Author: Andrew Sullivan

Rosa Brooks pushes back against Sheryl Sandberg’s “lean in” philosophy and the culture of overwork, arguing that women, in particular, should fight for their right to relax:

Here’s the thing: We’ve managed to create a world in which ubiquity is valued above all. If you’re not at your desk every night until nine, your commitment to the job is questioned. If you’re not checking email 24/7, you’re not a reliable colleague. But in a world in which leaning in at work has come to mean doing more work, more often, for longer hours, women will disproportionately drop out or be eased out.

Why? Because unlike most men, women — particularly women with children — are still expected to work that “second shift” at home. … It’s hard enough managing one 24/7 job. No one can survive two of them. And as long as women are the ones doing more of the housework and childcare, women will be disproportionately hurt when both workplace expectations and parenting expectations require ubiquity. They’ll continue to do what too many talented women already do: Just as they’re on the verge of achieving workplace leadership positions, they’ll start dropping out.

Kathleen Geier applauds:

[S]lacking off unjustly gets a bad rap. People often enhance their abilities to think independently, to develop their own interests, and to do creative work when they’re not on someone else’s clock — when they’re just doing stuff they enjoy on their own time. It’s scary that our 24/7 economy seems to be allowing less and less time for that (at least, for those who are employed). I pity the Sheryl Sandbergs of the world who, as Kate Losse noted, appear to place little value on “pleasure and other nonproductive pastimes.”

Olga Khazan examines why Brooks’ call will be hard to follow:

U.S. policy doesn’t exactly make it easy to lean out even temporarily. Only about a fifth of moms get fully paid maternity time off, and high-powered “key employees” can be legally denied reinstatement if they go on family or medical leave.

Parents who truly wish to split the “workday” between actual work and childcare might also discover that the U.S. lacks a culture of part-time work, even though more than half of American working moms would prefer to work part-time or not at all. Part-time employees at American companies are much less likely to have access to benefits like retirement, medical care, and sick leave than are their full-time colleagues. U.S. workers are some of the least likely among the OECD nations to work part-time. (And even in countries where working less is accepted, the career disparity persists because it’s generally women, not men, who choose this route.)

A reader writes:

You quote Conor thusly: “I can’t help but wonder, when I hear about Christian businesses boycotting gay weddings, is how many of those businesses also refuse to take photographs or bake cakes for other marriages that don’t strictly conform to Biblical codes.”

In fact we know exactly that it’s only the gays they have discriminated against. The two biggest cases cited for these laws are the photographer in New Mexico and the baker in Oregon, Sweet Cakes by Melissa. The Portland alt-weekly, the Willamette Week, contracted Sweet Cakes for a host of cakes for other seemingly unChristian occasions, like babies out of wedlock, divorce party, pagan solstice, and stem cell success. All were agreed to by the company.

Indeed they were. Two priceless examples:

WW Asks – I was calling to get a quote on a cake for a midsummer solstice party. My coven is celebrating on Friday, June 21. The decoration would be very simple: just a green pentagram. We’d like to pick it up sometime that afternoon, before the bonfire. It’ll be for about 30 people.

Sweet Cake says – “For 30 people we have a couple options… We have two kind of cakes you could have. About the diagram you want on the cake, I’m not sure how much extra that would be.”

And this:

WW Asks – I’m shopping around for a nice baby shower cake for my friend. It’s her second baby with her boyfriend so I’m not looking for anything too big or fancy—probably enough to serve 15 to 20 people.

Sweet Cake says – “We have a sheet cake that will feed 30, or a 10-inch cake that would feed 30 people. The 10-inch cake is $50 and the sheet cake is $52. Or we have an 8-inch cake that would feed 15 for $40.”

I think the question in the core case is answered. Their only expression of religious freedom is the right to turn gay couples away. That’s not religious freedom. It’s bigotry.

Nora Caplan-Bricker observes that the 2012 Regnerus sociological study, which suggested that children of gay parents had relatively poor outcomes, is still being used to support conservative arguments against marriage equality despite the expert consensus that it was fundamentally flawed:

The denunciations of Regnerus’ work haven’t kept it from having influence. The study appeared in amicus briefs during the DOMA and Prop 8 cases that went before the Supreme Court in 2013. According to the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), which has tracked mentions of the study, it has come up in legislative debates in Hawaii, Illinois, Colorado, Maryland, Minnesota, Rhode Island, and the U.S. Congress. Before Regnerus was scheduled to testify in Michigan, his study was used as evidence in cases that went to court in Hawaii and New Mexico. Regnerus’ work has even influenced debates abroad—especially in Russia, where Yelena Mizulina, the chairwoman of the Duma’s committee on family, women and children, cited him to argue for a law banning same-sex adoption, which was enacted this February.

