Master Feed : The Atlantic |
- The White House Blinks on the Obamacare Employer Mandate
- 3 Reasons Why Obama Wants to Expand Trade With Africa
- The Winklevoss Twins Want You to Invest in Bitcoin—Don't!
- The Supreme Court's LGBT Catch-22
- Traveling Man
- Her Big Idea: Gabby Giffords
- 'Use Your Voice'
- NBA Stars John Wall and Dwight Howard Try to Speak Chinese
- A Burnout Fix: Occupational Health
- Do the U.S. and EU Need Couples Therapy?
- International Astronomical Union Decides Against Naming Pluto Moon 'Vulcan'
- 'The Mom Test'
- What Do Chinese Students Think of American History?
- The <i>Great Gatsby</i> Line That Came From Fitzgerald's Life—and Inspired a Novel
- Texas State Capitol
- Crazy Video of the Russian Rocket Exploding Over Kazakhstan
- The World's Biggest Bands Are British and Its Biggest Solo Artists Are American
- The Secret to Cutting Government Waste: Savings by a Thousand Cuts
- What Accountable Health Care Means
- 10 Reasons Why Everyone Is Protesting
- How the Sharing Economy Can Save Summer Vacation
- For Chinese Students Abroad, Personal Freedoms—Not Political—Are What Matter
- How Strong Is the Female Sex Drive After All?
- Meet the Hacktivist Who Wants to Warn Syrians About Incoming Missiles
- The CIA Doesn't Need a 'Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade' to Keep Secrets
| The White House Blinks on the Obamacare Employer Mandate Posted: 02 Jul 2013 03:18 PM PDT  Reuters With less than six months to go before the Affordable Care Act takes effect, the administration has decided not to implement a crucial element of the law for one year. The requirement that businesses provide insurance to their workers is being pushed back to 2015, Bloomberg News scoops: Businesses won't be penalized next year if they don't provide workers health insurance after the Obama administration decided to delay a key requirement under its health-care law, two administration officials said. Of course, it's the individual mandate to purchase insurance that has gotten the most attention and was the most disputed ground during the Supreme Court case challenging the law last year: Could the government force individuals to buy insurance or else pay a fee? The justices decided, ultimately, that it could -- but only if the fee was labeled as a tax. Ironically, though, the individual mandate isn't expected to cover that many Americans, since most of us have insurance through our employer, Medicare, or Medicaid. That brings us to the employer mandate. Businesses with 50 employees or more are now required to offer insurance to anyone who works at least 30 hours per week. If they don't, they -- like uncovered individuals -- have to pay a fine. (You can learn more from Sarah Kliff here). But businesses have complained that the requirements for reporting compliance information are byzantine and onerous, and that the 50-employee bar is simply too low. And now, the Treasury Department has basically conceded that they've got a point. In a blog post with the rather anodyne title "Continuing to Implement the ACA in a Careful, Thoughtful Manner," Assistant Secretary for Tax Policy Mark Mazur wrote: We have heard concerns about the complexity of the requirements and the need for more time to implement them effectively. We recognize that the vast majority of businesses that will need to do this reporting already provide health insurance to their workers, and we want to make sure it is easy for others to do so. We have listened to your feedback. And we are taking action. This all threatens to leave a huge hole in coverage, of course, and so Mazur also implores employers not to hold off on coverage. The idea is that while there will be a one-year gap in enforcement, the lag is meant to allow businesses to get up to speed, not to procrastinate. But for the time being, the administration has blinked. 
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| 3 Reasons Why Obama Wants to Expand Trade With Africa Posted: 02 Jul 2013 02:23 PM PDT  AP When Western officials have historically visited Africa, the major themes have been things like combatting poverty and fighting horrible diseases. So it was a bit of a departure for Obama to focus on investment and trade instead. On his trip to the continent, Obama announced a $7 billion plan to build more power plants, invest in institutions, and work more closely with African heads of state. He also unveiled a new program, Trade Africa, to boost imports and exports both with and within the continent, starting with the East African region known as the EAC. "The EAC is an economic success story, and represents a market with significant opportunity for U.S. exports and investment," the White House said in a fact sheet. Overall, U.S. trade with Africa has been tiny relative to the continent's size:  Quartz Nigeria is the U.S.'s largest trading partner in Africa, but it only ranks 31st among all countries, as David Yanofsky reported at our sister site, Quartz.  The biggest obstacles are the myriad infrastructure and governance issues -- everything from bad roads to corrupt leaders to clunky customs processes -- that prevent goods from moving between African borders as smoothly as they could. But with the new initiatives, the U.S. seems to be looking to fix that, and here's why: 1) Africa's middle class is ballooning: Sub-Saharan Africa is home to six of the world's 10 fastest-growing economies, and its middle class is set to triple to more than one billion people in the next half-century. About 42 percent of Africans will be earning between $4 and $20 a day (as opposed to $1 or $2, the general definition of "living in poverty") by 2060, according to a report from the African Development Bank. It's population is also incredibly young -- more than half of Africans are under 20 -- so in a few decades it will have a massive working-age population. Of course, this GDP growth doesn't always get spread evenly among the population, and some countries have handled their booms better than others. Still, where there's purchasing power, there's business interest. 2) Many multinationals are looking for new, untapped markets: There are only so many Americans who Harley Davidson can convince to buy a giant motorcycle. But Africa's growth will eventually create whole new population of people who will, for the first time, have spending money. "If you take a company like Unilever or Walmart, companies have an eye on this large retail opportunity," Haroon Bhorat, a professor of economics at the University of Cape Town, told me. "Walmart now has fairly good global footprints, but nothing in Africa [until recently]. They realize there is a huge consumer market." As mining in Africa grows, Caterpillar is selling enormous trucks for hauling ore to Mozambique. Harley had a biker convention at a South African resort. Nestle recently said it wants to triple its African business by 2020. China and other Asian countries have also doubled their African trade since 1990, so at this point the U.S. and Europe risk falling even further behind in emerging markets unless they jump in. 3) "Aid for trade": Obama's visit signals a shift away from aid transfers -- the more traditional way the Western world has engaged with Africa -- and toward building trade relationships. But his recommendation to develop infrastructure also resembles the "aid for trade" philosophy of international development, or the idea that donations should aim to help countries create the kinds of systems that make buying and selling easier. What's more, much of Africa's growth has been fueled by the extraction of minerals, which most economists agree is not the best path to creating lasting, sustainable growth like the kind Asia has seen. Instead, countries need manufacturing and services industries in order to truly cement their "rising" status. "Africa's growth tends to be concentrated on a limited range of commodities and the extractive industries," a recent report by the African Development Bank states. "These sectors are not generating the employment opportunities that would allow the majority of the population to share in the benefits." Of course, many U.S. companies remain averse to investing in risky places, and only a few African nations have fully made the transition from utter poverty to "success stories." But if the initiative works, increased trade could provide the kind of broad economic base the continent needs in order to make even greater gains in reducing poverty. 
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| The Winklevoss Twins Want You to Invest in Bitcoin—Don't! Posted: 02 Jul 2013 01:54 PM PDT  (Reuters) Henry Ford brought cars to the masses. Mark Zuckerberg brought social networking. And the Winklevoss twins are trying to bring ... Bitcoins. Remember Bitcoin? It's the virtual currency that isn't really a currency. It was developed back in 2009 by the pseudonymous hacker(s) "Satoshi Nakamoto." The idea was to create money that central banks couldn't print and governments couldn't tax. It would give people an anonymous way to buy and sell things over peer-to-peer networks without middlemen -- or inflation! -- taking a cut. Indeed, the supply of Bitcoins is tightly regulated: anyone can "mine" for them by running a computationally-taxing program, but there isn't that much digital gold in them thar computers. No matter how many people become virtual prospectors, the supply of Bitcoins will grow at a predetermined rate -- until 2040. After that, no more will be created. In other words, Bitcoin has a massive deflationary bias that makes it semi-worthless as a currency. Because the supply of Bitcoins can't increase to meet increased demand, the price should go up. But if the price goes parabolic, nobody will want to part with their Bitcoins to, you know, actually buy things. (Except to buy illegal things). After all, why use your Bitcoins to buy things today when your Bitcoins will be worth more tomorrow? Now, this hoarding can set off a speculative bubble: People buy because the price is going up. And what if the price stops going up? Well, Bitcoin "investors" will try to take their profits off the table, which will push prices down even more, which will lead to even more selling, and so on. That's how Bitcoin went from $48 to $266 in a month -- and then to $105 in a day. It's not clear why anybody would want Bitcoins. Normal people don't care about hiding what they buy from the government. They're happy with Paypal. And they definitely don't want to go through the hassle of actually getting Bitcoins, which, as Kevin Roose discovered, involves either giving a "currency dealer" your bank account info or sending cash to a Enter the Winklevii. America's most famous rowing-twins-who-love-pistachios-and-think-they-invented-Facebook want to make it easy for the little guy to gamble on crypto-currencies. On Monday, they filed paperwork with the SEC to launch an exchange-traded-fund (ETF) that would trade like a stock, and track the price of Bitcoin -- and only Bitcoin. Of course, as the prospectus for the delightfully-named Winklevoss Bitcoin Trust makes clear, there are plenty of risks speculating in a digital asset with no inherent value. Aside from the volatility of the Bitcoin market -- which is perfectly set up for manipulation -- there's the danger that the virtual coins in the Winklevii's virtual "vault" could get hacked, and vanish like that. And then there's the biggest risk of all: the government could outlaw Bitcoins at any moment. After all, why would the authorities put up with a currency people use to launder money, evade taxes, and buy narcotics? But the Winklevoss twins are convinced virtual currencies are the hottest thing since virtual friends -- and this time Mark Zuckerberg won't steal their idea! They've already plowed some of their Facebook settlement money into scooping up 1 percent of all the outstanding Bitcoins, and now they want to give everyone else the chance to own part of THE FUTURE -- provided you pay them a fee. Here's how Tyler Winklevoss evangelized for this brave, new currency a few months ago:
He should try putting his faith in history. Inflexible currencies are nothing new, and have failed everywhere they've been tried. Bitcoin can only "work" as long as it's an alternative currency that only techno-utopians care about. And even then, it wouldn't really be a currency. It'd be the bubbliest dotocm stock of them all. That'd be a hard lesson investors would learn for themselves if the Winklevii's Bitcoin ETF somehow got approved (which it won't). But the good news is if, against all odds, the Winklevoss twins' latest foray into business ends up getting turned into a movie, there's a ready-made title: The Muppet Network. 
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| The Supreme Court's LGBT Catch-22 Posted: 02 Jul 2013 01:00 PM PDT  Joshua Roberts/Reuters Last week the Supreme Court issued two of the greatest wins and setbacks to civil rights we've seen in the last 50 years. In ruling key elements of the Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional, it validated the love I share with my wife and that of other LGBT couples whose relationships have been all but invisible. But instead of opening the floodgates for gay rights to take hold across the country, it may have stalled them, by neutering a key provision of the Voting Rights Act that ended federal oversight of voting-law changes in states with a history of racial discrimination. As a black lesbian raised by my black grandparents from the South, I know all too well the struggles of black Americans to obtain and sustain the vote. And as the former president of the District of Columbia's successful marriage-equality campaign, I've experienced firsthand the plight of the LGBT community as it seeks to emerge from the shadows into the light of full equality. So the decisions last week were personally bittersweet for me. But they also illuminate how critical a fair and open election process is to further advancing LGBT rights, particularly in the South, which is home to some of the most anti-gay laws and policies in the country. Despite the recent momentum behind marriage equality, LGBT people still have a ways to go to achieve full equality. There are still no explicit nondiscrimination protections for LGBT workers, which means they can be legally fired in more than half the states in the country simply because they are LGBT. The 2 million children being raised by LGBT parents are left economically vulnerable under antiquated laws and family policies, and LGBT youth face burdens of biased school policies, homelessness, and over-criminalization. All of these issues are compounded for LGBT people of color like myself and are exacerbated for LGBT people living in the South. More than half of the 19 states that have no LGBT-inclusive laws or protections whatsoever are located in the South, including Texas, South Carolina, and Virginia -- states that were covered under the Voting Rights Act preclearance statute, but began moving forward with laws to restrict voting less than 48 hours after the Supreme Court's decision to strike it down. This stifling of the democratic process will make it more difficult to upend the layers of anti-gay laws on the books in these states and others across the South. Progress will require the election of fresh pro-equality lawmakers who will vote to repeal constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage, and who will enact laws to protect LGBT people from discrimination in employment and housing. It will require an electorate ready to thwart or support relevant ballot measures as necessary. In short, it will be even more difficult to achieve the full freedom to work or to marry without the unobstructed freedom to vote. The voter-suppression tactics that were successfully blocked by VRA's preclearance requirement last year were clearly aimed at disenfranchising the "rising American electorate" -- the growing coalition of people of color, millennials, and others voters who are more likely to support progressive candidates and causes in general and LGBT rights in particular. Recent polls show that a majority of millennial, black, and Hispanic voters now support marriage equality. Other surveys show that African Americans also demonstrate close to unanimous support for basic equal rights for LGBT people and believe it's important to solve the issues of housing and workplace discrimination, bullying, and hate crimes that persist. And these would-be voters don't just believe in these issues, they show up at the polls to elect candidates who share their values, especially African American voters. During the 2012 presidential election African Americans turned out in enormous numbers, casting a higher percentage of votes than white voters for the first time on record. Ninety-four percent of these votes went to President Obama, with the vast majority going to like-minded lawmakers down-ballot who support LGBT rights. Black voters also helped to usher in marriage equality in Maryland, demonstrating their highest levels of support at the polls to date. Simply put, progressive ideas, including LGBT rights, advance when people of color and young people vote. So it's not surprising that states most hostile to LGBT equality are also the strongest proponents of voters-suppression measures. Voter-ID laws fragment the electoral power of voters of color and make it more difficult for them to cast ballots, thereby clearing the field for anti-gay forces to win. The enthusiasm of the rising American electorate is a direct result of the success of the Voting Rights Act, which ensured that their votes would be counted fairly. Without the check it provided, the progressive voices critical to advancing LGBT issues may be silenced in future elections, drowning out our quest for full equality. 
