The new political correctness

Insightfully analyzed by Jon Chait:

Under p.c. culture, the same idea can be expressed identically by two people but received differently depending on the race and sex of the individuals doing the expressing. This has led to elaborate norms and terminology within certain communities on the left. For instance, “mansplaining,” a concept popularized in 2008 by Rebecca Solnit, who described the tendency of men to patronizingly hold forth to women on subjects the woman knows better, . . . has now grown into an all-purpose term of abuse that can be used to discredit any argument by any man. (MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry once disdainfully called White House press secretary Jay Carney’s defense of the relative pay of men and women in the administration “man­splaining,” even though the question he responded to was posed by a male.) . . .

If a person who is accused of bias attempts to defend his intentions, he merely compounds his own guilt. (Here one might find oneself accused of man/white/straightsplaining.) It is likewise taboo to request that the accusation be rendered in a less hostile manner. This is called “tone policing.” If you are accused of bias, or “called out,” reflection and apology are the only acceptable response — to dispute a call-out only makes it worse. There is no allowance in p.c. culture for the possibility that the accusation may be erroneous. A white person or a man can achieve the status of “ally,” however, if he follows the rules of p.c. dialogue. A community, virtual or real, that adheres to the rules is deemed “safe.” The extensive terminology plays a crucial role, locking in shared ideological assumptions that make meaningful disagreement impossible. . . .

The Marxist left has always dismissed liberalism’s commitment to protecting the rights of its political opponents — you know, the old line often misattributed to Voltaire, “I disapprove of what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it” — as hopelessly naïve. If you maintain equal political rights for the oppressive capitalists and their proletarian victims, this will simply keep in place society’s unequal power relations. Why respect the rights of the class whose power you’re trying to smash? And so, according to Marxist thinking, your political rights depend entirely on what class you belong to.

The modern far left has borrowed the Marxist critique of liberalism and substituted race and gender identities for economic ones. “The liberal view,” wrote MacKinnon 30 years ago, “is that abstract categories — like speech or equality — define systems. Every time you strengthen free speech in one place, you strengthen it everywhere. Strengthening the free speech of the Klan strengthens the free speech of Blacks.” She deemed this nonsensical: “It equates substantive powerlessness with substantive power and calls treating these the same, ‘equality.’ ”

Political correctness appeals to liberals because it claims to represent a more authentic and strident opposition to their shared enemy of race and gender bias. And of course liberals are correct not only to oppose racism and sexism but to grasp (in a way conservatives generally do not) that these biases cast a nefarious and continuing shadow over nearly every facet of American life. Since race and gender biases are embedded in our social and familial habits, our economic patterns, and even our subconscious minds, they need to be fought with some level of consciousness. The mere absence of overt discrimination will not do.

Liberals believe (or ought to believe) that social progress can continue while we maintain our traditional ideal of a free political marketplace where we can reason together as individuals. Political correctness challenges that bedrock liberal ideal. While politically less threatening than conservatism (the far right still commands far more power in American life), the p.c. left is actually more philosophically threatening. It is an undemocratic creed. . . .

The p.c. style of politics has one serious, possibly fatal drawback: It is exhausting. Claims of victimhood that are useful within the left-wing subculture may alienate much of America. The movement’s dour puritanism can move people to outrage, but it may prove ill suited to the hopeful mood required of mass politics. Nor does it bode well for the movement’s longevity that many of its allies are worn out. “It seems to me now that the public face of social liberalism has ceased to seem positive, joyful, human, and freeing,” confessed the progressive writer Freddie deBoer. “There are so many ways to step on a land mine now, so many terms that have become forbidden, so many attitudes that will get you cast out if you even appear to hold them. I’m far from alone in feeling that it’s typically not worth it to engage, given the risks.” [The Nation's Michelle] Goldberg wrote recently about people “who feel emotionally savaged by their involvement in [online feminism] — not because of sexist trolls, but because of the slashing righteousness of other feminists.” Former Feministing editor Samhita Mukhopadhyay told her, “Everyone is so scared to speak right now.”

That the new political correctness has bludgeoned even many of its own supporters into despondent silence is a triumph, but one of limited use. Politics in a democracy is still based on getting people to agree with you, not making them afraid to disagree. The historical record of political movements that sought to expand freedom for the oppressed by eliminating it for their enemies is dismal. The historical record of American liberalism, which has extended social freedoms to blacks, Jews, gays, and women, is glorious. And that glory rests in its confidence in the ultimate power of reason, not coercion, to triumph.

Revering the irreverent

In an article called "Satire Lives," Adam Gopnick writes this in the New Yorker:

The staff of the French magazine Charlie Hebdo, massacred in an act that shocked the world last week, were not the gentle daily satirists of American editorial cartooning. Nor were they anything like the ironic observers and comedians of manners most often to be found in our own beloved stable here at The New Yorker. (Though, to be sure, the covers of this magazine have startled a few readers and started a few fights.) They worked instead in a peculiarly French and savage tradition, forged in a long nineteenth-century guerrilla war between republicans and the Church and the monarchy. There are satirical magazines and “name” cartoonists in London and other European capitals, particularly Brussels, but they tend to be artier in touch and more media-centric in concern. Charlie Hebdo was—will be again, let us hope—a satirical journal of a kind these days found in France almost alone. Not at all meta or ironic, like The Onion, or a place for political gossip, like the Paris weekly Le Canard Enchaîné or London’s Private Eye, it kept alive the nineteenth-century style of direct, high-spirited, and extremely outrageous caricature . . . .

For those who recall Charlie Hebdo as it really, rankly was, the act of turning its murdered cartoonists into pawns in a game of another kind of public piety—making them martyrs, misunderstood messengers of the right to free expression—seems to risk betraying their memory. Wolinski, Cabu, Honoré: like soccer players in Brazil, each was known in France by a single name. A small irreverent smile comes to the lips at the thought of the flag being lowered, as it was throughout France last week, for these anarchist mischief-makers, and they would surely have roared at the irony of being solemnly mourned and marched for by former President Nicolas Sarkozy and the current President, François Hollande. The cartoonists didn’t just mock those men’s politics; they regularly amplified their sexual appetites and diminished their sexual appurtenances. It is wonderful to see Pope Francis condemning the horror, but also worth remembering that magazine’s special Christmas issue, titled “The True Story of Baby Jesus,” whose cover bore a drawing of a startled Mary giving notably frontal birth to her child. (Did the Pope see it?)

So Charlie Hebdo was nothing like the Onion, eh? Did the New Yorker writer see the Onion's article "No One Murdered Because Of This Image" — with an illustration showing several religious figures, including Jesus, in an orgy, with genitals and breasts on display?

The New Yorker article goes on:

[Charlie Hebdo] was offensive to Jews, offensive to Muslims, offensive to Catholics, offensive to feminists, offensive to the right and to the left, while being aligned with it—offensive to everybody, equally. . . . The right to mock and to blaspheme and to make religions and politicians and bien-pensants all look ridiculous was what the magazine held dear, and it is what its cartoonists were killed for—and we diminish their sacrifice if we give their actions shelter in another kind of piety or make them seem too noble, when what they pursued was the joy of ignobility. . . .

“Nothing Sacred” was the motto on the banner of the cartoonists who died, and who were under what turned out to be the tragic illusion that the Republic could protect them from the wrath of faith. “Nothing Sacred”: we forget at our ease, sometimes, and in the pleasure of shared laughter, just how noble and hard-won this motto can be.

While it may be ironic to imbue Charlie Hebdo with too much nobility or piety — attitudes that would seem to be the opposite of what the publication stands for — I actually think it's important to revere the irreverent. We've certainly been doing that with the Marx Brothers for 80 years, for instance. It's a strength, not a weakness, for a society to be able to not take itself too seriously.

Now, I don't find Charlie Hebdo particularly funny (what little I've seen of it), and maybe they haven't always exercised the best judgment about how to walk the fine line humorists often need to walk between being outrageously funny and causing pointless outrage. But there's no way to make sure that all comedians always show the most sensitive judgment; by their very nature, they're sometimes going to slip up and land on the wrong side of the line. This will occasionally cause offense. But that's the price of living in a world with humor and satire — which serve a vital role in puncturing pretense, deflating pomposity, giving us permission to laugh at authority figures.

Humorists are like the child in "The Emperor's New Clothes," who points out what everyone else is thinking but no one else has the nerve to say: the emperor isn't wearing any clothes. And if anything in the world is ripe for this kind of treatment, it's religion!

