Jack Hamilton marks Jason Collins’ momentary return to the NBA:
Years from now memories and box scores will attest that Collins entered that game and was the best thing anyone could hope for:
He was himself. He was himself without any hint of incident, turmoil, or gawky spectacle. In the aftermath of his coming out last spring, the vast majority of NBA players voiced strong support for their friend and co-worker, but that landmark Sports Illustrated cover also provoked its share of ugliness. Certain members of the media howled about how they could care less about Collins’ sexuality, and shame on all of us for turning Collins into a “hero” since sexual preference (suddenly) mattered so little to them (that is, straight dudes). As we’ve seen repeated in the wake of Michael Sam’s announcement, there were passive-aggressive grumblings about “distraction”: Hey, I’m not saying it’d bother me, just the guys who work with me, even though they’re saying the opposite. There were no “distractions” last night—Brooklyn came away with a victory—and no one was unduly concerned with sexuality, outside of the energized anticipation of seeing a brave and important person make history.
Update from a reader:
Taking nothing away from Jason Collins, but he wasn’t the first active player of a major American sport to come out; Glenn Burke was (Los Angeles Dodgers and Oakland As from 1976 to 1979 ). He was out to his team, family and the front office of the Dodgers. He even talked to reporters about it. But they wouldn’t print it.
Rosie Gray has a must-read on how the Ukraine government tried to get pro-Yanukovych op-eds into the US journalist mainstream. The usual suspects pop up. Money quote:
Huston didn’t directly deny being paid by Scoville. “I would not be open to say who pays me and who doesn’t,” he said.
“We’re at our worst when it comes to politics,” declares Paul Bloom in an essay about reason and morality:
Most of us know nothing about constitutional law, so it’s hardly surprising that we take sides in the Obamacare debate the way we root for the Red Sox or the Yankees. Loyalty to the team is what matters. A set of experiments run by the Stanford psychologist Geoffrey Cohen illustrates this principle perfectly.
Subjects were told about a proposed welfare program, which was described as being endorsed by either Republicans or Democrats, and were asked whether they approved of it. Some subjects were told about an extremely generous program, others about an extremely stingy program, but this made little difference. What mattered was party: Democrats approved of the Democratic program, and Republicans, the Republican program. When asked to justify their decision, however, participants insisted that party considerations were irrelevant; they felt they were responding to the program’s objective merits. This appears to be the norm.
The Brown psychologist Steven Sloman and his colleagues have found that when people are called upon to justify their political positions, even those that they feel strongly about, many are unable to point to specifics. For instance, many people who claim to believe deeply in cap and trade or a flat tax have little idea what these policies actually mean.
So, yes, if you want to see people at their worst, press them on the details of those complex political issues that correspond to political identity and that cleave the country almost perfectly in half.
The latest installment in the saga of a brilliant comic actor felled by his extreme temper unfolds this week in New York magazine. The “greatest actor in the world” has declared that he is now withdrawing from public life, and eschewing “show-business” for the artist’s life. I hope he finds happiness, really hope he can do what he does best again, and I sure don’t begrudge him his utter frustration with the price of celebrity in 2014.
But he accuses me and Anderson Cooper of falsely accusing him of homophobia. He insists he did not call that photographer a “cock-sucking faggot.” Rather, he called him a “cocksucker” and some other word he can’t quite remember. And he had no idea that “cock-sucker” was an anti-gay slur in any case. Yes, he did refer to someone has a “toxic little queen” but again he was utterly unaware that the phrase had anything to do with homosexuals. He is now researching homophobia he was so oblivious to it before: “I want to learn about what is hurtful speech in your community.”
A couple things: as I said before, I have no window into Alec Baldwin’s soul and have no reason to believe he is, in some permanent or fundamental way, homophobic. So much of his public life would seem to portray the opposite. My point is nonetheless that he deployed homophobic curse-words in public against other human beings, in order to cut them down to size. All he has to say is that he has a hot Irish temper, that it got the better of him, that he realized he has some buried issues that he needs to grapple with … and get on with his life. The gay community would have welcomed him with open arms. But he cannot accept the truth of what transparently occurred, because it would dent his pride. So he still bizarrely insists his Twitter tirade against a nasty British tabloid hack had nothing to do with homophobia:
At the time, I didn’t view “toxic little queen” as a homophobic statement. I didn’t realize how those words could give offense, and I’m sorry for that.