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| Posted: 02 Jul 2013 12:50 PM PDT I am bursting with things to tell you guys--things I've seen in the last week. I started out in at the Ideas Festival and then found myself in Chicago (in Bricktown today) rolling with an eviction team. In between this I'm reading Rousseau for the first time and having my mind blown. Like dig this: The strongest is never strong enough to be always the master, unless he transforms strength into right, and obedience into duty. How real is that? It's not just enough for me to subdue you, I must make your subjugation into something more than "I've got more glocks and Techs than you." Power has to be sanctified. Charlemagne must have the Pope. Subjugation must be official. Must be biblical. Must be scientific. Here's something else: Even if we assume this terrible right to kill everybody, I maintain that a slave made in war, or a conquered people, is under no obligation to a master, except to obey him as far as he is compelled to do so. By taking an equivalent for his life, the victor has not done him a favour; instead of killing him without profit, he has killed him usefully. So far then is he from acquiring over him any authority in addition to that of force, that the state of war continues to subsist between them: their mutual relation is the effect of it, and the usage of the right of war does not imply a treaty of peace. A convention has indeed been made; but this convention, so far from destroying the state of war, presupposes its continuance. This is exactly what I was trying to get at in my Civil War piece from a few years back. America's slave society was a kind of of "useful killing." To strip a child from their mother in 1845 and sell the child to Mississippi is not literal death. But that child is no longer in the mother's world, and will never be again. To the mother, imagining the child in Mississippi is as "real" as imagining the child in Limbo. Also I've been reading the Bible: Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. I sort of love that. These are the kind of words that could inspire you to a great principle--or a psychotic one. I leave for France on Friday. Won't be back until the end of the summer. I feel like I've got that plug jacked into my head from The Matrix. Except nothing these days comes across with the clarity of, "I know Kung-Fu." It's all a scramble. More soon. 
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| Posted: 02 Jul 2013 12:38 PM PDT Former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords joined her husband Mark Kelly and Andrea Mitchell for a conversation about gun control on Sunday at the Aspen Ideas Festival. It has been two and a half years since she and 18 other people were shot by Jared Lee Loughner during a constituent meeting in Arizona. Beside sharing her goal the for the next five years, which is quite romantic and adorable, she sums up how she feels about America's future after her ordeal. Courtesy of the Aspen Institute 
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| Posted: 02 Jul 2013 12:30 PM PDT  About 12 minutes before midnight last Tuesday, senator Leticia Van de Putte stood on the floor of the Texas Senate, a microphone in her hand. Her colleague Wendy Davis had been filibustering an omnibus anti-abortion bill for most of the day. The bill would have shut down 37 of the 42 abortion clinics in the state, severely restricted the administration of RU-486 (the abortion pill) in rural areas, and banned abortions after 20 weeks, among other things. All of these measures failed to pass in the regular legislative session. The Texas Republicans had introduced the bill during a special 30-day legislative session that has laxer rules than the regular one. Tuesday was day 30 of the special session, and if the bill did not pass the Senate before midnight it would die and never be law. The Texas GOP was probably assuming it would sail through with little fanfare. What supporters of the bill did not count on was the work of a team of activists, the strategy of the Democrats in the Texas House, the physical and mental fortitude of the filibustering Senator Wendy Davis, and the power of thousands of voices raised together. Davis' filibuster had fallen apart around 10:30 pm as the Republicans in the Senate challenged it with parliamentary procedure and questions about whether Davis had stayed on topic. Van de Putte had only returned to Austin hours before, coming directly from her father's funeral in San Antonio. With almost no time to grieve, Van de Putte arrived at the capitol, she told me, "so drained, so exhausted...'I have nothing left. I have nothing emotionally.'" It was another woman--the wife of Senator Royce West, Carol West--who encouraged Van de Putte to join the parliamentary fight that was taking place on the floor of the Senate following the end of Davis' filibuster. Van de Putte said that Carol told her, "You're here but you're not here. You need to speak up. You've got to engage. Use your voice." The she said the words the got Van de Putte going, "I know your Dad. He was so proud of you. Honor his memory by fighting." The minutes were ticking away and as midnight approached, the president of the Senate tried to move to a vote on the bill. Van de Putte realized this and "I kept trying, thinking, 'I'm going to move to adjourn,'" she told me. "I'm going to use every parliamentary trick I knew." But you can't argue parliamentary procedure if you aren't recognized by the president of the Senate and allowed to speak. "I would not get recognized," she said. "I was jumping up and down. Dan Patrick [a Republican Senator] in front of me got recognized. I was screaming, 'Did you not hear me? Did you not hear me and refuse to recognize me?'" When Van de Putte finally got her chance right around 11:48 pm, these words just came out of her mouth, unplanned: "At what point must a female senator raise her hand or her voice to be recognized over her male colleagues?" The crowd in the gallery immediately started yelling and didn't stop. The senators could not hear each other and so they couldn't take a vote. When the people outside the gallery figured out what was happening, they started yelling, too, and it spread out into the Texas capitol rotunda. So, two minutes after Van de Putte's statement, I found myself standing near the center of that rotunda. My pink uterus necklace was around my neck and I was wearing an orange shirt. (We had chosen that color months before because we thought it would stick out in a crowd.) Thousands of other Texans in orange clothing surrounded me and filled up the three floors above where I was standing. They crowded into overflow rooms in the capitol basement and packed into the wide hallway that led to the gallery of the Texas Senate chamber. And inside the Senate gallery, hundreds of abortion rights supporters were up out of their seats. And I, like everyone else in all of these parts of the capitol, was screaming my face off. For just over ten minutes, we stood as a collective one. American society tells women that they're supposed to be calm. When women raise their voices or shout about the ways they are hurt by the system, they are painted as dramatic, hysterical, or irrational. Yet, here we were, thousands of us, literally yelling together in an effort to destroy a bill we saw as deeply sexist. For many of us who were there, the yelling was a cathartic release against the stringent, often unfair rules that we had faced over the previous six days. Before the House voted on the bill, they held a committee hearing where citizens could show up to testify, each person allotted three minutes. But after 8 hours and with over 200 people left to testify, the Republican committee chair cut off testimony. Then on Sunday, while people were sitting in the gallery of the House watching the debate and the eventual vote on the bill, they were told by officials that they could not make noise and could not even shake their hands (the American Sign Language sign for applause). Finally, on Tuesday, as Republicans used questionable parliamentary procedures to end Davis' filibuster, the crowd in the gallery responded loudly and angrily. The president of the Senate, at the behest of a Republican senator, reminded those in the attendance that he had the power to arrest them and hold them for up to 48 hours if they did not follow the rules of decorum. Amanda Woog, who had spent seven hours that day in the gallery and was in an auditorium watching the proceedings on a large screen with other protesters, said that people in the gallery "were so scared" because they felt like they could be removed or the gallery cleared for even the smallest infraction. "We were tip-toeing, trying to be silent." Jennifer Longoria described it this way: We were in orange. There were so many of us. It was a huge presence. We were not acknowledged except to hush us. That was the only time our presence was acknowledged - to calm us down or to remind us to behave. There was never any acknowledgement that it was a good thing to take part in the process....They literally did everything they could to pretend we didn't exist. Van de Putte believes that the loud response from the gallery "was about women's healthcare, but it was about much more. ... How many times in class did you raise your hand but they called on a boy? How many times at work did you stay later but the guy who worked less got the promotion?" Ash Hall, who had spent hours in the gallery, said that Van de Putte's words were "a beautiful point that illustrated not only what was happening in that room but the entirety of the issue. What is it going to take for women to be recognized over men, to have their voices heard?" The sound got "so loud that the building started vibrating. That's a granite building." Outside the gallery doors, the wide hallway was packed with people. Dara Silverman said that they couldn't actually hear much of what was going on in the gallery. "We were depending on social media," she said. But they also had Brittany Yelverton, a community organizer for Planned Parenthood of Greater Texas. According to Silverman, Yelverton was standing right at the doors of the gallery, watching the proceedings. Silverman said, "Brittany came out, raised her arms up, and said, 'Yell! Yell!' Everyone started screaming. It spread throughout the capitol. We were all yelling at the top of our lungs. It felt like it went on forever." Katherine Patton, who was on the main floor of the capitol rotunda, three floors down from the gallery and the hallway just outside of it, said that she heard a man above her say something along the lines of, "we need to make a lot of noise now. Then everyone started yelling. I've never heard noise like that." Cheasty Anderson was also in the rotunda. She did not hear anyone telling people to yell. Instead, "all of a sudden, this thunder of noise was coming from above us. The acoustics of the capitol made it sound like thunder. We looked up instinctively. One by one the levels of gallery started screaming. It was louder than anything I've ever heard in my whole life." Senator Van de Putte said that in the gallery, at one point, she "felt a boom" then the sound got "so loud that the building started vibrating. That's a granite building." All of the overflow rooms where protesters could watch the proceedings on a screen via a live-stream are below the main floor of the rotunda, two or three stories below ground. Cassandra Johnson, who was in one of those rooms, said that "we could hear [the yelling] the basement, down the hall. All we could hear was screaming everywhere." Courtney Barge said it was "a roar" and Rob Ryland said you could both hear it "and feel it." We literally shook the Texas capitol. Ash Hall called the sound "beautifully deafening." Representative Jessica Farrar was on the Senate floor that night. She was on the House committee the previous Thursday that heard all those hours of testimony. As leader of the House Democratic Caucus, she fought hard that Sunday on the House floor along with a bevy of her colleagues. She, like many people I interviewed, said, "it is hard to describe" how she felt listening to those women and men yell. "I was in awe at the level of participation, the level of concern for women," she said. "I was just," she pauses to think, "in huge admiration of everybody that was there and participated because they spoke up. They didn't take it." Ash Hall described her experience: I remember getting to a point where I was continuing to yell and to clap, but I started crying, just very, very hard, because I was so proud of everyone in that room, and out in the hallways and the rotunda, I knew exactly what we doing and the message we were sending to all the people watching as well as the people on the floor. This was an entire community of people that came together and were standing up for their rights. And just to be a part of that and also a witness to it was a powerful thing. Ellen Sweets, who had been in the gallery since 10:15 am, said that it was "electric. It was as though the women of Texas finally - finally - were internalizing what a small group of people have been attempting to inflict on all the women on Texas." Arlene Cornejo said that she's "never felt more empowered, more rejuvenated actually. It was amazing." Amanda Woog said it "felt liberating" because it was a sign that "we will no longer be silenced." For Cheasty Anderson it was a combination of feelings: "I felt completely untethered, everything that held me quiet, everything that had held me back from fully engaging in the process. The most freeing feeling in the world. At the same time, I felt terrified, watching the clock. Every minute seemed to take an hour." Katherine Patton had trouble finding the words she wanted to use. She said, "I'm struggling to find the right adjectives because 'rage' and 'outrage' feel very negative and violent. And it wasn't that at all. It was like a pure positive force. I honestly felt like we were a part of something so powerful and we had for the first time, as this whole thing unfolded, it felt like the people were being heard." Senator Van de Putte said the response was both "intensely gratifying and so humbling." Both she and Representative Farrar give the credit for that final ten-to-twelve-minute stretch to the thousands of Texans in the capitol. Van de Putte said, "once they started and realized they could run out the clock, they did the filibuster. It was a manifestation of the people finding their voice. This is how civic engagement is supposed to be. " Farrar simply said, "I observed a citizen's filibuster." Many people there that night not only were thinking of that particular moment or the days and hours leading up to it. What seems perhaps most striking and most exciting about those beautifully loud minutes is what they made people there feel about the future. Arlene Cornejo said, "those who were in attendance and those who were watching realized, 'This is a pivotal moment.'" Ellen Sweets called it a "galvanizing moment. It took forever for us to get here but we are in it now. I don't think that spirit's going away." Rob Ryland was there that night with his 15-year-old daughter. He said she is now "harassing me about the next thing. This completely engaged her." When I asked Courtney Barge's six-year-old daughter who was there with her that night if she wanted to attend another political event, she said, "Yes, very much." Though our voices, powerful and positive, filibustered the bill, Governor Rick Perry has called a second special session and it is already underway. It is not clear right now what our chances are in this particular fight. But last Tuesday night, as we gathered as a collective progressive group for those glorious minutes, Cheasty Anderson said it was like looking at "what the future may be like" in Texas. Then she added, "and it looks a lot better than what it looks like right now." 
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| NBA Stars John Wall and Dwight Howard Try to Speak Chinese Posted: 02 Jul 2013 11:35 AM PDT  China's Yao Ming enjoyed a successful NBA career until injuries forced his retirement in 2011. (Richard Carson/Reuters)The NBA is a big, big deal in China, where the success of former Houston Rockets center Yao Ming triggered a surge of interest in basketball. Even two years after injuries forced the 7 foot 6 Yao to retire, Chinese fans continue to follow the league with intense interest. Meanwhile, China's own professional basketball league has lured once-marquee players like Stephon Marbury and Tracy McGrady to the Middle Kingdom. Basketball players aren't paid for their linguistic chops, but that doesn't stop the more adventurous of them from trying. In this video, the Chinese ex-NBA player Yi Jianlian "interviews" John Wall of the Washington Wizards and Dwight Howard of the (for now) Los Angeles Lakers and the results, well, speak for themselves. How'd they do? Well, let's just say that when Wall and Howard visit China this summer, they're going to need interpreters. Nevertheless, as any foreigner who has gone to China could tell them, they'll get points just for trying. If only the same was true of basketball. 
