Author: Andrew Sullivan

by Patrick Appel

The WSJ profiles adults with limited palates. Jackson Kuhl nods:

We all have likes and dislikes; I don’t care how much of a delicacy they are in Cambodia — I ain’t eating a tarantula. Still, experience with my son taught me that, as the article suggests, picky eating is a neurosis. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that in both cases, the appetites of my guy and the pediatrician’s son expanded at the same age when kids demonstrate greater self-awareness and personal responsibility. Becoming more confident, they realize they have some control of their environment and new foods are no longer as strange or anxiety-inducing. The stakes aren’t as high as they once believed. They recognize a meal is a finite experience and that if there’s some broccoli on the plate, they can just eat and be done with it because dinner will soon be over.

I’m not as judgmental as some people around here about vegetarians (I lean paleo in my diet, which is just another kind of self-selection), but I do think some of the extreme types, like vegans, are adult picky eaters who wrap their neuroses in an ideological flag.

There is some truth in that. Vegetarians are often people who never much liked meat in the first place. There are certainly formerly meat-loving vegetarians, but moral arguments are more compelling the less you like what you are giving up. Veganism doesn't work the same way; none of us inherently dislike all animal products.

by David Frum

… also most most needed in these hard times: AgainstDumb.com

by Patrick Appel

Friedersdorf notes Bill Kristol's peace-offering to the tea parties:

It is darkly amusing that he opens his strangely hollow outreach to the Tea Party movement with a quotation from Alexander Hamilton, the Founding Father its typical adherent would most abhor.

Inside the Tea Party movement, there is much annoyance — some of it justified — about the treatment received at the hands of media elites. I submit that Mr. Kristol's latest is as striking an example you'll find of treating Tea Partiers as if they're naive idiots. Our leading, unrepentant advocate for "national greatness conservatism" is doing his best to co-opt a fundamentally small government movement that has had enough of "bold efforts" by federal legislators, and he's so confident that criticizing President Obama is sufficient to forge this alliance that he trots out as prelude the most brazen principled advocate for a powerful, far-reaching, supreme federal government in American history. 

Poulos pushes back.

by Patrick Appel

Digby reflects on this article:

It turns out that our brains are designed to create "cognitive shortcuts" to cope with the rush of information which I'm guessing is more important than ever in this new age. I'm also guessing one of these "cognitive shortcuts" is trusting in certain tribal identification and shared "worldview" to make things easier to sort out, which is why things are getting hyperpartisan and polarized in this time of information overload. (And sadly, one of the effects of that would be more confirmation of whatever bad information exists within the group.) So politics becomes a dogfight in which the battle is not just between ideas, but between the facts themselves.

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

I came of age in an era when, as a friend put it, "everyone was supposed to sleep with everyone, and did."  (The infamous "sixties," though for me it was offset into the seventies.) In the midst of all that pressure, ignorance, and confusion, I fell into a long-term relationship that we (a young man and I) defined as "open."  We also defined me as being immature, ignoble, and unpleasant for being jealous and possessive.  There were a couple of decades where I was, a lot of the time, in shredding pain over the openness of the relationship.  (Yes, I'm a slow learner.) 

Eventually that relationship ended, or at least radically changed.  It will never totally end, because before we were done we had had two children together — now grown, and the light of my life.  I had one more major love relationship that started out as "open" (I was by that time the prophetess of non-monogamy, full of "reasons" and justifications) and ended when, among other things like the separation of continents, I was finally able to claim the right to have monogamy or no relationship at all.

It has been fascinating reading all the responses to the "Evolutionary Case Against Monogamy" idea.  I could write a book, but in the meantime I have two main comments in reaction:

1. If we are to have a more nuanced understanding of the urge toward non-monogamy, I would like to request the converse as well.  I suspect it is just as deeply embedded in human nature — and like all qualities and characteristics, more deeply embedded in some of us than in others — to want our partners to be monogamous, and to be in pain when they are not.  I could say that I wish I had grown up to be able to claim my own reality much sooner, but then I wouldn't have had my kids.

2. When I finally got out of my second and last major non-monogamous relationship, one of the things that finally gave me the clarity to do it was the realization that if anything was worse than sexual non-monogamy, it was non-monogamy of decision-making.  That was the deeper basis of the pain I had been in all those years.  I had agreed to non-monogamy, but I did not — unlike some of your readers — have the clarity or understanding to ask for an agreement about the primacy of one relationship over all the others in terms of making decisions about the relationship(s).  I found myself in a situation where decisions that affected my life profoundly were being made by other people, and that's when I finally got out for good.

As for your readers who wrote about making a success of having one primary, decision-makingly monogamous relationship with some sexual non-monogamy thrown in — well, more power to them.  I hope it keeps working out for them.

Today on the Dish we welcomed our two guest-bloggers for the week: David Frum and Dave Weigel. 

