Category: The Dish

A Burning Desire

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Mary Pauline Lowry confesses to pyromania:

The constraints of attentive parents kept my pyromania to a minimum for the next few years. I’d light a few matches while my mom was in the shower, or feed scraps of paper to the gas burner on the stove if she stepped out to the grocery store. I told no one about my urge to light things — not even my big sister, whom I usually told everything. My mom would sometimes let me light candles on the dinner table. She would watch me closely and joke about the incident with the advent wheel. I’d feel a twinge of guilt — she wouldn’t have laughed if she knew it wasn’t just a one-time incident, how I yearned for more ambitious conflagrations.

In sixth grade, I was deemed old enough to make the short walk home from school with my best friend and then stay at home unsupervised for an hour or so. This brief window of freedom became a time for me to explore my pyromania more fully. I did most of my fire-lighting in the bathroom, operating under the theory that bathroom tile wasn’t flammable. The first time I lit a match and sprayed the tiny flame with Aqua Net, the ensuing fireball was so big and breathtaking that I felt satisfied — and only a little afraid.

I wondered if these urges would ever be appeased. But even as I hoped I would outgrow my love of fire, I took bigger and bigger risks.

(Photo by Flickr user herval)

Pregnant With Depression, Ctd

David Bornstein argues that postpartum depression has been misunderstood:

Postpartum depressions are often assumed to be associated with hormonal changes in women. In fact, only a small fraction of them are hormonally based, said Cindy-Lee Dennis, a professor at the University of Toronto and a senior scientist at Women’s College Research Institute, who holds a Canada Research Chair in Perinatal Community Health. The misconception is itself a major obstacle, she adds. Postpartum depression is often not an isolated form of depression; nor is it typical. “We now consider depression to be a chronic condition,” Dennis says. “It reoccurs in approximately 30 to 50 percent of individuals. And a significant proportion of postpartum depression starts during the pregnancy but is not detected or treated to remission. We need to identify symptoms as early as possible, ideally long before birth.”

Regarding treatments, the following passage from Bornstein brings in a recent thread on telemedicine:

The third model grows out of Cindy-Lee Dennis’s research in Canada, and is important because it illustrates the potential of treating women through interventions over the phone. It thus reduces one of the biggest barriers low-income or rural women face in accessing treatment: transportation to and from treatment and scheduling appointments.

In one clinical trial, 700 women in the first two weeks after giving birth, who had been identified as being at a high risk of postpartum depression, were given telephone-based peer support from other mothers — volunteers from the community who had previously experienced and recovered from self-reported postpartum depression (and received four hours of training).

“We created a support network for the mothers early in the postpartum period,” Dennis explains. “It cut the risk of depression by 50 percent.” On average, each mother received just eight contacts — calls or messages, and the calls averaged 14 minutes. Over 80 percent of the mothers said they would recommend this support to a friend.

Previous Dish on depression and pregnancy here and here.

Creepy Ad Watch

The above ad for BLAH Airlines – Virgin America’s parody of airline travel – is just a glimpse into the nearly 6-hour commercial tracing a flight from Newark to San Francisco. Jessica Plautz calls the full film “more than boring – it’s nearly Dalí-style surrealism”:

It starts out boring, as you would expect on any flight with nothing but the safety manual to entertain you. Shots go back and forth between the back of the seat and our protagonist, a gaping dummy with a bowl cut. A fasten-your-seatbelts announcement 12 minutes in is so familiar it’s uncanny. At 3 hours and 19 minutes, a dummy appears outside the window, Nightmare at 20,000 Feet style. And then it gets even more Twilight Zone. There are weird small talk conversations throughout that must have been a treat to write and produce.

Full video after the jump:

Home Sweet Moon?

Saskia Vermeylen considers what it might take to own a lunar homestead:

If you just simply occupy a place and no one else can access or use it, aren’t you the de facto owner? Lawyers call this corporate possession (corpus possidendi) and it represents another reason why title deeds cannot be a legal proof of lunar ownership – no one is physically there. In order to possess something, both mind and body need to be involved. Intention alone is not sufficient; possession also requires a physical act.

The difficulty of physically establishing an act of possession on the moon should protect it from private development, but it seems technology is once again outsmarting the law. Back in the late 1990s commercial firm SpaceDev intended to land robotic prospectors on an asteroid to conduct experiments and claim it as private property. The project eventually ran out of funds and was shelved, but advocates of such “telepossession” point to cases of salvage companies claiming undersea wrecks as property after exploring them with robots. …

I get the uncomfortable feeling of a déjà vu. Was it not Locke’s property theory that justified possession over nature and vacant land and eventually led to the colonization of the Americas?

