Tag: Premium

Olga Khazan traces the American tendency to view sleep deprivation as a badge of professional dedication back to Thomas Edison:

Early newspaper accounts touted Edison’s willingness to work “at all hours, night or day,” to frequently rack up more than a hundred hours of work in a week, and his tendency to select his subordinates based largely on their physical endurance. In an 1889 interview with Scientific American, Edison claimed he slept no more than four hours a day, and he apparently enforced the same vigilance among his employees. …

Over time, children’s books and magazines began to promote this type of Edisonian asceticism. “One juvenile motivational text featured a photo of Edison with a group of workers identified as his Insomnia Squad,” [historian Alan] Derickson writes. Early 20th century biographies of Edison featured him interviewing job candidates at 4 a.m. and cat-napping on lab benches between marathon work sessions.

Some short-sleepers might have shrugged and said they were simply biologically lucky. But Edison encouraged all Americans to follow his lead, claiming that sleeping eight hours a night was a waste and even harmful. “There is really no reason why men should go to bed at all,” he said in 1914.

Drawing on Samuel S. Cohon’s Judaism: A Way of Life, D.G. Myers praises religion’s “practical phase”:

Transcendence may be the “most persuasive evidence of God,” but this is not how it operates in the lives of most religious men and women. They do not require evidence of God; their concern is not to defend His existence, but simply to serve Him. Some of them may never even have a “highly personal transcendent experience,” but for those who do, it is less a great and strong wind or an earthquake or fire than a kol d’mamah dakah summoning the believer to go and return to her way.

In Christopher Beha’s astonishing debut novel What Happened to Sophie Wilder (reviewed here), the title character is attending mass at a small parish church when she is invaded by the Holy Spirit—she is taken over by “something outside of herself, something real, not an idea or a conceit or a metaphor”—but rather than pursuing a repetition of the experience, she dedicates herself to caring for her father-in-law as he dies painfully from cancer.

The ordinary religious duties (or what she, as a Catholic, would call humility) are what gives permanence to the moment of transcendence. Neglecting them she might have managed to “hook up” with God, but only briefly and without meaning.

In a follow-up post, Myers turns to a passage from Beha’s second novel, Arts & Entertainment, to warn of what happens when such “ordinary religious duties” aren’t cultivated:

As a ten-year-old altar boy at his family’s parish in Queens, Eddie had experienced a single unforgettable moment of what adults might call transcendence, when his whole body buzzed with the presence of something other than himself, a moment he had never talked about to anyone and didn’t like to think about now, because it still seemed unmistakably real to Eddie and didn’t make any sense to him.

Instead, Eddie tries to find substitutes for the experience in acting (“Something like that feeling had sometimes visited him while he was onstage”), and it remains without religious significance for him: “If asked, he would have said he was Catholic, just as he would have said he was Irish—it was a matter of birth, not of action or belief.”

Everything that happens to Eddie in the sequel is a consequence of his failure to make “that feeling” the basis of action or belief. Like so many of his contemporaries, he prefers the fever to the habit.

Recent Dish on Myers’s thoughts on death here.

In an essay that explores why some works of art achieve legendary status while others languish in obscurity, Ian Leslie investigates why, exactly, the Mona Lisa became so famous only in the 20th century. It “wasn’t a scholarly re-evaluation,” he explains, “but a burglary”:

In 1911 a maintenance worker at the Louvre walked out of the museum with the “Mona Lisa” hidden under his smock. Parisians were aghast at the theft of a painting to which, until then, they had paid little attention. When the museum reopened, people queued to see the gap where the “Mona Lisa” had once hung in a way they had never done for the painting itself. The police were stumped. At one point, a terrified Pablo Picasso was called in for questioning. But the “Mona Lisa” wasn’t recovered until two years later when the thief, an Italian carpenter called Vincenzo Peruggia, was caught trying to sell it to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.

The French public was electrified. The Italians hailed Peruggia as a patriot who wanted to return the painting home. Newspapers around the world repro­duced it, making it the first work of art to achieve global fame.

From then on, the “Mona Lisa” came to represent Western culture itself. In 1919, when Marcel Duchamp wanted to perform a symbolic defacing of high art, he put a goatee on the “Mona Lisa”, which only reinforced its status in the popular mind as the epitome of great art (or as the critic Kenneth Clark later put it, “the supreme example of perfection”). Throughout the 20th century, musicians, advertisers and film-makers used the painting’s fame for their own purposes, while the painting, in Watts’s words, “used them back”. Peruggia failed to repatriate the “Mona Lisa”, but he succeeded in making it an icon.