Something fundamental about the enemy has been revealed by its decision to carry out summary mass executions, and to arrogate worldwide jurisdiction in doing so . . . over cartoons. The Charlie Hebdo killings, the Danish cartoon killings, and the North Korea/The Interview incident have made clear that we need to send a serious message to the world about the freedom to be unserious — as Tina Fey put it, "the right to make dumb jokes."

Headline of the day

GOP clown car runs into ditch

How to tell when a naive person is trying to sound intelligent

They'll take a simple idea and try to make it sound complex. As if they haven't noticed how much of a waste of time this is, and how much more there is to gain from making complex ideas simple.

Do Obama's anti-homemaker proposals make sense?

Ramesh Ponnuru says they don't:

He wants to triple the existing tax credit for child-care expenses, and create a new credit for second earners. Those proposals will help some parents and couples, but have nothing to offer families where one parent concentrates on home-based tasks. The second-earner credit is probably too small to affect couples’ decisions about work and child-care arrangements. So its main effect will be to lower the share of the tax burden paid by two-earner couples who were going to be working even without the credit.

Why do that?

There are two standard economic justifications for shifting the tax burden in this way, neither of them convincing.

One is that two-earner couples have higher costs than single-earner couples making the same income, so it's harder for them to pay the same taxes. But that seems like using the tax code to counteract the efficiency advantages of a particular way of dividing a family's labor, which doesn't make much sense. And it seems like an especially weak argument since, in the real world, single-earner couples have smaller incomes.

The second justification is that a progressive tax code, when applied to families rather than individuals, can penalize second earners. A second earner will often pay a higher tax rate than she would if she were single and making the same income, because she moves to a higher bracket when she marries a wage earner. The tax code thus discourages her from working. That's true, but it's just a special case of the way taxes discourage work, and not one that seems especially unjust or destructive. Marriage is (among other things) an economic partnership, and this feature of the tax code reflects that it involves pooling resources.

If the second-earner credit ignores that feature of marriage, Obama's other proposal ignores how little Americans like commercial child care. Surveys suggest that most parents prefer that small children be primarily cared for by a parent at home, and the Census Bureau reports that less than a quarter of them are in organized care facilities.

Given these preferences, it would make more sense to enlarge the child tax credit -- not the child-care credit -- and let parents use it as they see fit rather than requiring them to use the commercial day care most of them try to avoid. Some of them, it's true, might use the extra money to let one parent scale back from full-time to part-time work, or from part-time work to leaving the labor force.

Insects made out of scrap metal

Um, wow.

Auto-tuned conversations

A comic from Zach Weiner's Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, which is worth checking out regularly:

State of the Union

I can't believe I missed the chance to see Obama repeat the same proposals I've been reading about for weeks but with soaring rhetoric, a very determined tone of voice, and the occasional humorous aside.

President Obama's community-college plan

The Washington Post Editorial Board is unimpressed with Obama's plan to subsidize community-college tuition, which he's going to announce in tonight's State of the Union address. The plan would supposedly save an average of $3,800 per student for 9 million students a year, three-quarters of which would be paid for by the federal government, with the rest covered by state governments. Here's what WaPo has to say:

[U]nder Mr. Obama’s plan, taxpayers would pay even for those who could pay for themselves. If additional money can be found for education, why not direct it to those who face the highest barriers? Further increasing the size of Pell Grants, for example, would be a more progressive way to help very needy students. Larger Pell Grants would also be usable at four-year colleges and universities, which could give some poor students a better chance at success, and not just at community colleges. The government should at least make Pell Grants available year-round, so that students could study over the summer, rather than just during the school year. These are all higher priorities.

If the president wants to help those who earn just too much to qualify for Pell Grants, he could consider means testing community college tuition assistance some other way. The White House, however, hasn’t gamed out how means testing would affect the proposal, in part, apparently, for philosophical reasons. “The president believes that it is time to make college education the norm, and that about 100 years ago this country decided that high school would be the norm and that now is the time to make sure that all Americans, regardless of age, have access to higher education,” White House spokesman Eric Schultz said Friday. That’s a fine goal. But in an era of constrained resources, there are better ways of improving access to higher education than establishing a new middle-class entitlement.

State of the Union ad infinitum

"[A]n almost-plausible speech taking one sentence from each SOTU since 1961."

Call it the scientific ignorance of the American voter — but don't call it the stupidity . . .

"Over 80 percent of Americans support 'mandatory labels on foods containing DNA.'"

But why? And who cares? Ilya Somin explains why this is a big deal:

"A recent survey by the Oklahoma State University Department of Agricultural Economics finds that over 80 percent of Americans support “mandatory labels on foods containing DNA,” about the same number as support mandatory labeling of GMO foods “produced with genetic engineering.” Oklahoma State economist Jayson Lusk has some additional details on the survey. If the government does impose mandatory labeling on foods containing DNA, perhaps the label might look something like this:

WARNING: This product contains deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). The Surgeon General has determined that DNA is linked to a variety of diseases in both animals and humans. In some configurations, it is a risk factor for cancer and heart disease. Pregnant women are at very high risk of passing on DNA to their children.

The Oklahoma State survey result is probably an example of the intersection between scientific ignorance and political ignorance, both of which are widespread. The most obvious explanation for the data is that most of these people don’t really understand what DNA is, and don’t realize that it is contained in almost all food. . . .

Polls repeatedly show that much of the public is often ignorant of both basic scientific facts. . . . A 2012 National Science Foundation survey even found that about 25% of Americans don’t know that the Earth revolves around the sun rather than vice versa. . . .

It would be a mistake to assume that widespread political and scientific ignorance are the result of “the stupidity of the American voter,” as Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber put it. Political ignorance is not primarily the result of stupidity. For most people, it is a rational reaction to the enormous size and complexity of government and the reality that the chance that their vote will have an impact on electoral outcomes is extremely low. The same is true of much scientific ignorance. For many people, there is little benefit to understanding much about genetics or DNA. Most Americans can even go about their daily business perfectly well without knowing that the Earth revolves around the sun. Even the smartest people are inevitably ignorant of the vast majority of information out there. We all have to focus our time and energy on learning that information which is most likely to be instrumentally useful, or at least provide entertainment value. For large numbers of people, much basic political and scientific information doesn’t make the cut.

Unfortunately, this is a case where individually rational behavior leads to potentially dangerous collective outcomes. While it doesn’t much matter whether any individual voter is ignorant about science or public policy, when a majority (or even a large minority) of the electorate is ignorant in these ways, it can lead to the adoption of dangerous and counterproductive government policies. In this case, excessive and unnecessary warning labels on food products could confuse consumers, and divert their limited attention from real dangers.

Mitt Romney's plan for 2016

Dave Weigel reports:

[Romney] sketched out the basic outlines of a potential campaign, saying the nation would be focused on a post-Obama era and taking a swipe at the front runner for the Democratic presidential nomination by saying, “The results of the Hillary Clinton-Barack Obama foreign policy have been devastating," he said, adding that "terrorism is not on the run."

Sounding every bit like a candidate, Romney said the party needed to be focused in 2016 on three things: Making the world safer; ensuring that all Americans have an equal chance at opportunity; and lifting the poor out of poverty.

So his plan is to flip-flop on whether he's concerned about the poor.

Weigel dryly adds:

Whether Romney is the best messenger for those points remains unclear. Some Republicans declined to put their skepticism on the record after the speech.

"Hate speech"

I hate this article!

This might be the worst paragraph:

Speech that offends, insults, demeans, threatens, disrespects, incites hatred or violence, and/or violates basic human rights and freedoms has absolutely no place in even the freest society. In fact, it has no place in any free society, as bigotry is fundamentally anti-freedom by its very nature. The human right to freedom of speech must always be balanced against the human rights to dignity, respect, honor, non-discrimination, and freedom from hatred. Civilized countries consider hate speech to be among the most serious crimes around, with many countries even placing it on par with murder. In some countries, people are automatically declared guilty of hate speech and other hate crimes unless they can absolutely prove their innocence beyond any reasonable doubt. The principle of guilty until proven innocent may seem a bit harsh to some, but it makes sense when you consider how severe the crime of hate speech is – it is a crime that simply cannot be tolerated in a democracy. Hate speech is not merely speech, but is, in fact, a form of violence and the international community has established hate speech to be a form of violence many times. Hate speech doesn’t merely CAUSE violence. Hate speech IS violence.

What I'd like to know is: how does the author think government should deal with someone who says, "I hate men," or "Men are stupid"? I don't agree with those statements. They're hurtful, sexist, and offensive. But I don't want the government to stop people from saying them. And if government can't stop people from saying those things, it also can't stop people from making hateful statements about women, blacks, whites, gays, etc.

