Month: December 2013

The modest Vatican shake-up announced today is striking for a couple of reasons. The first is that the arch-conservative American, Raymond Burke, is no longer a member of the Congregation of Bishops, which has great influence on finding the future leaders of the church. Burke is, after Dolan, the most reactionary of the American bishops, and an architect of the very Benedict XVI policy of putting social and sexual issues at the obsessive forefront of the church’s mission. Only last week, he gave an interview to the hardline Catholic EWTN television channel, saying of the new Pope:

“One gets the impression, or it’s interpreted this way in the media, that he thinks we’re talking too much about abortion, too much about the integrity of marriage as between one man and one woman. But we can never talk enough about that.”

Oh yes you can, as the Pope has explicitly said. Burke is, like Benedict, a fan of ornate vestments and has aired the possibility of denying communion to politicians who do not follow to the letter the hierarchy’s views on faith and morals. It seems to me that the latter is one reason for his being sidelined. If you want to know why, read Evangelii Gaudium, section 47:

The Church is called to be the house of the Father, with doors always wide open. One concrete sign of such openness is that our church doors should always be open, so that if someone, moved by the Spirit, comes there looking for God, he or she will not find a closed door. There are other doors that should not be closed either. Everyone can share in some way in the life of the Church; everyone can be part of the community, nor should the doors of the sacraments be closed for simply any reason. This is especially true of the sacrament which is itself “the door”: baptism. The Eucharist, although it is the fullness of sacramental life, is not a prize for the perfect but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak. 

The second reason for this shake-up being notable is an absence. Where is Cardinal Dolan? How odd is it that the Cardinal of New York is basically a non-entity in Francis’ church. Francis has picked another American, Seán Patrick O’Malley, to be part of his new council of eight global cardinals, and has also picked Archbishop Wuerl, a pragmatist in Washington DC, for the Congregation of Bishops. Dolan? Nowhere to be seen.

Know hope.

Last Friday, Beyoncé stunned her fans and even the music industry by dropping her new album exclusively on iTunes for download, selling 80,000 copies within three hours and reportedly causing the online store to crash. In the first three days, sales hit 800,000. Angela Watercutter considers what Beyonce’s brilliant move means for the future:

She announced the album, posted a “Surprise!” on Instagram and gave fans enough material to keep them busy for days. Then she dropped the mic. Thanks to whatever death-to-snitches plan she had in place, word of the album never got out and nothing leaked. Even the NSA can’t keep a secret that well. In the annals of minimal-marketing marketing, it was a pretty smart move, particularly for an artist who is obsessively discussed on social media but engages with it selectively. (She has pretty active Tumblr and Instagram accounts, but hasn’t tweeted to her 13 million followers since August.)

Of course, this wouldn’t work for every artist. Only someone with albums as highly anticipated as Beyoncé’s can do this. Like her husband Jay Z, who can pretty much guarantee one million people will download his album via a Samsung app, she knows people are going to find her record no matter how she promotes it. So why not let everyone else spread the gospel for you? Or, as one smart tweet put it, “Beyoncé doesn’t need publicity. Publicity needs Beyoncé.”

It’s all very selfie and instagrammy. And perfect. Claire Suddath notes the precedent set by Radiohead and David Bowie, who also released music online with minimal promotion:

But there’s a difference between what Radiohead and David Bowie did and what happened today: Beyoncé is still considered a pop star, and pop music relies heavily on the traditional marketing machine sponsored by record labels. The stars begin with a hit single, hopefully follow it up with another hit single, release an album and perform at some heavily watched live event like the Grammys or on American Idol, launch a world tour, and then reap the profit. They leave it to the rock stars and hip-hop artists to experiment with free downloads and unofficial mixtapes.

Beyoncé is changing all that. Her new album doesn’t have an obvious hit single (her last one, 4, didn’t have one, either) but that seems to be by design. Beyoncé is a polished work of electronic-inspired dance pop—peppered with Jay-Z and Blue Ivy cameos—yet it’s made for a listening world dominated by curated playlists rather than preprogrammed, Clear Channel-style broadcasts. This is the work of an artist who’s graduated beyond the usual pop star marketing machine and started making music that’s free of the three-and-a-half minute hook-heavy formula that makes a big hit. And by forcing everyone to pay $15.99 for the album now, she might be more successful because of it.

James West argues that “this may well be one of the most climate-friendly major studio releases yet”:

Purchasing “Beyoncé” on iTunes instead of as a CD could result in a greenhouse-gas-emissions savings of between 40 and 80 percent, according to a 2009 study for Intel and Microsoft by researchers from a group drawn from Carnegie Mellon University, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Stanford.

