Month: January 2013

This weekend on the Dish, Andrew talked testosterone, cast a skeptical glance at American interventions abroad, offered an update on the Obama-as-liberal-Reagan thread, ruminated on Christianity’s non-violent core, and reminded readers about the reasons for Dish independence.

We also provided our typical mix of religious, books, and cultural coverage. In matters of faith, doubt, and philosophy, Gary Gutting defended faith without knowledge, Christian Wiman meditated on suffering, and Karen Swallow Prior reframed the debate about the decline of the religious novel. Peter Berger considered the reasons for the culture wars, Morgan Meis complicated what it means to be a Luddite, Alice Gregory panned a new book about friendship, and Lisa Guenther taught Plato to death-row inmates.

In literary and arts coverage, Natalie Shapero turned to Thornton Wilder’s Our Town to understand the writer’s love life, scientists found that we hear even while reading silently, and J.L. Wall feared the death of the bookstore would limit exposure to the classics. An animated grammar lesson taught us about the proper use of possessives, John Walsh argued that the intersection of romance and class distinctions was part of Pride and Prejudice‘s appeal, and Gordon Marsden hailed Burke and Orwell as prophets. Tim Parks made a paradoxical case for the grammar police, Freya Johnston mused on the source of English sadness, and Johnny Cash sang for prison reform. Molly Erman test-drove Instagram as a dating service, John J. Ross recountedthe medical lives of our favorite writers, and Mark O’Connell explored the art of the epic fail. Read Saturday’s poem here and Sunday’s here.

In assorted news and views, Christopher Benfey investigated our complicated relationship to wolves, Nathaniel Rich reported on the physical toll depth-diving takes on humans, and Ed Glaeser outlined the GOP’s urban problem. Christopher Jobson noticed a philanthropic forger, Gary Wills reflected on the self-defeating South, and Jennifer Senior unpacked the science behind high school madness. Melissa Gira Grant tore into our shameful war on prostitution, Steve Martin downplayed the chances of the opium’s resurgence, Soraya Roberts related the difficulties of being a non-drinker, and James Hamblin explained why you might want to skip that nightcap.

FOTD here, MHBs here and here, VFYWs here and here, and the latest window contest here.

– M.S.

Zuberoa Macros explains the hibernation process:

For five to seven-and-a-half months of the year, black and brown bears turn themselves off. They do not eat, drink, urinate, defecate or exercise. They reduce their metabolism by 50 to 75% of normal rates. They breathe once every 15 to 60 seconds and their heart rate drops from around 50 to about 10 beats per minute.

What humans can learn from from the phenomenon:

“I am convinced there is some kind of connection between hibernators and human survivors, people who have cheated death after being submerged in icy water, or buried in snow, without oxygen, for hours,” says [molecular biologist Matthew Andrews]. A lack of oxygen often kills people who have had a cardiac arrest or a stroke. About five years ago, doctors began to experiment with therapies to cool down, even temporarily, such patients’ bodies and reduce their need for oxygen. The results have been nothing short of extraordinary.

(Photo: Palle-Jooseppi, a male brown bear of Ranua Zoo, begins to wake up after winter hibernation in Ranua on February 23, 2012. By Kaisa Siren/AFP/Getty Images)

Scott Adams knows many “successful white-collar types who had unpleasant manual jobs when they were young.” He considers the significance of those jobs:

In my case, I worked on my uncle’s dairy farm in upstate New York.  And let me tell you, nothing makes you want to avoid farming as much as actually doing it. When I studied for a test in school, I was keenly-aware that it meant something. … But I imagine how different I might have felt if I had never experienced unpleasant manual labor – and lots of it – and instead was tortured with several hours of homework every night. I think I might have longed for a simpler future with no books and not so much thinking. In other words, I think the homework would have redirected me away from seeking a career in law or engineering and toward something that didn’t require so much damned studying.

Update from a reader:

I did a fair amount of work not requiring a college education before I completed college (restaurant, janitorial, shipping room, kibbutz factory and fields), and I found most of it reasonably pleasant – certainly not an incentive to get out into the ‘white collar’ world. I think only having to live for an extended time on scanty wages does that – though of course, there are lots of really unpleasant jobs that I didn’t have to do. Just saying, lots of college-track kids can get plenty of not-particularly-unpleasant work that won’t in itself scare them off a life of wage labor.

When I first stumbled into blogging over 12 years ago, it was for two reasons: curiosity and freedom. I was curious about the potential for writing in this new medium; and for the first time, I felt total freedom as a writer. On my little blog, I was beholden to no one but my readers. I had no editor to please, no advertiser to woo, no publisher to work for, no colleagues to manage. Perhaps it was working for so long in old media that made me appreciate this breakthrough so much. But it still exhilarates every day.

