Author: Andrew Sullivan

A reader writes:

I cannot believe we’re still having this debate. As always, people who should know better like to combine and muddy issues that should be clear.

1) Of course the fault of rape lies with the rapist. Entirely and totally.

2) Talking about how to avoid rape isn’t about fault. It’s about how to deal with a flawed, screwed-up world. Given the fact there are people (mostly men) who rape, how do you deal with that?

I mean, who ever thought you could stop murders by telling murderers to stop? Or robbers to stop robbing? The world is full of bad people who commit all manners of crimes. Trying to prevent those crimes has nothing to do with making the victims at fault. But it is still practical and important. I don’t understand why so many people cannot handle the simple explanation: “If you get really drunk, you put yourself at risk of a large range of crimes from bad people. Rape isn’t the only one, but it is a major one. It’s not your fault, but it is a danger.”

As always, it’s the “should” that kills people. No one should go hungry. No one should be raped. The world should be more fair and equitable. Yes, but so what? “Should” is small comfort for those who’ve discovered that the world is built on what “shouldn’t”, not “should.”

Another suggests:

Here’s a proposal for how we can give gender-neutral advice to people new to drinking: the buddy system.

Like swimming, drinking is an activity where everyone should have a buddy: Nobody should drink alone, nobody should go home without knowing that their buddy is safe for the night. This holds for both men and women – anyone who is up for a night of serious drinking is at risk of making stupid decisions. Run these decisions by your buddy first, that’s all we’re saying. And if two drunken people do want to hook up, their buddies can at least check that both participants are conscious enough to discuss condoms.

This is not the same as a designated driver – your buddy can drink too. But it’s someone who will come check on you if you vanish into a back room, or if you start walking down the middle of the highway, or fall asleep in a puddle of puke. And someone to remind you (and someone you will remind) that you agreed not to do shots that night.

Another reader:

The controversy surrounding Emily Yoffe’s warning reminds me of my days as a resident adviser back in the mid-1980s. In our RA training, alcohol consumption got a lot of attention, and one point I particularly remember was that drunkenness made people more likely to commit crimes and more likely to be the victims of crime. The advice was directed equally at women and men.

But something else came up the year I was an RA, and the double standard got to me. At an RA meeting, some male RAs brought up the fact that they had seen some female residents asleep in their rooms while their doors were open. The male RAs’ concern stemmed from fears that a wayward male might take that situation as an invitation. It had happened; there had been reports at our campus of young men just walking into dorm rooms and getting into bed with women they hadn’t met.

On the one hand, I could understand the concern. On the other hand, I didn’t like the tone. I remember a statement to the effect of, “Someone needs to talk to those girls and tell them they’re really asking for trouble.” The thing is, Andrew, if a guy fell asleep while his door was open, nobody would have thought twice about that. Maybe he didn’t face the same risk as a female, but to doze off in an open room was (so far as I could tell) unconsciously assumed to be a male student’s right and a female student’s poor judgment.

A reader writes:

Good morning from Nebraska. As a computer engineer I have definitely had my share of math classes. The classic question of “when am I ever going to need this?” doesn’t stop with Algebra. It continues well into the college curriculum. The best answer I ever got was from my discrete math professor. He said (and I agree) that we might never use it. But that’s not the point.

Learning new math concepts not only increases your problem-solving sophistication, it also exercises your ability to analyze and then solve problems. In my experience, he’s been absolutely right. I rarely use (or remember to use) any of the advance math I learned in undergrad. Heck, I don’t even use much of the math that I learned in high school and I’m a freaking engineer. I do, however, encounter problems everyday and rely on my learned ability to analyze the problem and find a solution. Giving students the option to eliminate math at such an early stage is not only going to impact their mathematical understanding, but also the problem-solving sophistication.

And just a little jab: how many students really use what they learned by reading and then analyzing Ethan Frome or The Great Gatsby? How are lit classes any more relevant to everyday use than math? It’s not necessarily the content of the subject that’s important, but rather the method and process for approaching and solving problems that is.

Another:

If there was ever a post to make me absolutely insane, this is it.

Replace every instance of “math” in your post with “reading.” If the post then infuriates you, you know how I feel. I haven’t had to write a paper about Gatsby’s green light since I was 18, but I recognize that the subject built fundamental cognitive and intellectual skills that I do use all the time.

If you want to re-imagine a relevant curriculum for mathematics instruction, I’m all for that. But, to eliminate math for a significant portion of young minds is absurd. Making it optional will result in many children opting out of math, goaded on by the shocking number of adult parents who feel that math is “hard” and “useless.”

Do all students need to take trigonometry and calculus? Of course not. But everyone should take statistics. Everyone should take basic finance. In the eighth grade, my idiot friends and I still thought we’d be rock guitarists and professional athletes. If we’d opted out of math at that point, we’d have been woefully unqualified in careers in science. By the time kids know what they want to do with their lives, they’re past the point of making up for gaps in their education.

