Don't Release Your Tax Returns, Mitt

The main GOP argument for a Romney tax return release is that by disclosing the information in question, he can deal with the inevitable questions soon, rather than closer to November. Even though the questions would be tough, the speculation that he's concealing something sinister in the meantime is more damaging. Alex Altman takes the opposite view, that releasing them would be futile:

Though the campaign has been tactically coy on the subject, it’s likely that Romney intends to name his No. 2 at the beginning of August, when he returns from his trip abroad. That selection will surely swallow all talk of tax havens, offshore accounts and carried interest. Until then, the topic is certain to linger, no matter how many shiny objects Camp Romney offers up to distract reporters. (And you have to hand it to them: between Matt Drudge’s preposterous VP floats and John Sununu’s “American” dog whistle, they’ve been rather inventive.) Unless, of course, additional years of returns yield no politically problematic revelations. And even then, Democrats would just keeping asking for more.

I'm not entirely sure whether releasing potentially damning financial information is the right public relations decision for Romney. The lack of transparency is enough to cause considerable alarm, but I suspect that this will become a fairly minor issue for either side. The tax returns are a distraction. The really disturbing thing about Romney is to be found among the information we already have: not only that he was an expert at outsourcing, but that he did it at tremendous expense to the American economy.

And besides, isn't there something just a little amiss about Romney aligning himself with small business? When it comes to firms like Bain, nothing seems more antithetical than the idea of mom and pop living above the store.

America Is a Violent Country

The blue line at the top is the United States; the other lines represent other advanced OECD countries. Krugman is surprised by the turnaround:

I grew up in the America marked by that peak in violence — the America in which Times Square was a nest of drug addicts and porn shops, and people were afraid to take the subway. Now it’s another world. And that’s one reason I find all these laments about declining values among non-elite Americans hard to take seriously. If things like single parenthood were as bad as they say, how can social pathologies have declined so much?

(Via Crooked Timber)

Art Over Biology

The classic example is the peacock's tail. Why must an animal devote so much of its energy to producing a beautiful and decorative but ultimately nonfunctional tail? In a less enlightened time, such a feature would have been credited to a creator, but we no longer have it so easy. The question apparently plagued Darwin, who said, "The sight of a feather in the peacock’s tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick." Like all things in an evolutionary Darwinian sense, it comes back to reproduction:

Animals produce beauty on their bodies; humans can also produce it in their artifacts. The natural inference, then, would be that art is a human form of sexual display, a way for males to impress females with spectacularly redundant creations. There is even an animal precedent for this: the Australian bowerbird, which attracts females by building an incredibly elaborate bower out of grass and twigs, and decorating it with colorful bits and the juice of crushed berries. The bower is a perfect example of an artwork whose explicit purpose is to promote reproduction.

Moreover:

In a strictly Darwinian nature, of course, there is no such thing as honor, value, or goodness; there is only success or failure at reproduction. But the very words “success” and “failure,” despite themselves, bring an emotive and ethical dimension into the discussion, so impossible is it for human beings to inhabit a valueless world....Likewise, it makes no sense logically for us to be emotionally invested in the question of whether or not art serves our evolutionary fitness. Still, there is an unmistakable sense in discussions of Darwinian aesthetics that by linking art to fitness, we can secure it against charges of irrelevance or frivolousness—that mattering to reproduction is what makes art, or anything, really matter.

The Week in Review

Last Sunday, I bemoaned the state of Romney's singing voice, calling his tuneless rendition of America the Beautiful a "cruel, cold-blooded murder." We asked about the most effective killing machine in human history, and were surprised to learn that it was the mosquito; we also discovered that Andy Warhol called a chocolate bar between two pieces of bread 'cake' and that he had a rather unusual relationship with food. We call someone 'hot' because there is a primal relationship between our emotions and temperature, according to various studies.

On Monday, we began the week with a post on the challenges of being a juror for the Pulitzer prize and on the following day examined the art of writing a decent obituary. I wrote a piece in defense of Alex Kane, a writer whose criticism of Israel provoked a charge of antisemitism, and concluded that there is a danger in ascribing the term too liberally. We talked about the horrors of alcoholism, continued our discussion on the nature of offensive jokes, and found that the Newsweek cover story on internet addiction was based on scant evidence and is an example of poor reporting. Sarah Silverman had a very indecent proposal for Sheldon Adelson, and Sam Harris explained that Religions are just failed sciences. We also wondered whom Mitt will pick as his running mate, and concluded that contrary to the current speculation, it wouldn't be Condoleezza Rice.

Wednesday on the Report, one post linked to a celebration of the delightful feminist and columnist Caitlin Moran, another to interview with a Disney Park addict, and yet another to Milos Forman's defense of Obama. Calling the president a socialist, the filmmaker said, was something of an insult to the actual victims of socialism. Also: let's stop trying to debate the merits of Facebook and social media; it's getting boring. We also discussed the possibility of intervention in Iran, and examined the evidence behind the claim that such intervention would only set back the nuclear program by one to three years. We continued our exploration of the mommy porn literary phenomenon Fifty Shades, and agreed with the literary critic who said that in the absence of good comedy, there is always the allure of bad seriousness. In addition, we asked why it is hard for people over thirty to make new friends, along with a very amusing clip from Mitchell and Webb, and asked if it was possible for Anthony Weiner (you know, the disgraced congressman?) to make a comeback in New York.