So claims James Bennet, editor of The Atlantic. Not actual long-form journalism – just the word:

[I]n the digital age, making a virtue of mere length sends the wrong message to writers as well as readers. For when you don’t have to print words on pages and then bundle the pages together and stick postage stamps on the result, you slip some of the constraints that have enforced excellence (and provided polite excuses for editors to trim fat) since Johannes Gutenberg began printing books. You no longer have to make that agonizing choice of the best example from among three or four—you can freely use them all. More adjectives? Why not? As a writer, I used to complain that my editors would cut out all my great color, just to make the story fit; as an editor, I now realize that, yes, they had to make my stories fit, and, no, that color wasn’t so great. The editors were working to preserve the stuff that would make the story go, to make sure the story earned every incremental word, in service to the reader. Long-form, on the Web, is in danger of meaning “a lot of words.”

This is a particularly ripe moment to rethink our terminology (and I should own up to the fact that I still lapse into using the dreaded term myself) because deeply reported narrative and essayistic journalism is suddenly all the rage. Far from fading away, it shows signs of an energy and imagination not seen since the heyday of New Journalism.

Of course James is right. The word “longform” seems to take one of our pleasures and make it one of our duties. But you can see why it has new luster in our listicled, tweeted age. It’s shorthand for “thoughtful”, for writing that is not just typing, or blogging or tweeting. And there is something newly liberating about that – especially when it is not constrained, as long-form almost always was, by the sharp constraints of print on paper. I would say that about a quarter of my work as an old-style magazine editor was trimming pieces to fit. It was great not to have that distracting obsession any more, as I worked on the latest piece for Deep Dish.

But mere length, as Bobbie Johnson notes, is not a good thing in itself, as any honest reader of the pre-Tina New Yorker would have sometimes told you:

If word count is your only yardstick, then it becomes stupendously easy to write really bad long-form. We’ve all read enough overwrought, overlong pieces to know that length is absolutely no measure of quality.

At the same time, long-form is also attached to a certain form. A lot of this sort of writing adopts a particular tone of voice: a sort of detached, flat, word-heavy sound that makes everything sound like a PBS documentary. It’s not a tone I really enjoy, so often draining the emotion from stories and filling it up instead with a sad pomposity. It’s like when you hear a great poet read their most vibrant work out loud and they choose to deliver it in a passionless, intellectual monotone.

The way I see it, though, long-form is not about length or form, but about a mindset. Both the author and the reader come together with one ambition: to weave a story that sucks everybody right in and doesn’t let go until it’s finished. The best long-form is bewitching, captivating and deep — regardless of how long it takes you to get to the end. I’ve read pieces just a few hundred words long that feel more like long-form than others that ramble into the thousands.

The FDA has admitted that antibacterial soap is probably no better than regular soap – and may even be bad for you:

In a draft rule that will be published Tuesday in the Federal Register, the agency calls for manufacturers of consumer antibacterial products to begin providing data that shows the ingredients are both safe for daily use, and also more effective than plain soap and water. Deep in the 137-page rule, it also raises the issue that’s most interesting to me: whether the routine use of these products causes bacteria to develop resistance against the active ingredients, and against antibiotics as an unintended side effect.

Kiera Butler relays scientists’ concerns over triclosan, the most common ingredient in antibacterial products:

[T]here is strong evidence that anti-bacterial soaps contribute to antibiotic resistance. In 2004, a team of University of Michigan researchers found that exposing bacteria to triclosan increased activity in cellular pumps that the bugs use to eliminate foreign substances. These overactive excretory systems “could act to pump out other antibiotics, as well,” says Stuart Levy, one of the study’s authors and a leading researcher on antibiotic resistance at the Tufts University School of Medicine. That’s a problem, since troublesome bacteria like streptococcus, staphylococcus, and pneumonia are already evolving defenses against our best weapons. Worse, there aren’t enough new drugs in the production pipeline. Over the past 15 years, the FDA has approved just 15 newantibiotics—in the preceding 15 years, it approved 40. The World Health Organization now views antibiotic resistance as “a threat to global health security.” And while triclosan’s contribution to the problem hasn’t been adequately studied, Levy believes it could be “significant.”

Citing a Pew study that found that men with daughters were more likely to be Republicans, Douthat attempts to draw a lesson from fiction:

The next round of research may “prove” something completely different about daughters and voting behavior. But as a father of girls and a parent whose adult social set still overlaps with the unmarried, I do have a sense of where a daughter-inspired conservatism might come from, whatever political form it takes. It comes from thinking about their future happiness, and about a young man named Nathaniel P. This character, Nate to his friends, doesn’t technically exist: He’s the protagonist in Adelle Waldman’s recent novel of young-Brooklynite manners, “The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.” …

And lurking in Waldman’s novel, as in many portraits of the dating scene (ahem, Lena Dunham, ahem), is a kind of moral traditionalism that dare not speak its name — or that can be spoken of only in half-jest, as when the novelist Benjamin Kunkel told Traister that the solution was “some sort of a sexual strike against just such men.” Because Kunkel is right: One obvious solution to the Nathaniel P. problem is a romantic culture in which more is required of young men before the women in their lives will sleep with them.

