Category: The Dish

by Dish Staff

Oscar Abello suggests fair-trade coffee might actually be bad for workers:

Fair-Trade certified coffee has become known as an easy way for coffee drinkers to make the world a better place for coffee growers, many of whom are among the world’s poorest people. But a study released in April 2014 seriously questions how much fair-trade certification really does for them. Limited to 12 research sites in Ethiopia and Uganda, the study found that non-fair-trade certified farms paid better wages and provided better working conditions than fair-trade certified farms. The study authors surveyed 1,700 farm workers, going beyond the usual farm owner or farming co-op member that has historically been the beneficiary at the heart of fair trade’s story. …

So why are farm workers finding a better deal on non-fair-trade certified farms? Scale could be one reason. Until recently, only small farms, loosely defined as 10 acres or less, have been eligible for fair-trade certification. The report says larger farms appeared to be in better financial position to offer higher pay, more annual days of work, and better working conditions. Regulatory requirements like paid maternity leave for agricultural workers may also apply only to larger farms, the study found.

(Photo by Eric Magnuson)

by Dish Staff

Ethan Zuckerman, who helped invent the pop-up ad, expresses regret about where ads have taken the Internet:

I have come to believe that advertising is the original sin of the web. The fallen state of our Internet is a direct, if unintentional, consequence of choosing advertising as the default model to support online content and services. Through successive rounds of innovation and investor storytime, we’ve trained Internet users to expect that everything they say and do online will be aggregated into profiles (which they cannot review, challenge, or change) that shape both what ads and what content they see. Outrage over experimental manipulation of these profiles by social networks and dating companies has led to heated debates amongst the technologically savvy, but hasn’t shrunk the user bases of these services, as users now accept that this sort of manipulation is an integral part of the online experience.

Users have been so well trained to expect surveillance that even when widespread, clandestine government surveillance was revealed by a whistleblower, there has been little organized, public demand for reform and change.

Zuckerman encourages sites to “charge for services and protect users’ privacy.” Meanwhile, DJ Pangburn is skeptical users would cough up the cash for an internet without ads:

Paying for an ad-free internet would be cheaper than cable, but nearly zero people do so.

By dividing digital advertising spending in the UK in 2013 (£6.4 billion) by the total number of UK internet users (45 million), Ebuzzing found that an ad-free internet would cost around £140 ($232.24) a year. The survey also found that 98 percent of UK consumers would be unwilling to pay that amount of money for an ad-free internet.

by Alice Quinn

Another from Samuel Daniel’s sonnets, To Delia:

Why should I sing in verse, why should I frame
These sad neglected notes for her dear sake?
Why should I offer up unto her name
The sweetest sacrifice my youth can make?
Why should I strive to make her live forever,
That never deigns to give me joy to live?
Why should m’afflicted muse so much endeavor
Such honor unto cruelty to give?
If her defects have purchased her this fame,
What should her virtues do, her smiles, her love?
If this her worst, how should her best inflame?
What passions would her milder favors move?
Favors, I think, would sense quite overcome,
And that makes happy lovers ever dumb.

(Photo by Pavlina Jane)

by Dish Staff

Dan Piepenbring calls Cory Arcangel’s Working on My Novel “a brilliant litmus test—there are those who will read it as a paean to the fortitude of the creative spirit, and those who will read it as a confirmation of the novel’s increasing impotence”:

Arcangel suggests there’s something inherently ennobling in trying to write, but his book is an aggregate of delusion, narcissism, procrastination, boredom, self-congratulation, confusion—every stumbling block, in other words, between here and art. Working captures the worrisome extent to which creative writing has been synonymized with therapy; nearly everyone quoted in it pursues novel writing as a kind of exercise regimen. (“I love my mind,” writes one aspirant novelist, as if he’s just done fifty reps with it and is admiring it all engorged with blood.)

It’s also a comment on the peculiar primacy the novel continues to enjoy—not as an artistic mode but as a kind of elevated diary, a form of what we insidiously refer to as “self-expression,” as if anyone’s self is static enough to survive transmission to the page. Not for nothing do we have Working on My Novel instead of Working on My Screenplay or Working on My Scrimshaw, because the novel, with its rich intellectual-emotional tradition and its (very occasional) commercial viability, is still perceived as the ideal vehicle for saying something ambitious. Even as fewer people read novels, we’re made to feel that writing one is a worthy, rigorous enterprise for serious thinking people, a means of proving that we have reservoirs of mindfulness and discipline deeper than our peers’. And so we try to write fiction, though certainly we don’t need to, and, as this book attests, we often don’t especially want to, even if we greet the task steeled by a perfect cup of coffee, a glass of red wine and a hot bath, or an Eminem song.

by Freddie deBoer

 

I would like to thank Andrew, Patrick, Chris, and the entire Dish crew for the opportunity. (And the money.) It’s been a lot of fun. I want to thank the team here for making things so streamlined for me, particularly given that I sent like a dozen emails asking questions, and I want to thank Andrew for the chance to put my feet up on his desk. It’s been fun.