Although many have tried, it does seem improbable that the painting’s unique status can be attributed entirely to the quality of its brushstrokes. It has been said that the subject’s eyes follow the viewer around the room. But as the painting’s biographer, Donald Sassoon, drily notes, “In reality the effect can be obtained from any portrait.” [Sociologist] Duncan Watts proposes that the “Mona Lisa” is merely an extreme example of a general rule. Paintings, poems and pop songs are buoyed or sunk by random events or preferences that turn into waves of influence, rippling down the generations.

(Photo of the Mona Lisa in the Louvre by Thomas Ricker)

Reihan Salam wants the vertically challenged to stick up for one another:

As I go through life, I will occasionally say, “well, as a short person …” before making some observation. And I’ve found that my interlocutor will often interject something to the effect of, “Hey, you’re not that short,” as if to reassure me. But why would this be reassuring if there were nothing wrong with being short? This is the root of the problem. I come from a long line of fierce and proud short people, who proved resilient in the face of all manner of natural calamity. My ancestors had small bodies that were tailor-made for sweating, which allowed them to work long hours in sweltering heat in South Asia’s swampy marshlands. The notion that being short is something to be ashamed of strikes me as deeply wrongheaded.

His call for unity:

To the short men among you, I’d like to ask:

Have you ever poked fun at someone for their size? Have you done so to delight your taller friends, and to establish that you are truly one of them? If so, I’d like you to think hard about the place in hell that is reserved for your ilk. If you have no fear of hell, consider this: Do you think that your chums respect you more or less for selling out one of your own?

It is those men who hover within spitting distance of the average height who have a special obligation to stick up for short men as a whole. When other short men are getting pushed around, it is these men who must speak up. Is someone making fun of “midgets”? Now is the time to get in their face. When presented with the opportunity to seamlessly blend in with average-sized or tall people, it is these men who must reject it, and to assert the importance of treating all people fairly and humanely, regardless of their size. And if the time comes when discrimination against short people intensifies, it is these men who must join the general strike that will bring the entire architecture of anti-short-people oppression to its knees. My credo is simple: Stay short. Stay strong. And when you see a short brother in need, do something about it.

Jamelle Bouie asks Republicans: “If raising the minimum wage destroys jobs and prevents employment, then lowering it would do the opposite. And if you gain from lowering the minimum wage, then why have one at all?” Ramesh Ponnuru answers:

For one thing, it’s not just opponents of a higher minimum wage who think it would destroy jobs while a lower one would create some. Almost everyone who has thought about this question believes these claims are true. Most proponents of a higher minimum wage think the trade-off is worth it because the job loss will be small and the benefits to people who will receive the higher wage large.

Opponents of an increase sometimes say to the proponents, “If $10.10 is such a good idea, why not $25?” This is not a great argument, because the proponents can reasonably say that the trade-off in that case would be much worse. But if it’s logically possible to favor a $10.10 minimum wage but not a $25 one, then it’s also possible to favor a $7.25 one and not a $10.10 one. (Tim Pawlenty, one of the Republicans Bouie mentions, wants one somewhere in between $7.25 and $10.10.) So an opponent of raising the minimum wage to $10.10 could answer Bouie’s question as follows: Yes, raising the minimum wage destroys jobs, as nearly everyone understands. I think it is an especially bad idea when the increase is nearly of 40 percent and it’s in the middle of a persistently weak labor market.

But Jordan Weissmann points out that abolishing the minimum wage wouldn’t necessarily lead to full employment:

It’s easy to think up reasons why nixing the minimum wage might not lead to a flood of new career opportunities for the unskilled. Because we have minimum wages today, businesses are required to work at a certain level of efficiency. Unless a business is understaffed, adding a new worker, even a cheaper one, might not be particularly profitable.

Or take technology.

Minimum-wage skeptics often point out that when employing a real live human being becomes too expensive, companies start buying computers and machinery instead. In a post-minimum-wage world, it seems unlikely that businesses would suddenly throw their profitable business models into reverse, and start scooping up cheap workers to handle tasks they had already purchased fancy new equipment to accomplish. Your local McDonald’s, for instance, wouldn’t suddenly return the fancy new soda machine that lets customers fill their own cups with umpteen variations on Diet Coke, just so that it could hire another person to work behind the counter for $4 an hour.

Of course, there’s another big question to answer: If we ripped up the wage floor, would pay for low-skill workers actually fall all that much? It’s hard to say. First, many low-wage businesses still offer their workers more than the absolute minimum. Second, wages tend to be “sticky,” meaning that once they go up, they tend not to come down. The reason why is still a bit of a mystery, but it likely has a lot to do with the fact that making your employees take a pay cut is a) emotionally unpleasant for both parties and b) a good way to sap their motivation on the job.

