James Poniewozik defends his decision to avoid a certain trope:
We all have our not-for-me markers with fiction: mine is kids in peril. It’s not that I can’t appreciate, even enjoy a series based on it; Broadchurch, about the aftermath of a child’s murder, was one of the best things I saw on TV last year. But when I’m off the TV-critic clock, these shows need to clear a much higher bar for me. …
It’s one of fiction’s jobs to face the worst of experience, not to leave an unexplained hole in place of terrible crimes, illnesses and accidents that–would that it were otherwise–do happen. Stories that handle the material with respect and awareness of its lasting consequence do a service; beyond the general role of art to reflect human experience, they provide a kind of emotional disaster preparedness.
But it’s also not anyone’s job as a viewer, or as a human, to face the worst in fiction, much less repeatedly. Again, I get why someone might make this argument. Like real-life violence–see the debate over watching terrorist beheading videos–the outrage that a fictional atrocity provokes makes people want to react morally one way or another. Either it must be a violation to portray this thing, and to watch it; or it must be an obligation, a mark of bravery, to bear witness. The counter-moralizing response to the one I talked about above is: you owe it to others–to real people who suffer and die–to confront this stuff. If you avoid certain kinds of dark material, you’re avoiding life, you’re in denial, you’re a wimp.
Leonid Bershidsky regrets that that Obama’s executive order did little for skilled immigrants:
On the surface, there is little the president, without Congress’s help, can do for skilled migrants. The Immigration and Nationality Act allows only 65,000 people a year to receive H1B temporary skilled worker visas. (Exempt from this quota are 20,000 U.S. graduates of master’s degree programs, as well as an unlimited number of potential government and nonprofit employees.) Just 140,000 skilled workers and their family members are eligible for employment-based green cards each year. …
Perhaps the story of the lottery-losing programmer isn’t as poignant as that of Astrid Silva, who, according to Obama, came to America with just “a cross, her doll and the frilly dress she had on.” The programmer would, however, be more immediately useful to the U.S. economy than Silva, “a college student working on her third degree.” Not letting him in is at least as wrong as kicking out Silva would be.
Jim Manzi argues for more high-skilled immigrants generally:
All of the major Anglophone democracies have done a far better job of this than America and have reaped the benefits.
Australia, Canada, and New Zealand all have a higher foreign-born population than the U.S., and all three plus Britain have more new immigrants each year per capita than the U.S. They have all used some kind of points system to select for immigrants with relevant skills, such as English proficiency and educational attainment, and extra points for degrees or expertise in such fields as science, technology, and medicine. They are generally moving to a two-stage system in which foreign applicants who achieve at least some specificed target score under such a points system are put into a pool which prospective employers can browse, and are granted visas when specific employers offer them jobs. America should implement such a system.
Along the same lines, Philip Sopher thinks it should be easier for physicians to immigrate to the US:
The United States… has strict policies regarding medical licensing—a doctor is only allowed to practice in the U.S. once he has obtained a license in the state in which he intends to work. The person must acquire a visa, pass the first two steps of the United States Medical-Licensing Exam (USMLE), then become certified by the Education Commission for Foreign Medical Graduates (ECFMG), get into an accredited U.S. or Canadian residency program, and finally, go back and pass step three of the USMLE. Each of these steps could take multiple years, repelling doctors who are already able to practice in the country in which they were trained.
But is it really a good idea to deter them? By 2020, America’s doctor shortage is projected to reach 91,500 too few doctors, with nearly half of the burden falling on primary care. This means doctors will be overworked and citizens may have to wait longer and pay higher fees for an appointment. Without all of these barriers, many foreign doctors would find the prospect of migrating to the United States appealing.
The Obama administration, it is now beyond dispute, is in thrall to the CIA. The president, through his chief-of-staff, Denis McDonough, has been doing all he can to render the Senate Intelligence Committee Report on torture unintelligible, if he cannot prevent its publication entirely. And he is not giving an inch in his now two-years’ war against the transparency and accountability he once said he favored. Readers know I’ve almost given up on them, and am deeply concerned that next year, a Republican-run Senate will bury the report for ever. That’s clearly John Brennan’s strategy, as it has been from the start. It’s also, clearly, Obama’s.
