Tag: Premium

Byron York thinks immigration reform can come back from the dead. Drum, on the other hand, can’t find a pulse:

[W]ould the business community like to see a comprehensive bill pass? Sure, probably. Is it a huge priority? No, not really. Are they willing to go along with the obvious reality that it can’t pass the House? It sure sounds like it.

Waldman wants Democrats to revive the immigration reform debate, even if it’s doomed:

The thing is, even if Obama were sure there was next to no chance of succeeding in passing reform, there are few things he could spend time talking about over the next few months that would do more damage to his opponents.

Think about it this way: What’s the GOP’s biggest problem right now? It’s the widespread perception that they’re a bunch of extremists who are willing to throw sand in the gears of the political system to fight anything Barack Obama wants to do, no matter the damage to everyone else, and even the sane people in the party don’t have the courage to stand up to Tea Party nuts. And what happens if we have a debate about immigration?

Well, you’d see a lot of establishment Republicans saying, “This is something we really should do.” And then you’d have a bunch of conservative Republicans saying, “No, no, no!” and making outlandish demands. And I’d rate the chances at somewhere around 99 percent that along the way some of those Tea Partiers will say some ugly things about immigrants that get lots of attention and cause Karl Rove and the rest of the national Republican establishment no end of agita.

Ezra chuckles at how, when it comes to tackling immigration reform, the GOP is “so scared that Obama is trying to destroy them that they’re destroying themselves”:

The unifying excuses for the GOP’s failure to move on immigration reform is that it’s all the Democrats’ fault. York quotes an unnamed Republican lawmaker saying, “Everyone has seen the bad faith exhibited by Obama and Reid during this fiscal fight and I can’t imagine anyone making the case that a final [immigration] product would reflect conservative principles in any fashion.” That’s similar, of course, to Labrador’s contention that Republicans should abandon immigration because Obama is trying to destroy the Republican Party.

The irony is that if you talk to White House officials, their belief has long been that immigration reform might be possible precisely because it would help the Republican Party politically and because the Senate was able to craft a bill that conservatives like Marco Rubio found ideologically congenial. They’ve even tried to keep Obama distant from the process so the Senate Republicans who participated would get much of the credit. If the price of immigration reform is a more competitive Republican Party in 2016, it’s a price the White House is happy to pay.

Up to 85 percent of many insects have same-sex sex. Scientists trying to figure out if this is due to the same evolutionary reasons for widespread homosexual behavior across many species have decided it’s just about confusion. The dudes think other dudes are chicks – yes, all ants look alike even to ants – and they fuck anything that moves and looks fuckable:

“Insects and spiders mate quick and dirty,” Dr. Scharf observes. “The cost of taking the time to identify the gender of mates or the cost of hesitation appears to be greater than the cost of making some mistakes.” … Almost 80 percent of the cases of homosexual behavior appeared to be the result of misidentification or belated identification of gender. In some cases, males carry around the scents of females they have just mated with, sending confusing signals to other males. In other cases, males and females look so similar to one another that males cannot tell if potential mates are female until after they have mounted them.

So many Justin Biebers, so little time. But species with high rates of homosexual sex also tend to be more generally horny, with a penchant for humping beer bottles and … well, basically anything. So you can put it down to bonobo-levels of sex. Or we may not understand it fully yet:

It is also possible, however, that sexual enthusiasm in bugs is related to other evolutionarily beneficial traits, the researchers say.” Homosexual behavior may be genomically linked to being more active, a better forager, or a better competitor,” says Dr. Schart. “So even though misidentifying mates isn’t a desirable trait, it’s part of a package of traits that leaves the insect better adapted overall.” To confirm their theory, the researchers plan to study the conditions that make homosexual behavior more or less likely in bugs. They also want to look more deeply into male resistance to homosexual mating.

Yeah: what about bug homophobia? At what point does the buggered bug turn around and say, “Hey, wait a minute …”?

