Category: The Dish

Maybe not:

Since 1980, presidential campaigns have on average produced a 15-point gender gap. That is, the difference between Democrats’ advantage among women and Republicans’ advantage among men is generally 15 points. So, for example, Democrats win women by 8 points and Republicans win men by 7 points: 8+7=15. …

Now, using 15-17 points as the baseline gender gap, we looked at eight marquee Senate races between 2006 and 2012 in which Republican nominated a female candidate. According to exit polls and the last available pre-election polls (where exit polls were not available), the average gender gap for women in these eight races was … wait for it … about 15 points (14.5, to be exact).

John Sides isn’t so sure:

At least one piece of academic research offers a somewhat different conclusion. In a 2005 article entitled “Women for Women?,” political scientist Craig Brians examined voter behavior across 300 different House races from 1990-2002 in which female and male candidates squared off.

Brians found a modest tendency for female voters to support female candidates more than male candidates: 55 percent of women voted for the female candidate while 45 percent vote for the male candidate. Men’s votes were split 50-50.

Meanwhile, Marcotte notes the considerable challenges that female candidates of all parties candidates face:

After performing 45 interviews with experienced candidates and officeholders and holding multiple focus groups with other politicians and staff members, the [Institute for Women’s Policy Research] found that women had smaller networks than men to access for funding, faced sexist nonsense while campaigning, and had far less support on the homefront than male candidates, who can often depend on a wife who devotes herself to his career full time.

One thing the researchers did not find is that women lack ambition. “Ambition is not an issue or a deficit with these women,” Denise L. Baer and Heidi Hartmann, the study’s authors, write. “Most women self-recruited for their first office or campaign, and only one in four say others recruited them for their first office.”

Previous Dish on Project GROW, the GOP’s attempt to recruit more female candidates, here.

Michael Peppard grapples with the question, offering this answer – “under the current conditions, few conservatives want to become professors”:

[A]cademic theology shares a similar model for research as the rest of the university: one must consistently produce new knowledge about the world; the process of double-blind peer review is the gold standard; notions of scientific repeatability in analysis are also applied to the “data” of theology and religion. Theology as done in the university is usually investigative, exploratory, and boundary-pushing. …

Which conservatives, then, are likely to find a calling to the academy, as it is currently organized? I would say those who are substantively conservative (e.g., have conservative topics of inquiry, scholarly conclusions, or policy prescriptions for society) can in most cases find a successful and happy spot in the academy, as Matthew Woessner’s research has found. But that substantive conservatism will probably need to be combined with a liberal temperament that continually seeks newness and a research procedure that challenges at least some authoritative traditions in ways that secular peers recognize.

Dreher nods, wondering if this explains the ideological tilt of his own profession, journalism:

I think that succeeding in journalism requires a high degree of questioning authorities and institutions, and that liberals are in general more predisposed to do that. The problem with this is that newsroom liberals are in general highly disinclined to question their own assumptions.

Julia Moskin mulls it over:

Who owns a restaurant reservation? Is it the restaurant, having set aside a table as a courtesy for a particular guest? Is it the guest, who made the reservation and can use it – or not – at will? Or is it the entrepreneur who pays workers to frantically redial reservation lines at the moment when prime tables are made available, snagging them under false names and marking them up for sale?

This is the crux of the restaurant industry’s current debate over selling reservations for cash, a smoldering issue being reignited by mobile apps that do just that.

Tyler Cowen defends the practice:

When restaurants don’t charge for reservations, they tend to hold back tables for regular customers, celebrities, very attractive people and the politically and socially well connected. You might be dying to go to that restaurant for a special birthday or anniversary, but you’ll simply be unable to get in. Money is ultimately a more egalitarian force than privilege, as everyone’s greenbacks are worth the same.

But Marina O’Loughlin is skeptical of its value:

The sell is the promised democratization of a notoriously exclusive system: I have experienced it first-hand, calling and being rejected under an alias, and then getting a warm welcome and prime-time table when I phone back with the name of a well-known pal. … But paying before you even glance at the menu simply provides yet another barrier to entry.

Meanwhile, restauranteur Alex Stupak thinks the issue is a no-brainer:

From my perspective the price that comes with booking the table is simply to discourage a no show. If anyone understands anything about the economics of restaurants they would know that a few tables are the difference between profit and deficit. …

Selling tickets to dinner, as some restaurants have done, and pricing based on time and other factors, are brilliant ideas, and certainly precedented in other industries. If you show up five minutes late for a flight, that plane is gone. People do show up 45 minutes late to reservations and look at us as inhospitable if the table is no longer available. Paying in advance could minimize, if not eliminate, this phenomenon. The trick for restaurateurs, is to become a brand so desirable and unique that people are willing to go down these roads to get in.