I once saw Obama as a way out of our torture shame. If he was never going to investigate and prosecute, as is demanded of any signatory to Geneva, I never thought he would actively prevent even some small measure of accountability. How wrong I was.
Senator Rockefeller calls it like it is after yet another meeting with John Brennan’s best friend, Denis McDonough, a Catholic for some reason dedicated to ensuring that torturers not only face no punishment or reproach, but that their crimes are protected from public accountability for ever:
Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), who served as intelligence committee chair before Feinstein, was furious after the meeting, and accused the administration of deliberately stalling the report. “It’s being slow-walked to death. They’re doing everything they can not to release it,” Rockefeller told HuffPost. “It makes a lot of people who did really bad things look really bad, which is the only way not to repeat those mistakes in the future,” he continued. “The public has to know about it. They don’t want the public to know about it.”
As negotiations continue, Rockefeller said Democrats were thinking creatively about how to resolve the dispute. “We have ideas,” he said, adding that reading the report’s executive summary into the record on the Senate floor would probably meet with only limited success. “The question would be how much you could read before they grabbed you and hauled you off.”
In this game of brinksmanship, it’s clear that Obama is prepared to risk the burial of the entire report. The Senators therefore need to come up with a way to bypass him and the rogue agency he refuses to hold to account. If they can’t read the report into the Congressional Record, there must be another way. To leave this rogue agency with the knowledge that it can do anything, commit any crime, violate any treaty, spy on its overseers, and never even face a public accounting, let alone punishment, of its crimes, is an invitation for these lawless agents to do anything they want in the future. And under a pro-torture, pro-war, pro-secrecy future Republican administration, we can only begin to wonder what they will get away with next.
As of yesterday, residents of Bath in southwest England have the exciting opportunity to ride a bus powered entirely by their own garbage and excrement:
The 40-seat “Bio-Bus” runs on biomethane gas, generated through the treatment of sewage and food waste. It can travel up to 186 miles on one tank of gas, which takes the annual waste of around five people to produce. The bus is run by Bath Bus Company and will transport passengers between Bath and Bristol Airport. Engineers believe the bus could provide a sustainable way of fuelling public transport while improving urban air quality.
The gas is generated at Bristol sewage treatment works, run by GENeco, a subsidiary of Wessex Water. It produces fewer emissions than traditional diesel engines and is both renewable and sustainable. This week, the company also became the first in the UK to inject gas generated from human and food waste into the national gas grid network.
Fittingly, the Bio-Bus rolled out on the heels of World Toilet Day. But this is not the only poo-based technology to come out recently. As Becky Ferreira points out, we are in the midst of a veritable golden age of human-waste recycling:
These examples illustrate that by the 21st century, sophisticated poop-based power had been accepted as a real possibility by the public, business, and academic spheres. It was further launched to new heights in 2011, when the Gates Foundation launched the ReInvent the Toilet Challenge in 2011. … And it’s not just human poop, either. Manure-fueled biogas facilities are becoming more common, and one massive new project in Missouri points to the future. The $80 million facility involves covering some 88 hog waste lagoons—poop lagoons, yeah—and capturing waste gas for processing in biogas digesters.
The essayist and critic George Scialabba has produced an absorbing account of his long struggle with severe depression – simply by reproducing selected intake reports and treatment notes from four decades of therapy and medication, adorned only with a very short introduction. It’s a granular, intimate look at what it is like to live with depression, made all the more notable by the place of religious faith in his story. As one psychologist put it, after Scialabba lost his faith as a young man, “the pieces of his life never came back together.” Here’s an excerpt from a 1987 entry from the document:
Mr. Scialabba dates his psychiatric symptoms back to age 17 when he developed incapacitating anxiety when he had any sexual impulse and he would have guilty ruminations that disrupted his usual activities.
He went to a priest who told him he would be responsible to God for the patient’s sexual impulses, and the anxiety episodes stopped. Mr. Scialabba also joined a very devout all-male Catholic organization called Opus Dei, and he became very involved in that organization during his undergraduate years at Harvard. He felt a missionary zeal about converting others and involving them in Opus Dei. Mr. Scialabba describes his commitment as “intense, demanding, and lifelong.” After four years of college he “lost all belief in Catholicism.”
