James Lipton offers some good, though likely impossible, advice to Mitt Romney (via The Dish.)

Politics is performance. This has never been more true than now.

Why is Romney so uncomfortable in his own skin? What’s under there that he’s so afraid we might see?

All politicians wear masks. Some wear more convincing masks than others. Lipton is right about Reagan. He was comfortable as an actor, comfortable as an orator. Despite his power and wealth, he could speak directly to people. Bill Clinton is another good example of a man at home in his various masks. His wife, not so much.

But whereas Hillary inevitably comes across as too cold, Romney comes across as almost desperate for our affection. It’s a bit painful at times. There are moments where I really want the veneer to come off. There are moments when I wonder if he’s always like this, even off-camera, even around his family.

Maybe this fake Romney is in fact the real Romney.

Something David Ryan wrote about dark art and wanna-be-sophistos has had me thinking for a while – first about whether valuing civility and the desire not to offend keep us all trapped in a glass fortress (they do, but there’s a trade-off, of course) – then about why we like the things we do. In terms of the latter, after considerable thought and up until recently, I had embraced some species of nihilism; the idea that aesthetic preferences are merely expressions of political power seemed a bit too Marxist for my sensibilities but still close to my then default position. I remain fascinated yet skeptical of neurophysiological attempts to explain aesthetic preferences.

For some time I continued to believe that building a coherent, simple aesthetic was impossible. I knew I had no good reason to like the things I did and that the various things I liked seemed to be connected in no objectively-meaningful way; but something I saw a few days ago on Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations provided the ah-ha moment I’ve been needing.

Bourdain was set to dine at a small shop in Tokyo that served only old-style unagi (eel). The restaurant had made no changes to its one-item menu for sixty-some-odd years: the eels are sliced-up nose-to-tail, folded on themselves, skewered, covered in sauce, and grilled yakitori-style. Before he had even tasted the unagi, master chef and seasoned world traveler Bourdain commented that he greatly appreciated that that establishment did exactly that one thing – based on the experiences of thousands of years times many more thousands of diners – so exceptionally well that it could remain open continuously without any significant changes for so long. That is to say, Bourdain recognized that restaurant’s craftsmanship and took the weight of all of that into account before sensuously experiencing the food, judging, and being satisfied.

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Recently, I have seen my tastes in many things go through some dramatic changes. I’ve been getting into red wine – something I never, ever saw myself doing. A knowledgeable friend recommended I start with Bordeaux, and I’ve since gone on to enjoy a wide range of Pinot noir, Spanish and Sardinian reds, Napa Valley Cabernet, and Chianti. My musical tastes are changing too: I’m actually starting to like some pop and R&B. I’m no longer too cynical to honestly evaluate American Idol contestants, but I have just enough cynicism remaining to continue to honestly evaluate the judges. Finally, in my adult life I hated fantasy up until I started watching Game of Thrones (don’t worry, no spoilers), but if I had more free time at this stage of my life I’d seriously consider locking myself in my room and reading the kinds of fantasy series Erik has been recommending, which took up a large chunk of my childhood.

Some of my preferences, like some of your preferences, derive from the fact that our society is supersaturated with art, combined with some random set of botched or stellar (first) impressions. Humans this day and age are bombarded with information, and we rarely have enough time to process it all. We tend to make quick judgments about entire categories of things before moving on to make more quick judgments.

The first few times I drank red wine were at weddings and other large functions, which tend to serve cheap wine that’s there for only one reason. Up until recently, I thought the language sommeliers used to talk to each other was a form of conspicuous consumption or bourgeois signalling or even bullshit*, until I realized it was a shorthand not dissimilar from that of the ancient scribes who gave birth to written language itself: “cherry” and “tobacco” do not actually signify “cherry” and “tobacco”, just as the letter “a” does not signify “ox“. Sommeliers spend years training their noses and palates to recognize hundreds or thousands of unique tasting notes, just as pianists spend years training their eyes and fingers to recognize written musical notes. And just as expert musicians can just look at a piece of sheet music and hear the harmonies and timbres, sommeliers can just speak to each other and experience flavors, aromas, growing conditions, yields, sunlight, and rain from all over the world. It’s amazing what sublime complexity and subtlety thousands of years of a culture has brought us.

