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Anthony Sattin reviews The Last Train to Zona, Paul Theroux’s account of his final trip to Africa:

This [book] has some of the same faults as Dark Star Safari, including the sweeping overstatements (Cape Town is not the only city in Africa to aspire to grandeur) and generalisations about Africa and Africans: imagine how annoying it would be to read a book set in England where the natives are constantly referred to as Europeans. And yet it is hard to put down The Last Train to Zona Verde, for no other reason than for its core of brutal honesty, about the author himself as much as about the places he visits.

Far less forgiving is Hedley Twidle, an instructor at the University of Cape Town, who dresses down Theroux from a local perspective:

Theroux is unwilling to let go of his African fantasies. … As Theroux-watchers will know, his sub- Saharan travelogues read as if he had taken Binyavanga Wainaina’s sarcastic instructions on “How to Write About Africa” literally. He is, as the sharp-eyed blog Africa Is a Country remarks, “so reliable that way”. He mints generalisations and insults at such a clip that they soon begin to outstrip even the most gifted parodist. Africa “can be fierce”, we are told, but “in general … turns no one away”. Game animals have all but disappeared from war-torn Angola but human specimens substitute, “many of them, in their destitution, taking the place of wildlife”. He is told to avoid eye contact with hustlers at the border, which proves “strangely prescient” – “Animal behaviourists agree: stare at a chimp and he is likely to attack you.” …

The rhetoric is so offensive and plain bizarre to anyone making her or his life in “Africa” that I had no option but to pretend that we were in a different genre, to keep imagining the book as a comic novel with a deliberately unlikeable narrator.

The final verdict?

Bankrupt in more ways than one, then, this is a book I would recommend only as a teaching aid or to someone interested in tracking the final sub-Conradian wreckage of a genre, rusting away like the hulks of tanks that so fascinate the narrator along the roads in Angola. It is imbued not just with the narrator’s old age but the senescence of an entire genre.

David Anderson rounds up the latest reviews here.

(Hat tip: 3QD)

Manjoo is on to you:

Only a small number of you are reading all the way through articles on the Web. I’ve long suspected this, because so many smart-alecks jump in to the comments to make points that get mentioned later in the piece. But now I’ve got proof. I asked Josh Schwartz, a data scientist at the traffic analysis firm Chartbeat, to look at how people scroll through Slate articles. Schwartz also did a similar analysis for other sites that use Chartbeat and have allowed the firm to include their traffic in its aggregate analyses.

Schwartz’s data shows that readers can’t stay focused. The more I type, the more of you tune out.

And it’s not just me. It’s not just Slate. It’s everywhere online. When people land on a story, they very rarely make it all the way down the page. A lot of people don’t even make it halfway. Even more dispiriting is the relationship between scrolling and sharing. Schwartz’s data suggest that lots of people are tweeting out links to articles they haven’t fully read. If you see someone recommending a story online, you shouldn’t assume that he has read the thing he’s sharing.

OK, we’re a few hundred words into the story now. According to the data, for every 100 readers who didn’t bounce up at the top, there are …

Hey, that’s what the Dish is for! We edit the web for short-attention spans. Longer form pieces really do belong on the tablet instead. But you can always dig deeper if you want. That’s what hyper-links are for. If you’re still with me.

Anas Aremeyaw Anas went undercover to report on disturbing stories of crime and corruption in Ghana:

Certainly Anas’ immersive tactics can be extreme. While working on a story on the Accra Psychiatric Hospital, Anas played the part of the patient, taking prescribed drugs that left him impotent for a week after he left the hospital. And in his most recent story, on Nsawam Prison in Ghana, Anas shows footage of queuing for a “proper” toilet — a manhole in the middle of the yard, around which four men are squatting, back to back. The footage, which he showed for the first time at TED2013, also contains a harrowing shot of a room within the prison piled high with dead bodies.

In the TED talk seen above, Anas speaks from behind a wire mask to conceal his identity.  Below you can watch his short film, “Ghana’s Madhouse Story”:

Do college kids prefer Monet and Van Gogh to lulzy cats? UVA researchers asked two groups of students to rate five posters (two art posters, three humorous and cartoon- or cat-themed) and pick one to take back to the dorm. The test: how would results between groups differ if only one group of students was asked to reason about their preferences?

