The Case For The War, Ctd

Deconstructing Kendrick Lamar's Grammys Performance

Spencer Kornhaber

With a jailbreak, massive bonfire, and new song, he shed light on an internal struggle caused by external conflict.

Kendrick Lamar’s performance at the Grammys has been widely described as “fiery”—a nice way to say there were pyrotechnics both of the actual and emotional sort. But there was more than fire, too. The set was obviously political; it was obviously powerful. What exactly did it say?

Lamar arrived bound to other mock-inmates, slouchily walking with a hint of rhythm: every few beats, a twitch. This was clearly an image for the age of mass black incarceration. From the jail cells, jazz players noodled softly, queasily. Lamar put his chained hands over the mic and said “I’m the biggest hypocrite of 2015,” the first words of “Blacker the Berry.” The rhythm section suddenly stabbed in—bam, bam—and Lamar flinched before launching into another line.

The Power of Buying Less by Buying Better

Elizabeth Cline

A number of new online fashion retailers are capitalizing on consumers’ desires to purchase clothing that lasts.

According to a recent survey commissioned by the British charity Barnardo’s, a majority of women’s garments are worn a mere seven times before being pushed to the back of the closet or tossed into the garbage.

Combatting this wastefulness is at the heart of a growing number of clothing brands offering alternatives to so-called “fast fashion,” the trendy, throwaway method of selling clothes pioneered by companies such as H&M, and the cultural force to blame for the world’s overflowing and underutilized closets. Among the other startups positioning themselves as durable and ethical alternatives to throwaway fads are the online retailers Zady, Cuyana, Of a Kind, Everlane, and The 30 Year Sweatshirt.

The Pragmatic Case for Bernie Sanders

Christopher D. Cook

Political and social change emanates from persistent pressure for a just world, not settling for what is “realistic” before even getting to the negotiating table.

As Bernie Sanders defies expectations with a resounding New Hampshire victory and a virtual tie in Iowa, Democratic Party leaders still insist Hillary Clinton is the pragmatic choice to beat Republicans and bring effective leadership and change—if incremental—to Washington. Clinton and her supporters frame the race, and her appeal, as a matter of “ready on day one” leadership and “get things done” practicality. But what does the record show, and what do leadership and pragmatism really mean?

On the pragmatics of electability, nearly every major national poll consistently shows Sanders equaling or bettering Clinton against all Republicans. Polls show Sanders nearly tied with Clinton nationally and rising. On electability, if anything, Sanders has the edge right now. There is nothing empirical to suggest Clinton’s superior electability—quite the contrary given her loss to Barack Obama in 2008 and her flagging campaign this year. While Clinton might gain more moderate Independents (particularly against a polarizing Republican nominee), Sanders can inspire massive Democratic and liberal Independent turnout and likely win over many white working-class swing voters.

Anti-Vaxxers Aren't Stupid

Emma Green

Doctors, pharmaceutical companies, and the government have a lot of power over children's lives. That can make parents act irrationally.

Among scientists and in the media, anti-vaxxers have earned a certain reputation. “They just don’t know something, or they’re anti-science, or there’s just something pathological about them,” as Mark Largent, a professor at Michigan State University and the author of Vaccine: The Debate in Modern America, characterized it. There is near-consensus among researchers that widespread immunization is crucial for children and American public health. Yet, according to Largent, 40 percent of American parents have either refused or delayed a recommended vaccine for one of their kids.

The question is: Why?

In Largent’s view, the answer has to do with imbalances of power. Many parents feel helpless and overwhelmed within a dysfunctional health-care system, he argued; on an average vaccine schedule, kids may get up to 25 inoculations in their first 18 months, and up to six in a single doctor’s visit. In interviews with people who seek out waivers in Michigan, he and his colleagues found that vaccine-skeptical parents show “tremendously high trust in medical communities,” he said. “Who don’t they trust? The feds, and pharma.” This research, along with rhetoric from recent political fights, suggests some parents may feel uncertain about vaccines partly because they’re skeptical of pharmaceutical companies, whose profit motives mix with their vaccine-promotion campaigns. And while state governments can mandate immunization, this may end up pushing parents away from the public-school system if they feel that regulations are forcing them to make certain decisions about their children’s health.

The Senate Awaits Its Doomed Nominee

Russell Berman

Charges of judicial hypocrisy broke out among lawmakers as President Obama weighed naming a replacement for Antonin Scalia, who might not even get a vote.

Updated on February 16, 2016

Within the next few weeks, President Obama will call up one of the nation’s top legal minds and initiate one of the trickier conversations of his presidency. He will offer him or her the honor of a lifetime—an appointment to the Supreme Court—and then he’ll share a caveat they already know: It’s a nomination that’s probably doomed from the start.

Congratulations?

That is one of the many awkward complications of the constitutional confrontation that has erupted in record time following the unexpected death on Saturday of Justice Antonin Scalia. Over the weekend, Senate Republicans up for reelection in 2016 largely fell in line behind Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s declaration that it should be “the next president” who appoints Scalia’s replacement on the high court. Their support dampens Democratic hopes that electoral pressure from Republicans in swing states would force McConnell to give Obama’s nominee a fair hearing and a floor vote in the several months.

