Tag: The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

by Zoë Pollock

After a bad breakup, Tracy Clark-Flory consulted the experts for some advice:

I thought I’d be good at this alone thing by now. I’m an only child, for crying out loud. Instead, on the heels of another split, I’m amazed at how difficult just being by myself can be. I have friends – they are wonderful — but I feel a suffocating solitude at the end of the night, in the morning or at any moment of the day that isn’t scheduled with distraction. It wasn’t this way when I was coupled. Just the knowledge that I had “a person” to call my own (even though I know in my bones that you can never truly call another person “your own”) was a comfort; that knowledge itself was a constant companion. 

Judy Ford, author of Single: The Art of Being Satisfied, Fulfilled and Independent, points the way after the jump:

Her practical tips for conquering solitude are to get creative (“creativity is the cure of loneliness”), push yourself to “do something you have never done before” (like taking yourself out to dinner), admit your loneliness to others (“you might be surprised that they feel lonely too”), “get cozy with the gaps,” those empty spaces in between plans, and remind yourself, “Loneliness is not going to kill me.” These aren’t easy fixes — and may induce eye-rolls from self-help haters — but they’re crucial to happiness, she argues: “To experience wholeness, first we experience the void.”

Slate excerpts part of Michael Cobb’s Single: Arguments for the Uncoupled:

Certainly being single is a variation on being individual. Even Thoreau had to keep reassuring us that he was not too lonely in the woods: “I am no more lonely than a single mullein or dandelion in a pasture, or a bean leaf, or sorrel, or a horse-fly, or a bumble-bee.” I’m not sure if he can prove or commit too many pathetic fallacies in these comparisons. Such rhetoric betrays a sense that the question of his loneliness is still very much open, and something about individualism must be thought about as we consider the single.

We’ve previously covered Cobb’s book on the Dish here and here.

(Photo courtesy of Lee Materazzi, via Flavorwire)

via The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/08/instructions-for-being-alone.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+andrewsullivan%2FrApM+%28The+Daily+Dish%29

Historian Tony Perrotet discusses how the ancient Games more closely resembled some combination of Woodstock, Red Light Districts, and cage-fighting than the current Costas/Seacrest vibe:

The combat events on the fourth day were very popular with the rank and file. The wrestling was similar to today’s Greco-Roman wrestling. But the boxing was more exotic. Guys pummeled each other to the head using their fists with leather thongs wrapped around them. Body blows were actually forbidden. There were no rounds and no weight restrictions. There are vivid tales of people’s faces being pummeled to a bloody pulp. One boxer didn’t want to give his opponent the satisfaction of knocking out his teeth, so he swallowed them all.

Meanwhile, prostitutes could make the equivalent of a year’s revenue in just five days. But women weren’t excluded from competition:

The [women’s] games were held at Olympia and dedicated to Zeus’s consort Hera. The young women ran in short tunics with their right breast exposed as an homage to the Amazon warrior women, a race of female super warriors that was believed to have cauterized their right breasts so as not to impede their javelin throwing.

Doping was also a thing back then:

Forget anabolic steroids in easy-to-swallow tablets, or EPO in clean syringes. Ancient Olympic dopers got their pre-Games hormone boost from chewing on raw animal testicles.

I prefer mine lightly sauteed.

(Sketch: Olympia in Ancient Greece from the Pierers Universal-Lexikon, 1891.)

via The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/08/the-ancient-olympics-more-hbo-than-nbc.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+andrewsullivan%2FrApM+%28The+Daily+Dish%29

The closet’s corrosive effects are alive and well in China, where an estimated 70% of gay men marry women to satisfy parental expectations. While most of these marriages involve unwitting straight women, some of them are consensual, often conducted via a gay men-lesbian matchmaking site with some 153,000 members. The personal account of one of such couple:

Zhuang Xiang, a 30-year-old accountant from Shanghai, came to understand why he was drawn to boys when he was 17. On flicking through a gay comic book in a shop, he had his great “a-ha!” moment. He met his boyfriend in 2004. And then he married his lesbian wife in 2009. He and his wife don’t live together, but they visit each other’s parents once a week. Mr Zhuang even keeps some of her clothes on display at home, in case of unannounced visitors.

Mr Zhuang says he is lucky to live in a big city like Shanghai, where such a solution is possible. But he wants to live in a country where gay men are accepted. His parents have started to talk about a grandchild. Mr Zhuang and his lesbian wife will likely get a forged certificate of infertility. Keeping up the appearance of their marriage feels like a never-ending battle, he says. But sometimes lies are more sensible than the truth.