This “reasons” group liked the art posters less [than the control group] … and the humorous posters more. … Most of them still chose an art poster to take home, but it was a far lower proportion – 64% [vs 95%] – than the control group. That means people in this group were about seven times more likely to take a humorous poster home compared with the control group.

Here’s the twist. Some time after the tests, at the end of the semester, the researchers rang each of the participants and asked them questions about the poster they’d chosen: Had they put it up in their room? Did they still have it? How did they feel about it? How much would they be willing to sell it for? The “reasons” group were less likely to have put their poster up, less likely to have kept it up, less satisfied with it on average and were willing to part with it for a smaller average amount than the control group. Over time their reasons and feelings had shifted back in line with those of the control group – they didn’t like the humorous posters they had taken home, and so were less happy about their choice.

But Tom Stafford insists that “the moral of the story isn’t that intuition is better than reason”:

We all know that in some situations our feelings are misleading and it is better to think about what we’re doing. But this study shows the reverse – in some situations introspection can interfere with using our feelings as a reliable guide to what we should do.

And this has consequences in adulthood, where the notion of expertise can mean struggling to discern when introspection is the best strategy. The researchers who carried out this study suggest that the distorting effect of reason-giving is most likely to occur in situations where people aren’t experts – most of the students who took part in the study didn’t have a lot of experience of thinking or talking about art. When experts are asked to give reasons for their feelings, research has found that their feelings aren’t distorted in the same way – their intuitions and explicit reasoning are in sync.

(Image: Lolcat poster available here)

Lee Drutman uses one of the Koch brothers to illustrate the difficulty of tracking political donations:

The case of Charles G. Koch is a nice lesson in just how hard it is to determine who is breaking and who is abiding by campaign finance limits. It’s hard to make accurate tallies of individual aggregate campaign contributions when the Federal Elections Commission doesn’t require donors to have a unique ID, and when campaigns don’t always reliably report donor names. … It’s also challenging because recount funds are exempted from aggregate individual donation limits, but the FEC doesn’t provide data in a form that makes it easy to separate out those contributions from ones that do count. The only way to effectively enforce the law is to spend endless hours hand-verifying individual FEC records. It’s almost as if the system were designed to make enforcement impossible.

Seth Masket, in contrast, wonders why we’re “still getting worked up over the Citizens United decision”:

A lot of political commentary, particularly that emanating from the combination of journalists, politicians, and activists he calls the “campaign finance community,” claimed that the growth of Super PACs and other well-heeled political organizations in the wake of the Citizens United case would overwhelm the voters’ voice. Yet despite unprecedented sums spent by these groups on behalf of Mitt Romney and many Republican congressional candidates, the votes ended up going almost exactly as we would have otherwise expected.

This isn’t a new pattern. It has generally been very difficult to pinpoint any specific effect of campaign spending on a general election outcome. … Now, none of this means that campaign spending doesn’t matter at all, of course. Even with very small effects, an absurdly huge expenditure of money could be critical. But there is a saturation point where you just can’t get any more ads in front of people’s eyes. And we really don’t have a sense of whether the ads put together by Super PACs are as effective as those aired by the campaigns themselves. … But the idea that voters can be bought with enough money just doesn’t hold water. And given that recent efforts to make campaign finance more fair just seem to result in more byzantine rules and less transparency, maybe we should stop trying to do that for a while.

I tend to agree that the wave of Super-PAC money didn’t alter the core dynamics of the campaign – a major relief, as well as a major blow to campaign finance reformers. Meanwhile, Kay Steiger makes the case that “the Citizens United ruling has led to to the unprecedented amount of state-level anti-choice legislation in the last several years”:

[Crow After Roe author Jessica Mason] Pieklo explained [on Democracy Now] that National Right to Life, Americans United for Life, Liberty Council and the Tomas Moore Center are groups whose goals are either to overturn Roe v. Wade, making abortion once again illegal, or to make abortion so inaccessible that abortion is legal “in name only.”

“One of the reasons that the book looks at the onslaught of legislation after 2010 is that there is an explosion at the state level, and that is in large part due to one of the driving forces, and that is James Bopp Jr., who is one of the legal forces behind the challenge that created the Citizens United decision,” Pieklo said. “He sparked — and his group, National Right to Life — sparked a lot of the initial campaign finance challenges through conservative groups, so as a result of unrestricted funding at the state level, that’s where we’re at right now as a result of it.”

