What's so great about Andrew Sullivan

Yes to Matthew Yglesias's response to Kate Antonova's smear, which misspells Yglesias. [UPDATE: The tweet has been deleted, but Antonova essentially said that Andrew Sullivan, Matthew Yglesias, David Brooks, and Steven Pinker shouldn't be published because their writing adds nothing of value.]

I got hung up on the part of this that was about me, but imagine looking at a world where same sex couples can marry all across the western world and deciding that Andrew Sullivan has never had anything of value to add to the conversation.

Such a dumb, myopic view of the world. pic.twitter.com/qhqTnQayz7

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) August 29, 2020

My old post about Andrew Sullivan.

Sullivan, Yglesias, Brooks, and Pinker are all great. I've disagreed with all of them at times, but their writing does add value to the world. For instance, I blogged this and this by Brooks, this and this by Yglesias, and this and this by Pinker.

Also, lol at the hair-splitting of: I don't want these writers to be canceled — I just want them to be stopped from getting published anywhere ever again! Reminds me of that old joke: "We're not lost — we just don't know where we are!"

John McWhorter and Matthew Yglesias on the "class skew" of frequently updating identity language

Matthew Yglesias interviews John McWhorter about language, race, police, etc.

Ezra’s on vacation, so I asked @JohnHMcWhorter to come on the Weeds and talk about the changing way we talk about racism and the pros and cons of the Great Awokening. https://t.co/FcG5ceDaSf

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) July 31, 2020

Listen to the whole thing, but here's a sample:

Yglesias: A lot of what people are doing in this reckoning is actually linguistic in its nature.… I feel like a lot of what happens these days is a strong assumption that changing the way people talk about things is going to beat the racism out of them, or otherwise construct the world, and that we should really judge people based on their … mastery of up-to-date verbal formulas, rather than their actions in the world. And then there comes to be a kind of a weird class skewing to it. Because, I'm very current [with] whatever activists are saying, because, like, this is my job! So I can use "BIPOC" currently, I can do all the things. But just because somebody is, like, 60 and didn't go to college, that's going to really manifest in how they talk, right? And, like, is that really the most important thing?

McWhorter: Yeah, I think we have a problem, in that there is a sense that you can change thought by changing the terms that people use for things. And it's not that changing the terms can't help get a conversation going. But the truth is that if you don't change the thoughts underneath with good old-fashioned suasion, then the labels end up really just kind of floating along, and whatever label you come up with is going to become accreted with whatever negative associations you were worried about before. And then also what you're referring to is the fact that this idea of changing the names of things on a regular basis, and also being often rather condemnatory to people who aren't using the new labels — there is a class skew, there is an education skew.

And so, for example, with "Latinx," … I completely understand the impulse to get past old-fashioned ideas of gender, and to make a space for transgender identification, etc. But the simple truth of "Latinx" is that it's a term used by people, basically, in college towns and maybe a 5-mile radius around them.… For example, I live in a neighborhood where Latinos are, I'm pretty sure, the majority. So I am around Latinos every day. I have never once heard a single person in this neighborhood — Colombians, Ecuadorians, Venezuelans, not to mention many, many, many Dominicans — never heard anybody use the term "Latinx." And I'm listening, and my Spanish is not bad. And it's because it's an elite thing: I hear that at Columbia, I don't hear it among ordinary people.…

This is something that people should think about: "African-American" is something that came down in '89, '90. No one would've expected it. It happened very quickly. For a very long time, "black" was the term, then all of a sudden it was "African-American." And the idea was that "black" had certain negative associations, partly because of the nature of the color and its symbolism, and also because of what many people unfortunately think about black people. So "African-American" was thought of as more positive. It was thought of as something generated from within black people themselves.… Now, say what you want about that — it happened, it really caught on. Look at us now. 30 years later, "African-American" has accreted, for better or worse, all the associations that "black" used to have, such that now some people seem to be moving back towards "black." And some people used to explore, for a while, "person of color," but now apparently that's a narrower definition. The thing is, changing the name can only do so much; it's the thought that really counts.

Why cancel culture should be canceled

This open letter on open debate is signed by a wide range of notable people including Steven Pinker, Gloria Steinem, Fareed Zakaria, John McWhorter, Jonathan Haidt, Olivia Nuzzi, Noam Chomsky, Matthew Yglesias, Michelle Goldberg, David Brooks, Caitlin Flanagan, Emily Yoffe, Dahlia Lithwick, Michael Walzer, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Katha Pollitt, David Frum, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Deirdre McCloskey, Coleman Hughes, Jonathan Rauch, Wynton Marsalis, J.K. Rowling, Francis Fukuyama, and Salman Rushdie:

The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.…

[I]t is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought. More troubling still, institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms.

Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes.

Whatever the arguments around each particular incident, the result has been to steadily narrow the boundaries of what can be said without the threat of reprisal.

We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement.

This stifling atmosphere will ultimately harm the most vital causes of our time. The restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation. The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away.

We refuse any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other.

As writers we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes. We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences. If we won’t defend the very thing on which our work depends, we shouldn’t expect the public or the state to defend it for us.

Matthew Yglesias explains how excessive regulatory obstacles to starting a business ...

... give an unfair advantage to people like him.

Warren Buffett's weird editorial on capital gains taxes

Normally, you'd expect a columnist who's claiming that a tax isn't going to have any deterrent effect to have to make an argument for why not. But when Warren Buffett writes an editorial for the New York Times, it seems to be good enough for him to say, in effect: Trust me, I'm rich!

Buffett wrote a similar NYT editorial last year.

Thomas Sowell has made the case for keeping capital gains taxes much lower than income taxes. Even the left-leaning Matthew Yglesias has supported that position, saying:

[T]his is definitely an issue where the conservative position is in line with what most experts think is the right course, and Democrats are outside the mainstream.

Maybe Sowell and Yglesias are wrong. But if they're wrong, there must be some reason why, and the reason isn't that Warren Buffett has more money than them.

Should we be so trusting of the super-rich in making claims about taxes? Or could it be that a multibillionaire like Buffett, who has a lifetime guarantee of  having more wealth than he could possibly spend, might be out of touch with the kinds of incentive effects that apply to most people?

President Obama and Paul Ryan are almost the same on Medicare.

Explains Matthew Yglesias:

Medicare is . . . an open-ended promise to pay the bills for most of the health care services consumed by the elderly. It’s almost as if the government had a program that just gave senior citizens free shoes in unlimited quantities. The main difference is that undergoing medical treatment is generally unpleasant and it has no real resale value, so in practice people only want to consume so much of it. . . .

Both Ryan and Obama want to put an end to this and give Medicare a finite growth target. And, indeed, they’ve both converged on the same target. Ryan put out two budget plans based on very stingy Medicare proposals: The most recent version of his idea caps Medicare growth at the underlying GDP growth rate plus 0.5 percentage points. Obama, in his remarkably little noticed Fiscal Year 2013 budget proposal, offers the very same target on Page 33. Both campaigns, in other words, propose putting Medicare on a fixed diet and they agree on the precise diet.

Where they disagree is on how to implement the cuts. Ryan’s proposal is to turn Medicare into a voucher program where seniors would get a subsidy with which to buy an insurance package, with the value of the subsidy limited by the overall growth target. Obama’s proposal is to hit the growth target the way foreign single-payer systems limit their costs, with more aggressive bureaucratic management of what Medicare is willing to pay for and how much it’s willing to pay.

The difference between outsourcing (Ryan) and centralized rationing (Obama) is an important one, but from a patient’s point of view they might end up looking pretty similar. Under Ryan’s approach, the poor will be left with bare-bones plans and more affluent seniors will either pay higher premiums to get more deluxe plans or else pay out-of-pocket for noncovered services. Under Obama’s approach, the poor will be left with bare-bones Medicare and more affluent seniors will either buy separate supplemental insurance plans or else pay out-of-pocket for noncovered services. The workability of Obama’s idea, in my view, is well-validated by international experience while the Romney/Ryan alternative amounts to taking a leap of faith in the magic of the private sector. But ironically it’s essentially the same leap of faith Obama is taking in his signature health care program for nonseniors—the view that an adequately regulated, subsidized system of private insurance plans can provide reasonable coverage at reasonable cost.

Yes, President Obama did cut Medicare ...

. . . not just for health-care providers, but for senior citizens too.

UPDATE: Matthew Yglesias agrees:

Reducing Medicare's generosity to health care providers is an idea I'm happy to get behind, but there's a reason Medicaid is not considered a particularly high-quality health insurance program and its low reimbursement rates are a key part of it—lots of doctors refuse to accept Medicaid patients. Already Medicare is stingier than private plans, and in large high-income metro areas the most-in-demand doctors often decline to see Medicare payments. Any change at the margin to make it less lucrative for doctors will increase the number of providers who try to shun Medicare payments.

