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After the FAA deal, Ezra declares that the “Democrats have lost on sequestration”:

It is worth noting how different the Democrats’ approach to sequestration has been to the GOP’s approach to, well, everything. Over the past five years, Republicans have repeatedly accepted short-term political pain to win the leverage necessary for long-term policy gain. That’s the governing political principle behind their threats to shut down the government, breach the debt ceiling, and, for that matter, accept sequestration. Today, Democrats showed they’re not willing to accept even a bit of short-term pain for leverage on sequestration. They played a game of chicken with the Republicans, and they lost. Badly.

Chait argues that “Obama’s mistake wasn’t the design of sequestration” but, instead, “finding himself in that negotiation to begin with”:

Earlier this year, Obama refused to negotiate over the debt ceiling, and Republicans caved and raised it. If he had done that in 2011, they would probably have done the same thing. Instead, Obama took their demand to reduce the deficit at face value and thought, Hey, I want to reduce the deficit, too — why don’t we use this opportunity to strike a deal? As it happened, Republicans care way, way, way more about low taxes for the rich than low deficits, which made a morally acceptable deal, or even something within hailing distance of a morally acceptable deal, completely impossible.

Weigel identifies a contributing factor:

Intuitively, voters don’t understand that a president might be hamstrung when he’s making decisions about spending. … Call it the Maureen Dowd Paradox — people are so inclined to see the president as powerful that they don’t understand how and why he might be limited legislatively.

Yglesias wonders whether Democrats will cave on the sequester’s defense cuts:

The military cuts would give me a lot of leverage vis-a-vis the GOP because I really think the United States spends wildly too much money on an agenda of global military hegemony. But that’s not what Obama thinks, and it’s certainly not what Obama says. Nor is it a line that red-state Democratic Party senators or folks plotting political strategy for the DCCC are going to want to hold. So far, Republicans keep bailing Democrats out by proposing to rescind military cuts and replace them with cuts in programs for the poor. The different wings of the Democratic Party are comfortable hanging together to oppose that and insist instead on a “balanced” alternative. But what if Republicans proposed to rescind the military cuts and replace them with nothing.

TNC adds:

Sequestration was premised on the abiding belief among Democratic power-brokers–including the president–that Republicans and Democrats were working with equal pain thresholds. They are not. Obama underestimated his enemies, and now we are going to pay for it.

They get their success the old fashioned way:

Tufts economist Linda Loury suggests that half of all jobs in the U.S. are found through family, friends, or acquaintances.

Canadian economists Miles Corak and Patrizio Piraino look at how often men end up working at the same company where their father worked, finding that as many as 40 percent have done that at some point. The proportion rises to 70 percent among the top 1 percent in income distribution. This helps to explain why the relationship between the earnings of parent and child is even higher at the top end than it is across the population at large, according to Corak. One-third of successions between chief executive officers in publicly listed companies in the U.S. involves an incoming CEO related by blood or marriage to the old CEO, the founder, or a large shareholder. That’s bad news for the share price, according to Francisco Perez-Gonzalez of the NBER, but clearly good news for the newly appointed relative.

The ginger Svengali alleged to be the mastermind of Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s conversion to Internet Islam … seems pretty harmless in this NYRB report. But read the comments as well as the short piece. Update from a reader:

It’s funny that you should note the comments on the NYRB article – Catherine Fitzpatrick is a well known “eccentric” in the Russia-watching circles. (And by eccentric I mean nutty and conspiratorial.)

Another:

Long-time reader, early subscriber here. I write to register how offended I was that you would highlight on your blog an ad hominem attack on Catherine Fitzpatrick. (Full disclosure: I knew her in NY in the ’70s and ’80s, but have not been in touch since.) She’s a long-time human rights activist on Russian and Eastern European fronts. In her work with Aryeh Neier at Helsinki Watch in the 1980s she defended, sometimes with distinct personal bravery, more dissidents than you and I ever will. She is a very well-known scholar of Soviet/Russian affairs, and her Russian fluency is so superb that she was a translator of many major books in the 1990s (including Yeltsin’s autobiography). She was an “early adopter” of all things Internet. (Her association with Second Life led, by my reading, to the controversy that led your reader to call her “nutty.”) In short, political perspectives aside, she and you (and I) have a lot in common.

The Boy Scouts of America recently announced that it plans to end its ban on gay Scouts but keep the ban on gay troop leaders. EJ Graff suggests an alternative:

Instead of accepting the gay-okay-till-21 recommendation, here’s my hope: that the Scout assembly at large will instead find a way to move forward on the earlier trial-balloon policy. A few months back, the Scouts let out the suggestion that perhaps each troop could decide its policy on gay members and leaders for itself. That was, I thought, a brilliant compromise, a kind of federalism that would allow each troop to remain in sync with its community’s attitudes.

