Month: June 2011

Priceless, especially on the pendants:

 

At least, that's the only sane inference from this remark:

In an extended on-the-bus interview with Fox News' Greta van Susteren, Palin addressed a proposal for $2 billion in U.S. aid to Egypt. "We don't have the $2 billion!" Palin said. "Where are we going to get it? We're going to go borrow it perhaps from China? We'll borrow money from foreign countries to give to foreign countries."

I'd say Egypt needs the aid right now more than any other country, because protecting and nurturing its path toward democracy is a vital interest of the US and the region. In contrast, I see no reason at all for Israel to keep getting the billions you and I are now paying for a country with a booming economy, a lively democratic culture, and a military and intelligence capacity unequaled in the world. Many Israelis feel the same way:

In Egypt, Pakistan, Iraq and Afghanistan, we see countries that are in genuine need of economic and military support so that Islamic extremism will not take root in these “moderate” yet fledgling democracies. Unlike these other nations, Israel is a self-sufficient state that should be politely declining the continuing American aid, if not for economic reasons than for idealistic ones.

But do you think for a second Palin would ever withdraw that aid? Maybe a reporter should ask her.

Asti Hustvedt studies the issue in her new book, Medical Muses. She thinks hysteria "was at least partly an illness of being a woman in an era that strictly limited female roles":

I set out to write a nonhysterical book about hysteria, to ground my work in something real. At first I found it unfathomable that these women really were suffering from the spectacular forms of illness recorded by their doctors, an illness that no longer exists. But now I believe that Blanche, Augustine, and Genevieve were indeed ill. They suffered from chronic debilitating symptoms. To what degree their disease was socially determined and to what degree it was physically determined is impossible to say. If they showed up at a hospital today, suffering from the same symptoms, they would probably be diagnosed with schizophrenia or conversion disorder or bipolar disorder. They would undoubtedly be diagnosed with eating disorders because they had bouts of willful starving and vomiting. However, if these women were alive today, they might not have become ill to begin with and no doubt would suffer from other symptoms.

Daniel Fromson delves into the history of health food, which is often served with a generous helping of cultish religiosity:

Uncontroversial businesses like restaurants … help spiritual groups avoid persecution. Consider the case of the Hare Krishnas, whose aggressive panhandling during the 1970s generated bad press. One 1976 AP article chronicled how Krishnas wearing Santa suits began competing with other Santas for holiday donations in Manhattan, harassing rivals and following passersby for as far as a block, demanding, "Ho, ho, ho. Don't you have anything for Santa?" The group ended the Santa turf wars soon after and invested in vegetarian cookery.

(Photo of a meal from a Krishna Cafe by Flickr user Premshree Pillai)

David Bornstein profiles the social enterprise, Lumni, which offers “human capital contracts” to fund underpriveleged students during college:

In exchange for $8,530 in financing, [Columbian nursing student Jairo Sneider] agreed to repay 14 percent of his salary for 118 months after he graduated. At that point, regardless of how much he has paid, his obligation terminates. … If he ends up earning the average salary for nurses in Colombia, he will end up paying the equivalent of an interest rate of 17 percent, which is the average rate in the country for a student loan. And if he ends up doing better, he will pay more, and Lumni will share in his success.

Lumni has made similar deals with 1,900 students to date. Fifty five percent of them are women and 90 percent are the first in their families to attend college. Most of these students would have otherwise been unable to pay for college. So far, the default rate is under 3 percent.

Max Chafkin visits Argentina:

The meltdown of 2008—which nearly destroyed the world's banking system, sent the United States into its worst recession in 80 years, and put half of Western Europe on the brink of economic collapse—barely registered in Argentina. Andy Freire, Bilinkis's co-founder at Officenet, told me that he finds it hard not to laugh when his American friends complain about their problems. "Retail sales fall 5 percent in the U.S., and people say it's a major crisis," Freire says. "Our sales went down 65 percent in a single month. That's a crisis."

Nathan Yau gets googly-eyed over Mapnificient:

A lot of time when making plans to meetup with friends or family, you're not so concerned with how far possible locations are than you are how long it takes to get there. Similarly, when deciding where to live relative to your workplace, you care more about how long it takes to get to work in the morning than you do how many miles away it is. Mapnificient lets you do this. Place the pin on the map, and see where you can get in a specified amount of time via public transportation or bicycle.

Over at TNC's place, Hilzoy advocates learning what you can from seriously flawed writers:

It would be a mistake not to read Naipaul. He's a gorgeous, gorgeous writer. … That said, he's also one of the best examples around of someone who is (imho) deeply worth reading, but whose treatment of both women and blacks (esp. blacks outside Africa) is just horrific. … I would have lost so much had I just thrown the book across the room and never looked at Naipaul again. And in saying this, I'm not being nice to him, or something; I'm being entirely selfish. He's one of the writers I learned the most from, I think, and I would hate to have been deprived of that.

Ta-Nehisi nods:

What Hilzoy is pointing to here is not an embrace of blindness or amnesia, but the crucial importance of not becoming a shallow reactionary. It's true that the The New Republic would piss me off when I was in college. But I read it whenever I could find the time, and I studied the people who wrote there, hoping to steal whatever secrets of the craft they brought to bear. And now I find myself somewhere even worse–studying the words of slaveholders.