In the comments: some suspect the article was intended to be satirical. (But it's not very funny . . .)

France suppresses speech at the free speech rally

Andrew Napolitano writes, in Reason magazine:

The photos of 40 of the world's government leaders marching arm-in-arm along a Paris boulevard on Sunday with the president of the United States not among them was a provocative image that has fomented much debate. The march was, of course, in direct response to the murderous attacks on workers at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo by a pair of brothers named Kouachi, and on shoppers at a Paris kosher supermarket by one of the brothers' comrades.

The debate has been about whether President Obama should have been at the march. The march was billed as a defense of freedom of speech in the West; yet it hardly could have been held in a less free speech-friendly Western environment, and the debate over Obama's absence misses the point. . . .

[E]ven though the French Constitution guarantees freedom of speech, French governments treat speech as a gift from the government, not as a natural right of all persons, as our Constitution does.

The French government has prohibited speech it considers to be hateful and even made it criminal. When the predecessor magazine to Charlie Hebdo once mocked the death of Charles de Gaulle, the French government shut it down—permanently. . . .

And how hypocritical was it of the French government to claim it defends free speech! In France, you can go to jail if you publicly express hatred for a group whose members may be defined generally by characteristics of birth, such as gender, age, race, place of origin or religion.

You can also go to jail for using speech to defy the government. This past weekend, millions of folks in France wore buttons and headbands that proclaimed in French: "I am Charlie Hebdo." Those whose buttons proclaimed "I am not Charlie Hebdo" were asked by the police to remove them. Those who wore buttons that proclaimed, either satirically or hatefully, "I am Kouachi" were arrested. Arrested for speech at a march in support of free speech? Yes.

The Wall Street Journal is skeptical of Romney 2016.

WSJ editorial:

Mr. Romney is a man of admirable personal character, but his political profile is, well, protean. He made the cardinal mistake of pandering to conservatives rather than offering a vision that would attract them. He claimed to be “severely conservative” and embraced “self-deportation” for illegal immigrants, a political killer. But he refused to break from his RomneyCare record in Massachusetts even though it undermined his criticism of ObamaCare. A third campaign would resurrect all of that political baggage—and videotape.

The businessman also failed on his own self-professed terms as a superior manager. His convention was the worst since George H.W. Bush’s in 1992, focusing more on his biography than a message. This left him open to President Obama’s barrage against his record at Bain Capital, which Mr. Romney failed to defend because that would have meant playing on Democratic turf, as his strategists liked to put it. The unanswered charges suppressed GOP turnout in key states like Ohio.

Mr. Romney’s campaign team was notable for its mediocrities, led by a strategist whose theory of the race was that voters had already rejected Mr. Obama so the challenger merely needed to seem like a safe alternative. He thus never laid out an economic narrative to counter Mr. Obama’s claim that he had saved the country from a GOP Depression and needed more time for his solutions to work.

And don’t forget the management calamity of Mr. Romney’s voter turnout operation, code-named Orca. Mr. Romney likes to say he reveres “data,” but Mr. Obama’s campaign was years ahead of Mr. Romney’s in using Big Data and social media to boost turnout. The Romney campaign was so clueless on voter mobilization that well into Election Night the candidate still thought he would win. He lost a winnable race 51%-47%, including every closely contested state save North Carolina.

Mr. Romney had his good moments, notably choosing Paul Ryan as running mate and the first debate. He also, eventually, adopted solid proposals on tax and Medicare reform after his initial and forgettable 59-point plan. More comfortable with slide decks than ideas, he still struggled to make a compelling argument for the agenda he claimed to favor.

Mr. Romney’s post-election diagnosis also doesn’t inspire confidence that he has learned the right lessons. He said Mr. Obama won because he promised “extraordinary financial gifts” to voters. “It’s a proven political strategy,” Mr. Romney said. “Giving away free stuff is a hard thing to compete with.” Maybe so, but if he can’t sell a larger message of growth and opportunity, he won’t defeat Hillary Clinton’s gifts either.

Let the negative campaigning begin!

The New York Times reports on former Senator Rick Santorum's attacks against some of the other (potential) Republican candidates:

Discussing [Mike] Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor and winner of the 2008 Iowa caucuses, Mr. Santorum raised four policy issues that he said would prompt questions about Mr. Huckabee’s fealty to conservative principles. Mr. Santorum was even harsher when discussing [Rand] Paul of Kentucky and [Ted] Cruz of Texas, both first-term senators, dismissing them as “bomb throwers” with scant achievements. . . .

The criticisms . . . illustrate the two simultaneous campaigns already taking shape. While former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey and perhaps [Mitt] Romney begin vying for commitments from center-right contributors, elected officials and activists, a parallel race is taking place among more conservative contenders including Mr. Santorum, Mr. Huckabee and the two senators.

Already, there is notably less restraint in the language used by the more conservative aspirants than in the public statements from the establishment-backed potential candidates.

“Do we really want someone with this little experience?” Mr. Santorum asked, referring to Mr. Paul, Mr. Cruz and Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, who is also in his first term. “And the only experience they have basically — not Rubio, but Cruz and Paul because I don’t think Rubio is going to go — is bomb throwing? Do we really want somebody who’s a bomb thrower, with no track record of any accomplishments?”

Mr. Paul’s top strategist responded that the party should not take advice from a politician who was soundly defeated in 2006.

“Senator Santorum lost re-election in [Pennsylvania] by 18 points nearly a decade ago, and has spent the time since then trying to convince people to elect him to an even higher office than the one he was booted out of,” said Doug Stafford, senior adviser to Mr. Paul. “We will pass on responding to his alleged wisdom.”

Why are sports so popular?

This 4-minute voice memo helped me understand why sports are so popular.

I might have put some of his points in a different way. But I think Joel van Vliet has hit on something important here.

Romney 2016

WaPo reports:

Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, told Republican donors in New York on Friday that he is seriously considering a third presidential campaign in 2016, according to a source present at the meeting. . . .

“One of the more interesting things was Mitt said, ‘People ask if I really want to be president,’ and he said, ‘I’ve run twice. Yeah, I want to be president.’”

If that's one of the more interesting things he said, I'd hate to hear the more boring things . . .

Free speech

Zach Weiner on free speech (link 1, link 2):

The whole point of free speech is to protect transgressive speech. Saying "pie is nice" has never required legal protection.

Having free speech except when it's offensive is like having an umbrella that only works when the sky is clear.

How does raising the minimum wage affect employment levels?

A large literature has examined the effects on employment of raising the minimum wage, with different researchers arriving at conflicting conclusions. The core reason that economists can’t answer questions like this better is that we usually can’t run controlled experiments. There is always some reason that the legislators chose to raise the minimum wage, often related to prevailing economic conditions. We can never be sure if changes in employment that followed the legislation were the result of those motivating conditions or the result of the legislation itself. For example, if Congress only raises the minimum wage when the economy is on the rebound and all wages are about to rise anyway, we’d usually observe a rise in employment following a hike in the minimum wage that is not caused by the legislation itself. UCSD Ph.D. candidate Michael Wither and his adviser Professor Jeffrey Clemens have some interesting new research that sheds some more light on this question. . . .

Clemens and Wither found that the federal minimum wage hike resulted in about a 6% decrease in the probability that low-wage individuals would have a job based on this comparison of states in which the minimum wage hike would have been binding and those for which it would not. The hike in the minimum wage thus appears to have raised the wage for low-skilled workers but made it harder for them to find jobs.

(Source.)

Two things to remember to keep this in perspective:

1. Reducing employment is just one of many ways workers can be hurt by raising the minimum wage. It can also cause employers to avoid giving raises to higher-level employees, cut benefits, offer less hours, raise prices (paid by low-wage workers who are also customers at their own companies or other companies), etc.

2. Unemployment is a particularly bad problem for a person to have — it's a far worse problem than not being paid quite enough. So even a small disemployment effect could be good reason to oppose raising the minimum wage.

"All Creative Work Is Derivative"

Good point.

"Correction . . ."

". . . This article was totally wrong."

[T]he problems seem systemic, not the kind that can be fixed simply by asking writers to slow down or hiring a few more editors. Vox has hired a number of Bright Young People—and is run by the Brightest Young People—and the house style seems to be, "Write as if you are an expert, in a tone assuming that everything one needs to know about a subject can be found in your article." These Bright Young People may well be near-experts on one or two subjects, or at least close enough to pass as such online, but Vox publishes at the same rapid pace as the rest of the internet, on an exceptional and ever-growing number of topics, and there's only so much authoritativeness to go around.