We were also unusually sporty on Wednesday. As it happens, sex is the order of the day in the Olympic Village, that sweat doesn't really smell, and that a sort of reverse anorexia is common among bodybuilders. Promising to be less athletic in our coverage next week.

We looked at the obsession with slogans in the election, and determined that Romney had essentially pinched Thatcher's famous (or infamous) Saatchi-coined "Labour isn't working" ad line; we also took a quick glance at Romney's years at Bain, via a timeline from Mother Jones. Why, when space exploration itself is such a secular pursuit, is it celebrated with such a great deal of religious fervor? Also, should the army return to conscription? A number of people, including apparently a large number at the Allen & Co. Sun Valley conference, certainly think so. On Thursday, we agreed that what is considered 'correct' grammar is really just a matter of fashion. We still don't know what the Higgs Boson is, and New York has fallen out of love with Starbucks.

My long-read for the week on Friday focused on Obama's so-called gaffe about business owners. On a related note, take a quick look at the nature of the gaffe.

Once again, we took the time to look at the 'climate of denial' around climate change (relevant note: Alexander Cockburn died last night), and the rich kids of Instagram, who epitomize everything that's wrong with the internet photo service. We asked if the Assad regime was really falling in Syria, and warned that we ought not to jump to conclusions on the matter. Also interesting was an exploration of the literary value of Twitter from N+1 magazine. We agreed that Oscar Wilde would have been an excellent Tweeter.

On Saturday, much of our material was focused on the shootings in the Aurora cinema. In our first post on the subject, we linked to Roger Ebert's piece in the Times, which had a salient point to make about the 'insane' gun laws in the United States; we quoted a 2008 column from another film critic who draw a vital link between violence in the media and a more violent society; and considered the suggestion that magazines like Time not put the killer's face on their covers. Our second post delved into the question of whether or not a brave, armed moviegoer could have stopped the shooting; evidently, it seems unlikely. And finally, we looked at how politicians responded to the tragedy, and the etiquette surrounding a political response to such an event.

Image of the Day here. Required Listening from Coconut Records here.

Politicizing the Tragedy

Weigel urges everybody not to think about the shooter's politics:

What would it mean if he was a Democrat? What would it have meant if he was a Tea Partier? Probably nothing. Some killers put out manifestos explaining why they did it. Some are psychopaths who go through some of the motions of ordinary life -- showing up at events, voting -- before snapping and committing a non-ideological crime. Jared Loughner shot a congresswoman because he believed that money wasn't real.

Alex Koppelman notes that neither Obama nor Romney mentioned the issue of gun control in their speeches on the massacre, in what could only be regraded as astute omissions:

There’s a protocol in American politics for dealing with days like this. Those who follow it forswear politics. They offer heartwarming words for the victims and their families. They talk about prayer, loved ones, and their own children and grandchildren. They deliver affecting speeches. They do not talk about gun control.

As a result, those speeches—no matter how heartfelt they are, no matter how much comfort they offer a confused nation—can sometimes seem a bit awkward, at least to those who know what’s missing. Today, two Presidential candidates who are, by all appearances, personally in favor of at least some measure of gun control, spoke about what happened at a showing of “The Dark Knight Rises” in Aurora, Colorado—the largest mass shooting ever perpetrated by one person in the U.S.—and didn’t once mention the issue.

More coverage here and here.

(Image: "Obama supporters bow their heads during a moment of silence for the victims of the Aurora, Colo., shootings at a campaign rally for President Obama in Fort Myers, Fla." Mandel Ngam/AFP/GettyImages, via Slate)

A Succession of Gaffes

Jonathan Chait on the importance of political screwups:

Michael Kinsley once famously defined a gaffe as when a politician tells the truth — not the truth about the world, but a true version of what he believes. The aphorism has been endlessly repeated. It’s actually among the least interesting observations in the column. (It’s only partially true: Many gaffes involve a politician saying something they don’t believe — say, Obama’s claim that the private sector is “fine,” Romney saying he enjoys firing people, and so on.) The rest of the column is actually a masterpiece, and still, 28 years later, the best exegesis of how gaffes work.

This is essentially in response to Obama's politically dangerous remark last week about business owners.

The Shootings in Aurora, Ctd

The question of whether or not a brave person with a concealed weapon could have stopped the slaughter remains unanswered. Wiegel spoke to Greg Block, a California-based firearms safety trainer:

Holmes acted while a loud movie was playing in a dark theater. That, said Block could be "a great diversion" for someone trying to drop down and shoot back. But the "tear gas" -- we're still trying to figure out what kind -- absolutely gave Holmes the advantage. "All that's going to do is make people fish in a barrel," said Block. "Smoke would disorientate people. They may not even see the aisles." Any panic or movement from other people in the seats would be distracting, too. "But anybody from the military would hit the deck. They'd prone themselves between the chairs. That's how they're trained."

Please Retweet

I had read this in the print edition of N+1 a little while ago and had intended to post it earlier than this, but here you go anyway. It examines Twitter in a literary sense, and what it means for language:

Of course a tweet is just a tweet, not to be made too much of. Even so, La Rochefoucauld, Oscar Wilde, Dorothy Parker, Cyril Connolly, the Kafka of The Blue Octavo Notebooks, Cioran — they would have been excellent tweeters, and the best tweets, today, rival their greatest one-liners. (In fact to encounter their sententiae parcelled out as tweets would have made for a better experience than reading The Unquiet Grave or The Trouble with Being Born straight through. Aphorisms are ideally consumed like nuts or candies, a handful at a time.) So Twitter doesn’t only have the widely recognized usefulness of providing updates on news and revolution, and illuminating links, and many laughs and smirks. It has also brought about a surprising revival of the epigrammatic impulse in a literary culture that otherwise values the merely personal and the super-colloquial as badges of authenticity. “Write as short as you can/ In order/ Of what matters,” John Berryman counseled in a pre-tweet of 44 characters. Favorite that, followers.

