Category: The Dish

Pulverizing Peaks, Ctd

An expert writes in (with a few updates below):

As a geologist, I’m surprised that the discussion of extensive mountain-flattening in China has so far ignored the most scary potential consequence: widespread earthquake damage. The danger doesn’t come from removing the mountains; it comes from filling in the valleys. In brief, soils that are being placed for future building construction need to be deposited in thin “lifts” a few feet thick and compacted carefully before the next layer is placed. Soils that are just dumped into valleys, in layers tens of meters thick, can not be properly compacted. They are very likely to turn into Jello when shaken, especially if they’re wet when the shaking occurs.

If you want to see a marvelous example of this, look at the damage to the Mission District in San Francisco during the Loma Prieta quake. Buildings constructed on thick layers of poorly compacted fill were far more heavily damaged than those a few blocks away, which were built on native soils.

The scale of what the Chinese are doing dwarfs any comparison with San Francisco.

Some of these cities could double in area, with nearly all of the additional construction space consisting of poorly compacted soil. Even if the new buildings stay up for a few years, the soils at depth will remain uncompacted and may liquefy during the next earthquake. And central China, where this work is being conducted, is subject to frequent massive earthquakes, at least as frequent and as intense as anything California has to offer.

Update from a reader:

Mine is a small correction: it’s the Marina District that was built on landfill, not the Mission, and the damage from the ’89 earthquake was worst in the Marina. I was living on Telegraph Hill at the time. My home was shaken, a few books and records knocked out of their cabinets, but there was no real damage to my house or to those of anyone around me on the hill. We lived on rock. Most of the Mission, if not all of it, is solidly on land.

But the Marina and much of the Embarcadero are on landfill. (There’s a fine poem by Robert Hass about how some of this came about, called “The Harbor at Seattle“.) Currently our home is at the beach, built on sand, and everyone knows what that means, or thinks they do. But it’s survived two temblors with just one crack, a minor one, in the basement walk way. Liquefaction is a potential problem.

But the “give” of sand, in an earthquake, might be advantageous. It’s the tsunamis we have to watch for. There are signs everywhere out here instructing you where to run. (“To the hills!”)

Another:

Your first update was correct, in part: It was the Marina, not the Mission, that the first reader probably meant to reference. But the Mission did have soil failures in 1906, and we have liquefiable soil around the entire Bay edge and along old Mission creek.

But while we’re correcting earthquake references in the 25th anniversary year of Loma Prieta, may I just note, as a structural engineer in San Francisco, how often I have to shake my head when clients say “My building is on rock” or worse, point out how little damage they sustained in 1989 – from a short earthquake centered 50 miles away! When our earthquake comes, rock sites are going to shake plenty too, and a lot harder than they did in ’89. Soil can explain why a distant site still feels strong shaking, but the real culprit is a weak or ill-conceived structure above the ground. (San Francisco has a new mandatory retrofit program addressing the worst of these. Come here in the summer of 2018, and you won’t be able to walk to the nearest google bus stop without seeing a dozen retrofits in progress. Meanwhile, both the A’s and the Giants are currently in first place …)

As for the uncompacted fill (the first reader’s point about China), the earthquake issue there is not just amplified shaking, but settlement. Shake all that loose soil, and if it slumps or settles just a few inches, that’s enough to crack foundations, roads, runways, buried pipelines, etc. It doesn’t kill as many people as structural collapses, but it can really mess with your local and regional economy.

The Best Of The Dish Today

The above message is definitely NSFW. But contains a more eloquent statement of the truth than I was capable of earlier today. Words are just words: as powerful as our minds want them to be and no less. No, I don’t favor deliberately giving offense, or being ill-mannered, or callous or cruel. But in a classroom or in the public arena, I do favor minimal sensitivity when debating core issues. Why? Well a reader summed it up well:

The poet William Stafford had a habit of occasionally issuing an invitation – around the dinner table, or in the classroom – that went like this: “Let’s talk recklessly!” As his son Kim Stafford recalls: “This meant tiptoeing in polite banter was done. We were to dig deep, gossip freely about our uncertainties and strange beliefs, and lean forward and tumble into the liveliest possible interchange. I always felt this kind of verve matched his habit as a writer: to speak boldly through fear, reticence, or even the need to be strong or eloquent. ‘I must be willingly fallible,” he said once, “in order to deserve a place in the realm where miracles happen.’ And part of such necessary fallibility required trying out wild things in language, and speaking with the tang of zest and adventure.”

