Interracial Couples Are Hotter

At least among college kids in California:

A new study of university undergraduates in California found students engaged in interracial dating gave their partners higher ratings for attractiveness and intelligence than did their peers who were seeing someone of their own race. A research team led by psychologist Karen Wu of the University of California-Irvine, reports these positive evaluations were persuasively communicated to their partners, and – at least on a level of physical attractiveness – were not illusory.

“We hypothesized that because interracial daters face social biases, their partners would have to possess higher levels of (certain) positive attributes to offset the costs of these biases,” the researchers write in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. Their results indicate that may indeed be the case. … For the final study, independent raters assessed the attractiveness of the individual members of 101 couples. “Interracial daters were rated as more physically attractive,” the researchers write.

Isn’t the exotic often erotic? It seems to me that one of the biggest advantages of living in a racially diverse society is that sexual life can be more adventurous and, with differing cultures, also mind-expanding. I think of the 21st Century as the era of the miscegenation nation – with Obama its early symbolic product.

Why Write A Novel?

The Spanish novelist Javier Marías sees seven reasons not to bother and only one to give it a shot:

Writing novels allows the novelist to spend much of his time in a fictional world, which is really the only or at least the most bearable place to be. This means that he can live in the realm of what might have been and never was, and therefore in the land of what is still possible, of what will always be about to happen, what has not yet been dismissed as having happened already or because everyone knows it will never happen. The so-called realistic novelist, who, when he writes, remains firmly installed in the real world, has confused his role with that of the historian or journalist or documentary-maker. The real novelist does not reflect reality, but unreality, if we take that to mean not the unlikely or the fantastical, but simply what could have happened and did not, the very contrary of actual facts and events and incidents, the very contrary of “what is happening now.” What is “merely” possible continues to be possible, eternally possible in any age and any place, which is why we still read Don Quixote and Madame Bovary, whom one can live with for a while and believe in absolutely, rather than discounting them as impossible or passé or old hat. …

Earlier, I said that fiction is the most bearable of worlds, because it offers diversion and consolation to those who frequent it, as well as something else: in addition to providing us with a fictional present, it also offers us a possible future reality. And although this has nothing to do with personal immortality, it means that for every novelist there is the possibility— infinitesimal, but still a possibility— that what he is writing is both shaping and might even become the future he will never see.

A Short Story For Saturday

This week, Cloud Atlas author David Mitchell published his latest short story, “The Right Sort,” on Twitter. The narrator, a teenager hopped up on his mom’s Valium, begins the story this way:

Keep reading the story in chronological order here, or check out Mitchell’s Twitter feed here. Previous featured short stories here.

Reading Across The Sea

Tim Parks considers American fiction’s outsize role in world literature:

[An] openness to American literature is general across Europe. Go into any European bookshop and you find 50 per cent to 70 per cent of novels are translations, the vast majority from English, above all American English. Since the 1960s European readers have grown used to reading fiction set in a society quite distant from their own. So constant is the presence of Americana in their lives that no mediation is required beyond the act of translation. Jonathan Franzen can pack his descriptions with every kind of American paraphernalia – mechanised recliners, air-hockey tables, refrigerated beer kegs – and still be widely read.

The same is not true the other way round. American and English readers are not overwhelmed by foreign texts and, with the exception perhaps of crime novels, show significant resistance to the minutiae of countries they know little about. Only three per cent of the novels on British and American shelves are translations. But then Europeans show the same resistance towards cultures they do not know. A writer from, say, Serbia, offering the same density of local cultural reference Franzen has, would require significant editing, or some radical act of mediation before being accepted for publication in Italy or Spain.

 

A GIFted Artist

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MessyNessy profiles the GIF artist Oamul, particularly praising his On the Road series:

Oamul is a talented young illustrator and animator from China who brings his hand-drawn illustrations to life in these enchanting GIFs. His subject matter ranges from things he sees, hears and experiences on his travels and in his daily life to his favourite movie scenes….

In an interview last year, Oamul talked about how he became an illustrator:

When did you first discover you liked illustration? What were your influences?

When I was a kid, I saw my sister had drawn a picture about Sailor Moon. At that time, I wanted to draw things that I enjoyed and liked, so I began to use a pen to sketch everyday.

How was your design education? Were you formally educated in design, or was it just a hobby?

After my parents discovered I was gifted at drawing, they decided to send me to formally learn art. When I went to university though, I chose Interior Design. Although interior design is very different from what I create now, it still has a big influence in my work. After I graduated, I learnt 3D animation in a computer game company. Those experiences were crucial in influencing my work today.

What do you think of Design and illustration in China? Do you think it has its own style, or do you think that it is still influenced by the West?

I think today, China’s illustration is becoming more and more diverse, all designers having their own style. But we are still learning all the time from many influences all over the world.

See more of his work here.