Mr. Scialabba describes his leaving the church and Opus Dei as extremely difficult, and he described an episode of confusion and perhaps of depersonalization in which he didn’t know what he was going to do, but he went into a meeting of Opus Dei and tried to speak about his loss of faith. Instead he became agitated and had to be led from the room. Mr. Scialabba feels he has never recovered from this emotional upset. He describes the time leading up to his departure from Opus Dei as the most intensely meaningful, exciting time in his life, when he felt that all of life and intellectual and philosophical pursuits were open to him.
Damon Linker riffs on Scialabba’s story, thinking through what faith can mean for a person – and what happens when that faith is lost. The despair Scialabba endures seems to complicate our secular-religious divide, drawing attention to those “who are unceasingly restless for God, whose deepest and highest hopes point toward transcendence of the merely mortal world, but who either never manage to acquire faith — or, perhaps even worse, enjoy it for time but then lose it”:
For someone like that, unable to reconcile himself to the disenchantment of his own world, faith — its promise, its withdrawal, its absence — can become a source of the purest misery. Even a curse.
Worse, a curse backed up by a taunt, echoing continually in the former believer’s mind: “You’ve seen the Truth. If you now reject it and turn your back on God, the fault is yours alone, and you will suffer for your sins. Indeed, your depression is merely a finite taste of the agony you will reap in a hellish afterlife of eternal punishment.”
Against these existential-spiritual agonies, modern medicine deploys talk therapy and Prozac. No wonder the results are mixed.
As for the rest of us, secularists seemingly so much more content than George Scialabba with our lack of faith, we are left with a puzzle worth pondering: Was Augustine deluded about the ultimate source and aim of our unceasing, anxious restlessness?
Virginia Hughes looks at the science on why people have pets:
If pet-keeping were a purely (or even largely) biologically driven trait, it would be difficult to explain why its popularity has spiked in the last 200 years, and particularly since World War II — a tiny blip on the timeline of human evolution. As a rough marker of this change [psychology professor Harold] Herzog turns to Google Ngram, a tool that tracks the frequency of words published in books. If you put the word “pet” into Google Ngram, you’ll see a sharp rise since about 1960.
Similarly, if pet-keeping were biological you’d expect all human cultures to do it. While it’s true that most human cultures have pets in their home, the way they interact with them is remarkably variable. Herzog cites a study published in 2011 comparing pet-keeping practices in 60 societies around the world. The study found a large variety of species of pets, including some that seem quite odd from a Western perspective: ostriches, tortoises, bears, bats. The most common pet species is the dog, but even then, people are very different in the way they keep dogs.
Of the 60 cultures surveyed, 53 have dogs, but only 22 consider dogs to be pets. Even then, pet dogs are usually used for specific purposes such as hunting or herding. Just seven cultures regularly feed their dogs and let them live inside the house, and only three cultures play with dogs. The study’s general conclusion, as Herzog puts it: “The affection and resources lavished upon pets in the United States and Europe today is a cultural anomaly.”
Meanwhile, Kaleigh Rogers flags research on the role of animals in helping humans overcome addiction:
Animal-assisted therapy (AAT) is not a new concept. Most of us can imagine how having a therapy dog wagging around a group session helps chill people out and enables them to open up (and there’s plenty of research to back that up). But do we really think that Lassie can help us kick a crack addiction? And when expensive, in-patient treatment facilities are upgrading from a golden retriever to a tank full of dolphins, is it based on research evidence or just a marketing gimmick to stand out from the pack?
Research on the effects of AAT specifically in the treatment of substance dependency is limited, but there is a bit of scientific evidence to back up the claims addiction centers make. In 2009, Dr. Martin Wesley, dean of the School of Counseling at the University of the Cumberlands in Kentucky, was inspired to study the effects of animals on addiction therapy while working at a residential treatment center. He noticed how much his patients took an interest in the critters around the facility. “I would see how the clients would respond to squirrels outside and the cats that would come by and even raccoons,” he said in a recent phone chat. “Someone would bring their dog and these hardened individuals would melt.”
I have to say I understand. My dogs do one thing for me every day: they break my spell of narcissism; they take me out of an exclusively human sphere and force me to see the world, even briefly, from the point of view of another species – which seems, as each day goes by, vastly superior to my own. For this, they trip us out of our ruts of thought as surely as meditation does. Because they are themselves a kind of permanent, living form of meditation: that the universe is about far more than us, if we look up a little, and if, occasionally, we also look down.
