Month: September 2010

Today on the Dish, we heard from customer service reps; one pretty angry lawyer; a master herbalist; an academic librarian; a resident physician; and the conversation continued on elites. Leon Wieseltier found clarity and common ground on the mosque; we played war games with the Taliban and the Discovery gunman was mostly just crazy. 

Weigel took on the Tea Party; Reason went robo-tripping; and and labels were for soup cans.  The Palin article got factchecked and Bristol Palin's dancing might encourage 14 year olds to have babies. Sanctions weren't helping Iran, while two Matts dueled and new hip church inductees included The Innocence Mission and Derek Webb. We learned how to beat procrastination and how to win in winning.

We enjoyed some macho salad; got the downlow on how to "do hip-hop" and the economics of death. School (photos) started; loving boobies might be bad for breast cancer; and Netflix does vacation very well. Aaron Fotheringham landed the world's first double backflip on a wheelchair; Franzen predicted the future and Yiddish wasn't dead. VFYW here; cool ad watch here; MHB here; dissent of the day here; and FOTD here.

A Dish reader's portrait of Dina Martina

Thursday on the Dish, we eyed Iowa for Palin; even the Vanity Fair writer who liked her couldn't believe how much she lied; and on top of all that, she ruined Alaska's quirkiness for the rest of the state. Chris drew on the Glenn Beck-Howard Beale connection; and the Tea Party defense and dissent of the day is here.

Yossi Klein Halevi asked Imam Rauf to modify the mosque, not move it. Israeli-Palestinian talks, amazingly, continued; and nation-building in Iraq, unsuprisingly, didn't work that well. We compared what worked in Haiti versus what hasn't in Pakistan; heard China's opinion on Iraq; and tracked deaths by drones. Sweatshops might not be as bad as we think but American Taliban still seemed to rub most the wrong way.

Savage savaged Democrats for not doing anything on gay rights; and Mazzone got impatient for a DADT repeal. Hitchens shut down his detractors; Sabato placed bets for November; and there's an ode to E.D. Kain and reformers on the right here. Conor called for less federal government under an overburdened presidency; we graded teachers' grades; and outed the flaws of an imperfect meritocracy.

We got the Dish from an indologist, a businessman, a scientist, and a Y2K programmer; is it me or does this sound like an awesome remake of the Breakfast Club? Cannibis went commercial; McWhorter advocated for the end of the war on drugs; and panhandlers sometimes buy booze and other times just deoderant. VFYW here; Yglesias award here; FOTD here; and MHB here. Twitter pwned old media on the Discovery gunman; we learned about "real" Americans; and we got the spectrum of romances both big and small from Dish readers on engagements. Jan Brewer was as bad as a BBC satire of a politician and this internet star sold out for a pot of gold at the end of his double rainbows.

Wednesday on the Dish, Afghan men took boy lovers; we learned lessons from Iraq and picked at Obama's speech. More romantic Dish readers pitched in on progressively alternative engagement gifts; immigration could solve the housing crisis; and healthcare could determine November's election. Weigel wrote the post-mortem on Murkowski; political parties are not dead yet; and Andrew got dragged into the argument over Kos's new book, American Taliban.

In the lead up to Labor Day, we heard from pharmacists; mathmeticians; a paid pro-bon lawyer; teachers; a mortician; more sacrificing public sector workers and about how the economic downturn has affected the hiring of elites.

The Vanity Fair piece had some ripe Sullivan bait; we got more of Ms. Dina Martina; and Americans were exceptional.  We counted vacation days and inducted more musicians into the hip church (and synagogue) hall of fame. VFYW here; Malkin award here; MHB here; FOTD here. We enjoyed some snacks and shit (so did tigers); Swedish fathers pushed strollers; and we kept the law out of craft cocktails. Glenn Beck wore a bulletproof vest; bonobos are like humans; and men wooed virtual girlfriends on romantic getaways.

Tuesday on the Dish, we followed the Beck backlash; parsed polls for November; and reflected on the Big Question of the best way to engage people who disagree. Politicians weren't as important as parties; Christianity in America made a splash; and the Heritage Foundation's newest hire doesn't quite gel with its ideals.

We played with the Rubik's cube of Pakistani politics; and wondered sarcastically about what will happen to all the Mexican police officers fired for their ties to drug cartels. Ambinder previewed Obama's address tonight; we asked after Atlas; and according to Churchill, sometimes appeasement was necessary.

Preppies needed help to survive; the codex won one over the screen; and the official Oxford English Dictionary may be the internet's most recent casualty. Apatow and Serwer defended Apatow's mockery of American masculinity and we tackled domestic violence in pop culture. We mined maternity leave and the defense of diamonds; and McArdle seconded Bering on monogamy and jealousy while Dan Savage disagreed. FOTD here; cool ad watch here; Yglesias award nominee here; MHB here; VFYW here; VFYW contest #13 winner here; and your many suggestions for mapping future contests here. On the elite professions front, we touched on Scalia's choices and heard from dating coaches; civil servants in the shadows; attorneys; pastors and prostitutes.

