Category Archives: Journalism

How Thomas Friedman Gets China Wrong

04 Friday Dec 2015

Posted by in Freedom, Interview, Journalism, Politics

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Peter Robinson: New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman writes that,

One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages… It is not an accident that China is committed to overtaking us in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power and wind power.

What do you make of this “Beijing Consensus,” this view that maybe they are better suited for the future than our form of government.

Victor Davis Hanson: If you gave me ten minutes and the internet, I could give you an almost verbatim quote from what left-wing people said about Mussolini in the twenties, and what right-wing people like Charles Lindbergh said about Germany in the thirties. They make the trains run on time…

But China has a rendezvous with radical pollution problems and clean up; demographic problems, a shrinking population that will grow old before it grows rich; one male per family, imbalance between the sexes. Somehow their brilliant foreign policy cooked up a nuclear Pakistan, a nuclear North Korea, a nuclear Russia, a soon-to-be nuclear Iran, and maybe, in the future, a nuclear Taiwan and Japan — all right on their border.

So I don’t get this fascination that, just because you fly into the Shanghai airport and everything looks great in a way that Kennedy doesn’t, suddenly they’re the avatars of the future.

What Thomas Friedman would need to do is get on a bicycle, cross rural China, then compare that with biking across rural Nebraska to see which society is more resilient and stable.

Victor Davis Hanson

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A counterpoint made by VDH in his interview with the Hoover Institute’s Peter Robinson several years ago. To read more, you can take a look at Hanson’s much praised study of nine of history’s most pivotal battles, Carnage and Culture.

Or you can read on:

Hooman Majd on the Difference Between Sunnis, Shias, Arabs, and Persians

05 Thursday Jun 2014

Posted by in Journalism

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Hooman Majd

“It is notable that Arabs, when and if they wish to disparage Iranians, more often than not will also refer to them as Persians: the ‘other,’ and, because they’re Shia, the infidel. Some Sunni Arabs in Iraq have taken it one step further, calling all Shias, including Iraqi Shias, ‘Safavids,’ the name of the Persian dynasty that made Shiism the state religion of Iran, and a clear move in sectarian times to associate non-Sunni Arabs with the non-Arab Persians. Shia Islam, however, because of its beloved saint Imam Hossein, the grandson of the Prophet Mohammad and an Arab, conveniently bridges the Arab-Iranian schism through Hossein’s wife, a Persian princess he wisely (as far as Persians are concerned) wed and who bore him the half-Iranian great-grandchildren of the last Prophet of Allah.

The often contradictory Iranian attitudes toward Arabs can be difficult to explain. What can one make of Iranians who shed genuine tears for an Arab who died fourteen hundred years ago, who pray in Arabic three times a day, and yet who will in an instant derisively dismiss the Arab people, certainly those from the peninsula, as malakh-khor, “locust eaters”? As one deputy foreign minister once said to me, lips curled in a grimace of disgust and right before he excused himself to pray (in Arabic), ‘Iranians long ago became Muslims, but they didn’t become Arabs.’ His scorn was meant, of course, for desert Arabs who brought Islam to the world, and not necessarily Syrian, Egyptian or Lebanese Arabs, whom the Iranians place a few degrees higher on the social scale than their desert brethren. The disconnect between Arab and Muslim for Iranians is not unlike the disconnect between certain anti-Semitic Christians and Jews — a disconnect that conveniently ignores not only that Christ was a Jew but also that Christianity, at least at its inception, was a Jewish sect. (The peculiar Iranian disconnect can work both ways, though, for many Arabs today, or at least Arab governments, would rather Israel remain the dominant power in their region than witness, Allah forbid!, a Persian ascent to the position.)”

Hooman Majd

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Hooman Majd, writing in The Ayatollah Begs to Differ.

Every now and again, the pictures on this blog make it look like one of those innumerable, indistinguishable “style” Tumblrs that that college friend of yours made, promoted on Facebook, and maintained for about a week before exhausting her collection of Jon Hamm pictures. I try not to be so superficial, but denying the impulse is ridiculous: some people just look cool, and Majd is one of them. If cool-looking people have something sharp to say, well then that’s even better — and plus, there’s enough weighty stuff here to get you through the day’s pensive minutes.