The latest damning evidence in the Cosby saga is this post-interview AP footage:
Amanda Hess blames the culture of entertainment journalism for allowing the allegations to go under the radar for so long, pointing to that AP interview as a prime example:
Entertainment journalists require access to rich, famous people, and rich, famous people require favorable press. How news organizations and celebrities negotiate that exchange depends on their relative status in the marketplace. When Cosby granted the AP interview at the beginning of the month, he believed that he was powerful enough to demand positive coverage, and ultimately, it appears the AP agreed.
But just ten days after the piece aired, Cosby’s stock had dropped considerably: In that time, Netflix, NBC, and TV Land had all cut ties, meaning that he had fewer friends, less influence, and very little leverage. As the power differential shifted, the AP’s complicity with Cosby in producing the art-related video and scuttling the rest began to pose a reputational risk to the news organization. (The AP notes in the new video that it decided to publish the additional footage in the new context of the “backdrop” of his shuttered business deals.) So: The AP rolled the tape of its interview touching on the rape allegations, and also included the tense off-the-cuff conversation that followed. The postscript contained the interview’s juiciest bits, but it also served as a sly explanation for why the AP failed to release the video earlier: The implication is that Cosby and his people intimidated the AP into silence.
But the video shows that the Associated Press reporter was not eager to approach the topic in the first place, and unwilling to justify his line of questioning when Cosby challenged him.
The odd thing about Cosby’s downfall is that nothing had changed in the last decade; there was no suggestion that any of the events described by his new accusers had happened since the first allegations and an accompanying civil case, which was settled. The initial lack of followup by influential outlets created a sort of reverse pack mentality—a reinforcing silence. No one mentioned it, because no one else had.
This was helped along by the feel-good nature of much arts writing: If the point of the story is to promote a comedy appearance, or a new book or other product, a digression into allegations of drugging and sexual assault was buzzkill.
Others reflect on how one should approach Cosby’s work now that he’s widely seen as a rapist. Despite being “100 percent in favor of NBC yanking his sitcom,” Pilot Veruet laments TV Land’s removal of the show that made Cosby famous:
The Cosby Show may have been about a family that happened to be black, rather than about a black family, but that doesn’t negate the huge strides the show made. Most importantly, it doesn’t negate the fact that for many people, myself included, this was one of the first times I was seeing myself — my family, my skin, my hair — represented on television in a way that actually made me feel good. …
Aside from the show’s legacy, TV Land’s decision brings up a whole slew of questions that are impossible to answer: What are the rules when it comes to public erasure of a prominent figure and his work? What makes Cosby different from Roman Polanski or Woody Allen — two filmmakers who continue to work and get their films distributed, and whose movies still regularly air on television (I can’t imagine them ever getting yanked) — or any other terrible person who has also contributed something of value to society? Is it the sheer number and volume of victims, or something else at work here? And what does this mean for everyone else who worked, for so many years, on The Cosby Show and will now fail to get their share of the residuals? Will all of Cosby’s past work eventually see the same fate?
The thing that strikes me the most about TV Land’s choice is that it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with righteousness or respect for the victims; it appears to be a panicked business decision, a preemptive strike to ensure the network doesn’t receive any of the backlash that Netflix and NBC were getting prior to pulling their respective Cosby projects.
Separating art from the artist — or condemning art made by terrible people — is never a zero sum game. You can find Cosby’s alleged actions so appalling that you can’t watch his show at all. You can also find his alleged actions appalling, yet find they don’t impact your ability to watch anything he’s ever done — or even appreciate his stand-up.
If you fit into that latter category, don’t worry that you’re tossing piles of cash his way if you fire up a favorite Cosby Show episode on Hulu. But if you find Cosby to be a monster and want to monetarily punish him somehow, you don’t really have a lot of recourse, unless you were planning to see him perform live soon and now won’t. Cosby’s considerable fortune — the one that made it possible for him to settle allegations against him out of court, the one that made it necessary to try him in the court of public opinion — was made long, long ago, and there’s little to be done about it now.
And Tim Teeman sums up much of the response over the question, “How could the guy who played Cliff Huxtable do this?”
