Month: October 2013

Quote For The Day

“The biggest single problem since 1980 has been that the publishing industry has been led by the nose by the retail sector. The industry analyzes its strategies as though it were Procter and Gamble. It’s Hermès. It’s selling to a bunch of effete, educated snobs who read. Not very many people read. Most of them drag their knuckles around and quarrel and make money. We’re selling books. It’s a tiny little business. It doesn’t have to be Walmartized,” – Andrew Wylie, legendary literary agent (and my own).

But for the full flavor of the full metal Andrew, this captures him best of all:

Young writers, when they see me, it’s like meeting Ronald Reagan. Sometimes I go in to pay my respects. Everyone is perfectly polite, but you can tell they’d be a lot comfier if I’d just get the fuck out. So I do.

I can’t help but love the man.

Why Would You Put Your Balls To The Wall?

I guess I should ask Tina Brown, who was inordinately fond of the expression. Maybe it was my balls she was putting “to” the wall? Anyway, it probably doesn’t matter what she meant. From a short history of idioms:

Many figurative expressions have literal origins, but few people stop to think about what they are. For example, the saying “it’s raining cats and dogs” apparently comes from a time when cats and dogs liked to hide in thatched roofs for warmth; when heavy rains fell, the animals would either fall through the roof or jump down in masses, according to etymologist and author Michael Quinion. It’s doubtful that Marvin Gaye knew the roots of his own lyrics, “I heard it through the grapevine”—a term that caught on in the mid-19th century in reference to the twisted vine-like wires of the telegraph and the jumbled messages that would result.

To be fair, it’s hard to believe there was once literal meaning to most phrases. It all seems so violent:

we’d be shooting ourselves in the foot, cutting off our noses, breaking each other’s legs for good luck, shooting messengers, and stabbing friends in the back. We’d be too hurt to dig our own literal graves. We’d be killing birds with stones, breaking camels’ backs, and beating dead horses. Dogs would be eating other dogs, cats would be getting skinned, and Mr Biden would be strangling Republicans. Maybe people would somehow lose their shit, but not before it hits the fan.

Alas, sometimes we think we know the root of a term but we are wrong. “Balls to the wall”, for example, is a term that refers to military pilots accelerating rapidly, thrusting the ball-shaped grip of the throttle lever to the panel firewall, thus gaining full speed. (Naturally Mr Borg was perplexed over this expression as well. “[Putting my balls on the wall] does not help me to do anything, except smell the wall,” he observed.

Another observation from Borg above.

Is The Immediate Crisis Over?

Tim Alberta reported last night that the “particulars of this short-term [debt-ceiling] proposal are in flux, as there are ongoing discussions within the conference regarding which provisions — if any — should be attached.” Cohn is waiting to see the House’s bill:

[I]t’s hard to judge Boehner’s proposal without knowing more details. In particluar, will it actually stipulate that fiscal negotiations take place—and, if so, will it put restrictions on what the outcome of those talks can be? These are critical questions. While Obama and the Democrats have signaled that they would reluctantly accept a short-term increase in the debt ceiling—notwithstanding the political perils that my colleague Noam Scheiber recently identified—they have been adamant that legislation increasing the limit not come with strings attached. It’s not clear whether the bill Boehner described would satisfy those criteria.

Jonathan Bernstein’s perspective:

Democrats have no choice but to accept a clean debt-limit extension (or government funding bill, if that’s available) of any length at all … Where it gets fuzzier is if Republicans propose something that isn’t exactly “clean.”

If the add-ons are cosmetic, Democrats probably (again, depending on details) should accept it. If it includes Republican policy gains or Republican-favoring procedural gains, then Democrats should reject it. But if it’s just some meaningless mumbo-jumbo tossed in so that Republicans can claim a victory (or at least pretend there was no defeat), then Democrats should accept it.

Alex Altman is unsure how many Republicans will support the plan:

It is still uncertain whether the restive House Republican conference broadly supports the plan. While members described the meeting as positive and cordial, others said both more moderate and more conservative members expressed reservation. Some centrist Republicans are concerned about leaving the government shuttered. While several of the Tea Party Republicans who forced the shutdown in an effort to change elements of Obamacare said they would support the plan if Obama signed on, others withheld their support.

Chris Cillizza has similar questions:

Can a clean debt limit bill win a majority of the majority?  This is perhaps the most basic question in all of this. Boehner, as we have noted previously in this space, has already passed three pieces of legislation — the fiscal cliff bill, Hurricane Sandy relief funding and the re-authorization of the Violence Against Women Act — with a minority of Republicans supporting them this year. Does he want to do it again on something as high profile as the debt ceiling?

My favorite quote of the day on all this is from a “senior Democratic aide“:

“Republicans may let one hostage go, but they are keeping a gun to the head of the other, while reserving the right to kidnap the first one again in a few weeks.”

