Andrew Sullivan

What’s Next For The WaPo?

How Josh Marshall understands the sale of the paper:

What Bezos is doing isn’t philanthropy. He’s buying a for profit company and presumably aims to run it as a profit. But from a broader vantage point, it represents one of our Gilded Age robber barons taking his ample wealth and directing toward what is something like a public trust. I think that’s a good thing. In that sense, I think it’s similar, though not quite as altruistic and on nothing like the scale of what Bill Gates is doing with his vast fortune, investing in generally unglamorous projects that have immense impact in human terms for people around the world.

Pareene disagrees:

[B]illionaires don’t buy newspapers to run them as public goods, and smart billionaires don’t buy newspapers to make money. Billionaires buy newspapers for influence. That is the point.

The Post is among the most influential in the nation. Second- or third-most, depending on which party is in power. Buying the Washington Post is sort of like retaining the best-connected lobbyist in Washington, in a parallel world in which lobbyists are universally praised for their value to functioning democracies. Bezos needn’t even exercise his influence in the vulgar fashion of a Murdoch. He can merely staff the paper with people attuned to his worldview and allow the opinion page to evolve to reflect his interests naturally.

Sasha Issenberg bets that Bezos is more interested in the WaPo’s delivery infrastructure:

UPS, like its peers in the postal and shipping sectors, never aspired to offer same-day delivery. In fact, only one industry has consistently done so: newspapers. Their delivery networks — hub-and-spoke fleets trucking bundles of newsprint into warehouses and out to retailers, with individual delivery drivers bringing single products to pre-selected doorsteps in neighborhoods they know well. The Washington Post, like nearly every newspaper in the country, already offers pre-dawn same-day delivery, a service extended to subscribers for less than the cost of buying individual copies from a newsstand.

Newspapers may become obsolete, but there is no reason that their distribution networks have to die, too.

Massie zooms out:

There are two roads, I think, open to the media. You can be very, very large and survive or you can be very, very small and thrive. The choice is Walmart or the boutique corner shop; everything in between seems likely to be pulverised.

And The New Doctor Is …

Peter Capaldi, of “The Thick Of It” fame. Here’s the inevitable mash-up of foul-mouthed Malcolm Tucker as the Doctor:

Capaldi is a life-long fan of the series:

“It is so wonderful not to keep this secret any more,” he said. “For a while I couldn’t even tell my daughter. Being asked to play the Doctor is an amazing privilege. Like the Doctor himself I find myself in a state of utter terror and delight. I can’t wait to get started.”

Jenny Colgan approves:

[I]f we are to have a 12th white male … could we have done any better? Working on the excellent template of angular Scottishness perfected by David Tennant, the possibilities for Peter Capaldi, an actor with such extraordinary experience and range, are fun and immense. There will be an undeniably dangerous edge: not just of Malcolm Tucker – viewers may also remember him as the Angel in Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, full of purity and beauty while hiding terrible secrets within; or the gentle, heartbreaking moral conflict of his John Frobisher in Torchwood’s Children of Earth, one of the most underrated pieces of television of the past 10 years.

Mary Elizabeth Williams likes the pick as well:

He’s a versatile everyman who’s also utterly unique. In short, he is everything a classic Doctor should be – able to pivot from slapstick goofball to heartbreakingly tragic figure in the span of a single scene. And as one of the oldest actors to play a man who’s already nine centuries old, Capaldi also brings a worldly gravitas that will serve in contrast to the lithe physicality of his previous two predecessors.

Ted Kissell bemoans the choice, sighing, “another white male”:

[N]ot taking a bolder leap in the casting and switching up the gender and/or race of the Doctor feels like a missed opportunity. The Feminism of Doctor Who Tumblr, in anticipation of the announcement, ran a feature called The Time Lady Project, which suggested dozens of potential actresses who could play the part. Some of these were pie-in-the-sky because they were such big stars (Tilda Swinton, Helen Mirren, Emma Thompson), but many of them were in that really-good-but-not-too-big-to-commit-to Who’s-grueling-schedule range. And having a woman as the smartest, bravest person in the universe, being able to fix any problem, save the world with her wits, a magical vehicle, and boundless courage–who wouldn’t want to watch that show?

