Author: Andrew Sullivan

Springtime means baseball, and George Will has a new book, A Nice Little Place on the North Side: Wrigley Field at One Hundred. One of his arguments? The team has struggled in part because Wrigley was built and marketed as “a destination whose appeal was largely independent of its tenant’s won-loss record”:

The strategy wasn’t always foolproof — attendance dipped as the Cubs slogged through particularly wretched stretches — but by and large, Wrigley Field gave the team’s owners a comfy cushion of fan loyalty through thick and (mostly) thin. But Will’s provocative hypothesis, which over the course of this slender book’s 223 pages comes to seem indisputable, is that the ballpark is “part cause and part symptom of the Cubs’ dysfunctional performance.” If the Cubs ownership hadn’t been able to rely so heavily on the stadium’s enduring popularity with fans, Will argues, it might actually have been forced to field a winning team.

Joseph Epstein recaps that dysfunction:

The Cubs’ last World Series victory was 1908; its last appearance in a World Series was 1945. Since moving to Wrigley Field in 1916, the team’s winning percentage has been a dispiriting .488, its overall record 7,478 wins to 7,833 losses. The question is: Has the antique elegance of Wrigley Field been an enticement for the team’s owners to do nothing to improve the team, since the fans, allured by the field’s fading grandeur, come out in any case?

Larry Thornberry looks at the evidence Will provides:

The latest stats, dreamed up by a couple of quantitative sports guys named Tobias Moskowitz and Jon Wertheim, claim to demonstrate, with charts and graphs, that the attendance at Wrigley Field is less sensitive to the Cubs’ winning than is the case with any other team and any other ballpark.

I’ll spare you the boiler-plate, but the average “attendance sensitivity” in Major League Baseball is 1. The Yankees sensitivity is 0.9, meaning attendance tracks the pin-stripes’ won-lost percentage pretty closely. The Red Sox are also at 0.9. The Cubs are at 0.6, leading Moskowitz and Wertheim to label the Cubs “America’s Teflon team.” In fact, the pair finds the price of beer in the park tracks attendance better than the Cubs’ won-lost percentage.

Update from a reader:

Another problem with Wrigley is that due to the eccentric lake winds, it’s nearly impossible to establish a home-field advantage. Despite its reputation as a homerun-happy bandbox, when the winds blow in – as they regularly do, especially early in the season – Wrigley is really a pitcher’s park. So there’s no clear blueprint for a winning edge like there is at, say, Yankee Stadium (load up on lefty power to take advantage of the short porch in right) or the old Busch Stadium in St. Louis (where the Cardinals memorably stocked their outfield with gazelles to roam the cavernous gaps). Add to that the fact that all those day games really do mess up the players’ circadian rhythms and it’s no wonder the Curse of the Billy Goat has held so long …

Another:

OK, now you’re in my area of expertise; I reviewed Will’s book and four other 100th Anniversary-of-Wrigley for the Chicago Tribune this weekend.

The key fallacy in the idea that the appeal of Wrigley as an antique ballpark has led to the team’s lack of success is the simple fact that for its first 60 or 70 years, Wrigley was not an antique ballpark: it wasn’t even the oldest ballpark in Chicago until Comiskey Park (1910) was demolished in 1992.  The spate of construction of dual-use concrete bowl stadia in the ‘60s and ‘70s (all of them except Oakland’s now demolished because they were bad for both football and baseball) led to the Wrigley/Fenway romanticism.  It’s true that ownership promoted “fun at the friendly confines” rather than a winning team (because he didn’t have very many winning teams) but the Ye Olde Wrigley meme doesn’t begin till the 1980s.  And since ’84, while the Cubs haven’t won a World Series, they have won 5 division titles and made one Wild Card appearance.  They are not as bad as people think, and lately attendance has dropped as the quality of play has gotten worse since ’08.

