acowells

A Pakistani cartoon features a burka-clad heroine:

Burka Avenger stars a girls’ school teacher who dons a burka to combat a cast of Taliban-esque villains with a decidedly conservative view of the appropriate role of women in society (the show contains clear parallels to Malala Yousafzai, the young campaigner for girls’ education in Pakistan who was shot in the head by the Taliban). To fight these nemeses, Jiya, the star of the show, employs a novel form of marshal arts that utilizes only books and pens. The message is clear: The pen is mightier than the sword.

Faiza S. Khan defends the show’s use of a burka:

It goes without saying that forcing women to wear anything is entirely unacceptable. The woman in question, however, is adopting the veil of her own free will, for the express purpose of obscuring her identity. When we ignore the character’s intentions behind willingly adopting a burka (as a disguise), it brings us back to good old-fashioned patriarchy, whereby a woman’s decisions are dwarfed by whatever message her clothing is putting out.

Elias Groll agrees that Jiya’s burka is not a simple symbol of oppression:

Ultimately, the show — in emphasizing the right of girls to an education — is doing something far more subversive with the burka than its critics contend. It’s also important to note that Jiya is not covered by day, and only puts on the burka when she assumes her crime-fighting alter ego. That she does so in a burka while running atop power lines to a sweet theme song seems all the better. Suddenly the woman in the burka has been turned into something altogether different — a pretty great superhero.

M. Sophia Newman suggests that the educational benefits of the show may extend beyond wealthier Pakistanis more likely to own a TV:

[A] 2007 economics study (PDF) documented an upswing in gender equality and education in India after the arrival of cable television. “Introducing cable increases the likelihood of current enrollment for girls by 3.5 percentage points,” the authors wrote, describing a shift over four times larger than the 0.83% increase created by the Pakistani government between 2005 and 2011. … By promoting middle-class values to the Pakistanis who do see the show, “Burka Avenger” might make the show’s tagline a real promise to Pakistan’s Islamist minority: “Don’t mess with the lady in black.”

A nifty new diagnostic tool:

[Ridge Diagnostics's] test takes measurements of 9 different biomarkers. The measurements are then calculated through a set of proprietary algorithms to produce what the company calls an “MDD Score” – a number from 1 to 9 that rates how likely it is that a person is clinically depressed, and the level of that depression. The cost of the test right now is about $745. …

The next step in the company’s research is developing a way to use their blood tests during ongoing courses of depression treatment. If successful, the company will be able to use that test to guide psychiatrists in modifying treatment using a blood test at a guide.

Indian Hindu devotees representing Potharaju, brother of the goddess Mahankali, dance in the streets during the Bonalu festival at the Sri Ujjaini Mahakali Temple in Secunderabad, the twin city of Hyderabad, on July 29, 2013. The Goddess Kali is honoured mostly by women during Bonalu festival by offerings of food and dancing. By Noah Seelam/AFP/Getty Images.

I’ve written how, for 20 years, I have lived on a street corner in Washington DC known for its drug activity and one gang, based at 17th and Euclid. I’ve written that I’d never been attacked, never hesitated to walk through a group of young black males, never crossed the street the way Victor Davis Hanson would. So it behooves me to note this story today:

Police say three black men approached a white male from behind in the 1700 block of Euclid Street NW. [DC police spokesman Araz] Alali says two of the men threw the victim to the ground and kicked him. Police say they yelled “This is for Trayvon Martin.” The attackers took the victim’s iPhone and wallet before fleeing.

Will that change my attitude when I manage to return from NYC? No. Does it deeply depress and anger me? Yes.

In what can only be described as an extract from the annals of extreme chutzpah, the Clintons – yes, the Clintons! – are now weighing in, via surrogates, to force Anthony Weiner from the race for mayor of New York. Apparently, the Clintons believe that an embarrassing dick pic – along with lying in his apology – should be enough to force the horny narcissist from the race.

