The Dish – Page 786

Your Prius Was Made For Beijing Traffic

It turns out that hybrid vehicles’ fuel efficiency varies from country to country, due in part to “national driving styles”:

When the computer generated vehicles were “driven” according to the real world driving data, the hybrids generated fuel savings of 48 percent in India and up to 55 percent in China, compared with around 40 percent in the US. Why the discrepancy? At low speeds, such as found in many cities, the internal combustion engine is inefficient, and so in the hybrids the electric motor took over. Energy recovered through regenerative breaking – when the electric motor is allowed to run backwards as a generator when the car is slowing – was, as expected, the main reason why they hybrids were much more efficient.

The second most important factor surprised the researchers. “We forgot about the aggressiveness of the driving styles,” says [researcher Anand] Gopal. “Dense traffic and aggressive driving styles favor hybrids.” In India and China, driving involves a lot of accelerating and braking – which can both be done more efficiently with an electric drive train versus a petrol engine. Although a major road in Los Angeles or London may be a pain to get through at rush hour, it does not require the levels of hard, emergency, braking required in New Delhi, Gopal says. Drives that include more time in traffic jams and fewer motorways also generated greater benefits from hybrids.

Why Swooshes Went Out Of Style

John McDuling suggests the decline of suburbia bears some of the blame:

Two themes being talked about in retail lately are the death of the mall, and the decline of logo-centric fashion. Both malls and (to some extent) the obsession with logos emerged in the first place due to the rise of the suburbs. Suburban developments were in many cases built around shopping malls, and the homogeneity of the suburbs created a mentality that “resulted in group think and concentration of brand interest,” Piper Jaffray argues. This environment helped logo-centric brands like Abercrombie and Fitch prosper.

Normcore aside, that is no longer the case: branded clothes have been displaced by so-called fast fashion, designs that are basically straight from the catwalk, more sophisticated – like cities, if you will, in contrast to the suburban aesthetic of the logos. It’s far too early to describe the suburbs as dying, but a shift back to the cities is happening, and it looks like its already having an impact, on shopping malls and teen clothing retailers at least.

(Photo by Vivian Peng)

The Writer’s Better Half

Koa Beck explains why Vera Nabokov “remains a revered figure” – and often a source of envy – among writers:

Vera not only performed all the duties expected of a wife of her era—that is, being a free live-in cook, babysitter, laundress, and maid (albeit, she considered herself a “terrible housewife”)—but also acted as her husband’s round-the-clock editor, assistant, and secretary. In addition to teaching his classes on occasion (in which Nabokov openly referred to her as “my assistant”), Vera also famously saved Lolita, the work that would define her husband’s career, several times from incineration, according to Stacy Schiff ‘s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2000 biography, Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov). With Vera by his side, Nabokov published 18 novels between 1926 and 1974 (both in Russian and English). Through 1976, the year before his death, he also published 10 short story collections and nine poetry collections along with criticism, plays, uncollected short stories, and translations.

She goes on to describe other literary partnerships:

As Laura Miller recently pointed out in Salon, Virginia Woolf and Edna St. Vincent Millay each benefited greatly from truly anomalous marriages of their time, in which their respective husbands assumed a Vera-esque role. Millay’s husband, Eugen Boissevain, reportedly described himself as a feminist and “married the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay with the express purpose of providing her with a stable home life and relieving her of domestic tasks so she could write.” By the time Millay died, she had written six plays and more than a dozen books of poetry. While Leonard Woolf cared for Virginia during her bouts of mental illness, he also managed the household, tended to the garden, and co-founded the couple’s literary press.

But not all gifted writers are blessed with Veras (or Leonards or Eugens for that matter). At a promotional reading of Bark at Congregation Beth Elohim in Park Slope, Brooklyn, [Lorrie] Moore clarified to me—and a room’s worth of fans—that she absolutely does not have a Vera. “I do every little thing myself,” she said.

Previous Dish on the spouses of writers here.

