Year: 2013

by Chris Bodenner

In case you’re confused by the multiple bylines today, last night Andrew unplugged for his annual fortnight away from the blog. But before doing so, he reflected on the first seven months of an independent Dish and praised the young staffers contributing to its slow but steady success. A new subscriber writes:

Well, your vacation going-away post finally got me. I am a religious RSS user and thus I haven’t “had” to pay yet. But I’ve been reading the Dish daily since your coverage of the Green Revolution and, yeah, I can afford it, so [tinypass_offer text=”take my money”]!

Also, for the “You Think ‘Weiner’ is Bad?” files, I bring you Dick Power, “an important Long Island, New York bike shop owner and bicycle maker.” Yes, Dick fucking Power.

Andrew also wrote a handful of other posts before signing off; he tore into the Cameron government for detaining Greenwald’s partner under an anti-terrorist law; he filled us in on the somber state of Eddy over her dearly departed roommate Dusty (prompting similar stories from readers); and he rallied beard-lovers everywhere, provoking readers to weigh the pros and cons of pogonophilia. One more from the con side:

Howard Jacobson’s argument, and the vanity-free high ground, can be owned only by that tiny subset of beard wearers that do not “interfere in the process” and proudly display their long, scraggly, unkempt beards. Cheers to them. But the bearded men I know groom their prized facial hair meticulously, with more attention and effort than goes into my two-minute daily shave in the shower sans mirror. Simply scraping all the hair off is easier (and just maybe, less vain) than all of that obsessive trimming and sculpting.

Another narrates the above video:

I trust you’ve been getting updates on the bearded Daniel Bryan, the Dish’s favourite pro wrestler. But in case you haven’t, I thought I’d pass along news from last night’s Summerslam (WWE’s second-biggest annual show), where Bryan defeated John Cena to become WWE Champion in one of the most triumphant moments in recent wrestling history. Unfortunately, he also became one of history’s shortest-lived champions after getting screwed by a conspiracy between WWE’s top brass (COO Triple H was the special guest referee) and one of its veteran heels, Randy Orton. So Bryan’s reign lasted about five minutes in total. It was heartbreaking, but also thrilling.

But far more importantly on the Dish today, we continued to chronicle the escalating carnage in Egypt, something that National Review and Commentary seemed to endorse by backing the military crackdown. (Maybe instead of sending the junta billions of dollars, the US should start sending civilians bulletproof whiteboards.) The increasingly violent Muslim Brotherhood already looks doomed while the Egyptian press is under threat by both sides of the conflict.

Death seemed to be the overriding theme of today’s Dish; we honored the passing of Christian political theorist Jean Bethke Elshtain, drew larger lessons from a sports journalist who killed himself on his birthday, continued to joke about suicide, and studied the science of near-death experiences.

A better note to end on: another scenic window view from a reader on the can.

by Matt Sitman

R.R. Reno meditates on the way certain books become “existentially arresting” for us because of “the time and place when they happen to fall into our hands”:

I read Herman Hesse and J.D. Salinger at a teenager. Like many others I thrilled to their intimations of philosophy. But they did not become touchstones, perhaps because I quickly grew out of the superficial angst and feelings of alienation that I was told should characterize the life of a serious teenager. Instead, my first important book was The Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann.

I read it while living as a climbing bum in Yosemite Valley in the late 1970s. The title was of the sort to attract a climber’s attention. And the book’s many pages promised hours of diversion. What I got instead was a modicum of self-knowledge. Hans Castorp, the main character, goes to visit a relative at a tuberculosis sanatorium in Switzerland, and ends up staying indefinitely. Situated literally above everyday concerns about career, family, and class, his life is pleasantly suspended. Such is the mountain’s magic. Yet, as Mann develops the story over hundreds of pages, the mountain turns out to work a black magic of self-deception and false innocence. The novel did not diminish Yosemite’s seductions, but it allowed me for the first time to see the darkness in my dreams.