I'm on Twitter, but I'm far from a compulsive tweeter; I have this blog for that sort of thing. Mostly, it's useful when you need to chew up a little time while waiting for a class to start or during an awkward moment when the last thing you want is to be seen doing nothing. Twitter can be useful in that sense. But it's also an excellent conduit for information when news breaks, like last night's Colorado shooting, or for simple pleasure, frivolity, and celebrity. Twitter is not a revolutionary literary form, but it's not the end of language, eloquence, or long form reporting and journalism.

We tend to live in a world which thinks for better or worse that it's either everything or nothing. We also live in a world that is generally wrong about most things, but it's especially wrong when it comes to language.

Stephen Fry, who is known for his prolific twitterings, likes to liken use of the website to the letters of Lord Byron, who in an effort to save money when he sent messages to England would use an extraordinary number of abbreviations. Yours became yrs, or something like that. As you can imagine, this language of convenience did not prohibit him from writing conventionally when he needed to. It bears a great deal of resemblance to text language today, does it not?

Is the Assad Regime Really Falling?

Let's not be too quick to jump to conclusions:

There is little future in Syria for Alawites once Assad is gone. What’s more, the Syrian leader knows there will be no safe haven for him anywhere even if he agrees to step down. The precedent for prosecutions of deposed despots has already been established. He knows that he will either end his days in his palace or eventually wind up in a courtroom in The Hague. That has concentrated his mind wonderfully on the task of slaughtering as many of his compatriots as needed to ensure the latter is not the case.

(Image: "A member of the Free Syrian Army holds a burning portrait of President Bashar al-Assad, in Al-Qsair, southwest of Homs, Syria." Alessio Romenzi/AFP/Getty Images, via Bloomberg)

The Rich Kids of Instagram

And a meme is born. On what they have to say about the rest of the service:

To be certain, these wealthy kid pix are particularly funny (and also sad) because they showcase a gross variant of entitlement. Preteens posing with helicopters they did nothing to earn and posting the pictures online for others to ogle provides an easy in for commentary on the state of the American dream. (Dead.) While we don't disagree with that reading, it's par for the course on Instagram, a shallow medium all about promoting superficiality that photo takers did little to nothing to earn.

The Shootings in Aurora

Roger Ebert wonders about the relationship between the attacks and the 'insane' gun laws in the United States:

Should this young man — whose nature was apparently so obvious to his mother that, when a ABC News reporter called, she said “You have the right person” — have been able to buy guns, ammunition and explosives? The gun lobby will say yes. And the endless gun control debate will begin again, and the lobbyists of the National Rifle Association will go to work, and the op-ed thinkers will have their usual thoughts, and the right wing will issue alarms, and nothing will change. And there will be another mass murder.

That James Holmes is insane, few may doubt. Our gun laws are also insane, but many refuse to make the connection. The United States is one of few developed nations that accepts the notion of firearms in public hands. In theory, the citizenry needs to defend itself. Not a single person at the Aurora, Colo., theater shot back, but the theory will still be defended.

Back in 2008, the film critic Jenny McCartney argued in the Telegraph that there's Hollywood plays a role in inspiring violence, despite those who insist otherwise:

Is there a link between screen violence and actual violence? Fans of violent films will tell you – frequently in the most aggressive terms – that there is not. Yet we know that children are, to greater and lesser degrees, highly imitative of what they see. We know that there is escalating public concern about violent crime, particularly knife crime, among teenagers. And we know that entertainment aimed at young people is becoming markedly more violent. My generation was terrified by the Child Catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang; the current one is diverted with torture and agonising death.

Harold Pollack suggests that, this time, we not put the killer's face on magazine covers:

I hope Time and others do better this time. I don’t want to read the killer’s weird manifesto. I don’t want to see his face. I don’t want to see pornographic interest in his weaponry beyond what might usefully inform public policy.

By far the most contentious response I've found this morning was from Juan Cole, who said that everyone was wrong to believe the shooter had no accomplice, and that his accomplice was the gun lobby and a system that allows this sort of event to occur. Even that view seems slightly too extreme for me.

(Image: "Judy Goos hugs her daughter's friend, Isaiah Bow, 20, as Emma Goos, 19, and Terrell Wallin, 20, look on after they all made it out alive from the Century 16. They were gathered outside Gateway High School, where witnesses were brought for questioning." Barry Gutierrez / Associated Press, via LA Times)

A Climate of Denial

Sean Hannity, of Fox News, called climate change the "biggest scientific fraud, I think, in our lifetime." Rush Limbaugh put it a little differently, saying that belief in man-made global warming is a lot like believing in Santa Claus. Saul Landau has something to say about the current climate of climate change denial:

Unlike Hannity, I’m no scientist, but I also don’t believe in Santa Claus or, like the Chamber of Commerce in ongoing human adpatation to warmer climates. I trust my viscera, which have responded to the heat, fires, draughts, floods, hurricanes, tsunamis and tornadoes. “It doesn’t feel right,” my insides tell my brain, as I sit in a smog-filled downtown traffic jam (pick your city) and imagine a similar situation in Mumbai, Bangkok and Shanghai. Fumes and air-conditioners emitting gases. These ill winds blow malice on Nature and cannot help perpetuate human life. Millions of people – even coal, oil and Fox News executives — can imagine disaster scenarios with fires burning homes in Colorado or New England woods. Storms raging fromm the Midwest to the east knocking out power, killing twenty three people! Floods from hurricanes inundating neighborhoods in New Orleans! Food shortages everywhere! Tsunamis overwhelming nuclear plants in Japan and California! Etc…

Why Obama Was Right

You know, watching the Romneyite ad, you could be forgiven for thinking that Republicans were livid at being told that success never belongs to one person alone.

