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Master Feed : The Atlantic

Master Feed : The Atlantic

False Equivalence Watch: Another Strong Contender

Posted: 12 Jul 2013 02:45 PM PDT

It's from today's NYT, in the form of an unfortunate account of why so little actual legislation is making its way through Congress:

The chaos reflects the reality that Congress has largely been reduced from a lawmaking entity to a political operation, in which positions are taken and fermented largely in the name of maintaining party unity rather than attracting votes from the other side. In both the Senate, controlled by Democrats, and the House, under the rule of Republicans, the minority is largely powerless to do anything but protest.

Actually, No. The point of that paragraph is that Congress is suffering from symmetrical paralysis, which is exactly wrong.

In the House, a minority is indeed "largely powerless." Just ask Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, et al about how life has changed since 2010.

In the Senate, it's very different. There a minority is extremely powerful. Just ask Mitch McConnell, who has made 60 votes -- not a simple majority of 51 -- the de-facto minimum for getting either nominees or legislation approved. 

Here's one way to think about it: in both the Senate and the House, the minority party has about the same proportional strength. The Republicans now have 46 Senate seats, obviously 46% of the total. And the 201 Democrats in the House are just over 46% of its makeup. 

But in the House, those 46% might as well be 0%, since everything is run by majority vote. While in the Senate, 46% is a fully empowered blocking minority -- which can keep judgeships vacant, legislation from being approved, and essentially anything else from being done. That is, as long as they vote as a bloc, as they usually have; and are committed to making the filibuster not an emergency matter but a daily routine, as under McConnell they have done.

Another way to look at it is via a chart like this one:Filib2.jpg

For details on that chart, see a Harvard Journal of Legislation article; for background and analysis, plus a more elaborate chart, see these two great explainers from WonkBlog last year. For instance:

Between 1840 and 1900, there were 16 filibusters. Between 2009 and 2010, there were more than 130. But that's changed. Today, Majority Leader Harry Reid says that "60 votes are required for just about everything."

At the core of [the Harvard Journal] argument is a very simple claim: This isn't what the Founders intended. The historical record is clear on that fact. The framers debated requiring a supermajority in Congress to pass anything. But they rejected that idea.

In Federalist 22, Alexander Hamilton savaged the idea of a supermajority Congress, writing that "its real operation is to embarrass the administration, to destroy the energy of government and to substitute the pleasure, caprice or artifices of an insignificant, turbulent or corrupt junta, to the regular deliberations and decisions of a respectable majority."

I could go on, but I figure that at this point anyone who thinks about politics has thought about the modern challenge of governing under "super-majority" conditions. And people at the NYT have to be aware of this too, right? I mean, they couldn't not be. So how can a story about Congressional dysfunction in 2013 ignore the starkly different situations of minority power on the two different sides of Capitol Hill? 

Time to reflect on that one with a beer. Meanwhile thanks to the dozens of people who wrote in about this one. Hey, you might write to the NYT as well.

    

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's Female Supporters Are Not 'Fangirls'

Posted: 12 Jul 2013 01:07 PM PDT

[IMAGE DESCRIPTION]
Brian Snyder/Reuters

Since the April 19th capture of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the young man allegedly responsible, along with his now deceased older brother, for this year's Boston Marathon bombings, media outlets have anxiously observed the development of the "Free Jahar movement." Less a typical protest group and more a loosely affiliated confederation of conspiracy theorists, Tsarnaev sympathizers, and anti-government dissenters, these individuals communicate mainly through social media sites like Tumblr and Twitter, where they keep up to date on the latest developments in Tsarnaev's trial by tagging pictures and text posts with #FreeJahar. The Twitter account devoted to the cause, @FreeJahar, has fewer than 2,000 followers. The handful of Tumblr accounts devoted to the same purpose use hashtags to indicate posts related to Dzhokhar, allowing for easy, anonymous perusal.

Those who support Tsarnaev have a variety of reasons for doing so. Some believe he is innocent, and that the marathon bombings were perpetrated by the U.S. government. Others believe that Tsarnaev's rights were violated during and shortly after his capture, while others fear that he will be subject to the death penalty, which they oppose. Yet despite the fact that conspiracy theories and their adherents abound all over the web, it is the primarily female users of these social media outlets who have been, despite their varied reasons for supporting Tsarnaev, uniformly reviled as a single entity in the media.

To properly smear Tsarnaev's female supporters, it was first necessary to lump them together in a gender-based cadre stripped of whatever affiliations they may have ascribed to themselves: Tsarnaev fangirls. In a May 22nd opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times, Charlotte Allen transforms a profoundly varied series of beliefs into a single vulgar premise:

These besotted double-X chromosome-bearers feel sorry for "Jahar,"[...]The fangirls think Dzkokhar was a naive campus weedhead who fell victim to the influence of his jihad-obsessed 26-year-old brother. Or they think both brothers fell victim to a complex conspiracy [...] Or they think the officers who apprehended Dzhokhar on April 19 were mean to fire on the boat where he was hiding [...] Mostly, though, they think Dzhokhar is cute.

Two X-chromosomes is evidently all it takes to make a woman -- the naiveté and cartoonish sexuality presumably come part and parcel. Yet, more disturbing than Allen's clumsy handling of gender is her willingness to collapse a number of differing stances into a single, sexually motivated category.

Allen's leap may seem intuitive because the women she reports upon affiliate with one another through online communities that are dominated by 'feminine' modes of expression, including the sharing of Instagram-filtered photographs, wistful personal ruminations, and even fanfiction. But in uniformly labeling all woman Tsarnaev supporters as "fangirls," Allen reduces meaningful (if misguided) political positions into bad-faith subdivisions flimsily obscuring sexual desire. These women aren't really conspiracy theorists or adamant proponents of Miranda rights, Allen suggests, they're just lusty young lasses throwing up politically-tinged smokescreens. Antonio Planas, writing on July 11th for the Boston Herald, seems to be aware of the willful obliteration of woman Tsarnaev supporters' political positions - and yet still presses on in that same tradition:

A throng of young women devoted to accused teen terrorist Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and wearing T-shirts bearing his image outside U.S. District Court yesterday insisted they aren't smitten "fan girls," they just believe he's innocent. "He's just a baby. Gross," Lacey Buckley, 23, replied when asked if she had fallen for the curly locked, doe-eyed suspect.

Allen and Planas have not been alone in their assumptions about Tsarnev's female supporters. Others have endeavored to similarly erase the distinctions between women whose only commonality is their objection to some aspect of Tsarnaev's pursuit, capture, trial, or presumed penalty. On April 29th, Hanna Rosin wrote a post called 'Why All This Maternal Sympathy for Dzhokhar?' featured in Slate:

But what stands out in the ardor for Dzhokhar is a deep maternal strain...In the past week and a half I have not been to a school pickup, birthday, book party, or dinner where one of my mom friends has not said some version of "I feel sorry for that poor kid." This group includes mothers of infants and grandmothers and generally pretty reasonable intelligent types, including one who is an expert on Middle Eastern extremist groups.

Rosin reverts to the same reasoning Allen exhibits: these people cannot really be expressing opinions arising from different views and analyses. They're all women; therefore, the root of their 'sympathy' arises from some inherent maternal softness. A note of bitter irony: Tsarnaev's own mother has said she no longer cares if Dzhokhar lives or dies, now that her older son Tamerlan is dead. She also spent time on a terrorism watchlist along with her eldest son, and is suspected of encouraging his Jihadist ideation. So much for that gentle, universal motherliness.

Perhaps the iconography of Tsarnaev is in some part to blame here. Before his crime and subsequent capture, he had been active on social media, and left behind the flotsam and jetsam of any teenager's life online: posed photographs, tweets, favorite song lyrics. Images of Tsarnaev are therefore easily accessible, plentiful, and usually filtered and angled to be flattering, unlike the post-rampage mugshots usually disseminated after a horrific act of violence. Since online communities thrive on the sharing of images, it is easy to imagine picture-heavy exchanges between supporters to be reducible to nothing more than the images themselves.

Accusations of "hybristophilia," the experience of immense sexual attraction to suspected, confessed or convicted violent criminals, have arisen in support of the latter notion. Rosin used the term in her article, and Allen alluded to it by indicting "something more primal and less pretty in the female psyche." The pathologizing of female sexuality is nothing new, but more stunning than this modern rerun of hysteria as an explanation for aberrant female sexuality is the fact that adopting this theory requires us to openly dismiss Tsanaev supporters' claim that they believe him to be innocent. The old, worn-out whine that women only go for bad boys is especially puzzling when a large contingent of the women themselves are insisting that the boy is not, in fact, bad.

Major media outlets would rather imagine Tsarnaev's female supporters as deviant or hysterical, but never just plain wrong. If there is a legitimate criticism to be made of the individuals who believe Tsarnaev to be innocent it is that their beliefs are counterfactual. Different arguments await engagement with those who question how Tsarnaev's Miranda rights were handled, or with those who oppose the death penalty in this case or all cases.

But I doubt that those arguments will ever be had. It is not surprising to me that many of the writers who have most angrily shredded Tsarnaev's female supporters are themselves women. After all, women are aware that we are always in danger of being dismissed due to unfair associations with slanderous gender stereotypes, and are therefore quick to distance ourselves from women who are out of line. The looming threat of being labeled just another one of the repugnant, hysterical ones is doubtlessly enough to discourage young women with unpopular opinions on the Tsarnaev trial from joining important discussions.

In a July 10th L.A. Times opinion piece by Alexandra Le Tellier called "Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his Disgusting Fangirls," Le Tellier echoes Rosin, Allen and others in viciously tearing into Tsarnaev's 'disgusting' female supporters. Above her screed is a photograph, and in it is a pair of protestors. One is a man with a shaven head wearing a black sweatshirt and Guy Fawkes mask. He is holding a piece of poster board decorated with pro-Tsarnaev slogans. The other person is a young woman with long dark hair, wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with Tsarnaev's face. It reads: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is innocent.

Their opinions, it seems, are substantively identical. But only one of them is disgusting.

    

How the Sequester Is Holding Up Our Legal System

Posted: 12 Jul 2013 12:49 PM PDT

empty courtroom.jpg
Underfunding means more empty courts across the nation this summer. (Chip East/Reuters)

It has been 134 days now -- roughly one-third of a year -- since the federal budget "sequester" formally took hold. And while members of Congress rushed a few months ago to ease the sequester's impact upon air traffic control -- that is, rushed to make sure their planes would take off on time as they got out of Washington for their long weekends -- there has been no such rush to protect the nation's legal system from the grim impact of the budget cuts. Our federal trials can be delayed at great cost to litigants, our nation's third branch may slide into third-world practices, but God forbid our planes should be late.

It would be one thing if the federal judiciary's budget were bloated. But clearly it is not. "For every one thousand dollars ($1000) of federal spending, the Judicial Branch uses one dollar and eighty-nine cents ($1.89)," U.S. District Judge Fred Biery wrote last week in an open letter to members of the Texas delegation to Congress. "Of that amount," the judge added, "the Western District of Texas uses three pennies." The sequester, in West Texas and everywhere else in the United States, is about the willingness of Congress and the White House to hinder justice by squeezing pennies out of the nation's already-underfunded courts.

Few outside of legal circles want to talk about the impact of the cuts upon the administration of justice. It rarely makes news -- and certainly not television news since there are few images to broadcast. But the sequester's impact upon the federal courts is bad, and getting worse, and will reach constitutional crisis next year around this time if the budget cuts reach into the next fiscal year. In the past few days, I've rounded up a sampling of views from some federal trial judges on what this means for federal litigants today and what it portends for future litigants if Congress continues to fail or refuse to adequately fund the federal court system. Read this cogent "fact sheet" from the Federal Defenders Office if you want details.

Included below are the comments of several sitting federal trial judges who expressed concern to me not just about the cost-cutting that impacts their courtrooms now but also about the profound separation-of-powers principles implicated by the lingering political deadlock in Washington. The sequester, in other words, represents an assault by the legislative and executive branches upon core judicial functions. And if it lasts much longer, if the next fiscal budget is impacted, the sequester will strip Americans of their right to both serve upon and to be served by juries.

The Administrative Office of the United States already has indicated that it may be forced to eliminate civil jury trials in the month of September -- a whole month without federal civil trials anywhere in America! "If sufficient funding is not provided to the courts," 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Julia Gibbons bluntly told lawmakers in March, "we cannot provide the people of the United States the type of justice system that has been a hallmark of our liberty throughout our nation's history." The sad truth is, however; few of the nation's political leaders, including the former constitutional scholar who now inhabits the White House, seem to care.

The view from the bench 

Pennsylvania

I asked U.S. District Judge John E. Jones, of the Middle District of Pennsylvania, an appointee of George W. Bush, for his views on the sequester's impact upon his courtroom and courthouse. Judge Jones told me Thursday morning:

To us, it's a gathering storm. We are seeing presently the effect of furloughs in our federal defenders office. So we are ending up not being able to schedule criminal cases on particular days because of the unavailability of federal defenders. As we look ahead, we have been forewarned... that there are enormously impactful cuts [coming]. The sort of rolling effect of the sequester is evident and it gets really worse by the month for the federal courts.

I wouldn't say that it's impacted issuing decisions at present but for example there are fewer people in the clerks office -- which means we are in a clerk sharing situation. All of us are concerned because as you know there is a speedy trial rule in the federal courts and the unavailability of defenders who are constitutionally mandated is something that I think concerns every federal judge. I think the criminal side, at least here, is where we have concern. 

We felt we were running lean before the sequester. As we progress, if there is not a fix by the Congress it's highly likely in my view that there are just going to be certain days where we are not going to be able to conduct trials. It's that simple and that's justice delayed, obviously, where we are going to be not staffed. I don't think that's too far ahead. I can foresee that looming ahead, absolutely, because you don't have an available courtroom deputy, you don't have a defense counsel available, it impacts resources that we use to pay jurors, it cuts across everything that we do...   

This is so difficult because the average guy on the street doesn't particularly have sympathy for the federal judiciary. I think it's abstract for people... They think we ought to do with less except that we are operating under as I said earlier constitutional mandates. If you have a case pending, if you want access to the federal courts, you ought to be concerned about this... Maybe the public doesn't care about it but I would suggest that they should care about justice in America. I wish there was the will to be smart to fix this but I'm not perceiving it.

The view from Massachusetts

U.S. District Judge William Young, sitting in Massachusetts, an appointee of President Ronald Reagan, told me Thursday morning that the sequester will generate a full-blown constitutional crisis by next summer if Congress doesn't act to restore adequate funding for the judiciary. He also echoed his colleague's concerns about a lack of public consciousness about the impact of the sequester. Judge Young told me:

I don't see any particularly public consciousness. The media, not just you but Washington Post and The New York Times, they have made comments, especially about the defenders but it's all ho-hum. There is not much lobby for defending the rights of people accused of crime. I am going to approach it from a slightly different tack. It is believed that the second wave of the sequester will going into effect at the next fiscal year; that there won't be a major debate about that, and that it will go into effect.

When that happens, within the judiciary, you are going to find serious questions about separations of powers -- questions of genuine constitutional magnitude. And I start with the jury. This fiscal year we have squeaked by, we are going to squeak by as far as I can see, with sufficient funds to pay for civil juries. Civil juries are like the canary in the mine. Our budgeting for civil juries is extraordinarily accurate -- I have nothing to do with it -- we can tell within about a week to two weeks when we will run out of money for civil juries. This year, this fiscal year, we won't run out.