Likewise, one of the major problems I have with most fantasy literature is that “magic” is often evoked licentiously as a cure-all to both pander to readers and cover plot holes. Things looking down? Well, hey, there’re these ghosts who owe like the hero’s ancestors and stuff a huge favor, and they’re ghosts so like they like can’t be killed and stuff so at the very end they just come in and kill all the bad guys just at the right time and everyone lives like happily ever after and stuff and wizards and dragons. The end.

Thrones doesn’t do that. The series continues to surprise and horrify me, and as much as I despise infant murder and prostitute torture and the constant deaths of characters I care about, I keep watching because George R.R. Martin has created something beautiful and complex in Arya Stark and Jon Snow and even Cersei Lannister. They are not senseless archetypes but something new entirely. For me and for my aesthetic, appreciation for Game of Thrones, the performances of Jessica Sanchez, and the tastes of certain red wines comes from their craftsmanship. And just as sommeliers communicate with each other through the currency of tasting notes, so too do artists communicate with their audiences through the currency of thoughtful creation.

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* My favorite so far: ”A banal sloppy joe flavor and mild albuterol overtones are mixed in the 1776 Semillon from Mussolini Bros Vineyards.”

Time Magazine deliberately started an uproar with its cover photo of a woman confrontationally breastfeeding (seriously, if you can breastfeed confrontationally, she’s doing it) a preschooler. And so the backlash against attachment parenting begins. The article is behind a pay wall, and I really don’t want to reinforce this kind of cover, so I haven’t read it.

I don’t especially welcome this backlash. If someone wants to breastfeed her kid until he’s four, that’s seriously none of my business. It certainly doesn’t constitute abuse. Some version of attachment parenting is definitely the norm among my mom friends, and I’m pretty sure all their kids will mostly turn out fine. I don’t practice attachment parenting, and I’m pretty sure my kids will turn out basically fine, too.

Here is why I’m not an attachment parent.  We don’t know that much yet about child development. We don’t even fully understand how children learn the meaning of words or what other people’s mental states are. I read a lot of developmental psychology for my work, and go to a lot of talks by researchers. Really exciting and interesting stuff is happening in understanding infant minds. But we seriously don’t know anywhere near enough yet to engineer an environment that will make drastically different long term outcomes for our children. The touted long term benefits of attachment parenting are simply not well supported by data. I remember Alison Gopnik, a developmental psychologist who puts more emphasis on the importance of environmental stimuli to development than many others, saying that parents sweat small stuff. Putting a toddler in a playpen (gasp, baby jails!), as long as there’s something to explore, is actually not the sort of thing that is likely to make a difference one way or another. (I’ve expressed my skepticism about taking significant steps and buying products to boost your child’s cognition here.)

I, like so many kids of my generation (born in 1973), was subjected to an endless stream of cigarette smoke in the womb and in our house, was bottle-fed, watched as much TV as I wanted and whatever I wanted (often 4 hours a day), was regularly kicked outside of the house and told to go play on my own. My parents would not dream of intervening in fights between my brother and me, or my friends and me. They pretty much never sat on the floor and played with us. They took next to no interest in my developmental progress, and later my schoolwork. They certainly had books around the house, but pretty much never read to me once I left the picture book phase. This isn’t what I do with my kids, but I don’t think I turned out that bad in the end.

Given that we don’t know whether attachment parenting techniques will work in terms of making a happier higher-functioning adult, I vote for the easiest, most enjoyable method. If for someone else, that is attachment parenting, great! Not me. I am extremely fond of sleep. Seriously. I do a hell of a lot for my kids, but I will not give up sleep. Non-negotiable. We managed to get the kids sleeping through the night and out of our room by 3 months old (happily, there was no serious crying it out). I could not bear being woken up several times a night for years as many of my friends are. I would have breastfed, but due to reasons too complicated to go into here, I bottle fed. And enjoyed much of it – the fact that my husband could do his share, that I was freer to leave the baby for longer periods of time, that I could drink, etc. I only put my baby in a bjorn if we’re going out somewhere and I will need my hands. I don’t like wearing a baby most of the time. I will usually pick up my baby if he cries, but once in a while, he’s got to wait a couple of minutes while I finish what I’m doing. If he’s fussing but not crying, I leave him alone to see if he can sort it out himself. He often can. I need boundaries. I need alone time sometimes, or I will start crying. I need to let my kids play by themselves. I don’t see how I could balance the needs of all my children, my job, and pursue any interests outside of job and family while doing serious attachment parenting. I definitely get on the floor and play with my kids and talk to them more and am more interested in their schooling than my parents were. I am more vigilant about TV and more encouraging of books and interests. I encourage my kids to express negative feelings in healthy ways. But not attachment parenting.