Drum highlights these numbers from a new ABC/WaPo poll:

He adds:

Ted Cruz and his fellow tea partiers have done tremendous damage to the Republican Party brand. If I were sociopathic and didn’t care about my country, it would almost be enough to make me hope that they do it again a little closer to Election Day.

The question before the House, though, so to speak, is whether something shifted in the national psyche this past month. Did this stunt that brought the global economy to the brink of a catastrophic collapse deeply alter the public’s views of politics in ways that will last? My hope is yes, unless the Obama administration’s rank incompetence on its highest domestic priority might rescue the GOP from the oblivion it so richly deserves. What gives that hope some evidentiary clout are, to my mind, the following pieces of polling evidence: Independents now favor the Dems over the GOP by 46 – 35 percent; only one in five think Republicans are “interested in doing what’s best for the country,” while 77 percent think they’re “interested in what’s best for themselves politically.” As Sargent notes, among independents, that number is a staggering 14-83. Among moderates 18-81. Among seniors – yes, seniors – 24-74.

So you have a big majority blaming the GOP for the shutdown and near-default; and you have a massive majority (80 percent) believing the shutdown and near-default were bad for the country; and you have a massive majority believing that the GOP is a cynical exercize in partisanship as opposed to a party offering solutions to public problems in good faith.

Now, I’ve reluctantly come to believe all of this over the past ten years or so, but never has there been such an amen chorus. It could be that we just had an aha! moment about the degeneracy of the political right that could shape future politics the way the Gingrich shutdown did. For me, it makes backing Republicans next year unthinkable – and electing a Democratic House a win-win for the country and, perversely, for the cause of GOP reform in the long run. Could that judgment begin to entrench itself among the public as a whole?

Nate Cohn also analyzes the post-shutdown polling:

Last night, two surveys from CNN and ABC/Washington Post showed Democrats building an 8 point lead on the generic ballot; if Democrats could win the popular vote by such a wide margin, they would be well positioned to retake the House. But those 8 point leads might not be as strong as they look. These are polls of registered voters, not likely voters. And once the pollsters apply likely voter screens, the Democratic edge will narrow.

According to Nicholas Bagley and Austin Frakt:

As things stand, the rules the [HHS] secretary has put in place provide for an individualized application process. But nothing in the law prevents her from tweaking that approach. If necessary, she could draft a new rule instructing nonfunctional exchanges — including the federally operated ones — to issue blanket certifications on behalf of all of the uninsured in their states. With those blanket certifications, the penalty would be waived — and all without congressional action. With luck, it won’t come to that and the exchanges will all be operational long before mid-February. But if they aren’t, the Obama administration could spare the uninsured from being punished just because government officials couldn’t build a few websites on time.

Chait welcomes this news:

The real upside here is that, because it doesn’t require Congress, the administration could use a mandate delay to actually improve the functioning of the law, as opposed to using it to destroy the law, as Republicans in Congress have suggested.

The Republican’s mandate-delay plan was to pass a fixed-length mandate delay — they proposed this before any website failures became public — as a condition for reopening the federal government, and then just continue to trade mandate delays for bills reopening government, so that the mandate would be delayed indefinitely. That’s rank sabotage.

Delaying the individual mandate only for states that can’t get the exchanges working, and reinstituting it when the exchanges come online, would be a way of making the program work. Again, that option is a long way off. But it’s there if the need arises. The fact that Obama has the power to do it, and doesn’t need to rely on a Congress bent on repealing the law, probably kills off Congress’s enthusiasm for delaying the mandate.

Sarah Kliff is wary of delaying the individual mandate:

Delaying the individual mandate only in states with glitchy Web sites could, in a weird way, make the federal health-care coverage there a whole lot worse. Without the requirement to purchase coverage, fewer healthy people would likely sign up, and more sick people would flood the system. That, in turn, would likely lead to higher premiums next year in those states that are already having problems with HealthCare.gov. They would, after all, have to figure out a way to cover the costs of their very sick enrollees pool.

