Month: May 2012

Chris Mooney assesses the lonely status of climate skeptics today:

Time was, after all, when U.S. fossil fuel industry majors were united in a climate “skeptic” stance, under the aegis of the anti-Kyoto Global Climate Coalition. Nowadays, in contrast, even ExxonMobil has dropped off as a chief source of support for the climate denial machine—see investigative reporter Steve Coll’s great new book on this—and the extreme to which the Heartland Institute went with its billboards says a great deal about the intellectual weakness of the climate denial case today. The denial of global warming is no longer mainstream within corporate America or the fossil fuel industry, then—and that can only be considered a major achievement. And yet at the same time, it is stronger than ever among Tea Partiers and the Republican Party itself.

More on the Heartland tailspin here, here and here. Previous videos from Jim Manzi here, here, here, and here, with some reader pushback here and here. You can buy his book, Uncontrolled: The Surprising Payoff of Trial-and-Error for Business, here. “Ask Anything” archive here.

Noah Millman weighs in on the Bain debate. Obama's strongest argument:

[I]f Romney’s “private sector experience” can be described as basically destroying healthy businesses to skim money for rich investors, then what does it mean to say he’ll bring that experience to bear in dealing with the economy, and with government? The obvious answer – intended by the Obama campaign – is that Romney will cut everybody’s benefits not to get the economy moving again, but to reduce taxes on the wealthy. That would be precisely analogous to what they are alleging he did at Bain: cut jobs not to save businesses, but to squeeze them for cash and then throw them away.

Not entirely:

Lecturing — which is all one can do with 100,000 students — is just about the worst way to teach ever devised. It’s problem are well known in the pedagogical literature … To give one-way talks to an audience (which is what lecturing is about) is an effective way to communicate a large amount of information to a large number of people. But communication represents a small fraction of what teaching is about. Real teaching must include guided discussions, interactions among peers, and a great deal of exercises. The ideal model is that of the Renaissance workshop, where one learned from the Master and his best assistants, day by day. In modern education, this is what is done in the best graduate schools and when using the Montessori method.

Well, yes. But that merely means gathering a group together to take a class ensemble. Or finding a poor grad student to help out. But even without those aids, it seems to me that being able to absorb top-notch lecturing at home for free cannot but be a fantastic thing. If combined with an online grading service, it could be revolutionary.

(Video excerpt from Andy Conway's Princeton lecture course on stats. Andy was my boyfriend before my marriage to Aaron. I wish he'd taught me stats.)

Bennett Foddy explores the extraordinary science of aging:

Lobsters seem to have evolved an adaptation against the cellular lifespan. There's this phenomenon where the DNA in our cells basically unravel after they've divided a certain amount of times, but lobsters have this enzyme that helps them replenish their telomeres—the caps that hold DNA together… You could imagine us living more like the lobster, where we still live to be about 80-85, but we're alert and active until we drop dead. In that scenario we wouldn't have this giant burden where the state has to support and pay to nurse people that are unable to look after themselves anymore. 

Jessa Crispin considers how fluid gender really is:

This has happened repeatedly: I will be at a party, introducing my new beau to friends for the first time. Someone will pull me aside: "Honey, I hate to break it to you, but that guy is gay." All my life I’ve been attracted to men who creep a little further down to my side of the gender spectrum than most. Or, let’s face it, men who meet me somewhere in the middle, as I’m not off in the far reaches of femininity myself. Men who are a little more fluid. And so this scene has played out a few times in my life. "No, he’s not," I say. Now, anything I offer as proof will only solidify their assessment. Such as, "But I am having the best sex of my life." "Well, yes, he’s probably good technically," a friend will say. "He probably had to learn to be to disguise the fact that he wasn’t into it."

There’s no winning this argument. Because the only acceptable deviation from traditional masculinity is queerness; anyone deviating must be queer.

Even if they don’t know it. Suddenly what was good in my life is pathologized. Suddenly there is something wrong with him (secretly gay), and there’s something wrong with me (only attracted to men who are secretly gay). This isn’t about style, about guyliner or wearing a boldly pink tie. It’s about something essential in who they grew up to be, something in their nature that my friends — smart, bright, ambitious, dare I say masculinized women all of them — are reading as less than. 

(Image:  Scott Sheidly’s Portraits: a series of “fabulous” depictions of tyrants, dictators and popes, on view at the Spoke Art Gallery, via Emily Temple)

Why dead pigeons don't litter city sidewalks:

“I've never watched a pigeon in its dying moments,” says Seerveld, “but a lot of wild animals do choose to go somewhere to die naturally. They don't just plop in a street: They often just crawl under a building or into a tight space, because as they die they are vulnerable and don't necessarily want to get eaten alive in their last moments.”

Margaret Talbot dismantles a widely-cited fake statistic: that 85 percent of college grads are moving back in with their parents. She cites more reliable numbers from Pew, which finds that "twenty-nine per cent, or about three in ten, of young adults ages twenty-five to thirty-four, have lived with their parents for a time": 

What was striking about the reaction to these new households was how few of the people living in them saw their situation as a sign of social pathology or even of diminished personal prospects. Yes, many of the young adults had moved back in because of the financial benefits or necessity in difficult economic times, but they weren’t taking their compromise like defeated, Häagen-Dazs-scarfing singles in rom-coms.

Nyhan marshals evidence that "most of the messages that voters are receiving now about Romney will wash out over time":

[T]he conventions aren’t just the beginning of the fall campaign; they mark the beginning of the period when campaign events really start to matter. In the meantime, why not help voters learn about the campaign promises that the candidates are making and the agendas they are proposing as they roll out their general election platforms? The horse race won’t be decided now, but the agenda of the next president will be.

Nicholas Lemann sees elite colleges as status symbols:

Where higher education is actually underpriced is in the top-tier schools. That may sound offensive, but price is determined by what people are willing to pay, and the top twenty-five or so schools in the country could charge even more than they do.

The number of applications to those schools continues to grow faster than their cost. (Ivy League colleges will charge about sixty thousand dollars next year.) That’s because the perceived value of their degrees continues to rise. Now that we know that either Obama or Romney will be President next year, we also know that, from 1989 through at least 2017, every President of the United States will have had a degree from either Harvard or Yale or, in the case of George W. Bush, both. That could be a three-decade accident, or it may be a sign of something lasting—the educational version of the inequality surge, elevating “one per cent” institutions far above the rest.