Master Feed : The Atlantic |
- Don't Invest in Hedge Funds
- The 6 Graphs You Need to See to Understand the Economics of Awful Blockbuster Movies
- China's Big (and Growing) Problem With its Elderly Population
- Oregon's Very Radical and Very Terrible Plan to Make College 'Tuition-Free'
- The Biggest African Conflict You've Never Heard Of
- Happiness Is a Paul McCartney Concert in Summertime
- The Cicada Killers Are Coming
- How to Wash Your Hair in Space
- Parisian Twitter On The Radio
- A Note From the Road
- For Many Students, College Means Back to Middle School
- Big Star: The Greatest Band You've Never Heard, Now on Film
- George W. Bush Is Back (Sort Of)
- Massive Open Online Healthcare
- What Samsung's New American HQ Says About the Korean Giant
- Why China's Slowdown Could Be Good News For the U.S.
- The Most Dangerous Thing In America--A Brother With A Passport
- Disney Is Not a Movie Company; It's a Television Company
- Beyond the Coup: Egypt's Real Problem Is Its Economy
- What It's Like to Kill Thousands of NYC Rodents for a Living
- Is the 'China Dream' Real? Or Just Empty Propaganda?
- Apple's Violation of Antitrust Law, Explained in 6 Bullet Points
- The Mandela Family Feud: What Will It Mean for His Legacy?
- 'To Catch a Predator' Goes Russian
- Late-Night Comedy Roundup: Watch Osama Bin Laden's Traffic Violation
| Posted: 10 Jul 2013 04:11 PM PDT  (Reuters) There are some ideas worse than putting your money in a hedge fund -- like burning it -- but not many. Indeed, the supposedly smart money has not been so for the past decade, at least not for actual investors. But now, with hedge funds free to advertise for the first time, don't be surprised if you hear about the outsized returns they offer. Ignore them.
Not that there's much to talk up. As you can see in the chart to the right from The Economist, hedge funds have cumulatively underperformed a simple 60-40 stock-bond index going back to 2003 -- and underperformed it badly. Hedge funds have returned just 17 percent after fees the last decade; a stock-equity index returned over 90 percent. (Even adjusted for risk, hedge funds likely come out well behind). Now, it's certainly true that there are a few hedge funds that can and do consistently beat the market -- which are, in other words, worth the fees. But those hedge funds don't want your money. They have more than enough investors already. That leaves people looking for the Next Big Fund -- and that's not easy. Can you tell the difference between someone who just got lucky, and someone who is actually good? In other words, the hedge funds that do advertise will the ones you shouldn't invest in. Funds like well-coifed, Wall Street 2 extra Anthony Scaramucci's fund-of-funds -- which is just him investing in hedge funds for you, with, of course, a second layer of fees larded on. Or funds that warn old people who think it's still the 1970s that the Fed is DEBASING THE DOLLAR, and only they hold the secret to protecting your wealth from Weimar 2.0 -- what Noah Smith calls affinity fraud. But for 92 percent of us, it doesn't matter whether hedge funds can or can't advertise. We can't invest with them regardless. And that's not a problem. See, the rich are different from you and me -- they blow their money on hedge funds, instead of lottery tickets. 
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| The 6 Graphs You Need to See to Understand the Economics of Awful Blockbuster Movies Posted: 10 Jul 2013 02:41 PM PDT The Lone Ranger's historic flop this weekend was either entirely shocking (it really was historic) or entirely predictable (westerns often disappoint at the box office). But behind every $225 million bet, you can bet there are reasons. Indeed, the economics of betting a lot of money of a few loud movies a year are tantalizingly clear. So here, with a little dose of data, is why studios feel encouraged to fill your summer with loud, dumb, sequels and reboots. The globalization of cinema means less explosive dialogue and more explosive everything else.
What does this have to do with bad summer blockbusters? Well, the conventional wisdom in Hollywood is that clever jokes don't translate well for an international audience, whose biggest and fastest growing presence is in Asia. But familiar characters and/or explosions? They translate just fine. Without 3-D, the domestic box office might be shrinking.
There's a good reason that Hollywood is obsessed with sequels. So are you.
A dollar spent on a blockbuster goes further.
What does that mean for summer movies? It explains why $1 spent on a blockbuster is (all things considered) worth more than $1 spent on a non-blockbuster. The potential for each mega-budget movie to go big and create a train of merchandise, licensing and sequels makes it strategically wise to bet a very large sum of money on a very small number of big films. Fewer typical moviegoers means fewer chances to get your money.
Films are for kids.
___________ *"Prometheus", a sort-of-"Aliens"-prequel, and "Hotel Transylvania" are on the cusp. 
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| China's Big (and Growing) Problem With its Elderly Population Posted: 10 Jul 2013 02:39 PM PDT  A new law passed on Monday allows China's elderly population to sue relatives for neglect. (Andy Wong/AP)In most countries, failing to visit your older parents might result in a nagging phone call. In China, it can now land you in court. On Monday, the ruling Communist Party took filial piety to a whole new level when it passed an "Elderly Rights Law" that allows seniors to sue their children for neglect. The particulars of the bill may be lacking -- What constitutes a "regular" visit, after all? Do children have to come once a month, or will once a year suffice? And what about those families separated by great distances? Then there's the question of enforcement. But these are mere details -- apparently, the law has already nabbed its first violator. Unsurprisingly, the Elderly Rights Law elicited a caustic reaction from an online population used to Beijing's displays of nanny-statism. But its passage raises this question: Why, in a culture known for venerating the elderly, is enforcing filial piety even necessary? The answer, like with many other things in China, has to do with changes in the country caused by Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms, first introduced in the late 1970s. Historically, multiple generations of lived together under one roof, a characteristic shared by other mostly-agrarian societies throughout history, and pooled financial resources. When the Communist Party assumed control over the country in 1949, each Chinese person was assigned a hukou, or internal passport, which stipulated that they could only accrue social welfare benefits if they remained in their place of registration. The vast majority of Chinese people obtained cradle-to-grave benefits -- the so-called "iron rice bowl" -- through working for the state, and all around this system functioned well as part of China's planned economy. Deng's reforms changed this equation. As China industrialized, rural residents began migrating to the country's booming coastal cities in order to find jobs in the manufacturing and service sectors and soon, working-age men and women from the vast interior began spending most of the year far from home, typically returning only for the annual Chinese New Year celebration. Moving to the cities vastly increased these workers' income and fueled China's incredible rise, but tore at the traditional social fabric of society: the multi-generational home. Accompanying the economic reforms was the one child policy, which China implemented in 1980 as a desperate fix to the country's spiraling over-population problem. The policy, has, by and large, worked as intended: China's population growth indeed slowed. But over the past 33 years, the unintended consequences piled up: There is now a large number of "4-2-1" families; that is, only children whose parents were only children and who, at some point, become solely responsible for the welfare of six people. China has loosened the One Child Policy in many ways, but the fundamental change to China's demographic outlook cannot be undone. Nearly 180 million people in China were over 60 years of age in 2010 -- and that figure is expected to double in the next 20 years. Simply put, there will be more old people in China and fewer young people able to help them. 30 years ago, nearly all Chinese people lived where their family had always lived, seldom traveled for work, and shared the work of caring for their elderly relatives with multiple siblings. Filial piety -- what the Rush University physician and researcher Xin Qi Dong refers to as the core aspect of Chinese culture -- was simply a given. But China's boom years have unraveled this arrangement, and one consequence has been the increase in elder neglect and abuse throughout the country. Some of these cases -- like that of the farmer who forced his 100 year-old mother to live in an actual pigsty -- have inflamed public opinion in China. But more mundane forms of abuse, including psychological trauma, are equally concerning. What can be done about it? One possible solution would be to build more senior assistance facilities, the sort that provides care and companionship for elderly people across the developed world. These homes, though, are relatively rare in China and don't appear to be catching on: Dr. Dong pointed out that the latest 5-year plan included little provision for them. So perhaps the new Elderly Parents Law isn't so ridiculous after all. However, its first week has not been auspicious. In an example of classic Chinese ingenuity, some entrepreneurially minded citizens have already begun hiring surrogates to visit their parents for them. How this will assuage the elderly is unclear -- nothing says "filial piety" like hiring complete strangers to visit your folks for you, right? -- its very existence is an indication that the law doesn't address the underlying trends causing the problem in the first place. 
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| Oregon's Very Radical and Very Terrible Plan to Make College 'Tuition-Free' Posted: 10 Jul 2013 02:09 PM PDT
Wikimedia Commons For the past week, the world of higher education has been buzzing about Oregon, where state legislators have taken the first step towards a radical attempt at combating student debt. The proposed "Pay It Forward" plan is catchy as it is seemingly straightforward. Colleges would no longer charge their undergraduates tuition up front. Instead, students would promise to pay a fixed percentage of their income to the state for a set number of years after graduation. You earn a lot, you pay a lot. You earn a little, you pay a little. But most importantly, nobody has to take out loans to cover the cost of classes. It's bold. It sounds progressive. And if implemented, it could be a boondoggle. Here's why. The Plan That said, we have an decent sense of what the plan might look like in practice. As originally proposed by a group called Students for Educational Debt Reform, bachelor's degree recipients would pay 3 percent of their annual income for 24 years after finishing school, while community college grads would pay 1.5 percent. In other words, each full year of college would cost 0.75 percent of a student's earnings. The average B.A. completing their degree today would pay an estimated $39,653 over a lifetime, more than $7,000 above the actual cost of tuition and fees. That extra money would go towards making the system self-sustaining over the long term. However, taxpayers would have to keep footing their portion of the state's higher ed bill. Pay It Forward would only replace the costs currently covered by tuition. The Upside The plan also has an appealing progressive streak. Future One Percenters will pay the most for their educations. Graduates that find themselves mixing espresso drinks after commencement, or who devote themselves to low-pay careers like teaching, will pay the least. Meanwhile, the system might encourage poor students to reach for better, more selective colleges. Some higher-ed experts, such as the University of Wisconsin's Sara Goldrick-Rab, argue that low-income students are discouraged from applying to top schools by so-called "sticker-shock." They see the astronomical advertised price of tuition at State U. and assume they can't afford it, even if the admissions office promises that they'll provide ample financial aid. Part of the problem may be that poor and working class families have little trust in large, unfamiliar institutions. But under Pay It Forward, up-front tuition is no longer an issue, and there's no need to guess about grants and other aid. Finally, the program could potentially enforce some spending discipline on Oregon's colleges. Without the ability to raise tuition, schools will be forced to clamp down on their most profligate habits. The Downside Let's take those one at a time. One of the fiercest critics of Pay It Forward so far has actually been Wisconsin's Goldrick-Rab. In a lengthy, must-read vivisection* of the policy posted today at The Century Foundation, she hones in on what I think is one of the idea's biggest weaknesses: it would still leave plenty of students buried in loans. It's a major misconception that student debt is driven entirely by tuition. In many cases, it's not. At public schools, and especially community colleges, room, board, and supplies like textbooks are often far more expensive, especially once you take institutional aid into account. Pay it forward delays the cost of classes until after graduation, but not the cost of housing, meals, or course materials. So, as Goldrick-Rab points out, the typical student at The University of Oregon would still be staring down about $14,000 a year in expenses. Working 20-hours a week at a minimum-wage job, she notes, would earn them $7,000 after taxes. The other $7,000? Either they'd pay it upfront with family help, or they'd borrow it. (That's one of the reasons she's doubtful the plan would help with sticker shock). Which brings us to why Pay It Forward might actually be a bad deal for some cash-strapped students. Today, financially troubled federal loan borrowers have the option of wrapping all their debts into an income-based repayment program that caps their monthly bill at 10 percent of discretionary earnings. It's a great safety net. But under Pay It Forward, BA's from Oregon would still have to pay an additional 3 percent of their income, for 24 years. Now, supporters of the Oregon plan do have a counterargument. Ending tuition as we know it would free students to spend their financial aid money on living expenses. For instance, federal Pell Grant recipients could use their awards to cover housing instead of course credits. The problem is that most students don't get Pell Grants. Most students would still face a very real possibility of having to borrow. Of course, those students who wouldn't have needed to borrow may have it even worse. After all, there's a good chance they'll be paying more for their education over time than if they had simply been allowed to pay up front. The next big issue is what I call the engineer problem. If you're a student who plans to make a lot of money after college, say as an engineer or a computer programmer, Pay as You Go is a terrible deal. The average student is already asked to pay more than the value of their tuition over time. Students who make higher than average salaries will be asked to pay vastly more. If you're a student contemplating grad school, say to become a doctor or a lawyer, the problem may be even worse, since chances are you'll be relying on an income-based repayment program to handle your federal loans down the line anyway. Depending on the precise math, it may no longer be worthwhile for a talented student to attend an Oregon public school instead of a private institution that might offer them merit aid. The engineer problem would also pose an accounting headache for the state. Remember, the system assumes that high-earning students will balance-out low-earning ones. Cut the high-earners out of the equation, and students will suddenly need to pay a higher percentage of their income to keep the system solvent. That said, what it would take to keep the system solvent is a bit of an open question in the first place. Advocates have suggested that state would need to spend $9 billion over a quarter century before enough former students are paying into the program to cover its costs. The problem (well, one of the problems) is that their calculations appear to be based on the earnings of college graduates. But only half of Oregon public college students finish a B.A. within six years, and dropouts tend to earn far less than their classmates who earn a degree. Their figure is also based on a projection of the economy's health and college graduate earnings decades from now, which is utter guesswork. If those estimates don't pan out, the whole idea could turn into a financial albatross for taxpayers. Or, possibly worse, the state would have to ask students to pay back more of their income. Ordinarily, when state legislators tell a committee to study an offbeat policy idea, it doesn't generate headlines in the New York Times. But the attention the Oregon plan has received speaks to just how frustrated Americans have become with student debt, and how desperate they are for a solution. But there are no simple fixes at this point, and the last thing we want to do is make a sad situation even worse. _________________________________ *A few of my points later in this post are similar to hers, though not altogether the same. In any case, I'd like to give credit where it's due, and encourage any education wonks out there to read her whole take. 