Copan Ruinas, Honduras, 8.31 am

Monday on the Dish, we had reactions to the Glenn Beck rally here, here, and here. We examined the profit bias behind Beck, analyzed his reach, and awarded him our Hewitt award. We had more Mosque fear-mongering here while Conor condemned recent incitements to violence.

We measured Obama's record on torture and the lack of progress on trying detainees in the US. We compared liberalism in Europe and the US and a very generous maternity leave in Germany; and the expat travelogue got an infusion of Americana. There was an insider's call to arms over Afghanistan; Conor weighed the pros and cons of Jane Mayer's profile of the Koch brothers and Jay Rosen doled out advice to journalists.

We remembered Katrina; took a tour of the housing market; and Joyce scored a point on Jest. Plastic bags puzzled us; the Paris Review revealed its methods; and the Atlantic's archives offered a different vision of WWII, long-form style. The web embraced print; we asked for your stories about professionals and the atmosphere around elites; and small towns produced good athletes. We tallied up the record of a girlie man on gay rights; Jesse Bering dissected a gay man's jealousy an evolutionary perspective; and Jay Bakker, son of Tammy and Jim, apologized way before Marin did and meant it.

Cannabis continued getting censored; some men hired assistants to date for them; and we all wanted to have a beer on the beach without getting arrested. We admired notes from bathroom stalls; studied the list of 12 things to get high on that you've never heard of and probably never want to try; and jammed out to a MHB from someone who was probably on at least one. VFYW here; FOTD here; and cool ad watch here. McDonald's hamburgers stayed "fresh" for 137 days; circumcision took the form of self-loathing; lap dances helped some women make the grade and Bill O'Reilly used to review porn for a living.

–Z.P.

by Conor Friedersdorf

The indispensable Dave Weigel has published an enormously informative take on the Tea Party movement. It's here, and if you've been observing the phenomenon from afar it probably answers most of your questions.

An excerpt:

The politician who’s rightly seen as the ideological vessel of the tea party movement is Sen. Jim DeMint. I’d argue that he’s more important to the movement than its bigger star, Sarah Palin, because DeMint has actually gotten specific about what he wants to do in power and why he thinks tea party activists can help him do it. He thinks that Congress needs to reckon with popular entitlements and spending programs, and it needs to cut them even though this has been, consistently, politically disastrous. His theory is that things are bad enough that Americans understand what needs to be cut. They are ready to give up benefits and programs that, in the past, they’ve supported, because they realize how bad things are. That was the not-so-hidden subtext of Glenn Beck’s big rally on the mall last week. Beck, who’s done so much to inform the Tea Parties, told a crowd of 100,000 or so people in person, and many in the TV audience, that they needed to look inward and look back to God and be ready to restore the pre-New Deal vision of America.

Is this good for the Republican Party? I think it is. When is an active and powerful base bad for a political party? The issue that activists and Republicans have to deal with, as they look to power, is whether they can be as successful at convincing Americans of their agenda as they have been at convincing themselves. They need a country that has given up on Democratic policies largely because of high unemployment to be convinced that their policies will hurt in the short term and work in the long term. If all the Tea Party does is help the GOP create momentum for tax cuts, it will have failed. It’s spending cuts, painful ones, that 40 years of conservative activism have been asking for, and 2 years of Tea Party activism have tried to convince the country that it needs.

by Zoe Pollock

Ross is a little freaked out by the ability of Franzen's novels to tap into the zeitgeist, and maybe even predict it a little. First with The Corrections which addressed the excess of the 1990s and was followed by September 11th, and now, with Freedom:

One thread in the narrative tapestry involves the Iraq War (there are neoconservatives, defense contractors, etc.), and so of course “Freedom” just happened to be published on the day that Barack Obama announced the end of combat operations in Iraq. But the thicker, more important thread involves a character whose secret obsession is population growth: He’s an unreconstructed Club of Romer, a Zero Population Growth guy who works for environmental causes but chafes against the movement’s unwillingness to say what it said boldly in the 1960s and 1970s — namely, that there are just too many bloody people on the planet. …

Now it would seem difficult, in an age when population control has fallen far down the list of left-wing cause célèbres (and for good reason), to imagine anything that would make this particular plot twist feel timely.

But then came James Lee.

by Conor Friedersdorf

A reader writes:

I teach at an Ivy, so I could go on at length about the privileges my undergraduates receive. Even in this most recent class, I still had a fair number of students who started at 100k+, flights to the Hamptons, etc… However, what I really wanted to discuss is the effect of elite high schools, which I think is far greater than that of the Ivies. My wife attended Andover, did well, etc… but chose to attend a large public university in the South (read academic burnout here).

After college, from which she barely graduated, she delivered flowers for a living.  In short, nothing doing financially or in life. However, a move to NYC (as I was on an academic odyssey) led to an immediate job in finance at a major company. Mind you, this is a person with a degree in communications, who had not taken math since high school. As part of this job, she had a full six months paid to acquire a variety of licences and skills. The interviews for this position extended over a week and nearly every interviewer inquired not about college but Andover.

