Year: 2013

Larison wonders:

If Rubio ends up backing an immigration bill favored by Obama, it will become extremely difficult to prevent a conservative backlash against him. So it’s possible that Rubio is the one trying to play both sides of the issue, and he may end up succeeding. It would suit Rubio’s interests to make some effort to promote Bush-era legislation, which earns him favorable coverage from non-conservative media and boosts his reputation as a “reformer,” but then become an opponent of whatever legislation comes before the Senate. Rubio will say that he wanted to make a deal, but the other side was too unreasonable in its demands. That way, he can neutralize most of his conservative critics while retaining a reputation for “bipartisanship.”

Is Rubio that cynical/canny of a politician? Maybe not, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it turned out this way.

Noting that we “look at [our] phones 34 times a day,” David Yanofsky chafes at the inconvenience of having to pull your phone out of your pocket every time:

We’ve seen watches, Walkmen, radios, cell phones, address books, calendars, checkbooks, and even wallets combine into multi-function devices. Android, iOS and Windows devices are now capable of replacing all of them. All the while we’ve ignored the most convenient place to keep track of all that information. Pockets are where we store our lint. Nascent information could easily be made available on our wrists. It’s high time.

Zach Honig is hopeful about a new product trying to utilize this unused real estate:

A reader writes:

I’m sorry, but that reader’s response implying we should just get rid of the Selective Service System is one of the most asinine things I have ever laid eyes on. This argument is akin to the GOP plan to defund FEMA – eh, if there’s a disaster we’ll deal with it when we deal with it. This sort of foolish comment – we haven’t had a draft in 35 years, ergo, we shalt never have one again and we don’t even plan on it – is born of the coddled minds during a very brief and very anomalous time in world history where one country is significantly more powerful than the rest.

Today on the Dish, Andrew counted up the dividends of reality brought on by Obama’s re-election, and crossed his fingers for a fresh wave of rationality from American right. He scrutinized Obama’s pitiless border policy in his first term, read some unimpressive excerpts from the legal defense of DOMA, and spoke up in defense of public nudity (in San Francisco, mainly.) Elswhere, Andrew sat down to answer reader queries on Dish health care and its relation to the ACA, and thanked subscribers to the new Dish for the $500k received so far (which you can add to here.)

On the political beat, we collected feedback on the economy’s poor showing last quarter, readers reported on the crumbling of the Boy Scouts’ ban on gay membership, and we paid a visit to the pitiful courtroom antics at Guantanamo Bay. We heard some uplifting news about the safety of Mali’s cultural artifacts, while Gordon Adams decried the US military’s new interest in horning in on Africa. Plumer faced the fact that China and India won’t make future climate policy easy, Ramesh called off the conservative offensive on the president, and Goldblog got real about the far right in Israel—very real. Meanwhile, a heretical Free Republic poster earned an Yglesias Award nomination, joining former RNC chair Jim Gilmore.

In assorted coverage, Evelyn Lamb searched for a better way for journos to communicate science and stats, while Priscilla Long provided some on not-so-identical twins and Joseph Stromberg offered some on the relation between depression and homosexuality. Jesse Lichetenstein penned a sprawling portrait of the Post Office, Mike Dash visited the family time forgot, and Alyssa Rosenberg attended Ai Weiwei’s latest show. Jonathan Evans reported on Denmark’s splitting hairs on gender equality, Burton Pike waved goodbye to the days of artful translation and we explored the feelings of helplessness under the flash of cameras.

Readers fileted David Mamet’s latest blathering on gun control, continued to search for an truly internationalist fast food spot, and set off an avalanche of emails on John H. Richardson’s ode to promiscuity. Others pushed back on suspicions about the NFL’s regard for players’ health, while Rhys Southan responded to Dishheads critical of his essay on veganism. We saw a stark white Park Rapids, Minnesota for the VFYW and awed at the movements of starlings in the MHB. A Chicago radio station’s cool ad asked its listeners to go forth and multiply, and we caught a close look at a bubbly clown in the Face of the Day.

– B.J.

(Photo: Aline Marie prays outside St. Rose of Lima church in Newtown, Conn., on the day of the school shooting. By Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty Images.)

Ai Weiwei has been prevented from seeing his own show:

Alyssa reviewed the Hirshhorn exhibition several weeks ago:

It’s a tremendous show, and a sharp rebuke not just to the Chinese government and to anyone who dismisses Ai as a simple political activist, but to the idea that art and politics somehow occupy separate spheres. Art doesn’t lose any of its dignity when it’s applied to protest. And politics is not somehow exempt from the powerful examination that comes from the outside perspectives of artists.

Jesse Lichtenstein profiles the USPS, which is losing $25 million a day and approaching default. He supplies portraits of the workers invisible to the millions of Americans they serve:

Holli Apodaca works at the Remote Encoding Center in Salt Lake City. There, in a warehouse-sized room that operates twenty-four hours a day, she sits in a beige cubicle, staring at a flat-screen monitor upon which the addresses appear, a constant stream of broken communications that she must fix. Eight thousand addresses per shift, ten thousand keystrokes an hour, doing her part to wade through the four to five million addresses that flash across the center’s screens each day. The third grader whose 3’s look like E’s, the ninety-year-old pensioner whose right hand shakes violently.

Apodaca zooms, rotates, squints, deciphers, then fires the information back to the machine in Medford, where the once rudderless letters, now matched to an address, are pulled back into the main stream and rejoin their easy-to-read brethren for their ultimate baptism: a 2.75-inch bar code sprayed along the envelope’s bottom edge. The city, state, street, house number, and ZIP-plus-four — the local post office, carrier route, and sequence within that route.

Previous Dish on the USPS here, here and here.

Mike Dash profiles the Lykov family, which, for 40 years, survived in the wilderness completely disconnected from the rest of humanity:

The Lykov children knew there were places called cities where humans lived crammed together in tall buildings. They had heard there were countries other than Russia. But such concepts were no more than abstractions to them. Their only reading matter was prayer books and an ancient family Bible. Akulina had used the gospels to teach her children to read and write, using sharpened birch sticks dipped into honeysuckle juice as pen and ink.

Another highlight:

Burton Pike bemoans the state of literary translation, claiming its decline has rendered language “simply instrumental, a medium of communication” and that “a creeping homogenization is developing in prose fiction”:

Certain canonical texts about translation now seem out of date. Walter Benjamin’s tragic view of history included a tragic view of translation. His famous 1923 essay “The Task of the Translator” rests on the notion of the sacredness of the word, and insists on a translation that will recreate the sacred spirit of the original in another language. But what if writers and readers no longer think that the surface of a literary text conceals layered depths that the translator must labor to transmit?  What if translation is no longer thought of as an art but as piece-work?