitional glitches but the philosophy behind it.

I know the designers meant well and worked very hard. Like everyone else, I deeply appreciate their hard work. Maybe some agree with Goldberg that this HuffPo/DailyBeast/Gawker type melange is, in fact, “a thorough reimagining of what a magazine’s website could be: Current, topical, intellectual, earnest (and ironic), but rooted in the culture and history of one of America’s most indispensably important magazines.”

I understand that advertisers like “verticals” to pitch certain kinds of products, and are allegedly leery of individual bloggers with style. I also know in this media climate how vital advertising is, and how our survival online is critical to our endurance in print. I am not a businessman. And I deeply believe in the Atlantic, as readers well know. If this keeps us afloat, that sure is better than going under. If there is business genius here, congrats to all involved.

But treating blogs as a series of headlines, designed to maximize pageviews, is a deep misunderstanding of blogs, their reader communities and their integrity.  I hope they get restored to their previous coherence, and these amorphous “channels” gain some editorial identity. I hope writers like Fallows and Goldberg aren’t treated as random fodder – anchors! – for “channels”. I believe in the Atlantic as a place for writing. The redesign seems to me to ooze casual indifference to that and to the respect that individual writers deserve.

The redesign also makes the Dish’s role at the Atlantic even more anomalous than it has recently become. The Dish once fit into a bevy of bloggers as a kind of unifying hub for all of them. In the new design, it’s clear the Dish fits in nowhere. It has always been an experiment fitting a blogazine like the Dish into an online magazine like the Atlantic. But the experiment is clearly failing.

Still the Dish will survive, however estranged from the rest of the Atlantic.com’s content; and relatively benign neglect is probably better than the alternatives. We may even get some more help soon – even our own unpaid interns – that will lighten the crushing workload.

But give us back our search engine!

The Undertaking

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by Graeme Wood

Matt Labash lands in the Dominican Republic and travels across the border to Haiti, from prosperity to penury.  “It’s as though God bisected the island of Hispaniola, and said, ‘This side gets the shortstops. This side gets the cholera.’”

In a profile of Rick Frechette — priest, gravedigger, hostage negotiator — Labash finds a place that has never been better than awful:

In Haiti, even before the quake, dead bodies were nothing more than background music — as commonplace as they are unnoticed. If they didn’t end up in the stark death-cave that is the general hospital morgue, they were burned in the streets on the spot where they died (a pragmatic hygiene concern). The decency and sentimentality that a better-developed society affords are luxuries here. Father Rick and his men gather the bodies themselves, packing them into makeshift coffins fashioned from supermarket cardboard boxes. They then truck them outside the city, up a sun-bleached highway that runs alongside the Caribbean Sea, to the rolling wastelands of Titanyen, which translates from Creole as the “fields of less than nothing.” A New Orleans-style Haitian jazz-funeral band — all horns and drums — plays graveside. Father Rick, an irreverent sort, calls them “The Grateful Dead.” Then he and his men plant the cardboard coffins in large holes dug by their own gravediggers, endowing their cargo in death with a tiny modicum of the dignity that eluded them in life.

(Photo by Flickr user United Nations Development Programme under a Creative Commons license.)

“Mousavi’s Long Struggle”

by Chris Bodenner

Abbas Milani looks at the life of Mir Hossein Mousavi Khamenei (who is, in fact, a distant relative of Ayatollah Khamenei):

By any measure, the rise of a little-known architect and newspaper editor to the highest ranks of the new regime was surprising, even meteoric. But, by the time of the revolution, Mousavi had built a reputation as a leading intellectual and man of unquestionable pieties. And, at that moment, the regime needed a façade that projected a spirit of inclusion, that could ballast its far-flung coalition. With both his demeanor and ideological roots in the Ershad, Mousavi exuded exactly those reassuring qualities.

Face Of The Day

Toledano

by Patrick Appel

Phillip Toledano explores the beauty of the cosmetically altered (NSFW):

Is beauty informed by contemporary culture? By history? Or is it defined by the surgeon’s hand? Can we identify physical trends that vary from decade to decade, or is beauty timeless? When we re-make ourselves, are we revealing our true character, or are we stripping away our very identity?

(Hat tip: Kottke)

Where Health Care Stands

by Patrick Appel

From Andrew's column this week:

I suspect the bill will pass — but I sure wouldn’t bet much money on it. If it fails, does this mean we could face such deadlock in the world’s largest democracy that we are threatened with what one British economics commentator has described as “a financial crisis so horrific that actions by the British or European governments would be swept away like beach huts in a tsunami”? Er, no.

