The Dish

Law School By Default

David Lat identifies a major problem with legal education:

Many of the challenges facing the legal profession can be reduced to supply and demand: too many lawyers chasing too little work, which itself results from too many people going to law school. And why do people go to law school? Often it’s a failure of imagination. As a former professor of mine put it, “Law school is the great American default option for smart kids who can’t stand the sight of blood.” If you’re intelligent, ambitious, and undecided about your future, going directly from college to law school is the path of least resistance. Too little resistance, and not enough deliberation—which is why law schools should follow the model of many business schools and require incoming students to have at least two years of post-undergraduate experience.

I’m finding the new reader thread on suicide and its survivors illuminative and haunting. I went after the convenient fatalism of pro-Israel Middle East experts, and the finessed racism still thriving at National Review. We got more insights into why marijuana use seems correlated with lower weight and better heart-health; and how old media hacks at the NYT couldn’t bear Nate Silver’s success and accuracy.

Map fights!

The most popular post of the day was my cri de coeur against the vandals and saboteurs in the GOP, followed by my thoughts on old media, Nate Silver and old-fashioned envy. My post on Obama’s role as “defuser-in-chief” continues to rack up pageviews.

See you in the morning.

(Photo: Huma Abedin, wife of Anthony Weiner, a leading candidate for New York City mayor, listens as her husband speaks at a press conference on July 23, 2013 in New York City. By John Moore/Getty Images.)

It’s Not Racist …

… if you tell your children to be wary of all young black males they might meet:

The advice was not about race per se, but instead about the tendency of males of one particular age and race to commit an inordinate amount of violent crime.

It was after some first-hand episodes with young African-American males that I offered a similar lecture to my own son. The advice was born out of experience rather than subjective stereotyping. When I was a graduate student living in East Palo Alto, two adult black males once tried to break through the door of my apartment — while I was in it. On a second occasion, four black males attempted to steal my bicycle — while I was on it. I could cite three more examples that more or less conform to the same apprehensions once expressed by a younger Jesse Jackson. Regrettably, I expect that my son already has his own warnings prepared to pass on to his own future children.

That’s the gist of Victor Davis Hanson’s new piece in National Review. All young black men are guilty until proven innocent – a sentiment with which New York’s chief cop apparently agrees (especially if he can gussy up his racial profiling with minor pot possession, thus making the future of any young black male that little bit harder). I don’t think anyone in this debate, including the president, has denied the disproportionate amount of crime committed by young black men (primarily against other young black men). The question is how we should personally deal with that fact while living in a multiracial society. Treating random strangers as inherently dangerous because of their age, gender and skin color is a choice to champion fear over reason, a decision to embrace easy racism over any attempt to overcome it.

It’s also spectacularly stupid.

I can fully understand and appreciate TNC’s incandescent, yet reasoned, rage at the piece. Do yourself a favor and read it in full. But Ta-Nehisi’s core point is that making such blanket warnings about an entire group of human beings is just dumb if you actually care about the safety of your kids. It puts the race/gender/age category before all other obvious contexts: neighborhood, street, school, college, inner city, distant suburb, daytime, night, crowded places, dark streets, and the actual observed behavior of the young black man. As TNC notes:

This is the kind of advice which betrays a greater interest in maintaining one’s worldview than in maintaining one’s safety.

Indeed. And what ever else may be said about Victor Davis Hanson, he is far from stupid.

The interesting question to me is how this sentiment is different from that of John Derbyshire, who wrote almost the exact same column as Victor Davis Hanson did a little over a year earlier, framed around exactly the same trope – mocking the “Talk” parents give to African-American boys by explaining the “Talk” non-black parents give to non-black kids. Derbyshire’s rant was in a different magazine, but he was still fired from National Review for it. The difference is that Derbyshire tells his children to avoid all “blacks”, while Hanson focuses on advising his children solely about young black men. Any young black men they don’t know.

Is that the distinction National Review will now cling to as the acceptable face of prejudice?

