Tag: Premium

House of Cards creator Beau Willimon discusses the series and the conventions of television:

I don’t know how much longer the idea of a “season” will be something that we feel like we need to adhere to in television. Even the idea of an episode. I think with streaming, you might have shows in the future where you have three or four hours released. And then three months later you’ll get another couple hours. And then nine months later you might get six more hours. I mean, do all of those constitute a season, or do you sort of dispense with the notion of seasons altogether?

I’ve toyed with the idea for a show that doesn’t have episodes at all. That would simply be one eight-hour stream for a season, and the viewer decides when they want to pause, if at all. That definitely could affect the writing of a show. But we’re in an in-between period now, where we have traditional broadcast networks on one end of the spectrum and streaming on the other, meaning that shows kind of have to be able to live in both worlds.

Scott Meslow wants Netflix to continue experimenting:

Someone could create a show where one episode is 75 minutes long, and the next episode is 15 minutes long. Someone could decide to release one episode every week, or every month, or every holiday — or at random, turning every new installment into a welcome surprise. Someone could release every episode of a series but the finale, then hold that finale back for six months — turning its premiere into a buzzy event that will be simultaneously shared by all of its viewers.

The structure of television is so deeply ingrained that it takes effort to even imagine these kinds of scenarios — but anyone who’s willing to break with convention has the opportunity to expand the very definition of TV storytelling.

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang defends binge-watching the new House of Cards. He calls doing so a “restorative experience”:

The term “restorative experiences” was coined by University of Michigan psychologistStephen Kaplan. He wanted to understand why walks in the park, or even looking at a picture of a landscape, can recharge your mental batteries. Restorative experiences, he found, share a few common features. They’re fascinating: Unlike a conference call or spreadsheet, they hold your attention without effort. They provide a sense of transporting you from your normal life and environment. They strike a balance between complexity and compatibility: They’re rich and fully realized worlds, but you can make sense of them. Natural environments like parks and beaches, and built spaces like churches and gardens, can be restorative. So can the theater or good books.

Previous Dish on the Netflix model here and here.

Fisher suspects it won’t end anytime soon:

Negotiating between the rebels and the government was hard enough before the rise of ISIS over the past year. A three-way stand-off is much tougher to resolve than a two-way stand-off: a potential peace deal that might satisfy two of those groups is probably going to infuriate the third. Getting representative from all of those factions to simply come together or recognize one another’s negotiating authority is, in itself, a major hurdle. Finding something they could all agree on would be herculean.

There’s another reason this map and its divisions show the intractability of the Syrian conflict: no one side is anywhere close to a military victory.

Joshua Hersh reports on the government’s bombardment of the rebels:

All of the infrastructure of rebel-controlled Syria has shut down: the local councils, which help run city administration; the various relief agencies; even the bakeries that, with international assistance, produce bread for the starving population. Almost no one has been left behind in some parts. “There’s been areas that are just completely emptied out—not a living soul,” the aid worker said. “It’s obvious that they’re hoping to drive everyone out.”

What’s disturbing about the current round of bombings and evacuations is not simply that it’s a humanitarian disaster, but that it seems to fit a pattern of the Syrian government’s campaign to retake rebel-held parts of the north: destroy a city, empty it out.

In an excerpt from her new book on failure, McArdle unpacks the research of psychologist Carol Dweck:

While many of the people she studied hated tasks that they didn’t do well, some people thrived under the challenge. They positively relished things they weren’t very good at—for precisely the reason that they should have: when they were failing, they were learning.

Dweck puzzled over what it was that made these people so different from their peers.

It hit her one day as she was sitting in her office (then at Columbia), chewing over the results of the latest experiment with one of her graduate students: the people who dislike challenges think that talent is a fixed thing that you’re either born with or not. The people who relish them think that it’s something you can nourish by doing stuff you’re not good at.

“There was this eureka moment,” says Dweck. She now identifies the former group as people with a “fixed mind-set,” while the latter group has a “growth mind-set.” Whether you are more fixed or more of a grower helps determine how you react to anything that tests your intellectual abilities. For growth people, challenges are an opportunity to deepen their talents, but for “fixed” people, they are just a dipstick that measures how high your ability level is. Finding out that you’re not as good as you thought is not an opportunity to improve; it’s a signal that you should maybe look into a less demanding career, like mopping floors.

Yuval Levin highly recommends McArdle’s book:

We conservatives value markets and like to argue that they make for far better means of obtaining and applying knowledge than the a priori certitudes of technocratic know-it-alls. But we are not always ready to contend with what that commitment to decentralized, dispersed, trial-and-error learning really means: It means lots and lots of errors, and lots and lots of failures, and it requires us to constantly keep in mind that these errors and failures are what make success possible.

