Month: February 2013

An instant classic:

NYT: What is your favorite literary genre? Any guilty pleasures?

Kate Boo: When your work is nonfiction about low-income communities, pretty much anything that’s not nonfiction about low-income communities feels like a guilty pleasure.

Danny at Shutterstock’s blog investigates the origins of the ubiquitous heart symbol:

A leading theory contends that during the seventh century B.C., the silphium plant was used as a form of birth control in the city-state of Cyrene. Legend has it that the plant was so important to the local economy that “coins were minted that depicted the plant’s seedpod, which looks like the heart shape we know today,” according to Slate. …

For a long time before the common era, hunters reportedly scrawled the symbol on cave walls, though its meaning to those early people is unclear. Ancient Egyptians, for instance, believed that the heart epitomized life and morality. The Greeks held that it controlled reason, thought and emotion. It’s possible that the Greek association of ivy with the god Dionysus (the god of sensual things) led to the heart being identified with romantic love. Once the heart surfaced as a mark for sex, it’s not a large leap to understand how it came to connote love, too. And, in time, eternal love.

But non-procreative love, right? If it started as a symbol for contraception … So naturally, so to speak, the Vatican decided that the symbol actually began in the 17th century and was about Jesus who never had sex or romantic love at all. The Sacred Heart is indeed a powerful symbol. But the seed against seed wins out.

(Photo by H Matthew Howarth)

Loved the sexy barebacked cossack look on giantesses parading like svelte hobbled mules at @ralphlauren show #NYFW

— Tina Brown (@TheTinaBeast) February 14, 2013

“[T]his detention interrogation program, I’ve got to say … the people who ran it were ignorant of the topic, [it was] executed by personnel without relevant experience, managed incompetently by senior officials who did not pay attention to details, and corrupted by personnel with pecuniary conflicts of interest,” – Senator Jay Rockefeller, summarizing the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s conclusions in a 6,000–page report that studied the CIA’s black site detentions and torture program, at the nomination hearing of John Brennan to head the CIA, Feb. 7, 2013.

Show us the report. Show us what was done in our name without our being consulted. If the defenders of the torture program want to defend it, let them defend it on the facts, not on hypotheticals. Let us see what we did.

Reviewing pre-K research, Grover Whitehurst notes that the “largest impacts have always been associated with children from the most disadvantaged backgrounds,” which he thinks “argues for targeted, intensive programs, not universal ones.” McArdle is on the same page:

I think universality is the enemy of the president’s stated goal, which is to help give poor kids a leg up into the land of opportunity. First, and most obviously, a universal program will be much more expensive than a program targeted to the 20% of kids who are poor (or the somewhat higher percentage whose families have incomes within 1.5 or 2 times the poverty line.) But perhaps even more importantly is the way that the middle class portion of the program will siphon off the best resources, which is to say, the best teachers. Think of the flow of teachers within school districts from poorer to richer schools. The affluent kids are easier to teach: fewer behavior problems, much better preparation for school, and few of them have trouble getting their homework done because the family’s crammed into three rooms with Grandma and Aunt Marie. So the best teachers flow towards the kids who need them least.

There’s no evidence that I’m aware of that pre-school helps middle class kids; it helps poor kids because it makes up for the stuff that middle class parents do (reading readiness, for example), and poor parents can’t or don’t. So if we’re going to pass a big expensive new program aimed at helping poor kids with serious deficiencies in their home environment, I want to target it on those kids, to make sure that they get as much benefit as possible.

The president’s pre-K proposal, which was released this morning, is summarized here. One element of the plan that focuses on the poor:

A state-federal partnership to guarantee pre-K to all 4-year-olds in families at or below 200 percent of the poverty line, to be provided by school districts and other local partners, and to use instructors with the same level of education and training as K-12 instructions.

Earlier debate over universal pre-K here.

Freddie analyzes the whimsical, Oscar-nominated short film seen above:

It’s interesting that Alyssa Rosenberg cites “Paperman” in contrast to most romantic comedies, because I see in “Paperman” a perfect example of a basic problem with the genre. This problem was defined perfectly by The Onion: “Romantic Comedy Behavior Gets Real-Life Man Arrested.” Think about the behavior here. The protagonist is very forward in pursuing a woman who he hasn’t talked to at all. We know that there’s mutual attraction, thanks to the nonverbal clues that we (as a disconnected audience) observe. In a Disney short, that’s perfectly sufficient, and internal to the world of the movie, I find it sweet. In the real world, I think it’s exactly the kind of behavior a lot of women are justifiably tired of. But our culture and media keep reinforcing it, and that contributes to unhappiness.

The other candidates for Best Animated Short are here.

