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In his new book, Art as Therapy, reviewed by Joshua Rothman, Alain de Botton argues that museums “have embraced as their guiding paradigm the discipline of art history,” focusing on arranging pieces by period or artist, rather than emphasizing “what actually makes art interesting”:

Most people, [de Botton] thinks, care only a little about who commissioned what. When a visit to a museum succeeds, it usually isn’t because the visitor has learned facts about art but because she’s found one or two works that resonate in a private way. And, yet, museums do very little to foster these kinds of personal connections; if anything, they suggest that our approach to art should be impersonal and academic. “The claims I’m making for art,” de Botton said, “are simply the claims that we naturally make around music or around poetry. We’re much more relaxed around those art forms. We’re willing to ask, ‘How could this find a place in my heart?’”

On a stroll with Rothman through the Frick, de Botton offered practical examples of what he means:

Museums, de Botton believes, would be more energetic, unpredictable, and useful places if curators thought less like professors and more like therapists.

Instead of being organized by period—“British eighteenth-century painting,” say—galleries could be organized around human-scale themes, like marriage, aging, and work. Rather than providing art-historical trivia, wall text might address personal questions: How do I stop envying my friends? How can I be more patient? Where can I find more beauty in my life? …

The word “therapy”—a “big, simple, vulgar word”—is meant, de Botton said, to be taken broadly. It can be therapeutic to acknowledge “the ugly, the complicated,” or to be reminded of one’s neglected, inner possibilities. Contemplating Bellini’s “St. Francis in the Desert,” what struck de Botton wasn’t Francis’s story, per se, but Bellini’s attention to detail—a dirty hare amongst the rocks, a perfect little town in the distance, the Saint’s toes. “This picture can make us feel guilty, and a bit sad, about how we’ve neglected close observation,” he said. “We rush through experience. We’re on our phones. But that’s also why it’s moving. My theory is that many of the things that move us are things we long for but find hard to do.” (In a video from 2010, the Frick’s former curator, Colin Bailey, offered an alternate, but still de Bottonian, reaction: “The picture gives us comfort because it seems so restful, so joyous, so joyful.”)

(Image of Saint Francis in the Desert by Giovanni Bellinni, 1480, via Wikimedia Commons)

Julia Ioffe highlights the growing extremism of the Heritage Foundation:

DeMint was known nationally as a warrior for purity, spending more of his time seeking out like-minded candidates for the U.S. Senate rather than passing legislation. But, at Heritage, DeMint found kindred spirits in [Chairman of the Board Thomas] Saunders and [Heritage Action CEO Michael] Needham, who created a Heritage Action scorecard to grade Republican members of Congress on their ideological mettle. (The standard is so high that, at this writing, the House Republican caucus gets a paltry 66 percent rating.)

Among the consequences of Heritage’s transformation:

With DeMint’s arrival, Heritage’s government relations team, which once boasted the ability to meet with 250 GOP and as many as 40 Democratic congressmen on any given day, disappeared. “The people at government affairs would go down to the Hill, and they had Hill folks saying, ‘Listen, we don’t want to meet with you because of what the folks at Heritage Action did yesterday,’” says the former Heritage staffer. Heritage analysts now have a hard time getting meetings on the Hill, even with Republicans. The congressional staffer told me that, for many Republican members of the House, “their research staff is probably not dealing much with Heritage anymore. They’re systematically going elsewhere for their information.”

Pareene chimes in:

Truth be told, Heritage was always mostly political hacks, they just used to be effective political hacks with a realistic agenda. What was different now was the cheerful absense of any coherent and/or achievable goal — beyond fundraising and image-boosting for Heritage Action itself.

How the American Humane Association – which confers the “No Animals Were Harmed” label on movies – sells itself:

The organization is now under fire:

A Husky dog was punched repeatedly in its diaphragm on Disney’s 2006 Antarctic sledding movie Eight Below, starring Paul Walker, and a chipmunk was fatally squashed in Paramount’s 2006 Matthew McConaughey–Sarah Jessica Parker romantic comedy Failure to Launch. In 2003, the American Humane Association chose not to publicly speak of the dozens of dead fish and squid that washed up on shore over four days during the filming of Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. Crew members had taken no precautions to protect marine life when they set off special-effects explosions in the ocean, according to the AHA rep on set. And the list goes on … All of these productions had AHA monitors on set.