The Best Of The Dish Today

A new twist on the metaphor of what it sometimes feels like to blog every day:

Meanwhile, a reality check on whether Muslim apostates can really live free lives across the world. It’s in the form of the hashtag #AnApostatesExperience. I found it a sobering reminder of the trouble with Islam today. You may too. A sampler:

https://twitter.com/KiranOpal/status/521790206199201792

https://twitter.com/Mookers/status/521790308154372096

https://twitter.com/schwanncells/status/521758972630798337

For some unaccountable reason, these victims of brutal intolerance want to get Reza Aslan’s attention. Maybe Ben Affleck could chime in about the racism of these people as well.

Today, we reported tentative good news from the ongoing victims of Islamist terror and unspeakable brutality in Kobani against ISIS and in Nigeria against Boko Haram. And some other tentatively good news about Ebola in the US. Plus: gains in the fight for legal cannabis in DC and now in Mexico. And more good news: inflation is clearly whipped – not that any of those predicting a second Weimar a few years ago will ever apologize or recant.

Now for the bad news: I found my stomach lurching when hearing of a debate within the Obama administration on whether to ban torture and abuse anywhere under US control in the world. Yes: a debate. Presidents come and go. The CIA endures – and does whatever the fuck it wants. Always in secret and with total impunity.

Many of today’s posts were updated with your emails – read them all here.  You can always leave your unfiltered comments at our Facebook page and @sullydish. 22 more readers became subscribers today. You can join them here – and get access to all the readons and Deep Dish – for a little as $1.99 month. Gift subscriptions are available here. Dish t-shirts are for sale here, including the new “Know Dope” shirts, which are detailed here. A final email for the day:

Every day your readers email you about the content of your posts, but today I just want to thank you and the Dish team for your consistency. I started reading the blog back in 2006, recommended to me by a political science teacher at a haughty East Coast university. Since then I’ve studied and taught at six universities in five countries. No matter where I went or what I was going through, your posts and words comforted and challenged me. Whether I am in the arcane confines of a British university master’s program or freelancing articles in a dusty desert suburb of Los Angeles, your blog acts as a tether to a constantly changing conversation. I just sent away my passport in preparation for another move and felt the urge to write these words. Thanks again.

See you in the morning.

The Limits Of Meritocracy

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Matt O’Brien discusses a new paper showing how even “poor kids who do everything right don’t do much better than rich kids who do everything wrong”:

You can see that in the above chart, based on a new paper from Richard Reeves and Isabel Sawhill, presented at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston’s annual conference, which is underway. Specifically, rich high school dropouts remain in the top about as much as poor college grads stay stuck in the bottom — 14 versus 16 percent, respectively. Not only that, but these low-income strivers are just as likely to end up in the bottom as these wealthy ne’er-do-wells. Some meritocracy.

What’s going on?

Well, it’s all about glass floors and glass ceilings. Rich kids who can go work for the family business — and, in Canada at least, 70 percent of the sons of the top 1 percent do just that — or inherit the family estate don’t need a high school diploma to get ahead. It’s an extreme example of what economists call “opportunity hoarding.” That includes everything from legacy college admissions to unpaid internships that let affluent parents rig the game a little more in their children’s favor.

Noting the abundance of other studies that point to this same class disparity, Freddie stresses that the notion of America as a pure meritocracy has been thoroughly debunked, even if many people still believe in it:

The question of how much control the average individual has over his or her own economic outcomes is not a theoretical or ideological question. What to do about the odds, that’s philosophical and political. But the power of chance and received advantage — those things can be measured, and have to be. And what we are finding, more and more, is that the outcomes of individuals are buffeted constantly by the forces of economic inequality. Education has been proffered as a tool to counteract these forces, but that claim, too, cannot withstand scrutiny. Redistributive efforts are required to address these differences in opportunity. In the meantime, it falls on us to chip away, bit by bit, on the lie of American meritocracy.

Email Of The Day

A reader writes:

I choose to believe that Obama will not adopt Bush administration interpretation of torture treaty obligations, will not adopt a West African travel ban, and will not go deep into Syrian quagmire.

Maybe “hope” is a better word.

I’m hoping too. And doing what little I can to help make it so.

Marriage Makes All Relationships More Stable

Ronald Bailey digs through recent research:

In a September study in the Journal of Marriage and Family, [Stanford sociologist Michael Rosenfeld] uses time series data from the How Couples Meet and Stay Together survey (HCMST) to probe the longevity and breakup rates of America’s marriages. The HCMST, which began in 2009, is a nationally representative survey of 3,009 couples, of which 471 are same-sex. Rosenfeld’s paper reports the breakup rate of the couples surveyed annually through 2012.

What he discovered:

Not too surprisingly, there are big differences in relationship stability between married and unmarried heterosexual couples. The annual breakup rate among married different-sex couples was 1.5 percent. The relationships of unmarried different-sex couples dissolved at annual rate of 21.7 percent.