Next year, with additional sequester cuts, I predict (but I'm not positive) that we will run out of money for civil juries before the end of the fiscal year. July, August, I'm not sure when but we will run out. Now, on that day, the Congress will be engaged in a direct attack on the constitutional rights of all American citizens. Because it is a constitutional right to sit on the nation's juries. And it is not an answer to say "Oh no, Heavens no, all we are doing is delaying it. It's just delay. There will be more money in the next fiscal year."

That's not so -- not so in this sense. Every day when we do not sit with juries, civil or criminal, a certain percentage of citizens who otherwise would have had the chance to exercise their right to sit on the nation's juries lose that right. If you delay it, simply by a day, you are in total going to call fewer jurors than you would call if you were running on every business day. A furlough day for juries doesn't mean that you will just be able to go on. It means that all the people who would have been called for service that day will never be called, never be able to exercise their right, and it is a right, a constitutional right, to sit on the nation's juries.

Judge Young then recounted what happened the last few times the federal judiciary has (inadvertently) run out of money to pay for civil jurors -- and how that contrasts with legislative indifference this time around. Last time, he told me, Congress as an institution was mortified and quickly, and quietly, found the necessary additional funding. "Scrambled" to fix the problem is the word Judge Young used. This time, however, he says he's seen no "particular concern about the fact that we will run out of money to serve as jurors." And he also wanted to be clear about the critical distinction between judicial and legislative power.

I am a judge of the United States. I occupy a position that Congress has authorized. They could turn my permanent judgeship into a temporary judgeship -- no doubt they could do that -- they could extinguish this court. But those are discrete Congressional legislation. The point is that it is a violation of the separation of powers by a sweeping budget resolution to take away the core judicial function.

They authorized my position. The president appointed me to it. The Senate confirmed me in it. Within the bounds of judicial authority, I am expected to exercise the judicial power of the United States, insofar as a district judge does it. One of those things is I have the power to summon jurors. I have the power to adjudicate the nation's business. That's the best argument [against the sequester] under the separation of powers.

The view from Colorado

U.S. District Judge John L. Kane, sitting in senior status in Colorado, an appointee of President Jimmy Carter, chose an altogether different approach to the question. He told me Thursday that he believes the judiciary itself could also do a better job of allocating scarce resources. Echoing concerns raised by Republican lawmakers about Justice Department expenses, Judge Kane told me:

I am very distressed with efforts to cut the budgets and staff of the federal public defenders and possibly delay payments to lawyers for investigative costs, travel, experts and time while at the same time the Third Branch spends enormous sums on judicial conferences, non-case related travel and seminars. Further cuts to district court staff, already in dire straits is causing delays, mistakes and scheduling problems with both civil and criminal cases.
Article III of the Constitution requires us to administer justice and in tight financial times, all other activities should be "sequestered" rather than those for the fundamental justification for our existence. Do we really need conferences at expensive resort hotels in this age when all information can be distributed electronically? I am in the final stages of preparation for a death penalty murder trial scheduled to take eight to ten weeks. Why complicate enormous efforts with concerns about whether funds to pay defense counsel and other costs will be exhausted. If so, what then? Declare a mistrial?

Washington would do well to listen to these voices and promptly end the sequester's impact upon the judiciary. These are not political figures. These are not partisans. These are not budget-busting bureaucrats. These are three men, representing hundreds of other federal judges and thousands of other federal court officials, who simply want to be able to do their job, to fairly and justly administer justice, according to their constitutional duties. Today, in the name of partisan obstructionism, Congress is precluding them from doing so. That's a far bigger scandal, I think, then a few planes running late into and out of National Airport.

    

Central Asia's Most Important City Is ... Not in Central Asia

Posted: 12 Jul 2013 12:45 PM PDT

urumqibanner.jpgUrumqi's mixture of cultures is unique in China. (DPerstin/Flickr)

Central Asia's beating heart, the commercial hub of the region that cultivated the old Silk Road, is neither of the fabled Thousand and One Nights cities of Samarkand or Bukhara. In fact, the center of this region is not even really in Central Asia. It's in China.

Urumqi, capital of Xinjiang, the autonomous region that together with Tibet makes up China's western edge, is a bubbling, gritty metropolis, and probably the most cosmopolitan place between Shanghai and Istanbul. On the surface, Urumqi resembles most second-tier Chinese industrial hubs. But, with its myriad advertisements, signs and business placards in Chinese, Uighur, Russian, Kazakh and Kyrgyz -- written in Chinese, Arabic or Cyrillic scripts --Urumqi is no ordinary Chinese city. In fact, it has emerged as the de facto capital of a revived Central Asia, a region poised to assume a higher profile in the world's energy, diplomatic, and cultural scenes.

On the street, in the immense electronics, clothes, and kitchenware markets, and in the 24-hour all-inclusive spas used by traders as cheap hotels, the signs of Urumqi's variety are everywhere. You regularly find pudgy Guangzhou businessmen next to nervous-looking Pakistani merchants from Peshawar, standing across the street from entire Russian families, dressed in white, as if on vacation in the Greek Isles. Iranian truck drivers commiserate with Farsi-speaking Tajiks, and entrepreneurs from Mumbai and Bangkok haggle in English with local Uighurs hocking goods manufactured in Shenzhen. The Turkic peoples of Eurasia: Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and Uzbeks, and even some Turkmen and Azeris, mingle with Uighurs and Turks from Anatolia: all groups who share a language family that is still prevalent in Xinjiang.

They are all here for one reason: to do business. The elderly shuttle trader with her overstuffed cargo bags will buy plastic Chinese merchandise and then, following a flight or bus trip back to a remote region like Karakalpakstan, Uzbekistan, will re-sell these goods at inflated prices. The mid-range container-owner is here to fill rail carriages with air-conditioners, laptops or nylon carpets to travel back to the bustling bazaars of the Ferghana Valley, where he will re-sell his items in bulk to retailers in affluent Kazakhstan or Russia. The big businessman is here to open a new branch office for his rapidly-growing commercial empire. Urumqi, farther from the sea than any other city in the world, has all of the brands and services available in China's coastal cities. It is just that they're a bit more rough-and-ready: The latest Samsung smartphone is still in its bubble wrap, while the flashy BMW is still on the transport truck.

The official population of Urumqi is around 3 million, and the majority of these people are Han Chinese, not Uighur. But the real population is probably substantially higher. GDP per capita, at around $11,000 is almost double China's average and just below that of cities like Beijing and Shanghai. This isn't an accident: the Chinese government has cultivated Urumqi at the expense of Xinjiang's traditional trading cities of Turpan and Kashgar. Anyone flying from coastal China to Central Asia almost always must stop in Urumqi first. The city also serves as the hub for China's major railway and pipeline arteries, connecting the country's major cities with Central Asia, Russia, and the Middle East. It's of little surprise, then, that such a wide variety of travelers find their way to the city.

Urumqi's cosmopolitan profile hasn't gone unnoticed in Beijing. For the last three years, the Chinese government has devoted a lot of resources to the China-Eurasia Expo, the region's premier trade fair and an aspiring Davos. Last year, the six-day event included speeches by Premier Wen Jiabao and a host of regional leaders, from the Central Asian states to Pakistan, Turkey and the Maldives -- even professional conference-goers like Tony Blair dropped by. Tens of billions of dollars worth of deals were made, with everything from Kyrgyz kalpak hats to Chinese tractors on display. The Afghans touted their mineral deposits, the Kazakhs their oil and local Xinjiang potentates repeatedly stressed the opportunities of investing in Xinjiang. This year's expo, scheduled to take place in early September, has been promoted around the world, from Helsinki to Kuala Lumpur.

Urumqi's role as a regional locus is mainly due a fortuitous location and culture. During the Qing Dynasty, Urumqi became an administrative center because it was here that the Manchu Bannermen crushed the Zhungarian Mongols, who had long threatened to cut eastern China off from its western domain. It is a fertile plain in the middle of Xinjiang's deserts, and its location on a natural route across the Tianshan mountains into Central Asia and Russia make it as suitable a hub as anywhere nearby. Today, Urumqi is the closest major Chinese city for Central Asians who wish to buy merchandise, and the closest major Central Asian city for Chinese who wish to sell it. And, it is a chief selling point that the two major languages of the region, Mandarin and Turkic Uyghur, are spoken here with equal fluency.

Distant, obscure Urumqi also may loom large for the United States' plans in the region. At the moment, the major plank of the Obama Administration's policy for Central Asia after the withdrawal of combat troops from Afghanistan is the cultivation of a so-called New Silk Road consisting of economic integration across the region that will turn Afghanistan into a roundabout for trade and transport. However, Washington's "North-South" strategy not only ignores the the reality that -- at least at the moment -- Central Asia generally trades east-west, but also the existence of a major regional trade hub: Urumqi. As opposed to a commercial corridor dictated by geopolitical priorities, Urumqi is a natural focal point that sits between the production in central and eastern China on one side and the markets of Russia, the Middle East and Europe through Central Asia on the other.

This is not to say that it is in the United States' interest to support the growth of an already booming Chinese axle with various Eurasian spokes. But it is imperative that any American policy take into account the regional realities of commerce and cultural interconnection. Afghanistan and South Asia may well be economically integrated with Central Asia. But when this happens, no city will be better positioned to capitalize than Urumqi.

    

Sorry, Twitter: 'Sharknado' Was an Enormous Ratings Bust

Posted: 12 Jul 2013 10:58 AM PDT

And so, when all the eyeballs and tweets were counted, the verdict was thus: Sharknado devoured Twitter but scared away viewers.

The SyFy movie about flying sharks and bad weather was seen by just over 1 million people. It had a 0.4 rating in the 18-49 demographic in early Nielsen numbers. That's not just a bust by cable standards. It's a bust by SyFy original movie standards. "Most Syfy originals have an average viewership of 1.5 million people, with some getting twice that," Claire Suddath reports.

The peculiar thing about this bust was that it was a social media blockbuster. There were more than 600,000 tweets sent about the movie between 8pm and 3am last night (fewer if you go by Nielsen's numbers), which is two tweets for every three people in America watching Sharknado. That's particularly strange since Syfy original movies have an average viewer age of 52, and fiftysomething guys are a bit off the key demo for Twitter.

Let's compare audience and tweets to another viral show, Games of Thrones and its "Red Wedding" episode.

Screen Shot 2013-07-12 at 1.47.47 PM.png

With more social media love but a much smaller audience, Sharknado had 13 times more tweets-per-viewer than one of the most tweeted-about shows on TV.

What does it all mean? On the one hand, a ratings bust is a ratings bust. On the other, the SyFy Channel, like most cable networks, makes most of its money not from advertising but from subscription fees negotiated with cable companies. If they can make the case that their stuff is viral and a hit with famous media people with big Twitter followings then, hey, maybe they'll get a higher affiliate fee in their next negotiation round. But the real conclusion is that the overlap between the meme-hunting Twitterverse and the larger world of families with TVs in the living rooms isn't as massive as we thought.

    

Does Waze Mark the Beginning of the End of Israel's Brain Drain?

Posted: 12 Jul 2013 10:35 AM PDT

wazetop.jpg
Waze, an Israeli mobile satellite navigation application, is seen on a smartphone in this photo illustration taken in Tel Aviv May 9, 2013. (Nir Elias/Reuters)

Israel is the world's second-largest destination for hi-tech venture capital, after Silicon Valley. Often called the "Start-up Nation," part of Israel's economic strategy has always been to sell start-ups to foreign companies. According to a recent Jerusalem Post article, over 95 percent of Israeli start-ups sell to foreign businesses. Traditionally, these acquisitions have required the start-up to move most of its operations overseas, often while keeping a small R&D center in Israel. This creates a complex dynamic: a large number of talented Israeli science and engineering professionals move abroad for economic opportunities, and many never come back. Fourteen percent of Israelis with doctorates in science and engineering have left Israel for at least three years, compared with 3.8 percent of those with degrees in the humanities and social sciences, and 17.7 percent of Israelis with a PhD in engineering choose overseas employment.

But Waze, an Israeli traffic navigation application that was bought by Google for approximately $1 billion last month, bucks the trend by staying put: One of its key demands was that its Israeli employees remain in Israel. Google agreed to this requirement while other interested buyers, including Facebook, did not. Waze's exit was the fourth-largest buyout in Google's history.

It was also the largest buyout ever for an Israeli consumer firm, far outdoing Face.com's sell to Facebook for $60 million last year. Waze's success opens a new frontier for Israeli start-ups, which have traditionally focused on encapsulated software solutions, to online consumer engagement . Because these jobs are web-based, this precedent may also eventually shift Israeli start-up jobs from abroad to back home.

***

Venture capitalist David Stark immigrated from Wall Street to Israel to join the Jerusalem-based v.c. firm OurCrowd, which funds early-stage Israeli start-ups.

Stark, a Wharton business school graduate wearing a kippa, or religious skullcap, says that he is seeing fewer Israeli companies move abroad because many current start-ups are more internet-based. "More and more business is being done on the web. Successful companies like Waze that are more consumer-facing have an online or mobile presence that you can build from anywhere. Now fewer [Israelis] feel pressure to move abroad." Of the 21 companies in OurCrowd's portfolio, only 30 percent have staff located overseas, specifically in the U.S.

He claims that a lot of Israeli entrepreneurs prefer staying in Israel, but at some point, they feel the need to live abroad for a period of time in order to broaden their networks: "I'll be sitting at a meeting, and [entrepreneurs] will show all the startups they have been in, and they usually will have spent some time abroad."

But when it comes time to start their next business, he says, many will opt to return to Israel.

"They say, 'I want to do it here.' Maybe it's easier for them. They've been abroad, they've built the networks and can leverage the networks. Their preference is to be closer to home, close to family."

One common criticism of the Israeli start-up scene is that few Israeli companies grow into mature businesses. This creates a pattern of "serial entrepreneurship," in which founders look for a big buyout rather than developing a long-term company.

The first official statement from Waze after the buyout, however, seemed to assure customers that its leadership team will not change anytime soon. "Nothing practical will change here at Waze. We will maintain our community, brand, service and organization -- the community hierarchy, responsibilities and processes will remain the same," the company said. They further specified that, "Our employees, managers, founders... are all committed to our vision for many years to come."

Uri Levine, one of Waze's co-founders, explains this line of thought in a recent speech at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa. He gives the example of the Israeli entrepreneurs that formed the start-up HumanClick (now part of LivePerson), who remained at their company even seven years after the buyout. Levine says, "I asked one of the partners a simple question, 'Why?' He said, 'It was the funnest workplace we ever had.' And with that understanding, we decided that we were going to found Waze."

Levine has spent a significant amount of time living in Silicon Valley (Waze has an office there), a fact that becomes obvious throughout the speech. He wears sporty green cargo pants and randomly utters English words throughout his Hebrew speech. When talking about the buyout, he reflects that he had, " Mixed feelings (said in English). On the one hand, dazzling financial success. We're a beacon (said in English) that marks the destination for a whole lot of other startups. But on the other hand, they took my baby."

For successful Israeli start-ups such as Waze, it's hard not to be seduced by the United States. Not only are foreign investors keen on Israeli start-ups, individual states are starting to lure Israeli companies to relocate there. In the last several years, 18 top-level state delegations have visited Israel, including groups from Massachusetts and New York.

Now, over 137 Israeli businesses call Massachusetts their home. The state was partly able to attract these start-ups because of its world-class scientific research institutes, such as MIT and Harvard.