And the beat goes on. Earlier Dish on Boehner’s latest, desperate gambit here.

Cohabitating With Cancer

George Johnson marvels at the power of words to convey “what it is like, just a little, to be sentenced to life with cancer”:

The writer Reynolds Price was moving smoothly through life, not a star like Roth or Updike but valued for his novels and poetry, when his body’s own story asserted itself. After stumbling unaccountably on a walk across campus, he went to a doctor and was diagnosed with a very rare cancer — one that took the form of an elongated tumor “pencil-thick and gray-colored, ten inches long from my neck-hair downward . . . intricately braided in the core of my spinal cord.” He named it “the eel” and wrote a poem about it. The verses are included in his memoir, A Whole New Life, along with his description of cancer as a being that seems to assert “its own rights.”

Now it sounds a little cracked to describe, but then I often felt that the tumor was as much a part of me as my liver or lungs and could call for its needs of space and food. I only hoped that it wouldn’t need all of me.

The Football Fan’s Dilemma

After watching a screener of the new documentary League of Denial: The NFL’s Concussion Crisis, Dan Amira winced his way through Monday Night Football:

Like many football fans, I’ve always cringed a little during those big, loud helmet-to-helmet hits, the ones you can almost feel in your own neck as you watch them. But now, even during the mundane plays, I couldn’t shake the thought that men were mortgaging their futures away, and perhaps shortening their lives significantly, for my entertainment.

Andrew Sharp applauds the film for making the facts of the matter – and thus the moral quandary – “as clear and undeniable as possible”:

Nothing in the documentary is breaking news, but if nothing else, it gives us a definitive document of all the NFL’s hypocrisy and ignorance that’s defined this battle from day one. … I love football, and I hate talking about concussions, but everything we know about football makes it impossible to choose between the two without being just as reprehensible as an NFL doctor.

Eric Levenson describes football fans one of the “losers” of the documentary:

After watching, it’s hard not to feel conflicted about the sport, particularly after hearing about Pittsburgh Steelers lineman “Iron Mike” Webster, whose football-caused head injuries led to an early death. The documentary showed parts of his autopsy and it wasn’t pretty for fans to see: cracked feet, disfigured legs, and a brain filled with tangled tau protein, the tell-tale signs of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, the degenerative condition most associated with damaged football players. And as a fan, it’s hard not to feel a little responsible for that.

Fantasy football enthusiast Greg Pollock wonders what responsibility fans like him bear for transforming NFL players “from real people into collections of stats”:

To succeed in a game, the player must distinguish information that serves his goal from information that does not. Becoming a better player means doing more of that automatically, without thinking, before thinking. For serious fantasy players—and it is hard not to play fantasy without becoming serious about it – that means automating the process by which we ignore information that does not affect points earned. This warps the way we watch football – Frank Gore blocked so Vernon Davis could get the touchdown? What a useless idiot!—but also the way we think about the league as a broader institution.

Meanwhile, Evin Demirel asks if the film could mark a turning point for the NFL:

[A]fter you’re through with the film, you can’t help but feel that the league’s days of dominance are numbered, even if League isn’t what ultimately destroys it. It’s not that football is too violent; it’s that we now know too much about that violence’s effects. A tipping point of mothers who find the sport dangerous will inevitably be reached, and football will become yet another relic of America’s past, one of those things it’s embarrassing we used to love.

Previous Dish on League of Denial here. To read our extensive thread on head injuries in professional sports, go here.

Dick Morris Award Nominee

“Within three to five years, we can assume that Iran will become autonomous in its ability to develop and produce a nuclear bomb, without having to import either the technology or the material. [The nuclear threat] must be uprooted by an international front headed by the U.S.,” – Benjamin Netanyahu, January 1995, speaking at the Knesset. (Award glossary here.)

Ask Rick Doblin Anything

From his bio:

Rick Doblin, Ph.D., is the founder and executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association forshroomies Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). He received his doctorate in Public Policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where he wrote his dissertation on the regulation of the medical uses of psychedelics and marijuana and his Master’s thesis on a survey of oncologists about smoked marijuana vs. the oral THC pill in nausea control for cancer patients. His undergraduate thesis at New College of Florida was a 25-year follow-up to the classic Good Friday Experiment, which evaluated the potential of psychedelic drugs to catalyze religious experiences.

His professional goal is to help develop legal contexts for the beneficial uses of psychedelics and marijuana, primarily as prescription medicines but also for personal growth for otherwise healthy people, and eventually to become a legally licensed psychedelic therapist. He founded MAPS in 1986, and currently resides in Boston with his wife and three children.

What should we ask Rick? Sound off in the survey below (if you are reading on a mobile device, click here):

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(Photo of Psilocybe Cubensis by Flickr user afgooey74)