But about the substantive part. Several pages prior, Majd offers a telling personal detail which should color his above clarification:

I had discovered two years earlier, and there is no way to verify it because Iranians didn’t have surnames, let alone birth certificates or even records of births prior to the reign of Reza Shah in the 1920s, that I am a descendant of his and, more interesting, that he was a Jew: a brilliant mathematician and scholar… In my father’s village of Ardakan, moreover, some people apparently still think of my family as “the Jews.” During my Ashura week visit to my cousin Fatemeh’s house, where a few people I hadn’t met before seemed to drop in from time to time, as is not unusual in small towns in Iran, I was introduced to one older woman who asked, “Majd? Ardakani Majd?”

“Yes, Majd-e-Ardakani,” I replied, using my grandfather’s original name (which just means “Majd from Ardakan,” and Majd actually being the single name of my great-great-grandfather).

“Oh,” she said. “The Jews.”

It is worth keeping this in mind if you to decide to open the book, because many of its conversations and interactions, especially with Iranian officials, revolve around then-President Ahmadinejad’s public denials of the Holocaust and his highly touted, “scholarly” conferences on the subject. Majd confronts these officials, in a restrained but unmistakable way, with the treatment they deserve: disbelief, contempt, and muted ridicule.

Above all of this, however, Majd is an important voice on Iran because although he was born in Tehran to a well-established family (his maternal grandfather was an Ayatollah), he gravitated to the West — first to St. Paul’s school in London, then George Washington University in Washington, then to live in New York City, where he still resides. So there is a very literal sense in which he traverses the boundary between East and West.

If you want to read a shorter piece of non-fiction, check out his essay on rediscovering his childhood home, “The House on Iran Street”. If you came here for the look, click on his style blog The House of Majd, which he maintains with fashion photographer Ken Browar.

Hooman Majd

Hooman MajdHooman Majd Bag

Lewis Lapham on the Crucial Role of Blogs

19 Saturday Apr 2014

Posted by in Interview, Journalism

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Lewis Lapham

Nick Gillespie: Put against the broad array of the internet and this explosion in access to text, do more people have more access to more of the past, or do they just get lost in the clutter?

Lewis Lapham: Well, that’s the reason for curators. Yes, I’m a curator here. I’m like a museum director. And a lot of people who run blogs are the same. I mean, if you go to Truthout or Truthdig or Tomdispatch, essentially these are curated compilations or anthologies. And there’s going to be more and more and more of that, because as the internet becomes so crowded, it eventually becomes incomprehensible. So you’re going to have to find some source you can trust. And this, of course, is the secret of all successful American journalism — that’s the Readers Digest, that’s Time Magazine, that’s Poor Richard’s Almanac.

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From the tail end of Nick Gillespie’s reason.com interview with Lewis Lapham, former Harper’s editor and current curator of Lapham’s Quarterly.

Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Hitchens: What Country Would You Live In?

23 Sunday Feb 2014

Posted by in Journalism, Politics

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Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Hitchens

Brian Lamb: If you had to choose a country to live in, besides Great Britain and the United States–

Christopher Hitchens: India. I love India. It’s the only place I’ve ever felt sort of instantly at home. It must seem incongruous when you look at me.

Brian Lamb: And Andrew?

Andrew Sullivan: I would die. I wouldn’t live anywhere else.

Brian Lamb: You would not pick anywhere else?

Andrew Sullivan: No.

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Two British transplants, Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Hitchens, reflecting on where they would live and their love for the United States during a joint interview with C-Span in February, 2002. Both men, though born in the United Kingdom, became American citizens in the last decade.

Watch the whole thing — but this particular segment is below.


Will It Be Clinton vs. Bush in 2016? (Probably So, Says John Heilemann)

10 Monday Feb 2014

Posted by in Interview, Journalism, Politics

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Hillary Clinton

Andrew Sullivan: Look, obviously apart from the Clinton machine sitting there ready to take over, I don’t see anything on either side right now that seems even faintly in the game.

I mean I might have said Christie, but I think at this point no sane person would want that kind of personality in charge of any greater sort of power. Because once you’re wired that way, you’re just not a President. And I say that as someone who was kind of hoping for some kind of moderate, Northeastern Republican in 2016.

But I just can’t see [Ohio Gov. John] Kasich, or [Wisconsin Gov. Scott] Walker; or on the Democratic side, who’s going to go up against it? [Maryland Gov. Martin] O’Malley? [New York Gov. Andrew] Cuomo?

