Author: Andrew Sullivan

The Enduring Appeal Of Bullshit

Meet the

Brendan Nyhan considers why absurd claims spread so quickly on the Internet:

[T]ake the bizarre but instructive example of the woman who claimed to have had an implant to add a third breast – clearly an example of an implausible story that was too good to check. Initial reports circulated widely on social networks, totaling over 188,000 shares according to Emergent’s data. The story was quickly discredited after it was reported that a three-breast prosthesis had been previously found in the woman’s luggage, but the articles reporting that it was false never attracted even one-third as many shares as the initial false reports.

That hoax may seem silly, but it’s instructive about the problem with rumors –  they’re often much more interesting than the truth. The challenge for fact-checkers, it seems, is to make the facts as fun to share as the myths they seek to replace.

(Screenshot from the New York Post)

Not Minding The Gap

Alice Robb discourages excessive gender-gap-awareness:

The “bike gap” is the latest in a small spate of “gender gaps” that don’t seem worth our concern. At New York’s “The Cut,” Ann Friedman says women don’t feel “at home in the world of weed.” It’s not entirely clear that Tracie Egan Morrissey, writing for Jezebel, is joking when she urges women to “close the gender gap on being potheads.” She cites research suggesting that nearly twice as many men smoke weed (or at least admit to it). The only possible explanation, according to Morrissey, is sexism. “When it comes to cultural representations, it’s generally accepted that the world of weed is a guy thing,” she writes. …

“No one bemoans the gender gap in female dominated activities,” points out journalist Jessica Grose in an email. “Where are the men in knitting or flower arranging?” Or, for that matter, where are the men in Soul Cycle? Marcotte admits that indoor cycling is dominated by women; she estimates that women make up “80 to 100 percent” of most spin classes. Yet she sees no problem.

Friedman dissents:

Closing a gender gap for the sake of closing the gap is going about it all backwards. Usually gaps are symptomatic of other problems. It is important to interrogate why a gap exists, and address that problem. I don’t think you can argue that women are naturally less interested in cycling or video games or weed than men are—our choices are shaped by the culture and society we live in. That society is pretty sexist!

Instead of looking at the world with all its many group differences and appreciating that, one kind of liberal sees it all as a problem to be fixed. Let me just reiterate my own view: vive la différence! Amanda Marcotte agrees with Friedman:

I don’t think the fact that men smoke more pot than women is a problem, in and of itself, that needs fixing. But the fact that men don’t feel guilty about firing up a joint and playing Call of Duty while women think they should be spending that time on “worthwhile” activities perhaps bears a little more interrogation.

Michael Barone inserts evolutionary theory into the debate:

There are salient differences between men and women, on average, as the natural result of the evolutionary process, and those differences are reflected in different behavior and different career choices, again on average. We want a society where people can make the choices they want, but we fool ourselves if we think that in such a society men’s and women’s choices would be statistically indistinguishable.

Ya think?

Is Baseball A Religion?

As October nears, George Will answers the question this way:

Part of the beauty of baseball, and sport generally, is that it doesn’t mean a damn thing. It’s valued for itself. Now, it can be the pursuit of excellence. dish_baseballprayer It is competition tamed and made civil by rules. It is aggression channeled in a wholesome direction. These are all virtues. They tiptoe up to the point and stop well short of giving baseball meaning. It’s a game. It’s a very pretty, demanding, and dangerous game.

I do think that baseball satisfies a longing in people, particularly urban people. There is a vestigial tribal impulse in all of us. For instance, when you get on the L and the cars begin to fill up with people wearing their Cub blue and you’re all going to the same place for the same reason, for about three hours a little community exists. It disperses after three hours, but it will come back tomorrow.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan talked about what he called the “liberal expectancy.” He said that with the coming of modernity the two drivers of history, religion and ethnicity, would lose their saliency. Sport caters to this and entertains this desire for group identification. But there’s nothing transcendent about baseball.

Update from a reader:

George Freaking Will and baseball? Seriously? Any post about Will and baseball should be accompanied by this SNL skit.

(Photo from 2012 Giants-Padres game by Joel Henner)

Poor Choices

Linda Tirado, author of Hand To Mouth, explains why the poor often make terrible decisions:

I smoke. It’s expensive. It’s also the best option. You see, I am always, always exhausted. It’s a stimulant. When I am too tired to walk one more step, I can smoke and go for another hour. When I am enraged and beaten down and incapable of accomplishing one more thing, I can smoke and I feel a little better, just for a minute. It is the only relaxation I am allowed. It is not a good decision, but it is the only one that I have access to. It is the only thing I have found that keeps me from collapsing or exploding.

I make a lot of poor financial decisions. None of them matter, in the long term. I will never not be poor, so what does it matter if I don’t pay a thing and a half this week instead of just one thing?

Dreher, who was initially sympathetic to Tirado, had second thoughts after a reader dug up a 2013 hit piece on her. In an interview with Danielle Kurtzleben, Tirado defends herself against such attacks:

DK: You were accused of being a hoax after that “Poverty Thoughts” essay came out. Is that flaring up again now, with your book coming out? What’s your response to all that?

LT: I’m a published author at this point, and The Nation did a very, very good job of reporting on that. But most of the criticism I’ve seen centers around my decision-making processes. What I see a lot of is people talking about like things I have to explain — like why did you do this or why did you do that? A lot of people are confused about how I couldn’t, for instance, feed myself when I could pay my electric bill.

The Guardian also caught up with Tirado:

[Q.] Were you expecting what happened after your essay was published?

