2013 – Page 8 – The Dish

A Short Story For Saturday

Today’s (very) short story is Heinrich Böll’s “The Laugher,” translated by Leila Vennewitz. How the story begins:

When someone asks me what business I am in, I am seized with embarrassment: I blush and stammer, I who am otherwise known as a man of poise. I envy people who can say: I am a bricklayer. I envy barbers, bookkeepers and writers the simplicity of their avowal, for all these professions speak for themselves and need no lengthy explanation, while I am constrained to reply to such questions: I am a laugher. An admission of this kind demands another, since I have to answer the second question: “Is that how you make your living?” truthfully with “Yes.” I actually do make a living at my laughing, and a good one too, for my laughing is—commercially speaking—much in demand. I am a good laugher, experienced, no one else laughs as well as I do, no one else has such command of the fine points of my art. For a long time, in order to avoid tiresome explanations, I called myself an actor, but my talents in the field of mime and elocution are so meager that I felt this designation to be too far from the truth: I love the truth, and the truth is: I am a laugher.

Continue reading here, and check out this collection of Böll’s stories for more. Previous SSFWs here.

The View From Your Window Contest

You have until noon on Tuesday to guess it. City and/or state first, then country. Please put the location in the subject heading, along with any description within the email. If no one guesses the exact location, proximity counts. Be sure to email entries to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Winner gets a free The View From Your Window book or two free gift subscriptions to the Dish. Have at it.

The Next Level Of Moneyballing

Andrew Leonard examines “people analytics,” a method of assessing workers based on statistics, similar to how Sabermetics sizes up baseball players:

Max Simkoff, [big data analysis company] Evolv’s co-founder and CEO, told me that his company’s big-data crunching had revealed a stream of intriguing, contrarian results. For example, “people with a criminal background stay longer on the job and perform better at entry-level hourly jobs,” he said. Having “relevant experience” for a job didn’t track with later productivity. Indeed, the relative quality of a manager or supervisor was more important in influencing worker attrition and productivity than the background of the individual workers. Other useful insights — as reported by the Atlantic’s Don Peck in a comprehensive recent feature story, “They’re Watching You At Work” – include the nugget that educational attainment is not as big a factor in job success as the conventional wisdom believes. Another interesting data point: Being unemployed for a long period of time does not make you a worse worker, if hired. Put it all together, says Simkoff, and you end up with a better world: Listening to the wisdom of the algorithm, he believes, results in a fairer workplace, less tainted by bias and discrimination.

Leonard considers how the “wisdom of the algorithm” might not translate to all workplaces:

[T]here’s a darker scenario, one that increasingly seems to be playing out already: The best workers reap huge rewards; everyone else struggles for the scraps. Because that’s the logic of the algorithm. Reward productivity and punish inefficiency. It’s a great model for an NBA team, with only 11 or 12 spots on the roster. But it’s not all clear that it’s a great way to run an entire society.

Earlier Dish on people analytics here.

Paging Orwell

Robert Colls, who recently wrote a book on the author, sighs, “Orwell, you should be living at this hour”:

A medium ranking, 30 something year old man works on programmes concerned with gathering global information and using it in the interests of the state. Although he is an agency insider and enjoys the modest state privileges that derive from that, he comes to the conclusion that ‘The People’, in whose name he does these things, are not its beneficiaries but its victims, and that for all its talk of freedom and truth the state is intent on deceiving them. The man wants to admit his rebellious thoughts and reveal the deception but knows that by doing so he is going to make the rest of his life difficult, not to say short, and there will be no going back. He does it all the same. He has no accomplices, except his girlfriend. The world has yet to decide what will happen to him.

I am of course talking about Edward Snowden, who worked for the American National Security Agency before tipping its secrets last summer. But I could have been talking about Winston Smith, hero of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Winston, like Snowden, works in state security. Winston, like Snowden, acts alone. In spite of his name, Winston, like Snowden, is no action hero. … Here’s my point: Winston Smith and Edward Snowden are ordinary guys. You might say geeky-ordinary. But they had access to what we do not have access to, and came to believe that the job they were doing was not ordinary but extraordinary, and was not only wrong it was pointless.

Colls notes ironically that “Orwell spent his life loathing intellectuals and state technicians like Edward Snowden”:

He was sure they would betray the people. Well, Orwell did not always get it right and in this particular matter there can be no doubt that – as the cliché goes – if he was alive today the greatest political commentator of the 20th century would be supporting the young American. For Edward Snowden recognized two great Orwellian truths; first that liberty depends on millions of private lives kept private. As a fully paid-up non-deceived realist, Orwell would have argued the difficult case as to the point at which state secrecy should end and private life begin. Second, Snowden recognized that the War on Terror is no war and the quicker we drop the impossible abstraction of it all the better. Far better that we stick to what is ordinary: ordinary law, ordinary war, ordinary security, ordinary guys.

