Month: May 2011

Today on the Dish, Andrew frisked Cheney for continuing to endanger US troops, and rebutted Ross' defense of the Bush-Cheney years. Andrew questioned the Catholic Santorum's embrace of torture, Obama's leadership veered starkly from Bush's, and Les Gelb demanded we get out of Afghanistan asap. We watched Osama enjoy some me time, and Bush traveled through time. Hasids photoshopped Hillary out of history, totalitarian art endured, and Sara B. King psychoanalyzed terrorists. Syria got some help from Iran in cracking down on protesters, Iraq debated whether to ask some US troops stay, and Dagan tried to restrain Barak in Israel. Issandr El Amrani defended Turkey's independent policies, and Christians suffered as the Other in Egypt. 

Lawrence J. Korb proposed budget cuts to defense, bloggers settled on muddling through the deficit, and the marriage equality momentum built in New York. Canada's conservatives could teach the US a thing or two, Gay Inc backed Obama's reelection, and Tina Fey brought Sarah Inc back to life. Trump reiterated he isn't a racist, a reader pegged our political zeitgeist, and Weigel cheered up over Obama's bump in swing states. Finland's education system bested ours, cursive writing lured youngsters like sex, and Kevin Outterson placed bets on Vermont's single-payer healthcare system. Dara Lind skewered Shakespeare's birthers, and we admired the extinct thylacine, which is more marsupial than cat or dog. Kevin Fanning contemplated the commute, Mark Post tried to grow sausage in a petri dish, and failure leads to success. Andrew admired Schock's abs and Beckham rocking toilet paper, beardage trended in golf, and Strindberg on drugs made us giggle. Orwell kept great diaries, Hitchens lost his voice, and Eeyore the sad donkey would have made a great blogger.

Yglesias award here, chart of the day here, FOTD here, VFYW here, and MHB here.

–Z.P.

Hitchens' cancer has gone after his vocal cords. His voice is on the fritz, which inspired him to write about its place in his life and writing:

To my writing classes I used … to open by saying that anybody who could talk could also write. Having cheered them up with this easy-to-grasp ladder, I then replaced it with a huge and loathsome snake: “How many people in this class, would you say, can talk? I mean really talk?” That had its duly woeful effect. I told them to read every composition aloud, preferably to a trusted friend. The rules are much the same: Avoid stock expressions (like the plague, as William Safire used to say) and repetitions. Don’t say that as a boy your grandmother used to read to you, unless at that stage of her life she really was a boy, in which case you have probably thrown away a better intro. If something is worth hearing or listening to, it’s very probably worth reading. So, this above all: Find your own voice.

A reader writes:

Here's a wonderful song by the Mountain Goats.  It's written from the perspective of soon-to-be extinct animals.  The album, The Life of the World Yet to Come, consisted entirely of songs inspired by certain texts of Scripture (with each being titled thusly).  It was probably a tough sell for a lot of self-identified "indie" types, but it's a gorgeous album.

Another reader is vigilant:

The thylacine was emphatically NOT "a blurring of cat and dog." Evolutionarily, it's light years from either cat or dog.

It was a marsupial, far more closely related to kangaroos, koalas, and opossums than to cats, dogs, or even the ancient common ancestor of cats and dogs.  It's no closer to cats or dogs than kangaroo rats are to actual kangaroos – or squirrel monkeys are to actual squirrels (further, in fact, since squirrel monkeys and squirrels are both placental mammals). 

Thylacine evolved many of the same anatomical features and behavior characteristics as cats and dogs, filling, as it did, the ecological niche of predatory quadruped in an ecosystem in which marsupials spread out and specialized to fill all the same ecological niches as true (placental) mammals filled in the rest of the world.  But the similarities are due not to close kinship but to parallel evolutionary histories among two very different family trees. 

Maybe you meant "apparent blurring of cat and dog" or "mixture of cat-like and dog-like behaviors."  But your word choice does not make it at all clear that you grasp the distinction.

A reader writes:

I am still tired from Mother's day (kids ages 11, 8 and 6) and I enjoyed today's Mental Health Break. But any video that closes with Mary Tyler Moore in Ordinary People, where she's standing there next to her poor wounded son (Timothy Hutton) with that brittle, pasted-on smile, just doesn't feel like a celebration of motherhood. I need a Laura Petrie chaser now …

Ordinary People really is a masterpiece. How can something that close to camp be utterly sincere and convincing?

A research brief convinces Ezra Klein that a grand bargin on the deficit isn't likely. Klein believes the US will address the deficit through "a slew of deficit-reduction measures passed over the next decade or so." Karl Smith is onboard:

The idea of grand bargains, big deals, and come-to-Jesus moments where our leaders get serious about the deficit are sexy but they are not realistic and quite frankly not smart. Big ideas make for big narratives and great stories to tell your grandkids but the history of ideas is that most of them suck and hanging your hat on any one of them is the surest route to ruin.

Smith continues this thought in a later post. Ryan Avent expects drastic action when treasury yields rise. He quips that "muddling through strikes me as a terrible option except for many of the others."

Simon Leys pores over Orwell's personal effects:

Orwell’s diaries are not confessional: here he very seldom records his emotions, impressions, moods, or feelings; hardly ever his ideas, judgments, and opinions. What he jots down is strictly and dryly factual: events happening in the outside world—or in his own little vegetable garden; his goat Muriel’s slight diarrhea may have been caused by eating wet grass; Churchill is returning to Cabinet; fighting reported in Manchukuo; rhubarb growing well; Béla Kun reported shot in Moscow; the pansies and red saxifrage are coming into flower; rat population in Britain is estimated at 4–5 million; among the hop-pickers, rhyming slang is not extinct, thus for instance, a dig in the grave means a shave; and at the end of July 1940, as the menace of a German invasion becomes very real, “constantly, as I walk down the street, I find myself looking up at the windows to see which of them would make good machine-gun nests.”

Rising inequality isn't exclusive to America:

American society is more unequal than those in most other OECD countries, and growth in inequality there has been relatively large. But with very few exceptions, the rich have done better over the past 30 years, even in highly egalitarian places like Scandinavia.

(Hat tip: Mankiw)

Stephen Cook critizes Turkey for its luke-warm reaction to the Arab Spring. Issandr El Amrani defends the country:

Turkey may indeed carry cynical moves, and deserves moral condemnation for it. But it doesn't mean its foreign policy is a failure. The real achievement of Turkey's foreign policy is not so much its success in achieving its goals, but its independence: it acts like a sovereign state, not a client state. In the face of a tough and unpredictable regional situation that directly affects its interests, it may have faltered, but it has retained its autonomy. That is what Arabs ruled by Quislings and acquiescent puppets have admired, not necessarily the policies themselves.

You want to succeed? First, fail. David Leonhardt interviews Tim Harford, author of Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure. Money Harford quote:

I see two promising approaches. One is to earmark more government research grants for high-risk projects. A fascinating research paper compares conservative medical research grants from the National Institutes of Health with more speculative grants from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The Hughes approach produces more failures but many more “big hits.” Clearly, there’s a balance to be struck.

A second approach is the use of innovation prizes. These have received increasing attention but there’s potential to put up far larger prizes — multibillion-dollar affairs.

Bristol gets her own reality show. And a new face?