Updates – Page 21

Dating With Mental Illness, Ctd

A reader writes:

Molly Pohlig’s perspective on dating with mental illness is right on. I have PTSD and have watched the effects, pre- and post-diagnosis, torpedo many a relationship. In addition to the PTSD, I have two chronic pain conditions, so there is also the toll of being a physical caretaker. One man filled this role with ease; I ended our engagement for fear that I would destroy his gentle and kind nature with the rage and swings that are part of my life.

I spoke with a friend about this while my last relationship was in its death throes. He understands – he has PTSD himself from childhood trauma (very different than my adult-acquired version) and deals with depression, anxiety, and chronic migraines. He said he thought that the only way for someone struggling with an issue this serious to have a relationship was for them to find someone else with mental illness.

I thought he was being ridiculous and just flirting. I was wrong about the first part and right on the second. We are scheduled to be married this fall.

It works because our crazy is balanced. I don’t suffer daily anxiety, so things that make him anxious don’t feed me and I can ground him. He doesn’t struggle with intimacy issues, so he can remind me how to be a feeling person, rather than an emotionless automaton. It’s less stressful for him to take care of me, since I will have to take care of him some days, too. Plus, having someone who understands that there are limits to what you can control takes a huge burden off your bad days.

Is this the only way for someone with mental illness to find a partner? No, of course not. But it’s something I never would have considered as a way to make relationships a little easier until I tried it.

Another:

I’m coping with bi-polar disorder, would like to date, and envy those who hold down families, careers, and social lives with the condition. I can’t afford to date on my disability income with meager part-time work. What kind of financial stability can I possibly offer him as a life partner? I don’t know how Molly Pohlig does it, or does she depend on the other person paying her way?

Update from a reader:

I finally subscribed. It was this post that did it. I’ve struggled with mental illness (depression, anxiety). I am, at this very moment in my life, negotiating a new relationship and I don’t want my issues to torpedo this one as they have so many before. I had an incredibly empathetic reaction to this post and realized: where else can I read about foreign policy, pet ethics, and then have a moment like this? Of genuine heart? So, ya got me.

“Sartorial Slumming”

Kate Dries observes that denim-on-denim, or the “Canadian Tuxedo,” is so hot right now. Marcotte is unconvinced:

https://twitter.com/AmandaMarcotte/statuses/494103531507310594

Meanwhile, Judith Thurman – in what could well be the first New Yorker piece illustrated by Kim Kardashian in open-thigh jeans – examines the history of denim and other forms of “sartorial slumming”:

You may suppose that dressing like the indigent, in rags and tatters, to make a statement about art, politics, or identity, started with the punks. But Count Tolstoy adopted the rough homespuns of Russian serfs, along with a credo of “voluntary poverty,” inspired by Christ and Buddha, that wasn’t popular with his family members. In the nineteen-twenties, Paul Poiret accused no less than Chanel of perpetrating a look that he called la misère de luxe: costly couture outfits made from jersey tricot, a proletarian fabric formerly used only for work clothes and men’s underwear. It was suddenly chic to look as though you had something better to do, and to think about, than changing an effete toilette three times a day.

Update from a reader:

If you want a real example of double-denim the first time around, you could try this video:

C’est la vie!

Bad Science On The Big Screen

Jeffrey Kluger is frustrated by Lucy, a film premised on the widely believed misconception that we only use 10 percent of our brains:

The fact is, the brain is overworked as it is, 3 lbs. (1,400 gm) of tissue stuffed into a skull that can barely hold it all. There’s a reason the human brain is as wrinkled as it is and that’s because the more it grew as we developed, the more it bumped up against the limits of the cranium; the only way to increase the surface area of the neocortex sufficiently to handle the advanced data crunching we do was to add convolutions. Open up the cerebral cortex and smooth it out and it would measure 2.5 sq. ft. (2,500 sq cm). Wrinkles are a clumsy solution to a problem that never would have presented itself in the first place if 90% of our disk space were going to waste.

