How Comedy Movies Are Changing
Plus: How to increase diversity at the top Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here. Im still rounding up your emails about the song Fast Car and coverage of race in journalismtheyll run early next week and then well be back on our regular newsletter schedule. Locked Up in a Heat Wave In a Marshall Project article that draws on work by the ACLU, Jamiles Lartey makes the case that incarcerated people, including children, are at serious risk from lack of air-conditioning: This week, more than a third of the U.S. population was under excessive heat warnings and heat advisories . Dozens of major cities and states have set new temperature records in recent weeks , including Baton Rouge, Louisiana, which logged its hottest June ever . Less than an hour from the city is Louisiana State Penitentiary, better known as Angola prison, where the state set up a temporary youth jail last fall , in a building that once housed adults awaiting execution. A federal court filing this week from the Louisiana American Civil Liberties Union alleges that the youth at Angola face inhumane conditions, in large part because they are regularly kept in non-airconditioned cells for up to 72 hours . In a statement to the court, medical expert Dr. Susi U. Vassallo called the practice foolhardy and perilous, and said, I would not dare to keep my dog in these conditions for fear of my dog dying. This June and July at the prison, the heat index has regularly exceeded 125 degrees , which the National Weather Services classifies as extreme danger for heat-related illness and death . In 2021, Louisiana spent $2.8 million to study what it would cost to cool all of its prisons with air conditioning, but it is still waiting on results . In the meantime, adults at Angola the states largest facility struggle for relief. Its over 100 degrees in there. I lie on the floor. I barely can breathe. God, it feels like its suffocating! an unidentified person told The Advocate. Conditions in Texas are likely even worse. How to Increase Diversity at the Top In The Atlantic , Annie Lowrey highlights research on the outsize impact that 12 highly selective colleges have on shaping the American elite, and argues that even with new restrictions on race-based affirmative action, a straightforward set of policies exist that would still let these schools diversify themselveswithout making any sacrifice in terms of student quality or ambition. She outlines those policies: The first step is to eliminate legacy admissions, as Wesleyan did last week . Most of these schools have an extremely strong preference for the children of alumni, and especially the children of wealthy alumni ... Legacy kids whose parents are in the top 1 percent of the earnings distribution have a 40-percentage-point advantage in admissions compared with non-legacy kids with equivalent test scores; that advantage falls to just 15 percentage points for less wealthy students. This alumni preference acts as affirmative action for wealthy white kids. Second is getting rid of recruitment policies for athletes. Participating in a sportincluding a niche, moneyed sport such as fencing or sailinggives kids an admissions boost equivalent to earning an additional 200 points on the SAT, one study found . At many elite schools, athletic programs function as a way to shuttle in rich kids who would not get in otherwise. People sometimes have the intuition that student athletes might come disproportionately from lower-income or middle-income families, Chetty told me. Thats not true. Third is putting less emphasis on super-high non-academic ratings. Pretty much all kids who matriculate at the Ivy Plus institutions have resumes thick with leadership-cultivating, creativity-showcasing activity: volunteering, playing an instrument, making art. But kids from the countrys Eton-like secondary schools, such as Exeter and Milton, tend to have especially strong recommendations and padded resumes, ones Harvard and Yale love. These admissions preferences tilt strongly in favor of the rich, Chetty noted. Getting rid of the admissions policies favoring athletes, legacies, and resume padders would increase the share of kids from the bottom 95 percent of the parental-income distribution by nearly nine percentage points, the study finds. Yale, Harvard, and the other super-elite schools would each replace about 150 kids from rich families with kids from low- and middle-income families each year. In addition, the economists find, schools could bolster their admissions preferences for low- and middle-income kids with excellent test scores... I would add one more policy ... simply matriculating many more students. The Ivy Plus schools have a combined endowment of more than $200 billion ... Surely they could enroll many more kids. Oppenheimer-Adjacent In the Washington Examiner , Tim Carney argues that the U.S. should not have dropped the atomic bomb on Japan at the end of World War II and the associated idea that nuking Nagasaki and Hiroshima [meant] flipping a lever, rerouting the trolley, and causing the death of fewer people. He writes: The trolley problem is a philosophical exercise meant to test the distinction between the moral weight of the actions we choose versus the consequences of inaction. Is it the better decision to take an action that kills one person versus taking an inaction that results in five deaths? Its a fine ethical exercise, but its inapplicable in real life ... We know where a trolley will go if we dont flip a switch because there is a track there. We dont know what Japans military and civilian population would have done had we not flipped the switch. Defenders of the atomic bomb say that our only alternative to the deliberate slaughter of tens of thousands of noncombatants, including babies and elderly women, was a massive land invasion that would have cost millions of lives. They present this as if it was one of two sets of train tracks available. People who were very involved at the time disagree. Again, Eisenhower said