But you'd be wrong. They're delighted.

Obama's recent line about "you didnt do it on your own" is already a big reason to celebrate for Republicans. One commentator I stumbled upon was even prepared to say, having seen the Romney ad-team response and praising it as a political campaign masterpiece on par with Reagan's Morning in America, that he believed the GOP nominee "just won the election." So what did Obama actually say that caused the conservative propaganda machine to launch this armada of attack ads, blogs, articles, and tweets? Here's the text from Obama's speech, much of which wasn't employed in Romney's ad (the italicized text was used):

There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me -- because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t -- look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something -- there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business -- you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.

The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together. There are some things, just like fighting fires, we don’t do on our own. I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service. That would be a hard way to organize fighting fires.

Before I get started, aren't those word much more nuanced and much more representative of Obama's actual views on the subject than the vapid conservative vulgarization? It was nothing radical, I can assure you. Nothing that would cause you to brand it 'Un-American', as Charles Murray did, insisting to his readers that their president was thoroughly out-of-tune with the music of American culture. Nor was it particularly characteristic of what has become known as a political gaffe (the word 'gaffe' is itself clumsy, incase you hadn't noticed). But of course Obama's remarks here don't really fit the bill. There was no 'oops' moment, as in the case of Rick Perrry.

When it comes to the ad, my favourite part must be the moment at which Romney cites Steve Jobs as an example of the quintessential American success story. If you know anything about the founding of Apple, though, as I and most others do, then you'll know that Steve Jobs was incredibly lucky. So was Bill Gates — and as Malcolm Gladwell says when he talks about Gates' success in Outliers, he is the first person to admit that. Of course there's nothing wrong with being lucky, and there's nothing wrong with being successful; in the case of Jobs and others success is a legitimate cause for celebration. But let's not lose sight of the fact that while their success is largely due to their own drive and courage, they owe too much to others to claim authorship of their own success.

In Jobs' case, he had a string of lucky breaks. Take a look at Xerox PARC and the graphical user interface and the mouse, and how Apple invented none of these products, but simply knew how to bring them to market. Look at how Gates' mother was an influential member of the mothers's club at his high school, and pushed to have early, expensive, revolutionary computers installed for its students, one of whom was the future billionaire. Look at how the giants in the marketplace at the time saw none of the potential in personal computers that these two did, and were incompetent in catching up.

There are just too many variables.

Obama's words were unfortunate not because they were wrong but because they were politically dangerous. When he uttered them, the conservative media had the perfect lede for their attacks. Obama was savagely and undeservedly paraphrased in the most distorting manner. But for all his intelligence, surely he should have known better, as an intelligent man, than to have simply gifted ample ammunition to his opponents like this. Now his words have not only been distorted, but have metastasized. 

But here's the thing. When Obama said in Roanoke last week that "you didn't build that," he was right. The enduring fallacy of the self-made man is not only an illusion, but one which threatens to demonize those who aren't successful — whatever that is. Obama didn't demonize success; he just plucked the flowers from its chain.

Don't get me wrong: I believe in meritocratic systems to some degree. I really do, but the elevation of material wealth as the metric by which human beings are measured has had a kind of dulling effect on us. Republicans seem content to style themselves as the champions of capitalism, and the priests of the free market system. It would certainly seem so. I have no interest in a society which celebrates the accrual of material wealth as a product of someone's own work entirely. And I think any basic understanding of the market begins with the realization that, even though we talk about meritocracy all the time, there is really no such thing.

New York's Bitter Starbucks Beak-Up

Jonathan Knee, in what has to be the best subtitle in history, says "It started when they took away the comfortable chairs." Things only got worse:

Some city Starbucks stores began discouraging laptop users from lingering during peak hours.* Reuters broke the story last year that many New York City stores have begun to block electric outlets to discourage laptop users altogether. Last winter, under the headline, “Just a ‘wee’ change,” the New York Post reported that a few city Starbucks locations had closed their restrooms to the public.

What in the World Is the Higgs Boson? Ctd

We lay people still don't really know. Dennis Overbye, to quote one person who attempted to explain it to the masses, described it as "a kind of cosmic molasses". All those metaphors aren't really helping:

Grammar as Fashion

The 'proper' way of speaking and writing is really just a matter of what's fashionable:

“I wish you was here,” John Adams wrote to Abigail from France in 1778. Abigail had written to John two years earlier worried that “you was poisond at New York.” You was turns up quite regularly in their correspondence. It was acceptable English to John and Abigail – as was at New York, which would have been preferable to in New York.

Thus when linguists observe that language always changes, we do not mean only that Old English became Modern English far back in the mists of time, nor are we referring merely to the ever changing nature of slang. Even educated people’s sense of what it is to speak elegantly changes from century to century.

Previous post on linguistic pedantry here.

