The Dish

One Reason Why Buzzfeed Is An Embarrassment To Journalism

It runs articles by third parties attacking other newspapers’ integrity – yes integrity – for money. Update from a reader:

I think that BuzzFeed article is especially problematic because it’s actually just impossible to tell (likely purposefully impossible) exactly what a “Community Brand Publisher” is.

When you go to the site, the article disclaimer says: “This post was created by a Community Brand Publisher, which means it is not sponsored and has not been vetted or endorsed by BuzzFeed’s editorial staff.” While the “not sponsored” is likely meant to be read “not sponsored … by BuzzFeed’s editorial staff”, it could also be taken to mean that the article is not “sponsored content.” That reading would suggest that BuzzFeed had not been paid to run it, though it seems that they have. This is further confused by their use of the term “Community Brand Publisher”… the BuzzFeed “Community” is open to anyone and makes no mention of any payment, but I can’t determine what exactly a “Community Brand Publisher” is. Searching the term on Buzzfeed gives no results, and searching on Google seems to return a bunch of posts by these “Community Brand Publishers”, rather than any real definition of what that means.

It seems like Buzzfeed (through the use of the word “Community” and the lack of explanation of what that means) is trying to confuse their readers as much as possible while covering their asses (being able to say “well look, we clearly noted that it was a Community Brand Publisher, not someone from the Community”). An embarrassment to journalism indeed.

Write Wingers

Adam Bellow’s cover-story in National Review (paywalled) urges conservatives to re-engage with popular culture, especially by embracing the novel as a medium to fight the culture war and bring right-wing ideas into the mainstream. Dreher cheers:

[A]rt and culture should not be approached from an instrumental point of view. This is why, for example, so much contemporary Christian filmmaking is so bad: it’s designed to culminate in an altar call. It’s about sending a message, not telling a story. I’m personally aware of a conservative donor and investor who poured millions into an independent film because he thought it was wholesome, and would improve the character of its viewers. I watched the movie in a private screening, and it was terrible. A total waste of money. My sense was that the investor had no idea what he was paying for, and in fact he wouldn’t have paid for a film that was anything other than moralistic propaganda. That model is not what conservative artists and writers want or need.

Alyssa offers some advice to writers who want to heed Bellow’s call. “Popular fiction,” she notes, “has a long tradition of packaging conservative ideas about everything from sexual mores to foreign policy in page-turning plots,” but pop novelists like Tom Clancy, John Grisham, and Tom Wolfe haven’t always done a great job with it:

Neither Clancy nor Grisham are particularly adept at character development or psychological writing. Instead, they hook us with plot, which is the primary vehicle for their ideas. This is an approach that works well if the stakes for a story are external, whether Jack Ryan is foiling a terrorist plotor Mitch McDeere is bringing down a mob-controlled law firm. Something different is required when a novel is trying to get at more internal issues of morals and ethics.

In 2004, when Tom Wolfe published “I Am Charlotte Simmons,” his novel about an elite university and the contemporary students who fail to live up to its reputation, he obviously intended to pen a scathing look at what would come to be known as hookup culture. But the book is marred by Wolfe’s failure to create a fully compelling internal life for his titular fallen freshwoman. Charlotte reads like a 73-year-old’s fantasy of how an 18-year-old woman thinks, which is, of course, precisely what she is. “I Am Charlotte Simmons” should be a strong reminder of the value of empathy and nuance when writing characters who do not share your life experiences–particularly when you want to criticize their morals.

But Waldman is skeptical of Bellow’s vision, questioning whether the contemporary American right is even all that interested in influencing mainstream culture:

The problem is that conservatives love their politicized media bubble. It’s so nurturing and warm and supportive. Unfortunately, it also produces all kinds of pathological beliefs and behaviors, from the Benghazi obsession, to the insistence that climate change is a giant hoax, to the “unskewed” polls proving that Mitt Romney would trounce Barack Obama in 2012.

If Bellow can find a conservative writer who’s also the next great American novelist, more power to him. But he’ll start at a disadvantage, because artists are just more likely to be liberal. As a group, liberals tend to be more open to new experience and tolerant of ambiguity—traits that might lead one to be more creative—while conservatives tend to be more conscientious, but also more rigid. That’s why artists of all types have always been more likely to be liberals—challenging tradition, exploring new ways of seeing—and always will be. There are plenty of exceptions, of course, and maybe Bellow can help create a community of writers that produces work that would make both William Faulkner and Milton Friedman weep with gratitude. But it sure won’t be easy.

