Month: December 2014

The Best Of The Dish Today

The New Republic Centennial Gala

I’m heart-broken today about what can only be called the corporate manslaughter of my alma mater, The New Republic. And yes, many of us regard that place – for all its and our flaws – as an alma mater, the equivalent of a college, and our time there as formative and life-changing. It was a cauldron of first-class minds and third-class temperaments, engaged in something roughly called journalism not for money or pageviews, but because they believed in something, and were prepared to engage every ounce of their brainpower to fight over it. Editorial meetings were tempestuous, ribald, hilarious, and unmissable – and the island of misfit toys that Marty assembled over the years taught me more than anyone at college or grad school ever could.

We experimented every week – and took risks others balked at. The editors I was immensely privileged to work with – Mike Kinsley, Rick Hertzberg, Leon Wieseltier, Charles Krauthammer, Dorothy Wickenden, Ann Hulbert, Mickey Kaus, Bob Wright, John Judis, Peter Beinart, Jon Chait, Frank Foer, Jake Weisberg, and many others – still today count as some of the finest journalists in the country. There is no dream team out there in opinion journalism today that comes close. Which was why, in its heyday, the magazine truly mattered – to its readers and beyond – in ways almost no journalistic institution does any more.

I know that era is over. I figured that out a very long time ago. But Frank seemed to me to be trying to revive it in ways that were often successful in both old media depth and new media buzziness. And that the magazine (now to be published only ten times annually, when I used to put out 48 issues a year) could be swiftly despatched in favor of a “vertically integrated” (sic) “digital media company” – that the very idea of a place where people would assemble, and fight over ideas, under the sternest strictures of reason and reporting and wit could be thrown out with the trash – was not inevitable. Hard to re-imagine, sure. Terribly hard to monetize. But still worth trying to grow into something that could change out of all recognition and yet also stay the same.

But the economic forces of new media are very powerful, and few multi-millionaires seem willing any more to lose their shirts in order to keep them at bay. That noblesse oblige in defense of the highbrow and traditional is now no more. And when I witness the death of these magazines and their culture – one of the great achievements of post-war American life – and I witness the new, fissiparous models emerging, it is hard not to feel a little despair. The new business models are anti-magazines, in a way. What matters online is not the fellowship of writers in a joint enterprise, but the shareability of links, the success of single posts in social media, and the merging of advertising with editorial that blends all forms of journalism into the same corporate, indistinguishable, marketing mush.

I wonder if we can still manage – as we navigate this new forbidding media economy – to recreate what we once had in some form. Which makes it all the more heartbreaking that TNR could not be a vehicle in that experiment, even as many TNR alums are engaged in it; that it could instantly lose two figures, Frank Foer and Leon Wieseltier, with uniquely strong institutional memory, and thereby make its digital future utterly unconnected with its storied past. Chait pens a eulogy today. It is not, I’m afraid, an inapposite word.

Five posts worth revisiting from this sad day in journalism: Pauline Kael’s TNR review-essay on Godard; a truly hathetic Stand With Hillary ad; the new masculinity of dieting; pushback against the pushback on the UVA rape story; and readers tackle me (once again) on the thorny question of affirmative action.

The most popular post of the day was The Right’s Response To Eric Garner; followed by A Question of Human Dignity.

Many of today’s posts were updated with your emails – read them all here.  You can always leave your unfiltered comments at our Facebook page and @sullydish. 21 more readers became subscribers today. You can join them here – and get access to all the readons and Deep Dish – for a little as $1.99 month. Gift subscriptions are available here. Dish t-shirts are for sale here and our new mugs here. A final email for the day:

I finally subscribed after reading for years, and now that I have, I thought I’d just take a second to say thanks for all that you do. I love the Dish. I love reading your opinions, which do not always match my own but are always reasoned and thoughtful. I love reading contributions by your readers, whether they’re countering your opinion with their own or sharing a personal story. You’ve really put together something wonderful here and what you do is so important. Thank you for fighting the good fight. Happy holidays to you all!

See you in the morning.

(Photo: Former President Bill Clinton speaks on stage at the New Republic Centennial Gala at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium on November 19, 2014 in Washington, DC. By Teresa Kroeger/Getty Images.)

The Danger Of Cracking Down On Drugs

A test case in San Francisco:

Christopher Ingraham holds up the Netherlands as another success story:

Authorities in the Netherlands are warning Amsterdam tourists about heroin masquerading as cocaine, which has already killed several people and sent a number of others to the hospital. The campaign is striking because you’d never see one like it in the U.S.: “You will not be arrested for using drugs in Amsterdam,” the fliers promise. Instead, they give information on how to receive medical assistance and how to keep potential overdose victims alert while waiting for help.

Dutch law distinguishes between “soft drugs,” like marijuana, and “hard” ones, like cocaine and heroin. Possession and use of up to 5 grams of marijuana, and 1 gram of cocaine or heroin, is not subject to penalty. In sharp contrast to the U.S., where drug use has primarily been dealt with as a criminal justice issue (although there’s some evidence this is changing), the Dutch approach emphasizes harm reduction and public health.

