Comedian Amy Schumer says that Comedy Central steered her away from making a suicide joke on her TV show:
“I wanted to write a sketch where a guy tried to kill himself and had a failed suicide attempt, but then still had to come to work on Monday,” 32-year-old Schumer revealed in a recent radio interview. “And everyone knew, but he didn’t get his work done and he is like, ‘Well, I didn’t think I was going to be here.’ And we wanted it to be like he was a hipster — like, what would a failed suicide be as a hipster? And I think they were like, ‘that’s too sensitive’ or ‘too personal.’”
This prompts Emma Garman to wonder whether suicide is the last taboo in comedy. But Michelle Dean suspects Schumer’s set-up just wasn’t funny enough:
[I]t’s not that suicide is viewed as beyond comedy. It’s that a comedian who legitimately thinks the best joke about returning to work after a suicide is of the “hehe, I didn’t do my work” variety is probably not really zeroing in on what’s funny about the situation. I’m no comedian, of course, and can’t tell you what a better joke would be. I can only say, in this context, well: try something else. If you’re going to make suicide funny, well: make it funny. It shouldn’t take a genius to see that’s the only real rule of the game.
Garman cites Heathers as an example of a comedy that successfully worked the topic for laughs:
The low-budget movie, a box office flop that became hugely popular on cable, VHS and DVD, is widely considered one of the best high school comedies ever made. Yet the sophistication of the “Heathers” script, and the unremitting blackness of the humor, places it in a category of its own. High school’s toxic cauldron of peer pressure, mindless conformity and amoral superficiality — embodied in the ruling triad of popular girls all named Heather — is scriptwriter Daniel Waters’ primary target.
But he’s also savage on the self-glorifying earnestness brought forth by public tragedy. “Whether or not a teenager decides to kill themselves is the biggest decision of their life,” declares the hippie-ish guidance counselor in a TV broadcast. “With supervision from people like myself, we can help young people make the right decision.” It’s a rare film whose caustic sensibility packs as hard a punch twenty-five years on, but “Heathers” makes today’s teen comedies, even the more daring ones, seem anodyne. That suicide remains a verboten subject — at least in homegrown comedy — only underscores the audacity of Waters and the director, Michael Lehmann.
The New Yorker just published, for the first time in English, Albert Camus’s The Life of the Artist: A Mimodrama in Two Parts. Ryan Bloom, the translator, describes the short play this way:
Unlike his other plays, “La Vie d’Artiste” contains no dialogue; the text of the mime, or “mimodrame,” as Camus called it, is made up entirely of actions and directions. Composed in a clipped, elliptical style, and alternating between humor and horror, the play, appearing in English here for the first time, poses the question: How is one to be a pure, authentic artist and live in a world that corrupts and destroys purity?
Tracing the evolution of a painter’s fortunes, the entire work can be read in just a few minutes. The opening scene:
A small painter’s studio. Three walls, one of which is, perhaps, made of glass. These panels must be mobile. The studio is shabby but contains some attractive objects: an antique, a beautiful pitcher, some drawings, an old copper vase, two or three pieces of old furniture with dirty, but handsomely made, wood. Above all, the light.
As the curtain rises, the painter and his wife. He paints, she poses. They are shabbily, but tastefully, dressed. She shivers. He looks at her. He stops painting, goes to load up the stove. While he’s doing this, she gets up and goes over to hug him. He keeps her against him a moment, then takes her back to the pedestal on which she poses. She makes angry faces. They laugh. She returns to posing. He works.
Jonathan Schooler surveys research suggesting that belief in free will correlates with desirable personal traits:
Recently we found that a belief in free will is positively correlated with a host of positive attributes (including: self-control, life satisfaction, subjective happiness, mindfulness, and ambition) and negatively correlated with several less desirable traits (such as neuroticism and mind-wandering). Of course, we must be cautious in drawing causal inferences from correlational studies. Nevertheless, these findings are consistent with the view … that a belief in free will affords some positive benefits.
Given these various lines of research, it might be tempting to conclude that a belief in free will makes us better people. However, I think such a blanket conclusion is misguided for a number of reasons.
First, the strengths of the relationships between belief in free will and the assorted positive traits and behaviors reviewed above, though observed in various labs and typically statistically significant, are generally relatively modest. Indeed, some studies have failed to find these relationships at all.
