Author: Andrew Sullivan

Jonathan Chait defends himself and journo-list. It was just a water-cooler list-serv that just happened to be open only to liberals whom Ezra Klein liked. (Why writers and reporters cannot kibbitz one on one or share their private thoughts by email outside such an exclusive list is beyond me.) Spencer Ackerman's post – and the obvious assumptions behind it – are just Spencer, and have nothing to do with Chait or anyone else at Journolist. And there's no double standard between Chait's condemnation of Townhouse because the Townhouse members were open activists, while the hacks on Journolist are pure as the driven snow and seeking truth among one another, untainted by any smidgen of groupthink, collusion or a partisan echo-chamber.

Yes, seriously.

For the record, I never stated that Journolist was started as a means to foster groupthink. My point is that such a smug, self-satisfied elitist clique cannot but evoke such an atmosphere over time. And it did. That Klein had to stop collective petitions suggests there was an atmosphere in which such petitions were likely, no? If it were just a water-cooler, how could that possibly have happened? What bizarre idea did some of the members get into their heads?

As I've said all along, I'm sure much of the list's chats were entirely proper, helpful, productive, etc. I defended the privacy of the list and found the scummy attacks on Weigel to be awful. I do not publish private emails and never have. But I don't believe liberals are somehow immune to the groupthink that has destroyed conservatism as a coherent governing philosophy.

Hat tip: Buzzfeed.

Thomas Morton travels down to Louisiana to talk with environmental experts and "our nation's most well-spoken rednecks" and comes back with this unvarnished look. Here's Part 2 and Part 3.

David Gelernter imagines the next leap forward in artificial intelligence:

Emotion summarizes experience.  If the subtle emotion you happen to feel on the first warm, bright day of spring (an emotion that has no name) is similar to the emotion you felt the first time you took a girl to the movies, this particular emotion might connect the two events; and next year's first warm spring day might cause you to remember the girl and the movie. 

No computer will be creative unless it can simulate all the nuances of human emotion.

We tend to think of emotions in a few primary colors: happy, sad, angry….  But our real emotional states are almost always far more subtle and complex.  How do you feel when you've hit a tennis ball hard and well, or driven a nail into a plank with two perfect hammer blows?  When you first re-enter, as an adult, the school you attended as a child?  When you spot the spires of Chartres on the horizon, or your son's girlfriend reminds you of a girl you once knew?  Or the day turns suddenly dark and a storm threatens, or your best friend is about to make a big mistake but you can't tell him? 

Ambinder has some suggestions for journalists:

Study cognitive science. Figure out how minds work. Be suspicious about patterns and be knowledgeable about probability.

Don't be self-righteous. Journalists working for big newspapers, magazines, television networks, or websites are privileged to have the platform and should be humble about using its power.

Be humble about conclusions. This is not to say that you can't make them. It is to say that if your conclusions aren't provisional, then they probably are not correct.

Sady Doyle underscores one:

When you compare the sins of Mel Gibson (racism, threats of violence and rape, sexism, allegedly punching his girlfriend while she held their child) to the crimes of Lindsay Lohan (doing drugs, drunk driving, being generally unprofessional) it seems clear that one of them has had to work a bit harder to become infamous. And men seem to have more avenues open for rehabilitation: Just look at all the adoration reserved for Robert Downey, Jr. and Mickey Rourke, men whose struggles with alcohol and drugs are well-known and readily forgiven. Last year, at the Golden Globes, Mike Tyson took the stage to help director Todd Phillips accept the Best Picture – Comedy award for The Hangover. His name was applauded, and loving jokes were made at his expense: You'd never know the man was a convicted rapist. The stories of badly behaved women, on the other hand, tend to end in obscurity or early death. The most a girl who's made some unfortunate choices can hope for, it would seem, is to become a joke, along the lines of Elizabeth Taylor.

Thoreau notices:

Oakland is doing the utterly predictable, and contemplating factory farming of a taxable crop.  When politicians view something as a revenue source, they want more of it, and they are prepared to get in bed with any businessman who can make that happen.  Most significantly, if it’s a source of tax revenue they are perfectly happy to provide security for those businessmen, which means that you get the sort of businessmen who don’t have their own street gangs and hitmen.

 

From Lane Kenworthy.

A milestone worth marking:

The news that China may now be the world biggest energy customer comes based on analysis by the International Energy Agency (IEA). According to the IEA, China overtook the U.S. in energy consumption sometime last year.

(Hat tip: Compass)