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| The Biggest African Conflict You've Never Heard Of Posted: 10 Jul 2013 01:55 PM PDT  A Nigerian license plate with the Plateau state slogan "Home of Peace and Tourism" is seen in the Nigerian capital Abuja on December 3, 2005. Plateau has been plagued by religious violence that has killed hundreds, but local license plates offer a much rosier version of reality. (Reuters) As the military's assault against Boko Haram and civilians in northern Nigeria continues, so too does the ongoing and underreported conflict in the villages around Jos, the capital of Plateau state in Nigeria's Middle Belt. As in other parts of the Sahel stretching from Khartoum to Dakar, rivalries between ethnic groups, settlers and indigenes, herders and farmers, and religious groups overlap to create a kaleidoscope of insider and outsider identities. Resulting conflicts, in turn, create openings for international jihadist Islam, as in other parts of the Sahel. In the Middle Belt thus far, conflicts still remain largely local, but there is potential that they could acquire a cross-border dimension. With an elevation of more than 4,000 feet above sea level, Jos has perhaps the best climate in Nigeria. It has long been a favored residence of Nigerian elites. Well-watered roses grow in Plateau, and it is a rich agricultural area. Jos was the closest Nigeria ever had to a "hill station" in the colonial period. It is the site of Hillcrest School, much patronized by missionaries and the children of the Nigerian elite. The University of Jos was a center of American studies. There are several medical institutions and, in the past, numerous non-governmental organizations made Jos a center of their operations. But Jos is no longer a West African paradise. Bloody "religious" riots, ostensibly between Christians and Muslims in 2001, 2008, and 2010, split the community. The latest round, starting in 2011, continues. According to the Council on Foreign Relations' Nigeria Security Tracker (NST), there have been 785 sectarian related deaths in Plateau state alone between May 29, 2011 and June 30, 2013. Between January and June 2013, 481 people were killed; 61 percent of the total since May 2011. These estimates are very conservative. What happened? The conflict in Plateau state is economic and ethnic with a religious dimension. With good governance, these differences could be managed. But, as elsewhere in Nigeria, residents accuse local and state government personalities of fanning identity-based divisions to advance their own political agendas. As with so much in Nigeria, Plateau's violence has its roots in the colonial period. The British opened up tin mines in the historically Christian area and invited in outsiders from other parts of the Nigerian colony to work them. Many of these "settlers" were Muslims from small tribes and from Fulani, the largest ethnic group in the North. As the city of Jos grew, substantial numbers of Yoruba (religiously mixed) and Igbo (Christian) from the south and west also settled there. Under Nigerian law and custom, "settlers" have fewer rights and privileges than "indigenes," those whose ancestral roots are in a particular area. The legal concept of indigeneity is related to a core principle of Nigerian governance called "federal character." This aims to safeguard equitable access to all government offices and services by all ethnic groups-and all states. "Settlers" only benefit from "federal character" where they are "indigenes," not where they happen to live now. "Settler" (or non-local) status can be overcome only with difficulty, and Jos Muslims often accuse the local administration of facilitating the process for Christians, but not for them. In Plateau many "settlers" have lived there for generations without acquiring indigene status. But, for reasons that are debated, the Fulani and other "settlers" are more economically dynamic and entrepreneurial than the "indigenous" population, even as they remain second-class citizens in their "new" state of residence. The "indigenous" population of Plateau is made up of small tribes, of whom the Barome are probably the largest. They are predominately Christian. They traditionally control the state and local government authorities and have the best access to state contracts. They are predominately sedentary agriculturalists. Jos elites regard their city as "Christian." They claim that "Jos" stands for "Jesus our Savior." Subsequent to the arrival of tin miners, Fulani herdsmen have also been pushing south into Plateau in search of pasture for their livestock. Shortage of pasture in their traditional grazing lands further north reflects, in part, desertification and the southern creep of the Sahara. The arrival of Fulani herdsmen in Plateau brings them into direct land-use competition with the Barome, who are Christian. And the Fulani are Muslim. Before the British came, the Fulani were notorious slave owners, feeding the trans-Sahara slave trade. They preyed on minority tribes, such as the Barome, who practiced traditional religion at the time. In the 20th century, the Barome and other minority tribes have become overwhelmingly Christian. It is hard to know the consequences of this slaving history for the current bloodletting, but, at the very least, it does not promote good feelings between the Fulani and the now-Christian minority tribes. Weak government at all levels, poor security, an under-resourced court system, incomplete rule of law, and a culture of impunity hinders the peaceful resolution of the inevitable disputes. Peace and reconciliation non-governmental organizations (Nigerian and foreign) have had only limited and episodic success. It is tempting to seek cooperation links between tin miner "settlers" and the Fulani herdsmen. While they may exist at the local level, there is little evidence of any more general collaboration. The killing sprees that afflict the Middle Belt, at times claiming more than 40 lives, according to the NST, are often ignited by alleged cattle theft or destruction of crops. These episodes in turn generate revenge killings. Often, the killings are done with traditional weapons, not guns and bullets, and have a ghastly, almost ritualistic quality. Victims are predominantly women, children, and the elderly- men are able to run off. Killings sometimes occur among close neighbors. In Jos itself and in some outlying villages, the violence has led to ethnic cleansing that recalls the Balkans. Formerly mixed villages or Jos neighborhoods now consist of only one ethnic group. If an outsider is detected, he risks being killed on the spot. The government has stationed military forces in Plateau state to contain the carnage. However, the declaration of the state of emergency on May 14 in Borno, Yobe, and Adamawa states may have led to the transfer of at least some of them to the North. In any event, they have been remarkably unable to control the carnage. There appears to be little coordination between the military and the state government. In the aftermath of many attacks, villagers complain that there were no military or police nearby. Probably more important is the size of the geographic area affected, which is so large that military can do little. The killings in Plateau state are not directed at the Abuja government, unlike in the North. But, the government's inability to stop them contributes to the growing sense in Nigeria that the state is impotent. There is widespread suspicion that local officials are often complicit in the killings; the evidence is inconclusive. Meanwhile, residents contend that economic activity is only a shadow of what it once was, which is also the case in those parts of the North dominated by Boko Haram violence. There has been only episodic Western attention to the bloodletting in Jos and Plateau. This may be because the violence is local in nature, if horrific in magnitude. It is not associated with the "international jihad" or the other perceived threats to Western interests. This could change. "Boko Haram" has allegedly carried out attacks in Plateau and has represented itself as a champion of abused Muslims. Plateau would seem wide open to eventual penetration by the radical Islamists revolting against the Nigerian polity in the North. 
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| Happiness Is a Paul McCartney Concert in Summertime Posted: 10 Jul 2013 01:55 PM PDT  Marc Andrew Deley/Invision/AP It's a tiny planet, really, and most of the people on it have some love for the songs of Paul McCartney. And so to simmery-summery Boston he comes, to the hysterical green bowl of Fenway Park, this sly, gangsterish old boy with his legend in his back pocket. He looks good, a vision of vegetarian slimness, narrow-trousered, Cuban-heeled, sliding between guitars and pianos on familiar elegant-ungainly Beatle legs. He sold out this show in five minutes, I'm told. "Let's get high on life!" he exhorts before "Hi, Hi, Hi", and it does seem almost possible. Crowdpleaser, deliverer: "All My Loving" is the first number, and the joy of the audience is instantly complete. He could end it here, really, take one of his impressively low bows and call it a night. But he doesn't--he plays for another nine hours. Or five hours. For several hours, anyway, without ever (as far as we can tell) a sip of water. This is hard, hard rocking. And loud, too: The incredible, beautiful matrimonial bombast of "Maybe I'm Amazed" properly shakes the place. Maybe I'm amazed at the way you love me all the time... Shouldn't he be streaming with tears as he sings this? No--he's Paul McCartney. Huge latitudes of emotion conveyed with boisterous professionalism, with showbiz invincibility. So we get the wink, the head-toss, the comically lengthened upper lip, the full arsenal of insouciance. My companion for the evening is a McCartney nutter, a real Macca-head, rapt in her enjoyment even as she trains her formidable critical mind upon his performance. "Another song of empathy," she shouts in my ear after a thumping, flawless run-through of "Lady Madonna". "Always taking the woman's side. He's very woman-identified." He plays "Blackbird" alone, with an acoustic guitar. Then, similarly, "Here Today." It's shockingly moving. He plays the first half of George Harrison's "Something" on a ukulele, and the humbleness of the sound seems to reach into the song's mystery--the essential mystery of an erotically sated Beatle. All I have to do is think of her... I could live without hearing "Yesterday" again, but that's just me. Ob la di, ob la da. The principle of entertainment is indestructible. It is a human truth. "One of my more intellectually challenging songs," he says after the nonsense rave-up of "All Together Now" (A,B,C,D/ Can I bring my friend to tea?) And after "Mrs Vandebilt" he confides to us that the Wings-era number--with its cheery-beery refrain of Ho! Hey ho!--is a great favorite when the band plays the Ukraine. Hordes of delighted Ukrainians, thumping along: Ho! Hey ho! Can't you just see it? Night-glow rises, city-glow: Fenway Park brims with happiness. "Let's get high on life!" he exhorts before "Hi, Hi, Hi", and it does seem almost possible. "Live And Let Die" includes fireworks. You can't miss with fireworks. "He's seventy-one dude!" insisted a voice in the bag-check line, hours ago. "This is his last tour for sure!" No way, no way. He'll bury us all. 
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| Posted: 10 Jul 2013 01:53 PM PDT  The invasion of periodical cicadas is over, but a second insect invasion looms. Sphecius speciosus, the Eastern cicada killers, have begun to emerge. And they make the national media hype over the cicadas look rather misplaced. Hunting, warring, patrolling, tunneling, they do more in two months--the length of their adult lives--than periodical cicadas do in 17 years. With bodies up to two inches in length, huge jaws, and glossy black paintjobs streaked with yellow, they are unmistakable, and more than a little intimidating. They emerge in July and August, to coincide with the hatching of annual-cycle cicadas, their sole prey--larger cousins of the periodical cicadas the nation watched so obsessively earlier this summer. Cicada killer females construct burrows that are small wonders of engineering and effort. Several feet long, and featuring numerous individual brood chambers at their far end, they require the excavation of hundreds of times the insects' own weight in soil. The female killers manage the feat in just a few hours, using only their jaws and hind legs. After that they hunt, for the so-called dog-day cicadas of genus Tibicen. A killer paralyzes a cicada with a single sting, but getting it back to the burrow can be an all-day affair. It may be three times the killer's own weight--too heavy to properly fly with. Instead she drags it up the nearest tree, then launches herself, prey in claw, and glides as far as possible toward her burrow. She may have to repeat the process half a dozen times. Back at the burrow, she deposits the paralyzed cicada in a brood chamber. Then she lays an egg and carefully tucks it beneath the cicada's foreleg, beside the puncture wound from her sting. (The doomed creature looks, creepily, like a wizened old man with a baguette tucked under his arm.) The female then seals the chamber with dirt, the cicada still living and immobilized within it. A few days later the egg hatches and grub begins to eat the cicada alive, using the puncture wood as an entry point. Later, the grub spins a cocoon, in which it metamorphoses into an adult wasp, emerging the following year. (Footage of these behaviors has been kindly posted online by filmmaker Sam Orr, who is working on a documentary about the 17-year cicadas.) Meantime, the males are trying to win mates. Each claims about a square yard of territory. But because the bare ground on which these territories are established is basically featureless, the boundaries are impossible for the other males to determine. The result is a constant war of all against all. (In one experiment, a researcher laid down a grid of wooden dowels, providing visual cues for territorial boundaries. The violence immediately dropped by 80 percent.) There's a second indignity to male cicada killer life. Tethered by biological duty to their barren patches of earth, they get no relief from the sun, and spend the summer barfing on their own heads to generate a little evaporative cooling. Despite being top predators, cicada killers are themselves frequently victimized by other insects. Some of these go after the killers' grubs; Chuck Holliday, emeritus professor of biology at Lafayette College and a leading cicada killer expert, recalls seeing one such parasitic fly approach a burrow and, in full flight, drop its egg down the hole "like one of those thermobaric bombs we used at Tora Bora." Aware of the danger, female cicada killers attempt to outwit these "satellite flies"--so named because they hover around the much larger wasps as if orbiting them--by dropping to the ground and remaining motionless for minutes at a time. Other cicada-killer antagonists go after the adults, spiking them with needle-like probosces and sucking out their guts--"the stuff of sand wasp nightmares, if they had them," as the late entomologist and science writer Howard Ensign Evans drily put it in his masterwork. We humans, happily, have nothing to fear, although we're very likely to encounter the insects. Cicada killers live almost everywhere east of the Rockies and south of Ontario. Moreover, like pigeons, coyotes, and white-tailed deer, they actually benefit from human activity and enjoy suburban living. The soft soil around home foundations, in gardens, and on golf courses and playgrounds is ideal for burrowing. Some of the first research into cicada killer behavior was conducted beside two baseball fields in Brooklyn. But unlike other wasp species that plague human summers, only the females of the cicada killers have stingers, and both their sting and their temperament are very mild. Holliday has captured, tagged, clipped the wings of, and in other ways harassed thousands of them in the course of his research. "I've done abominable things to these animals, and I've never had one try to sting me," he says. Instead, when threatened, they fly away or, if trapped in a burrow, frantically beat their wings against its walls, producing a loud rattlesnake-like whir. Male cicada killers are entirely stingless, and though they do tend to brusquely approach anything that moves inside their territory, including people, they're simply on the lookout for rivals and potential mates. Since humans are neither, they quickly break off their "attacks." If your lawn becomes infested with killers and you simply must exterminate them, Holliday has a complete guide. But, as Evans wrote when considering the insect, these aren't "really necessary for the nonentomophobic among us who can tolerate a few brown spots in our lawns and occasional libidinous, dive-bombing male wasps." And Holliday encourages, instead, using them to introduce children to nature's intricate clockworks. Their predictable, curious behaviors are just the thing for capturing young minds. As for adult appreciation, the killers are some of the most effective cicada-silencers around. After the last few months' deafening treetop chorus, their presence should be welcome. 
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| How to Wash Your Hair in Space Posted: 10 Jul 2013 01:48 PM PDT Karen Nyberg is a mechanical engineer who earned her PhD in the control of thermal neutrality in space suits. In May 2008, she became the fiftieth woman in space, serving on the crew of the space shuttle mission STS-124 on a trip to the International Space Station. She is currently living aboard the Station as a flight engineer on Expedition 36. Karen Nyberg, in addition to all that, is also the possessor of long hair -- hair that, in the microgravity of low-Earth orbit, takes on an amazing life of its own. Nyberg's typical space-coif is a sensible ponytail; occasionally, however, she'll undo that to reveal a remarkable hair halo. In the video above, she shares her tricks for hair-washing in space. The process -- which seems only marginally more labor-intensive than its counterpart here on Earth -- involves special space shampoo; some warm water; a towel; and a wide-tooth comb. Oh, and a water-drenched fauxhawk the likes of which you would never see here on Earth. 
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| Posted: 10 Jul 2013 01:33 PM PDT I have a great many things to say to you. They are, in no particular order, the following: 1.) There is something very libertarian about this city. Yesterday I watched a dude put his his kid, who could not have been older than four, on a motorcycle. I get the feeling that Mike Bloomberg would not do well here. 2.) Really enjoying Le Contrat Social. This, for instance, ties back to our earlier conversations: Let us add that there is no Government so subject to civil war and internal strife as the Democratic or popular kind, because there is none that tends so strongly and continually to change form, nor that requires more vigilance and courage in order to be maintained in its own. It is above all in this constitution that the Citizen must arm himself with force and constancy, and each day of his life say in his innermost heart what a virtuous Palatine* used to say in the Polish Diet: Malo periculosam libertatem quem quietum servitium. If there were a people of Gods, it would govern itself Democratically. So perfect a Government is not suitable for men. One thing I see in Rousseau, and that I saw in Tocqueville, was an affectionate skepticism of democracy. It is not a tyrant's skepticism, but a realists'. The basic frame seems to be, "Democracy would be awesome if this works, and it is worth trying, but you should understand all the risks inherent." When did that affectionate skepticism disappear from our popular discussion? When did it "make the world safe for democracy" become an applause line? Is this a post-World War II development? Rousseau and Tocqueville would have laughed at "making the world safe for democracy" right?3.) If you accept Rousseau's skepticism, then it must be true that some non-democratic governments were "good" for their people. Is that correct?4.) I watched France vs. Croatia last night. OK, I am in for le fut. How do you follow football? I really like watching the dudes move without the ball when they are close to the goal.4.) Tintin is awesome. I want to take back the completed works. 5.) Also "C'est Pour Rire." Guy I'm staying with left a cabinet of white wine. He hates the stuff. Told us to finish the stuff. On our second bottle watching this joint. Good times. 