This buzz of start-up activity near Boston started making New York City a little jealous. In late 2011, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg sought to rebrand NYC as the new hi-tech capital. As part of this plan, he issued a first-time bid to universities around the world to launch an applied sciences graduate school in his city. The Technion-Israel Institute of Technology partnered with Cornell, and both won the competition. Their newly created institute, Cornell NYC Tech, began classes this year. The Jacobs Technion-Cornell Innovation Institute (JTCII), part of Cornell NYC Tech, will welcome its first class next fall and will fully launch in 2017 on Roosevelt Island.

Technion Professor Craig Gotsman is the founding director of JTCII. Sitting in his temporary office in Google's NYC headquarters, he explains how the institute's graduates will position Manhattan as a future hi-tech hub: "You need your graduates to not just be good engineers, but also good entrepreneurs. We're creating entrepreneurial engineers. We expect that a significant proportion will start up their own companies."

Gotsman helped lead a recent delegation from New York to Israel that aimed to find Israeli start-ups and persuade them to move their operations to New York City when the time comes to move overseas. "The idea was to persuade the Israeli companies when they eventually expand to the U.S., which they all do at some point. They usually move their marketing and sales and business development. The point was to convince them that New York was the right place to be."

The efforts are working. According to a recent article in Crain's New York Business, Yaron Samid, a serial entrepreneur who runs TechAviv -- a global "founders club" for the Israeli tech industry -- counts almost 200 active tech companies in New York City founded by Israelis. That number roughly matches his approximation for California.

Even Stanley Fisher, Israel's former Bank of Israel governor, admits the challenges for Israeli professionals to return home after enjoying the economic conditions of the United States. As he relays to The Daily Beast, "The conditions are enormously better in the United States. A graduating student in economics who gets his first job in the United States will earn three or four times what he earns in Israel... It demands something of people to come back."

When asked if New York's lobbying should worry Israel's tech scene, Stark answers, "It doesn't concern me. It's a good thing as long as New York and Israel's startup ecosystems have a collaborative relationship," he says. However, he cautions that depending on "what type of program they'll have in place to lure Israeli investors," New York's rebranding could be of concern.

Paradoxically, as the Waze exit exemplifies, buyouts can also enable Israeli startups to remain in Israel rather than relocate. As Waze described in the aforementioned statement, "Why not stay completely independent? We asked ourselves: 'Will Waze still be a fun project to participate in, and a fun place to work, as a stand-alone public company?' Choosing the path of an IPO often shifts attention to bankers, lawyers and the happiness of Wall Street, and we decided we'd rather spend our time with you, the Waze community."

    

The Quantified Penis

Posted: 12 Jul 2013 10:09 AM PDT

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Actor Lionel Barrymore portraying Grigori Rasputin, 1932 (AP)

Before (or possibly after) nineteenth-century Russian mystic Grigori Rasputin was poisoned, shot, rolled in a carpet, and thrown in a river, some say that his murderers severed and preserved his penis. Among those claiming dubious propriety over the well-traveled organ is the collection of Dr. Igor Knayazkin in a museum of erotica in St. Petersburg. Whoever it once belonged to, the piece attracts its share of gawkers and conversation not just because of its mythic background, but because it's a solid twelve inches.

Today's penises are not beyond the reach of the quantified self movement. For all the subtleties of modern relationships, all the outlets people have to connect creatively and intellectually and live deeply, the noble charities we espouse or profess to, humans really do care about the size of their/others' sex organs. We count calories, steps, friendships, VO2 maxes; in a way it makes more sense than ever that we should measure and compare our genitals to understand ourselves in quantifiable terms.

Even though a man can do no more change the size of his penis than he can the size of his cranium or color of his eyes, it does matter to potential partners, as a biological and cultural imperative. Among others. So this week researchers led by Dr. Debby Herbenick with the storied Kinsey Institute at Indiana University's Center for Sexual Health Promotion published an academic article that lays claim to the most accurate data yet on human penis sizes, as they vary by age, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc. The most interesting part is probably the explanation of why these sorts of studies are done, and what's on the research forefront:

Numerous studies of penile dimensions have been conducted and various rationales have been presented for such studies (e.g., related to clinical and/or surgical interventions, to understand the potential effect of prenatal influences on sexual orientations and various bodily dimensions, to present data for a specific nationality of men). However, given the disproportionately high number of studies of penis size to the relatively small number of studies of vaginal and/or vulvar dimensions it is also perhaps the case that penile dimensions have simply captured more of the public's attention -- as well as that of (mostly male) scientists who have published scientific research related to penile dimensions.

Certainly it is easier to measure a penis than it is to measure the vagina and such ease of measurement may, in part, account for the differential number of reports (it does not account for the strikingly few studies of vulvar dimensions, however). Yet we would be remiss not to mention that a greater understanding of female genitals is warranted and that, given the consistency in findings related to penile dimensions, it is perhaps time to turn greater attention to the study and understanding of female genital dimensions in future research or other aspects of either male or female genitalia.

The findings, though, are of course not interesting. I don't even care about this stuff. ... I guess it is sort of interesting that of the 1,661 erect penises measured in the study, the largest by a significant margin was 10.2 inches. Only 35 were longer than 7.5 inches. The average was 5.2 inches long, and 4.8 inches around. Also penises seem to get longer with age, the racial and ethnic differences were negligible, and sizes seemed to vary based on the manner in which the erection was obtained. And when asked if anyone else was present during the measuring process, most people said they were alone or with their sexual partner, but 16 people said they did it with "a friend." Okay, actually I could go on.

The point is that now we have numbers to which we can compare ourselves or our lovers (or friends), so we can know if we should be satisfied or listless. Once science figures out the best way to measure vaginas, if everyone will just be open about their measurements, it will be easy for, say, Match.com to pair people who are a good fit. Some day we will all make perfect sense.

    

A Zimbabwe Hospital Charges Women $5 For Each Scream During Labor—Why?

Posted: 12 Jul 2013 10:03 AM PDT

The Atlantic business channel always enjoys a good price mystery. But this factoid probably falls under the category of Really Awful Price Mystery. It's so awful that I sincerely hope it's just not true: At least one Zimbabwe hospital reportedly charges $5 for each time a woman screams while giving birth.

Via Max Fisher, that means each scream accounts for 3.3 percent of average income per capita:

Gross domestic product per capita is only $500 in Zimbabwe; average annual income per person is about $150. Zimbabwean hospitals also charge a $50 delivery fee. This means that, in a country where underemployment is 95 percent and poverty is rife, a mother who screams a few times during delivery might owe half her annual income after giving birth.

What is allegedly an effort to reduce "false alarms" is clearly a ploy for the hospital to run up charges on what might be the least price-sensitive consumer category on earth: a woman in labor. In the United Nations' ranking of countries by gender equality, Zimbabwe finishes 172nd out of 186.

Unfortunately, Zimbabwe's corruption runs far beyond the emergency room. Sixty-two percent of respondents told Transparency International that they had paid a bribe for one of eight common services. By comparison, the figure was 7 percent for the U.S. and 17 percent for Sudan. 

    

Great Walls Don't Work, Truman Capote Has a Problem, Colleges Are Pinching the Poor: The New Atlantic Weekly</em>

Posted: 12 Jul 2013 09:45 AM PDT

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A month after launching The Atlantic Weekly, we're hoping readers are, by now, eager each Friday for the next issue ( delivered right to your iPad or iPhone for a mere $20 a year). But in the annals of impatience, few people were as anxious to see the next edition of a magazine as young Truman Capote was in 1947. The unheralded author had had a story accepted by The Atlantic for publication and was none too pleased at the length of time it was taking to reach readers. " The Atlantic has held this story an unduly long time, and this has been rather an inconvenience," the 23-year-old Capote wrote to his editor. This week, we're happy to present that story, "Shut a Final Door," in the iPad edition of The Weekly just as it finally appeared--much to Capote's relief--in the summer of 1947.

Speaking of anxiety, this week Alexis C. Madrigal takes stock of a summer camp for people looking to disconnect from computers and gadgets, and wonders whether we aren't being a little quick to indict technology for our perceived mental unease. We also present a piece titled "Why Great Walls Fail," that tracks the decline of empires of yore and shows how fence building--of the sort under way along the U.S. border with Mexico--is foolish. For a smart idea, Alan Barra looks at the business model employed by the resurgent Pittsburgh Pirates, who this season have gone from laughingstock to league leaders. We've got a piece that spotlights a rather surprising and problematic effect of runaway college costs and another story that takes up the question of how Hollywood villains, this summer, reflect our current societal fears. Finally, we present a somewhat cinematic and potentially fearful tale likely unfolding in your backyard, as so-called cicada-killers begin feasting on their undead prey. We've got all that this week and more--and you don't have to wait around like Capote.

The Atlantic Weekly is available in the iTunes store now.

    

What If You Could Snapchat a Scent?

Posted: 12 Jul 2013 09:35 AM PDT

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Shutterstock/Sofia Andreevna

Fresh-brewed coffee. Towels, just out of the dryer. The sour-sweet of a summer sidewalk. Sweat. Ocean. Brownies baking. Lilies blooming. Musk. We tend to classify scent according to the way we experience it: as a sensation, ephemeral and ethereal, powerful in large part because of intangibility. In that, however, we tend to be wrong. Scent is stuff like any other stuff -- little bits of the world that shed and sweep and waft, making their way, finally, to our noses. Only at the point when the miasmic world meets the human mind does scent take on its mysterious power to alert us to danger, to seduce us to action, to lull us into memory.

But what if fragrance could be made ... non-fleeting? What if it could be made permanent -- a document of experience, lived and seen and smelled? Over in the U.K., the designer Amy Radcliffe has created a project that explores that idea. It's a device that uses some of the best scent-preservation technology we have, headspace capture, to take, effectively, "snapshots" of scents. It works like an analog camera, and its aim is to convert sensory experience into a vehicle for nostalgia. Imagine being able, Radcliffe suggests, to take a "scent" picture of that blissful day at the beach. Or of your newborn son. Or of your ailing mother.

Radcliffe's device is called the Madeleine. As in, yes, Proust's cake -- a baked good that, activated by the power of scent memory, transformed into a time machine.

The Madeleine exploits, basically, the stuff-iness of scent. To use it, you place a funnel over an environment or object whose scent you want to preserve. A pump then transfers that scent-laden air to an odor trap made of Tenax, a porous polymer resin that absorbs the volatile scent particles. The result is a "snapshot" of scent only in the broadest sense: capturing the smell of a strawberry can take several minutes, while preserving the more subtle scent of an aroma in the air -- campfire, sea, pie -- can take an entire day. 

That slowness is both a bug and a feature: part of the point of the Madeleine is to encourage its users to associate scent with nostalgia. Images' increasing ease of capture, combined with our abundant means of storing them, has led us to a kind of photographic promiscuity. Digital images have become, at this point, "infinitely replicable," Radcliffe told me -- and, as a result, "almost disposable." But there's value, she says, in applying slowness to the process of archiving -- power in the attempt to add a bit of ritual to deciding what, and whom, we choose to remember.

The Madeleine, Radcliffe says, uses "a scenario designed to be very similar to 35 mm photography," in that you take a snapshot of your scent, send it away -- in this case, to a fragrance lab that uses a gas chromatography-mass spectrometry machine to process the scent molecules -- and receive the results later on. It's the pre-digital model of photo-processing, one predicated on curation and, then, anticipation. You click, you send, you wait.

The Madeleine, to that end, is a working prototype, but it is also "an unproven prototype," Radcliffe is quick to point out. Rendering archived aromos with full fidelity will require much more input, she says, from perfumers and scent scientists. The device as it exists at the moment is instead a proof of concept that is also an exploration of an idea. "Rather than aiming to produce a working product," Radcliffe explains, the project "was more to open this discussion on the power of scent memory." 

To smell, after all, is to engage in an act of autonomic intimacy: it's to take in invisible bits of the world, to process them into sensation, to associate them with something familiar -- whether that something be a plastic trash bag or fresh-cut grass or Grandma's kitchen. Despite that (and, probably, because of it), smell is perhaps the sense that has been most neglected by technology. Our media, from our books and our magazines to our television and our Internet, are biased toward vision and hearing, sight and sound. Our devices and their interfaces -- tangible, tactile -- exploit the nuances of touch. Even taste, that oh-so-sensory of senses, marches forward armed with technological augmentation: we are, as a culture, obsessed with innovation in food preparation, using new machines and new chemicals to create flavors and textures never before imagined.

Scent, however, is in many ways the sense that has been left behind. We have not, yet, found a way to convert odor into a medium. Perfumery may be a science as well as an art form. Medicine may be exploring the power of scent for diagnostic purposes. And there are, definitely, entire industries devoted to the manufacture of new scents for commercial ends. Axe Body Spray is its own kind of technological achievement. But Axe Body Spray is also a testament to our biases when it comes to scent: the technologies we've developed in the name of science-izing scent have treated fragrance largely as additive rather than preservative: they have sought to add manufactured odors to the ones that have naturally evolved in the world. We've taken our sweat and our sweet and our sour -- the molecules that meet to render the aromas of life -- and focused our energies on covering them up. Chanel No. 5 (and Secret deodorant, and Glade candles, and Febreze fabric spray) are commercial products, but they are also shots fired in the ongoing saga of man-versus-nature.

So while we have long had tools that record images and sounds, we have not really had tools do the same thing for scent. We have not, in general, thought of scent as something that can be processed and preserved into a vessel for memory.

The Madeleine, however -- the "camera" that turns the scents of life into an archive of that life -- proposes a shift in that approach. And it is only the latest technology to do this. The tradition of scent-mapping goes back, it seems, to the 1790s, when the physician and pioneering hygienist Jean-Noël Hallé embarked on an odor-recording expedition of Paris. Hallé had a grand vision that was technologically limited: the equipment he used to document his six-mile expedition along the banks of the Seine started and stopped at his notebook and his nose. 

Nearly two centuries later, however, in the 1970s, the Swiss fragrance chemist Roman Kaiser developed the odor-preservation technique he dubbed headspace capture: a process meant to analyze and manufacturer the fragrances of the natural world. Kaiser used his technique to measure and then recreate the scents of a tropical rainforest; scientists and perfumers have since adapted the process to recreate scents of a more quotidian variety. In the 1980s, the scent scientist Braja Mookherjee, working for the fragrance firm IFF, invented a process that allowed technicians to extract fragrant molecules from living flowers, with the ultimate goal of recreating their smells. In the late 1990s, Japanese scientists began developing an "odor recorder" that promised to capture and replicate the world's scents. Today, the odor artist Sissel Tolas uses headspace technology to create Hallé-esque "scratch and sniff" maps of the world. Olivia Alice uses a similar technique to preserve the scents of loved ones that linger on their clothes -- by "deconstructing the clothing and extracting its composite and essential elements." So does Li Jingxuan's "Aromastagram."

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These works are incremental steps, and they are as much about making a point as they are about making a memory. But they suggest what might happen when headspace capture further develops, when scent scientists combine with technologists to produce new ways of rendering aroma as a record of the world. While it's likely that the future will see more commercial uses for scent -- the scent of Subway bread, exuded onto a city sidewalk; the aroma of coffee, squirted into a bus; the Smell-o-Vision idea, put to marketing purposes -- it's just as likely that scent capture will also find itself in the hands of everyday people. A 2007 survey of tech experts predicted that scent will be, by 2015, convertible into digital data -- leading to, yes, a smellable Internet.