The minimum wage also has non-economic benefits, such as a clear correlation with happiness:

Can one approach be empirically demonstrated to contribute to greater levels of human well-being? The following graph is at least highly suggestive of an answer. It plots the mean level of life satisfaction in a nation against its minimum wage (for those industrial democracies that have a minimum wage). As is apparent, the slope relating wages to satisfaction is positive (and statistically significant at the .01 level), meaning that average levels of life satisfaction increase as minimum wage increases. …

The relationship is dramatic and clear: As the minimum wage increases, people are in general more satisfied with their lives. To be sure that this result is not an artifact of failing to consider alternative explanations, we note that the same positive relationship continues to obtain if we add statistical controls for other factors, including as a country’s level of economic development (GDP per capita, again in purchasing power parity), which may affect both its level of happiness and the level of its minimum wage, and (simultaneously) short-term economic performance (the unemployment rate).

The average adult drinks 1.64 gallons of pure alcohol each year, according to a new World Health Organization report (pdf) covering more than 190 countries. But as Kate Kelland points out, that may be understating the case:

Less than half the population – 38.3 percent – drinks, so those who do drink on average 17 liters (4.49 gallons) of pure alcohol a year. “We found that worldwide about 16 percent of drinkers engage in heavy episodic drinking – often referred to as ‘binge-drinking’ – which is the most harmful to health,” said Shekhar Saxena, director for mental health and substance abuse at WHO.

Globally, Europe consumes the most alcohol per person, with some countries there having particularly high rates of harmful drinking. A study published earlier this year found that a quarter of all Russian men die before they reach their mid-fifties, largely from drinking to excess. Some men in that study reported drinking three or more bottles of vodka a week. WHO said global trend analyses showed that drinking has been stable over the last five years in Europe, Africa and the Americas – but is growing in Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific.

And as The Economist notes, “when abstainers are excluded, the national averages look extremely different”:

By this measure, it is in Africa, Asia and even the Middle East where actual drinkers quaff the most. In Chad almost nine in ten adults abstain, yet its 780,000 drinkers put away almost 34 liters of alcohol each. On the usual ranking, it would come 115th out of 190 countries. France drinks a lot, but because it has one of the lowest rate of abstainers at just 5 percent, it ranks 113th compared with 20th.

Meanwhile, Ria Misra looks to the future:

Globally, the WHO expects the average to continue to rise, though they’ll be some regional differences here as well. The biggest increase, say researchers, will be found in the Western Pacific region and China. The biggest decrease will most likely be seen in Europe, though even with that decrease, they are still expected to keep the highest average overall.

Ioffe tracks a rising tide of anti-Semitic incidents in Russia:

The Russian Jewish Congress, for instance, issued a report saying that there has been a marked increase in anti-Semitism in Russia in the first four months of 2014. Though there were no physical attacks on Jews, there were some minor incidents—everything from cemetery attacks to Russian nationalist thugs chanting anti-Semitic slogans. But most of this rise, the Congress reports, “was manifested first and foremost in public anti-Semitic statements, the number of which has increased dramatically.”

The report notes public statements from politicians, like the member of Putin’s United Russia party in Kaliningrad who accused his opponents of being “Jews, hiding among the opposition” and destroying the country. Dmitry Kiselev, who has threatened to turn the U.S. “into radioactive ash,” was called out for pointedly pointing out the Jewish names of some opposition writers and saying that they should be wary of comparing the Sochi and 1936 Berlin Olympics because, in Germany, they wouldn’t have been allowed to write, let alone live. The columnist of one state-friendly Russian newsletter listed Jewish members of the Russian opposition, saying that “they have no homeland because of their political beliefs.”

Yet at the same time, Putin is claiming that his intervention in Ukraine is saving the country from fascists and anti-Semites. Josh Cohen looks into how Ukrainian Jews feel about that:

Despite the substantial presence of right wing nationalists on the Maidan during the revolution, many in Ukraine’s Jewish community resent being used by Putin in his propaganda war. …

On March 5, 21 leaders of Ukraine’s Jewish community signed an open letter to Putin excoriating the Russian president for using Ukraine’s Jewish community to bash the interim government — and insisting that the real threat to Ukraine’s Jews emanated from Russia: “We know that the political opposition consists of various groups, including some that are nationalistic. But even the most marginal of them do not demonstrate anti-Semitism or other forms of xenophobia. And we certainly know that our very few nationalists are well-controlled by civil society and the new Ukrainian government — which is more than can be said for the Russian neo-Nazis, who are encouraged by your security services.”

This letter to Putin brought forth an important point: namely, that much of the real anti-Semitism directed at Ukrainian Jews is actually coming from Russia.