House Ways And Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp’s tax simplification proposal is out (pdf). Waldman provides the knee-jerk liberal response:

The centerpiece is an elimination of most tax brackets, leaving only two, at 10 percent and 25 percent. In a total shocker, that means a huge tax break for the wealthy! I know—I too am amazed that Republicans would propose such a thing.

Pareene has actually read the proposal:

Yes, it contains a tax cut, and effectively cuts tax rates on dividends and carried interest — two huge sources of income for the very rich — but it also taxes large financial institutions, adds a surcharge for very high-income households, and closes some loopholes that primarily benefit wealthy taxpayers.

Drum gives Camp credit “for going after a long laundry list of very specific deductions”:

Camp’s plan is long and includes upwards of a hundred specific tax deductions that he wants to reform or eliminate. There are enough caveats that it’s hard to tell exactly how far his proposals go, but again, kudos to him for making specific proposals at all. His plan may be DOA precisely because he was so specific, but kudos anyway. I’ll be interested in following the reaction as everyone figures out just whose ox would be gored by his various bullet points. Should be fun.

Critics are already dismissing some of Camp’s revenue-raisers as “gimmicks”:

Camp reportedly would allow U.S. companies with overseas operations to repatriate some of their foreign-sourced income at a lower tax rate — which would raise revenue in the short term but not in the longer term. The same would be true with some of the proposed depreciation changes allowed in the proposal.

Chuck Marr, the head of tax policy for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said his organization would oppose any proposal that uses these methods to raise revenue temporarily while cutting taxes permanently. He also questioned whether Camp’s proposal would count against revenue the enactment of so-called tax extenders, provisions such as the research-and-development tax credit, which expired at the end of the year, and are always extended by Congress.

Salmon likes Camp’s proposal for a bank tax:

At heart, this is a Pigovian tax on something (too-big-to-fail financial institutions) we don’t want, and often Pigovian taxes are more effective than regulation when it comes to minimizing such things. What’s more, it’s sharp enough to hurt: JPMorgan, for instance, would have ended up paying about 15% of its 2013 net income in this one tax alone.

For exactly that reason, however, I’m still skeptical that the tax will ever actually arrive. Those ten institutions are extremely powerful, and are more than capable of persuading politicians on both sides of the aisle to vote against a tax which singles them out for pecuniary punishment. The tax was a good idea in 2010, and it’s a good idea today. But it has very little chance of ever becoming a reality.

Pethokoukis thinks “mortgage interest reform is maybe the best of his tax reform plan”:

The [mortgage interest deduction] is a $70-billion-a-year, market distorting subsidy for the purchase of expensive homes by high-income taxpayers. It does little to promote homeownership by Americans of more modest means. There is no sound economic reason to use the tax code to artificially advantage the higher-end real estate sector over other sectors of the economy.

In any case, Brett Logiurato expects the plan to go nowhere:

On Wednesday, even House Speaker John Boehner wouldn’t publicly offer his support for the legislation. In a press conference, he said it was good to start a “conversation” about tax reform. But, when asked if the party was prepared to back Camp’s plan, he told a reporter, “You’re getting a little bit ahead of yourself.”

Camp is likely making this play because it’s the last year of his chairmanship on the Ways and Means Committee — and because one of the dreams of every Ways and Means chair is to lead a comprehensive overhaul of the nation’s too-complicated tax system.

Howard Gleckman looks further into the future:

In the end, the details of Camp’s plan are less important than the fact that he wrote a plan. His framework, like the ones proposed by President George W. Bush’s orphaned tax reform commission, the Bowles-Simpson fiscal commission, the Bipartisan Policy Center, and others will help inform future efforts to rewrite the code.  Think of Camp’s plan as one big step down a very long road.

Stephen Mihm explains what Chuck Hagel’s 2015 defense budget might mean for the economy:

Hagel’s proposal to cut the military spells trouble for the stock market, right? Actually, no. The headlines about plans to reduce the size of the Army by 6 percent obscured the news that, over the coming years, the actual level of defense spending is set to rise slowly, from $535 billion in 2016 to $559 billion in 2019. And that’s before members of Congress move to shelter their districts’ pet projects.

In fact, what most analysts have missed is that the reduction is strictly in the number of active personnel, not overall military expenditures.