So what’s going to happen, John? Predict. Because if we’re going to face another Clinton era, I’m gonna need some help.

John Heilemann: Tell me something I don’t know. It’s a very unusual circumstance.

Just as a matter of brute political reality, in many ways she is better situated to be the Democratic nominee than a sitting President would be, in the sense that she has almost all the assets for incumbency and yet she doesn’t actually have to run the government. She is free to be a candidate, but she has all the pro weight of incumbency – she has the record, now, of an incumbent. She’s very much attached to this administration; she’ll be seen as part of it if she runs, with all the attendant benefits in terms of the nomination that that entails.

Much of the Democratic party, having nominated an African-American, now thinks it’s time for there to be a woman nominee. She has extraordinary, extraordinary amounts of loyalty from the constituencies that choose Democratic nominees: women, Latin Americans, African Americans, gays and lesbians, union households – she has strength in all of those communities. Pick an important Democratic nominating constituency, she is incredibly strong with all of them.

She is the only Democrat who can really raise money, if she’s in the race. If she’s not in the race, the donor class is all over the place. But if she runs, she locks up a vast chunk of the Democratic voter base. Beyond health issues or some self-inflicted scandal — or Bill’s health or some potential scandal he could be involved in — she effectively will win the Democratic nomination by acclamation.

But I don’t think that anyone will run against her. Biden will not run if she runs, I believe. Cuomo will not run if she runs. Martin O’Malley has said he will not run if she runs… Who is going to take her on? It doesn’t mean she’s going to be President, but it means that if she wants to be the Democratic nominee, she is close to unstoppable.

AS: How psychologically crippling would it be for the Republicans to lose two elections to Obama, and then lose the next one to Hillary Clinton? Would you not want to just pack up and go home at that point?

Jeb Bush

JH: The talk of there being a Republican “Civil War” is not radically exaggerated. It has lost five of the last six general elections at the level of the popular vote, and if you look at where the Republican party stands right now with the American electorate, the only thing that’s keeping it afloat is Obama’s weakness, which is real… The party is radically out of touch with the rising demographic forces in the country, and with what the policy implications of those changes are.

I think that most of the Republicans that people talk about as potential nominees are a joke compared to Hillary Clinton.

Who’s the strongest Republican candidate right now? You know, it’s probably Jeb Bush. And there are big issues with Jeb Bush.

But if the Republican party is going to win, they have to find someone who the establishment donor class wing of the party is really behind, and believes can win; and that the Tea Party cultural wing of the party can be energized for. Someone who fuses those two things together, and someone who can talk to the so-called “coalition of the ascendant” (minorities and single women) – not necessarily get a majority of them, but still not get only 27% of the Hispanic vote. Because you can’t win a national election with 27%; you have to get 37, 38% of the Hispanic vote, and Jeb Bush is someone who can conceivably do those three things.

I’m not saying he’s a perfect candidate, but right now, he is someone who could conceivably do those things. Can Paul Ryan do those things? I don’t think so, and I don’t think he’s going to run. Can Scott Walker do those things? That’s kind of a stretch. I mean, have you spent much time with Scott Walker? His a fine Midwestern governor – “fine” in the sense of his political skills, just as a candidate. But is he a major league ball player who can go toe-to-toe with Hillary Clinton?

This is like during the last cycle when people would say Tim Pawlenty may have a shot; and I would say, ‘have you been with Tim Pawlenty?’ Like, he’s a really good guy, and he was a successful governor of Minnesota, but you watch him – and I hate to use sports analogies – but it’s like a really good AA player, and you’re going to go out and play against Barack Obama? It’s ridiculous. A very good minor league player, who you’re going to put out on the field to hit against Sandy Koufax.

Rand Paul? Ted Cruz? Obviously not plausible to win.

John Heilemann and Mark Halperin

AS: Not plausible?

JH: Not plausible to win a national election. Could one of those guys, in a very fragmented Republican field, and especially now with the way they’re building the Republican nomination process, could one of them win the nomination? It’s not impossible. But they will not be President of the United States.

AS: But if you win Iowa and New Hampshire [in the primaries], you’re kind of set.

JH: Yeah, you can run the table.

AS: I’ll end on this — what does it say about America that we could be looking towards the most plausible scenario, of the most viable race in 2016, is a Clinton against a Bush?