A slightly different option would be to extend the open enrollment period, as many investors already expect. The current period, which stretches from Oct. 1 through March 31, was set in Health and Human Services regulations. It doesn’t show up anywhere in the Affordable Care Act. Extending the open enrollment period would give people more time to enroll in coverage, but could still leave them vulnerable to at least part of the individual mandate penalty.

But extending the open enrollment period would, apparently, require action from Congress.

A reader writes:

Just a reality check:  Most coffee shops in Amsterdam charge between 10 and 15 euros per gram ($13 – $20) – and on rare occasions, more than that – for their highest quality weed, which, after conversion in dollars, is equal to or higher than the per gram street price for comparable weed in NYC or Washington D.C.  Perhaps medicinal marijuana users will feel pain from excessive taxation (assuming medical usage is not exempted from that), but for the recreational user, $15 – $20 per gram is a small price to pay for being able to obtain and consume high quality pot legally, without risk of incarceration.

I have bought any number of bottles of wine for $300 or more.  And some wines costs thousands of dollars per bottle because of scarcity.  I guaranty that each expensive bottle of wine that I have purchased was consumed within 8 hours, and pissed into the toilet shortly after that.  Whereas that ounce of high quality weed that I bought for $450 a month ago, and have used at every opportunity outside of work since, is still going strong.

Another reader:

I’ve followed the Dish since ’08 and I’m happy today to join your illustrious list of [tinypass_offer text=”subscribers”].Thank you for all you do; you have given me a deeper appreciation of poetry and divinity, not to mention politics. Regarding your short thread on “The Premium On Legal Weed”, enclosed is a pic of me in my medical cannabis grow catching up on the news after getting back from a seminar held for potential applicants to the new state-run marijuana market by the Washington State Liquor Control Board.

I’m not sure how many “industry voices” you get to hear, but as someone who has extensive knowledge growing the highest quality medicinal cannabis, and as someone who is considering his options and the merits of my state’s foray into unknown waters, I thought you might be interested in a “boots on the ground” report to go with the “ivory tower academics thinking they’re businessmen” side of the story I’ve seen so much of lately.

Your readers should know that the report Jacob Sullum references in Forbes about over-taxing leading to really expensive marijuana was made by Mark Kleiman’s company BOTEC. Washington State hired BOTEC as its lead consultant to draft the new rules.  And so along comes Kleiman in his Oct. 19 post writing that legal cannabis will be much, much cheaper than illegal cannabis.  He says, “Anyone who’s worried about the price of cannabis is spending far too much time stoned”.  Are his BOTEC analysts a bunch of stoners then? Because he seems to contradict the findings of his own report to the state of Washington.  To a small business owner weighing cost and benefit, blogger Kleiman seems to be talking from the opposite side of his mouth that he uses when he’s playing consultant Kleiman.

A lot of economists and policy wonks throw around a lot of predictions, but the fact is, nobody knows what will happen with the price of legal marijuana.  Let me share my outlook from what I’ve learned in the six years since I started growing and selling for a living.

Consumers of course want cheap weed.  Kleiman notes Colorado dispensaries selling $5 grams (untaxed). But guess what Mark?  That’s nothing; today it’s even cheaper than that!  In Seattle you can get it for $2 or $3 a gram; the product is called Mexican schwagg.  This is the stuff smuggled over the border in semi-truck tires, usually mostly seeds and stems, state of the art circa 1974.  Point being, consumers already have this choice in the black market but few buy it because its very poor quality.

The current black market may be illegal, but it is definitely an efficient one.  It’s a market that has been in place in Seattle for a very long time, and if there’s one thing Seattleites have learned to love with their improved coffee, improved microbrews and culinary culture, it’s improved buds.  Consumers expect better but want it cheaper, ’twas ever thus.  It’s more realistic to say cheap weed compared to what?  Cannabis comes in many grades. To not mention that we already have super cheap crappy weed seems to me disingenuous, or maybe he doesn’t know.