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| Posted: 10 Jul 2013 01:08 PM PDT
I am reminded of a reality of the reporting life: We think of this as the always-connected age. Indeed, if you'd gone away to Mars eight years ago, and just suddenly been plunked down in any American city small or large, the first texture-of-life difference you'd be amazed by is that people are always staring at little devices in their hands, even when they're otherwise walking, standing in line, (oh no!) driving their cars, or for men (OH NO!!) standing at urinals in the rest room. And on days when you're mainly in your office or at your home, the main challenge can be breaking away from the constant online lure. I find that it's very, very different on the road, where ideally as a reporter I should spend a lot of my time. What I think of as "working" connectivity involves: (a) having a real keyboard to type with, rather than a tiny smartphone screen on which to hammer out "thx" or "c u soon," (b) ideally having a place to sit (even if it's an airport concourse), so I can type with both hands rather than using one to prop up the computer and pecking at keys with the other, and (c) having a fast-enough connection for a long enough time to see what is going on. By those standards, when I'm not in my office it can still seem to be the rarely-connected era. Over the past month I've spent a lot of daylight hours either traveling to someplace, in various non-connected circumstances; or interviewing people and touring farms, factories, etc, where my attention is on the people I'm seeing; or being in meetings; or staying in places with shaky online connections. I've spent the past few hours getting to and sitting in the San Diego airport, where the wifi coverage (like most provided across the country by the AWG company, in my experience) goes off and on, and am about to spend the rest of the day and evening aboard an airplane -- which, because it's a United B-737, means it has no wifi. [And where we've just been told there will be a three-hour takeoff delay.][Now back to one-hour.]
I am not in any way complaining; I feel more fortunate by the day to be able to make a living doing what I love. By far the best part of the reporting life is the time when you're out seeing, learning, listening, and being surprised. (The worst part: the actual sitting-down-and-writing.) But while the benefits of the disconnected life are clear -- adventure, discovery, the ability to concentrate on the person or place you're actually encountering rather than with an eye drawn to the electronic simulacrum of life, the simple chance to read or think -- I've noted that the costs of disconnection also seem to mount up. There are so many emails I "mean" to answer, and know that I never will; so many discussions with friends, readers, or critics I unintentionally let wither; so many leads I would like to pursue, from political and aeronautical developments to the Atlas Shrugged Guy. Even a few years ago, you could be away from the internet through a 24-hour cycle and still feel perfectly normal. Not so much today. Of course this is the General Predicament of life, in slightly updated form -- decades ago, I remember my 10th grade English teacher talking about the pileup of magazines and Book of the Month Club deliveries in her mailbox each week, and how there was so much more she wanted to read than there was time. And of course too it is a better problem to have than the reverse. I mention it now (a) because a multi-week burst of mainly disconnected time has highlighted the tension, and (b) as way-long-winded prelude to a list of items that I had hoped to say something about. And will still try, but in case not: 1) How wonderful it is for the Atlantic, for the reading public, and for Ta-Nehisi Coates and family that he, his wife, and their son are immersing themselves in France and that he is chronicling their experience. And how grateful my wife and I are for their friendship and his generous note. 2) More on Asiana 214 -- including what we know and don't know now, why it is so nutty to hear TV speculation about findings from the "black box" when (in contrast to most crashes) there are three live pilots to discuss what happened, why so many people survived, and what the pattern of injuries for survivors might indicate. 3) The very long talk I need to have with the author of the latest NYT op-ed piece, which begins this way:
4) The very long talk we should all be having with the Republican party's leaders in the Senate, and the Democrats' too, about the very different ways in which they are contributing to a breakdown in governmental functioning. The Republicans, by abusing the filibuster in an unprecedented fashion; the Democrats, by not calling them out more clearly or fighting back more firmly than they have. Read more about one of the many bad consequences here. And the long talk we need to have with the press about stories like this on CNN: "The U.S. Senate voted today against taking up a Democratic measure to temporarily reverse the doubling of some student loan rates, falling short of the 60 votes needed." Of course, having seen CNN and other cable networks in the hotel these past few days, I realize that we should be grateful for news on any topic whatsoever other than George Zimmerman. 5) Why my wife and I have been at a big meeting in San Diego these past few days, which I can explain; and why Dole apparently has an entire container boat dedicated to the shipment of -- pineapples? bananas? -- between the islands and the mainland, which you see above and which was a surprise to me. 6) Why so much of the angry email I get these days is from Hong Kong. Will try to provide some samples. Time to board the plane. Thanks to readers, supporters, and even complainers. 
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| For Many Students, College Means Back to Middle School Posted: 10 Jul 2013 01:06 PM PDT
Reuters "A large fraction of students are leaving the 12th grade with a high-school diploma, and they're about to begin a course of studies at the 8th grade level," said Marc Tucker, president of a Washington, D.C. think-tank, of its recently released a report on college readiness. "What Does It Really Mean to Be College and Work Ready?" offers a stark assessment of the disparities among what high schools think students should know to succeed in college, what colleges expect students to be able to do, and what skills employers expect college grads to have upon being hired. In recent years, "college and career readiness" has become the benchmark goal of both the school reform movement and the college completion agenda. The report from the National Center on Education and the Economy suggests that achieving that objective might require a radical reassessment of what skills are taught when throughout all levels of the American education system. The report is based on two empirical studies conducted over three years. NCEE randomly selected one community college in each of seven states, then examined eight of the most popular programs--accounting, automotive technology, biotech/electrical technology, business, criminal justice, early childhood education, information technology/computer programming, nursing, and the general education track. NCEE researchers examined the programs' textbooks, assignments and exams to see what math and English skills truly were necessary to succeed. While the researchers found that "the reading and writing currently required of students in initial credit-bearing courses in community colleges is not very complex or cognitively demanding," the report's math findings are even more striking. The report also states that middle school math--"arithmetic, ratio, proportion, expressions and simple equations"--were more central to the community college math courses than the Algebra II most high schools emphasize in college readiness programs. "What really is needed in our community colleges--and really for the majority of Americans in the work that they do--is middle school math," Tucker said.  New Report: High School Graduation Rate Continues Uptick, Nears 75 percent Is Student Motivation the Missing Link in School Reform? It's a discovery that raises many questions. Should community colleges raise their admission standards? Tucker said that's not the way to go , given that "many students "can't meet the current standards." Plus, as the NCEE research suggests, only a minority of students will ever need to use advanced math skills in college or the workplace, comparing today's college-prep math requirement to previous generations' being forced to learn Latin. Similarly, the report found placement tests two-year colleges use to determine whether students should be in developmental education or credit-bearing courses also mismatch standards with the skills actually needed. "It looks like we're denying high school graduates the opportunity to take credit-bearing courses because they can't master math that they don't need, and that seems very unfair," Tucker said. Instead, "both the schools and our community colleges will have to help their students reach for different kinds of targets and, at the same time, achieve at much higher levels than they do now," the report notes. Of course, the report also highlights how important it is for students to master those math skills when they first encounter them in middle school. Indeed, Tucker offered a telling example of how difficult it can be to break the cycle once that original opportunity has passed. "The reason that the students don't understand the concepts underlying middle school math is that their math teachers don't either," Tucker said, adding that "If they didn't learn it in middle school, they'll never have the opportunity to learn it again" as they study to become teachers. This post also appears at The Educated Reporter, an Atlantic partner site. 
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| Big Star: The Greatest Band You've Never Heard, Now on Film Posted: 10 Jul 2013 12:32 PM PDT  Writing about Big Star is risky: Readers familiar with the band are probably already on the lookout for evidence that, say, I don't know enough about Rock City to call myself a serious Big Star fan. The other 98 percent of readers are already lost.
But don't click away! As any fan will tell you, Big Star is the greatest thing you've never heard. Here's a capsule biography for the band, which is the subject of the new feature-length documentary, Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me. Founded in Memphis in 1971 by singer-guitarist Chris Bell, it included Alex Chilton, the former teenage singer of the Box Tops' 1967 hit "The Letter." Big Star's first two records--immaculately crafted guitar-and-Mellotron power-pop with hooks to spare--won fanatical, breathless praise from the music press but were torpedoed by distribution problems. Bell quit in despair, leaving Chilton to make Third, Big Star's last testament and a surreal, disjointed, genius journal of decay. But just about everyone who did hear the records was entranced. The band's disciples include R.E.M., Yo La Tengo, the Replacements, the dB's, Wilco, Elliott Smith, and basically every power-pop band since. And everyone knows either the Bangles' cover of "September Gurls" or "In the Street" as the Cheap Trick-performed theme to That '70s Show. You've gathered by now that people who love Big Star really love Big Star. Take the Replacements' Paul Westerberg, who wrote a song called "Alex Chilton" in his band's heyday and wrote an appreciation in The New York Times when Chilton died in 2010 at a heartbreaking 59. Take Peter Holsapple of the dB's, who in the liner notes to a 2009 box set recalled summarily breaking up with a girlfriend when she failed to appreciate Radio City, the band's second release. Or take Danielle McCarthy, Drew DeNicola, and Olivia Mori, the directors of Nothing Can Hurt Me, which is out in limited theatrical release and on demand. There are three main ways to think about the movie. The first is as gospel: Like every other Big Star fan, its makers approach the band's music with a furious evangelical zeal. The second is as a narrative of a singular surreal event, Big Star's live show at the 1973 Rock Writers Convention in Memphis, which according to witnesses was like the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, but with Big Star subbing for the Fab Four and a group of misfit, drugged out critics playing the part of the ecstatic teenage girls. The third way of understanding the film seems dearest to the film's makers and those who appear in it. It's also the most daunting. More than anything else, this is a film about Chris Bell, the little-remembered, tragic founder of Big Star. If Chilton is the hero of Big Star, Bell is the hero of Nothing Can Hurt Me. That makes ita film about the forgotten, underdog member of a forgotten, underdog band--an exponentially tough order. To a surprising degree, it pulls it off. Unlike Chilton, already a jaded star at 20, the Paul Rudd lookalike Bell had never been famous and dreamed of rock stardom. He co-wrote the first two records with Chilton, led his partner toward the power-pop sound, and was the studio whiz who made the debut #1 Record sound immaculate. But when the band didn't hit it big, Bell was deeply disappointed and left. He went to Europe seeking a record deal, drank heavily, returned to Memphis, and became a born-again Christian. He worked in a local fast-food joint as Chilton reached a sort of auteur status. In 1978, Bell's car struck a light pole late at night and he was killed, aged 27. After Bell left, between the writing and the recording of a second record, Chilton became the band's face. Third, which featured drummer Jody Stephens but came after bassist Andy Hummel's departure, is practically a Chilton solo record. He then went on to an esoteric career, producing punk pioneers the Cramps, steadfastly refusing to make anything that sounded like Big Star or would sell much at all, and remaining a hero to bands like the Replacements. Chilton had a knack for alienating people, though they continued to love him from afar, and he consciously drove off listeners with work like the brilliant, grating dada-rock album Like Flies on Sherbert. Then, in 1993--to the shock of everyone he knew--he reformed Big Star and performed with it occasionally. His later profile never matched his Box Tops zenith, but Chilton seems to have been relieved by that. Interviews with Stephens, Bell's brother David and sister Sara Stewart, and John Fry, head of Big Star's label, Ardent Records, explain Bell the man. Later footage of Chilton's work--the Cramps and Tav Falco's Panther Burns (where he's credited as Axel Chitlin)--drive home how much of the signature Big Star sound was Bell's. There are some fumbles. You might get the idea that Bell's lone solo release, "I Am the Cosmos," was recorded just before his death, not in 1974, and there's frustratingly no explanation for why Chilton urged his protégé Chris Stamey of the dB's to release it in 1978. The documentary addresses the conflict between Bell's religion and his personal life, but far too obliquely--it's clear, by implication, that Bell was either bisexual or gay, a fact that should have been more directly addressed or left out. The Paradox of Big Star: As much as the critics and latter-day fans adore the band, they're just as in love with the idea of an unknown band. This catch-22 translates to the movie, which is at once trying to evangelize but also intoxicated with its own obscure knowledge. The rest of the film has plenty to amuse, amaze, and entertain the Big Star fan, marred only by sloppily edited captions. The range of interviews is wide--including Stephens, Hummel (who died five months after Chilton), many Big Star associates, and dozens of famous fans--as is the archival footage. Chilton appears only in archival footage and radio interviews; it's not clear if he was still alive when filming began. And there are great details--for example, Ardent had the U.S.'s first Mellotron, without which #1 Record would be unfathomable. Plus there's the story of the Rock Writers Convention, ostensibly a way for critics to unionize and demand respect. It was organized by Ardent PR man John King, a garrulous fellow who bears a disturbing resemblance to Fred Willard's character in a A Mighty Wind. He offers a po-faced but dubious vow that he did it for the writers and not just to promote the band. Motivations aside, it worked--sort of. "They had a bunch of rock critics dancing, which is a miracle," one attendee cracks. The sight of a bunch of aging writers--one of the more jaded groups imaginable--un-self-consciously rocking out and playing air-guitar and -drums along with recordings as they reminisce can only be described as tickling. But as Billy Altman, one of the writers, correctly observes, this is just the problem. You might call it the Paradox of Big Star: As much as the critics (and we obsessive latter-day fans) adored the band, they were just as in love with the idea of an unknown band--"the greatest lost track of all time .... You can't hear it on the radio, you can't hear it anywhere you go," to paraphrase one Big Star fan. "We wanted them to be a tiny band that nobody listened to," Altman says in the film. It's hipsterism avant la lettre. This catch-22 translates to the movie, too, which is at once trying to evangelize but also intoxicated with its own obscure knowledge. For the Big Star fan, no matter how obsessed, Nothing Can Hurt Me is a must-see. For everyone else ... hey, have you ever heard #1 Record? Man, you've got to check out this band, you won't believe they never hit it big, it's gonna be the greatest thing you've ever heard ... 
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| George W. Bush Is Back (Sort Of) Posted: 10 Jul 2013 12:30 PM PDT  George W. Bush dipped his toe back into the national immigration debate Wednesday, calling for a "positive resolution" in Congress to a "broken" immigration system in remarks before a citizenship ceremony at the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas. "We have a problem. The laws governing the immigration system aren't working. The system is broken. We're now in a important debate on reforming those laws, and that's good," the 43rd president said, before quickly distancing himself from any particular path forward. "I don't intend to get involved in the politics, or the specifics of policy, but I do hope there is a positive resolution to the debate," he said. "And I hope during the debate, that we keep a benevolent spirit in mind and we understand the contributions immigrants make to our country." It was an important, if small, step in increasing the visibility of the former president, who has hidden himself away from the public eye for much of the past four and a half years. But it was clear from his brief remarks that his cautious step forward would be too measured to have much impact on the roiling national debate over immigration, which the former president was unable to win even when he had the full power of the White House bully pulpit. Nor were his remarks particularly new -- in his calls for a respectful debate, recognizing the value of immigrants, and solving immigration-system problems, Bush returned to language he's used often since 2006. "We're a nation of immigrants and we must uphold that tradition, which has strengthened our country in so many ways. We can uphold our traditions of assimilating immigrants and honoring our heritage of a nation build on the rule of law," Bush said Wednesday. Compare today's remarks to what Bush said in December 2012, at another Bush institute forum on immigration: Immigrants come with new skills and new ideas. They fill a critical gap in our labor market. They work hard for a chance for a better life. Today our panelists will discuss those contributions in a sober and enlightening way. America is a nation of immigrants. Immigrants have helped build the country that we have become and immigrants can help build a dynamic tomorrow. Not only do immigrants help build our economy, they invigorate our soul. America can be a lawful society and a welcoming society at the same time. As our nation debates the proper course of action relating to immigration, I hope we do so with a benevolent spirit, and keep in mind the contribution of immigrants. This echoed what he said as president in 2006: We are a nation of laws, and we must enforce our laws. We're also a nation of immigrants, and we must uphold that tradition, which has strengthened our country in so many ways. These are not contradictory goals. America can be a lawful society and a welcoming society at the same time. We will fix the problems created by illegal immigration, and we will deliver a system that is secure, orderly, and fair. Nor was it his first recent reference to the system being "broken"; Bush earlier used the same term in May. Obama also has used a Bush legacy outfit as a platform for promoting the need for immigration reform, using the occasion of the dedication of the George W. Bush Presidential Library in April 2013 to praise the former president's support for immigration reform. "Seven years ago, President Bush restarted an important conversation by speaking with the American people about our history as a nation of laws and a nation of immigrants," Obama said, adding later: "If we do it will be in large part thanks to the hard work of President George W. Bush." If immigration reform passes, it's possible George W. may take on an even more prominent public role. But it's hard to see why he'd want to risk the reputational gains he's made while staying out of the limelight by now inserting himself into a contentious legislative fight that he might be destined, for the second time in his life, to lose. 