That sort of humility doesn’t come easy, especially if you’re the person doing the failing.

Brad Plumer interviews Elizabeth Kolbert about her new book on the coming mass extinction:

BP: One thing your book explores is that there’s no one factor causing modern-day extinctions. There’s hunting. There’s deforestation. There are changes in land use. There’s climate change and the acidification of the oceans. Which of these stands out as most significant?

EK: To me, what really stood out… And I always say, look, I’m not a scientist, I’m relying on what scientists tell me. And I think many scientists would say that what we’re doing to the chemistry of the oceans is the most significant. One-third of the carbon-dioxide that we pump into the air ends up in the oceans almost right away, and when CO2 dissolves in water, it forms an acid, that’s just an unfortunate fact.

The chemistry of the oceans tends to be very stable, and to overwhelm those forces is really hard. And we are managing to do it. When people try to reconstruct the history of the ocean, the best estimate is that what we’re doing to the oceans or have the potential to do is a magnitude of change that hasn’t been seen in 300 million years. And changes of ocean chemistry are associated with some of the worst crises in history.

Bill McKibben also has a fascinating conversation with Kolbert:

McKibben: The hallmark of evolutionary biology is adaptability. Is the main thing that’s different in this era the speed with which we are forcing things to adapt? Is that the single biggest new variable in this new system?

Kolbert: I once got this question from a person who said, “Well, if things start going extinct, won’t new things just evolve?” It was like extinction and evolution were a one-for-one trade. But the answer is that you can drive things extinct quickly, but it is very difficult to speed up evolution. If we were driving these changes at a pace that’s hundreds, even a million times slower, then yes, maybe most things would adapt to that, and we would get a very different world but not necessarily a humongous wave of extinctions. But otherwise you can do the math yourself.

In yet another interview, Kolbert discusses our denial of culpability:

Mother Jones: I was fascinated by your discussion of the “perception of incongruity,” and how humans create more and more elaborate explanations to account for contradictory evidence. Where does this turn up in the modern debate on extinction?

Elizabeth Kolbert: Even very smart people can try to shoehorn new information that just doesn’t fit into an existing paradigm. For a long time the story that we’ve been telling ourselves is that humans are just another animal. We evolved from other animals and our place in the universe isn’t particularly special. What I’m trying to convey in the book is that we are unusual. We turn out to be the one species altering the planet like this, and that puts people back in the position of being responsible for what happens. There’s a big resistance to the idea that we could be such a big deal. The Earth is big. There are huge natural forces that have worked over geological time. But it turns out, when you look carefully at the geological time, you can’t find anything like us.

A fluent Mandarin speaker writes:

I totally support more people learning Mandarin Chinese, not least because it’s a rewarding and interesting language that (believe it or not) is fairly easy to pick up as a spoken language due to its fantastically simple grammar. However, I also have to point out that your reader who compares learning Mandarin Chinese to “learning European” obviously doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

Speaking Mandarin in most parts of Mainland China is not the same as speaking English in France. Instead, it is more like speaking Latin in the Roman Empire, or German in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Wherever you go, there will always be educated people who can speak to you. And if people are in a field where they have to work with the general public, it is certain that they will be able to speak Mandarin to a reasonable standard. Yes, every part of China has a local dialect (although in some parts this dialect is little different than Mandarin – Nanjing, for example), but this dialect is normally only used in circumstances where the speaker is fairly sure that those listening to them will understand.

Another reader offers an important, and basic, clarification:

The comment that “learning Chinese is like learning European” irritated me so much that I feel the need to write to you for the first time in a decade-plus of reading your blog. Chinese is a written language. Mandarin is the most common spoken dialect of Chinese. Mandarin and Chinese are not interchangeable terms.

Update from a reader:

“Mandarin is the most common spoken dialect of Chinese.” This statement isn’t exactly true. Mandarin, in its current form, is a refinement and standardization of the dialect that’s spoken in the capital city, Beijing. The practice of making the dialect of the capital city the “official dialect” goes back hundreds of years. While the adaptation of the Beijing dialect as the “official dialect” probably goes back to the Ming Dynasty, the refinement/standardization that lead to its current form occurred during the early years of the KMT/Republic of China government.

Another reframes the discussion:

Setting out to learn any foreign language only for practical reasons – I’ll be able to order in restaurants! I’ll be able to get a better job! – is, for most people, an enormous waste of time.