The Root Of The STEM Problem

Lumping science, technology, engineering, and math together obscures more than it clarifies, according to Danielle Kurtzleben:

[I]t’s not necessarily that there aren’t enough science and math scholars out there; it’s that there aren’t enough people out there with the particular skills the job market needs right now. Spending four years doing biology experiments is no guarantee for a job, and indeed might not go as far as a couple semesters of statistics or computer science.

The issue in part is that STEM is in many ways too broad a classification to describe the complicated job market right now. A May 2014 report from the Government Accountability Office found that employment and wage outcomes could vary widely between healthcare STEM jobs, so-called “core STEM” jobs, and other STEM jobs. “STEM makes no sense as a category. What you have is science and engineering, and then you have this IT labor force,” says Hal Salzman, a professor of planning and public policy at Rutgers University.

(Chart from the GAO’s “Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education: Assessing the Relationship between Education and the Workforce,” May 2014)

Is It ADHD Or Trauma?

Rebecca Ruiz observes that “inattentive, hyperactive, and impulsive behavior may in fact mirror the effects of adversity, and many pediatricians, psychiatrists, and psychologists don’t know how – or don’t have the time – to tell the difference”:

[Dr. Nicole] Brown was completing her residency at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, when she realized that many of her low-income patients had been diagnosed with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). These children lived in households and neighborhoods where violence and relentless stress prevailed. Their parents found them hard to manage and teachers described them as disruptive or inattentive. Brown knew these behaviors as classic symptoms of ADHD, a brain disorder characterized by impulsivity, hyperactivity, and an inability to focus.

When Brown looked closely, though, she saw something else: trauma. Hyper-vigilance and dissociation, for example, could be mistaken for inattention. Impulsivity might be brought on by a stress response in overdrive. “Despite our best efforts in referring them to behavioral therapy and starting them on stimulants, it was hard to get the symptoms under control,” she said of treating her patients according to guidelines for ADHD. “I began hypothesizing that perhaps a lot of what we were seeing was more externalizing behavior as a result of family dysfunction or other traumatic experience.”

Previous Dish on ADHD here and here.

The Bias Against Black Dogs, Ctd

A reader writes:

It really is true that it is more work to appreciate the features of a black dog. For instance, in this photo of my dog, you can barely see his eyes:

Or his body. Or his feet.

Another can relate:

I volunteered at a shelter and noticed this problem too. I adopted a black-haired, medium-sized, young adult, mixed-breed dog who turned out to be essentially perfect. I find that with a decent camera and some experience, experimentation, and digital editing, one can make great photos of black-haired dogs. Here’s one I took of my dog, which I think proves the point:

Another reader:

We recently adopted a rather large black dog. Sonny is beautiful, but there are problems.

First, Sonny is impossible to see at night. That means he sometimes gets stuck at the back door, begging to be allowed back in the house. And sometimes, in the middle of the night, I get tripped up on my way to the bathroom.

Second, having a black dog muddies my standing as a yellow dog Democrat. In years past, when asked about my politics, I just pointed to my pooch. Can’t do that now.

Another has a suggestion for photo-taking:

As you can see, black dogs can be photographed wonderfully, and tools like Instagram help:

Another has more tips:

First, there’s the Black Dog Project if you want to see some great photographs of black dogs. The photographer, Fred Levy, photographs them against dark backgrounds to highlight the difficulties they face in being adopted.

Secondly, there’s a few things that you can do when taking photographs of black dogs to make them turn out better. This is really good for shelter workers, but also just for regular dog owners who want better photos of their pooches. Black dogs can seem scary and ominous, but if you play with the dog for a few minutes and get it into a light pant, they start to look like they are smiling, and their eyes come alive. The dog goes from scary to friendly in an instant. Washing them and giving their coat a good brush will help them shine and create really nice highlights that also make them turn out less like a dark blob in a photo.

Finally, I’d be remiss to not include a photo of my own black pup:

Another has a different recommendation:

The best barbecue joint I have ever been to in my life is in Urbana, Illinois, home of the University of Illinois, called Black Dog Smoke and Ale House. It proudly displays several signs about this exact issue of adoption, donates to the Humane Society of Champaign (a no-kill shelter), and the owners have their own adopted black dogs. And their food is out of this world. If you ever find yourself lost in the cornfields of Illinois, worth the time.