As for Will, my take on his book:

George Will’s “A Nice Little Place on the North Side: Wrigley Field at 100” belongs in the dining room. Not because his book is especially suited to formal meals, but because at every holiday dinner, there’s one cranky uncle or in-law who disagrees with everyone else about religion or politics. To keep the familial peace, you seek some conversational common ground and end up talking about baseball (unless of course, this cranky uncle is a Sox fan, in which case you talk about football). As a renowned conservative columnist and bow-tie fancier, Will fits this profile. …

In his narrative, Will re-creates the structure of a conversation at the ballpark. The ballpark’s lore provides the main thread, and Will adds to our knowledge of that history. (His take on the Elia rant, for instance, adds intriguing context from interviews with Keith Moreland.) But there’s time for digressions on Chicago history, the importance of beer in civilization, or the invention of Ladies Day, just as during a game, one will follow the action but chat about nearly anything else between pitches, at-bats and innings. Will’s conversational tone hits the sweet spot of just such a day’s talk.

But like the guy talking at the ballpark, Will sometimes gets things wrong. To cite one error, Will claims that one indignity contemporary Cubs fans will have to suffer is Greg Maddux in an Atlanta Braves cap on his Hall of Fame plaque in Cooperstown. Maddux chose to go into the Hall with no logo on his cap — he was more generous to Cubs fans than Will was when he assumed that three Cy Youngs and a World Series ring outweigh playing at Wrigley after coming up in the Cubs system. But as the old cliché goes, when you “assume” … no, never mind. Be generous to cranky Uncle George; put his book in the dining room.

(Photo by Flickr user atalou)

Virginia Morell describes why she wrote Animal Wise: The Thoughts and Emotions of Our Fellow Creatures:

I wanted to reveal something about the scientists who are investigating animal cognition and emotion, to show their personalities, backgrounds, and what led them to devote their lives to studying the mind of a particular species of animal. … When you consider their results overall, it’s not difficult to reach the conclusion that other animals think and feel. This includes the pets we have, and domesticated and wild animals. They have active minds and experience feelings.

The idea that we are special and at the top of a hierarchy of animals just doesn’t fit with what scientists now know. There isn’t a tree of life; it’s more like a bush.

Humans are at the end of one of the branches on the bush. It’s often said — even by some scientists — that there is a cognitive chasm between us and other animals. The researchers in my book are helping to close this chasm, to show us there is not as great a gap between us and the other animals. I think Darwin put it best: the differences between humans and other animals are “one of degree, not of kind.” There really isn’t any evidence for assuming that other animals are not cognitive, feeling creatures. The discoveries reported in my book show that indeed they are, and that we humans are part of a continuum of life. The scientific experiments and observations in Animal Wise are also supported by neurobiological research showing how similar our brains are to those of other animals. Ours are more complex, but at a fundamental level there are important similarities that give animals the ability to experience the world, make decisions, and do things intentionally.

In a February interview, Morell described the responses she’s been getting from readers:

I get messages from people that my book changed their lives and opened up a whole new way of looking at the world. Some say, “I can’t kill the ants on my kitchen counter anymore.” It seems to have opened people’s minds and hearts to recognizing that the other animals aren’t just robots—they truly are living, sentient beings. What an amazing world we live in, to be surrounded by all these other minds.

Previous Dish on animal cognition here, here, and here.

“[W]hy are people all of a sudden inking or tattooing semicolons on their wrists?” asks Allan Metcalf of a new Internet phenomenon. “To prevent suicide, of course”:

Here’s an explanation from the website of the Semicolon Movement on Tumblr:

“The semicolon is used when a sentence could have ended, but didn’t.

“The movement is for anyone who has ever self-harmed, has a personality disorder, or has tried to commit suicide. The semicolon is a sign of hope. Your sentence is not over yet. …

“If you have ever harmed yourself, attempted suicide, or just want to support the cause, put a semicolon on your wrist or wherever you feel would mean the most. Every time you see it, think of something that makes life worth living.”