When people are afraid to talk about anything in a classroom, the potential of a university is diminished. I’m not talking about deliberate demonizing of others or threats of violence; I’m not talking about prejudice or bigotry. I’m talking about being able to say words freely in order to think more freely. That’s the animating spirit of this blog – and it allows us to discuss subjects like compassion for virtuous pedophiles, as we did today. Or the link between testosterone, men and violence. Or the latest inflammatory evidence throwing doubt on the idea that three simultaneous deaths in Gitmo were all suicides, undetected for two full hours. No one should be afraid of honest, open attempts to figure out the truth. Period. Including about those formerly affectionately known by many as “trannies.” (By the way, it’s a word barely ever used on the Dish, and never without irony or affection. Check out the archives yourself.)

Today, I also felt better about airplane turbulence and worse about our robot future. I gave some unsolicited advice to Hillary – run as a “tough old broad” – and despaired of the American refusal to disown and destroy the Gitmo torture and detention camp.

The most popular post of the day was Engaging The T, Ctd, followed by my take on the latest bombshell in the Gitmo “suicides” case.

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. 14 more readers became subscribers today, and you can join them here.

See you in the morning.

Book Club: Sensing Too Much

A reader emailed prior to Maria’s intro today:

Afternoon! I am finding On Looking fascinating in so many ways! Two of my children werehorowitz-onlooking diagnosed with sensory processing disorder (along with Aspergers) and it is difficult for them not to notice everything. Hypersensitive to noise means they hear things that most of us have learned to filter out – same goes for light, touch, smell and taste. Like most people with SPD, their diagnosis came after years of extremely picky eating, complaints about scratchy clothing seams and tags and silky linings in coats, refusing to see movies at the theater and, in our case, having one of them bolt and get lost at an amusement park when he sensed the fireworks were about to start (even though we were on our way out of the park).

Living with my boys means that the rest of us are forced to take note of what we hadn’t. Often we realize just how much we are missing with our so-called properly functioning sensory system. True, they often find themselves with what can only be described as a traffic jam of sensory input in their brains (and that often leads to scenes that are not pretty), but they also notice first when the spring peeper frogs are awake, that the water system needs salt, that Daddy is home (in a Prius), and that the night-light bulbs are about to burn out.

bookclub-beagle-trWe prefer the word “challenge” rather than “disorder” when talking about their Aspergers and sensory issues because while it can be overwhelming at times and even debilitating, it is who they are. And we kid that they can use their powers for good rather than evil! Their powers of sensory observation sometimes astound and add layers to the ordinary that would otherwise have been totally missed. Coupled with what I have read so far in On Looking, I can’t see any journey being ordinary again.

The Dish has covered sensory processing disorders before – here and here. By the way, a reminder of Maria’s appeal to readers earlier today:

Perhaps the greatest gift of a book club is that we get to share our private realities around a common point of interest – the book – and in the process enrich the collective experience. With that in mind, what is one facet of your day or aspect of your usual daily routine – your apartment, your commute, your dog walk route – that On Looking helped you see with new eyes?

Email your personal observations – and photos when relevant – to bookclub@andrewsullivan.com and we’ll pick the most interesting ones to post. And we’ll be discussing On Looking for up to the whole month of June, so you still have plenty of time to buy the book and join the conversation.

Has Griffin Struck Again?

I haven’t seen The Case Against 8 yet, because they won’t send me a screener, but this review is a beaut. Two passages stand out:

Chad Griffin, founder of AFER and since 2012 the president of the Human Rights Campaign, wonders—when the group faces initial opposition from other campaigning groups who think in 2010 it is “too early” to pick marriage as the central gay rights fight to have—why gay groups spend more time fighting each other than “right-wing nut jobs.”

One hopes this is just a misunderstanding. Marriage had been the central gay rights fight since president George W. Bush announced support for the Federal Marriage Amendment in 2004. No one ever disputed that. The only question at issue by 2010 was whether it was worth trying to get the Supreme Court to issue a federal ruling on the entire matter at that juncture. Griffin, Boies and Olson bet on that – and lost, when their case was dismissed on the minor ground of standing. Which brings one to the following paragraph from the review as well:

The directors told me the most difficult scene to film was the last. The couples had just won their 2013 ruling in the Supreme Court, which struck down the Defense of Marriage Act and rejected Proposition 8, and now they wanted to get married—the women in San Francisco and the men in Los Angeles.

But the couples in Perry did not succeed in striking down DOMA; and one hopes the Beast will run a correction. The review tells us that there is no account of the other side in the case, there is no criticism of the Prop 8 team –  “We are not only on the side of the good guys, but we are only ever on the good side of the good guys”, and that there is nothing actually revealing on the couples involved. In other words, it appears to be exactly the propaganda Griffin tried to peddle through Becker.

Well, I guess they’ll let me see the film at some point, won’t they?