All things considered, I'm fine with that. . . . But if your top priority in life is to make senior citizens' health care as excellent as possible at any price, then Obama's savings are in fact contrary to that goal.

Justice Scalia gets the law of supply and demand wrong at oral argument

And Matthew Yglesias thinks Scalia's error could actually make the case that the Affordable Care Act is constitutional.

Did Obama's State of the Union abandon his focus on income inequality?

I didn't watch President Obama's speech last night, so I have no comments of my own. But I recommend reading what Mickey Kaus, Matthew Yglesias, and Andrew Sullivan have to say about it.

Here's one of Kaus's points:

In his allegedly table-setting, voice-finding December Kansas manifesto, Obama made a big deal about rising money inequality, citing statistics on the relative growth of the ”average income of the top 1%,” referencing the Occupy movement, etc. There was none of that in Tuesday’s speech. Obama only wants “an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules.” He didn’t say everyone “gets their fair share.” That’s not money-equalizing populism[.] It’s moderate Republicanism. Looks like Walter Russell Mead was right – [the Kansas speech] was just a ploy to stroke Obama’s left base, quickly abandoned when more Americans were paying attention. Or else it polled as badly as he suspected it would. Sorry, E.J. … (Don’t tell me about the Buffet Rule: Obama pitched his higher top tax rate for “millionaires” as a way to ensure equal sacrifice (as anticipated by W. Galston) not as a way to help reverse the growing income inequality trend.)

Yglesias writes:

Obama pledged to support “every risk-taker and entrepreneur who aspires to become the next Steve Jobs,” perhaps making him the only person in America who didn’t read the New York Times story over the weekend about how Apple’s products are all built in Asia.

The right lesson to take from Apple might be that an economic agenda whose “blueprint begins with American manufacturing” is misguided. South Korea, Taiwan, and China all have us beat as builders of electronics. But the world’s leading mobile electronics maker is headquartered in the United States of America and it’s insanely popular. That’s because the greatest value in the electronics business is in the industrial design, the software engineering, the marketing, and the combination of research and intuition that help you figure out what products people will want. Manufacturing, as a statistical category, is more arbitrary than people realize. There’s no inherently greater virtue in putting tuna into a can . . . than in preparing a seared tuna appetizer . . . . If people aspire to remodel kitchens or teach yoga or treat illness or be hair stylists or be chefs or, God forbid, Internet columnists . . . there’s nothing wrong with that.

Why does Obama think ATMs take jobs away from bank tellers?

President Obama said in his recent speech in Kansas:

Over the last few decades, huge advances in technology have allowed businesses to do more with less, and made it easier for them to set up shop and hire workers anywhere in the world. And many of you know firsthand the painful disruptions this has caused for a lot of Americans. . . .

If you were a bank teller or a phone operator or a travel agent, you saw many in your profession replaced by ATMs or the internet. Today, even higher-skilled jobs like accountants and middle management can be outsourced to countries like China and India. And if you’re someone whose job can be done cheaper by a computer or someone in another country, you don’t have a lot of leverage with your employer when it comes to asking for better wages and benefits — especially since fewer Americans today are part of a union.

Now, . . . there’s been a certain crowd in Washington for the last few decades who respond to this economic challenge with the same old tune. “The market will take care of everything,” they tell us. If only we cut more regulations and cut more taxes — especially for the wealthy – our economy will grow stronger. Sure, there will be winners and losers. But if the winners do really well, jobs and prosperity will eventually trickle down to everyone else. . . .

It’s a simple theory – one that speaks to our rugged individualism and healthy skepticism of too much government. It fits well on a bumper sticker. Here’s the problem: It doesn’t work. It’s never worked.

If you're going to make such a stark claim and phrase it in pragmatic terms of what has "worked," you should at least make sure the facts are on your side with respect to your own specific examples. But Matthew Yglesias disproves Obama's claim about ATMs replacing bank tellers with one simple chart (from this site):

Yglesias explains:

[I]t's true that since the recession started, we've seen fewer people on the job as tellers. But that's not a decades-long technologically induced trend. It's a recession. The [U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics] continues to project long-term growth in the number of bank tellers presumably because banks like to open branches to attract deposits. It's true that bank tellers as a share of the labor force should shrink but that's different. Banks are doing more with a little bit more, not doing more with less.