My jaw is hovering near the floor-boards.

So far as we know, Anthony Weiner has never committed adultery or sexually harassed or abused anyone. And Huma Abedin has not blamed a vast right-wing conspiracy for her husband’s libidinous indiscretions. None of that could be said about the Clintons. Bill lied and lied and lied again and again and again – until he was lying under oath, and lying to his own cabinet, telling them to go out and deny the very things he knew he had done. Bill didn’t send his dick pic to some activist paramour; he told state troopers to bring that hot woman he spied in the hotel lobby up to his room where he exposed himself to her and told her to “lick it.” And this creep has the gall to vent about Weiner.

The Clintons, via Sidney Blumenthal, orchestrated a whisper campaign to portray a young intern, Monica Lewinsky, as a deluded stalker who was lying about her affair with the president. If that dress had never emerged, both Clintons would still be smearing her today. As for recklessness, Bill Clinton, knowing full well that he was already being sued for sexual harassment by elements on the far right, went right ahead and had sex with an intern working for him at the White House – destroying the promise of his second term, and giving the hypocritical, extremist Republicans the political gift of a lifetime. Talk about betrayal of his supporters and everyone who had ever worked for him, including his cabinet. The Weiner affair is a trivial non-event compared with the Clintons’ reckless, mutual self-destruction.

Even now, the Clintons, through their various spokespeople, are lying:

“The Clintons are upset with the comparisons that the Weiners seem to be encouraging — that Huma is ‘standing by her man’ the way Hillary did with Bill, which is not what she in fact did,’’ said a top state Democrat.

Really? Let’s go to the tape:

Almost everything that man says in the video above is a lie. Hillary knew that and yet still stood by her man in that critical New Hampshire primary interview with Steve Croft, giving her husband crucial cover to stay in a race many were telling him to pull out of. Listen to her lies above – and Hillary’s assertion that the press created this story by paying Gennifer Flowers. She went much, much, much further than Huma’s dignified statement, knowing full well that she had been complicit for years in her husband’s sexual harassment and abuse. What has always mattered to Hillary Clinton is her path to power, not the abused women her husband left as media roadkill and Hillary stepped on afterward. Which makes this chutzpah all the more remarkable:

“The Clintons are pissed off that Weiner’s campaign is saying that Huma is just like Hillary,’’ said the source. “How dare they compare Huma with Hillary? Hillary was the first lady. Hillary was a senator. She was secretary of state.”

There you have not an argument, but a resort to authority. Huma Abedin, dealing with a political husband caught up in sexual embarrassment and lies, is not comparable with Hillary Clinton because Hillary Clinton … has held high office? You really do have to be neck-deep in Washington presumption to insinuate such a thing. But, staggeringly, that’s now the position of Maureen Dowd – that sexual harassment, abuse and perjury – were okay for the Clintons because Bill was so talented at politics, while Weiner is a loser. You really couldn’t make this up:

[Clintonistas] fear Huma learned the wrong lesson from Hillary, given that Bill was a roguish genius while Weiner’s a creepy loser. “Bill Clinton was the greatest political and policy mind of a generation,” said one. “Anthony is behaving similarly without the chops or résumé.” As often as Bill apologized, he didn’t promise he would “never, ever” do it again, as Weiner did. “What people won’t forgive is lying in the apology,” said the Clinton pal. “It has to be sincere, and it sure as hell has to be accurate.”

But lying under oath? Fine if you’re talented enough. The double standards here are so grotesque they remind you once again of who the Clintons are: liars who think that the rules should never apply to them.

They sicken me to my stomach. But they’ve given Anthony Weiner one more reason to stay in the race. He should let the voters decide his fate, not the Clinton machine. Now, it’s a matter of principle.