(Photo: US business magnate Sheldon Adelson speaks on the phone after attending the first presidential debate between US President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney in Denver, Colorado on October 3, 2012. By Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images. Adelson shelled out more than $100 million on failed GOP candidates during the 2012 cycle.)

Readers keep the thread alive:

You want to talk about offensive mascots?  My high school (Patrick Henry High School in Glade Spring, VA) has the Confederate soldier, i.e., The Rebels, as a mascot.  The Confederate flag is painted on the football stadium, and the marching band – of which I was a member – plays Dixie when the team scores.

Another sends the newspaper clippings seen above:

In 1980 Pekin (IL) High School changed its sports team mascot from “the Chinks” to “the Dragons.” Angry students protested, carrying signs that said “Chinks 4-ever” and the like. I especially like this quote: “My dad was a Chink and he doesn’t want it changed, either.”

Another shares a more amicable controversy at the local level:

My daughters attended, and I taught at, Arapahoe High School in Centennial Colorado – one of the first high schools in the nation to officially modify its mascot, with the assistance of the Arapaho tribe. The mascot was and still is the Warrior, fitting since the high school sits on ground once occupied by the Arapahos; their reservation is now in Wind River, WY. Ron Booth, principal at the time and part Indian, reached out to the Arapahos during mascot controversies in the Early 1990s. The result was a redesign of our mascot by an Arapaho artist to depict the warrior accurately; many educational and ceremonial visits by tribal members each spring to answer questions and relate tribal stories and lore; visits by AHS groups to the Wind River reservation and Denver Indian Center to donate goods, food, and share camaraderie, and the attendance at Arapahoe graduations by tribal leaders to deliver words of congratulation.

Our school is richer from the connections with the Arapahos, and I feel the tribe has gotten more respect and pride in return.

More discussion on our Facebook page.

Jeremy Stahl looks at the polling firm’s analysis of where it went wrong in the 2012 election:

It found that four areas most likely combined to result in the disparity between the polling firm’s final prediction of a 49-48 Romney popular vote win, and the actual result of a 51-47 Obama victory. Those four areas were as follows: how they weighted likely voters, underrepresentation of the East and West coasts in geographical controls, underrepresentation of nonwhite voters based on how Gallup determined ethnic backgrounds of survey respondents, and issues in how it contacted landlines that resulted in an “older and more Republican” survey sample. … At the time of the fiercest criticism, Gallup editor-in-chief Frank Newport said that there was “no evidence” that his company’s likely voter models were off. Now he’s saying they’ll do better next time.

Nate wins! Enten indicts the polling industry more generally, noting that “there are proven ways to poll that produce more consistently accurate portrayals of the election than doing a single live telephone interviews of a randomly selected population in a national poll”:

The average of polls done in the final week, excluding Gallup and Rasmussen, had Obama’s lead over Romney more than 2pt too low. I might be willing to look the other way, except the polling average in 2000 had George W Bush winning and had a margin error of again more than 2pt. The error in margin in 1996 was off by 3pt. The 1980 average saw an error of more than 5pt. The years in between 1980 and 1996 were not much better. In other words, the “high” error in national polling even when taking an average isn’t new; in fact, it seems to be rather consistent over the years. …

The state polling, meanwhile, did not show an analogous large bounce. It consistently had Obama leading in the states he needed to be leading in. Moreover, it showed Obama holding very similar positions to those he did prior to the first debate in the non-battleground states.

Yglesias, meanwhile, believes that the differences between Gallup’s numbers and the Obama campaign’s internal numbers polling “did exactly what it was supposed to do”:

[W]hat [the Obama campaign is] doing isn’t what Gallup is doing which—again—is trying to drum up media interest in Gallup polls. And compared to the Obama numbers, the Gallup numbers are really interesting. You could write lots of articles about those numbers, while the Obama numbers tend to suggest that you shouldn’t bother.

I’m not a huge fan of the “we should be gambling all the time about everything” school of thought, but it would be useful in this realm. If public polls were released by people who were placing large financial bets on the outcome of the campaign, then pollsters would work to purge their models of excessive volatility. But in the world that exists, the incentives are all wrong. “Incumbent President presiding over economic growth and falling unemployment will probably win and nobody’s paying attention to the campaign” is a terrible news story. It just happens to be true.