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| A Burnout Fix: Occupational Health Posted: 02 Jul 2013 11:28 AM PDT  f-l-e-x/flickr This past week, discussions of the U.S. doctor shortage dominated the health op-ed sections of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post, among others. In the current Washington Monthly, as James Hamblin discussed here yesterday, Phillip Longman addressed the open secret that the most academically prestigious medical residency programs routinely train the fewest number of primary care physicians. Concerns about salaries, student debt, and physician burnout discourage these students from staying in medicine -- and, more importantly, from selecting primary care and preventive medicine specialties as a career. Yet few if any writers addressing the doctor shortage describe a structural component of medical training that dissuades students and residents from long-term employment as physicians: American medical trainees receive next to no specialized training in worker health and safety. Where does that leave me, the medical student who wants to be a primary care provider, but is worried she is going to burn out before the work begins? Physician burnout -- a symptom cluster reflecting feelings of emotional exhaustion, low personal accomplishment, and depersonalization and isolation -- is a psychiatric epidemic in most industrialized countries. While burnout itself is not a DSM-5 diagnosis, the resultant anxiety disorders, depressive disorders, and suicide are. (For those interested in a more feeling version of this feeling, New York internist Danielle Ofri has characterized physician burnout in her new book What Doctors Feel .) Medical trainees work in an underfunded patient care system, then immerse themselves in the service of patients whose demands they cannot meet alone. Deprived of institutional supports in the medical community for burnout prevention, the experience of medical training detracts those who would try full-time practice, in particular primary care practice, from continuing. Physician burnout is a key cause of the doctor shortage, and one we can reverse if we train happier doctors. Happier doctors are better educated doctors: A 2013 American Journal of Surgery pilot study of surgery residents suggests that residents are more likely to identify burnout in themselves if you teach them how to diagnose burnout. General surgery residents, as it happens, are more likely than most specialists to experience burnout. According to a 2012 study in the Archives of Internal Medicine, preventive care has the lowest burnout rate of any medical specialty in America . It is therefore no accident that many preventive medicine physicians specialize in worker health and safety, or "occupational and environmental medicine." The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) health as "identification and control of the risks arising from physical, chemical, and other workplace hazards in order to establish and maintain a safe and healthy working environment," hazards that "may include chemical agents and solvents, heavy metals such as lead and mercury, physical agents such as loud noise or vibration, and physical hazards such as electricity or dangerous machinery." Occupational physicians support patients who suffer from work-related injuries. They work in the tradition of Irving Selikoff, the researcher at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City who linked asbestos exposure to mesothelioma, a rare lung cancer. Their work may take them into political advocacy on behalf of large groups of workers who share similar pathology. As preventive medicine specialists, occupational physicians are in high demand as primary care providers. The American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine (ACOEM), founded in 1916, today represents just 4,500 American physicians, compared to the estimated 209,000 in primary care in the United States -- and 624,434 overall physicians involved in direct patient care . Occupational physicians may have a primary care practice, a consulting role on a corporate or governmental health and safety initiative, a supervisory position as a military officer overseeing risk factors for illness on and after deployments, or an academic research practice. They may enter the Epidemic Intelligence Service of the Centers for Disease Control on fellowships sponsored by the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health. Entry into one of 28 accredited training programs in the US, covering only 20 states, requires at least a preliminary intern year, and ideally board certification in another primary care specialty (three or more years of training in internal medicine, family practice, etc.). Occupational and environmental medicine residencies, which are supervised by the Association of Occupational and Environmental Clinics, train fewer than 10 residents per class. And so many medical trainees don't know they exist. Where does that leave me, the medical student who wants to be a primary care provider, but is worried she is going to burn out before the work begins? When people ask me about my plans for medical residency, I sure don't tell people, "Oh, occupational and environmental physician!" the way one might say oncologist or cardiologist. They don't have that in American Girl or Playmobil and Richard Scarry: They have fireman and doctor coat and Huckle Cat. When my class got one of its few lectures on occupational health, it was in a short introductory epidemiology case study series thrown in a few free blocks during a course on host defense. An occupational physician was teaching us during the microbiologists' breaks to visit their labs and do lunch. Physical and mental health is formed by experience of the shift work environment, but the vast majority of students never work a job mandating a lunch break until they train on the hospital wards. How can we conceive of ourselves as workers--health care workers represented by a union, the SEIU's Committee of Interns and Residents, no less -- responding to a labor shortage with this knowledge deficit? Working on my master's in public health, I specialized in occupational and environmental health and learned clinical skills I worry I will not be able to use again until I finish my planned residency in primary care. There is almost never time to ask patients about their jobs in a 15-minute "patient encounter." Work injury and underinsurance causes poverty as often as work helps one escape it. Patient care is patient disease is patient work: Eventually you're going to come across workplace-related asthma and musculoskeletal injury and stress after you rule out everything else (and not, one hopes, a career in primary care). If you don't have time to ask patients about their work, you do not get a correct diagnosis--and you do not get compensation, which a 2012 study from the University of California-Davis found was woefully inefficient cost-sharing. There were roughly 4,600 workplace fatalities in 2011, something like twelve workers a day, or 3.5 of every 100,000 workers in the United States. 729 of these workers were born outside the United States. 666 died from simple, fixable problems like slips, trips, and falls. Statistically speaking, it is more dangerous to be a commercial fisherman than to be a first responder, but the same is true of a camel going through the eye of a needle. And we need doctors aware of worker poverty in long-term jobs from which they can alleviate doctor shortages. Occupational medicine, with its social conscience and its great lifestyle for good money, is the best-kept secret in American medicine. Salaries are higher than for most primary care specialties, hours are better, and burnout rates are lower --because these doctors know that they practice medicine right. Occupational medicine rethinks primary care by doing medicine the humane way: by providing doctors and patients with a financial and administrative safety net. Most occupational health patients are insured by their employers and covered by worker's compensation, which improves patient care, as well as physicians' lifestyles, as they do not bear the administrative fallout. The specialty is both good for the worker receiving the service and good to the one providing it. Expanding insurance was the whole goal of Obamacare, and we would do best to expand that vision further by expanding how we train our residents in preventive and occupational medicine. With finance firms, tech start-ups, and biotechnology lobbies out to poach young, frustrated physicians from clinic, medical trainees must be exposed to worker health training so they can design and promote healthy work environments for their peers. It is in everyone's best interest. Physicians who know how to assess whether or not work environments are healthy, and to intervene medically when they are not, are more likely to stay fit for work themselves. We can only reduce doctor shortages with humane working conditions for doctors -- conditions occupational physicians can provide. 
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| Do the U.S. and EU Need Couples Therapy? Posted: 02 Jul 2013 11:10 AM PDT  A member of German Piraten Partei (Pirates party) wears a mask with the portrait of Obama sporting Google Glass during a protest in Berlin's Tiergarten district on June 19, 2013. (Pawel Kopczynski/Reuters) New leaks detailing NSA spying on European delegations have touched a nerve in Berlin, where politicians are calling for Snowden to be given asylum as questions over what Chancellor Angela Merkel knew about Prism grow louder. Over the weekend, German weekly Der Spiegel cited documents provided by former intelligence analyst Edward Snowden that purportedly showed that the NSA had spied on European Union offices in Brussels, Washington, and New York. Using data taps and computer hacks, the agency gained access to the EU's computer system, email, and confidential documents, the magazine said. Separately late Sunday, The Guardian cited a 2010 NSA PowerPoint slide that was said to detail how the U.S. had spied on several of its allies, among them Japan, Mexico, South Korea, India, and Turkey. The strongest reaction so far to this latest news has come from politicians in Berlin, namely the head of Germany's Green Party, Jürgen Trittin, who for the first time broached the issue of offering Snowden asylum in Germany (or elsewhere in the EU). In an interview with television network ARD, Trittin said, "The Americans criticize the Chinese, but they're acting the same way." He said he thinks Snowden should have safe accommodation in Europe because "he has done Europe a service" and should not "need to seek refuge from despotic regimes that themselves trample on basic rights." Daryl Lindsey, editor of the English edition of Der Spiegel, told me that Europeans are offended by what appears to be an unabashed NSA program aimed at vacuuming up and storing practically any European data it wants. "We've seen a document from an internal presentation of the NSA where they describe information superiority as their vision," Lindsey said. "And that's obviously in conflict with using the spying for security purposes, their original justification." The immediate result of these latest disclosures is threefold. In Germany, a government investigation into what Chancellor Angela Merkel's government knew about Prism will likely come into being this week. In Brussels, kickoff talks on the EU-U.S. trade deal could be hampered or stall out completely over fears that the U.S. government is using its spying system to steal European trade secrets. And, on both sides of the Atlantic, Transatlanticists are struggling to figure out what still binds both sides. "There is growing pressure in Germany for Chancellor Angela Merkel to take a stance on this," Lindsey said. "She's said very little as this has trickled out over the last two weeks. If it turns out that Germany's intelligence agency, the BND, has been openly cooperating with the NSA in this data collection, this could have very serious constitutional implications here. The government will face legal challenges and there could be political consequences for politicians as well." Jan Philipp Albrecht, a German EU parliamentarian, told me that he doesn't see the trade deal going anywhere unless the United States addresses the spying issue. Albrecht also suggested that agreements in place on sharing "banking data, airline passenger data, and on mutual legal assistance" could be called into question in the face of "such a dramatic loss of trust." U.S.-EU policy expert Sergey Lagodinsky suggested that the Obama administration needs to engage in some serious public diplomacy if it hopes to neutralize the harmful effect of what seems to have become a regular, inevitable drip of Snowden leaks. "I think the administration will have to do serious thinking regarding public diplomacy," Lagodinsky said. "I think what's been broken here through these leaks is the trust of Europe's remaining Transatlanticists. The people who are convinced of the special relationship with the United States are slowly running out of arguments of what unites us, and what kind of values we still share. Substituting those values with trade partnerships and trade commonalities is too thin a base for a true alliance and a true partnership." Lagodinsky said Europeans are particularly offended by what they perceive as the U.S. government simply ignoring their anger. "It's important for the United States to understand that there's an identity issue at stake here, a true issue. As in any friendship in a crisis, you can only overcome the crisis by good, open, and transparent therapy. And I think that's what we need -- post-crisis therapy. But this will not substitute substantial improvement in communication and in the way that intelligence is gathered on both sides. Maybe we need to go to something like a framework of treaties or agreements on how and what we need to know about each other's citizens. And what aspects of this intelligence is indeed necessary for security purposes. People just don't trust that there's a security concern here any more." 
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| International Astronomical Union Decides Against Naming Pluto Moon 'Vulcan' Posted: 02 Jul 2013 11:05 AM PDT -thumb-650x606-126205.jpg) NASA The people have spoken and they have been overruled. After a team of researchers discovered two previously unknown moons orbiting Pluto in 2011 and 2012, Mark Showalter, the team's leader, decided to turn to the public for a vote on what the new moons ought to be named. When the polls closed in February, more than 450,000 votes were in, and 'Vulcan' was the clear winner, helped in part by a campaign by the man who had proposed it, William Shatner.  Alas, Shatner's dream was not to be. This morning the International Astronomical Union announced the names of the two moons, and it has chosen Kerberos and Styx, the second and third most popular in the vote. On its website, the IAU explained the reason for its countermajoritarian ruling (emphasis added):
Better luck next time, Captain. 
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| Posted: 02 Jul 2013 10:47 AM PDT ![[IMAGE DESCRIPTION]](http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/science/assets_c/2013/07/5513733609_f06cd737b9_z-thumb-570x380-126212.jpg) At a panel about design at the Aspen Ideas Festival this week, John Doerr asked Flipboard co-founder Mike McCue what advice he'd give to budding entrepreneurs. McCue's reply? Give products the "Mom Test." McCue tells his employees, he said, to think constantly about their mothers' reactions -- real or imagined -- to the things they're building. Think, he said, about how the average person -- the person who could benefit from technology, but who is not necessarily adept with technology -- might react to their product. "You're sitting down at Thanksgiving," McCue said, "and your mom asks, 'So, what are you doing? What are you building?'" "And if you start to give an answer, and her eyes are glazing over, and she doesn't really understand what you're saying, you know you're off to a bad start." McCue elaborated. The Mom Test, he said, has three core criteria: 1. understanding Basically, your user needs to get what your product is about. She needs to want to use it. And she needs to be able to use it. Bells and whistles aren't much good to you when the average person won't be able to make sense of them or benefit from them. So "when you describe what you're doing," McCue said, "she needs to say, 'Oh, that's really cool. I'd like to use it.'" "And when you think about it," McCue said, "there are very few products that pass all three of those tests." 
