Andrew Sullivan

An Aspie By Any Other Name

Hanna Rosin’s son Jacob was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome four months before it was expunged from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Rosin reflects on what gaining, and subsequently losing, a label for her son’s condition has meant:

[A]lmost the minute we got the diagnosis, my resistance to labeling melted, and so did my husband’s. We walked willingly into another world, with its own language, rituals, and worldview. This was our version of the transformative experience [John Elder] Robison had described in his memoir. “It did fit me. Completely,” he wrote of the diagnosis, which he received at the age of 40. “The realization was staggering. There are other people like me. So many, in fact, that they have a name for us.” We found a summer day camp for Jacob specifically designed for people like him. This fall we moved him from public school, where he was struggling, to a private-school program that has the word Asperger’s in its name and a curriculum that integrates social and emotional learning into every lesson—that caters, in other words, to a population that technically no longer exists.

But she found the label less useful over time:

Asperger’s is a term I find myself still using a lot—more than I otherwise might, in fact, precisely because the category is now officially obsolete. I’m relieved to feel it’s not a well-bounded identity that sums up my son perfectly and in perpetuity. His program’s director, who always worried that the Asperger’s shorthand minimized the challenges the kids face, is happily contemplating a name change. Jacob, I’m glad to say, couldn’t care less about the new label in his life, which is lucky, because who knows what will ultimately become of it.

Washington’s Favorite Show

Scott Meslow ponders the Beltway’s infatuation with House Of Cards:

Why would a town so careful about presentation so gleefully embrace a show that treats politicians as either imbecilic or deeply corrupt, and treats most established journalists as cynical, selfishly motivated and malleable? For a time, the popularity of House of Cards in the District was something of an open secret; a BuzzFeed article published two weeks’ after the show’s first-season premiere reported that “aides who gushed about the show off the record subsequently refused to be interviewed […] fearing it might reflect poorly on their bosses or themselves.” Mike Long, the press secretary for real-life House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy, took to Twitter to clarify that his boss had nothing in common with Frank Underwood.

Since then, Hill staffers, journalists and politicians alike all seemed to finish watching the first season and something began to change. The less salient aspects of the show collapsed under the weight of a simple truth: House of Cards makes Washington and its two wonkiest industries—journalism and politics—look really cool, even as it implicitly attacks them at their very roots.

The problem Weigel has with the show:

Should the show be truer to Washington? No, that’s a dull ask. Nobody wants to hear Washingtonians or journalists complain that this-or-that metro station should have more stairs. The problem is Underwood’s enemies don’t seem to understand politics.

The Mess Cleaning Up Politics Makes

Jonathan Rauch remembers George Washington Plunkitt, “a factotum of New York’s renowned Tammany Hall political machine during the late 19th and early 20th centuries”:

His greatest insight was the distinction between honest and dishonest graft.

“There’s the biggest kind of a difference between political looters and politicians who make a fortune out of politics by keepin’ their eyes wide open,” Plunkitt said. “The looter goes in for himself alone without considerin’ his organization or his city. The politician looks after his own interests, the organization’s interests, and the city’s interests all at the same time.” Dirty graft is parasitic, mere larceny, whereas honest graft helps knit together a patronage network that ensures leaders can lead and followers will follow. Reformers who failed to understand this crucial distinction, Plunkitt said, courted anarchy.

Rauch’s bottom line:

Earnest campaigns to take the politics out of politics can make governing more difficult, with results that serve no one very well. The next time you see some new reform scheme touted in the name of stopping corruption, pause to recall the wisdom of another old-school pol, the late Representative Jimmy Burke, of Massachusetts: “The trouble with some people is that they think this place is on the level.”

The Vanilla Icing Of Rap

This white boy is nuts:

Dave Bry examines how white people are making up an ever greater proportion of hip-hop’s stars and audiences:

In 2013, for the first time in the 55-year-history of the Billboard Hot 100, not one black artist lodged a number-one single. (Of the eleven songs that held the spot for some portion of the year, four were hip-hop, and four featured black singers or rappers in guest roles.) There’s been round, sustained clamor over Macklemore’s Grammy haul, which was all the more glaring because it came at the expense of fellow nominee Kendrick Lamar, a (frankly) far more talented artist, who is black. … Macklemore admits that white privilege is a factor in his success. “I benefit from that privilege,” he has said. “And I think that mainstream Pop culture has accepted me on a level that they might be reluctant to, in terms of a person of color.” But that doesn’t change the facts on the ground:

A new white hip-hop superstar has been anointed, one who does not live up to most rap critics’ definition of excellence. (Eminem is widely considered to be an extremely skilled rapper.) Some have even gone so far as to anoint Macklemore some sort of savior of hip-hop, a Great White Hope who will help the genre evolve into a more enlightened form. A recent Dallas Morning News headline sums up this perspective: “Macklemore shows hip-hop doesn’t need to be homophobic, violent in Dallas concert.”

