Month: April 2012

Mark Schmitt worries more about the causes of inequality than inequality itself:

I am concerned about what leads to sharply rising inequality, and what follows from it. And that’s what the book is really about. Think of it almost like one of those medical mysteries from the New York Times Magazine, in which a patient presents with a symptom – sudden weight gain or mysterious headaches. The symptom itself may not be debilitating, but the doctor has to figure out what caused it, what else is going on, what’s likely to happen, and how to treat the patient, not just the symptom. The Great Divergence – high end gains/middle- and low-income stagnation — is a big symptom. What are the causes and consequences? How bad is it, doc?

Brink Lindsay differs:

I don’t believe that the level of inequality, on its own, tells us anything useful about the state of a society or the justice of its institutions. As my former colleague Will Wilkinson has pointed out, the U.S. and Ghana have roughly the same Gini coefficient – the leading metric for overall income inequality. Yet Ghana ranks 135th out of 187 countries on the United Nations’ 2011 Human Development Index, while the U.S. ranks 4th. It thus seems beyond serious dispute that the Gini coefficient by itself is virtually useless as an indicator of social well-being.

Schmitt goes another round:

The question that can’t really be answered statistically, yet, is whether today’s 35 year olds, or even 45 year olds, will enjoy the same level of widely distributed security later in life that today’s Boomer seniors and their predecessors do. It seems unlikely, since they are starting out in a world of stagnant incomes, educational debt, and with little chance of enjoying the kinds of wealth gains that someone who invested in either a house or in the stock market in the 1970s or 1980s has accrued. That’s not to say that all seniors are rich, or promote a generational conflict – just that the majority of wealth is concentrated in a sector of the population that reflects the greater equality of opportunity in an earlier era.

German sanitation workers get creative:

A group of garbage men in Hamburg have figured out a way to combine their love of photography with their work of hauling trash, turning large dumpsters into giant pinhole cameras to photograph their city. The dumpsters are converted by drilling tiny holes into the fronts and then hanging large sheets of photo paper inside.

More photos here.

(Photo: The old church in Hamburg Altenwerder photographed with a garbage container by Hans-Peter Strahl, Christoph Blaschke and Mirko Derpmann. Shot on a 106×80 cm sheet of ilford multigrade with 45 minutes exposure time. By the Trashcam Project on Flickr)

After her own battle with artificial insemination, Belle Boggs contemplates fertility in the animal kingdom:

Like ours, the animal world is full of paradoxical examples of gentleness, brutality, and suffering, often performed in the service of reproduction. Female black widow spiders sometimes devour their partners after a complex and delicate mating dance. Bald eagle parents, who mate for life and share the responsibility of rearing young, will sometimes look on impassively as the stronger eaglet kills its sibling. At the end of their life cycle, after swimming thousands of miles in salt water, Pacific salmon swim up their natal, freshwater streams to spawn, while the fresh water decays their flesh. Animals will do whatever it takes to ensure reproductive success.

A whole lotta Lotte, from age 0 to 12:

Kottke is wowed:

We've seen this kind of thing before (Kalina, etc.) but the use of short snippets of video instead of still photos adds something.

A similar video of the videographer's son here.

Justin Martin argues that the "word bureau should be retired when used to describe a single employee":

A 2011 report in the American Journalism Review found that the number of full time foreign correspondents employed by US newspapers declined steeply since 2003. But news outfits that have slashed budgets for foreign reporting are nonetheless eager to present themselves as global news organizations.

This is why NBC will at times feature a reporter in its London bureau discussing events in Athens or even Iraq. The correspondent might as well be in Hoboken. “Many news outlets that have no foreign staff are eager to pretend that they do,” former International Herald Tribune editor Mort Rosenblum wrote in Little Bunch of Madmen, a book about foreign reporting. News organizations want audiences to believe they have the resources to scour the globe, even when it isn’t true.

Gender reveal parties, which the Dish noted last year, have gained popularity:

Last month, Bobbie Stroessner, a pregnant Wisconsin mom of a 7-year-old girl, discovered her baby’s gender through cupcakes that she’d ordered after asking an ultrasound tech to tuck a fetal crotch shot into a sealed envelope. Stroessner gave the envelope to a baker with instructions to dye the cupcakes — but not the vanilla icing — pink or blue. The next day, with friends, parents, grandparents and great-grandparents gathered around, Stroessner, her husband and their daughter peeled back the foil on their treats: the cake was tinted the color of a Smurf.

Packer is saddened by the parties:

At bottom, the invented rituals that proliferate in our culture signify a disenchantment with modernity. If, like millions of Americans, you’re secular and the traditions of a church or temple have no hold on you, or if you’re assimilated and ethnic identity has faded away, then what is there to sustain you on the lonely path through a turbulent, rootless, uncertain world? 

