Category: The Dish

Where Are The Sugar-Daddies Of Yore?

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Chris Hughes wants to turn a profit:

At the heart of the conflict of the past few days is a divergent view on how the New Republic — and journalism more broadly — will survive. In one view, it is a “public trust” and not a business. It is something greater than a commercial enterprise, ineffable, an ideal that cannot be touched. Financially, it would be a charity. There is much experimentation in nonprofit journalism – ProPublica and the Texas Tribune are proving the model — and that may be the right path for certain institutions. At the New Republic, I believe we owe it to ourselves and to this institution to aim to become a sustainable business and not position ourselves to rely on the largesse of an unpredictable few. Our success is not guaranteed, but I think it’s critical to try.

This is relatively new in the history of persons of sugar. And I don’t think it’s because Hughes is somehow a different sort of mogul than those in days gone by, just that the incentives have shifted rather dramatically in a very short period of time. The truth is: when there were only a handful of magazines that had a monopoly on opinion journalism, owning one gave you a real cultural gate-keeper power. It was worth losing money for the huge gains in influence you received in return, the social status, access to the powerful and pursuit of a cause. You could shape the discourse around your pet causes, and alter and shape the debate in ways no one – outside the Kochs and liberal ad-buyers – now can. This was a bad thing in some respects – the debate about Israel, for example, was far less open and diverse than today – and a few men (and they were almost all men) really shouldn’t be able to wield that kind of influence in a democracy. But it also provided a way for great writing and sharp thinking to endure. As a simple formula, it worked. And owners were relatively happy.

Fast-forward to today and the benefits of owning TNR or the Atlantic or the Nation have all but evaporated. There is no incentive for cultural gate-keepers any more, because there are no gates to keep. Anyone with an Internet connection can reach a mass audience, and the power and prestige that once accrued to a publisher are thereby eviscerated. You end up where Hughes ended up: spending millions to fund ornery, if talented, writers, and wondering what’s in it for you. Sure, you get to interview the president once in a while. Maybe you can get Nancy Pelosi to come to your wedding. But, once that thrill is gone, what’s left … but a giant headache and a company that hemorrhages money?

In response to my hankering for the TNR of old, Dreher argues that there is “no way to be that kind of magazine today and make money. Maybe there never was”:

[W]hen people like Freddie de Boer, a true leftist, sneer from a left-wing perspective at the demise of TNR, I understand where he’s coming from and don’t begrudge him his opinion. But I think he shouldn’t be quite so confident, because the same dynamic that’s brought TNR down threatens all small magazines of opinion in this country. I would be surprised if any of us could pay our bills on subscriptions and ad sales alone. We depend on the generosity of donors — many of them wealthy and public-spirited — who believe that the work we do is important, even if it is not money-making.

Somebody said yesterday that TNR doesn’t need a better business model, it needs a better owner. Yes, exactly. I don’t know how many rich people are willing to subsidize a money-losing journalistic operation out of principle and for the common good, but we sure need to find them.

Chait makes related points in response to Ezra:

The odd thing about Klein’s column is that, other than this small disagreement about TNR’s character, I cannot find anything in it with which I disagree. He straightforwardly described the problem of highbrow magazines that serve a public-interest function and have always lost money. He proceeds from that accurate description straight to the conclusion in his headline — TNR must change — without explaining why. One could just as easily conclude that TNR will always lose money, and its value should be assessed in non-market terms and subsidized accordingly by a willing donor.

That unacknowledged leap of logic contains nearly all our disagreement. It seems to be rooted in a deep faith in the power of the free market when it comes to media. Klein has always been very explicit about his view that media functions that earn money are good …

That sort of market fundamentalism is largely associated with the political right. You can find traces of it on the center-left among the winners of the new media economy, like many otherwise-liberal winners of other sectors of the new economy. They implicitly associate success with virtue. They may understand that an institution like The New Republic creates externalities that are not captured through market value, but this factor does not intrude upon their model.

Yet the fact that TNR does not meet a market need does not mean it serves no purpose. The main thing it needed to change was its owner.

