Andrew Sullivan

ISIS Or ISIL?

As regular readers have surely noticed by now, the English-speaking world can’t settle on an acronym for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria/al-Sham/the Levant. Ishaan Tharoor comments on the distinction:

[I]f we are to interpret “greater Syria” as the equivalent of “the Levant” — which it essentially is — then both designations are basically correct. Neither are as accurate as “DAIISH,” the Arabic shorthand for the group that no one in the English-language press seems to use. ISIS has become part of the English-language media’s common parlance and has something of a ring to it — it’s like the ancient Near Eastern goddess. So switching to ISIL is, if nothing else, a bit jarring.

Most of the time, we deploy acronyms that preserve the wording of non-English languages. Many English-language readers following South Asian politics will know the upstart Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party as the PTI, not the Movement for Justice (which is what Washington Post style dictates). The main ruling party in Algeria is almost always referred to as the FLN — for Front de Libération Nationale – and not by what would be its English equivalent, the NLF. And there are myriad more examples.

The Dish has settled on ISIS primarily because of how it rolls off the tongue, but also, as Hassan Hassan points out, “Bilad al-Sham” is the proper term for the Levant as a whole, whereas “al-Sham” is commonly used to mean Syria alone. In any case, a look at the region’s history leads Nick Danforth to conclude that the group’s dream of uniting “Iraq and al-Sham”, by any definition, is a little quixotic:

Both Iraq and al-Sham are place names with their own historical and political cachet, but it’s telling that ISIS’s leadership couldn’t come up with a single geographical term to describe its current area of operations. Al-Sham — which has sometimes been translated as Syria, though perhaps “Greater Syria” or “the Levant” gives a clearer sense of the geography — was most recently the name of an Ottoman province based in Damascus. Iraq, by contrast, was a geographical term that came into its own with the arrival of the British in the 1920s.

Operating on the sound logic of opportunism, ISIS is claiming to unite two regions that even the first opponents of the European mandate system were content to treat as separate. In the immediate aftermath of World War I, some of the earliest Arab nationalists came together in defense of a state covering the entire Levant. When Faisal, champion of the Arab revolt and later king of Iraq, proclaimed in 1920 a short-lived Arab Kingdom based in Damascus, he imagined its territory stretching from the Taurus Mountains in southern Turkey to the Sinai Peninsula, but not east into Iraq.

Book Club: Sensing Too Much, Ctd

A reader responds to the email from the parent of two sons with sensory processing disorder:

As a well-functioning but diagnosed older person on the autism spectrum, taking a walk is an annoying and frustrating event. I friggin’ notice everything. I have to force myself not to read every word in every ad, identify the make and model of every car I pass by, peek around to see what that sound was – even though I know it was just a car door closing or a skateboarder in the distance. It doesn’t ever, ever stop.

That said, taking these walks with Alexandra Horowitz and her guests in On Looking got me out of my head. Getting out of my own head doesn’t happen enough, even when reading insightful books. Now, when I walk, I remember some of the wisdom of her experts’ knowledge and I look for those things. I think, What am I smelling? I look at the annoying signs and instead of repeating the words over and over until I see another annoying sign, I look at the typeface. I force myself to focus. On building materials, on rocks, on asphalt even.

In some small sense, I’ve become a better autistic. Or at least a calmer walker.

Maria Popova, who is hosting the Book Club, responds to the reader:

I love this. It reminds me of a favorite passage from the book:

Right now, you are missing the vast majority of what is happening around you. You are missing the events unfolding in your body, in the distance, and right in front of you. By marshaling your attention to these words, helpfully framed in a distinct border of white, you are ignoring an unthinkably large amount of information that continues to bombard all of your senses: the hum of the fluorescent lights, the ambient noise in a large room, the places your chair presses against your legs or back, your tongue touching the roof of your mouth, the tension you are holding in your shoulders or jaw, the map of the cool and warm places on your body, the constant hum of traffic or a distant lawn-mower, the blurred view of your own shoulders and torso in your peripheral vision, a chirp of a bug or whine of a kitchen appliance.

