Category: The Dish

The Pursuit Of Happiness Leads To The Suburbs

by Dish Staff

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Ben Schiller runs down the research of Stephan Goetz, who tracked “the number of days people said they were in a negative mood” on a county-by-county basis:

Goetz says suburban counties tend to be happier than urban or rural ones, and that non-white counties tend to be happier than whiter ones. People were also happier when they commuted less, moved homes less often, and lived in places deemed to have more closely-knit communities (higher levels of “social capital”).

For example, a 1% increase in the share of non-whites in a county reduced the average number of poor mental health days by 0.08%—which is actually a larger number than it might seem, when you consider the whole country. “After controlling for other factors including income, educational attainment, place of residence, commuting time, social capital, there is still a residual, unexplained factor that leaves whites a little bit less happy than non-whites,” Goetz says via email. “One possible factor that may explain this difference could be religious adherence, to the extent that it varies between whites and non-whites.”

(Image: the results of Goetz’s study plotted on a map of the United States, with the highest number of “poor mental health days” in red and the lowest in green.)

A Wish List For Wall Street

by Dish Staff

Michael Lewis created an amusing one. Near the top of it:

No person under the age of 35 will be allowed to work on Wall Street.

Upon leaving school, young people, no matter how persuasively dimwitted, will be required to earn their living in the so-called real economy. Any job will do: fracker, street performer, chief of marketing for a medical marijuana dispensary. If and when Americans turn 35, and still wish to work in finance, they will carry with them memories of ordinary market forces, and perhaps be grateful to our society for having created an industry that is not subjected to them. At the very least, they will know that some huge number of people — their former fellow street performers, say — will be seriously pissed off at them if they do risky things on Wall Street to undermine the real economy. No one wants a bunch of pissed-off street performers coming after them.

The Whole Sontag

by Dish Staff

Reviewing the new documentary, Regarding Susan Sontag, J. Bryan Lowder argues that it demonstrates how much of her swagger was a “carefully (and wisely, for a woman in a man’s trade) crafted façade, behind which lived and wrote a person who, despite the kind of career most writers can only dream about, felt as inadequate as the rest of us”:

That Sontag harbored such self-doubt can almost feel offensive—such as when a confidant reveals to the director that, after publishing the remarkable book On Photography, Sontag could only worry that it wasn’t as good as Walter Benjamin’s work.

But if you can get past that initial bristling response, Kates’ documentary offers fascinating and crucial insight into the psychology and motivations of one of the previous century’s greatest, and most mercurial, thinkers. Indeed, the film is so attentive to Sontag’s personal life, so committed to pushing past her decades-long PR campaign, that at moments it felt like a violation. But then, there’s something important about placing the kind of person who is more-than-willing to pronounce upon everyone and everything else under a similar scrutiny, something irresistible in regarding the critic, the figure whose job description is to regard the rest of the world.

And what does Kates see when she looks at Sontag? For one thing, she discovers a woman whose sexuality clearly informed her orientation to culture and who yet declined to directly come out as queer (some oblique textual gestures aside). Though the film is not exactly angry about this omission, it refuses to respect it, dedicating a considerable portion of the run-time to interviews with Sontag’s many female partners and lovers.

The Economist‘s Y.F. has more on Sontag’s sexuality:

While on a fellowship at Oxford in her early 20s, Sontag made her first trip to Paris, where in the 1950s so much of America’s avant garde seemed to find a natural home. Harriet Sohmers Zwerling, the writer’s first lover, accompanied her to France and recounts that the day before they were due to host an expat party she punched Sontag in a jealous rage. At the party, noticing Sontag’s bruise, Allen Ginsberg asked Zwerling, “Why’d you hit her, she’s younger and prettier than you.” Zwerling replied, “That’s why.” Sontag possessed a magnetism that even in their moments of greatest candour the film and the people in it—some of them deeply hurt by her—seem unable to withstand.