Like Serch said, with so many more white people listening to rap than black, more and more white people will make it (and, it’s hard to deny that its easier to sell a white rap star to millions and millions of white consumers than it is a black one). So let’s imagine that, in 25 years, most of the people making it are white, and that, like rock, it’s thought of as a white form. Shouldn’t we expect black artists will be on to creating whatever next new form might challenge the status quo the way rap did, and the way rock n’ roll did before that? As rock became whiter over time, black artists forged new paths in R&B, in soul, in funk, in disco. (And many—Chuck Berry, Jimi Hendrix, Phil Lynott of Thin Lizzy, Prince, Bad Brains, Living Colour, Fishbone—stayed on and made an indelible impact in rock.)

Bry goes on to recognize a “new wave of [black] artists from Chicago and Atlanta have been pushing rap into aesthetic spaces it has never been before,” who often use Autotune “to warp their voices in ways traditional rappers never could, they bleed one word into the next, blurring the line between rapping and singing.” Exhibit A is ZMoney:

Why So Many Uprisings?

Brian Merchant revisits the work of Yaneer Bar-Yam, who uses food price indices to predict revolutionary unrest across the globe:

There are certainly many other factors fueling mass protests, but hunger—or the desperation caused by its looming specter—is often the tipping point. Sometimes, it’s clearly implicated: In Venezuela—where students have taken to the streets and protests have left citizens dead—food prices are at a staggering 18-year high.

“In some of the cases the link is more explicit, in others, given that we are at the boiling point, anything will trigger unrest. At the boiling point, the impact depends on local conditions,” Bar-Yam says. But a high price of food worldwide can effect countries that aren’t feeling the pinch as much. “In addition, there is a contagion effect: given widespread social unrest that is promoted by high food prices, examples from one country drive unrest in others.”

Map Of The Day

Tasneem Raja and Chris Mooney compare state-by-state data on vaccine exemptions:

There’s evidence that tightening exemption laws makes a difference. After reaching an exemption rate of 7.6 percent in 2009, Washington state passed a law requiring parents to get a doctor’s signature if they wanted to opt out of their children’s vaccinations. In just two years, the exemption rate plummeted by more than 40 percent. Pertussis vaccination ratesclimbed to 92.4 percent in the past school year, representing “the highest pertussis vaccine completion rate for kindergartners since the state began to collect this data in the 2006-2007 school year,” according to the Washington’s Department of Health.

Razib Khan examines the data for patterns:

[R]ather than a standard Left-Right axis, I think we’re seeing a “crunchy counter-culture” sentiment.

Slap-Happy In Topeka

A Kansas lawmaker is concerned that parents and teachers aren’t hitting children hard enough:

Democratic Rep. Gail Finney has introduced a bill that would allow parents, teachers and caregivers to spank children hard enough to leave redness or bruising. Under current state law, spanking that does not leave marks is already permitted. … Finney’s bill would allow “up to 10 forceful applications in succession of a bare, open-hand palm against the clothed buttocks of a child and any such reasonable physical force on the child as may be necessary to hold, restrain or control the child in the course of maintaining authority over the child, acknowledging that redness or bruising may occur on the tender skin of a child as a result.”

The chairman of the House Corrections and Juvenile Justice committee says they won’t even consider the bill. Other states, however, have laws on the books that are even more spanking-friendly:

Yes, it’s all the usual suspects. As of 2013: kids are still getting paddled (yes, paddled) in Georgia, though that’s declining in Mississippi. Florida banned paddling elementary school students and then un-banned it. A city in Tennessee almost banned corporal punishment, then decided to do more research. In 2012, there was an uproar in Texas when two male assistant principles paddled two girls so hard they had bruises. Parents thought it was inappropriate for men to paddle girls without a same sex administrator in the room. As long as the paddler can prove they’re beating the paddlee for “discipline,” it’s all legal.