There is a middle ground, of course, and it seems to me that TNR’s staff were prepared to find it. A magazine that has no interest in paying its way becomes a sad vanity publication. But a magazine that can pay for the bulk of its operations but still needs some sugar-money to keep it afloat is a perfectly good model for a place whose standards and intellectual heft will never make it a mass publication. And it remains a good model. It’s just that few of the super-rich today really respect that model, or have even a crude interest in sustaining it.

(Image from The Federalist)

A World Awash In Cheap Oil

Michael Specter fears that low oil prices will persist:

Many environmentalists had assumed that if neither fear nor reason helped us to lessen our reliance on oil, then at least we could count on scarcity. But scarcity is not an economic or environmental policy. Humans have long had a habit of expecting the sky to fall. Yet from Malthus to Paul Ehrlich, predictions that the planet was on the verge of starvation have never come to pass (or at least not as broadly as expected). Nonetheless, the drop in oil prices comes at a terrible moment. Last month the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported that our only chance to halt the rising temperature of the Earth, and to prevent the calamity that rise will cause, would be to eliminate fossil-fuel emissions by the end of the century.

A plan to end U.S. fossil-fuel dependence would be an unlikely goal in any case, but, if oil remains easily accessible, it becomes politically impossible. “It is technically feasible to transition to a low-carbon economy,” Youba Sokona, the co-chair of one of the I.P.C.C.’s working groups, says. “But what is lacking are appropriate policies and institutions. The longer we wait to take action, the more it will cost to adapt and mitigate climate change.”

Ronald Bailey hears that oil may remain cheap:

During the last decade, even as alarums about the advent of “peak oil” grew ever more frenzied, world oil production actually increased from 77.6 million barrels per day in 2003 to 86.8 million barrels per day in 2013. Lynch’s book The “Peak Oil” Scare and the Coming Oil Flood, scheduled for publication this coming spring, predicts even larger leaps in the global production of crude. Lynch thinks world oil production will increase to around 110 million barrels per day during the next decade. In the meantime, global oil prices will hover around $60 per barrel over the next couple of years and conceivably drop to $40 per barrel in five years. At $40 per barrel, the price of oil would, in inflation-adjusted dollars, just about equal the annual average price of $17 per barrel in 1998.

I asked Lynch if this meant oil markets might be in for a replay of the price collapse that occurred in the 1980s. He replied that he thought so. In inflation-adjusted dollars, the price of oil reached its peak annual average of $106 per barrel in 1980 and then collapsed to an annual average of $30.80 per barrel in 1986.

Jordan Weissmann sees some advantages to the low prices – beyond more money in the pockets of consumers:

Right now, the band of small and midsized oil companies that have fracked their way to riches aren’t the most efficient or strategic bunch. As one executive put it in 2010, the early days of the boom were mostly driven by “brute force and ignorance” as drillers tried to get crude out of the ground as fast as possible. That approach has led to lots of poorly structured wells that quickly run dry on oil and wasted effort fracking shale deposits that don’t produce much to begin with. When prices for oil were lofty, the industry could afford to be that sloppy. With prices sinking, however, it will be forced to improve its methods. That could be good for the environment. Fracking involves pumping a toxic mix of water, chemicals, and sand into shale deposits to crack them, and the more sparingly it’s used, the fewer problems it creates. A more cautious industry could also be good for investors, who would see less of their money sunk into failed wells.

When Silicon Valley Dabbles In Journalism

In response to TNR’s implosion, Lucia Moses considers why applying tech solutions to media so often ends in tears:

“They’ve arrived from Mars with the typical arrogance of a tourist, over-noticing the wrong things,” said Jason Pontin, editor in chief and publisher of MIT Technology Review. “If there were a simple solution, smart people like me would have done it. Publishing is an extremely fidgety business with a direct cost, a base that is in many cases unwilling to pay for the product, and an indirect audience in marketers and advertisers who have found increasing efficiencies, which have driven down CPMs.”

Apart from that, it’s a great industry to work in! McArdle compares media and tech industries:

In many ways, a company such as Facebook and eBay is the opposite of a media company.

