Andrew Sullivan

HN

Journalist here, survivor of several 'digital first' revolutions and now, officially, a 'content director' and glad to have a very good job. A couple of things:

1. A really good newsroom is really tight. Very few print-trained journalists are in it for the money, so the cause and comradeship are everything. A quick way to ruin a newsroom is to implement sweeping changes that have nothing to do with good storytelling (and also mean a lot of extra work). I've been through several of these reorganizations. In the worst, management delivers a master plan heavy on digital/social goals but then provides no tools or training. Essentially, somebody went to yet another publishing conference, heard the latest on why everyone's losing money, or what sort of digital results you need to hit the multiples the current VC owners want to flip their share ... Oh hell, this is too frustrating to relive.

Gist: By and large, print journos don't do digital. A good story is a good story, but the tools/skills are essentially different. It's like telling someone skilled with an epee she's going to have start breaking boards. Ordering an accomplished story teller to deliver a list and a quiz each week and promote them heavily across multiple social platforms, for example, is a mistake. You want clickbait, get a pro. You want video, get a pro--not GoPros and iMovie tips for the writers.

2. Of course, owners are absolutely expected to do what they think is best for a property. And outside of TNR…

Sullivan identifies as a conservative and sometimes a Republican: https://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/22/books/review/Brooks.t.html

> “The conservatism I grew up around” Sullivan writes on the second page of the book, “was a combination of lower taxes, less government spending, freer trade, freer markets, individual liberty, personal responsibility and a strong anti-Communist foreign policy.” His heroes were Thatcher, Reagan, Solzhenitsyn, Havel, Hayek and Orwell.

Sullivan is ideologically similar to, and a fan of, Anthony Kennedy, who was a life-long Republican: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/06/anthony-kennedy-and-the-death-of-true-american-conservatism.html (noting Kennedy’s “pragmatic libertarianism — his belief in limited government, pluralism, moderation, and social cohesion”).

It’s not really as simple as “Republicans moved too far to the right and he’s a liberal now.” For example, Sullivan is a devout Catholic who thinks Roe was wrong to take the decision on how to regulate abortion out of the hands of voters: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/05/andrew-sullian-a-way-through-the-intractable-abortion-wars.html. (He thinks voters would converge on laws like in France or Germany, allowing abortion up to 12 weeks with limited exemptions after that.)

He supported Bush (and thought Gore tried to steal the 2000 election) and the Iraq war initially. He soured on it later and reeled at Bush’s deficits and fiscal excess, and Bush’s support for the federal marriage…

87% of Americans are not descended from a recent Sub-Saharan African population (where recent is defined as within the last 80,000 years). African Americans form a genetically distinct American subpopulation with about 70-80% of genes from Africa. If you sent in spit samples to 23andMe from a white American and an African American, 23andMe would have no problem telling them apart. If race did not exist, this would not be possible.

It is interesting that crime rates and other social pathologies are so segregated by race in America. Different experts have different explanations for this. The point is, comparing America against Europe is hard to do when the racial makeup of the two countries is so different.

The legacy of slavery in America cannot be avoided. 14-24 year old African American males make up 1% of the USA population and commit 27% of the murders. Europe had no large scale agricultural African slavery in the 19th century, and its current society has evolved differently as a result.

I agree that government-defined racial categories are too broad and inexact. The true amount of human genetic diversity is far larger and far messier than five racial categories would suggest. Andrew Sullivan addressed the myth that "race is a social construct" on his blog[1].

[1] http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/05/16/is-race-only-a-social-construct/

Anyone who is impressed by this should seriously check out Andrew Sullivan's view from your window contest. Most weeks a reader submits a photo from their window, literally anywhere in the world. And people track it down with very similar techniques, to the exact window. And a lot of the contest photos offer much less to go off of than this [namely, only 1 photo, low res, country/context unspecified].

Here is the winners archive.

http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/vfyw-contest/

Some of photos aren't too crazy or offer a landmark that is recognizable if you'd seen it before. But most of them offer very little in terms of knowing where to start unless you've got a huge body of contextual knowledge you can draw on.

A couple ones that I had absolutely no idea where to start with:

http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2010/08/17/the-view-from-your-window-contest-winner-11/
http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2014/08/19/the-view-from-your-window-contest-winner-218/

I imagine the CIA/NSA has a crack team of a couple dozen people doing this exact job.

I see little relevance of this to HN. That said, the opening line stands out:

> A Dallas officer fatally shot a 26-year-old man Thursday night

This is a departure from the way this is usually written up these days, which would be: "A 25-year-old Dallas man died as a result of an officer-involved shooting."

This manipulation of language infuriates me to no end. The officer was not just "involved" in a shooting -- the officer did the shooting! This choice of words is not an accident. Law Enforcement has somehow convinced the press to use language that removes the direct causality (and therefore, the responsibility / culpability) of the shooting.

Longer articles on this phenomenon:

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/craig-martin/time-to-kill-the-term-off_b_7428072.html

http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2014/09/02/stop-saying-officer-involved-shootings/

https://news.vice.com/article/some-nypd-officer-involved-shooting-narratives-just-dont-fly

> the extremely wealthy members of society (the 1%).

Not to be that guy, but if "society" is defined as "humanity", as it should be imo when it comes to human health, all of us in first world are the 1%.

Edit: "To make it into the richest 1 percent globally, all you need is an income of around $34,000, according to World Bank economist Branko Milanovic. The average family in the United States has more than three times the income of those living in poverty in America, and nearly 50 times that of the world's poorest. Many of America's 99 percenters, and the West's, are really 1 percenters on a global level."

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/02/27/we_are_all_the_1_percent

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2082385/We-1--You-need-34k-income-global-elite--half-worlds-richest-live-U-S.html

http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2012/03/01/the-global-1/

http://www.globalrichlist.com/