Masters of Love

Emily Esfahani Smith

Science says lasting relationships come down to—you guessed it—kindness and generosity.

Every day in June, the most popular wedding month of the year, about 13,000 American couples will say “I do,” committing to a lifelong relationship that will be full of friendship, joy, and love that will carry them forward to their final days on this earth.

Except, of course, it doesn’t work out that way for most people. The majority of marriages fail, either ending in divorce and separation or devolving into bitterness and dysfunction. Of all the people who get married, only three in ten remain in healthy, happy marriages, as psychologist Ty Tashiro points out in his book The Science of Happily Ever After, which was published earlier this year.

Social scientists first started studying marriages by observing them in action in the 1970s in response to a crisis: Married couples were divorcing at unprecedented rates. Worried about the impact these divorces would have on the children of the broken marriages, psychologists decided to cast their scientific net on couples, bringing them into the lab to observe them and determine what the ingredients of a healthy, lasting relationship were. Was each unhappy family unhappy in its own way, as Tolstoy claimed, or did the miserable marriages all share something toxic in common?

XY Bias: How Male Biology Students See Their Female Peers

Ed Yong

In three large classes, men overrated the abilities of male students above equally talented and outspoken women.

Over the last three years, Sarah Eddy and Daniel Grunspan have asked over 1,700 biology undergraduates at the University of Washington to name classmates whom they thought were “strong in their understanding of classroom material.” The results were worrying but predictable. The male students underestimated their female peers, over-nominating other men over better-performing women.

Put it this way: To the men in these classes, a woman would need to get an A to get the same prestige as a man getting a B.

“A lot of people make the assumption that issues of gender in biology are gone because so many women enroll,” says Eddy. “But we know there are strong unconscious biases equating science to males. They’re just there in the air.”

Antonin Scalia's Secrets

Russell Berman

The late justice once discussed running for vice president and later gave President Obama an unsolicited recommendation for the Supreme Court.

Supreme Court justices seldom publish memoirs. But to judge by the never-before-told stories that have come out about Antonin Scalia in the days since his death, his autobiography would have been as compelling as the justice himself.

Vice President Scalia?

The most surprising tale came from former House Speaker John Boehner, who emerged from his post-resignation hibernation to reveal that in 1996, he met with Scalia about the possibility that Bob Dole would choose him as his vice-presidential running mate. Boehner was then the fourth-ranking member of the House Republican leadership, and as he writes in the Independent Journal Review, Scalia agreed to meet for a “clandestine” lunch with Boehner and his chief of staff, Barry Jackson.

Why I Am Not a Maker

Debbie Chachra

When tech culture only celebrates creation, it risks ignoring those who teach, criticize, and take care of others.

Every once in a while, I am asked what I “make.” A hack day might require it, or a conference might ask me to describe “what I make” so it can go on my name tag.

I’m always uncomfortable with it. I’m uncomfortable with any culture that encourages you take on an entire identity, rather than to express a facet of your own identity ("maker," rather than "someone who makes things"). But I have much deeper concerns.

An identity built around making things—of being “a maker”—pervades technology culture. There’s a widespread idea that “People who make things are simply different [read: better] than those who don’t.”

I understand where the motivation for this comes from. Creators, rightly, take pride in creation. In her book The Real World of Technology, the metallurgist Ursula Franklin contrasts prescriptive technologies, where many individuals produce components of the whole (think about Adam Smith’s pin factory), with holistic technologies, where the creator controls and understands the process from start to finish. As well as teaching my own engineering courses, I’m a studio instructor for a first-year engineering course, in which our students do design and fabrication, many of them for the first time. Making things is incredibly important, especially for groups that previously haven’t had access. When I was asked by the Boston-based Science Club for Girls to write a letter to my teenaged self (as a proxy for young girls everywhere), that’s exactly what I wrote about.

The New Yorker Presents: Quirky, Eclectic, Fascinating

David Sims

The new Amazon show offers an uneven but intriguing mix of hard-hitting journalism and whimsical storytelling.

The kind of dramatic whiplash offered by The New Yorker Presents is rare indeed among television shows. The new Amazon series, an anthology of half-hour episodes made up of smaller vignettes, covers the broad range of topics you might encounter in any one issue of the storied magazine, from a chilling documentary on a police shooting of a homeless man in Albuquerque to more whimsical humor pieces starring Alan Cumming or Paul Giamatti, all delivered in a necessarily breezy tone that avoids an air of self-importance. The result is a mixed bag, but one that—like the magazine—offers the opportunity to pick and choose as you go.

In that, the show seems well suited to Amazon’s bulk-release strategy, and as with many streaming series released in their entirety, it’s good to go into The New Yorker Presents knowing that it starts a little slow. The first episode includes an interview with the performance artist Marina Abramović that only skims the surface of her rich (and controversial) body of work. That’s followed by a humor piece, scripted by Simon Rich (a New Yorker contributor and the creator of the TV show Man Seeking Woman), that has an intriguing cast (Cumming as God, speaking to a demented man played by Brett Gelman) but provokes only mild chuckles. The New Yorker’s humor isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, of course, but its profiles usually go much deeper, making the half-hour format feel somewhat limiting.