The Best Of The Dish This Weekend

A beagle takes playing catch to a whole new level:

I took the girls out myself to the park today, which was jammed with picnickers, weekenders and stoners. Drum circle at one end, young Washingtonians sprawled out on the lawn at the other; some Latino soccer players kicking up dust in between; an occasional giant crown passing through from an Easter service; boyfriends balancing girlfriends in yoga poses; a rasta in a loin cloth; awkward prepsters swaying nervously; a child showing off her Easter gown; and the blossoms bursting out of the very branches:

I’m not sure that’s the typical scene many think of when they think of Washington. But on a day like today – a true high holiday – it was really good to be home.

We pulled out some 4/20 stops today – this video is a classic – but focused more on the Easter side of things. One simple account of Easter’s meaning today; one surpassing meditation on its power and vitality; and a George Herbert poem to say what prose cannot.

How to write: advice from Doris Lessing. How to pray: Rosary-learning from Carolyn Browender. How men react to being cruised the way they cruise women; and a hauntingly beautiful portrait of a mother and daughter.

The most trafficked posts of the weekend were Map Of The Day, on where Americans don’t live; and my takedown of a new and surreal book on the marriage equality movement.

As of today, we have 28,395 subscribers. Join them here. Update from one:

I have been reading the Dish since I followed a link to it from a National Review Online article by Jonah Goldberg. (You guys still friends I wonder?) My memory is little foggy on the point, but I remember donating 20 bucks to your site in your very first attempt to monetize it, before you went over to The Atlantic. So when you said you were going to start charging a subscription to your site, I decided to wait and see if you were really going to go through with it. It soon become apparent that this was real deal, but then I somehow just never got around to it. Anywho, I paid $50 – one year plus arrears for the last year-and-a-half of foot-dragging.

I keep coming back to this site for a number of reasons. First and foremost, I do not have time to browse the Internet the way I used to, so I rely on you and your staff to connect me to interesting content. (Through you I discovered, for example, Coursera, where I’ve taken a half-dozen of their online courses). Secondly, I love your honest and nuanced engagement with the issues, which is expressed in a clear and accessible every man’s style of writing. Finally, I enjoy the eclecticism of your posts, as well as your amusing little pet obsessions. (Speaking of which, I have a burning question. Do you really – now be honest with me – get turned on by a “smoking hot beard” in the same way that I do by a nice set of tits? Don’t bother answering, I know the answer already and it cracks me up!)

I am attaching a view from the window of my office in Sassari, Italy (island of Sardinia), where I own and run a private language school. I would be honored if you used it for one of your contests or in your regular posts.

Happy Easter to you and your family!

Happy Easter to all our readers. And see you in the morning.

Columbine: 15 Years Later

Dave Cullen, author of the best-selling book Columbine, addresses the lessons that much of the mainstream media haven’t yet learned from the tragedy:

Casey Chan puts the anniversary in a broader context:

History buffs might not know this already but it seems as if this week—April 14th to April 20th—might be the worst week in American history. Things like President Lincoln being assassinated, the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Columbine shooting, the Virginia Tech school shooting, the Oklahoma City bombing, the Boston Marathon bombing, etc. all happened during this week in history. Of course, if you look back far enough into history, you’re going to find something terrible for every day because, well, terrible things happen all the time. But you have to admit, this week just isn’t a good week for American history.

From an Esquire profile of Frank DeAngelis, the Columbine principal retiring this year after 35 years at the school:

Mr. D’s job of reconciling the past with the present and the future is a difficult one. Because, as the students will readily attest, people are uncommonly weird about Columbine. Tour buses stop to let their riders snap pictures during the school day. Visitors take selfies in front of the school’s sign. Travelers who’ve gotten lost looking for the memorial end up wandering around the parking lot. The memorial was built in 2007, in nearby Clement Park. It was set away from the school to deter tourists from bothering students, but that didn’t work. They keep coming. To them, the school itself is the monument.

