Tag: Premium

A reader writes:

I feel weird telling you this, but your blog and its ongoing coverage of circumcision culminated around the fourth or fifth month of my wife’s pregnancy with our first child. She and I decided to not have him circumcised. Your blog had much to do with this decision.

What struck me about it in the hospital is how ingrained the process is across other aspects of post-natal care. Many nurses told us not to worry about the pain of the blood samples because it’s “so much less painful than circumcision”. The same goes for the surgery my son had on his frenulum to aid in breastfeeding. Everyone has a standard response: “The pain might be severe, but it’s nothing compared to his circumcision”. I don’t know if that means anything or not, but we corrected them when they gave that assurance, and I could tell that it was the first time they had stopped to think about it in a while.

Another dissents:

Even if you believe that circumcision should be ended – something I’m by no means convinced of – I question whether this documentary is the proper vehicle towards that dubious end. For one, I question the applicability of the title “documentary” to what is clearly an advocacy piece.

Though we’ve become accustomed to biased documentaries, from “Obama 2016” to “Capturing the Friedmans” and “Farenheit 9/11,” it’s long-past time to make a distinction between a nonfiction film that informs and tells a story, like “Jiro Dreams of Sushi,” and a nonfiction film that argues and selectively presents facts, like any of the above.

“American Secret” falls clearly into the advocacy category, and though coasting on the “documentary” label, it makes damn sure you know it. The Kickstarter’s tagline – “One Nation Under the Knife” – is off-puttingly alarmist. Based on the film’s web presence, it also intends to use outdated, 19th century justifications for circumcision to argue against the modern practice, a rhetorical fallacy you see more often in anti-abortion extremists and creationists.

The film’s website also seems to imply that doctors continue routine circumcision because of the profit involved. That converts an argument that could be about education – doctors just don’t know that circumcision is bad, so they should be taught – into the serious accusation that doctors knowingly mangle children for money. There’s no easier way to alienate the middle, and kill a growing movement, than to impugn the intentions of those you’re trying to convince.

Beyond that, the film also charges that doctors could (and should) face civil litigation for circumcising a newborn child without the child’s consent. I have found no authority for this “wrongful circumcision” claim. Though there is litigation over botched circumcision, and doctors have faced discipline for circumcising over the parents’ direct objection, those are very different matters.

Though I don’t believe now that circumcision should be ended, I would be willing to be shown otherwise. I bet much of the public feels similarly. A film that lectures the audience, and histrionically converts a public-education cause into a fight against some massive conspiracy, with your family doctor as the principal villain, is not the vehicle to perform that task.

The presentation of difficult issues is what the Dish does best. So, I urge you to take a second look at this issue.

I think it’s a little unfair to judge a documentary that hasn’t been made yet, although I sure hope, for the sake of the argument, that they don’t go in the histrionic MSNBC/FNC direction my reader suspects. The one point I’d make against my reader’s worries is that noting the financial incentives for circumcision for doctors and hospitals need not degenerate into name-calling. It’s just one small part of the fee-for-service bloat the ACA is trying to reduce. The producers would be better served by simply laying out the facts and arguments as clearly as possible. Like the case for marriage equality, why add lots of heat when you will win by simply adding light?

Tom Ferraro makes the case for Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, “the most read adult novel in history and the most influential single act of American creativity of the second half of the American century”:

The Godfather was written in 1969 and can be read as a dramatic response to a pivotal moment in American history.

Puzo substituted the Corleones’ tactical genius for our stumbling intervention in Vietnam; he traded the family’s homosocial discipline and female complicity for women’s liberation; and he offered the dream of successful immigrant solidarity in place of the misconstrued threat of civil rights and black power.

Yet like any profound myth narrative, The Godfather reads as well now as then. Its fantasy of perfect succession, the son accomplishing on behalf of the father what the father could not bear to do, is timeless. And Puzo’s ability to express love and irony simultaneously is masterful: the mafia is our greatest romance and our greatest fear, for it suspends our ethical judgments and binds us to its lust for power and vengeance. Of course, our immigrant entrepreneurs, violent of family if not of purpose, keep coming. Even Puzo’s out-sized vulgarities illuminate, if you can hear their sardonic wit.

After Puzo, none of America’s epic stories, Ahab’s or Gatsby’s, Hester Prynne’s or Invisible Man’s, reads exactly the same. And that is exactly the criterion of T.S. Eliot’s admission to the “great tradition.” The Godfather teaches us to experience doubly. To enjoy the specter of Sicilian otherness (an old-world counterculture, warm and sexy even in its violence) while suspecting the opposite, that the Corleones are the hidden first family of American capitalism. In Puzo’s omerta, the ferocious greed of the mafia is all our own.

The shareable commenting features on e-readers may seem like a novelty, but reading has been a “social” activity far longer than it’s been a solo one:

Homeric poetry and other oral genres were recited to crowds for centuries before the notion of reading came around. The most beautiful depiction of learning in Western art may be Raphael’s School of Athens, which shows Socrates speaking as disciples surround him, listening and taking notes.

After writing became more widespread, it was often a prompt for speaking, something one used as an aid in orating, reciting, or declaring to others. When Saint Augustine watched Ambrose read a book without moving his lips or making any sounds, he was shocked: Until about the eighth century, most people read by reading words out loud.

No one was curling up with the large, bulky, vellum-and-wooden books that were kept chained to desks in monasteries. This kind of “social reading” continued throughout most of the Middle Ages, as scribes copying manuscripts assumed readers would enunciate the words they saw on the page. Written texts developed from and aided oral communication, and since there are no commas or capital letters in speech, there were initially no spaces between words, no lower-case letters, and no punctuation in manuscripts, either. THEIRSENTENCESLOOKEDLIKETHIS.