Most of this is from ease rather than conviction, but a little bit is from conviction. I value self-reliance. I’m glad my kids are self-soothers. One thing that sort of bugs me is that on playdates with attachment parent kids, the parents are always intervening and playing with the kids, and are always insanely loaded with snacks and drinks. If I don’t bring snacks and drinks, my kid will go begging to the other parents like Oliver Twist, which is embarrassing. It’s also socially awkward to ignore when my kid does some infraction, like steal a toy, from another kid. My strong inclination is to let them work it out (with the obvious exception of if my kid hit another kid, or got physical in some other way). But if the other parent is intervening whenever her kids steals a toy, it becomes awkward for me to ignore it when my kid does it.

So now my oldest of three is a formerly bottle-fed, rarely-worn 4 year old who has been in his own room since he was two weeks old. Here’s my n of 1 observation. He’s pretty much like all the other kids he plays with who are raised by attachment parents. He is quite bright and verbal and reasonably well-behaved. His most serious health problem has been strep throat one time. He sleeps 11 hours a night unfailingly. He is less cuddly than other children. He is also less inclined to cry or have a temper tantrum than others.  Who knows whether that is temperamental or not?

If I got a kick out of attachment parenting, I would do it. I don’t, so I don’t. And I’m pretty sure if we all, attachment parents and non-attachment parents, love our kids and have a reasonably stable environment, they’ll all mostly turn out all right.

by Sam Wilkinson

Once, I was a graduate student pursuing a PhD in Political Science, a stupid idea for at least a thousand different reasons, perhaps most importantly my aversion to political science in general. I took a comprehensive exam in which I was expected to cite literature that the department had decided was important to the field. As I am wont to do, I insisted upon including a reference to Hunter S. Thompson’s “A Southern City With Northern Problems,” an essay he wrote about Louisville, Kentucky. It was an evisceration of his hometown, something written shortly after a more expansive and more widely read piece he wrote about the Kentucky Derby (“The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved”). Needless to say, my professors were not impressed, I was sent a not-so-subtle message that it might be time to move on, and I agreed.

Political science made a point of informing me via sledgehammer about the importance of its own literature. This isn’t a point that’s worth debating; every field has its books that greatly matter. I have to be honest though – political science books are painfully boring, especially the more modern ones, the ones that decided that emotion made books worse, the ones that decided that math made books better. This also isn’t a point worth debating, because I know that analysis matters and I know that math makes analysis easier or better or both.

But the appeal of “A Southern City With Northern Problems” is that we’re not forced to waste time, first on understanding the dataset, and then on understanding how we’re going to flog it to death. Instead, we have a simple article in a writer makes one conclusion absolutely clear: this is bullshit.

You can engage with the article on its most immediate level, in which it becomes plainly clear that blacks in America are fighting a virtually unwinnable fight against a society filled with what Thompson describes as Southern and Northern racism, the Northern variety being the harder of the two to triumph above. The point he makes, even decades later, remains salient today, but it is the larger point that matters more, the point about the absurdity of the whole thing. Thompson emphasizes the dangerous entrenchment of cultural bias, the sort of bias that cannot be done away with legislatively, but instead can only crumble under the relentless pressure of time. Things will change, in other words, so long as the aggrieved are willing to wait.

Screaming about the inherent injustice of such a necessity does about as much good as walking to the ocean to complain about the tide. There is unfortunately no better solution, such that even when we witness great progress on particular social issues (such as a sitting president endorsing, albeit cautiously, gay marriage) we still run immediately into stories like the one today out of Virginia, in which a prosecutor whom everybody (”Dogs and cats, living together, mass hysteria!”) agreed was eminently qualified to hold the position was nonetheless rejected because he was gay.