(Thumbnail image: Screencap from The Hunted And The Hated)

Calls Of The Wild

Bernie Krause shares his recordings of wild soundscapes, including the happiest – and saddest – sounds he encountered:

A companion piece notes the usefulness of Krause’s work for determining the extent of our encroachment on nature:

Krause’s wild soundscapes give us an often-overlooked diagnostic tool to measure the health of a habitat — sound. And the difficulty of recording natural soundscapes speaks to the devastating changes happening in many ecosystems because of global warming, resource extraction and human noise. In [this talk], given at TEDGlobal 2013, Krause shares the extent of damage that he can hear in recordings taken from different points in his 45-year career.

“Every soundscape that springs from a wild habitat generates its own unique signature, one that contains incredible amounts of information,” says Krause. “When I began recording, over four decades ago, I could record for 10 hours and capture one hour of usable material … Fully 50% of my archive comes from habitats so radically altered that they are altogether silent or can no longer be heard in their original form.”

Face Of The Day

A ring-tailed lemur licks a block of flavored ice handed by zoo keepers at the Israeli zoo of Ramat Gan, north of the Mediterranean coastal city of Tel Aviv, as temperatures reached 34 degrees Celsius on July 12, 2012. By Jack Guez/AFP/Getty Images.

Life In The Fast-Pass Lane

While visiting an amusement park, McArdle bought a fast pass that allowed her to jump the line, but she was put off by the attitude of some of her fellow fast-passers:

The real problem with fast passes isn’t that they allow a tiny number of people to jump the queue; it’s that those people start feeling that they should never have to mingle with the people who don’t have the passes. They act like entitled jerks who have the right to shove everyone else out of the way.

Her broader point:

[M]ore people are living a fast pass Life. Getting a special queue with special service isn’t a rare treat, something to indulge in on your first vacation in three years. It’s a permanent condition.

Jump the security queue at the airport because you’re a frequent flyer. Walk straight into your rental car because you’re a Hertz#1 Club Gold member. Don’t like the kids your children are hanging around with? Push them into an elite program, or buy a house in a more exclusive school district. Join a gated community so the wrong people can’t even walk near you.

The economic elite used to just buy more of the things we all enjoyed. Now they have access to a different set of experiences entirely. No, that’s not quite true — of course the rich used to be able to afford better vacations and nicer cars. But increasingly they’re enjoying an exclusive version of the things we all do — right there in front of us, where we can resent them for it.

Joyner adds:

I’m not sure how one gets around the “entitlement” problem. Rich people have always had ways to avoid the worst aspects of life but, as the divide between the rich and everyone else widens, they’re able to buy their way out of more of them.

Sometimes Pink Is Just A Color

Alice Dreger, a professor of bioethics, revised her views on gender dysphoria after receiving a letter from a mother of a “pink boy” – one “whose manner of play and dress has often tended toward what’s common in girls”:

The approach I called “therapeutic” seeks to see a child’s gender dysphoria evaporate, if at all possible. This typically involves strictly limiting the child’s access to gender-atypical activities and trying to help the child adjust to fit a social environment that (supposedly) requires gender divisions. It also often involves family therapy. Though it would seem to promise to make a child more comfortable with his body, there’s very little data that the therapeutic approach “works.” Moreover, the proponents of it have tended to be obsessed with measuring outcomes in terms of ultimate gender identity and sexual orientation rather than ultimate well-being, which surely is what should really matter.

By contrast, the approach I called “accommodating” seeks to prepare the gender dysphoric child for a transgendered life—a life that will ultimately involve hormonal and surgical sex change. Though it seems superficially more gender progressive, the problem I have with this approach is that it may end up sending more children down a high-medical-intervention path than is really necessary to maximize well-being in the population of children who go through gender dysphoria.

“You’ve done a good job of outlining the warring factions,” Sarah told me. But, she added, “I think that there is a third, quieter point of view:

the perspective that, sure, transgender kids exist, but really, most of these gender-nonconforming kids are just kids who don’t fall to the most-masculine or most-feminine ends of the spectrum, and that’s okay. They don’t need treatment, they don’t need sexual reassignment, they just need a supportive home life, schools with anti-bullying protocols, and therapy for any harassment they face for being different.”

