Month: December 2013

Andrew Butterfield strolls through the National Gallery’s exhibit Facing the Modern: The Portrait in Vienna 1900, reporting that the show “offers a strong sense of the melancholy, the introspection, and the desperation that were characteristic of Vienna in that era”:

The first items in the show are Beethoven’s death mask and a post mortem painting of his hands turning grey and blue, and among other pictures in the room is von Amerling’s painting of his wife on her death bed (1843). Even the one seemingly triumphant picture here, von Amerling’s large and resplendent portrait of Cäcilie Freiin von Eskeles (1832), although depicting her dressed in luxurious clothing and posed in front of a red velvet curtain like a Baroque princess, emphasizes the keen sorrow of her gaze. Despite her wealth and status, like nearly everyone else in the room, she is shown alone with her sad thoughts.

The theme of painful solitude was everywhere in the culture of the city at the time. Indeed, the catalog of the 1905 exhibition spoke of today’s “isolating times”; and just two years later in his book, Vienna, Herman Bahr, referring both to artists of the past such as Beethoven and Waldmüller, and of the present such as Mahler and Klimt, wrote, “Real people are always kept in a cage of immense loneliness [in Vienna].” …

The most powerful image of dematerialization in the entire show is Egon Schiele’s haunting picture of his wife Edith, expiring from the Spanish Flu. Drawn in loose lingering lines of charcoal, she is turning to wisps of smoke right in front of you. Only her sad and penetrating eyes remain fixed in the slowly spinning cloud of disappearance. Schiele himself died of the flu three days later, on October 31, 1918—Halloween—the same day that the Austro-Hungarian Empire was dissolved. Halloween is an apt terminus of the show, for in a sense the entire exhibition is a danse macabre that begins with the Funeral March of Beethoven’s Third Symphony and ends with Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder. The somber music reaches its devastating climax in a gallery that includes not only Schiele’s image of his wife, but also Klimt’s drawing of his dead infant, and a posthumous portrait by Gyula Benczur of the beautiful but insane Empress Elisabeth, who was assassinated by an anarchist in 1898.

(Image: “Die Mutter” by Egon Schiele via Wikimedia Commons)

Maria Konnikova presents research into “sleep inertia” – the reason why we’re all so miserable in the morning – and what can be done about it:

When [neuroscientist Kenneth] Wright asked a group of young adults to embark on a weeklong camping trip, he discovered a striking pattern: before the week was out, the negative sleep patterns that he’d previously observed disappeared. In the days leading up to the trip, he had noted that the subjects’ bodies would begin releasing the sleep hormone melatonin about two hours prior to sleep, around 10:30 P.M. A decrease in the hormone, on the other hand, took place after wake-up, around 8 A.M. After the camping trip, those patterns had changed significantly. Now the melatonin levels increased around sunset—and decreased just after sunrise, an average of fifty minutes before wake-up time. In other words, not only did the time outside, in the absence of artificial light and alarm clocks, make it easier for people to fall asleep, it made it easier for them to wake up: the subjects’ sleep rhythms would start preparing for wake-up just after sunrise, so that by the time they got up, they were far more awake than they would have otherwise been. The sleep inertia was largely gone.

Wright concluded that much of our early morning grogginess is a result of displaced melatonin—of the fact that, under current social-jetlag conditions, the hormone typically dissipates two hours after waking, as opposed to while we’re still asleep. If we could just synchronize our sleep more closely with natural light patterns, it would become far easier to wake up.

It wouldn’t be unprecedented. In the early nineteenth century, the United States had a hundred and forty-four separate time zones. Cities set their own local time, typically so that noon would correspond to the moment the sun reached its apex in the sky; when it was noon in Manhattan, it was five till in Philadelphia. But on November 18, 1883, the country settled on four standard time zones; railroads and interstate commerce had made the prior arrangement impractical. By 1884, the entire globe would be divided into twenty-four time zones. Reverting to hyperlocal time zones might seem like it could lead to a terrible loss of productivity. But who knows what could happen if people started work without a two-hour lag, during which their cognitive abilities are only shadows of their full selves?

A new study (pdf) assesses the effects of anti-poverty programs over the past 45 years. Emily Badger comments:

If you’re a working mom of two making $18,000 a year, just below the poverty line, the government doesn’t consider in its own poverty rate whether the food stamps and rental subsidies it gives you effectively help pull your family above that threshold. To address this, the Census Bureau began to roll out in 2011 a supplemental poverty measure, a revised tool that tries to take these non-cash benefits into account (alongside other essential family costs). The supplemental measure, though, is primarily a resource for the curious. It’s not used in official poverty statistics or policy-making.

Researchers at Columbia University’s Population Research Center, however, have used it to make a powerful point about the real impact of all these government programs. Christopher Wimer and colleagues took the new supplemental threshold and carried it back in time, adjusting the 2012 supplemental poverty line for inflation … Take away those programs, and the poverty rate would have actually inched up from 1967 to 2011.

Brad Plumer sees the above chart in the context of the Great Recession:

There are a couple of ways to read this chart. One, if you don’t include safety-net programs, then poverty has actually risen from 26 percent in 1967 to 29 percent in 2012. There are more people dependent on safety-net programs to stay out of poverty than ever before. Or here’s another view: The green line shows that poverty rates would have soared during the most recent recession if there were no safety-net programs in place. But as the blue line shows, the poverty rate actually stayed fairly constant. The expansion of food stamps, unemployment insurance, and the Earned Income Tax Credit blunted a lot of misery.

Vauhini Vara adds:

Some politicians on the left might resist a measure that shows that poverty is much lower than it used to be: couldn’t this minimize the problem and make it harder to gain support for new anti-poverty programs? But it also may show that some anti-poverty programs of the past several decades appear to have achieved what they were meant for—which, one expects, should come as good news to everyone.