Required Listening

"West Coast", by Coconut Records. (This is the first installment in our recommended music thread, conceived as a musical interlude between more serious posts. I'll endeavor to feature mostly new music, but you're also likely to see relatively old songs like this one.)

Should the Army Return to Conscription?

General Stanley McChrystal, the former commander of the force in Afghanistan, received cheers and a standing ovation from a crowd at the annual Sun Valley conference in Aspen for saying it should. He said that if a government decides to go to war, a professional army is no good, and not at all representative of the actual citizenry. "Everybody [should have] skin in the game…every city, every town, needs to be at risk." Before pointing out the obvious — "Of course you can get killed in the army" — William Pfaff explains one of the draft's more benevolent contributions to history:

I can’t say that I enjoyed military service, but I learned a lot, about myself and about others—including the young black men who made up a good half of my all-southern, and mostly rural, basic training company (where I was not only the sole college graduate but probably the only high school graduate). This was just two and a half years after President Harry Truman had ordered the army desegregated. The regular army—which has always been essentially a southern institution—hated and feared the consequences of that order, but said “yes, sir” and did it, producing undoubtedly the biggest and most successful program of social engineering the United States had ever experienced. It also created what remains today the most successful route of social and professional ascension for talented young black males from poor communities that the country has ever known.

While I agree that a more democratic system would undoubtedly assist in breaking through social barriers, as it has done in the past, there's something innately repulsive about the whole business. Most people really won't want any part of it — that's for sure.

Romney's Years at Bain

Mother Jones has an excellent timeline at their website.

Communion on the Moon

Rebecca Rosen is confused as to why our secular space exploration is celebrated so religiously:

This ultimate scientific endeavor does not answer the questions religion seeks to answer; it brings humans into a close encounter with their own smallness, the Earth's beauty, and the vastness of the cosmos. Faced with these truths, is it any wonder that some astronauts turn to religion? Some surely find comfort in the words of secular philosopher-scientists like Carl Sagan and Neil deGrasse Tyson. But others will find that the ancient religions of Earth have some greater power, some deeper resonance, when they have traveled safely so far from their homes. Astronaut James Irwin put it this way: "As we got farther and farther away it diminished in size. Finally it shrank to the size of a marble, the most beautiful marble you can imagine. That beautiful, warm, living object looked so fragile, so delicate, that if you touched it with a finger it would crumble and fall apart. Seeing this has to change a man, has to make a man appreciate the creation of God and the love of God."

If you're unfamiliar with it, take a look at Carl Sagan's famous "Pale Blue Dot" monologue.

(Image: "Before the launch this weekend of three human beings into the ether of space around the Earth, before they boarded their Soyuz spacecraft, and before the rockets were fired, precautions were taken. Not the humdrum checklists and redundancies of space exploration -- assessing the weather, the equipment, the math -- but a preparation with a more mystical dimension: the blessing, by a Russian Orthodox priest, of the spacecraft, as it sat on the launchpad on the Kazakh steppe." NASA, via the Atlantic)

Why Sweat Smells

Krulwich captions:

In this very sweaty video, featuring a warmly clad Louis Pasteur, Josh discovers that sweat, when it's just plain sweat, doesn't smell. But sometimes sweat bonds with a particular group of proteins, and it's those proteins that smell, not the sweat. You'll see. Just hold your nose.

What Happens in the Olympic Village...

Maybe you guessed:

Home to more than 10,000 athletes at the Summer Games and 2,700 at the Winter, the Olympic Village is one of the world's most exclusive clubs. To join, prospective members need only have spectacular talent and -- we long assumed -- a chaste devotion to the most intense competition of their lives. But the image of a celibate Games began to flicker in '92 when it was reported that the Games' organizers had ordered in prophylactics like pizza. Then, at the 2000 Sydney Games, 70,000 condoms wasn't enough, prompting a second order of 20,000 and a new standing order of 100,000 condoms per Olympics.

What’s With All the Slogans?

Karen Hull asks why the idea of big campaign slogans has caught on:

The most frequent and overarching campaign slogans used have been “Forward” by the Obama campaign and “Believe in America” by the Romney campaign. While I understand the reasons for “Forward”: keep taking this path and we’ll succeed, we’ll overcome, we’ll make it through; I’m not exactly sure what the “Believe in America” slogan means (other than the obvious).

Romney's "Obama isn't working" line is obviously a Thatcher snatch: Maggie's 1979 campaign staff used the Saatchi-coined "Labour isn't working" line on their posters. Perhaps the irony of the phrase was lost on the Romney crowd.

On the other hand, Obama's slogans were beginning to seem a little queasy by the end of 2008. "Yes we can" and the unusually laconic "Hope" don't even really count as slogans, but they seem especially vapid and infantile in retrospect. In David Remnick's The Bridge, we learn that even Obama thought so. It's an encouraging sign that he managed to resist the charming vacuity of his own propaganda. Something tells me Romney isn't quite so astute.

(Image: "Republican presidential candidate and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney delivers a speech at the National Gypsum Company January 24, 2012 in Tampa, Florida." Chip Somodevilla/Getty)

The Sports Doping Epidemic

In his profile of Brian Shaw, a bodybuilder dubbed the world's strongest man, Burkhard Bilger speaks with Tom O'Connor, a physician from Hartford whose specialty treatment is for muscle dysformia, a kind of reverse anorexia common among bodybuilders:

“It’s an absolute epidemic!” O’Connor told me, leaning in so close that I could see his pupils dilate and sweat bead on his forehead. “The men come to me broken and hurt. They come to me with cardiac problems and libido problems and erectile dysfunction.” His solution: low-dose hormone-replacement therapy. The sign above his booth read, “Got Testosterone?” It was tempting, to a flabby outsider like me, to dismiss all this as anomalous—an extreme subculture. But to athletes it was the new normal. “Are you kidding me?” O’Connor said. “Have you seen what’s happening around here? It’s never going to end.”