The View From Your Window

Littleton, Colorado, 4.57 pm

Theology For Hedonists

David Sedley delves into the philosophy of Epicurus:

Hedonists are ethical thinkers who hold that things are good precisely in so far as they are pleasant, and bad precisely in so far as they are painful. Epicurus was, more specifically, an “egoistic” hedonist, in that he took it to be obvious that the good for each individual, from the moment of birth, is that person’s own pleasure, not other people’s: in other words, your life is a good one if, and only if, you yourself enjoy it. Although an enjoyable life must, according to Epicurus, be centred on moral virtue, what makes it worth living is in the last analysis your enjoyment of it, and not the morality for its own sake.

Moreover there are, besides moral propriety, other factors equally indispensable to enjoying your life.

In particular, because the fear of the gods and the fear of death do more than anything else to blight lives, overcoming these is the essential starting point of Epicurean living. And almost equally important is the moderation of your desires, gastronomic and otherwise, restricting them to the most basic and readily satisfied ones. Extravagant pleasures – even that of meat-eating – threaten to make us their slaves, yet their satisfaction brings no more pleasure than living on the simplest fare. Epicurus was no epicure!

Sedley goes on to explain why the thinker valued a tranquillity “simply incompatible with the world-governing role that popular religion attributes to the gods”:

According to Epicurus, our innate conception of god is simply that of an immortal and blessedly tranquil being. Reduced to moral terms, this means that the ideal that from the moment of birth we all intuitively seek is a life of tranquillity totally unmarred by the fear of death. Unfortunately in most of us this basic aspiration has been distorted by superimposing the values of a corrupt society, so that our ideal role models come to be characterised by vindictiveness, greed, belligerence, lust, tyrannical rule and so on. This plausibly accounts for the popular worship of deities (Ares, Aphrodite, etc.) whose profiles distort true moral values.

A Poem For Sunday

From “Easter” by George Herbert (1593-1633):

Rise heart; thy Lord is risen. Sing his praise
Without delayes,
Who takes thee by the hand, that thou likewise
With him mayst rise:
That, as his death calcined thee to dust,
His life may make thee gold, and much more, just.

Awake, my lute, and struggle for thy part
With all thy art.
The crosse taught all wood to resound his name,
Who bore the same.
His stretched sinews taught all strings, what key
Is best to celebrate this most high day.

Consort both heart and lute, and twist a song
Pleasant and long:
Or, since all musick is but three parts vied
And multiplied,
O let thy blessed Spirit bear a part,
And make up our defects with his sweet art.

(Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of St. Thomas, 1602, via Wikimedia Commons)

Cool Ad Watch

Alex at Weird Universe captions:

An ad by a Seattle burger restaurant, inspired by the fact that Easter Sunday is on April 20 (4/20), which is a special day for cannabis enthusiasts. Of course, some people are already saying that the ad offends them. But in the ad’s defense, there is a long-standing argument that Jesus and his disciples probably were cannabis users. Though I doubt that argument is endorsed by the Vatican.

Money quote from the guy responsible for the ad:

“No one group is sacred,” [Lunchbox Laboratory owner and “practicing Catholic” John Schmidt] said. “Do you ever watch South Park where they parody everybody and every religion and pretty much anything?”

Update from a reader:

The ad offends me, but not because of the spliff. It shows Jesus eating an animal product from industrial agriculture, which is an act of “grave evil.” Jesus may have been a vegetarian:

Epiphanius quotes the Gospel of the Ebionites where Jesus has a confrontation with the high priest. Jesus chastises the leadership saying, “I am come to end the sacrifices and feasts of blood; and if ye cease not offering and eating of flesh and blood, the wrath of God shall not cease from you; even as it came to your fathers in the wilderness, who lusted for flesh, and did sat to their content, and were filled with rottenness, and the plague consumed them.” [Numbers 11:32-34]

Thou shalt not kill. No one was harmed in the making of the spliff.