I lost interest in Vox after I noticed that an article about law was clearly written by someone who wasn't a legal expert; the writer seemed to have mistakenly believed s/he was well-versed in a certain criminal procedure issue just by reading some news reports about a Supreme Court case.

"2015? You mean we're in the future?!"

When Siskel and Ebert and Roeper gave thumbs down — way down

"There are 3 good things in [Catwoman]: Halle Berry's face, Halle Berry's body, and Halle Berry's costumes. Those are first-rate. Everything else in this movie is unbelievably bad." — Roger Ebert

"When I saw She's Out of Control, I became so depressed, I actually thought about quitting my job as a film critic, feeling as though the movies had abandoned me. Because what I was seeing there really wasn't a movie. It was some sort of strange concoction by someone who didn't understand what movies are all about. Fortunately, however, I would see the movie Say Anything later in the same day, and all is right with the world. I'm still on the job." — Gene Siskel





At the end, Siskel and Ebert correctly foresee that Siskel will die before Ebert.

Hey, some of these animals are pretty good at skateboarding.

Memes of yesteryear

So many internet memes are rehashed versions of things that were already cringe-inducingly trite when I was a kid.

". . . said no one ever!" is a throwback to ". . . not!"

"First-world problems!" is a throwback to "Finish your dinner — there are starving children in Africa who would love to have that food!"

The "real college rape hoax"

Glenn Reynolds writes:

For months we've been told that there's a burgeoning "epidemic" of rape on college campuses, that the system for dealing with campus rape is "broken" and that we need new federal legislation (of course!) to deal with this disaster. Before the Rolling Stone story imploded, Sens. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., were citing the Virginia gang rape as evidence of the problem, but now that the story has been exposed as bogus, they're telling us that, regardless of that isolated incident, there's still a huge campus rape problem that needs to be addressed as soon as possible.

And that's the real college rape hoax. Because the truth is that there's no epidemic outbreak of college rape. In fact, rape on college campuses is — like rape everywhere else in America — plummeting in frequency. And that 1-in-5 college rape number you keep hearing in the press? It's thoroughly bogus, too. (Even the authors of that study say that "We don't think one in five is a nationally representative statistic," because it sampled only two schools.)

Sen. Gillibrand also says that "women are at a greater risk of sexual assault as soon as they step onto a college campus."

The truth — and, since she's a politician, maybe that shouldn't be such a surprise — is exactly the opposite. According to the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics, the rate of rape and sexual assault is lower for college students (at 6.1 per 1,000) than for non-students (7.6 per 1,000). (Note: not 1 in 5). What's more, between 1997 and 2013, rape against women dropped by about 50%, in keeping with a more general drop in violent crime nationally.

Upshot: Women on campus aren't at more risk for sexual assault, and their risk is nothing like the bogus 1-in-5 statistic bandied about by politicians and activists. So why is this non-crisis getting so much press?

It's getting press because it suits the interests of those pushing the story. For Gillibrand and McCaskill, it's a woman-related story that helps boost their status as female senators. It ties in with the "war on women" theme that Democrats have been boosting since 2012, and will presumably roll out once again in 2016 in support of Hillary Clinton, or perhaps Elizabeth Warren.

Worst. Punditry. Ever.

The New York Times, December 20, 1924 — 90 years ago today:

(via)

How to teach creativity …

… to a fish!

Hollywood didn't always yield to dictatorships

How is it that Hollywood was willing to release this scathing satire of Hitler in 1940, in the middle of World War II and the Holocaust, yet we're not allowed to see The Interview for fear of North Korea in 2014? I thought we were supposed to be "the land of the free and the home of the brave". . .

The Obamas on their "racist experiences"

Actually, these are not necessarily "racist experiences." The reason a woman asked Michelle Obama to hand her something from a shelf in a store is that Michelle Obama was much taller than the woman. Michelle Obama is apparently 5'11" — an inch taller than me — and I often get asked by other customers in stores to get things from the high shelves. This is not because of prejudice against me; it's because I happen to be of average height for a man. Relatively tall people like us are advantaged by having an easier time reaching products in stores; how can we complain about occasionally being asked for help by someone who's too short to comfortably reach some of the products?

I've also been mistaken for a store clerk. I've also been closely followed by store clerks, and interrogated while trying to leave a store without buying anything. I've also been refused entry into my own workplace, when I was wearing a suit and tie and had been working there for a long time, because the security guard (a white man) didn't believe I worked there. (I should mention that this was not at my current job.) Yes these things are annoying, but they happen to people of all races.

Many of the Obamas' examples reflect a certain classism: Don't you know who I am?! How could you possibly mistake me for a lowly waiter?!

There's something unseemly about the most famous, powerful couple in America expressing dismay that a random citizen would ever fail to recognize how important they are.

UPDATE (December 21): I was looking around for help in a clothing store today, and it wasn't totally clear who was a customer and who was an employee. The employees had no obvious dress code or name tags, and some of them walked around nonchalantly in a way that blended in with the customers (which could be a good sales technique). It occurred to me that if I had taken seriously what Michelle Obama said about racist microaggression, I should have avoided asking any of the black or Hispanic employees for help, and sought out the white employees instead. But that would mostly help whites and hurt minorities! They're all working for commissions, and they can benefit from the sales experience of interacting with me even if they don't make a sale. That seems to be a worse "microaggression" than occasionally mixing up a customer with a store employee, which isn't going to prevent anyone from making money.

An idea

If I were Lorne Michaels, I'd offer Dan Aykroyd tons of money to rejoin the cast of Saturday Night Live to play Jeb Bush.

What should "white privilege" mean?

Reihan Salam writes:

I wonder if the racial self-flagellation of ‪#‎CrimingWhileWhite‬ is like buying an indulgence. If you engage in ritualized expressions of white guilt, you are free to enjoy your white privilege, comfortable in the knowledge that you are nothing like those ignorant and presumably terrible white people who refuse to do so. I have little patience for this kind of privilege-checking. As Phoebe Maltz Bovy observed back in May, invocations of white privilege are more often than not a way for one privileged person to “win a sensitivity competition” with another privileged person. What, then, is a useful way to think about what white privilege means and how it works? . . .

It’s also important to understand the social and economic components of white privilege. The basic idea, as described by scholars like Nancy DiTomaso, author of The American Non-Dilemma, and Daria Roithmayr, author of Reproducing Racism, is that all kinds of valuable social goods are transmitted through social networks. If you hear of a job opening at your company, you will likely pass that information along to a close friend or relative. I’ve shared information in this insider-y way, and I’m guessing that you have as well—if you don’t, then the people you value and respect might value and respect you a little bit less.

Why does white privilege come into play here? Because most Americans, like most humans, associate with people much like themselves. Robert P. Jones of the Public Religion Research Institute has found that the social networks of white Americans are 91 percent white, and three-quarters of whites have entirely white social networks. This shouldn’t be too shocking, as most Americans are non-Hispanic whites and there are many neighborhoods in which making nonwhite friends would take a great deal of effort. Looking at these relationships through an exclusively racial lens can be misleading, as factors like the neighborhood you live in, the high school you attended, and your religious background could be doing more of the work than any preference for associating with other people of your own race. But the neighborhoods we live in and the high schools and churches we attend tend to be segregated by race, so even the mildest same-race preference will get magnified by these other avenues. Since white people hold a disproportionately large share of the most lucrative and the most powerful jobs, the natural tendency to help those you care about most ends up reinforcing racial inequality.

There is nothing intrinsically white about helping your friends and relatives. When it comes to building self-reinforcing social networks, one could even make the case that other groups are beating whites at their own game. Recently, Chris Martin, a graduate student in sociology at Emory University, and John Nezlek, a social psychologist at the College of William and Mary, found that people consistently underestimate the median household income of Asian Americans, and that people who believe that whites are highly privileged were particularly likely to assume that Asian-American households earn less than white households. This is despite the fact that Asian-American households have had higher incomes than white households for more than 30 years.

Does this mean that we ought to talk about Asian-American privilege more and white privilege less? Not without acknowledging what “privilege” means in the context of different groups. If anything, newcomers to American society and their children might find themselves more dependent on friends and relatives than deeply rooted whites, and thus more likely to cultivate and maintain these ties in an environment that seems alien and at times hostile. Those who arrive with high levels of educational attainment are particularly well-positioned to take advantage of job opportunities, and to share inside information with their co-ethnics. Virtually all Taiwanese immigrants benefit from the fact that 74.1 percent of American adults of Taiwanese origin have at least a bachelor’s degree. Similarly, the life chances of college-educated Hmong Americans are affected in all kinds of ways by the fact that 37.9 percent of American adults of Hmong origin have less than a high school diploma.