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| Massive Open Online Healthcare Posted: 10 Jul 2013 12:26 PM PDT  jiri/flickr Hark, a new age dawns in healthcare! No longer must we tolerate long waiting times for a doctor appointment or service in the hospital emergency room. No more will we suffer inequities in access to healthcare. Relentlessly climbing healthcare costs will become a thing of the past. Herald instead a brave new world, in which cutting-edge information technology will solve once and for all the core problems that have plagued US healthcare for decades. MOOH follows on the heels of a number of other technological revolutions, including radio, motion pictures, closed-circuit TV, and video conferencing. Just as the MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) has revolutionized education at all levels, so the MOOH (Massive Open Online Healthcare) is about to revolutionize the nation's healthcare system, putting out of work most of the businesspeople, politicians, and pundits who have for so long profited from its afflictions. At last, we stand on the threshold of not just "the next big thing" in medicine, but the final and biggest thing of all. The MOOC was born in 2008, when prophets of the new information technology finally realized that the real purpose of pedagogical accessories such as teachers and classrooms is educational content delivery. The MOOH is emerging just five years later, as healthcare leaders finally realize that the real purpose of physicians and hospitals is merely to deliver medical content. To achieve massive increases in efficiency, we simply need to get rid of most teachers and physicians. Consider the following analogy. In the old days, people contracted infectious diseases such as measles or smallpox, which often left their victims permanently scarred or even dead. Then onto the scene burst vaccination, from the Latin for cow, because the first vaccination was derived from cowpox. Suddenly, people no longer contracted such diseases. The MOOH does the same thing -- transforming medical care from a highly labor-intensive, expensive process into an efficient type of inoculation. Like the MOOC, MOOH follows on the heels of a number of other technological revolutions, including radio, motion pictures, closed-circuit TV, and video conferencing. It solves the problem of healthcare access by making it available to anyone with an Internet connection. It solves the finance problem by making it available almost for free -- an hour of a physician's time can be beamed out to thousands, even millions of patients. And it can be delivered anytime, at the patient's convenience. In other words, the MOOH dramatically increases the efficiency and reduces the costs of the healthcare industry by largely removing its greatest source of inefficiency and cost -- human beings. Once physicians have recorded their consultations, they cease to be needed. After all, how many times each day do physicians around the country say the same things? "What seems to be the problem?" "Take one of these every six hours for ten days." "You really should drop a few pounds." Direct costs go down, because we need far fewer physicians, nurses, and hospitals. Indirect costs, such as time off from work and the costs of transit to and from healthcare facilities, also decrease dramatically. This will permit a huge reallocation of the nation's labor pool, from maintaining and repairing the workers to actually making more things. Someday people will look back in wonder and amazement at all the time and effort we once frittered away tending the sick and injured. Experience with MOOCs suggests another potential cost advantage of MOOH. Many MOOCs enroll huge groups of students, numbering into the tens and even hundreds of thousands. However, the percentage of students who actually stick with the course throughout the semester and complete all the assignments is often in the low single digits. If this patterns recurs, the number of patients the healthcare system needs to deal with long term could be dramatically reduced, causing costs to plunge. To capitalize fully on the bovine analogy, may I suggest as the logo for robust MOOH the image of a strapping golden calf? Just as there were once never enough chairs in the classrooms of schools and universities, so there were never enough seats in physicians' offices and hospital emergency rooms. Now, however, we can do away with the seats entirely. And patient choice is dramatically expanded -- we can choose which physician we want to hear, tune out what does not please us, and absorb information at our own pace, even replaying over and over parts that we do not get the first time.  (bhikku/flickr) The advantages for healthcare administrators will be huge. First, they need no longer waste time cajoling and threatening their recalcitrant medical staffs, a task often likened to herding cats. In addition, they will be able to exert more direct control over healthcare, removing intermediaries such as physicians and nurses, who often fail to get with the program. Finally, it will make it possible to slow down the often bewildering pace of change in healthcare, giving leaders valuable time to adapt. What we are talking about here is the replacement of medieval models of medical care, which rely on quaint and frankly obsolete notions such as the patient-physician relationship, with an evidence-based, data-driven, information-rich, and leaner approach to healthcare. Plus it will be crowd-sourced, enabling participants to take full advantage of peer-to-peer education and evaluation. In effect, it can turn the waiting room into a treatment room, fully capitalizing on the wisdom of the crowd. Once medicine was physician-centered. Now medicine will be truly patient-centered, with us the patients in control of where we receive care, how the care is delivered, who delivers it, and what care we receive. Patient dissatisfaction with physicians and hospitals will become a thing of the past, since there will be virtually no physicians and hospital to be dissatisfied with. The triumph of MOOH seems all but inevitable, like a tsunami of technology rolling across the nation's healthcare landscape. Of course, the change in our healthcare business model will be profound and irreversible, spawning unexpected benefits. For example, as costs plunge toward zero, healthcare providers will no longer need or even be able to compete on costs. No longer treated as commodities, they will compete strictly on the basis of quality, and the excellence of U.S. healthcare will necessary rise at an ever-quickening pace. Only the very best will be able to survive. Inevitably, some problems will arise. For one thing, a small number of backward patients will still want to see and be seen by their physicians in person, just as a few Luddite students still insist on attending classes with live professors. Some accommodation will need to be made, at least temporarily. On the bright side, however, the fact that such patients will be receiving care in an outmoded and discredited model should hasten their demise and speed the universal proliferation of MOOH. A second problem concerns procedures that cannot be delivered digitally. For example, some patients will still need broken bones set and inflamed appendixes surgically removed. When such circumstances arise, however, procedure centers operating on a self-service basis will be available, much like a quick oil change. Patients will simply schedule the procedure on line, present at the appointed time, and then undergo the procedure with a minimum of wasteful human interaction. Finally, there is the problem of time and effort. While physicians and other health professionals will be relieved of a great deal of work, the burden will shift to a large extent to patients. Like the MOOC student, MOOH patients must devote time and effort to healthcare, into whose pilot seat we will now be thrust. Happily, however, this should not be much of a problem, since it will be our own life and health on (the) line, which should provide more than adequate incentive. In sum, we stand at the precipice of healthcare's promised land. The New York Times declared 2012 the "Year of the MOOC." The time has come for the nation's patients and physicians to declare 2013 the "Year of the MOOH." To facilitate the unification that will be necessary, it would be helpful to have some symbol to rally around. To capitalize fully on the bovine analogy, may I suggest as the logo for robust MOOH the image of a strapping golden calf? 
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| What Samsung's New American HQ Says About the Korean Giant Posted: 10 Jul 2013 11:52 AM PDT
Samsung breaks ground on a new $300 million North American headquarters building in San Jose today. The building will house more than 2,000 employees in R&D and sales. As you'd expect, it's a green (LEED Gold) building that's designed to foster fickle innovation by making it easy for people to bump into each other in courtyards and facilities. The heart of the development is a ten-story tower that the company's architect, NBBJ, says "will create a powerful brand image for Samsung." I got curious, though. What, precisely, did the building say about Samsung, a company that can compete with Intel with one hand and Apple with the other? So, I sent six renderings of the new building to some architecture critics to see what they had to say. I did not tell them the name of the company or architect; they were flying/critiquing blind. (And while I waited for them to respond, I brushed up on my Samsung history; you can skip ahead if you're familiar with the company's rise.) A Brief History of Samsung Through a variety of joint ventures with Japanese companies like NEC and Sanyo, Samsung began to build its technological capabilities, largely focusing on assembling black-and-white televisions through the late 1970s, primarily for export to the United States as an original-equipment manufacturer, or OEM, for American brands. It was around this time that Samsung entered the semiconductor and telecommunications hardware businesses. The company built technical know-how throughout the 1980s across the world, including a massive facility in Austin, Texas. Samsung's founder, Lee, chose DRAM, memory chips, as the area where the company would compete. By the late 1980s, that choice had paid off. As Japanese and American memory chip companies fought, Samsung swooped in to capture more and more business. By 1993, it had the largest DRAM market share in the world. That success started to bubble over into adjacent businesses. The company became a leading maker of flash memory and LCD TVs, the latter of which became wildly profitable in the late 1990s. All three fields required Samsung to value speed as they could only make money on a particular generation of products for a short time before commodification caught up with them. That trait served them well in the small but growing mobile phone market of the early 2000s. "Even expensive fish becomes cheap in a day or two," Jong-Yong Yun, CEO of Samsung Electronics, told Newsweek in 2004. "For both sashimi shops and the digital industry, inventory is detrimental. Speed is everything." Aided by South Korea's early deployment of both broadband and wireless broadband, Samsung got the jump on some other companies in realizing the importance mobile phones would come to assume. Thanks to a massive (and still growing) global marketing and advertising campaign begun by Eric Kim in 1999, their phones became the consumer product that transformed Samsung's image from a manufacturer of cheap electronics into an elite global brand. Now, Samsung finds itself as a vertically integrated monster electronics company with a top 10 global brand. And they're one of only a handful of corporations that have figured out how to make money off smartphones. And yet, the original knock, summed up by Sea-Jin Chang in his 2008 book, Samsung Vs. Sony, on which I've relied heavily in this account of the company's fortunes, remains: "Samsung is not competitive in products for which creativity and software matter and to which Samsung's magic formula, 'speed and aggressive investment,' do not apply." But that's not to say that Samsung has not desperately wanted to become radically innovative, like the Sony of old and Apple of late. The Architecture of Fitting In Remember that (all but one of) the architecture critics I contacted did not know that we were talking about a Samsung building. They just knew it was the prospective North American HQ of a global corporation. Christopher Hawthorne, the Los Angeles Times' architecture critic, delivered a perfect summation of the building's aspirations, revealing several threads that run through the rest of the evaluations. I'm going to let him walk you through the building.
What do these renderings reveal? A building that makes sincere if modest gestures in the direction of public engagement but is more clearly designed to draw employees into a sleek, dynamic and well-appointed interior realm. On its outer facades, it is stocky, symmetrical and well-behaved, reminiscent of office buildings of the 1960s and 1970s; the decision to slice it into three horizontal bands suggests an interest in keeping it, at any cost, from looking like a vertical building.
Inside, the focus is very different: on interaction, collegiality, a chance for employees to see what their colleagues are doing, and even better to run into them on the way to or from a meeting or the gym. Many new high-tech campuses -- by Facebook, Apple et al. -- put an architectural and rhetorical premium on this kind of serendipitous encounter and how it can boost a company's creativity. This was the basis of Marissa Mayer's edict that Yahoo employees stop working so much from home; as she put it, people are "more collaborative and innovative when they're together. Some of the best ideas come from pulling two different ideas together."
That, of course, is a fundamentally urban notion, the same idea that has always made cities attractive and vital. Crucially, though, the companies allow it only inside, from one employee to another; outside, they prefer suburban enclaves that their staffs reach largely by car. They want city-like energy inside the building, but a ring of privacy and a suburban buffer outside.
This building seems not nearly as extreme in that regard as, say, Norman Foster's Apple Campus 2; but the long arm of the parking garage serving the main building like plumbing serves a house, half-heartedly camouflaged behind its solar array and giant gridded metal panels, combined with the way the architecture is staid on the outside but fluid and energetic in the interior courtyard, suggests a watered-down version of the same approach here: a squared-off update of the Apple ring, feeling slightly guilty (but not *too* guilty) about sealing itself off from the world around it. You park, you experience a few yards of the public realm, maybe you buy a coffee at one of the storefronts attached to the garage; and then you make your way inside, where the architectural and corporate action is.
Mark Lamster, the architecture critic for the Dallas Morning News, saw the building's rather practical appeal. "It looks like a pretty forward-thinking design, and I guess it will be a desirable place to work, but," he noted, "it has a hermetic feel to it, even as it appears to be very open architecturally." As Hawthorne noted, the building retains the trappings of a suburban office park. "Move beyond the high-end, high-tech aesthetics and landscaping, and you find a building that is pretty insular, even though it appears to be set on a busy street grid," Lamster wrote. "The idea: keep employees inside at all times, so they're never away from work. (Companies also like to point out that this kind of enforced proximity promotes collaboration and innovation.)" Samsung is, in fact, famous for requiring that employees trying to innovate spend vast amounts of time with each other. In Korea, they even have a facility called the Value Innovation Program Center to which employees repair for months at a time to literally eat and sleep at work. Design Observer's Alexandra Lange picked up on specific set of corporate cues. "Infinite loop. Check. Green walls. Check. Green roof. Check. Fitness feelies. Check," she wrote. "The renderings of this headquarters exhibits many of the de rigeur elements of new corporatism, focusing on glass and greenery and casually dressed people, making the workplace seem like more of a walk in the park, or a lifestyle, than an office." She wondered whether the tension between the corporate subtext and casual facade could be resolved. "The front, boxy building looks like a blandish 1970s office building newly retrofitted with a curving interior atrium," Lange said. "It should be rethought, as the message of its front facade doesn't match with the long, green-walled tail. Founding editor-in-chief of Dwell Magazine and former New York magazine architecture critic Karrie Jacobs weighed in although she knew she was looking at Samsung's building. Generally, she had much the same reaction as those who did not know it was a tech company's new digs. "The idea is that everyone can see everyone and that this will somehow encourage human contact and collaboration. It's post-Panopticon," she said. "Not authoritarian but more about visual peer pressure, the built version of social media."
Where the others saw a general, bland corporate decisionmaking process at work, she had more explicit me-too reference points. "My first thought upon seeing the open core of the building was that Apple had reigned in its giant Foster donut," Jacobs said. She also compared the building to IBM's 1964 headquarters building in Armonk, NY. "Not for any good reason," she noted. "But the resemblance, real or imagined, was enough that I entertained the thought that maybe IBM was trying to reinvent itself yet again with a fabulous, greenish, state of the art Silicon Valley building." Putting the responses together, I'm struck by the idea that this is an architecture of fitting in. When American companies look to foreign markets, they often talk about "localizing" their products for the "cultural preferences" of the target consumers. This building strikes me as what happens when a very smart company from a distant shore localizes ititself for Silicon Valley. It must have green space. It must have green walls. It must have "fitness feelies." And there is something for everyone, as BLDGBLOG's Geoff Manaugh (and incoming editor of Gizmodo) observes. "They are also trying to project an appeal across class lines and lifestyles by depicting different types of render ghosts in the images: dudes in shorts, women in pant suits, a lady in a tennis visor, guys in Prada-like autumn wear sporting Ray-Bans in the sun."
Manaugh allllmost calls the building the mullet of corporate headquarters: business in the front, party in the back. "The images also say that they're serious and competitive on the outside (see the modern, gridded, rectilinear building envelope), but, around the corner, if you're willing to walk out back here with us, you can check out our oddly shaped long tail where you'll get lost in the free geometry and casual landscaping, and you can dwell for a while and have a coffee" he wrote to me. "Meanwhile, if you are lucky enough to work here -- or to be invited here for a meeting -- you will experience our quirky interior courtyard carved out of the floor plate, indicating that we're more fun and less formal than the public image we first deliberately greeted you with." What makes the building interesting as a Samsung emblem is that this is an inversion of the stereotypical Valley attitude. The vibe is supposed to be casual on the outside, but serious and competitive on the inside: sharks in flip-flops, vampires in jeans, eggheads in t-shirts. Samsung inverts this norm, playing off the besuited Asian business stereotype, while not quite pretending to the affable, work-life balance hang-looseism of a Facebook. This is a work space, even as it concedes that it must look Silicon Valley -- which is to say, "innovative" -- enough. Maybe call it Minimum-Viable Valley Architecture. 