The conventional wisdom is that once marijuana’s fully legal, the prices will crash.  This may happen.  But based on what I’ve researched and lived, I’m siding with Mr. Sullum’s concern, for the following reasons. First, I seriously doubt how much cushion the black market provides to price support.  Can you name a commodity used by hundreds of millions, maybe billions of people daily that has maintained the same price since 1988? How about illicit drugs?  An eighth ounce bag of decent smoke has cost $40 on the street for 25 years.  I think gasoline was about a dollar a gallon in ’88.  Here in Seattle, home of Hempfest, it’s practically legal already, leading to wholesale prices that have already fallen 25-50% since medical dispensaries really took off about four years ago.  The War On Drugs has been a failure, most would agree, illicit drugs of all stripes have had their real prices go down.  You could say this war is also a failure at keeping prices high.  It’s not a stretch to think maybe illegality isn’t the big reverse price subsidy to the pot industry some people think it is.

People make a good point that economies of scale will bring down costs of production and distribution, and I definitely believe this to be true, to a small extent.  But I also think it’s true consumers I serve have been rightfully spoiled by the high level of product development lately; they expect the best.  When Kleiman equates weed to tea in a teabag or Marlboros in a pack, the practical product equivalent is freeze dried coffee or rot gut in a pop top can.  That’s because marijuana, unlike most plant crops, as you probably know, has trichomes, which break with handling; they’re fragile; they taste bad when grown poorly and keeping them in the good condition discerning buyers expect takes some work and skill. Nice flowers command the price they do because of the labor involved.  Demand is high because most growers aren’t very good at it.

I also think it’s probably safe to say that big factory grows (which already exist and supply the medical market) will probably have the same problems they already have in their quest to equal the quality of smaller ma-and-pa farms.  Budweiser doesn’t make an India Pale Ale.  Legal production may offer efficiencies to lower the price a little on some grades of product, but probably not the better ones, because here in western Washington it is practically legal already and broadly tolerated, even encouraged.  The big price shake-out has probably already occurred courtesy of the medical marijuana market.

Considering these views of price history, current consumer product expectations, a practically already legal environment, the comparative difficulty in producing and the high market demand for quality buds, we now have a very diverse existing market about to be taxed and heavily regulated for the first time. BOTEC’s reports say about 40% of the consumer’s new price will be excise taxes.  For growers, there are also new compliance costs, new testing costs, new security costs, difficulty obtaining banking services, difficulty writing off expenses on federal taxes, difficulty finding suitable real estate (some landlords here are bumping rents 20-40% if you’re cannabis related) etc., etc.  Market efficiencies will most likely not offset these new administration and tax expenses.

Kleiman blogs that this time next year the legal market’s prices will be much, much lower than prices in medical dispensaries today.  That’s a pipe dream. Real prices might decline in five years time, as they gradually have since the late ’80s, but if the Feds come in and add an excise tax on top of the states’, all bets are off.

Regarding this reader’s complaint that “blogger Kleiman seems to be talking from the opposite side of his mouth that he uses when he’s playing consultant Kleiman,” Jacob Sullum explains why Kleiman has changed his tune:

When I interviewed UCLA drug policy expert Mark Kleiman about marijuana legalization in Washington a couple of months ago, he worried that the state-licensed stores will have trouble competing with black-market dealers and medical marijuana dispensaries. He called the projected price advantage for those alternative sources “a big problem,” adding, “The legal market is going to have a hard time competing with the illegal market, but a particularly hard time competing with the untaxed, unregulated sort-of-legal market.” Kleiman, whose consulting firm, BOTEC, was hired to advise Washington’s marijuana regulators, now says he is more optimistic, partly because of the Justice Department’s August 29 memo suggesting that federal prosecutors will refrain from interfering with legalization as long as regulations are strict enough, which Deputy Attorney General James Cole issued a few days after I talked to Kleiman. “I think the DoJ announcement makes a big difference,” Kleiman says in an email message. “Of course things could change. But if they don’t, we’re going to see prices drop like stone.”

