The Dish

“I’ve taken her for a McFlurry loads of times,” – an English woman who brought her pony into McDonalds where it relieved itself, as one does.

Katie Engelhart wants the New Atheists to reach out more to women:

Writers have suggested that the doggedness of New Atheism tends to turn off women—and that, for social reasons, women don’t muster the same militancy when defending their (non)beliefs. Others have looked to sexism within the Atheist community (read: Elevatorgate). A few have made unconvincing references to biology. And some academics blame the fact that churches have pulled a retroactive fast one on history: falsely claiming credit for progress on the women’s front.

Or perhaps it’s all a mirage? In a 2011 article in Bitch, journalist Victoria Bekiempis made the provocative claim that the “showboating [Atheist] boys’ club” is a media construct. She notes that around 2006, several news articles were published describing Dawkins et al. as a “band of intellectual brothers”: Atheism’s bullheaded bro-elite. That image—with its tidy narrative and ready stock characters—stuck. Bekiempis’s advice: “Let’s reframe. For every mention of Hitchens, counter with a mention of Hecht.”

Jennifer Michael Hecht, author of Doubt: A History: The Great Doubters and Their Legacy of Innovation from Socrates and Jesus to Thomas Jefferson and Emily Dickinson, is seen above. Update from a reader:

Don’t forget Madalyn Murray O’Hair! For at least a couple of decades before her mysterious death, she was the face of atheism, certainly in Texas if not nationally. I believe it was her advocacy against school prayer that religious conservatives still use as part of their cultural lamentation.

Previous Dish on women and atheism here.

Noam Scheiber covers it:

There are currently between 150 and 250 firms in the United States that can claim membership in the club known as Big Law, the group of historically profitable firms that cater to the country’s largest corporations. The overwhelming majority of these still operate according to a business model that assumes, at least implicitly, that clients will insist upon the best legal talent instead of the best bargain for legal talent. That assumption has become rickety. Within the next decade or so, according to one common hypothesis, there will be at most 20 to 25 firms that can operate this way—the firms whose clients have so many billions of dollars riding on their legal work that they can truly spend without limit. The other 200 firms will have to reinvent themselves or disappear.

Yglesias adds that, “while the pace of change obviously seems furious to the people at the center of the storm, the genuinely remarkable thing is how long the Big Law model has lasted—not the fact that it’s fading away.”

A reader writes:

Your reader’s reaction (comparing the “black belt” and the NYT map [seen above]) was my first reaction, too. But the article focuses a lot on the issues of social mobility between different cities. Most of the “black belt” is quite rural (these counties may vote deep blue, but their states are GOP strongholds because not that many people live there). Not only are there fewer opportunities in these areas, but the data may be somewhat skewed by smaller response rates. The question is: why do several of the largest and most successful cities in the south (Atlanta, Memphis, Charlotte) have such low rates compared to cities in other parts of the country?

Another sharpens the points of the previous reader:

That’s a fascinating map!  But sadly it speaks to racial division more than simple geography (despite what the NYT article seems to suggest).  That low-mobility corner of Arizona?  The Navajo reservation. West coast of Alaska? Native Alaskan villages.

Also, low mobility is not just in “the South”, or even “the deep South”, but in the specific parts that have a high percentage of African-American population: the Mississippi Delta, the black belt of Alabama (so-called originally because of its soil, but it also applies demographically).  Compare the South in the mobility map to this map of county-by-county presidential election results from 2008, which in the South reflects where African-American voters are concentrated.  (Or, for that matter, this map [seen right] of the last slave census, in 1860.)

Oh, that high-mobility patch on the North Dakota / Montana border?  Beats me.

Another has the answer:

I wanted to make a few observations on the mobility map you posted:

1) Manifest destiny is alive and well. The West still provides opportunities for new settlers after all these years. The map demonstrates the West’s promise for a fresh start has not dried up yet.

2) Extractive resources are the best bets for mobility.

The map’s blue tinge in the Bakken in North Dakota and Montana, the gas and coal fields of Wyoming, and West Virginia and eastern Kentucky’s coal country highlight how important that mining, oil and gas, and coal are for large scale mobility. Pennsylvania’s pale interior of Marcellus fracking production also demonstrates this trend. Where can someone right out of high school rise to a six figure income right away without working on an oil rig? Also, these are the industries that will be hurt the most by efforts to mitigate carbon emissions in the face of global warming. More immediately, these trends show how efforts to slow or halt horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing act to shut the door on many people’s best chance at mobility.