While much has been made of Sontag’s desire to remain private about her sexuality, she also wrote about it often and gave it an enshrined place in her life and intellectual development. Wayne Koestenbaum, a writer, wryly sums the situation in the film: “Does the author of ‘Notes on Camp’ have to come out?” The film takes us through her experiences as a very young undergraduate in Berkeley and San Francisco in the late 1940s, discovering the area’s underground queer culture and her own place within it. “Everything begins from now…I am reborn,” she writes, “I have been given permission to live…” Of its connection to her writing she observed, “My desire to write is connected to my homosexuality. I need the identity as a weapon to match the weapon that society has against me. I am just becoming aware of how guilty I feel being queer.”

How Much Would It Cost To Make Higher Education Free?

by Dish Staff

Andrew Ross calculates it:

Several estimates are now in circulation, and Robert Samuels’s 2013 book Why Public Higher Education Should Be Free presents the most detailed proposal. According to the most-recent calculations of Strike Debt, the debt-resistance group I work with, the cost would be relatively modest. The federal loan program is propped up by a motley assortment of subsidies and tax exemptions that amount to tens of billions of dollars. Strip these away, along with some other unjustifiable subsidies (GI Bill benefits and Pell Grants that are gobbled up by fraudulent for-profit colleges) and the cost to the government of public college would be as low as $15 billion in additional annual spending. That is little more than a line item in the defense budget, and a small price to pay for meeting the challenge of the 21st-century knowledge economy.

Tough In Advertising

by Dish Staff

Christie Thompson flags findings on the impact of judicial campaign ads:

A growing body of research suggests that soft-on-crime attack ads may be changing how judges rule on criminal cases. In the American Constitution Society’s study of state-supreme-court races, Emory University law professors Joanna Shepherd and Michael Kang concluded that the more TV ads aired, the less likely individual justices are to side with a defendant. The impact was fairly small but statistically significant, showing that doubling the number of TV ads in a state with 10,000 ads increased the likelihood of a vote for a prosecutor by an average of about 8 percent. … Previous studies have found that Pennsylvania judges handed out longer sentences as an election approached, and that Kansas judges chosen in partisan elections gave harsher punishments than those who kept their seats in nonpartisan retention elections.

Same-Gender Schooling, Ctd

by Dish Staff

Back in 2007, Andrew had this to say on the subject:

It’s always been a good idea, especially for boys. … The only way to ensure gender equality is to base it on a firm grasp of gender difference. In today’s educational world, a blank slate theory about human nature leads to boys’ being short-changed.

But Katie J.M. Baker cites new data running against that view:

A recent comprehensive study of 1.6 million students in grades K–12 from 21 nations found no advantage to single-sex schooling. It also found that single-sex schooling reinforces negative stereotypes, as did an oft-cited 2011 report published in Science, “The Pseudoscience of Single Sex Schooling.” Any benefit from single-sex education, the authors say, are from variables like discipline policies or parent engagement. Single-sex schooling “looks like a quick fix for low-income kids, but it’s all junk,” said Diane Halpern, Dean of Social Sciences at Minerva Schools at Keck Graduate Institute and former president of the American Psychological Association, as well as the lead author of the 2011 study. “Data simply doesn’t support that this is a superior way to teach.”

The Stubbornness Of Class Snobbery

by Phoebe Maltz Bovy

Freddie recently complained about his Facebook friends sharing a jokey item that conflated “think[ing] Olive Garden is fancy” with being a racist. Freddie’s post title, and seemingly straightforward request, is, “keep your classism out of my antiracism.”

I share his sentiment, but am pessimistic about the prospects of separating classism from not just antiracism, but social justice advocacy more generally. It’s not that sometimes, well-meaning progressive sorts slip up and accidentally insult one group while helping another. Rather, it’s that a certain kind of chic progressivism (or pseudo-progressivism) has fused with class snobbery. The chance to engage in a bit of class signaling is a feature, not a bug.