Those companies have huge network effects, and they get their content for free or nearly free. Making a lot of money out of a business like that is hard — many more attempts have failed than succeeded. But a prestige media company makes expensive content that has zero network effects; you can’t copyright a fact. In the new digital world, hours after your expensively reported story is out, dozens of other outlets will have re-reported the same facts and taken some of the traffic. Making a lot of money out of a business like that is much more difficult. Chris Hughes was not insane to think that he could make something like a New Yorker for Washington. It was, however, pretty crazy to think that you could do so without losing a bunch of money.

You need only read the stories about FirstLook and The New Republic to understand how badly tech-style management assumptions translate into media. When that approach failed, spectacular public meltdowns ensued. So the new moguls now learn another key difference about the media business: You are always being closely watched, so communications, and effective crisis management, are supremely important. A spectacular HR crisis translates more directly into loss of reputation, and sales, than it does almost anywhere else.

Drezner is in the same ballpark:

I’ve heard a lot of nonprofit sector folk complaining that Silicon Valley investors want to revolutionize their field without really understanding it.

The pattern in each of these cases is that a fabulously wealthy and successful investor enters a new and not-terribly-successful sector and tries to apply the lessons learned from the investor’s past successes to this new area. Except that there’s not a ton of evidence that those lessons are truly generalizable. One almost wonders if there is an extension of the Peter Principle for investors.

The 73rd Most Disruptive Idea In History Is … Kitty Litter?

Paul Ford makes a compelling case:

Ed Lowe was working at his father’s delivery business in southern Michigan when he had a brilliant idea: take some fuller’s earth (a type of clay) and sell it to local farmers for chickens litter-heartto nest. He called it Chicken Litter. It was 1947. The farmers weren’t interested—which is why Lowe had a big pile of it when a local woman came by. She’d brought her cat in from the January cold and needed some sand for her cat box. On an impulse, Lowe offered her some fuller’s earth instead.  The stuff turned out to absorb the ammonia smell of cat pee. The woman soon came back for more. So did her friends. After enough requests, Lowe put some fuller’s earth in bags, wrote KITTY LITTER on them, and dropped them off at a hardware store. The product sold, and it sold in supermarkets and pet stores. The market grew ever outward, from southern Michigan to the world.

The introduction of Kitty Litter meant that after millennia of scratching at the door cats could come indoors and stay there. They had long been visitors in American homes; now they were residents. In some ways it has been a hostile takeover: There are millions more cats than dogs in the U.S. This also means that Lowe is the indirect father of countless Internet cat memes. Anyone who sells recreational laser pointers, fuzzy mice, scratching posts, cat furniture, or electric-fountain cat water dishes should thank him, too.

(Photo via Cheezburger.com)

Quote For The Day

“I have known cops who haven’t had a racist bone in their bodies and in fact had adopted black children, they went to black churches on the weekend; and these are white cops. They really weren’t overtly racist. They weren’t consciously racist. But you know what they had in their minds that made them act out and beat a black suspect unwarrantedly? They had fear. They were afraid of black men. I know a lot of white cops who have told me. And I interviewed over 900 police officers in 18 months and they started talking to me, it was almost like a therapy session for them I didn’t realize that they needed an outlet to talk,” – Constance Rice, civil rights attorney.

Leaving The Farm

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Alec D. Rogers reviews Edward Larson’s The Return of George Washington: 1783-1789, a portrait of our first president from the end of the Revolutionary War until he took office. Unlike many accounts that portray “a Washington who emerges from Mount Vernon only with the greatest reluctance to play out a script written by James Madison,” Larson gives us “a much more active and politically engaged Washington, who did as much as anyone during these years to bring the new republic into being”:

[Larson] shows us how Washington’s political savvy helped ensure that the Constitution would gain acceptance. The result was a product that closely resembled what, for years, Washington had been advocating in private.

At the crux of the story, though, is Larson’s explanation for why Washington ultimately abandoned a retirement from political life that he earnestly desired.

Larson makes the case that the political class of the time was sold on the need for reform of the Articles of Confederation, and that all agreed Washington’s active support was essential. But the key connective element is Washington’s own political thought and understanding of republican duty. As Glenn Phelps has noted in his study of Washington’s constitutional thought, Washington’s concept of republicanism was that of Greece and Rome: “Republican hagiography demanded that its heroes always be willing to defend the republic against corruption and decay. As much to confirm his own virtue as to attain specific reforms, Washington determined to end his public ‘retirement.’”