Mike Springer flags the above video, which features controversial research showing that wealthier people are more likely to lie, steal, and break the law:

Perhaps most surprising, as this story by PBS NewsHour economics reporter Paul Solman shows, is that the tendency for unethical behavior appears not only in people who are actually rich, but in those who are manipulated into feeling that they are rich. As UC Berkeley social psychologist Paul Piff says, the results are statistical in nature but the trend is clear. “While having money doesn’t necessarily make anybody anything,” Piff told New York magazine, “the rich are way more likely to exhibit characteristics that we would stereotypically associate with, say, assholes.”

Blake Morrison ponders why so many acclaimed writers have been drawn to the bottom of the bottle:

There’s a window between the first and second drink, or the second and third, when the unexpected sometimes happens – an idea, an image, a phrase. The problem is getting itdown before it’s lost; if you’re in company, that means disappearing with your notebook, which takes resolve or self-regard. The Amis principle – a glassful to relax with at your desk when most of the writing has been done – is fine for those with will power. But there’s the cautionary example of Jack London, who used to reward himself with a drink when he’d done half his daily quota of 1,000 words, then found himself unable to get started without one. The man takes a drink, then the drink takes the man. Liberation becomes stupor. “Write drunk; edit sober” is Hemingway’s much-quoted advice. But the rat-arsed aren’t capable of writing. After a point, the crutch becomes a cudgel.

Why do writers drink? Why does anyone drink? From boredom, loneliness, habit, hedonism, lack of self-confidence; as stress relief or a short-cut to euphoria; to bury the past, obliterate the present or escape the future. If Olivia Laing’s entertaining book fails to come up with a simple answer, that’s because there isn’t one. To the literary biographer, binges and benders are a godsend – a chance to recount lurid anecdotes under the guise of earnest psychoanalytic enquiry. But for the rest of us, the words on the page are what matter. And most of them get there despite the drinking, not because of it. “Drank like a fish, wrote like an angel,” would make a pleasing epitaph. “Drank like a fish, wrote like a fish” is more likely.

Previous Dish on drinking and writing here and here.

(Photo: Ernest Hemingway, via Wikimedia Commons)

Michael Malice is the author of the forthcoming book, Dear Reader: The Unauthorized Autobiography of Kim Jong Il, which is ”based on what is presented as fact in the DPRK.” In an article about his visit to North Korea, Malice explains why North Koreans tell outlandish tales:

The laws in North Korea are oppressive, but they aren’t completely ambiguous or arbitrary. They generally boiled down to three principles: 1) Don’t denigrate the Leaders, 2) Don’t denigrate the government, and 3) Don’t acknowledge anything is wrong. It’s this last one that explains so much of the apparent insanity behind so much of what North Koreans say.

On the limits of the propaganda:

It may be easy to convince an isolated population that they have “nothing to envy in the world,” as one of their popular songs goes. But it’s practically impossible to convince them that they have more food this year than they did last. Even if that’s the fault of Yankee imperialist bastards, Kim Jong Il either authorized the actions or was powerless to stop them. The famous Kim Jong Il stories (“He has perfect pitch!” “He can shrink time!” “He can change the weather!”) serve a very real function: they’re political ads designed to convince a skeptical, not credulous, populace that the son is the equal to the father.

Judith Schulevitz wants to change how we think about the severely overweight:

What would help the most, according to obesity doctors, would be for patients, general practitioners, insurers, and even regulatory agencies to grasp that weight loss, on its own, does not cure obesity. “This is a chronic disease much like hypertension or diabetes,” says Arthur Frank, the senior physician at the National Center for Weight and Wellness. “The idea that the task is the task of losing weight is naïve and a waste of time.” As is true of those disorders, you can’t manage obesity without a lifelong regimen that includes behavior modification and probably drugs, maybe even drug cocktails. But weight maintenance is costly, and very few insurers cover limited weight-loss programs, let alone open-ended ones.

Moreover, obesity drugs are unpopular. They don’t work all that well. Then again, not much does, and it’s not uncommon for treatments for chronic disorders to achieve partial success at best.