Really? He had no idea that this was homophobic:
George Stark, you lying little bitch. I am gonna f%#@ you up … I want all of my followers and beyond to straighten out this fucking little bitch, George Stark. @MailOnline … My wife and I attend a funeral to pay our respects to an old friend, and some toxic Brit writes this fucking trash … If put my foot up your fucking ass, George Stark, but I’m sure you’d dig it too much … I’m gonna find you, George Stark, you toxic little queen, and I’m gonna fuck…you…up.
My italics. And so – drum-roll – comes the classic non-apology apology:
If I offended anyone along the way, I do apologize.
And, of course, after a non-apology will come a non-exit from public life. If you want to exit from public life, you can do it. You can stop giving paparazzi what they live for; you can let old stories die and rebuild your career with good work; and you can give to charity with total anonymity. Alternatively, you can write a long screed in New York magazine, claim that you were completely and falsely smeared, re-visit every tortured detail of the story that made life more difficult for you, detail your expansive holiness, throw barbs at lots of people who once worked with you, and loudly tell the world you’re taking your marbles and going home.
Alec Baldwin is less sad if you imagine Jack Donaghy saying the things that come out of his mouth. “I won’t be in tomorrow, Lemon, I’m being subpoenaed by the Gay Department of Justice.
Alex has apparently morphed into Jack Donaghy, or was that portrayal truer to life than we knew?
Paul Ford ponders how new currencies like Bitcoin might actually make us appreciate online advertising:
Advertisers pay to reach highly valued online audiences; they use a variety of technologies, many surprisingly ineffective, to find these individuals. Could cryptocurrencies help? [Digital advertising and finance analyst Larry] Smith asks us to consider the following scenario: imagine a brand like Dunkin’ Donuts that wanted to create a loyalty program. Now imagine that brand creating its own currency: DunkinDollars. Finally, imagine an online advertising campaign where people who clicked on an advertisement would be given the virtual coins. Small amounts of money might be distributed without friction. If large brands could create their own currencies and allow individuals to participate in this marketplace, they could create consumers who were truly invested, in every sense.
The entire web of advertising would suddenly become a more interesting place. Before, the ads seemed to hunt you, but now you would have reason to hunt for ads. The coins you earned could then be exchanged for branded goods, but they could also be exchanged on an open market, like a kind of penny stock. “Pay consumers for clicks and acquisitions,” says Smith, defining this new kind of model.
When the Karachi-born Bay Area rapper Bohemia released an album including lyrics in Punjabi in 2006, he kicked off a new wave for rappers in Pakistan. Hamzah Saif describes how contemporary Pakistani rappers moved on from the English raps of Eminem and began to embrace the vernacular:
The new rappers owned their product. Their rhymes, rapped in street vernacular, had now found a vocabulary familiar with representing their own experience. … Kasim Raja’s track Black Hoods Black Sheeshay illustrates this indigenization of creative trajectory. While the track shares a celebration of braggadocio and automotive culture with commercial American rap, its engagement with alcohol is a radical departure from the substance abuse celebrated by Eminem and Bohemia, “Not into drugs / we’re into cars… Poppin bottles but only sodas / livin far from drugs, we’re against drugs / we’re against drugs…” …
Vernacular raps added another new dimension to Pakistani rhyming. Rappers were no longer just rapping; they were rapping in their language, itself a socio-political statement. “Why should I rap in someone else’s tongue?”, says Jawad from [rap group] DirtJaw, “I love Punjabi very much.” This sentiment was quick to catch on among non-Punjabis as well.