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| What Do Chinese Students Think of American History? Posted: 02 Jul 2013 10:43 AM PDT  A map of the United States, in Chinese. (Wikimedia Commons)White male privilege, genocide against Native Americans, slavery and subsequent racial oppression, exploitation of immigrants and laborers, repression of women and homosexuals, and environmental destruction -- teaching American cultural history through a post-modern lens is hardly the most obvious way to promote positive feelings toward the United States. Yet that is precisely what Amy Werbel did during her Fulbright year in China.  MORE FROM TLN
"We were not going to China to make the United States look better than it is -- but rather to share what it feels like to be in a classroom in which everyone is free to scrutinize history without fear," explains Werbel. A professor of Art History at the State University of New York, Werbel taught courses on American culture from the Civil War to World War I and on America in the 1960s at Guangdong Foreign Studies University between August 2011 and July 2012. Werbel's new book Lessons from China: America in the Hearts and Minds of the World's Most Important Rising Generation chronicles her experiences in and out of the classroom. The book captures Werbel's Chinese students in their own words as they grapple with America's tragic and transcendent past and, in doing so, inevitably reflect upon their own country's past, present, and future. Teaching critical thinking is no small feat in any cultural context, but China poses particular challenges. The life-altering college entrance examination (gaokao) epitomizes a systematic emphasis on memorization. (The test is virtually the sole determinant of a student's university placement and subsequent professional opportunities, and it provokes anxieties that have led to cheating scandals and even alleged attacks on exam proctors.) According to Werbel, many of her students had never read primary sources in a history class. Their previous assignments had apparently consisted of regurgitating scholarship from sources vetted by the state's education bureaucracy. Werbel is frank about the challenges and limitations in reaching her students. In a unit on American westward expansion, Chinese student perspectives mirrored the attitudes of most 19th Century Americans. It was possible to get students to empathize with Native Americans but more difficult to see both native and settler communities as equally "civilized" and deserving of a self-defined future. Chinese ethnic minorities have chafed under their government's campaign to develop the country's Western provinces in part through settlement of Han Chinese. During the American westward expansion unit and other periods covered in Werbel's courses, there is an unmistakable sense of déjà vu. It would be nice to think that certain aspects of the U.S. experience could serve as a cautionary tale. But for those of us who may think that mere access to information can undo China's social contradictions -- such as the persistent Han-Uyghur divide -- this book provides a healthy dose of humility. Some of the most profound "lessons" of the book come when Werbel's students teach their professor (and the reader) to view American history in a new light. In their analysis of Fredrick Douglass' autobiography, for example, many students shared the assumption that a person could not be whole without the identity that comes from family and place. One student wrote in English that removal of a slave child from his or her family "is more serious than the segregation or even the genocide because it avoids the cultural links, the inner spiritual essence, be instilled into the new generation [sic]." Only after Werbel visits a family temple in an outlying village during the Spring Festival holiday does she realize how keenly her students empathize with Douglass, who never had the opportunity to know his ancestral home. The course unit covering America's conflict in Vietnam and the Anti-War Movement challenged students. They tended to expect democracy to produce "virtuous" policy outcomes, and when it did not, they strained to understand how this could be possible. One student's written response managed to capture the complexity of the time with the following insight:
This nuanced view of patriotism -- historically rare in the Chinese context and still highly controversial -- has begun to creep into mainstream discourse. In a similar vein, on Sina Weibo, China's Twitter, lawyer and activist Yuan Yulai (@ 袁裕来律师) recently tweeted:
Yuan's tweet went viral with more than 35 thousand retweets, 10,000 comments, and 4,753 thumbs up. Today, China's blogosphere can provide a platform for conversation and exchange of ideas not altogether unlike Professor Werbel's classroom. Of course, the Web is no substitute for face-to-face engagement. Upon completing Lessons from China, the reader is left with an appreciation for the value of international exchange programs like Fulbright. In introducing the fellowship that bears his name, Senator William Fulbright suggested that regular and ongoing intellectual exchange would "continue the process of humanizing mankind to the point, we would hope, that men can learn to live in peace -- eventually even in cooperation in constructive activities rather than compete in a mindless contest of mutual destruction." While Professor Werbel does not claim to have ended the world's "mindless contests," both she and her students gained a bit more mutual empathy and exercised their abilities to see the world as others see it. This kind of emotional intelligence will be critical if both countries are to operate successfully in this interconnected century. This post also appears at Tea Leaf Nation, an Atlantic partner site. 
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| The <i>Great Gatsby</i> Line That Came From Fitzgerald's Life—and Inspired a Novel Posted: 02 Jul 2013 09:53 AM PDT By Heart is a series in which authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature.  Doug McLean In 1939, Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald stirred up one last fiasco--a disastrous and booze-fueled trip to Cuba. They had been separated. Zelda lived in Asheville's Highland Hospital, where she was institutionalized after suffering from anxiety and hearing imaginary voices; Scott left from Hollywood, where a screenwriting job for MGM stalled his fiction and depressed him terribly. We know very little about the trip, except that it was the last time they saw each other. Scott died less than two years later, succumbing to his weakened heart and broken spirit. Zelda perished in a North Carolina asylum, when a fire broke out and she, locked in a room awaiting electroshock therapy, could not escape.
Beautiful Fools: The Last Affair of Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald differs from recent Zelda-themed novels (Z, Call Me Zelda) by maintaining a tight focus on that Cuba trip, two dimmed stars' last grasp at love and happiness. The author, R. Clifton Spargo, dramatizes the few established historical events (we know, for instance, that Scott was beaten up for trying to stop a cockfight) and fills in the gaps and silences with moments of his own invention. Key to his depiction of the couple's torrid relationship is the literary competitiveness that thrived between them. As he writes in his essay for this series, both Zelda and Scott borrowed heavily from life--and from each other--to make their art, and they both criticized the other's plagiaristic tendencies. But what right do writers have to borrow from real people, and what should stay put in the domain of private life? R. Clifton Spargo, a graduate of the doctoral program in literature at Yale University and the Iowa Writer's Workshop, is currently the Provost's Fellow in Fiction at the University of Iowa. He writes the "HI/LO" cultural criticism blog for The Huffington Post and publishes fiction in literary magazines like The Kenyon Review. "It'll show you how I've gotten to feel about--things. Well, she was less than an hour old and Tom was God knows where. I woke up out of the ether with an utterly abandoned feeling and asked the nurse right away if it was a boy or a girl. She told me it was a girl, and so I turned my head away and wept. 'All right,' I said. 'I'm glad it's a girl. And I hope she'll be a fool--that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.'" --Daisy Buchanan, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby R. Clifton Spargo: Invention begins in the middle of things, torn from the messiness of the world around us. Most good writing plunders life, often the most intimate moments in life, but at what cost? As writers we treat our own experiences, and also other people's everyday lives, as the raw material of literature--though it's difficult to tell, as you wade through the now, which experiences will trouble your imagination long and hard enough to contribute to a story worth telling in the long run. As Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald wrote in a rather meta review of her husband's second novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922), "plagiarism begins at home." She had recognized her own diaries and scraps of her love letters repackaged in the book, and she was being playful--and pointed. F. Scott Fitzgerald spent a lifetime eavesdropping on the conversations of his peers, making a study of their character for his future literary characters. Scribbling notes from overheard conversations and inventing dialogue on the fly were part of his writerly process. And he wasn't discreet about it, sometimes interrupting an acquaintance in the middle of a conversation to ask her to repeat some clever phrase. At times his curiosity became prurient, his scrutiny unbearable. When, in the late 1920s, he made a study of his friends Gerald and Sara Murphy for the novel that was to become Tender Is the Night, he tried their nerves so badly that Sara Murphy would later reprimand him, "You can't expect anyone to like or stand a continual feeling of analysis, & sub analysis & criticism . . . you can't have Theories about friends." Zelda's 1922 review, however, was written on a lark--in point of fact, she'd given Scott permission to use her diaries for his second novel. Still, her charge of plagiarism, however playful, haunts me every time I read one of my favorite passages from The Great Gatsby. Early in Gatsby, Nick Carraway, while visiting the Long Island estate of his cousin Daisy Buchanan, learns of Daisy's husband's affair after Tom takes a phone call from his mistress; this intrusion inspires Daisy to confide her marital troubles to Nick, announcing that she's become "pretty cynical about everything." By way of proof, she recounts the story of what she said on the day her daughter was born. The moment is brilliantly staged: almost immediately we begin to wonder, What's real here? What's performance? In recounting the episode, Daisy tells Nick how she broke into tears, but then bore up bravely in order to pronounce her verdict on the all-American girl's life: And I hope she'll be a fool--that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool. Nick Carraway, neither a trusting man nor an altogether trustworthy narrator, doubts the sincerity of Daisy's words. Which sets us to wondering as readers: Would she really have been capable of such grandiloquence immediately after giving birth? The answer is yes, or a qualified yes, since in this case the history behind a famous passage seems as important to its legacy as the final meaning of the words on the novel's page. In actuality Scott stole the words right out of Zelda's mouth, or, to be more accurate, out of the ledger in which he'd jotted down the words his wife said, while still floating on waves of ether, as she learned the sex of her child: "I hope it's beautiful and a fool--a beautiful little fool." It's a brilliant line, and the fictional use Scott makes of it seems to me brilliantly loaded. Still, whenever I think of the backstory of Daisy's famous declaration, I can't help but wonder how one defines the ethics--and who gets to define them?--of cribbing lines from a wife while she's half-gassed and unlikely to recall the strange but lovely phrase she's just uttered. Daisy's staged declaration of a variation on Zelda's phrase works on two levels. We're being asked as readers to see both sides, which is to say, both the inside and outside of a self. Even Daisy, ever self-aware, seems to have anticipated Nick in doubting that her own words can be trusted. If we spend our lives on a social stage, performing emotions, ideas, and acts for others, how are we ever to be sure of the authenticity of our feelings and memories? Might there be holes in her own story of which Daisy herself is half-aware? In the larger sweep of the novel, a sense of irony--which might be defined precisely as those holes puncturing the surface meaning of every direct declaration--attaches to the very idea of the "beautiful fool." Daisy might mean to say there's foolishness in her belief in beauty as the ultimate commodity. A woman raised to be decorative must sooner or later become the occasion of disillusionment--as much for herself as for the men who pursue her. This is the proto-feminist theme of too many a Fitzgerald short story to count ("Winter Dreams" and "The Rich Boy" are the finest examples in this vein). But the idea of the "beautiful fool" also nods to the beauty of those foolish enough to have reckless dreams, unrealistic hopes, untiring aspirations. I'm talking about Gatsby himself, of course, who is a fraud, a criminal, an aristocratic poseur, redeemed only by his uncompromisingly quixotic dream of winning Daisy back. It's Gatsby, not Daisy, who is the novel's truest "beautiful fool." In pilfering the phrase for my new novel, Beautiful Fools: The Last Affair of Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, I was inspired in part by Fitzgerald's nagging reservations about his hero's foolishness, but also by memory of Zelda's playfully nagging charge of plagiarism. How much of the drama in any life belongs on the public stage? And how exactly do our truly private thoughts and our historically lived yet secret hopes inform the dramatic staging of personal lives on which all literary fiction thrives? Historical fiction only makes our ethical worry about the line between private and public selves more urgent because it draws attention to the fact that as authors we're poaching material from documented, historically significant lives. The very act seems to cry, "Plagiarism, plagiarism!" A few years ago novelist Jonathan Lethem butted heads with our culture's copyright-crazed management of everything from pop music to the fine arts, offering an impassioned plea on behalf of plagiarism. Appropriation, mimicry, masked and unmasked quotation--these are the very founts from which creativity springs. Not only that, but insofar as the artist creates a work of art as a gift to society, we ought to be free to borrow from that recreated world as freely as possible. Interestingly, Lethem fails to address literature's most fundamental thieving, its talent for raiding ordinary lives, even those that don't "belong" to the author. In raiding a scene from Fitzgerald's Gatsby and the real-life incident behind it for my title Beautiful Fools, I was drawn in part to the cultural controversy (first provoked by Nancy Milford's fine 1970 biography Zelda) about Scott's use of Zelda's life. Whatever sense we make of Scott's relentless mining of her diaries, letters, and conversation, we have to remember that Zelda played the part of willing collaborator, and she deserves her due as a shaping influence on--not merely a model for--his best fictions. It's also important to note that Scott's free-handed use of their lives only became controversial for the Fitzgeralds during a period in which they fought, as rival authors, over which of them had dibs on the real-life drama of their relationship during Zelda's first major breakdown--material she effectively mined for Save Me the Waltz, and he for Tender Is the Night. In raiding the Fitzgeralds' lives for my historical novel about them, I sought to explore not only the controversies their history provokes about authorship and ownership, but the intrigue their model of romance holds for so many. But if you're an author foolhardy enough to write about the Fitzgeralds--two people ever watching us watching them--you need to find the holes in received history. For me, then, Daisy Buchanan's reference to "beautiful little fools" is as much about what gets left out of any story as it is about what gets included. It's the ultimate invitation to begin again, retelling the tale with new possibility. If you're foolhardy enough to write about the Fitzgeralds--two people ever watching us watching them--you need to find the holes in received history. Entering their lives at a moment when they're off the historical grid gave me license to invent the Fitzgeralds freely. Beautiful Fools came about because I'd long been fascinated by a missing chapter in the Fitzgeralds' love story--a trip Scott and Zelda took to Cuba in 1939. It's effectively a lost trip, with scant reference to it in the vast Fitzgerald archive, and it was the very last time they saw each other. Entering their lives at a moment when they're off the historical grid, so to speak, gave me license to invent the Fitzgeralds freely even as they try, on this final trip, to reinvent themselves and their love affair. It's through that hole in a much-told story--much like the hole in the overly rehearsed tale Daisy recounts for Nick--that a new possibility enters the picture. When Scott and Zelda gamble one last time on their long romance--we have no way of knowing whether something like what I propose in the pages of my novel really happened--they've become beautiful fools, one last time. It's admirable, Scott and Zelda's deep belief that they'll at last be able to conquer their demons, that they're still in some way beautiful, glamorous, and worthy, that they--in a last-ditch effort to salvage a great passion--are on a brave journey and not a fool's errand. It's a chance the careful and the contrived would never dare to take. 
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| Posted: 02 Jul 2013 09:52 AM PDT 
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| Crazy Video of the Russian Rocket Exploding Over Kazakhstan Posted: 02 Jul 2013 08:47 AM PDT Earlier today, a Russian rocket exploded minutes after take-off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. As The New York Times reports:
In the video above, spectators watching from a nearby road. They realize something is wrong at about the 0:32 mark, and from there they narrate the event with a stream of Russian expletives (thanks to Atlantic editor Olga Khazan for help with the Russian). A news broadcast from Rossiya 24, a state channel, gives another perspective of the disaster, albeit with less colorful language ("It seems something is not right"). 
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| The World's Biggest Bands Are British and Its Biggest Solo Artists Are American Posted: 02 Jul 2013 08:38 AM PDT  AP Images The Michael Jackson estate recently announced that the King of Pop had posthumously achieved the milestone of moving one billion records worldwide. The numbers are hard to verify, but if true, they put him in a small club with The Beatles and Elvis Presley. These three artists are the best-selling acts of all time: two American solo singers from humble beginnings, and a group of working-class boys from the north of England.
