Author: Andrew Sullivan

The Power Of Names

Cody C. Delistraty mulls it over:

Not being able to pronounce a name spells a death sentence for relationships. That’s because the ability to pronounce someone’s name is directly related to how close you feel to that person. Our brains tend to believe that if something is difficult to understand, it must also be high-risk. In fact, companies with names that are simple and easy to pronounce see significantly higher investments than more complexly named stocks, especially just after their initial public offerings when information on the stock’s fundamentals are most scarce. People with easier to pronounce names are also judged more positively and tend to be hired and promoted more often than their more obscurely named peers.

There are more variables at play than just pronunciation, though. In competitive fields that have classically been dominated by men, such as law and engineering, women with sexually ambiguous names tend to be more successful. This effect is known as the Portia Hypothesis (named for the heroine of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice who disguises herself as a lawyer’s apprentice and takes on the name Balthazar to save the titular merchant, Antonio). A study found that female lawyers with more masculine names– such as Barney, Dale, Leslie, Jan, and Rudell – tend to have better chances of winning judgeships than their more effeminately named female peers. All else being equal, changing a candidate’s name from Sue to Cameron tripled a candidate’s likelihood of becoming a judge; a change from Sue to Bruce quintupled it.

Dish Shirts Are Here!

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[Re-posted from Monday. Responses from readers here and here]

Finally – after lots of your input – we’re psyched to offer you a choice of four custom Dish shirts. If you’re dying to take a look and want to skip the descriptions below, head straight to our storefront and buy your shirt now!

We thought we’d start our store simply enough by offering two t-shirts. The first is a light blue one emblazoned with the Dish logo across the chest (see above on the left). Or if you prefer the baying beagle by herself, check out the gray Howler Tee (modeled by the dashing bear on the right). I love the lone howler myself – only other Dishheads will get it.

andrew_howler-teeWe picked American Apparel t-shirts that use high-quality screen-printing and a higher quality tri-blend fabric that’s super soft, durable, and has a bit of stretch that retains its slim shape. There are  sizes for both men and women – no generic “unisex” option this time around, as you insisted. We’ve also lowered the price by half compared with the t-shirts we did a few years ago.

Want something a little more formal you can wear to the office, church, or restaurant? Check out the polo shirts, which come in white (see below left) and navy blue (see above right). Both of these classic polos are made with a “Silk Touch” poly-cotton fabric and embroidered with the familiar Dish beagle on the left breast. The polos run a little large, and the high-quality fabric is shrink resistant, so keep that in mind when you pick your size. For the perfect fit, consult the sizing chart.

andrew_white-poloBecause we’re doing the higher-quality screen-printing option with a bulk-ordering process, in order to keep prices down, these particular shirts will only be available for a limited time, so you need to order very soon to be part of the first printing. So if you’re interested in a shirt, don’t hesitate – buy now!

As always, we welcome your feedback in the in-tray. And send us a pic of you wearing your new shirt! You may see it appear on the blog.

But first go here to grab your new t-shirt or polo. It’s one critical way to keep the Dish independent and running for years to come. And they’re pretty sweet as well.

Write Wingers, Ctd

Responding to Adam Kirsch and Adam Bellow on the subject of conservative fiction, Douthat argues provocatively that there aren’t enough bad conservative artists out there:

[T]o be truly great, truly lasting, a novel or any other exercise in storytelling has to transcend cliches and oversimplifications, has to capture something of the deep complexity of human affairs. So at a certain level of seriousness or genius, the problem-or-is-it of conservative underrepresentation in the contemporary arts melts away, because you’re dealing with a range of creators whose talents effectively transcend partisanship and ideological fixations …. It’s that mass-market territory that more often vindicates Jonathan Chait’s powerful argument about the essential liberalism of the culture industry; it’s there that you’ll find the big-business bad guys and multicultural preachiness and paranoid stylings and caricatures of religious conservatives and Ted Mosby-ian sexual assumptions and enviro-propaganda that the right tends, understandably, to react against with anti-Hollywood fury or resigned frustration.

But this suggests a rather strange-sounding riposte to Kirsch’s question, posed after his elevation of writers like Foster Wallace into a kind of conservative literary pantheon. “With all these books to read and admire,” he asks, “why does Adam Bellow continue to believe that conservative writers are a persecuted minority?” Well, one might say, because there aren’t enough mediocre conservative writers and artists at work!