An Anthony Weiner Comeback?

Apparently the disgraced politician is considering a mayoral run. And although you might think that a comeback is unlikely for the scandalized former congressman, it's well within his reach:

Weiner was considered a strong candidate to succeed Mayor Bloomberg before Weinergate forced him to resign in disgrace. However, political analysts say that Weiner now has a better shot at winning a battle for public advocate, a position with a much smaller salary, and one that would give Weiner the opportunity to prove he deserves a second chance with New Yorkers. The public advocate typically serves as a sort of advocate for the concerns of the average city resident, and is first in line to succeed the mayor.

Weiner's scandal is particularly bad for his long-term image, because the incident actually happened online, and evidence of it will probably follow him around forever.

Why Is It Hard to Make Friends Over 30?

Among other things, two couples becoming friends with each other is much harder than two individuals doing the same — "matchmaking for two" in other words. As Alex Williams points out, throwing children into the mix only complicates things further:

Suddenly, you are surrounded by a new circle of parent friends — but the emotional ties can be tenuous at best, as the comedian Louis C. K. related in one stand-up routine: “I spend whole days with people, I’m like, I never would have hung out with you, I didn’t choose you. Our children chose each other. Based on no criteria, by the way. They’re the same size.” Even when parent friends develop a bond, the resulting friendships can be fleeting — and subject to the whims of the children themselves.

As you can imagine, to a 17 year-old the headline is a little frightening.

Fifty Shades of Meh, Ctd

I was amused yesterday to find this essay on the aptly-dubbed 'mommy porn' book "Fifty Shades of Grey" in the London Review of Books. The reviewer, in a sentiment which I echo, says that the more erotic 'literature' (the inverted commas inserted for effect) becomes, the more he feels compelled to laugh:

I suspect the book has taken the world’s mums by storm because there’s no mess on the carpet and there are hot showers afterwards. Everybody is comfortable and everybody is clean: they travel first-class, the rich give presents, the man uses condoms, and everything dark is resolved in a miasma of cuddles. In some quarters the publishing phenomenon of the year has been called ‘filthy’. But that must be a joke. It is a litany of swelling breasts and spent individuals, none of whom would be terrifically out of place at the more modest end of Mills & Boon. The expensive silk tie on the cover tells you everything about the acquisitive vibe behind the whole thing, the appeal for mothers who wouldn’t mind a slightly naughty son-in-law if he also had tousled hair, an Audi R8 Spyder, several apartments and a general handiness with the black Amex.

The line that I found most amusing from the article, though, was when O'Hagan talked about how funny the book is. But not intentionally so. "In the absence of good comedy," he says, "there is always the appeal of bad seriousness." Indeed.

Previous Report coverage of the phenomenon here.

Running Out of Excuses on Iran

It was in late May that former Obama Pentagon official Michelle Flournoy assured her mostly Israeli audience at a major security conference in Tel Aviv that although a strike against Iran had not been disqualified as a possibility by the administration, its results would be limited. Any military strike, she told them, would, even "in its most wildly successful incarnation", only set back Iran in its pursuit of nuclear weapons by one to three years. Now time is surely running out, and the 'one-to-three' line has become a mantra for the White House, a sort of received wisdom. But is there any truth to it?

Lee Smith examines the claim of minimal delay:

Christopher Ford, a former State Department official who worked on nuclear proliferation issues, told me that the evidence on which the standard assessment is based could have various loopholes. “There are so many assumptions built into the idea that it’s only one to three years,” said Ford. “For instance, it’s true to a degree that you can’t really get rid of the knowledge, but the nuclear-weapons scientists themselves aren’t the only link in chain. There’s other human capital that might be part of your destruction package, like some minor metallurgy specialists, who maybe aren’t working on the most sophisticated parts of the nuclear program, but without it they can’t have one.”

Obama officials aren’t telegraphing any of this. Instead, top intelligence and military officials, like Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and Adm. Mullen, keep saying that the Iranians can be only minimally delayed. Keane, the retired four-star general, believes that’s because the White House, as much as it claims it won’t allow Iran to get a bomb, isn’t willing to strike. “I don’t believe this administration has any intention, ever, of attacking Iran,” says Keane. “I don’t believe it, the Israelis don’t believe it, and the Iranians don’t believe it.”

Jonathan Tobin thinks the administration is running out of excuses when it comes to Iran, and suggests that so long as the United States upholds its commitment to diplomacy, not military action, then Israel is unlikely to act on its own.

(Image: Spencer Platt/Getty Images, via FP)

Obama's No Socialist

Says Milos Forman (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Amadeus, The People vs. Larry Flynt) in an op-ed piece:

I hear the word “socialist” being tossed around by the likes of Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and others. President Obama, they warn, is a socialist. The critics cry, “Obamacare is socialism!” They falsely equate Western European-style socialism, and its government provision of social insurance and health care, with Marxist-Leninist totalitarianism. It offends me, and cheapens the experience of millions who lived, and continue to live, under brutal forms of socialism....I’m not sure Americans today appreciate quite how predatory socialism was. It was not — as Mr. Obama’s detractors suggest — merely a government so centralized and bloated that it hobbled private enterprise: it was a spoils system that killed off everything, all in the name of “social justice.”

