Month: March 2014

Jessica Grose flags a new study debunking the conventional wisdom that shacking up before marriage leads to divorce:

According to a paper [sociologist Arielle] Kuperberg is publishing in the April issue of the Journal of Marriage and Family, it’s not premarital cohabitation that predicts divorce. It’s age.

It’s long been known that there’s a correlation between age at first marriage and divorce—the younger you get married the first time, up until your mid-20s, the more likely your marriage is to break up. Kuperberg looked at data from the National Survey of Family Growth from 1996–2010 and found that the same goes for cohabitators. If you move in together in your teens or early 20s, then you are more at risk for divorce; the reason that couples who move in together young break up “is the same reason age of marriage is a predictor of divorce: people aren’t prepared for those roles,” Kuperberg says.

Another study discovered “that the length of time a couple has been romantically involved before moving in together is also crucial to whether they end up divorcing”:

Those with higher education levels tend to take longer to move in with their partners, she found. Half of college-educated women moved in with their partners after at least a year; one-third were romantically involved for two years before joining house. Data from the most recent National Survey of Family Growth show that more than half of women with only a high school degree in a cohabitating relationship moved in with their partner in less than six months.

Professor [Sharon] Sassler found in her research that many couples with lower incomes and less education decided to move in together because of financial pressures.  She argues that it is the type of premarital cohabitation that predicts divorce, not necessarily cohabitation in itself.

Neve Gordon, reviewing a pair of books that shine light on the “very dark sides of occupation” in Iraq, considers the role of Iraqis who collaborated with the US military. He assesses To be a Friend Is Fatal, a nonfiction account by Kirk Johnson, who worked with USAID in Baghdad and Fallujah and “founded the List Project to Resettle Iraqi Allies and raised money, wrote op-eds, mobilized journalists, and lobbied Congress to find a solution for these Iraqi refugees”:

Johnson’s book ends up being a poignant story about bureaucratic red tape and lies, where the US government constantly made promises to address the plight of the collaborators while simultaneously creating insurmountable obstacles for their visa applications. Samantha Power and her friends were unwilling to say it, but they preferred to leave behind a hundred innocent Iraqi employees facing possible assassination than to admit one former collaborator who could potentially cause damage — nobody, Johnson surmises, wanted his or her signature to be on the visa papers of the next 9/11 hijacker.

This is the major difference between Johnson’s List Project and Operation Baghdad Pups, an initiative to resettle Iraqi dogs that had befriended US troops. “No Buddy Gets Left Behind!” reads the organization’s flashy website banner followed by the imperative: “Abandoning Charlie in the war-ravaged country would have meant certain death for him.” In exchange for a $1,000 donation, the group promises to cut through the US government’s red tape in order to bring these pets to “freedom.” In July 2012, CNN reported that Americans had donated $27 million to help Iraqi dogs (nearly 14 times the amount the List Project was able to raise over the years). On January 2, 2013, President Obama signed the 2013 National Defense Authorization Act, which included an amendment to grant dogs working for the US military the status of “Canine Members of the Armed Forces.”

While I don’t have anything against the resettlement of dogs, witnessing the government’s radically different approach toward those Iraqis who came to the US’s aid leaves, to use a British understatement, a foul taste in one’s mouth.

 
Michael Grabell investigates the struggles of our 2.8 million-strong temporary workforce:

Overall, nearly one-sixth of the total job growth since the recession ended has been in the temp sector. Many temps work for months or years packing and assembling products for some of the world’s largest companies, including Walmart, Amazon and Nestlé. They make our frozen pizzas, cut our vegetables and sort the recycling from our trash. They unload clothing and toys made overseas and pack them to fill our store shelves.

The temp system insulates companies from workers’ compensation claims, unemployment taxes, union drives and the duty to ensure that their workers are citizens or legal immigrants. In turn, temp workers suffer high injury rates, wait unpaid for work to begin and face fees that depress their pay below minimum wage. Temp agencies consistently rank among the worst large industries for the rate of wage and hour violations, according to a ProPublica analysis of federal enforcement data.

Another report sheds light on the squalid living conditions of California’s farmworkers:

Don Villarejo, the longtime farmworker advocate who authored the report, tells In These Times that growers have “systematically” reduced investment in farmworker housing over the past 25 years in order to reduce overhead costs and to avoid the trouble of meeting state and federal regulations, which were established as part of a broader overhaul of agricultural labor, health and safety standards during the 1960s and 1980s. According to Villarejo, workers’ modern material circumstances are little improved from the old days of the Bracero system. That initiative—the precursor to our modern-day guestworker migrant program—became notorious for shunting laborers into spartan cabins, tents and other inhospitable dwellings on the farms themselves, beset with entrenched poverty and unhealthy, brutish conditions.

Even today, however, surveys and field reports have revealed that a large portion of workers are squeezed into essentially unlivable spaces. Some dilapidated apartments and trailer parks lack plumbing or kitchen facilities, much less any modicum of privacy; others are exposed to toxic pesticide contamination or fetid waste dumps. Workers can “live in a single-family dwelling with perhaps a dozen to 20 [people] crowding in,” Villarejo says.