The challenge this reader articulates, and a challenge for many on the autism spectrum, is that of being unable to turn off precisely those myriad external stimuli that the average person automatically misses. But what’s interesting is that over the past decade, growing bodies of research have shed light on the autistic mind as not lesser but different.

Perhaps one of its great advantages, and a key point of difference, is exactly this wide lens of attention coupled with narrow focus on each of the many things attended to – a fusion of what’s an either-or proposition for the nonautistic person. At its most acute, this advantage can manifest as anything from intricately detailed visual lists of everyday objects to mathematical genius. Autism advocate and pioneering animal behaviorist Temple Grandin has spoken about this beautifully in her TED talk and her introduction to the book Drawing Autism.

For the rest of us, though, missing “the vast majority of what is happening” is undoubtedly a survival strategy. I tried to imagine, biking through the city today, what it would be like if I paid attention to everything simultaneously – listened to every bird and every siren and every rushing executive yelling on her cell phone, looked at every storefront and every redhead and every fleeting reflection in a car window. I’d crash instantly – both literally and figuratively.

Follow the whole Book Club discussion here. Maria and Alexandra just recorded a short conversation over various aspects of On Looking, so stay tuned.

It Pays To Keep Out Of Trouble

In the face of an intractable violent crime epidemic, Richmond, California, decided in 2007 to try out a new approach to the problem: paying people not to kill each other. Tim Murphy reports on the “Office of Neighborhood Safety”:

Here’s how it works:

A team of seven “neighborhood change agents” patrol the streets like beat cops, keeping tabs on the 50 high-risk members of what [DeVone] Boggan [who designed the initiative] calls the “focus group.” The coordinators, most of them former convicts, check in with their sources at corner stores, barbershops, and churches and report back daily on what they’ve heard. “I want us to hunt ‘em like they hunt, and I want us to hunt for information,” Boggan says. “We have better information than the police.” Once a certain level of trust has been established between the coordinators and their targets, a meeting is arranged, and the pitch is made.

In exchange for shunning dangerous behavior, ONS fellows receive anywhere from $300 to $1,000 per month, depending on their progress following a “life map” of personal and professional goals.

If they team up with someone from a rival community to renounce violence altogether, they can get even more money—though that’s yet to happen. Fellows can receive stipends for 9 of their 18 months in the program. The city gave ONS $1.2 million for its operating budget last year, but the money for the stipends came from a handful of private donors, including the health care giant Kaiser Permanente. (A Kaiser spokeswoman says the program is good for “diffusing community tensions and reducing violence,” thereby limiting stress-related health risks like heart disease, strokes, and diabetes.)

ONS staffers help fellows take concrete steps toward stability, from providing assistance in getting a driver’s license or a GED to helping raise $5,000 for a merchant-marine training class. Though the program officially cuts off when fellows turn 25, Boggan says ONS tries to stay in touch with them as long as possible.

What Do You Do With A BA In English?

You will actually get hired more than most:

Defying all conventional wisdom and their parents’ warnings, most English majors also secure jobs, and not just at Starbucks. Last week, at the gathering of the Associated Departments of English, it was reported that English majors had 2 percent lower unemployment than the national rate, with an average starting salary of $40,800 and average mid-career salaries of $71,400. According to a 2013–14 study by PayScale.com, English ranks just above business administration as a “major that pays you back.”

But using numbers to dispute the fatalism over humanities is a bit like reading novels to cure consumption – at best it is a distraction before the next coughing fit. Besides, engineers and dentists still earn more than English majors. Rather than citing more statistics, we might ask why humanists keep simultaneously pursuing this field and lamenting its perpetual crisis. The answer is that crisis, which comes from the Greek word for “choice,” is what humanities do best.

Meanwhile, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry wishes certain political reporters had studied the liberal arts rather than communications:

The expression “liberal education” is quite important. Today, when we think “liberal education”, we think “Would you like fries with that?” But as the common root with the word liberty suggests, liberal education is an education that helps make us free. Only by first understanding not only the empirical scaffolding of our Universe–a.k.a. science–but also its conceptual scaffolding, a.k.a. the ideas, concepts and history which shape the world we live in, can we ever hope to be free, that is to say to be able to make informed, conscious decisions. …

Nobody stops to ask what education is for, because the answer is implicitly accepted by all: an education is for getting a job. It is, in other words, for being a cog in the giant machine of post-industrial capitalism. It is, in other words, for the opposite thing that our forefathers wanted for us.