Of course, one question is: why didn't Obama have anyone fact-check his speech? But more importantly, this shows Obama's attachment to left-wing ideology. He has faith that technological progress destroys jobs. If you're strongly inclined to see advances in technology as setbacks to society, then it's easy to believe that the idea of an efficient free market doesn't make sense.

How to know if you're intellectually honest

Paul Graham writes:

Let's start with a test: Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers?

If the answer is no, you might want to stop and think about that. If everything you believe is something you're supposed to believe, could that possibly be a coincidence? Odds are it isn't. Odds are you just think whatever you're told.

The other alternative would be that you independently considered every question and came up with the exact same answers that are now considered acceptable. That seems unlikely, because you'd also have to make the same mistakes. Mapmakers deliberately put slight mistakes in their maps so they can tell when someone copies them. If another map has the same mistake, that's very convincing evidence.

Graham doesn't use the phrase "intellectual honesty," but that's what he's getting at. Oddly, there are some people (including Matthew Yglesias) who deny that there's any such thing as "intellectual honesty," unless it's used as a synonym for just plain "honesty." I think that's a big mistake.

The problem with books, according to Sam Harris

First of all: they're too long. Harris explains:

I love physical books as much as anyone. And when I really want to get a book into my brain, I now purchase both the hardcover and electronic editions. From the point of view of the publishing industry, I am the perfect customer. This also makes me a very important canary in the coal mine—and I’m here to report that I’ve begun to feel woozy. For instance, I’ve started to think that most books are too long, and I now hesitate before buying the next big one. When shopping for books, I’ve suddenly become acutely sensitive to the opportunity costs of reading any one of them. If your book is 600-pages-long, you are demanding more of my time than I feel free to give. And if I could accomplish the same change in my view of the world by reading a 60-page version of your argument, why didn’t you just publish a book this length instead?

The honest answer to this last question should disappoint everyone: Publishers can’t charge enough money for 60-page books to survive; thus, writers can’t make a living by writing them. But readers are beginning to feel that this shouldn’t be their problem. Worse, many readers believe that they can just jump on YouTube and watch the author speak at a conference, or skim his blog, and they will have absorbed most of what he has to say on a given subject. In some cases this is true and suggests an enduring problem for the business of publishing. In other cases it clearly isn’t true and suggests an enduring problem for our intellectual life. . . .

[W]riters and public intellectuals must find a way to get paid for what they do—and the opportunities to do this are changing quickly. My current solution is to write longer books for a traditional press and publish short ebooks myself on Amazon. If anyone has any better ideas, please publish them somewhere—perhaps on a blog—and then send me a link. And I hope you get paid.

Did Harris find my blog post called "6 ways blogs are better than books," specifically #1 and #6, and steal my idea (which I, of course, took from other people)? Probably not. Most readers have had the same realization. The question is who has the courage to publicly admit it, and act on it.

I'm currently reading a book that has done both: Tyler Cowen's The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better. It was originally released exclusively as an eBook, and was later released as a dead-tree book. One of the blurbs is by Matthew Yglesias, calling it "a great innovation in current affairs publishing — much shorter and cheaper than a conventional book in a way that actually leaves you wanting to read more once you finish it."

In the book's introduction, Cowen makes an odd argument for his decision to release it in exclusively digital form:

I meant for [the ebook version] to reflect an argument from the book itself: The contemporary world has plenty of innovations, but most of them do not much benefit the average household. (2)

So, publishing it as a digital book only (until it became so successful that the dead-tree version was a no-brainer) made sense because it didn't help many people! OK. That argument is even more innovative than the book's short length.

But then Cowen realized that eschewing paper was a problem. He writes:

Some readers . . . were frustrated with the Digital Rights Management systems embedded in nearly all published electronic content. These systems mean that you can't pass around an eBook like a paper book. Libraries don't necessarily own eBooks forever; it's possible for the publisher to flip the switch and literally take them back — debate on this topic is raging. Paper books are easier to give as gifts and easier (sometimes) to use in the classroom. On top of all that, Amazon.com, B&N.com [Don't try typing that into your browser. He meant bn.com. — JAC], the iBookstore, and related services do not yet reach into every corner of the globe. Paper books can get to remote places a little more reliably. Personally I like reading books on trips and dropping them somewhere creative, in the hope they will be picked up by a surprised and delighted future reader. (2-3)