Chotiner read the study differently; he doesn’t think it’s as flattering of conservatism as Ross makes it out to be:

How to phrase this gently?

The impulses behind social conservatism often stem from a desire to control the sex lives of women. (It is surely not a coincidence that nearly every conservative religious tradition places a disturbing amount of emphasis on women’s sexuality.) And we know that the thought of one’s precious daughter having sex is enough to cause nonsense from even liberal men like President Obama. (His joke about using drones against possible suitors was a true low.) So it’s no surprise that having a girl around, one who MUST be protected, would spark conservative thinking.

Kilgore is unimpressed with the implication that being protective of his daughter leads a man to adopt a certain set of political positions:

It seems from Douthat’s analysis that if you favor, say, the Affordable Care Act or legalized abortion you implicitly favor perpetual sex-without-commitment for young men. I must have missed that line in the Liberal Litmus Test last time I signed it. Conversely, I don’t see a whole whole about the Republican (or for that matter, the “social conservative”) agenda that’s going to solve the problem of “Nathanial P.” Will deregulating Wall Street make him more interested in marrying and propagating? How about a war with Iran? Are SNAP benefits his kryptonite? And will taking away the reproductive rights of the women he exploits turn him around?

Jessica Grose piles on:

Marc Tracy asks Adelle Waldman herself what she thinks of Douthat’s theory:

Waldman said she was “flattered” that Douthat cited her novel, and was also not a little thrilled “that people would talk about it as if it has bearing on reality. I didn’t want to write about some strictly literary universe.” But she didn’t join him in his conclusion. “Women are often told that whether a relationship succeeds or fails is their fault—that they did something wrong, whether it’s by not holding out or holding out for too long or just their general behavior,” she explained. “That does more harm to women’s well-being.”

Your LinkedIn password could be making the rounds in European galleries:

Forgot Your Password is a set of eight books containing some 4.7 million passwords that were leaked in June 2012. Visitors to the exhibit, which has toured Europe and is currently residing in [artist Aram] Bartholl’s native Germany, are invited to look through the volumes to see if their password is inside. Each password is arranged alphabetically and presented without its linked username(s).

Brian Merchant admits that his own password is probably on view:

I have an account on LinkedIn that I access a couple times a month to click the big yellow Accept button when prompted by all kinds of people I’ve never met nor will likely ever hear from again. If I lost my password, or got signed out somehow, it’d probably be months before I bothered to request a new one. As such, I certainly never changed my password in the wake of last year’s hacking event. This is kind of Bartholl’s point:

we maintain a half-ignorant, mostly cavalier attitude towards things like social media profile security – we just assume hackers and stolen passwords won’t effect us, and usually, they don’t. Your LinkedIn password is probably in this guy’s binder, after all, and nothing’s happened to you yet.

Or maybe it has. Two million more accounts were just hacked this week, and the media wants you to be sure yours wasn’t one of them. And that’s an interesting question reared here: what does it mean, exactly, that your personal information has been open to the public for over a year now? After all, we’re outraged that the NSA might have it stored somewhere too – we’re not wrong to be, either – but the dissonance between that anger and our lack of interest in where our passwords and data are at any given time is worth exploring.

(Photo by Aram Bartholl)

It’s not just the thieves:

A recent attempt by Samsung to pre-load Absolute’s LoJack app – software embedded in the firmware layer that assists device owners in either retrieving or disabling lost or stolen devices – was flatly rejected by the major American carriers, according to San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón. Such kill switches have been touted by law enforcement officials nationwide, who believe the inclusion of the technology in all phones would help curb phone theft. Gascón has been a vocal supporter, and along with New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, launched a campaign aimed at curbing smartphone theft.

So why would phone companies object to kill switches?

Gascón says carriers are more concerned about protecting their insurance premiums, a claim he says is based on emails between Samsung and mobile providers in which the latter reject the standard use of kill switches. “These emails suggest that the carriers are rejecting a technological solution so they can continue to shake down their customers for billions of dollars in (theft) insurance premiums,” Gascon told the AP. “I’m incensed. … This is a solution that has the potential to end the victimization of their customers.”

The theory is that once thieves become aware that expensive smartphones won’t work if they’re stolen, the market for stolen phones will dry up, as San Francisco Police Department spokesman Albie Esparza explained. Legally requiring kill-switches is a tactic that’s worked in Australia, Esparza said, to the tune of reducing phone theft by about 25 percent. “Adding kill switch technology to phones would definitely help reduce the number of thefts,” Esparza said. “When you kill the phone, there’s no longer an aftermarket.”