Andrew Sullivan

Monopoly For The Millennials

From a profile of Klaus Teuber, inventor of the wildly popular Settlers of Catan:

A board game with economic theory, land development, and cute little buildings: one is naturally reminded of something else. The Washington Post hailed Catan as the Monopoly “of our time.” Wired called it the “Monopoly Killer.” Meanwhile, Monopoly itself has begun to respond to the shifting tides. In 2007, Hasbro published Tropical Tycoon Monopoly, in which the original Atlantic City layout frames the perimeter while Rich Uncle Pennybags erupts from a volcanic tropical island in the center. U-Build Monopoly, released in 2010, replaces the rectangle properties with hexagonal tiles that resemble Catan’s terrain. Still, Derk Solko, a co-founder of the popular gaming forum Boardgamegeek.com, said to Wired in 2009, “If I could wave a magic wand and replace all the copies of Monopoly out there with Settlers, I truly think the world would be a better place.” Fenlon told me, “Our mission in life is to make Catan the preëminent game—to have people think of Catan instead of Monopoly when they think of a board game.”

(Photo of Catan costumes by David Trawin)

The Chances That Clinton Runs

Charlie Cook pegs them at 70 percent. He focuses on the age factor:

The choice to run for president is effectively a nine-year commitment: one year to run, another four years if she wins a first term—finishing up that term at age 73—and then, assuming she runs for reelection and wins, serving four more years to end a second term at 77 years of age. None of this is to say that the age issue could successfully be used against her. After all, Reagan won the presidency at the same age. But how many 67-year-olds make nine-year commitments, and what concerns have to be addressed if they do?

Update from a reader:

Timing is everything, as Obama showed by seizing the moment in 2008. Clinton’s time has passed. It has been over a quarter-century since America elected a president over age 60 (George H. W. Bush in 1988). The zeitgeist as I read it is suggesting Clinton will not run, because of a health problem or some other unexpected turn of events.

There is only one woman who perfectly suits the emerging spirit of the age:

Kirsten Gillibrand. She’s smart, tough, politically savvy, and willing to challenge entrenched patriarchal power structures. And she is a babe. Why shouldn’t the first female president have iconic female characteristics, in the same way that male presidents have had iconic male characteristics (tall, virile, heroic)? It may not be politically correct to say so, but women who are as gorgeous as Palin and Gillibrand have a better chance of getting elected president than their less attractive peers. It is simple human psychology to want the leader to look the part of the alpha female or male.

So, you heard it here first. Kirsten Gillibrand will be the next president of the United States.

What Makes An Olympic Hero?

Classics scholar Laura Swift notes that historically, you didn’t have to be a winner to be a hero:

To become a hero meant something concrete in the Greek world: it normally occurred after death, and meant that you’d receive worship at the site of your tomb. Nowadays we’re familiar with the great mythological heroes like Achilles, Ajax, or Theseus, but there were hundreds if not thousands of other heroes, many of whom were real individuals who had died within living memory. And while these people were often made heroes because they’d achieved something memorable, this could involve doing something strange or outlandish just as easily as something good. …

The historian Herodotus, for example, tells us of a construction worker who was heroized because he was believed to have had the loudest voice in the world. In another even more bizarre story, we learn of a man who became a hero because after his death a swarm of bees made a nest in his skull. The underlying idea seems to have been that these were people who were somehow different from the rest and who stood out. This gave them a power that was believed to abide after their death.

So when you see media attention directed to an eccentric athlete at Sochi, remember that idolizing the improbable has just as good a pedigree as praising the greatest of talents.

Another reason to cheer on Mohammad Karim, who taught himself to ski using wooden planks and today is the sole Pakistani competitor at the Games. A video profile of Karim is seen above.

Re-Learning How To Make Love

Sonya Lea’s husband had an invasive surgery to treat his cancer, during which he lost his memory and forgot how to have sex:

His hand reaches out, enfolds my hip. It’s the first time he has moved toward me since the surgery. I do not cry, though I wish I could. In my mind, I add sex to the list of things forgotten. Things like the day we met, the day we married, the days our children were born. I think about the ways I have made myself a “we” — who we are, and what we like and what we don’t like, what we do and what we will never do — and I watch those things vanish, too. After a while, I watch him sleep. The man who taught me to explore has become as unknowing as a stranger in a strange land.