I'm convinced by those and other reasons to keep paper books around for good. So I hope Sam Harris is wrong to say that "[t]he future of the written word is (mostly or entirely) digital." I see little reason why authors and publishers can't heed Harris's advice to make books shorter while still publishing paper books. Harris says readers won't be willing to pay for a 60-page book. Well, I paid for Cowen's book, which is 109 pages. It's just 89 pages without the endnotes and index. I think Harris is underestimating people's willingness to buy a reasonably priced, well-supported nonfiction book that gets to the point in 100 pages, as opposed to a 300- or 400-page book that might be even more rigorously supported but also includes more repetition — and will be much less likely to be read in its entirety. As my mom, Ann Althouse, more succinctly put it in her message to writers (particularly one writer who scolded her for not reading every word of her book):

You pad. I skim.

IN THE COMMENTS: My dad, Richard Lawrence Cohen, says:

I don't follow Harris' argument about pricing. Long books are the pricing problem, because they cost much more to print and readers are reluctant to pay an equivalent percent extra to make up for it; thus the tendency of long books to have small, light print and thin paper. Meanwhile, if a book is only 100 pages, you can still charge almost as much as for a 150-page book and save a lot of the printing costs. The relatively higher price on the short book creates perceived value in the reader's mind, justifying the expense. We're all accustomed to paying $15 for a paperback anyway, and page-counting isn't a top priority; the page range consumers accept at that price is pretty wide. It's a mistake to assume that the reader is glad to have more pages for the money; the extra pages are a chore. It's a welcome relief to be able to get the message fast.

"Almost Everything is Unconstitutional"

Matthew Yglesias lists the 10 "weirdest ideas" in Texas Governor Rick Perry's book Fed Up!

(I wish there were a simple way to indicate that the exclamation mark is part of the book title, not my own punctuation of the whole sentence.)

The case for big government that Obama hasn't made

Peter Beinart lists 3 ways the Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert rallies captured "what the American left did wrong in the early Obama years." His last point is

the focus on “sanity.” Talk about condescending. The Tea Party types who believe that expanding government undermines their freedom are not insane. They’re tapping into a deeply-rooted American fear of government power, one that would be immediately recognizable to Calvin Coolidge or Strom Thurmond. And in the process, they’re conjuring, once again, the myth that America was born free, and surrenders a smidgen of liberty every time Washington imposes another tax or establishes another government agency. (The Tea Partiers may not be racists, but it’s hardly surprising that this idealized image of 19th Century America doesn’t impress African-Americans). The Tea Partiers, in other words, are making a serious argument, which the left too often tries to dismiss by calling them nuts. In fact, the haughtiness reflected by such insults conceals the left’s confusion over how to respond ideologically.

Beinart then goes on a tangent about how President Obama has undersold his own policies:

The Obama administration has barely tried to argue that activist government can make people more free—by, for instance, guaranteeing their health care coverage and thus freeing them to leave a dead end job. In America today, as at past moments in our history, there’s a profound debate underway not just about how to right our economy but about the relationship between capitalism and freedom. Pretending it’s not a real debate is a great way for the left to lose.

Matthew Yglesias and Ezra Klein have made the health-care point well. I'm at least convinced by their criticism of the status quo ante, though this isn't necessarily a good affirmative argument for the new law. As Klein says:

Unable to risk losing their employer-sponsored health insurance, would-be entrepreneurs don’t start small businesses, they stay in jobs that don’t maximize their productivity, they remain in positions that another worker would be better suited to.

OK, so that's a cumbersome run-on sentence. But if you edit it down to something snappier and more eloquent, why wasn't that Obama's #1 argument for health-care reform?

Short URL for this post: goo.gl/T5reP

Did the journalists who reported on the Koran burning threat understand what they were doing?

Matthew Yglesias offers some common sense about why Terry Jones, the pastor in Florida who threatened to burn the Koran, is (or isn't) such a big deal:

[I]t's kind of nuts, isn’t it, that we have the general in charge of an ongoing war commenting on some guy in Florida being a jerk. Even nuttier is that he might well be right that this episode will endanger the lives of Americans soldiers. But that really raises deeper issues about Afghan society and the wisdom and nature of America’s engagement with it. The essence of a digital, globalized world with billions of inhabitants is that there’s always going to be some jerk somewhere doing something ridiculous. “Guy in Florida deliberately trying to antagonize Muslims” can’t become a global news story every time it happens.

