Tag: Premium

Anastasia Corell checks in on the capital city of Lhasa, where Chinese authorities are keeping a worried eye on separatist sentiment:

The conventional Chinese belief toward Tibet is that the Communist Party liberated Tibetan people from an oppressive, feudal government under the Lamas and, through development, have improved their material welfare and provided them with opportunities in the modern world. Beijing’s investments in the territory are substantial: In 2011, China announced a five-year plan that includes $21.4 billion in infrastructure projects such as road, rail, and hydropower. Tibetans argue that these improvements have come at a great cost to their culture and way of life, and that the migration of Han Chinese settlers—lured by government incentives—is turning once-traditional Lhasa into an ordinary Chinese city.

Tibet’s strategic importance to China is great. The territory is the source of Asia’s most important waterways, including the Yangtze, Yellow, and Mekong Rivers, which irrigate China’s fertile central plain and most of Southeast Asia. It also serves as a buffer between the country and an emerging rival, India. Beijing feels that any compromise with Tibetans would encourage separatist movements elsewhere, particularly among the Uighur population in China’s far-west Xinjiang region. It is essential to China’s domestic security that Tibetans come, eventually, to regard themselves as Chinese.

Meanwhile, the Tibetans have grown increasingly desperate.

Over the last two years, tensions have led to a spike in self-immolations, resulting in over 120 deaths, and the possibility that people may set themselves on fire explains Lhasa’s tense police presence. In Jokhang Square, the physical center of ancient Lhasa and a holy Buddhist pilgrimage site, soldiers carry fire extinguishers instead of guns. At gas stations, everyone must register and report exactly how much gasoline they take, and to which destinations. The government monitors siphoning—after all, it may be a possible prelude to self-immolation.

Fisher says Tibet is now less accessible to foreign journalists than North Korea:

[Tibet scholar Carole] McGranahan discusses one of the major challenges facing an anthropologist like herself who wants to study Tibet: simply getting information. She can’t go herself unless she sneaks in, which is risky; she can’t “call up friends in Tibet” without “putting them at risk,” she says; Tibetans living in exile face the same problem. And she can’t read journalistic reports because, with the exception of the “very brave” Chinese-Tibetan journalist Woeser, they are almost never allowed to go.

The comparison to North Korea is not an invalid one. The Chinese government, by and large, has not been anywhere near as severe or restrictive as North Korea’s since leader Mao Zedong died in 1977. The two countries are just on very different paths, and being a journalist in most of China is much freer than being a journalist in North Korea. But within Tibet, some of China’s old, totalitarian-tinged habits can still come through. The irony is that, in recent years, North Korea has been opening itself up to foreign journalists – albeit under extremely tight restrictions – as China has closed them off from Tibet.

The Associated Press even has a tiny bureau in Pyongyang; a deal with the devil, some critics charge, but if nothing else it produces an awful lot of very good photos of life in North Korea. There is nothing close to an analogous foreign media presence in Tibet. Sometimes the best we can do is satellite images, taken from thousands of miles away in space.

Bernstein thinks so:

I still believe, by the way, that “Obamacare” will eventually disappear, at least assuming it’s reasonably successful. Of course, the fiasco in October wasn’t good for making “Obamacare” disappear; I’ve always said that it disappears if it succeeds. It’s possible, too, that the conservative information bubble is so obsessed with the law that they’ll still be blaming everything up to and including the common cold on Obamacare decades from now. On the other hand, sooner or later there will be another Democratic president, and once that happens Fox News and all are sure to compare the radical socialist leftism of that new president to the reasonable moderation of Obama. Will “Obamacare” survive that? Hard to guess.

Eric Patashnik and Julian Zelizer disagree:

Political conflict over a program can last for decades.

Congress passed the Voting Rights Act in 1965, and opponents continued to attack the legislation through 2013, when the Supreme Court invalidated one of its central components. The potential for conflicts over existing laws to persist has only increased as a result of partisan polarization. While both the Social Security Act of 1935 and the Medicare Act of 1965 had some bipartisan support on final passage, the ACA was passed on a party-line vote. Forrest Maltzman of George Washington University and Charles Shipan of University of Michigan have shown that the greater the roll call opposition when a bill is passed, the more likely the law is to be amended by a future Congress. An open question is whether partisanship exacerbates the problem of divisive enactment. While systematic research has not been done, there are good reasons to think it might. AsDavid R. Mayhew of Yale argues, while a cross-party opposition to a policy might fade, “a party that loses on a congressional issue and stays angry may have an  incentive to keep the conflict going.”