What’s more, our bodies simply couldn’t afford to maintain so much idle neuronal tissue since the brain is an exceedingly expensive organ to own and operate—at least in terms of energy needs…. “We were a nutritionally marginal species early on,” the late William Greenough, a psychologist and brain development expert at the University of Illinois, told me for my 2007 book Simplexity. “A synapse is a very costly thing to support.”

So why does the myth persist? A theory from neuroscientist David Eagleman:

I think it’s because it gives us a sense that there’s something there to be unlocked, that we could be so much better than we could. And really, this has the same appeal as any fairytale or superhero story. I mean, it’s the neural equivalent to Peter Parker becoming Spiderman.

Putting the scientific misinformation aside, Richard Brody feels the film doesn’t live up to its ambitions:

The grand-scale part comes when Lucy’s control of ambient energy taps into the mainframe of existence, the core of space and time. The trailer shows some wondrous stop-motion effects in Times Square and Lucy’s power to swipe action in and out, from high-speed to frozen and back, with her hand, as if swiping along a smartphone or tablet screen. [Writer/director Luc] Besson takes this idea audaciously, exhilaratingly far. I won’t spoil the contemplative delight, except to say that he comes amazingly close to territory covered in the more visionary moments of Malick’s “The Tree of Life.” Even now, I can hardly believe what I saw in “Lucy.”

Yet Malick’s movie—with its authentically profound considerations of the links between experience and transcendence, between ordinary life and intuitions of the absolute, between scientific knowledge and religious ecstasy—has an aesthetic, a style, a tone, a mood, which cohere with its grand ideas. His scenes of family drama in Texas, featuring such actors as Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain, are filmed as distinctively and with as original and imaginative a vision as his synthetic images of the beyond, and the substance of that drama (down to the role of music in it, which meshes with the music heard on the soundtrack) is integral to his cinematic-philosophical creation.

Besson, by contrast, films the action with energy and flair but little originality. He realizes his characters with virtually no tendrils of identity to link up to his grander conceit.

Previous Dish on Tree of Life and Malick here. Update from a reader:

My guess is you will receive a version of this from others, but here’s mine:

You mean to tell me that light sabres aren’t real? Or that radioactive spiders can’t bite me and turn me into a superhero? Or that time travel may not actually exist?

It’s a movie, Poindexter. Shut up and let me watch the hot girl kick ass, OK?

The Grey Lady Endorses Legal Weed, Ctd

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In response to the NYT’s pro-pot announcement, Nate Silver calculates that around 77 percent of Americans who fit the NYT editorial board’s demographic profile support legalization:

[P]eople with this demographic profile are somewhere around 25 or 30 percentage points more supportive of marijuana legalization than the average American. That implies that back in 2000, when only about 30 percent of Americans supported legalization, perhaps 55 or 60 percent of these people did. The margin of error on this estimate is fairly high — about 10 percent — but not enough to call into question that most people like those on the Times’ editorial board have privately supported legalization for a long time. The question is why it took them so long to take such a stance publicly.

And if you want to know why no one watches Meet The Press, check out their boomer pundit-fest above in which they could find no proponent of legalization at all, along with the familiar condescension and dated “jokes”. Nate’s too right that “there’s a particularly large gap between elite and popular opinion on marijuana policy”:

Consider that, according to The Huffington Post, none of the 50 U.S. governors or the 100 U.S. senators had endorsed fully legal recreational marijuana as of this April — even though some of them are very liberal on other issues, and even though an increasing number of them represent states where most voters support legalizing pot.

Perhaps some of this is smart politics — older Americans are less likely to support marijuana legalization and more likely to vote. But there’s also a more cynical interpretation: racial minorities, low-income Americans and young people are disproportionately more likely to be arrested for marijuana offenses than senators or newspaper editorial board members (or their sons and daughters). The elites may be setting the policy, but they’re out of touch with its effects.

