Author: Andrew Sullivan

Over at TNC's place, Cynic has a complaint:

I bristle when I see people discuss the culture of poverty as a pathology. That's too self-congratulatory, and too cramped a view. The reality is that, like all cultures, it has aspects that translate well to other circumstances, those that translate poorly, and those that are just plain different. And that's no different than the Culture of Affluence.

Ta-Nehisi riffs on the theme:

People talk about reading books as being written off as "acting-white." I guess. Here's what I know about that: When I was eighteen, binge-drinking and snorting coke was "acting white." I was at Howard then, where a large swath of the student population hailed from high schools where most people didn't go to college. Most of us had watched the crack era unfold firsthand. The notion of coming to college and essentially tempting suicide was seen as the province of "The Culture Of Affluence," of the rich and the foolish, of the white.

And now for our standard disclaimer: This is an expression of how it was processed at the time, and not an accurate depiction of the great variety and richness of the white American experience. I can well imagine that there were also plenty of poor white kids at that time who dismissed such practices as "The Culture of Affluence" also. I am offering some reflection on how we processed the world, and not how the world, in its complex totality, actually worked.

Margaret Haney, a professor of clinical neuroscience and the co-director of the Substance Use Research Center at Columbia University, does some cannabis myth-busting. Among her various data points:

Marijuana can produce dependence but at a lower rate than other drugs of abuse. Epidemiological data suggest that about 42 percent of the U.S. population has tried marijuana and about 9 percent met criteria for dependence on marijuana at some point in their lifetime, while 15 percent met criteria for dependence on alcohol and 32 percent for tobacco.

Gryphen spotlights a Glee-themed spot from the Illinois gubernatorial race:

Tired of political ads? Who isn't? But some are actually pretty fun to watch. Here is an example.

Fun, maybe, but not very effective. Brady is way ahead in the polls.

Spencer Ackerman and Adam Rawnsley continue to dig through the Wikileaks document dump. In this post they focus on the techniques and tools of Iraqi insurgents:

Insurgents didn’t necessarily trust the people they rigged to explode. In November 2006, a U.S. military report warned that some explosive-lined vests were equipped with cameras broadcasting imagery back to insurgent cells and a “secondary detonation device” that could be activated remotely. The idea behind the camera, first unearthed by the Guardian, was to ensure that the suicide bomber had satisfied his superiors that he’d reached a position of maximum potential damage before blowing up. And if he lost his nerve, the report warned, “the observer can detonate the device remotely.” Some of these contraptions were constructed out of U.S. military surplus uniforms.

Virginia Postrel goes in search of a fashionable helmet:

In my article, I briefly mention Yakkay, a Danish startup that offers stylish helmets with changeable covers. "If you make a stylish bicycle helmet you don’t need legislation," says CEO Michael Eide, "and in YAKKAY we wanted to make a helmet people actually want to wear." Now sold in Europe and Canada, Yakkay helmets will be available in the U.S. beginning next spring.

Taking a more radical approach is the Hövding (Chieftain), developed by Swedish designers Anna Haupt and Terese Alstin. An airbag disguised as a collar, it is, as Ariel Schwartz reports on Fast Company.com, "the complete antithesis of the hard-shelled helmets that cyclists have become used to." Six years in development, it will be available next year.

Above is a video of the Hövding in action.

Loyal Democrat Mickey Kaus airs an unusual idea at his new blogging digs:

Call it Instant Recall voting. No longer would you be stuck with the two turkeys picked by the highly polarized primary electorates of the Democrats and Republicans. Voters could reject them both without having, at the same time, to settle on the candidate they actually wanted. Do you have to have a new boyfriend in order to break up with your old boyfriend? I didn't think so. Faced with the unappetizing choice of Angle or Reid, the electorate could just push back from the table. "Waiter, bring me something else."

I can see two ways of implementing a Ratigan Instant Recall. The conventional approach would put "none of the above" on the ballot with the other candidates. If "none" won, then the other candidates would lose. There'd have to be another election. The somebodies who got beat by nobody could be banned from that second election.

Being Mickey, he runs through various permutations on the idea here.

Choire Sicha looks at magazine sales on the iPad:

As things are currently set up, people with iPads who want to buy a magazine on their shiny device have to go searching for it. There's no magazine rack, or what have you. Still, I'm not sure you can put that sunny a face on the figures for sales of magazines on the iPad, as reported by Ad Age. Wired at least started extremely strong, at 100,000. Now they do about 30,000 an issue. Still pretty good!

People is doing 10,000 an issue (and that includes free digital issues to print subscribers). Vanity Fair does about 9000 an issue. Other magazines are doing even fewer sales; many are doing about 1% of newsstand sales. There were 4.19 million iPads sold in the third quarter of this year; some say there's about 7.5 million iPads sold in total, though some estimate it's just 5 million. So at most, and the very most conservatively, at one point for Wired, during the to-date best-selling moment for magazines on the iPad, 1 in 50 iPad owners bought an issue. That number dropped to about 1 in 150. What are the other 149 people doing with their iPads is what I want to know.

Maybe their kids took them.

Andrew Sprung joins the debate:

I'm not sure that the various goods under discussion can be placed hierarchically.  With that caveat, I"m not sure that preservation of "thought, conscience and speech" is the primary good of democracy. In my view, democracy is essential because it holds governments accountable, and gives the people the power to throw the bums out, and so allows for course corrections when government policy is leading to disaster or when it allows those in power to steal all the wealth.  An elected president who curtails freedoms, but nonetheless allows for an unrigged election — if such a thing has ever existed — would be preferable in my view to an enlightened despot who hands absolute power to an inheritor of unknown disposition.

Joel Wing explains how the Wikileaks report is playing in Iraq:

After WikiLeaks released its cache of U.S. military war logs, Iraq’s political parties were quick to put them to work in their internal struggle to form a new Iraqi government. Iyad Allawi’s Iraqi National Movement said that the documents gave proof that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki should not stay in office. They claimed that under his rule Iraqi security forces tortured prisoners, and that was a sign of Maliki’s abuse of power. They went on to say that having all the decision-making and security forces in the hands of one man was what led to the mistreatment in Iraqi prisons. In response, the prime minister’s office issued a statement saying that the timing of the WikiLeaks release might have been politically motivated, and that there was no proof of abuses under Maliki’s rule. The problem with playing this card is that almost all of the parties that have been involved in the government have committed acts of torture.