The Other Torture Report

The International Criminal Court in The Hague is finally speaking up about our abuse of detainees in Afghanistan:

The prosecutor’s office concluded that “the information available suggests that between May 2003 and June 2004, members of the US military in Afghanistan used so-called ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ against conflict-related detainees in an effort to improve the level of actionable intelligence obtained from interrogations.” (The report also considered whether certain raids and airstrikes by international forces constituted war crimes but concluded that there was no evidence of intentional harm to civilians.) Still, the prosecutor’s statements on U.S. detainee abuse mark the first time that the ICC, which the United States has not joined, has explicitly identified possible criminal behavior by U.S. nationals. …

The court remains a very long way from indictments of U.S. soldiers or civilian officials. The prosecutor still hasn’t decided to open a full investigation. Even if she does, indictments of U.S. personnel are highly uncertain. What appears to be happening behind the scenes is a quiet push and pull between The Hague and Washington over whether the United States has adequately investigated abuses by its own forces. If the United States can demonstrate that it has done so, the doctrine of “complementarity” should preclude any court action.

Ryan Vogel isn’t sure the ICC has valid grounds to investigate these abuses:

Whatever one’s views regarding U.S. detention policy in Afghanistan from 2003-2008, the alleged U.S. conduct is surely not what the world had in mind when it established the ICC to address “the most serious crimes of concern to the international community as a whole.”  The ICC was designed to end impunity for the most egregious and shocking breaches of the law, and it is hard to see how alleged detainee abuse by U.S. forces meets that standard.

But even if a case against U.S. forces for alleged detention-related abuses is not dismissed because it is insufficiently grave to meet the thresholds for the ICC to proceed, it also seems questionable for the ICC to pursue such a case for reasons of complementarity (i.e., the principle that the ICC is not to move forward when a State is genuinely able and willing to investigate and prosecute).  The United States has one of the most developed and effective military justice systems in the world, which has the demonstrated ability and willingness to hold its own accountable for violations of the law, including any violations in the context of detention operations.

To which Kevin Jon Heller replies:

[The prosecutor’s office] is not interested in the low-level US soldiers who were the principal perpetrators of torture in Afghanistan; it is focusing instead on “those most responsible” for that torture. It is thus equally irrelevant that “there have not been many issues more thoroughly investigated by the military and U.S. Government in the past decade than that of detainee treatment.” The problem for the US going forward is that it has never made any genuine attempt to investigate, much less prosecute, the high-ranking military commanders or the important political officials who ordered and/or tolerated the commission of torture in Afghanistan. That is simply indisputable. So until such time as the US does — read: never — complementarity will not prevent the OTP from continuing its investigation into US actions.

Going Public

Freddie finds that “we should start to think of crowdfunding as another failed example of turning activities that previously required expertise over to the broader public, and with awful consequences”:

After all, crowdfunding is a type of crowdsourcing; what’s being crowdsourced is the gatekeeping functions that investors and organizations used to perform. The essential work isn’t just sorting through various projects and determining which are cool or desirable, but determining if they’re responsible and plausible — capable of being successfully pulled off by the people proposing them, within the time frames and budgets stipulated.

It turns out that most people are not good at that. But then, why would they be? Why would the average person be good at fulfilling that function? Where does that faith come from? There are so many places where we’ve turned over functions once performed by experts to amateurs, and we’re consistently surprised that it doesn’t work out.

401(k)s aren’t crowdsourced, exactly, but they exist thanks to a choice to turn over control of retirement funds to individuals away from managers, in the pursuit of fees, of course. The results have been brutal. But why wouldn’t they be brutal? Why would you expect every random person on the street to have a head for investment in that sense?

Face Of The Day

The Southbank Launch Their Winter Festival with Five Giant Illuminated Rabbits

Large inflatable rabbit sculptures go on display at the Southbank Centre in London, England on December 4, 2014. The seven-metre-high inflatable sculptures by Australian artist Amanda Parer entitled “Intrude” form part of the Southbank Centre’s Winter Festival that opened in November and runs until January 11, 2015.  By Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images.

Getting Out The Vote By Any Means Necessary

Tomasky ponders the Republicans’ midterm advantage:

The turnout problem, I suspect, runs deeper than the message of the moment. Republican voters, being older and somewhat wealthier and more likely to own property, are more apt to see politics as a continuing conflict of interests that roll over from one election to the next—they can always be convinced that some undeserving person is coming to take away what they’ve earned. Voters who are overall younger and have fewer assets are less likely to view politics in such stark terms. The thundering high and crashing low of these voters’ experience with Obama—“I had such hope in him, I thought he could really change things”—reflect this.

Ambinder wonders if Dems will come “to view the Republicans like the Republicans view the Democrats: as an enemy”:

For good-government, consensus, let’s-get-along, politics-can-be-pure types, this is a horrible message. Can it be true that the only way for Democrats to vote their true strength is to treat the opposing party just as poorly as the opposing party treats the Democrats? Can it be true that the only way to break the logjam is to embrace a politics that is even more loathsome, more unctuous and more uncivil than it is today?nMaybe, yes.

