Month: March 2013

Dish alum Gwynn Guilford makes the case that marriage equality in China would not only be good for gays; it would “also help solve a China’s hugely problematic gender imbalance” caused by the country’s One Child policy:

China has tens of millions more men of marriageable age than there are women. Known as “bare branches,” these guys pose a big potential threat to social and economic stability. For instance, economist Lena Edlund projects that a 1% increase rise in the gender-gap ratio leads to a 6% rise in violent crime and vandalism. China also has a long history of social unrest (pdf, p. 17) resulting from gluts of men—not to mention the fact that they’re miserable. Here’s how gay marriage could help the problem:

16 million straight women are now married to gay men. That’s the estimate of population scholar Zhang Beichuan.

20 million men are “bare branches.” That includes gay and straight men; Zhang estimates that 2-5% of the male population is gay.

If gay marriage were legalized, a significant proportion of the marriages between straight women and gay men could end, allowing gay men to marry other gay men and returning millions of straight women to the dating pool.

She continues with caveats here, namely the lesbian factor. Previous Dish on Chinese gays marrying straight women here and here.

Gun parts aren’t the only pieces of printable contraband:

[Some people are] putting 3D-printing technology to an entirely new end: Getting high. Which is to say, we’ve come a decent way since the MakerBong first showed up on Thingiverse, the digital-design hub. That was three years ago. It was by all accounts the first user-created specs for printable paraphernalia, and it likewise spurred some of the initial chatter over the legal uncertainties of a near-future where every home–maybe–has a printer.

Lee Hutchinson explores the ethical issues raised by this sort of printing:

As marijuana legalization gains traction at the state level, what is the responsibility of 3D repositories like Thingiverse to police themselves? Is it “moral” to allow the storing and downloading of 3D bong templates, but not firearm templates? Casual marijuana smokers consistently tout the harmlessness of the drug, but those opposed to its legalization are point to the dangers of abuse; on the opposite side of that coin, firearm enthusiasts push their own hobby’s safety and the dangers of restricting gun ownership. Each group may be seen by the other as somewhat hypocritical: a gun is a tool, but gun control proponents point out that guns are tools designed to kill.

Previous Dish on 3D printing here.

(Image: Thingiverse user hendo420)

Despite what recent commentary would have you believe, Douthat suspects that Anne Hathaway haters are an extreme minority:

[T]hanks to Twitter’s influence, pop culture pundits have persuaded themselves that one of the most successful movie stars of her generation occupies a role in the public’s imagination “not unlike Lindsay Lohan’s … [as a] punching bag on which we project our resentment of celebrities, generally speaking.” Which would be a completely plausible bit of cultural analysis, if Lohan were coming off two monster hits and basically writing her own ticket in Hollywood while Hathaway was sharing top billing with a porn star in a desperate attempt to jump-start her career.

Since the reverse is true, it’s safe to assume that Hathaway’s career will survive the press’s recent elevation of her online haters. But that elevation is still an indicator of a media that’s at ease in the Twitterverse’s various echo chambers, and prone to forget that there’s a wider world outside.

XOXO 2013 > SXSW 2013. This may be the year SXSW (really) jumps the shark and Portland takes over. Maybe. 2013.xoxofest.com

— Mike Lee (@mikel_ee) February 7, 2013

Music journalist Andrea Swensson is skipping the Austin festival this year after attending the previous six:

[E]ach year, more and more celebrity-sized acts and corporate conglomerates seem to crash the party. Remember when Kanye West stole all the SXSW headlines in 2011 by setting up camp at a massive abandoned power plant and throwing a star-studded, Vevo-sponsored blowout? It hollowed out downtown Austin and led to paltry attendance at the actual festival’s closing night activities. On the plus side, I was able to waltz up to the front row to see one of SXSW’s biggest bookings of that year, Yoko Ono; on the downside, hardly anyone wrote about the iconic performer’s disarming set, or much of anything else the festival was presenting that evening. That stunt was on a scale that only a pop star like Kanye could pull off, but it signified a sea change that some attendees had seen coming for years. The extracurricular parties that happen during SXSW had outgrown and overshadowed the festival itself. And in this era of pageview-chasing journalism, which events do you think the media are going to cover: The fledgling band playing a tiny club on Sixth Street, or the celeb throwing the once-in-a-lifetime rager?

A writeup of last year’s fledgling XOXO festival here.

(Hat tip: Xmastime)

Peter Orszag observes college graduation rates:

Not surprisingly, but somewhat depressingly, those who don’t finish are disproportionately poor. Among those born around 1980, only about a third of college students from low- income families got their degrees, compared with about two- thirds of those from affluent families.

As another indication of the challenge, the college completion report from the KIPP charter school network shows an impressive 95 percent of KIPP students receive their high school degree, and 89 percent enroll in college — but then less than 40 percent graduate from college. This is a crucial and challenging problem. The College Board’s College Completion Agenda recommends some strategies to support and motivate students that might help, starting in preschool and continuing after they reach college, but the truth is that no one yet knows what will work.

A reader quotes Marin Cogan:

Studies suggest that men are more likely than women to interpret friendly interest as sexual attraction, and this is a constant hazard for women in the profession. The problem, in part, is that the rituals of cultivating sources—initiating contact, inviting them out for coffee or a drink, showing intense interest in their every word—can often mimic the rituals of courtship…

That doesn’t mimic the rituals of courtship; it is the rituals of courtship. Some of them, at least.  The reporter is just employing them for a different purpose (to “cultivate” a relationship other than a romantic one). Nonetheless, the only reason the behaviors she described work is because they are courtship rituals. The parts of the brain that produce emotional attachment don’t know anything about modern cultural contexts or complex rational motivations.  They see behaviors and do their thing.

In this case, what the reporter is shooting for is to perform just enough courtship behavior to elicit just enough emotional attachment to produce an exclusive and ongoing relationship of openness and trust without getting the rest of the relationship that courtship is designed to produce.  Sometimes the source’s prefrontal cortex can figure all this out and realize that what’s going on isn’t real courtship, but sometimes it can’t.  (Likewise, sometimes the reporter modulates her courtship behavior just right, and sometimes she overshoots.)

I’m not saying female reporters are intentionally leading on male sources, nor am I saying male sources are looking for love in exchange for information.  Exactly the same applies when the genders are reversed. I’m just calling a spade a spade, and I’m puzzled that Cogan is describing these situations as if they’re surprising or accidental.  Courtship behaviors often elicit courtship responses.  This is neither surprising nor accidental.