The Senate won’t be passing new sanctions against Iran:

A deal in the Senate to impose additional sanctions on Iran has fallen apart, as Senate Democrats accede to requests from President Obama to delay new legislation while world powers negotiate a nuclear deal with Iran.

Earlier this week, Colin H. Kahl made the case that more sanctions would be counterproductive:

Suppose the Majles, Iran’s legislature, passed legislation tomorrow, over Rouhani’s objections, declaring that Iran would resume and escalate its nuclear activities in six months’ time if Washington failed to live up to its Geneva commitments and agree to a final deal that fully respects Iran’s nuclear rights. …

Suppose further that when asked by an Iranian reporter whether this legislation risked undercutting diplomacy, speaker of the Majles Ali Larijani pooh-poohed the notion, assuring the media that this in no way violates the terms agreed to in Geneva. After all, Larjani would say, “Iran is doing nothing now. We are simply creating a sword of Damocles as leverage to ensure the Americans live up to their end of the bargain and accept a final agreement that respects Iran’s red lines.”

How would U.S. lawmakers view such a move? Would they see it as consistent with the letter and spirit of Geneva? Would it enhance American support for diplomacy? Would the threatened Iranian escalation be helpful to Obama as he works to convince skeptics on Capitol Hill of the need to back continued negotiations and support future compromise? Or would it put the administration on the defensive, confirm the worst American suspicions about Iranian intentions, complicate diplomacy and make a confrontation over the nuclear program more likely?

Recent Dish on Iran here and here.

In Swann’s Way, the taste of a madeleine famously transports Proust’s narrator to the realm of childhood reverie.  Borrowing a page from the novel, Julian Baggini decided to spend “a day eating only as I had done around the age when I started secondary school,” reproducing the cuisine of Britain in the 1970s and early ’80s:

By dinner time I was losing my appetite for self-experimentation. This time I cooked a 1970s-style spaghetti bolognese, topped with dried ‘Italian cheese’ from a drum. It could, quite rightly, no longer be called Parmesan. Cooking it brought back some memories: the patient waiting for onions to soften, the pink mince browning and breaking up into very small bits and the meaty smell as it did so, the sauce reducing and getting a greasy sheen. But when I actually ate it, it was underwhelming.

Changing habits mean changing perceptions.

Having discovered more interesting dishes, my bolognese is now a bland meat sauce, not a reassuring dose of comfort food. Philosophers and psychologists disagree about whether we should say the taste or the taster has changed, but whatever the answer the whole experience of tasting is certainly very different. When I was a child, I positively liked all of these foods, and now I don’t: if you can’t recapture that pleasure, then you can’t recapture what it felt like to eat them.

It is like standing in someone else’s shoes while still being you. Context frames every experience and so, if your life changes, you can never go back to how it once was. That’s why, as the American wine writer Michael Steinberger puts it in Au Revoir to All That (2009), gourmands eager to revisit great meals will be disappointed: ‘trying to recreate memorable moments at the table is often a recipe for heartache’.

My Proustian day brought back some forgotten memories, but the emotions it stirred in me were mainly negative, a kind of pity for the culinary dreariness of my childhood, as well as a kind of guilt for feeling that I now stand above it, superior and elevated. I was hardly transported back. It strikes me as sad that I cannot look back with straightforward joy at things that made me happy at the time. And there’s something almost humbling about this, a reminder that I was literally made out of that stuff, no matter what I do differently now.

Previous Dish on Proust’s eating habits here.

A reader writes:

I thought the thread was dead, but apparently not. I’m glad, because I want to share my story. I started this email almost three weeks ago with my adopted five-day-old son on my lap, but then I saved it in my drafts folder thinking that I couldn’t write about my miscarriages or the adoption. Now that the 15-day waiting period has ended and our son can no longer be taken back by his birth mother, I’m ready to talk about my experience.

I read the New Yorker miscarriage piece with horror a few weeks ago because we were anxiously awaiting the birth of our baby. The birth mother is a healthy young woman, and I was pretty sure the baby would turn out OK. What I wasn’t so sure about was whether or not she would change her mind and close the door on our dream.

My husband and I experienced our first miscarriage in fall of 2004. My last, the twelfth, occurred in January 2012.

We stopped trying to conceive because my doctor said that my advanced maternal age and my clotting disorder would kill me if I somehow managed to stay pregnant and deliver the child. Words cannot adequately describe the part of my psyche that has been damaged by these losses. I did not understand the depth of the wound until a few days into motherhood when I suddenly realized that I am perfectly, gloriously happy being a parent. Even the worst of motherhood – the sleepless nights, the endless round of needs to meet, the mountains of laundry, the silly bickering with an equally tired spouse – have little impact as I look at my newborn son’s face.

Our birth mother chose us as the parents for her unborn child on our 11th wedding anniversary, and though I try not to read too much into portents and signs, I can’t help but think that something special happened that day. Our long years of suffering and waiting were not erased, but they were eased. A therapist once told me that someday I would wrap my miscarriages up into the birth story of my firstborn, and for a long time, I clung to that idea. But I am finding that the truth is more complicated and subtle. Those lost pregnancies are still with me every moment. They remind me of the gift that is my child, and they keep me focused on parenting with joy and compassion. And, so, even if I could forget the misery that is miscarriage, I wouldn’t. The miscarriages have strengthened me immeasurably.

As a final note, I used to sort of despise the Sunday churchy content, but now I’ve begun to look forward to it. I find the break from worldly, political matters is a nice way to spend my day of rest. Getting into a contemplative headspace is useful to me, and I hope at some point you’ll include some of the spiritual work in the subscribers-only portion of the site – maybe a particularly good interview or some other philosophical piece.

A long essay on Pope Francis is in the works.