In the Bloggingheads clip below, Sarah Posner -- a reporter who specializes in religion -- asks why the mainstream media became so fixated on a pastor who has only about 50 congregants. She hypothesizes that the problem is that most of the reporters who covered the story aren't enough . . . like her! That is, they don't specialize in religion, so "they don't know how to evaluate the influence of a particular person."



While I share her incredulity that this became an international news story, I find her explanation hard to believe. Her own passing remark that Jones has only 50 congregants is not beyond the ken of any competent reporter. If anything, you'd expect a generalist reporter to have an especially high standard for when one pastor's statements are a real story.

For instance, Matthew Yglesias is not a reporter, let alone one with a religion beat. Like me, he's a 29-year-old opinion blogger. He and I can easily see these points, and I don't think this is because we're so extraordinarily perceptive or have any expertise about religion. I don't believe that the reporters at the New York Times and the Washington Post lacked the capacity to do what Yglesias and I and so many others (including Dave Weigel and my mom, Ann Althouse) did when we wondered: Wait a minute -- how is this a major news story?

What seems to have been going on for a long time is that the MSM feels that a story is automatically newsworthy as long as it involves religion at all -- completely aside from any normal metrics of newsworthiness. Their standard seems to be based entirely on subject matter, not whether the events are likely to have any broader consequences.

Of course, the Koran burning would have had international consequences if Jones had followed through with it -- but only because of the media's own coverage.

Like it or not, symbolic burnings are pretty commonplace. People burn effigies, flags, love letters, sacred texts. It happens. And usually, it's not very exciting. Think of any kind of object, and there's probably someone somewhere burning it or fecklessly threatening to burn it -- despite, or because of, whoever might be offended if they found out. Normally, major news outlets wouldn't even think of paying any attention to these shenanigans, even if the burned object symbolizes something important.

Here's my point: a symbolic burning doesn't, by its own unaided momentum, inexorably alter anything else in the outside world. This is as true of a pastor burning a Koran as it would be of anything else. The media coverage to date has surely inflamed the Islamic world far more than if the pastor had burned the Koran and the media had ignored it.

As is so often the case, the news coverage itself becomes the story, but the news media rarely admit it. Normally, this is a fairly benign quirk of journalese: Bill Maher has noted that journalists reflexively avoid the first person (singular or plural).

In this case, however, more self-awareness on the MSM's part might very well have saved lives. Now that the story is out there, even though Jones called off the burning, it can be used as a terrorist recruiting tool. We'll probably never be able to pinpoint a causal link from the Koran burning media circus to a specific victim of terrorism, but that doesn't mean there won't be any such causation.

I hope that MSM reporters are pausing to think about what this whole episode means about their own role and responsibility. Reporters don't just neutrally reflect the world; they're willful actors who affect the world. To assume that their effects are always for the better can be fatal.

Men's magazines from back in the day when men were attacked by small animals

A blog called The Art of Manliness has lots of front covers of men's magazines from the early to mid 20th century. (They're from this art book published by Taschen.)

The names of the magazines are as un-subtle as possible:

Man's Life
ALL MAN
MAN'S magazine
FOR MEN ONLY
MALE
TRUE MEN stories
man's CONQUEST
Fury — exciting true adventures for men
Real — the exciting magazine FOR MEN

As I said in the heading, small animals were a theme. As you can see from the top of that blog post, one magazine cover proclaims: "Weasels Ripped My Flesh." This was apparently quite popular — not only did it inspire a Frank Zappa album, but one can detect traces of it on another magazine cover: "Flying Rodents Ripped My Flesh." Other covers have snakes, otters, and turtles.

Matthew Yglesias has a good catch on Twitter (which is how I found out about this whole thing). He calls it the "Best magazine cover-line ever":

"Sex Can Be Fun!"

The Art of Manliness argues that they were a bygone era's equivalent of pornography:

The popularity of men’s adventure magazines peaked in the late 1950s, when fifty different titles were published and hundreds of thousands of men picked up the magazines at the local drugstore or read them at barbershops. But as Playboy and then Penthouse came on the scene, and the courts loosened their restrictions on what was deemed obscene material, “the sweats” began to seem quite tame and outdated in comparison and couldn’t compete. They quietly disappeared in the 1970’s.

The link to the Art of Manliness post comes from the excellent blog Sociological Images, which observes:

They are a window into a time when being a man was clearly a very distinct achievement, but much less related to consumption than it is today.