Update from a reader:

Like you, I wholly believe that we shouldn’t shy away from disturbing images and videos when they’re reporting things that have actually taken place. But for God’s sake, did you have to post that horrible, terrible, terrifying, nauseating video? I’m speaking, of course, about the cadre of grey-haired idiots debating pot legalization on Meet the Press, a program I swear to God I forgot existed.

So, c’mon, trigger warning next time? Something simple, like, “Warning: this video may cause you to vomit all over yourself uncontrollably.”

You know what’s good for nausea? Another reader gets serious:

That MTP clip is unreal. If I were the father or son or spouse of one of the millions of marijuana users whose life has been irrevocably ruined by The War On Drugs and I saw those comfortable Beltway insiders having a silly pun-fest while wondering what the rush is on legalization, I would probably have thrown my laptop out the window in anger and disgust. Fuck them.

Best Cover Song Ever?

The submissions keep pouring in:

Manfred Mann’s “Blinded by the Light.” Very few people actually realize this song was originally written and recorded by Bruce Springsteen. Manfred‘s version is dramatically different:

Another:

I would like to nominate The Beatles cover of “Twist and Shout”, which was originally recorded by the Top Notes in 1961 and the by The Isley Brothers in 1962. The Beatles version changed the form of the original and John Lennon gives us one of the greatest vocal performances. The Beatles version has become the standard:

The Boys had the savvy to not only repeat the bridge and buildup but to parlay the latter into a slow-triplet-bound complete ending. This gives the overall thrust of the song a much greater sense of teleology, of having “arrived” somewhere; the Isleys sounds in comparison more like just static vamping.

(Alan W. Pollack’s Notes on Series)

Another huffs:

Girl Talk? Alien Ant Farm? Give me a break. Everybody knows that the greatest cover ever is Joe Cocker’s awesome rendition of “With a Little Help from My Friends,” delivered, among other places, at Woodstock:

I think Cocker gets extra points for doing a Beatles cover, given how brutal the competition is.

Check out the growing number of nominees here. Update from a reader:

My friends and I enjoy passing around this “subtitled” version of Cocker singing that song at Woodstock:

Eating Man’s Best Friend

John D. Sutter doesn’t understand why we don’t eat dogs:

The United States euthanizes 1.2 million dogs per year, according to the ASPCA. Would eating them be so different? It actually could be seen as helpful.

“[U]nlike all farmed meat, which requires the creation and maintenance of animals, dogs are practically begging to be eaten,” Jonathan Safran Foer, a vegetarian and novelist, writes in the book “Eating Animals.” Euthanizing pets, he says, “amounts to millions of pounds of meat now being thrown away every year. The simple disposal of these euthanized dogs is an enormous ecological and economic problem. It would be demented to yank pets from homes. But eating those strays, those runaways, those not-quite-cute-enough-to-take and not-quite-well-behaved-enough-to-keep dogs would be killing a flock of birds with one stone and eating it, too.”

Michael Brendan Dougherty objects to this line of reasoning:

[T]he reason we shouldn’t eat dogs is related to the same reason it is more heinous and hateful to burn a synagogue than a community center, or that it is more of a violation to burn down a man’s home than the two rental properties he owns of an equivalent dollar value. The spaces, objects, and even animals we sanctify with our respect, friendship, and time really do enter into different moral categories. It is not inherently evil to smash a picture, but it is a gesture of hatred to tear a beloved family photo.

Societies like Korea, where dogs have been eaten and kept as pets, even come up with different categories of dogs to separate the ones that are sanctified by human friendship, and those that are not and therefore can be eaten. As Americans, with our own history and sense of ethics, we would probably never develop this distinction, and that’s okay. We’re fine with diversity when it comes to other cultural manifestations, like manners, another dimension of human behavior with moral implications. It is a human wrong to be inhospitable, but hospitality may have completely different expressions and taboos from one culture to the next. So, too, with our taboos on eating and animals.

The Dish has covered this subject repeatedly over the years. Update from a reader:

Before moving to eating dogs, why can’t we at least start with eating the pigeons? City pigeons are extremely well fed, many are gourmet fed and plump as hell. They should taste great. And it’s gotta taste like chicken, right?