I get it – such bigotry or “Reasonable religious objection!” or whatever we’re using to describe decisions such as these – require considerate volleys from dedicated opponents willing to fight such behavior for generations if need be. It makes sense to me that the slow and steady approach in which hearts and minds are changed over the course of weeks and months and years does more good than anything else. Still, there are times when it seems worthwhile to take a critical view of the entire situation and mutter disgustedly under your breath, “This is fucking ridiculous.”

The swearing is off-putting maybe. I’m 31; perhaps I should have grown out of such things. But I see no decent reason to avoid the language that most accurately describes the thing. Which doubles me back to Thompson’s essay; unlike the political science research that I so loathed for its utter lack of substantive impact upon the lives of breathing human beings, Thompson saw a broken situation and said so. Although he didn’t explicitly pivot from that situation to the much larger one at play throughout the United States (a situation that still plays itself out in a million little ways as human beings try desperately to draw lines between themselves and others, often on the most ridiculous of grounds), the criticism was clear: the culture matters more than the policy, and until that changes, the disunity of our society isn’t going to change.

On my shelves, I have dozens of books that political scientists consider valuable. I wonder if any of them does as effective a job communicating a message as that one slight essay does.

It took several months and a rogue barracuda, but by the end of the 2008 campaign, John McCain’s reputation for being a “maverick” with centrist leanings was dead as the moose in the Palin living room. There was always more than a little myth behind the McCain-as-maverick story — excepting those moments when he sought to needle George W. Bush, the Arizona Senator was, on the whole, always quite rightwing  — but whatever vestiges of goodwill his apostasy had earned him with the press was long gone by the time Barack Obama swore to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States… [Continued at Jubilee]

(Previously: The Knock Down, Part 1 and Part 2)

I am a morning writer; a cup of coffee, sitting in bed with my laptop.

But as we crash on the boat time’s been short, so I have not been able to write out the epilogue of my knock-down story. As a place-holder I offer the below video of Nassim Nicholas Tabeb from the 2010 Washington Ideas Forum:

What is robust and what is fragile? It’s a good question.

The halls of the U.S. Capitol are already teeming with people warning of disaster if lawmakers fail to defuse a New Year’s budget bomb scheduled to raise taxes for every American taxpayer and slash spending at the Pentagon and most other federal agencies.

What one Congress enacts, another Congress can repeal. Always. This problem is often brushed aside, but it makes a lot of policy proposals ultimately silly the longer you look at them. Al Gore’s Social Security lockbox is the most infamous example, but unless I’m missing something really big, this one bids fair to surpass it.

A certain kind of religious activist takes it as a given, and as an imperative, that the Decalogue must be displayed prominently on and in public buildings. Gratefully, these folks are rare; sadly, they have influence because few people want to be seen as opposing them. Which is why there are groups like the ACLU and the FFRF, willing to (among other things) absorb the unpopularity of ”opposing the Ten Commandments” so as to stand against the melding of church and state — something done, as I hope this post will demonstrate, for the benefit of both the religious and the secular among us.

Quite possibly the strangest set of cases in the modern era of the Supreme Court comes from efforts to display the Ten C’s on the grounds of the Texas Capitol in monumental statuary, and in a small display case in the entryway of a rural Kentucky county courthouse. Turns out, the big, prominent, expensive display was okay, and the small, nearly obscure display was not — because the big prominent display was found to be, artistically speaking, part of a larger piece of art and display celebrating the role of law in society generally, while the small display had as its primary purpose the endorsement and proselytizing of Christianity.

So one judge, who apparently shares my disquiet with this rule, decided to put that notion to the test.

After all, if you were to edit the Ten C’s, and remove the religious parts, maybe they would be appropriate for government display. After all, more than half of the Ten C’s (six or seven, depending on the version you use) are not particularly religious. “Thou shalt not steal,” for instance. So for those who claim that they wish to post the Decalogue on the walls of courthouses, public schools, and city halls so as to “celebrate the foundational nature of the law that underlies our culture,” Would posting six of the ten be good enough? It would seem to carry out the artistic purpose of demonstrating the heritage of the law.