Nick Gillespie nods:

Like culture in general - which has benefited from a technological and attitudinal deregulation - political battles and elections are more hard-fought because more not fewer people can get in the game now. In this sense, the passion of contemporary politics (remarkably non-violent, too, despite all those phoney-baloney warnings about tea party mobs and all that) is a sign that Americans are still making glorious, discordant, woefully off-key music.

Debating Facebook, Politely

Obviously there are different sides to take on whether or not sites like Facebook are, in general, a good thing for the world. But it often seems to me an argument without a point. Like any well-rehearsed debate, it's predictable, and often lends itself too easily to boredom. Debating the merits of social media hasn't produced any new points or insights lately, and seems unlikely to turn up anything new anytime soon. Tim de Lisle recently had the experience of debating the issue, and as you can see, the predictable stock argument flashed from its scabbard:

"That’s When I Know I’m in My Happy Place"

An interview with a woman who has been to Disney parks around 40 times.

How To Be a Woman

Peggy Orenstein on the delightful feminist Caitlin Moran, a columnist at the Sunday Times, and her most recent book, How To Be a Woman:

So many waves of feminism have washed up on America’s shores. Moran’s hopes for her own impact initially come off, like her book itself, as deceptively personal, the dreams of an awkward girl turned celebrity journalist. “I just want Tina Fey to be my best friend,” she said. “And Lena Dunham. And Oprah, too. I just want those three chicks to read it and say, ‘You did good.’ Just those three.” She paused. “And Roseanne Barr. Four. I only really want to sell four copies in America. If I can sell it to those four chicks … and Hillary. OK five. And Michelle Obama. OK six. If I could get those six women to read it …”

Religions Are Failed Sciences

In a Big Think interview, Sam Harris articulates the origins of religion, and how it was used to explain the initially inexplicable. Money quote:

I view religions as essentially failed sciences. I mean religion was the discourse that we had when all causes in the universe were opaque. We didn’t know . . . We didn’t know the basis of anything. We didn’t know why we were here. We didn’t know how diseases spread, or what disease was. We didn’t know how people . . . why people died early, and why others flourished. We don’t know what’s causing thunderstorms, or what’s causing crops to fail. And we very naturally . . . As a cognitive and behavioral imperative, we formed descriptions of the world, and we tried to figure out what’s going on.

On the Nature of Offensive Jokes, Ctd

Jessica Valenti is unimpressed by the enthusiastic defense of the comedian Daniel Tosh, after he made a number of controversial jokes about rape:

Those supporting Tosh are outraged that anyone would dare tell a comedian how to be funny. (There’s also been a lot of “if you can’t take the heat” sentiment aimed at this woman, given that she heckled Tosh.) Many of his defenders insist that his joke—and other jokes about rape—are simply edgy and controversial, which is what a comedian is supposed to be. But here’s the thing: threatening women with rape, making light of rape, and suggesting that women who speak up be raped is not edgy or controversial. It’s the norm. This is what women deal with every day. Maintaining the status quo around violence against women isn’t exactly revolutionary.

Earlier post in this thread here.

Whom Will Mitt Pick?

The Times thinks Mitt fancies Pawlenty:

The conservative National Review now describes Mr. Pawlenty as “Romney’s traveling salesman.” While other potential vice-presidential candidates like Senator Rob Portman of Ohio and Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana have day jobs that limit their availability, Mr. Pawlenty, who has no other full-time position, is the political equivalent of an empty nester, available to do whatever Mr. Romney asks.

Tim Pawlenty certainly appears to be courting Romney for the running mate position, doing as best he can to remain in the spotlight, both in Romney's eyes and in the eyes of Republicans in general. Indeed, he has had at least some measure of success: the reporter talks about his "down-to-earth" appeal and his "plain-spoken" manner, qualities of unpretentious simplicity which for years have made many even in the supposedly intellectual wings of the GOP positively giddy.

If one thing's for sure, the recent speculation around Condoleezza Rice is probably unfounded. Apart form anything else, political life simply isn't her thing:

How many times has Condi Rice explained that she's just not that into politics? These are not the usual protestations of not being enamored of the veep job in particular; they are blanket denunciations of the very concept of being a politician. Condi doesn't want to kiss babies; she doesn't want to shake hands; she doesn't want to dial for dollars; she doesn't want to eat rubber chicken every night; she doesn't want to be Mitt's attack dog. When she says she'd rather be commissioner of the NFL, she means it.

The story will probably materialize as little more than an itinerant media plaything, around for only the time being.

Confessions of an Internet Addict, Ctd

Newsweek's coversplash was based on nothing more than "a blog post, a quote and a single case study." Furthermore:

The internet ‘rewires the brain’ – which I should hope it does, as every experience ‘rewires the brain’ and if your brain ever stops re-wiring you’ll be dead. Dopamine is described as a reward, which is like mistaking your bank statement for the money. There are some scattered studies mentioned here and there but without any sort of critical appraisal. Methodological problems with internet addiction studies? No mention. The fact that the whole concept of internet addiction is a category error? Not a whisper. The fact that prevalence has been estimated to vary between 1% and 66% of internet users. Nada

Sadly, these sorts of distorted media portrayals have a genuine impact on the public’s attitudes and beliefs about mental illness.