Today’s men’s magazines emphasize control over oneself and the conquest of women, as do these vintage magazines, but instead of tests of strength, cunning, and fighting ability, they emphasize conquest through consumption. The message is to consume the right exercise, the right products (usually hygiene or tech-related), the right advice on picking up women and, well, the right women. In contrast, these old magazines pit man against nature or other men; consumption has not yet colonized the idea of masculinity.

Maybe the old view was more purely masculine: adventurous, heroic. But that's nothing against the new view. It's not inherently bad to consume things — consumption is a part of life. You're already consuming a magazine. I'd rather the magazine try to cajole men into buying the right cologne than try to implant in their heads that life is a series of a vicious attacks.

How good has Obama's foreign policy been?

Pretty good, says Matthew Yglesias.

Pretty bad, says The New Republic.

I hate to say it, but TNR's argument sounds more convincing. But I haven't been following foreign policy very closely since January 2009, so I don't have a strong opinion. What do you think?

Could teaching nonfiction as literature improve American kids' reading ability?

In a Daily Beast article called "How to Make American Teens Smarter," Dana Goldstein takes stock of the disappointing progress we've made with children's reading skills:

According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the federal test known as "the nation's report card," only one-third of American kids can read at the "proficient" level. Over the past two years, no national gains have been made in closing the achievement gaps between rich and poor, white and black, white and Hispanic, or girls and boys. And though some individual states did better than others on the assessment, the overall picture of literacy in America is bleak—a decades-long achievement plateau that leaves most young adults unprepared for higher-level work.

Are we not allowed to suggest that this might be caused in part by the custom that reading and writing are taught almost entirely through fiction rather than nonfiction? Goldstein goes there:

In no grade do students typically read nonfiction, beyond memoirs like the The [sic] Diary of Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel's Night—even though success on standardized tests, in college, and in many jobs requires the ability to comprehend dense nonfiction texts. . . . [In the comments, my dad takes issue with this paragraph, and Goldstein responds. -- JAC]

"People don't really understand the nature of reading. They feel that reading is a skill, that it's transferable, so once you're a good reader, you can read anything that's put in front of you," says Daniel Willingham, a University of Virginia cognitive psychologist who focuses on K-12 education. "But that's only true for decoding—what you learn until grade three or four. After that, when you see good readers versus poor readers, what you're looking at is mostly differences in the knowledge that kids bring to the reading. It's easy to read something when you already know something about the topic. And if you don't know about the topic, it's utterly opaque to you."

That's why children should read newspapers and magazines, texts about nature and technology, and biographies—genres that increase real-world knowledge. This is especially important for poor children, who may not be exposed to as much "background" information at home: the random vocabulary, facts, and associations that make it easier to do well on tests like the NAEP and SAT, and to succeed in the workplace.

My favorite example Goldstein gives is that high-school students are regularly taught George Orwell's novels 1984 and Animal Farm; why shouldn't they read "Politics and the English Language"? And that's just one of his great essays. Children are taught to write essays for specific purposes, but they're not taught to read essays for the sake of encountering an intelligent mind contemplating the world (as opposed to the utilitarian, non-literary nonfiction in science and history textbooks).

My mom made this proposal (which "really stirred people up"):

[W]hy does reading even need to be a separate subject from history in school? Give them history texts and teach reading from them. Science books too. Leave the storybooks for pleasure reading outside of school. They will be easier reading, and with well-developed reading skills, kids should feel pleasure curling up with a novel at home. But even if they don't, why should any kind of a premium be placed on an interest in reading novels? It's not tied to economic success in life and needn't be inculcated any more than an interest in watching movies or listening to popular music. Leave kids alone to find out out what recreational activities enrich and satisfy them. Some may want to dance or play music or paint. Just because teachers tend to be the kind of people who love novels does not mean that this choice ought to be imposed on young people via compulsory education. Teach them about history, science, law, logic -- something academic and substantive -- and leave the fictional material for after hours.

Back to Goldstein's article:

"One of my big gripes is the imperialism of literature, of trivial fictions and poetry," says E.D. Hirsch, a literature professor and advocate of "cultural literacy." Hirsch rejects the idea that storybooks are the only books that appeal to children. "Fiction doesn't have a monopoly on narrative," he says. "Take, for example, biographies. They have the form of fiction. It isn't whether kids can read it or not, it's whether it is taught or not. And boys tend to be more interested in nonfiction than fiction. It's one of the reasons… that boys do less well and are turned off from reading."