A recent report from the CBO indicates that the growth of healthcare costs has slowed recently. Annie Lowrey examines [NYT] the potential causes of the “sharp and surprisingly persistent slowdown”:

Health experts say they do not yet fully understand what is driving the lower spending trajectory. But there is a growing consensus that changes in how doctors and hospitals deliver health care — as opposed to merely a weak economy — are playing a role. … Part of the slowdown stems from “the recession and the loss of income and wealth” causing people to cut back on health care, Douglas W. Elmendorf, the director of the Congressional Budget Office, said last week. But he added that a “significant part” of the slowdown “probably arises from structural changes in the health care system.”

Austin Frakt, unsure whether the slow down will continue, reframes the question:

I want to know if growth for overused, low-value care is moderating while growth in high-value, underused care is at least holding steady. Are we trimming fat or muscle? … In this respect, our obsessive focus on reducing or bending the curve of the health care budget is a bit misguided. After all, we could do that quite easily and be far worse for it.

Walter Russell Mead directs attention to a different finding from the report:

When Obama took to the stump for health care reform, one promise came through loud and clear: “If you like your insurance, you can keep it.” That promise is officially about to be broken, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Millions of employees will soon be dropped from health insurance coverage as new provisions of the law go into effect. … The CBO also projected that 5 million fewer people will gain health insurance coverage over the next decade than originally expected.

A reader writes:

I am with you on ribbons. I hate them, and they are everywhere for everything. They usually remind me of the Seinfeld episode from so many years ago, where Kramer ended up ganged up upon at an AIDS walk because he dared not wear a ribbon. I also have for some time hated the magnetic ones, either yellow or American flag emblazoned, for people to stick on their cars that say “I support our troops”. I often mentally add “at least in so far as buying this magnetic ribbon at a convenience store,” since for so many years most of us were not asked to make any sacrifices for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Another quotes me:

“The fact that we gays started this lame tradition truly saddens me.” We’re off the hook for that one. The AIDS red ribbon was designed in emulation of the use of yellow ribbons to express solidarity with the Iran hostages in 1979 and revived during the first Gulf War, and that use of the yellow ribbon almost certainly was inspired by the popularity of the song “Tie a Yellow Ribbon ‘Round the Old Oak Tree” by Tony Orlando and Dawn, which updated a meme (we used to call them “legends”) that dates back decades earlier – though not verifiably as far back as the Civil War, despite popular belief (see this Library of Congress piece). So this is one of those rare fashion trends where gays followed rather than led.

Another adds:

Not noted in the LoC piece is that almost immediately after the yellow ribbons being worn for the US hostages, GREEN ribbons started being worn to show concern for the black children of Atlanta during the extremely scary period of the Atlanta Murders, the serial killings for which Wayne Williams was eventually convicted. If you find any 1981 photo of Robert DeNiro receiving his Oscar for Raging Bull, he’s wearing a green ribbon on his tuxedo lapel.

Another:

I also didn’t know what the green ribbons were supposed to signify. So, I looked it up on Wikipedia: You’re right. They’ve run out of colors, and are now just recycling them over and over again. “In 17th Century England during and after the English Civil War the wearing of a sea-green ribbon signified affiliation with the ideals of the Levellers and later in the century with radical Whiggism.” More recently, green ribbons have been used to show support for issues as varied as cannabis legalization, farm families, music education and those suffering from various illnesses. Hilarious.

Update from a reader:

Your reader wrote that the yellow ribbon is “a meme (we used to call them “legends”) that dates back decades earlier – though not verifiably as far back as the Civil War, despite popular belief (see this Library of Congress piece).” That’s incorrect, though understandably so given what’s on the public record. I’m a historical researcher myself, and while pursuing an unrelated project I found a mention of an Englishwoman wearing yellow ribbons for a faraway lover, one that dates to the late 18th century, probably 1788. So the idea certainly predates the American Civil War.

Another update:

I just want to clarify why the Sandy Hook ribbons are green. The school colors of Sandy Hook are green and white. I cannot believe I am emailing about this, but as someone who grew up in Newtown and whose parents still live there, one of whom has been in the middle of this tragedy, I felt I needed to set the record straight. So yes, maybe the ribbons are lame and show up everywhere now, but the color does have real meaning to the people in Newtown and Sandy Hook.

Weigel’s theory about the GOP strategy:

Not all Republicans are as theatrical as Lindsey Graham. They are cool to the idea of an “unprecedented filibuster” of a Cabinet-level nominee. But if they can reframe the filibuster as something else—if it’s merely a delay, and they can talk about approving him later—well, then, they get the recess to beat him up (or completely fail to beat him up, as happened this weekend) or beg the White House for more, more, more Benghazi information, like the president’s exact actions on the night of the attack.

As loath as the White House is to discuss that, senators seem to think they’ll get something.