JH: It says that America, very firmly, deeply, profoundly, and broadly believes it’s time for a change.

[Both crack up laughing.]

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A selection transcribed from last week’s ‘Andrew Asks Anything’ with John Heilemann, posted on The Dish.

This new feature is exclusively for subscribing members of the site, and along with the additional resources offered by The Dish, it is well worth the $20 price of a yearly subscription. The site is a current events and cultural hub that covers issues deeply and widely, and is serious but does not take itself too seriously. It’s among the first news resources I check each day. Plus, Sullivan is, in addition to an almost perfectly fluent writer, a commentator whose opinions are decidedly fresh, attentive, and apartisan. His conversation with Heilemann runs over an hour and a half, with this particular portion being just the final 3 minutes.

Above: Heilemann, left, with his Double Down and Game Change co-author, Mark Halperin.

Stateless, But Not Voiceless

21 Saturday Dec 2013

Posted by in Current Events, Journalism, Politics

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Edward Snowden

“Today, if you carry a cell phone in Sao Paolo, the NSA can and does keep track of your location: they do this 5 billion times a day to people around the world. When someone in Florianopolis visits a website, the NSA keeps a record of when it happened and what you did there. If a mother in Porto Alegre calls her son to wish him luck on his university exam, NSA can keep that call log for five years or more. They even keep track of who is having an affair or looking at pornography, in case they need to damage their target’s reputation.

American Senators tell us that Brazil should not worry, because this is not ‘surveillance,’ it’s ‘data collection.’ They say it is done to keep you safe. They’re wrong. There is a huge difference between legal programs, legitimate spying, legitimate law enforcement — where individuals are targeted based on a reasonable, individualized suspicion — and these programs of dragnet mass surveillance that put entire populations under an all-seeing eye and save copies forever. These programs were never about terrorism: they’re about economic spying, social control, and diplomatic manipulation. They’re about power…

[After leaking documents] I was told my government had made me stateless and wanted to imprison me. The price for my speech was my passport, but I would pay it again: I will not be the one to ignore criminality for the sake of political comfort. I would rather be without a state than without a voice.”

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From Edward Snowden’s Open Letter to the Brazilian People.

Although I like Francis, my nomination for person of the year is Mr. Snowden, the man who did something in 2013 which was not only fascinating, but brave.

Read on:

Lady Justice

Why the Obama Administration Is Wrong about Ed Snowden

Surveillance Cameras

In Today’s News: Bridling the Surveillance State

Time for Silence

15 Sunday Dec 2013

Posted by in Journalism

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Christopher Hitchens“Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the ‘transcendent’ and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don’t be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you.”

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Christopher Hitchens, writing in Letters to a Young Contrarian.

Hitch passed away two years ago today. Read more from CH.

A Newspaper Is A Business Out To Make Money

05 Tuesday Nov 2013

Posted by in Journalism, Literature, Politics

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Raymond Chandler by Ida Kar, vintage bromide print, early 1950s

“‘We live in what is called a democracy, rule by the majority of the people. A fine ideal if it could be made to work. The people elect, but the party machines nominate, and the party machines to be effective must spend a great deal of money. Somebody has to give it to them, and that somebody, whether it be an individual, a financial group, a trade union or what have you, expects some consideration in return. What I and people of my kind expect is to be allowed to live our lives in decent privacy. I own newspapers, but I don’t like them. I regard them as a constant menace to whatever privacy we have left. Their constant yelping about a free press means, with a few honorable exceptions, freedom to peddle scandal, crime, sex, sensationalism, hate, innuendo, and the political and financial uses of propaganda. A newspaper is a business out to make money through advertising revenue. That is predicated on its circulation and you know what the circulation depends on.’…

‘There’s a peculiar thing about money,’ he went on. ‘In large quantities it tends to have a life of its own, even a conscience of its own. The power of money becomes very difficult to control. Man has always been a venal animal. The growth of populations, the huge costs of wars, the incessant pressure of confiscatory taxation — all these things make him more and more venal. The average man is tired and scared, and a tired, scared man can’t afford ideals. He has to buy food for his family.