What We’re Not Reading Lately

Recently, Jordan Ellenberg noticed that, judging by the most-frequently-highlighted passages in Kindle bestsellers, the overwhelming majority of people who buy Thomas Piketty’s 700-page Capital in the Twenty-First Century don’t make it far past the first pages. As William Falk observes, “the Kindle formula also works with fiction”:

Ellenberg’s dullness detector uncovered a curious phenomenon among readers of The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, which won the Pulitzer Prize this year. The five most popular highlights all occur in thelast 20 pages of the 771-page novel. Is that a compliment? I suspect not. The Goldfinch is one of those self-conscious “masterpieces” that some readers and critics adore — and some, like me, find bloated and self-indulgent. To get to the end, I found myself skimming over dense chunks of pointless description and meandering subplots. … I think Tartt’s novel would benefit if it were cut by, say, 250 pages. Kindle doesn’t lie: To be read more, write less.

Meanwhile, Tom Lamont advocates abandoning boring books early on:

[O]f course you should stop reading when the fireworks aren’t there. When you aren’t impressed, lulled, entertained, lightened, depressed, remoulded, whatever you go to books for. Even if it means reshelving the thing with that telltale halt in the creases on the spine, or admitting to friends, spouses or book clubs that you’ve bunked a recommendation.

Alex Clark differs:

Believe me, I am not defending every book that gets published, nor telling people to force themselves onwards when something is clearly a) dross or b) so completely antithetical to everything they as a reader hold dear that only misery awaits. That would be ludicrous, masochistic and likely to result in a more total disenchantment with reading. … But I am saying that if you give up on a book the minute you don’t like a character, twig a plot development, see quite where the author’s going with it all, have a sudden yen for a game of Candy Crush – then you’re going to miss out. I’ve nothing against reads that are quick and dirty fun, but seriously good books are immersive experiences, demanding of time and patience. Respect them.

Previous Dish on Piketty here, and previous Dish on The Goldfinch here.

The View From Your Window Contest

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You have until noon on Tuesday to guess it. City and/or state first, then country. Please put the location in the subject heading, along with any description within the email. If no one guesses the exact location, proximity counts.  Be sure to email entries to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Winner gets a free The View From Your Window book or two free gift subscriptions to the Dish. Have at it.

Autism On The Rise

Virginia Hughes explores why autism studies have exploded in the 21st century. Considering that many more males than females are diagnosed with the disorder, she explores how gender factors into funding:

In 2009, the National Institutes of Health spent $196 million on autism, compared with $186 million on Parkinson’s disease and $22 million on Down syndrome. In her new paper, [science historian Sarah] Richardson takes a close look at hundreds of grant applications and published studies related to autism and sex differences. Many grant applications cite autism’s rising prevalence as prime motivation. But they also frequently site the sex bias and [psychologist Simon] Baron-Cohen’s theory [that autism’s “primary characteristics are just an exaggeration of typical differences between men and women, and that they’re caused by excessive exposure to male sex hormones in the womb”].

Richardson describes grant proposals investigating autism’s sex bias through the lens of genetics, epigenetics, gene-hormone interactions, brain anatomy, chemical exposures, rat brain cells, and even the nervous system of worms.

She also found 442 studies related to autism and sex differences that have been published since 1980. Of these, 86 percent came out after 2001, and 10 percent were authored by Baron-Cohen. The rest came from laboratories in a variety of fields, including endocrinology, genetics, brain imaging, and molecular biology. Since 2001, animal research on this topic has exploded.

This is all evidence, Richardson says, that autism has become a “biomedical platform” for scientists of all stripes who are looking for funding, particularly in this era of shrinking science budgets. “We show how, over time, researchers have begun to link their very basic research — even if it’s on nematodes — to frame it as a contribution to autism,” she says. “In the funding and publication structure, there’s been a real shift toward opportunistically using extreme-male-brain-type theories to gain research funding.”

Previous Dish on autism here, here, here, and here.

 

A Poem For Saturday

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Dish poetry editor Alice Quinn writes:

In 1998, the poet and editor Deborah Garrison published her debut collection, A Working Girl Can’t Win. At the time, she and I were colleagues at The New Yorker. Now she is poetry editor at Alfred A. Knopf, where I once had the same wonderful job, as well as a senior editor at Pantheon Books.

Her book was highly praised, drawing compliments from A. Alvarez (“A triumph of wit and modesty.”), The New York Times Book Review (“An intense, intelligent and wonderfully sly book of poems.”), and John Updike, who wrote, “Many a working girl will recognize herself in the poems’ running heroine, and male readers will part with her company reluctantly.”

What struck me rereading the book last weekend were the poems about a young marriage. We’ll post three in the hope that many of you will find them as winsome and dear as we do.

“3:00 A.M. Comedy” by Deborah Garrison:

Sometimes it’s funny, this after-hour when
whatever hasn’t happened between us
hasn’t happened again, and I pretend

to be another kind of woman, who spends
the night on the couch in a rage,
on strike for affection—

How ridiculous.
I’m always in this bed,
if not having you, then forgiving you

exquisitely, consoling myself
with a lame joke: I’m a shrinking
being, tinier and tinier I grow,

there I go!
The last woman on earth
who even bothered about sex,

and now I’m nothing but a speck.
What a shame for all those lusty men;
their world without me is barren.

While you, my dear, get
larger: you’re a hulking, man-
shaped continent, a cool green

giant (I can hardly reach your leafy
parts), or a statuesque
philosopher-king, whose sleep soars

above mathematics, his loftiest argument.

(From A Working Girl Can’t Win © 1998 by Deborah Garrison. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company. Photo by Flickr user Sholeh)