Foreign languages – that is, languages not spoken where you live, languages that you have little or no opportunity to use in daily life – are incredibly difficult to acquire, requiring thousands of hours of focused study over a span of years, and are quickly forgotten if not used. And even if you’re one of the few people who become fluent in a foreign language, you might still end up not having much chance ever to use it.

If, on the other hand, you set out to learn a foreign language to challenge yourself, to learn about other parts of the world, to learn how other people think, to make yourself think in different ways, then it will be worth the effort. In that case, the target language matters little. It would be just as rewarding to learn Korean, Tamil, or Hungarian as French, German, or Mandarin Chinese. Dead languages – Latin, classical Greek, classical Chinese, Sanskrit – are great, too. Pick one and go for it.

Or pick many, as this reader has:

As someone who’s studied English, Gujarati, Marathi, French, German, Japanese, Arabic, and Chinese, in addition to my native Hindi, at some point or another, I can attest to nuggets of brilliance in all languages. German is stupendous for its clarity and directness; Japanese for the detail in which allows the speaker to describe things; Hindi for its vigor and vitality; English in the way it allows itself to be molded by the speaker, whether she’s from Nigeria, Nala Sopara, or Nantucket. Arabic and Persian poems are the most heart-wrenching. Each language has its charm.

Eve Tushnet criticizes both the disease theory of addiction and those who react against it with contempt. She admits that, “When I was drinking my will really was damaged.” But that’s not the whole story:

I am convinced that there were times, within this compulsion and constriction, when I was capable of choice.  Sometimes I chose heaven—often tiny little choices which seemed pointless at the time, like the choice to read a book about addiction even though I was stressed and scared, or sincere prayers which were quickly swamped by rationalization, exhaustion, and fear—and a lot of times I chose the other place. But even in my own past, I doubt I could accurately gauge the depth of my own freedom in any individual moment. How can I hope to gauge it for others?

This is the point that both sides of the disease/choice divide get wrong. Of course your will is constrained. Your background, what you were taught (explicitly or implicitly) growing up, your brain chemistry, your mental health—a whole host of factors out of your control, unchosen and not always even noticed, constrain your choices. But within that landscape of constraint we often do choose. We make huge leaps or crawl tiny, painful inches up or down. You’re not trapped in your brain or your past—at least, not always. But even from the inside, you can’t always see the moments when you’re free.

Relatedly, Keith Humphreys offers an explanation of why programs like needle exchanges help addicts make better choices:

People are more prone to take care of themselves if they think that others care about them. If you are using drugs and sleeping rough, you can go through long periods where no one expresses any feelings toward you other than contempt, disgust or hostility. In contrast, when a stranger stretches an open hand into the cold night and offers to help you, it communicates something markedly different: You have worth. Knowing that you are not worthless after all provides a motivation to try to make changes that will improve your health and well-being.

Recent Dish on addiction here, here, here, and here.

When Tocqueville visited America, he wasn’t impressed with our humor, claiming that “people who spend every day in the week making money, and the Sunday in going to Church, have nothing to invite the muse of Comedy.” Reviewing John Beckman’s American Fun: Four Centuries of Joyous Revolt, Ben Schwarz thinks that’s not the whole story:

The country’s true comic muse, [Beckman] suggests, has always resided in rebellious, unacceptable humor and entertainment. He begins this chronicle with the forgotten hedonist pilgrim Thomas Morton and his lively seventeenth-century settlement, Merry Mount. The name alone was a pornographic joke to the locals. In his satirical poetry, Morton referred to Puritan leader Myles Standish as “Captain Shrimpe,” and at Merry Mount he encouraged forbidden Maypole dancing, refused to recognize bonded service, embraced Native American culture aesthetically, and Native American women literally. Within a year, Standish’s and Morton’s followers negotiated at gunpoint for Morton’s expulsion from the New World, after which Standish had the pilgrim playboy’s Maypole chopped down. From there, Beckman offers a narrative history touching on the revolutionary bonhomie of Samuel Adams’s taverns (a barroom insurgency that led, in turn, to the rowdy, whooping Boston Tea Party), the subversive revelry of plantation slave culture, Western prank journalism, P. T. Barnum, jazzmen, flappers, merry pranksters, and riot grrrls. In American Fun, humor and music catalyze cultural subversion, breaking out spontaneously in response to intolerant majority rule.