Imagine if we could rigorously apply a similar subgroup analysis to white Americans. The Census doesn’t capture data on educational and labor market outcomes for religious minorities like Jews and Mormons, yet there is evidence that people have a much greater tendency to associate with narrower ethno-religious groups than with fellow members of larger racial groups. Even so, we don’t generally speak of Jewish privilege or Mormon privilege. The language of white privilege also obscures the ravaging effects of poverty in heavily white regions like Appalachian Kentucky, where drug abuse is rampant and privilege-checking seems almost totally irrelevant.

Why does the white privilege conversation ignore the ways in which Asian Americans have used their social ties to achieve success, or the yawning chasm that separates upper-middle-income Mormon Californians from impoverished Appalachian whites? The simple answer is that we talk about white privilege as a clumsy way of talking about black exclusion.

Even white Americans of modest means are more likely to have inherited something, in the form of housing wealth or useful professional connections, than the descendants of slaves. In his influential 2005 book When Affirmative Action Was White, Ira Katznelson recounts in fascinating detail the various ways in which the New Deal and Fair Deal social programs of the 1930s and 1940s expanded economic opportunities for whites while doing so unevenly at best for blacks, particularly in the segregated South. Many rural whites who had known nothing but the direst poverty saw their lives transformed as everything from rural electrification to generous educational benefits for veterans allowed them to build human capital, earn higher incomes, and accumulate savings. This legacy, in ways large and small, continues to enrich the children and grandchildren of the whites of that era. This is the stuff of white privilege.

There's an interesting analogy to be made between Asian Americans and Jewish Americans. Both groups are richer than the average white American. But they reached that point only by doing a lot to compensate for discrimination and historic oppression.

"Warren's present-tense denial adds to speculation she will run in 2016"

A correct headline.

"I am not running for president" is what you say when you want to leave the door wide open to the possibility that you might start running for president any day now.

Someone else who said he was not running for president was a junior Senator named Barack Obama.

Lennon or McCartney?

My favorite answer is by Adam Duritz of Counting Crows (starting at 4:44):

I think Lennon's a great lyricist especially … a great writer, really. But melody is unquantifiable. I mean, you live your day, so you've got shit to write about. I don't know where people get melody from. The ability to write something that sticks in people's heads for 10, 20, 50, couple hundred years — the ability to be Puccini or McCartney … I don't know where that comes from. And I don't know how one guy wrote so many pieces of music that I can hum 50 years later. I don't know how it's possible. And that to me is such a rare thing.… All the dark … cool songs in the world are great, but the only reason we love music is because melody gets to the gut.… The ability to write something that we're all humming … that's how I remember the Beatles. Not that Lennon didn't write a lot of great songs too, but McCartney's abilities there are … without peer.

Hillary Clinton vs. Elizabeth Warren

Howard Dean and my friend Ben Wikler debate the Democratic primaries, focusing on Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren. At one point, the host seems a little disappointed that they're both being too positive, and Howard Dean responds that he's not going to "fight" Ben Wikler — who Dean calls one of the smartest Americans under 35.

Things that have become less annoying than people complaining about them

• smartphones

• people who don't have a TV

• hipsters

Sam Cooke died 50 years ago.

50 years ago today, on December 11, 1964, Sam Cooke died at the age of 33.

There’s a home video of me at about age 5, where my mom asks if I want to sing a song. I sing a couple verses of “You Send Me." Then I point out that it's really "a grownup song." Sam Cooke had clearly touched me from very early on. He had a light, warm, amiable quality that could appeal to a young child, while having the depth and maturity to appeal to adults. And he had a passion and feeling that’s allowed his music to endure for 50 years.

Wikipedia sums up his career:

Samuel "Sam" Cooke (January 22, 1931 – December 11, 1964) was an American recording artist and singer-songwriter, generally considered among the greatest of all time. Influential as both a singer and composer, he is commonly known as the King of Soul for his distinctive vocals and importance within popular music. His pioneering contributions to soul music contributed to the rise of Aretha Franklin, Bobby Womack, Al Green, Curtis Mayfield, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Billy Preston and popularized the likes of Otis Redding and James Brown. AllMusic biographer Bruce Eder wrote that Cooke was "the inventor of soul music", and possessed "an incredible natural singing voice and a smooth, effortless delivery that has never been surpassed."

Cooke had 30 U.S. top 40 hits between 1957 and 1964, plus three more posthumously. Major hits like "You Send Me", "A Change Is Gonna Come", "Cupid", "Chain Gang", "Wonderful World", and "Twistin' the Night Away" are some of his most popular songs. Cooke was also among the first modern black performers and composers to attend to the business side of his musical career. He founded both a record label and a publishing company as an extension of his careers as a singer and composer. He also took an active part in the Civil Rights Movement.

Here's "Good News," followed by a short interview of Sam Cooke (by Dick Clark), in which he tells "the secret" to his songwriting:




Cooke wrote "Chain Gang," after meeting some chain-gang prisoners on a highway while he was on tour. (Chain gangs have been almost entirely abolished from the United States.)




Cooke concisely answers the question: "What is soul?"




That recording shows that Cooke wasn't the most technically perfect singer — his voice breaks a little. And he didn't have the biggest range. I've read that he had the exact same range as Justin Bieber, of all people.

But just listen to this — a scorchingly intense performance of "Bring It on Home to Me," with an extended intro that brilliantly includes some of "You Send Me":




"Bring It on Home to Me" is probably one of Cooke's most covered songs — it's been done by Wilson Pickett (who gave a shout-out to "the late Sam Cooke" in the beginning of that 1968 recording), Aretha Franklin, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and She & Him.

He clearly brought something extra to his live show that isn't on the studio recordings:




Though he generally wrote his own songs, he was also a gifted interpreter of classics. Here's "Summertime" (by George Gershwin and DuBose Heyward):




"Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen" (a traditional spiritual):




Before Cooke switched to pop, he sang gospel with the Soul Stirrers. Here's a rousing, 9-minute "Nearer My God to Thee":




But to many people, the most soul-stirring Sam Cooke song is his civil rights anthem, "A Change Is Gonna Come." He recorded it in January 1964, a little less than a year before he died.




When Rolling Stone ranked Cooke the 4th greatest singer of all time, Van Morrison wrote this for the magazine:

If a singer is not singing from the soul, I do not even want to listen to it — it's not for me.

Sam Cooke reached down deep with pure soul. He had the rare ability to do gospel the way it's supposed to be — he made it real, clean, direct. Gospel drove Sam Cooke through his greatest songs, the same way it did for Ray Charles, who came first, and Otis Redding.

He had an incomparable voice. Sam Cooke could sing anything and make it work. But when you're talking about his strength as a singer, range is not relevant. It was his power to deliver — it was about his phrasing, the totality of his singing.

He did a lot of great songs, but "Bring It on Home to Me" is a favorite. It's just a well-crafted song with a great lyric and melody. It's a song that's written to allow you to go wherever you can with it.…

Not many people can play this music anymore, not the way Sam Cooke did it, coming directly from the church. What can we learn from a singer like him, from listening to songs like "A Change Is Gonna Come"? It depends on who the singer is and what they are capable of, where their head is and how serious they are. But Sam Cooke was born to sing.

Let's keep his music alive for 50 more years.

(Sam Cooke in Billboard magazine, from Wikipedia.)

Should you "follow your heart" or your "head" when it comes to dating/relationships?

Your head, according to this Psychology Today article:

One famous study conducted in Jaipur, India, compared couples there who married for love—"the Chosen"— to those who wed for family—"the Arranged." As you’d expect, Chosen couples reported being significantly more in love at the start of the marriage than the Arranged. But by the five-year mark, the figures had reversed—with the Arranged couples reporting being in love at the same levels as newlywed Chosen couples had, and the Chosen couples now declined to the newlywed levels of the Arranged couples.

And at the 10-year mark? The effect had doubled. Arranged marriages just kept getting better.

Does that mean that love’s not important in arranged marriage cultures? Hardly. It just means that here, we expect love before marriage; and there, afterward. Here, we expect love to conquer all; there, they expect similarity to pave the way for love.

And, factually speaking, they’re usually right. . . .