Update from a reader:

Good grief, can Gobry be any more melodramatic about the need for a liberal education? I don’t dispute the importance of the humanities, but explaining condescendingly why we’re all “less free” for not reading Aristotle is asinine.

I majored in Russian in college, because that massive, eternally tsarist country has, in spite of the odds, turned out some of the greatest literature we have. And besides that, the language and culture are fascinating. Even though I only had the opportunity to spend three months there, my studies and time abroad were formative experiences. They have certainly shaped how I approach the rest of my life, and I continue to foster a love for all things Russian.

Unfortunately, the world can support only so many American Slavophiles, so I also majored in Chemistry. Why? Because I needed to get a job. Yeah, I guess it’s a bummer that I can’t “freely” pursue whatever I want, but we can’t all get paid to mock people for not reading Plato or Max Weber. When I’m not at work, I can spend my time doing whatever I want; but when it comes to making a buck, whether we like it or not, concrete skills that produce tangible goods make money.

Trying To Stand It

After becoming convinced that his sedentary lifestyle posed a major health threat, Dan Kois decided to spend a month on his feet. (He made exceptions for driving, using the bathroom, and, once, attending a play). His thoughts toward the end of the experiment:

Hit wall. Completely fucking dead. Wife rubbed my feet tonight. If Sitting Dan got a foot massage from his wife, he’d thank her. Standing Dan is a whiny asshole. Email to friend: “If a nun gave me a $100 bill I would be like, screw you, my legs hurt.”

What he learned:

[T]his enforced standing has made me realize how much of my time bonding with my family is spent seated. Now we play Crazy Eights with me hulking over the table like a grudgingly accepted giant. I’ve begged off story time because my kids don’t like craning their necks to see the pages, and I find it maddening not to be able to snuggle with them in bed. At the beach house we shared with my in-laws for Easter weekend, I was completely unable to relax or join anyone else in relaxing. … It all came to a head at Easter dinner, during which I stood straight up as if in a Last Supper parody, loved ones assembled to each side, my roast lamb perched on that stupid aluminum work tray. All I wanted to do was just be for a little while! Instead, I could never stop thinking about my dumb, clumsy, painful body, not for a second. …

My month has been an ordeal, but it’s clearly succeeded. I’ve lost almost five pounds and gained muscle in my legs, especially my calves. I’ve cut my time-wasting drastically, editing and writing more than in any month I can remember. I’ve walked 92.5 miles, basically without trying.

The View From Your Window

Caledonia, Michigan, 6.17 pm

Which Party Will Lead The Energy Revolution?

Jim Manzi recently praised America’s innovation-heavy approach to climate change. Chait admits that the “embrace of new environmental technology does represent genuine differentiation from the mindless scientific denialism and reflexive sneering at green energy that is the mainstream Republican position.” But he claims that Manzi and other reform conservatives, aka “reformicons,” lack a coherent agenda:

In a 2007 National Review cover story, Manzi proposed to create a new agency tasked with funding advanced, speculative scientific research. “The agency for funding any government-sponsored research should be explicitly modeled on the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency,” he wrote. In 2009, the stimulus created this exact thing. It’s called “The Advanced Research Projects-Energy.” It was explicitly modeled after DARPA. (You can read an account of its creation in “The New New Deal,” a history of the stimulus, which reports on page four that the agency was “modeled after DARPA.”) It still exists.

Now, maybe the reformicons believe ARPA-E needs to have its funding boosted. But they haven’t actually defined a specific proposal to do so. Indeed, it’s not clear they actually realize the agency exists. Since Manzi proposed created a DARPA for energy in 2008, I have only found one example of him mentioning the idea since — a 2011 column calling for a“DARPA analog focused on new energy technologies,” a phrasing that implies Manzi was proposing to create an agency that had already existed for two and a half years. Since its establishment, the Obama administration has been fighting to preserve the agency from House Republicans, who have proposed to cut its budget by 80 percent. Needless to say, the technology-first reformicons have said nothing at all about the incumbent Party stance of slashing basic energy science research.