An AHA employee describes as the organization’s 99.98 percent safety rating record as “a total B.S. number made up for PR purposes.” Nora Caplan-Bricker parses the expose:

[The Hollywood Reporter] lays [the] filmmaking fatalities at the feet of the American Humane Association, the non-profit that hands out the “No Animals Were Harmed” designation that is such a staple of TV and movie credits, building a portrait of an organization that is far too cozy with Hollywood to effectively police it. The regulator is actually on the movie industry’s payroll: AHA’s Film & TV Unit subsists largely on a multi-million dollar grant from the SAG-AFTRA actors’ union and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, and it’s currently working on a “fee-for-service” plan, under which producers will pay AHA to monitor sets starting as early as January. In other words, this litany of Hollywood’s furry casualties is a familiar parable of what happens when a powerful entity regulates itself.

Ezra checks in on the administration’s progress:

The worry, at this point, is that the site is working in ways that are visible but broken in ways that are harder to see. The Obama administration won’t answer direct questions on the percentage of “834s” — the forms insurers need to sign people up for the correct policies at the correct prices — that are coming through with errors. Robert Laszewski, a health-industry consultant with deep contacts among the insurers, told the National Journal the problem is getting better, but that his clients are still seeing a five percent error rate. That’s still too high.

The systems that determine whether applicants are eligible for insurance are also improving. But inside the administration there’s a recognition that it was error-ridden in the first six weeks of Obamacare — and so the question is how to handle the many people who unknowingly received an eligibility determination that can’t be trusted.

Still, it’s clear that HealthCare.Gov is improving — and, at this point, it’s improving reasonably quickly. It won’t work perfectly by the end of November but it might well work tolerably early in December. A political system that’s become overwhelmingly oriented towards pessimism on Obamacare will have to adjust as the system’s technological infrastructure improves.

Garance rattles off some of Healthcare.gov’s remaining problems:

• Ongoing site outages. The site had outages both this week and last week. It turns out that fixing one part of the site can crash other parts of it, and CMS says it expects intermittent site outages to continue in the weeks ahead.

• Capacity issues. At the height of interest in Healthcare.gov, as many as 250,000 people were on the site at once—five times more than the site is expected to be able to manage on November 30 under the best-case scenario.

• The return of the dreaded waiting room. “There will be times that volume on HealthCare.gov will exceed … demand, and we are preparing for that,” Bataille said. “If we experience extraordinary demand, consumers may not be immediately able to complete the application. They will be queued, in order to ensure a smoother process, and will experience some wait time.” The new online version of “your call will be answered in X minutes” is being touted as better than the last version, an “online waiting room” in which people had no idea how long they’d need to wait.

• Novel glitches. New bugs will continue to be discovered and need fixing, especially since every new fix risks causing trouble downstream.

Drum prematurely declares victory:

Republicans have run out of time, and they know it. Their fixation on Obamacare already looks sort of balmy—this weekend’s deal with Iran was designed to draw attention away from Obamacare? Seriously?—and it’s only going to look loopier as time goes by. Getting Obamacare to the end zone wasn’t easy, and Obama almost fumbled the ball at the one-yard line, but he’s finally won. There’s nothing left for conservatives to do. Love it or hate it, Obamacare is here to stay.

Liel Leibovitz explores the Orwellian effect of Papers, Please, a simple online game that establishes the player as “a bureaucrat at a border-crossing in a fictional totalitarian state”:

The metal gate goes up. Your station is open for business. People come streaming in. The rules, communicated by the government in the beginning of each level, are simple, telling you just who is to be let in and under what circumstances. The reality of your job, however, is infinitely more complex: What, for example, would you do with the mother whose papers are not in order but who begs you to let her in so that she could reunite with her long-lost son? Or the woman who begs for sanctuary from persecution in a neighboring state? The married couple, he with his papers in order and she without?

The questions aren’t just theoretical.

Each transgression from protocol will cost you dearly: With every act of kindness comes a steep fine, which means that heating bills go unpaid and medicine for loved ones unobtained. Each level ends with a short statement of your personal finances and their consequences. Without heat and medicine and food, children and spouses and parents get sick and die.