And this is what whining about math always seems to miss: math education is not about math for math’s sake; it’s about science, technology, and engineering. In the 21st century, when computer illiteracy is tantamount to actual illiteracy, when biotechnological breakthroughs are helping us live longer and more productive lives, when the threat of climate change, fossil fuels, and stray asteroids become more and more unavoidable by the day, asking for a reprieve from learning something hard is tantamount to sabotaging our future.

Another:

Gary Rubenstein may be right that most students do not need to take algebra, calculus, or geometry (worthy as these topics are) unless they’re planning to go into a technical field.  However, there is one type of math instruction that American high school students desperately need – and most aren’t getting it.  It’s consumer math and basic financial literacy.

How to manage your checking and savings accounts.  Understanding mortgages, home equity loans, school loans, car loans, payday loans, and other types of consumer loans.  How to safely use credit cards.  How to save for education and retirement (and why it’s a good idea to start early in life).  Understanding sales, coupons, discount and reward programs from retailers.  In other words, the kind of math needed to navigate everyday situations that involve money.

Many high schools do teach these classes, but they are not normally required for graduation.  They probably should be. The benefits would be huge. For instance, if more Americans had the financial savvy to understand and avoid the funny mortgages that were being peddled during the early-to-mid 2000s, the housing crash might not have been as severe.

Update from a reader:

There is plenty of room for disagreement about Gary Rubinstein’s argument, but these readers don’t even address that argument! His whole point is that the way we teach math crams in facts at the expense of problem-solving skills, not that math is irrelevant. In other words, they dissenters basically agree with him.

In a 1954 essay from TNR’s archives, literary critic George Woodcock celebrated Oscar Wilde as an “original and daring” thinker who was “not merely the writer of several permanently readable books, but also a great personality and a seminal influence of unusual persistence”:

Wilde’s broadest appeal lies in the mood of daring thought and enthusiasm from which such insights emerged. It is significant that he had always attracted the adolescent, and in this way has influenced the literary and intellectual awakening of each generation that has followed his own. “I have met no one who made me so aware of the possibilities latent in myself,” said William Rothenstein, remembering his own youth, and many young people who have met Wilde only through his writings have found there an invaluable stimulus at certain stages of their development. This peculiar appeal to the young arises not only from the romantic iconoclasm of Wilde’s ideas, but also from the almost adolescent zeal with which he champions them.

Much like Monty Python, seen above. Previous Dish on Wilde here, here, and here.

(Hat tip: Cassandra Neace)

Pharmacologist Ian Musgrave notes a rare death in the UK:

In this particular case, the deceased had consumed an entire tin of caffeine-containing mints. Each individual mint contained 80 milligrams of caffeine, about the same amount as in some moderate-level energy drinks. Consuming the whole tin of the mints is like consuming 12 cans of a moderate-level energy drink, one after the other. But is that enough to kill you?

The handy website Death by Caffeine, where you can find out how many cans of energy drink, cups of coffee or bars of chocolate you will need to consume before expiring, suggests that a 70-kilogram [154-pound] person would need to drink 132 cans of a beverage containing 80 milligrams of caffeine (or a similar number shots of espresso coffee) to die of an overdose. If that’s correct, then [the victim] should have had a tenfold safety margin. So what went wrong?

The reason is related to why dogs can’t eat chocolate:

Caffeine (and the related stimulants from tea and coca, theophyline and theobromine) is broken down in the liver by a specific enzyme (cytochrome P450 1A2 for the technical-minded). Not everyone has the same amount of this enzyme in their livers for many reasons, such as the gene for the enzyme being missing or defective. The reason you don’t give chocolate to dogs is that they have very low levels of their version of the human enzyme and are more susceptible to toxicity from theobromine and caffeine in chocolate.

Around 40 percent of Caucasians have a version of the enzyme that breaks down caffeine slowly. In these people, caffeine consumption is correlated with higher incidences of heart attack and high blood pressure. But in this case, the reason was not a genetic variation but disease. The deceased had cirrhosis of the liver, which, among other things, greatly reduces the ability of the liver to break down a variety of chemicals, including caffeine.

Readers continue to contribute to our ongoing ACA coverage:

I recently made like the Dish and went independent, moving to my own business instead of working for an employer. This was done largely out of necessity. I am married with two kids and am at the moment the sole earner, as my kids are small. Health insurance is our single biggest expense. We’ve had help with our premiums from my parents, thank goodness, because they haven’t been affordable. I will almost certainly qualify for a subsidy.

I heard the reports of the glitchy site, and since coverage doesn’t start until January 1 anyway, I have not had a sense of urgency. Yesterday I dove in, and spent a couple of hours on healthcare.gov. Well, it still sucks. I had to re-do whole sections of the application, It took me a long time just to register for a username, and after I finished the application, I was not able to see the results. I still haven’t been able to. I have no idea where things stand, because it just gives me a blank page.

I am not to worried, as I’m sure I’ll be able to get it figured out by Jan 1. If nothing else, I am highly motivated and will give it the necessary time. But my experience certainly reflects the consensus that it is still a buggy pain in the ass.

On the other hand, a reader sends the above video, which was uploaded October 8 and has close to a million views:

This video of a guy signing up for Obamacare does put the website problems in perspective, since he demonstrates how maddening it is to register for health insurance under the status quo. Not sure why others aren’t doing the same thing.  Not to rationalize the online kinks and trouble with the ACA roll-out, but here’s another perspective.