Their forecast may have been premature, but that doesn't mean it was wrong. Scent, in nature, is data; the question for us humans is how to store it and reproduce it. Radcliffe's Madeleine, and its fellow projects, ask us to imagine what might happen once we've answered that question. What will it mean when we can transform fragrance from a decorator of the world into a document of it? What will happen when we can Snapchat a scent? 

Perfumers prize sillage -- the wake of aroma that trails the wearer, lingering after she's gone -- precisely because its sensory residue must be manufactured to exist. Smells are some of the last things in our world, short of time itself, to be left ephemeral. And there is power in the fleeting: to know that this flower, this fire, this particular fragrance of this particular skin, will fade. That knowledge changes how we know these things, how we experience them. We stop to smell the roses not just because they are fragrant, but because they are fleeting. But what might happen when the roses lose that essence and that urgency? What will it mean when scent becomes, like so much else in our heavily mediated world, "infinitely replicable"?

    

'A So-Called Independence': Emma Goldman on Having It All in 1911

Posted: 12 Jul 2013 09:30 AM PDT

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Emma Goldman speaking about birth control in Union Square, New York City, 1912.

Yesterday I was Googling for something else and accidentally happened upon anarchist Emma Goldman's 1911 essay, "The Tragedy of Woman's Emancipation." Never having read it before, I gave it a scan, and was shocked to discover that with minor alterations for changes in the law, Goldman's concerns about women and emancipation bear a striking resemblance to the contemporary debate about women's happiness and "having it all." From the assumption that gender equality has been achieved to concerns about equality of access not leading to equality of outcomes (such as equal pay and respect), to the broader question of whether or not women may find more happiness in work or in their families, which work takes them away from, Goldman more than 100 years ago identified the tensions in the transformation of women's roles that still tug at us today:

Emancipation has brought woman economic equality with man; that is, she can choose her own profession and trade; but as her past and present physical training has not equipped her with the necessary strength to compete with man, she is often compelled to exhaust all her energy, use up her vitality, and strain every nerve in order to reach the market value. Very few ever succeed, for it is a fact that women teachers, doctors, lawyers, architects, and engineers are neither met with the same confidence as their male colleagues, nor receive equal remuneration. And those that do reach that enticing equality, generally do so at the expense of their physical and psychical well-being. As to the great mass of working girls and women, how much independence is gained if the narrowness and lack of freedom of the home is exchanged for the narrowness and lack of freedom of the factory, sweat-shop, department store, or office? In addition is the burden which is laid on many women of looking after a "home, sweet home" -- cold, dreary, disorderly, uninviting -- after a day's hard work. Glorious independence! No wonder that hundreds of girls are so willing to accept the first offer of marriage, sick and tired of their "independence" behind the counter, at the sewing or typewriting machine. They are just as ready to marry as girls of the middle class, who long to throw off the yoke of parental supremacy. A so-called independence which leads only to earning the merest subsistence is not so enticing, not so ideal, that one could expect woman to sacrifice everything for it. Our highly praised independence is, after all, but a slow process of dulling and stifling woman's nature, her love instinct, and her mother instinct.

Nevertheless, the position of the working girl is far more natural and human than that of her seemingly more fortunate sister in the more cultured professional walks of life teachers, physicians, lawyers, engineers, etc., who have to make a dignified, proper appearance, while the inner life is growing empty and dead.

The narrowness of the existing conception of woman's independence and emancipation; the dread of love for a man who is not her social equal; the fear that love will rob her of her freedom and independence; the horror that love or the joy of motherhood will only hinder her in the full exercise of her profession -- all these together make of the emancipated modern woman a compulsory vestal, before whom life, with its great clarifying sorrows and its deep, entrancing joys, rolls on without touching or gripping her soul.

    

Dear Congress, Please Fix the Student-Visa System Too

Posted: 12 Jul 2013 09:30 AM PDT

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Reuters

Stepping into the American Embassy in New Delhi can be a terrifying experience. As I stood in line in 2012 to get my student visa to attend Swarthmore College, waiting to be interviewed by one of several people seated behind thick glass panes, I watched the interviews of those before me, gradually growing more nervous as I realized that the course of my life depended on receiving a student visa.

Most interviews were short, insignificant affairs. Others began with polite pleasantries and quickly turned into aggressive questioning and fumbling answers if the applicants' documents did not present a convincing story. One woman was asked to produce a wedding photograph to prove she was married to the man that she wanted to join in America. Another was grilled about her multiple attempts to get student visas for programs at different institutions.

Though I saw applicants trying to gain access to better lives with more opportunities, the interviewers probably saw potential terrorists or drains on the social safety net trying to con the immigration system. Watching my countrymen denied access to America, I was convinced that I'd probably forgotten an essential document in my application and would be publicly yelled at just like the others.

Fortunately, my anxiety was unfounded, and my interview was short and smooth. But the cases of the women in front of me are representative of some of the problems that the new immigration bill seeks to address: The Senate bill contains new restrictions on work visas for family members, and measures to crack down on academic institutions that serve as a front for people to enter on student visas before moving to full-time employment.

While border security, illegal immigration from Latin America, and high-tech visas suck up most of the oxygen in the debate, they're not the only important issues on the table. Small changes in existing laws would make the immigration process far simpler for legal immigrants who will be the beneficiaries of the new W visas for agricultural workers, the revised H1B work visas, and F-1 student visas, if immigration reform becomes law. Simplifying the immigration process would both produce a fairer system and benefit the American economy and society.

The anxiety I felt at the embassy reappears whenever I have to deal with issues involving my status as a "legal non-resident alien." For all the freedom of opportunity my student visa gives me, it also imposes some excessive restrictions that affect my daily life.

There are stringent rules about the minimum number of courses I can take to maintain my visa status and the kind of job I can have if I want to work. Off-campus jobs unrelated to my course of study are not permitted. The rules are well-intentioned -- they seek to differentiate between those who are here to study and those who are here to work -- but they have some clumsy side effects.

For example, although Swarthmore has a paid program for students to tutor low-income high school students in a nearby town, I'm not allowed to participate without a work permit, which would cost me innumerable hours and $300 dollars to obtain. And refusing payment for a job that others get paid to do is illegal, to prevent extortion of workers.

Jobs such as dog walking, baby-sitting, and tutoring children are convenient for students but impossible for those of us on student visas. Unpaid internships are permitted but come with strict warnings about receiving any form of payment from your employers. The only money I can receive for my activities in America must come from my school and these activities had better be directly related to the college.

Unfortunately, the immigration bill has not changed much about student visas. The one change that has been approved, however, strikes me as hasty and potentially disadvantageous. Student-visa holders now get a 60-day grace period after they graduate (and their visa expires) to sort out their affairs and leave the country. However, after it was discovered that one of the people charged with obstruction of justice in the Boston Marathon bombings was allowed into the country because of this grace period, the Senate rushed to revoke these 60 days of leeway.

This rule might make sense if there was proof that the grace period was the culprit in the security lapses involved with the bombings, but there's no evidence that suggests the bombing would have been prevented without it. I don't know if the change -- should it become law -- will strengthen national security, but it will certainly affect those who could use those two months to search for a job stateside. With an American education, we could provide valuable services for American employers and enrich the American economy.

If this change is implemented it will mean that I will have to pack my bags and leave immediately after graduating. I'll have no chance to travel and see friends. Any job search will have to be done in my senior year while I am writing a thesis and preoccupied with studying for final exams.

A smaller inconvenience is the lack of official identification that most immigrants face when they arrive. College-issued student IDs aren't considered official ID, so students face two choices -- apply and get a state-issued ID, or carry around a passport. Applying for a state-issued ID can be an onerous addition to the amount of paperwork international students have to complete upon arrival anyway, the most important example being applications for social security numbers. The distance of the DMV from a student's college can cause more inconvenience in the matter. Why can't the embassy simply issue a uniform student ID along with the student visa?

Training immigration officers to be culturally sensitive and resist the urge to stereotype would also be a worthwhile investment of time and effort. While returning from a week long trip to India this spring, the officer asked me if I'd gone home to get engaged or married -- even though my documents proved I was an 18-year old undergraduate student who had gone home for spring break to see her family.

On the plus side, whenever I'm in New York, I'm treated to discounted taxi rides by South Asian drivers who see my skin color, hear my Indian accent and instantly warm up to me. Many of them share the same basic story -- they migrated decades ago, saved up enough to have their families join them, and stayed. Many cannot return home due to a lack of funds. Imagine a taxi driver with an expired work visa and a family to support, but no money to fly back to India and slim chances of finding a job here. When viewed from this angle, it's not as easy to "self-deport" or follow immigration rules as lawmakers tend to believe.

Words like "illegal," "non-resident," and "alien" can dehumanize us and detract from the personal stories and contexts that form the narrative of immigrant life in America. Whether we are students, taxi drivers, entrepreneurs or software engineers, we are all here looking for something better than what our origins could offer us, and we are all invested in this country's economic welfare and progress. Immigration reform should not just be about broad institutional changes but also include smaller initiatives that improve the personal lives of legal immigrants in America.

    

Guitar Restoration with Love

Posted: 12 Jul 2013 09:29 AM PDT



"Our goal is to promote the good feelings that we've gotten playing music ourselves" Frank Ford says, "if we could make more musicians we'd like to do that." He and Richard Johnston began Gryphon Stringed Instruments from their Palo Alto garage in 1969, but for the duo music is only part of the draw. Ford and Johnston view the instruments as a connection to history, both personal and musical. Filmmaker Mike Collins goes inside their guitar shop (no longer located in the garage) to see what drives the guitar-makers to continue building and refurbishing guitars more than 40 years after the birth of their business.

To see more films by Cinema Mercantile check out their other shorts The Spare Parts Company and ReStore.

    

Inner Mongolia's Weird and Wonderful Genghis Khan Marathon

Posted: 12 Jul 2013 09:07 AM PDT

genghisbanner.jpgRolling grasslands served as the backdrop of China's Genghis Khan marathon. (Debra Bruno)

These days if you don't host a marathon, you're not on the map. Disney World, New Orleans, and South Africa -- among countless other places -- have the event. Even Antarctica, which doesn't even have full-time residents, has one. And why not? Marathons are a way to attract tourism and spread a bit of publicity.

China is no stranger to marathon fever. Consider the Genghis Khan MTB Adventure & Grassland Extreme Marathon 2013 which, for the town of Xiwuqi in China's Inner Mongolia, is like a combination of the Rose Bowl, Christmas, and the Fourth of July. The 700 runners and bikers who descend on this town of 60,000 people (a village by Chinese standards) are treated like Martians or maybe African princes -- people gape, surreptitiously take photos, wave, and generally act as if Nicole Kidman or Robert DeNiro just happened to be wandering around.

Much like the public relations genius who convinced tourists to visit frigid and polluted Harbin in winter to see electric-kool-aid-colored ice sculptures, someone had the clever idea to monetize Inner Mongolia's rolling grasslands by bringing avid athletes to town. 

genghisrainbow.jpgDebra Bruno

China, however, has seen a few bumps in its road to marathon tourism. Xiamen, for instance, made the news a few years back when marathon runners were caught taking public transportation to get a leg up on others, apparently in order to obtain extra points on their college entrance examinations. Beijing has a regular marathon, but the city's notorious air pollution mars the event: last year 30,000 runners faced "hazardous" air pollution at 6 a.m., two hours before the start of the race.

Other events have been more successful. There are two different marathons on the Great Wall of China, and another 100 kilometer, three-day race in Guizhou where runners sleep each night in the village homes of ethnic minority. And soon, there will be a new trail race along the Tea Horse Road in western Yunnan.

But the Genghis Khan is the granddaddy, so to speak, of China's trail races. The first Genghis Khan mountain bike race took place in 2007 and the first marathon followed the next year. Progress has been fast: By last year, the event had 500 participants, and the town of Xiwuqi is committed to another five years, says race organizer Kris Van de Velde of Nordic Ways. "Most of Inner Mongolia is only known for the mining industry," he says, so this was a way for the town to upgrade its reputation.

genghissunset2.jpgDebra Bruno

The good news is that the event takes advantage of the natural beauty of the sweeping grasslands, a place that feels far more Mongolian than Chinese: Road signs are in Mongolian first, Chinese second, and only occasionally in English. Although Xiwuqi seems to have more sheep in the surrounding hills than people living in town, the city is a drab, boxy place criss-crossed by six-lane roads. But the countryside is dotted with farms, yurts, cows, horses, sheep, goats, and the occasional patch of wind turbines that capture the constant blowing wind from the Gobi Desert. In theory, a perfect venue for a 26-mile race.

The bad news was this: the mob of 700 participants badly stretched the resources of the town and the race organizers. Buses didn't show up when they were scheduled to come, food that was promised fell short, and even though the participants were a mix of Chinese and foreign athletes, most of the helpers spoke only Chinese. My 25-year-old daughter and her boyfriend, running their first marathon, got lost on poorly marked trails and ended up running for seven full hours, dragging past the finish line in the midday sun while the Xiwuqi traffic pushed past them. Other runners said that the water wasn't available every five kilometers as promised, and the "gentle" trail had steeper hills and a harder route than advertised.

Then there was the post-marathon banquet. Held in the Mongolia Khan City, a kitschy collection of concrete yurts surrounding a vast round yurt, the feast featured the worst kind of Chinese banquet food, plus an entire roasted sheep that was brought out on a platter, its head extended toward the sky in an agonized death grimace. As the meal ended, the music began: traditional Mongolian songs, so over-amplified that our inner ears hurt, followed by a rock band, some acrobatics, and I'm not sure what else. At that point nearly the entire room had emptied out to see the better show outdoors: a sunset that managed to peek out after a rainstorm, rolling clouds, and then, the most vivid rainbow, a full arc from horizon to horizon, that I've ever seen. Suddenly that rainbow was doubled, and even the Mongolian performers rushed out of the giant yurt to take photographs of the sky.

After a night inside our concrete yurt, we rented off-road four-wheelers to take in a little more of the countryside, roaring past farms and horses and cows. We came to a hill decorated with an enormous dagger-topped pole. It marked the spot where Genghis Khan famously found his lost horses, Siriguleng and Halagatu. It stopped him -- at least temporarily -- from destroying everything in his sight, and he named the hill after those horses.

On that quiet Sunday morning, there was no sound but the wind whooshing through the grass and making it ripple like water. The race might have been disappointing, but Mother Nature definitely came through.

    

What's Missing From Egypt's Latest Revolution? People

Posted: 12 Jul 2013 08:56 AM PDT

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A member of the Tamarod petition drive against Morsi gestures with an Egyptian flag in front of army soldiers in Cairo on July 3, 2013. (Amr Dalsh/Reuters)

Egypt's struggle today features two flawed and irreconcilable elitist groups, neither of which speak for the popular revolution that upended the status quo. So long as organized Islamists are competing with the resilient deep state, the contest for Egypt will continue to push the country in a reactionary and divisive direction.

The Democracy Report

Meanwhile, the popular revolutionary forces that seek a reinvented covenant between citizens and their government will continue to play a critical role as a check on tyranny. So long as revolutionaries are excluded from the drafting table of Egypt's new constitutional order, the country will remain unstable and autocratic. Only when revolutionaries and sincere reformists are represented in a new constitution and a new government will Egypt begin its transition away from authoritarian rule.