In our time we have seen a shocking decline in both public and private morals. You can’t expect quality from people whose lives are a subjection to a lack of quality. You can’t have quality with mass production. You don’t want it because it lasts too long. So you substitute styling, which is a commercial swindle intended to produce artificial obsolescence. Mass production couldn’t sell its goods next year unless it made what it sold this year look unfashionable a year from now. We have the whitest kitchens and the most shining bathrooms in the world. But in the lovely white kitchen the average American housewife can’t produce a meal fit to eat, and the lovely shining bathroom is mostly a receptacle for deodorants, laxatives, sleeping pills, and the products of that confidence racket called the cosmetic industry. We make the finest packages in the world, Mr. Marlowe. The stuff inside is mostly junk.”

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A monologue from the multimillionaire Harlan Potter, speaking to detective Philip Marlowe in chapter 32 of Raymond Chandler’s 1953 novel The Long Goodbye.

Like many of the best novelists, Chandler can effortlessly slip canny and credible observations like this into the mouths of characters who inhabit an otherwise plot-driven story. John Updike, Philip Roth, Somerset Maugham, and John Steinbeck are some of the other modern novelists who, at least according to the top of my head, possess this same subtle gift.

I would, however, suggest a small addition to the above monologue. After the hinge sentence, “A newspaper is a business out to make money off of advertising revenue,” there should be a declarative phrase: “Nothing more, nothing less.” The reason: I think there’s a crucial corollary to the fact that a free press within a market economy will run on advertising revenue (and to a lesser degree, private donations or public subsidies). If there is consumer demand for news which is superficial, trivial, and tawdry, then that is the content which will generate the most advertising revenue — and will therefore be supplied. If enough consumers demand exhaustive coverage of the new NSA infrastructure in Cyprus — instead of, say, Ms. Cyrus —  then the former will quickly flood the airwaves as the latter recedes. In this sense, the Harlan Potters (and Rupert Murdochs and Ted Turners) of the world are not completely deserving of our condemnation, or at least may not be the first to blame for our ignorance and delusion en masse. No, what might first deserve indictment are the skewed economic incentives themselves, the educational system and cultural institutions which make us unreceptive to sober journalism. Perhaps, most fundamentally, the responsible party is the one hardest to hold accountable — ourselves.

One beef I have with the thesis of Noam Chomsky’s and Edward Herman’s famous 1988 analysis of the American mass media, Manufacturing Consent, is that it incriminates elites for the sensationalism and superficiality of most U.S. journalism and network news. Of course these issues have been reconfigured by the advent of the internet, but according to my take, a different premise — that I the consumer is ultimately driving what passes as “content” — is what obtains. If we crave insubstantial and easy-to-digest news coverage, then, like junk food, that’s what we’ll be served. Milton famously declared that, “they who have put out the people’s eyes, reproach them of their blindness”; in our case, if we’ve lost the ability to see, we may have no one to blame but ourselves.

As Twain would later observe, “If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you’re mis-informed.” Surely there is enough blame to go around — but who’s most fundamentally at fault?

Republicans, Here’s How to Defeat Obamacare (Spoiler: Delay the Mandate)

18 Friday Oct 2013

Posted by in Current Events, Journalism, Original, Politics

≈ 11 Comments

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Defunding ObamaCare Vote

If Republicans are serious about gumming up the gears of Obamacare, and eventually seeing the reform metastasize and the law repealed, there is one simple, shrewd, and potentially very effective option open to them. They can delay the individual mandate.

This boils down to basic math. The provisions of the Affordable Care Act (and I think we should call it that, not “Obamacare”: it’s an act passed by Congress) work only through expanding coverage, and by extension, the pool of premiums from which to draw for those who get sick or injured. This is why there has been so much fervor about how the young and healthy are getting the raw deal here; because there is a lesser chance that they will get sick, there is less incentive for them to pay into the system. The ACA controls for this in effectively two ways. First, it allows young people to stay on their parents’ plans until their 26th birthday, thereby easing the youngest and healthiest’s (YAH’s) entrance into the pool. Secondly and more crucially, it imposes a penalty on anyone above that age who does not sign up. This is the mandate.

If you are uninsured and do not find coverage by April of next year, you will be fined roughly $100, and this amount will increase over time. Consequently, through the mandate, the federal government offsets the incentive for YAHs to forgo entering the system. In Republican Oklahoma, for instance, the cheapest policy is $96/month. You can either pay that (and get health insurance), or just fork over a C-note to Uncle Sam (and get nothing).

Thus the imposition of a penalty does change the calculus for the 60 million people who are currently uninsured and must decide whether to browse for a policy on the exchange, or just pay a fine.