Weigel examines upcoming hazards for the law, such as Halbig v. Sebelius:

Conservatives can argue about the most effective Obamacare-killer—and that’s the point. Progressives (and insurers) who thought they’d settled all this need to strap in for another year of challenges and end-runs. If Halbig gets to the D.C. circuit and fails, conservatives have pre-blamed the new judges Barack Obama placed on the bench after last month’s filibuster reform. If Halbig doesn’t get to SCOTUS, maybe one of the other versions of the case will, or maybe a state will succeed with one of the new Health Care Freedom Acts.

Lauren Rosewarne reflects on Christian Bale’s latest transformation – gaining 43 pounds for his role in American Hustle:

Bale’s fattening prompted the same question one might ask of Robert De Niro’s weight gain in Raging Bull (1980), Toni Colette’s in Muriel’s Wedding (1994), Renée Zellweger’s in Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001), Charlize Theron’s in Monster (2003), Jared Leto’s in Chapter 27 (2007) and Chris Pratt’s in Delivery Man (2013): Why? Couldn’t producers find plumper actors?

The obvious answer is that big budget films only get green-lit if big names are attached. The biggest names are invariably the thinnest. Yadda yadda, insert doughnut consumption. There are, of course, other explanations worth pondering. … In a world where fatsuits – as witnessed in the deplorable Shallow Hal (2001) – or special effects could offer weight gain far quicker than a junk-tastic diet, going the distance and actually fattening-up apparently separates the artistes from the poseurs. And time and time again, such gimmicky madness gets validated. Theron took home an Oscar for her fattening; Collette snared an AFI. Cinemas inevitably get filled because audiences have an unquenchable curiosity for make-overs and bodily transformation.

Update from a rant-filled reader:

“Theron took home an Oscar for her fattening; Collette snared an AFI.” Um. What?  Has Ms. Rosewarne SEEN Monster?

Charlize Theron didn’t take home an Oscar for her fattening, for fuck’s sake!  She took it home by portraying one of the most despicable, loathsome and vicious women ever born – in a tragic, human and sympathetic way, all while distinctly not looking like Charlize Theron! In fact, I constantly had to remind myself, while watching the film, that it even WAS Charlize Theron in there somewhere. Is the author seriously suggesting that the Academy voters watched this grueling, emotionally punishing, heartbreaking film and said, “Well. I was going to vote for Naomi Watts, but LORD did Theron pack on those pounds! I’m voting for the fat!”

And wasn’t Muriel’s Wedding Toni Colette’s first feature film EVER?  I’d never heard of her before that delightful little film, and the LAST thing I thought after thoroughly enjoying it was, “God I hope that Toni Colette, whom I’ve never seen before, can drop all those pounds I didn’t know she put on!”  Ugh.

I’m not discounting or belittling the massive Method madness inherent in these transformations – quite the opposite; these are actors so committed to Craft and Character that they are willing to put themselves through hell in order to wear their own bodies like alien costumes. (I am, however, put in mind of Sir Laurence Olivier’s advice to Dustin Hoffman on the set of Marathon Man, when the latter was complaining about his Method-inspired sleep deprivation and exhaustion: “My dear boy, why don’t you try acting?”) But it seems to me that if you have the time, the medical advice and the cash necessary to treat your body like an inflatable/deflatable costume, why wouldn’t you do absolutely everything you could to become the thing you portray?

Matt Phillips remarks on the sharp decline in law school enrollment over the past two years:

Fresh numbers from the American Bar Association show US law school enrollment tumbling 11% over last year to 39,675. That’s the number of full-time and part-time students who started law school studies in the fall of 2013. Overall, enrollment is down 24% from the 2010 peak. The Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog points out that we’re back to 1977 enrollment levels, an era that predated the surging growth of lawyers during the 1980s.

Campos chimes in:

What’s particularly striking about these numbers is that first year enrollment is down by 24.4% even though admissions standards have been slashed all across legal academia (Yale, Harvard and Stanford are the only elite schools that haven’t dropped admissions standards, and many non-elite schools have cut median LSAT scores for admits by ten percentage points or more). … [I]f law schools had maintained the admissions standards that prevailed a decade ago, next fall’s incoming class would feature about 24,600 matriculants, which is a number about 13% larger than the average annual total of jobs for lawyers that the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates will become available over the course of this decade.

