Read This, Not That

The Benefits of an Empty Stomach

For Harper’s, Steve Hendricks synthesizes research on the medical benefits of month-long fasts, and recounts his own. 

To test his vow of celibacy, Gandhi slept in the nude with a nubile grandniece. He never advanced on her, but an involuntary emission could prompt weeks of self-recrimination. I lack a grandniece, but I recalled the Mahatma’s test on the day I prepared a meal for my family. When starting my fast, I traded my traditional role of family chef for that of dishwasher. But as time passed, I missed cooking, so on Sunday, my seventh day, I made a trial of penne with olive oil and parmesan for my son. I was surprised that the meal aroused me not at all. On subsequent days I made pad thai, potato and leek soup, chickpea curry, and artichoke and feta pizza, all without yearning.

I was without yearning in other spheres too. My libido, which had been de minimis since Tuesday, had by the weekend become defunctus. I had foreseen this sorry state, another fasting commonplace, but it was still a wound. My avenues of recreation were being hedged in one by one. For paltry redress, the throb in my temples had disappeared, my clarity of mind had returned, and my sense of well-being was once more as intact as a writer’s—a sex-less writer’s—could be.

Read the full article here. 

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The Fall Of Public Housing

Ben Austen writes in Harper’s about the demolition of Chicago’s infamous Cabrini-Green public housing high-rises, as part of the Chicago Housing Authority’s so-called Plan For Transformation. 

Deborah Hope lived in the Cabrini row houses for nearly twenty years before moving to a fourth-floor unit in the newly built Parkside of Old Town. … It all began, Hope said, when she was ten years old and her mother moved the family into the projects, to Rockwell Gardens on the West Side. That was the start of the disasters for them, the murders and drugs and alcohol and what they call the felonious society. Her sister was stabbed to death in the elevator, and Hope, at thirteen, took charge of raising her eight-month-old nephew. She pointed to a portrait of her sister on the wall above the dining room table, a pretty girl of eighteen, heavy-lidded, seated in a rattan lounge chair. A photograph on top of Hope’s television showed a brother who had died of AIDS. She counted off fifteen family members—including the sister, another brother, an aunt, and two of her own children—who got killed by guns or knives.

Hope later moved into an apartment on the North Side, in an all-white neighborhood. Yuppieville, she called it. They paid full rent, $1,500 a month, no assistance, food stamps, or medical card. She was raising four kids at the time, working three jobs, one for American Airlines at O’Hare, another at a skating rink, and the third as a school crossing guard. Hope would come home to drop off money and head right back out, riding the train or a bike. Then her mom died, at the age of fifty-two, Hope’s age now. And her brother went to prison, for being a “menace to society,” the court said. He got twenty years for selling drugs. Hope said there were weak men and strong men, and her brother was strong… But her landlords found out about her brother and said they didn’t want that kind. They raised the rent up so high Hope couldn’t manage, and she ended up in eviction court. She was given two weeks to get out and either head into emergency housing or be homeless. She didn’t want to go back to the projects, but she had no other choice.

Read the full article here. 

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Is Indigenous Media a Faustian Bargain? 

Anthropologist Faye Ginsburg considers whether the benefits of empowering indigenous people to produce media outweigh those traditions that are lost.

Indigenous and minority people have faced a kind of Faustian dilemma. On the one hand, they are finding new modes for expressing indigenous idetntiy through media and gaining access to film and video to serve their own needs and ends. On the the other hand, the spread of communications technology such as home video and satellite downlinks threatens to be a final assault on culture, language, imagery, relationship between generations, and respect for traditional knowledge. 

Read the full article here. 

Speaking In Tongues

Here’s something special for your Monday morning: In a lecture given just after the 2008 Presidential elections, Zadie Smith explores the stigmas associated with straddling different cultures and languages, and expresses hope that Obama’s ability to do so heralded a new politics of inclusivity.

We now know that Obama spoke of Main Street in Iowa and of sweet potato pie in Northwest Philly, and it could be argued that he succeeded because he so rarely misspoke, carefully tailoring his intonations to suit the sensibility of his listeners. Sometimes he did this within one speech, within one line: “We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states.” Awesome God comes to you straight from the pews of a Georgia church; poking around feels more at home at a kitchen table in South Bend, Indiana. The balance was perfect, cunningly counterpoised and never accidental. It’s only now that it’s over that we see him let his guard down a little, on 60 Minutes, say, dropping in that culturally, casually black construction “Hey, I’m not stupid, man, that’s why I’m president,” something it’s hard to imagine him doing even three weeks earlier. To a certain kind of mind, it must have looked like the mask had slipped for a moment.