Previous Dish on Jews in Ukraine here.

Ben Richmond flags a study on how coming of age during an economic recession lowers narcissism:

Published in the journal Psychological Science , the team from Emory University examined survey data from over 1,500 American adults, and found that participants who entered adulthood during a worse economic climate—when average unemployment was at 7.7 percent—scored 2.35 points lower on a 40-point narcissism scale than those who graduated in more prosperous times, when average unemployment was 4.3 percent. Better economic conditions later in life didn’t put the narcissism back on, either. It’s those formative “Best Top Ramen-Eating” years of your life that really do a number on you.

Recessions also impact CEOs’ narcissism:

A separate study in the paper analyzed the salaries of CEOs from more than 2,000 publicly traded companies. The researchers discovered that the CEOs who were 18 to 25 during sunnier economic climates paid themselves 2.26 times as much as the next most well-paid executive; compare that to CEOs who came of age during bleaker economic times, who paid themselves just 1.69 times as much (recent research has suggested that CEOs who pay themselves considerably more than colleagues immediately below them show higher rates of narcissism).

Julie Beck ponders what this all means:

It seems that the humbling experience of struggling through a recession shapes people, leaving them less narcissistic than they might have been had they found success in a thriving economy. However, the study notes that this could be both good and bad for the humbler children of recessions. “Narcissists are often well-liked in initial interactions and are effective at claiming resources for themselves,” Bianchi writes. “In this regard, the present results could help explain why entering the workforce in an economic boom continues to confer advantages even decades into people’s careers.”

Justin E.H. Smith considers the theology underlying a certain strain of environmentalism:

Ironically, much conservationist thinking involves an implicitly mythological conception of species diversity that agrees in its essentials with the creation account offered in Genesis. In the scriptural tradition, God looked upon his work and deemed it good, and what ensued was a stable order of fixed, discrete, and well-bounded kinds, with no relations of descent among them. The best metaphor for conceptualizing biodiversity in this view is Noah’s ark, where each kind can be neatly separated from the others in its own compartment. The conservationist view generally leaves the creator out of the picture, yet the creatures are still deemed good, intrinsically good, and if they do not remain fixed and unchanging, then we may conclude that something is out of order – or “unnatural,” to use [Elizabeth] Kolbert’s term.

Darwinism, properly understood, is the opposite of this mythological outlook. It tells us that no particular arrangement of biodiversity is good in itself, and that no species has any absolute reason to exist. … The point here is not to relativize the current ecological crisis, or to call for an approach to mass extinction that simply says, que será, será. Rather, it is to suggest that conservationism might do well to acknowledge the endurance and the strength of the mythopoetical conception of nature, the one that sees our fellow creatures not only as more or less well adapted, but also as good, truly good.

The indifference to specific species is indeed one of Darwin’s great revelations. The whole planet is a teeming mass of DNA attempting to advance itself through various environmental challenges and changes. The death of one species is as integral as the birth of another. And so it will surely be with climate change. And at some point, I’ll wager, as the reality seeps through our consciousness, I’m sure we’ll begin rationalizing it. Species are always dying out, we’ll say to ourselves; weather has always changed, hasn’t it?; climate is never fixed, etc. The difference this time, of course, is that we humans have managed to change the climate in unprecedented ways. We have never reached this abyss before in all 200,000 years of struggle and survival. We are gods in that respect in planetary terms. And like the Greek gods, we are fickle, unpredictable and occasionally catastrophic.

A different theological account of environmentalism would not seek to set in stone every single species on the planet or resist any changes that occur because of some pristine present.

It would not construct a religion of Gaia, or be actively hostile to technology and science. But it would understand that we are but one species on this earth, even though we are easily the most powerful, and that our self-awareness bestows on us a responsibility unknown to other species. My view is that nature changes all the time and there’s nothing sacrosanct about this era in the millions of years that the earth has existed. But equally, one species’ knowing decision to destroy countless others, to shift the patterns of climate in potentially dramatic ways, and to up-end the ways of life of so much else on earth is an unprecedented global crime. To have dominion over the earth means a responsibility to be a worthy steward. We can use and exploit its resources – but only to the extent that we do not irreversibly alter its diversity.

You do not have to worship earth above humans to be an environmentalist. You merely have to respect the earth and better understand how all its inhabitants are connected through evolution. When you do that, the kind of wanton vandalism humanity is now wreaking is horrifying to any objective eyes. What a tragedy that the smartest species began as a territorial, murderous primate. And what spiritual revolution will be necessary to prevent this ongoing assault on nature?

(Detail of Edward Hicks’ Peaceable Kingdom, ca. 1834, via Wikimedia Commons)