Author: Andrew Sullivan

Jonah Lehrer lists the benefits of social diversity.

A provocative thought:

Since TV was invented, critics have pointed out the dangers of watching the perfect people who seem to inhabit the screen. They are almost universally beautiful, live in interesting places, do interesting work (if they work at all), are unfailingly witty, and never have to do any cleaning. They never even need to use the toilet. It cannot be psychologically healthy to compare yourself to these phantasms. So it’s interesting that social networks have inadvertently created the same effect, but using an even more powerful source. Instead of actors in Hollywood, the characters are people that you know to be real and have actually met. The editing is done not by film school graduates, but by the people themselves.

Ben Casnocha nods.

(Image from Flickr user (A3R) angelrravelor (A3R))

Gregory Mankiw has a long wonky article on the stimulus:

The question for economists now is whether the administration's assumptions, and the model based on them, were correct. After all, if we could be sure their model was right, we would know what to conclude when their stimulus plan was followed by 10% unemployment: The patient was sicker than they thought, and unemployment would surely have been higher still if not for the stimulus. (Indeed, since Obama's advisors do believe their model was right, this is the conclusion they have reached.)

The trouble is, we have no way of knowing for sure if the model was in fact correct. To react to a model's failure to predict events accurately by insisting that the model was nonetheless right — as Obama's economic advisors have done — is hardly the most obvious course. Careful economists should instead respond with humility. When their predictions fail — as they often do — they should not dig in their heels, but should instead be willing to go back to their starting assumptions and question their validity.

A celebration of ugly animals.

Reihan suggests that servants and nannies are the low-skill professions of the future:

As more skilled women enter the workforce, and as the labor market position of millions of less-skilled workers deteriorate, we'll see more servants and nannies in middle-class homes. While this future might seem disturbing at first, there is no reason to believe that these armies of servants and nannies won't earn decent wages. But let's just say that this isn't the future most of us envision for our children.

Plumer thinks the EPA will step in to fill the void:

Note that this is all likely to be costlier than a cap-and-trade system devised by Congress. There's not the same flexibility. One tool at the EPA's disposal, for instance, is the ability to require new power plants to adopt what's called "Best Available Control Technology" for pollution. But having the EPA pick and choose technologies is a lot less flexible and efficient than putting a price on carbon and letting the market sort out the cheapest, easiest ways to make cuts. That's one reason why polluters may start lobbying more heavily for congressional legislation once they see that the Obama administration is serious about wielding EPA authority.

"In Dwight's "Travels in New England" it is stated that the inhabitants of Truro were formerly regularly warned under the authority of law in the month of April yearly, to plant beach-grass, as elsewhere they are warned to repair the highways…. In this way, for instance, they built up again that part of the Cape between Truro and Provincetown where the sea broke over in the last century…. Thus Cape Cod is anchored to the heavens, as it were, by a myriad little cables of beach-grass, and, if they should fail, would become a total wreck, and ere long go to the bottom." – Henry David Thoreau.

(Photo: Thursday afternoon, at the end of the Cape.)

And a new meme:

Was America ever the world

we grew up with? Didn't it stop being that somewhere in the fifties – after Truman?
Hasn't it stopped having the windy day idea, the refugee, the glamour girl, the gangster
the whisky-driven dice down the plains, the new deal, the public love, the
wheat, the music of wheat, Robert Flaherty, James Agee, Dorothea Lange?

Or just before: the American parades clashing down two avenues
when Charles Ives would stand somewhere in the middle so he could
listen to two different kinds of music steep into the same sky because they were both his life.

– by Michael Klein, in his new collection, "then, we were still living."

Michael Petrelis chronicles the impact of long term retroviral therapy on the faces of those who have survived HIV a long time -  by boldly posting his own above. I am lucky not to have been too affected by this, but some loss of fat in the face and accumulation of fat on my back or deep in my gut – the "elephant hump" and "protease paunch" – is something I've learned to live with (and counter with the only drug that seems to work, the prohibitively expensive serostim).

Michael notes how some of this happens to all of us: old faces always lose fat. Plenty of older men have paunches. But there is a distinctive look of pozzy survival. Michael deploys the same tactic toward it that many of us learned to adopt as a survival mechanism with the virus itself: own the condition, be public with it – and, if necessary, tackle it head-on. Of course, I see nothing wrong with a little infusion of fake fat to prevent a gaunt look – but there is something characteristically stark about Petrelis's bravado.

I wonder sometimes if this long-term fight with what was once a terminal, terrifying disease has shaped me in ways I do not fully appreciate. The knowledge that my virus, with the HIV ban in force for almost all my HIV life-span, could literally expel me at any moment from the country I love and the husband who supports me and the friends who keep me going must have instilled in me a deep and constant sense of insecurity, of guardedness, of fear. The illness itself compressed my sense of mortality in ways that started young. In grappling with this bit by bit, year by year, I have shifted back and forth from a kind of prudent defensive crouch (I have seen far, far less of my family than I would have without the travel ban) to a brazen, angry candor.

Perhaps the instinct to say things outright, to vent all and any questions on my mind, to hide little, to cast aside politesse, to vent to the whole world every day what's on my mind, is related to this. Once you leave the gay closet and the HIV closet, all closets, all silences, all evasions seem threatening. As Michael still has it on his little button, Silence = Death.

It literally meant death for so long. But it can also mean a silent death of the spirit and soul, a deadening of the eyes, a surrender to shame or social expectations imposed from the outside against the human life-instinct within. Through the death of others, and the the fear of my own, I guess I have come to see the defense of that life-instinct as a core part of self-preservation – and find nature (especially the sublime beauty of Cape Cod) the only true salve. And blogging, the rawest, roughest, most candid form of writing came naturally to me perhaps as part of this survival mechanism, as a way to keep opening doors and windows, to ensure that the light coming in could overwhelm the darkness I always felt, and still, feel advancing behind my back. Something must have kept pushing me forward every day for ten years now.

Perhaps I still speak for fear I will otherwise die – somewhere, somehow within.

How many still live in fear and shame? How many still die inside long before their body gives up? And how can our honesty – sometimes to the point of masochism – help them? Or bring them back from the dead?