I felt kind of stupid reading Sarah’s message, because I realized that I had, in fact, left out this approach. I had targeted my article to parents who report that their male children are insisting they are girls or that their female children are insisting they are boys. But the truth is, as Sarah was suggesting, that a lot of “gender nonconforming” kids don’t have a simple story of being “trapped in the wrong body.” They are expressing more subtle, more complex, and more varied messages of self. What they need isn’t therapy; what they need is to know that it’s OK to be gender non-conforming. It’s perfectly OK be a male who has feminine-typical interests, behaviors, and desires, or a female who has masculine-typical interests, behaviors, and desires.

(Video: A father tells the story of his “pink boy” wanting a pink bicycle.)

On Terrible Sentences

Prospero is aghast at a line from Philip Mirowski’s Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste:

“Yet the nightmare cast its shroud in the guise of a contagion of a deer-in-the-headlights paralysis.” That is not just a mixed metaphor; it is meaningless and pretentious at the same time. One would nominate it as the world’s worst-written sentence but it is only the opening clause.

He suggests Mirowski revisit Orwell’s six rules of writing. Linguist Mark Liberman disagrees:

The most obvious problem with Mirowski’s sentence is its unpalatable stew of mixed metaphors: a nightmare is casting a shroud in the guise of a contagion of the sort of paralysis that afflicts a deer caught in the headlights of a car. That’s between four and seven distinct metaphorical systems in 19 words, depending on whether we take cast, guise, and paralysis to have any metaphorical force left. But Orwell’s rule doesn’t tell us not to mix metaphors, it tells us not to use them, or at least not to use metaphors that we’re “used to seeing in print.”

The US-China PR Battle

Max Fisher draws up a map comparing America’s and China’s popularity abroad. The contest is most heated in Southeast Asia:

It’s easy to over-exaggerate any competition for global influence between the U.S. and China; Beijing simply doesn’t see itself as a world leader or power in the same way that Washington does. But the diplomatic chess match is more real in Southeast Asia, an increasingly important and resource-rich region that has some historical cause for skepticism of both Chinese and American meddling. If I were in charge of long-term foreign policy planning for either China or the U.S., this is the region where I’d focus the most energy, both because of its importance and because it seems so unusually uncommitted.

In diplomatic terms, China has largely failed to establish greater influence here, often over-playing its hand in a way that Southeast Asian neighbors see as bullying or threatening and a cause for greater reliance on U.S. protection. So it’s interesting to see that this is and is not reflected in the Pew data. The Philippines, a close U.S. military ally and its only former colony, appears as pro-American as ever. But not Malaysia, which, despite an ongoing territorial dispute with China, reports a sky-high 81 percent favorability rating for China.

The Future Of Education Is Experiencing Technical Difficulties

San Jose State University has put its massive open online course (MOOC) project on hold because more than half the students in the pilot program failed their online courses, with pass rates for some classes as low as 20 percent. George Anders suggests that Silicon Valley philosophies don’t translate well into higher education:

Lots of Silicon Valley startups try to make a virtue out of a hit-and-miss approach to product development. It’s common for software companies, in particular, to bring not-quite-proven ideas to market in a hurry, so they can be rapidly refined or quietly kicked aside as public feedback comes in.

This approach, known as “failing fast,” is admired and celebrated in tech circles, where it’s seen as a way to speed up innovation. But education may turn out to be a fiercer, more unforgiving domain.

After all, major universities have spent decades—even centuries—building their reputations. It’s vital that they be seen as having students’ best interests at heart. It’s unlikely that other schools will want to risk the stumbles of San Jose State’s pilot program. The likely result: schools will put pressure on MOOC developers to do whatever it takes to succeed slowly, rather than being in a hurry to fail fast.

Will Oremus wonders what will come next:

It’s a sure bet that somehow, at some point, online instruction will indeed reshape higher education, if perhaps in more modest ways than its most ardent backers assume. Missteps are part of the process. Still, this is not the first heavily hyped online-learning venture to make headlines for going dramatically awry. The question is, what university will be eager to offer up its students as the next lab rats in what amounts to a massive pedagogical R&D program by for-profit Silicon Valley startups?