Bill Cosby, it seems, can only be seen in two registers: sainted family man of a much-loved sitcom, or fallen, tarnished villain. There is no middle ground. There is no understanding that on The Cosby Show, Bill Cosby was playing a role, and playing it so well that America happily conflated character and actor. The conflation was so total that now America apparently feels cheated, or tricked somehow, that this person is not the character he played.
But Cosby never was, and it is not his failing that America took him to their hearts as so (indeed, ironically, that confidence trick was solely down to his acting brilliance). Cosby’s alleged crimes are horrific, but America’s infantile deification of celebrity, its crazy melding of the fictional and the real, underpins Cosby’s present position in the public stocks, as much as his alleged crimes.
Myron May, the man who shot and wounded three people at the Florida State University library yesterday morning before police killed him, was mentally disturbed:
May’s Facebook page shows he posted mostly Bible verses and links to conspiracy theories about the government reading people’s minds. Records show May was licensed to practice law in Texas and New Mexico. According to a Las Cruces, New Mexico, police report last month, May was a subject of a harassment complaint after a former girlfriend called to report he came to her home uninvited and claimed police were bugging his house and car. Danielle Nixon told police May recently developed “a severe mental disorder.” “Myron began to ramble and handed her a piece to a car and asked her to keep it because this was a camera that police had put in his vehicle,” the report said. The report also said May recently quit his job and was on medication.
In the wake of this latest tragedy, Beth Elderkin wants to talk about how almost all such “active shooters” are male:
[T]here’s no way to deny that almost all active shooters of the past decade have been men. Even Paul Elam, founder of men’s-rights site A Voice For Men, called the FBI’s statistics “reasonable” in an interview with the Daily Dot. But does that mean masculinity is, or should be, part of the conversation? According to researchers, the answer is yes. An increasing number of sociologists, including [Michael] Rocque, who authored a study on school shootings in 2011, say gender should be treated as a key component in how we address active shootings and other violent acts. And we’re not just talking about mass shootings; FBI statistics show that in 2012, more than 80 percent of arrests for violent crimes were men.
Update from a reader:
So can we acknowledge now that male brains work differently from female ones? Obviously I don’t mean that it’s always for the better! But then couldn’t these differences also partially explain the lack of gender parity in certain professional fields? Testosterone is powerful stuff.
Tyler Lopez, meanwhile, blasts the NRA’s position on these incidents and how to stop them:
The gun lobby acknowledges the problem of mass-shooting incidents in the United States. Its solution calls for arming more people who could potentially stop a shooter and for rapid-response training focused on minimizing casualties. This is part of an increasingly pervasive, insidious gun culture that accepts mass shootings as inevitable. But by this logic, the first victims—friends, loved ones, children—are expendable. The first victims of a mass shooting are a mangled human sacrifice on the altar of Second Amendment rights.
Until a shooter pulls the trigger to begin his slaughter, he is merely a guy with a gun. The gun lobby insists that the government should allow people to carry firearms into all public places. (Gun advocates continued to push for expanded open-carry legislation the morning after the Tallahassee shooting.) After all, who are we to judge a man simply because he is proudly displaying a gun by his side? In this world, the first victim is merely an alarm for others to respond.
He will be a refreshing presence on the campaign trail. He doesn’t talk like a politician. He can be blunt and combative. He has taken strong populist economic stands and was a strong opponent of the war in Iraq. In fact, Webb goes in strong whenever he takes a stand. He’ll certainly be fun to watch during debates (he was a boxer at Annapolis).
You’d have to call him a longshot, of course. But I suspect he’ll be one of those long shots who have the power to shape a campaign with new ideas and sharp arguments. He will certainly cause Clinton some populist agita, should she run.
It has all the trappings of a campaign as vanity project, the type of presidential exploration designed not to excite convention delegates but to boost a candidate’s name ID before cable-TV bookers.
Webb, after all, would come into a Democratic primary with considerable baggage—never mind that he would likely be squaring off against Hillary Clinton, the most overwhelming favorite in an open Democratic primary in history. There is the fact that Webb used to be a Republican, a point he proudly points to in the video when he mentions his service in the Reagan administration. Or the fact that Webb, who decided not to run again after only one term in elective office, doesn’t seem to have the stomach for the degradations of politics. And the fact that Webb’s base of support lies among working-class whites, who are a diminishing constituency in a party made up more and more of liberals, minorities, and the professional classes.