Which brings us to the single-voiced Obamanation crowd. They rage on in the blogs and on the radio, waiting obsessively for the mask to slip. They have a great fear of what they see as Obama’s doubling ways. “He says one thing but he means another”—this is the essence of the fear campaign. He says he’s a capitalist, but he’ll spread your wealth. He says he’s a Christian, but really he’s going to empower the Muslims. … And when Jesse Jackson heard that Obama had lectured a black church congregation about the epidemic of absent black fathers, he experienced this, too, as a tonal betrayal; Obama was “talking down to black people.” In both cases, there was the sense of a double-dealer, of someone who tailors his speech to fit the audience, who is not of the people (because he is able to look at them objectively) but always above them.

Read the full article here. 

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How Apple Avoids Billions in Taxes

For The New York Times, Charles Duhigg and David Kocieniewski explain how Apple and other tech companies take advantage of outdated tax codes to avoid paying taxes.

Apple, for instance, was among the first tech companies to designate overseas salespeople in high-tax countries in a manner that allowed them to sell on behalf of low-tax subsidiaries on other continents, sidestepping income taxes, according to former executives. Apple was a pioneer of an accounting technique known as the “Double Irish With a Dutch Sandwich,” which reduces taxes by routing profits through Irish subsidiaries and the Netherlands and then to the Caribbean. Today, that tactic is used by hundreds of other corporations — some of which directly imitated Apple’s methods, say accountants at those companies.

Without such tactics, Apple’s federal tax bill in the United States most likely would have been $2.4 billion higher last year, according to a recent study by a former Treasury Department economist, Martin A. Sullivan. As it stands, the company paid cash taxes of $3.3 billion around the world on its reported profits of $34.2 billion last year, a tax rate of 9.8 percent. (Apple does not disclose what portion of those payments was in the United States, or what portion is assigned to previous or future years.)

Read the full article here.

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The Real Romney

In The New Yorker, Louis Menand looks past the Republican primary posturing to examine what Mitt Romney really believes. 

Romney’s program is logical (which doesn’t mean that it’s practical). He believes that if freedom is to be fostered and preserved around the world the United States needs a stronger military. For the United States to have a stronger military, it has to grow economically. For the nation to grow economically, American companies must become more productive. And, for American companies to become more productive, business has to be allowed to do business. This means that Americans have to tolerate, to appreciate, even to encourage what Romney calls (using a phrase borrowed from Joseph Schumpeter) “creative destruction.”

It’s a strange slogan for a politician to adopt at a time of high unemployment and economic uncertainty, but Romney invokes it in his book and he uses it in interviews, because it’s precisely what he means by business. To make the future, we have to be willing to destroy some of the present. “It takes a leap of faith for governments to stand aside and allow the creative destruction inherent in a free economy,” as Romney puts it. We can’t be sentimental. And everything can be thought of in this way, from the production of microchips to the education of children. If we want cheaper chips or better schools, we have to be willing to pay the transaction costs. The unwillingness to do so is what’s holding us back.

Read the full article here. 

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Is Procreation Immoral?

For The New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert reviews several new books examining the ethical quandaries of reproduction. 

…lots of people offer the notion that parenthood will make them happy. Here the evidence is, sadly, against them. Research shows that people who have children are no more satisfied with their lives than people who don’t. If anything, the balance tips the other way: parents are less happy. In an instantly famous study, published in Science in 2004, the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman asked nine hundred working women to assess their experiences during the preceding day. The women rated the time they’d spent taking care of their kids as less enjoyable than the time spent shopping, eating, exercising, watching TV, preparing food, and talking on the phone. One of the few activities these women found less enjoyable than caring for their children was doing housework, which is to say cleaning up after them.

But none of this really matters. Procreation for the sake of the parents is ethically unacceptable. “To have a child in order to benefit oneself is a moral error,” Overall writes.

Read the full article here.

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Take The Money And Run For Office

Something unique for your Sunday afternoon: a recent This American Life episode explores how lobbyists, corporations, and wealthy individuals give money to politicians, and what exactly that money is buying. 

Listen to the podcast here. 

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