Second, although the bulk of studies investigating the issue have found positive benefits of a belief in free will, there is also evidence that a disbelief in free will has its advantages. For example, a recent set of studies by Sharif and colleagues found that discouraging a belief in free will reduced people’s tendency to punish purely for the sake of vengeance.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, those who have concluded that a belief in free will is misguided would reasonably cringe at the notion that people who believe in a convenient fiction are “better” than those who have faced up to the reality of the situation.
Sabrina Rubin Erdeley profiles twin siblings Patterson and Georgia Inman, heirs to the Duke tobacco fortune who will inherit a $1 billion trust fund when they turn 21. A riveting excerpt:
Raised by two drug addicts with virtually unlimited wealth, Georgia and Patterson survived a gilded childhood that was also a horror story of Dickensian neglect and abuse. They were globe-trotting trust-fund babies who snorkeled in Fiji, owned a pet lion cub and considered it normal to bring loose diamonds to elementary school for show and tell.
And yet they also spent their childhoods inhaling freebase fumes, locked in cellars and deadbolted into their bedrooms at night in the secluded Wyoming mountains and on their ancestral South Carolina plantation. While their father spent millions on drug binges and extravagances, the children lived like terrified prisoners, kept at bay by a revolving door of some four dozen nannies and caregivers, underfed, undereducated, scarcely noticed except as objects of wrath.
“We were so fearful. I would hide in cupboards smaller than that,” says Georgia in her Southern-tinged lilt, pointing to a two-foot-tall cabinet in the kitchen of their spacious Park City, Utah, home where the twins, now 15, are reassembling their lives and residing with their mother, a woman who has seen her own share of trouble and who has only recently become a presence in her children’s lives. Patterson anxiously paces across the house’s open floor plan with its panoramic view of snowcapped mountains while he and his sister take turns narrating their harrowing history. Unfailingly polite, earnest and occasionally skittish, the twins radiate a sheltered naiveté that can make them seem far younger, or like visitors from another culture. For instance, Georgia confesses she’s never heard of the children’s party game musical chairs.
“What is it?” she asks, her eyes wide and curious. “No, really, tell me!”
Such frank sweetness, delivered in their mushy drawl, tends to take the edge off some of the harsh and surprising things they will say in the coming days, as when Georgia wistfully recalls her toddler years: “I remember walking to my dad’s room and holding a gun to his head. I don’t know what stopped me,” she says before bursting into giggles. “I’m sorry, that’s terrible, I laugh when I’m nervous or upset.”
A Pakistani cartoon features a burka-clad heroine:
Burka Avenger stars a girls’ school teacher who dons a burka to combat a cast of Taliban-esque villains with a decidedly conservative view of the appropriate role of women in society (the show contains clear parallels to Malala Yousafzai, the young campaigner for girls’ education in Pakistan who was shot in the head by the Taliban). To fight these nemeses, Jiya, the star of the show, employs a novel form of marshal arts that utilizes only books and pens. The message is clear: The pen is mightier than the sword.
It goes without saying that forcing women to wear anything is entirely unacceptable. The woman in question, however, is adopting the veil of her own free will, for the express purpose of obscuring her identity. When we ignore the character’s intentions behind willingly adopting a burka (as a disguise), it brings us back to good old-fashioned patriarchy, whereby a woman’s decisions are dwarfed by whatever message her clothing is putting out.
Elias Groll agrees that Jiya’s burka is not a simple symbol of oppression:
Ultimately, the show — in emphasizing the right of girls to an education — is doing something far more subversive with the burka than its critics contend. It’s also important to note that Jiya is not covered by day, and only puts on the burka when she assumes her crime-fighting alter ego. That she does so in a burka while running atop power lines to a sweet theme song seems all the better. Suddenly the woman in the burka has been turned into something altogether different — a pretty great superhero.
M. Sophia Newman suggests that the educational benefits of the show may extend beyond wealthier Pakistanis more likely to own a TV:
[A] 2007 economics study (PDF) documented an upswing in gender equality and education in India after the arrival of cable television. “Introducing cable increases the likelihood of current enrollment for girls by 3.5 percentage points,” the authors wrote, describing a shift over four times larger than the 0.83% increase created by the Pakistani government between 2005 and 2011. … By promoting middle-class values to the Pakistanis who do see the show, “Burka Avenger” might make the show’s tagline a real promise to Pakistan’s Islamist minority: “Don’t mess with the lady in black.”