The Dish noted the practice awhile back.

via The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/07/chinas-faux-marriage-epidemic.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+andrewsullivan%2FrApM+%28The+Daily+Dish%29

Last week, following the second episode of Aaron Sorkin’s “The Newsroom”, the Internet lit up with talk that the show “transforms its female characters into hysterics and fools.” After the third episode aired this Sunday, things only got worse, as Glynnis MacNicol explains:

Sorkin does not have a terrific recent track record with his female characters, and the fact that he opened this series with a monologue from Will bemoaning a past where America was blessed with “great men, men who were revered” did not exactly bode well for the female-driven storylines to come. So far, however, his female characters (namely MacKenzie McHale and Maggie Jordan) have struck me as such pale derivatives of Sorkin’s past female characters that I was willing to give it a wait and see. Well, I’ve waited, and I’ve seen.

In this week’s episode Maggie (Allison Pill) suffers a severe panic attack during a staff meeting and needs to be talked off the ledge (almost literally) by the ever-knowing, always confident Jim (who employs expertise learned in the field in Afghanistanto coax her from her fit). Meanwhile, McHale, whose own impeccable war-zone credentials we were assured of in the first episode, flubs and natters her way through various confrontations with a series of women McAvoy parades through the office. We can all be grateful McHale didn’t fall in love on the battlefield; she gives a whole new meaning to I.E.D.

In Sorkin’s world women are helpmates, entirely emotional beings, always just one tick away from an explosion. They are worthy of being feared, the way a small child fears its mother; they must be constantly soothed. The result is less offensive than exasperating and quickly becoming boring to watch.

From a listicle of differences between “The Newsroom” and an actual newsroom:

On Newsroom, the staff instantly discusses their love lives with people they just met. In a newsroom, no one does that because it’s ridiculous.

The above illustration is from the tumblr Hey Internet Girl, a meme that emerged from an interview Sorkin gave last month to Toronto Globe and Mail writer Sarah Nicole Prickett:

“Listen here, Internet girl,” he says, getting up. “It wouldn’t kill you to watch a film or pick up a newspaper once in a while.” I’m not sure how he’s forgotten that I am writing for a newspaper; looking over the publicist’s shoulder, I see that every reporter is from a print publication (do not see: Drew Magary). I remind him. I say also, factually, “I have a New York Times subscription and an HBO subscription. Any other advice?”

He looks surprised, then high-fives me. Being not a person who high-fives or generally makes physical contact with interview subjects, I look more surprised.

“I’m sick of girls who don’t know how to high-five,” he says. He makes me try to do it “properly,” six times. He also makes me laugh; I’m nervous, and it’s so absurd. He loves it. He says, “Let me manhandle you.” Then he ambles off, hoping I’ll write something nice, as though he has never known how the news works, how many stories can be true.”

Sorkin said in an interview last week:

As for understanding women, I go on the assumption that not all women are the same. I gave up trying to understand the women in my life a long time ago, and now I just try to please them. Much better results.

Previous Dish coverage of “The Newsroom” here, here and here.

via The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/07/sorkins-girl-trouble.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+andrewsullivan%2FrApM+%28The+Daily+Dish%29

The monopoly mindset: 

The business model that the owners of the metro dailies gravitated toward in the decades after World War II was this: 1) establish monopoly, 2) milk that monopoly. The monopoly was on the delivery of printed advertising messages into homes in a given city or (better) metropolitan area: department store ads, supermarket ads, car dealer ads, and, most of all, classifieds. Notice that I didn’t mention news. That’s because, once a monopoly was established, the editorial content of a newspaper had no detectable impact on its financial success.

via The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/06/why-newspapers-were-always-doomed.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+andrewsullivan%2FrApM+%28The+Daily+Dish%29

The idiotic campaign non-news of today is that Mitt Romney has never heard of WaWa stores. This apparently, makes him “out of touch.” No it doesn’t. Then he was struck by those amazing gizmos where you touch a few buttons on a screen and you get a Hoagie. That doesn’t make him out of touch either. Technology is a marvel. When my gym recently added fingerprint i.d. for everything from a massage, a sweatshirt or a smoothie, I was impressed too. I’m just not sure about that second hand story Romney told about it taking a businessman filling out a federal government form to change his address. He says he had to fill out 33 pages, then had to fill them out again. It wasn’t just a change of address form (that couldn’t be simpler); it had something to do with federal reimbursement for optometrists. Is it true? Could a reporter find the optometrist and check it out?

More to the point, it seems quite clear to me that MSNBC aired an edited version that removed Romney’s core point about public vs private service and competition. The full version is here. It’s a good point, if, as always with Romney, an eternal platitude rather than a concrete proposal or argument.

via The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/06/a-33-page-form-to-change-your-address.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+andrewsullivan%2FrApM+%28The+Daily+Dish%29