(Photo of demonstration against PRISM in Berlin, June 19, 2013, by Flickr user ubiquit23)

A New View Of Autism

Maia Szalavitz describes how neuroscientist Henry Markram, father to an autistic son, has come to interpret the disorder:

Imagine being born into a world of bewildering, inescapable sensory overload, like a visitor from a much darker, calmer, quieter planet. Your mother’s eyes: a strobe light. Your father’s voice: a growling jackhammer. That cute little onesie everyone thinks is so soft? Sandpaper with diamond grit. And what about all that cooing and affection? A barrage of chaotic, indecipherable input, a cacophony of raw, unfilterable data. Just to survive, you’d need to be excellent at detecting any pattern you could find in the frightful and oppressive noise. To stay sane, you’d have to control as much as possible, developing a rigid focus on detail, routine and repetition. Systems in which specific inputs produce predictable outputs would be far more attractive than human beings, with their mystifying and inconsistent demands and their haphazard behavior.

This, Markram and his wife, Kamila, argue, is what it’s like to be autistic. The behavior that results is not due to cognitive deficits—the prevailing view in autism research circles today—but the opposite, they say.

Rather than being oblivious, autistic people take in too much and learn too fast. While they may appear bereft of emotion, the Markrams insist they are actually overwhelmed not only by their own emotions, but by the emotions of others. Consequently, the brain architecture of autism is not just defined by its weaknesses, but also by its inherent strengths. The developmental disorder now believed to affect around 1 percent of the population is not characterized by lack of empathy, the Markrams claim. Social difficulties and odd behavior result from trying to cope with a world that’s just too much.

Previous Dish on autism here, here, and here.

A Poem From The Year

“Nighttime Begins with a Line by Pablo Neruda” by Yusef Komunyakaa:

So my body went on growing, by night,
went on pleading & singing to the earth
I was born to be woven back into: Love,
let me see if I can’t sink my roots
deeper into you, your minerals & water,
your leaf rot & gold, your telling and un-
telling of the oldest tales inscribed
on wind-carved rocks, silt & grass,
your songs & prayers, your oaths & myths,
your nights & days in one unending lament,
your luminous swarm of wet kisses
& stings, your spleen & mind,
your outrageous forgetting & remembrance,
your ghosts & rebirths, your thunderstones
& mushrooms, & your kind loss of memory.

Please consider supporting the work of the Poetry Society of America here.

Non-Selective Food Service

Reflecting on her time waiting tables in Madison, Wisconsin, Michelle Wildgen proposes a mandatory tour of duty in the restaurant business:

We would all be better people if restaurant work were compulsory. … In the dining room, you face humanity. And this is humanity at its most oblivious, tetchy and petulant. We’ve all heard about the snooty, demanding restaurant guests, but snootiness was not generally a big problem in Madison. … No, it was the regular folks who drained me of my will to stay in the restaurant business, and at times my will to breathe. …

A required year on the front lines would not just be a refresher in simple good manners, but the reminder of the underlying purpose of those manners: Even in a privileged dining room, this is a crowded, uneasy world, and being considerate of each other at the moments our lives unavoidably intersect can smooth the rough edges just a little bit. A former server is more likely to treat wait staff as sentient beings, yes, but I’d like to think we also retain some measure of empathy, too, much as we try to squelch it. A lot of lives came into my orbit when I was a server, drawing me in at moments that were joyous, sorrowful, nerve-wracking and all the more delightful or harrowing for occurring so publicly. You can’t live in your own hermetic world if you’re a server; you can’t avoid learning about the lives of others, not when those others arrive in your life each and every night, bringing with them a bundle of hopes and worries and celebrations and rifts.

The Complexity Of Empathy

Christian Jarrett offers “a calm look at the most hyped concept in neuroscience — mirror neurons,” which have been linked to human empathy and “the birth of human culture”:

[W]e do not yet have the research to show that mirror neurons are vital for human empathy, and there are reasons to believe that empathy is possible without them. For starters, we are able to comprehend the intentions behind the actions of other people or animals even if we’ve never performed, or are incapable of performing, their actions ourselves. Many brain damaged patients who can no longer produce speech are still able understand it. There are other patients who have lost the ability to express emotion yet can still understand the emotion of others.

He praises a recent paper by neuroscientists James Kilner and Roger Lemon:

Reading their paper it soon becomes clear that the term “mirror neurons” conceals a complex mix of cell types.

