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Nobel Prize-winning author Doris Lessing died last Sunday at the age of 94. Her life, like her work, was varied:

A generous, open minded character, she was, at various stages of her life, a communist, socialist, feminist, atheist, Laingian and finally a Sufi. To each of these beliefs, she brought a tireless enthusiasm that sometimes obscured judgment. She fell for ideas, digested then, outgrew them and then moved on. While she still believed, she wrote novels out of the experience. Her interests were varied but her ability to make fascinating fiction out of life was constant.

If she had written nothing else, The Golden Notebook (1962) would have secured Doris Lessing a place in the hall of fame. With it, she wrote about “new women” in a new kind of novel, one that stretched the boundaries of realist fiction.

Kim Murphy elaborates on The Golden Notebook:

In her work, Lessing raised but didn’t necessarily answer the existential questions of women’s lives in the 1960s and beyond: Is it better to be married or single? How do you raise children and have a professional life? Is a woman denying her intellect if she longs for a man to love her? Why do older women still feel passion, and what is acceptable for them to do about it? If my life is so perfect, why do I feel as though I’m losing my mind? …

“The Golden Notebook” suggested that humanity, male and female, is driven by a common yearning: “Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who would really understand me, who’d be kind to me,” one of the characters said. “That’s what people really want, if they’re telling the truth.”

The above video from 2007 captures Lessing’s reaction to the news that she won the Nobel Prize. Her first words? “Oh, Christ!” When she was offered the title of “Dame” in 1992, she was similarly dismissive, rejecting the honor by writing, “There is something ruritannical about honours given in the name of a non-existent Empire.” David Ulin praises her as someone who believed “that literature should recognize no boundaries, that the best work moves us by challenging our preconceptions, whether they have to do with content or with form”:

This, in some ways, could be read as Lessing’s legacy: Don’t stand on ceremony, question your beliefs and prejudices and always, always be prepared to change your mind.

Justin Cartwright remembers a woman “truly unique in her views and in her take on life.” Sophia Barnes argues that “[t]he diversity of Lessing’s oeuvre goes hand in hand with the impossibility – and I would argue the futility – of trying to categorise her”:

A recent collection of scholarly essays on her work was titled Border Crossings, in reference to her seemingly endless capacity for moving between spaces, genres, forms and modes of thinking. What is important to emphasise is that in crossing borders Lessing did not leave what she had experienced or thought behind; rather, she constantly moved back and forth across borders, displaying an adaptive historical consciousness which was vital to the whole body of her fiction.. … She was a postmodernist before postmodernism, a post-communist before the fall of the Iron Curtain, and perhaps both more and less of a feminist than she has often been seen to be. She was without doubt a radical, in the truest sense: intellectually uncompromising, absolutely individual, always striving with the boundaries of her form and the intellectual climate of her age.

From her 2007 Nobel lecture:

We are a jaded lot, we in our threatened world. We are good for irony and even cynicism. Some words and ideas we hardly use, so worn out have they become. But we may want to restore some words that have lost their potency.

We have a treasure-house of literature, going back to the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans. It is all there, this wealth of literature, to be discovered again and again by whoever is lucky enough to come upon it. A treasure. Suppose it did not exist. How impoverished, how empty we would be. We own a legacy of languages, poems, histories, and it is not one that will ever be exhausted. It is there, always.

The New Yorker has assembled a collection of her pieces here. The New Statesman has republished her first piece for the magazine, from 1956, on being refused entry into South Africa. Her 1988 interview with the Paris Review is here.

Drezner considers it unwise, to say the least:

Israeli jaw-jawing about a military strike puts it into a corner with no good exit option.  Netanyahu’s definition of a bad nuclear deal seems to include… any nuclear deal.  So say that one is negotiated.  What can Israel do then?  Netanyahu could follow through on his rhetoric and launch a unilateral strike.  Maybe that would set Iran back a few years.  It would also rupture any deal, accelerate Iran’s nuclear ambitions, invite unconventional retaliation from Iran and its proxies, and isolate Israel even further.  If Netanyahu doesn’t follow through on his rhetoric, then every disparaging Israeli quote about Obama’s volte-face on Syria will be thrown back at the Israeli security establishment.  Times a hundred.