The Parent-Friendship Trap

https://twitter.com/jetpack/status/539931326262935554

Tracy Moore reflects on friendships rooted in parenthood:

I know what you’re thinking: Wow, do I even want to make parent friends!? Aren’t my old regular friends good enough? The answer is: yes you do and no they are not.

Try as your old friends might to adjust to you plus baby, they can and should only have to adjust so much. There is nothing better than commiserating over an annoying teacher or childhood development phase with someone staring it down on the same lack of sleep as you. If you discover that you both actually like even a few of the same new bands, restaurants or movies, lock that shit down. Because when you find other parents who are as laid back as you are (or aren’t), as flexible as you are (or aren’t), and as approximately cool as you are (or aren’t), it’s easy and fun and it reminds you how friendships work anyway: You get together sometimes, you like their company, and it’s pretty fun.

My real advice is this: Stay open-minded, lower your expectations, and remember that it’s really about your kids. So do make the effort to expose yourself and your kid to as many types of people that are out there, while also understanding that if your kid doesn’t like the kids of your parent friends, the whole situation is hosed. Try also to compartmentalize the friendships the way you might “friends with benefits,” aka, “play date with good snacks” or “play date with Pinterest mom” or “playdate with free stock market discussion.”

Thoughts On Affirmative Action, Ctd

Many readers are agitated over this post:

Regarding the comments from the “Asian-American reader and Harvard grad with a JD and MPH” on rhetoric and composition, my field of discourse, I guess I never thought to consider Aristotle, Cicero, Campbell, Blair, John Quincy Adams, Nietzsche, Burke, etc., as “squishy” scholars. I suppose I could make some rude comment about the unenlightened, unethical, anti-humanities discourse of the commentator. However, I will just let his own remarks stand and undermine his own ethos and that of his argument.

Another has Freddie’s back:

I’ve enjoyed the dialogue between you and Freddie deBoer, and I am genuinely conflicted on the merits of the policy in question. While I appreciate your dedication to airing dissents, the recent reply from the Asian-American Harvard grad is both misinformed and mean-spirited toward Freddie. I think it’s worth noting a few things:

1. Freddie’s Ph.D. program in Rhetoric and Composition (he does not yet have his degree) is extremely rigorous and empirical; I’d love for your reader to read this article and explain how it typifies “squishy” humanities thinking: “Evaluating the Comparability of Two Measures of Lexical Diversity”

2. The idea that Freddie can be lumped in with any group of “happy talk” liberals (especially the anti-intellectual strawmen this reader depicts) is pretty laughable.

3.  To the larger argument: MIT is about 24% black and Latino and about 24% Asian. CalTech has chosen not to use affirmative action; that’s fine. But it is a choice, and the idea that they would be unable to put together a more diverse class should they choose to do so is not supported by any evidence at all.

4. The final anecdote about the risky brain surgery at the hospital that rewards diversity and not merit is a ridiculous false choice. Your reader went to Harvard, which has been open about trying to diversify its student body since the mid-1940s. Should your reader’s diploma have an asterisk on it? Forget brain surgery – I wouldn’t let this particular reader feed my cat.

Freddie also responds to the Harvard grad, in an email to the Dish:

My research interests are diverse, but most of my time is spent looking at spreadsheets, using algorithms used in natural language processing and corpus linguistics, typing away in R Studio. I do quantitative work, myself, computerized, quantitative work. I personally don’t think that makes my study more rigorous or meaningful, but clearly, the emailer does. Even a minute of genuine research would make this aspect of my research identity clear. Instead, the emailer Googled my name, spent 15 seconds, and did no other research to confirm his or her presumptions. I would call that remarkably lacking in merit, myself.

One more:

Your reader, his credentials aside, seems to forget that his alma matter has, according the US News, the third best chemistry department in the country, the second best physics department, the best biology department, the third best math department, and the seventh best statistics department in the country. Now, while I’m well aware that Cal Tech doesn’t use affirmative action, Harvard seems to be doing just fine using affirmative action, and in some cases, better than Cal Tech. Remember, Cal Tech is the anomaly here – all the Ivies and other elite colleges (MIT, Stanford, etc.) practicing affirmative action admit just as qualified students as Cal Tech, not worse ones. So to come out swinging with an argument that affirmative action is somehow harming scholarship or impeding human progress by prioritizing “jargon and happy-talk” over “traditional notions of academic rigor” is grossly inaccurate.

I also want to tie in this story over at the Upshot about how 80 percent of high-achieving students get into elite colleges. I think it’s important to remember that, while Asian-American students may be “underrepresented” at Harvard, they are not underrepresented in the college-educated population. In fact, the majority of adult Asians have college degrees. So it isn’t as though Asians are systematically being denied higher education in this country – they are in fact achieving it at a greater pace than the rest of us. To abolish affirmative action, aimed to help under-represented minorities in the entire education system, under the guise of helping the group that is honestly exceeding everyone else, seems wrong to me.