For the first time in human history, a writer – or group of writers and editors – can instantly reach readers – even hundreds of thousands of readers across the planet – with no intermediary at all.

And they can reach back. Few discovered this as quickly as I did – and as the Dish evolved over the first six years, I was forced to admit when I was wrong (see: George W. Bush, 9/11, the Iraq War, etc), and it was not pretty at times. Looking back, I realize that in many ways, you, the readers, made that unavoidable. I had to face you every day. And you were merciless.

And that, I realized, was a good thing. The more this sank in, the more what started as a monologue became a dialogue. The dialogue eventually ceded to a sprawling conversation in which I now play the role of host/provocateur, while my Dish colleagues (and readers) scour every nook of the web to add insight, news or amusement to the whole mix. We have an official staff of 7, and an unofficial one of around a million unpaid obsessives.

But as the pretense of old media authority ceded to the crowd-sourcing of argument, fact and thought, one thing remained elusive: how to make this work financially.

I did it on my own for nothing but two pledge drives for six years. Then I tried partnering with bigger media institutions for the following six – Time, the Atlantic, and the Daily Beast. The Beast in particular gave us the resources and support to take the Dish to a new level of richness, breadth and depth: adding one more staffer and two paid interns, helping us with video, giving us a supportive space to breathe and grow, as we have. We are intensely grateful to them, especially Tina Brown and Barry Diller, who became great partners in this evolving enterprise. The Dish now is beyond what I allowed myself to imagine twelve years ago.

And so, as we contemplated the end of our contract with the Beast at the end of 2012, we faced a decision. As usual, we sought your input and the blogosphere’s – hence the not-terribly subtle thread that explored whether online readers will ever pay for content, and how. The answer is: no one really knows. But as we debated and discussed that unknowable future, we felt more and more that getting readers to pay a small amount for content was the only truly solid future for online journalism. And since the Dish has, from its beginnings, attempted to pioneer exactly such a solid future for web journalism, we also felt we almost had a duty to try and see if we could help break some new ground.

The only completely clear and transparent way to do this, we concluded, was to become totally independent of other media entities and rely entirely on you for our salaries, health insurance, and legal, technological and accounting expenses.

The “we” in particular was executive editors Patrick Appel, Chris Bodenner and me. Every member of the Dish team contributed to the debate (Zoe and Matt very much so), but Patrick, Chris and I were the core. We’d bonded most powerfully during our coverage of the Iranian Green Revolution, but over the years before and since, we’d evolved into something like a triad brain, blogging alone (apart from weekly lunches and South Park nights) but somehow intuiting each other’s rhythms and interests, passions and conflicts – while constantly feeding off yours in the in-tray and beyond. We grew to trust the model that emerged from the intimations of the daily blogging, and treasure the formula you slowly helped concoct and we collectively call the Dish.

And so last week, the three of us signed an agreement setting up an independent company called Dish Publishing LLC, and agreed to strike out on our own with no safety net below us but you.

And that’s the primary reason we’re hopeful this can work. Because the Dish readership is the core strength of this site anyway, and you have shown us over the years how deeply you care about an open, honest, provocative debate on all kinds of subjects. The computers say the average Dish reader spends up to 17 minutes a day on the site – a massive investment of time and energy. All your extraordinary emails are anonymous – a sign of a community eager to debate the real issues rather than take credit for their own insights. And this relationship between all of us now goes back a long way – to a time when everyone I met kept asking me what a blog was, through the horrors of 9/11 and the Iraq War, past the Obama miracle and the odd lies of a former half-term governor whose name now escapes me.

If you’ve stuck with the Dish through all this, if you’ve tolerated my idiosyncrasies and occasional meltdowns, and if, in fact, you’ve helped create our content with the best reader threads anywhere online, we just hope you’ll help keep this show on the road in a more sustainable, permanent way.

So, as of February 1, we will revert to our old URL – http://www.andrewsullivan.com. All previous URLs will automatically redirect, so don’t worry about losing us. Until then, the Beast has generously agreed to keep us on so we can organize ourselves in time for the launch. In fact, Tina and Barry have been fully supportive of this decision once we made it, although we’re all sad to part ways.

Here’s the core principle: we want to create a place where readers – and readers alone – sustain the site. No bigger media companies will be subsidizing us; no venture capital will be sought to cushion our transition (unless my savings count as venture capital); and, most critically, no advertising will be getting in the way.