You can find explanations like these, and numerous illustrations of semicolons decorating arms and wrists, on Facebook and Pinterest, as well as Tumbler. And there’s a website for The Semicolon Project, “a nonprofit organization dedicated to presenting hope, help, and support to the people and communities suffering from mental-health issues. We are here to address depression, anxiety, self-harm, addiction, and suicide.”

The website announces a special day: “On April 16, 2014, everyone who self-harms, is suicidal, depressed, has anxiety, is unhappy, going through a broken heart, just lost a loved one, etc., draw a semicolon on your wrist. A semicolon represents a sentence the author could’ve ended, but chose not to. The author is you and the sentence is your life.”

(Image via The Semicolon Movement)

“The government’s surveillance program,” writes Christopher Cox in Harper’s (subscription required), “is so far removed from what the Fourth Amendment defines as a permissible search … that it’s hard to believe they thought they could get away with it—and still think they can.” He looks to history to illustrate his point:

Two hundred sixty years ago … Shawnees were attacking Englishmen on the American frontier.

The frontier, at the time, was in Pennsylvania. In Philadelphia, the colonial assembly voted to raise a militia to fight back, but Governor Robert Hunter Morris rejected the bill because the assembly proposed a tax on all landowners to pay for it. Morris insisted that the legislation exempt the Penn family, who were the largest landowners in the colony (and had appointed him to his position). The assembly, led by Benjamin Franklin, refused to revise the bill.

It may have been the first time an American dispute started with a proposed tax on the rich. It certainly wasn’t the last time the country was threatened by what Franklin, in his Historical Review of Pennsylvania (1759), called the “insidious attacks of small parties of skulking murderers.” In Franklin’s account, Morris wanted to be made “provincial dictator” and was exaggerating the threat from the Shawnee and their French allies in order to get his way. (“The populace are never so ripe for mischief as in times of most danger.”) The assembly, in any case, wasn’t persuaded: better to let the frontier burn than accept Morris’s proposal. Their reply to the governor: “Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

Time has edited the phrase to remove the adjectives; Franklin would probably admit that there’s really no such thing as permanent safety or inessential liberty. And its application has shifted over the years. In the eighteenth century, fighting for liberty meant preserving the power of the legislature; today, it means preserving the power of individual citizens to resist the state’s intrusions. But Franklin’s sentiment, made universal, should be the one to guide us in this debate.

Lauren Slater investigates exotic pet ownership across the country:

Privately owning exotic animals is currently permitted in a handful of states with essentially no restrictions: You must have a license to own a dog, but you are free to purchase a lion or baboon and keep it as a pet. Even in the states where exotic-pet ownership is banned, “people break the law,” says Adam Roberts of Born Free USA, who keeps a running database of deaths and injuries attributed to exotic-pet ownership:

In Texas a four-year-old mauled by a mountain lion his aunt kept as a pet, in Connecticut a 55-year-old woman’s face permanently disfigured by her friend’s lifelong pet chimpanzee, in Ohio an 80-year-old man attacked by a 200-pound kangaroo, in Nebraska a 34-year-old man strangled to death by his pet snake. And that list does not capture the number of people who become sick from coming into contact with zoonotic diseases.

The term exotic pet has no firm definition; it can refer to any wildlife kept in human households—or simply to a pet that’s more unusual than the standard dog or cat. Lack of oversight and regulation makes it difficult to pin down just how many exotics are out there. “The short answer is, too many,” says Patty Finch of the Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries. It’s estimated that the number of captive tigers alone is at least 5,000—most kept not by accredited zoos but by private owners. And while many owners tend to their exotic pets with great care and at no small expense, some keep their pets in cramped cages and poor conditions.

Mark Vernon finds that “a definitional approach to friendship has its limits”:

Try listing some of the friends you have – your partner, oldest friend, mates or girlfriends, one or two family members, work colleagues, neighbours, friends from online chat rooms, family friends, a boss perhaps, therapist, teacher, personal trainer – whoever you might at some time think of as a friend. A look at such a list puts your friends in front of you, as it were, and highlights the vast differences. For example, the friendship with your partner will in certain key respects be unlike that of your oldest friend, though you may be very close to both. Conversely, although friendship is for the most part a far less strong tie than say the connection to family, you may feel less close to members of your family in terms of friendship than others with whom you have no genetic or legal bond. Then again, lovers might make you blush and families can make you scream, but friendship – even soul friendship – is usually cool in comparison.

