Blog Profile / The Daily Dish By Andrew Sullivan
| URL : | http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/ | |
|---|---|---|
| Filed Under: | Politics | |
| Posts on Regator: | 72531 | |
| Posts / Week: | 266.5 | |
| Archived Since: | March 6, 2008 | |
Blog Post Archive
The View From Your Window
Indian Wells, California, 8.54 am
Meat-Cleaving Terror
Anthony Lane focuses on the weapons used in Woolwich: There is a particular horror associated with low-grade or homemade violence of this kind. The bombs used in the attack on the Boston Marathon were, as has become clear, frighteningly easy to construct; but there remains something hideous about the use of weapons that are, to other […]
Regulate The Reefer Already
Despite the fact that “Canadian teens were the most likely to smoke pot of all teens in the developed world,” Soraya Roberts isn’t ready to start toking: Call it reefer madness, but I don’t trust my already-precarious anxiety-addled brain to survive pot intact. Particularly these days—this ain’t the pot my parent smoked. In the ’60s, […]
Quote For The Day
“Austerity has failed in the UK and it has failed in the eurozone. Its failure was predictable and, by some at least, predicted. It turned a nascent recovery into stagnation. That imposes huge and unnecessary costs, not just in the short run, but in the long term, as well: the costs of investments unmade, of […]
An Islamist Beheading In Britain, Ctd
A reader balances this reader’s rage: I am a Muslim and I was never taught that violence is acceptable. I went to a mosque to study Quran between the ages of 7 and 9. All I know about Islam is to forgive, be patient, love your family, friends, neighbor and be good to people. What […]
Primed For The Needle’s Prick
Feeling anxious before a shot can make vaccinations significantly more potent: From an evolutionary perspective, the fact that short-term stress revs up the immune system makes sense. Consider a gazelle fleeing a lioness. Once the gazelle’s eyes and ears alert its brain to the threat, certain brain regions immediately activate the famous fight-or-flight response, sending […]
Reality Check
What we spend on our pets: Americans spent approximately $61.4 billion in total on their pets in 2011. On average, each U.S. household spent just over $500 on pets. This amounts to about 1 percent of total spending per year for the average household. Timothy Taylor puts this in perspective: [T]he World Bank often uses a poverty line of $1.25/day in […]
Decoding Family Secrets
Recounting the story of a girl who discovered through genomic testing that her brother was actually her uncle, Daniel Engber considers how genetic testing companies deal with potentially startling results: 23andMe does take some steps to warn its users of the risks. The top question on the company FAQ is “What unexpected things might I learn?” […]
The Next Generation’s Privacy Settings
Jared Keller summarizes findings from a new report by Pew and the Berkman Center for Internet Society: The joint paper found that teenagers are sharing more and more personal information online: 91 percent of teenagers post at least one photo of themselves (up from 79 percent in 2006), while 71 percent post their school name (up from 49 […]
What Threatens The Middle Class?
In his new book, Jaron Lanier blames the web: Much of the book looks at the way Internet technology threatens to destroy the middle class by first eroding employment and job security, along with various “levees” that give the economic middle stability. “Here’s a current example of the challenge we face,” he writes in the book’s prelude: “At […]
Where The Suburbs Don’t Meet Utopia
Pivoting off Dreher’s recent musings on the suburbs, Alan Jacobs considers our dissatisfaction with them: Suburbs are diverse not just in age but also in population density. There are no “empty” suburbs, of course, or else they wouldn’t be suburbs, but while some disperse their people into spacious lots, others pack them in in city-like ways. […]
We’re The Fairest Of Them All
Last month a reader asked for a study to test the premise of a Cool Ad Watch in which Dove reassures us that we are more beautiful than we think. Here’s one: The researchers took pictures of study participants and, using a computerized procedure, produced more attractive and less attractive versions of those pictures. Participants were […]
Disorder Disorder, Ctd
A reader writes: Allen Frances bemoaned, “About half of Americans already qualify for a mental disorder at some point in their lives.” Roughly 100% of Americans already “qualify for” a somatic disorder at some point in their lives. Does that mean we have too many somatic disorders on the books? Or does it mean the human body and its interaction with the physical […]
Letters From Oklahoma
A reader writes: I live in Moore about a block south of the corner of SW 19th and S Santa Fe, less than 2 miles south of where Plaza Towers Elementary used to be. I drove past Moore Medical Center every day on my way home from work. If the tornado had turned east toward Santa Fe just a […]
“He Said It Was A War”
The first guy goes for the female fed with the machete and she not even ramping she took man out like robocop never seen nutn like it — Boya Dee (@BOYADEE) May 22, 2013 I’m feeling things today in the wake of this act of religious barbarism on the streets of London that I haven’t […]
Insane Clown Family
The fascinating and often poignant documentary that a reader mentioned in an update today is worth watching in full (NSFW): A primer on the Juggalo subculture: The term originated during a 1994 live performance by Insane Clown Posse. During the song “The Juggla”, Violent J addressed the audience as Juggalos, and the positive response resulted in Bruce and Shaggy 2 […]
Faking Out The Führer
Susan Karlin previews an upcoming PBS documentary about the “artistic sleight-of-hand” that helped the US defeat the Germans in WWII: This is the astonishing true story of the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, nicknamed the Ghost Army, a group of 1,100 handpicked American G.I.s who tricked the German army with rubber artillery, sound effects, fake radio transmissions, […]
Judging A Society By Its Word Choice
David Brooks considers [NYT] recent studies on the frequency of given words in published books over time: The first element in this story is rising individualism. A study by Jean M. Twenge, W. Keith Campbell and Brittany Gentile found that between 1960 and 2008 individualistic words and phrases increasingly overshadowed communal words and phrases. That is […]
Face Of The Day
A woman receives a beauty treatment at the Carmen Navarro luxury beauty center in Sevilla, on May 20, 2013. By Cristina Quicler/AFP/Getty Images.
The “Loneliness Epidemic”
Douthat, noting [NYT] that violent crimes are on the decline while suicides are up, blames increased isolation: As the University of Virginia sociologist Brad Wilcox pointed out recently, there’s a strong link between suicide and weakened social ties: people — and especially men — become more likely to kill themselves “when they get disconnected from society’s core […]