Jonathan Bernstein opines that Webb “isn’t so much a serious candidate for a presidential nomination as he is an interesting person who has chosen to enter the contest”:
In that, he reminds me of Bill Bradley in 2000 or perhaps Eugene McCarthy in 1968. Interesting people can be excellent (or so-so) senators, but they never get close to presidential nominations. For that, the requirement is almost insane ambition.
Nevertheless, on the surface Webb looks like a viable candidate (he fits my criteria of having convention qualifications and fitting in the mainstream of his party on policy). He also appears to be well-regarded by many in the national press corps. So even if he polls badly six months from now and has little in the way of the organization that real candidates need, it will probably be easier for Clinton to accept at least a couple of debates with him than to freeze him out.
If nothing else, Webb can show how empty Clinton’s message may be. He can turn her insistence on inevitability into a portrait of entitlement, which in fact it is. And if he starts getting attention, it might stir other Democrats to get in and steal some of the limelight.
Noah Millman hopes Webb will force Clinton to debate foreign policy. But he fears Webb will get tripped up by the culture war:
Webb’s campaign is going to be severely under-funded, and Webb himself is going to start out of the gate a terrible campaigner, so it may be that Clinton will simply ignore him and we won’t get any debate at all. But if she wants to make him instantly irrelevant, the last thing she’d do is engage him. Rather, all she – or, rather, her surrogates – need to do is to position him as a culture war conservative, someone who is at best iffy and at worst outright hostile on women’s equality, gay rights, affirmative action, immigration, and so on down the line. Once that becomes the story, that will likely be the only story – the only one that matters, anyway. And then, either he sinks without a trace or, if he gets a little bit of traction, it’ll be another story about how culturally conservative working class whites who rejected Obama are rejecting Clinton as well. Which, in turn, will further facilitate their consolidation as a GOP voting bloc – precisely the opposite of what Webb intends to achieve. …
Webb is never going to be the great progressive hope – and that’s fine. Indeed, it’s better than fine. It’s better for Clinton to be challenged on foreign and economic policy by a Jim Webb than a Bernie Sanders. People who aren’t the usual suspects might just listen. But he needs to avoid being defined by the cultural signals he gives off.
[T]he conservative message machine has gone on at length about the “constitutional crisis” the president is instigating. The right has compared Obama to a monarch (see here and here), a Latin American caudillo, even a conspirator against the Roman Republic. (Ever melodrama much?) The rhetoric gets a little thick. But if you boil it down, the critique is mostly about Obama’s usurpation of power and contempt for democratic norms, not the substance of his policy change. Some Republicans no doubt believe it.
And yet, try as they might to stick to the script, there’s something about dark-skinned foreigners that sends the conservative id into overdrive.
Most famously, there’s Iowa Congressman Steve King’s observation last year that for every child brought into the country illegally “who’s a valedictorian, there’s another 100 out there who weigh 130 pounds and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.” While King tends to be especially vivid in his lunacy, he’s no outlier.
Substantively, Obama’s executive order gives him less than he hoped to gain with a bipartisan law. But politically, he has ceded no advantage. Indeed, he has gained one. Not only does immigration remain a live issue, it is livelier than ever. The GOP primary will remorselessly drive its candidates rightward and force them to promise to overturn Obama’s reform, and thus to immediately threaten with deportation some 5 million people — none of whom can vote, but nearly all of whom have friends, family, co-workers, and neighbors who can. …
The emotional momentum in the Republican Party now falls to its most furious, deranged voices. Michele Bachmann has denounced what she calls “millions of unskilled, illiterate, foreign nationals coming into the United States who can’t speak the English language.” Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama has even presented the most sympathetic slice of the immigrant community — the ones serving in the military — as a source of insidious competition and even treason. (“I don’t want American citizens having to compete with illegal immigrants for jobs in our military … These individuals have to be absolutely 100 percent loyal and trustworthy.” Steve King, a regular font of nativist outbursts, is setting himself up as a power broker in Iowa, which will command center stage in the GOP primary for months and months on end.
The Dish 