Kleiman adds that BOTEC’s June 28 projections suggesting that marijuana in state-licensed stores will cost two to three times what it costs in the black market were based on the assumption that legal pot would be grown indoors, which imposes additional regulatory and logistical burdens. But the Washington State Liquor Control Board later decided, perhaps partly in response to BOTEC’s projections, to allow outdoor growing as well. “Marijuana as a dirt-farmed licit product will be dirt-cheap,” Kleiman says.

(Photo: Dave Warden, a bud tender at Private Organic Therapy (P.O.T.), a non-profit co-operative medical marijuana dispensary, displays various types of marijuana available to patients on October 19, 2009 in Los Angeles, California. By David McNew/Getty Images)

A few male readers add the factor of unconsciousness to the thread:

I’m reminded of an incident that occurred while I was backpacking in South America in 1995. I was staying at a hostel in Chile with a friend, and went out for the night with a couple of local girls, one of whom lived/stayed at the hostel. We got real drunk. We danced and flirted. We went back to the hostel. I woke up with this girl on top of me, basically having sex with me. And to this day can’t remember what exactly happened – I just know it wasn’t consensual (on my part). I just shrugged it off, but it definitely wasn’t OK. If this was a guy (me?!) doing this to a girl, I think that it would be judged much more harshly. I don’t know what this says other than what you other contributors have said – there are a lot of shades of grey.

Another:

Well, here’s another similar story for the thread. First of all, this was years ago, when I was in college. And I was absolutely not traumatized by it at all.  In fact, it was pretty awesome.  But it could have been different …

So, this girl and I were just sort of starting to see each other.  Not “dating” per se, but we had had sex once or twice before.  In other words, a new, not-yet-committed kind of relationship. (Ultimately, it never really went past this stage.)

We were at her parent’s house for her birthday party.  Her parents let her have the place to celebrate – which was actually pretty cool of them.  You know, a safe place to drink, etc.  And not a crazy-big party or anything.  A lot of her friends from high school, maybe one or two others from college.  So she was pretty much the only person I knew there, but I was her (informal) date for the party of course.

Anyway, later in the evening I got a pretty bad headache.  One of those (thank God) rare ones that makes you not care about anything.  So I bowed out and turned in, and assured her nothing was wrong – just a migraine from hell, gotta go to sleep.  Sometime later I woke up (no idea how much later) and we were having sex.  My headache was completely gone, so – as I mentioned – the sex was awesome.  And strange, to wake up in the middle of it like that.

So, it was implicit, I guess, that it was okay for her to have sex with me that night.  But really what happened was: she was drunk and horny, and just decided to fuck me.  Didn’t ask first, didn’t even wake me up; just moved my boxers out of the way, got me hard, and climbed on top.  And then I just happened to wake up.  (I mean come on, how could I not?  But ‘waking me up’ was way down on her priority list.)

Reverse the roles and that’s maybe-rape, and maybe just creepy as hell.  But your previous reader is right – there are all kinds of shades of grey on this topic.  And I think in a situation like this – the difference between “cool” and “creepy” – is also the difference between trauma and no trauma.  I mean, how society defines this particular act also influences how we, individually, would define it.

Another story, with a different angle:

I am a male. A large male. A strong male. A not “unbelievable pussy” male. I am a former bouncer in a bar, and have been in more brawls than anyone outside of security/bouncing would normally be in. I take martial arts. I can take pretty much anyone down.

I was in a marriage with an unstable woman who became more unstable as the marriage proceeded. For the record, we had two kids and I tried to make things work and get her to go to counseling – which she would go to and work on sometimes, but not enough. My wife would at times demand sex when I wasn’t interested. I knew that the pain that would follow if I refused. She would make the next month of my life a living hell.

I was coerced into having sex out of fear of a month of emotional pain and emotional abuse and screaming and yelling – and sometimes physical violence – from her to me. I never hit her ever, even if it was part of my personality to hit a woman (which it isn’t), my mom would have killed me if I’d ever even raised a hand.

I called myself “the hairy dildo” to my friends as I lamented the demands and threats my wife made. Is it marital rape? Or something in between rape and bad sex?