The decision on advertising was the hardest, because obviously it provides a vital revenue stream for almost all media products. But we know from your emails how distracting and intrusive it can be; and how it often slows down the page painfully. And we’re increasingly struck how  advertising is dominated online by huge entities, and how compromising and time-consuming it could be for so few of us to try and lure big corporations to support us. We’re also mindful how online ads have created incentives for pageviews over quality content.

We’re only human and so we want to set up the incentives so we are geared entirely to improving the total reader experience, not to ratchet up hits, or to please corporate advertisers. We may be fooling ourselves, and it would be imprudent for us to rule out all advertising right now for ever. So we won’t. But it would be a great missed opportunity, in my view, not to try. Remember the classic saying:

If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product being sold.

We want to treat our readers better than that, because you deserve better than that.

Hence the purest, simplest model for online journalism: you, us, and a meter. Period. No corporate ownership, no advertising demands, no pressure for pageviews … just a concept designed to make your reading experience as good as possible, and to lead us not into temptation.

So for the next month, we’re going to offer you advance membership of the Dish for $19.99 a year, which translates to $1.67 a month, which is around a nickel a day. The meter won’t start until February, and the price won’t change then, but by pre-subscribing, you give us a crucial financial bridge to get to independence – and you’ll never notice a thing when the transition happens.

To be honest, we didn’t know where to set the price – we have almost no precedents for where we want to go – but $19.99 seemed the lowest compatible with a serious venture. We wanted to make this as affordable as possible, while maximizing revenues.

Which led us to a second thought: who better knows the value of a site than its readers? More to the point, we know the Dish is worth much more to some of you than others; that twice-daily readers plumb more of it than daily ones; and that multiple-click readers and regular emailers are the source of so much of our content, and might see the Dish as more valuable. So for those of you who would like to support the Dish over and above $19.99, we’ve left the price box empty. Pay $19.99 or what you think a year of reading the Dish is worth to you. No member will have any more access or benefits than any other member, but if hardcore Dishheads want to give us some love for the years of free blogging and for the adventure ahead, we’d be crazy not to take it.

And we do need it, if we are to continue and grow. We need, in particular, to get paid decently for what is extremely intense work 365 days a year. Some people I bump into ask me how we produce 240 posts a week (13,000 separate posts last year alone) or how we read the 90,000 emails we get a year. I have a simple answer: we work our asses off. And my colleagues and I deserve to be paid for it. (For the best defense of this basic principle, see Louis CK’s explanation here.) If the money doesn’t come in, we’ll have to find another way to make a living.

Equally, the more you give us, the more we will be able to do. It’s really as simple as that. The more of you who pre-subscribe the easier our transition will be; the more of you who give more than $19.99 the more ambitious we can get. We have many future projects in our head – commissioning and editing original long-form journalism is a core ambition of ours, along with a possible monthly tablet magazine called “Deep Dish” (which would both require hiring old-school editors) – and the more you give us, the faster we can evolve, mature and develop further. Throughout, we’ll be asking you what you want, and as always, airing dissent and opinion as freely as possible.

And that’s where the real pay-off begins. If this model works, we’ll have proof of principle that a small group of writers and editors can be paid directly by readers, and that an independent site, if tended to diligently, can grow an audience large enough to sustain it indefinitely.

The point of doing this as simply and as purely as possible is precisely to forge a path other smaller blogs and sites can follow. We believe in a bottom-up Internet, which allows a thousand flowers to bloom, rather than a corporate-dominated web where the promise of a free space becomes co-opted by large and powerful institutions and intrusive advertising algorithms. We want to help build a new media environment that is not solely about advertising or profit above everything, but that is dedicated first to content and quality. (And notice I’ve even finally managed to spell “advertising” right in this post.)

That’s why we have partnered with a new company, TinyPass, which shares our vision. You can read their mission statement on their website. Here it is:

Tinypass is a team of refugees from advertising, design, and banking. We came together because we believe that in this new digital world there should be more than one bookstore, more than one music store, and more than one video store.

They are providing a way for any website – from a mom and pop store to a fledgling newspaper – to get revenue from readers in the easiest and simplest way. No massive cut for Amazon when selling your book, no 30 percent to Apple for getting your music or podcast out there – just a simple meter and payment system that can be scaled at any level.

Our particular version will be a meter that will be counted every time you hit a “Read on” button to expand or contract a lengthy post. You’ll have a limited number of free read-ons a month, before we hit you up for $19.99. Everything else on the Dish will remain free. No link from another blog to us will ever be counted for the meter – so no blogger or writer need ever worry that a link to us will push their readers into a paywall. It won’t. Ever. There is no paywall. Just a freemium-based meter. We’ve tried to maximize what’s freely available, while monetizing those parts of the Dish where true Dishheads reside. The only tough love we’re offering is the answer to the View From Your Window Contest. You’ll have to become a member to find where the place is. Ha!

