Month: March 2012

It's possible:

Although Santorum is an easy favorite, Louisiana is unique enough that there should be a degree of uncertainty about the eventual result. French Catholics in Louisiana are culturally southern, but definitionally not evangelical and strongly supported McCain in 2008. We can’t discount the possibility that these voters ultimately support Romney, even if it seems somewhat unlikely. 

When I wrote this piece eight days ago, Gingrich had just come off strong performances in Mississippi and Alabama. If the conservative vote is as divided in Louisiana as it was in Mississippi and Alabama, Romney has a real shot. However, Gingrich performed exceptionally poorly in Illinois. If Gingrich falls far beneath 30%, Santorum is likely to benefit and Romney’s narrow opening will probably close.

For these kids, chess is more than just a game:

Linda Holmes worries the story will be corrupted:

The tricky news about this documentary that broke at the festival is that Scott Rudin and Sony Pictures have bought the rights to remake it. In other words, they're going to make a "based on a true story" Hollywood film based on this delicate story, and to be honest, that terrifies me. While there are movies that come out of stories about kids that are actually about kids (Akeelah And The Bee comes immediately to mind), it's far more common for classroom stories to become about the adults. I have a gnawing fear of seeing somebody like Charlize Theron (an actress I really like) as the woman who coaches the kids in chess. I fear the focus drifting from the kids to the adults who are more easily played by existing movie stars.

Lea Goldman investigates gender pricing:

It's not just dry cleaning and haircuts where women get socked: We pay more for home mortgages, health insurance, and cars and car repairs (even when we mind our credit, eat right and exercise, and do our homework), not to mention everyday items like deodorant and disposable razors. California, which in 1996 became the first state to ban gender pricing, found that women paid about $1,351 annually in extra costs and fees. Apply that figure to the rest of the women in the country and the total burden is staggering — roughly $151 billion in markups.

… A recent study by researchers at the University of Central Florida examined some 200 sticks of deodorant sold at major drugstore chains and found that sticks for women cost, on average, 30 cents more per ounce than those for men, even when the only discernible difference was scent. 

As far as health insurance is concerned, the ACA prohibits "gender rating," effective 2014. 

Women didn't dominate the sport until long after World War II: 

The presence of women changed how people thought about cheering.  Because women were stereotyped as cute instead of "valiant," the reputation of cheerleaders changed.  Instead of a pursuit that "ranks hardly second" to quarterbacking, cheerleading’s association with women led to its trivialization.  By the 1950s, the ideal cheerleader was no longer a strong athlete with leadership skills, it was someone with "manners, cheerfulness, and good disposition."  In response, boys pretty much bowed out of cheerleading altogether. … Cultural changes in gender norms continued to affect cheerleading. Now cheerleaders, still mostly women, pride themselves in being both athletic and spirited, a blending of masculine and feminine traits that is now considered ideal for women.

(Photo: Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush, left, is seen as a cheerleader at Phillips Academy in Andover MA., in a 1964 school archive photo. By Darren McCollester/Newsmakers.) Update from a reader: "Photo: Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush…"? He’s running again???  NOOOOOOOO!"

Emily Yoffe questions the practice:

[Robert Hickey author of Honor & Respect: The Official Guide to Names, Titles, and Forms of Address] says the best rule for any ex-official is, "Who are you at this moment?" If you’re a former senator who’s now a lobbyist on K Street, you should work your contacts as a private citizen, not as "senator."

Waldman nods:

There aren't very many other arenas in America where you get to make people call you by the most high-falutin title you were ever given, no matter how briefly you held the position or how many decades have passed since you did.

Alyssa Rosenberg wraps her head around the recent proliferation of "gritty" fairy tale films:

In the absence of the dark woods, the arbitrary nature of feudal lords, the horror of high infant mortality rates (at least in the developing world), the wolves that steal the sheep, what are our terrors? And which stories are the best matches for telling them? The persistence of crime dramas would suggest that the big city has replaced the big woods, that serial killers are our ravening beasts. But I’m not sure we have myths to embody the new fears generated by a world that’s much larger than the village, or the disembodied terrors of the digital age.

Kornacki considers Santorum's chances in the wake of Romney's resounding win in Illinois:

If Santorum can clear these hurdles – wins in Louisiana, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania – he’ll probably be able to justify pushing on into May, when the calendar becomes more favorable for him. He’d be even farther behind Romney in the delegate chase, but he’d still have a theoretical chance to deny his opponent 1,144. Anything short of the Louisiana/Wisconsin/Pennsylvania trifecta, though, will undermine the logic that’s keeping Santorum in the race.