This pattern has repeated itself as she has changed jobs. Andover is always discussed. If an interviewer went to Exeter or St. Pauls, that must be mentioned. Her college has never been discussed. Even positions which require minimum GPA's, which she could never meet, are waived. She actually leaves this block blank often on applications, and it is never asked about. Currently, she is a manager at top hedge fund without ever having a degree in finance or an MBA.

I think what is missing in this debate is perspective on numbers. The best high schools are very small affairs. The Ivies actually graduate a far greater number of kids. Boarding schools build life long bonds as well that are much stronger due to their size. They take care of their own in ways that Harvard cannot imagine.

This world is completely foreign to me. Until I moved to the East Coast I thought Exeter was a college and I hadn't heard of St. Pauls until I read this e-mail. I also grew up on Andover Place in Costa Mesa, Calfornia's college park, and thought it was a college.

by Conor Friedersdorf

A reader writes:

I think that the most common misconception for my job is that we actually do routinely work 80 hours a week. Doctors in training are one of the few professions, along with truck drivers and pilots where we are defined by a maximum number of hours to work. The way it is defined now is that we can work no longer that 30 hours in one shift, must have 10 hours off between shifts, and must have one day off in 7 when averaged over 4 weeks. You do the math and that makes 80 hours. The 30 hours shifts are what we deem Call and typically have 2 a week. The average over 4 weeks means that often we sometimes work 90 hours and sometimes work about 70.

Clearly this is an arduous task and means that many times people in the hospital are cared for by overworked, exhausted trainees. It also means that we are getting intense training at being able to manage extremely complex patients under significant mental duress. In MANY teaching hospitals there is no staff physician in the hospital at night so even in Intensive Care Units the resident (typically an upper level like myself) is the most experienced person in the building.

All of that said, most of us who have been through this would only go to a teaching type hospital because these are hospitals that typically have 4-6 resident on call physically in the building to see and evaluate patients. If you have ever been to one of the typical small private hospitals the only physician in the hospital may be the ER doctor who is already overworked with the 20 to 30 people in the ED and only see the admitted patients if a Code Blue takes place. Thus all other calls go to the doctor who is at home asleep and has badgered the nurses into not calling him anymore.
So despite the fact that we are tired, cranky, and not completed in our training, I submit that you are much safer being taken care of by the resident who hasn't slept yet then the experienced guy sleeping 30 minutes away from you.

by Chris Bodenner

Christopher Orr reviews the latest Clooney vehicle, The American:

A film so spare in its dialogue needs to offer meaning in its silences, and neither Corbijn nor the script (Rowan Joffe's adaptation of a Martin Booth novel) is quite up to the task. Jack's relationship with Father Benedetto never acquires the requisite moral gravity, nor his tryst with Clara the emotional consequence. And for all of Clooney's quiet charisma, his Jack remains a cipher, balanced awkwardly between the human and iconic.

by Patrick Appel

Hooman Majd thinks sanctions against Iran are doing little good:

The suggestion that tensions within the leadership have been aggravated by the sanctions, or that sanctions are responsible for Iran's apparent willingness to talk, is a misreading of the political scene in Tehran. At a base level, it ignores the long history of clashes and rivalry between strong personalities in government and among the ayatollahs. Moreover, history has shown that outside threats tend to create unity rather than divisions among Tehran's leadership; that unity does not need to be coerced. Yet the supreme leader's call to stop the squabbling is likely motivated by a deep — perhaps even occasionally paranoid — fear that to respond to hostility with conciliation is to fall into a trap that the West has set for Iran, one in which Iran suddenly finds itself beholden to greater powers or subject to a "soft" or "velvet revolution." Put simply, now is not the time for petty infighting. And even those conservatives who retain their distaste for Ahmadinejad won't want to jeopardize their good standing with Khamenei — especially as the 2013 presidential election approaches — by appeasing Iran's enemies, real or imagined.

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

Thanks for asking the question recently about whether the church can be hip.  In the interest of disclosure, I am an Episcopal priest, and I find great value in traditional worship and music.  I listen to a wide range of music, but I’m often suspicious of “Christian” artists because, frankly, most of them are lame.  Not all, but most.  I can get on board with a lot of what you’ve cited as hip Christian music on the blog recently.  The problem with all of this for me, however, is that I do not believe church is about being entertained.  I believe it’s about worshiping the living God.  Now, that doesn’t mean that worship should be a lifeless snooze fest, but I think there’s an appropriate time and place for everything.  I have about a million different entertainment choices every day.  If I want to be entertained, I can find something.  But that’s not what church is about to me.  When the church seeks to be hip, relevant, or whatever you want to call it, what you often end up with is [the video above].  For me ultimately it’s manipulative and all about “me” and my desire to be entertained rather than about God.  But that’s just me.

It's not just you; another reader, who passed along the same video, writes:

A friend just sent me this.  I think it pretty much sums up my experience of the "contemporary" church scene. I do, in fact, think church music can be hip. But if hip is your goal, then you've really missed the point.

For the most excruciating example of a church trying to be hip, go here.

by Conor Friedersdorf

Matthew Yglesias and Matt Welch are a great Bloggingheads pairing. Especially recommened is this section on the Brothers Koch, donors to non-profits, and related issues.