This is why the mandate is the key piece of the intricate Obamacare puzzle: it tilts that cost-benefit scale towards signing-up for a policy. If YAHs do not have to buy insurance, then many of them will not buy it. Moreover, if YAHs are not paying into insurance pools crowded with sick and elderly policyholders, then those insurance schemes will inevitably fall apart, as premiums will begin to rise in relation to the number of YAHs who remain uninsured.

It’s the same reason why a casino must keep in reserve enough money to cover all bets on all tables: in the off chance that everyone hits blackjack, you will have to pay out more cash than you just took in. And a health insurance system disproportionately constituted of sick and elderly policyholders will inevitably see a lot of people cashing out. Such a system is unsustainable; that casino will go out of business.

As the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation revealed in a new study, if you were to remove the incentive for healthier people to obtain health care coverage, “between 40 and 42 million would remain uninsured as opposed to 26 million,” and “individual premiums… would increase by 10 percent in a scenario assuming high exchange participation and by 25 percent with a low participation scenario.” In other words, without a mandate, there will be fewer YAHs paying for coverage; with fewer YAHs paying for coverage, premiums for everyone will skyrocket. As a result of this, the two central tenets of the ACA – the “Affordable” and “Care” parts – will quickly fall by the wayside.

Thus Republicans should treat the mandate as the foundation upon which the rest of the ACA is built. If they want to bring down the entire apparatus, swing the GOP wrecking ball at the mandate, and the whole system will eventually crumble in response. Sure, last July the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that the penalties the law imposes on those who don’t buy health insurance count as a tax, and are therefore protected by the Constitution; but this does not mean that the mandate is untouchable, merely that it is not illegal.

Moreover, Congressional Republicans have nothing to lose in throwing all of their considerable political weight towards delaying the mandate. Americans are highly suspicious of Obamacare, and will have little tolerance for its initial defects and inefficiencies. With the government shutdown and debt-ceiling negotiations on every front page, Republicans missed their chance to frame the recent glitches in the on-line exchanges as merely a foretaste of how a once-working healthcare system has been arrogated by a sluggish bureaucracy. But there is still a chance to reclaim the narrative. After all, all you are asking for is a delay, not a repeal. This is a “mend it” approach, not an “end it” one. It looks far more constructive than the radical intransigence we have seen from the Tea Party Caucus, which seems to have preferred to force millions out of work, forfeit $24 billion dollars of our GDP, and risk our economic standing in the world, all for the impossible chance to abolish – rather than amend – the law.

Numerous polls show that this strategy has not played into the hands of Republicans. The willful shutdown of the federal government, Ted Cruz’s faux-filibuster (‘Ted Talks’), and John Boehner’s inability to corral his own conference have attracted hostile attention to the GOP — attention which was only a few weeks ago fixated on a Democratic administration reeling from one of the most scandal-ridden first years in the history of the modern Presidency.

Yet there is a second and very crucial aspect by which the GOP’s campaign to delay the mandate will reap short- and long-term benefits for the party. This relates to the way in which a repeal – or at least the optics of an attempted repeal – will play with young people, a cohort of voters which has, especially in the last eight years, trended heavily toward the left. Like many issues (e.g. rethinking the drug war) which the Party of Small Government could claim as their own, and by doing so energize young voters, delaying the mandate will, in the short term, be looked upon favorably by those who do not want to buy health insurance. In the long run, it will collapse a system which has been the centerpiece of the Democratic agenda for almost twenty years.

It’s the easiest argument in the world: “Look, Obamacare is not ready for prime-time. The American people cannot even sign up on the exchange websites – so why punish them for not getting coverage? We will refrain from trying to repeal the law, so long as you refrain from immediately imposing the mandate.”

It’s the Trojan horse of policy arguments: if they refuse it, they look ungrateful. If they accept it, they won’t know what they’ve lost until it’s too late.

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For the record: I think we should implement the ACA and try to fix kinks where we find them, rather than ruin parts of it or repeal the whole thing. Still, if Congressional Republicans were more savvy they’d consider the approach outlined above.

How to Communicate

28 Tuesday May 2013

Posted by in Journalism, Writing

≈ 3 Comments

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Sebastian Junger

“When you write a book, when you write for people, what you’re saying is, ‘Okay, please step out of life, and into this weird mental place where you’re just alone with me… for hours, days.’ That’s a big request, and if [your readers] honor you by accepting, you have to really work hard to make it worth their while.