It seems obvious to me that taking God out of the Ten Six Commandments is never going to be acceptable to the deeply religious people who want so fervently to see this religious text displayed by the government. So the proposal is certainly useful to flush out the motivation behind the display — endorsement of a particular religion.

Beyond that, though, this atheist thinks it would be a bad idea to edit the Ten C’s. The Ten C’s are supposed to have been handed down to the Hebrews by Jehovah Himself. Part of the point of the Ten C’s is that they come from God — the law comes from God, which means that without God there is no law. The fact that the Hebrews had to get the Decalogue from God means that humans cannot derive a just and moral law on their own. This is a foundational notion to a variety of legal theories and even today a prism through which large numbers of people view the very concept of law — while I disagree with that notion, that doesn’t stop me from understanding that many people disagree with me. They should not have their beliefs edited to the point of changing the meaning of their expressions of belief by a judge.

That doesn’t mean I think the Decalogue should be displayed on public buildings. It should not. I realize that in many places it is, and I can tolerate grandfathering in existing displays left over from times before our jurisprudence evolved to conform to contemporary notions about what it is for the government, at some level, to “Establish” a religion. So I would not take a chisel to the frieze on the Supreme Court to remove Moses (and Mohammed, by the way) from that display. And I’m cool with using public money to maintain what’s in place right now, for the same reason — there is no reason to eschew or blind ourselves to our history, even if those who came before us failed to live up to their, or our, ideals.

But if that frieze were destroyed in some way other than via human agency (say, it fell down in an earthquake or something) then new, different, artwork without religious content ought to be put up in its place. I don’t know what I’d think if some atheist activist blew it up, but that doesn’t seem very likely to happen and we can think about it if it does. But if we could start over again, and we can start over again with our new buildings and our new public art, then we should realize that we’re not living in the 1790′s anymore and conduct ourselves accordingly. What the Founders would have tolerated in many other instances we would not, and that’s a good thing.

We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this issue over the past hundred years and the Founders’ notions of what “Establishment” was and was not were imperfect and cognitively dissonant. Nor would the Founders want for us to be bound by their ideas and notions. They wanted us to solve our problems for ourselves, they wanted us to decide for ourselves what kind of a society we collectively want to live in. We may and should honor their achievements and celebrate their ideals while at the same time remaining unfettered by their dead hands.

So I don’t much care that James Madison authorized church services in the Capitol or that in the 1870′s an explicitly religious plaque was put on the Washington Memorial. As a modern secular American, what I want is for my government to keep its hands off religion to the extent that is possible, and to the extent it isn’t, then it should treat religion, both in denomination and quality, evenhandedly.

To the religious person, particularly the Jew or Christian for whom the Decalogue is an essential and celebrate part of their faith, there is a different danger: that of the government diluting their faith. If trying to shoehorn religion into the secular government results in the Decalogue being reduced to the Hexalogue produces a judge literally editing God out of them, how much clearer an example is needed of why it’s bad for religion to try and commingle church and state? I’ll let some Baptists express this point in their own words:

Proponents of Ten Commandment posting argue the historical legal significance of the document, claiming that keeps the government’s display from being a purely religious one. Now we see one of the potential outcomes of their argument: a court’s suggestion that we take an editing knife to them. And they say those of us who oppose government-sponsored Ten Commandment displays are the ones secularizing America?

The Ten Commandments are sacred text of great religious significance. We should keep it that way. The best way to do that isn’t to post them in government buildings; it’s to resist the temptation to do so.

Religion and government are like Chinese food and chocolate. You can like both of them, but they really aren’t very good when you blend them together.

In the wake of JPMorgan Chase’s $2 billion mistake, you’d think Washington would be paying closer attention to see whether this is a sign that Dodd-Frank, not yet fully implemented, is already proving to be insufficiently restrictive of risky behavior.  The bank’s gargantuan loss, after all, was the result of bet-hedging with depositor money — a practice that a robust version of the Volcker Rule would ban. But because the version of the Volcker Rule passed by Congress was far from the most stringent possible; and because the rule itself has yet to be concretely defined by regulators, anyway; it’s likely that even if the Volcker Rule were in effect, JP Morgan’s mistake wouldn’t have landed it in regulatory hot water. You can thank a “hedging exemption” (or, more accurately, bank lobbyists) for that…[Continued at Jubilee]