As late as the 19th century, Victorian readers could still often aptly be called “listeners” as they sat in chairs in a circle lit by candlelight, with one person reading out loud the copy of the latest triple-decker installment of, say, a Dickens novel. Even for us moderns, reading can be construed as an inherently social act, not as in “sitting in a room with others” but as in “together, alone.” Reading can be one of the most profound encounters a human can have, revealing the inherently connective tissue that is human consciousness. As David Foster Wallace put it: “Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion—these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.”

(Image: The School of Athens by Raffaello Sanzio, 1511, via Wikimedia Commons)

Jon Michaud urges you to read or re-read Frank Herbert’s 1965 sci-fi classic:

With daily reminders of the intensifying effects of global warming, the spectre of a worldwide water shortage, and continued political upheaval in the oil-rich Middle East, it is possible that “Dune” is even more relevant now than when it was first published. If you haven’t read it lately, it’s worth a return visit. If you’ve never read it, you should find time to.

Like the best science-fiction and fantasy novels, “Dune” creates for the reader a complex, fully-realized universe. … This is … a universe of Machiavellian realpolitik, science fiction through the prism of the Cold War. There is little that is cute or cuddly: no furry-footed Hobbits, no teddy-bear-like Ewoks. (In fact, the cutest thing you’ll see in a copy of “Dune” is the author photo: bald, bearded, and smiling, Herbert could pass for one of Tolkien’s dwarves.) Even the hero, young Paul Atreides, stuns his mother with his unsentimental reaction to his father’s death. Instead of grieving, he immediately begins plotting the overthrow of his adversaries. This is terrain that is familiar to readers of George R. R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire.” Herbert’s scheming, backstabbing villain, the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, would be perfectly at home among the Lannisters of Westeros.

Michaud guesses why the book lacks obsessive devotees on par with Lord of the Rings or Star Wars:

Perhaps one explanation for “Dune”‘s lack of true fandom among science-fiction fans is the absence from its pages of two staples of the genre: robots and computers. This is not an oversight on Herbert’s part but, rather, a clever authorial decision. Centuries before the events described in the novel, humans revolted and destroyed all thinking machines. “The god of machine-logic was overthrown,” Herbert writes in an appendix, “and a new concept was raised: ‘Man may not be replaced.’ ” This watershed moment, known as the Butlerian Jihad, resulted in a spiritual awakening, which put into place the religious structures that ultimately produce the messiah, Paul Atreides. There is no Internet in Herbert’s universe, no WikiLeaks, no cyber war. This de-emphasis on technology throws the focus back on people. It also allows for the presence of a religious mysticism uncommon in science fiction. It’s a future that some readers may find preferable to our own gadget-obsessed present.

Michael Keller ran a bunch of misspelled words through an iPhone simulator to see which topics Apple doesn’t autocorrect:

Our analysis found over 14,000 words that are recognized as words when spelled accurately, but that won’t be corrected even when they are only slightly misspelled. However, the vast majorityof these words are technical or very rarely used words: “nephrotoxin,” “sempstress,” “sheepshank,” or “Aesopian,” to name a few.

But among this list as well are more frequently used (and sensitive) words such as “abortion,” “abort,” “rape,” “bullet,” “ammo,” “drunken,” “drunkard,” “abduct,” “arouse,” “Aryan,” “murder,” and “virginity.”

We often look to technology to make our lives easier—to suggest restaurants, say, or to improve things as simple as our typing. But as more and more of our speech passes through mobile devices, how often is software coming between us and the words we want to use? Or rather, when does our software quietly choose not to help us? And who draws the line?

A commenter makes an obvious counterpoint:

I’m not the engineer in charge of this, but if I *WERE*, I’d probably have been told that my boss didn’t want to see users complain about spellchecks turning innocent typos into offensive words. The best way to do that would be to mark the word as something that the dictionary wouldn’t complain about, but that would never feature in those “Damn You, Spellcheck!” websites or tweets.

If that’s the case in reality (and it certainly seems likely enough), it’s not censorship and it’s not squeamishness. It’s Apple helping the majority of users from having little mistakes escalate into major embarrassments.

Jennifer Rubin says it should strike “a middle ground between unbridled intervention and neo-isolationism”:

Finding a conservative middle ground that incorporates the lessons of the past decade should be the work of elected Republicans, former officials and think-tank gurus. They must present a foreign policy that maintains (or restores, when Obama leaves) American supremacy in the world and is also politically sustainable.

Larison pounces:

Since neo-isolationism doesn’t really exist and even Rubin wouldn’t claim to favor “unbridled intervention,” we can be confident that the “middle ground” Rubin refers to here is not a compromise between her hard-line, aggressive foreign policy and a foreign policy characterized by restraint and respect for the limits of American power. By setting up two extremes that virtually no one favors, Rubin is resorting to the time-honored tactic of presenting her own position as the “middle ground” that will satisfy most conservatives and Republicans.

He describes the conservative foreign policy he’d like to see:

A conservative alternative to Obama’s foreign policy wouldn’t automatically support all or even most U.S. overseas commitments, but would reduce those commitments when regional allies and rising powers have the resources to assume responsibilities for security in their own parts of the world. It wouldn’t treat “American supremacy” as an end in itself, and it would recognize that America’s post-WWII and post-Cold War roles were exceptional ones that needn’t and shouldn’t be emulated forever. Unless a treaty ally is attacked, a conservative foreign policy wouldn’t allow the U.S. to be pulled into conflicts where the country’s security wasn’t at stake for the sake of preserving “credibility” or supposed allied solidarity. It also would oppose waging wars of choice.