Maybe from a pigeon farm. But you really want to taste a pigeon that feeds on New York Shitty trash?

(Photo by Nina Matthews)

The Best Of The Dish Today

A reader says it best about where I’m now at with respect to Israel/Palestine:

You quote Goldblog:

A moderate-minded Palestinian who watches Israel expand its settlements on lands that most of the world believes should fall within the borders of a future Palestinian state might legitimately come to doubt Israel’s intentions.

This is really the whole Israeli-Palestinian problem in a nutshell. For 47 of my 56 years, Israel has occupied the West Bank and Gaza. (Yes, Israel “withdrew” from Gaza some time ago, but it is still very much Israel’s captive.) In modern times, there is no single other example of a nation that supposedly shares “western” values sustaining such a long occupation of another people. Yes, Israel has a right to defend itself. Yes, Israel has every right to question whether it has a partner to make peace. Of course I don’t trust Hamas. Of course the rockets merit a vigorous no-nonsense response. But one question sticks in my mind about the position of Israel: If Israel really wanted peace, why does it keep building those darn settlements?

Every answer I’ve ever heard – the irrelevant “there never really was a Palestinian state on this land”, the hopeless “even if Israel did that what makes you think they’d suddenly change their stripes?”, or the more limited “construction is for the most part only expansion of existing settlements anyway”, whatever – all of them only go so far as to try to justify why Israel should be permitted to continue to build. It doesn’t explain why it is a good idea for Israel to continue to build.

Just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should. And in that sense, there is no justification I have ever heard for the settlements that one can reconcile with trying to make the two state solution a reality, or indeed even with leaving it open as a possibility. Just the opposite. Until there is an answer to that question, in my mind, Israel cannot and will not be guilt-free. Maybe if those of us who love Israel but think it has lost its way focused on that one simple question until it is answered, we might get somewhere.

That’s where I’m at as well. At some point, the denials and equivocations and diversions and distractions fade away to that core reality: why are they continuing to settle the West Bank? It empowers Hamas, it weakens the Palestinian Authority, it is a constant grinding of salt into an open wound.

The Israelis had a golden opportunity with Barack Obama’s presidency to make a historic peace; and they didn’t just throw it away, they treated the US president with contempt for even trying and now cast ugly, public insults at the secretary of state. If the settlements had been reversed, if Abbas and Fayyad had been given the autonomy they needed, this war in Gaza would appear as something very different. It would be much simpler to condemn Hamas’ extremism, if there was clearly another way forward. But Netanyahu – because of the settlements – has blocked any way forward. The Palestinians have two options: bombardment and blockade or the humiliation of more settlements. Which is why I have come to the conclusion these past six years that Greater Israel is the goal, that nothing else really matters, and anyone who doesn’t see that is a useful idiot.

Today, in non-war-and-dead children coverage, we looked forward to an app that will guide you to a scenic route across town; we celebrated the better late than never endorsement of legal weed by the NYT (by the way, try watching the David Gregory segment on the question yesterday without needing to toke from the instant nausea); and cheered a new study on sponsored content that proves it’s deceptive to readers, great for advertisers for only a while, and damaging to publications for ever. I also happened to love the window view today – from Buffalo.

The most popular post of the day was The Lie Behind The War; followed by Why Am I Moving Left?

A few of today’s posts were updated with your emails – read them here. You can always leave your unfiltered comments at our Facebook page and @sullydish. 19 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. One writes:

Andrew, you and I don’t always agree. But today I became a paid subscriber. This post alone – “Why Am I Moving Left?” – was worth the $20. It is what I have been posting and commenting on, over and over, to anyone who will listen, for three years. As someone who once would have been considered a pro-business Centrist and registered Independent, there is absolutely no way I can comprehend anyone can feel any sense of pride and honor in identifying as a Republican in the current climate. Just the thought causes a disconnect. And like you, it isn’t me that changed. Thanks for speaking for me.

See you in the morning.