But for many, I suspect, such deprivations will never come to pass. The most terrifying thing about Papers, Please is the temptation to excel in it, to be the best border guard possible, the most well-oiled cog in the machine. This, after all, is a game, and like most games it invites its players to gradually hone their skills. By the time you get very good at examining passports for forgeries, work permits become mandatory as well. You learn to read different kinds of documents. An elaborate handbook is on hand to offer guidance. Mastering the technicalities is a tedious and time-consuming affair, but its rewards are immense—in the game, as in life, control brings with it a sense of order and peace.

Previous Dish on morality-based gaming here.

Micah Zenko takes their threats at face value:

The recognition of Israel’s nuclear capabilities will continue to matter over the next six months because, if we are to take Tel Aviv seriously, Israel could undertake a unilateral military attack against Iran’s known nuclear facilities. Should the IAEA’s outstanding questions about the possible military dimensions of Iran’s nuclear program go unaddressed, or access to sensitive sites remain restricted, there are intentionally ambiguous undefined conditions under which Israel might attack Iran, with or without the United States.

Steinglass warns Israel against such actions:

American Jews are largely liberal, and largely support Barack Obama; Mr Netanyahu’s relentless baiting of Mr Obama over the past five years has already tested their willingness to take Israel’s side. Now, Mr Netanyahu’s threat to stage a unilateral attack on Iran risks creating an unprecedented schism.

In every previous conflict between Israel and its regional enemies, even when Israel initiated the military action (as in the 1956 and 1967 wars, and to some extent the invasions of Lebanon and Gaza), American Jews have accepted Israeli assessments of the threat. This time, many of them won’t. An Israeli attack on Iran that resulted in Iranian and regional Shiite attacks on American targets and interests, against the wishes and best judgment of most Americans and many American Jews, could lead to an irreversible break. The fact is that Mr Netanyahu is wrong about the deal signed on Sunday: it reduces, rather than increases, the risk of an Iranian nuclear bomb. But even if Mr Netanyahu were right, an increase in the risk of an Iranian nuclear bomb poses nowhere near as great a threat to Israel’s security as losing the solidarity of American Jews.

Alex Altman expects it to come back to bite the president:

“No matter how we reform health care,” Obama said in 2009, “we will keep this promise: if you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. Period.” It’s not that simple. In order to participate in health-insurance exchanges, insurers needed to find a way to tamp down the high costs of premiums. As a result, many will narrow their networks, shrinking the range of doctors that are available to patients under their plan, experts say.

Chait counters:

Cohn argues that Obamacare isn’t to blame for limited network plans:

[A]ccording to nearly every source inside and outside the industry I’ve consulted, the primary reason carriers are offering so many small-network plans in the exchanges is that they believe consumers want them. Their marketing research suggests that, when forced to choose between paying higher premiums for wider networks or lower premiums for narrower networks, the majority of people will go for the cheaper insurance. The one survey I’ve seen on this question, by Morning Consult, suggests the carriers may be right: In that survey, nearly 60 percent of respondents said they’d opt for plans with fewer provider choices if meant saving on premiums.

 

Simon Henderson assesses Saudi Arabia’s public and private reactions to the deal with Iran:

Saudi princes and officials often cast Israel as the villain of the Middle East, implying and often saying outright that if it were not for the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, everything in the region would be fine. Prince Alwaleed skipped this line of argument completely, instead saying, “For the first time, Saudi Arabian interests and Israel are almost parallel. It’s incredible.”

Incredulity is also a good word to sum up the feelings at a roundtable in Washington D.C. that I attended a few days earlier, when U.S. officials, military officers, and think tankers questioned another prominent Saudi personality. Asked what the kingdom would do if Israeli aircraft flew over Saudi Arabia on their way to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities, the Saudi, whose remarks were off the record, replied: “Nothing. Why would we do anything? They would be doing what we want to happen.” Of course, after a pause, he added, “But we would issue a strong public note of condemnation for the intrusion into air space when it was all over.”

Despite the rhetoric coming from Riyadh, Keating is skeptical that the Saudis will express their displeasure by obtaining a nuke:

First, as Steve Cook wrote last year, Saudi Arabia “has no nuclear facilities and no scientific infrastructure to support them,” so building a bomb from scratch could be a long and daunting process.