For writers, learning a new language can be profoundly transformative:
Towards the end of Ray Bradbury’s novel “Fahrenheit 451” the reader comes across something whose significance exceeds the confines of the story. It is the scene where Montague meets the “book people.” In a world where printed texts are banned, they have dedicated their lives to preserving the “great books” of the humankind; each commits a book to memory and spends the whole life reciting it. They are living texts, these people, language incarnated. Apart from the masterpieces that inhabit them, they don’t mean much. Their bodies matter as little as the paper on which a book is printed. In a way, a writer who has changed languages is not very different from these people. In the long run, because of their compulsive preoccupation with linguistic precision and stylistic perfection, a colonization of sorts takes place: language penetrates all the details of that writer’s life, it informs and re-shapes it, it proclaims its dominion over her – it takes over. The writer’s self is now under the occupation of an invading power: her own writing in the new language.
In a certain sense, then, it could be said that in the end you don’t really change languages; the language changes you.
At a deeper, more personal level, writing literature in another language has a distinctly performative dimension: as you do it something happens to you, the language acts upon you. The book you are writing ends up writing you in turn. The result is a “ghostification” of sorts. For to change languages as a writer is to undergo a process of dematerialization: before you know it, you are language more than anything else. One day, suddenly, a certain intuition starts visiting you, namely that you are not made primarily out of flesh anymore, but out of lines and rhymes, of rhetorical strategies and narrative patterns. Just like the “book people,” you don’t mean much apart the texts that inhabit you. More than a man or a woman of flesh and blood, you are now rather a fleshing out of the language itself, a literary project, very much like the books you write. The writer who has changed languages is truly a ghost writer – the only one worthy of the name.
Allow me to think aloud a bit about the question of boycotting the Sochi Olympics or of asking foreign athletes to perform some act of civil disobedience. You wrote in your response to the Dissent of the Day:
The reason this may be the best form of civil disobedience is that it would have the maximum television exposure and therefore the maximum visibility…. It would also be against Olympic rules. But if the issue became one of athletes versus the IOC as much as athletes versus Putin, so much the better. The IOC needs a kick in the ass for its blithe acquiescence to authoritarianism.
This statement raises some interesting questions – about the target of the action and about the goal of the action, and I’m not so sure that they can be collapsed in the way you do above.
If the purpose of any protest, whether boycott or civil disobedience, is to affect Russian society and Russian law, then I’m not sure that the type of civil disobedience by foreign athletes that you and Frank Bruni are advocating would have much effect. The Putin regime is more than prepared to withstand a little global embarrassment. In that sense, a boycott, which has real (if limited) economic effects, might be more effective.
I also think it highly unlikely that Putin would risk a global incident by arresting lots of foreign athletes who perform such acts of civil disobedience, especially when the harm to Russia is so minimal, little more than a public shaming (this is different from the Snowden issue in the sense that it would likely not merely target the U.S.).
On the other hand, Putin might be prepared to retaliate against Russian LGBTQ people and activists in the aftermath of such protests. And Russian nationalists, their national pride harmed, might be likely to act out with even greater violence against Russian LGBTQ. In advocating such acts of civil disobedience (or, for that matter, a boycott), especially from the comfort of afar, one must consider not just the potential risk that the foreign athletes are taking, but also the potential backlash against Russian activists and the degree to which civil disobedience might be counterproductive for the Russian LGBTQ rights movement.
If the purpose of the protest is to expose the hypocrisy of the IOC and the Olympic movement, then it might have more effect. The Olympic movement, as you note, prohibits political expression, but it also takes as one of its core values a commitment to human rights. Waving a rainbow flag during the opening ceremony is thus an act of civil disobedience against the IOC, one that exposes the tension between the stated commitment to human rights and the prohibition on political expression when that political expression is itself a show of commitment to human rights and a protest against the systematic violation of human rights. Such public shaming is likely to have a far greater influence on the IOC than it is on Russia. It could also be a powerful challenge to the IOC, to have it live up to its stated ideals. But, again, is that protest against the IOC worth the potential backlash against the Russian LGBTQ movement that it might trigger?
In making such calls for civil disobedience, I think that we also need to make it clear to the athletes themselves that in doing so they are assuming the risk of punishment – and, according to theories of civil disobedience, must be prepared to accept that punishment. That punishment might come in the form of arrest by Russian authorities. But it might also come in the form of expulsion from the Games or being stripped of their medals.