Yes He Did

Chait delivers a reality check:

On January 20, 2009, when Obama delivered his inaugural address as president, he outlined his coming domestic agenda in two sentences summarizing the challenges he identified: “Homes have been lost, jobs shed, businesses shuttered. Our health care is too costly, our schools fail too many, and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.” Those were the four major areas of domestic reform: economic recovery measures, health-care reform, a response to climate change, and education reform. (To the justifiable dismay of immigration advocates, Obama did not call for immigration reform at the time, and immigration reform is now the only possible remaining area for significant domestic reform.) With the announcement of the largest piece of his environmental program last Monday, Obama has now accomplished major policy responses on all these things. There is enormous room left to debate whether Obama’s agenda in all these areas qualifies as good or bad, but “ineffectual” seems as though it should be ruled out at this point.

“An Epic Of The Human Body”

But first, a very NSFW reading of one of James Joyce’s love letters to his wife:

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In his about-to-be released The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses, Kevin Birmingham offers new evidence that the author was going blind from syphilis:

The Harvard scholar decided to “turn over every stone” to find out what might have caused Joyce’s deteriorating vision, compiling references to every symptom and treatment the author had. One item in particular sparked his curiosity: Joyce’s reference in two separate 1928 letters to the injections of arsenic and phosphorous he was receiving.

“It wasn’t too long before I found a medication that fit: galyl, a compound of arsenic and phosphorus that doctors injected multiple times. Galyl was only used to treat syphilis,” said Birmingham.

The drug is obscure, and Birmingham believes Joyce opted for this treatment, rather than the more effective drug salvarsan, because one of salvarsan’s side effects was that it could further damage his eyesight – and Joyce hated the idea of having to dictate his work.

As John Lingan’s review of The Most Dangerous Book makes clear, sex also figured into the obscenity trial that Ulysses sparked:

Fancying his book “an epic of the human body,” he filled it with every conceivable excretion and referenced a panoply of sex acts, from the mundane to the surreal. Moreover, its opening lines, a mock invocation of the Catholic mass over a shaving bowl, announced Joyce’s intention to revel in heresy.

Obscenity was the lifeblood of Ulysses, the proof that it truly comprehended all human experience. “To artists like Joyce,” Birmingham writes, “who considered free expression sacrosanct, censorship epitomized the tyranny of state power. … To publish a gratuitously obscene text—to deny ‘obscenity’ as a legitimate category altogether—was a way to expose and reject the arbitrary base of all state power. It was a form of literary anarchy.”

The novel was eventually published in 1922 by Shakespeare and Company, another literary institution (this one in Paris) run by a strong-willed American woman. Sylvia Beach had opened her store in 1919, and it quickly became the Lost Generation’s literary locus, functioning as a library and mailing address for itinerant artists. Her version of Ulysses, with its iconic blue cover and monolithic title font, was priced up to 10 times higher than the normal rate for a new book, but was nevertheless so popular that she had to remove a copy from her store window to prevent mob scenes.

In a detail that will resonate with anyone who’s tried to make it all the way through Ulysses, James Longenbach notices one of the defenses of the book during the obscenity trial – that no one actually would read it:

John Quinn, a powerful New York lawyer who was a friend of Pound’s and a patron of many modernist writers and painters, represented the editors at the Jefferson Market Courthouse. No passage from Ulysses was read into evidence; the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice argued that it would violate the law to do so, since the book was “so obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, indecent and disgusting that a minute description of the same would be offensive to the Court and improper to be placed upon the records thereof.”

Cannily, Quinn based his defense on the Hicklin Rule (formulated by a British judge in 1868 and still current at the time), which maintained that the “test of obscenity” was whether or not the language in question would tend to “deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences.” Language could not deprave and corrupt, Quinn argued, if nobody read it: “You could not take a piece of literature up in an aeroplane fifteen thousand feet into the blue sky, where there would be no spectator, and let the pilot of the machine read it out and have it denounced as ‘filthy,’ within the meaning of the law.” Quinn was himself an avid reader of Joyce’s prose, but in court he argued that Ulysses was like the entry on “and” in theOED: Who would get through it?

Don’t Drive Stoned And Drunk

Balko proclaims that “Colorado’s poster boy for ‘stoned driving’ was drunk off his gourd.” Kleiman chimes in:

The involvement of alcohol is hardly surprising. Drunk driving is much more dangerous than stoned driving, and the combination is worse than either drug alone.

In a followup, Kleiman asks, “what are the actual risks of stoned driving?”:

The answer, from what seems to be a well-done case-control study, is that driving stoned is hazardous, but much less hazardous than driving drunk. (A relative risk of 1.83 – meaning that driving a mile stoned is about as risky as driving two miles sober – strongly suggests that cannabis-impaired driving is a problem, but also that it isn’t much of a problem; the relative-risk number for alcohol is over 13.) On the other hand, the same study shows that adding cannabis or other drugs to alcohol substantially worsens the odds: alcohol-and-something-else has a relative risk of 23.

