The death and destruction of the Civil War gave rise to “spirit photography,” a cottage industry where charlatans convinced grieving family members that their dead loved ones could be captured on camera. The scam art was pioneered by William H. Mumler, who was eventually exposed:
Witnesses appearing at the highly-publicized hearing included prominent Spiritualists as well as skeptical photographers, who identified nine possible methods by which “spirits” could be imitated, including double exposure and combination printing. Constructing admittedly fake spirit photographs had already become a source of fun for some photographers, and witness Abraham Bogardus submitted one of his own as evidence. Taken at the request of showman P.T. Barnum, the image featured Barnum with the somber “ghost” of President Lincoln. Barnum was called to the witness stand as well, as an expert on “humbuggery.” He had previously railed against Mumler in his own writings, pointing out how some of Mumler’s ghosts were awfully fashionably dressed for having been dead so long. …
The friendship between illusionist Harry Houdini and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle fell apart in the 1920s when Houdini made public statements deriding spirit photographs as farcical. Doyle, an ardent Spiritualist who had written a book in support of spirit photography, was crushed. The possibility of contacting his dead spouse and children was too great a comfort to him, as it had been to Mary Todd Lincoln fifty years earlier. Lincoln supposedly wept upon receiving William Mumler’s pictures of herself next to her husband [seen above].
[G]iven the White House’s obviously acute understanding of the political cost of rate increases and plan cancellations (otherwise why would they have said “if you like it, you can keep it” so many, many times?), I’m actually quite interested in why they didn’t consider compromising a bit more on comprehensiveness. I was an outsider to what was mostly just an intra-Democrat argument, but in my memory of the 2009-era debates, it doesn’t seem like the fate of catastrophic insurance ever really came up as a point of potential negotiation between the left and the center. Red state and moderate Democrats were focused on flashpoints like abortion, on pushing back against the possibility of a “public option” or a Medicare buy-in, and on, well, protecting their own state interests. But to the best of my recollection these “what counts as insurance”/”who should keep their plan” debates were never really on the political radar screen. (There were Republicans, like then-Senator Judd Gregg, who raised the possibility of some sort of compromise around catastrophic rather than comprehensive insurance, but there was little interest in that idea on either side of the aisle.)
So why weren’t they on the radar screen, given the entirely predictable political problems the new regulations have created?
The Keystone movement developed in 2011, when environmentalists needed a cause to replace the failed cap-and-trade bill. It was only immediately following the 2012 election that the NRDC laid out a plan by which the EPA could effectively tackle existing power plants, the last big repository of unregulated emissions. The road map to solving climate change is far from certain: It involves writing a regulatory scheme to reign in existing power plants, surviving a legal challenge, and then, having credibly committed the U.S. to meeting Copenhagen standards, wrangling India, China, and others into a workable international treaty.
That plan is far from certain. But Keystone won’t affect the outcome much one way or the other. If Obama pulls off the EPA plan, then the U.S. can hit its emissions target even if it builds the pipeline. If he doesn’t, it won’t hit the target, even if it kills the pipeline.
There’s another possibility — a victory (or anger over a loss) might be something you can build on. In the larger scheme of things segregated buses in Birmingham were a fairly minor Jim Crow injustice, but the successful opposition to it helped build a movement that could effectively oppose disenfranchisement, employment discrimination, etc. etc.
[T]he question is whether the passion generated by the fight against Keystone XL was available for more salient but abstract battles, and was thus robbed from it. At Grist, Dave Roberts asked and answered that question back in February of 2012 … While Chait regards the opportunity costs of emphasizing Keystone XL to the exclusion of other environmental issues as huge, Roberts argued they are virtually non-existent, and indeed, a successful (or perhaps even unsuccessful) fight against the pipeline could create the foundation for future environmental activism.
The fight against the pipeline began as a citizen’s movement because the people most directly affected by the project saw that the skids already were greased. It has been a citizen’s movement ever since. Chait’s argument for the EPA regulations as a more important goal for environmentalists is interesting, but off the point. The government can fight two important environmental battles at once; in fact, as the years go by, and climate change gets worse, it’s going to have to. Go to Nebraska, Jon. Talk to the people there who have lost their land. Talk to the people who have been sold out by their elected leaders. Talk to the people who have been lied to, and who have lost control of a good part of their lives. Then tell me why this pipeline is the wrong fight at the wrong time.
The NYT reported today that “even if President Obama rejects the pipeline, it might not matter much” because oil “companies are already building rail terminals to deliver oil from western Canada to the United States, and even to Asia.”
Before the 20th century, there is little historical record of a link between Halloween and witchcraft. The relatively recent association appears to be American:
It is no surprise, perhaps, that part of the answer lies with the rise of modern marketing and branding. How does one dress up as a witch for Halloween, as many thousands will be doing this 31 October? Basically you stick a black pointy hat on your head. Depictions of witches with pointy hats began to appear in children’s books in eighteenth-century England, probably inspired by earlier black steeple hats worn in stereotypic depictions of seventeenth-century Puritans. By the end of the nineteenth century the pointy-hatted witch had become a widespread image in print. It was at this moment that Salem, Massachusetts, comes into the picture. It was there that a jeweller named Daniel Low began to produce souvenir spoons depicting a witch with a pointy hat and broom. Their success kick-started the transformation of Salem into the marketing creation ‘Witch City’, and the pointy-hatted witch was replicated on numerous ‘Witch City’ products.