Above is a 1993 standup routine from Bill Hicks that Letterman initially refused to air. Update from a reader:

The whole interview with Bill Hicks’ mom is priceless:

In addition to being sugar-sweet and tack-sharp, Mrs. Hicks offers some fascinating background on her son. He wasn’t an easy comic for a parent to watch, and her pain at his loss remains palpable. The whole visit was an unusual move by a talk show host, but it was as close as Letterman could come to correcting the mistake … especially since he used the opportunity to go ahead and show the original routine in full.

Previous Dish on Hicks here and here.

A long-term study published this week found that mammograms don’t increase women’s odds of surviving breast cancer:

The University of Toronto study split a group of 89,835 women in two. Half of them got mammograms, and half did not. After 25 years, the rate of death from breast cancer was the same in both groups. Some of the women who underwent mammograms ended up with unnecessary treatment.

The research is well done and will influence a global conversation. Dr. Richard Wender, chief of cancer control for the American Cancer Society, said an expert panel will factor this research into new guidelines to be released within the year. Until then, current recommendations stand.

Moreover, they can actually be harmful:

The BMJ study calculated that 22 percent — more than 1 in 5 — breast cancers diagnosed by a screening mammogram represented an overdiagnosis. These were breast cancers that did not need treatment, and the women who received these diagnoses needlessly underwent treatments that could damage their hearts, spur endometrial cancer or cause long-lasting pain and swelling. …

These treatments are totally worth it if it means that you avoid dying from the cancer. But if they’re aimed at curing a cancer that was never going to become deadly, then what early diagnosis has actually done is made a healthy person sick. I think it’s safe to say that no one wants that. Treatments and awareness about breast cancer seem to have created most of the improvements in breast cancer outcomes, and we should celebrate those accomplishments.

Still, Kate Pickert says regular mammograms are likely here to stay:

Otis Brawley, chief medical officer for the ACS, has been outspoken about the downside of various types of cancer screening, arguing that benefits are often over-stated. But even he points out that the ACS examined the ongoing Canadian study when the group last updated its breast cancer screening guidelines seven years ago and concluded that annual mammograms for women over 40 were still warranted. (Findings from the study back then were similar to those published this week.) The ACS will take a fresh look at the research on mammography this year and may change its recommendations, but there’s no guarantee.

Cohn gets Ezekiel Emanuel’s take:

“There will never be a truly definitive mammogram study,” says Emanuel, who was longtime head of the National Institutes of Health Bioethics Department and is now a vice provost at the University of Pennsylvania. “You’re in this circle where you will never resolve the issue. You need a long timeline to get the best results, but in that time span the technology always improves—and people will always say, well, this is based on old technology so it’s not so relevant anymore.”

Aaron Carroll adds:

If you’re not going to be swayed at all by a randomized controlled trial of 90,000 women with 25 year follow up, excellent compliance, and damn good methods, it might be time to consider that there’s really no study at all that will make you change your mind.

John Horgan thinks it’s up to patients to stop demanding expensive, ineffective medical tests:

[U]ltimately, the responsibility for ending the testing epidemic comes down to consumers, who too often submit to—and even demand–tests that have negligible value. Our fear of cancer, in particular, seems to make us irrational. When faced with evidence that PSA tests and mammograms save very few lives, especially considering their risks and costs, many people say, in effect, “I don’t care. I don’t want to be that one person in a million who dies of cancer because I didn’t get tested.” Until this attitude changes, the medical-testing epidemic won’t end.

But Leah Libresco sympathizes with patients:

It’s tempting to be skeptical whenever a medical recommendation is reversed. If the last thing they told us was wrong, why should we trust them again? However, health care has changed since the advent of mammography. The old studies on the benefits of mammography weren’t necessarily wrong, just out of date. As awareness of breast cancer has increased, self-screenings have begun to do the work of mammography. As cancer drugs have improved, it’s no longer critical to identify diseases at their earliest stages to be able to survive.

But for a patient, who just hears conflicting recommendations, and not a discussion of research methods or the history of medicine, it’s hard not to come away with a sense of unease.

Keating ponders a new poll on the Cuba embargo:

A majority of Americans, and even a majority of Cuban-Americans in Florida (who also supported Barack Obama over Mitt Romney in the last election), may now oppose the embargo, but older voters with visceral personal experience of Castro’s Cuba feel more strongly about it.

The number of people whose votes and donations are determined by their support for the embargo may be dwindling, but it’s probably still greater than the number whose vote and donations are determined by opposition to it. Still, the numbers indicate the downside isn’t as bad as it once was. The reactions to Obama’s handshake with Raúl Castro turned out to be fairly mild. Could something more dramatic be coming?