James Surowiecki doubts that the makers of Candy Crush will come up with another comparable hit and insists they are making a mistake in going public:

It’s easy to see why [King Digital Entertainment’s] founders want to go public: money. But the money isn’t worth the hassle. As a public company, King will have to show shareholders consistent results and ever-growing profits. Such expectations are, frankly, silly in crazily competitive, hit-driven industries, and trying to meet them is a recipe for frustration. If King stayed private, it could milk its cash cow and build games without having to worry overmuch about hatching a new cultural juggernaut.

We expect companies to constantly be in search of the next big thing. But, for one-hit wonders, the smartest strategy might be to just enjoy it while it lasts.

But Felix Salmon suspects the company is trying to seduce a buyer, thus making the IPO a rational choice in the current market:

[T]he IPO market is so frothy right now that companies have to have the credible threat of an IPO in order to get the best possible price from a strategic acquirer. Right until the day before the IPO, King is going to retain the option to simply sell itself to some company which wants proven expertise at making enormous profits in the world of mobile-native apps. By moving towards an IPO, King is forcing those companies to get serious about making an offer — both in terms of timing (they’d better do it quick) and in terms of valuation (they’d better meet the likely IPO share price). Because buying King after it’s gone public is going to be a lot more difficult.

Douthat found True Detective‘s finale wanting:

The fact that the internet is full of defenses (or at least quasi-defenses) of the “True Detective” finale today is a testament to the show’s genuinely extraordinary qualities — direction, acting, atmosphere, and (sometimes) writing. But I’m afraid it’s also a testament to the human will to believe, often in defiance of the evidence, and reading the various apologia for the way the detective drama finished up I’m inclined to channel the show’s nihilist-hero’s harsh words about religion: “You gotta get together and tell yourself stories that violate every law of the universe just to get through the [expletive] day? What’s that say about your reality?”

Freddie deBoer blames the disappointment on the enthusiasm of the show’s viewers:

I would argue that True Detective, despite its pedigree, its status as a limited-run series of 8 episodes, and its resolute dedication to realism, had the same problem as Lost.

After all, the enormous public engagement and commentary on the show was largely dedicated to crackpot theories, the great fun of trying to piece together convoluted explanations of plot points both large and minute. That’s the fun of puzzlebox fiction, and why it has such obvious commercial appeal: the participatory nature of solving the puzzle fits perfectly in with the current way many people engage with fiction, which is by analyzing it in a way once reserved for critics and academics. The problem is that as you generate more and more outlandish theories, the expectations about the real conclusion become impossible to meet. Reality will always be a disappointment in relation to imagination.

Orr contends that the show’s “moments of greatness far outweighed its disappointments”:

All told, I feel a little bad for Nic Pizzolatto, who in retrospect seems to have written a powerful, engaging serial-killer miniseries that was so good early on that it raised expectations that it would be considerably more—expectations that, again, he’s seemed to spend the last couple weeks trying hard to ratchet down. Do I think some of the scenarios invented by the shows’ many rabid fans were better than what wound up on screen? Yes, I do. … But what writer is going to do a better job at a mystery series—especially so early in his career—than the combined ingenuity of a horde of meticulous fans who don’t really need to make the pieces all fit?

So now Pizzolatto has something to aim for next season. And I’ll be right there watching, hoping for a bullseye.

Francisco Toro checks in from Venezuela, where he says the protesters are now playing right into the government’s hands:

The sites of ongoing unrest remain solidly concentrated in the middle class enclaves of the bigger cities, i.e., precisely where the government wants them.

Large, peaceful daytime demonstrations are followed every night by running battles around makeshift barricades, or guarimbas. This night-time ritual of improvised road-blocks, burning garbage, plastic pellets, tear gas and armed bikers in plain clothes involves many fewer people than the daytime protests. And yet, inevitably, the guarimba has come to define the current protest movement, giving it its flavor, its distinctiveness, its identity.

The peaceful daytime marches have broad public support, but only when they’re seen as demanding redress for failures of government rather than agitating for regime change. In the country at large, support for a coup is practically non-existent. For the communicational hegemon, it’s easy to disappear the large, day-time protests and paint the entire movement as the outcome of a tiny, violent guarimbero clique.

Katelyn Fossett examines how the government has tightened its grip on the media since 2002, when private news outlets were a driving force behind the attempt to oust Hugo Chávez:

Throughout the unrest, critics have been sounding the alarm about a  government-coordinated “media blackout” designed to minimize coverage of the protests. Press freedom advocates say the government’s harsh treatment of private media organizations has led many newspapers, TV stations and radio broadcasters to effectively censor their own coverage and largely ignore the protests. Maduro took a news channel off the air after it broadcast coverage of the violence in mid-February. When Henrique Capriles Radonski, the country’s most prominent opposition leader and the runner up in last year’s presidential election, delivered a major speech two weeks ago, no network covered it.

It’s a far cry from the political muscle the private media flexed in 2002.