At first I think the teenage sex will dissipate, that the fast intercourse, few words and all-boy appetite will be replaced by the experienced sexuality the two of us shared before the cancer treatment. Three years after the brain injury, it still isn’t possible for him to ask for what he wants, or conduct a conversation, or remember the ways my body responds. And that’s not even important, because we’re in survival mode, trying to get our children through college, and help him relearn his career, and sell the house, and apply for disability. My husband suffers both long-term and short-term memory loss, making remembering arduous. Still, the brain changes have made his desire immense. He artlessly reaches for me, his man-hands grasp my breasts before an exchange of words, glances, clinches. Even though I’m angry at what’s happened to us, I cannot ignore his longing.

Tim Parks wonders why literary biographers tend to present their subjects “as simply the most gifted and well-meaning of writers, while their behavior, however problematic and possibly outrageous … is invariably described in a flattering light”:

Returning … to these over-generous biographies, and to the constant insinuation of academe that writers are talented laborers in a good cause, one can only assume that they are satisfying a general need to reinforce a positive conception of narrative art, thus bolstering the self-esteem of readers, and even more of critics and biographers, who inwriting about literature are likewise contributing to the very same good causes. Authors themselves, though often contradicting this positive image in private (Dickens frequently acknowledged that certain negative characters in his books were based on himself), soon learn how to play the part. Beckett must have been aware of how those famous author photos, suggesting a lean, suffering asceticism, fed the public’s perception of an austere and virtuous separateness. “How easy,” wrote Beckett’s friend Emil Cioran, “to imagine him … in a naked cell, undisturbed by the least decoration, not even a crucifix.” Actually Beckett was sharing a spacious flat in central Paris with lifetime companion Suzanne, spending weekends and summers with her in their country cottage, but drinking heavily with friends (never Suzanne) most evenings and generally making time for mistresses when possible.

(Image: Caricature of Beckett by by Edmund S. Valtman via Wikimedia Commons)

China’s Power Isn’t Its Military

Zack Beauchamp believes that China will never replace America as a global hegemon:

Chinese foreign policy, to date, has been characterized by a sort of realist incrementalism. China has displayed no interest in taking over America’s role as protector of the global commons; that’s altogether too altruistic a task. Instead, China is content to let the United States and its allies keep the sea lanes open and free ride off of their efforts. A powerful China, in other words, would most likely to be happy to pursue its own interests inside the existing global order rather than supplanting it.

Charles Kenny notes how China is economically constrained:

If trade was severely disrupted by war today, China’s economy would grind to a halt because a lot of what it does isn’t the complete manufacturing process, it’s some bit of a larger supply chain. That makes the disruption of trade much more damaging to an economy. So, for that reason and because China is just much more integrated into the global trade system, I think that China would have to think a lot harder about declaring war on somebody than the United States did in 1914. (And by the way, the United States was busy invading lots of places in 1914.)

But Elizabeth Economy, co-author of By All Means Necessary, looks at how China’s desire for natural resources is reshaping the world:

Chinese companies are not very strong in undertaking environmental impact assessments back at home, and you can see throughout Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Africa — they often don’t undertake environmental impact assessments abroad, either. Similarly, in their labor practices, Chinese miners are often poorly paid, and the conditions are challenging, to say the least in terms of labor safety. And we found across the board, in countries like Papua New Guinea to Peru, when miners are asked to compare the practices at Chinese mines with those at others, they uniformly rated the Chinese mines much lower.

And you can also see it in corruption: The way that the Chinese do deals at home for land, through the back door between officials and businesses to appropriate land. Well, when companies go to Brazil, they think that’s the way business can be done there as well. And China does have something akin to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, but they don’t have any monitoring or enforcement mechanisms.

So China has a different way of going out of securing resources than we typically see, and it’s impacts can be pretty substantial when you’re looking at a set of governance issues.

Ask Reza Aslan Anything: What Do We Know About Jesus?

A reader is asking:

In another video after the jump, Reza gives a fascinating account of the earliest non-Christian evidence of Jesus (followed by several comments from readers):

Here he addresses the Resurrection:

A reader writes:

Lutheran Seminarian here. Regarding Reza Aslan’s video about why Jesus would be confused about ritual of the Catholic Mass, the reading of and commentary on texts would have been part of Jesus’s religious environment. Moreover, the Eucharist, the Mass itself, was instituted by Jesus. Jesus might be confused by the structure of the Catholic Church, but the core of the Mass itself wold probably feel remarkably familiar.