I’m not suggesting that you let your family arrange your marriage. If you’re not from such a culture, it could be intensely weird, and daunting for your parents. But I am suggesting we would be wise to emulate arranged-marriage cultures by valuing our heads as much as our hearts—starting with logic and ending with love. To that end:

• Define your standards, making sure they’re realistic and vital;

• Only date those who seem to meet them—ditching those who lack your required qualities, no matter how appealing they might otherwise seem; and

• Let yourself fall for someone from the small group that fits.

In other words, arrange your own marriage. You can do it with the help of the Internet, of course—and recent research suggests that online dating may be associated with longer, happier marriages than those that are launched in person.

What Facebook does with your face

Sterling Crispin’s “Data Masks” are haunting portraits that don’t actually depict any one person. Instead, they use raw data to show how technology perceives humanity. Reverse-engineered from surveillance face-recognition algorithms and then fed through Facebook’s face-detection software, the Data Masks “confront viewers with the realization that they’re being seen and watched basically all the time,” Crispin says.

“Facebook actually makes masks out of everyone’s faces,” the artist explains. The social network analyzes every face that appears in photos on its servers and renders them into three-dimensional models. “It’s happening whether you get tagged in the photo or not” . . .

As the U.S. government builds biometric databases like its Next-Generation Identification face-recognition system, it’s more important than ever to know how our identities are captured and processed by the technology we adopt. Crispin’s work is a reminder.

(Quoted from "This Is What Your Face Looks Like to Facebook" by Kyle Chayka.)

Pantera's "Dimebag" Darrell died 10 years ago.

On December 8, a great musical artist’s life tragically ended when he was not yet 40 years old, shot by a murderer who’s euphemistically referred to as "a crazed fan." A great guitarist and composer, who must have had plenty more great music to give to the world, although his legendary band for which he'll be best remembered had already broken up. I feel honored to have gotten the chance to see him live in concert. The world lost one of the greatest metal guitarists 10 years ago today.

“Dimebag” Darrell, born Darrell Lance Abbott, died at the cruel age of 38 on December 8, 2004. As the guitarist of Pantera, he pushed the envelope of ultra-heavy rock music, inspired countless guitarists, and was acclaimed by many as the greatest metal guitarist of all time.

Some of Pantera's standouts:

"Hollow" starts out disarmingly gentle for a Pantera song, with some beautiful melodies by Darrell, then descends into a more straightforward metal song halfway through. One line is chilling today:

No one knows what's done is done — it’s as if he were dead . . .




"I'm Broken," which is probably Pantera’s most famous song, was essentially made by Darrell even if he didn't write the lyrics. Both his riffs and his solo in this song are unforgettable. Some of the stretched-out notes of the guitar solo seem to have a playful sense of humor — uncharacteristically for metal.



(And here's what it sounds like for Pantera to be played as chamber music.)

"Mouth for War" — You probably won’t like this. In fact, please don’t click on this unless you like music that’s aggressively heavy. If you do listen, notice how brilliantly the band starts the song with the pre-chorus riff (instead of a more common choice like the verse or chorus), which lends a special, climactic feeling to the actual pre-chorus ("bones, in traction . . .").

"This Love" melds the quiet and heavy sides of Pantera. Darrell plays a soaring guitar solo with some unexpected key changes.

"Walk" is a good example of why Pantera is called "groove metal" (as opposed to the "thrash metal" of Metallica and Megadeth, for instance). Here's a bluesy cover that's faithful to the spirit of the original while being radically different. A commenter at SongMeanings describes how meaningful the song has been to her:

This is the song that gave me back my confidence and self belief. For the years I was at high school I suffered at the hands of bullies who ripped my confidence to shreds and left me in tatters. They basically chewed me up and spat me back out. This song is about attitude and self belief. I got into the metal scene and found an outlet and music I loved. Far from being the victim, I became the victor, this song was my anthem.

“Shedding Skin” — I'm surprised this isn’t better known. To me, it’s one of Pantera’s best. But please don’t click that link unless you’re OK with some pretty crude lyrics and brutal music. Starts with a compelling riff, then switches to an eerily soft verse, which flows seamlessly into the heavy chorus. Tempo changes keep things interesting later on: the part where it slows down, in the section right before the guitar solo, is transcendent. The guitar solos (plural) are amazing as usual.

“Cemetery Gates” is an earlier song from Pantera — a classic showcase for Phil Anselmo’s singing and Darrell’s guitar virtuosity. This came out in 1990, and you can tell that it's rooted in the '80s in a way their later work wasn't.

"Planet Caravan" is a haunting cover of Black Sabbath. Pantera was so concerned that this un-heavy song would alienate the fans that the liner notes included a message justifying the decision to include it on the Far Beyond Driven album. It gives us a rare chance to hear Darrell soloing with a clean tone.

The longest word in the English language

A word so long you grow a beard saying it — and (spoiler alert) a plant dies.

The "old" drive out the young at TNR

"I can no longer in good conscience even imagine my work appearing in the magazine. Your assault on the magazine has nothing whatsoever to do with print versus digital or with age versus youth. Chronologically, you are young — and some of us who are now leaving the magazine are older. But to me you seem old — old in the conventionality of your fast-forward thinking that goes nowhere. What you have done to The New Republic has broken the hearts of many people in their twenties and thirties — people who would like to take part in the great intellectual conversation that The New Republic has been for a hundred years and is no more."

— Jed Perl, resigning as TNR's art critic

Why the end of The New Republic matters

David Greenberg, a former TNR editor, writes in Slate:

The bloodletting this week at the New Republic—the journal of opinion regarded for a century as the flagship of American liberalism—has been rightly taken to herald the end of a great magazine. With the news that its two top editors, Frank Foer and Leon Wieseltier, resigned, that much of the staff subsequently quit, and that the magazine will halve its yearly output and move its headquarters from Washington to New York, the political and intellectual worlds are thrumming with outrage toward the short-sightedness of the magazine’s new leadership and elegies for an august institution. . . .

But one reason for the New Republic’s demise has not been fully appreciated, and that has to do with its unique tradition of heterodox liberalism. The New Republic is being seen as a casualty of the crisis of print journalism that has felled many other newspapers and magazines during the past decade—the drying up of advertising revenue amid free and cheap online commentary. The problem with this line of argument is that “little magazines” have always lost money, relying instead on the largesse of rich owners, whose combination of public-spiritedness and vanity has led them to sponsor high-quality journalism. The New Republic was hurt by something more specific: the polarization of a media environment that leaves little room for a strain of liberal thought that not only attacks the right and the far left but also prods and questions liberalism itself.

Founded in 1914 by some of the leading minds of the Progressive Era—Herbert Croly, Walter Lippmann, and Walter Weyl—the New Republic from the beginning sought to challenge conventional thinking, including among its own readership. These editors recognized that while liberalism (like all political creeds) needs foundational principles, one of those principles specific to liberalism is openness to debate, experiment, and reconsideration. Dogmatism, even more than conservatism, was its bête noire.

Over the years the magazine sometimes wavered in that mission. During the editorial tenure of former Vice President Henry Wallace in the 1940s, it descended into high-minded cliché, and for spells in the postwar years, it lapsed into sleepy predictability. But with its purchase by Harvard professor Martin Peretz in the mid-1970s, the New Republic regained its stature as the most provocative magazine on the left. Peretz hired a bevy of brilliant young minds. Three in particular became the three finest editors of their generation: Michael Kinsley, Hendrik Hertzberg, and Wieseltier. The twentysomethings who cut their teeth at the magazine in these decades include some of the most accomplished nonfiction writers working today. . . .

Under Peretz and his editors, the magazine led the way in questioning left-wing shibboleths on issues such as crime and fiscal policy and especially foreign policy, where it championed a revival of the liberal internationalism that had guided the Democratic Party from Woodrow Wilson through John F. Kennedy, until the disaster of Vietnam. The election in 1992 of Bill Clinton, whose candidacy the magazine supported early on, marked a triumph of this reconstructed liberalism.

Some old-time subscribers and confirmed partisans disliked the magazine for its willingness to publish conservative voices—Fred Barnes was its ace White House correspondent for years while staff writer Charles Krauthammer migrated during his time at the magazine from Walter Mondale speechwriter to neoconservative paragon. Critics assailed its perceived hawkishness and its unapologetic Zionism, which had long been anathema to the hard left and was now becoming distasteful to certain high-minded progressives as well.

But to other readers, the sense of freewheeling debate—as opposed to bien-pensant wisdom or party-line doctrine—gave the magazine its exciting appeal. As a college student in the late 1980s, I found its pages more stimulating than those of rival publications, which tended to toe what was already being called the “politically correct” line. I never agreed with all of the magazine’s positions—its support of the Nicaraguan contras, its opposition to affirmative action—but its pieces made me think in ways that few newspaper columnists or television pundits did. . . .

