Author: Andrew Sullivan

Kilcar, Ireland, 4.18 pm

Weirder and weirder.

Christopher Leinberger looks at housing trends:

Housing comes in two basic types. The first is the now-classic Ozzie and Harriet–style single-family house on its own large lot, from which nearly every trip is taken by car. The second is similar to what we predominantly built before the Great Depression: small-lot single-family houses, townhouses, and apartments that are within walking distance of most everyday needs and are typically connected by public transit to work, shopping, and entertainment—housing that is built at least five times more densely than that in conventional suburbs.

Ten years ago, conventional large-lot housing in wealthy suburbs was the highest-priced housing, per square foot, in nearly all metropolitan areas. Today, housing in walkable neighborhoods is typically the most expensive; the lines crossed in the 2000s.

TED captions this NSFW talk:

At TED2009, audience member Cindy Gallop gave a 4-minute presentation that became one of the event's most talked about. Speaking from her personal experience, she argued that hardcore pornography had distorted the way a generation of young men think about sex, and talked about how she was fighting back with the launch of a website to correct the myths being propagated.

Gallop also points to several stats compiled by Michael Castleman. Money quote:

Why would social ills decline as porn becomes more widely available? No one knows. But the one thing porn really causes is masturbation. Internet porn keeps men at home one-handing it. As a result, they're not out in the world acting irresponsibly – or criminally.

Julian Sanchez weighs in:

I’m fairly solidly in the Guesser camp on the whole—though I can’t hold a candle to my late maternal grandmother, a paragon of New England reserve.  As was explained to me before one of her visits as a young child, I should not expect her to be so unspeakably gauche as to ask that I “please pass the potatoes” (say) during dinner. One might as well just leap on the table and plunge one’s head directly into the bowl. No, if the potatoes were down at my end of the table, she would say something along the lines of: “Oh, do have some potatoes” or “Have you tried the potatoes?”—it being understood that the civilized response was “Oh, no, you have some.” As I say, I don’t take it quite that far, but I do think I internalized the association between civility and indirectness.

The campaign isn't confined to France. In Australia, an armed robber who used a burqa as a disguise has kicked up a political storm. In Belgium, the lower house of parliament recently voted 136-0 to outlaw veiled garments. In Italy, where face-covering has been illegal but unenforced since the '70s, a woman was just fined for the very first time. Alex Wilhelm wades through the debate:

For the Italian woman mentioned above, the fine for her attire (a steep 500 Euro) is the least of her concerns. Her husband has decided that if she cannot wear the burqa outside, then she cannot go outside. The woman is now effectively under house arrest for committing no crime. She will not be able to go outside to take a morning walk or an evening stroll. Her sentence is life in prison. […B]anning the burqa as an ancient hulking relic of sexism can backfire and take away what modicum of freedom that these women had enjoyed previously.

Below is more commentary and firsthand experiences from readers. One writes:

I am a modern, liberal, Muslim woman who has never worn a scarf on my head, let alone burqa. There is nothing Islamic or religious about it.

There may be some idiotic women who choose to wear it because they don't want others to look at them but please, they need to grow up and be a part of western society if they want to live here. Men in Pakistan (where I am from) are crazy and often sex-deprived and I can understand why some women would want themselves covered and not get stared down by scary men in public places. My understanding is that Islam says don't attract undue attention toward yourself and dress modestly. But in western society, they are attracting undue attention to themselves by wearing this burqa. I just don't get why these people are incapable of thinking and take the Quran so literally.

Another:

One of your readers said that the burqa communicates and reinforces the idea that "women are dangerous and that they belong to men.  It says 'you are allowed out of the house only if no one can see you.  Only if you are invisible.'" But this is only part of what it communicates. It is not only a religious symbol, but a traditional one as well. Its traditional importance is to communicate and reinforce the idea that men are uncontrollable sexual beasts who must be kept from seeing the female form in too much detail lest he, understandably, lose control over himself and act out his desires. It's something of a preventative measure for the sake of the young woman's honor and, often times more importantly, the honor of the family.

I'm an American living in a Muslim country for over two years now and have had this explained to me by both men and women again and again, and it never makes any more sense. Otherwise respectable men will go on about how they just doesn't know what they would do if they saw an overly exposed woman, and how this is just part of our nature. My response of "You're a man, be one, control yourself," is shrugged off as naive.