The neuroscientist who wrote the above response seems to know what he's talking about. Though when I read the article I thought of it as more a response to the change in the way people think, not as a response to the 're-wiring' of the brain by technology, as the magazine's columnist put it. Nevertheless, I think that the science here is worth exploring. Citations and thoroughly evidenced arguments, though? Now there's a criticism worth sticking to.

You can see the original post on the story here.

Big Naturals

The funniest, and most disturbing thing you'll see all day (but seriously, this is pretty NSFW):



David Weigel captions:

Sarah Silverman is out with a quasi-sequel to the "Big Schlep," her 2008 campaign to get young Jews to extort their elderly Florida relatives into voting for Obama. That's a heavier carrier this year, so Silverman has moved on to outright offers of... you know, I don't want the text in this post to alert any library censor software, so I'll leave it to the video.

What Alcoholism Is Really Like

A writer describes the night terrors he would experience, even while awake:

These aren’t nightmares, as you don’t achieve REM sleep. That’s because, as previously mentioned, you cannot sleep. But you sometimes do get into a weird half-awake/half-asleep state in which you think you can see everything in the room in which you lie. The details are extraordinary. There’s the television, the coffee table, the remote. You feel the fabric of the couch beneath you. But you cannot move. You’re paralyzed. And what’s more awful is that you hear the footsteps (someone’s, but whose?) approaching from behind.

Image of the Day

"U.S. President Barack Obama is pictured during a heavy rain storm at a campaign rally in Glen Allen, Virginia, July 14. Obama traveled to Virginia on Saturday for campaign events." I have to say, it does have a distinctly cinematic quality, to the extent that it has invited comparison with The Matrix. As well as that, it's not the only Obama-in-the-rain shot we have, as Michael Shaw points out. (Jason Reed/Reuters)

The Charge of Anti-Semitism

Alex Kane recently published a piece on the Open Zion blog at the Daily Beast, in which he was rather critical of Israel. Money quote:

The [Times] editorial states that a recent report which concluded that Israel has the right to build settlements on occupied land draws “attention to a dispiriting anomaly: that a state founded as a democratic homeland for the Jewish people is determined to continue ruling 2.5 million Palestinians under an unequal system of laws and rights.” Sounds like apartheid to me.

What happened was that Armin Rosen, a media fellow at the Atlantic, cried antisemitism. As it happens, Kane is a staff writer for a website called Mondoweiss, which, according to Rosen, occasionally gives airtime to work of an anti-Semitic nature. But he goes further, branding it as an organization giving the appearance of an "anti-Semitic enterprise," and citing the comments of its editor, who once said, "I can justly be accused of being a conspiracy theorist because I believe in the Israel lobby theory ... certainly my theory has an explanation of the rise and influence of the neocons. They don't have a class interest but an ideological-religious one."

Rosen then goes on to recount a litany of journalistic missteps that, while unfavorable to Israel, could scarcely be interpreted as evidence of anti-Semitic or bigoted intent. Needless to say Rosen's interpretation is based on considerably scant evidence. He finishes his post on this slightly bitter note, that, while restrained, smacks of acrimony:

Publishing anti-Semites, or people who work for websites that traffic in anti-Semitic innuendo or conspiracy theories, empowers ideas aimed at obscuring the humanity of one side of an already-violent conflict. 

Rosen's Atlantic colleague Robert Wright, who concluded that Rosen's condemnation had an air of neo-McCarthyism, submitted these fitting words on the topic:

This tarring of Kane by virtue of his association with Mondoweiss would be lamentable even if Rosen produced a convincing indictment of Mondoweiss, showing that it indeed evinces anti-Semitism. Does he do so? All I can say is that I clicked on the links to Mondoweiss that Rosen provided and--though I didn't read every single post with utmost care--I did reach a point where I could safely conclude that Rosen has a looser definition of anti-Semitism than I do....I'm not saying that everyone who finds any Mondoweiss content obnoxious or offensive does so in bad faith, out of an attempt to silence voices critical of Israel. Still, I do feel that anyone who tries to stigmatize a publication by suggesting that it's anti-Semitic (or racist, or un-American, or whatever) has an obligation to provide clear examples of things in the publication that they definitely consider anti-Semitic and explain exactly how they qualify as anti-Semitic. Rosen doesn't do that.

Moreover, on the point of judging a single writer by his employer:

I guess by Rosen's logic I am now personally responsible for his article--because, after all, it appeared on the Atlantic's site, and I work for the Atlantic. Well, I'm happy to say I disagree. But maybe my connection to the Atlantic at least entitles me to offer an apology to Alex Kane. He certainly deserves one.

Few things are more reliable as an indication of idiocy than anti-Semitism. Wherever it appears in even the slightest undertones it ought to be denounced and condemned, and its adherents rejected by at least the most mainstream publications — like Newsweek, to give a topical example. But I think we do ourselves a tremendous disservice to let the standard slip when it comes to what anti-Semitism actually is.

Like all charges of this sort (racism and bigotry included), there's an impact to be upheld, and an impact that is immediately lost when it it ascribed to apparently innocuous work by a relatively unknown writer on a blog of a relatively respectable publication simply because said writer works for a website whose other writers are unanimously opposed to Israel and Zionism. The currency of the term is wastefully cheapened when it is used out of turn, and without any real and valid justification. What you're really doing here, if anything meaningful at all, is assisting the real anti-Semites, for whom the word will no longer suffice as a description (even, in some cases, as a job description). Rosen owes more apology than he perhaps realizes.