the Japanese were about to surrender. Eisenhower told his biographer that he expressed to War Secretary Harry Stimson his grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of face. Was Eisenhower right that the atomic bomb was no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives? I dont know! Neither do you! Theres a lot of uncertainty here. Among the classic arguments for the course America did take is Paul Fussells 1981 essay Thank God for the Atom Bomb . Also relevant were the lives of people still under brutal Japanese occupation. What effect would each choice have on how long their subjugation lasted? Why Are There So Few Great Comedy Movies Today? In conversation with Noam Dworman, the owner of the Comedy Cellar, the economist Tyler Cowen asks that question and puts forth a hypothesis: Cowen : Why are there so few great comedy movies today? And TV shows, for that matter. It used to be top TV shows were comedies not all of them Seinfeld the clearest example. Now for a long time, HBO, dramas. What happened? Dworman : The obvious answer that most people would say is because you cant make those jokes anymore. Most of the classic comedies had jokes which would be considered off-limits today. Cowen : But theyre not mostly that politically incorrect. Seinfeld is less politically incorrect than Curb Your Enthusiasm , but theres not a Seinfeld of today, is there? In movies, you can go pretty far out. Most of the funny movies from the past, like Bringing Up Baby its pretty funny. Its not politically incorrect at all. Dworman : [laughs] Its coming around, that kind of comedy. I dont know, Tyler. Do you have a thought on that? Cowen : We seem to be getting funny bits in different ways, and theyre more condensed, and they come at a higher information density, and we can pull them off the internet or TikTok whenever we want. It seems that sates us, and we enjoy the feeling of control over comedy, which you dont quite get when youre watching, say, a hundred-minute film. That would be my hypothesis. Dworman : Does that mean that there are movies that have been made which are funny and would deserve the success of a classic comedy, theyre just not getting appreciated? Cowen : No, they dont get made... it could also be audiences are themselves less funny. Theyre more depressed, theyre more neurotic. We see some of that in the data, at least for young people . I suspect thats not the main reason, but part of it. Dworman : I dont know. Sometimes there isnt a reason. Sometimes theres just a golden age. Lets compare it to music. Why is music a little bit stagnant now ? Maybe thats just the ebb and flow of where its at, and were trying to correlate it to something, but it has nothing to do with that. Maybe its just that the great talents are doing other things now, or a lot of the jokes have been told. I dont know, but there are definitely golden ages of every art form. Cowen : But comedy is still in a golden age; its just not in movies and television. Do you disagree with the premise and believe there are great comedy movies today? Freddie deBoer believes that the concept of equality of opportunity is a mess and that society ought to abandon it as a lodestar. He writes : What happens if someone reaches their potential by becoming a D+ student who just barely graduates from high school and ends up a ditch digger making $24,000 a year? What if a life spent in material deprivation and constant financial insecurity is the outcome of a genuinely equal opportunity? What if someones potential is correctly fulfilled when they end up in a life thats barren of wealth, stability, and success? If equality of opportunity means anything, then it must include such outcomes. I constantly have to make this point when discussing education, a field where failure is seen as inherently a matter of injustice and yet one where there will always be a distribution of performance - a distribution with a bottom as well as a top. What if someone faces a completely equal playing field and, through the full expression of their talent and hard work, ends up totally ill-equipped for the job market? I find that you can get people on board with that kind of outcome if the loser in question came from great privilege; people like the cosmic karma of the most privileged being severely downwardly mobile. But what if someone is born into poverty and stays there, and that static outcome genuinely reflects them operating at the peak of their potential? That would have to constitute a successful implementation of a system of equal opportunity. And yet most people would likely still feel sympathy for that person and demand a better life for them. If that sympathy is systemic rather than individual, it would seem to suggest that equal opportunity is not in fact what people see as the correct system. Rather, equal opportunity functions as a moral backstop for the system that theyre already in - and provided the story of equal opportunity is always told in terms of the dedicated and smart person who rises above hardscrabble beginnings, it remains emotionally satisfying. But the person who gets all of the required opportunity and still struggles his way to a life of destitution is just as much a story of equal opportunity as that one. It seems to me that in a wealthy society, equality of opportunity is most defensible when paired with a social safety net that creates a minimum standard of living available to everyone. Of course, what that floor ought to be is contested. Is it enough for a just society to meet basic survival needs? Is John Rawls right that we ought to maximize the status of the least well-off? Should everyone be guaranteed a job and a living wage? One could pose as many questions as there are visions of how we ought to be. But once nutritious food, comfortable shelter, and health care are available to those unable to get them, it seems to me that equality of opportunity to excel becomes a quite defensible way to organize a society. If realized in the U.S., it would certainly improve on the status quo.