Month: March 2011

A reader writes:

I'm a man in my late-twenties who is (happily) married to the first woman he ever slept with. But she's not the only woman I've ever slept with. During a six-month break in our relationship I "sowed my wild oats," so to speak, precisely to figure out what I wanted and needed in a relationship. Doing so was the primary catalyst for us getting back together.

I got lucky first-time around but I would never have known it had I jumped into marriage immediately. Uncertainty gnaws at you long-term. But I have no need to feel uncertain. Put bluntly, sleeping with other women prior to marrying has positively impacted the long-term health of my marriage. And I suspect I'm not the only one. There's a reason that there is less divorce among couples who marry later.

Another writes:

This discussion reminds me of a woman I knew, who in looking back over her difficult life (early marriage, early divorce, left to be single mother to two kids) explained that once she slept with this guy, "as a good Catholic" she felt she had to marry him. I always privately thought (never shared with her, though) that it was probably a mistake to sleep with the wrong guy, but it was marrying him, not sleeping with him, that wrecked her life.

Ross also really is fixated on monogamy as a core social goal. But we know that this is an ideal, rare in practice, a standard honored most emphatically in its breach and in the mild forms of hypocrisy that help keep a society on its feet. And among couples without children, it's not entirely clear why couples cannot work out their own arrangements, if they so wish, while not publicly attacking the more general paradigm. But this complexity defies a certain worldview.

Last week Matt Miller argued that low teacher salaries mean "that we draw teachers from the bottom two-thirds of the college class" and  "for schools in poor neighborhoods, teachers come largely from the bottom third." In response, Cohn unearths a McKinsey report that Miller worked on:

The McKinsey team broke down teacher compensation, but with a twist: Instead of comparing how much teachers made relative to accountants, nurses, and other professionals, they compared how much teachers made relative to teachers in other countries. The U.S. did not stack up well

For the military campaign against Qaddafi to succeed, Christopher Albon thinks grain is as important as bullets:

Food shortages in eastern Libya, the largest rebel-controlled area, have reached dire levels. Fighting has left food stocks depleted and food supply chains in shambles. Around Benghazi, food prices have reportedly risen by 50 to 75 percent. Due to its poor suitability for agriculture, Libya imports the majority of its food, which has become largely impossible since fighting broke out.

The United Nations-run World Food Program is attempting to alleviate the food shortage, but so far with little success. Last Thursday, a ship that the World Food Program had chartered to carry 1,000 tons of flour to Benghazi, the provisional capitol of the rebel leadership, abandoned the trip after reports of attacks by pro-Qaddafi aircraft in the area. As food runs out and the conflict drags on, eastern Libya's food crisis will only get worse. Qaddafi appears willing to use the shortage as a weapon against the rebels, reportedly blocking food from reaching the besieged rebel-held town of Zawiya.

If you don't know much about Justin Bieber's rise to superstardom, James Parker provides a good primer:

How did he do it? With YouTube, that’s how. Kissed in his cradle by the witch of the Web, Justin was throwing up little promo reels by the time he was 12. Singing a Brian McKnight song into the bathroom mirror. Or sitting on some municipal steps somewhere, busking mightily about the Lord: “You’re my God and my Fa-ther!” he bellows through the legs of passersby, the wooden body of his guitar reverberating with his shouts. …

Bieber wasn’t from the Disney factory, and he didn’t have a show on Nickelodeon, so the marketing plan was skewed toward his already established constituency in social media: lots of Facebooking and YouTubing and sugary tweets to his millions-strong Twitter army.

"She's not afraid of his show. She doesn't think about him all that much. Neither do I. However, I do recall that he's been rather vicious in his coverage of her, so I'm not sure why she would even want to appear on his show to give him a ratings boost," – Palin mouthpiece Rebecca Mansour, asked why her boss has never accepted an invitation by Jon Stewart.

After this tragedy, Stephen Walt explains why the war in Afghanistan has a convoluted mission:

"[P]opulation protection" itself is not always a purely benign or politically neutral act. Protecting a local population often requires interfering with their daily lives in sometimes onerous and bothersome ways, whether through the construction of massive concrete barriers (as in Baghdad), or "strategic hamlets" (as in Vietnam), or through intrusive search missions in local villages. Even when we are in fact improving the security of the local population, that may not be how the people we are supposedly protecting perceive it. In the Pech Valley, at least, the local population mostly wanted us to get out and leave them alone. 

James Atlas interviews David Brooks about his new book, The Social Animal. Brooks:

"The scientists I’ve spent the last three years talking to are truth seekers, unlike people [in Washington]. They’re not technical materialists. They love Henry and William James. They’ve helped me see how the power of deep ideas changes the way you think. It was part of my idea to go down, down, down, to look at moral and spiritual creativity, the deepest issues. You learn the importance of culture, of history—some of the deep knowledge that comes from Plato and Aristotle. Philosophy and theology are telling us less than they used to. Scientists and researchers are leaping in where these disciplines atrophy—they’re all drilling down into an explanation of what man is.”

Paul Waldman believes in the political value of shamelessness:

One thing they understand very well at Fox, and in the conservative movement more generally, is the political value of shamelessness. As long as you say what you're saying with conviction, it doesn't matter how absurd or hypocritical it is. You may not get the majority of the public to agree with you, but you can get a good number. … As a result, conservatives may not win every argument, but they almost never get routed completely.

The general amnesia of the American public aids this in the short run. But Beck's ratings reveal, it may not be a good long-term strategy. And as Jonathan Bernstein notes:

My guess would be that as an overall effect the FNC/shameless strategy is a net minus. When pundits can pick up and drop arguments at the drop of the hat without worrying about long-term consistency, it may make it easier to appear to be winning at any moment, but at the cost of actually fighting for policies they believe in.

Seth Masket provides an example of shamelessness backfiring.

Unluck from Yaniv Fridman on Vimeo.

Messing around with C4D, just for the fun of it.  Music – "Unluck" by James Blake

He's at it again. This time around, he's sleuthing about lesbians:

Lesbian and bisexual women are more likely than totally straight women to say they've had anal sex with a man.

He explains:

Here's my best guess: In many if not most cases, openness to experimentation is driving everything else. Adventurousness makes a woman more likely to try various sex acts with men. And at the same time, it makes her more likely to express interest in other women. …The unkind way of putting this, from a liberal point of view, is that women who claim to be exclusively heterosexual are, on average, more conventional or uptight than women who report having some interest in other women. These "exclusively" straight women might not even be exclusively straight. They're just obtuse to their wayward feelings, or afraid to admit them. The equally unkind view, from a conservative perspective, is that sexual mores are collapsing in all directions.