Joyner supports the cuts:

Hagel and the Joint Chiefs have repeatedly emphasized—correctly, in my judgment—that it’s far preferable to take the risks associated with a small but highly trained and well equipped force than those associated with a larger but “hollow” force that is unprepared for the fight. Accordingly, they “chose further reductions in troop strength and force structure in every military service—active and reserve—in order to sustain our readiness and technological superiority, and to protect critical capabilities like special operations forces and cyber resources.” That’s a difficult but necessary trade-off.

But Lindsay Cohn thinks the Pentagon is going about personnel reductions in the wrong way:

It is a mistake to believe that reducing numbers automatically introduces efficiency. In a normal American firm, cutting personnel is an efficient means of reducing costs because a firm can choose whom it wants to fire and can engage in lateral hiring when its need for personnel increases again. In the military, however, one cannot simply fire the lowest-performing people and replace them with new hires, nor can one engage in lateral hiring for certain specialties when a sudden need arises (e.g. combat medics, artillerymen, military lawyers). While it is possible to pass over low-performing officers and deny re-enlistment requests from below-average enlisted personnel, the military has little control over the timing of such actions, and may face budgetary time limits that force out higher performers. In general, the forces will achieve personnel cuts by reducing recruiting and relying on voluntary attrition. This is an inefficient means of managing personnel.

Michael Krepon considers the fate of our nuclear arsenal:

So far, Hagel has been silent about reductions in nuclear forces, promising to preserve all three legs of the so-called triad — missiles, bombers and submarines — while making “important investments to preserve a safe, secure, reliable and effective nuclear force.” But reductions in nuclear forces are coming: It’s not a question of whether, but when — and how deep.

Diving deep into a history of Jamaican music, John Jeremiah Sullivan attempts to pinpoint the emergence of ska:

When I … [was] doing my best to stake out some understanding of what was going on musically in Kingston in the late Fifties and early Sixties, I ran into the riddle that bedevils every person who gets lost in this particular cultural maze, namely, where did ska come from? That strange rhythm, that chop on the upbeat or offbeat, ump-ska, ump-ska, ump-ska, exemplified quintessentially in “Simmer Down” (or in parts of Bruno Mars’s “Locked Out of Heaven,” if there’s doubt of its relevance). Did someone think that up? Can it be traced to a particular song or band, or accident, or earlier Caribbean style (mento, calypso)? Maybe its evolution should be followed out of the island’s deeper past, from African and Afro-Caribbean sources, and Indian influences—both kinds of Indian, in Jamaica’s case. There were a disproportionate number of Chinese-Jamaicans helping to shape Kingston’s music scene—did that have any effect?

As with almost all cases of musicological origin-hunting, the answer is something tedious like, “Yes and no to all of the above.”

Multiple streams converged to prepare the ground for that rhythm, for it to become a rhythmic move that would make sense to the Jamaican ear (and body), or to the fingers of a Jamaican guitarist.

Nevertheless there are moments that can be pointed to, when you hear the insistent uptick venturing forth. Theophilus Beckford’s piano on the classic Fifties proto-ska “Easy Snappin’” is one. You hear it there in the way Beckford’s pounding the chord, hear the rhythm offering itself, If you felt like going all the way, we could play it like this. Count Ossie’s polyrhythmic Rasta drumming on the Folkes Brothers’ “Oh, Carolina” is another such moment. The horns on Cuban-Jamaican blues master Laurel Aitken’s “Boogie in My Bones.” (Or over in the States, electric-guitar pioneer Wild Jimmy Spruill’s string-scratching fingernail technique on Wilbert Harrison’s 1959 “Kansas City”—Spruill a sharecropper’s son from Fayetteville, North Carolina; Harrison a churchgoing city kid from Charlotte). Sit down with any ska freak, and they’ll give you many other moments.

Update from a reader:

I’m a music and film producer based in San Francisco. I just had to add one really cool anecdote about ska music from Jamaica, as I didn’t see John Jeremiah Sullivan mention it in his write-up. I have worked with many Jamaican musicians, and some of the old school ones as well, including The Melodians, who were one of the original reggae groups. I have heard this story repeated by many of them. The “ska sound” story is essentially that there were radios around here and there in Jamaica, and of the few radios that did work, some were able to get signals from the United States, but signal was not fully clear, and frequently bounced in and out. So when musicians listened to these American songs, they thought that’s how cool music from the U.S sounded, with this off-beat rhythm. Some of the early ska songs from Jamaica are literally covers of early American Motown songs, almost 95% like the original recordings, except the Jamaicans adding a ska beat.

(Video: “Simmer Down” by Bob Marley and the Wailers, 1964)