SEK is on the same page:

I wanted Steven Moffat to make a selection as outrageously ambitious as the show itself can be, and Peter Capaldi is more of the same. Which isn’t to say he’ll be a terrible Doctor, as Capaldi’s a fine actor and will bring to the role a gravitas it’s lacked since the end of David Tennant’s run. But as heroes go, the Doctor’s just “a madman with a box” whose power, such as it is, is the ability to bluff his way out of a war. And as powers go, “intelligence” is limitless in its potential appeal because everyone likes to think they’re smart. Having him embodied by an endless parade of white British males creates an unwholesome and unnecessary connection between intelligence, acts of extreme whiteness and penises.

Previous Dish on the expectations for the 12th Doctor here and here.

Can The Death Penalty Be Defeated?

Janell Ross talks to activists who think capital punishment’s days are numbered. Recent progress:

Since 2000, death-penalty sentences handed down by state courts and juries have declined nearly 75 percent, and the number of executions has been cut in half, said Richard Dieter, executive director of then Death Penalty Information Center, a Washington, D.C.-based anti-death-penalty nonprofit.

Keith Humphreys argues that “the most important thing to know about the death penalty is that it is something only a small number of states do”:

If one state — Texas — abolished the death penalty its prevalence would drop by over a third (Texas has executed 503 of the 1342 people who have been put to death since the 1976 restoration of capital punishment). More broadly, as Ross notes, southern states today execute four times as many people as the rest of the states do combined.

What Americans as whole think about the death penalty therefore doesn’t matter much. What matters is what people in Texas and Florida and Virginia think about the death penalty. Those are the hearts and minds that must be changed for this practice to end in this country.

(Interactive map of inmates on death row as of May 2012 from the website Death Penalty Curriculum)

Are Mermaids The New Vampires?

Carolyn Turgeon thinks so:

Conflicted, frustrated sexualities are integral to both the vampire and the mermaid. But compared with vampires (or zombies too, for that matter), the mermaid makes for a much livelier figure: She’s not dead, for one, plus she has a bright, pretty tail and exists in full sunlight. And she’s female. (Mermen are so rare as to be culturally negligible.) She’s primal and wild, from the deep ocean — she is death and birth and the subconscious and the great mother. And typically she is represented as super hot — think of Daryl Hannah in Splash or pretty much any other mermaid you’ve ever seen — yet she might kill you if you get too close, as with the killer mermaids in Pirates of the Caribbean. Even Disney’s friendly flame-haired Ariel swims around shipwrecks and skeletons at the bottom of the sea.

But the appeal of the mermaid may depend primarily on her flexibility.

Mermaids offer an image of female sexuality that is both potent and nonthreatening to men. As Stephin Merritt recently commented of mermaids, “I think straight men like the idea of women with all the knockers and none of the complicated parts.” Mermaids allow women to tap into something essential and powerful without becoming “unlikable” or unattractive. For women, mermaids offer the freedom of different interpretive options depending on her vicarious needs: Mermaids can be read as sexed or unsexed, vulnerable or terrifying, accessible or forever remote.

Forrest Wickman isn’t buying it:

I can give you one simple reason that mermaids aren’t the new vampires, and never will be: genitals. If you want people to fantasize about you, or about being you, genitals are pretty much a requirement.

Mer-partisans will try to counter this. They’ll claim that the lack of genitals just adds an alluring unattainability. Wasn’t that the point of Twilight, after all? This is factually wrong and woefully misguided. As anyone who knows anything about Stephenie Meyer’s saga will know, the whole driving force behind all the sexual tension in those books and movies is the fact that Bella and Edward are capable of having (spoiler alert) wild, headboard-tearing vampire sex. If there wasn’t that possibility of romance—and with mermaids, to make a long story short, there basically isn’t—there would be no sexual tension. Has there ever been a lasting vampire series that didn’t indulge in a little fang-banging? It’s the sole reason for True Blood’s existence.

Recent Dish coverage of The Little Mermaid here.

(Photo by Kathryn Rotondo)

Contaminated By Wealth

Christopher Mims flags a UK study revealing that the rich absorb different toxins than the poor:

People who can afford sushi and other sources of aquatic lean protein appear to be paying the price with a buildup of heavy metals in their bodies, found Jessica Tyrrell and colleagues from the University of Exeter. Using data from the US National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, Tyrrell et al. found that compared to poorer people, the rich had higher levels of mercury, arsenic, caesium and thallium, all of which tend to accumulate in fish and shellfish.

The rich also had higher levels of benzophenone-3, aka oxybenzone, the active ingredient in most sunscreens, which is under investigation by the EU and, argue some experts, may actually encourage skin cancer.

