Year: 2013

Ambers sizes up the Democrats’ presidential hopefuls:

The Democratic Party has two tiers of candidates. In order for the second tier of candidates to even conceive of running, then the first tier has to step aside. That first tier, of course, is occupied by Clinton. Her intentions are unknowable, but trust me when I tell you that, to the extent that the Democratic Party still has reliable donors and committed activists, the lion’s share are hoping Clinton runs and are ready to endorse her immediately. She is the 800-pound gorilla in a pantsuit. No one moves until she does.

I’m glad I didn’t use that metaphor. Update from a reader:

So am I crazy or is this pretty much exactly where the Democratic Party was heading into 2008? It was going to be a Hillary coronation, remember? Barack Obama was certainly a rising star, but nobody thought the idea of him getting the nomination was plausible, especially this far away from the election.  At this point, there are many legitimate reasons that Clinton has earned the nomination, more so then before 2008. But if I were her, the parallels would make me uneasy. Particularly if she runs the same textbook frontrunner campaign she did in 2008. Presumably she has learned a thing or two since then.

(Photo: This February 6, 2013 photo illustration shows a woman viewing the new website of Hillary Clinton in Washington, DC. Once again fueling speculation about whether she will run for president in 2016, Clinton launched a new website even before she officially stepped down as secretary of state. According to news reports, the website was registered on Thursday, just 24 hours before Clinton stepped down as America’s top diplomat, handing the baton to John Kerry. By Karen Bleier/AFP/Getty Images)

I mean, of course, the Republican version of God, Ayn Rand.

Laura Entis can’t decide if the proposals of Danish Professor James Vaupel are “crazy or brilliant”:

The 40-hour work week is an outdated model, according to [the] head of the new Danish Max Planck research center. Instead, he argues, we should only work 25 hours a week–but keep working until we’re octogenarians. … Spreading out working hours over the full course of a person’s life, Vaupel argues, is both psychologically and physically beneficial at all stages of life.

Vaupel hopes the 21st-century will herald big changes in our working habits:

The important thing is that we all put in a certain amount of work – not at what point in our lives we do it. In the 20th century we had a redistribution of wealth. I believe that in this century, the great redistribution will be in terms of working hours.

Well at some point, something will have to give. Automation, new technology, a new universe of global competition, soaring healthcare costs for the elderly … I’m sure we’ll muddle through somehow. But the global force of these changes, their acceleration, and the generational inequities that are soaring means we will have to adjust at some point – and it will be hard not to do so without reinventing the parameters of work somehow.

Jennifer Vanasco notes that, with the Boy Scouts thinking of ending their ban on gays, fear-mongering about gay pedophiles has spiked. Tony Woodlief attempts to justify the Boy Scouts ban with a nuanced version of the pedophilia argument:

I’m not acquainted with research comparing the rates of child molestation between homosexual and straight men, but I’m certain it doesn’t matter; this is about dogma, not data. That is why we shouldn’t expect a journalist to state the obvious, which is that if it defies good sense to send teenaged girls off into the woods with heterosexual men, it likely defies good sense to send teenaged boys off with homosexual men.

This is no aspersion against homosexuals, except insofar as they are men, and we know enough about men to understand that some of them find teenagers sexually attractive, and the older and more mature-looking these teenagers, the easier it becomes for seemingly decent men to violate them while pretending the act is consensual. It’s no slander, except that it disputes ground that is within the grasp of homosexual activists, and hence must be proof of homophobia, and therefore unreason, and should thus be disregarded.

The trouble is: the Girl Scouts already allow male troop leaders. According (pdf) to the Girl Scout Council of the Nation’s Capital (GSCNC), to “avoid even the appearance of impropriety and for the protection of leaders/advisors as well as the girls, it is GSCNC practice that at all Girl Scout sponsored activities there will be at least two adults, one of whom must be a female registered as a Girl Scout adult volunteer.” Safeguarding children from any adult alone is one thing – and certainly sensible. I don’t see why, on the same principle, any gay male or lesbian Scout leader should not equally be accompanied by a straight one of either gender.

The truth, I suspect, is that the closeted pedophile is the real danger. And out-of-the-closet adjusted gay men act like Kryptonite on that atmosphere of secrecy, shame and control. An outright ban on gay troop leaders and gay scouts merely encourages and helps legitimize the closet, which facilitates, as in the church, child-rape or abuse.

Honesty and sunlight and solid rules to make sure that no single Scout leader is left alone with boys or girls seems to me the most effective way to help sustain this admirable institution. It’s about ethical conduct, regardless of  sexual orientation.

(Photo: Will Oliver, Eagle Scout , and Eric Andresen, former Scout leader, deliver boxes containing 1.4 million signatures urging the Boy Scouts of America to reverse the organization’s ban on LGBT Scouts on February 4, 2013 in Irving, Texas. By Tom Pennington/Getty Images)

Kevin Charles Redmon points to new research indicating that “marijuana may be a ‘gateway drug’ to cigarettes”:

The recent [National Institute on Drug Abuse] study is important because it demonstrates that, even if THC doesn’t promote a neurochemical gateway for heroin and cocaine addiction, it does for nicotine.

The popularity of e-cigs may be changing that. And newly popular vaporizers to inhale THC act similarly: call them e-joints.

We promised to keep you updated and here’s the latest. We don’t really have any solid data yet on how effective the meter will be in bringing in revenue, since it’s only been up a couple of days, and 140,000 readers have yet to set off the meter by clicking a read-on. Of all the other readers, only 117 – less than .001% – are now at seven, and about to trigger the pay-button. That’s too small a data set to tell anything meaningful yet. We’ll have a much better sense in a week or so, and a better one in a month. But traffic is robust; and the roll-out, while completely exhausting for all involved, has been much more glitch-free than these things usually are. We’re really encouraged so far by the experiment and especially by reader input on the changes.

If you’re new today, check out our infinite scroll, our new search function (most cool), our new Reader Threads section, and new, easily searchable archive going all the way back to January 2001. I hope reading is also quicker and more responsive, now we’ve removed the ad clutter.

After the finale of 30 Rock (sob), Emily Nussbaum contemplates Girls:

[T]he most significant thing about “Girls” may be that it’s not a book, a play, a song, or a poem. And not a movie, either; since women rarely control production, there are few movies of this type, and even fewer that have mass impact. “Girls” is television. It’s in the tradition of sitcoms in which comics play humbled versions of themselves: Lucy, Roseanne, Raymond, Seinfeld. But it’s also TV in a more modern mode: spiky, raw, and auteurist. During the past fifteen years, the medium has been transformed by bad boys like Walter White and sad sacks like Louis C.K.

“Girls” is the crest of a second, female-centered wave of change, on both cable and network, of shows that are not for everyone, that make viewers uncomfortable. It helps that the show’s creator has her own roguish, troublemaking quality, a Molly Brown air that lets Dunham wade into controversy without drowning.

In that sense, I think, as Dunham herself explained, that the new wave of television is related to the impact of the web. We’re slowly breaking up the blockbusters for mass audiences (although there will always remain a place for them) and actually providing more options for more audience segments with more varied and specific and niche interests and experiences.

As long as we can find a way to finance these projects, we are slowly turning TV into more of a web experience, with options to watch a huge amount at once in your own time – binge-viewing – or track your favorite shows by DVR to watch when you see fit – and on and on. TV will always have live events to make it unique – the Super Bowl, the Grammies, Campaign debates, game-show finales – but it’s merging with web culture before our eyes. And not just in form but in content.