(Photos: Yeoman Serjeant Bob Loughlin admires a section of an installation entitled ‘Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red’ by artist Paul Cummins, made up of 888,246 ceramic poppies in the moat of the Tower of London, to commemorate the First World War on July 28, 2014 in London, England. Each ceramic poppy represents an allied victim of the First World War and the display is due to be completed by Armistice Day on November 11, 2014. By Oli Scarff/Getty Images; Smoke trails over Gaza city after Israeli shelling on July 25, 2014. By Ashraf Amra/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images.) Update from a reader:

Sad to have to make this correction, but less than a million ceramic poppies only represents the death toll of soldiers from the British Empire. Russia had twice that many again. Even France had close to a million and a half. It would take more than the moat around the Tower to hold enough poppies for all the lives lost on the Allied side. It’s a fabulous installation, though.

Best Cover Song Ever?

A reader recommends an extreme genre-bender:

Great contest. Let me nominate an unconventional, but brilliant, submission by Girl Talk. You want genre mixing? How about something that includes parts of Black Sabbath, Ludacris, Dorrough, the Ramones and Missy Elliot, among others (plus equally amazing video):

Is it a traditional cover song? No, but if this is the future of the cover song, we are in extremely good hands …

Previous coverage of the Dish’s favorite mashup DJ here. Another reader:

I can’t be the first to submit Cowboy Junkies covering Lou Reed’s “Sweet Jane”. This version is so good Reed himself changed the way he performed the song live:

Another:

How could I forget this one?! Another example of the cover being better than the original. This time it’s Sheryl Crow covering Cat Stevens’ “The First Cut is the Deepest”:

Another:

Please consider the Fine Young Cannibal’s cover of “Suspicious Minds”. Both Elvis and FYC had a hit with this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibx5-nTLIns

Check out all the nominees here. Update from a reader:

Might I advocate for keeping the covers contest limited to “clean” covers and saving mashups for, possibly, a later contest? You’ll be hard pressed to beat Girl Talk at his own game, but you’ve got stuff like Pogo (with gardyn being among my faves there, and this boosh remix) competing for the “repurposed splicing” title (though let’s be honest. Girl Talk is in a league of his own with the breadth and depth of his mashups). Hell, you could have individual Girl Talk and Pogo contests (I would put “Minute by Minute” up against “Oh No” for Girl Talk)

But then beyond that, you’ve got other more focused, less all-over-the-place mashups:

DJ Danger Mouse’s Grey Album (Jay-Z’s Black Album vs. the Beatles’ White Album) [probably the gold standard as an album, but individual tracks out there can at least compete]
Sham Sham’s 99 Hearts (Jay-Z’s 99 Problems v. Architecture in Helsinki’s Heart It Races)
Psycosis’ In da G4 Over the Sea (Neutral Milk Hotel vs. various rappers)
Amerigo Gazaway’s Yasiin Gaye (Mos Def [Yasiin Bey] vs. Marvin Gaye)
the Notorious XX, Wait What (Notorious B.I.G v. the XX)

I find all of these, in their own way, to be amazing examples of how someone can make something completely new out of two songs that seem wildly different. Or maybe I’m just hoping you’ll crowdsource my efforts to find more mashups like this.

Be A Man. Take Paternity Leave. Ctd

A new ad for Cheerios champions stay-at-home dads:

A reader responds to a recent post on paternity leave and masculinity:

There’s nothing more manly than taking paternity leave. Any stigma around it is tied to a general misunderstanding of its purpose. Paternity leave is the very opposite of time off: it’s a cruel parody of a vacation. Far from rewarding a new dad with a couple weeks to put up his feet and light a valedictory cigar, it’s meant designed to let a bewildered, anxious new dad support his exhausted, overwhelmed, frazzled spouse as much as possible and keep her from jumping out a window. But just as important, it creates the foundation of a lifelong bond with a child that no real man would want to break. A young single friend of mine recently suggested that paternity leave was bullshit—that new dads should be real men and get back to work. I somehow controlled my rage and gently explained to him that, after spending a couple of weeks in the trenches with an incomprehensible newborn and a spouse on the edge, I couldn’t wait to get back to work, where the office world, however imperfect, was populated with adults and routine and still made some kind of familiar sense.