Some motor cells only show mirror-like responses when a monkey sees a live performer in front of them; other cells are also responsive to movements seen on video. Some mirror neurons appear to be fussy – they only respond to a very specific type of action; others are less specific and respond to a far broader range of observed movements. There are even some mirror neurons that are activated by the sound of a particular movement. Others show mirror suppression – that is their activity is reduced during action observation. Another study found evidence in monkeys of touch-sensitive neurons that respond to the sight of another animal being touched in the same location. …

Importantly, Kilner and Lemon also highlight findings from monkeys showing how the activity of mirror neurons is modulated by such factors as the angle of view, the reward value of the observed movement, and the overall goal of a movement, such as whether it is intended to grasp an object or place it in the mouth. These findings are significant because they show how mirror neurons are not merely activated by incoming sensory information, but also by formulations developed elsewhere in the brain about the meaning of what is being observed.

This is not to detract from the fascination of mirror neurons. It does show they are not the beginning of a causal path. Rather they are embedded in a complex network of brain activity.

The Marriage Equality Wins Pile Up

Toobin covers the recent surge in court victories. He calls Monday’s ruling in Ohio possibly “the most important of all”:

James Obergefell and John Arthur, who lived together in Cincinnati, married in Maryland at a time when Arthur was gravely ill. In anticipation of Arthur’s death, the couple petitioned the state of Ohio for Arthur to be listed as “married” on his Ohio death certificate, and to record Obergefell as the “surviving spouse.” Ohio, which does not allow same-sex marriages, refused, but federal judge Timothy S. Black ruled against the state and in favor of the couple. The judge said it was “not a complicated case.” Throughout Ohio’s history, Ohio has treated marriages solemnized out of state as valid in Ohio. “How then can Ohio, especially given the historical status of Ohio law, single out same-sex marriage as ones it will not recognize?” Black asked in his opinion. “The short answer is Ohio cannot.”

The Ohio decision is crucial because people in the United States tend to move from state to state. Like Obergefell and Arthur, people in same-sex marriages may well end up living in states where such marriages are illegal. Once they are in those states, these couples will become enmeshed in the legal system in the way that heterosexual married couples do. They will have children; they may divorce and dispute child custody; they will seek to file joint tax returns; they will visit each other in the hospital; they will want to be with each other when they die. Their lives will intersect with the legal system in scores of ways at those junctures. In light of this, many judges will face dilemmas similar to the one Black just resolved.

Lyle Denniston notes how the Ohio ruling relies and expands on Windsor. Mark Joseph Stern games out the cases that might make it to SCOTUS. On Utah:

Kitchen v. Herbert, Utah

Odds of reaching SCOTUS: Fairly good, but far from certain. Some observers have taken it as a given that the Utah case is destined for the high court: It’s a head-on challenge in a deeply red state, the kind of direct conflict that the Prop 8 case resoundingly was not. But it’s this straightforward factor that makes this case so risky. The court can’t wriggle out of it Perry-style; if the justices take it, they can’t get rid of it without issuing the final word on state-level bans. Given these stakes, the justices might prefer to kick the issue down the road—they’re pretty good at that—and let the lower courts figure this one out.

What happens if SCOTUS takes the case: The justices will essentially be forced to either legalize gay marriage nationwide or uphold all state-level bans. You can read the Windsor tea leaves however you want, but my money is on a broad ruling bringing marriage equality to the entire United States.

What happens if it doesn’t: That depends on the 10th Circuit’s ruling, but by denying a stay of the federal judge’s decision, the circuit judges may have already shown their hand. A court will generally stay a ruling if there’s a reasonable likelihood of reversal; here, the court has tacitly suggested, there is not. If the circuit court does uphold Judge Robert Shelby’s Scalia-baiting ruling, expect gay couples in Colorado, Oklahoma, and Wyoming—non-gay-marriage states within the 10th Circuit—to bring suit (and win).

A Poem From The Year

“Slave Driven” by Wanda Coleman:

i barely niggle a living squirreling around
the home office. I work for myself as my own secretary.
it’s a shitty job, paperwork ceiling to floor. the
technology changes every few months. i’m on call
weekends and holidays. no benefits or perks.
there’s no vacation or overtime. the pay is less
than minimum wage.
it’s like every job I’ve ever had except I don’t drive
rush-hour traffic and can wear nightclothes if I want.
there are no racist vibes, no gender or sex preference
or intergenerational discrimination, quitting time
is determined by level of exhaustion.
i get no breaks. i sit all day.
i grab a bite while on duty
the boss never has anything
good to say

Please consider supporting the work of the Poetry Society of America here.

(From Ostinato Vamps © 2003 by Wanda Coleman. Reprinted by kind permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press. Photo of Coleman courtesy of the Poetry Society of America)