Nate Cohn thinks Gallup could prove more accurate next time:

The survey is extremely well-funded and has huge samples, especially over a multi-week period. They’ve brought in a highly regarded team of survey methodologists, and their commitment to transparency means that analysts should ultimately be able to confirm that their efforts have paid dividends. It just might be enough to restore confidence in America’s oldest polling firm.

Tim Grierson compares the latest Owen Wilson-Vince Vaughn vehicle to “watching two aging fraternity brothers try to convince each other that they haven’t lost a step since college”:

If the movie was just the two guys hanging out, The Internship might have been enjoyable. But Vaughn has put them into a really creaky underdog tale that’s part Animal House, part Revenge of the Nerds, and a large part “Homer Goes to College”—The Simpsons episode where Homer has to hang out with a bunch of smart, nerdy college kids and teaches them how to have some fun. That setup makes The Internship sound like a raucous comedy, but unlike Wedding Crashers, which was rated R, this PG-13 offering is actually pretty tame, no matter how many “shit”s the characters get away with saying. …

As for the Google setting and downsized-America topicality, the movie actually takes it seriously, hoping it’ll give the movie some emotional resonance. But according to The Internship, Billy and Nick are meant to represent all of us, the aging workers scared about an uncertain future in which we’ll be replaced by brainiac millennials who are too busy on their iPhones to, like, experience life, man, and get laid.

For A.A. Dowd, “it’s enough to make a lifelong Googler want to switch to Bing”:

Product placement is one thing; building a whole movie around the glorification of a multinational corporation is something else entirely.

Essentially a feature-length sponsored post, The Internship casts Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson as middle-aged salesmen who find themselves competing against braniac college kids for a job at Google. As the film incessantly reminds viewers, the company—envisioned here as a professional paradise, where the food is free, diversity is key, and cars drive themselves—is regularly voted the greatest place to work in America. Characters go further, describing it as an “engine for change,” the “Garden of Eden,” and “the best amusement park you’ve ever been to, times a million.” If this excessively flattering farce is to be believed, Googliness is next to godliness.

Lydia DePillis has more on the corporate propaganda:

As the Los Angeles Times reported recently, Google charged neither location nor licensing fees for the privilege of shooting at its edenic headquarters, but did enjoy veto power over its contents. Accordingly, the script fully buys into the company mystique: Intern teams competing for full-time jobs are told they’ll be judged on their “Googliness,” which one character describes as “the intangible stuff that made a search engine into an engine for doing good.” And when Wilson’s love interest, a workaholic middle manager, says she puts in long hours because she thinks her job “makes peoples lives just a little bit better,” we’re clearly supposed to admire her.

The film’s advertorial nature hasn’t gone unnoticed. Early reviews have focused on the movie’s all-encompassing product placement, the Googleplex perks it highlights, and how it could be useful recruiting tool. (One critic even went so far as to suggest tickets to the movie, since it’s one long advertisement, should be given away for free.) It’s all true: In the world of The Internship, Google is basically paradise, the pinnacle of modernity and meaning in work. No wonder the company’s head of HR is so happy with it.

Previous Dish on the movie’s extreme product placement here.

Buster Olney reports (paywall) that a war is exactly what most MLB players want:

I’ve written this here before and it’s worth repeating now: In 1995, the players used as replacements during the MLBPA’s strike were treated as scabs thereafter, because they were perceived to be a threat to the union’s stance, and to the other players’ ability to make a living. Well, in 2013, players who choose to take performance-enhancing drugs to gain a competitive advantage over other union members are a far greater threat than the replacement players ever were, and worthy of much harsher treatment from their brethren. Because the players who choose to cheat have effectively chosen to try to take jobs and money illicitly from other union members.

Jonah Keri observes:

Fifteen, 20 years ago, the league and mainstream media were both content to let players smash home runs and fire 97-mph fastballs while said players consumed performance-enhancing substances; the league hadn’t properly codified which substances were allowed and which ones were not, while the media wrote fawning profiles of players who were later found to have used. No one likes to get duped, especially publicly. So we got an onslaught of hysterical articles slamming the league and its players for the spread of PED use. And now we have a league determined to beat back any criticism of its policies, even if it means suspending minor leaguers with flimsy evidence because they can’t defend themselves [because they don’t have a union], firing arbitrators for making honest decisions with which the league didn’t agree, and building cases based largely on the testimony of a broke alleged drug dealer.