People forget that the American political system is designed to stop anything getting done. Civil rights bills, even after Kennedy’s assassination, were filibustered for 37 days straight. Bill Clinton’s healthcare bill failed; Bush’s social security reform failed. The Senate, with its arcane procedures, is a brick wall against change — just one senator can, in effect, stop everything. Rural states with barely anyone in them have two senators each, while the national capital, Washington DC, has none. The population represented by senators who favour health insurance reform dwarfs the population represented by senators who don’t. As Churchill once said: “Americans always do the right thing after they have exhausted every other alternative.” And that’s what the founders wanted. This isn’t a bug; it’s a feature.

After the appalling imperial presidency of Bush, Obama is trying to restore constitutional balance and order. While Dick Cheney, the former vice-president, had contempt for the rule of law, Obama is a stickler for it. His seeming passivity is actually what used to be called constitutionalism, which is why I still see Obama as a One Nation Tory rather than a liberal radical. If he squeezes this bill through, no one will now believe he rammed it through. He tried. Just as, if he imposes sanctions on Iran, no one will be able to say he didn’t try all he could to bring Tehran around. And this strengthens his position in the long run, when not all of us will be dead.

Do Vacations Make Us Happy?

by Patrick Appel

Ryan Sager explores the question:

[A] “very relaxing” vacation could create a noticeable (if small) bump in happiness for at least two weeks, wearing off completely after eight weeks. A small buzz of extra happiness for two to eight weeks sounds pretty good to me.

He thinks much of the benefit comes before the vacation actually starts:

 Start off daydreaming about where you might like to go. Look at various beautiful places and imagine being there. Look at hotels and imagine staying there. Look at rental cars and imagine driving down the highway. If a trip’s complicated — involving more than a few destinations — I’ll take a week or more to plan, doing just a little bit at a time so that the planning won’t be over until it’s just about time to leave. What could be more fun?

I don't find planning vacations nearly as enjoyable as Ryan does, but having something to look forward to certainly makes long stretches of intense work more bearable.

Kant Doesn’t Care If You Get High

by Patrick Appel

Ben Casnocha tweaks Kant's moral maxim:

In Kant's Categorical Imperative he includes this moral maxim of universality: "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law without contradiction." In other words, if your action were to be the action everyone was taking, would you still do it? The implications of Kant to non-voters would be, "If everyone chose not to vote, the democracy wouldn't function. So vote!"

That seems like a fine aspirational ethic — a principled stance applied to things like democracy and drug buying — but the more realistic approach would to weigh the probability of universal adoption of the action.

If it's insanely low — like in the case of non-voting or drug-buying — then ignore it. If, on the other hand, there were only five total drug buyers in the world, and if you stopped buying drugs that would drastically shrink demand and perhaps result in less drug violence, you would be right to incorporate societal implications more seriously in your decision as they much greater.

I'm with Kant.

Casnocha doesn't object to drug use but to drug purchases funding other criminal activities. Drug use, in moderation, doesn't violate Kant's moral maxim; a world where everyone smokes a joint once in awhile wouldn't be much different than the world we live in. And drug violence could largely be resolved either by drug users quitting en masse or by legalization. Casnocha's maxim falls further apart when applied to other moral dilemmas. Take this post by McArdle on pedophilia and child pornography from earlier in the week:

Dan Savage a couple of weeks ago had a letter from a pedophile who has never done anything about it: never used child porn, never touched a child, doesn't even let himself look at children in public places.

In some sense, people like this–the pedophiles who never do anything, and do their damnedest to keep from even thinking about it–are exercising a virtue that borders on the saintly.  They're struggling mightily with a powerful desire that they exert rigid control over.  Society should gather round to help them, tell them what a great job they're doing, give them other ways to channel the energy they aren't pouring into molesting kids, and substitutes for the emotional succor that most of us hope to get from our partners.

No one would argue that this pedophile should "weigh the probability of universal adoption" before making the decision not use child pornography. Kant's maxim only works well when debating the direct effects of an action. If one buys marijuana it is possible that they funding other criminal activities. If one consumes child pornography they are directly supporting a heinous act.

The Redesign, Ctd

by Patrick Appel

Fallows continues the conversation in TNC's comment section:

I have now literally spent the majority of my years on Earth as an employee of the Atlantic, and I could not be more loyal to the magazine, its heritage and prospects, my colleagues, and whatever it takes to keep this enterprise going. Therefore it's unusual for me to say in public that I think we've put a foot wrong. I do think that — as explained at my neighboring site — but I want to be entirely clear about the underlying reasons. No one at this company has had anything in mind except finding a way to maintain our standards of journalism in circumstances that always present new problems and new opportunities. This was an honest effort by a well-meaning and mutually supportive group of people to modernize the site, make the presentation of topics and themes more coherent, and also of course to make it more viable as a business. Everyone has quickly recognized that in the process we've created new problems for ourselves. The idea was just to make things better, not to screw up anything that worked. The point may seem obvious, but I wanted to say that I agree with TNC that this should be understood as a well-intentioned miscalculation rather than anything else.