Author: Andrew Sullivan

A reader says the case for no-till farming is more complicated than it seems:

While the evaporation argument made by the Ars Technica article is valid, I don’t see the benefit from the change in albedo – the amount of sunlight reflected from the Earth’s surface. During most of the hot and sunny portion of the summer, for example, the crops we grow on our family farm in Missouri will have grown tall (corn) or canopied (soybeans) so that the residue is in shadow. Other crops like winter wheat are planted and harvested on a different cycle, so there might be more benefits from the effect on albedo.

Regarding carbon affects, there are drawbacks to no-till systems. Typically, more herbicide is required to kill weeds, and more nitrogen (which is produced with fossil energy) is required for fertilizer. Farmers argue about the comparative yields, but generally, flat land farmers still use conventional tillage. A recent USDA analysis shows that 35.5 percent of US cropland was planted with no tillage in 2009. No-till use has increased a great deal since it began to be adopted in the 1980s, but even in the US it’s still used on a minority of farms. There’s research under way at the Economic Research Service of the USDA on the potential of various methods to mitigate carbon dioxide additions to the atmosphere. Here‘s an example of their analysis [partly illustrated in the above graph].

Overall, higher temperatures and the greater risks and uncertainty of more extreme weather conditions are driving forecasts for 15- to 20-percent reductions in crop yields over the next 25 to 50 years. The implications of those forecasts are sobering.

Susan Cheever, author of the recently-released e.e.cummings: A Life, reveals a mystery that haunted her while working on the poet’s biography: his father was killed and his mother injured in a 1926 car accident caused by driving over railroad tracks into the path of an oncoming train. How could the pair have missed it hurtling toward them? The incident, never fully explained in previous books about Cummings, made her think about the research methods available to biographers (NYT):

Three official types of research are the foundation of writing biography: Primary-source research uses original papers found in libraries, archives or occasionally an attic; secondary-source research uses the work of other writers and researchers; interviews can be with experts, people whose memories are useful or other writers and researchers. There is a fourth kind of research. It doesn’t have a fancy name; it is just going to the places where the story happened. Landscapes often speak, and houses hold ancient scenes and memories and secrets.

She reveals how this fourth research method helped her solve what happened that night in New Hampshire almost nine decades ago:

Once I saw the crossroads, the accident made perfect sense. The tracks were perfectly flush with the road and came toward it at a 45-degree angle from the right — Rebecca Cummings’s blind side in the driver’s seat, especially in the snow. I walked around a bit, noticing which of the trees were second growth and which might have been there in 1926. I could almost hear the screech of brakes from the locomotive and the dreadful sound of metal crushing the wooden frame of the Franklin and shattering the windshield. I could see the brakemen running through the snow and imagine Rebecca’s insistence that her husband’s body be covered. The Chevy engine ticked quietly. An occasional car passed going north. Then the dachshund began to whine. I was back in 2012. I said a small prayer for the soul of Edward Cummings and got in the car for the short drive up to Silver Lake.

(Image: self-portrait of e.e. cummings)

The emails on religious freedom keep pouring in, and I’d like to sleep on them before responding at length again. The arguments are dense and complex and I want some time to think them through some more and not get too defensive in response. So bear with me.

Today, I noted the astonishingly categorical dismissal of a ban on marriage equality by a Bush appointee judge in Kentucky, of all places. We mulled one response to the ACA fights: why not make all contraceptives over-the-counter medications? I argued that, in the context of the culture war, the religious right is actually losing – and not winning – most of its battles. We celebrated rap as poetry. And we said goodbye to pi.

The time-lapse above is of the recent massive pro-democracy protest in Hong Kong. I guess I needed cheering up a bit.

The most popular post of the day was KY Lubricates The Case (apologies for the headline); followed by Perspective, Please.

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. 17 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. One writes:

So, after 13 months of being unemployed (largely of my own doing … following my heart and all that), I have finally found meaningful employment in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, working on an environmental-public policy issue that I’d bet most of your readers care about.  After a few years in DC and NYC, I’m now living in the middle of the country, but still feel happily (albeit much more tangentially) connected to the freneticism of our nation’s public life – thanks largely to this blog, you and your readership.

Your daily posts on politics and culture and reading your readers’ sane and informed commentary during this rather destabilizing period in our country has helped me keep my political-moral compass. And your “View From Your Window” has kept me feeling happily in love with the beauty of this country – urban, rustic, autumn, summer, whatever.  VFYW was a small and symbolic, but integral part of what led me to Colorado.

So, one of the first decisions I made after getting the call that I’d been hired (after roughly 120 job applications) was doing my fair share to keep this blog going.  I feel bad that I skimped for as long as I have.  But now that I have a steady income, I’m trying to align my paycheck with my values.  So, you get $20.

See you in the morning.

In an interview, Andrew Bowie, a jazz-playing philosopher, claims that what we can learn about politics from the symphony has to do with practice rather than theory. He points to Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said’s East-West Divan Orchestra, along with jazz, as examples of what he means:

The Barenboim-Said Orchestra offers an example of communication between people whose political views are often totally opposed. Barenboim cites two musicians from the orchestra on opposed sides of the Arab-Israeli disputes who cannot agree at all on issues of justice and politics, but who can agree on the importance of getting the phrasing in a Beethoven symphony right. Philosophers also hardly ever agree on anything, but they have to coexist, so finding modes of communication and interaction which circumvent inevitable differences should be crucial. The point of something like music, where participation is essential, is that what happens in successful participation cannot be fully cashed out in discursive terms. Our political judgements, on the other hand, should have to be publicly cashed out, and this means we often arrive at irreconcilable conflicts, where both sides’ judgements may, of course, anyway be mistaken. …

[T]he world of music is … actually notorious for being riven by conflict – but it does also offer examples of cooperation and communication beyond everyday antagonisms in other domains. That is one of the things I love about the jazz scene, where people from wildly different backgrounds, with very different levels of experience and skill, and very different musical conceptions, can play together successfully.

“Stern fathers often make the mistake of believing that their children will not defend the home or the values of the family if martial discipline is not instilled. But turning the homestead into a garrison then drives the children to go AWOL. Instead, all the father has to do is make his home a place of love and, yes, comfort. Having done that, his sons will defend it from any real threat with fire in their eyes.

Ideologues prefer the idea of an ideological nation, a crusader state. Crusader states inspire great battle poetry. But a democratic republic like America needs no purpose, no mission civilisatrice. It needs no poetry. America just needs to be our home — that will require sacrifice enough,” – Michael Brendan Dougherty, taking on David Brooks.

Cody Delistraty examines new evidence that musical talent may be a sexually selected trait:

For over 140 years, research had not been able to verify Darwin’s theory, that is until a recent study conducted by Benjamin D. Charlton confirmed that indeed, “music is a product of sexual selection through mate choice.”

But the findings come with some nuance. Charlton and his fellow researchers at the University of Sussex found that women in the middle of their menstrual cycle – at their most fertile – tended to believe men with strong musical abilities carried better genes than men without that skill and thus preferred them as mates. For the study, 1,465 women listened to four different piano compositions of increasing levels of complexity and were asked which composer they desired most. Women who were not at a point of peak conception were generally ambivalent, not preferring a single composer over another, but those who were on days six through 14 of their respective reproductive cycles overwhelmingly preferred the composer of the most complex song.