Readers chime in:

I don’t have stats or figures or anything resembling first-hand knowledge, but I still think it’s worth pointing out the difference in the two situations. The drug war has been a decades-long bust. It has created many more problems than it has solved, and has not gotten near reducing drug-usage or any of its social or political or economic side-effects.  The baseball war on steroids, however, has certainly been a success.

The period of time from 1996-2010 alone saw the amount of people with 600+ career home runs more than double (Ruth, Aaron and Mays have been joined by five others). Records and precedent were constantly smashed, from Brady Andersons’s 50+ home runs as a leadoff hitter to the single-season home-run record being broken several times over. Of course, most importantly, many of these feats happened in the twilight of players careers, and statistically, Bonds, McGwire and Sosa (not to mention Clemens) had most or some of their best seasons in their 30s. Most athletes bodies break-down as they age, not get better (see: Ken Griffey Jr.).

Since baseball started getting serious about drug testing (not that it’s been a perfect system or successful quite yet), we have seen a return to the status quo. Albert Pujols, after one of the finest first-ten years of baseball ever, is slowing down. Derek Jeter’s been nursing an injury since last October, and has seen most of his stats trickle downwards. Alex Rodriguez has been injured consistently the last two years, as well. Star pitchers like Steve Strasburg or Josh Beckett and Cliff Lee are also breaking down in totally normal ways, that we just didn’t seem to see during the most prominent portion of the steroid era.

There will always be “cheats”, and as many point out, baseball has a wonderful history full of sign stealing, spit balls, and other questionable acts. But steroids are very rarely if ever now tainting the game and de-legitimizing it in ways that was prevalent a few years ago. Policies are definitely working and having an effect. The same cannot be said of the drug war.

Another:

The baseball steroid issue and war on drugs analogy is appropriate, but not for the reasons listed. The real issue is more free market oriented, i.e. about the money. Just as an inner city teen may wonder why he should work for minimum wage at McDonalds when he could make a ton of money selling drugs, look the income and lifestyle discrepancy between minor league baseball players and major league players. In the minors, you ride a bus from Rochester to Brooklyn and salaries range from $30-$125k a year. In the majors you get a private plane flying you from city to city and the league minimum of $480,000. If the steroids can bump you from the minors to the majors, that’s an immediate 284% (minimum) increase in your salary. And MLB clubs can’t void your contract if you test positive for PEDs.

A reader writes:

The Batman logo on the chemo container seems cute and well-intentioned, but the fact is that chemo is such a horrible experience that can linger for years. Many people report feeling nauseous just from driving by the hospital where they got their treatment. So is the Brazilian hospital dooming these kids to feel queasy every time they see Batman’s logo for years to come? Can’t help but wonder.

Another:

Your post on a Brazilian hospital’s attempt to disguise chemotherapy as “superformula” awoke a strong resistance in me that I’m having difficulty fully understanding. I had Leukemia when I was 9-11 years old, so I know a thing or two about chemotherapy, and would say I hate it as much as anyone else. Suffering from cancer as a small child is unlike anything you could ever experience, and I understand the urge from adults to turn these children’s weakness into strength, their internal pain into power. But to do so underestimates the resiliency and stoicism I’ve seen in every childhood cancer sufferer I’ve ever met.

Those who survive deserve to know that they are fighting the greatest enemy they’ll ever face, and that their only ally will hurt them before it helps. They, like me, will leave understanding what true strength feels like and can wake every morning knowing they’ve already faced the worst day of their lives. Those who die – and sadly there are far too many – already know deep down that they are not like the other kids; there is a reason they don’t go home after a treatment cycle.

There is no need to be blunt about their future, but lying to them adds nothing to their quality of life. The three strongest people I’ve ever known never made it to 12 years old; every evening we would say goodbye for the last time, but then every morning we would play like … well, like kids.

I don’t mean to belittle kind-hearted efforts to improve the lives of kids who are facing such a tragedy. It is important to cheer up “cancer kids” (those Pittsburgh window washers you linked to would make anyone’s day). It is important to make them feel like they’re not alone. But pretending that chemotherapy isn’t the worst thing they’ll ever experience? Not only is that a lie that could make it harder for kids to understand what’s happening to them, but it’s a lie that assumes that they can’t handle the truth. They can.