FOR SALE: the American free press

(Where print publishing is headed)

My husband has spent over 30 years editing magazines. His company now publishes fewer than half the number of magazines they did a decade ago, and the number of employees has been significantly reduced. He feels some sympathy for the situation described in a recent New York Times article, "Sponsors Now Pay for Online Articles, Not Just Ads," "if the articles are clearly marked," he said, "and they don't promote the companies' products." Right, I said, and the camel's nose under the tent flap isn't hurting anybody.

I understand why magazines are turning to sponsored articles. Most of us would rather read our magazines online, though we have no intention of paying for the privilege of doing so. Unfortunately, advertisers are not willing to pay as much for online ads as they once did for print ads, possibly because consumers have learned how to block them. (I use Adblock Plus, which is great for now, but they're starting to let "more useful and pleasant" ads past their censors, which may soon render them useless to ad-avoiders like me.) With dropping revenue from consumers and advertisers, magazines have a hard time paying for original research, reporting, writing, and editing. The temptation to use sponsored articles is strong.

It's good for spouses to have common interests, so my husband and I both chose careers in a doomed industry that pays poorly. What could possibly go wrong? My work has been in book publishing, which has its own share of problems. A decade ago my little college town had a Borders and a Barnes & Noble. Now we have to get our books from Amazon or, more often, from the public library. Read another recent New York Times article, Scott Turow's "The Slow Death of the American Author," and weep.

Turow, who is president of The Authors Guild, is not complaining about his remuneration: his books have sold over 25 million copies. He simply notes that authors of e-books earn "roughly half of a traditional hardcover royalty"--unless they are pirated, lent, or re-sold, in which case they earn nothing at all. And since an e-book never wears out, why would anybody pay for a new one?

I didn't put a newspaper in my toilet photo, because I don't have an actual newspaper. We stopped subscribing to the Chicago Tribune about the time a good friend of mine, seeing the handwriting on the wall, took early retirement. She's glad she did: during the last decades, hundred of editors, writers, and reporters have been laid off, and pension benefits have dramatically decreased. Like everyone else, I read my news online now. As my mother once asked under other circumstances, why buy the cow if you can get the milk for free?

But what's going to happen now that we all expect to get our news, our magazine articles, and our books free of charge? If newspapers can't afford to hire good reporters and editors, news will deteriorate into shouting matches based on uninformed opinion. If magazines can't afford to pay their writers and editors, they will first try to turn into advertising delivery systems and then, failing that, go out of business. If book publishers lower royalty rates and refuse to take a chance on new or little-known authors (i.e., authors who are not yet "brands"), careful thinking and writing will be replaced by self-published schlock. Oh, right... those aren't predictions. They're descriptions of what has actually happened over the last decade.

Q. So where will our reading material come from? 
A. From businesses with products to sell, of course.

It's an American tradition. The current Supreme Court has decided that businesses have the right to sponsor political candidates. For many years cigarette makers sponsored the research that found no link between smoking and cancer. Nowadays manufacturers of sugary products sponsor dubious nutritional research. Why shouldn't businesses sponsor news, commentary, and entertainment, not only by advertising, but also by providing content? Especially if they're not specifically mentioning their own products in the articles they supply?

Well, one wonders how much of the camel will follow his nose into the tent. And one thinks of the old adage that he who lies down with dogs (or camels) gets up with fleas. For a fascinating first-hand look at how advertising influenced women's magazines before 1990, read Gloria Steinem's (possibly pirated) article "Sex, Lies & Advertising." For a fascinating first-hand look at how advertising is influencing all forms of media today, just stay online.

A short rant about memes and rants

We Americans managed to make it past the 2012 election without descending into civil war. We somehow made it past the fiscal cliff without armed conflict (though who knows what will  happen over the debt ceiling). But once again we are at each other's throats, this time over gun regulation.

It was with great relief that I read the title of a forthcoming book from Johns Hopkins University Press: Reducing Gun Violence in America: Informing Policy with Evidence and Analysis.

The book won't be available for another couple of weeks, so I haven't seen it yet. I don't know if it is cogently argued, balanced, or even readable. If it's really based on evidence and analysis, though, I hope it will inform policy. So far there is little evidence that today's policymakers analyze any proposed measures much beyond the Congressional bottom line: Will such-and-such a policy help or hurt my reelection chances?

Unfortunately, Congressional reelection chances depend on a public that far too often forms its opinions from Facebook memes and emailed rants rather than from evidence and analysis. Alas, many of the "quotes" turn out to be inventions, especially if they are attributed to Thomas Jefferson. Much of the "history" has little to do with what actually happened (see "The Hitler Gun Control Lie," for example). And much of the data, even when not fabricated, is used in misleading ways.

Memes and rants do not create an informed electorate. They do not help us solve big problems, and they do not help us plan for a healthy future. What they do, if we let them, is drive us to political extremes and make us pawns of special interests.

If we do Facebook or email, we can't avoid memes and rants. We should, however, do our best to keep them from eating our brain cells.