In an earlier review of the book, Steve Donaghue expressed regret regarding Larson’s “unwillingness to pin down this less-than-selfless side of his hero”:

His Washington is generally a Washington of whom Washington would have approved, with the man’s baser motivations kept discreetly in the background. This extends even to the choosing of the site for the seat of the national government; Washington and Madison worked hard to make sure the location of that new capital city was on the banks of the Potomac River, near Mount Vernon. As Larson somewhat innocently reports: “It lay at the midpoint of the country’s north-south axis and, if Washington’s company could open the upper Potomac for commercial navigation, at the terminus of the main route west.” It’s about as neutrally phrased as it could be.

Rather than being motivated by grubby financial concerns, Larson’s Washington is always the dispassionate and far-sighted statesman. He refuses to comment publicly during the new constitution’s lengthy ratification process, for instance, not because his personal vanity outweighed his respect for its republican virtues, but because “the Cincinnatus ideal demanded that he not seek power and taking sides now might limit his ability to serve as a unifying leader later”.

(Image: General George Washington Resigning His Commission by John Trumbull, via Wikimedia Commons)

Keeping Excessive Punishment In Check

Reihan sketches out a plan to do so:

What government routinely fails to do is account for the costs the criminal justice system imposes on the civilians who get caught in its web. Mark A.R. Kleiman, a public policy professor at UCLA and author of When Brute Force Fails, made this point vividly in a Democracy Journal essay published last spring. Instead of fixating on the dollar costs of running the criminal justice system, he asks that we also account for “the suffering inflicted by arrest, prosecution, conviction, and incarceration, including all of the residual disabilities that go with the label ‘ex-convict,’ and the fear created by overaggressive policing.”

Imagine if, as Cardozo Law School professor Richard A. Bierschbach has suggested, we had in place a “punishment budget.”

Given such a budget, we would accept that the criminal justice system would cause some degree of suffering. At the same time, we’d insist that if you pass some measures that increase suffering in some way—say, by making more arrests—you’d have to reduce the sum total of suffering in some other way, for instance by reducing prison sentences for nonviolent offenders. This would impose a useful check on the creep of new laws, rules, and regulations that steadily increase the government’s coercive powers, as if on autopilot.

He also recommends getting “better, more reliable data on policing so that communities have a clear sense of what local law enforcement agencies are doing in their name.” Along the same lines, Josh Voorhees wants the president to “call for all law enforcement agencies to keep an accurate count of how many people the police kill each year”:

Without a formal and comprehensive reporting system, the president, lawmakers, and everyone else have no way of knowing the true scope of the problem. Even if the government is willing to believe that police officers are almost always justified when they kill suspects in the line of duty, Washington still owes the nation a full accounting of those killings that it has implicitly sanctioned. How can the president hope to limit the number of lives lost if he has no way of knowing how many lives are actually lost? How will Congress evaluate whether policies aimed at curbing police shootings are successful if it has no way of tracking the success or failure of those policies?

Buried In Berries

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Josh Barro registers a shift in Americans’ eating habits:

According to statistics published by the United States Department of Agriculture, per capita consumption of fresh raspberries grew 475 percent from 2000 to 2012, the most recent year for which data are available. Blueberry consumption is up 411 percent, and strawberries are up 60 percent.

He notes, to his surprise, that “the main factors changing what fruits we eat are on the supply side”:

If people are eating more of some kind of fruit, it’s probably because farmers have figured out how to deliver more of it, at higher quality, throughout the year. Of course, there is the “superfood” factor:

Both raspberries and blueberries have been praised for their nutrient value. But Chris Romano, who leads global produce procurement for Whole Foods, attributes the boom in berries largely to taste and availability. “Techniques in growing raspberries, blueberries and blackberries have gotten much better over the last 15 years,” he said. Growers are planting better breeds of berry, with higher sugar content; they’re using pruning and growing techniques that extend the season, including growing berries inside greenhouse-like structures called tunnels that retain heat; and most important, they’re growing berries in places they didn’t used to, where production is possible at different times of year.