(Photo by Flickr user kristin_a) 

A reader dissents:

I have the same view of Slavoj Zizek that you do, roughly: he's much overrated, and generally full of himself (he's the media's idea of a philosopher, but decidedly not the genuine article). He's Marxist to the core and he's an atheist. The only remotely positive thing I can say about him is that when he writes about Marxists and the Communist world of 1919-92, he seems generally to know what he's talking about, even while he is sometimes appallingly uncritical.

But I disagree with your suggestion that the rise in religiously-motivated violence is limited to Islam.

That is the example we see most dramatically portrayed in the media, but it is tied to a troubling modern phenomenon generally. There is a great deal of violence related to religious fundamentalism of other faiths. In Zizek's native Yugoslavia, Serbian nationalists used Orthodox Christianity as a mask to justify atrocities; in India, Hindu nationalists turn recurrently to violence; in Sri Lanka there has been a great deal of Hindu-on-Buddhist violence; and haven't you been documenting some of the vile things done by Orthodox Jewish settlers in the West Bank?

And let's not forget America's Christianists, their frightening relationship with the military and with American military power – and their tendency to see America's contemporary wars as anti-Muslim crusades. No doubt that radical Islamist groups are Exhibit A, but as for others, Christianists, Hindus… the problem is certainly wider, and Zizek's point has more validity than you want to give it. Is there not indeed a problem of religious fundamentalism generally?

Well, since The Conservative Soul begins with a worry about the rise of fundamentalist certainty in every faith – and focuses primarily on the corruption of Christianity – I take my reader's point. Hence my Islamist-Christianist terminology. But there are peaceful democratic Islamists and almost all Christianists are personally non-violent and democratic. Yes, there is a nexus between Christianism and violence – especially the justification of wars against Islam, and evangelical support for torture and near-deification of the gun, of all symbols. But we shouldn't miss the fact that Islam right now (but not always in the past) is easily the most violent of religions. This is not to say that all Islam is violent; it is to say that mass murderers are still doing what they do in the name of Allah.

A ballot initiative will give Californians a chance to ban the death penalty this November. Friedersdorf cheers them on: 

[C]onservative support for the death penalty is problematic insofar as the right asks voters to believe both that 1) government is frequently inept and corrupt, and inclined to abuses of power; 2) government is capable of determining guilt with sufficient certainty to irreversibly impose the most extreme penalty there is. Here is a list of people executed when their guilt was in doubt. A former governor of Illinoissigned a death penalty ban in his state due partly to the alarming number of innocents who were on death row. Texas likely executed an innocent man.

(Chart from The Economist)

… and thereby enabled our species to outlast the Neanderthals. Using dogs for hunting almost certainly increased both the efficiency of hunting and the amount of animal meat consumed. Humans with dogs beat out Neanderthals without them. And there's another possible twist in  fascinating piece in American Scientist:

Domestication is a two-way street, as we know from examples such as the genetic changes that make adult humans able to digest milk. Those mutations arose several times in different human populations after the domestication of cattle. I have no evidence that the change I am about to discuss did or did not occur between 45,000 and 35,000 years ago. But it might have. …

A study by Hiromi Kobayashi and Shiro Kohshima of the Tokyo Institute of Technology showed that modern humans are unique among extant primates in having highly visible white sclerae surrounding the colored irises of their eyes, as well as eyelids that expose much of the sclerae. In other primates, the dark sclerae, similarly colored skin and concealing eyelids tend to mask the direction in which the animal is looking, according to the Japanese team. In humans, the white sclerae and open eyelids make the direction of a person’s gaze visible from a distance, particularly if that glance is directed in a more or less horizontal direction. The changes in the human eye may be adaptations to enhance the effectiveness of the gaze signal…

Ádám Miklósi of Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary, and his team tested dogs and wolves, and found that dogs were far more attentive to human faces than were wolves, even socialized wolves. Although wolves excel at some gaze-following tasks, perhaps suggesting a preadaptation for communicating with humans, dogs tend to look at human faces for cues and wolves do not. Miklósi’s team believes this major behavioral difference is the result of selective breeding during domestication.

Rolling Stone asks:

Newspapers?

I’ll thumb through all the major papers in the morning. I’ll read the Times and Wall Street Journal and Washington Post, just to catch up.

Do you read Paul Krugman?

I read all of the New York Times columnists. Krugman’s obviously one of the smartest economic reporters out there, but I also read some of the conservative columnists, just to get a sense of where those arguments are going. There are a handful of blogs, Andrew Sullivan’s on the Daily Beast being an example, that combine thoughtful analysis with a sampling of lots of essays that are out there. The New Yorker and The Atlantic still do terrific work. Every once in a while, I sneak in a novel or a nonfiction book.

Dishheads are everywhere.