Married same-sex couples broke up at a rate of 2.6 percent per year, while 12.8 percent of unmarried same-sex couples went their separate ways annually. Interestingly, Rosenfeld notes that “lesbian couples have a significantly higher rate of break-up compared to heterosexual couples, while gay male couples have a break-up rate that is not distinguishable from the break-up rate of heterosexual couples.” It is also noteworthy that unmarried same-sex couples broke up at about half the rate of unmarried different-sex couples. It is likely that part of the reason for this disparity is that unmarried same-sex couples had already been together almost twice as long their different-sex counterparts at beginning of the survey.

Rosenfeld also found that “marriage is not just associated with stability but causes it.”

The State Of The Race In Texas

One of our midterm correspondents from the in-tray directs our attention to a “very important underreported story” in the Lone Star State:

It’s not getting the attention it deserves here because of the sad state of both the news media and the Texas Democratic Party.  You are probably aware that Texas is voting on all of its statewide offices in next month’s general election because of the Greg Abbott-Wendy Davis match-up for governor.  That is the only statewide election that has received any significant press coverage.  This is likely due to Rick Perry’s retirement and Abbott and Davis becoming national celebrities in the last couple of years because of Abbott’s lawsuits against the Obama administration and Davis’s filibuster of HB-2 (the abortion law).  Sadly, the other campaigns are receiving almost no press coverage, which will probably result in another Republican sweep of all statewide offices.  This disinterest is probably what helped the Republican Party nominate three people for statewide offices who have no business being on the ballot.

The most egregious of these candidates is Ken Paxton, the Republican nominee for attorney general.

Paxton admitted to violating state securities laws back in the spring and paid a fine to the state securities board.  Shortly thereafter, the Travis County District Attorney’s office brought a criminal complaint against him but will not proceed with the case until after the election.  Paxton has admitted to breaking the law yet will probably become the the most powerful legal officer in the state because of disinterested voters and straight-GOP-ticket voters.  (The Democratic nominee is named Sam Houston.  How can someone named Sam Houston lose an election in Texas?!)

The Republicans have nominated for comptroller (aka the person in charge of the state’s finances) Glen Hegar.  He is a long-time state representative who is also a farmer with a history degree.  He has no professional accounting or finance experience at all but will probably win anyway.

Finally, there is the lieutenant governor’s race.  This should actually be the most important and most covered race in the state because of how powerful the lieutenant governor is in Texas.  It has received slightly more coverage than the other non-governor statewide elections, but not much.  The Republican candidate is Dan Patrick (no, not the guy from ESPN).  He was a radio personality and Houston’s equivalent of Rush Limbaugh for many years (though more conservative) before he became a state senator, representing Houston’s northwest suburbs (by far the most politically and culturally conservative part of the Houston area, a city that is generally pretty moderate).  Patrick’s views are extreme even by today’s Republican Party standards – supporting laws that would ban all abortions without exception and advocating mass deportations of illegal immigrants, among other things.  Patrick was able to win the nomination because the Republican primary is always dominated by the most extreme voters and because David Dewhurst, the sitting lieutenant governor, looked ineffectual after Wendy Davis’s successful filibuster.  Patrick and some of the other Republican candidates for statewide office are not really campaigning because they are so confident they will win.

It feels like the Texas Republican Party is trolling us simply because it can.  There is no effective check on its power right now.  I hope the 2014 election is a wake-up call to the Texas Democratic Party and local media outlets throughout the state.  They cannot allow these utterly unqualified people to continue to hold these important public offices.

Today is the first day of early voting in Texas, so these stories are on my mind.  This seemed like an issue that would be dear to the Dish’s heart – the decline of the news media and the continued rightward lurch of the Republican Party – so I hope you don’t mind my rant.  Thanks for listening.

Black Holes Under A Microscope

Ron Cowen relays the news that scientists “have come closer than ever before to creating a laboratory-scale imitation of a black hole.” Why it’s important:

The black hole analogue, reported in Nature Physics, was created by trapping sound waves using an ultra-cold fluid. Such objects could one day help resolve the so-called black hole ‘information paradox’ – the question of whether information that falls into a black hole disappears forever.

The physicist Stephen Hawking stunned cosmologists 40 years ago when he announced that black holes are not totally black, calculating that a tiny amount of radiation would be able to escape the pull of a black hole. This raised the tantalizing question of whether information might escape too, encoded within the radiation.

Hawking radiation relies on a basic tenet of quantum theory – large fluctuations in energy can occur for brief moments of time. That means the vacuum of space is not empty but seethes with particles and their antimatter equivalents. Particle-antiparticle pairs continually pop into existence only to then annihilate each other. But something special occurs when pairs of particles emerge near the event horizon – the boundary between a black hole, whose gravity is so strong that it warps space-time, and the rest of the Universe. The particle-antiparticle pair separates, and the member of the pair closest to the event horizon falls into the black hole while the other one escapes.

Hawking radiation, the result of attempts to combine quantum theory with general relativity, comprises these escaping particles, but physicists have yet to detect it being emitted from an astrophysical black hole. Another way to test Hawking’s theory would be to simulate an event horizon in the laboratory.