[A.] Oh, God, no! I was just on a message board. I was just talking to my friends the same way I’d done for many years. Then I went to bed, and then I went to work. It took me about two weeks to realise I was awake because I was pretty sure I was having a really fucked-up dream. There is no processing what happens when the internet looks at you and says: it’s your turn. It was insane: people were outside my house, they were calling my elderly relatives, I got 20,000 emails in a week. I still have no idea why it was this piece at this moment; it’s nothing me and my friends haven’t been saying for years. I don’t understand why it was controversial. Period.

Meanwhile, Andrea Louise Campbell, author of Trapped In The Safety Net: One Family’s Struggle, shares another harrowing story of poverty:

In February 2012 my sister-in-law Marcella was in a car accident on her way to nursing school, where she was working towards a career which she hoped would catapult her and my brother Dave into middle-class security. Instead, the accident plunged them into the world of American poverty programs. Marcella is now a quadriplegic, paralyzed from the chest down. She needs round-the-clock personal care and assistance.

The only source – public or private – for a lifetime of such coverage is Medicaid. But because Medicaid is the government health insurance for the poor, she and my brother must be poor in order to qualify. (Medicare does not cover long-term supports and services, and private long-term care insurance is time-limited and useless to a 32-year-old who needs decades of care). Thus, Marcella and Dave embarked on a hellish journey to lower their income and shed their modest assets to meet the state limits for Medicaid coverage.

To meet the income requirement, my brother reduced his work hours to make just 133 percent of the poverty level (around $2,000 per month for their family). Anything he earns above that amount simply goes to Medicaid as their “share of cost” – a 100-percent tax.

Face Of The Day

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A man takes a picture with his mobile phone of a pro-democracy protest on Nathan Road, a major route through the heart of the Kowloon district of Hong Kong, on September 29, 2014. Police fired tear gas as tens of thousands of pro-democracy demonstrators brought parts of central Hong Kong to a standstill on September 28, in a dramatic escalation of protests that have gripped the semi-autonomous Chinese city for days. By Alex Ogle/AFP/Getty Images.

Take It As Unread

Mallory Ortberg kicks off a Toast thread by coming clean about the books and TV shows she’s only pretended to know:

I will get the ball rolling: I have never seen The Wire. I have seen the pilot for Friday Night Lights three times and the pilot for The West Wing four; I have never seen any other episode for either show. I have never gotten more than three chapters into Lucky Jim because it wasn’t funny and also I hated it. At least two separate friends have lent me their cherished copies of Mary McCarthy’s The Group and I have returned their copies to both of them unopened. I have never read Octavia Butler and I’ve gone for so long without admitting it, I don’t know how I’ll get on after confessing. …

I have read two Chelsea Handler autobiographies. This is not germane to the topic, but I felt the need to confess. I read the first half and the last chapter of The Brothers Karamazov but skipped most of the important stuff. I do not know if I have ever read Camille Paglia. I have a vague idea of who she is — in my mind she is a little bit connected with Fran Leibowitz? — and I know a lot of my friends get mad about her. That’s pretty much it.

I have never read Infinite Jest. I have done my best to give the impression that I have in conversation without ever actually making outright claims, but I have not read even a single word of David Foster Wallace’s fiction. I have never read A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, and I do not believe that I ever shall.

The Case For Slow And Steady

Olga Khazan explains why being in a hurry can be so counterproductive:

Do you park in the first spot you see, even if it means a longer, grocery-laden walk back from the store later? When unloading the dishwasher, do you quickly shove all the Tupperware into a random cabinet, thereby getting the dishes-doing process over with faster—but also setting yourself up for a mini-avalanche of containers and lids?

In a recent study published in Psychological Science, Pennsylvania State psychologists coined a new term for this phenomenon: Precrastination, or “the tendency to complete, or at least begin, tasks as soon as possible, even at the expense of extra physical effort.” … Why do we do this? Holding a goal in our minds taxes our working memory, the authors write, and just doing something—anything—allows us to dump that memory faster. Last year my colleague Julie Beck explained how this works with unpleasant experiences: We’ll want to get it over with faster in order to lessen our feelings of dread.

A Gloomy Take On Global Democracy

John Gray finds a sobering message in Francis Fukuyama’s latest book, Political Order and Political Decay, about what it takes to make democracy work:

One of the merits of this ambitious and wide-ranging book is that it recognises the daunting difficulties of creating an effective state – democracy’s most essential precondition. ‘Before a state can be constrained by either law or democracy’, Fukuyama writes, ‘it needs to exist. This means, in the first instance, the establishment of a centralized executive and a bureaucracy.’ Much of the book is a catalogue of the vicissitudes of state-building, and Fukuyama recounts in impressive detail the disparate results in countries such as Prussia, Italy and the United States. Part of the book is given over to examining semi-failed states, with an instructive chapter devoted to Nigeria. Here Fukuyama’s analysis is incisive: ‘Lack of democracy is not the core of the country’s problems.’ What Nigeria lacks is ‘a strong, modern, and capable state … The Nigerian state is weak not only in technical capacity and its ability to enforce laws impersonally and transparently. It is also weak in a moral sense: it has a deficit of legitimacy.’

In some ways Political Order and Political Decay may be Fukuyama’s most impressive work to date. The upshot of his argument is that functioning democracy is impossible wherever an effective modern state is lacking. Since fractured and failed states are embedded in many parts of the world, the unavoidable implication is that hundreds of millions or billions of people will live without democracy for the foreseeable future. It’s a conclusion that anyone who thinks realistically is bound to accept. It’s also a view that runs counter to nearly all currents of prevailing opinion. Perhaps it’s not surprising that Fukuyama – who is not known for challenging ruling orthodoxies – makes little of this aspect of his analysis. At the same time, it is a conclusion that is hard to square with his continuing talk of ‘the globalization of democracy’.