The Best Of The Dish Today

As summer kicked in, we continued our deep dive into Iraq today. No US airstrikes, mercifully. An intransigent sectarian in Maliki. The case for partition. The options with Iran. Turkey’s strange, paranoid complacency. Oh, and the now-familiar but still shocking gall of Paul Wolfowitz.

If you want your eyes open to a different take on the transgender experience, this email is quite something. If you can’t believe the deranged Benghazi fixation on the right, you’re not alone. Plus: another formerly sympathetic observer gives up on Israel’s occupation. And this optical-illusion video deserves some sort of award.

The most popular post of the day was Obama Caught Another Terrorist and the Right Can’t Handle It. Next up: Paul Wolfowitz’s Noble Lies.

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. 26 35 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:

I don’t have a comment for your thread, nothing unique that hasn’t been covered on The Dish since the recent Iraq crisis began. With that said, I work in the counterterrorism community, where one of my responsibilities is to shape counterterrorism policy for the National Security Council staff. I have the full range of American and allied intelligence reporting to shape my work, which is essential. At the same time, I also look to The Dish nearly every hour for the ongoing political, moral, ethical, and historical debate on the Iraq crisis. I could do a good job with the former, I can only discharge my duties in a truly responsible way with the latter.

You need not post any of this – I recognize it’s hardly interesting – I just felt a note of thanks to you and the team was appropriate. Yes, the president and other people far more powerful than me are fans, but so are the mid-level civil servants working on Saturday mornings. I’m proud to be a long-term subscriber. Please keep going.

See you in the morning.

(Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty)

The Rarest Of Them All

“Rarity itself has become very rare,” argues Rex Sorgatz:

With access to infinite bytes of media, describing a digital object as “rare” sticks out like a lumbering anachronism. YouTube — the official home of lumbering anachronisms — excels at these extraordinarily contradictory moments. Here, for instance, are the Beatles, performing a “VERY RARE” rendition of “Happy Birthday.” That sonic obscurity has been heard 2.3 million times. And here [see above] is a “Rare Acoustic” version of Slash performing “Sweet Child O’ Mine.” Over 26 million have devoured this esoteric Axl-less morsel.

More? Nearly 5 million people have heard Bob Marley opine “No Woman No Cry” (“version rare”), while a bit of conspiratorial Area 51 footage (“RARE,” of course) has racked up 1.5 million views. And some Woody Allen standup from 1965 (excitedly: “RARE!”) has garnered a half-million views, while double that number have endured a Marlon Brando screentest (prosaically: “Rare”).

He concludes:

“Rare” is such an quizzical descriptor, a blatant contradiction of the very nature of digital culture. Rarity describes a state of scarcity, and as we enter a proto-post-scarcity economy, digital stuff defies such shortages. Things are no longer rare; they are either popular or unpopular.

Life Of An Obit Writer

Ann Wroe writes the obituaries for The Economist. Isabelle Fraser, a fan, spoke to Wroe about what the job is like:

Readers often write in to complain, “especially when it’s an evil man. They hate that. They do think, the Americans especially, that it’s a sign of honouring someone, a sign of respect.” Wroe says that when she receives such letters, “I write back and say that all human life is interesting.”

Those characters who make for the best tales are usually people who are totally unknown; often they are suggested by readers. One such person was Marie Smith, the last person to speak Eyak, an Alaskan language. “She was the only person left who remembered all the different words for all the parts of a spruce tree. And nobody is ever going to see a spruce tree in that way again. I love it when there is an end of a whole tradition or culture: it is the last glimpse we are going to get first-hand of something that’s gone.”

Wroe’s attitude about death is refreshing, allowing her to face it every week, albeit from a certain distance. “I don’t think of dead as dead, that’s the thing, and therefore it doesn’t trouble me. It’s an absence, if you like. It’s not the end.” She notes how “I never mention how people die, because I don’t think that’s important at all. I think an obituary is a celebration of a life.”