But what if Saudi Arabia simply bought itself a nuke? A BBC Newsnight report earlier this month suggested that “nuclear weapons made in Pakistan on behalf of Saudi Arabia are now sitting ready for delivery” should the Saudis decide they want them.

In the midst of negotiations, the report seemed awfully conveniently timed to provide ammunition to the deal’s critics. Moreover, as Zachary Keck pointed out in the National Interest, Saudi interests aside, it’s not really clear what Pakistan would get out of this other than enraging its major source of military aid—the United States—as well as what it hopes will be a major energy supplier—Iran.

Walt’s read on the Saudi and Israeli freak-outs:

[T]he real issue isn’t whether Iran gets close to a bomb; the real issue is the long-term balance of power in the Persian Gulf and Middle East. Iran has far more power potential than any of the other states in the region: a larger population, a fairly sophisticated and well-educated middle class, some good universities, and abundant oil and gas to boost economic growth (if used wisely). If Iran ever escapes the shackles of international sanctions and puts some competent people in charge of its economy, it’s going to loom much larger in regional affairs over time. That prospect is what really lies behind the Israeli and Saudi concerns about the nuclear deal. Israel and Saudi Arabia don’t think Iran is going to get up one day and start lobbing warheads at its neighbors, and they probably don’t even believe that Iran would ever try the pointless act of nuclear blackmail. No, they’re just worried that a powerful Iran would over time exert greater influence in the region, in all the ways that major powers do. From the perspective of Tel Aviv and Riyadh, the goal is to try to keep Iran in a box for as long as possible — isolated, friendless, and artificially weakened.

Photo: Saudi newspapers headlining the deal made with major powers over Iran’s nuclear program are seen on November 25, 2013 in the capital Riyadh. By Fayez Nureldine/AFP/Getty Images)

The FDA is going after DNA testing company 23andMe. The FDA’s reasoning:

The FDA says it is concerned that consumers would misunderstand genetic marker information and self treat. For example, the agency cites the company for testing for versions of the BRCA gene that confers higher risk of breast cancer worrying that women might get a false positive test leading “a patient to undergo prophylactic surgery, chemoprevention, intensive screening, or other morbidity-inducing actions….”

Ronald Bailey rejects that logic:

What the test results would actually lead patients to do is to get another test and to talk with their physicians. The FDA also cites the genotype results that indicate the sensitivity of patients to the blood-thinning medication warfarin. Again, such results would be used by patients to talk with their doctors about their treatment regimens should the time come that they need to take the drug. In fact, in 2010 the FDA actually updated its rules to recommend genetic testing to set the proper warfarin dosages for patients.

Razib Khan’s take:

23andMe has been moving aggressively to emphasize its medical, as opposed to genealogical, services over the past year. But this isn’t the story of one firm. This is the story of government response to very important structural shifts occurring in the medical delivery system of the United States. The government could potentially bankrupt 23andMe, but taking a step back that would still be like the RIAA managing to take down Napster. The information is coming, and if there’s one thing that can overpower state planning it is consumer demand. Unless the US government wants to ban their citizens from receiving their own genetic data they’re just putting off the inevitable outsourcing of various interpretation services. Engagement would probably be the better long term bet, but I don’t see that happening.

Alex Tabarrok weighs in:

The FDA wants to regulate genetic tests as a high-risk medical device that cannot be sold until and unless the FDA permits it be sold.

Moreover, the FDA wants to judge not the analytic validity of the tests, whether the tests accurately read the genetic code as the firms promise (already regulated under the [Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA)]) but the clinical validity, whether particular identified alleles are causal for conditions or disease. The latter requirement is the death-knell for the products because of the expense and time it takes to prove specific genes are causal for diseases. Moreover, it means that firms like 23andMe will not be able to tell consumers about their own DNA but instead will only be allowed to offer a peek at the sections of code that the FDA has deemed it ok for consumers to see.

Alternatively, firms may be allowed to sequence a consumer’s genetic code and even report it to them but they will not be allowed to tell consumers what the letters mean. Here is why I think the FDA’s actions are unconstitutional. Reading an individual’s code is safe and effective. Interpreting the code and communicating opinions about it may or may not be safe–just like all communication–but it falls squarely under the First Amendment.