Floral And Faunal Fragrances

Richard Conniff ponders the role of scent in the natural world:

We are by no means the only species trying to smell like something (anything) other than ourselves. The caterpillar of South Africa’s Zulu Blue butterfly, for instance, mimics the chemical scent that the ants use to recognize their own brood. So the gullible ants carry the caterpillar into their nest, and don’t seem to notice when it proceeds to devour the very ant brood it has been mimicking.

Orchids are also wicked olfactory deceivers. They need to attract wasps, bees and other insects to spread their pollen. So some orchid species have evolved the shape and coloration of specific female insects – and also release chemicals that duplicate the come-hither perfume of the females they mimic. (It’s interspecies cross-dressing – and, wait, do I hear a Broadway musical?) The duped males respond at first with clumsy groping and then quickly proceed to copulation, sometimes to the point of ejaculation. It gets more interesting: Some male wasps actually seem to prefer the scent of make-believe females. They will break away from a real female to have sex with a flower.

Drug War Fail: Afghanistan Edition

Beauchamp illustrates how little our opium eradication efforts have accomplished:

From 2008 to 2013, when the US anti-opium campaign hit its apex, the US only managed to eradicate 3.7 percent of the land devoted to poppy cultivation. The total amount of land devoted to poppy cultivation was a third higher in 2013 than in 2008 … Now, it’s true that the total amount of opium produced in Afghanistan has declined from its 2008 peak. But, according to the UN, that’s because of “plant diseases and bad weather” — not the war. There’s more land devoted to poppy cultivation, but it’s less productive because of natural conditions. Drug eradication doesn’t appear to have much to do with it.

Why has the campaign against opium failed so epically?

There are plenty of reasons, including widespread Afghan government corruption and the fact that 95 percent of poppy cultivation happens in the country’s insecure, Taliban-filled southwestern provinces. But the most important one is the most basic — Afghanistan runs on opium. Opium-related activities make up half of the country’s GDP; the legal economy depends on its proceeds to function. As Fabrice Pothier, the director of the Carnegie Endowment’s European branch and an expert of the Afghan drug trade, explains in an absolutely staggering passage, opium is more than 50 times as important to Afghanistan as cocaine is to Colombia[.]

Dan Murphy concurs with Zack’s takeaway:

To be fair, trying to wipe out opium production in Afghanistan would have been a Sisyphean task no matter what strategy was deployed. It’s a lucrative business, and poppies are easily cultivated, generating far more money for poor farmers and corrupt middlemen than any feasible substitution crop. During the height of the American counterinsurgency effort, winning over the general population to the side of the government and foreign forces was a big focus. The US found that tearing up crops and impoverishing farmers wasn’t very popular.

The early eradication strategy was largely abandoned in favor of going after big opium dealers and encouragng farmers to grow other crops. But that really hasn’t worked, either. The country’s opium and heroin trade is a top earner, and with the military effort winding down, the business opportunities associated with aid and foreign military spending are set to decline.

Be A Man. Take Paternity Leave.

Joe Pinsker discusses one way to put peer pressure to good use:

A study released in this month’s issue of the American Economic Review suggests a social snowball effect that might counteract the stigma that’s attached to taking time off. It found that fathers who take paternity leave make their brothers 15 percent more likely to do the same. Similarly, dads who see their male coworkers take time off are 11 percent more likely to take leave themselves. …

As things stand now, the theory is that fathers tend to shy away from taking paternity leave because they think taking time off work might damage their professional lives. A 2012 article in Harvard Business Review highlighted research that suggested that “fathers with even a short work absence because of family obligations are recommended for fewer rewards and receive lower performance ratings,” and came to the conclusion that, just as women are being pressured away from prioritizing their professional lives, men are steered away from spending time with their families. Within this framework, the study’s findings make sense: armed with information of how an employer reacts to a peer’s paternity leave, a father will probably be a lot less worried about any unforeseen consequences at work.

Previous Dish on paternity leave here and here.

The Best Of The Dish Today

The former half-term governor has now declared herself in favor of impeachment of the president, and called on all good Republicans to do the same. Drudge, the original impeacher, went into full metal jacket mode – and an instant poll of his readers (close to 170,000 of them at time of posting) backed impeachment by 72 to 15 percent.