Neither of these poles speaks for genuine liberals, revolutionaries, or the idealistic youth movements who provided the heart, if not all the manpower, of the January 25, 2011 uprising.

The institutional power struggle between Islamists and the Military complex leaves out the most important development in Egypt over the last decade: people power, with an articulated philosophy embodied by the slogan "bread, freedom, social justice." Until now, the country's prolific revolutionary impulse remains hostage to the factions competing for the machinery and spoils of government.

***

Today in Egypt, on one side stand the Islamists, who can plausibly claim to represent a popular majority and who possess an articulated project to Islamicize the state, but whose style and substance runs roughshod over the rights and aspirations of many Egyptians, including Christians, women and those of a secular bent. The Islamists have the only organized popular movements with cohesive leadership and cadres.

On the other side stand the forces of the old order, whose byword is stability. It boasts undeniable resources: the army, the police, most of the state bureaucracy including the judiciary, the financiers of the deposed regime, and a powerful elite that benefited from President Hosni Mubarak's rule and is loathe to erode their privileges. This coalition pays lip service to freedom for minorities and secularists, but has little interest authentic liberalism and liberty.

The ultimate arbiter for all factions remains the military.

Both lay claims to represent the majority, although the Islamists have the edge in the results of the rounds of elections since the Tahrir uprising. Neither of these poles speaks for genuine liberals, revolutionaries, or the idealistic youth movements who provided the heart, if not all the manpower, of the January 25, 2011 uprising. The long-term fight is between adherents of majoritarian revolution and revolutionary pluralism, a distinction made by the scholar Ellis Goldberg.)

Right now we're caught up in a momentary conflict between the military complex and its reactionary supporters on one side and the Muslim Brotherhood and some religious extremists on the other, leaving out a major and perhaps decisive swath of the population that supports neither.

In this unenviable contest, the likely outcome is an illiberal, authoritarian government that will lay no claim to consensus, and which will be viewed as anathema, even treacherous, by nearly half the population. If the deep state prevails, it will never have the loyalty of the population. If the Islamists prevail, they will never control the security apparatus and the institutions of state.

The original Tamarod movement is not party to this conflict, but is still on stage, at times driving events. They are the constituency for pluralism, due process, political consensus-making, and accountable, transparent, civilian authority.

***

The deposed Muslim Brothers have been making an opportunistic appeal to the most superficial elements of the democratic process: elections and elections alone. Their arguments eerily echo those of Mubarak's regime before it toppled. "There are a million people in Tahrir Square against Mubarak, but there are 79 million at home who support the regime," a deluded police officer told me just before Mubarak resigned. President Mohamed Morsi lost his mandate to rule because of the unforced errors he committed in office, which alienated almost every constituency in the country.

Equally opportunistic are the military and police, which perhaps out of different institutional imperatives, have piggybacked on the outraged masses of June 30. Sure, there is a distasteful faction that applauds military rule and which is comfortable with the return of a corrupt, abusive police force that has not faced a single consequence for decades of corruption, criminality, and oppression. But we can't forget that the millions who signed the Tamarod petition and demonstrated on June 30 and July 2 were demanding Morsi's ouster; they weren't demanding a military coup, or a return to Mubarak's system.

Now, we'll never know what would have happened had the Muslim Brotherhood government been allowed to confront, dismiss, or negotiate with people power. We'll never know what the Islamists would have done had they continued to push their agenda and fail politically. We'll never know how Egyptian politicians and civilians would have responded to the latest showdown absent military intervention. In some ways, the coup has absolved the Brotherhood of some of its share of the blame.

The Islamist threat is real -- and so are the dangers of military rule. The most dangerous blow comes from the absence of political evolution. Why is it natural for Islamists to threaten jihad and generalized violence in the face of a coup? Why is it natural for liberals to turn to an abusive, totalitarian, corrupt, and inept military for protection? Both are suicidal moves.

For all the fears of Islamist totalitarian rule, the Brotherhood could never control Egypt; in a year in power, it made scarcely any inroads within the military and police.

Incredibly, some Brotherhood supporters now claim they're justified in resorting to violence since the system failed them, as if the millions of other Egyptians whose aspirations were stymied by the security state over the years should have been building bombs instead of movements.

Yet the nasty outcome -- military coup and Islamist resistance -- doesn't erase the vast and thirsty popular current, which is sizable and real. Its core has been the reformists and revolutionaries, but at different junctures it found allies among Islamists, former regime supporters, and the mostly apathetic citizens known in Egypt as the "Sofa Party." This popular current felled Mubarak. It pushed the military junta from power in 2012, long before it intended to pass authority to an elected civilian. And now it has ousted Morsi.

It's a critical problem that the revolutionary fervor has not found its expression in a coherent political movement that can agitate for a tangible system of checks and balances, rule of law, minority rights, economic reforms, and government policies. It is not yet, however, a fatal flaw, nor a weaknesses that justifies dismissing Egyptian people power.

Egypt can survive many more waves of revolt, election and coup, and it will, until the political order begins to reflect more of the will of the people. The latest roadmap repeats most of the mistakes of 2011 (for detailed explanations of how, readNathan Brown and Zaid Al-Ali). The Egyptian public has developed a profound intolerance for arbitrary authoritarian rule; for opaque, paranoid leaders; for governments that ignore the country's collapsing economy and standard of living.

Revolutionaries might not represent the majority, but they are now a maturing, key constituency. They are unlikely to embrace fascism or fiats from anyone: not the military, not the Brotherhood, not the old political parties. That's the underlying signal of Egypt's latest revolt. Until Egypt's power brokers recognize the core demands of the public and begin to address them, the public isn't likely to go away.

    

Priced Out in New York City, Where Space Makes Everything Possible

Posted: 12 Jul 2013 08:53 AM PDT

So many New York stories turn on space. That's why New Yorkers scrap so hard for every square foot that they can buy, rent, or occupy. With enough of it, almost anything is possible in that city. I know because, for over six years now, I've been watching Anya Sapozhnikova prove it. The 26-year-old circus impresario, aerial acrobat, and stage producer attracts crowds that line up and pay to see her dangling upside down, 30-feet-in-the-air, hanging onto a strand of silk. But what happens now that doubling rents are forcing her from her high-ceilinged base of 5 years?

Everything turns on the dimensions of whatever she rents next.

* * *

I wouldn't have met Anya in the spring of 2007 if not for event promoter Will Etundi's proclivity for finding party spaces with very high ceilings. We were on opposite sides of a crowded warehouse, hundreds of drunk people between us, but no one could miss Anya: on stilts, she was 13 feet tall. stilts.jpg

Back then she lived in a sprawling Bed-Stuy basement with a very low ceiling and a thick pipe running down its center. Her building, 1054 Bergen Street, was about a 15 minute walk from the Marcy projects, where Jay-Z grew up. The basement door was silver, bore a rainbow, and said "boring" at the top. She'd reclaimed the space behind it, along with her friend, roommate, and eventual business partner, Kae Burke, cleaning out all manner of squalor. The unpleasant work left them with enough affordable square feet to host what they called MakeFun parties. Think cheap alcohol and crafts. Yards of fabric, sewing machines, paint, wood, and tools were on hand. If you were a scrappy entertainer in Brooklyn's underground scene, you could come get supplies needed for a costume or prop, along with a community well-versed in the ups-and-downs of affixing sequins onto anything. Since most attendees lived in closet-sized apartments, a workroom itself was a valuable thing, and everyone was playful even when sober. Most 19-year-olds would've lived there for years. Yet weeks after I visited that Bed-Stuy basement for the first time, Anya was thinking bigger.

The House of Yes, 1.0

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Kevin L. Muth


In those days, I'd g-chat with her intermittently to ask after various Brooklyn parties and art performances.

In April 2007 we had this conversation:

me: hey, sorry i never made it on Friday -- end of semester work is crazy. Are you free anytime Tuesday or Wednesday night to hang out?
 
anya: tuesday is make fun at my house. i'm about to embark on setting up a brand new communal paradise so i'm pretty busy this week

me: the one at coney island?

anya: no this one is in bushwick. 3500 sq feet!!!!!

me: awesome.
 
 anya: yeah. ladders and rooftop access and a patio. And a bathtub in the middle of one of the lounges.

As someone who felt overwhelmed, as a 26-year-old grad student, securing my own $1,000 a month NYC apartment, I remember being awed that Anya was orchestrating a 5-figure rental agreement at 20. She found tenants, filled all the rooms, and after figuring how to make rent each month, secured tow-away dumpsters to empty the space of accumulated cat droppings and rubble. And with a little help from her friends, she built that "dream space." Dubbed "The House of Yes," its vibe is captured by an email sent out to her burgeoning list of extended NYC friends.

The subject line: "Who wants to live in the House of YES?????!!"

Here's the body:

We used to have a roommate. His name was Rocket and he was a sweet dude. He moved to New York City for a girl and stuff didn't work out. Now he is moving back to California. Or maybe it was the fact that he was Mormon and The House of Yes was kinda rowdy. Naked stilt walking, hip hop shows, drunk aerial performances, topless glass walkers, indoor parades, 12-hour costuming workshops, friends hanging out till dawn, etc. Anyways, Rocket left and we will miss him.

BUT

We need a new roommate!

The space: $725.00 a month everything included. (utilities, Internet and ice cold PBR's). The room has its own private freight elevator entrance. A nice big window, high ceilings, a small storage space.

The House of Yes itself is located at 19-49 Troutman St. at the corner of Flushing Ave. You would take the L train to Jefferson and then walk 6 long blocks with traffic to 19-49. We're on the second floor and have no neighbors at night. We have a nice big kitchen and a nice stage. We got an aerial silk rig and a pool table. A deck and a roof. Two bathrooms, a public bathing bathtub in the living room, a sewing/costume/craft/soon to be silk screening studio room, MFTA access.

We had a house meeting last night and decided on an ideal roommate: a dj with a car and gear, who also does electrical work and is at least a 7 out of 10. If you are those things then you are automatically in. If you are not, but still need a room, please send me an e mail...  

In addition to all that, The House of Yes had a six-foot-high paper mâché mask of a Where the Wild Things Are monster hanging on the kitchen wall. Most 20 year olds would've lived and partied there for years. But space being at a premium, the giant mask wasn't quite far enough away from the malfunctioning toaster to not catch fire when some toast set alight. It was a four alarm fire, and Anya watched the flames take all of her possessions. She mourned the lost space even more.

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Kae Burke

Making It

I'd moved away from New York by the time the House of Yes caught fire, having enjoyed many parties and random performances within its walls. Anya had been teaching herself to do acrobatics on silks dangling from high ceilings. For her, it was countless hours of grueling, exhausting, somewhat dangerous aerial training, every incremental improvement hard fought and exhausting. But casual friends like me experienced her training regime somewhat differently.

Last I'd seen her, she was still learning; then, suddenly, she was a pro. She messaged one night out of the blue.

anya: what's been going on

me: I've been working for a web magazine in DC. You?

anya: building a new space in nyc

me: I'd love to see it sometime...
   
anya: have you seen the times write up on us?

I hadn't seen it, or known that the young woman I'd met a couple years prior in a Bed-Stuy basement had achieved that right-of-passage for NYC success stories: the article in the paper of record.

Quoth the New York Times:

A slender young woman hung 30 feet in the air, coiling her body around two pieces of black silk that were attached to the rafters. A crowd watching below screamed as she unraveled herself and started falling toward them and then gasped with relief as she came to a stop just above their heads. The woman, Anya Sapozhnikova, was performing her aerial circus act, but this was not Cirque du Soleil, and there was no big top. Instead, it was a warehouse party in Bushwick, Brooklyn. While the notion of circus performers is largely associated with major productions like Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus and the Coney Island sideshows, a new generation of performers is taking the circus arts to unexpected places.

Fire eaters, stilt walkers, aerialists and sword swallowers are among those showing off their skills at parties, concerts, clubs and in the streets and in parks. "It's more exciting when you don't expect to see circus arts; it makes it dangerous" said Claire de Luxe, a stilt walker, fire dancer and member of Lady Circus, the troupe that performed on a recent Saturday night at the Bushwick warehouse.Audience members, who paid $15 to see the circus acts, were also treated to live bands and disc jockeys.

"I'm having a good time, drinking a beer, listening to some music, and out of nowhere this girl is falling a few feet from death," said Enrique Ruiz, 30, a plumber from Brooklyn. "It was amazing."

It's funny reading in the newspaper about someone you've hung out with and learning things you didn't know:

In recent years, groups like Cirque du Soleil, Blue Man Group and De La Guarda have expanded the concept of a circus beyond the traditional three-ring formula. In New York, lesser-known circus performers are carving out their own niche in the city's nightlife. The members of Lady Circus are often hired to perform at big Manhattan nightclubs, concerts and corporate events, and are typically paid $500 a night per performer. But they feel most at home and creative, they say, working the lower-paying warehouse parties in Brooklyn. "Loading into a warehouse and not knowing if the party is going to get shut down or not, it's chaos and it's great and that's what gives us a lot of our inspiration," said Ms. Sapozhnikova, 22, who started the troupe.

Ms. Sapozhnikova was a student at the Fashion Institute of Technology three years ago when, coming home from a party one night, she was handed a business card for a company of stilt walkers. Curious, she called the number and was soon taking lessons in her apartment. She started taking her own stilts to parties and was soon hired to perform at a Lower East Side club. She decided about two years ago to organize her own group and started recruiting members through the Internet...

"Everyone's talents melded together and we became these multi-skilled performers," Ms. Sapozhnikova said. Lady Circus now has eight women, who train an average of at least 20 hours a week to improve their acts. Because a fire destroyed the loft... the troupe is renovating a loft space in Bushwick, where the women will hold performances and offer workshops for those interested in circus acts.    

That move changed everything.

The House of Yes 2.0

The new space, an old ice warehouse, was at 342 Maujer St. It took 3 months to find. After renovations, undertaken with a lot of do-it-yourself gumption, it could accommodate a 300 person crowd and seat 100 in its theater, which was custom built with state-of-the-art aerial rigging.

house of yes 2.png
The House of Yes


It also enabled the founding of Sky Box, where performers can learn aerial or refine their skills.

The timing couldn't have been better. Having refined their own skills at paying gigs all over New York City, The Lady Circus suddenly had a space expansive enough to accommodate their ambitions.

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The House of Yes


Even given all the hard work, the House of Yes 2.0 was a lucky stroke: there aren't that many available Brooklyn buildings with 30-foot ceilings. It was the beginning of a years long run of events and shows, almost all featuring an aerial acrobatics element, though the themes were always different: an exquisitely choreographed series of dance performers in elaborate bird costumes; a raunchy, comedic take on the traditional circus; aerial-focused productions of Spider Man and Peter Pan; annual Christmas spectaculars; and many, many others. The vibe was a bit too earnest to be hipster, each show was more polished than the last, tickets started selling out more quickly, and the enterprise kept getting positive press, including in the Times, which declared in 2010 that partners Sapozhnikova and Burke were creating "Culture with a capital C."