As it has been explained to me in the past, feminism is not only for the improvement of the status and understanding of women, it is also for the improvement of the status and understanding of men. Men are hardly the victims in this situation, but views on masculinity are definitely linked to this issue and need to be brought up.

Another:

I live in Minneapolis and spent a lot of time during the last few years volunteering in adult basic education classrooms, where our students are primarily learning English, and many of the attending are Somali women, all wearing a burqa or hijab.  The women I've worked with are smart, passionate, engaged with learning about their new country and home.  Usually I'm a very cynical – came of age during the Bush years and all – but these women absolutely inspire me with their firm belief that America is about freedom of expression and opportunity.  It's incredible.  They don't fit the stereotype of a Muslim woman who has no identity and is indoctrinated to believe in her own subjugation.  I never saw one of the shirk from a man during an argument in class.  They wear their traditional dress and want to enroll in business classes.  They hope their daughters go to med school.  But they still hold to their religion, it's deeply important to them, and are keenly aware of the choice they're making. 

This blew my mind as a young feminist in college. I was so surprised to find such strong women when I started teaching English.  If a ban on burqas was ever proposed in my city, I'd be the first protester in line.

(Photo by Flickr user deepchi1)

Or, as TDW puts it, "The most fun you’ll ever have watching a Darwin’s beetle get laid, guaranteed."

A reader writes:

Your reader referencing the Gulf's "Dead Zone" oversimplifies the reasons behind the lack of oil-covered wildlife. My wife works at the Environmental Defense Fund and told me the workers in the Gulf are using chemicals that dissolve the oil, making it heavier than water, so it sinks down and is absorbed into the sediment, rather than resting on the surface for birds or other larger animals to get coated. So the less sexy issues are plant, plankton, algae, and larvae life being threatened – in addition to unseen implications for fish and coral.

Another writes:

The focus on dead animals would be misguided anyway. This is not your run-of-the-mill oil spill. The real threat is not the loss of animal lives; it is the risk to human lives. The potential for the destruction of acres of wetlands accelerates the loss of New Orleans' natural protection from hurricanes by 50-100 years. That's the biggest problem here. That's what journalists should be reporting on and columnists should be pitching proposals to rebuild our natural defense barriers, not whining and wondering about the lack of dead dolphins.

More on the wetland threat here. A TPM reader reviews the new math on the size of the oil spill. New images of the spill at the Big Picture.

(Marshland is seen as efforts continue to contain BP's massive oil spill on May 11, 2010 in Venice, Louisiana. Oil is still leaking out of the Deepwater Horizon wellhead at a estimated rate of 1,000-5,000 barrels a day. Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images.)

Fallows follows up:

If there is a point that, above all the others, I wanted most to convey in this article, it is not "everything is going to be OK" or "Google is our friend" or even "here comes a torrent of new advertising money!" Rather it is a cultural/attitudinal argument about the press and everyone who cares about it. Far from being autumnal and despairing and mournful about a supposed golden age that has passed and fatalistic about the doomed state of public information and the resulting lapsed state of society, people who care about the media should (according to me) recognize that technological upheaval, and the resulting business shifts and forced individual innovations, have been the norm rather than the exception in our enterprise. Clever and ambitious people, especially but not only young people, will find new ways to do the work a society needs of them — and to make a living while doing so. There will be parts of a future press establishment that will be worse than what we know now. There will be parts that are better. That is how it has always been. This paragraph, near the end of the story, is what I really believe:

Ten years from now, a robust and better-funded news business will be thriving. What next year means is harder to say. I asked everyone I interviewed [at Google] to predict which organizations would be providing news a decade from now. Most people replied that many of tomorrow's influential news brands will be today's: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the public and private TV and radio networks, the Associated Press. Others would be names we don't yet know. But this is consistent with the way the news has always worked, rather than a threatening change. Fifteen years ago, Fox News did not exist. A decade ago, Jon Stewart was not known for political commentary. The news business has continually been reinvented by people in their 20s and early 30s–Henry Luce when he and Briton Hadden founded Time magazine soon after they left college, John Hersey when he wrote Hiroshima at age 32. Bloggers and videographers are their counterparts now. If the prospect is continued transition rather than mass extinction of news organizations, that is better than many had assumed. It requires an openness to the constant experimentation that Google preaches and that is journalism's real heritage.