That fact conforms a rule that becomes more and more noticeable the further down you look on the list of the greatest-selling artist of all time: The biggest bands in the world are British, and the biggest solo artists are North American. The top 20 artists, in order, are The Beatles, Michael Jackson, Madonna, Led Zeppelin, Elton John, Pink Floyd, Mariah Carey, Celine Dion, AC/DC, Whitney Houston, The Rolling Stones, Queen, ABBA, The Eagles, U2, Billy Joel, Phil Collins, Aerosmith, Frank Sinatra, and Barbra Streisand. The list is perfectly split between 10 solo artists and 10 groups. Eight of the 10 solo artists are from North America, while eight of the 10 bands are from outside America, the majority being British. Remarkably, the country that invented rock and roll has not produced any of the top seven rock bands. America's strongest contender, in at No. 8, is often-derided soft-rock stalwarts The Eagles. As Independence Day nears, the history of this divide in musical outputs serves as a reminder of how the cultures of U.S. and its mother country have been distinct yet inextricably twined. The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin have always admitted that their music is a take on American rhythm and blues. Even The Beatles started out performing Chuck Berry covers. American bands, meanwhile, have often needed to make it in England before getting recognized back home, as was recently true of The White Stripes, The Strokes, and The Kings of Leon. (The greatest-selling album by a US band in the UK ever? The Scissor Sisters' debut. Yes, really.) While U2 (not strictly British but signed to a British label with two members born in the UK) were shifting millions of records in the late '80s and '90s, there were arguably two American bands that could have achieved the same worldwide domination. Guns N' Roses and Nirvana both had the combination of anthemic songwriting and compelling stage presence needed to become a true world-beating act. Only one of these bands ever desired to be that big, and for very different reasons, neither was able to produce a sustained run of best-selling albums. At the dawn of the modern music era, though, American solo artists led the way. "For the first 10 years (1953-63) of rock and roll, there were no British musicians involved in recording and having a worldwide impact," says rock historian Barry Drake in an email. "The American '50s models were all solo performers--Elvis, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Buddy Holly, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Sam Cooke, Ray Charles." Even when an ensemble did make it big during that era of American rock and roll, it would be named after the front man--Buddy Holly and The Crickets, Bill Haley and The Comets. The Beatles' name was inspired by Holly's "backing" band, but they broke out as a democratic group--maybe because there was no way of choosing a front man from Paul and John. Until the fab four blew up, Drake points out, even most British recording artists were solo performers like Cliff Richard, Helen Shapiro, and Billy Fury. But when the band of four seemingly equal members did take over the world, appearing on the Ed Sullivan Show on February 9th, 1964, they changed the rules forever--and created the intercontinental rock divide that persists till today. While Motown Records' Berry Gordy realized the attraction of moving the spotlight onto a lead singer by renaming The Supremes "Diana Ross and...", the Beatles were being sold by Capitol as four boys with identical haircuts and matching gray collarless suits. While Michael Jackson was being groomed to leave the Jackson Five from the age of 13, Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin were releasing million-selling albums without a single band member's image on the artwork. The greatest-selling album by a US band in the UK ever? The Scissor Sisters' debut. Yes, really. It's hard to avoid wondering whether political/social mores play a role in the dichotomy. America, after all, likes to think of itself as a land of individualists. Elvis, Jackson, and Madonna all came from humble beginnings, surrounded by poverty and family tragedy. They epitomized the American dream, and so you might argue that the more left-leaning Europeans are happier to celebrate the collectivism of a band. If we look to what's thought to be the most ideologically "right" genre, this theory holds true: Of the 25 greatest selling country-music stars of all time, all are solo artists. The UK's two bestselling solo stars, meanwhile, do not fit the rags-to-riches mold of the American singers, but are rather privileged virtuosos who were in stage school from a very young age (Phil Collins, Elton John.) But an arguably sturdier explanation lies in the way those first two giants, Elvis and The Beatles, influenced listeners, musicians, and recording industries in their respective countries. The most-talented aspiring artists on the east side of the Atlantic, from Bono to Freddy Mercury, wanted to be in a band like the Beatles. In the States and Canada everyone from Madonna to Michael Jackson wanted to be the next King. For evidence, look no further than the two continents' current of-the-moment, globe-conquering phenoms. "We watched that film of The Beatles when they first touched down in America and we saw a real likeness with our personalities," Harry of One Direction said last year. Justin Bieber, meanwhile, had this to say on Argentinian TV: "Elvis... He was cool." 
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| The Secret to Cutting Government Waste: Savings by a Thousand Cuts Posted: 02 Jul 2013 08:00 AM PDT  In 1991, Texas faced a whopping $4.6 billion budget deficit. The legislature asked state Comptroller John Sharp to review the budget to find some face-saving cuts before they raised taxes. Sharp assembled a crack team and not only found a few savings here and there: He found enough to close the entire deficit. And then he kept going. Over the course of the next decade, Sharp's Texas Performance Review (TPR) saved the state $10 billion and won awards for government innovation from admirers as diverse as Harvard and the Heritage Foundation. Sharp and his colleagues were called to Washington to help advise President Clinton and Vice President Gore on a National Performance Review -- whose most famous image was the $400 hammers at the Pentagon -- which resulted in $106 billion in savings the first year and helped to reduce the federal payroll to its lowest level since the Eisenhower Administration. TPR staff also advised California's Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger on a similar state review. My firm eventually absorbed some former TPR staff and adopted its methodology. We have since conducted similar reviews of individual agencies, local governments, or entire state bureaucracies in about a dozen states. Such reviews routinely identify annually recurring savings totaling roughly 5 percent of total operating spending. (By "annually recurring," I mean that cheap gimmicks and one-time savings like selling the state capitol don't count.) Let me give a few favorite examples: By unscrewing the tiny light bulb behind the big plastic display that covers almost the entire front of most soda machines -- which serves no purpose but to make the can of Coke look more delicious -- Texas saved about $200,000 a year in energy costs. (There are a lot of soda machines on state property!) Colorado used three different entities to deliver mail on the state office campus, including two government agencies and a private firm (proving that privatization alone isn't always the answer). You could literally stand outside the capitol and photograph three mail trucks following each other around from building to building. And West Virginia had never properly calibrated the salt-spreaders on its snowplows, so that whenever it snowed it was dumping far more salt on the highways than needed. Simply adjusting these devices saved the state about $3 million a year. None of these make a significant dent in structural deficits -- but put together 100 small changes like that and, as the saying goes, pretty soon you're talking real money. It's hard for anyone to be against that (well, except salt companies). Of course, while such items make for good stories, and can certainly add up, that's not where most savings arise. The biggest item in any review we've conducted is, not surprisingly, fraud -- particularly in health-care programs. The biggest savings are generally achievable in health and human-service programs, in part because, as Willie Sutton said of banks, "that's where the money is." But it's not just entitlement programs beloved of liberals that are inefficient and costly -- prisons and other correctional institutions tend to be money sieves. Worst of all is where these fields intersect: To paraphrase President Kennedy, correctional health services tend to have all the efficiencies of our health system and all the charm of our corrections systems. So there are many places to look to reduce costs without threatening public services. One cardinal rule: Look for how to do better rather than simply how to cut. Cuts are easy to find -- but they don't necessarily save money. Every state in the country could cut its budget by one-quarter or more overnight by eliminating Medicaid -- but taxpayer subsidies to hospitals for uncompensated care would skyrocket. Reducing governmental costs doesn't necessarily involve doing less; usually, it involves doing better. The biggest impediment to "doing better" is that those in government -- as well as advocates and critics -- tend to think in terms of programs and functions that can, or might have to be, cut. To most, that's what government consists of. But this view of government -- and of how to trim government budgets -- is reminiscent of an old New Yorker cartoon, in which a father tells his family, gathered around the kitchen table, "Because of the recession, we're going to have to let one of you go." No family, of course, would really approach a tight budget that way, but that's pretty much how most discussions of government cuts proceed -- cutting budget "line items" wholesale. Many programs should be terminated on the merits -- but that's not where to find waste or inefficiency, which don't have budget line items. Neither do most of the places where you'll find it in government. There is no line item in state budgets for electricity for Coke machines (or, in most cases, for the electric bill, period), or intra-office mail delivery, or purchase of road salt. It's an old adage: What gets measured gets done. And most budgets don't identify, track, and measure wasteful practices. That's why the waste occurs. What should be cut is what's not in the budget. Another rule of thumb is that most of these savings will not be found in particular agencies or administrative units. While some large standard departments like health, human services, corrections, and transportation are reliable producers of inefficiencies, the real savings come in government-wide functions that affect all departments and, as a result, tend to be budgeted by none. Personnel and procurement functions are always good places to look for improvements to save money (remember Rule No.1: improve performance, savings will follow); utility costs like energy and phones also tend to be neither well-monitored nor cheap. These are not what most people think of when they think of government waste and inefficiencies -- but they are where most of the money disappears, just like in most organizations and probably your own household budget. How do you ferret out all these hidden expense items? I'd like to say that it requires a team of well-versed experts like me, but, really, the first place to go is to public employees themselves -- the very people the public likes to imagine as lazy, stupid sinkholes for tax dollars. In fact, most public employees are conscientious and can tell you exactly how to make government work better and more efficiently. Unfortunately, in the current climate of disdain, they're rarely asked. When we did ask, we learned about the salt spreaders. (I don't know anything about road salt otherwise.) We learned from state employees in West Virginia and city employees in Chicago the variety of pipes and lighting fixtures ordered and stored, and how greater standardization could lead to shorter lead times, lower storage costs, and more efficient replacement operations. One state employee in Colorado's transportation department had a great idea for using leftover asphalt from road-paving to stop weeds growing under highway dividers -- making use of something that was otherwise wasted to reduce weed-whacking costs. Of course, probably not unlike your workplace, not everyone's in it to win it. All efforts at meaningful efficiency improvement require a top-down commitment. Some governors, like Chet Culver in Iowa, took the time to sit down with us and go through every single recommendation for savings and discuss how to make it work on implementation. Unfortunately, such a commitment from the CEO is needed. My favorite example was the department secretary who insisted to me that her agency couldn't possibly hit the savings targets we set, then bragged to me a year later about how she exceeded them. The kicker: When I complimented her and said that that ought to make it easy to hit the following year's targets, she protested, "Oh, no, we can't possibly do that!" Former West Virginia Governor Joe Manchin, now a U.S. senator, found a clever way to deal with that: He gave all agencies and their staffs a fair chance to shoot at the savings ideas and dollar targets, but then they had to sign "contracts" committing to the agreed savings. If they weren't met, the savings were cut from other parts of their budget. Actual savings a year later exceeded projections. That's another basic rule: Don't listen to naysayers. Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer described three stages of response to a new idea:
Recalcitrant bureaucrats have coined a variation on stage 3: "We've done it already." That usually follows with head-spinning speed after rejection of their preceding, months-long insistence that "it can't be done." But it can be done, which is why it must be done. Again and again: Texas carried on the TPR for about 20 years -- and found new ways to save money every time. Some might say that shows just how inefficient "government" is, but that misses the real point: Every human organization -- including governments and businesses -- has inefficiencies. Those that aren't constantly finding, and correcting them, aren't, well, worth their salt. 
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| What Accountable Health Care Means Posted: 02 Jul 2013 07:49 AM PDT  Still image released by the Mexican Social Security Institute in 2012 shows a 2-year-old boy prior to having a benign tumor removed from his body. Mexican doctors successfully removed a 33-pound benign tumor protruding from his right armpit to hip, which weighed more than the rest of the boy. (IMSS / AP) Woe to the hospital that turns to the courts to collect its patients' debts. It is widely known that health-care costs have recently become the single most common cause of personal bankruptcy in the U.S., and when we hear of such cases we frequently regard indebted patients as unfortunate victims, while casting hospitals as greedy predators. After all, patients did not intend to fall ill and require prolonged and expensive medical care, while the marbled lobbies and elaborate amenities of many new hospitals smack of surplus wealth. Who could feel sympathy for a billion-dollar corporation? On the other hand, even non-profit organizations, which include about 62 percent of U.S. hospitals, need to generate revenues that exceed their costs, or they will go out of business. In the individual case -- the single mother of five who needs a million-dollar organ transplant -- it is difficult not to side with the patient. But if we expect health-care organizations to forgive all such debts, we may soon find ourselves bereft of hospitals to turn to. A hospital that liberally provides free care will soon find itself besieged by its competitors' non-paying patients. Dr. Otis Bowen, Secretary of Health and Human Services during the Reagan administration, once described how poor families in his northern Indiana medical practice would sometimes pay him with chickens and the like. It was important to them to offer something in return for the services they received. These situations are often portrayed as conflicts between noble moral sentiments (the desire to care for the poor and infirm) and hard-hearted financial realities (the imperative to make money or disappear). In the best of all possible worlds, we would never turn away a single patient due to inability to pay, and everyone would get all the health care they need. But because such a world is not the one we inhabit, we need to ask patients to bear the costs of their care, or else repair to someone else, such as a private insurance company or the government, to do so for them. Yet such a portrayal is simplistic, superficial, and dead wrong. One of the reasons our health-care system is ailing is the fact that we habitually insulate decision makers from the consequences of their choices. Many patients have no idea of the costs that are being generated when their physician orders a test or performs a procedure. As a matter of fact, many health-care professionals, including colleagues of mine in the medical profession, have little idea of the retail prices or actual payments collected for the work we do every day. For decades, both patients and physicians have carried on blithely unaware of such financial realities, secure in the knowledge that financial experts, insurance companies, and state and federal governments are on hand to make sure that all the bills get paid. This situation foments moral hazard, in which the incentives favor more care, greater tolerance for inefficiency and waste, and escalating costs. The patient wants nothing less than the best that medicine has to offer, the physician gets paid for each test and procedure, and no expense is spared. People who don't expect to pay the bill tend to disregard the tab. Similar incentives apply at the institutional level. Hospitals tend to overbuild and overbuy, creating excess capacity that must be utilized to finance itself. Consider the case of medical helicopter transport. Many big cities have more helicopters than needed. Why? Because few large hospitals want to admit that they lack such services. Nurses and doctors in flight suits also make for good marketing. So each hospital secures a helicopter. Hospitals, medical practices, insurance companies, medical device manufacturers, and pharmaceutical firms have all profited with rising health-care costs. As patients and health-care providers -- and more importantly, as citizens and human beings -- we must avoid the seemingly charitable impulse to insulate ourselves and others against bad decisions. In other words, rising costs have richly rewarded those who generate them. For decades, physicians and executives have been earning handsome incomes, and in some cases growing wealthy, by exploiting these incentives to do more. In the meantime, other potentially more efficacious approaches, such as providing patients with incentives to take better care of themselves and incentivizing physicians and health-care organizations to keep costs down, have suffered from neglect. Insurance will pay for your bypass operation, but not your gym membership. It is not as though we have not tried. Remember health maintenance organizations? In the past, efforts to underwrite truly prudent and parsimonious care have failed, largely because lack of accountability for costs looks so attractive. There has been simply too much money to be made from a system in which no one really understands what is happening, especially when those directly involved - health-care professionals, hospitals, and insurance companies - stand to earn more by keeping the system byzantine and accountability for costs diffuse. In fact, the term "system," as in health-care system, is probably a misnomer. There is very little systematic about it. This is not to say, however, that the solution is to appoint a health-care czar, housed in the federal government, who would rationalize our current agglomeration into something truly systematic. To do so would merely further institutionalize the perverse political incentives that have long distorted American health care. What we need is not more systematization in Washington, but more transparency and accountability at home. Let us be clear. The plea to care for the poor is not the only moral argument in the health-care debate. As Yoda might say, there is another. Our failure to give this second argument its due is one of the principal reasons that U.S. health care has become so dysfunctional. For lack of a better term, this principle might be called accountability. But this is not accountability as in "accountable care organizations," which seek, among other things, to tie health-care payments to reductions in costs for assigned groups of patients. This is a quite different sense of accountability. We need to guard against the tendency to think of patients and health professionals as accountable purely in terms of our roles in health-care. Every patient and every health-care professional is also a citizen and a human being. And if we are to acquit ourselves well as free and responsible citizens and human beings, we need to hold ourselves accountable for the consequences of the decisions we make or fail to make. To be sure, no one chooses to get cancer, and no one wishes to be unable to pay for care. But when our choices entail costs, we should not insulate ourselves too much from them. John Stuart Mill famously wrote that a nation that dwarfs its people will soon find that with small human beings no great thing can be accomplished. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (AKA Obamacare) imposes escalating penalties on people who elect not to purchase health insurance. Inevitably, some will choose not to do so, especially early on. In this circumstance, we should resist the impulse to forgive all the health-care costs of those who fall ill. Parents who, when their children make poor choices, always step in and make everything right are not doing them any favors. In fact, they wreak genuine harm. If we do not bear the consequences of our actions, we literally do not know what we are doing -- a principle that applies in health-care no less than life. I have witnessed a number of community clinics that provide health-care to the poor. One feature that characterizes an increasing proportion of the most successful among them is an expectation that those receiving services make a payment. This payment is based on financial means, so that those who have less pay less. But everyone is required to pay something. Often this is less than the cost of the care, which is why such organizations require philanthropic support. But they are successful in large part because they treat patients with the dignity of expecting them to contribute something to their own care. In the old days, physicians often accepted unorthodox forms of payment. Otis Bowen, MD, former Governor of Indiana and U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services in the Reagan administration, once described how poor families in his northern Indiana medical practice would sometimes pay him with chickens and the like. It was important to them to offer something in return for the services they received. Such traditions signify a healthy community, one in which people expect and even want to bear the responsibility of paying for the services they have received. John Stuart Mill famously wrote that a nation that dwarfs its people will soon find that with small human beings no great thing can be accomplished. As patients and health-care providers -- and more importantly, as citizens and human beings -- we must avoid the seemingly charitable impulse to insulate ourselves and others against bad decisions. As free and responsible human beings and citizens, we can be our best only if we bear at least some of the costs of the health-care choices we make. 