Rachel Feltman explains how the online exchange Redditgifts created a culture – and eventually a business – of anonymous gift-giving:

Through a process that [developer Dan] McComas calls “friendly stalking,” users found out their recipients’ likes and dislikes based on the information given, which included their Reddit username, then sent them an anonymous present–laptops, lobsters, plush sharks stuffed with toys and t-shirts, cruises, and even the odd serenade from Jimmy Fallon. In the first exchange, there were 4,375 participants from 62 countries, and they spent $183,118 on gifts for each other. …

In a TED talk this past May, McComas tried to figure out what Redditgift’s “secret” is.

He pointed to the research of  Harvard Business School’s Michael Norton, presented in a TED talk called “Money Can Buy Happiness.” Norton gave students envelopes full of cash, including instructions to spend the money on either themselves or others by the end of the day. At the end of the day, the self-spenders weren’t any happier than they’d been in the morning, but the gift-givers were—whether they’d had $5 to spend on coffee for a stranger in Starbucks or $20 to give to charity. “What he learned,” McComas told the crowd, “is that you can buy happiness with money. You just have to spend that money on a stranger.” The warm-and-fuzzies a Santa gets from spending their cash on someone they’ll never meet are only amplified by a few of the site’s features: Recipients post pictures and descriptions of their gifts, so a Santa knows just how happy she’s made them—plus, each Santa knows that she’ll eventually get a surprise of her own in the mail.

In a brilliant TED talk, Lesley Hazleton, author of a recent biography of Mohammed, argues for “a new appreciation of doubt and questioning as the foundation of faith – and an end to fundamentalism of all kinds.” It’s worth watching in full:

Jeremy Adam Smith ponders them:

If we feel pride, it should be in the accomplishments of our fellow citizens and in any contributions we ourselves have made toward making our country and community a better place, however small and local. Pride of simply being born American leads to hubris, which leads to bigotry and belligerence. For pride to be authentic, it must be something we feel we have earned.

The best American leaders have always made that distinction. We all know this line from John F. Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural address: “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” But few seem to remember the next line: “My fellow citizens of the world, ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.”

The brutal Cold War context of these words is almost lost to us now, but the higher ideals behind them are not ambiguous. Kennedy presented himself as a patriot of the United States and as a citizen of the world, seeing no contradiction. These words are, at root, an appeal for authentic pride—citizenship as something that must be earned, in a nation that is part of a community of nations. Those are ideals worth celebrating on the Fourth of July.

Curious about the outcomes of wine-tasting competitions, winemaker Robert Hodgson collaborated with the organizers of the California State Fair:

Each panel of four judges would be presented with their usual “flight” of samples to sniff, sip and slurp. But some wines would be presented to the panel three times, poured from the same bottle each time. The results would be compiled and analysed to see whether wine testing really is scientific. The first experiment took place in 2005. The last was in Sacramento earlier this month. Hodgson’s findings have stunned the wine industry. Over the years he has shown again and again that even trained, professional palates are terrible at judging wine.

“The results are disturbing,” says Hodgson from the Fieldbrook Winery in Humboldt County, described by its owner as a rural paradise. “Only about 10% of judges are consistent and those judges who were consistent one year were ordinary the next year. Chance has a great deal to do with the awards that wines win.”

Alex Mayyasi recently reviewed research on wine-tasting:

[W]hat these studies really tell us is that our idea of taste as a constant, even if appreciated in subjectively different ways, is a fiction. Due to the complicated way that we experience taste – as an amalgamation of information from all 5 senses, our expectations, and how we think about what we are tasting – taste is easily manipulated.

A heart-wrenching timeline of emails from an Iraqi who tried to get asylum, after helping the US during the occupation, and who is now dead. It’s from Ira Glass’s This American Life. Of 25,000 visas to the US once authorized, only 5,500 have been issued. This dead man’s emails represent just one of them.