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| Why China's Slowdown Could Be Good News For the U.S. Posted: 10 Jul 2013 11:05 AM PDT  (Reuters) China is slowing down -- that much is clear. (Especially after this morning's dismal trade report.) What isn't, though, is what that means for everyone else. For those pondering America's fortunes, China's $1.26 trillion in holdings of Treasurys are a source of particular unease, for reasons articulated by economist Stephen Roach: "Who will fund a seemingly chronic U.S. saving shortfall -- and on what terms -- if America's largest foreign creditor ceases doing so?" Roach has a point. It's unlikely any global player will emerge with the voracious appetite for U.S. Treasurys that China has had. But that might be fine. Why? Because America might need to borrow less. And that means it will need fewer borrowers of its debt. Let's break this down. China's Treasury buying is an outgrowth of the government's manipulation of its exchange rate. Simply put, China has pushed down the value of its currency, the yuan, as a matter of policy since the 1990s. How? The People's Bank of China -- the central bank -- prints fresh yuan and uses them to buy dollars at the exchange rate of its choosing. It then takes those dollars and stashes them in a safe place. That safe place has been the U.S. Treasury market, pretty much the only market big and liquid enough to invest the volume of dollars China was amassing. Why? A cheaper currency gives Chines exporters an edge. That part's well known, though. What's less obvious is the effect of the Chinese government's interest rate policy. By keeping bank deposit rates lower than the market rate -- and often lower than inflation -- Chinese banks could loan out funds to businesses at ludicrously cheap rates. That was good for China's export economy. Chinese businesses could sell cheaply and still have plenty of easy credit available to keep growing. At the same time, it seemed to be good for American consumers, who were able to buy these cheaper-than-they-should-have-been Chinese products. But it was bad for Chinese households, since the government's currency and interest rate policies crimped their wealth and purchasing power. And it was bad for U.S .manufacturers, both because they couldn't compete with China's subsidized export machine and because China's policies choked off its demand for U.S. imports. Between 2001 and 2011, the U.S.-China trade deficit effectively killed 2.8 million U.S. jobs, according to economist Robert E. Scott, including around half of U.S. manufacturing jobs lost during that time. In other words, the U.S. was buying a lot more than it was selling. China's share of the U.S. trade deficit jumped from 20 percent in 1995 to 41 percent in the first five months of 2013. And while it was buying cheap Chinese stuff, the U.S. economy was losing business and jobs -- and, therefore, tax revenue. In order to keep up consumption as revenue fell, the U.S. had to borrow money, i.e. sell Treasury bonds. While China's exports to the U.S. rose only 1.5 percent in the first half of 2013, compared with the same period last year, imports of U.S. goods jumped a whopping 15 percent. And, what do you know? China's mushrooming demand for U.S. Treasurys pushed down interest rates, making it all the easier. So in a sense, you can say that that China's policy of keeping the yuan weak and its households poor enabled the U.S. borrowing problem. (Price wars and lavish tax cuts exacerbated this.) But here's the thing: The effectiveness of China's policies is waning. That's evident in June's lousy trade data. First off, it's clear that the trusty old model is no longer working. China's exports fell more than 3 percent in June, compared with the same month in 2012. China could, of course, return to that model in a bid for stability. But that's what it did just after the Lehman collapse. It started weakening the yuan and boosting lending to help juice exports. But now, excessive debt and overcapacity might that sort of stimulus push less effective. Here's a more interesting point, though. While China's exports to the U.S. rose only 1.5 percent in the first half of 2013, compared with the same period last year, imports of U.S. goods jumped a whopping 15 percent. That's compared with a 10.4 percent increase in China's overall exports, and only a 6.7 percent rise in imports. That's happening even as China's economy is getting shakier. Of course, a "hard landing" of the Chinese economy would be bad for domestic consumption. And there's a long way to go. Even as China's U.S. imports rose in the first half, compared with the previous year, they were still only 45 percent of the value of its exports to the U.S. Here's a look at the size of that trade gap:  So what Stephen Roach was arguing is right. A slowing economy and falling exports means China won't be buying up Treasurys anymore. But if that pickup in U.S. imports keeps gradually righting the trade deficit, the U.S. might not need to borrow so much either. 
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| The Most Dangerous Thing In America--A Brother With A Passport Posted: 10 Jul 2013 10:01 AM PDT Over at the American Conservative, Rod Dreher has been kind enough to respond to my writings about Paris. He did the same thing last spring, and I've been meaning to say how much I appreciate it. My experiences here are necessarily a neophyte's view, so any context from folks with a little more experience than me is appreciated. Rod, having done this trip before, is one of those people. But we come at this from different places, though perhaps not the different places he might suspect. Before I get into that, I want to clarify something, because it comes up later in Rod's piece. To claim the game is rigged--as I do--is not to relieve people of responsibility to act, nor to strip credit from people who actually achieve something. Dan Marino never won a Super Bowl. John Elway won two. I think "luck" has something to do with that. But it does not follow that John Elway didn't work hard or that he didn't actually do anything himself. And it also doesn't follow that John Elway worked harder than Dan Marino. Life is complicated. Being born rich has advantages but it does not then follow that it's impossible to ever achieve anything of your own. Moreover, I was privileged. You can't really buy the kind of parenting I had. My pops had seven kids. Some of them were born to friends. Some of them were born in the same year. All of them, except me, graduated from college. Some of them are engineers. Some of them are computer programmers. Some of them are lawyers. Some of them are in the family trade. And some of them are writers. All of them are alive and healthy. And if you asked my dad about this (as I did only weeks ago) the first word that would come from his lips is this--lucky. What you must get is that we were privileged and we were lucky and we worked hard and were black in America. All at the same time. There's no contradiction there. The game is rigged--and it can be won. One doesn't cancel out the other. Jackie Robinson's greatness doesn't make the MLB of his era any less racist. That aside, there's something else in Rod's post that I find really fascinating. Here is a portion where he discusses how someone very close to him (his sister) reacted to his excursion: It's not that I was born wealthy, or from people who traveled (except my great-great aunts, who died when I was small). I did not, and my sister, to her dying day, resented me for becoming the sort of person who liked to go to France... For many years I have generally doubted the import of the "acting white" thesis, mostly because I never experienced or saw anything like it. I was a pretty weird kid in my Baltimore days. I played D&D, collected comics, and read a lot of obscure books. My family ate strange foods, and clearly had ambitions beyond the hood. I got called a lot of things. White wasn't among them. But I've heard from enough black people who did have this happen to them to understand that it is real, and I suspect it is a sub-specimen of what Rod is talking about here--a kind of tribal border-patrolling. I felt really, really sad reading this. By the time I graduated from high school I was writing poetry and I was really beginning to blossom as a thinking person. I can't really imagine how I would have taken it if someone had accused me of "getting above my raising." A number of you here have said you had that very experience and I am amazed that many of you moved on despite it. I think, in some ways, the quasi-black nationalism of my childhood shielded me. You have to remember that Malcolm X read everything in jail--not just black stuff--that Malcolm traveled to London and Paris. There's some portion of the nationalist tradition that holds that the acquisition of knowledge--any kind of knowledge--is self-improvement, and thus improvement of black people. You can hear this in the lyrics of Public Enemy. Or in the old nationalist saw that the best place to hide anything from a black person is in a book. Or in Brother Muzone's quip about a "nigger with a library card." It's actually older than the nationalist and goes back to the slave narratives. The idea is that knowledge was transgressive, something that "they" don't want you to do and thus cool. I could turn half of 125th francophone just by saying, "The white man don't want you parlez-vous Françaising, brother. He got a plan." OK, so maybe not. Plus half of 125th is already francophone. But you get my point. And to the extent that I am still a quasi-nationalist, this is the portion of the tradition that I cling strongest to: There's nothing "white" about reading Rousseau or Tocqueville or visiting Paris. This isn't getting above your raising. It's burning down the Big House, the caveat being that you can bring some of this back and flip it to relate to the nature of your people. And you always can. Because your people are human. 
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| Disney Is Not a Movie Company; It's a Television Company Posted: 10 Jul 2013 09:51 AM PDT So, "The Lone Ranger" was a disaster. That much we know. In its extended holiday weekend opening, the $225 million (!!!) film took in barely a fifth of its budget at the box office. Analysts are now projecting a write-down for Disney as large as $190 million. That sounds bad. It is bad. But it's also a good time to remind people less familiar with the Walt Disney Company that, despite what you think, Disney isn't strictly speaking "a movie company." It's a TV company. What does that mean? Doesn't Disney make movies? Yes. Lots of movies. And it owns amusement parks, all over the world. And cruise ships. And merchandise. But if you look at Disney's financials, the majority of its earnings don't come from its film studio. They come from its TV holdings: cable networks, particularly ESPN and the Disney Channel, and ABC. Take a look. (Broadcasting, here, refers to its ABC ownership.)
Financial reports aren't perfectly precise snapshots of a company's identity. Movie accounting is totally wacky and the studio division might not reflect its true significance to the parent company. Without its movies, you might say, Disney wouldn't have much of a merchandise business. Without its movies, it wouldn't have much of an amusement park business. It wouldn't have characters and plots of spin off and license on TV. And so on. All of that's true. But at its core, the Disney company draws its largest and most dependable source of income from subscriptions fees that power its cable networks ... even though casual newspaper readers could be forgiven for thinking the company lives and dies by the opening weekend of its summer blockbusters. And that's the brilliant thing about Disney. The movie business is a rotten thing. American audiences don't go the movies every week, so they have to be lured with egregiously expensive marketing campaigns for a handful of tentpole movies that, if they blow up, can destroy quarterly earnings for the film division and take down careers. The TV business is somewhat the opposite. The subscription fee model (wherein a sliver of your cable bill goes straight to the networks' pockets) guarantees that cable networks get paid with or without a "hit." Think of it this way. "The Lone Ranger," the movie, only earns money from people who choose to sit at watch it in a theater. That's a high bar. But if "The Lone Ranger" were on TV, its network would earn money from all pay-TV households, whether they watched "The Lone Ranger" or not. That's the dirty secret and the dark genius of the cable TV business. And that's why it's the business Disney is in. 
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| Beyond the Coup: Egypt's Real Problem Is Its Economy Posted: 10 Jul 2013 09:30 AM PDT  International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde checks some pyramid stones next to security guards on August 22, 2012.(Asmaa Waguih/Reuters) Egypt's political dilemmas are based, in important part, on its economic dilemmas. But since the overthrow of the Morsi government, far less attention has been paid to crucial economic issues than the political and constitutional conflicts. But economic issues--and the lack of a legitimated economic vision--have been as much a cause of the unrest, change and uncertainty in Egypt, and during both the Mubarak and Morsi tenures. And they may be more intractable. Any new permanent government will face the choice Morsi had but never made: between market economic reforms on the one hand, led by economists and business people to promote growth, jobs, and trade, and a command-and-control statist economy on the other, which provides subsidies for essentials like energy and staples like bread, rice, and sugar--and also provides sinecures for ex-military officers. Part of the problem is that "liberalizing" reforms--there have been three waves since the end of Nassar's regime than 40 years ago--are perceived as helping the rich and reflecting crony capitalism, rather than raising Egypt as a whole. Morsi's inability to chart a clear economic path led to a significant worsening of Egypt's economic straits, which in turn helped mobilize the powerful street opposition. From just before 2011 to today: GDP growth is down (from nearly 6 percent to under 2 percent); unemployment is up (from 9 percent to over 13 percent); foreign exchange reserves are down (from $35 billion to just under $15 billion); the budget deficit has more than doubled (from nearly $110 billion to over $230 billion); a quarter of that budget are subsidies to poor and middle class; and the poor and near-poor total approximately half of the population. Tourism is down significantly due to security concerns; direct foreign investment has declined sharply; gasoline and power shortages bedevil the population; a slide in the Egyptian currency has raised prices of foreign goods such as food imports; wealth distribution is badly skewed; the nation's credit rating is cratering; the hidden "black" economy constitutes as much as 40 percent of Egyptian economic activity. And corruption continues. The critical economic issue is not the scope of the problems but what to do about them--a subject lost in the political swirl, but essential to any future regime stability. As with constitutional and political reform, a consensus economic program must resolve deep conflicting interests: between liberal elite capitalists and the military elite, between competitive enterprises and huge state subsidies for energy and food; between a private-sector middle class and a government-employed middle class that makes up fully one third of the workforce; between the 45 million Egyptians under 35, poor or professional, and those who control the economy through what the young regard as corrupt and non-meritocratic means; between urban and rural; between a variety of secular and Islamic views of the economy. In the fall of 2011, the International Monetary Fund proposed one set of reforms as part of $4.8 billion standby agreement aimed at creating economic growth. More than $5 billion in additional funds from the EU and the U.S.--beyond the current $1.3 billion in military assistance--were to follow. The IMF conditions included the following controversial items: removing energy subsidies for all but the poor; raising revenue through a broadly applicable value-added tax; using those funds to reduce the budget deficit and increase infrastructure spending; reducing a bloated bureaucracy; and significantly increasing transparency in government budgeting and finance--transparency that in Egypt would threaten longstanding corrupt activities. Morsi initially agreed to the IMF conditions. But within three weeks, he stunningly renounced the agreement because of strong opposition to reduced subsidies and new taxes on many Egyptians and because many criticized the lack of transparency in IMF negotiations. The depths of controversy on the reforms simply overwhelmed an economic way forward. All this occurred before the first anniversary of the original Tahrir Square demonstrations. Egyptian economic reform was effectively dead. With no new IMF, EU, or U.S. funds, the Morsi government received about $8 billion in stopgap funding from Qatar and, in smaller amounts, Turkey and Libya. None of that financing imposed any economic reform conditions. Today, with those nations critical of the Morsi government's demise, it appears that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, both of them critics of the Moslem Brotherhood, will step up to provide billions in emergency funding. But again, it seems unlikely that these funds will come with any demands for economic reforms. So the economic dilemmas are, for the foreseeable future, likely to remain acute. It is hard to imagine that the current interim government will take any of the major reform steps that would inevitably create winners and losers--even though a moderate and experienced Egyptian economist, Hazem el-Beblawi, will be interim prime minister. And a revised constitution, duly elected parliament, and newly chosen president are not likely to be in place until sometime next year. Already, the interim government's recent proposals for these fundamental processes are being widely criticized. If and when a constitutionally based and fairly elected government takes office next year, it will still have an extraordinary challenge addressing the economic dilemmas and conflicts embedded in reducing subsidies, trimming the government, raising revenues, rejuvenating the private sector, limiting the military's commercial activities/sinecures, and dealing with endemic corruption and the black economy. Without a broad consensus on an economic plan, the IMF, EU, and U.S. are not likely to provide funding tied to such reforms. And funds from Arab nations may forestall basic economic issues--but not resolve them. A government that can create a societal consensus on an economic way forward seems more distant today than in the heady period of the first Tahrir Square demonstrations, two and a half years ago. The world will watch to see if Egypt can avoid economic, not just constitutional, tragedy. 
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| What It's Like to Kill Thousands of NYC Rodents for a Living Posted: 10 Jul 2013 09:30 AM PDT In most cases compassionate is not the first adjective one might use to describe an exterminator, but for Michael Sabov, a New York City pest management professional, the word is hardly adequate. "It's not easy to do, and when you see a lifeless body it's not easy to deal with," says Sabov in Of Mice and Man, the short film above. With the five boroughs' rat population estimated at over 30 million, times are tough for the big-hearted exterminator. "Sometimes you get numb to it and that's just scary. And the day I get numb to it is the day I'm going to want to get out of this business," he says. In their latest short, filmmakers Tom Mason and Sarah Klein go beyond the standard interview format with inventive visual effects and animation to reveal the surprisingly humane mindset of this New York City exterminator. Collectively known as Redglass Pictures, Mason and Klein have been featured on The Atlantic Video Channel before with On Story, an intimate conversation with documentary filmmaker Ken Burns about the craft of storytelling. For more work from Redglass Pictures, visit http://redglasspictures.com/. 
