Month: August 2012

July was the best traffic month for the Dish since September and October 2008, a quarter of the pageviews due to publishing an email sent to me by an old friend. 3.5 million individual people logged onto this page at some point, for a total of close to 11 million pageviews. 20 percent of our traffic came from Facebook and social media. Welcome to all the newbies; big thanks to the loyalty of long-time Dishheads. This never gets old for me. Every now and again as an alumn of old media, I have to pinch myself when I realize that last month, the eyeball readership of the Dish was 35 times the circulation of The New Republic when I edited it in the 1990s. We get so used to this revolution it's sometimes useful to take a deep breath and see just how far we've come.

According to the Institute of Alcohol Studies in the UK, alcohol is 44 percent more affordable today than in 1988. Peter Popham thinks the combination of austerity and the Olympics spells trouble:

Simon Jenkins thinks the outrage at China's badminton team's throwing games is off-base:

Day and after day we read relentless hyperbole about the vital importance to national pride of winning: not winning a heat or a round or an exhibition, but winning medals. So obsessed is the media with this single index that the BBC has stopped displaying the medals table because it is too humiliating. This is the pastiche chauvinism of a banana republic.

Along come the Chinese, who clearly know how to win. You plan. The badminton heats were apparently staged to give an incentive, in certain circumstances, to losing games in the qualifying stages. Faced with the risk of a tougher opponent later and thus losing a medal, the players did what their tacticians said. They lost a round. I cannot see how, in sporting terms, this is any different from sprint cyclists hovering for an age on a curve, waiting for the right moment to surge forward. Anyway, the athletes were not trying to lose, they were losing so as being more likely to win.

That latter point is surely salient. Honing tactics to have a better chance at winning is not the same as throwing a game for money. And there's an obvious solution: go back to knock-out rounds.

A reader writes:

This assumption that Reddit has a particular culture, and that that culture is hostile to women, is false. It's just not true. Look at that thread you linked to: It's full of registered Reddit users discussing the perils of male privilege. I've seen TONS of feminist opinions on Reddit in the several years I've been on the site. I've seen very sensitive guys be very nice to girls. I've even seen rape victims get great advice, such as "call the police" and "seek therapy" and "don't blame yourself".

The point isn't that there's no sexism on Reddit, or even that it's not prevalent. The point is that reducing a complex social ecosystem to a stereotype of a virgin neckbeard sexist is no better than reducing all women to the stereotype of stuck-up, entitled, frigid shrews.

In other words, it's exactly the sort of thing that writers with no real understanding of their subject matter routinely do, whether the writer is a sexist, geek commenter on Reddit, or a militant feminist writing for Jezebel who has never spent even a week reading Reddit every day.

Also, how come the negative experiences of men don't count the same as the negative experiences of women? It seems to me that, because certain women have negative experiences with certain men, they feel justified in writing negative things that sum up "men" as a whole. That's just fine. But geeks on Reddit, who largely have been ignored and laughed at by women since middle school, are sexist and out-of-line when they take to an anonymous Internet forum to vent that frustration. Isn't this the exact sort of double-standard that equality's champions purport to deplore?

An international panel recently named India the G20's worst country for women – a startling feat given that Saudi Arabia was in the running. Suparna Chaudry details the dubious distinction:

Sure, India might not be the worst place to be a woman on the planet…[b]ut 45% of Indian girls are married before the age of 18, according to the International Centre for Research on Women (2010); 56,000 maternal deaths were recorded in 2010 (UN Population Fund) and research from Unicef in 2012 found that 52% of adolescent girls (and 57% of adolescent boys) think it is justifiable for a man to beat his wife. Plus crimes against women are on the increase: according to the National Crime Records Bureau in India, there was a 7.1% hike in recorded crimes against women between 2010 and 2011 (when there were 228,650 in total). The biggest leap was in cases under the "dowry prohibition act" (up 27.7%), of kidnapping and abduction (up 19.4% year on year) and rape (up 9.2%).

It's not just violent crimes, says Chaudry:

[O]ther kinds of (non-violent) crimes—commonly referred to as "eve-teasing"—are a part of many women’s daily existence while out at work or on public transport, and include being subjected to sexually suggestive remarks and unwanted physical contact. The expression of discomfort by many women led the Delhi Metro to designate separate, women-only carriages on the train. However, as many have rightly claimed, separation of the sexes is not something that increases tolerance. An anonymous blog post by a woman highlights how her ride in the Delhi metro turned nasty when she did not board the ladies’ carriage of the train and instead traveled in the general compartment.

And India's rape laws are woefully narrow:

There is currently no special law in India against sexual assault or harassment, and only vaginal penetration by a penis counts as rape…. The maximum punishment is a year's imprisonment, or a fine, or both.

(Photo: Women's rights activists march during a rally in Calcutta, India on March 19, 2012. The rally was organised to protest against the recent physical assaults and rape on women, and also as a demand for a proper rule of law for women's rights. By Dibyangshu Sarkar/AFP/Getty Images)

A reader writes:

I find the conclusions of this study problematic.  First of all, why is the scope limited to the apparent sexiness of women?  It seems to me that popular men's sports (swimming, gymnastics, track) involve scantily clad men.  Why is there a double standard? But, more importantly, is this correlation even remotely true?  Have you seen the US women's competition swim suits?  I'm not sure you can consider those more revealing or attractive than a pair of bicycle shorts.  Furthermore, one of the most popular women's events, US women's soccer, doesn't get much prime time coverage because it's really hard to slot a 90 minute game into the prime time broadcast.  It's much easier to do a 10-20 minute bit on an entire swimming race than to find an elegant way to weave in US v. France.

It seems to me as though there are three factors that determine what NBC shows:

1) the chance of the US winning a medal, 2) It's ability to fit into the broadcast, 3) the actual popularity of the sport in the US.  I'm sorry that nobody cares about fencing, but most people don't actually understand the sport.  Meanwhile, almost everyone has played beach volley ball a few times.  Which one would you rather watch?

I love the Olympics because it's one of the few places where both male and female athletes are appropriately celebrated for their accomplishments.  Abby Wambach is a legitimate star at the Games; just ask my 10-year-old niece when she gets back from soccer practice.  Why are we speaking negatively about the Olympics instead of celebrating the fact that we love watching our women compete on the international level?  It drives me insane, and it belittles the accomplishments of some of the amazing female athletes that are receiving attention.  Who cares if she's wearing a bikini … she just won a gold medal!

Inspired by the Olympic rings, each representing a different region (Oceania, Europe, the Americas, Africa, Asia), Gustavo Sousa created an elegant visualization conveying "vast inequalities":

Everything from percentage of millionaires to McDonald’s outlets gets a graph; all-in-all, there’s 16 prints–one for each day of the games–and a live projection, which will be exhibited in East London during the festivities. And if you find yourself searching for a key while scrolling through his site, you’re out of luck; its omission was intentional. "The reason I didn’t reveal which is which because you can almost figure that out as you read through; I thought that process of discovery was interesting," [said Sousa].

Key provided after the jump:

Oceania: blue. Europe: black. Americas: red. Africa: yellow. Asia: green

To see a static version of each of the 16 prints, as well as larger font, go here.