At the same time as this witch image was proliferating in marketing and the mass media, the nature of American Halloween custom was changing. With its roots in Irish mischief night, American youths had traditionally marked Halloween by performing such malicious acts as greasing railway tracks, smashing windows, and overturning outdoor toilets. But from the 1950s onwards the sanitised American trick-or-treat and costume bonanza we know today was beginning to spread. The remarketing of Witch City into Halloween City by local entrepreneurs from the 1980s onwards was a significant element in this transformation. “It’s America’s biggest Halloween party and you’re invited!” one promotional site proclaims today. The now inseparable link between witchcraft and Halloween was forged.
Culminating in this amazing awful scene in The Worst Witch (which you can watch in full here):
Martin Schneider shivers at the classic Halloween hathos:
Tim Curry is always inescapably Tim Curry, and in this context that’s a positive boon—he may be the only element in this brief clip that’s even halfway up to snuff. Never have I seen so many superfluous and chintzy video effects deployed in such a short span of time—innumerable green-screen effects, several completely crazy swirl transitions, who knows what the hell else. It’s truly a phantasmagoria of 80s cheese.
This post from Robert Laszweski, a health industry consultant, is making the rounds. His personal health insurance policy was cancelled thanks to Obamacare:
I have been in this business for 40 years. I know junk health insurance when I see it and I know “Cadillac” health insurance when I see it.
Right now I have “Cadillac” health insurance. I can access every provider in the national Blue Cross network––about every doc and hospital in America––without a referral and without higher deductibles and co-pays. I value that given my travels and my belief that who your provider is makes a big difference. Want to go to Mayo? No problem. Want to go to the Cleveland Clinic? No problem. Need to get to Queen’s in Honolulu? No problem.
So, I get this letter from my health plan. It says I can’t keep my current coverage because my plan isn’t good enough under Obamacare rules. It tells me to go to the exchange or their website and pick a new plan before January 1 or I will lose coverage.
His alternatives are worse than what he currently has:
Now, my plan covers about everything. Never had a procedure for either my wife or myself turned down. Wellness benefits are without a deductible. It covers mental health, drugs, maternity, anything I can think of. The new plan would have a deductible $500 higher than the one I now have and a lot more if I go “out-of-network” inside the rest of the Blue Cross national network. And, wait all you people telling me rate shock does not exist, the new far more restricted plan costs 66% more than our current monthly premium. Mr. Rate Shock got rate shocked––and benefit shocked to boot.
It’s not only plutocrats and one-percenters who will find themselves worse off; not only the comparatively affluent retirees enrolled in Medicare Plus programs. Self-employed professionals who earn too much to qualify for ACA subsidies will soon discover what I have discovered: They are paying more for a worse product.
McArdle thinks supporters of Obamacare need to be careful about how they respond to these cancellation stories:
The law’s supporters have made some quite reasonable points in response — that rate shock was an unfortunate but necessary consequence of broadening coverage to people with pre-existing conditions, and it may not even affect that many people. You can’t make even the nicest of omelets without breaking eggs. And some of them did mention this at least once during the run-up to the law’s passage.
They’ve also, however, made some arguments that were, at the very least, extremely ill-considered, such as saying that the insurance people had before wasn’t “real insurance” and implying that they are too stupid to know what’s good for them. As product marketers will tell you, when customers complain about a product change, here’s what not to do: Declare that your customers are idiots who don’t understand that they didn’t actually want the thing you took away from them. If you don’t believe me, just ask the folks on the New Coke team.
There’s also a growing trend toward suggesting that either the people complaining about rate shock or their insurers are engaged in some sort of nefarious behavior. I’m pretty sure that David Frum and Bob Laszewski are neither lying nor too stupid to understand what is happening with their insurance policies, and David’s experience basically matches mine shopping on the Washington exchange — not shopping for some outside policy that might be more expensive than the marvelously cheap insurance that I’ve seen people insisting must be available on the exchanges.
What’s with pointing up when you stop at a station?
We’re pointing at the conductor’s indication board, which is a zebra-striped sign. If the sign is in front of my window, it means that the entire train is on the platform. They don’t trust us to just look (see that other question about zoning out), so required procedure is to point to it at every station before we open the doors. The absolute biggest violation a conductor can make is opening the doors where there isn’t a platform. If that ever happens, the first thing supervision is going to ask you is, “Did you point to the board?”
Or, as that charming video suggests, they could be pantless.
For Love of Animalsis an honest and thoughtful look at our responsibility as Christians with respect to animals. Many Christians misunderstand both history and their own tradition in thinking about animals. They are joined by prominent secular thinkers who blame Christianity for the Western world’s failure to seriously consider the moral status of animals. This book explains how traditional Christian ideas and principles—like nonviolence, concern for the vulnerable, respect for life, stewardship of God’s creation, and rejection of consumerism—require us to treat animals morally.