What Margaret Sanger really said about infanticide and abortion

Margaret Sanger

Margaret Sanger, founder of America's family planning movement, may be the most lied-about woman on the Internet.

Wait - I'll take that back. A lie is a conscious untruth, with intent to deceive. Certainly liars are involved with the mishmash of falsehood, half-truths, and logical fallacies relating to Ms. Sanger, but many honest people are now passing this misinformation along, sometimes embellishing it in the process. I believed some of it myself, though I wondered how a woman respected by so many in my mother's generation could be reviled by so many today.

So when I saw a copy of her Autobiography (1938) on a library bookshelf, I checked it out, found it fascinating, and reviewed it on my book blog, The Neff Review.

After I posted the review, a friend reminded me of a Sanger quotation that often shows up on anti-Sanger websites: "The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it." My friend told me that the sentence is from Sanger's Woman and the New Race (1920), so I immediately looked it up. Indeed it is there - at location 466 if you're reading it on Kindle - exactly as she quoted it. Margaret, I said to myself, what were you thinking?

To find out, I read the whole chapter in which the sentence appears (V: "The Wickedness of Creating Large Families"), and what Sanger was thinking became clear. Excessively large families, she argues, are the root cause of all kinds of evils: prostitution, low wages, child labor, war, the oppression of women, ill health, mental dejection, spiritual hopelessness, malnutrition, inadequate medical attention, crime, feeble-mindedness, insanity, child abuse, unchastity, and - especially - infant and child mortality. She quotes research showing that the likelihood of death before the first birthday rises with each additional child, reaching 60% by child number twelve - and, as she points out, many of the children who survive to age one will not make it to age five. Sanger is by no means advocating infanticide: she is using hyperbole to underline the unimaginably squalid conditions of the large working-class families she encountered in her daily work as a visiting nurse in New York tenements. "Let the day perish wherein I was born," wailed the suffering Job. "Why died I not from the womb?" The families Sanger served were equally miserable.

How can I know she is not advocating infanticide? Her second chapter is a history of infanticide - an extremely common practice from ancient times right up to the present day, though tending in modern times to be replaced by abortion. Frequently lumping abortion, infanticide, and child abandonment together, she calls them "abhorrent practices." "It is apparent," she writes, "that nothing short of contraceptives can put an end to the horrors of abortion and infanticide" [loc. 202]

Hold the phone - the horrors of abortion? Wasn't Sanger the founder of Planned Parenthood? Didn't she promote abortion?

Not in her autobiography, at least, written when she was in her late 50s (see page 217, for example, where she says that abortion, no matter how early in the pregnancy, is the wrong way to limit family size, because it is the taking of human life), and certainly not in Woman and the New Race. Quoting estimates that between one and two million abortions are performed each year in the United States - in 1920, when the population was only a third of what it is today! - she writes:

Apparently, the numbers of these illegal operations are increasing from year to year. From year to year more women will undergo the humiliation, the danger and the horror of them, and the terrible record, begun with the infanticide of the primitive peoples, will go on piling up its volume of human misery and racial damage, until society awakens to the fact that a fundamental remedy must be applied. [Loc. 218]

Sanger calls abortion "an abhorrent operation which kills the tenderness and delicacy of womanhood, even as it may injure or kill the body" [loc. 575].   "While there are cases where even the law recognizes abortion as justifiable when recommended by a physician," she writes, "I assert that the hundreds of thousands of abortions performed in America each year are a disgrace to civilization" [loc. 945].

Sanger was a Utopian visionary. In her view, widely available contraceptives would usher in a new age of health, happiness, and justice for all. War - the inevitable result of overpopulation and the concomitant search for new territory - would lose its raison d'être. Abortion would disappear:

When motherhood becomes the fruit of a deep yearning, not the result of ignorance or accident, its children will become the foundation of a new race. There will be no killing of babies in the womb by abortion, nor through neglect in foundling homes, nor will there be infanticide. Neither will children die by inches in mills and factories. No man will dare to break a child's life upon the wheel of toil. [Loc. 1695]

(Note to the suspicious: when Sanger writes of "racial damage" and "a new race," she is referring to the whole human race. If she ever favors one subset of the human race over another, it appears neither in this book nor in her autobiography, though by lifting certain sentences out of context and applying the usual 21st-century usage of the word race, some writers have portrayed her as a racist.)

OK, Sanger was mistaken. If her figures are correct, over the last century the number of abortions in the U.S. has remained constant (though, since the population has tripled, that represents a major per capita decrease). Despite the availability of contraception, says the Guttmacher Institute's most recent fact sheet, "nearly half of pregnancies among American women are unintended, and four in 10 of these are terminated by abortion. Twenty-two percent of all pregnancies (excluding miscarriages) end in abortion." If you want to argue that contraception does not prevent abortion, Planned Parenthood will provide the statistics to back you up.