I also want to thank all of you, for the opportunity to invade your space for awhile, and for all the emails. Even the many, many cranky ones. I am not an easy person to know. I have pretty much been a take-it-or-leave-it, love-me-or-hate-me deal for my whole life, even as a little kid. So I appreciate your patience and your candor, and I’m glad to have had the chance to occupy your space for a little while. Writing, for me, is pathological in the simple sense. I don’t stop for long mostly because I don’t know how. This is about the only way I’ve ever found to distract my mind for long enough that it stops beating itself up, and so I have to thank Andrew and his team and all of you for the opportunity to seek that solace here. It’s my privilege. It’s my privilege.

As for the future, you can check me over at my website, although I reckon I’ll be pretty busy this fall. In the long term, I hope I still get the opportunity to speak to fine people such as yourselves, and that when I do, I tell the truth. Cheers.

by Dish Staff

Sam Leith ponders the British press’ vexed relationship with Martin Amis:

Has there in living memory been a writer whom we (by which I mean the papers, mostly) so assiduously seek out for comment – we task him to review tennis, terrorism, pornography, the state of the nation – and whom we are then so keen to denounce as worthless? In recent years his public interventions on everything from Islamist terror to population demographics have caused mini shitstorms; and critics seem to take a particular, giant-killing glee in slamming his fiction. Setting out to write a retrospective essay on his work and reputation, the implied title you find yourself reaching for is “in defence of … ” It’s as if, and in answer to some inchoate public need, we demand of Amis that he say things in public so we can all agree on what an ass he is.

Pivoting off of Leith’s essay, Emily Temple wonders why America has so few literary bomb-throwers:

As I read the article, I couldn’t help but be slightly jealous. It’s true that Amis is a singular fellow, but it seems like all of the real contemporary enfants terribles in the literary world come to us from overseas. Michel Houellebecq, Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul, Will Self (just read this delightfully snooty Q&A), etc. Where oh where is the American Martin Amis? (The fact that Amis somewhat recently moved to Brooklyn is not relevant; he is not ours.) Is there a writer we love to hate? Or one who picks fights with equal glee?

No. You know who we’ve got? Franzen. Whiny, whiny Jonathan Franzen. Our hatred of him is there, but it’s utterly joyless. We don’t love to hate him. He just kind of pisses everyone off. And unlike their reactions to Amis, which are frequently ambivalent and all over the map, the critics pretty much universally enjoy Franzen’s writing – which leaves us arguing about whether or not he’s right about Twitter.

by Dish Staff

Teju Cole experiences a sense of communion while rereading James Baldwin’s 1955 essay “Stranger in the Village” in the tiny Swiss hamlet in which it was written:

I took a room at the Hotel Mercure Bristol the night I arrived. I opened the windows to a dark view, but I knew that in the darkness loomed the Daubenhorn mountain. I ran a hot bath and lay neck-deep in the water with my old paperback copy of “Notes of a Native Son.” The tinny sound from my laptop was Bessie Smith singing “I’m Wild About That Thing,” a filthy blues number and a masterpiece of plausible deniability: “Don’t hold it baby when I cry / Give me every bit of it, else I’d die / I’m wild about that thing.” She could be singing about a trombone.

And it was there in the bath, with his words and her voice, that I had my body-double moment: here I was in Leukerbad, with Bessie Smith singing across the years from 1929; and I am black like him; and I am slender; and have a gap in my front teeth; and am not especially tall (no, write it: short); and am cool on the page and animated in person, except when it is the other way around; and I was once a fervid teen-age preacher (Baldwin: “Nothing that has happened to me since equals the power and the glory that I sometimes felt when, in the middle of a sermon, I knew that I was somehow, by some miracle, really carrying, as they said, ‘the Word’ – when the church and I were one”); and I, too, left the church; and I call New York home even when not living there; and feel myself in all places, from New York City to rural Switzerland, the custodian of a black body, and have to find the language for all of what that means to me and to the people who look at me. The ancestor had briefly taken possession of the descendant. It was a moment of identification, and in the days that followed that moment was a guide.

by Dish Staff

Rachel Shteir, who calls (NYT) writing “daily frustration, not to mention humiliation,” mulls writers’ failures:

I remember the first time I felt like a bona fide failure as a writer. This feeling of nausea washed over me, but it was confusing because it appeared at the exact moment when I was supposed to be feeling success. It was when I finished my first book and realized there were some things in it that I hated, things that were made all the more hideous to me whenever people said, “You must have such a sense of accomplishment.” I asked a more experienced writer if she ever got over this nauseated feeling. She didn’t reassure me. “Oh, that never goes away.”

Every writer has subjects that are our “Moby-Dicks,” the ones we imagine will transform us, more than the others, catapulting us to some other more pleasant climate.

Instead, they sink us. Help, help, we cry, as we drift out to sea on a leaky lifeboat. Doomed.

by Dish Staff

Roger Scruton offers a diagnosis:

Academic philosophers in the English speaking world still regard philosophy as Locke defined it in the 17th century, as “the handmaiden of the sciences”: it doesn’t explore the world beyond science but the limits of science, with the result that philosophy doesn’t really intrude into the public world. In the early 20th century were were caught up by the movement to form analytical philosophy, based in the study of logic, the foundations of mathematics, the syntax of ordinary language, the validity of arguments, something very formal. So when people have a big question, especially now since the decline of the orthodox religions, they don’t turn to philosophy for the answer but try to formulate it in whatever technical words have been bequeathed to them, and when a scientist comes along and says “I have the answer,” or even “there is no question,” they think “this guy knows what he’s talking about, I’d better lean on him.”