Update from a reader:

I don’t know why Josh Barro is so surprised by this. I lived in Ithaca, NY, when the farmers market got started. There were already several farms in the area where people could pick strawberries and other crops. After a few years in the 1970s, we went to one farm that had more than a one-week strawberry season. When we asked, it turned out that they were starting some berry plants earlier using protection from the weather and Canadian varieties more accustomed to cooler weather. I think they experimented with Southern varieties to extend the season later.

Over the years, vendors selling in the farmers market pushed to extend their seasons or get two seasons out of cool weather crops, including some greens, broccoli, and peas. There were probably more crops that I can’t remember or that came after we got transferred out of town. I miss the Ithaca farmers market a great deal. I was delighted to buy fresh produce that was locally grown “out of season”.

Where I live now in Pennsylvania, I see the season for fresh corn being extended through early and later planting and some careful management. But it’s also getting harder to get fresh corn right out of the field at some farm markets, which have added refrigeration facilities to hold the corn. The supersweet varieties do have pretty good quality when they’re refrigerated right away, but the ones grown locally are not candy-sweet. Frozen corn in bulk packages at grocery stores is now so sugary I can’t stand the brands I’ve tried. I’ve gone back to home freezing and otherwise avoiding corn.

The downside of all this sugaring up is that with corn and also with winter squash – at least for me – is that I don’t like eating them as much. I don’t want to eat corn that is as sweet as a banana. I want to be able to add a little brown sugar to the squash to perk up the flavor but add that molasses overtone – and acorn squash has gotten so much sweeter adding brown sugar makes it cloying. In addition, some of the squashes I used to buy seem to be unavailable. In Ithaca when I was first married, I’d bake a mixture of acorn and buttercup squash because the buttercup was drier and the combination could be run through a food mill and frozen, and the result reheated nicely and wasn’t watery. Buttercup squash, confusingly, looked more like acorns with the big cap and protruding cup-shaped base. I haven’t seen it in a farmers market or store in years.

One thing I’d like to know about the increased sale of raspberries is what the rate of waste is. I am very cautious about buying berries and inspect carefully. A fair number of packages of blueberries show a bit of white mold or squashed berries on the bottom, and blueberries are fairly sturdy compared to raspberries. Raspberries spoil really easily, so I wonder if more are discarded at the store and if more are discarded at home because of mold or other deterioration. I do appreciate getting the berries in clear plastic containers, because I can visually inspect them, but berry sales, unlike banana sales, depend on a lot of plastic – which also gives me pause.

(Photo by Flickr user swong95765)

The Distinctiveness Of DFW

Adam Kirsch finds it in his Americanness – especially the writer’s conviction that his unhappiness was “a specifically American condition”:

Like many classic American writers but few contemporary ones, he genuinely experienced The_best_people_you_will_ever_knowbeing American as a bitter, significant fate, a problem that the writer had to unravel for the benefit of his fellow sufferers. In a late story, “The Suffering Channel,” Wallace theorizes about “the single great informing conflict of the American psyche,” which is “the conflict between the subjective centrality of our own lives versus our awareness of its objective insignificance.” All of “Infinite Jest” can be seen as a demonstration of the thesis Wallace advances early in the novel: “American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels.”

When Wallace wrote about how difficult it was to be an American, he specifically meant an American of his own generation—the post-sixties cohort known as “Generation X.” “Like most North Americans of his generation,” Wallace writes about the teenage hero of ”Infinite Jest,” “Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he’s devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves.” Likewise, in “Westward,” he writes, “Like many Americans of his generation in this awkwardest of post-Imperial decades . . . Sternberg is deeply ambivalent about being embodied.” It is no wonder that readers born between 1965 and 1980 responded to this kind of solicitude, with its implication that they were unique, and uniquely burdened.

Recent Dish love for David Foster Wallace here and here.

(Photo via Wiki: “David Foster Wallace at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, standing for a photo with fans Claudia Sherman and Amanda Barnes, in January 2006.”)