Such a policy would make it possible for individuals locally to lobby and educate their neighbors and friends. Mormon-sponsored troops could live by their own strictures, while the Unitarians or some other group could independently sponsor a gay-welcoming troop across town. That policy would allow the Scouts’ ban to fade slowly, along with antigay attitudes, until they were ready to flush it away as an embarrassment. In the meantime, yes, individual gay kids would be marooned in hostile troops as they realize that they might be, you know, like that—but no matter the policy, you know that those troops (and the families that are putting their kids in them) are not yet going to be welcoming, no matter what the Scouts’ official policy might be.

Sam Harris, a practitioner of meditation and Brazilian jiu-jitsu, connects the two:

Almost all our suffering is the product of our thoughts. We spend nearly every moment of our lives lost in thought, and hostage to the character of those thoughts. You can break this spell, but it takes training just like it takes training to defend yourself against a physical assault. You are thinking every moment and not aware of it, and the initial experience of anyone who seriously tries to meditate is one of discovering how incessant this cascade of thoughts is.

Graeme Wood sparred with Sam:

Harris likened training with an expert fighter to “falling into deep water without knowing how to swim.” He sees BJJ as a cycle of mock death and resurrection, wherein an expert may kill you many times per session. “To train in BJJ is to continually drown—or, rather, to be drowned, in sudden and ingenious ways—and to be taught, again and again, how to swim.”

Having read all this, I asked Harris to drown me.

I am several inches taller and several pounds stockier than Harris, who is 5 foot 9 and weighs 165 pounds, and I am undefeated in single combat—though only because I have never been in a fight and flee anytime I see anyone who looks even vaguely threatening. …

I soon found myself in what BJJ practitioners call a “rear naked choke,” which, while less alarming than it sounds, is lethal if applied unmercifully. At one point, I resisted by pushing my jaw between Harris’s elbow and my throat. That didn’t help. “He can choke your whole jaw into your throat,” [instructor Ryron Gracie] said. “It affects the carotid—through the jaw!” He said this with an air of Isn’t that cool? Later, once Harris had let me go, I had to agree: Yes, very cool.

Jay Griffiths emphasizes the need for adventure in a risk-averse society:

William Golding’s Lord of the Flies is cited as if it were documentary evidence, as if, without the authority of adults, children will become vicious little monsters. Children are made to read this malignant propaganda against their childhood selves, and its message is beloved by those who believe that the opposite of obedience is disobedience. But these are false opposites. The true opposite of obedience is not disobedience but independence. The true opposite of order is not disorder but freedom. Most profoundly, the true opposite of control is not chaos but self-control. …

For there actually has been a real-life Lord of the Flies incident, and the result was the opposite of what is portrayed in the novel.

One day, in 1977, six boys set out from Tonga on a fishing trip. They left safe harbor, and fate befell them. Badly. Caught in a huge storm, the boys were shipwrecked on a deserted island. What do they do, this little tribe? They made a pact never to quarrel, because they could see that arguing could lead to mutually assured destruction. They promised each other that wherever they went on the island, they would go in twos, in case they got lost or had an accident. They agreed to have a rotation of being on guard, night and day, to watch out for anything that might harm them or anything that might help. And they kept their promises—for a day that became a week, a month, a year. After fifteen months, two boys, on watch as they had agreed, saw a speck of a boat on the horizon. The boys were found and rescued, all of them, grace intact and promises held.

Joshua Rothman reflects on the question:

What does it mean to say that a decade of your life is good or bad? That it was worthwhile, or a waste of time? Barring some Proustian effort of recollection, a long period of years, with its vast range of experiences and incidents, simply can’t be judged all at once. The best we can do is use what psychologists call “heuristics”: mental shortcuts that help us draw conclusions quickly.

One of the more well-understood heuristics is called the “peak-end rule.” We tend to judge long experiences (vacations, say) by averaging, more or less, the most intense moment and the end. So a grad student’s account of grad school might not be truly representative of what went on; it might merely combine the best (or worst) with how it all turned out.