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| 10 Reasons Why Everyone Is Protesting Posted: 02 Jul 2013 07:15 AM PDT
A protester holds up signs during a demonstration in front of a government building in central Sofia on June 21, 2013. (Stoyan Nenov/Reuters) A national leader rarely faces a doubly threatened ouster--both by public pressure and a military coup--but that is the situation confronting Egyptian President Mohamad Morsi. The opposition has given him a day to step down or face a civil disobedience campaign, and the military has signaled a coup if Morsi cannot turn around his problems within 48 hours. Morsi joins a handful of leaders around the world who have recently found themselves subject to an surge of populist wrath. In Brazil, Bulgaria, Chile, Turkey and other nations, the cascade of events has caught the leaders themselves and the world as a whole off guard. Observers have scrambled for an explanation in a slew of articles plumbing the possible reason for the sudden onslaught. Perusing the instant analyses, and making a few calls ourselves, we glean 10 common threads, as well as clues for the future. It is an exceptionally combustible time ... We are watching "the summer of middle class discontent," write the Washington Post's Anthony Faiola and Paula Moura. Or perhaps the more apt phrase is the "age of unrest." Mass rage just seems to be in the air. For a variety of reasons, the populations of numerous countries seem prepared to be very, very angry. They even find happiness in it (see picture above). The type of countries involved share a form of government--they are not tyrannical dictatorships, but vibrant democracies--and the intensity of the indignation. Is this another adverse sign of globalization? Big thinkers might be prone to think so, but, writes commentator Moises Naim, "the reality is that the protest movements are highly localized, focused on grievances specific to a single country."
... that has precedent in history But this is not new. We have seen this strain of epidemic anger before--in the years 1848 (the cascade of European revolutions), 1968 (the global youth rejection of the established way) and 1989 (the collapse of Soviet bloc), writes The Economist. In fact, writes political historian Francis Fukuyama, our times seem to have the ring of the Bolshevik, Chinese and French revolutions. But the danger is analyzing too deeply, Fukuyama says, since contemporary forecasts often prove to be exaggerated. Marx was wrong to predict the end of capitalism; Bob Dylan was right enough that the times in 1964 were a-changing, but not as much as he thought; and the year 1989 did not end tyranny, nor even Communism. It's momentous, only we don't know how ... No one seems prepared to write off the confluence of events as mere coincidence--the consensus is that 2013 seems historic. In a few years, writes former CIA analyst Paul Pillar, the factors underlying the discontent may very well be the subject of doctoral dissertations. But what is the historical significance? That is anyone's guess. Taking their shot at the answer, the Post's Faiola and Moura conclude, "If the 1960s were about breaking cultural norms and protesting foreign wars, and the 1990s about railing against globalization, then the 2010s are about a clamor for responsive government, as well as social and economic freedom." ... except that a 1968 text by Samuel Huntington seems to be involved Every important era has its associated theoretical text, and the one being cited the most at this point is Political Order in Changing Societies (pdf), a 1968 work by the late political scientist Samuel Huntington. Huntington today is more famous for his 1993 thesis about the Clash of Civilizations, but before that he was best known for the 1960s work, which sought to define why countries become violent and unstable. The reason, Huntington wrote, was "in large part the product of rapid social change and the rapid mobilization of new groups into politics coupled with the slow development of political institutions." In other words, rulers fail to keep up with their population's pace of social, educational and/or economic advancement. A new, better-educated middle-class ... A key factor in all the countries involved is the emergence of an educated and aspirational middle class. "Middle-class people want not just security for their families but choices and opportunities for themselves," writes Fukuyama (as did we at Quartz earlier this year, in item No. 4 in our rules of geopolitics). No one should be surprised about this particular aspect of the uprisings--we have multiple early signposts of this trend. A 2008 Goldman Sachs report signaled the coming of a large new global middle class. And protests in China in 1989, Venezuela in 2002, Iran in 2009 and Russia in 2011 were led by these "urban, educated haves who are in some ways the principal beneficiaries of the regimes they now reject," writes New York Times columnist Bill Keller. ... that is getting upset over surprising things There seems to be a lot of last straws around the world, surprising triggering points to violent protests that spin out of control: In Chile, violent protests were ignited by high education costs. In Turkey, it was the government's intention to raze an Istanbul park, and in Brazil it was the price of bus tickets. Chinese cities regularly erupt over shoddy construction, pollution and corruption. Most famously, the Arab Spring was triggered by Tunisian fruit vendor Mohamed Bouazizi, who set himself afire after chronic harassment by government officials. And the trouble is not over The global middle class will rise by another 2 billion members just in the next seven years. If the current trend of instability holds, that spells more trouble even for careful national leaders. After the Arab Spring, some of the world's toughest rulers decided that the best course of action was to avoid the apparently fatal mistake of Egypt's Hosni Mubarak--who stepped down voluntarily in 2011 after resisting for awhile--and to crack down instead. But the latest rash of uprisings shows that getting harsh does not necessary intimidate the masses: Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been politically weakened after a series of brutal police attacks on protesters, and Syria's Bashir al-Assad is in the midst of a lengthy and brutal civil war. Erdogan and Russia's Vladimir Putin face certain trouble down the road, says William Courtney, a former US ambassador to Kazakhstan and Georgia. "Both have been in office too long, have come to think they are indispensable and popular, but over time have come to believe their own propaganda, and become more arrogant and detached from their people," he told Quartz. Succor for suffering rulers: the middle class can't pull it off alone ... Yet the middle class cannot bring about change by itself in most cases. That is because it is the minority in most of the states where the uprisings are occurring; it will succeed in bringing political change when it can find common cause with other classes. This rule has applicability in the current protests: In Turkey, Erdogan may ultimately survive despite future trouble because of his popularity in the countryside, where the Taksim masses have not penetrated. The same goes for Morsi in Egypt, where the Muslim Brotherhood has broad appeal among the underclass that his critics lack. ... but China is a special worry ... The most significant demographic change is under way in China, whose middle class is growing the most, and national wealth--along with aspirations for a better future--surging. Barely a few days go by without another Chinese protest over social grievances. But China's economy is not growing at the same pace it once was, suggesting that the unhappiness could worsen, posing increasing problems for Beijing. "If ever there was a threatening gap between rapidly rising expectations and a disappointing reality, it will emerge in China over the next few years, with vast implications for the country's stability," writes Fukuyama. ... not to mention the Western world The most important message of the uprisings is that no one is immune. That is the message of the Tea Party and Occupy Movements, which grew out of isolated disgruntlement over perceived mishandling of deficits and wayward bankers, not to mention related protests elsewhere in the world including other recent uprisings in India and Sweden. Both the US and Europe are experiencing slow growth with no sign of better days soon, and could be the target of street action just as Brazil and Turkey have, says Pillar, the former CIA agent. 
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| How the Sharing Economy Can Save Summer Vacation Posted: 02 Jul 2013 07:11 AM PDT
Reuters Once summer hits, the vacation countdown begins. Time for soft ice cream at the beach or sunbathing by the lake. That is, if you can afford it. With prices soaring on gas, hotels and summer rentals, a summer vacation is no longer within reach for much of the middle class. Paychecks are declining as the nature of work keeps changing. Full-time jobs are giving way to contract employment and gig work. It's leading more middle class professionals into the ranks of freelancers, where episodic income is the norm and paid vacation is rare. They're not looking to own a second home. They just want to be able to take a week or two off and go someplace to relax and recharge. It's time to reclaim summer, and the answer lies in an unlikely place: co-working. Most independent workers can't afford to lease an office on their own. So as more people enter the freelance workforce, they've started coming together to solve this problem by creating co-working spaces -- big, shared workspaces where professionals of all types work next to each other, spreading the cost. Co-vacationing is the next step. Co-working spaces usually offer support services freelancers want, like conference rooms, a kitchen and broadband access, giving them access to more amenities than they could have afforded solo. Plus, members get a built-in community of potential friends and business partners. Co-vacationing builds on the same idea. By pooling their resources, families can afford more of a vacation together than they could on their own. In fact, it's the way the middle class used to do summer. There's a long history of groups of families getting together to buy a piece of land upstate or a string of bungalows on the beach. They'd basically set up their own camps, arranging outdoor activities like fishing, swimming and tennis, and social events like campfires and dances. Kids spent their summers playing with other kids. Labor organizations built permanent summer camps for their members, like Unity House, owned by the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union. In 1919, the union bought a lodge on a lake in the Poconos, built cabins and facilities, and created an affordable summer resort where workers and their families could rent rooms or bungalows. Unity House ran outdoor activities and educational programs, theaters and guest lectures until its closure in 1989. Workmen's Circle, a fraternal organization that was part of the Jewish Labor Committee, also built a family camp in the early 1900s, called Circle Lodge, in Hopewell Junction, NY. It's still running. Members can still rent bungalows, and the camp runs outdoor activities and Jewish cultural programs. These were not time-shares. These were complete summer communities. The difference is subtle, but important. A time-share is about an individual family getting a condo unit for a week or two of vacation -- they just take turns with hundreds of other part-owners of a resort complex. "Ownership" typically means buying a license or an investment share in a property run by a larger company. The group vacation retreats, on the other hand, were about a collective vacation experience. People knew they'd be coming back with the same families, year after year, so they had to build a sense of community. And the property was held by the families, or the labor union, as a group asset. By coming together, families who weren't wealthy could own a slice of summer. It's not so different from freelancers joining forces so they can all work in a nice office. They, too, gain a new community and can enjoy some of the perks that bigger (or wealthier) companies can afford. Sure, not having your own private office takes getting used to, but the success of co-working spaces shows there's an appetite for this kind of sharing. Collective vacations aren't just a quaint experiment from the past. Some of these original summer retreats are still going strong, like the cooperatively-owned Bay Terrace Country Club, in Bayside, Queens. It was started in 1960 when 400 families got together to build a pool. Now, members enjoy summer in the middle of Queens with a pool and water slides, a swim program, sun decks and social events. Unlike a typical country club, Bay Terrace is a cooperative, so members own the club and run it together. They are not the 1%. They offer coupons for discounted summer membership and special rates for single-parent families. They host a flea market. Some members say the term country club is misleading, because it makes it sound "fancy, like a golf club." There's no golf here. Another is the Three Arrows Cooperative Society in Putnam Valley, NY. It was started in 1936, when a group of socialists got together and bought 125 wooded acres and built a camp. It has about 75 bungalows where generations of families have spent their summers. Without a full-time staff, Three Arrows is literally run by members, which means work-duty for all. Cabins occasionally come up for sale, and newcomers must dive right in and serve on the committees that keep the place running. These models are basically the original share economy. If the middle class wants to reclaim summer and make it affordable again, we need to bring back that tradition of collective ownership. Co-working has shown that we can rethink the way we work; it's time to rethink the way we relax and recharge. This about more than just summer vacation. It's about pooling our resources in ways that help us live better. 