Ben Richmond notes the toxins more common at the bottom of the social ladder:

Those of lower socioeconomic status had higher levels of lead, cadmium and three types of phthalates—compounds commonly found in plastics. The reasons for these disparate chemical levels point to disparate lifestyles and environments. [Also], lead and cadmium come into those of lower socioeconomic status via cigarette smoking and their jobs.

The Geography Of Milk

If you had milk with your coffee this morning, thank evolution:

During the most recent ice age, milk was essentially a toxin to adults because – unlike children –they could not produce the lactase enzyme required to break down lactose, the main sugar in milk. But as farming started to replace hunting and gathering in the Middle East around 11,000 years ago, cattle herders learned how to reduce lactose in dairy products to tolerable levels by fermenting milk to make cheese or yogurt. Several thousand years later, a genetic mutation spread through Europe that gave people the ability to produce lactase – and drink milk – throughout their lives.

The remnants of that pattern are still visible today. In southern Europe, lactase persistence is relatively rare – less than 40 percent in Greece and Turkey. In Britain and Scandinavia, by contrast, more than 90 percent of adults can digest milk.

(Map from Nature, based on figures from International Dairy Journal)

The Illegal Cigarette Trade

Keith Humphreys worries that high cigarette taxes encourage black markets and drug-war excesses:

In New York City, a legal, fully taxed pack of cigarettes costs $10-15; Chicago prices are only slightly less. Working class and poor addicted smokers (i.e., most smokers) thus face great temptation to enter into the black market. Columbia University Professor Shelley Cantrell documented that “the $5 man” – a street seller of untaxed black market cigarettes – is now a pervasive feature of life in low-income New York City neighborhoods.

He thinks the federal government should push states to adopt moderate cigarette taxes:

If one imagined for the sake of argument that [a tax of] $1.50-$2.50 a pack were the initial chosen range for receiving federal tax largesse, that would give the 28 states below that range an incentive to hike state taxes. Citizens in those states would smoke substantially less, improving public health and more fully reimbursing the public purse for the costs of smoking. And out-of-state gangs of tobacco smugglers would have far less incentive to maintain a presence in the state. High-tax states (e.g., Washington, New York, New Jersey) would reap little net revenue from that part of their tax which was over $2.50 a pack because of the loss of the federal tax rebate. This would give them an incentive to stop further increases or even cut back. This could have the lamentable effect of reducing the frequency of price-driven smoking cessation, but those same states would benefit in terms of shrinking black markets.

When Rulings On Human Rights Work

Last year, Erik Voeten and Laurence Helfer found that international institutions can effectively push countries to protect gay rights – but only where popular support for gay rights is low and the government is secular or urban. Voeten elaborates:

In countries with high levels of public acceptance and an urban and non-religious government, policy change [toward recognizing civil rights] happens without international legal action. Rural, religious, and nationalist governments tend to resist liberalization regardless. Yet low public support but a government that is not necessarily ideologically opposed to liberalization creates an opportunity for an international intervention to make a difference. We estimate that a substantial number of countries, especially in Eastern and Southern Europe, have more liberal LGBT rights laws than we would have expected in the absence of international court action.

He adds that court rulings have the greatest effect in countries where homophobia is widespread, “suggesting that the institution matters where it is needed most”:

There is little evidence that the legal changes in these European countries have noticeably changed public attitudes or that they have eliminated discrimination in society. Nonetheless, it matters that you cannot be thrown in jail for consensual sex.

Luck Of The Draw

Adam Piore examines the psychology of playing the lottery:

Carnegie Mellon’s [Professor George] Loewenstein and colleagues demonstrated it’s possible to change how many lottery tickets people will buy by making them think —or not think—about their purchase in a larger context. The researchers gave one group of study participants $1 at a time, five times, and asked them if they wanted to buy a lottery ticket. They gave a second group $5 and asked how many tickets they wanted, while a third group received $5 and was told they had only two choices: they could spend it all on tickets or not buy any tickets at all. The people in the first group purchased twice as many tickets as those asked explicitly what percentage of the $5 they wanted to spend on tickets. Members of the all or nothing group opted for no tickets 87 percent of the time.

One of the things the experiment shows is that lottery players are often “thinking myopically,” says Romel Mostafa, who co-authored the 2008 study with Loewenstein, and is now an Assistant Professor of Business, Economics, and Public Policy at Ivey Business School, Western University. “We think about these purchases in one or two at a time. But when the decisions aggregate over time, it adds up. And if I were to bracket the spending over a longer period of time, I would not have bought it in the first place.”

(Photo by Flickr user DaGoaty)

Author: Andrew Sullivan