Finally, I would be interested to hear more Russian voices in this debate. I’m hearing a lot from American, British, German, French LGBTQ rights and human rights activists, but Russian voices seem few and far between. Before we start to advocate protests that are in large part designed to make us feel good, I would hope that we would try to find out what Russian activists want – that is, to truly be their allies.
A Tennessee judge recently ordered an infant’s name changed from “Messiah” to “Martin.” Eugene Volokh expects the case to be reversed on appeal. Dahlia Lithwick reads the “baby Messiah” case as “a reminder of how much freedom Americans truly enjoy when it comes to naming their children”:
In many Western democracies, it’s not at all unusual for a judge to weigh in on a baby’s name, if there is reason to believe the child is at risk of bullying or abuse. For starters, in New Zealand you can’t give your child a moniker that might cause offense to a “reasonable” person. “Talula Does The Hula From Hawaii” is perhaps the most famous name that’s been judicially blocked in New Zealand, but so were the rather charming “Fish” and “Chips” (for twins). (“Messiah” was also blocked in New Zealand, for whatever that’s worth.)
Sweden is also notorious for its strict baby naming laws, famously blocking the names “Metallica,” “IKEA,” and “Veranda,” as well as “Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116” (pronounced “Albin”).
In Norway they tossed a woman in jail for two days for naming her son “Gesher” (which means “Bridge” in Hebrew) after it appeared to her in a dream. In Denmark, parents must select from one of 7,000 or so names pre-approved by the government, with room to appeal for special circumstances. Ditto for Iceland, where a teen is suing the government to reinstate her name, which means, benignly, “Light Breeze.” …
In short, the notion that judges can intercede to change a baby’s name in order to protect her from bad consequences later in life may shock the heck out of Americans but it is remarkably common worldwide.
Keli Goff notes that – contra Louis C.K. –America actually has several laws regulating baby names:
But such laws (pdf) are regulated by the state, not at the federal level, and there is absolutely no continuity regarding what is and is not allowed. “Some states restrict things like obscenities, numerals, pictograms and/or diacritical marks. Other states impose no prohibitions at all,” [attorney Lawrence Walters] said. Louisiana and Tennessee require that the father’s last name be listed as the surname of the child if a couple is married. Iowa and Massachusetts limit how long names can be. Connecticut and Kentucky have no restrictions, while New Jersey prohibits numerals. It is worth noting that no states restrict names on the basis of meaning. So in New Jersey, where little Hitler lives, his parents would have been restricted from naming him “8,” but “Hitler” is OK.
I wanted to forward you this link to a collection of the overwhelmingly positive response to Darren Young coming out from wrestlers both in and outside the WWE. As a fan of wrestling for over 20 years, I am thrilled to see how positive everyone in the industry is being about this, as well as how relaxed Young was about telling the truth about who he is. There have been other wrestlers who have been out to the locker room (Pat Patterson being the most prominent, having been one of the most important members of WWE’s creative team since the ’80s and a star wrestler before then) and this is a great next step.
Another reader:
The interesting thing about this story is how much of a big deal it seems to be to the non-wrestling world but how minor a story it is to the wrestling world. The basic crux as to why:
1) The #2 guy in the WWE/F for years has been Pat Patterson, who has been known to be openly gay by everyone in the industry and amongst most hardcore fans.
2) Other wrestlers and promoters have been known to be gay for years and no one cares.
3) Young isn’t exactly a top guy in the WWE.
I think the bigger deal is that Linda McMahon – a two-time former GOP Senate candidate, her family and company – are so openly embracing Young. That party affiliation, not wrestling, is the harder nut to crack for gay rights.
Another sends the above recording:
Wrestling has come a long way. Here’s a video for fans of the Attitude Era of WWE: “Stone Cold” Steve Austin both supporting gay marriage and laying into churches who oppose it.
Money quote:
Which one of these motherfuckers talked to God and God said same-sex marriage was a no-no?