The New Republic’s heterodox liberalism—the willingness (indeed the eagerness!) to test liberal thinking from within the liberal family—is now being squeezed. Internet journalism has made it easy to find opinions that confirm one’s own beliefs and flatter one’s prejudices. Facebook places soothing assurances before our eyeballs. The left and the right are retreating into cocoons of information and opinion, on cable TV and social media.

Accordingly, the New Republic’s fortunes flagged amid the polarization of the Bush years, when its full-throated support for the Iraq war was too much for even many liberal internationalists to bear and when, post-Clinton, liberalism now seemed to need a course correction toward the left, not the center. Though Foer dynamically reinvigorated the magazine, it never regained the wider circulation it once enjoyed.

Wiser ownership could have recognized that although little magazines must adapt to the digital age with strategies for reaching social media users and mobile phone readers, they will never be cash cows. They succeed through influence, not volume. When I worked there in the early 1990s, it was often said that while the magazine had only 100,000 subscribers, it was “the right 100,000” . . . .

The impending transformation of the New Republic from a liberal magazine into a “vertically integrated digital media company” is regrettable for many reasons, not all of them sentimental. Conservatives need a liberal magazine that’s unpredictable enough to make them want to read it. Liberals and leftists need a magazine that will prod them to question their beliefs, and revise or strengthen them. All of us need robust intellectual debate of a high caliber that treats politics and ideas with the seriousness that they deserve.

Is The New Republic breaking up with itself on its 100th anniversary?

It sure looks like it.

TNR used to be my favorite magazine. I've been reading it since I was in high school. It played a significant role in teaching me how to write and how to think.

It used to be known as a liberal magazine that would question orthodox liberalism and conventional wisdom. TNR's outgoing editor, Franklin Foer, even wrote an article in 2001 challenging the conventional wisdom that conventional wisdom is often wrong!

But lately it's become predictably liberal — I can't think of the last thing I've read in TNR that differs from "what you'd expect a generic liberal to say."

The magazine seems to have been taken over by people who are more interested in transforming it into a "digital media company" than in taking over the helm of an august journalistic institution. It's going to move from DC to NYC and switch from 20 to 10 issues a year — not even a monthly. Its top two editors (Foer and Leon Wieseltier) just quit. The new CEO has warned of a "staff restructuring"; some are predicting "mass resignations"; and two of its former writers whose names are still on the masthead (Ryan Lizza and Jon Chait) have asked for their names to be taken off the masthead "immediately."

Chait has written a "Eulogy for The New Republic," and the consensus seems to be that "eulogy" is the appropriate term. This is a sad day for opinion journalism.

UPDATE: The "mass resignations" prediction was correct — look at TNR's masthead now! (Source.)

UPDATE:

On Friday morning, 28 senior staff and contributing editors resigned from The New Republic en masse. A letter of resignation to Chris Hughes was signed by ten contributing editors, including Lizza, poet and literary critic Helen Vendler and Princeton history professor Sean Wilentz:

“Dear Mr. Hughes,

 We are contributing editors of the New Republic, and our commitment to 
the venerable principles of the magazine requires us now to resign. 
Please remove our names from the masthead. 


"
Yours truly, 

Paul Berman, 
Jonathan Chait, 
William Deresiewicz, 
Ruth Franklin, 
Anthony Grafton, 
Enrique Krauze, 
Ryan Lizza, 
Sacha Z. Scoblic, 
Helen Vendler, 
Sean Wilentz.”

For Foer, Wieseltier and others at the magazine, the brutal shakeup by [Guy] Vidra, 40, who was hired in September, and his 30-year-old patron, [Chris] Hughes--who purchased TNR two-and-a-half years ago for an undisclosed sum from a consortium that included longtime owner Martin Peretz--didn’t come as a surprise. Tensions have been building since the summer. According to multiple sources, Hughes came to think of his writers and editors as “spoiled brats,” and especially disliked the flamboyant, feud-prone, white-maned Wieseltier, who was more than twice his age. Much of Hughes’s distaste was telegraphed in his body language; he strikes many TNR staffers as passive-aggressive and averse to confrontation.

The friction escalated with the arrival of Vidra, who is said to have complained to Foer that the magazine was boring and that he couldn’t bring himself to read past the first 500 words of an article. According to witnesses, Vidra did little to hide his disrespect for TNR’s tradition of long-form storytelling and rigorous, if occasionally dense, intellectual and political analysis--to say nothing of his lack of interest in the magazine’s distinguished history--at an all-hands meeting in early October.

Presiding at the head of a long conference table, Vidra didn’t acknowledge Foer, who was seated beside him; he didn’t look at him; he didn’t mention him. Instead, as he started to speak, Vidra confided that he liked to stand up and move around the room as he communicated his thoughts, as though he were Steve Jobs unveiling the latest technological marvel. Oddly, he stood up, but he didn’t move.

Vidra spoke in what one witness described as “Silicon Valley jargon,” and, using a tech cliché, declared: “We’re going to break shit”--a vow hardly calculated to ingratiate himself with TNR’s veteran belle-lettrists, who feared that he was threatening the magazine’s destruction. Only a few interns dared to ask questions, which Vidra repeatedly dodged. “The senior people were too shocked to speak,” said a witness. “Jaws were dropping to the floor.” Through it all, Chris Hughes nodded approvingly, an unnerving grin on his face.

To be sure, that meeting was a warning sign. But the manner in which the two technology mavens administered their coup de grâce only two months later has left a bitter taste.

According to informed sources, Hughes and Vidra didn’t bother to inform Foer that he was out of a job. Instead, the editor was placed in the humiliating position of having to phone Hughes to get confirmation after Gawker.com posted an item at 2:35 p.m. reporting the rumor that Bloomberg Media editor Gabriel Snyder, himself a onetime Gawker editor, had been hired as Foer’s replacement. Yes, it’s true, Hughes sheepishly admitted, notwithstanding that he and Vidra had given Foer repeated assurances that his job was safe. . . .

“It was cowardly, the way Chris and Guy went about this,” Ioffe said. “Media reporters have been calling for months, asking, ‘Is Frank fired?,’ and they’ve been lying to everybody, including Frank.”

It is far from clear whether the remaining, relatively inexperienced staff will be able to get out the next issue, which is scheduled to close on Wednesday. Two multi-thousand-word pieces slated for publication--a profile of Jeb Bush by Alec MacGillis and a report on Vladmir Putin’s political arch enemy, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, by Russian expert Ioffe--were still being edited when the ax fell. And even if the newbies manage to produce the issue, it will be accomplished in an atmosphere of outrage, recrimination and sorrow over the apparent death--some would say murder--of an American institution that was, for decades, a bulwark of liberal thought, cultural criticism and groundbreaking journalism.

“The New Republic was always a small political magazine that was trying to change the world,” said senior editor John Judis, who was trying to figure out late Thursday night if he could continue to work for the magazine. “My impression of what happened is Hughes and Vidra have decided to transform the magazine into a profit-making media center that is entirely different from what the magazine historically has been and what it has represented and entirely different from what The New Republic has been at its core--and this has led to this cataclysm where Frank and Leon have both left. I liked the old New Republic. I thought it had a really important role to play in America and I’m sorry if it’s no longer going to play that role.”

UPDATE: TNR's Facebook page is flooded with negative comments from readers. Just look at the comments on any recent article. Example:

A once storied institution with unsurpassed journalistic prestige & my source for thoughtful engaging content. An unfortunate end to The "old" New Republic. I will be unliking your page . . .

So much for adapting to the digital age.

UPDATE: If there was any doubt about whether TNR as we know it has gone, the fact that Noam Scheiber and Jonathan Cohn just quit today (December 5) has put an end to any suspense. Scheiber says:

So I just resigned from @tnr. People do muuuuch harder things every day. But boy was it brutal. A great ride for 14 years.

Cohn says:

Feel so lucky that I got to work at Herbert Croly's and Walter Lippmann's magazine for 17 years. Thanks to readers and my great colleagues.

UPDATE: Julia Ioffe quit but still attended the staff meeting — and she tweeted it:

Chris Hughes at staff mtg: "This is a setback. These are great journalists that we lost this morning. But we are incredibly well positioned."

Chris Hughes at the meeting: "This institution has been around for 100 fucking years." no fucking kidding

Guy Vidra treats the remaining staff to more deep thoughts at mtg: "This is hard. But we will get through it and we will be better for it."