(Video: “Black Hoods Black Sheeshay” by Kasim Raja)
For a recent study, researchers in Taiwan examined the data of 469,000 patients who had been hospitalised with mental disorders, then “parsed those admissions against changes in the broad-based Taiwan Stock Exchange Capitalization Weighted Stock Index (TAIEX)”:
The study found that a 1,000-point fall in the TAIEX (about two-thirds of its standard deviation) caused a daily increase of 4.71% in hospitalisations for mental disorders. Relatively routine stockmarket declines also had an impact: a 1% daily fall in the market raised the number of admissions by 0.36% on that day. Consecutive daily declines, regardless of size, led to cumulative increases in such hospitalisation: 0.32% for each additional day. So when share prices fell for five consecutive trading days, the fifth day saw a 1.6% increase in hospitalisations for mental disorders—a relentlessly falling stockmarket clearly has a mounting impact on psychological wellbeing. The study also notes that, on average, hospitalisations were 200% higher on trading days than on non-trading days.
Although falling stock prices influenced men, women and all adult age groups to some degree, the researchers found that the mental health of men and the middle-aged were most severely affected. A possible explanation comes from previous studies, which found that men invest in the stockmarket far more actively than women; are more inclined to relate their own competence to management of their finances; and take greater risks. Middle-aged investors, by contrast, have fewer future opportunities to recover their losses, making stockmarket declines more threatening to their mental wellbeing. And, as the study notes, age itself is an important risk factor for mental health.
S. Brent Plate meditates on Ai Weiwei and the paradox of iconoclasm:
In the modern age, as art has become sacred, the smashing of the artistic tradition becomes itself an iconoclastic act. One of Ai’s great works is a large-scale, three-panel photo artwork from 1995 titled Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn. It is iconoclastic, smashing an object of the past and by extension smashing the tradition itself.
[Last] week, Ai’s artwork [was] back in the news. On Sunday, Dominican-born artist named Maximo Caminero walked into the Pérez Art Museum in Miami and smashed one of the vases that was part of Ai Weiwei’s Colored Vases display. Caminero’s complaint? That local galleries put all their time and effort into international artists of high esteem, and forsake the locals. Here’s the thing:
iconoclasm is itself an iconic act. One image replaces another. Ai was careful to have his iconoclastic act documented, skillfully shot on camera and reproduced for many to see. Likewise Caminero did not sneak into the gallery under cover of night to do his smashing; he went in the middle of the day on Sunday and was sure that others were watching (we are waiting for the video surveillance footage of Caminero to emerge and watch that go viral). Tradition is itself a series of creative and destructive acts, stability and instability; the icons are the tradition as much as the images of iconoclasm. Nothing stays the same.
Nicholas Hune-Brown reviews a study that allowed test subjects to “earn” chocolate by listening to a harsh noise (representing “work,” as compared to the option of listening to pleasant music, representing “leisure”). Researchers divided participants into two categories: “high-earners, who got a chocolate every 20 times they listened to the noise, and low-earners who had to hear the noise 120 to earn their reward.” The results:
[R]esearchers found their test subjects earning far more chocolate than anyone would ever hope to consume. High-earners earned an average of 10.74 chocolates but only ate 4.26. They needlessly exposed themselves to unpleasant noises, then left the majority of their earnings on the table. Low-earners, meanwhile, earned slightly less chocolate than they could eat, but listened to about the same number of sounds. This suggests that both groups weren’t considering the optimal results, but rather how much work they could bear. Instead of trying to create the most enjoyable experience, they unthinkingly worked as much as possible, stockpiling useless treasure.
The researchers call this behaviour “mindless accumulation”—the tendency for people to forgo leisure to work towards rewards they’ll never be able to use. They argue that it’s a distinctly modern problem. For much of human history, earning rates were low and people needed to work as much as possible just to survive. The idea that you could “overearn” simply wasn’t realistic. If you’re one of today’s highly paid office workers, however, earning comes comparatively easily, yet the drive to hoard as much as possible remains. The researchers compare overearning to overeating, another distinctly modern problem caused by a life of surprising abundance.
The Dish 