We see this in so many arenas, the most obvious being a certain kind of anti-commercialism that seems to be about defending those who can’t afford flashy-fancy items, but is in fact about those who prefer discreetly high-end items (or better yet, experiences) looking down on those whose tastes aren’t so impressive. See: Black Friday. See also: the “basic bitch,” and Noreen Malone’s spot-on explanation. The thing these days is to sneer at the schmancy in a way that seems at first to be about supporting the underdog, but that’s in fact the opposite. “Gourmet” is no longer indicative of high-end, nor are designer logos. So you’re not actually taking the pro-underdog position of you prefer Bushwick farm-to-table to special-occasion restaurants (that may well cost less). A gigantic engagement ring, a McMansion, an SUV, these are the things one can evoke as examples of how “we” i.e. Americans over-consume, but the person ostensibly including himself in this first-person-plural actually has plenty of money, status, and whichever stuff does interest him. It’s simply not done to insult the actual poor. So all the classist energies have gone towards insulting this nebulous (and unless otherwise specified, white) middle class, all the while claiming to be concerned about the environment, labor, etc. Yet those remain, for others, true concerns. The difficulty is sorting out which is which.

We also see this play out in social-media issues-of-the-day discussions. Specifically, the “privilege” conversation, which is often, as we have seen, a way for those with the right manners and terminology to exclude everyone else. Class signaling and social-justice advocacy have, on Twitter and most especially on Facebook, started to look, at times, almost indistinguishable.

An Actual War On Women, Ctd

by Dish Staff

The Islamic State’s “Research and Fatwa Department” is circulating a pamphlet on what the jihadis are allowed to do to the thousands of women and girls they have captured and enslaved in their rampage through Iraq and Syria:

Much of the pamphlet talks about ISIS’ policy on having sexual intercourse with a female slave, something that the group cites the Quran to justify. “If she was a virgin, he (the owner) can have intercourse with her 1(355)immediately after the ownership is fulfilled,” ISIS explains. “If she was not a virgin, her uterus must be purified (wait for her period to be sure she is not pregnant.)”

There are other rules as well, like that two men who co-own a captive can’t both have sex with her and that a man can’t have intercourse with his wife’s slave. As to girls: “It is permissible to have intercourse with the female slave who hasn’t reached puberty if she is fit for intercourse,” the document reads. “However, if she is not fit for intercourse, he (the owner ) can only enjoy her without intercourse.”

An English translation of the evil document, via MEMRI, is available here. Jamie Dettmer notes how many women ISIS is believed to have kidnapped:

According to Nazand Begikhani, an adviser to the Kurdistan regional government and researcher at the University of Bristol Gender and Violence Research Center, ISIS has kidnapped more than 2,500 Yazidi women. Yazidi activists, meanwhile, say they have compiled a list of at least 4,600 missing Yazidi women, seized after they were separated from male relatives, who were shot.

The women were bussed, according to firsthand accounts of women who have managed to flee, to the ISIS-controlled cities of Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria, and chosen and traded like cattle. Kurdish authorities in northern Iraq say they have freed about 100 Yazidi women. In October, ISIS justified its enslavement of the women—and of any non-believing females captured in battle—in its English-language digital magazine Dabiq. Islamic theology, ISIS propagandists argued, gives the jihadis the right, much in the same way that the Bible’s Ephesians 6:5 tells “Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling.”

Katie Zavadski finds some perspective on the ghastly situation:

The pamphlet may be part of a response to a recent condemnation of the group by Islamic scholars from around the word, according to UMass Lowell security studies professor Mia Bloom. Instead of engaging with centuries of Islamic theological debates, ISIS is reverting to seventh-century norms, at which point “women would have fallen under the rubric of war booty.”

She also doesn’t rule out the possibility that some foreign fighters might find these guidelines attractive. “Maybe they think that this is a recruiting tool,” she says, for frustrated men from abroad. But Bloom worries that this cycle of sexual violence will be difficult to stop. “They are creating a very perverse incentive system,” she says, noting the uptick of domestic violence complaints in postwar Serbia.

Previous Dish on the Islamic State’s barbaric view of women here.