I know that I feel awful about being used and forced in that context – that sex had the love and connection part removed for her to get her rocks off – especially because if I ever wanted sex and she said no, that was the end of anything; I respect that boundary. The one time in our 18-year relationship that I “wheedled” my way into sex that she really didn’t want to have (but she explicitly said yes to) she took to calling “rape”. After our marriage ended, she told people I had maritally raped her in that instance. When I challenged her on her claim, she said, “but I really didn’t want to, so technically that’s rape.”

Aatif Rashid contrasts The Newsroom with the recently canceled BBC series The Hour:

Unlike The Hour, [The Newsroom] doesn’t take the inherently liberal agenda of journalism seriously. Journalism has always been a liberal institution, and while this may give some credence to the conservative argument about a liberal media bias, it makes sense when one considers that the function of a journalist is to reveal information that the existing power structures won’t reveal, to in a sense challenge the dominance of the institutions by giving a voice to the voiceless.

The Hour takes this liberal agenda seriously. Journalists like [The Hour‘s] Freddie go out of their way to depict immigrants in a climate of xenophobia, gay people in a climate of homophobia, or anti-war protestors in a climate of war mongering. Additionally, The Hour tackled the issue of government censorship directly in its first season, pitting the new team of journalists against government ministers trying to influence the coverage.

The Hour is also not afraid to skirt the extreme liberal edge of politics (namely, communism). Not only are Freddie’s liberal views tinged with Communist ideas (he considers quoting Marx in his interview), but the first season also contains a significant plotline about a potential Communist spy in the BBC. When this spy is finally revealed, however, the show doesn’t sanctimoniously glorify his downfall but allows him a more subtle and conflicted exit. “I don’t know why they don’t suspect us more, journalists,” the spy says to Freddie. “We’re thrust into world events, life changing events. They expect us not to be changed.” It’s a sentiment worthy of John le Carré and a piercing look at liberal journalism with The Hour‘s characteristic nuance.

Previous Dish on The Newsroom here, here, and here.

Bilge Ebiri outlines Kill Your Darlings, a new romantic thriller about the interlocking lives of Beat icons Allen Ginsberg, Lucien Carr, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs:

Together, the four of them begin to breathlessly explore the creation of a new creative movement, to be called the New Vision, which will rejuvenate American literature and tear down the stuffy, hidebound morality and culture all around them. The nation might think it’s fighting fascism abroad, but these guys are convinced the real fascists are here at home, hiding in the ironclad poetic rules of meter and rhyme, and in the sexual mores governing society. “Let’s make the patients come out and play,” they proclaim. “We need new words, new rhythms!”

What’s that you ask? Oh, right, the murder. While all this is happening, there’s also an older gentleman by the name of David Kammerer (Michael C. Hall), who expresses a bit too much fondness for Lu [Carr]. For all his sophistication, the man is clearly obsessed, pathetically, with this beautiful young boy. He also appears to have given Lu some of his bolder ideas, so the notion of said ideas now being shared with the likes of Ginsberg and Kerouac (all of whom Kammerer sees as potential romantic rivals) clearly drives him nuts. The film opens with Lu dropping Kammerer’s bleeding body into a river, so I’m not really spoiling anything when I say that the story builds up to the older man’s death. Is it a murder, or a blood sacrifice in the name of art? Is he the darling being killed, or is there something more symbolic going on here?

Andrew O’Hehir considers Darlings a solid entry in the recent wave of Beat Generation films, including 2010’s Howl, last year’s On The Road, and the upcoming Big Sur, which hits theaters next week:

One could argue that “Kill Your Darlings” could use a bit more unpredictable or hostile Ted Cruz energy, some sense of the threat the young Beats (who didn’t call themselves that until the ‘50s) posed to the social order. … But despite its unsure moments, “Kill Your Darlings” has considerable advantages over both Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s “Howl” and Walter Salles’ ambitious, hit-and-miss adaptation of Kerouac’s iconic “On the Road,” which featured Sam Riley and Kristen Stewart. For one thing, it actually has a plot, a crisp, compact (and mostly true) narrative that unfolds during the latter years of World War II, when Ginsberg first came to New York and met Lucien Carr.