Matthew Yglesias agrees that reading should be taught through nonfiction as well as fiction, but bristles at the gendered angle:

The thesis about boys is provocative, but it’s probably best not to get this tied in too much with controversial claims about gender. The essence of the issue is that clearly some people are more interested in reading non-fiction than fiction and might find reading lessons oriented to non-fiction material more engaging.

That does make a certain amount of strategic sense: if you're mainly trying to advance a controversial position (the nonfiction idea), you probably shouldn't connect it to a second controversial position that's not your driving motivation.

Maybe it's unfortunate that the idea that we should care about boys is so controversial. But, as Yglesias says, the more useful perspective is that we want to help people. The gender-neutrality of that goal is a good thing. While it might make some people feel good to say of a certain policy, "This helps women [or girls]," and it might make some other people feel good to say, "This helps men [or boys]," there's no inherent virtue to those statements beyond the general idea of helping someone.

I also don't see any need to stereotype boys as liking one type of reading and girls as liking another type of reading. (The article doesn't include any actual evidence to support the claim that boys especially enjoy reading nonfiction.) Rather, we need to stop stigmatizing nonfiction as unserious and privileging fiction as the only real literature.

IN THE COMMENTS: My dad, who works in this field, points out that things are a little more complicated than this post may have suggested. Admittedly, I'm no expert in nationwide English curricula (I used the time-tested writer's technique of extrapolating wildly from my own experiences), so I'm glad to hear that nonfiction-for-its-own-sake isn't quite as absent from schools as I thought.

Challenging the premise of "the books that have influenced me the most" meme

Ezra Klein challenges the premise of the "books that influenced me" blog meme (which I picked up today), saying books haven't influenced him much:

I've written this sort of thing before. The mainstays on my list are John Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath," Tom Geoghegan's "Which Side Are You On?," Abraham Joshua Heschel's "Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity," Richard Ben Cramer's "What It Takes" and maybe a handful of others.

But I always feel like a fraud.

These books meant a lot to me, but they were much less influential in my thinking -- particularly in my current thinking -- than a variety of texts that carry consider less physical heft. Years spent reading the Washington Monthly, American Prospect and New Republic transformed me from someone interested in politics into someone interested in policy. So, too, did bloggers like, well, Matthew Yglesias, Kevin Drum and Tyler Cowen. In fact, Cowen, Brad DeLong, Mark Thoma and a variety of other economics bloggers also get credit for familiarizing me with a type of basic economic analysis that's consistently present in my approach to new issues.

Much of my emphasis on the institutions of American government and the processes by which they work (or don't) came from my relationship with Mark Schmitt, first through his blog and then through his editorship at the American Prospect. . . .

So much as I love my favorite books, the biggest influences in my thinking have been the continuous intellectual relationships I've had with blogs, periodicals and other people.

One of the bloggers Klein cites as an influence, Matthew Yglesias, responds:

[I]f I look back at my list of books that influenced my thinking . . . these aren’t books that influenced my thinking “on the issues” the way blog posts and magazine articles do nearly so much as they’re books that influenced my thinking about my thinking. Like: What’s important? What’s it worth doing in life? What questions are a waste of time? What kinds of mistakes have I been making?

I feel like this is going to be the kind of thing books are still important for, simply because they’re more intense experiences. A solo encounter with a major work is a big deal in a way that sporadic engagement with blogs isn’t. Which is just to say that I hope and think digital media will mostly crowd out relatively low-value book-reading experiences and still leave room for some of the big deal reads.

Well, I agree with Yglesias. Klein seems to want to extend his reach as little as possible. Klein, Yglesias, Schmitt, and Drum share similar vocations (journalist-bloggers), and the same time period (right now), and the same country, and mostly similar worldviews (most of them are liberals; Cowen is a moderate libertarian). It may be comforting to draw your influence from this close by, and it hasn't stopped Klein from writing a top-notch blog. But his attitude seems cramped and a bit sad.

It's not that I'm surprised that Klein would have been more influenced by blogs and magazines than by books in writing his Washington Post blog about economic policy. But the question isn't "books that influenced my blog"; it's "books that influenced me." It's important to not just be your blog or your job but to be a complete person. That's hard to do if you're not willing to immerse yourself in worldviews that are far removed from your own.

Some quick common sense on the leaked Climate Research Unit emails

1. Matthew Yglesias.

2. Will Wilkinson.