The Best Of The Dish This Weekend

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Ross made a crucial point about TNR today:

The New Republic as-it-was, the magazine I and others grew up reading, was emphatically not just a “policy magazine.” It was, instead, a publication that deliberately integrated its policy writing with often-extraordinary coverage of literature, philosophy, history, religion, music, fine art. It wasn’t just a liberal magazine, in other words; it was a liberal-arts magazine, which unlike many of today’s online ventures never left its readers with the delusion that literary style or intellectual ambition were of secondary importance, or that today’s fashions represented permanent truths.

That’s why the Dish’s coverage of the world every day includes philosophy, theology, art, photography, literature, film and poetry alongside our bread and butter political and policy analysis. If you want to know why we don’t take the weekends off – but try to curate and aggregate some of the more thoughtful essays and reviews and posts on what might be called “the eternal things”, this is why. Because we’re trying in our inevitably limited bloggy way to keep the worldview of the now-disappearing literary and political magazines alive in a new medium and a new form. If we had the resources, we would do more – finding ways to add many more original essays and reviews to Deep Dish, for example. We’re brainstorming the future of our little experiment all the time – but the demise of places where high and low culture, politics and poetry, human life and abstract argument can jostle for space and inform each other makes me particularly aware of the need to fill this cultural void, while some of us still retain the institutional memory to replicate it. Culture needs stewards, and they can come in all sorts of shapes and sizes.

I struggle with blogging all the time – it’s a very intense and public way of being a writer, it’s extremely Howler Beagle (tr)strenuous, and doing it for fifteen years every day can get you exhausted by exhaustion. Part of me wants to drop off the planet all the time and just grab a book or ten, or debate something in the news without anyone but my friends to tell me I’m full of shit, or just not go online for a few weeks on end. Part of me would like to go a week without being called a racist, a sexist, a homophobe, an anti-Semite or a misogynist (I guess that was Burning Man). But I’m not delusional, and when I see the little lifeboat that we, with your help, have managed to create over a decade and a half, it seems a vital thing to figure out a way for it to survive and thrive. As more old-school magazines become shipwrecks, or unrecognizable, we have to keep that boat buoyant until the seas calm … or this metaphor completely runs out of steam.

This weekend, we discovered aspects of Kafka’s life that were straight from a sit-com; explored Pope Francis’ view of sexual complementarity; worried about the decline of male friendship and love (see Martin Amis talk about Hitch here); celebrated the art of toilet graffiti; and revealed the video-photo-shopping of movie-stars in movies – to make them flawless, of course.

Some other quotes:

Bad sex writing: “The universe was in her and with each movement it unfolded to her. Somewhere in the night a stray rocket went off.”

Faith: “The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise for the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience.”

Good luck: “Updike’s literary setbacks were those of a lottery winner who stubs his toe on the way to the bank and then has to wait in line before he can cash his check”

Jed Perl on Picasso: “A product of modernism, Picasso trumped modernism. By rejecting the idea of art as having a past or a future, he has somehow managed to stay with us in the present.”

And Mark Strand on his own death, and on life:

The weather, like tomorrow, like your life,
is partially here, partially up in the air.
There is nothing you can do.

The most popular post of the weekend was TNR RIP – my reflections on the implosion of an institution. Next up: A Smaller Screen For Sex.

If you want to help keep this blog alive, and haven’t yet subscribed, please do here. It matters for all the reasons above. If you have, thank you – and you can help some more by buying a Christmas gift subscription for a friend or family member, or by buying our new coffee mug. Some Dishheads’ pets – here, here and here – are more excited than others:

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Mug just arrived! Gorgeous!

One more email for the weekend, from the reader who sent the window view above:

Because I’m a recent first-time subscriber, I don’t know the unspoken decorum to go about submitting a Window View for the daily shots or the weekly contest, but here it is: a shot from the elementary school I work at in Boiro, Spain, taken at 3:33pm. I’ve been reading since around March or so and subscribed in July and am happy to contribute even a small amount to support such a high quality curation of links and articles from across the ‘net as well as the rich discussion that is hosted here. Keep it up.

We will in the morning; see you then.