3) The Ogallala Aquifer is one of our key national resources. The blue strip down the center of the country largely overlays the Ogallala Aquifer, supporting significant corn and agricultural production. This rich source of groundwater has recently gotten a little press in the Keystone XL debate, but this map shows how important the natural resource really is. As of late, concerns have arisen that the aquifer is being mined, depleting the water traveling beneath the nation’s center.

These observations avoid discussion of the Black Belt, the Rust Belt, and Indian reservations, as enough ink is spilled on those topics. However, in our move to a service-based economy, recognition of the natural resource-driven reasons European nations first set forth in conquest still apply today. Gold, cod, and timber (suitable for mast building, at least) have fallen away to oil, gas, and corn, but these resources provide the most opportunity for achieving the “American dream.”

Organized crime is on the rise internationally:

Gangsters are cropping up in all sorts of odd places. Criminal syndicates are implicated in everything from the poaching of rare wildlife to the counterfeiting of drugs and manufactured goods. That growing range of activities attests to the criminals’ skill at exploiting the possibilities offered by deepening global interconnectedness. Consider the opening of this story about a recent global raid by Interpol: “More than 6,000 people around the world were arrested in a two-month anti-counterfeiting sweep that netted tens of millions of dollars worth of fake shampoo in China, phony cigarettes in Turkey and bogus booze in Chile.” The investigators discovered everything from a subterranean factory in Ukraine manufacturing counterfeit cigarettes to a workshop in Peru that puts false labels on motors from China.

Jacob Rubin contemplates the perspective afforded by the tallest building in the world:

It is a 360-degree view from the Burj Khalifa’s observation deck, and I would say about forty-five degrees of that semicircle looked out at the plots of ordinary skyscrapers. The rest of the view—approximately 330 degrees—was of flat, low urban developments shading into the varied browns of the desert. To the west, a hazy view of the Persian Gulf. All of which would have been mostly unchanged at a much lower height. The irony—a simple one, perhaps, but one I could not get over—was that this building was the city’s most meaningful sight and we were now inside it, looking out at the very little that surrounds it.

This was not the intended view from the Burj. When construction began in 2004, Dubai was still in the grip of fiendish development. By 2009, with the Burj partially completed, Dubai had plummeted into apocalyptic debt, requiring a $10 billion loan from oil-rich Abu Dhabi to complete the project. (Originally titled the Burj Dubai, it is now named after the Sheikh of Abu Dhabi, presumably part of the deal.) No doubt more architectural wonders would have enlivened its view, if not for this financial catastrophe, caused in no small part by the erection of the Burj itself. Less a phoenix rising from the ashes, it is a phoenix whose rising helped cause a financial wildfire. The homage to Frank Lloyd Wright, in this sense, has come full circle: the Burj is impossible, no less fictional for having been made.

And yet this strange panorama makes a trip to the Burj inadvertently sublime. Every monument, at its inception, gives rise to its future ruin, and yet few face the prospect as directly as the Burj. From its state-of-the-art observation deck, one beholds the ageless, ungoverned desert. Futility is never more futilely refuted than with a monument. The Burj seems to have been erected to elucidate this fact.

Previous Dish on the Burj here and here. Another skyscraper will soon be close behind:

Just as the weekend took off, so did the world’s next tallest skyscraper. In China’s 25th biggest city, Changsha, Hunan, ground has ambitiously been broken. In just the next seven months, Broad Sustainable Construction plans to erect its Sky City, a 220-story, 838 meter (2,749 feet) megatower.

(Photo by Flickr user nelson ebelt)

Chris Dillow reviews the results of an experiment that suggests people confuse luck and skill:

Jordi Brandts and colleagues got a group of [fourth-year finance] students to predict a sequence of five coin tosses, and then selected the best and the worst predictor. They then asked other subjects to bet on whether the best and worst predictor could predict another five coin tosses. The subjects were told that they would bet on the worst predictor from the first round, unless they paid to switch to the best predictor.

82% of subjects paid to make the switch.

But of course, there is no such thing as an ability to predict the toss of a coin. Most subjects, then, saw skill where there was only luck. And, what’s more, they were willing to spend good money to back this daft opinion.