Larison piles on:

Attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities would make the Iranian government more interested in acquiring a nuclear weapon, so an Israeli strike couldn’t ever truly “prevent” that outcome in any case. Once a deal is negotiated, I suspect that Netanyahu will accept it as a fait accompli, because there is nothing else he plausibly could do that wouldn’t risk a huge breach between the U.S. and Israel.

Robert Merry chimes in:

Netanyahu believes, based on past experience, that he can set in motion pressures and forces within the American polity that will ensure the demise of Obama’s delicate reach-out to Iran. And he is willing to risk a rupture with this administration in order to do so because he doesn’t think the risk is very great.

In response to Merry, Larison bets that “the administration will press ahead with negotiations despite Israeli and Congressional complaints”:

I suspect that Obama correctly assumes that his handling of Iran has broader international and domestic support than the critics of the negotiations realize. Netanyahu may think that most Americans will sympathize with his position, but if so he is very likely misreading the public mood and potentially inviting a backlash against himself.

Drum joins the conversation:

Netanyahu obviously has good reason to think that Republicans will support him in this unreservedly, but he better be careful. Even Obama-hating tea party types can start to get a little antsy when a foreign leader is so obviously contemptuous of American interests and the American president.

Kalev Leetaru maps it:

[W]hat we are able to see in the crisp mathematical precision of the computerized graphs and maps above is just how vast and intense the negative coverage really is. As a result, we can move beyond anecdotes like “It’s getting a lot of coverage” to precise statements like “More than 80 percent of all television news shows are talking about it.”

We can also gaze through the eyes of the news media and literally map the deep pessimism towards the law as it spreads across the nation. This by itself is a key finding: just how much the media has been covering Obamacare and, in particular, how key the GOP’s tying of Obamacare to the government shutdown was in bringing it to the forefront.

Chait tries to calm the media down:

Lost in the Keep Your Plan imbroglio, it appears that healthcare.gov has already reached a point of functionality. It can currently handle 20–25,000 simultaneous users. That may or may not qualify as a full Hanukkah Miracle fixed website by the end of the month, but it’s probably enough, at the very least, to let the law muddle through.

All sorts of things will happen to Obamacare in the next few months. At least some of those things will be bad, because any large enough enterprise, public or private, has bad things happen. One thing that can be predicted is that more and more people will start signing up for Obamacare between now and the end of March, which means the constituency for the law will steadily grow. There will still be a constituency against the law, and possibly future failures will enlarge it, too.

But at some point, having state exchanges where people buy private insurance, with rules preventing abusive practices, will simply be part of the backdrop of health insurance.

Waldman adds:

I realize that there’s an impulse as a reporter or a pundit to cast everything in the most dramatic terms possible. “Things are neither perfect nor disastrous” is a much less interesting assertion to make than “Everything has changed! Earth-shattering developments are afoot!” But that happens to be the truth.

Earlier Dish on media coverage of Obamacare here.

Nate Cohn parses recent polling:

Several new surveys show that the Democratic advantage on the generic congressional ballot—the one that emerged during the shutdown—has faded or even evaporated. The three live interview surveys conducted more than two weeks after the shutdown show a dead heat, with the Republicans gaining an average of a net-5 points over the previous survey. Fox News, the newest poll, even shows the Republicans ahead by three points among registered voters.

A “dead heat” among registered voters all but ends Democratic hopes of retaking the House, notwithstanding another political earthquake. They might not even gain seats, since Democrats hold more vulnerable districts than Republicans.

He cautions against reading too much into these numbers:

[I]t would be foolish to assume that the environment will remain this bad for Democrats, just as it was wrong to assume that the GOP was doomed by the shutdown. Frustration will probably subside if and when Obamacare gets up and running. Frustration could even turn into a bit of renewed support if the president benefits from lowered expectations. In the end, the public has a short memory. So, apparently, do most commentators, who have forgotten that they were frothing about the end of the Republican Party as recently as three weeks ago.

Waldman made related points late last week:

Over the next year, the rest of the law will be implemented. There may be problems here and there, but overall it will probably go reasonably well. There will be plenty of things Democrats can point to in order to convince people that it was a good idea, like the fact that now nobody can be denied coverage because of a pre-existing condition, or the fact that millions of people who couldn’t afford coverage or were denied before now have it. There will also be things Republicans will say to try to convince people it was a terrible idea, like the fact that premiums didn’t plummet, and health care is still expensive, and Obamacare didn’t give every little girl a pony.