Another:

If we assume, as Aslan does, this human being named Jesus, who only speaks a long dead language and doesn’t have any cultural or historic context for a modern church, let alone the cars, the lights, the amplified sound, and all the weird clothes, wanders into a contemporary Catholic church, I don’t think he’d even understand he was in a place of worship. Even if he wandered into even a modern synagog, I think he’d be equally confused. Does Aslan really think Jesus would recognize this as a synagog?

The officials of wherever he wandered into – Catholic church, Protestant church, or synagog – would be confronted with a smelly, oddly dressed man who was babbling in some unknown language. They would likely call the police, who, if they didn’t shoot him or stun gun him, would take him to a hospital, which would be vastly more confusing to Jesus. All told, Aslan’s version of Jesus would likely be admitted to a psychiatric hospital within hours, assuming the police didn’t kill him first.

Another:

I’m enjoying the Reza Aslan video thread. I’m going through a prolonged and serious reevaluation of my faith, so his themes play into that well. One point I want to pick up on, and emphasize, is the idea that Jesus’ message is not the same as Christianity. Of course, there is a lot of unpacking to do on that issue, but the short point is that Paul repackaged Jesus’ message into a Gentile/Roman-friendly message. Without that, Jesus’s message would have stopped with the Ebionites.

Of course that means, on some level, I’m denying – or at least seriously struggling – with the miraculous aspects of Jesus’ life.

If you’re just joining the thread, Reza Asland is an Iranian-American writer and scholar of religions. He is the author of No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam and, most recently, Zealot, which offers an interpretation of the life and mission of the historical Jesus. Previous Dish on Zealot here, here and here. Our full Ask Anything archive is here.

Don’t Fear The Worst

But, if you borrow a page from the Stoics’ playbook, you may want to anticipate it:

The Stoics, who inspired the pioneers of modern cognitive-behaviour therapies, recommended a practice called premeditatio malorum. This involved envisaging all the evils one could foresee – such as being sent into exile, tortured or shipwrecked. The idea behind this seemingly morbid exercise was that it would help them to react to bad news with equanimity. If such things actually happened, they’d be well prepared. The Stoic advice was to anticipate, not fear, the worst.

The second component of the practice – cultivating equanimity – is as important as the first. If we just focus our attention on all the things that are bound to go wrong and how awful it would be if they did, the exercise would be likely to cause depression rather than serenity.

Most of us are not Stoics but we could still benefit from reflecting on how we think of potential negative events. The first point is to remember that these things may, rather than definitely will, happen. The second is to ask what the most constructive reaction would be if they actually happened. Imagine you lost your job: what resources could you draw on to deal with the situation?

Hair Pieces

Rebecca Drolen explores our relationship with hair:

In my work, Hair Pieces, I am interested in exploring the fickle relationship most have with their body hair. We consider some hair very desirable and grow and groom it with care, while we treat other hair as shameful and cover or remove it. Once hair has become disconnected from our bodies, we treat it with disgust, yet it has an archival, lasting presence that outlives the body and defies death and decay.

Last year, Joe Nolan reviewed an exhibition by Drolen:

Many of Drolen’s objects speak to the the kind of mourning jewelry that was popular at the end of the 19^th century. During that time special lockets and picture frames were often made to contain a lock of hair from a deceased family member. A piece like “Tweezings” takes this idea to the extreme, displaying a pair of open lockets, one of which has about a foot of hair pouring out of it. This piece could be making a statement about how the dead live on in our memories with a grisly allusion to the contentious claims that the hair will continue to grow on the deadest of corpses. However, Drolen’s lighthearted titles don’t let us take these objects too seriously and they’re only allowed to take on more interesting resonances in their roles as props in Drolen’s fantastical narrative photographs.

More images here.

(Photo by Rebecca Drolen)

Quote For The Day

“On Feb 9th 2011, you were evicted from an apartment at 20 Catherine St and your old red pit bull was seized by animal control and taken to the kill shelter. She was really skinny and had bad skin infections, and had been bred A LOT. She’d even had a Caesarian, judging by the scar. They said at the kill shelter she was 12 years old. She also had a lopsided face and it looked like there were a few cigarette burns on her head/ears …

If you do see this, we’d love to know how old she is, and what your name for her was. Also please say a prayer for her, as soon she is going to have mammary surgery to remove some small lumps … unfortunately not spaying a dog and breeding her a lot means she is very likely to get mammary cancer, and Cathy has it. Luckily my vet caught it early, so I am hoping Cathy can spend many more happy years with us. She really is the best dog.

P.S. you can’t have her back,” – a Craigslist posting for the ages.

Author: Andrew Sullivan