Year: 2013

Keith Humphrey, who has worked as a couples counselor, shares stories about American class blindness:

Unhappy American couples impressed me deeply with their ability to talk about how their marital strife emerged from their racial, ethnic and religious differences, as well as differences in personal experiences (e.g., if one went through a bitter divorce and has a hard time trusting since). But it was a rare couple who recognized that social class differences were a force which shaped their relationship.

The “classless” American marriage makes a stark contrast to places like Great Britain, where it is hard to listen to a couple talk about their relationship for even 20 minutes without class coming up as part of how they describe and understand each other. The comparative American class awareness deficit matters because a non-negligible proportion of the strife in some marriages can be traced to social class differences. And such problems are hard to resolve if you can’t see them (or don’t want to).

McArdle is discouraged by an electric car pilot program in Israel:

[W]hen you see [electric cars] failing in Israel, the obstacles look pretty daunting. Israel has some of the highest gas prices in the world–almost $10 a gallon last August–and its compact size makes it easy to cover with battery-swapping and charging stations. The economies of scale would have to be amazing to make this business model work in a bigger country like the US. Even if we somehow developed the political will to impose a $7 gas tax.

Which is perhaps why, so far, our electric car market isn’t looking so bright. We’re a long, long way from Obama’s goal of 1 million electric vehicles on the road by 2015.

Jeremy Rozansky claims that athletes who took performance-enhancing drugs have “diminished the humanness of athletics by choosing to technologically enhance their bodies”:

One cannot be personally, fully excellent if the excellence stems, at least in part, from a chemical intervention. Rather than cultivate his own individual gifts, he has chosen to have different gifts. Rather than “stay within himself,” he has chosen a different self. So when [former MLB pitcher] Dan Naulty exclaims “Look, my fastball went from 87 to 96! There’s got to be some sort of violation in that,” he is intuiting how athletic achievement, once the prize of a full self who toils away at his own betterment in this activity, is corroded by the innovations of laboratories.

One might argue that chemical intervention is less morally arbitrary than genetic inheritance. Some seem born to play or run or jump or catch. Are we celebrating their skill when they win or their genetic luck? Both, of course. So why not celebrate skill and chemical balance? Samuel Goldman reframes the debate:

Many fans claim to prefer the “clean” game they’d like their children to enjoy. Their behavior, however, suggests that they actually like super-charged competition among super-humans. In this context, open doping under expert guidance is preferable to the cynical, unfair, and dangerous pursuit of competitive advantage. Consistency demands that we either accept what professional athletics is–a mass spectacle of nearly gladiatorial intensity–or reject the whole nasty business.

A reader writes:

I’m a 24-year-old girl living in NYC and first-time emailer despite reading and loving your blog since high school. Thank you for defending us – the real-life girls whose very real lives are what everyone is actually criticizing when they criticize this show (and I’m not just projecting – many of my friends went to high school with Lena Dunham). I’m in medical school right now, following ambitions that may seem less “small and sad” than those of the show’s protagonists, but my more secure career path by no means inures me to the petty and constant growing pains of being a young woman in the big city.

We recently learned Erik Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development, which are based on the idea that different periods in your life are marked by different conflicts. The conflict of your twenties? Intimacy versus isolation … the existential question, “Can I love?”

An older female writes:

Yes! Yes to you and TNC. The reason women are more empowered in their 30s is that they finally have the confidence to move on from sexual experiences like the ones they have in their 20s. Girls gets it excruciatingly right.

Reader TMI:

My female friends and my 20s were riddled with guys who want to pee on you; guys who want to have anal sex with you but aren’t particularly good at it; guys who are genuinely surprised when you try to tactfully inform them that 30 seconds of foreplay is not going to do the job. It’s not really fair, but for girls, so much of figuring out your own sexuality involves wrangling the sexuality of guys. For some period of time, many girls in their 20s put up with this because they don’t have the confidence or experience to insist otherwise. (My sense of the character Adam, by the way, is that he actually does have the potential to be decent in bed, but Hannah is not giving him many pointers.)

I found that masturbation scene as surprising as you did. And what I loved about it was its complexity. Hannah wasn’t expecting to be mean to Adam in that way. And Adam was completely comfortable with asking for what he needed. Very interesting.

So, yes, it is sad. For a lot of girls, sex in your 20s is often sad, because you are fending off bad sex all the time. Then guys mature, and we mature, and we learn to be better to each other. And better for each other. And Lena Dunham is showing that process. It’s awesome.