And what else will happen in the next year? Other things. The economy may get worse, or it may get better. There may be a foreign crisis. Controversies we can’t yet anticipate will emerge, explode, then disappear. A young singer may move her posterior about in a suggestive manner, causing a nation to drop everything and talk about nothing else for a week. We might start talking about immigration reform again. There’s going to be another budget battle. In other words, all sorts of things could affect the next election, and the election after that.

I vented a little – well more than a little – in my Sunday Times column last week. It was about the amazement that many New Yorkers have that anyone could even think of moving back to DC once they’ve gotten a taste of the Big Apple. That a gay man would pick DC over NYC seems to strike a particularly raw and incredulous nerve. But, of course, one of the things I miss is the community I grew up in as an adult, the friendships over the decades, and the particular way of gay life that has evolved in DC more potently than in many cities with much stronger gay reputations.

And now it’s not just me saying it … but even the New York Times. Jeremy Peters’ piece is a little over-stated but its core argument is indisputably true. Washington has always been a very gay city, and still is:

Gary J. Gates, who studies census data for the Williams Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, reports that Washington has 18.1 same-sex couples per 1,000 households. That places it eighth among cities with populations larger than 250,000. Sorry, New York, but you have only 8.75 same-sex couples per 1,000 households. In Manhattan alone, it’s higher, at 16.7, but still not higher than D.C. The top three are San Francisco (30.3 per 1,000), Seattle (23) and Oakland (21). The numbers capture only those who acknowledge being in a same-sex relationship.

What Peters observes – after living in New York for six years – is the gay sophistication of the place. He argues that the stunning success of the civil rights movement, which reached its tipping point under Obama, has eroded the closet to the point of irrelevance, and thereby transformed the place. That’s certainly true, but I knew gay Washington before the Obama era, and it wasn’t ever as uptight as some would have you believe.

There was always a thriving nightlife – from the great old discos, Tracks and Lost and Found to one of the cradles of House music, the Clubhouse. The DC Eagle is as venerable as the New York version. The community’s response to the AIDS crisis was deep and wide. And the military and Congress brought gays from all over the country to the capital – and not simply because they were gay. So there was always a deep bench of gay cultural diversity in DC that was more like the rest of the country than the flypaper destinations like New York or San Francisco or Miami. And if you’ve never two-stepped at a gay country bar, then Remingtons will be a revelation. For me, a little English kid, it was quite simply overwhelmingly wonderful.

In that way, I think DC was ahead of its time as well as behind it. It had the kernel of a really thriving, large, and diverse gay community, but inside a hard shell of fear and the closet. I don’t want to minimize the fear.

When I was openly gay in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was a real novelty. I could almost feel the tension in some gay social circles as I entered: Would I expose them? Why did I think I could get away with being open in a city whose homosexual presence had always been defined by maximal discretion? When I came out as HIV-positive in the mid-90s, the was another collective dropping of jaws. But over the years, as the gay and (to a much lesser extent) HIV closets eroded, something that had always been there began to breathe and grow into something more mature and more integrated than the beachheads of gay visibility and power. So much so, in fact, that New York today seems a little dated in comparison, even a little stereotypical with its huge fashion and theater scenes.

Then the little things: the gay press in DC is vastly superior to NYC. The infrastructure – from booming 14th Street to Columbia Heights as well as Adams Morgan and Tacoma Park – is often newer and fresher and more modern than New York. A gym like Vida can be a little much – but it no longer has any inferiority complex toward New York. Yes, the white men are, to my mind, simply way hotter in NYC than DC. The DC gays are perfectly formed, but also a little too squeaky clean. A little less deoderant and a little more body and facial hair would be a blessing. But then what does New York have that compares with Bear Happy Hour at Town or a gay sports bar legend called “Nellie’s” that has plastered on its exterior: “Are you Nellie enough?” That kind of edge – integrating mainstream with the subculture and finding a new cultural fusion of the two is something really coming into its own in the nation’s capital. New York, in contrast, seems – dare I say it? – a little played out.