I hadn't chatted with Anya in ages, but every time I visited New York City I checked online to see if the House of Yes would be putting on a new show, eager to see whatever it was they'd do next. Five years of reputation building had put the enterprise in a position to fund, produce, and sell out increasingly ambitious spectacles with bigger budgets and more talented performers. And it seemed as if it would be a virtuous cycle right up to this summer: Weeks ago, I was pleased to see that a filmmaker successfully used Kickstarter to fund post-production costs on a feature length documentary about the House of Yes -- here's the trailer:


When I saw that pitch, I wrote to congratulate Anya, and noted how excited I was to see the film. Days later, The House of Yes sent out an unexpected note to its much expanded email list:

Five years ago, we signed a lease on decrepit building in the depths of East Williamsburg, and turned it into a castle of creative forces, an incubator for ideas and for many... a place to call home.This week, we learned that we were unable to renew our lease at 342 Maujer Street. While we were initially shocked and saddened by this news, we have now come to realize that this is the perfect opportunity to take things to the next level. We are looking to create North Brooklyn's first proper theater, a versatile event venue and an aerial training facility.

We will be a more polished, professional, and larger House of Yes.
If, that is, they can find the right space. As a subsequent note put it, "We are seeking an affordable industrial/warehouse type space off the L train with TALL CEILINGS (ideally 30ft ceilings) that is around 3,000 to 5,000 square feet. Please let us know if you have any leads!" In so many places in America, a venture like the House of Yes couldn't ever be built... and yet, if it did come into being, if it succeeded in building a profitable following and a community, survival wouldn't turn on space. Space could always be found easily enough: everything else was the hard part.

In New York City, talent and hard work can take you from a Bed-Stuy basement to a converted theater with 30-foot high ceilings and aerial performances that are praised in the world's leading newspaper. Your venue can provide state-of-the-art rigging for up-and-coming producers, many of whom would never be able to affordably create aerial productions otherwise.

And then the landlord might say -- at the end of a 5 year lease, and all that building -- that the rent is going from $4,500 to $10,000 per month. Suddenly, space and possibility collide. The community you've built is in jeopardy. And you're frantically looking for something else, hoping it pushes you to new heights. "We've thought about expanding before, but you get comfortable," Anya told me. "We've been looking to go bigger, but we might have to go a lot bigger to satisfy our specs and have the really high ceilings." So there are notes to social networks asking for leads; talks with potential investors with the means to make possible spaces and events on a scale heretofore unimagined; conversations with friends-turned-partners about the "right" size to be, the value of independence, and whether the vision should change. Finally, there is the disheartening risk that the wrong space would diminish what is possible.

Sometime in mid-to-late August, all House of Yes materials will be removed from its home of 5 years, which will go back to being a former ice warehouse. Given how fast Bushwick is developing, it may be condos soon. And for better or worse, the House of Yes 3.0 will be reshaped by whatever space that it reshapes. As a longtime fan, I hope they find something big enough to fit their potential. There aren't a lot of affordable spaces in Brooklyn with ceilings that high.
    

How Sharknado Explains the Federal Reserve

Posted: 12 Jul 2013 08:40 AM PDT

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The Asylum, Yuri Gripas/Reuters, Gary Cameron/Reuters

There is a movie called Sharknado. It is a real movie. It is about sharks in a tornado. The killer sharks in the tornado fly around snatching up people who say things like "we just can't wait here for sharks to rain down on us." 

And it explains everything you need to know about the Federal Reserve nowadays.

Sharknado, the movie, might just be a dumb story about sharks. But Sharknado, the business, is a story about a cable channel's need to keep upping the ante to persuade viewers that it can always come up with a crazier idea than the last. After all, this isn't the SyFy Channel's first foray into absurdist animal action. Before tornadoes started catapulting great white sharks at unsuspecting victims, there was Sharktopus and Dinoshark and Piranhaconda. But with each stoner nightmare of science-or-nature-gone-wrong, SyFy has had to turn the ridiculousness to 11 to keep anybody's attention: Alright, you've seen a genetically-engineered shark-human hybrid go on a rampage, but what about a genetically-engineered supergator ... versus, um, a a dinocroc!?! (Those are real movies by the way).

Upping the ante isn't just the job of the people in charge of SyFy Channel movies. It's also the job of the people in charge of the U.S. economy. Namely, the Federal Reserve.

For the last five years, the Fed has been in the business of persuading investors that it can be irresponsible. Now, in normal times, the Fed is anything but; it's boring. It just raises short-term interest rates when the economy is too hot, and lowers them when it's too cold. But when short-term interest rates are at zero, the economy is stuck in what economists call a liquidity trap. The Fed can't really cut interest rates below zero, because if it did, people would move their money from bank deposits that were costing them to cash that weren't. The only way the Fed can get the economy moving again is to cut real interest rates by, as Paul Krugman originally put it, credibly promising to be irresponsible.The Fed has to say it will run looser policy than it should in the future to raise expected inflation now -- and markets have to believe it won't go back on this.

In other words, the Fed has to promise to be a little, well, crazy. But the thing about crazy is that once you've been Sharknado crazy, you need to be even crazier to stay ahead of the curve -- or else disappoint everyone.

Of course, it's not easy for the Fed to even make investors think it's Dinoshark crazy. But after years of steady experimentation, the Fed has settled on a two-pronged strategy to do so -- and more. It has promised not to raise rates before unemployment falls to 6.5 percent or inflation rises to 2.5 percent, and it is buying $85 billion of bonds a month until the labor market improves "substantially"; the former is called forward guidance, and the latter quantitative easing. Now, the Fed likes to think that these two prongs work differently, but that's not at all clear. According to the Fed, forward guidance works by changing what people think -- the so-called expectations channel -- and quantitative easing works by changing what people own -- the portfolio channel -- in terms of stocks and bonds and other assets. But, as Mike Woodford has shown, it's possible that quantitative easing mostly works, because markets interpret it as a kind of forward guidance. In other words, a Fed that is buying long-term bonds is a Fed that looks less like it will raise short-term interest rates anytime soon.

If quantitative easing is really forward guidance, then less quantitative easing is tightening. Indeed, tightening is precisely what has happened since Bernanke started talking about "tapering" the Fed's monthly bond purchases back in May: real interest rates have shot up, even as inflation and inflation expectations have fallen, as you can see in the chart below from Brad DeLong. 

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QE3 has been the Fed's Sharknado -- and the sequel is going to be a letdown. Now, the Fed has been building up to this point the past few years with all of its other unconventional policies. It started with QE1 when it looked like the world was going to end; continued with QE2 when it looked like deflation was about to set in; went on with Operation Twist; followed by increasingly specific forward guidance. To keep easing when interest rates are zero, the Fed has had to do things that previously would have seemed ridiculous for such a staid central bank. And do more of them. See, unlike previous rounds of bond-buying, QE3 didn't set a limit on how many bonds it would buy, but said it would keep doing so until things got markedly better. But any step back from this -- like saying the Fed might buy fewer bonds a month -- is a disappointment. Just like SyFy probably can't top Mother Nature tossing bloodthirsty sharks at the dad from Home Alone and Tara Reid, the Fed won't top buying $85 billion of bonds a month.

Unless, of course, Bernanke decides to start dropping money from helicopters like Milton Friedman suggested long ago. Just don't let any flying sharks grab the cash first.

    

The City That Never Stops Complaining: A Map of NYC By Each Area's Top 311 Complaint

Posted: 12 Jul 2013 08:35 AM PDT

Manhattan is too loud. Brooklyn is overrun with vermin.

Yep, the clichés hold up when you overlay a map of New York City with each neighborhood's most common 311 (non-emergency call) complaints. NYU's Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy has the map:

Gridlines_311Map_620_630_90.jpg

The strangest detail I found in the data set provided by the Furman Center? The second-most-common complaint in Stuyvesant Town was ... tax exemption. Weird. But objectively better than the second-most-common complaint from Fort Greene: rats.



    

Not a Filibuster Problem, a Nullification Problem

Posted: 12 Jul 2013 08:24 AM PDT

I mentioned last night, just before a surreal immersion in Sharknado, some of the reasons to be concerned about a governance system many of whose members are uninterested in or actively hostile to the very idea of governance. For a little more in this vein:

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1) 'Are there no prisons? Are there no work houses?' Please see my colleagues Corby Kummer and Derek Thompson on the flat-out scandal and shame of the Republican vote in the House to deep-six the Food Stamp program. This is the kind of thing that is not going to look good in the history books, to say nothing of its effect in the here and now. Back at the dawn of time, in the late 1960s, I was working, as a college student, on an SCLC-organized effort to enroll people in the Food Stamp program in rural Mississippi and Alabama. This was in between George Wallace's first and second stints as governor of Alabama (and just after his wife held the job), and there was obviously a lot of racial-animus politics in criticism of the Food Stamp program. But at that time there were a lot of offsetting forces. Memories of the Great Depression were, for older Americans, close enough (think of the first few seasons of Mad Men); the JFK-era discussion of The Other America was fresh enough; the shared national effort of World War II was relevant enough; overall economic conditions were egalitarian enough; and "there but for the grace of God ..." thinking was plausible enough, that there was surprisingly little of what now seems the poverty-animus (or money-reverence) politics like that of the Food Stamp bill. If the term hadn't been destroyed by misuse, we could call this "class war." It's just ugly.

2) Choosing our leaders. Please see my colleague David Graham on what has gone wrong with our election system. 

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3) Back to nullification. A reader says that I've missed the point of the latest Congressional standoff:

I actually think "filibuster disaster" is the wrong way of thinking of it.  We don't have a filibuster problem.  We have a nullification problem.  Abuse of the filibuster is just one aspect of it, and one of several tactics.Mass filibuster of presidential nominees to head organizations like the CFPB, NLRB, etc., isn't just an abuse of a tactic.  It's a nullification of federal law.  What's really breathtaking about it isn't the number of filibusters, but the fact that they've dropped all pretense of objecting to the nominees themselves: they say explicitly that they are blocking these nominees because they don't like the laws they would enforce.  

They don't think the CFPB or the NLRB should exist.  They don't have the votes (which is to say, the democratic legitimacy) to make their existence no longer the law of the land, so they nullify those laws by other means.

They do the same thing in the House by simply refusing to fund what they don't like.  They can't get the laws off the books, so they nullify them by other means.  It's a mass deployment of Andrew Jackson's famous reaction to the Supreme Court: some previous congress passed this law, now let them fund it.

GOP-controlled state governments, of course, are nullifying things left and right, or trying to. That's what nullification has historically been: nullification of federal law by the states.  What's new here is that, in essence, the federal government is nullifying itself.  You can even be more specific than that: it's the Congress nullifying itself.

It's bizarre and, to be honest, terrifying... 

For more on modern nullification, see this and this from yesterday's Wonkblog, this from Greg Sargent, and these items (first, second, third) from the past year. Or this Ur-statement from John C. Calhoun.

4) While we're at it. Please check out this convincing Salon report on why the IRS "scandal" shows more about bad habits of the press than those of government.

    

Late-Night Comedy Roundup: The New School House Rock

Posted: 12 Jul 2013 08:16 AM PDT



After a video was released of him urinating in a mop bucket, defacing a photo of Bill Clinton and then screaming an obscenity about the former president, Justin Bieber is doing some damage control. The Canadian pop star called Clinton Thursday and apologized, then tweeted about it. Needless to say, the exchange was a main source of humor for late-night TV hosts. ABC's Jimmy Kimmel and Late Night's Jimmy Fallon both made the same joke about former Bieber girlfriend Selena Gomez, while Conan O'Brien made a similar joke. Kimmel also wondered about the seriousness of Bieber's apology on Twitter.

Kimmel also went back to his youth to explain the dreary state of the nation within the context of the current Congress's inactivity. Citing global warming, rising obesity rates and poor national infrastructure, Kimmel made his own version of Schoolhouse Rock with a cartoon explaining how government works.

Fast forward to 3:10 to see the full Kimmel cartoon.

Read more from Government Executive

    

Janet Napolitano to Leave Homeland Security, Head University of California

Posted: 12 Jul 2013 08:02 AM PDT

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Joshua Roberts/Reuters

In a surprise move, Janet Napolitano, secretary of Homeland Security, is resigning on Friday.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Napolitano will become the president of the University of California -- the first woman to hold that post in its 145-ear history. Napolitano has been at the Homeland Security Department since President Obama took office in 2009. She was often mentioned as a favorite candidate to succeed Eric Holder as attorney general. That, in all likelihood, will not be happening now.

A source close to The Times said, "She loves working for President Obama and serving the American people, but at the same time, this is a unique opportunity." Napolitano is a graduate of Santa Clara University, where she was a valedictorian.

While it's not DHS, which has a budget of $60 billion, the UC system is quite large. It has an annual budget of $24 billion, and counts 191,000 faculty and staff. Homeland Security currently has 240,000 employees. As a Cabinet secretary, Napolitano earns $200,000 annually. The current UC president earns $591,000 -- although it's not clear what Napolitano's salary as president will be.

In the run-up to the 2012 election, National Journal named New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, Bill Bratton, and retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen as possible successors for Napolitano at Homeland Security if she were to step down.

Here's the full statement from Napolitano on her resignation:

For more than four years I have had the privilege of serving President Obama and his Administration as the Secretary of Homeland Security. The opportunity to work with the dedicated men and women of the Department of Homeland Security, who serve on the frontlines of our nation's efforts to protect our communities and families from harm, has been the highlight of my professional career. We have worked together to minimize threats of all kinds to the American public. The Department has improved the safety of travelers; implemented smart steps that make our immigration system more fair and focused while deploying record resources to protect our nation's borders; worked with states to build resiliency and make our nation's emergency and disaster response capabilities more robust; and partnered with the private sector to improve our cybersecurity. After four plus years of focusing on these challenges, I will be nominated as the next President of the University of California to play a role in educating our nation's next generation of leaders. I thank President Obama for the chance to serve our nation during this important chapter in our history, and I know the Department of Homeland Security will continue to perform its important duties with the honor and focus that the American public expects.

And from President Obama:

I want to thank Secretary Napolitano for her outstanding work on behalf of the American people over the last four years. At the Department of Homeland Security, Janet's portfolio has included some of the toughest challenges facing our country. She's worked around the clock to respond to natural disasters, from the Joplin tornado to Hurricane Sandy, helping Americans recover and rebuild. Since day one, Janet has led my administration's effort to secure our borders, deploying a historic number of resources, while also taking steps to make our immigration system fairer and more consistent with our values. And the American people are safer and more secure thanks to Janet's leadership in protecting our homeland against terrorist attacks. I've come to rely on Janet's judgment and advice, but I've also come to value her friendship. And as she begins a new chapter in a remarkable career of public service, I wish her the best of luck.

    

A Beautiful, Disappointing <i>Pacific Rim</i>

Posted: 12 Jul 2013 08:00 AM PDT

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WB

Heading into the summer, there was perhaps no Hollywood blockbuster that appeared to have as low a floor and as high a ceiling as Pacific Rim. On the one hand, the cast is notably second-tier and the plot--giant, human-operated robots fighting giant, alien sea monsters off the coast of Hong Kong--seems like a cross between Battleship and the Transformers movies. On the other hand, the movie is directed by Guillermo del Toro, whose prior achievements--both pop-cultural (Hellboy) and high-cultural (Pan's Labyrinth)--are beyond reproach. Adding weight on the negative side of the scale were a series of underwhelming trailers. But on the positive side, again: The movie is directed by Guillermo del Toro.

So now that Pacific Rim has landed ashore, which is it? A feebly written special-effects-fest explicitly engineered for the international market? Or a work of next-generation visual imagination? The answer, I fear, is both--though the balance tilts somewhat toward the former.