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| For Chinese Students Abroad, Personal Freedoms—Not Political—Are What Matter Posted: 02 Jul 2013 05:52 AM PDT  There are nearly 200,000 Chinese students studying in the United States. (Paul Sancya/AP)Chinese exports may fluctuate with the global economy, but there's one international good that's sitting pretty in terms of both supply and demand: Chinese students. In the last five years, as the United States struggled with the after-effects of the financial crisis, the number of Chinese students studying in the country skyrocketed, nearly doubling from 2008 to 2012. Yet in spite of garnering much media attention, their presence abroad is not unprecedented. The nearly 200,000 students now in the United States are, in fact, heir to a national tradition; many of the People's Republic of China's revolutionary leaders found their footing as foreign students nearly a century ago. Zhou Enlai, who served as Premier under Mao Zedong, and Deng Xiaoping, the father of China's economic reforms, both became members of the Communist Party of China while residing in France in the 1920's. The fledgling Communist Party of China, established in Shanghai in 1921, did much of its early recruiting among idealistic overseas students, many of whom identified with Deng Xiaoping's stated mission for traveling to France: "To learn knowledge and truth from the West in order to save China." The revolutionary pedigree of these former foreign students have inspired hope among Chinese democracy advocates that the 21st century outflow of students will result in a major inflow of liberal ideals, ones that may challenge Communist Party control. New Tang Dynasty, an adamantly anti-Communist Party television station operating out of the United States, has promoted a vision of returnees promoting reform, calling them the seeds from which democracy in China will sprout. "[The Party] wants advanced science and technology from the West, and yet they don't want the thoughts that would threaten the CCP's ideology," opposition leader Liu Yinchuan told the station. "China's returnees will make democracy evolve." The idea of democratization by osmosis may excite democracy advocates, but interviews with this generation of returnees reveal a different set of priorities: While many in the first wave of Chinese students went abroad in order to save their country, those in the current wave of students are leaving China in order to save themselves. Like their predecessors, modern-day returnees from American colleges often describe finding freedom on foreign shores, but it's a freedom that's decidedly more personal than political. *** Xu Yawen grew up in Xi'an, where both her parents and her grandfather worked in the local finance bureau. She had long harbored a dream of studying abroad, and finally got her chance through a program that took students from Xi'an International Studies University and enrolled them for two years at Humboldt State University in northern California. Xu's parents wanted her to study finance, through which their government connections could smooth the way for a stable career. Xu, however, had other ideas. After enrolling at Humboldt State, she became the first mainland Chinese student to pursue a degree in journalism, joining The Lumberjack, the university's student paper. There, Xu wrote profiles of local homeless people and investigated the way California state schools allocated money for international students. Her work gave her the kind of direct contact with American democracy that most Chinese students never achieve, but when asked what stuck out to her about the experience, Xu's response was more personal. "Freedom," Xu said. "Freedom on a spiritual level. After I moved to America I could go wherever I wanted to go: hiking, backpacking, partying, traveling. There, your life isn't about your parents. There are no rules, just friends. You learn a lot of things, meet a lot of people, hear different stories. You start thinking about life, about options." Nian Xixi was raised by a father who taught Kafka and Goethe and a mother who worked at Xi'an International Studies University, giving her an international background that set her apart from other Chinese students at the school. While many of her classmates were holed up in their rooms, Nian spent much of her time traveling around China and partying. But by her junior year of college Nian was desperate to leave the hometown where she'd spent all of her life. "I love this place, but I felt trapped," Nian said. "I couldn't wait to get out of China, especially from my school. I just wanted to experience a whole different life. I didn't care if it was America or Africa. I was prepared for anything." In the end, it was an exchange program with the University of Oklahoma that offered Nian a ticket out. There, she finally found groups of friends that matched her interests. "When I was partying back home, we were the only people who went out to clubs, but in Oklahoma most people would do it," Nian said. "I think a lot of Chinese students are curious about trying different things but they're so timid because they care too much about how people would judge them." *** Many American portrayals of authoritarian China conjure up the image of nanny-state politicians and government censors, but the stress felt by most young Chinese people is more likely to come in the form of family pressures related to marriage and career choices. These pressures can be especially strong for young Chinese women who are saddled with the expectations of grandparents old enough to remember the days of arranged marriages and bound feet. Nian got a heavy dose of these pressures after returning from another year of working and studying in England. "I thought it was going to just be funny," Nian said. "But it wasn't." Constant pestering from family members was reinforced by the fact that almost all of her closest friends who had stayed in China were married or pregnant. "People think it's a problem for me to be single; even though it shouldn't be," Nian said. "I realized I've become the minority, and they think that if you're single you shouldn't be happy. You're not supposed to be happy." Xu Yawen, for her part, felt a world of difference when it came to dating and gender roles in the two countries. "In general, guys in the West think a woman should be independent, sexy and confident," Xu reflected. "But here in Eastern countries most men think a woman should be obedient. You handle the house, do good housework, do the washing. No need to be smart, no need to be independent." *** In the end, marriage expectations and strictly proscribed gender roles contribute to reverse culture shock for those Chinese who come home after studying abroad. The difficulty of re-adjusting to life in China has been documented in studies showing that while just 17 percent of Chinese people who study in the United States reported having difficulty settling into American life, a full 35 percent have trouble adjusting on their return to China. Xu Yawen struggled with both the social and political limits that she returned to in Xi'an. Many social interactions that previously seemed natural now felt fake, and despite a promising start in journalism, Xu found herself unwilling to re-engage with the Chinese media on its own terms. "I didn't go to any local press rooms because I was afraid to face reality," Xu said. "I was afraid to listen to my editor tell me what to do, what to cover, what to not cover." After just a year back in her hometown, Xu is preparing to return to the United States, this time to begin an MBA at Texas A&M-Commerce. "I want to be an international person, an international citizen," Xu said. "You work around the world, go to different countries and work with people of different backgrounds." Nian Xixi, meanwhile, returned to a stable teaching job after nearly three years abroad, but she quickly grew restless at home. After just a year she applied to a Ph.D. program in Chinese new media studies in the Netherlands. She has already been accepted and hopes to take up the post when she receives time off next year. "I don't know if people should belong to a country. We're human beings first and then we're Chinese or American or British," Nian said. "Now, I think China is just too big for me to say it's my home." These lofty notions of detached, international citizenship may conform to the ideals of contemporary universities, but they differ greatly with the experience of past generations of Chinese foreign students. Today, those activists who want China's young returnees to infuse the country with new ideas -- to be, in other words, the heirs of Zhou and Deng -- are more often than not disappointed. But that expectation, especially in comparison to the revolution-era returnees, fails to account for the massive changes experienced by China in the interim. The China that Deng Xiaoping and Zhou Enlai longed to save was economically backward, politically tumultuous and divided. When a 15-year-old Deng declared his intention to save China, his country was still in the midst of a "century of humiliation" that would only end with the Communist Party victory in 1949. In the past century, perhaps no other country has dealt with the consequences of excessive ideology than China. Small wonder, then, that many students have instead turned inward, leaving the country to find themselves. As she prepares for her return to America, Xu Yawen has been reading The Analects of Confucius. One sentence in particular, caught her eye. "To bring peace to all under heaven, one must first govern one's country. To govern one's country, one must first bring order to one's family. To bring order to one's family, one must first learn to cultivate oneself." 
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| How Strong Is the Female Sex Drive After All? Posted: 02 Jul 2013 05:39 AM PDT  Daniel Bergner, a journalist and contributing editor to the New York Times Magazine, knows what women want--and it's not monogamy. His new book, which chronicles his "adventures in the science of female desire," has made quite a splash for apparently exploding the myth that female sexual desire is any less ravenous than male sexual desire. The book, What Do Women Want, is based on a 2009 article, which received a lot of buzz for detailing, among other things, that women get turned on when they watch monkeys having sex and gay men having sex, a pattern of arousal not seen in otherwise lusty heterosexual men. That women can be turned on by such a variety of sexual scenes indicates, Bergner argues, how truly libidinous they are. This apparently puts the lie to our socially manufactured assumption that women are inherently more sexually restrained than men--and therefore better suited to monogamy. But does it really? Detailing the results of a study about sexual arousal, Bergner says: "No matter what their self-proclaimed sexual orientation, [women] showed, on the whole, strong and swift genital arousal when the screen offered men with men, women with women and women with men. They responded objectively much more to the exercising woman than to the strolling man, and their blood flow rose quickly--and markedly, though to a lesser degree than during all the human scenes except the footage of the ambling, strapping man--as they watched the apes." Far from being more sexually modest and restrained than the male libido, the female sex drive is "omnivorous" and "at base, nothing if not animal" writes Bergner. He says: "One of our most comforting assumptions, soothing perhaps above all to men but clung to by both sexes, that female eros is much better made for monogamy than the male libido, is scarcely more than a fairy tale." He goes on to write:
Bergner thinks that monogamy is society's way of constraining female sexuality. He implies that this constraint is unjust and prudish. He is not alone. Salon's Tracy Clark-Flory hailed his book for revealing "how society's repression of female sexuality has reshaped women's desires and sex lives... Bergner, and the leading sex researchers he interviews, argue that women's sexuality is not the rational, civilized and balancing force it's so often made out to be--that it is base, animalistic and ravenous, everything we've told ourselves about male sexuality." On its face, the flexible arousability of the female sex drive seems to be an indication of its strength, and that is what Bergner implies. But in truth, it is an indication of the very opposite, its weakness. Bergner's thesis that women are turned on by more stimuli than men does not mean that they are less monogamous than men. In fact, the very flexibility of the female sex drive implies that women are more willing to prioritize monogamy over their libido. For that to make sense, it's important to understand that the female sex drive can be simultaneously weak and "omnivorous." That is the view of the highly cited psychological researcher Roy Baumeister, who this year won a major lifetime achievement award from the Association for Psychological Science. About a decade ago, he set out to determine if the female sex drive was indeed weaker than the male sex drive. He was inspired to do so when he noticed, in the course of his research, that the influence of "cultural and social factors on sexual behavior ... consistently turned out to be stronger on women than on men." On measure after measure, Baumeister found, women were more sexually adaptable than men. Lesbians, for instance, are more likely to sleep with men than gay men are with women. Reports indicate that women's attitudes to sex change more readily than men's do. For instance, in one study, researchers compared the attitudes toward sex of people who came of age before and after the sexual revolution of the 1960s; they found that women's attitudes changed more than men's. The sexual patterns of couples also indicate that women are sexually adaptable. The female libido fluctuates throughout the month, based on ovulation and the menstrual cycle. But couples do not appear to have sex more or less frequently based on what time of the month it is. Rather, couples have sex in weekly and daily patterns--in the evenings and/or on weekends. A 1991 survey looked at how the gap between how frequently men and women desire sex and how often they actually have sex; the gap is bigger for women, 82 percent of whom had sex when they did not desire it, compared to 60 percent of men. What could explain this flexibility? Baumeister proposed that "Women might be more willing to adapt their sexuality to local norms and contexts and different situations, because they aren't quite so driven by strong urges and cravings as men are." When Baumeister set out to compare the male and the female sex drive about a decade ago, the four leading psychology textbooks of the time either did not address the fact that the male and female sex drive were different, or they suggested that they were the same. When he presented his hypothesis--that the male sex drive is stronger than the female drive--to peers in his field, they were skeptical. They believed, as Baumeister puts it, that "the idea that men have a stronger sex drive than women was probably some obsolete, wrong, and possibly offensive stereotype." So Baumeister and two (female) colleagues set to work reviewing hundreds of studies about human sexuality and found consistently that women are less motivated by sex than men are. For men, they found, the goal of sex is sex itself. One 1996 study found that seven in ten men--compared to four in ten women--said the goal of sexual desire was simply having sex. In the same study, 35 percent of women said that love and intimacy were important goals of sex compared to 13 percent of men. Men also think about sex more, according to studies. When men and women monitor their sexual urges over a seven-day period, men report having twice as many sexual urges as women do. Bergner and others might chalk these findings up to society's sexual double standard: Men are allowed to be more sexual than women and, therefore, they are more forthcoming about their sexual urges. But this doesn't seem to be the case. Men feel guiltier about sex. They feel guiltier about masturbating than women do (13 percent versus 10 percent) and they feel guiltier about thinking about sex than women do. For instance, men report having more unwanted and uncontrollable thoughts about sex. In one survey, men responded more affirmatively to the following statements than women did: "I think about sex more than I would like" and "I must fight to keep my sexual thoughts and behavior under control." The sexual patterns of Catholic priests and nuns are relevant here. Catholic clergy are a group of people who have imposed the exact same constraint of chastity upon themselves, removing any sort of double standard. A 1995 survey found that most priests masturbate. A 1992 study of several hundred clergy found that 62 percent of male clergy and 49 percent of female clergy had been sexually active since taking their vows, and the men had had more partners--about a quarter of the clergymen had five or more partners while only three percent of the women had that many. In marriage, where women are encouraged to have sex, they still want to do so at lower rates. A 1977 survey of couples who had been married for 20 years found that men wanted more sex than their wives. As Baumeister and his colleagues write, "Wives consistently reported that they were quite satisfied with the amount of sex they had in their marriages, but men on average wished for about a 50 percent increase." A study of elderly couples from Sweden, a country that is sexually progressive, also found that married men wanted more sex than women. "Men are significantly more sexual than women, in all ages and in all respects," wrote the authors of that study. One way to examine the sexual differences between men and women is to compare the amount of sex gay men and lesbian women are having. The research here indicates that women are far more monogamous than men. In one study, 82 percent of gay men reported having had sex outside of their relationship whereas only 28 percent of lesbians did. Over 40 percent of gay men in relationships reported having had more than 20 partners outside of their relationship while only 1 percent of lesbians did. In a 1978 study, four out of ten gay men reported having over 500 sexual partners while no lesbians did. This was, of course, before AIDS changed the equation. So men, without the constraint of a woman saying no, appear to be far more promiscuous than women. "Females," Baumeister writes, "constitute the restraining force on sex. That is, they refuse many offers or chances for sexual activity. When sex happens, it is because the woman has changed her vote from no to yes." In a classic 1989 study, for instance, attractive research assistants approached men and women of the opposite sex on a college campus and asked: "I've been noticing you around campus and I think you're attractive. Would you like to go to bed with me tonight?" Three quarters of men said yes. Exactly zero women did. One important thing to understand about monogamy is a point that Bergner misses. Monogamy is not meant to satisfy the female libido. It would be far-fetched for anyone to argue that, especially when the evidence runs in the opposite direction: Monogamy kills eros. But monogamy is a cultural constraint aimed at protecting the natural result of sex--namely, children. As Robert Wright explains in The Moral Animal, "The genetic payoff of having two parents devoted to a child's welfare is the reason men and women can fall into swoons over one another, including swoons of great duration." Bergner dismisses evolutionary biology, bizarrely equating it with fundamentalist Christianity. But he gives a wonderful example of it in action when he presents the case of Isabel, a lawyer in her early thirties whose sex life with her boyfriend falls flat, a defect in their relationship that does not prevent her from agreeing to marry him. "The issue was that despite his good looks, his intelligence, his kindness, and his skill in bed, she rarely wanted to make love with him," writes Bergner. Isabel may have craved better sex with her boyfriend-turned-fiancé, but she ultimately decides that she could live without it. After all, Isabel's relationship with her previous boyfriend Michael, a man ten years older than her, was far more erotic, Bergner tells us. But Isabel broke it off. Why? "The relationship with Michael had ended only because she understood he would never commit to her, never marry her or even live with her." 