There’s a relationship there. They’re not there to admire you — they may end up admiring you — but that’s not what they’re there for. You are writing to give them an experience, on some level, an entertaining and fulfilling experience. And it’s really not about you…

The sort of world of writing for me is divided into two things: there’s content and then there’s style. There’s what you’re writing about, and there’s the way you write about it. Style is what gets people to keep reading, but ultimately it doesn’t have any inherent value. God forbid we write a book where the writing is the point.

That’s just too self-referential, and it betrays a kind of lack of respect for the world. You’re not more interesting than the world is. Your writing is not more beautiful than the world is. You don’t want the facts of the world to serve as a platform for your skill as a writer. It’s the other way around. The relationship goes the other way. Your skill as a writer serves the world.

You’re not supposed to tell people what to think; you’re supposed to tell them what to think about. You want to address the readers directly. I mean, you want to kind of look them in the eye. It’s like a conversation. It’s a conversation where you have respect for their intellect. You’re not talking down to them. You’re kind of amazed by the world. I mean, the world’s an amazing place, but it’s easy to forget that. If you open yourself to how amazing the world is, your writing will communicate something really valuable to other people.”

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From Sebastian Junger on Writing with Power, Clarity, and Style.

I think these ideas generalize to nearly any form of communication. You can replace “writer/writing” above with “artist/painting,” “teacher/teaching,” or “speaker/speechmaking,” and it make exactly as much sense.

Junger upheld this outward-looking philosophy so doggedly that he lived for many years without a mirror in his New York apartment. “So I wouldn’t be thinking about myself,” was Junger’s justification. “When he has to shave or brush his teeth,” his ex-girlfriend once explained, “he uses the back of a CD.”

Sebastian Junger

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Check out some of Junger’s work below:

Restrepo: Junger and HetheringtonWar, Combat

Sebastian JungerThe Insane Amount of Firepower

Sebastian JungerSomething Noble about Human Beings

Something Noble about Human Beings

11 Saturday May 2013

Posted by in Interview, Journalism, War

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You said earlier that your experiences in Afghanistan changed you — how?

I mean, you know, I had the classic jumping at loud noises and stuff like that. Anyone who’s been in combat has a sort of startle response, as it’s called. I had some nightmares. But then the nightmares changed into just dreams about the Korengal. So when I was writing my book, every night… every night, I was back there in my dreams. They weren’t all bad dreams either, I was just back there. And in the end, the negative reactions were transitory. But there was a kind of permanent reaction, which was positive, and it was this: I became more emotional. I just found myself being moved by things, emotionally moved, and not at sad things. Just at the human drama around me. And not on a battlefield. Just the human drama at home. People’s weddings, people’s birthdays. People’s… whatever. I just got emotional.

Did you cry?

Sure. Absolutely. Oh my god, amazing. And, I mean, every guy in the platoon had that happen to him. And they were all amazed, they were like, Oh my god, we’re turning into girls. What’s going on? But they were crying about stuff — I mean they get plenty of crying in over the bad stuff, like their friends that they lost. But then they’d ask What are we doing crying about the good stuff? They didn’t understand. And the same thing happened to me. It just turned me into an emotionally connected person.

What do you think it is? Crying about the good stuff…

I don’t know. I don’t know. It just opened me up, and those guys up. Maybe not all of them, but some of them said that to me. And, so, for me — I’m 48 — better late than never. My wife definitely remarked on it. I mean, I just became a fuller person.

The orthodoxy would be to say you value life when you’re in a situation like that, where life is so precarious, in the hills of death.

You know I saw plenty of precariousness of life in Africa, and it didn’t do that. It just made me shut down. There was something about the connection between these guys.

Look: the decision that you’d rather die, or risk dying, to save someone else is a profound decision for a human being to make. I mean, maybe for your kid, maybe for your spouse — but for a peer? That’s an amazing decision, and I was in that environment, with guys who felt that way about each other, off and on for a year. And I think it sort of opened the door for me on something that’s really, deeply noble about human beings and their willingness for self-sacrifice. No other animal does that, and it really was a very profound experience.

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From an interview with Sebastian Junger about combat and its psychological impact.

Sebastian Junger