His concluding thoughts:

I started The Magic Mountain imagining myself in control. I planned to use the book to entertain myself during the evening hours at the campsite. But soon enough Mann’s novel bewitched me, and I was a patient operated upon by a master surgeon, which is what St. Augustine’s sense of enjoyment brings about. It’s this vulnerability to influence, an anesthesia to the self and its purposes—that we need to cultivate if books are to be important for us.

by Chris Bodenner

More readers add to the discussion:

It seems to me the best way to put pressure on Putin is to put pressure on the corporate sponsors that make hosting the Olympics so lucrative. Most of these companies are headquartered in the gay-friendly West and make most of their profits there. I applaud those athletes that choose to risk the repercussions of speaking out, but it shouldn’t fall on them to call out their hosts. Rather, the companies that seek to boost their images by association with these tremendous athletes should be made to think twice about instead associating themselves with Putin’s thuggery and demagoguery. At the very least, they should make clear that they do not condone the anti-gay laws. Companies truly concerned should ensure that their sponsorship money doesn’t enrich the Russian kleptocrats that wrote the laws, and if that’s not possible, they should withdraw their sponsorship and dare their competitors to sell their souls instead.

Another reader:

You want Obama to challenge Putin? Easy. All he has to do is call a press conference and publicly condemn the anti-gay laws Russia is promulgating.  I know Andrew is a fan of Reagan, so when he demanded that Gorbachev “tear down this wall” – even in the midst of an incredibly delicate peace process – it had more effect than all of our military spending.  Why?  Because the cause was so plain, so fortified by moral righteousness, that it was instantly recognizable by anyone that heard the speech.  I think that the same is true here.  Especially in the digital age.  No matter what our athletes do in the Olympics, no matter what our foreign policy officials do in the background, nothing will so publicly shame and humiliate Putin as much as that.  It’s the same as throwing the ball in his court, if you will.  Yes, it could be described as reckless … but so was Reagan.  Sometimes, reckless is all that works.

(Photo: Gold medalists Tatyana Firova and Kseniya Ryzhova of Russia kiss on the podium during the medal ceremony for the Women’s 4×400 relay during Day Eight of the 14th IAAF World Athletics Championships Moscow 2013 at Luzhniki Stadium on August 17. By Paul Gilham/Getty Images. More on the controversial kiss here.)

by Brendan James

Luke O’Neil insists that restaurants should be subject to critics’ reviews as soon as they open, rather than enjoy the customary grace period:

Perhaps the best parallel to the restaurant industry for our purposes is the world of theater. Most plays and musicals offer previews to paying audiences to give the cast and crew a chance to work out the kinks of a production. There has been pushback against critics’ self-imposed prohibition on writing about theater previews for a while now, because previews, like delayed restaurant reviews, don’t make sense. Why shouldn’t an early performance, or meal, be subject to judgment? People are paying full price for it. Is the money of the first few hundreds or thousands of people to buy a ticket or make a reservation worth less than the people who see a play or visit a restaurant after it’s hit its stride?

There are two functions of criticism: to inform the public, and to write for writing’s sake. The latter is great—who doesn’t appreciate reading a beautiful essay about an old film or book?—but it should take a back seat to the former. A struggling new restaurant may turn into the city’s most beloved establishment after a few years, but the fact that it opened poorly is news that diners have a pressing interest in knowing today. And a place that opens immediately running on all cylinders is newsworthy as well. Withholding either piece of information out of a sense of critical noblesse oblige seems like a dereliction of duty.

by Tracy R. Walsh

Today’s gangsters are less bloodthirsty than their 20th-century counterparts, according to The Economist:

The United Nations identifies a series of “emerging crimes” mostly committed by criminal gangs: These include poaching, illegal logging and trafficking controlled goods, such as archeological artifacts and endangered animals. Those sorts of crimes required ever more dispersed networks, with specialized skills replacing sheer muscle. But even they require more violence than the newest of crimes: cybercrime, identity theft and fraud. These are increasingly being committed by new organizations from countries with little history of organized crime, and are probably the fastest-growing ways of making an illicit buck. By contrast, the trade of the old-fashioned gangster, well-known in his district, his monopoly enforced by violence, now looks antiquated.

More Dish on the rise of globalized gangsterism here.