One more thing: my 15-year-old daughter watches girls religiously. She wants me to be up-to-date on it, but she definitely does not want to watch it along with me. And I will say that I am so happy that she is getting an education from that show. Because it is not from the male gaze. It shows the gaze in action, but the perspective of the show is girls.

I didn’t have anything like that when I was her age. Well, let me correct myself. I had Joni Mitchell and Chrissie Hynde. But there was no TV show – no mainstream smash hit – that reaffirmed my experience. That is a powerful thing.

Richard Sandomir and James Andrew Miller add [NYT] an ironic wrinkle to the Te’o story:

Reporters for the network had been working for almost a week trying to nail down an extraordinary story: Manti Te’o’s girlfriend… might be a hoax. ESPN decided to hold its story about the hoax involving Manti Te’o in hopes of getting an interview with him on camera.

Some inside the network argued that its reporters — who had initially been put onto the story by Tom Condon, Te’o’s agent — had enough material to justify publishing an article. Others were less sure and pushed to get an interview with Te’o, something that might happen as soon as the next day. For them, it was a question of journalistic standards. They did not want to be wrong. “We were very close,” said Vince Doria, ESPN’s chief for news. “We wanted to be very careful.” ESPN held the story, and then lost it.

Like Newsweek and Drudge on Lewinsky. Notice the need for the MSM to have the interview “get.” You can always ask for a statement instead. Now remember how the need for the interview “get” allowed Sarah Palin to avoid a single, open-ended press conference after being foisted on the country by John McCain. There’s a reason Drudge is still thriving and Deadspin beat ESPN. They both put reporting before access.

A gripping story of a miscreant priest that, alas, no longer surprises. Nor does this:

And this was not just any priest in any archdiocese. Wallin had been the longtime personal assistant and closest confidant to Edward Egan when he was bishop in Bridgeport, the two of them often going to see Broadway shows in New York.  Egan had continued the archdiocese’s tradition of shuffling priests accused of sex crimes against children and of discounting the pain of the victimized.

Millman is skeptical:

Here’s the thing about “centrist” Israeli parties: they are always very popular when they first appear, and they never last.

They are popular when they first appear because they promise to square the circle that everybody wants squared. They are in favor of a negotiated peace – but on terms that are broadly popular among Israeli Jews and that are basically non-starters with the Palestinians. The same is true in domestic matters. They favor liberalization (in a European sense) of the economy – and they favor strengthening the social safety net. They are in favor of a renegotiation of relations between the state and the ultra-Orthodox – permitting civil marriage, opening up the rabbinate, drafting yeshivah students – but to be part of the government they have to agree to sit with religious parties who are resolutely opposed to these very things. And they have to join the government, or they can’t accomplish anything. And if they sit in opposition, then aren’t they just another left-wing party?

Clare Malone reports on the popularity of the Intelligence Squared podcast, which was inspired by England’s Oxford debates:

The Brits like their debates cutting (conservative London Mayor and Oxford Union alumnus Boris Johnson once said of the rival Lib Dems that they’re “not just empty. They are a void within a vacuum surrounded by a vast inanition”), and so Britannia’s version of Intelligence Squared is, like a country garden or Rebekah Brooks’s hair, a bit untamed. British hosts announce each speaker politely, then let the snark and the savaging go on unchecked.

Intelligence Squared U.S. takes its civic duty with more gravitas. The idea is that American attitudes have grown more entrenched and insular thanks to the Internet and to TVs with more than three channels. “We want to help people understand the facts behind the emotion,” [Robert] Rosenkranz [who brought the debate series tothe US]  explained to an interviewer when the show launched. “Force people to have a greater respect for civil discourse, not trying to be bland, but appreciating how complicated the issues are.” The result lacks some of the gladiatorial fun of its British cousin.

Well, without the gladiatorial fun, I might as well watch “Killer Karaoke”. But on a more serious note, go watch Killer Karaoke. You should fast-forward through the filler dialogue the way you would America’s Funniest Home Videos’. The rest is belly-achingly funny. On a “gravitas” note, my own time debating at Oxford was full of jokes and brutal humor and attack (with Boris among others). But we all drank until we were shitfaced afterwards. Maybe Americans cannot quite master that trick, because it took centuries of alcoholic arguments to develop. But Intelligence Squared is as good a substitute as any.

(Video: Stephen Fry slaps around the Catholic Church over its history with slavery during a “Fry/Hitchens/Widdecomb/Onaiyekan debate at Intelligence Squared, on the motion, ‘The Catholic church is a force for good in the world'”)