But Jordan Larson suggests that all of these films have missed the mark:

[W]hat’s most problematic about these films isn’t their artistry but their authenticity. … One could argue that these films are only trying to honor the spirit of the Beat Generation, but can you separate the “essence” of a story or a movement from what its progenitors really said and did, and at what point in their lives? Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac were grown men who were also alcoholics, misogynists, and womanizers who killed themselves with substance abuse. Pretending Kerouac’s life was some sort of consequence-free dream not only does a disservice to viewers, but to the Beats, as well.

A.A. Dowd has mixed feelings about the new film but lauds the depiction of the young, brilliant lovers:

The saving grace of Kill Your Darlings is its sordid romantic angle, a narrative thread that pulls the film away from wink-wink allusions and into more serious emotional territory. At heart, this is a love triangle, one that drops a smitten Ginsberg between the charismatic Carr and the latter’s stalkerish benefactor, David Kammerer, similarly bewitched by the young, sexually ambiguous heartbreaker. Even before the scenario explodes into violence—culminating in a true-crime climax built from hard fact, hearsay, and invention— [director John] Krokidas has mined it for fine speculative melodrama.

Maria Popova offers high praise for David K. Randall’s Dreamland: Adventures in the Strange Science of Sleep. Below is an excerpt from Randall detailing the work of psychology professor Calvin Hall, who began collecting records of people’s dreams in the 1950s:

By the time he died in 1985, Hall had synopses of more than fifty thousand dreams from people of all age groups and nationalities. From this large database, he created a coding system that essentially treated each dream like it was a short story. He recorded, among other things, the dream’s setting, its number of characters and their genders, any dialogue, and whether what happened in the dream was pleasant or frightening. He also noted basics about each dreamer as well, such as age, gender, and where the person lived.

Hall introduced the world of dream interpretation to the world of data. He pored through his dream collection, bringing numbers and statistical rigor into a field that had been split into two extremes. He tested what was the most likely outcome of, say, dreaming about work. Would the dreamer be happy? Angry? And would the story hew close to reality or would the people in the dream act strange and out of character? If there were predictable outcomes, then maybe dreams followed some kind of pattern. Maybe they even mattered.

Hall’s conclusion was the opposite [of] Freud’s:

far from being full of hidden symbols, most dreams were remarkably straightforward and predictable. Dream plots were consistent enough that, just by knowing the cast of characters in a dream, Hall could forecast what would happen with surprising accuracy. A dream featuring a man whom the dreamer doesn’t know in real life, for instance, almost always entails a plot in which the stranger is aggressive. Adults tend to dream of other people they know, while kids usually dream of animals. About three out of every four characters in a man’s dream will be other men, while women tend to encounter an equal number of males and females. Most dreams take place in the dreamers’ homes or offices and, if they have to go somewhere, they drive cars or walk there. And not surprisingly, college students dream about sex more often than middle-aged adults.

Now that we’ve entered the era of smartphones and big data, dream research looks more promising than ever. Taylor Beck describes a new campaign that aims to create “the world’s largest database of dreams”:

Shadow: Community of Dreamers is a mobile app, crowdfunded with $50,000 on Kickstarter, which will wake people, collect dream reports by typing or talking, anonymize them and beam them into a searchable, analyzable online set. … “We can measure how global events affect mankind’s unconscious,” says Shadow adviser and Spanish neuroscientist Umberto León Domínguez, PhD, a researcher in the sleep and circadian rhythms lab at the University of Madrid School of Medicine’s Psychiatry department. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, natural disasters, terrorist attacks, elections, and the World Cup are examples of events Domínguez thinks impact people’s dreaming. Data collected on Shadow will show scientists how events like births, deaths, celebrity marriages, and pop cultural breakthroughs like documentaries or marketing campaigns affect global dreaming, too.