Bill de Blasio, who has surged in the mayoral polls recently, has a new ad:
Katrina Vanden Huevel sees national implications for the NYC mayoral race:
In the post-collapse, post-Occupy, post-Obama world, Democrats are headed into a fierce battle over the direction of the party. Obama forged his new majority largely on anti-war, socially liberal causes — aided by Republican reaction in contrast. But the Democratic Party’s consensus around social issues and diversity has masked a growing divide on economic issues between the Wall Street wing of the party and a populist wing that is beginning to stir. The mayor’s race in New York City is an early entry in this debate about the future of the party and the country.
I’d guess that before the day is out it’s going to occur to some news-starved Gotham-centric scribbler to do a piece contrasting de Blasio and Cory Booker as the twin poles of debate in this upcoming Struggle for the Soul of the Democratic Party. Or maybe it won’t be written until such time as de Blasio actually wins. Or maybe another New York figure named Hillary Clinton will manage to put off the Struggle for the Soul once again. It’s hard to say right now. But at some point internal differences, real and symbolic, sharp and focused or vague yet pervasive, will boil over into public. After all, conservatives can’t have all the factional fun.
George Packerpraises de Blasio for his focus on NYC’s inequality. David Sirota adds that de Blasio “is not just running on a gauzy rhetorical criticism of inequality, he is running on explicit proposals to use the power of government to combat that inequality.” Yglesias, on the other hand, argues that the mayor’s office has few tools to fight inequality:
Economic inequality is a serious issue and municipal governance is a serious matter, but the fact is that the two have relatively little to do with each other.
All New York City mayoral elections attract disproportionate media attention because so much of the national media is based there. That’s something those of us who live in the rest of the country have learned to deal with. But this disproportionate attention tends not to be paired with any specific focus on what the mayor actually does—which is to say manage city agencies and local regulations within the rather narrow confines of existing state and federal law.
Curbing the most egregious abuses of Wall Street, in other words, isn’t part of the mayor’s job. Even curbing in the most trivial abuses of Wall Street isn’t part of the mayor’s job. The city can’t even really set its own tax policy. Even to the extent that it can tax bank impresarios, it can’t stop them from commuting from New Jersey. The fundamental problems of financial regulation, in other words, need national solutions.
Edward Wyckoff Williams explains how de Blasio’s family informs his politics:
After a recent campaign advert featuring his son, Dante — who sports a big, beautifully bold Afro — African-American and Hispanic voters began to take note. For many New Yorkers who had not been paying much attention to the race — or were distracted by Anthony Weiner’s unfortunate revelations — de Blasio’s fierce criticism of the New York City Police Department’s stop-and-frisk policy suddenly became abundantly clear: This is a man who worries whether his son will be suspected and harassed by police for no other reason than the color of his skin.
Ben Florsheim also focuses on de Blasio’s multi-racial family:
De Blasio lacks the “built-in voter base” enjoyed by his chief rivals for the Democratic nomination, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn (openly gay, female) and former Comptroller Bill Thompson (black). De Blasio’s family buffers this disadvantage. It does so both by appealing to the groups from which Quinn and Thompson hail, but also by offering the de Blasio family as a metaphor for the city’s eclectic racial and social makeup, and giving voters a chance to say that character and lifestyle can outweigh background when it comes to advancing the progressive cause.
But Harry Enten expects Thompson, rather than de Blasio, to make it to a runoff with Quinn:
It’s no accident that in every single Democratic primary since 1989, a minority candidate has placed no lower than second. There’s a reason why the last time a white non-Jewish male won a Democratic mayoral primary was in 1969, when current runoff rules were not in effect. Ethnic politics in New York has always been the name of the game in New York City.
Alec MacGillis thinks “the Quinn campaign does not seem to have fully grasped the lessons of Clinton’s 2008 run”:
One of which was that liberal-leaning Democratic primary voters do not seem to take all that well to women candidates who tuck away their liberal instincts to run an uber-cautious campaign on a platform that amounts to “it’s my turn,” offering themselves as carrying on the legacy of a larger-than-life man who preceded them.
And Dylan Matthews believes that “the biggest repercussion of this year’s race” could be on education policy:
The biggest differences between the candidates appear to be on crime and education, whereas housing and taxes see big points of convergence. And even on crime, there’s a large degree of unity among Democrats; it’s Republicans that are willing to defend stop and frisk. But on education, there’s a real divide between those of a Broader, Bolder temperament like de Blasio and Thompson, who play well with teachers’ unions and emphasize increased services rather than increased accountability, and those of a reformist bent like Quinn or Lhota who want to continue Bloomberg’s approach.
The Dish 