The story begins in the near-future, when an interstellar portal opens up deep in the Pacific Ocean and belches forth a lumbering monstrosity that lays waste to San Francisco. Though this "Kaiju"--the term is a genial nod to the Japanese giant-monster movies of the 1950s and '60s--is ultimately defeated by the military, another materializes six months later, and then another, and another. Humankind quickly comes to the conclusion that (tagline alert) to fight monsters, we must create monsters of our own--specifically, towering mechanical men called "Jaegers." (The word is German for "hunter.")

This arrangement works out nicely for several years, with the implicit contest between Japanese Godzilloids and German engineering consistently favoring the latter. But in 2020, the balance of power shifts as a new and more formidable species of Kaiju surfaces. Within five years, the Jaeger program is all but abandoned. Though a few brave robot-jockeys continue to fight the good fight, the program is largely mothballed, with the governments of the world instead investing in the construction of a giant "Wall of Life" intended to keep out the transgalactic interlopers. (Let's see: liberal filmmaker, border wall intended to keep out "aliens"--I'll give you one guess how well this works.)

Let's begin with the good: Pacific Rim's visual effects are extraordinary, in particular an early Jaeger-Kaiju battle that takes place off the nighttime coast of Anchorage--an irresistibly kinetic and immersive churn of metal sinew and lizard flesh and sea foam. (Eat your heart out, Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla.) The final half-hour or so of the film is similarly spectacular--more Jaegers fighting more Kaijus--even if it doesn't quite reach the heights of that initial confrontation.

The problem is pretty much everything that takes place in between. There are a few nice visual moments scattered here and there: a gag involving a Newton's cradle; a scene of workers sitting on the girders of the half-constructed Wall that recalls iconic Manhattan skyscraper photos; an introductory shot peeking under an umbrella in the rain that's reminiscent of a similar shot in Hellboy. But overall, the plotting is tedious, the characters drab, and the dialogue evidently contrived with the specific intent of losing nothing in the process of dubbing or subtitling. Indeed, almost every element of the film seems designed for a seamless translation to foreign audiences, and while in some areas this is not a bad thing (the international cast, the Hong Kong setting), for the most part the result is a bland narrative appeal to the lowest common denominator. The movie's visual achievements notwithstanding, Pacific Rim's greatest breakthrough may be that it's the first Hollywood blockbuster to sport a title less descriptive of its plot than of its intended market.

Charlie Hunnam (of Sons of Anarchy) stars as Generic Caucasian American Hero Jaeger pilot Raleigh Becket--yes, I know, but be forewarned that the names only get worse from here. In the early going, Raleigh is essentially indistinguishable from his brother/co-pilot Yancy (Homeland's Diego Klattenhoff), though the film solves this problem by killing the latter off about 10 minutes in. Raleigh's stiffly upper-lipped boss in the Jaeger program, played by Idris Elba with an uncharacteristic lack of charisma, is Stacker Pentecost (I told you!); and his eventual new co-pilot and budding love interest is Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi, of Babel). Rounding out the cast are Charlie Day and Burn Gorman as a mismatched pair of Kaiju researchers, and Ron Perlman as a black marketeer specializing in Kaiju organs.

Normally, when a film provides characters as underdeveloped as these, the solution is to spend a little more time letting us get to know them. But in Pacific Rim the problem is that we already spend far too much time getting to not-know them. Let's face it: We're here for the robots and monsters, and pretty much every minute--and there are many of them--that del Toro wastes on underfed romance, clunking stabs at grace, and awkwardly manufactured interpersonal conflict is a minute that we're not able to enjoy the Global Ultimate Fighting Championship, Behemoth Division.

It is worth noting here that a central element of the movie's plot is that a single human being cannot withstand the psychic strain of operating a Jaeger alone, so two pilots, latched into mechanical harnesses side by side within the massive robotic cranium, must get into one another's heads via "neural bridge" to operate the machine together. (Duos adept at such bonding are called "drift compatible," which seems a phrase better-suited to surfing than to repelling alien invasions.) It's a hokey conceit--though many films have made do with worse--and del Toro does it no favors by larding it with metaphorical meaning. "Either we get along or we die," he told The Boston Globe. "The idea of the movie is just for us to trust each other, to cross over barriers of color, sex, beliefs, whatever, and just stick together."

Normally, when a film provides characters as underdeveloped as these, the solution is to spend a little more time letting us get to know them. But in 'Pacific Rim' the problem is that we already spend far *too much* time getting to not-know them.

It's an admirable sentiment, I suppose, though one not much in evidence in the actual movie. Far from offering a melding of different types, the Jaeger teams generally seem an exercise in genetic overlap. Of the four crews we meet, one is made up of two brothers, another of father and son, and a third of two Russians sharing a last name (whether this denotes marriage or siblinghood is unclear); the only team featuring non-nuclear family is the one comprised of Hunnam and Kikuchi's characters, who are gradually (and unpersuasively) revealed to be proto-smooch-buddies.

In the end, this all-in-the-family ethos seems like yet another prong in the movie's international marketing strategy. We know all the usual panders: limit the comedy (which often doesn't translate), go wild with the explosions (which always do), and don't worry too much about the central plot. But Pacific Rim adds a new wrinkle with its constant recourse to familial motivations: a brother avenging his brother, a daughter avenging her parents, a surrogate dad protecting his surrogate daughter, an Aussie father-and-son team swapping sacrifices, a boy offering his life for the girl he loves, and on and on. Forget culture-specific incentives such as honor or glory, let alone motivations more complex: Here, it's all about defending the tribe, on levels micro and macro alike.

As noted, Pacific Rim is visually spectacular, and those curious should endeavor to see it on the large screen. But the film also serves as a cautionary tale of the compromises entailed in trying to be all things to all peoples.

    

Who Will Take Care of China's 'Left Behind Children'?

Posted: 12 Jul 2013 07:58 AM PDT

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A young girl sits among the rubble in Gyegu town in Yushu County, Qinghai province after an earthquake in April 2010. (Reuters)

As reports of sexual assault and even murder of children have triggered public debate in China, the safety of the country's youth has become a recurring issue. A July 4 incident in which two left-behind children suffocated to death when accidentally trapped in a wooden box recently inspired one microblogger to call for greater care for the safety of an even more vulnerable subset of China's youth, the so-called "left-behind children," or those who remain in rural areas while their parents earn a living as migrant workers in China's big cities. Shared over 15,000 times, the post was cause for reflection about the roots of this problem, and ways it might be addressed. Weibo user Read Society wrote:

Recently, a number of left-behind children have died in accidents across the country, casting an even darker shadow on the issue of the safety of left-behind children. Their parents are working far away, and their grandparents have weak safety awareness. Truly, we are worried for these left-behind treasures! Where is a safe, secure home for them?

The post was accompanied by checklist that children and their caretakers could use to improve home safety. Left-behind children are more likely to experience suffer injuries than children who live with their parents, and have high rates of both psychological problems and juvenile delinquency. Being subject to less supervision, left-behind children are also more likely to be kidnapped and sold by human traffickers.

Some commenters had little sympathy for the parents of left-behind children. Wrote one, "If you don't have any ability to raise them, then don't have any." Others were more sympathetic to the pressures that gave rise to the phenomenon. "Who wants to leave their homes behind?" Asked Weibo user @zp赖慧, "Who doesn't like to spend time with their children, and watch them slowly grow up? Is that possible in today's materialistic society? In our village, if you don't leave to be a migrant worker somewhere, there's no money to be made planting crops at home!"

Some users called for the government to do something, or think of a solution, and some complained that it had not done much yet. Wrote Weibo user @五言六句, "How long have people been raising this issue, and we haven't seen this country come up with an effective policy? It's negligent!"

According to recent reports, left-behind children number more than 60 million in China. Economic pressures require many rural residents to leave their sons and daughters in the care of their grandparents or others to earn a living in China's more developed cities.

Many factors have driven and perpetuated the left-behind phenomenon. Heavy investment in cities like Shanghai and Beijing has exacerbated the rural-urban divide, while creating a need for migrant workers in sectors such as construction. The hukou registration system makes it difficult for the children of migrant workers to receive education and medical care in cities -- even if their parents wanted to bring them along, they might find it difficult. Sweeping, multipronged policy change may be slow, but awareness of the issue is increasing rapidly as traditional and social media focus in on individuals -- like the two unfortunate children who died on July 4 -- who have fallen through the cracks.

    

No, Alcoholics Anonymous Is Not 'Ill-Suited to Women'

Posted: 12 Jul 2013 07:44 AM PDT

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Rod Senna/flickr

The first time I walked into an AA meeting, I knew I was in the right place. It was a small women's meeting on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where I was then living, and what I found entranced me: Attractive, successful, articulate women talking--and laughing!--about the sort of things that had brought me close to hopelessness.

That was 16 years ago. Or 17. I've sort of lost track at this point, but one way or another, AA has kept me sober for a good many years. Since then, I've attended hundreds, maybe thousands, of meetings of all shapes and sizes. I've met homeless people and celebrities--people of diverse races, ages, sexes, and sexual orientations, and pretty much any other demographic box that you'd care to check. I've written (and published) two novels, drafted speeches for the dean of Harvard Law School (now a U.S. Supreme Court Justice), and accomplished many other fulfilling and challenging goals. I can't imagine having done these things without first getting sober, and I can't imagine having gotten sober without AA.

All of which goes to explain my profound uneasiness with the depiction of AA in Her Best-Kept Secret: Why Women Drink--and How They Can Regain Control, a new book by journalist Gabrielle Glaser that was recently excerpted in the Wall Street Journal and appears to be selling briskly. (As of this writing, it ranks #454 on Amazon.) As Glaser--a self-proclaimed non-alcoholic who attended "about 10 meetings" in the course of researching her book--portrays it, AA is a cult-like faith-based organization rife with sexism, a hotbed of misogyny that serves as a veritable playground for dangerous and sometimes violent sexual predators. In the rooms of Glaser's AA, it is "common" for vulnerable women to be preyed upon by men "who are purporting to help them heal." In support of such claims, she invokes a notorious Washington, D.C., AA group featured in 2007 pieces in Newsweek and the Washington Post, the infiltration of AA phone help lines in Britain by sexual predators, and the 2010 murder of a woman and her daughter by a troubled Iraqi veteran she'd dated after meeting him in AA, which he'd been court-ordered to attend.

Having set this sinister stage, Glaser urges women struggling with alcohol to seek out alternatives--to explore what she, with no small bias, calls "Twenty-First-Century Treatment." And what does this entail? Well, for starters, you send in a deposit check of $2,500 (to be followed with an additional $8,750 for five days of therapy, a medical evaluation, and three months of follow-up through a California treatment business called Your Empowering Solutions. Glaser helpfully notes that this is "a bargain by the standards of private rehab, never mind that most alcoholics can likely afford neither), book a plane flight, and reserve a room "at a luxurious inn near the ocean" where you'll stay during your five full-day sessions. Once there, in addition to undergoing counseling, you're likely to be prescribed the drug naltrexone, which reduces the pleasure of drinking--and thus its appeal--through endorphin blocking and costs about $100 monthly. (There's also an injectable form costs up to $1,000 a shot, Glaser notes). At least that was how things unfolded for "Joanna," Glaser's sole example of a woman embarked on this regime, whose treatment story occupies a good part of a 30-page chapter.

Think this could be hard to pull off for anyone besides the wealthy? Not to worry, Glaser has a plan--albeit one that seems unlikely to materialize in the foreseeable future. "Rather than entrust recovering drinkers as the first and last mechanism of support, we need to convince insurance companies and federal insurance programs to reimburse doctors for their new role, and patients for expensive medication." Good luck with that. In the meantime, there are millions of women (and men)--many un- or under-insured--suffering, who need help. AA is free--and it is everywhere.

In fairness, I share more than a little of Glaser's frustration with AA's failure to move with the times in its treatment of women, as well as with some of the religious framing that so antagonizes her (and, as she observes, the two are often related). For me, this has centered on out-of-date AA literature, including the seminal text known as "the Big Book," in which women appear primarily as the beleaguered helpmeets of alcoholic husbands, and not the alcoholics themselves. Well into the 21st century, there continues to be a Big Book chapter addressed "To Wives," replete with exhortations of patience and compassion. "Try not to condemn your alcoholic husband no matter what he says or does," is one such admonition.

The book's pervasive focus on male alcoholics, a vestige of the era when AA was founded, even led one anonymous AA member to pen a "contemporary translation" that dispenses with many masculine pronouns and otherwise attempts to make the Big Book more inclusive. "Women today frequently feel excluded by the Big Book, sometimes even hurt. They are forced to rewrite it mentally in order to include themselves," writes "J" in the introduction to A Simple Program, published by Hyperion in 1996. Similarly, where the 12 steps include the language "God, as we understand him," I--and a growing number of people in meetings I attend (not all of them women) have taken to reading "God as we understand God." (As to why AA doesn't simply change this language when any number of churches have managed to update hymnals and prayer books, all I can say is that an astonishing number of women AA friends, including lesbians and self-proclaimed feminists, have looked at me blankly when I raise the issue. "It doesn't bother me," they say.)

"Reminding people of their faults hardly seems the remedy for a person who has little sense of self"

I'm also wholeheartedly on board with Glaser's claim that there are real and important differences between male and female alcoholics. For one thing, as she writes, women are simply more vulnerable to the physical effects of alcohol, both because of their higher percentage of body fat and lower percentage of alcohol-absorbing water and because their bodies contain less of a key enzyme that breaks down alcohol before it enters the bloodstream.

Beyond these physical realities, women often arrive in recovery awash in feelings of hopelessness and shame stemming from sexual abuse and other forms of victimization, an issue explored at length in psychologist Charlotte Davis Kasl's ground-breaking Many Roads, One Journey: Moving Beyond the 12 Steps, published by HarperCollins in 1992. While the professional men who founded AA devised the 12 steps with an eye to reigning in egotistical selfishness and resentment, for female alcoholics, the challenge is often just the opposite one. "Reminding people of their faults and reinforcing humility hardly seems the remedy for a person who has little sense of self, feels ashamed of being alive, and self-blames for just about everything that goes wrong," Kasl writes, an insight that fueled her development of an alternative to AA's 12 steps--"16 steps for empowerment and discovery" designed to encourage people to tap into their internal wisdom and cultivate personal strengths, either along with or apart from AA.

But it's one thing to say that men and women alcoholics are different. It's quite another to make the global claim, as Glaser does, that AA "is particularly ill-suited to women." Perhaps I wouldn't be so disturbed by such assertions if I didn't know from first-hand experience the crucial role books can play in opening--or blocking--routes to sobriety. I got sober when I did only because I was fortunate enough to happen upon the late Caroline Knapp's life-changing AA memoir Drinking: A Love Story, a 1996 New York Times bestseller responsible for getting untold numbers of women to stop drinking. She was smart! She was confused! She was just like us. I hate to think how different my life might be had I stumbled on a book with a message like Glaser's instead of Knapp's. And I worry for all the problem drinkers out there who may now be in this position.

I have only the haziest ideas of how AA goes about revising literature or making other changes--just enough to know that the grassroots process moves with glacial speed--and no reason to think that changes I'd like to see will happen anytime soon. What keeps me in the AA rooms despite this is, first and always, the people--a community whose impact is hard to grasp unless you are part of it (which the self-proclaimed non-alcoholic Glaser most definitely is not). At the end of Drinking a Love Story, the one-year-sober Knapp looks out at a sea of faces in a meeting she's attending, filled with a mix of emotions--admiration, affection, appreciation, along with a bit of sadness for all the pain endured. "I didn't realize until hours later that there was a name for that feeling. It's called love," she writes.