Micah Mattix adds thoughtfully:

Douthat clearly sees the problem with Bellow’s project (at least as he presents it in The National Review), but he seems unwilling to reject it completely. He worries that any attempt to “close the ‘hack gap,'” as he calls it, will make conservatives look bad. (It will.) And he writes that a conscious “conservative investment” in the arts, “as opposed to an aesthetic one, which is how most writing programs and fellowships are conceived even when their politics are fundamentally liberal” may “be foredoomed to failure, or at the very least be putting a limit on the quality of the work it fosters, and a ceiling on its potential success.” Agreed.

But conservatives should not reject Bellow’s proposal because it will make them look bad or be unsuccessful. They should reject it because it is not conservative. It inescapably treats art or culture as a tool, or weapon, in the struggle for power. This, it seems to me, is a progressive or revolutionary conception of art. Even Douthat falls into discussing art and culture in terms of utility or “success.” Part of this is because he’s responding to Bellow’s argument regarding just these things. But it also risks obscuring conservatives’ defense of a proper view of art. … Both should treat art, not as a means to an end, but as an end in itself, which, paradoxically, also makes it useful.

Mission Creep, 1914 Style

Preparations For Remembrance Sunday And Armistice Day

The centennial of the July Crisis that led Europe down the perilous path to World War I has given many historians and scholars of war an occasion to revisit the question of how the European powers managed to blunder into such a bloody fiasco. Stephen Walt asks an equally interesting question: Why on did it take more than four years to correct what was obviously a huge mistake?

Ending the war was difficult because each side’s territorial ambitions and other war aims kept increasing, which made it harder for them to even consider some sort of negotiated settlement. War aims continued to expand in part because each side kept recruiting new allies by promising them territorial gains after the war, which both increased the total number of combatants and widened the geographical scope of the war. Germany promised the Ottoman Empire slices of Russian territory to get it to join the Dual Alliance; in response, London promised several Arab leaders independent kingdoms if they revolted against the Ottomans. The British also bribed Italy to realign by offering it territory along the Adriatic Sea. But all these war-time promises required each side to try to win an even bigger victory, which in turn just spurred their enemies to fight even harder to prevent it.

Each side’s ambitions also grew because politicians had to justify the enormous sacrifices their countrymen were making. The tyranny of “sunk costs” quickly sank in: the more each side lost, the more it had to promise to deliver once victory was achieved. By 1916, therefore, German war aims included annexing Luxemburg, substantial portions of France, making Belgium a vassal state, gaining new colonies in Africa, and carving out a vast new empire in Eastern Europe. For their part, allied war aims included a complete German withdrawal from the territory it had conquered, plus “national self-determination” and the establishment of democratic rule, which implied the dismemberment of the Austrian empire and the reshaping of Germany’s political order, something neither country would agree to until it was totally defeated.

(Photo: A memorial cross and poppy lays on the floor on a blanket of fallen pine needles at the National Memorial Arboretum on November 5, 2013 in Alrewas, Staffordshire. The National Memorial Arboretum is observed a two minute moment silence on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of the year, marking the exact time when guns fell silent at the end of World War I in 1918. By Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)

The Molecular Metropolis

MIT engineering prof Franz-Josef Ulm came up with an analogy for understanding cities as molecular structures:

With colleagues, Ulm began analyzing cities the way you’d analyze a material, looking at factors such as the arrangement of buildings, each building’s center of mass, and how they’re ordered ChicagoILaround each other. They concluded that cities could be grouped into categories: Boston’s structure, for example, looks a lot like an “amorphous liquid.” Seattle is another liquid, and so is Los Angeles. Chicago, which was designed on a grid, looks like glass, he says; New York resembles a highly ordered crystal. …

So far, Ulm says, the work has two potential applications. First, it could help predict and mitigate urban heat island effects, the fact that cities tend to be several degrees warmer than their surrounding areas—a phenomenon that has a major impact on energy use. (His research on how this relates to structure is currently undergoing peer review.) Second, he says that cities’ molecular order (or disorder) may also affect their vulnerability to the kinds of catastrophic weather events that are becoming more frequent thanks to climate change.