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| Is the 'China Dream' Real? Or Just Empty Propaganda? Posted: 10 Jul 2013 09:15 AM PDT  The 'China Dream' is central to Xi Jinping's presidency. (Vucci/AP) I'm coming to the view that the 'Chinese Dream' is a signal from the leadership of great import that has much to say about the nature of the Chinese state. It is striking, in my opinion, how effectively and rapidly the system swung into action to interpret and give content to the leader's signal and flesh out its implications in ideology and practice. Here are some of the things I've noted: Study and discussion groups organized throughout the Party and government system; research projects launched in Party schools and research institutes; newspapers and magazines running educational and commentary articles on the concept; state television, in both national and international services, staging learned debates; universities introducing the Chinese Dream into their political training of young academics. On Children's Day the 1 of June 2013, children and parents across the country were mobilized to praise, depict and realize the Chinese Dream. I'd be very glad for views and comments on this matter. And for examples of action, in particular what, if anything, is being done in the school system, such as political education of teachers and in curricula and teaching material. I hope that the notion of the Chinese Dream is a signal that the Party recognizes that China ought not to be merely the world's biggest factory, largest market, and most significant creator of pollution. I hope it is a recognition of the dignity and the aspirations of ordinary Chinese people.  MORE FROM CHINAFILE Unfortunately, I have seen nothing to convince me that the Chinese Dream is anything but a shoddy ripoff of the American Dream, a propaganda campaign imposed from above as an ideological framework to justify continued Party rule, and to find a euphonious way of talking about China's place in the world. The emptiness of the concept was demonstrated in May when Xinhua reported that "a senior Chinese official ... called for the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) to research the "Chinese dream." The official went on to say that the research "would provide academic support for self-confidence in the Chinese path, theories and system." In other words, China's leading think tank was given the task of finding an actual meaning for the Chinese dream. On the other hand, on the Internet where you find ordinary Chinese people talking about their own ideas rather than Party ideology, many people joke that the real Chinese dream is to get a Green Card and emigrate to the United States. "I have seen nothing to convince me that the Chinese Dream is anything but a shoddy ripoff of the American Dream, a propaganda campaign imposed from above." The tradition that the Chinese ruler must also be the fountainhead of society's moral authority dies hard -- in fact, it doesn't die at all, having been around for a couple of millennia, since the great emperors of the Han married their "hard power" to the legitimizing social and civil doctrines of the Confucian School. While the formal linkage between ruling house and Confucian canon was severed in 1905, with the ending of the Imperial Examination system for the recruitment of China's administrative elite, just about anyone with pretensions to national leadership since the end of the Dynastic era has adopted a rhetoric, not only of ardent national revival, but of moral instruction. Mao, of course embodied this temporal-cosmic synthesis in the extreme, armed with the eternal verities of Marxism, to be sure, but also literate in the idioms and formulations of the longer Chinese tradition. (Actually, one of Deng Xiaoping's unusual attributes was his low profile as Civilizational Leader: "It doesn't matter whether the cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice" was a perfect, anti-heroic formulation in the aftermath of the of the Charisma Tempest that was the Mao era, and the intensely practical quality of many of Deng's most famous utterances helped to unleash a burst of popular energy, mostly in pursuit of material gain, that has continued to this day.) But by now Mao has been gone for nearly four decades; it is nearly two decades since Deng's death. It's not for me to put thoughts in Xi Jinping's brain, but surely he has seen for himself, and heard from others, that China's headlong growth since 1978 has brought not only huge benefits to vast numbers of people but also huge burdens; unprecedented improvements in the quality of life, but, increasingly, ominous deteriorations as well. Many decry a deepening moral vacuum and confusion over values in a time of blistering social change. Many bemoan the blind pursuit of money without regard for other social values. And virtually everyone reviles metastatic official corruption, even as he or she tries to navigate that swamp. I can surmise that Xi understands the need, not for another Mao-like God-king, but for China's national leader to resume the role, not only of top politician or development-policy strategist, but of Figure to Be Listened To by China's vast populace. In choosing a slogan like "The China Dream," perhaps he aims to plant himself among the ranks of modern political leaders elsewhere, but, more importantly, within a much longer Chinese continuum. "The problem, of course, is that today's China is not your grandmother's China." The problem, of course, is that today's China is not your grandmother's China. The nation was left numb by the unremitting ideological bombardment of the Cultural Revolution period; 40 years later, many have observed that the ethical element of Chinese people's existence is dangerously atrophied (see, e.g., this week's legislation ordering people to pay visits to their elderly parents instead of abandoning them entirely). But it is far from clear that laying down a rhetorical formulation like "the China Dream" and then propagating it throughout society, employing the familiar Leninist organizational methods so frequently used in the past, will re-establish the link between the Figure To Be Heard and the Hearers. Given the fantastic, shibboleth-corroding diversification made possible by the Internet (even with China's official intrusions into it), and the pulsating, surging appetite for new wealth, it remains to be seen whether "The China Dream " will effectively help China secure its moorings, or whether instead, like "Morning In America," or the "Contract With America," (or -- wasn't there something about a "New Covenant" a couple of Administrations ago? I can't quite recall) -- it will be quietly retired in favor of something newer and catchier five, or at most ten, years down the line. As an American, it's hard to separate the rhetoric of a national "dream" from the forms it has taken in the United States: the soaring evocative message of Dr. King's "dream," or the far tawdrier invoking of "the American Dream" in too many cheap present-day political speeches. Let's hope that whoever coined the term "The China Dream" late last year, as Mr. Xi stepped into the highest political office in China, wasn't simply borrowing an overused phrase from the American political lexicon. At least, as the new regime prepares its scheme for the "urbanization" of hundreds of millions of disadvantaged rural dwellers, no one is talking about "A Shining City on a Hill." This post also appears at ChinaFile, an Atlantic partner site. 
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| Apple's Violation of Antitrust Law, Explained in 6 Bullet Points Posted: 10 Jul 2013 09:01 AM PDT ![[IMAGE DESCRIPTION]](http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/science/assets_c/2013/07/RTR2KOTP-thumb-570x393-126822.jpg) In a major rebuke, a federal judge has ruled that Apple violated antitrust laws when it conspired with book publishers to raise the price of ebooks. The 160-page opinion, delivered by U.S. District Judge Denise Cote, finds that Apple "brilliantly played its hand" as the ringleader of an attempt to re-engineer the entire ebook industry. Had Apple gotten away with it, the plan could have resulted in the rest of us paying significantly more for electronic literature. But the case was never really about Apple. To understand how and why this played out like it did, we need to start with Amazon. Here goes, in six bullet points:
This new "agency" model let the publishers price their books at $12, $13, or $14 a pop, perhaps more. Some books saw their prices jump over 50 percent, Judge Cote wrote in her opinion. But Apple went even further. Selling ebooks at $14 might be nice for the publishers, but bad for Apple's business if Amazon were still selling the same titles for $9.99. So Apple proposed what's called a "most-favored nation" clause that made the new, higher prices conditional on there not being any other retailers selling the same books for less. The clause forced publishers to set the price at whatever the lowest price on the market was -- in this case, the same old $9.99 that, ahem, certain other companies were charging. The publishers obviously weren't happy about this, because it put a great deal of pressure on them to end their wholesale agreement with Amazon. "As Apple made clear to the publishers," Cote wrote, "'there is no one outside of us that can do this for you." You can see where this is going. Not only was Apple's plan to raise ebook prices overall; its idea was to break Amazon's stranglehold over e-book pricing without getting its own hands dirty. In the words of Apple, the idea was to "move the whole market off [of] $9.99" simply by getting the publishers to act in their financial interest. Apple maintains that it was never engaged in a conspiracy. "We've done nothing wrong and we will appeal the decision," the company said Wednesday in a statement. It's still unclear what the penalty will be for Apple; that's be the subject of another proceeding to follow. But if Apple and the publishers were the losers in this debate, individual consumers won big. And so did Amazon, which still holds an estimated 60 percent of the ebook market despite being at 90 percent in 2009. 
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| The Mandela Family Feud: What Will It Mean for His Legacy? Posted: 10 Jul 2013 08:50 AM PDT  Mandla Mandela, at far right, follows his grandfather and former South African President Nelson Mandela in Mvezo. (AP) "Now, I can die in peace." That's what Nelson Mandela said back in 2007, when his eldest grandson, Mandla, was consecrated as nkosi, or head man, of the village of Mvezo, where the elder Mandela was born in 1918. Standing on a windswept bluff, I remember how frail Mandela looked even then, six years ago, how the wind batted him from side to side as he walked to the podium. He stubbornly insisted upon walking unaided across uneven ground and, struggling to stay upright on his own onstage, told the story of his grandson's acceptance of a role as traditional leader. Mandela looked triumphant on that day, as he described how his own father had been pushed out of the village by a British magistrate three generations ago. Now the role had been returned to stewardship of the family, and he presented the news as though it was the closing of a circle for himself, too. When he said he could die in peace, there was a hush and darting looks among his listeners in the village because nobody wanted to hear it. Six years ago, it was much harder to imagine a new South Africa without him. In the intervening years, there has been little peace in Mvezo. And in the last two weeks, in particular, a brutal inter-family skirmish brought to the surface longstanding differences between the nkosiof Mvezo and much of the rest of his family. As Mandela lay in a hospital bed, near death, during the past month, there's been a national discussion underway about his legacy and the significance of his passing for South African politics and culture. That discussion, including the schism within the family, underscored how many disparate parts of the national character Mandela had managed to bridge. He'd famously grown up in the rural Transkei, royalty among amaThembu people, but moved to Johannesburg, that hybridizing Afropolitan center, in his 20s. As a lawyer, guerrilla leader, and longtime prisoner, incarcerated for 27 years during middle age, he maintained a certain respect for rural traditions. He's celebrated as Tata Mandela, or grandfather, by rural villagers with little education and bling-bling city dwellers alike. Unlike many of his successors, he's seen as a leader who represented both the amaqaba, or uneducated rural residents, and the amagqoboka, Christian sophisticates. Rooted in the story of Mandla Mandela's ascension as chief of Mveso is the deep history of rural/urban difference in South Africa. As his grandson told me at the time, the next important political struggles in the country may come in fights along these divisive lines. The Backdrop: Nelson Mandela was the country bumpkin made good, running away from his rural home as a teenager to become a lawyer in the big city and, later, one of the world's most famous guerrilla leaders and most lionized political prisoners. After 27 years of incarceration, he was freed in 1990 and, in 1994, elected leader of one of the globe's newest democracies, South Africa. After a single term, he stepped down in a seamless transition of power, but he has remained a father figure for the nation. The narrative arc of Mandela's life marked the expected normal trajectory of any South African's life: migration from poor rural areas, where people were mostly uneducated, to the hybridized cosmopolitan culture of a city like Johannesburg. That's why it caused such a sensation when, in 2007, his eldest grandson, Mandlasizwe Mandela, made the reverse migration, from urban center to a life in the sticks. In the midst of high unemployment and rampant crime, the cities no longer necessarily represent the "better life for all" promised to South Africans by the governing party, Nelson Mandela's party, the African National Congress. The younger Mandela was raised in Soweto, a sprawling slum at the edges of rapidly modernizing Johannesburg. He studied for a master's degree at one of South Africa's most distinguished universities. When he and his young wife arrived in Mvezo, where the elder Mandela had spent his earliest years, Mandla Mandela took up the post of nkosi, or head man of the Traditional Council. In the process, the newly minted chief placed a spotlight on one of the central contradictions papered at the founding of the new nation -- the guarantee of one person, one vote in a nonracial and nonsexist country up against the privileges of unchecked, regal authority still exercised by appointed traditional leaders. (This article was drawn from a chapter of After Mandela: The Struggle for Freedom in Post-Apartheid South Africa), which The Atlantic originally excerpted in 2012.) In the Village:It was a long drive, on perhaps the worst road in the country, to reach the village when I went to Mvezo for the first time, to watch Nelson Mandela's grandson consecrated as traditional leader. Around the country, people were migrating from the most underdeveloped, poverty-stricken rural areas in the direction of the cities. Still, for the majority of Mandela's countrymen, life as it unfolded in Cape Town or Johannesburg was still as remote as the mischief caused by the upscale characters on installments of the soap operas Generations and Isidingo. Hills rounded like half moons rolled on to the horizon. The Mbashe River threaded lazy curlicues in clefts between the hills. On the day before the Mandela celebration, I had attended a lavish birthday party in honor of Jacob Zuma at the International Convention Centre in Durban. By then, Zuma had already mounted the challenge to then-President Thabo Mbeki that would split the ANC, lead to the ouster of a sitting president, and result in Zuma's election as president of the country in 2009 on a platform that emphasized the importance of rural development. At the International Convention Center it was smooth marble floors, cavernous expanses, bright lights, with the new business and government elite arrayed in all their finery; here it was dust, grit, tattered clothes, and the fresh air of the country. Sharp twists and turns led to precipitous climbs before I reached the stark beauty of the so-called Great Place. Undulating lines of people, the just-risen sun at their backs, had begun walking early, streaming toward the village in hopes of catching a glimpse of their best-known native son. More than 70 years had passed since Nelson Mandela's father, headman of the Traditional Council of Mvezo, had been summarily dismissed by a British colonial magistrate. The post of village chief had remained empty through the intervening years, according to the amaThembu king I consulted, who said that the people of the village had refused appointment of anyone but a Mandela. Here, the propriety of inherited leadership still prevailed. The younger boys considered the apartheid period as something remote and strange, like ancient history. This dismissal of Henry Gadla Mandela in the late 1920s was presented in Nelson Mandela's autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, as a stark lesson in colonial oppression. Mandela writes that his father, summoned by the magistrate, refused to bow to British rule, supposedly sending back this reply in isiXhosa: "Andiza ndisaqula" -- I will not come, I am girding for battle. The historical record produced a more complicated version of the story, including allegations that Chief Henry Mandela had made illegal sales of land along the river. In either case, ever since Nelson Mandela was released from custody in 1990, hopes flared periodically among the villagers that he would accept his father's inheritance and lead the council. Nelson Mandela had been requisitioned to run the ANC and the country instead, however. Hope flickered among the villagers again when Nelson Mandela stepped down as president in 1999, but he demurred that he was too old to take up the post. Next in line by customary law would have been his eldest son. But that son, Thembi, had died in a car accident while Mandela was imprisoned on Robben Island, and the next son, Makgotho, lost his life from complications related to AIDS in the early days of 2005. So the line of male inheritance was forced to skip a generation. Now, Mandlasizwe -- Makgotho's eldest son, Nelson's eldest grandson -- agreed to be wrapped in the skin of a lion. Here was the sign of a curious reverse migration to the one Nelson Mandela had made, from rural life to city lawyer to revolutionary hero. The prospective traditional leader wasn't the only city dweller returning to rural homelands out of disappointment with the realities of cosmopolitan life. Though the predominant flow of movement within the country was toward the cities, a small number of people were coming back after they experienced terrible reverses in their lives -- joblessness, illness, and victimization from crime -- while in the big city. Mandlasizwe, or Mandla, had grown up in Soweto and he had studied for a master's degree in political science from Rhodes University. He had budding business interests in China and the Middle East. Like his sister and brothers, Mandla was essentially a person shaped by Joburg's vibe, a cosmopolitan man. Still, he had decided to return to his grandfather's birthplace to assume a conservative, traditional role. In his autobiography, Nelson Mandela described Mvezo as "a place apart, a tiny precinct removed from the world of events, where life was lived much as it had been for hundreds of years." Mandla, I soon learned, had arrived back at the family