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| Meet the Hacktivist Who Wants to Warn Syrians About Incoming Missiles Posted: 02 Jul 2013 05:00 AM PDT  People search for survivors under the rubble after what activists said was a Scud missile hit in Aleppo's Tariq al-Bab neighborhood on February 22, 2013. (Reuters) On February 25, 2013, a 26-year-old Syrian "hacktivist" who had fled Damascus was sitting up late in his apartment in a Washington suburb watching the Syrian civil war unfold on Twitter. A man living near an air base southwest of Damascus tweeted that a SCUD missile had been fired and its fiery tail could be seen streaking north. Syria is believed to have at least 700 such SCUDs, which are slow and heavy 1960s-vintage short-range tactical ballistic missiles that the Soviet Union exported to various client states around the world. Having done his compulsory military service in a Syrian artillery unit, Dlshad Othman knew that this SCUD was likely headed for the northern Syrian city of Aleppo. He also knew the missile would be landing in roughly six minutes. But who would see the Tweet in time? As he waited helplessly for the SCUD to land, Othman hatched an idea: Set up an early warning system that could take citizen reports of a ballistic missile launch, calculate the likely target, and send alerts in real time to civilians inside the strike zone. SCUD missiles can be clearly seen when they are launched; in clear weather they can sometimes be spotted for great distances and their trajectory is evident to the naked eye. Syrians have posted many images of SCUD launches on YouTube. But death by SCUD is sudden. The whoosh of an incoming missile is followed almost instantaneously by the explosion. Syria has fired dozens of SCUDs and other missiles at targets in northeastern Syria. According to the Syrian Missile Launch Database, maintained by the Washington Institute of Near East Policy, between December 2012 and March 2013 the Assad regime fired dozens of surface-to-surface missiles against opposition-held areas, including major cities and towns such as Aleppo, Al Raqqah, and Der Ez Zor. Human Rights Watch reported that four SCUDS fired on Aleppo in February killed 141 civilians, including 71 children. Othman's SCUD early warning system began operating on Wednesday. It is called Aymta, which means "when" in Arabic. Users can opt to receive alerts by phone, text message, SMS, e-mail or RSS feed, or, if the regime cuts off internet access, as it often does, via a broadcast on satellite television or radio frequencies outside of regime control. Within the first 24 hours, 16,000 people viewed his website and 87 had registered to receive his alerts - although up to 40 percent of Syria was reportedly experiencing power outages at the time. Two satellite television stations also signed up for alerts. Some Syrians have already registered from abroad to track impending attacks on their hometowns and alert their families. Reactions posted on Othman's social media pages range from joy to disbelief. "Thank God," typed one fan over and over. "The idea is great but this is a luxury," wrote another from Aleppo. "Most people here in Syria do not have communications or sometimes power and will never get these warnings." Othman believes that forces loyal to President Bashir al-Assad have not fired a SCUD at civilians since a June 20 SCUD-D was fired at Aleppo at 11:45 p.m. from al Qalamon in the Damascus countryside. But when the next SCUD goes up, Othman is confident that his text messages will reach some people before the missile. Syrians by the thousand are already risking their lives to document the war, material that may eventually provide rich evidence for war crimes prosecutions. Never have so many atrocities been chronicled so thoroughly for the networked world to view online. Yet this unprecedented crowd-sourced documentation effort has not had the desired effect of deterring atrocities.  Both government forces and rebel groups have committed war crimes and horrific abuses against civilians are a near-daily occurrence -- though the behavior of the Syrian government forces has been worse than that of the rebels, according to the latest report to the United Nations Human Rights Council. Syrian authorities typically cut off cellphone and internet service prior to an attack, but even so, civilians are often the last to know what is about to befall them. It's not clear that Syrian civilians have been able to make much practical use of the torrent of YouTube videos and detailed military and atrocity reports that have been posted - unless one considers such citizen reporting to have helped millions of Syrians make a better-informed choice to run for their lives. At least 1.7 million have fled to Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon. In Syria, most of the casualties from missile attacks are caused by buildings collapsing onto people. Othman says merely instructing people to run out into the street or into a basement would increase the odds of survival. SCUDs are among the slowest of missiles, and in theory, a few minutes' warning should be enough, especially if activists in the target zones rig up local public address systems to sound air raid sirens when Aymta sends a warning. But can it be done without the Syrian government tracking down the organizers and killing them? *** Aymta is part of a growing movement among by idealistic "hacktivists" to deploy advanced technologies for peace-building. A 13-year-old Israeli developed an iPhone app called Color Red that sounds an alarm based on data from the Israeli Defense Forces about incoming missile fire from Gaza. The distance from launch to target is so short that citizens have as little as 15 seconds to take cover. Even so, the app has been downloaded at least 130,000 times.  In the annals of self-defense, though, Aymta is a novel hybrid: a citizen-run self-defense network that depends both on intense secrecy to protect those putting valuable military information in, and on openness and publicity, since anyone may get the free alerts and broadcast them to others. Aymta's secure reporting systems recognize that Syrian cellphones and internet traffic are monitored. The Syrian government has proved adept at infiltrating opposition computers, including in one case building malware into a piece of circumvention software that was supposed to let opposition forces evade government surveillance. Wary of such traps, Othman has equipped a group of trusted civilian monitors with hardened digital communication technologies that allow them to transmit information from a variety of sources, including visual sightings of SCUD launches and other reliable information, into a well-defended computer network. "We are doing our best to deliver 99 percent security," said Othman. There is no such thing as a "100 percent secure" computer network, only one that is engineered to be difficult to penetrate, said Ian Schuler, a former State Department specialist in internet freedom and security digital technologies, now at the nonprofit New Rights Group. "Anything can be cracked." By Saturday, the Syrian regime had apparently found Aymta, judging by the large cyber-attack that took down the site for 20 minutes. Othman had expected such a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack and is trying to speed up his defenses. He studied information technology at American University of Beirut, then got a job in Iraq working on rebuilding government communications systems. When he returned to Syria to visit his family, he was arrested and tortured for a week, suffering beatings with electric cables. Why? "Just because," said Othman. Among other things, his interrogators wanted to know whom the young Kurd had met in Iraq, and whether he knew any Americans. In a bizarre twist, just months after his release from jail, Othman was drafted into the Syrian army, sent to artillery training school, and was eventually assigned to perform tech duties for an artillery unit, where he saw his first SCUDs. After discharge, he worked for the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression until his boss, noted journalist and lawyer Mazen Darwish, was arrested. Still, Jeffrey Lewis, a missile expert following the Syrian conflict at the Monterey Institute for Strategic Studies, who has advised Othman on the project, is worried both about Othman's own safety and the potential for mass arrests by the Syrian regime of anyone near a SCUD base. "I don't want to know how you know your spotters," Lewis told Othman. "You need to make sure your spotters don't know one another and one person doesn't know multiple spotters." "It's built on trust," Othman replied. He is in contact with opposition coordinators in Syria who know and trust one another. He has applied for asylum protection in the United States and has decided to use his real name for the project. "If I will not use my real name, people will not trust this," he said. If Aymta works, it could save lives. It could also energize the new generation of activists trying to harness advanced technologies to lessen the power imbalance between repressive, well-armed governments and their unarmed but well-networked citizens. This attempt at asymmetric peace-fare may also offer Syrians who have been attacked by their own government a sense that they can do something, however limited, to control their fates. But even if Aymta works, it won't tip the military balance of the war, which is now tilting in Assad's favor. And there is no app for car bombs, for militias that have surrounded towns and massacred residents, for sarin gas, artillery or bombs tossed from helicopters. All of these tactics have terrorized unarmed Syrians. Civilians in war zones have a right to collective self-defense, but can rarely exercise that right in high-tech modern warfare. President Obama's newly announced lethal aid to the Syrian rebels includes small arms and undefined intelligence-sharing, but does not include PATRIOT anti-missile batteries or any anti-air defenses that would help rebels shoot down incoming SCUDs or other missiles. Nor can the shoulder-fired missiles supplied by Qatar shoot down SCUDs. The Aymta software automatically calculates the trajectory and likely arrival time of the missile. The more data it receives about where and when attacks are imminent, the more its accuracy will improve. Though the U.S., Turkey, and other countries may have radar or other data that could warn of SCUD launches, they don't share, said Lewis. He believes the U.S. should provide whatever information it can to the residents of Aleppo and other cities under attack. Meanwhile, Othman and his partners intend to expand the Aymta system to warn civilians of other types of threats -- including approaching tanks, convoys of militia fighters, or other information. Othman plans to share his open-source software for use by activists in other countries. "This is not just for Syria," he said. "We believe there are a lot of people in the world who are in a bad situation like ours." 
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| The CIA Doesn't Need a 'Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade' to Keep Secrets Posted: 02 Jul 2013 05:00 AM PDT  The U.S. intelligence community is having a terribly rough time lately with employees who just won't keep their mouths shut. Following Edward Snowden's drip-drip-drip of top-secret revelations and "several high-profile anonymous leaks and publications by former senior officers," CIA in late June launched the "Honor the Oath" effort -- an internal movement to stop officers from leaking classified material. It was indeed deliciously ironic that this missive was then leaked to the Associated Press. But this new effort is a misguided and even counterproductive approach to keep secrets, well, secret. It's misguided because CIA employees typically don't -- with rare exceptions -- disclose classified information to the press. Here's why: They're constantly reminded of the oath already. CIA employees are already acutely aware of what happens when you disclose classified material. From the first day a new agency trainee, analyst, or administrative staff member enters CIA Headquarters and "takes the oath" to uphold and protect the U.S. Constitution, they are told in no uncertain terms the very ugly, life-destroying consequences of betraying privileged information. As a former analyst, I remember the gruff, mustachioed fellow from the Office of Security who, on the first day of my employment, made this point crystal clear. This emphasis is underscored in multiple training classes. For example, every new analyst must attend the Career Analyst Program (CAP), where grizzled intelligence vets teach "the basic thinking, writing, and briefing skills needed for a successful career." One point that gets hammered home is what happens to people who provide information to those who shouldn't have it -- especially foreign governments. These classes highlight, among other cases, the Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen affairs, and take care to emphasize that these former top officials are currently serving life sentences in prison. It's the Agency Culture. CIA employees are reminded in ways both large and small about the consequences of mishandling or misusing classified documents. Your colleagues remind you. Your managers remind you. The internal websites remind you. When someone is caught providing secrets, even the director reminds you. Furthermore, because of their chosen careers, CIA employees are made justifiably paranoid about "security violations" -- for instance, if you absent-mindedly took a classified document from your office, placed it in your briefcase or purse, exited the building, and then remembered you had it while walking to your car, the Office of Security could slap you with a security violation. (Pro tip: Don't take a suitcase or large purse to work.) There are many other ways to trip up. If you didn't correctly seal a secret document while en route to a meeting, it would be a violation. Or casually mention a friend's real name publicly who might or might not be undercover. Any of these violations could cause you to lose your security clearance and your job. Certainly, if a person is considering providing classified documents to the press or a foreign government, he or she is probably far, far down the path to breaking the law. Edward Snowden had been considering leaking top-secret documents for years prior to actually doing it. It is doubtful that any seventh floor-directed educational effort would have steered him away from a lonely trip down the road to treachery. CIA's classified disclosures are usually to foreign governments. Compared to the military and other civilian agencies, CIA has a decent track record of keeping secrets. Of course, moles in the agency have done grievous damage to American security, like Aldrich Ames and Harold Nicholson, who both spied for the Soviet/Russian intelligence services, and translator Larry Wu Tai Chin, who secretly worked for the Chinese government for decades. Even Ghana's intelligence service during the 1980s penetrated CIA. Granted, there are a few CIA officials who go to the press, but their subsequent punishments have varied. John Kiriakou is now serving 30 months in a federal prison after providing the name of undercover officer. But senior CIA official Mary McCarthy, who leaked the existence of "black sites" housing captured al-Qaeda operatives to the Washington Post's Dana Priest But it's usually other government and military outfits that leak to the press. The father of all leakers, Daniel Ellsberg, worked for the Department of Defense, while W. Mark "Deep Throat" Felt was the FBI's associate director. Between 1950 and 1975, civilian and uniformed personnel working for the military committed the majority of the espionage detected. This is on top of all the individuals who have committed espionage on behalf of foreign governments -- Jonathan Pollard, Ana Montes, John Walker Jr., Ronald Pelton, and Clyde Lee Conrad -- were all non-agency personnel. *** To be honest, it must be a bit insulting to many long-time CIA employees to be told they need to try harder to honor their oath. Director John Brennan should instead stay positive and laud the vast majority of individuals at CIA for their efforts to maintain secrecy and prevent leaks. By reinforcing these agency values positively -- and by not adopting a suspicious approach toward employees -- he will probably receive a better reception among his subordinates. The vast majority of individuals who work at CIA and at other intelligence agencies will never, ever leak classified material (grumbling about work is another story, however). Ferretting out the moles and troublemakers in the agency will require more than a Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade and reminding employees that they raised their right hand and said some words when they first joined the federal government. CIA needs to have a better strategy than that. 
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