Weigel honored Nate Henn, the American who died in the World Cup bombing (and who happened to grow up with Weigel in Delaware). He also filed a dispatch from Anchorage, featured a new profile on John McCain, undermined a right-wing myth about the New Black Panthers and Obama's DOJ, gave a platform to a conservative critic of the GOP's fiscal record, and dug up a bit of trivia about a popular Weekly Standard cover.

Frum highlighted the dire financial markets, talked inflation and deflation, noted welfare reform in Australia, showed how Obama is ignoring a Supreme Court uproar in his hometown, bristled at the president for bringing up his middle name to explain Israeli mistrust, invoked his grandfather in a post on Christian Zionism, summed up the controversy between a FrumForum blogger and NewsRealBlog, pointed out the success of aggregators, and took a jab at the publishing industry.

In Palin news, her path to the nomination got much clearer (though she floundered on "The Factor" for the second time). San Francisco tried to ban the sale of pets. DOMA update here. Mariah Blake's expose on the medical supply industry is a must see.

In assorted commentary, Dayo Olopade celebrated the progress Africa displayed this World Cup, Nate Silver slammed the Pentagon for surveying servicemembers on gaydar, William Galston was gloomy about the Dems prospects this fall, Bernstein assessed Palin's chances in '12, and Larison compared her to Giuliani. Beinart thought Obama was no FDR, TNC tackled the fear felt by cops, Joe Keohane explained how our biases shape the facts we receive, Felix Salmon defended minimum wage laws, and Patrick circled back to one of his pet topics, the kidney trade. A comprehensive update on Social Security reform here. Recession view here. A great case of journalism here.

Creepy ad here. A quick laugh here and a longer one here. MHB here, VFYW here, and FOTD here.

— C.B.

(Video profile of Nate Henn here. Above is his last published tweet.)

by Dave Weigel

Joe Hagan keeps up New York's remarkable record of turning every profile into a mini-"Game Change" of revealing quotes and moments with this monolith on John McCain. The moment that's getting the most attention comes which McCain gets irritated at Scott Brown for his advice on how to win elections (my guess: "run against Martha Coakley"), but there's hardly a dull graf in this thing. For example:

By setting himself up against [former congressman and free money from the government pitchman J.D.] Hayworth, McCain was locked into a fight for the tea-party vote—essentially a race to the right, one in which McCain would be hobbled by his past positions. There was intense internal debate among McCain’s advisers in the fall of 2009 about whether McCain should even appear at a tea-party rally. McCain’s chief of staff, Mark Buse, was terrified of McCain getting booed off the stage and having the image go into cable-TV rotation. Until March, his advisers repeatedly refused to let McCain appear at one.

This is savvy, isn't it? The first McCain rally of this campaign that got major video coverage was the one Sarah Palin appeared at. No chance of boos there, so reporters had to settle for anecdotes of bored tea partyers walking out as the senator talked. And McCain is not alone here. I'm informed that Republicans haven't encouraged Michael Steele to speak at a tea party because they know he'll be booed, and that the video of this will outlast cockroaches and Twinkies. This is a good call — Rep. Bob Inglis (R-S.C.) never overcame the video of tea partyers heckling him for his TARP vote. And as much as the McCain of 2009-2010 deserves tea party support for digging in against the Obama agenda, he voted for TARP when he was in a unique position to stop it, and he'll never be forgiven for that.

by Patrick Appel

TNC connects the Oscar Grant case to the cop who pulled a gun during a snowball fight:

"Fear" is the common defense for officers who abuse the state-sanctioned right to brandish lethal force, excusing everything from the killing of Amadou Diallo to pulling a gun in the middle of a snowball fight. The question, however, remains–If you scare this easy, why are you a cop?

My old friend Julianne Hing has the best write-up on the Oscar Grant verdict, by far. Adam Serwer is in the same ballpark as Ta-Nehisi:

Times change, but the radioactive fear of black people, black men in particular, has proved to have a longer half-life than any science could have discerned. This is not a fear white people possess of black people — it is a fear all Americans possess. It makes white cops kill black cops, it makes black cops kill black men, and it whispers in the ears of white and nonwhite jurors alike that fear of an unarmed black man lying face down in the ground is not "unreasonable." All of which is to say, while it infects all of us, a few of us bear the brunt of the suffering it causes.

by David Frum

Those of us who work even occasionally with the quaint world of publishing often wonder: why is it that our publishers are so hard to reach? Partly it is our own fault for attempting to use email rather than typing out our communications on an IBM Selectric and posting them in the US Mail, the way they did in the good old days. 

But there is also this additional impediment, as a literary friend explains:

It's summer, and publishers take the summer off, starting about April 15 and resuming shortly after Labor Day. They work hard through early September until the Jewish holidays, which they observe for the full three weeks from Rosh Hashonah to Shemini Atzeret. Columbus Day and Thanksgiving pretty much wipe out October and November, and December is of course gone to Christmas.

Their offices are open at greatest length for a couple of weeks in each of January, February and March before they shut down again for the summer, as noted, in April.