Michelle Cottle imagines what it would take to push out Gingrich, a man "drunk on a cocktail of spite, narcissism, and general mischief."

Sebastian Seung explains why research on mapping out the way different neurons in the brain connect to each other has the potential to revolutionize medicine:

In brain diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, neurons degenerate and die. Autopsy reveals that something is visibly wrong with the brain. Yet for many mental disorders, such as autism and schizophrenia, a clear and consistent pathology of the brain has not been found. Why?

Researchers have conjectured that the individual neurons are healthy, but they are connected with each other in an abnormal pattern.  Unfortunately, such "miswirings" or "connectopathies" have remained merely hypothetical, because our technologies for mapping neural connections have been too primitive.  Imagine what it was like to study infectious diseases before the microscope was invented. You could observe symptoms, but not the microbes that caused disease. Similarly, most mental disorders are still defined only by their symptoms. We need to uncover their causes in the brain, and the new field of connectomics will be important for that.

(Image via tumblr fuckyeahnervoussystem. Brain Rubix cube designed by Jason Freeny.)

Charles Kupchan suggests so:

I believe that the world is entering a period of tectonic change in the global distribution of power. The coming redistribution of global economic output speaks for itself. For the United States to deny this inevitable reallocation of wealth and power (as Kagan recommends) would be to engage in dangerous self-delusion. To be sure, the United States will remain a power of the top rank for a long time to come. Even so, managing a world in which the West no longer enjoys material primacy will require acknowledging the task at hand—as well as ample foresight and judicious diplomacy. Now, while the United States still enjoys primacy, is the time to begin shaping that next world.

Tom Nichols challenges the idea that the growth of developing economies "speaks for itself:"

I never understand the chant about China’s growth, because China should have the world’s largest economy, because it has the world’s largest population, and the fact that it has gone for decades without reaching that mark is indicative of just how screwed up the Chinese economy has been in the 20th and 21st centuries. 

And a word about growth: it’s a relative measure. China and India need high growth, because without it, the lights start to go out and the water stops running. When your infrastructure is, in places, at Third World levels, you’d damn well better be able to crank up production, because you still have plenty of economic distance to make up. … Now, if the Chinese start to out-produce us in ways that matter, like innovation, intellectual achievement (and I don’t mean scoring high on math, I mean inventing another Apple instead of building them), or surpassing us in standard of living, then sure, we should rethink what we’re doing. But nobody is arguing that anything like that is going to happen.

Today on the Dish, Andrew called the end of the horse race, explained why he couldn't get on board with Paul Ryan's plan, and delved into the data suggesting that the GOP's Christianism was, rather than saving Christianity, destroying it. We blamed Romney's failings as a candidate for the overlong primary (follow-up here), noted the weaknesses of another veep pick, cornered the constituency responsible for Santorum's possible tactical victory in Louisiana, and listened to him disavow one of them. The next Democratic nominee looked poised to embrace marriage equality, Obama's supposed funding problem got scrutinized, and David Corn analyzed Obama's "strategic patience." Ad War Update here.

Andrew also got into it with Jeffrey Goldberg on arguments from "authoritah" on Israel and notified y'all about his Bill Maher appearance this Friday. We aired a sophisticated dissent from a reader on how to deal with the settlement problem, listened to more readers on the same topic, examined Peter Beinart's own rebuttal to his "Zionist boycott" proposal's critics, were appalled by the terrorist assault in Toulouse, checked on Syria's reverberations in Lebanon, and spotted basic Russian and Chinese weaknesses in global politics. American soldiers may (or may not) have been properly given the label "hero" automatically and officers made bank.

The web reacted to Paul Ryan's new budget, inequality's causes were debated, the ranks of the suburban poor swelled, men left professions that women entered, Obamacare litigation received scrutiny, a lottery ticket's value wasn't principally financial, and lying about Foxconn deflated the truth. Trayvon Martin was unjustly murdered, humanity seemed able to avoid extinction, horse racing brutalized horses, firefighter vision disoriented us, anonymous sobering helped many, and female Dish readers kept speaking up. AAA here, Quotes for the Day here and here, VFYW here, MHB here, and FOTD here.

– Z.B.

(Image by Will Fernia.)