homestead with plenty of ideas about how the village would need to change. A fierce wind blew through the gorges, rocking my car. I had stopped a few miles off the highway, and now the car was crammed with four old women in traditional dress and half-a-dozen children. It was so crowded that I could scarcely manage steering. Shifting gears was out of the question, so we trundled on in second. The women's cheeks were dusted with reddish mud, a sign they were amaqaba, or Xhosa-speaking traditionalists. Pointing in the direction of the arriving amagqoboka, the civilized ones, my passengers laughed behind cupped hands. Luxury sedans careened past us, lickety-split up the hill. Around the bend, a BMW 4x4 was parked akimbo at the side of the road, with two tires blown out. A little farther on, a brilliantly polished Mercedes revealed a popped hood and a plume of steam. The women murmured happily at the sight of the fancy car boiling over and the man in the fancy suit who had lurched out of the driver's seat to wave his arms madly over the engine. At the end of the road, on the overlook at Mvezo, canvas tents had been set up to shield people from an unrelenting sun. In the middle of the clearing was a square platform adorned with lion and leopard skins. Lurking beside it were stick-thin dogs with whiplike tails. Suddenly an army helicopter swooped past, landing on the top of a nearby ridge. When an oversized 4x4 pulled up, Nelson Mandela was visible in a passenger seat, with his face, fixed in a whimsical grin, pressed to the window. His grandsons -- Mandla, the man to be honored on this day, and his younger brother, Ndaba -- helped both their grandfather and his wife, Graça Machel, from the car. The young men were shirtless and garbed in traditional robes, with beaded bands around their heads and at their ankles. They followed the elders into the tent that had been raised for them. A terrible wind kicked up, the dogs started yapping, and people stood to cheer for the father of their nation. Since the generator trucked in by the ceremony's producers had short-circuited, the sound system was also kaput. Only those of us standing right next to the stage could hear a series of speeches from struggle veterans and traditional leaders that opened the celebration. When Mandla was summoned forward, he looked wide-eyed. Thembu King Dalindyebo, a wiry, hyped-up middle-aged man with rows of beads around his neck, placed the lion skin across the young man's back. A cluster of old men, religious leaders and royalty, placed their hands over the lion to consecrate Mandla Mandela's ascendancy. After the blessing was done, women in the crowd ululated in celebration. The brothers danced in the midst of a troupe of bare-breasted young women. Graça Machel joined them, taking the hand of Mandla's wife and leading her through the paces that had been, until this moment, intended only for the men. Finally, it was time for the elder Mandela to speak. He was helped to his feet, but he insisted on walking under his own power to the stage. Mandela mounted the steps upright, wobbling all the way. As he passed by, you could see how frail he had become, at 88. Wind battered him from one side, and he headed in that direction, then it whipped at him from the other side and he faltered to the right. He grinned into the gusts as he saluted the new nkosi of the Mvezo Traditional Council. Then Mandela murmured something in isiXhosa. His comment drew a shocked hush, followed by a sharp intake of breath from the people around me. "What did he say?" I asked a journalist standing next to me. "Now I can die in peace," he said, sounding stunned. When the elder Mandela finished his remarks, he and Graça Machel greeted old-timers in the VIP tent while younger guests mounted the platform to approach the new chief on their knees. It was a gesture of intergenerational obeisance to traditional authority. After the formal ceremony was over I had followed the Mandela brothers down to an overlook near where their grandfather was born. Past a rocky ravine you could see stretches of fertile land lying fallow. That's when I noticed the image of a lion tattooed smack-dab in the middle of Ndaba Mandela's back, and tapped him on the shoulder. He turned, with a puzzled look. I asked if he intended to survey the surrounding countryside and stake a claim to leadership in a neighboring community now that his elder brother was nkosi of Mvezo. Swirling around, he whispered, "Are you mad? Man, I'm totally a Joburg boy." The slower patterns of rural life, with traditional views of the relationships between men and women, were not for him. His description of himself as "totally a Joburg boy" provided the opening for long conversations, spread over the following four years, about what it meant to be a member of South Africa's most famous family and a Joburger at heart. He seemed buoyant in the moment, though, to watch his brother's moment of triumph. The new chief, on the other hand, looked somber, as if the weight of his new responsibilities suddenly had become quite clear. "The generators failed us today. But it was a wonderful ceremony anyway," he said. The new nkosi reported that there was no electricity in the village yet. He knew that it would be hard to convince the electricity supplier, Eskom, to install electricity way out in such a remote area. The road was abysmal, too. He noted that a number of VIPs had been waylaid by blown tires and ruined engines. He intended to revive small-scale agriculture in the area, having already offered his neighbors the services of his own bull to generate new herds of cattle for people of the village. The headman of Mvezo imagined a new kind of village -- a "place apart," perhaps, but also a rural precinct fully representative of new national aspirations. Mvezo would be more engaged in the wide world, and if Chief Mandela had his way, it would also be protected somehow from the more alienating aspects of modern life. Between trips to Mveso, I stopped by the Mandela mansion in Houghton one morning, to speak with the two younger siblings in the group of four sons of Makgotho Mandela's. They were the youngest of the four, and like their older brothers they had been fetched from Soweto at young ages to live with their older brothers in their grandfather's house. Andile and Mbuso, though, were unlike their older brothers in that they were from the Born Free generation. They had grown up city boys in the new dispensation. Ndaba had picked the two younger boys up at the home of an aunt, where they were living then, in Hyde Park, a high-tone neighborhood not far away. The three of them hunkered down on the couch, with Ndaba as a chaperone for our conversation. Mbuso, 16, was dressed in a red-and-white Fly Emirates soccer shirt, and Andile, thirteen, had his white Nike sweatshirt zipped all the way to his Adam's apple and was decked out in calf-length powder-blue jeans. The three of them, sitting side by side, made a striking tableau; Ndaba's resemblance to his grandfather was closest, but the two younger brothers could have been stand-ins for the Old Man in his teenage years as well. I asked what it was like studying modern South African history when your own grandfather was at the center of it. Mbuso replied that he had been reading up on the history of the Black Consciousness Movement in school, and he told me that he admired its chief proponent, Steve Biko, more than anybody else. He said that Biko, after all, had been the one to convince South African blacks to be proud of themselves. Mbuso Mandela didn't venture an opinion about the central role his grandfather had played in promoting a multiracial ethos so often at odds with black nationalist thinking. But he thought it was quite cool that when he was watching films in history class, and his grandfather came on screen, his classmates razzed him by saying, "Oh, Mbuso, you're now on TV!" It was clear, right from the start of our conversation, that, unlike their older brothers, the younger boys considered the apartheid period as something remote and strange, like ancient history. "It's weird. You never think that a human being could reach so low -- that he could think someone who doesn't look like himself is scum of the earth," Mbuso offered. "I don't judge people based on the past," Mbuso volunteered. "I just look at the present, and see what happens now. Things have changed. Can't hold a grudge forever." "The only real revolution that could emerge today in this country is out of traditionalism." The brothers were heavily invested in trends in modern music, and were especially drawn to the songs of Lil Wayne and Young Jack. Politics had been the old family business, but their aunts and uncles were now engaged in various private enterprises. Mbuso thought his future lay in business administration; Andile hoped he could find a way in producing music. The big ceremony they had attended with their grandfather, the one making their oldest brother chief of Mvezo, had been memorable, they said. But they also confessed that they hadn't understood much of what was going on because neither could speak isiXhosa. Andile said that he had learned isiZulu as a first language, because his mother was Zulu speaking, but his older brother, Mbuso, had begun teaching him English when he was just five years old. In a single generation, then, the sense of rootedness in Xhosa language and Xhosa culture, celebrated so lyrically in Nelson Mandela's autobiography, had almost completely disappeared among his younger grandsons. The way Mbuso talked about his identity reminded me of the children of Mexican immigrants whom I had gotten to know as a young reporter in the agricultural valleys of my native California. They often stopped speaking Spanish as soon as they started school, and you would often visit homes where the parents were fluent only in Spanish and the children understood only a fraction of what they said. The difference here, of course, was that the Mandelas had not migrated across national lines; they had simply become urbanized in a mix of ethnicities and languages. Theirs wasn't the classic story told, of displacement and loss of language and culture caused by immigration, for they had filled the interstices of discarded identities with something new -- a cross-cultural, cross-class, distinctly South African embrace of an emerging global identity. "So when you think about your identity, do you consider yourself amaXhosa or not?" I asked. Did they consider themselves part of the Xhosa-speaking people,in other words. "No," Mbuso replied, matter-of-factly. Ndaba's eyes widened, in disbelief. "You wouldn't say you were Xhosa?" he asked, with an edge. Mbuso pulled his chin down and turned away from his older brother. "I didn't say anything," he protested. Ndaba glared at him. "The man asked you how you see yourself!" he exclaimed. I interrupted, deflecting attention to Andile to try to ease the tension. "Say someone dropped from Mars and he asked who you were. What would you say about who you are and where you're from?"i I was thinking of Jacob Zuma's introduction of himself on my tape: "I am Jacob Zuma and I come from Nkandla." Andile looked puzzled, but he replied, like a shot, "I would say, I'm Andile and I live in Hyde Park." I pressed him a little further: Did the boys think of their oldest brother as a kind of repository of respect for their family's traditional life? "Xhosa is part of my heritage," Mbuso murmured, shifting in his seat. "But I don't think it would be one of the first things I would say if someone asked me, 'Who are you?'" At that point the door opened and their oldest brother came in. Mandla and his wife, Thando, had arrived to visit with his grandfather before embarking on a business trip to China. Chief Mandela was moving into the oil business in an arrangement that often took him to Beijing and the Middle East. Unfortunately, there had been an incident on the way from the airport. His wife, traveling separately, was forced off the road and rousted from her car at gunpoint. It would be a scramble to replace her clothing in time for their departure the next day. Being nkosi of Mvezo, and a Mandela no less, provided no immunity from the daily reality of crime. The younger brothers rose and left the room. They weren't about to discuss their tentative sense of belonging, in Xhosa language and culture, in front of the sibling who had chosen, at considerable effort, to spend the rest of his life reinventing it. On Christmas morning, I drove back to Mvezo to see how the new chief was faring. He and his wife had swapped lives rooted in Johannesburg and Grahamstown for a rural existence after taking up his new role as nkosi. In the intervening months, Ndaba Mandela had hinted several times that the transition had proved harder than anyone expected for the new chief and his wife. This time, as I drove out from the highway, there were no government ministers and royal visitors also lurching along the terrible road. Instead, young women and little boys, barefoot, were hauling buckets of water uphill. By the time I found the ridgetop and drove on to the overlook marked as Mandela's birthplace, the sun was blazing in a midsummer sky. Chief Mandela had been up since dawn to prepare for his first Christmas as village leader. A group of men had helped him slaughter seven sheep for a feast he was offering children from the surrounding area. Behind the five new rondavels built to accommodate Mandela's family, meat was cooking in huge metal pots over open fires. Since I had seen him at his installation, the new nkosi had plunged with enormous energy into a new and complicated role. He had taken twenty children from the village to the Miss World competition in Beijing, and he also had chaperoned a delegation of teenage girls to the Reed Dance in Swaziland, where they engaged in the traditional ritual of being tested for virginal status. The children who had accompanied him to China had traveled on an airplane for the first time. I thought of Jonathan's first flight, from Cape Town to Johannesburg, where he had met Nelson Mandela. None of the children from the village had ever left it before. "It was their first time seeing Chinese people," Chief Mandela said, smiling. "We went to see the biggest Buddha in the world. For them, it was the most amazing thing to see people worshipping another religion." The girls who had gone with him to Swaziland -- he referred to them as "our maidens" -- wowed the Swazis with their singing, he reported. "It was about our maidens going to the Reed Dance, meeting the maidens there, and gaining an understanding of the cultural values in Swaziland, and having our kids teaching those kids what our values are on this side," he said. For all the pride he took in these accomplishments, though, the new chief was already deeply distressed by the enormous obstacles he had encountered in his efforts to bring change to Mvezo. He had made countless appeals to provincial and national officials to get help in widening the roads. There was desperate need for a health clinic. He had plans for low-tech economic development projects on the outskirts of the village. But Mandela felt that the provincial government officials had stonewalled him. He was left steaming with frustration that he had not been able to accomplish more in his first eight months. Now he said that he understood, firsthand, why traditional leaders felt so much bitterness toward the ANC and the central government. Since 1994, the focus of national policy had been concentrated on urban "nodes of development." Little had been attempted in areas like this one. "I feel I've been beaten," Mandela told me. "You tend to want to pull back and understand why certain things have not gone the way they should. You start afresh, as to what should be the way forward." Chief Mandela wore a long-sleeved blue shirt and faded dungarees cinched by a studded brown leather belt. His face was creased with worry and a hint of sadness. At his investiture he had stood tall, with his shoulders thrown back. Now he hunched over, looking depressed. About 60 children lined up across uneven ground to receive Christmas candy and a loaf of bread. Mandela instructed the kids to sit on the slab near an enlarged photo of his grandfather in the traditional garb he had worn as he prepared to testify at the Rivonia Treason Trial, where he had been convicted and sentenced to prison forty years earlier. Then, Nelson Mandela had been about the age Chief Mandela was now. The grandson had closed the circle, bringing all of his inherited influence back to bear on the home village. The children waited, jostling one another to receive their special meal. Ndaba, his brothers, and cousins arrived from their grandfather's in Qunu to help serve. Chief Mandela upbraided them for being late and put them to work right away. They fetched steaming mutton in paper bowls from the cooking pots down the steep hill, ferrying it up to the children. The young ones held their hands out, sitting wedged in, hip-to-hip, on the concrete slab. It was moving to watch the grandchildren of Nelson Mandela serving poor, hungry children a rare meal with meat at the birthplace of their grandfather. Chief Mandela put on a canary-yellow sport coat. Behind us, women watched, many of them with infants strapped to their backs. The chief had insisted that parents drop their children off at the edge of the clearing and wait for them out in the field. Some villagers had refused to allow their kids to come because they disagreed with his decision to make it a feast for children only. A light rain started, and the parents looked hungry, wet, and resentful. As the children dug into the meal, the nkosi helped the youngest ones settle their bowls in their laps. When adults called on the kids to bring the food uphill into the field to share, he waved them back into their seats. Mandela had upended tradition, trumping the power of the parents to apportion their family's rations. By the time most of the kids had eaten their mutton, the misting rain had turned into a downpour. The storm shrouded the dying sun, casting the surrounding landscape into sudden darkness. On the outskirts of the village, you could see bonfires burning, and teenagers clustered around them. Mandela told me of his disappointment that more teens hadn't shown up for the celebration. As we left the Great Place, it became clear where the adolescents had been all this time, partying along the narrow, treacherous road. On the drive past them, groups of older girls and young women danced toward the car, slipping and sliding in the mud. Wet clothing clung to their bodies, translucent in the headlights. "Take us, don't you want us?" one girl shouted at me, holding her arms out and pressing her breasts up against the side window. Another young woman shimmied toward the passenger side of the car, beckoning at my companion their desperate invitation, and that drunken call -- take us, don't you want us? -- haunted me all the way to Mthatha, the town where we were staying. Early in the morning, on the day after Christmas, we made the muddy drive back out to Mvezo. The roads were clear of people. All the bonfires from the night before had been doused. Scattered remnants of charred wood were the only signs of the wild, roving celebrations that had taken place in the rain. It was overcast, and threatening gray clouds gave the impression of a sky brought low. When we arrived at the Great Place, Chief Mandela was meeting with a dozen local residents in one of the large rondavels down below the ridge. These were the villagers who had been sent as delegates to the ANC national conference at Polokwane. They were mostly elderly men wearing blankets. Each man took turns relating what had happened at the conference, all in rapid-fire isiXhosa. There was lots of laughter