Chris Hughes telling the staff that he is different from other FB founders bc he cares about institutions, that he's always sent that signal

Thing is, neither Chris Hughes nor Guy Vidra bothered to communicate anything to the editorial staff. Nothing. It's been silence for months.

Chris Hughes, some advice for you: instead of "sending signals" to your staff, talk to them. Honestly.

UPDATE: The New York Times reports:

Some staff members have asked that their work be pulled from the coming issue of the magazine, which will have to be completed without an editor, and a greatly diminished staff.

Mr. Foer was replaced by Gabriel Snyder, the former editor of The Atlantic Wire, who will start on Dec. 22.

The next issue is supposed to come out on Wednesday, but TNR won't have an editor-in-chief from now through then!

It looks like Hughes was right about his announcement to the staff: TNR is no longer a magazine.

"If lobbyists aim to empower the rich, they’re doing a lousy job."

Robert Samuelson argues:

How often have you heard that we have the best government money can buy? Washington is overrun, it’s said, with fat-cat lobbyists whose lavish campaign contributions and insider connections manipulate the White House and Congress to serve big corporations and the rich. Meanwhile, the poor and middle class are ignored. This damning and demoralizing indictment has only one major defect: It’s about 98 percent untrue.

What we actually have is government that’s beholden to the poor and middle class. It redistributes from the young, well-off and wealthy to the old, needy and unlucky. To be sure, Washington is awash with lobbyists who do secure tax breaks, congressional preferences and regulatory advantages for wealthy clients. But these triumphs — often cited to prove the system’s “unfairness” — are small potatoes in the larger scheme of things.

Read the whole article for the supporting evidence.

Bill Clinton on "our one remaining bigotry"

Here's former President Clinton giving the keynote address at a gala for the 100th anniversary of The New Republic:

So we need inclusive economics. We need inclusive governance. And we have to give back to systems of cooperation which minimize the happening of big, bad things and maximize the chances that good things will flow. And we have to do it through networks. That is the business of the 21st century. We can do it. But . . . you can't do it if you refuse to talk to people that disagree with you and to work with them.

You know, Americans have come so far since, let's say, the era of Joe McCarthy. I mean, think about it. We're less racist. We're less sexist. We're less homophobic than we used to be. We only have one remaining bigotry. We don't want to be around anybody who disagrees with us. And if you look, actually residential patterns in America are changing. I mean, not just on by Congressional Districts. I mean fixed-line borders, like counties, the internal, social and political complexion of them are changing, and we also are siloing our information sources.

I read the other day that 47 percent of self-identified conservatives will only watch Fox News on television. That's good for Fox News. I mean, it's a good business model. My mother-in-law, who died a couple years ago at 91, and whom I love dearly and who lived with Hillary in our Washington home while she was secretary of state and senator, was the most liberal member of our family. She watched Fox News every day. I asked her if she was trying to give herself a heart attack. She said, "No, I'm just trying to keep my blood pumping."

But then my—but then she seriously said—she said, first of all, Bill, I need to know what they're saying so I have an answer and I need to know what they're saying in case they're right. She said, nobody's wrong all the time. It's like almost biologically impossible.

So it was really interesting to see for me—as I had time to study this in the last few years—how much we are disaggregating ourselves from people who disagree with us.

So one of the things that I hope The New Republic will do in the coming century of its life and innovation is to actually make people debate an issue instead of labeling each other. I was shocked—you know, campaigns I used to be a part of, you'd see these negative ads or positive ads. But they were usually like reasonable ads subject to fact-checking, like, "My opponent wants to vaccinate cows against mad cow disease, and I think it's a terrible waste of money." And the other one said, "No, we really should do this, because just one mad cow can make a lot of people sick."

In other words, they would hit each other over something real. This was, "My opponent voted with the president 93 percent of the time." Well, what did they vote on? Would that include all the budgets? What is it? There's all this sort of dark labeling business going on. And I think the differences are healthy, but not if they're meaningless designed to shut people's brains down instead of fire them up, because unfortunately if you want to return to the kind of broad-based prosperity we had in the 1990s, it will require some really clever thought.

For example, I was blessed because the information technology revolution moved out of Silicon Valley, and the exchange companies here in northern Virginia, and the videogame companies in Texas, and Route 28, and it went into every aspect of the American economy. So all I had to do was put the pedal to the metal and try to figure out how to get it to places and people that would otherwise be left out and left behind. And it was 8 percent of our employment, 20 percent of our job growth, 33 percent of our wage growth, guaranteeing broad-based prosperity. The bottom 20 percent of our workforce's income grew as much as the top 5 percent, the only time in more than 40 years. A hundred times as many people moved out of poverty into the middle class as during the Reagan presidency, which was the high point of trickle-down economics.

Now there are people who say, if you look at Uber, Airbnb, all the fun stuff, that now we're on the 100 percent downside of that and all these technological innovations are by definition using less labor and not starting enough economic activity in some other place to generate more jobs. I don't believe that, by the way, because we're still a couple million jobs or more we could be generating in America on the energy revolution, which would in turn create a lot of other jobs, and because the biotechnology revolution is just getting underway, and because there are four or five categories in which there will be more jobs created in health care, even if we continue to implement the law and we continue to lower the price of it relative to our competitors.

But this is the first thing we have to do. We have got to focus on having an economy where prosperity is more broadly shared. And we have to think about it for the rest of the world, too, because a lot of the appeal of a lot of these groups comes to young, angry people who don't have anything to do when they get up in the morning and don't have anything to look forward to and think, unless they go pick up a rifle or a bomb, every tomorrow will be just like yesterday.

When I was born at the end of World War II, more than half The New Republic's life ago—alas, way more than half—my native state's income was 56 percent, I think, of the national average, the second poorest state in the country. But if you could put clothes on your back and food on the table and feed a neighbor who walked up unannounced, nobody really thought they were poor. And it was relatively rare to see somebody who had nothing to do and no way to earn any money.

When I was in law school, I had six jobs, never more than three at once. I never felt burdened or put upon, because I always knew that I could do something. I became a lawyer because I wanted a job where nobody could ever force me to retire. I wanted to die with my boots on. . . .

But the point is there was this sense of possibility in our country. So we had to do the civil rights revolution, because we were cutting too many people out of it, but once we did that, there was a sense of possibility. We have got to recover that. And we have to understand, in my opinion, that immigration reform is a part of that.

Having lost it, I can tell you: Youth matters. The youth of a workforce matters. One of the problems is, according to Fareed Zakaria's show last Sunday, Americans think 31 percent of our population are immigrants. And in fact, it's about 12 percent or 13 percent.

But I really was almost physically ill at the—what some people say when all those Central American immigrants showed up at the border. I don't even know if everybody here knows this, but there had been zero net in-migration from Mexico in the last four years. Zero net in-migration from Mexico, partly because the previous president, Mr. Calderon, established 140 tuition-free universities. And last year, Mexico, barely a third our population, graduated 113,000 engineers, the United States 120,000. They're in the innovation business. All you got to do is go to Mexico City now and look around. . . .

George W. Bush signed a bipartisan bill saying that if somebody showed up on our border and they felt they were at risk, they had a right to a hearing. It was a good and decent thing. It's fine if the administration is trying to protect people where they live so they can process there and they're not all lined up on the border, but to think that this means, oh, the border's out of control, the world's coming to an end, we don't need immigration reform, it's wrong. Those people will make America's future.

Do we have to have fair rules? Do we have to make people wait in line, do you not want people jumping? Yeah, all of that's true. But the more prosperous our neighbors get, the less illegal immigration we'll have and the more we'll want people to come here and, if they get an education, to stay here, particularly, and contribute to us. So I'm looking forward to what will be said tomorrow. . . .

The New Republic can affect that, not by pretending there's only one side of the story, but making sure people at least know what's going on. We've got—if you want to have inclusive governance, there has to be a conversation that has some rough relationship to the facts. And I don't mean just the facts that are useful in a political debate. Everybody in a busy life has to be careful not to become vulnerable to the storyline and have it then turn out to be inconsistent with the story.

But I'm just telling you, you should not be pessimistic about America. And you should not be pessimistic about the world. These guys are not going to win over the long run in the Middle East with the strategy of decapitating everybody that disagrees with them. The local people (inaudible) now, the Kurds are fighting back. It may be a long, hard fight, so nobody wants to live that way. They are recruiting by and large who are looking for a quick trip to Heaven because they think all those tomorrows on Earth are going to be just like yesterday.