Jed S. Rakoff, a US District Court judge for the Southern District of New York, contemplates why no high-level executives have gone to jail. The factor that he thinks is “arguably the most important”:

It is the shift that has occurred, over the past thirty years or more, from focusing on prosecuting high-level individuals to focusing on prosecuting companies and other institutions. It is true that prosecutors have brought criminal charges against companies for well over a hundred years, but until relatively recently, such prosecutions were the exception, and prosecutions of companies without simultaneous prosecutions of their managerial agents were even rarer.

The reasons were obvious. Companies do not commit crimes; only their agents do. And while a company might get the benefit of some such crimes, prosecuting the company would inevitably punish, directly or indirectly, the many employees and shareholders who were totally innocent. Moreover, under the law of most US jurisdictions, a company cannot be criminally liable unless at least one managerial agent has committed the crime in question; so why not prosecute the agent who actually committed the crime?

In recent decades, however, prosecutors have been increasingly attracted to prosecuting companies, often even without indicting a single person. This shift has often been rationalized as part of an attempt to transform “corporate cultures,” so as to prevent future such crimes; and as a result, government policy has taken the form of “deferred prosecution agreements” or even “nonprosecution agreements,” in which the company, under threat of criminal prosecution, agrees to take various prophylactic measures to prevent future wrongdoing. Such agreements have become, in the words of Lanny Breuer, the former head of the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division, “a mainstay of white-collar criminal law enforcement,” with the department entering into 233 such agreements over the last decade. But in practice, I suggest, this approach has led to some lax and dubious behavior on the part of prosecutors, with deleterious results.

Tracing the term’s history, Jennifer Szalai finds that it “exudes a false note, a mix of self-consciousness and self-congratulation”:

When “guilty pleasure” first appeared in the New York Times, in 1860, it was used to describe a brothel. The term appeared only a handful of times in the paper of record until the late nineteen-nineties, when it started coming up in its contemporary incarnation again and again, at the tail end of the culture wars. (According to the online Times archives, “guilty pleasure” shows up approximately a twelve hundred and sixty times—twelve hundred and forty-seven of those since 1996.) In some ways, the timing seems strange; the guilty pleasure was becoming a part of the cultural vocabulary right around the time cultural distinctions were ceasing to matter. But maybe it was precisely because those distinctions were becoming moot that people felt emboldened to use it. The guilty pleasure could then function as a signalling mechanism, an indicator that one takes pleasure in something but knows (the knowingness is key) that one really shouldn’t. Once distinctions were blurred, you could announce a love for pop culture that, in an earlier era, you would have been too ashamed to admit.

Her conclusion:

The guilty pleasure is a vestige of America’s disappearing middlebrow culture, of that anxious mediation between high and low, which at its best generated a desire to learn, to value cultural literacy and to accept some of the challenges it requires. General magazines once flourished because of it; even Ladies’ Home Journal, better known now as a chipper dispenser of service journalism and horoscopes, used to publish the likes of Edith Wharton and W. H. Auden. But the guilty pleasure seems to me the distillation of all the worst qualities of the middlebrow—the condescension of the highbrow without the expenditure of effort, along with mass culture’s pleasure-seeking without the unequivocal enjoyment.

If you want to listen to Rihanna while reading the latest from Dean Koontz, just go ahead and do it. Don’t try to suggest you know better. Forget the pretense and get over yourself. You have nothing to lose but your guilt.

Paula Marantz Cohen labels the Coca-Cola franchise “a religion of Americana”:

Not an American religion, but a religion devoted to the idea of America — which is to say, to those Norman Rockwell scenes of homecoming, fly fishing, and presents under the tree.