The Dish also addressed paternity leave back in December. Another reader:

Before you get too far arguing for paid paternity leave, can we first get a quarter of employers to offer paid maternity leave?

According to Working Mother magazine, just 16% of employers offer paid maternity leave. And frankly, women really need leave after giving birth. It is extremely hard on your body! Lack of sleep because you spend one of every three hours ’round the clock in the first weeks as The Boob. If you have a C-section you are advised not to drive for two weeks. There are other TMI-ish side effects, too.

We could go a long way towards socializing boys and young men to care for children so they are better prepared for active parenthood. My husband, who is an amazing father, spent the first four weeks of fatherhood hiding in the scary unfinished basement of our colonial-era house under the guise of “putting together an IKEA bureau.” (He was a student on holiday break, so he didn’t have a workplace to hide in.) When he couldn’t hide anymore, his default action whenever the baby cried was to hand her to me. I tried to speak his language, engineering, and put together a Baby Management Flow Chart mapping out the basics of caring for a newborn. It helped, a little.

Update from a reader:

I’m a business school professor and a long-time advocate for fathers’ work-family concerns, including paternity leave (also a proud Dish subscriber!). In fact, I recently spoke at the White House Summit on Working Fathers and the Working Families Summit to advocate for these very issues. I was also a national spokesperson for fathers to support the FAMILY Act for paid parental leave for both moms and dads. I know this may be poor form, but I recently wrote a blog post about my paternity leave experience, how it affected my family, and why it is important for more dads to have access to leave. I think it melds the personal and the policy well, and it may be of interest to Dishheads.

Another Dishhead:

I wanted to mention my own experience with this, although it wasn’t paid paternity leave. When my ex and I found out she was pregnant with our first child in 2002, I was able to get permission from my company to take four weeks off – two weeks was my paid vacation, and two weeks was unpaid time off. We had 9 months worth of paychecks to save up, so I just set aside enough from each paycheck to cover the two weeks that would be unpaid.

Unfortunately, when my son was born in November of 2005, I was working for a different company, and we were evacuated to Dallas at the time due to Hurricane Katrina. It made for an extremely stressful pregnancy, particularly since no New Orleans area code phone numbers were going through, and we weren’t able to reach our OB. Luckily, the one woman I knew in Dallas was married to a a guy who was a nurse, so he was able to recommend an excellent OB for us, and everything went fine. I was only able to take two weeks off for my son’s birth, but I was probably lucky to get those, considering the conditions.

I can’t say for sure whether that time with my newborns has made us any closer, or made me a better dad. But I’m glad I was able to have it. And I’m baffled by the fact that the majority of dads I’ve asked about it say they took one or two days off, and don’t seem to think it’s that big a deal. But then I’m baffled at a lot of things some parents do.

Off topic, I’ve written you before, but I don’t think I ever told you before that I started out as a liberal as a young adult, then became a die-hard conservative for many years. And during some of those right-wing years, I actively avoided reading your site. Finally came back right around the time of the 2008 elections, and between your writing and Sarah Palin being chosen as McCain’s VP candidate, I’ve become a fairly die-hard liberal again, although hopefully a more informed one than when I was 20. Amusingly, I’m even to the left of my ex-wife now on some subjects. One of them being marijuana legalization.

So thank you for making me see the other side of a lot of issues I had my mind made up about. And I guess I should thank Sarah Palin for being bat-shit crazy, but I don’t think I will.

Category: Updates

Sponsored Content Watch

Dating With Mental Illness, Ctd

“Sartorial Slumming”

Bad Science On The Big Screen

The Grey Lady Endorses Legal Weed, Ctd

Best Cover Song Ever?

Eating Man’s Best Friend

The Best Of The Dish Today

Best Cover Song Ever?

Be A Man. Take Paternity Leave. Ctd