Donna Tartt’s novel The Goldfinch has sold over a million copies and won a Pulitzer, but it’s failed to win over many high-minded critics. (James Wood, for example: “I think that the rapture with which this novel has been received is further proof of the infantilization of our literary culture: a world in which adults go around reading Harry Potter.”) Evgenia Peretz considers the chasm between grimacing critics and the readers who made the book a bestseller:

[W]e might ask the snobs, What’s the big deal? Can’t we all just agree that it’s great she spent all this time writing a big enjoyable book and move on? No, we cannot, say the stalwarts. Francine Prose, who took on the high-school canon—Maya Angelou, Harper Lee, Ray Bradbury—in a controversial Harper’s essay, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Cannot Read,” argued that holding up weak books as examples of excellence promotes mediocrity and turns young readers off forever. With The Goldfinch she felt duty-bound in the same way. “Everyone was saying this is such a great book and the language was so amazing. I felt I had to make quite a case against it,” she says. It gave her some satisfaction, she reports, that after her Goldfinch review came out she received one e-mail telling her that the book was a masterpiece and she had missed the point, and about 200 from readers thanking her for telling them that they were not alone.

Similarly, [Paris Review editor Loris] Stein, who struggles to keep strong literary voices alive and robust, sees a book like The Goldfinch standing in the way.

“What worries me is that people who read only one or two books a year will plunk down their money for The Goldfinch, and read it, and tell themselves they like it, but deep down will be profoundly bored, because they aren’t children, and will quietly give up on the whole enterprise when, in fact, fiction—realistic fiction, old or new—is as alive and gripping as it’s ever been.”

Jason Diamond expands on Stein’s remarks:

While I ultimately agree with Stein on that point, I wonder about the people buying one or two books a year. Should the books they read next hinge on whether or not the purchase helps to prop up a power dynamic that places “literary lions” in a binary opposition against the rest of the book-buying world? Are things that dire? Does it really take one bad experience to turn them off to fiction forever? And shouldn’t it give us hope that people who are only buying one book a year might be picking up Donna Tartt instead of, say, Dan Brown?

I get that some critics don’t love The Goldfinch. Yet the fact that this one book’s popularity among readers can cause so much controversy exposes not just how little the public pays attention to what we perceive to be “highbrow” literary criticism, but also that American literature is in a really awkward place in which the reputation of a popular, Pulitzer-winning novel is at stake simply because a few critics at a handful of highbrow publications didn’t like it. If this conversation represents where we’re at, what we read, what we like, and who should help guide us toward new titles, then something is seriously amiss.

Christopher Mims thinks not:

The central problems with the Fire, the factors that will kill its sales as surely as they have held Windows Phone to single digit market share in North America, are these:

1. People are loath to switch from the phones they already have, and in the process abandon all the apps and media they’ve bought.

2. The North American market for smartphones–and especially the market for high-end smartphones like the Fire – is heavily saturated, which means there are hardly any new users out there who might adopt the Fire as their first phone.

3. Fire can’t access the existing pool of Android apps. It’s missing critical ones like Uber (Bezos says it’s coming) and Snapchat (no word on when it will appear).

Yglesias worries that the new Fire Phone is too high-end for its own good:

Jeff Bezos’ company has a unique opportunity to come into the smartphone space with a strategy that’s not symmetrical to what other people are doing. Amazon’s phone is first and foremost a physical extension of Amazon-the-store. That argues for a strategy built around a cheap, zero-margin phone that aims to undercut the existing market leaders.

Instead, Amazon seems to be trying to beat the market leaders by adding a bunch of snazzy 3D features to what we’ve come to expect from a high-end smartphone. They’ve even gone out of their way to slightly exceed iPhone 5S specs as far as I can tell. The only price edge Amazon is offering is one year’s worth of Prime membership for free. But this, too, seems backwards. Rather than making Prime a benefit of phone ownership, why not make a cheap phone a benefit of Prime membership?

Manjoo concurs:

For Amazon, a company whose previous devices have had innovative pricing plans that often involved selling devices at cost, the Fire phone’s uninspired price tag is a surprising disappointment. The world needed a great, cheap smartphone.

But Vauhini Vara is tickled by some of the high-end features:

[I]t can do a bunch of charming tricks that are, in fact, like something out of a futuristic “Dick Tracy.” It can change the perspective in games in response to your head movements, make images appear almost as if they were in 3-D (though it isn’t actually 3-D, as some had predicted it would be), and scroll through the content on a Web page – say, a newspaper article – when you tilt it. … People seem to be finding its phone’s newfangled features pretty cool – cool enough, maybe, to get them to switch over from the iPhones and Samsung Galaxies that, after all, haven’t offered much in the way of new whiz-bang gadgetry over the past couple of years.

And Timothy B. Lee believes Amazon made one shrewd move:

The Fire Phone includes an app called Firefly that helps users identify things they point their cameras at, from books to paintings. For some items, Firefly will present useful information, like the Wikipedia page for a famous painting. If it’s an item Amazon sells, Firefly will let you click to buy it.

This should terrify brick and mortar retailers. They have long worried about “showrooming,” the practice where customers will find a product in a physical store (like Best Buy or Home Depot) but then order it from Amazon where the price is lower. Showrooming isn’t new – journalists have been writing trend pieces about it for years. But Firefly promises to make the process effortless.