(GIF of a satellite image of Chicago created by designer Troy Hyde for his series Lightscapes, previously featured on the Dish here.)

Catholics And Hobby Lobby

The defense of religious freedom by the Catholic hierarchy is not exactly a universal view among the people the hierarchy are alleged to represent, according to the latest Kaiser poll. Catholics are split down the middle on it – 49 – 47 percent. Black and Hispanic Protestants are opposed to the ruling. It looks, in fact, as if it really has little to do with religious liberty and might just be yet another issue where partisan polarization explains it as well as anything else. And look again at the generation gap. One gets the feeling that the current court is desperately trying to shift things firmly to the right before time takes its inevitable revenge.

The Tallest Slum On Earth, Ctd

Last week, the Venezuelan government began removing hundreds of squatters occupying an unfinished 52-story skyscraper in downtown Caracas. Juan Nagel considers the significance of the move:

Press reports suggest the eviction was done at the behest of the Chinese. Apparently, the VENEZUELA-HOUSING-POVERTY-EVICTION-TOWER OF DAVIDbuilding was being eyed as a future headquarters for the Bank of China, and the Venezuelan government is deeply beholden to Chinese interests, particularly in light of generous loans flowing from Beijing to Caracas. If this is true, one has to wonder why the Chinese picked that tower in particular as headquarters for its many Venezuelan interests. Many office buildings in Venezuela have plenty of room. Companies are leaving the country thanks to severe currency restrictions and a deteriorating business climate, and supply is probably outstripping demand.

The answer is in the symbolism. The Tower [of David] lies at the heart of Caracas’s banking district, and as such it was an eyesore, a blatant reminder of the failed promises of the Bolivarian revolution. The Chinese probably viewed this as unacceptable, and they may have wanted to test the government’s resolve in solving politically sensitive problems such as evicting thousands of squatters — many of them chavista supporters – from the middle of the city. It remains to be seen whether or not they will succeed – so far, only 25 percent of the tower’s inhabitants have left the building.

Previous Dish on the Tower of David here. Photo by Leo Ramirez/AFP/Getty Images.

The Formerly Autistic

Ruth Padawer looks at what we know about them:

The research by [clinical neuropsychologist Deborah] Fein and [researcher Catherine] Lord doesn’t try to determine what causes autism or what exactly makes it go away — only that it sometimes disappears. There do, however, seem to be some clues, like the role of I.Q.:

The children in Lord’s study who had a nonverbal I.Q. of less than 70 at age 2 all remained autistic. But among those with a nonverbal I.Q. of at least 70, one-quarter eventually became nonautistic, even though their symptoms at diagnosis were as severe as those of children with a comparable I.Q. who remained autistic (Fein’s study, by design, included only people with at least an average I.Q.) Other research has shown that autistic children with better motor skills, better receptive language skills and more willingness to imitate others also tend to progress more swiftly, even if they don’t stop being autistic. So do children who make striking improvements early on, especially in the first year of treatment — perhaps a sign that something about their brains or their kind of autism enables them to learn more readily. Researchers also say that parental involvement — acting as a child’s advocate, pushing for services, working with the child at home — seems to correlate with more improvements in symptoms. Financial resources, no doubt, help too.

For now, though, the findings are simply hints. “I’ve been studying autistic kids for 40 years,” Fein says, “and I’m pretty good at what I do. But I can’t predict who is going to get better and who’s not based on what they look like when I first see them. In fact, I not only can’t predict who is going to turn out with optimal outcome, but I can’t even predict who will have high-functioning autism and who will be low-functioning. There’s so much we still don’t understand.”

Dick Morris Watch

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A reader sounds the alarm:

The Dish’s favorite prognosticator and the namesake of the Dick Morris Award is now going on the road and lecture on financial planning and “market predictions”:

According to a July 30 press release, Morris is working with Retirement Media Inc. “to educate seasoned investors on how to protect their savings with safe alternatives outside of the stock market.” Morris is headlining several events in the next few months where attendees will “hear market predictions from him.” The event’s website includes a video featuring “A Special Message from Dick Morris” in which Morris warns of people preying on “suckers.”

Perhaps he was hired as Retirement Media’s contrarian investor.  In other words, whatever Dick Morris advises you to do, do the contrary.

Meanwhile, a great omen for the president today:

So third term?