(Photo: Craig Hollander, left, and his partner Gary Unger enjoy the Oscars at Shaw’s Tavern, a DC gastropub managed by a largely gay staff which attracts straight and gay patrons alike. Both men enjoy living openly gay in the district. ‘DC is very much gay-friendly,’ says Gary. ‘You don’t have to look over your shoulders anymore’. By Astrid Riecken/Washington Post/Getty.)

The kids are taking up Victorian martial arts:

Bartitsu was developed by Edward Barton-Wright, a British engineer who moved to Japan in 1895. After returning to London, just before the turn of the century, he created a mixed martial art hybrid, combining elements of judo, jujitsu, British boxing, and fighting with a walking stick. The style was promoted to the middle and upper classes during a time when they were becoming increasingly worried about the street gangs and crime publicized by the tabloid newspapers.

For a brief period, Bartitsu was “all the rage for fashionable ladies and gentlemen” – but the fad soon passed. Now, after a century of dormancy, it’s back:

Tony Wolf, a fight choreographer, martial arts instructor, and self-described ‘walking bartitsu encyclopedia’, serves as editor of EJMAS: Journal of Manly Arts, a scholarly online journal focusing on the martial arts and combat sports of the Victorian and Edwardian eras. As a founding member of The Bartitsu Society, Wolf explains how he and other members spent years researching and compiling archival material of the era in order to “bring bartitsu back to life” and move it online. “Then we created neo-bartitsu, which is really bartitsu as it might have been,” Wolf says.

There is no such thing as an accredited bartitsu instructor, and Wolf says that the group has worked hard to keep the art open-source and apolitical. Each instructor has his own blend of practical self-defense and historical recreation. But they all feature the principles that Barton-Wright explained in 1899:

1. To disturb the equilibrium of your assailant.
2. To surprise him before he has time to regain his balance and use his strength.
3. If necessary, to subject the joints of any parts of his body, whether neck, shoulder, elbow, wrist, back, knee, ankle, etc. to strains that they are anatomically and mechanically unable to resist. …

A Google search brings up dozens of clubs and meetup groups around the country with class titles including “Sparring with Sherlock” and “Kicking Ass in a Corset: Bartitsu for Ladies.”

Coin is a single card that stores all credit, debit, gift, membership or loyalty card data in one place:

Coin looks and works exactly like a credit or a debit card. You add your card information to it using the mobile app and a free accessory they provide. You connect the accessory to your phone and then swipe your current cards through it. The accessory transfers the card data to the phone app and saves it there. Then you take a photo of the card to help you identify it. The app then transfers the card data to the Coin. The app can hold an unlimited number of card data but Coin itself can store up to eight.

Ross Rubin calls Coin a “pricey convenience for those who carry many cards”:

Coin would appear to be convenient, or at least trade a bit of button manipulation for bulk, but its developers plan to sell it for $100 after a deep-discount preorder phase ends. And once you buy it, you’ll have to keep paying. While Coin doesn’t have a subscription fee, its nonrechargeable battery expires after two years, creating an effective cost of about $50 per year. What if Coin is gobbled up by an ATM and not released?

Christopher Mims says that it “sounds like a great idea … until you realize that … your ability to pay for anything becomes entirely dependent on the battery life of your smartphone”:

In those odd moments that you find yourself with a dead phone battery, it ceases to function. That might not happen so often, but think of the times it might, and how they’re precisely those moments you would most want your credit cards to function: Late at night, when you need to pay a cab, tow truck, restaurant bill, or whatever else you need to get you back to a place where you can charge your phone again.

Will Oremus fails to see this as a “fatal” drawback:

People are already so reliant on their phones that they’re terrified of letting the battery run low. If you want a safeguard, why not keep just one physical credit card in your wallet as insurance? … To me, the only real problem with Coin is that it feels like a stopgap technology, like those CD-changer cartridges that were popular for a little while before everyone switched to mp3s. Replacing eight cards with one may lighten your load by an ounce or two, but is that enough to convince people to take the leap of faith involved in adopting a new payment system? Even early adopters could be forgiven for holding out for a more comprehensive digital wallet—the kind that will let you pay for everything just by tapping your phone, or perhaps some other, even more seamless gesture.