So it’s over to you. We’re in your hands. The meter won’t start until February 1, but you can become a member now. It takes two minutes tops. All you need is a credit card and a zip code – and you’re done. The more of you who decide to contribute more than $19.99 the deeper and richer and more ambitious a Dish we will be able to provide. We have no marketing, no ads, no corporation behind us now. We only have you.

The link is here. Join us and keep the Dish alive and ad-free here.

And change the media world just a little – for the better.

Here’s a useful reminder of how even after a years-long occupation, a relatively smooth exit and thousands and thousands of deaths, there is still no democracy in Iraq and still no sectarian reconciliation. The “surge” failed in every respect but giving the US a face-saving run for the exits. Sunnis in the parliament just voted to prevent Maliki from getting a third term, after long-simmering Sunni-Shiite violence flared up again in Anbar:

Dueling scenes that played out on Saturday — the hundreds of mourners who hoisted the coffins of dead protesters in the streets of Falluja and the lawmakers in Baghdad who cast votes in an attempt to limit the power of the prime minister — encapsulated the prevailing features of Iraqi public life after the long and costly American war: sectarianism, violence and political dysfunction.

But notice that the prime minister’s power is effectively unlimited:

Mr. Maliki’s coalition in Parliament boycotted the vote, and an official close to the prime minister called it unconstitutional and vowed to appeal to the federal courts, which on paper are independent but in practice bend to Mr. Maliki’s will.

Yes, those thousands of dead soldiers and countless thousands more maimed and countless thousands more affected and a trillion dollars spent and … we relaced one Sunni genocidal dictator with a Shiite authoritarian. Meanwhile, president Obama’s unconstitutional and undeclared war on Libya continues to bring more chaos in its wake:

Libya’s upheaval the past two years helped lead to the ongoing conflict in Mali, and now Mali’s war threatens to wash back and further hike Libya’s instability. Fears are growing that post-Moammar Gadhafi Libya is becoming an incubator of turmoil, with an overflow of weapons and Islamic jihadi militants operating freely, ready for battlefields at home or abroad.

Then this news from Washington, as Obama tries to decide whether to support the French government’s impulsive armed intervention in Mali:

In the case of Mali, one official said, American intelligence assessments have concluded that the Islamic extremists have little ability to threaten the United States. “But they can threaten the region,” he said, “and that’s where the argument for American involvement comes in.”

If these Jihadists only threaten their own region now, our intervening will immediately shift their focus toward the US. It could make us less safe rather than more. And this is exactly why any single military intervention anywhere requires very serious debate in the Congress and the public before it is launched. It’s relatively easy to go in, given the simply massive neo-imperial war machine we pay for; far harder to get out; even harder to do anything to address the intricate, deep cultural, religious and political forces that are sweeping the Muslim world. We did not elect Obama to get us involved in more wars in distant places we don’t understand against Jihadists who do not threaten the US. And we cannot afford it either.

(Photo: Anti-government protesters perform the weekly Friday prayer in the western Iraqi city of Ramadi on January 25, 2013. The longest-running of the protests, in Ramadi, has cut off a key trade route linking Baghdad to Jordan and Syria for a month. By Azhar Shallal/AFP/Getty Images.)

Gary Gutting defends it:

Knowledge, if it exists, adds a major dimension to religious commitment.  But love and understanding, even without knowledge, are tremendous gifts; and religious knowledge claims are hard to support. We should, then, make room for those who embrace a religion as a source of love and understanding but remain agnostic about the religion’s knowledge claims.  We should, for example, countenance those who are Christians while doubting the literal truth of, say, the Trinity and the Resurrection.  I wager, in fact, that many professed Christians are not at all sure about the truth of these doctrines —and other believers have similar doubts.  They are, quite properly, religious agnostics.

Gordon Marsden finds similarities between Orwell and Burke, noting that both wrote “books for their times that could rightly be described as ‘a prophecy and a warning'”

Burke, like Orwell, challenges the liberal/left intellectuals of his day not out of a perverse desire to be different but from an urgent sense that human values and feelings are threatened with obliteration. For Orwell and Burke it is not the Sleep of Reason, but over-reliance on it and the consequent belief that cruel means are justified by abstract ends, that is producing their monsters. Burke’s radical chic English aristocrats taking up the soundbites of ‘Liberty, Equality and Fraternity’ are his counterparts to Stalin’s ‘useful idiots’. He warns them of the consequences, in his Letter to a Noble Lord (1796), as pungently as ever Orwell would have done: ‘these philosophers consider men in their experiments no more than they do mice in an air pump’.