The most wonderful students will be averaged with the grind of the dissertation; that glorious summer spent reading Kant will be balanced against the horrors of the job market. Essentially, peak-end is an algorithm; it grades graduate school in the same way that a software program grades those essays on the S.A.T. Sure, a judgment is produced, but it’s only meaningful in a vague, approximate way. At the same time, it raises an important conceptual question: What makes an experience worthwhile? Is it the quality of the experience as it’s happening, or as it’s remembered? Could the stress and anxiety of grad school fade, leaving only the learning behind? (One hopes that the opposite won’t happen.) Perhaps one might say of graduate school what Aeneas said of his struggles: “A joy it will be one day, perhaps, to remember even this.” Today’s unhappiness might be forgotten later, or judged enriching in other ways.

Bilge Ebiri offers a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at how Terrence Malick made To the Wonder, including these details about how the director used art and literature to inspire cast and crew:

As prompts for the actors, Malick shared representative works of art and literature. For Affleck, he suggested Fitzgerald, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky. (Affleck read Martin Heidegger on his own, having known that Malick had translated one of the German philosopher’s works as a grad student.) For Kurylenko, he also recommended Tolstoy and Dostoevsky — specifically, Anna Karenina, The Brothers Karamazov, and The Idiot. “Those books were, in a way, his script,” she says. But he did more than give the actors the books; he suggested ways to approach the texts and characters to focus on. So, for example, he recommended that Kurylenko read The Idiot with a particular eye on two characters: the young and prideful Aglaya Yepanchin, and the fallen, tragic Nastassya Filippovna. “He wanted me to combine their influences — the romantic and innocent side, with the insolent and daring side. ‘For some reason, you only ever see that combination in Russian characters,’ he said to me.”

Richard Wolin profiles the Egyptologist Jan Assmann, describing one of his more controversial ideas this way:

Assmann argues that biblical monotheism, as codified by the Pentateuch, disrupted the political and cultural stability of the ancient world by introducing the concept of “religious exclusivity”: that is, by claiming, as no belief system had previously, that its God was the one true God, and that, correspondingly, all other gods were false. By introducing the idea of the “one true God,” Assmann suggests that monotheism upended one of the basic precepts of ancient polytheism: the principle of “divine translatability.” This notion meant that, in ancient Mesopotamia, the various competing deities and idols possessed a fundamental equivalence. This equivalence provided the basis for a constructive modus vivendi among the major empires and polities that predominated in the ancient world.

Assmann readily admits that the ancient Middle East was hardly an unending expanse of peaceable kingdoms. However, he suggests that before monotheism’s emergence, the rivalries and conflicts at issue were predominantly political rather than religious in nature. For this reason, they could be more readily contained. Monotheism raised the stakes of these skirmishes to fever pitch. According to Assmann, with monotheism’s advent, it became next to impossible to separate narrowly political disagreements from religious disputes about “ultimate ends” (Max Weber) or “comprehensive doctrines” (John Rawls). According to the new logic of “religious exclusivity,” political opponents to be conquered were turned into theological “foes” to be decimated.

In addition to coming perilously close to rehashing anti-Semitic tropes, Wolin argues that Assmann’s theories only tell part of the story:

A major failing of Assmann’s approach is that it systematically neglects ancient Judaism’s robust moral inclinations toward tolerance and neighborly love. Numerous prescriptions in the Old Testament, known as the Noachide Laws, stress the importance of providing hospitality and succor to strangers. As we read in Leviticus (19:33-34): “When a stranger resides with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as your self, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.” Thus, contra Assmann, lurid tales of plunder, bloodlust, and divine retribution fail to tell the whole story.

Jim Holt thinks “the universe is more ugly than it is beautiful”:

[T]he form we can expect reality to take at its most general level is that of an infinite, incomplete mediocre mess. The laws of physics are not particularly elegant. The ingredients of the universe show no aesthetic parsimony. There are 60 odd elementary particles. That’s way more than is necessary. If the universe is created by a God it’s a God with no sense of economy or elegance.

He also responds to the idea that beauty is “the mystery of life”:

I think the delight one experiences in grasping a truth is the same sort of delight that’s elicited by beauty. I hate to make the hoary old distinction between the beautiful and the sublime but I think that things that are deeply mysterious don’t appeal to me. I’m irritated by mystery. It’s a temperamental thing. I know some people love it. So the day is beautiful and the night is sublime, as Kant said fatuously in one of his early works. The day is flooded with sunlight and everything is crisp and clear in its contours whereas the night is obscurity with these pinpricks of light that are stars. In the extremely unlikely event that all cosmic mystery is somehow dissolved, I don’t think that will destroy my aesthetic appreciation of the cosmos, but then I don’t think the cosmos is an aesthetically satisfying object as a whole. It’s a botched job! I think we should send it back and get a new one!

Last year the Dish had Jim on as an Ask Anything guest – watch those videos here.