Greg Weeks doubts it. He argues that it “simply does not matter what a majority of Americans support if they do not really care about it”:

The tiny minority of Americans of oppose normalization care about it very deeply. On a list of priorities it would be high; for some, number one. Therefore they will fight very hard, expend considerable political capital, and spend a lot of money to make sure the embargo and other similar policies remain firmly in place.

Larison chimes in:

The good news is that support for the utterly useless embargo of Cuba has been getting steadily weaker over time, and there is good reason to assume that it will continue to wane until the embargo is finally lifted. Even though this will happen many decades later than it should have, it is encouraging to know that there is some limit to how long such senseless policies can endure. The embargo is a good example of the kind of needlessly harmful policies the U.S. can pursue when it allows its dealings with another country to be shaped almost entirely by ideological and emotional factors. It is also a monument to our government’s remarkable inability to abandon some failed policies decades after their futility has become obvious.

Attorney General Eric Holder is urging states to overturn laws that bar people convicted of felonies from voting. How many Americans do these laws affect? Quite a few:

Nearly 6 million Americans are barred from voting due to felony disenfranchisement laws. Moreover, the bulk of disenfranchised felons—75 percent—are no longer in prison. Approximately 2.6 million of those remain disenfranchised despite having completed all parts of their sentence (prison time, parole, probation) because they live in states that bar felons from the polls for life. …

Felony disenfranchisement disproportionately affects people of color. Black men are incarcerated at a much higher rate than the rest of the population. According to the Urban Institute, 11.4 percent of African American men aged 20 to 34 were in prison in 2008, compared with just 1.8 percent of white men. One out of every 13 black Americans of voting age can’t vote due to criminal disenfranchisement laws, a number much higher than for any other demographic. This ratio is more stark in Florida, Kentucky, and Virginia, where more than 1 in 5 black adults is barred from the polls. Overall, 2.2 million black Americans have lost the right to vote because of felony disenfranchisement laws.

Roger Clegg brings up the usual objections:

[Holder] conveniently ignores the reason for felon disenfranchisement, namely that if you aren’t willing to follow the law, then you can hardly claim a role in making the law for everyone else, which is what you do when you vote. We have certain minimum, objective standards of responsibility, trustworthiness, and commitment to our laws that we require of people before they are entrusted with a role in the solemn enterprise of self-government. And so we don’t allow everyone to vote: not children, not noncitizens, not the mentally incompetent, and not people who have been convicted of committing serious crimes against their fellow citizens.

But Kevin Drum thinks restoring their rights is pretty fundamental to democracy:

I believe the right to vote is on the same level as free speech and fair trials. And no one suggests that released felons should be denied either of those. In fact, they can’t be, because those rights are enshrined in the Constitution. Voting would be on that list too if it weren’t for an accident of history: namely that we adopted democracy a long time ago, when the mere fact of voting at all was a revolutionary idea, let alone the idea of letting everyone vote. But that accident doesn’t make the right to vote any less important.

A probationary period of some kind is probably reasonable. But once you’re released from prison and you’ve finished your parole, you’re assumed to have paid your debt to society. That means you’re innocent until proven guilty, and competent to protect your political interests in the voting booth unless proven otherwise. No free society should assume anything different.

Meanwhile, Rick Hasen notes how resistant conservatives are to early voting, which would also expand the franchise:

[C]onservative critics of early voting runs don’t just mistrust early voters; they mistrust voters in general. As I explained here, there is a fundamental divide between liberals and conservatives about what voting is for: Conservatives see voting as about choosing the “best” candidate or “best” policies (meaning limits on who can vote, when, and how might make the most sense), and liberals see it as about the allocation of power among political equals. Cutting back on early voting fits with the conservative idea of choosing the “best” candidate by restraining voters from making supposed rash decisions, rather than relying on them to make choices consistent with their interests.

Beinart points out the contradiction between the GOP’s desire to attract more black votes and its efforts to restrict voting:

Do the Republicans pushing these restrictions really want to keep blacks from voting? Not exactly. The more likely explanation is that they want to keep Democrats from voting. As the Republican majority leader of the Pennsylvania state legislature said in 2012, the requirement for voter ID “is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania.”

The problem, of course, is that limiting Democratic voting means limiting African-American voting. And in a country that for much of its history denied African Americans the right to vote, pushing laws that make it harder for African Americans to exercise that right touches the rawest of nerves. As long as many African Americans feel the GOP doesn’t want them to vote, it’s unlikely anything the GOP says to African Americans is going to have much positive impact.