and even some acting out of the arguments during the discussions about policy and candidates, of comments about the victory celebration afterward. "They said, 'Madiba, we did exactly as you instructed us to do,'" Mandela said, turning to me. It struck me, then, that this use of the family's clan name, commonly reserved for Nelson Mandela, had been transferred in Mvezo to the new nkosi. "They said, 'We didn't compromise our votes,'" he continued. The chief insisted that he had not influenced their votes, but only had warned them against the undue influence of others. The delegates should be true to the feelings of the members of local branches, the chief had argued. The net effect, of course, was to weigh in on Zuma's side since he had won 62 percent of the vote, against Thabo Mbeki, in a local ANC branch meeting. Halfway through the political discussion, ceramic bowls were brought in. The bowls were filled with a charred delicacy, the brains of the sheep that had been slaughtered to feed the children on Christmas Day. The brains were spongy and tasted salty. Mandela picked at his share, sitting and listening for more than an hour, as long as the elders wanted to talk. His head cocked, he nodded occasionally and interrupted to ask questions. The outcome at Polokwane pleased him, because he had been rooting for Zuma. His grandfather, he told me, felt exactly the same way. It had been quite distressing for the elder Mandela to see the party in such disarray under Thabo Mbeki, he added. "My grandfather told me, 'I said I would only serve one term as an example to the rest of Africa. I never in my lifetime thought that the ANC that I've been part of would want to discuss the issue of a third term.'" The effort by Mbeki to cling to power "had been troubling to him," the chief reported. The outcome in Polokwane, he assured me, had left the elder Mandela "happy to see that South Africa has become a mature democracy, you know, and that we were able to unpack the difficulties." As the chief talked to the delegates recently returned from Polokwane, the cloud cover lifted. There was a bright, clear view of the valley below. The rises were covered with tall grasses, common saffron brush, broom cluster fig, and Cape ash. When his grandfather's father was chief, early in the last century, the family controlled the entire valley all the way to the horizon. Over the years, the land was divided up, sold, and resold. Reclaiming ownership had proved far harder than he had expected, though. Mandela told me that the provincial government had placed procedural obstacles in the way. First, the premier had offered to compensate current landowners, assessed the value at what Mandela considered inflated rates, and then failed to provide the money. Finally, King Dalindyebo had suggested to Nelson Mandela that he raise the funds needed for purchase of the land privately. Even after money raised by the elder Mandela was deposited in a bank, national and provincial officials put off approving transfer of the title, the chief said. For the next three years, this issue would continue to fester. What Mandela had thought would be a quick and clean process of reclaiming family property turned into a long, hard, and complicated slog. Conflicts over boundary lines for the land eventually would place him at odds not only with government officials but also with significant numbers of his own villagers. Years later, residents of Mvezo would haul him into court, accusing their nkosi of dictatorial behavior and illegal land grabs as he pushed through his plan to build a luxury tourist resort near the village. Inhabitants of Mvezo would accuse the chief, among other things, of fencing them out of traditional family burial grounds. At a community meeting in October of 2011, a reporter and photographer from the Sunday Times were held against their will for eight hours as Mandela accused them of trespassing and denounced the villagers challenging him in court. The chief made clear he considered the journalists agents of rebellion against him. "This is war. This is not time to fold our hands," Mandela was quoted as saying. "This is going to be a long weekend which calls for the slaughtering of a bull. The ancestors have brought these men to us." In the intervening years since his celebrated arrival as chief, the powers of his position -- or perhaps, the lack of the kind of power he had anticipated -- appeared to have taken Mandla Mandela off the rails. By then, even though I called and emailed Mandela regularly, we rarely managed more than a few words on the phone. He never responded in writing and skipped scheduled meetings. When I learned of the clashes in Mvezo in late 2011, it reminded me of how noble his plans had sounded three years earlier. Then, at the end of 2007, it was clear how important it was to the new chief to try to restore the kind of control over the village that his great grandfather had exercised before the colonial magistrate removed him in 1906. Many of the villagers in the area had deeds to parts of Mvezo that dated back to 1910, granted in the wake of the elder Chief Mandela's fall. The long delay in the recognition of his rights to control the surrounding lands the Mandela grandson had put down to a lack of respect by government bureaucrats toward traditional leaders, but there were many competing legal claims. The younger Mandela's clashes with the bureaucrats led him to curious conclusions, though. He predicted a coming confrontation of historic proportions between the ANC government and traditional leaders. "If you come to the core problems, the only real revolution that could emerge today in this country is out of traditionalism," he argued. "So the counterrevolution to ANC dominance lays upon the traditionalists. We have the masses, we have the people." The chief interrupted himself, then, to call a group of passing teenage girls into the rondavel. They were stunningly beautiful young women dressed in short skirts and rayon blouses, with hair pulled back from their smiling faces. When their chief began talking, though, their smiles died and they bowed their heads. He rattled off a long rebuke. The young women thanked him for his advice about how to behave in the future, and took the leftover loaves of bread, backing out of the entryway. "They were just caught up in those parties you probably saw," he explained, attributing the problem of the wild parties along the roadway to the influence of young men who lived in Johannesburg and Cape Town but had returned to the home village only for the holidays. "They come three days before Christmas with money they've brought [home] and instead of being creative and assisting their families, they engage in these shebeens," he said. Mandela had grown up in Johannesburg and spent a share of his young adulthood in shebeens himself. Now he sounded like a born-again prohibitionist. "They just engage in drinking!" he exclaimed. The holiday visitors retained a sense of belonging to Mveso, he noted, but the chief thought of them more as a kind of infectious agent. The young men had been "exposed to the Western lifestyle of urban culture," he complained. "They are not in touch with tradition, they are not in touch with custom." I noticed that the chief's wife, Thando, was absent. She had missed the feast the day before, his first Christmas in the new post. It was disappointing, for me, because I had been looking forward to learning what the transition to rural life meant for her. When I asked if his wife was doing well, Mandela slumped in his seat. He acknowledged, a little mournfully, that she had decided to spend the holidays with her own family and confessed that life in Mvezo had come as quite a shock to her. The two of them, after all, had begun their marriage as a modern couple. Their relationship had skidded up against old rules. Her identity in the small village had become circumscribed to that of the wife of a chief. "I've always loved this traditional lifestyle we lead. On her side, she's had a lot of sacrifices," Mandela remarked. "Being a modern woman: culture changes when you're out here." She was forbidden to wear pants in the village and was expected to cover her hair, for example. Mandela didn't mention a more significant source of tension, which I knew something about only because we had mutual friends. The subject was polygamy. It was expected of nkosi in the Transkei that he would take multiple wives, stitching together varied families and clans in the area through marriage. Thando Mandela certainly wasn't ready to welcome other wives into the fold. "This whole friction is erupting out of modernity," Mandela explained, in a rather vague reference to arguments he had had with his wife on the subject. It seemed to me that this was an updated version of the trouble many people had in reconciling the ways of the village with the ways of the city. Mandla Mandela, like Jacob Zuma, regularly shuttled between upcountry spots, where traditional authority held sway, and the most cosmopolitan settings in the country, where identity was mutable and diffuse. If you traveled frequently between villages like Nkandla and Mvezo to cities like Durban, Cape Town, and Johannesburg, it was hard to believe that Chief Mandela wasn't merely keening for the idea of a village already lost and longing for a way of life that had never been. Anthropologists John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, two South African scholars at the University of Chicago, had pointed out that this tension lay deep in the DNA of the new dispensation. The country's much-lauded Constitution included protection of human dignity, individual rights, and equal treatment, but it also promised a place of respect for traditional life characterized by what they called the chief-subject relationship. "For many -- perhaps most -- South Africans, it is the coexistence of the two tropes, of citizen and subject, that configures the practical terms of national belonging," they had written. When women in customary marriages were denied inheritance rights, when widows were punished because they refused to stay indoors for a year after the death of their spouse, when a woman in KwaZulu-Natal was killed for wearing trousers -- and when both women and men accepted physical assault and rape as the appropriate response of a husband to a wife he felt was disobedient -- these loosely intertwined strands of South African life came unraveled. Often, disputes rooted in these national contradictions ended up in courtrooms, and the trickiest cases to resolve involved the role of women. By Christmas Day, this tension was starkly evident in Mvezo, even in the nkosi's private life. Clashes over culture and power were bound to punctuate the second decade of democracy. It got Chief Mandela's back up, though, when people he knew from his old life decided that traditional ways were, at their core, oppressive of women. He launched, at great length, into a retelling of the history of the Thembu people, who had once been led by a queen. "I've always said that men and women exist as parallel parties, like tracks on a railway line," Mandela said. "No one is higher than the other, each are dependent on the other. You will never have things working right if the man and woman are not assisting one another. Once one becomes dominant, you find an oppressive system emerging." Thando Mandela, as it turned out, would soon decide not to return to Mvezo. When she filed for divorce the following year, she accused her husband of having threatened and beaten her. The severity of the setbacks in the chief's personal life wasn't something Mandela addressed directly. He acknowledged, in a more general way, that the obstacles he had encountered in his new role left him a little downcast. As we talked into the afternoon, it seemed as though Mandela was struggling to reconcile the manifold sides of his identity -- Soweto youngster, Rhodes University scholar, and global businessman -- with this new role, as a traditional leader. It occurred to him, as we were talking, that you could succeed in the larger world, but in the process lose a special, fragile rootedness to your ancestral place. Mandela's description of this quandary reminded me of his younger brother, the one who didn't consider himself part of the Xhosa culture. The twist was that the chief himself increasingly felt called on to play a larger role on the national stage. In 2009, the fourth election since 1994, he was placed on the ANC party list and ended up a Member of Parliament. In office, he made news mostly with sexist remarks and criticism of protections against discrimination afforded lesbians and gay men under South African law. Chief Mandela increasingly looked toward trade with China as an element in underwriting the costs of development needed to lift more South Africans out of poverty. He certainly looked to China for business opportunities for himself. In order to deliver on promises he had made to the people of Mvezo at his investiture, the nkosi resembled his grandfather in only one respect. Bit by bit, he migrated back to the centers of national power, in Cape Town and Johannesburg, and to the places outside South Africa where big decisions were being made that would shape the future of the world. In the end, Chief Mandela had decided that he must leave the village in order to save it. Excerpted from Douglas Foster's After Mandela: The Struggle for Freedom in Post-Apartheid South Africa(Liveright). 
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| 'To Catch a Predator' Goes Russian Posted: 10 Jul 2013 08:15 AM PDT  Vigilantes use social media sites like VKontakte to expose child predators. (Reuters) MOSCOW -- It's sort of a freelance sting operation aimed at suspected pedophiles. And it works like this: An activist logs into an Internet chat forum and poses as a minor. If an adult man shows interest and suggests inappropriate contact, he is gently warned that his interlocutor is underage. If he disregards the warnings, then a meeting is arranged. But instead of a child waiting for him, he finds a group of burly men with a video camera. The next thing he knows, he is the star of a pedophile video-exposé making the rounds online. This is one of the trademark stunts pulled by Duri.Net, a band of 15 Moscow-based activists who have pioneered a form of vigilante justice that is now being mimicked by copycats across Russia. Daniil Shamanov, 30, is a founding member who acts as the shadowy group's de facto spokesman. "It was our scheme," he says. "We showed how you can catch people using social networks. As soon as you see the videos, everything is clear. A lot of people have now taken up this weapon." Duri.net was formed in 2009 and initially targeted drug pushers in Moscow's metro stations, often dousing dealers in paint and then posting videos online. Shamanov says the idea came after a friend died of an overdose of krokodil, a dangerous opiate-based street drug. "After we buried him, we decided to somehow take revenge," Shamanov says. "We didn't really want to attack real criminals and break their heads. Well, actually, we did. We just didn't want to go to jail." Duri.net later expanded to targeting pedophiles and shaming them online. The group also says it shares its information with police and claims that this has led to more than 30 criminal cases being opened against suspected pedophiles. But while Shamanov says Duri.net's actions have curtailed drug dealing and made the Internet safer for children, the rising tide of vigilantism -- which has been mimicked by pro-Kremlin youth groups and nationalists -- have law-enforcement and social workers worried. Police, for example, have labeled their attacks on drug dealers "hooliganism." Kremlin Child Ombudsman Pavel Astakhov maintained that while people "must defend themselves," he also sympathizes with the police's apprehension of the activism. "We have to find balance," he said. Leonid Armer, the 38-year-old founder of the St. Petersburg branch of the Youth Security Service, a decade-old organization that assists recovering addicts and victims of domestic violence and pedophilia, maintains that the lack of police oversight is troubling. "To be honest, in a raft of cities it has turned into something half criminal that is extremely unpleasant and very ugly," he says. "In Saint Petersburg, we understood pretty swiftly that not much will come of dispatching these videos and that we should move to something more serious. We worked out a methodology for cities wanting to undertake this seriously. The first point was that the most important thing is to have ties with law enforcement." Critics say without oversight and accountability, the scope for abuse is wide. The groups raise money online with little or no accounting of how the funds are allocated. There is also a visible strain of zealous homophobia in some of the activities of Duri.net and other vigilante groups. One recent video shot in Magnitogorsk shows activists sneering at a 27-year-old homosexual man who arranged a meeting with a 15-year-old boy. They write "pedophile" across his forehead in marker pen. The video is posted on the LiveJournal page of a group called "Occupy Pedophilia: Magnitogorsk" with the caption: "You're gay if you don't repost this." Some vigilantes also appear to openly condone -- and even glorify -- violence. Videos made by the "Youth Antidrug Spetsnaz" group depict masked activists taping alleged drug dealers to fences, dousing them in paint and, in some cases, setting fire to their cars, destroying their possessions with a hammer, and blowtorching their wares. The group was disbanded in April. For his part, Shamanov says the wave of vigilantism is unsurprising because legislation is insufficient: "There's one major problem with legislation," he says. "Until a crime is committed and a child is raped, providing evidence of pedophilia is extremely difficult. Cases fall apart in court. That's a fact. Unfortunately, it is too late by the time a child is raped." Pedophilia has been in the spotlight in Russia since Dmitry Medvedev made children's rights central to his presidency. In December, the Investigative Committee said it recorded almost 3,000 incidents of sexual abuse in 2012. Vigilante actions targeting pedophiles made national headlines in June when Andrei Kaminov, a Moscow Oblast official, resigned after reportedly being lured to an apartment to have sex with a 14-year-old boy. This post appears courtesy of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. 
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| Late-Night Comedy Roundup: Watch Osama Bin Laden's Traffic Violation Posted: 10 Jul 2013 08:12 AM PDT A recently leaked report from Pakistan revealed that the al Qaeda leader was stopped for a traffic violation and wore a cowboy hat to evade satellite imagery. The Late Show's David Letterman jumped on some of these revelations, even showing alleged dashboard camera footage of the traffic stop. Conan O'Brien was interested in the cowboy hat and wondered of the popularity of such a look in Pakistan. A United Nations report released this week revealed that the United States is losing ground in yet another international indicator. In this case, Mexico has overtaken the US as the most obese nation in the world and this topic was very popular on late-night Tuesday evening. ABC's Jimmy Kimmel and O'Brien wondered if Mexico's cuisine had anything to do with it, while Late Night's Jimmy Fallon thinks we can get the title back. Also on NBC, The Tonight Show's Jay Leno as curious about the effects of Mexico's expanding waistline on immigration policy in the US. Fast forward to 4:40 to see Kimmel explain the threat of Canada's possible weight gain to the continent. Read more from Government Executive
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