You can try and figure out the logic but this is the most coherent of the passages in her declaration of war:

The federal government is trillions of dollars in debt; many cities are on the verge of insolvency; our overrun healthcare system, police forces, social services, schools, and our unsustainably generous welfare-state programs are stretched to the max. We average Americans know that. So why has this issue been allowed to be turned upside down with our “leader” creating such unsafe conditions while at the same time obstructing any economic recovery by creating more dependents than he allows producers? His friendly wealthy bipartisan elite, who want cheap foreign labor and can afford for themselves the best “border security” money can buy in their own exclusive communities, do not care that Obama tapped us out.

Look: don’t ask me. Nothing she says has ever made much sense to me.

But the obviously potent issue she is referring to is illegal immigration, the issue that took down Eric Cantor, and the issue that truly riles up the Fox Nation. And here’s the critical part with respect to the November elections:

It’s time to impeach; and on behalf of American workers and legal immigrants of all backgrounds, we should vehemently oppose any politician on the left or right who would hesitate in voting for articles of impeachment.

And so a gauntlet has been laid. A vote for the Republicans this November is a vote for the impeachment of Obama. Any Republican Senate candidate who does not back impeachment will now face growing Tea Party backlash. And every single Senator will now be asked if they support impeachment or not. That seems to me the import of Palin’s endorsement of the most radical action that can be taken against a sitting president. The November elections have just become a vote on the question of impeachment.

Are the Republicans aware of the implications of this? There are plenty of voters who might have voted Republican this fall who will hesitate if they think it means subjecting the country to the kind of spectacle we saw the last time a Democrat dared to win a second term in office. There are many African-American voters who might have sat out this election – but now will see the president beset by the same forces that tried to take down Bill Clinton and may well show up in force. There are, for that matter, many women voters who, before Hobby Lobby, might have felt apathetic this fall and may not now. What I’m suggesting is that, not for the first time, the Republican party’s most treacherous opponent … is the Republican party. And McCain’s Frankenstein leads the way!

Today, we took note of a new study of the power of psilocybin; and the role that plankton could play in reducing atmospheric carbon. I mulled over the promise and pitfalls of “reform conservatism” as well as the “revenge doctrine’ of the state of Israel. Plus: Big Pharma takes on marijuana; and the conversion of a small but growing minority of evangelicals to marriage equality.

The most popular post of the day was “The Tears Of An Elephant“, followed by “The Challenge of Reform Conservatism.” Many of today’s posts were updated with your emails – read them all here. You can always leave your unfiltered comments at our Facebook page and @sullydish.

If you haven’t yet, but have been meaning to, please take a moment to subscribe. Without you, we have no way to keep this show on the road.

And see you in the morning.

(Photo of the former half-term governor and failed vice-presidential candidate from Runner’s World.)

Looking Back At The Great War, Ctd

John Cooper and Michael Kazin have been debating the wisdom of America entering WWI. In the latest round of argument, Kazin imagines what Germany winning might have meant:

Cooper is certainly correct about Woodrow Wilson’s motives for entering World War I. He did wager that the blood of American soldiers could make a “new world order” more likely. But if a triumphant Germany—no sure thing, even if the U.S. had stayed neutral—had been a pillar of that order, what’s the worst that would have happened? At least, it would have meant that Adolf Hitler would be remembered, if at all, as the recipient of two Iron Crosses who still failed to make it past the rank of lance corporal. It also might have given Germany’s socialist party (the SPD) – the largest in the world and one committed to democratic rule and cultural tolerance – an influential role in combatting attempts to suppress national minorities and reining in the militarist state.

But John Cooper insists that a German victory would have been disastrous:

Defeat in 1918 unquestionably poisoned the politics of the Weimar Republic, and I agree with Kazin that without it Hitler would probably never have risen from obscurity. But would either Germany or other nations have been immune to the viruses of fascism and racialist nationalism? Being on the winning side did not immunize Italy and Japan against those infections. One likely result of a German victory might have been the defeat of the Bolsheviks in Russia, but before we relish that possibility think about what a chilling effect that would have had on later anti-colonial movements. Or consider how in later decades Gandhi might have fared in a German-dominated India or Mandela in a German-reinforced Boer South Africa.

(Video: Hitch recites Wilfred Owen’s WWI poem Dulce et Decorum est.)