Lauren DeLisa Coleman writes that while “for now, Coin is the coolest payment gadget available,” it’s “not the only company focused on innovating payment”:

In fact, banks are eager to move beyond magnetic strip cards into secure chip cards. “The primary security problem with cards in the U.S. is that it’s easy to capture and replay the contents of the [magnetic] stripe. When done by criminals, this is called skimming,” says Paul Kocher, President and Chief Scientist at Cryptography Research Inc. (CRI), a San Francisco-based R&D security company. “Coin is essentially doing the same thing, but for the cardholder’s benefit. … The U.S. will be rolling out chip cards soon in preparation for transaction liability rule changes in 2015, and Coin won’t work with the new cards.”

Looking forward to asterisk in any future Bloomberg coverage of Obama admin anti-leak campaign http://t.co/QB9tUG4hgI

— Josh Gerstein (@joshgerstein) November 16, 2013

It sure looks more and more like it:

A reporter for Bloomberg News who worked on an unpublished article about China, which employees for the company said had been killed for political reasons by top Bloomberg editors, was suspended last week by managers. The reporter, Michael Forsythe, was based in Hong Kong and has written award-winning investigative articles on China. He met with supervisors and was placed on leave, said two Bloomberg employees with knowledge of the situation, which was supposed to be private.

Joshua Keating sees a clash between Bloomberg’s editorial and business interests:

According to unnamed Bloomberg employees, that story had been killed over fears that the company, whose news website is already blocked in China, would be expelled entirely. Amazingly, this whole story may have been first broken in a video by Taiwan’s Next Media Animation studio, which in its own inimitable way implied that the whole affair may be tied to soon-to-be-ex-Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s business interests. That may be a stretch, but there certainly does seem to be an inherent conflict between the goals of Bloomberg’s top-notch investigative team, and the company’s interest in maintaining its lucrative terminal business in China. Last week, the New York Times’  Ed Wong, who seems to be getting pretty unfettered reports from inside the company, reported on the existence of “Code 204,” a line of coding that Bloomberg editors attach to certain articles on political and social issues in China so that they don’t appear on financial terminals on the mainland.

Dean Starkman is concerned:

There’s a lot, obviously, we don’t know—but that’s a problem in and of itself. Bloomberg’s hallmark – from its see-through headquarters to its entire corporate rationale – emphasizes transparency above all else. It was a key talking point, for instance, in its justly famous, successful lawsuit against the Federal Reserve’s secretive emergency lending programs during the crisis. … [This] issue is sensitive, involving unpublished material and personnel decisions. But suspending a reporter who is already involved in a very public controversy without further explanation is the opposite approach, in some ways very un-Bloomberg-like, and one unlikely to end the crisis.

Previous Dish on the scandal here.

Bernstein argues that the recent spate of anti-Obamacare stories is mostly a media-driven phenomenon:

The last media frenzy about Obama’s collapse (not counting a smaller one over Syria) came in the spring, when Triple Scandals threatened to destroy him. But those scandals fizzled prematurely, leaving the scandal-loving press with a bad case of frustration. Indeed, as Brandon Nyhan was writing before those Triple Scandals, Obama was way overdue for something like that. When it didn’t pan out, the press was presumably still primed for a pile-on, and even though ACA implementation may not have been a promising topic, they worked with what they had.

In other words, it’s like Whitewater because it’s the result of the press primed and ready and waiting for something to blow up around. It’s different because there is a real story here, but that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with how the press is behaving. Like Whitewater, or like the Triple Scandals from April, the phony frenzy part of this will blow over soon. But not before there’s plenty of damage – to the reputation of much of the working press, that is. There’s this week’s real fiasco.

He follows-up at his blog:

It’s ugly out there, folks.

The two that set me off in particular today are Josh Kraushaar’s massive overinterpretation of the events of last week, leading him to believe that Democrats are close to abandoning the ACA. And then Todd Purdom on the imminent collapse of “Big Government progressivism” if the ACA doesn’t work well (complete with supporting quotes from William Galston).

There’s just a lot of nonsense right now. Which is pretty much what happens when these press frenzies get started, but it’s very frustrating. … yes, there is a substantive story on health care reform here, but what the press are up to is mostly just fantasy.

Drum chimes in:

 This has pretty obviously become a game of one-upsmanship, and it seems to be continuing this week. For a story to get attention, it has to be even more hysterical than anything that’s come before, so that’s what we’re getting. It’s a doom-mongering bubble.