Given those numbers, and the technical difficulty of identifying cannabis-impaired driving (because impairment doesn’t track cannabinoid levels in blood nearly as well as it tracks alcohol levels) I’d propose the following rule: anyone who tests positive for cannabis on a mouth swab (which detects use within the past few hours) should be considered guilty of impaired driving if that person’s BAC is detectably different from zero. All that means is that, if you’ve been toking and drinking, you need to wait as many hours as you’ve had drinks before getting behind the wheel.

Is They Right?

Transgender activist and author Janet Mock tries to convince Colbert to substitute “they” for “he” or “she”:

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Meanwhile, linguist Gretchen McCulloch gets technical about why the singular “they” became nonstandard in the first place, arguing that it’s time to rescue the all-purpose pronoun from Middle English obscurity:

[I]n the late 18th century, grammarians started recommending that people use he as a gender nonspecific pronoun because they was ostensibly plural…. Many excellent writers proceeded to ignore them and kept using singular they, just as English-speakers had been doing for some four hundred years by that point, although … a whole bunch of style manuals did end up adopting generic he. That is, until they started facing pushback in the 1970s from people like the incredibly badass Kate Swift and Casey Miller, who you should go read about right now.

Recognizing that it’s useful to have a gender-neutral (aka epicene) pronoun but that many people are uneasy with both generic he and singular they, various creative people in both language reformer and nonbinary activist camps from the 1850s to the modern day have developed and advocated for an assortment of options.

While some invented epicene pronouns never made it past 1850s obscurity (heesh) and others are deliberately more fanciful (bun, bunself), a few made it to relative popularity particularly in certain communities, including ey, eir, em (the Spivak pronouns) and xe, xir, xem, both with a variety of spellings. It’s pretty hard to change the most common words in a language though, so at the moment the only one that has really wide use is our old friend singular they.

Despite this occasional lingering sense of unease around it, these days reputable usage guides endorse singular they for a whole host of reasons and institutions from Facebook to the Canadian Government are increasingly accepting of it, so maybe in another couple hundred years we’ll have finally forgotten about this foolish vendetta.

Not Any Udder Milk

David Despain observes the breast milk energy drink phenomenon:

Far away from government oversight or official scrutiny, hundreds of gallons of breast milk flow through online classifieds, according to one of the leading online facilitators, OnlytheBreast.com. The site officially caters to mothers who want to sell their “liquid gold” (their language, not ours) to other women, but about a third of the requests for milk on the site are posted by men. The demand has set off an arms race among the 10 percent of women willing to sell their milk to the other sex. One St. Louis provider catering to athletes boasts that her milk is best because she adheres to a “Paleo-style diet with added grass-fed butter,” only organic foods, and a daily regimen of supplements including charcoal and probiotics.

The “breast is best” believers drink this stuff up. They say they the milk is more nutritious than anything you can get from a cow, best for body building, the secret to fighting off disease, and a sure-fire way to boost energy levels. It’s the energy drink of the future, New York Magazine reports.

It’s too bad it’s soggy logic—on all counts, says Bo Lonnerdal, a professor of nutrition and internal medicine at University of California at Davis. “I don’t see much sense in it all,” she says. “It doesn’t provide more energy than other drinks with the same energy content.”

Marcotte is among the dubious:

Of course, the fact that this appears to be a male-only endeavor that involves boobs suggests that maybe, just maybe, all this talk about health and fitness is just a cover story. One of the men [Chavie] Lieber spoke with was refreshingly honest on this front: “All I’ll say is it’s a fetish for me.” And the discussion on Bodybuilder.com took a turn toward the pornographic, with men posting pictures of women pumping milk and making jokes about getting aroused thinking about it. I suspect these guys are never going to be convinced that eating a steak is as, uh, energizing as drinking breast milk.

But if you’re really set on unusual alternatives, there’s always “ass milk“:

Two things that may surprise you. One, you can milk a donkey (and yes, it’s also sometimes called ass milk). Two, people love the milk.

Over the past couple of months, Jean-Michel Evequoz, a chef and teacher at Les Roches International School of Hotel Management in Switzerland, has been experimenting with donkey’s milk, with a view to figuring out just how well it lends itself to traditional European cuisine. Thus far, he’s made a simple panna cotta, a “mousse au chocolat blanc” and he’s working on an emulsion of donkey’s milk and wild flowers to complement a poached lobster. “The milk works very well in a number of recipes,” says Evequoz, “and when you add in sugar and chocolate in particular, the taste is amazing.”

Evequoz is one of a small yet growing number of donkey milk aficionados in Europe, all of whom are instrumental for what’s become a sort of renaissance of both the milk as well as the animal that produces it.

Previous Dish on breast milk here, here, and here.