A bit about the author:
Charles Camosy is an assistant professor of Christian Ethics at Fordham University. … His early work focused on medical and clinical ethics with regard to stem cell research and the treatment of critically ill newborns in the neonatal intensive care unit, which was the focus of his first book, Too Expensive to Treat? Finitude, Tragedy, and the Neonatal ICU. His second book, Peter Singer and Christian Ethics: Beyond Polarization, uses intellectual solidarity in an attempt to begin a sustained and fruitful conversation between Peter Singer and Christian ethics.
Let us know what you think we should ask Charles via the survey below (if you are reading on a mobile device, click here):
This embed is invalid
Recent Dish thread on the morality of eating meat is here.
In a much-discussed NYT essay, Tim Kreider beseeches his fellow writers to stop working for free:
A familiar figure in one’s 20s is the club owner or event promoter who explains to your band that they won’t be paying you in money, man, because you’re getting paid in the far more valuable currency of exposure. This same figure reappears over the years, like the devil, in different guises — with shorter hair, a better suit – as the editor of a Web site or magazine, dismissing the issue of payment as an irrelevant quibble and impressing upon you how many hits they get per day, how many eyeballs, what great exposure it’ll offer. “Artist Dies of Exposure” goes the rueful joke.
Harlan Ellison has a great, if somewhat excessive, rant on this:
I feel for Kreider, but he tells only his side of the story. Writers were, to a degree, protected by costs of entry and distance and communication. That protection is falling away. This is painful and disruptive, especially because it is so abrupt. But the other sides must be told.
One is that more people get a shot at an audience than ever before, from academic development economists to North African activists to precocious 20-year olds with talent. Another side is that more people get more information and ideas at a lower price than ever before. If good writing and ideas are valuable, surely making it cheaper and more widely available is a good thing? Especially for the people in the world who before could least afford it.
I’m pinioned between these two conflicting forces. Magazine writers were coddled in luxurious greenhouses for years and in some ways, the new desert we are struggling in is a tonic against some of the mediocre crap that used to be run at endless length in what were effectively gilded guilds. And yet, the new landscape is also more of a desert than a plain. There’s almost nothing to eat unless you do something other than writing as well. Some new media patrons seem to be filling in the gaps – in nonfiction, we have Bezos and Omidyar and Hughes coming to the rescue. Others may follow. But that would be – yes, I will retire this metaphor in this sentence – a bunch of precious, gilded oases, in a still-vast wasteland, rather than a viable, renewable ecology.
What interests me is finding a way to pay writers with money that comes from readers.
It’s that simple really. The end of paper and print as the delivery system should make that feasible in principle. After all, what the old media barons used to have on their side was their unique ability to pay for all that industrial-sized printing and mailing. Now, all those costs have disappeared. So where are the new journals and magazines and blogazines, founded by writers and aimed at readers? There are many online, and at the Dish we do all we can to find and promote them. But there is as yet no viable, sustained model for them to stand on their own two feet.
But we’re trying to innovate one. I’m not saying this to ask you to [tinypass_offer text=”subscribe”] if you haven’t (but I’ll take a new subscription any time). I’m saying it because the Dish model of small, renewable subscription payments is an obvious way forward.
Companies like Tinypass have begun to make this technologically feasible. Affiliate revenue – like the Amazon revenue a blog like Brain Pickings relies on for a great deal of its income – can also help. Banner ads can also be useful – but it’s hard (and ethically tenuous) for a lone writer to both do her job and also persuade companies to sponsor her. Remnant advertizing – breakthroughs in testosterone! – can work too. Put some or all of this together and you have a model that might provide more writers with a way to make a living as writers.
In other words, what makes my own job so exhilarating – and nerve-wracking – is the chance not just to create and constantly evolve an online blogazine, but to pioneer a bit of this new writing economy. Dish subscribers already pay six full-time writers and researchers (including interns) and give everyone health insurance; in the future, we’d really like to start using this still-new model to commission and pay good money for long-form journalism. We won’t be able to help book-writers (except for promoting, examining and talking about), but we hope to be able to help nonfiction writers more generally – and not just with eyeballs. That’s why subscribing to the Dish is not just about the Dish. It’s about trying to create a new economy for writing. Think of us as an ice-breaker ship. If we can find a new passage to viable new media, many many others can follow. So, yes, I’m not going to be coy. If you care about the future of writers in this economy and want to empower them rather than potential new corporate overlords, [tinypass_offer text=”subscribe here”].
Witnesses appearing at the highly-publicized hearing included prominent Spiritualists as well as skeptical photographers, who identified nine possible methods by which “spirits” could be imitated, including double exposure and combination printing. Constructing admittedly fake spirit photographs had already become a source of fun for some photographers, and witness Abraham Bogardus submitted one of his own as evidence. Taken at the request of showman P.T. Barnum, the image featured Barnum with the somber “ghost” of President Lincoln. Barnum was called to the witness stand as well, as an expert on “humbuggery.” He had previously railed against Mumler in his own writings, pointing out how some of Mumler’s ghosts were awfully fashionably dressed for having been dead so long. …
The Dish 