Disney might be compared with Coke in having something of the same religious aspirations, but Disney has a more complicated apparatus — movies and theme parks (a visit to one of which is liable to bankrupt a family of four), not to mention the dubious figure of its founder, Walt Disney, a misanthropic anti-Semite (OK, Coke’s Colonel Pemberton was a drug-addicted Confederate soldier, but never mind). To worship at the altar of Coke, you just have to like the drink and put out the paltry sum required to buy it — which, even if it may produce rotten teeth, diabetes, and obesity, isn’t creating centuries of civil war and ethnic cleansing. It tastes good and it’s refreshing, especially after you’ve spent the afternoon trying to assemble an IKEA cabinet or five hours in heavy traffic to eat overcooked turkey at your Aunt Leona’s. …

Part of what makes Coke’s triumphal history go down so easily is that no one around today was alive before the beverage existed. Coke is “real,” as the promotional slogans remind us, because, artificial sweeteners, colorings, and preservatives aside, it has endured in more or less the same form for as long as anyone can remember. It is moving to see those old, round-cornered Coca Cola machines and those small, green-tinted glass bottles. The red on white Coca Cola script is a kind of Madeleine experience for childhood. Even if you never experienced anything like the America of Norman Rockwell (who did many of the Saturday Evening Post advertisements for Coca Cola during the 1940s and 50s) there’s something about that Coca Cola script that makes you think you did. I suspect individuals around the world feel this, even if they hate everything else that America stands for.

Ann Friedman disagrees with Douthat as to what worries today’s young women:

Now, I’m doubtful that educated twentysomething women are itching to reform and marry every L-train Peter Pan they swipe right on Tinder. But fertility is a legitimate back-of-the-mind anxiety for many young women, and we tend to imagine (explicitly or otherwise) timelines for ourselves as we try to navigate the limitations of biology. Douthat is wrong in assuming that the challenge lies mostly in getting the Nathaniels of the world to grow up and commit. It’s a much bigger question of how women successfully combine family and career. We’re well aware that we lose fertility at a certain age, but also that we lose professional power after we have kids. This is a generation of women who were raised on movies portraying the plight of the working mother, came of age in one of the worst economies in recent history, have read dozens of trend stories about the expense and trauma of IVF, yet still hope to have “it all.” They know the tough decisions that await them in their thirties. And so, they figure, better put in the professional work now — get as far as you can before it’s time to procreate. I wasn’t surprised to read a report from the Pew Research Center last week that women in their twenties are out-earning their male colleagues. The pressure is intense: Do it all now so you can have it all later.

Douthat pulls out some more sociology in his response to his critics:

If there’s evidence that 1) women’s stated sexual preferences are somewhat more conservative than what men say they want and what our cultural norms encourage, that 2) women’s happiness increases when their sex lives conform to their own preferences rather than to the culture’s more libertine script, and that (at least anecdotally) 3) men tend toward a kind of indecisive, listless, semi-exploitative relationship style when their preferences are too easily fulfilled, then perhaps — just perhaps — what we have here is a case for a somewhat more conservative sexual culture. Not a culture where the Ministry of Virtue locks Nathaniel P. away for crimes against chastity; not a culture where nobody ever has a one-night stand or a friend with benefits; not a culture where women are treated like porcelain or taught to quiver in fear of the ravening lusts of lecherous males. Just a culture where it’s a little easier for women (and men) to act on attitudes and preferences that, in the aggregate (!!!!), seem to correlate more with happiness and flourishing than many social liberals are willing to acknowledge or admit.

Andrew Gelman points to another study that found the exact opposite effect from the one Douthat cited in his column:

[T]he existence of two published results in the exact opposite direction suggest, at the very least, that any effects are likely to be lower than claimed in the published articles. As always, multiple comparisons problems are all over the place here — the Conley and Rauscher paper also had some “the difference between significant and non-significant is not itself statistically significant” moments — and I think reporters should be careful before taking the claims based on this sample and assuming that they apply to the population. The sex of your children is going to have all sorts of effects on your behavior and attitudes. With so many possible outcome measurements and various small effects in different directions, we can’t expect a sample size of 600 or 1,000 to form a coherent story, and I think there is a problem in that the conventions of scientific research papers, and of journalism, are that all the results should cohere.

He has a problem with this whole line of inquiry, however:

Why is it all about “the effect of daughters”? Why not “Does having sons make you support the Democrats?” … Lots of discussion about how you, as a parent, might change your views of the world if you have a girl. But not so much about how you might change your views if you have a boy. Lots of discussion of how having a girl might affect your attitudes on abortion, not so much discussion about how having a boy might affect your attitudes on issues such as gun control or war, which disproportionately affect young men. This is a real problem, when issues of girls and boys, men and women, are treated asymmetrically.