But being mistaken is not a crime. It's not even a moral failing, if a person is using the best information she has - and if she is careful to consider the information's source, literary context, historical context, and use of logic. It's mistaken, though, to accuse Margaret Sanger of promoting infanticide and abortion when she worked tirelessly to make both of those desperate measures unnecessary. And it's morally wrong to pass on such accusations without thoroughly investigating them, as a means of discrediting political opponents.

And anyway, why would pro-lifers want to base a campaign against abortion on misinformation? Why not just sweetly point out that Planned Parenthood's founder called abortion a horror and devoted her life to making it unnecessary?

Mavis Staples and Jeff Tweedy reflect on civil discourse and the limits of human understanding

This evening Mr Neff and I ate dinner to the music of Mavis Staples in her new album, You Are Not Alone, produced by Jeff Tweedy of Wilco fame, who also wrote two of the songs.

Earlier in the day we'd been talking about Alan Jacobs' article in Big Questions Online, "The Online State of Nature."  Jacobs, a professor of English at Wheaton College, asks (quoting Thomas Hobbes): "Why has Internet discourse devolved into a 'war of every man against every man'?"

Well, Mavis and Jeff have a song for that.  It's called "Only the Lord Knows," and you can watch a version of it here.

Here's the refrain:

What can you do, what can you do when you can't trust

Anybody to tell you the truth?

Can't trust him, can't trust her - what to do, what to do now?

Only the Lord knows, and he ain't you.

"That's a wonderful example of epistemological humility," said Mr Neff.

Took the words right out of my mouth.

Though I've been in love with Mavis Staples ever since she teamed up with Aretha Franklin in "Oh Happy Day" in the late 80s, and with Jeff Tweedy ever since I met him, his wife, and their toddler son eating celery sticks backstage after a Wilco concert in the mid 90s, I would never have thought of putting them together. Two years ago, however, Tweedy joined a small audience as Staples recorded a live album, and two weeks after that, Tweedy and Staples did lunch.

The resulting album, the one we listened to tonight, was released this week, and it's a match made in heaven. Maybe literally. You can read positive reviews in the Chicago Tribune, Paste Magazine, Rolling Stone, and even Christianity Today. Or you can watch Staples and Tweedy chat. Or, of course, you can just download the album and enjoy the whole thing beginning five minutes from now.

The Shallows, A Time of Gifts, and the importance of memorization

I just sent a review of Nicholas Carr's new book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, to Christian Century magazine, so I won't review it here. I will say, however, that the book is well researched and thought provoking, and Carr is an engaging writer to boot. If you're thinking you might want to buy or borrow it, you can get a preview by reading his Atlantic article, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" (July/August 2008).

But I'd like to comment here on his ninth chapter, "Search, Memory," which includes some startling ideas that aren't in the magazine article. Carr strongly disagrees with those who see no point in memorization, now that nearly anything we might memorize is available in the Internet's vast data banks. Without well-formed memories, he believes, we become unable to synthesize our cultural heritage and reinterpret it for our day. We can't draw on it to inform our own creative endeavors. And we certainly can't pass it on to future generations. "Outsource memory," says Carr, "and culture withers."

While reading The Shallows for work, I was also reading Patrick Leigh Fermor's A Time of Gifts for fun. In 1933 at the age of 18, Leigh Fermor set off on a solo walking tour from Holland to Constantinople. This book, the first of two about his journey, gets him as far as Hungary. With no MP3 player to distract him, he amuses himself en route by singing and reciting poetry: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spenser, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Coleridge, Blake, Scott, Swinburne, Rossetti, Wordsworth, Kipling, Donne, Herrick, Raleigh, Wyatt, Herbert, Marvell, Housman, Chaucer, Carroll, and Lear--to name only some of the authors he mentions.

Leigh Fermor, I should point out, left school at age 16.

If I made that journey, I wouldn't know enough poetry to get me from breakfast to lunch on the first day out. Back in the 1950s when I was in elementary school, memorization had largely fallen from grace. My father had memorized long poems in the 1920s, but by age 16 all I could recite was William Cullen Bryant's "Thanatopsis" (learned for extra credit to prove to my father than I could do it too), a couple of poems by Robert Frost, the first two and a half verses of "Paul Revere's Ride," and "Gerald McBoing-Boing Meets Mr. Magoo," a poem published in Family Circle that my mother suggested I memorize when I was driving her nuts on a long car trip (I was an 8-year-old chatterbox, and I had run out of library books).

This is a shame because, in Leigh Fermor's words, "I was at the age when one's memory for poetry or for languages - indeed for anything - takes impressions like wax and, up to a point, lasts like marble." Fortunately I attended a Christian school that, though it had given up on poetry and languages, still expected us to memorize scripture. Lots of it, from the King James Version. I whined and grumbled, but my mother wisely told me to just do it. "When you're older," she told me, "these verses will stay in your mind. You'll be glad they're there."

Mother was right, and so, I believe, is Nicholas Carr. As I learned in grade school and still remember, "out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh" (Matthew 12:34).


Check out William Dalrymple's 2008 interview with Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor here.