Author: Andrew Sullivan

Contemplating this year’s Sundance festival, Manohla Dargis makes a request of movie producers (NYT):

[T]ake a moment and consider whether flooding theaters with titles is good for movies and moviegoers alike. Because no matter how exciting Sundance will be this year, no matter how aesthetically electrifying, innovative and entertaining the selections, it’s hard to see how American independent cinema can sustain itself if it continues to focus on consumption rather than curation. There are, bluntly, too many lackluster, forgettable and just plain bad movies pouring into theaters, distracting the entertainment media and, more important, overwhelming the audience. Dumping “product” into theaters week after week damages an already fragile cinematic ecosystem.

Tim Wu has a great counterargument, writing that “making lots of films to yield a few hits is not dangerous to independent film but exactly how independent film sustains itself—and ultimately how it improves Hollywood”:

Who exactly gets hurt if too many movies are made?

If making films weren’t challenging and fun for the people involved, they wouldn’t do it. As John Kenneth Galbraith wrote decades ago, we live in an affluent society, with plenty of surplus cash, much of which ends up in the arts. More art means more bad art, too, but so what? … It may sound strange, but visible failures are the sign of a fertile cultural industry.

Ultimately, the only real victims are film reviewers like Dargis, whose job is complicated and made tiresome by the duty of watching so many films. … This leads to a suggestion for the Times’ critics: namely, that the paper’s ambition of reviewing every film that is “released” in New York City theatres is folly and entirely too twentieth-century. (The Times reviewed nearly nine hundred films in 2013.) The significance of a release is eroding in every media market—film is just the latest. Just as book-review sections long ago gave up on trying to keep track of every book published, it is pointless to review every film released, especially when the real life of most films happens on the small screen anyhow.

(Video: Trailer for Computer Chess, winner of the Alfred P. Sloan Prize at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival)

Rebecca J. Rosen investigates the question:

In the lightning-death literature, one explanation has gained prominence: urbanization. Lightning death rates have declined in step with the rural population, and rural lightning deaths make up a far smaller percent of all lightning deaths (see figure at right). Urban areas afford more protection from lightning. Ergo, urbanization has helped make people safer from lightning. …

But is the move from farms to cities what is driving the decline? Sure, lightning deaths and the rural population both declined during the 20th century, but so did a lot of other things, for instance, the percent of people living without electricity and plumbing, two infrastructural improvements that also help make your home less vulnerable to lightning. Of course, the development of better infrastructure—what I’ll refer to as modernization—is related to urbanization, but it is not limited to urban areas. Over the 20th century, rural infrastructure modernized as well. How can we know how much each is driving the decline in lightning deaths?

There’s one number we’d really need, and that’s the death rate for the rural population over time. If the rural rate held steady, than urbanization is responsible. If it too dropped, we’d be able to get a glimpse of the relative merits of the urbanization and modernization theories.

Nick Carr investigates what’s going on in our brains when we read deeply:

What is it about literary reading that gives it such sway over how we think and feel and maybe even who we are? Norman Holland, a scholar at the McKnight Brain Institute at the University of Florida, has been studying literature’s psychological effects for many years, and he offers a provocative answer to that question. Although our emotional and intellectual responses to events in literature mirror, at a neuronal level, the responses we would feel if we actually experienced those events, the mind we read with, Holland argues in his book Literature and the Brain, is a very different mind from the one we use to navigate the real world.

In our day-to-day routines, we are always trying to manipulate or otherwise act on our surroundings, whether it’s by turning a car’s steering wheel or frying an egg or tapping a button on a smartphone. But when we open a book, our expectations and our attitudes change. Because we understand that “we cannot or will not change the work of art by our actions,” we are relieved of our desire to exert an influence over objects and people and hence can “disengage our [cognitive] systems for initiating actions.” That frees us to become absorbed in the imaginary world of the literary work. We read the author’s words with “poetic faith,” to borrow a phrase that the psychologically astute Samuel Coleridge used two centuries ago.

“We gain a special trance-like state of mind in which we become unaware of our bodies and our environment,” explains Holland. “We are ‘transported.’” It is only when we leave behind the incessant busyness of our lives in society that we open ourselves to literature’s regenerative power.

That doesn’t mean that reading is anti-social. The central subject of literature is society, and when we lose ourselves in a book we often receive an education in the subtleties and vagaries of human relations. Several studies have shown that reading tends to make us at least a little more empathetic, a little more alert to the inner lives of others. A series of experiments by researchers at the New School for Social Research, reported in Science in 2013, showed that reading literary fiction, in particular, can strengthen a person’s “theory of mind,” which is what psychologists call the ability to understand what other people are thinking and feeling. “Fiction is not just a simulator of a social experience,” one of the researchers, David Comer Kidd, told The Guardian newspaper; “it is a social experience.” The reader withdraws in order to connect more deeply.

This week, after a nine-year court battle, former Stanford student Rahinah Ibrahim became the first person to successfully challenge her placement on a US government’s watch list:

Ibrahim’s saga began in 2005 when she was a visiting doctoral student in architecture and design from Malaysia. On her way to Kona, Hawaii to present a paper on affordable housing, Ibrahim was told she was on a watch list, detained, handcuffed and questioned for two hours at San Francisco International Airport. The month before, the FBI had visited the woman at her Stanford apartment, inquiring whether she had any connections to the Malaysian terror group Jemaah Islamiyah, according to the woman’s videotaped deposition played in open court.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup ordered the government to either purge her name from the list, or certify that it has already been removed. Federal watch lists contain some 875,000 names.

Jeffrey Kahn comments:

Judge Alsup’s ruling is a game-changer for the Government, the latest in a series of reversals resulting directly from this litigation.

The Government’s previous positions, that the district court lacked subject matter jurisdiction over the No Fly List and that a foreign national such as the plaintiff was not entitled to make claims of constitutional injuries, were both rejected by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in 2008 and 2012.  The Government has now also lost its core position that internal agency oversight, whether by the FBI (whose Terrorist Screening Center creates these lists) or by the Department of Homeland Security’s “TRIP” redress program, provides sufficient protection against erroneous deprivation of a variety of liberty interests.  According to Judge Alsup, “The government’s administrative remedies fall short of such relief and do not supply sufficient due process.”  A judicially enforced remedy is therefore required.

Scott Shackford examines the twisted logic behind the government’s position in this case:

The administration’s efforts to “vigorously” contest the case went so far as to ordering an airline to not let Ibrahim’s daughter board a flight to San Francisco in December to testify at the trial. Given the petty tactics used by the feds in this case, one wonders if they even have any reason other than “OMG! Terrorists!” to keep the order sealed. If, for example, you were an actual terrorist, wouldn’t you already know why you’re on the no-fly list and once you found out, wouldn’t you be able to figure out what information the feds would likely have on you to keep you from flying? Are the feds trying the argue that the average terrorist has so many balls in the air − like the evil mastermind in some television spy serial − that he or she needs to sue the government to find out which ones they’ve figured out? The existence of the no-fly list itself and the discovery that one is on it provides enough information to create concerns for any actual terrorist that the feds know something is going on.

Reflecting on the WV chemical spill, covered by the Dish here and here, James Salzman warns that “water systems present an impossibly big target to protect from intentional acts or accidents”: