Tag: Premium

One of countless complaints from the in-tray:

I am surprised and disappointed by your dismissiveness of the apparently widespread concern among the Dish community about the scrotum-shot as it relates to workplace propriety.  The nannyism of corporate America is clearly not the issue and your mention of it effectively neutralized the “I’m sorry” that preceded it. The potential employment termination of your subscribers, of which I am one, is a very significant concern that I believe you should properly acknowledge.  Otherwise, your characterization of the Dish as a “community” would appear to be fraudulent.

But my point was that it was the nannyism that creates the risk of being fired. I was sympathizing with the victims of this new corporate Puritanism, not dismissing it. Not acquiescing to that kind of censorship is one reason the blogosphere came into existence. But clearly, since this blog is primarily read by people at work, and people’s jobs may be at stake, censorship wins. Another quotes me:

“If bloody corpses are kosher, why not a simple and abstracted view of the human anatomy?” That’s a terrific question that my boss and coworkers are completely uninterested in considering.

Another:

Yes, this is different than pictures of bloody corpses.

Pictures of bloody corpses are a conversation that needs to be elevated. It needs to be discussed, the pictures printed to bring the event to the public’s attention, whether it happens in a remote corner of a far off land or at the finish line of a Boston marathon. It’s uncomfortable, but it needs addressing. We need to know about it to be able to do something about it.

The evolution of the scrotum just doesn’t have the same heft. It’s interesting, but not at all critical. And it doesn’t need the attached photo.

I went into blogging because of the freedom to write and post anything I wanted. But I didn’t go into blogging to get my readers fired. I’m somewhat unsure about the limits of this censorship. Are we allowed to post any pictures of humans in a state of undress? Lots could be erotic or sexual to some. Could this still from a YouTube, for example, get someone fired? Or this photo? Or this one? A lot is in the eye of the beholder, and I’m not sure the office police will make distinctions between photos that “add heft” and those that merely illustrate or, God save us, amuse. But in deference to the readers, this blog will henceforth censor itself in one area: no more non-pornographic, non-sexual depictions of any faintly naughty bits of the actual human body.

We are all Barbie and Ken now.

(Photo: Models dressed the same way as different Ken dolls pose during the press preview day of the International Toy Fair Nuernberg on February 2, 2011 in Nuremberg, Germany. Mattel celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Ken doll. 2,683 exhibitors will present their new toy products until February 8, 2011. By Miguel Villagran/Getty Images.)

Sean Dunne’s painkiller-addiction documentary Oxyana, which the Dish spotlighted in April and which won a documentary award at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, has left some residents of Oceana, West Virgina, decidedly unimpressed. Local critics have called the film sensational and raised concerns about its accuracy. Alec MacGillis, who agrees that the town has a serious drug problem, says the filmmaker lays it on a bit thick:

[Oxyana] is, as the promotional materials promised, a hellscape, one that little resembles the bedraggled but not blasted town I passed through on my April visit, a typical deep-Appalachian strip with a Bible bookstore and a medical supply shop and a WIC office and car repair shops and a foot and ankle clinic and a sign advertising for foster parents and another identifying the Afghanistan veteran for whom a small bridge has been named and an AT&T outlet store with the Kindle Fire on sale and, yes, a couple of pharmacies.

Conceding that “an AT&T store isn’t exactly material for a documentary film,” MacGillis considers the film’s objective:

Portraying people and places at the outer edge of despair is a fraught enterprise—finding the line between exposing wrong and suffering without wallowing in it. “Oxyana” is, in a sense, the Appalachian version of the ruin porn we’ve become used to from cities like Detroit. To just toss the images out there, one after another, without sufficient context and perspective, as Dunne has done with the broken people he found in Wyoming County, can start to look awfully gratuitous.

More Dish on Oxyana here and here; more on painkillers here and here; and more on ruin porn here, here, and here.

A. Barton Hinkle notes that “both state laws and departmental policies seem to let police officers use deadly force as a first resort against family pets that often present little or no threat.” He wants this to stop:

The Justice Department says not only that “dogs are seldom dangerous” but that even when they are, “the overwhelming majority of dog bites are minor, causing either no injury at all or injuries so minor that no medical care is required.” As Balko writes, “If dangerous dogs are so common, one would expect to find frequent reports of vicious attacks on meter readers, postal workers, firemen, and delivery workers. But according to a spokesman from the United States Postal Service, serious dog attacks on mail carriers are vanishingly rare.”

Yet serious – deadly – attacks against dogs are all too common. They shouldn’t be. And the solutions are obvious: Departmental policies, backed by state law, should require police officers to use lethal force against companion animals only as a last resort. Officers should receive training in safe and non-lethal methods of animal control – and in dog behavior: “An approaching dog is almost always friendly,” according to the Justice Department; “a dog who feels threatened will usually try to keep his distance.”

Recent Dish on cops shooting dogs here and here.

Michael White explains why a cure for cancer has been so elusive:

Cancer genome projects are the latest front in the War on Cancer. The U.S. National Institutes of Health created The Cancer Genome Atlas (whose acronym, TCGA, consists of the abbreviations for each of the four chemical letters in DNA), and the United Kingdom’s Wellcome Trust is assembling the Catalog of Somatic Mutations in Cancer (COSMIC). The goal of projects like these is to exhaustively map out the genetic terrain of cancer by identifying every mutation in the genomes of tumors from tens of thousands of cancer patients. The hope motivating these projects was that scientists would discover a core set of cancer driver mutations for each type of cancer, mutations that could be targeted with smart drugs.

What researchers have discovered instead is that cancer is a much more fiendishly complicated genetic mess than we ever imagined. Instead of a handful of cancer-causing driver mutations for each cancer type, scientists have found that there are many different genetic paths to the same cancer. Many driver mutations for a particular cancer type occur in less than 20 percent of cancers of that type, which means that drugs targeted at that mutation will only help a minority of patients. A recent review of the subject noted that the COSMIC project has cataloged more than 800,000 mutations, covering nearly every gene in the human genome. The authors of the review suggested that “the cast of genes involved in any single cancer type will be in the neighborhood of 50–100.”

Pareene calls the new PBS documentary “Two American Families” one of “the best, most heartbreaking, documentaries I’ve seen this year”:

It wasn’t “hard to watch” because it was about a singularly awful moment in human history or one unspeakable monstrous act — a hurricane or war or even a specific crime committed by specific people — but because it just happened to document the lives of some struggling working-class families beginning at shortly after the point when the ground fell out from beneath the American lower middle class and ending now, when there’s clearly no hope for a return to economic security.

To use the regrettable cliché, both families “played by the rules.” They are in fact superhumanly devoted to the rules. They both attend church — Claude is actually a minister — and they hate the idea of going on the dole and they take any available work and the kids are Boy Scouts and their parents are dedicated to their educations. The families are so virtuous, so imbued with the great American work ethic, that it is practically unfair to other struggling Americans; families that fuck up deserve our sympathy, and the support of a social safety net, as well. But as George Packer wrote earlier this month, the film serves as a rebuke to right-wing social critics like the execrable Charles Murray, “who believe that the decline of America’s working class comes from a collapse of moral values, social capital, personal responsibility, and traditional authority…” These people are overflowing with personal responsibility.

Previous Dish on the documentary here.

Oregon college students may soon be able to pay for college by pledging a percentage of future earnings rather than paying tuition upfront. Dylan Matthews provides details:

The actual bill text is very spare and doesn’t specify a set percentage or payment period, though the bill’s supporters tell the New York Times that something like 3 percent over 20 years would cover costs. And [John Burbank of the Economic Opportunity Institute] is quick to note that there would be some substantial upfront transition costs, which, for universal adoption in Oregon, are estimated at $9 billion. “25 years from now, it will be self-financing,” he says. “The question is, ‘How do we get there?’”

It’s a big question. Oregon’s commission will have to figure out not only what rate to charge and how long to charge it, but whether one can take a “buyout” by paying off tuition costs early, as is possible with student loans, and how to enforce the plan for students who move out of state. If you can’t take a buyout, then students who earn high incomes later on could find themselves paying far, far more than their education actually cost. And if enforcement is tougher in Oregon than out of state, that could provide a perverse incentive for state university graduates to skip town.

Michelle Asha Cooper lodges other criticisms:

[P]utting aside the complexity and feasibility of implementing such a system, this supposedly “debt-free” plan only covers tuition and fees, which is less than half of the costs most students incur while in college. Furthermore, the plan could have a negative impact on efforts to ensure equal opportunity in higher education because it may encourage recruiting practices that identify students on the likelihood of future employability, limiting access to our nation’s most underserved students.

Tony Lima doubts the Oregon experiment will work:

[A]ssume there are two types of students.

One type (S) majors in art, English composition, history, and ethnic studies.  The other (H) majors in mathematics, hard science, engineering, or even economics.  While type S individuals may not know it, their major will, on average, result in lower lifetime income than those in group H.  Type S individuals will happily accept Oregon’s offer since three percent of their income over 20 years is a good deal.  Type H individuals, however, are likely to think that three percent of their income is a high price to pay.  They will seek alternative methods of financing their education, paying the standard tuition and fees.  (This proposal could, in fact, revive the private student loan market — but without government intervention.)

Result: Oregon will collect far less than they are predicting.  The percentage of income will rise and the duration of the loan will also increase — to 25 years, then 30 years.

Richard Vedder wants to tweak the proposal:

A more successful approach would vary the percent and length of the payback on the investment with the student prospects for financial success, as measured by probability of, say, successfully completing a degree (as predicted by high school grades and ACT/SAT test scores) and the earnings experience of the student’s major. While less politically popular, this would make the program more financially viable.

Still, long term, this novel approach ducks the real problem: the cost of college is rising faster than earnings of graduates. No financial scheme — no matter how innovative — can overcome the ultimate reality that this is not an economically sustainable long-term trend.

Andrew Norton notes that Australia already has a similar plan in place.

Filmmaker Greg Gilderman composed six evocative profiles of individuals intimately connected to the AIDS crisis in Russia. From his intro:

Russia is dying. Much has been written about the country’s demographic crisis—the declining population, the low birth rate, the life expectancy that puts the country on par with the world’s poorest—but bleak as those figures are, they don’t yet include masses of people dying as a result of the country’s HIV/AIDS epidemic. The World Bank estimates that in 2020, Russia will lose 20,000 people per month to AIDS. Russia has experienced the fastest-spreading HIV/AIDS epidemics in any one country in history, but there remains a lack of effective preventative measures to slow it down—in large measure because the people most affected are also the country’s most reviled.

From the profile of a former heroin addict, featured in the above video:

Irina Zolotova has AIDS; her infant son is HIV-positive.

He shares her bed in a tiny room on the outskirts of St. Petersburg. HIV in Russia is spreading most quickly among the sexual partners of people who became infected in the 1990s, when it seemed every young person was experimenting with injection heroin use. Irina was one of those early heroin users. She is a part of the massive cohort of Russians in their late 30s and early 40s that has transitioned from being HIV-positive to having AIDS.

The irony isn’t lost in Irina that her generation, the most hopeful in Russian history, the one that experienced political and personal freedom in its youth, is becoming housebound and frail in middle age. “It’s difficult to say,” Irina says, “but it really feels like everything has left you, and nothing is left.” …

The Russian government’s most aggressive move in the country’s HIV/AIDS epidemic—arguably its only effective move—has been to provide antiretroviral drugs to pregnant women who are living with AIDS. The goal is to eliminate mother-to-child transmission of HIV. But the consumption of those drugs is no guarantee that no child of an HIV-positive mother will become infected.

Five more video profiles and a photo gallery here.

Yglesias asks:

Cars are very useful, and if you want to own one, you need someplace to put it. A parking space is valuable, and so reasonable real-estate developers will typically want to feature parking spaces as part of a new development. But parking spaces are a building amenity like any other—granite countertops or spacious bathtubs or a fitness center or a roof deck—and so they’re something the real-estate market is capable of generating in the quantity that people demand. The current rules, mandating that all new construction come with more parking spaces than the market supports, create costly distortions throughout the city.

Michael Manville of UCLA studied a liberalization of parking regulations in one section of Los Angeles and found that deregulation leads to the construction of more housing units and fewer parking spaces. Conversely, tighter regulation leads to a lack of affordable housing and a surplus of parking spaces. That might make sense if parking spaces were a public good, like clean air. But they’re closer to being a public bad. When Chicago mandates the creation of ahigh number of parking spaces per square foot of downtown office building, it reduces the price of parking, but it has a number of negative consequences. Cheaper parking means more traffic congestion on the streets. It also means lower ridership for Chicago mass transit. Perversely, cheaper parking offers a subsidy to commuters from outside the city limits at the expense of Chicago residents living within walking or biking distance of the central business district. And, of course, it leads to dirtier air, not cleaner.

A reader writes:

Obesity may not compare to sexual orientation, but that doesn’t mean it’s equivalent to short stature, ugly noses, acne, etc.  Our society doesn’t blame people for being short, having an ugly nose or acne.  In contrast, conventional wisdom is that obesity can be remedied and that tolerating it in oneself is a character defect.

Scientists are investigating the interaction between genetics and the environment (e.g., whether endocrine disrupters or something else in the chemical soup we live in causes obesity in genetically susceptible individuals).  If this research pans out, it may explain why obesity has dramatically increased in recent decades in some countries and not others. Those who believe the issue is primarily calories taken in versus calories burned should check out these articles from the NYTimes here and here.  The origins of obesity are complex, and it may be impossible for even the most motivated, conscientious people to maintain a normal weight.

Another reader:

There is a lot of overlap between the queer/feminist community and the fat acceptance community, and I think there are good reasons for that. I think that embracing being fat as a woman can be empowering in how it can be an act of willfully denying societal expectations of attractiveness and therefore gaining a profound sense of ownership over one’s body.  I have a pet theory that lesbians and fat women are offensive to some people for the same reasons – neither group is showing much care for the sexual impulses of straight men.

As an on-and-off-again fat chick with diabetic, obese parents, I am sympathetic to the FA message that basically equates with “Our Bodies, Ourselves”- though for myself I don’t think that I can be “healthy at any size”. But I have some real issues with how this all gets mixed up with sexuality.  A male friend who’s “out” once talked wistfully about how he wished his straight-sized girlfriend had a bigger ass, and I frankly don’t see how that’s any different than the more typical straight dude who probably wishes his girlfriend were skinnier; it’s still a man imprinting his sexual desires onto a woman’s body.  A couple things that make me particularly skeptical about this FAG-BLT suggestion:

1) The FA movement as a sexual orientation seems to be mostly centered on straight men liking fat women.  Even that first post from Anna Mollow specifically calls out the fat lovers as male.  Sure, there must be women who prefer fat – certainly of women who love fat woman – but who’s really out there saying that fat men are sexy, too?  This really seems to be an aspect of male sexuality, and like most things straight, the personification of sex is the naked woman.  The one-sidedness of the movement makes it suspect, in my eyes.

2) Someone can ask or prefer their lover to lose weight (we like what we like, right?).  This is unremarkable, because society tells us that slender bodies are more attractive.  FA guys might ask or prefer their lover to gain weight (and feederism seems active in this community).  What is the functional difference between preferring one over the other?  It’s really hard for some people to lose weight; it’s really hard for others to gain it; but let’s ignore for a moment what it’s possible for the individual to achieve – no one could ever ask someone to change their gender!

Another:

While I agree that fatness is a result of both genetics and ongoing lifestyle choices, whether you become fat and stay fatcan depend in part on socioeconomic status as well (a point which Anna Mollow’s piece addresses briefly but was not emphasized in your posts). Not everyone has access to the same kinds of lifestyle choices as middle- to upper-class fatpeople do. Personally, I find that reader advice that fat people just need to “work harder” and “do what you have to do” might be very applicable to someone like me–i.e., a slightly overweight upper-middle-class woman with time and money to go running in the park, pay for a personal trainer, cook healthy dinners and buy quinoa or kale salads for lunch, if I want to–but a shade too glib when you consider the circumstances of the overweight in lower-income communities. Not everyone is lucky enough to work only one job, and not everyone has the time to run 20 miles a week.

The limited sphere of choices for the lower-income overweight looks even worse when you consider that a good number of urban, low-income areas are stacked with fast-food restaurants. (I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the New York-run hospitals with McDonald’s on the premises are all located in high-immigrant, high-minority areas.) When I graduated from college in Manhattan six years ago, I moved in an almost perfectly horizontal line across the island, from the Upper West Side to East Harlem. In the span of ten avenues, my food choices changed dramatically–I went from having access to vegetarian restaurants, organic grocery stores, salad bars and weekly farmer’s markets to being surrounded by McDonald’s, KFC, Burger King and Dunkin’ Donuts as my nearest options. I got a gym membership to offset the effects of “2 Big Macs for $3” Tuesdays and “Buy One Get One Free” deals at Baskin Robbins, but my location definitely affected my eating habits and opened my eyes to the correlation between weight and class. The fast food was just so (1) cheap, (2) high in caloric content, which gives you a good amount of energy for the low price you’re paying, and (3) conveniently located all over the neighborhood.

Of course, I don’t agree with Mollow’s stance that we should celebrate fat people of all colors instead of trying to reduce obesity in lower-income minority communities. Again, it’s all about finding the happy medium between that extreme and the equally simplistic view that fat people who stay fat just don’t want it enough. Your readers aren’t wrong to point out that there are things you can do to not be as fat, but we also need to acknowledge that it’s harder for some populations to make the meaningful and long-lasting lifestyle choices they advocate. Maybe we should have a little more empathy in addition to providing support, encouragement and education for the overweight.

Previous parts of this discussion thread here, here, and here.