The Best Of The Dish Today

Arizona’s legislature passed the bill today allowing anyone in the state to discriminate against anyone else if their religious convictions demand it. My favorite quote from the debate was from the Republican sponsor of the bill, when challenged to answer whether it would sanction firing gay employees:

A business owner can already decide not to hire somebody who is gay or lesbian. This doesn’t change that.

Oh that’s all right then. Nothing to worry about. I’ll be fascinated to see if Governor Brewer decides to sign the law (she vetoed a similar measure last year). I’ll also be interested in what Senator John McCain has to say about this. Does he believe it’s now fair game to cite religion as a reason to refuse to offer any public accommodation or private employment? Can Catholics now openly discriminate against Protestants? Can Protestants now discriminate against Latinos now because they are largely Catholic? Are Jews now fair game as well?

I noted today how anti-Christian such laws are – an almost text-book modern case of what Jesus decried among the Pharisees of his day. We covered the unrest in Venezuela – a topic somewhat overlooked in much of the media; and wondered what on earth we can do about Russia’s attempt to keep Ukraine under Putin’s fascist thumb. Plus: Coke rips off the New Yorker. And how the Jews created Superman (or something like that).

The most popular post of the day remained “What The Hell Just Happened In Kansas?” (1.7 million pageviews so far), followed by “The Death-Throes Of the Anti-Gay Movement.”

The doggie-video above? It cheered me up. Arizona got me down.

See you in the morning.

Email Of The Day

[Re-posted from earlier today]

A reader writes:

Just a quick note. I have read your blog for many years now. I was an initial subscriber and also re-subscribed (for $40) for the new year.

I’m getting spoiled by the no ads. In fact, since I’m so used to no ads, it is getting annoying to read other online content with ads. I regularly (at least used to) visit the Huffington Post. It is getting ridiculous how slow their site is becoming with all the extra crap. It’s getting to the point I don’t visit as much. I have a very fast machine with very fast Internet. It doesn’t help. It will sometimes take 30 seconds before all the content loads and I can actually scroll down and read the story.

In short, thanks for keeping your site clean. It is SO worth the subscription.

We feel the same way. Because so many other sites do not have any actual subscription revenue, and because revenue from ads keeps declining, the prevalence of sponsored content and ads and sponsored links will, I’m pretty sure, continue to proliferate. We started with the luxury of a very loyal readership, which enabled us to head off in the opposite direction to the herd when we went independent. That was a high-risk decision at the time; it’s been a high-reward move a year later.

As for an update, the revenue renewal rate is pretty steady at 105 percent over 2013. February’s revenue is now higher than last year – and we have a week to go. And our traffic in February – just under 2 million unique visitors so far – is currently the highest since we went independent. The potential for creating a space for vibrant, accessible, online journalism that is not overwhelmed by advertizing or pseudo-advertizing is real. Subscribe here – and help us maintain one of the highest signal-to-noise ratios on the web.

Update from a reader:

I’m rather red-faced that it’s taken this long, but I finally renewed my subscription. In honor of the age I’ll reach in three months, I renewed at $60. Why did it take so long? Who knows. Laziness, an attitude of I’ll-do-it-later, maybe a naïve assumption I didn’t click on READ ON all that much. Well, let me tell you something – these past few weeks have reminded me I click READ ON all the time. I was going through withdrawal not being able to read the full text of just about everything in The Dish. Being part-Ukrainian, and trying to devour your news about the protests in Maidan, I had to act. Withdrawal symptoms are lessening now.

America Slowly Sours On Afghanistan

Paul Waldman is pleased that a plurality of Americans now see the war in Afghanistan as a mistake:

We’ve now amassed over 2,300 American dead there, in addition to the hundreds of billions of dollars we’ve spent. We didn’t get Osama bin Laden when we invaded. Our “partner” Hamid Karzai increasingly looks like he has lost his mind and is determined to make sure that when American troops leave later this year, the country will promptly get taken over by the Taliban again. So it isn’t too surprising that so many Americans are asking what the whole thing was for.

But it has taken us an unusually long time to come to that conclusion:

Just take a look at Gallup’s polling data from the four major U.S. wars since 1950. In comparison, the Afghanistan conflict actually took quite a long time for a plurality of Americans to consider it a mistake.

It took two years or less for public opinion to turn on the wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq. The 12-plus it took for Afghanistan is practically a lifetime. And when you track the course of the Afghanistan War’s popularity compared to the Iraq War’s, it appears much more stable (and higher overall). Support for the Iraq war has fluctuated since mid-2004, and a majority of Americans have considered it a mistake since 2007.