Another reemphasizes an important point:

Yes, the ACA website has been a mess, but for all the hyperventilating over the “disaster” I’ve not seen anyone make the point that its going fairly well in states that set up their own exchanges.

The disaster is primarily an issue in states that oppose Obamacare and refused to set up state exchanges, therefore subjecting their citizens to the federal government bureaucracy and its website. So much for states rights, local control, and conservatism! (Not to mention the millions in states that now have coverage due to expanded Medicaid, which those same “conservative” state governors rejected.) The ACA is mostly working for those who want it to work – for those it’s not, that’s partly Obama administration incompetence, but more so the result of those who don’t want it to.

Another gets technical:

First, to get it out of the way – I am a long-time reader of yours, and since this is my first time writing an e-mail to the Dish, I’d just like to congratulate you on the success of your subscriber model. The lack of ads makes for a great user experience and the quality of your insight is superb as ever. Keep it up!

I’m writing to you today to try to provide a simple explanation of an 834 – I read the article from WaPo you posted earlier and I wanted to try to simplify this. I am a database/application developer and I work for an insurance company. I have actually overseen the development and implementation of 834 processing applications and I think it’s important to clear some things up.

The 834 is not a form. It’s a standard file format that is used to communicate member information from a sender (the government, for example) to a receiver (Aetna, United, BC/BS, etc). Think of it as a complex-looking version of Google translate that is meant for computers to understand. Basically, healthcare.gov should be doing the following:

1) Collect the data – a user enters data in forms on the website (name, address, SSN, etc)
2) Organize and save the data – the user submits (clicks OK) and the website saves the data by writing to a database
3) Translate the data – a separate, completely unrelated application reads that data, formats it and spits out a file (which is in “834 format”)
4) Send the data to someone else – deliver the 834 to a receiver (the insurance company you want to sign up with)

Most of the work is completely invisible to the user – and it should be! The errors we have seen raised by the website seem to indicate poor database design and/or applications that don’t interact well with the database. If the federal exchange system is unable to generate 834 files correctly, it’s probably one of the following:

1) The website is not properly writing to the database (some data is not being captured, in other words)
2) The translator that is trying to create an 834 is not reading the data correctly in the database
3) Some combination of A and B

These are very fixable, but the actual corrections are incredibly time-consuming. Debugging code is tricky even when you are the developer who wrote the program; this whole idea of a “tech surge” is a bit silly, they will have to spend weeks trying to learn what the database structure is and how the applications work/interact with it. The best chance you have of fixing these issues quickly is to leverage the team that did the application and database design.

For the record, I am a supporter of the ACA and I would love to see it work, but as an IT professional I am more than a bit irritated about the coverage of the rollout. These kinds of scenarios where the technical side of a business is trying to alert everyone else about what can go wrong, trying to raise red flags – they are extremely common in the private sector too. Think of all the times Microsoft has had to hastily patch a batch Windows update release!

Thank you for taking the time to read my e-mail, I hope I was able to shine some light on the 834 and what the likely problems are.  Of course, only people who can see under the hood, as it were, can know for sure – but these types of errors during implementation are common, they just usually don’t get aired publicly.

Jia Tolentino interviews Brian, a clergyman at the Summerland Grove Pagan Church in Memphis:

What do you mean when you say you work with [gods]?

I pray to them, I offer them time, I meditate on them. When I say that I work with a god, I mean that I engage in a practice of reciprocal gift-giving. I develop and maintain a relationship with my god by giving gifts to them and thanking for the gifts they give to me.

That’s a really nice, simple way of putting it. Do you feel that you also atone for yourself to them? Is there an analogue to Judeo-Christian punishment and repentance within paganism?

With paganism being so varied, there’s no set code of ethics. Most pagans tend to believe that people know what the right thing is. They don’t need a father figure to say, “Don’t kill people, and don’t steal.” Most pagans believe in a variation of the Hindu belief in karma, and the variation comes from the fact that pagans tend to believe that what you do will come back to you not in the next life but in this one. …

What do you think are the biggest misconceptions of paganism?

Here’s the biggest one: that we’re anything but normal, that we’re evil, that we’re devil worshipers, that we’re going to steal your baby in the middle of the night. I mean, we all have day jobs and families. I’m just about to start a family. My wife is due in March. …

What’s something that you believe that could apply to anyone?

I really try to accept people for who they are. I very much believe in an individual’s decision to lead their lives for themselves and find meaning however they want, and that process is a beautiful thing. That’s one of the reasons I became a minister, was to help people find what gives meaning to their lives.

And this is true for any religion, but I should say that it’s very difficult for a single individual to be representative of paganism as a whole, because our faith structure is a postmodern one. Paganism—neo-paganism—only really broke on the scene in the ‘50s when England repealed its anti-witchcraft laws. So, fairly uniquely, paganism has always been defined by ease of access to information, which led us to emphasize diversity over orthodoxy, and promote tolerance, and acceptance of people walking their own paths.