As you continue further down the list to the friends who are in many ways little more than acquaintances, associates or individuals for whom you have merely a sense of friendliness, it is obvious that friendship stretches from a love you could scarcely do without to an affection that you’d barely miss if it ended.

Some people would say there is some minimal quality which means that it makes sense to call all of them friends, perhaps Aristotle’s goodwill. Others would disagree: they are the sort who say they have a handful of friends and that others are people they only know. In other words, the ambiguity of friendship extends to the very possibility of prolific and profound friendship-making.

Personally, I think that Aristotle is on to something in his belief that the closest kind of friendship is only possible with a handful of individuals, such is the investment of time and self that it takes. ‘Host not many but host not none’, was his formula. He would argue that less is more and it is easy to substitute mere networking for the friendships it is supposed to yield. He actually went so far as to express a fear of having too many friends, ‘polyphilia’ as it might be called. There is an expression attributed to Aristotle that captures the concern: ‘Oh my friends, there is no friend.’

For more, check out Vernon’s book-length treatment of the subject, The Meaning of Friendship. My long essay on friendship is in Love Undetectable.

Scientists are taking cues from painters:

Greek and German researchers have compiled the results of looking at sunsets in 310 works from the Tate and National Gallery in London. The art dates from 1500 to 2000 and covers some 50 volcanic explosions and the stunning skies in their aftermath. The focus is on sunsets because, as atmospheric refractions beaming light through the Earth’s atmosphere in a way we usually can’t see, they can potentially show what the climate was like in the past and help improve climate change models for the future. Called ”Further evidence of important environmental information content in red-to-green ratios as depicted in paintings by great masters,” the study follows and confirms findings from the team’s 2007 exploration of paintings by such artists as Rembrandt, Hogarth, and Rubens. The current study is heavy on J. M. W. Turner, who was drawn to the sunsets just after the [1815 Mount] Tambora eruption.

Becky Oskin provides more details:

By measuring the amount of red and green in the paintings, the researchers were able to figure out past aerosol pollution levels. More aerosols meant redder sunsets, because the tiny particles are small compared to the wavelength of visible light, More long wavelength red light makes it through the aerosols, and shorter wavelength blues and violets get scattered by the aerosol particles. “Regardless of the school and style, all painters provided quite accurate aerosol information when red/green ratios were examined,” lead study author Christos Zerefos, a professor of atmospheric physics at the Academy of Athens in Greece, said in an email interview.

Update from a reader:

In a similar vein, “Vanishing Ice: Alpine and Polar Landscapes in Art, 1775-2012” just ended it’s first exhibition at the local art museum in Bellingham, WA.  Admittedly, it scrimped as small museums must by using occasionally using reproductions in place of originals, but the themes and messages were all quite original and powerful.  Explore the meaning of ice in our world, in its many forms, and witness the changing ice patterns in “before and after” type comparisons of paintings, prints, sketches and photographs. Lots of other great media reviews on the exhibition website.

At the start of the exhibit in November 2013, the museum commissioned an installation in the museum courtyard. Called “Melting Ice” by Jyoti Duwadi in collaboration with Bellingham Cold Storage. From this YouTube video: “The sculpture was assembled with blocks of ice from the company’s old ice house and left to melt. A variety of fossils, some dating to the Ice Age, was embedded in the cube and revealed during the melting process. Fossils are time capsules into the earth’s natural history. Students from Bellingham schools participated in various educational activities related to the artwork. The process of creating this installation and the ice melting was captured on tape.”

The exhibition website is here. A complete video tour of the exhibit is here (damn the internet is cool).

(Image of Chichester Canal by J. M. W. Turner, 1828, via Wikimedia Commons)