    

Do Women Make Better Senators Than Men?

Posted: 12 Jul 2013 07:24 AM PDT

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Power bunch: Left to right, Senators Tammy Baldwin, Patty Murray, Barbara Boxer, Susan Collins, and Barbara Mikulski. (Chet Susslin/National Journal)

Five women are gathered around the dining-room table from Sen. Barbara Mikulski's childhood home. It's the centerpiece of her hideaway, an unmarked retreat in the U.S. Capitol, and, like the hideaway itself, it's a symbol of the distance all of them have traveled. The shelves and walls display testaments to Mikulski's long career: photographs, clippings, replicas of the space shuttle. One highlight is a picture of "Buckboard Barb" Mikulski in a cowboy hat and colorful Mexican-style vest, standing with former Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison during a visit to Texas. Another is a series of photos that starts with two women and ends with 20, a visual display that is striking less for its drama than for its incrementalism. The modern history of women in the Senate is one of slow, hard-fought gains across three decades that have at last given them real clout -- or perhaps we should say the potential for real clout, since they serve in a Congress famous for gridlock, not accomplishments.

"This room, probably when Barbara Mikulski came in, was one of those rooms where there were cigars and a bunch of guys," Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., said during a recent discussion in the hideaway.

And now? "No cigars," said Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine.

"No cigars and a lot of hardworking women," agreed Murray.

Five senators in any small room will set the atmosphere crackling with authority and power, and that was true here despite the conspicuous absence of testosterone. You don't get to become or stay a senator without sharp political-survival skills, and the cool self-assurance that you belong in one of the world's most exclusive clubs. Most of the women also believe they make special contributions to the Senate -- in the issues they highlight, in their collegial style, and in the close-knit network they have formed, despite their differences.

The group's most arguable contention is that women have a particular talent for working with others. If you ask them what they bring to the Senate, almost all of them say things like this: more collaboration, less confrontation; more problem-solving, less ego; more consensus-building, less partisanship. Those are fixed perceptions, not just among the senators but, research shows, among voters as well. And there is plenty of evidence, in the form of deals made and bills passed, that women know how to get things done. That's especially true now that women chair eight full committees and many subcommittees. But are they really better at this than men? Historians and researchers say there are too few of them, and their arrival on the scene has been too recent, to draw any conclusions.

Sixteen Democrats and four Republicans make up the Senate women's caucus. They span the ideological spectrum from San Francisco-area liberals Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer to tea-party favorites Deb Fischer of Nebraska and Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire. The age spectrum runs from Feinstein, 80, to Ayotte, 45. Mikulski, elected in 1986, is the longest-serving woman in Senate history. The most measurable aspect of the ever-increasing presence of women, and so far the most significant, is their impact on national policy -- from making sure federal researchers included women in clinical trials, to the current show of force on sexual assaults in the military. Onetime "women's issues" such as health, education, child care, abortion, and pay equity are now prominent on the congressional docket. "If you made a list and flipped back a couple of decades, that list would be an agenda for outside advocacy groups," says Ruth Mandel, director of the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers. "Those issues are now inside. And they're inside because there are women inside."

Another hallmark of the women is that they have re-created among themselves a bygone world, one in which senators drank together in the offices of their leaders or the Senate secretary; in which their families lived in Washington, and their kids played and went to school together, Democrats and Republicans alike. The women do it in part through their famously private dinners, begun 20 years ago to create what Collins calls a "safe space" for women to talk about their problems and triumphs, their children, their parents, and their passions. Held every couple of months at the Capitol, in restaurants, or at their homes, they are for senators only -- no press, no staff, no leaks, and, until recently, no men. That changed in April when President Obama, acting on a suggestion from Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., invited them all to dinner at the White House. "We set our sights very high," Boxer says.

The members have thrown showers for women who are getting married or adopting children. They socialize with their families at each other's homes. They run together and discuss how to juggle a Senate career and the responsibility of raising young children. Mikulski recently invited all 19 of her female colleagues to her office to update them on developments regarding sexual assaults in the military. Feinstein, elected in 1992, often takes new senators to lunch to advise them on how to run a Senate office. "We're not a clique. We're not a sorority. We're not a club," she says. "But it's very easy to talk to women. That's a real plus."

Don't men in the Senate bond with each other? They do, the women concede, but usually at the gym, with less conversation, and in smaller, self-selected, less inclusive groups. "It's who they choose to be with, rather than saying, 'I need to understand who this person is that I don't know well,' " Murray says.

Assistant Senate Historian Katherine Scott confirms that the women have something unusual going on. "The Democrats and Republicans come together, and they actually know each other pretty well -- and they're proud of that," she says. "They've tried to establish this relationship outside of the institution as a way to make them more effective members within the institution."

It's easy to include everyone -- easy to make reservations, some of the women joke -- when your whole group totals 20. If there were 80 women in the Senate, as there are men, they might often end up in small groups of like-minded people, just like the men. But there's also the intriguing possibility that more women could lead to a more functional Senate.

Wielding the Gavel
There was a time when bipartisan partnerships -- usually among men -- produced results. The late Massachusetts Democrat Edward Kennedy often worked with Utah Republican Orrin Hatch, most notably on the State Children's Health Insurance Program. Arizona Republican John McCain and Wisconsin Democrat Russell Feingold are known for their law aimed at reforming the campaign finance system. A bipartisan "Gang of 14," including three women, successfully averted a judicial-confirmation crisis in 2005. But today's Senate is in a paralytic state on most issues, from jobs, judges, and guns to climate change, student loans, and the national debt.

That's not to say some men aren't trying to make things work better. Aspiring deal-makers in today's Senate include McCain, South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham, New York Democrat Chuck Schumer, Virginia Democrat Mark Warner, and Tennessee Republican Bob Corker (who is freshman Massachusetts Democrat Elizabeth Warren's mentor, at her request). An all-male "Gang of Eight" negotiated its way to a 68-32 passage of the Senate's major achievement this year, a sweeping immigration-reform bill. And Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia (conservative Democrat) and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania (conservative Republican) produced a gun background-check bill that won wide praise. Still, it's a sign of these polarized times that the Manchin-Toomey compromise failed in the Senate, and the House is balking at taking up the Senate immigration bill.

The depressing state of affairs gives congressional women an opening to make the case that more of them could mean less stasis. Part of their argument is that their caucus lacks such provocateurs as Republicans Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, who make a point of standing out and not sparing their colleagues. "They really don't have among the women the equivalent of a Ted Cruz in either party. So there is a difference in style," says former Senate Budget Committee aide Steve Bell, who worked on the Hill for years. The only possible exception, he says, is Boxer.

That judgment is based in part on Boxer's outspoken advocacy for abortion rights and environmental protection, and most recently on her outburst in May when Republicans boycotted an Environment and Public Works Committee meeting on Gina McCarthy, Obama's nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency. Among other things, Boxer -- who chairs the committee -- said her colleagues were holding McCarthy hostage to their "pro-polluter fringe philosophy" and advised them to "get out of the fringe lane."

Yet for the past two years, Boxer has worked with polar political opposites James Inhofe of Oklahoma and David Vitter of Louisiana to shape and pass a $109 billion transportation bill and a $12 billion water-projects bill, and they and their aides have nothing but nice things to say about working with Madam Chairman on that legislation. "There's a sweet spot there. You have to find it as chairman," Boxer says. "I'm not telling you I'll find it on climate change. I have found it on infrastructure."

The women have found plenty of "sweet spots" in their roles as chairwomen. Michigan's Debbie Stabenow, who heads the Agriculture Committee, hammered out farm bills priced at nearly $1 trillion each with Republicans Pat Roberts of Kansas in 2012 and Thad Cochran of Mississippi this year (the glow of success faded fast; the House killed this year's bill and never took up last year's). While the complex farm bill always requires coalition-building, Stabenow has clear bragging rights in at least one respect. In 2011, when the super committee was asking every House and Senate committee to recommend budget cuts, she says she reached out to her Republican counterpart in the House and they produced the only bipartisan, bicameral proposal on Capitol Hill.

Mikulski found common ground with Hatch over the idea of a women's history month (the West, he told her, has a lot of pioneering women). That led to a more substantive partnership on modernizing the Food and Drug Administration. More recently, as chairwoman of the Appropriations Committee, she worked with Alabama Republican Richard Shelby to turn out a six-month spending bill that softened the effects of the sequester and averted a government shutdown in March.

This year's budget didn't draw any Republican votes in committee or on the floor, but Democrats nevertheless credit Murray for her leadership as chairwoman of the Budget Committee. To produce the first budget in three years, she had to wrangle committee Democrats ranging from Manchin to self-described socialist Bernie Sanders of Vermont. "I went to every member. I held a lot of meetings. I listened to what people needed," she says. Her talents were no match, however, for the intransigence of the 2011 super committee, which never came up with a way to avoid the sequester. "I was the only woman on that committee. It was a short lifetime. It was a very difficult challenge," she says. "The divisiveness was so large between the House and Senate at that time, it was impossible to get together."

Murray is close to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and along with Stabenow is part of the party's seven-member Senate leadership. She recently presided over a better-than-expected Democratic cycle in her second stint as chairwoman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Murray and North Carolina Republican Elizabeth Dole (back in 2005-06) are the only women who have ever served in that capacity in either party. Feinstein and Ayotte also are among the women who have taken on non-stereotypical roles. Feinstein is hugely influential as chairwoman of the Intelligence Committee, in particular as a defender of the administration's drone and data-collection programs. Ayotte, elected in 2010, quickly joined defense hawks Graham and McCain to become a chief critic of Obama on the deadly attacks on U.S. personnel in Benghazi, Libya, and other foreign policy issues. In a New York Times rating last month of Sunday talk-show appearances of senators since 2010, Feinstein was the top woman with 20, and Ayotte was second with 11.

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Some of the strongest bipartisan relationships are among the women themselves. Ayotte says she has "a very good working relationship on behalf of our state" with Democrat Jeanne Shaheen. And Gillibrand remembers the support she received from three Republican women -- as well as Louisiana Democrat Mary Landrieu -- when she was trying to help 9/11 first responders who had inhaled toxins at Ground Zero and now were ill and even dying. Landrieu, drawing from her Hurricane Katrina experience, advised Gillibrand on how to get other senators to care about the issue. Maine Republican Olympia Snowe worked with the New Yorker on how to cover the cost. Snowe, Collins, and Alaska's Lisa Murkowski went into the GOP caucus every week, Gillibrand says, and asked, "Why aren't we standing with first responders?" She credits their advocacy and advice with getting the bill passed.

Mikulski says women have made particular efforts to visit the states of their ranking Republican committee and subcommittee partners to get familiar with their constituents. The list includes Stabenow's trip to Roberts's Kansas, Boxer's visit to Vitter's Louisiana, and Mikulski's travel to Shelby's Alabama. Then there was Mikulski's trip to that Houston rodeo with Hutchison when they were chairwoman and ranking member of an Appropriations subcommittee. The self-described "urban gal" from Baltimore, laughing at the memory, says a tall Texan "hoisted" her onto a buckboard. Hutchison "was on a Palomino holding a flag. And we circled the Astrodome together to 'God Bless America.' " Hutchison's inscription on the photo commemorating the day reads, "To a great sport."

A search by the Senate historian's office for reports of men making similar trips in recent years did not turn up anything. But there's no conclusive evidence that these trips or others with similar opportunities for bonding are limited to women -- or that the women are correct in their insistence that in general, women are better at building consensus. Kathleen Dolan, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin (Milwaukee), says there are reasons for Senate collegiality that are unrelated to gender, among them the fact that so many of the women are Democrats and "the institutional incentives are more focused on collegiality." That is, unlike in the House, any one senator or a minority of 40 can gum up the works, so negotiation and accommodation are -- or should be -- the norm.

Researchers say women's life experiences and personalities may give them a little extra strength in that area. Still, "that's not where you're going to find the real impact of diversifying," says Michele Swers, author ofWomen in the Club, a 2013 book about Senate women. "The main impact is in the policies they're pushing."

Into the Mainstream
Swers offers statistical as well as anecdotal evidence that being a woman affects the way senators look at policy questions, what priorities they set, and the types of solutions they propose. There are countless examples of that female perspective at work. The issues are as volatile as sexual assaults in the military and as quiet as improving coverage of autism treatment for the children of troops. The autism amendment "didn't really get any press," Gillibrand says, and senior Republicans opposed it on the floor last fall. But it passed 66-29 with all 17 women then in the Senate voting yes.

In two recent examples from the immigration debate, Minnesota Democrat Amy Klobuchar sponsored a successful amendment to protect undocumented victims of elder abuse. Hawaii Democrat Mazie Hirono, along with Murray and Murkowski, pushed to balance a new preference for immigrants with desirable skills and education. Hirono said bias against women in some countries has blocked their access to education and careers, and without changes, the proposed reform "essentially cements unfairness against women into U.S. immigration law." Many senators acknowledged she had a point, but her amendment was part of a package that did not make it to a vote.

The 2010 Affordable Care Act is a strong example of why women need to be in the room. Four women sat on the Finance Committee at that time -- Stabenow, Snowe, Washington Democrat Maria Cantwell, and Arkansas Democrat Blanche Lincoln, who lost her seat later that year. "The four of us were significant over and over again," Stabenow says, on issues such as school-based health clinics and mental-health care as well as women-specific concerns such as maternity care, which spurred a viral exchange over whether insurance plans should be required to cover it. (Arizona Republican Jon Kyl: "I don't need maternity care." Stabenow: "Your mom probably did.") Stabenow says she's now advocating for the child-care tax credit in weekly discussions of the committee's latest big project, tax reform.

The women of the Senate, including Hillary Rodham Clinton while she was there, have also been longtime champions of the women of Afghanistan and the Middle East. They pressed for women to be included in the provisional government in Kabul. They broke away from official congressional itineraries to meet with women who otherwise would have been ignored, in Afghanistan, Egypt, and elsewhere. Boxer says Afghan women have come to see all the Senate women in their offices. "I think they know we have their back," she says.

The highest-profile crusade uniting the women these days is their effort to improve how the military handles sexual assaults. The sheer size of the women's contingent on the Armed Services Committee -- seven members -- has made them a formidable, aggressive force in questioning military brass and shaping legislation (one senator, North Carolina Democrat Kay Hagan, even headlined a press release "Hagan Questions Top Military Leaders on Sexual Assault"). The large number of women also has given rise to multiple approaches to the problem -- particularly the split between Democrats Gillibrand, who wants military prosecutors to handle the cases, and Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri, who wants to keep them in the chain of command.

Gillibrand minimizes those differences, noting that the Senate women have agreed on 90 percent of the path forward. Her amendment failed in committee, but she is still hoping to get 51 votes for it on the Senate floor. She'll have a cheerleader from afar in Snowe, who was on the phone with National Journal as Gillibrand was learning that the committee would reject her amendment. "That is really regrettable," said Snowe, who retired in January. She said she got the law tweaked to address the same problem back in 1997, though it kept the responsibility within the chain of command. "Obviously, it's not working," she says. "Here we are 16 years later. We continue to fight yesterday's battles -- even last century's."

Women have had their share of victories over the years, as Snowe acknowledged in a farewell speech reflecting on a career that began in the House in 1979. "That was a time in America when child-support enforcement was viewed as strictly a woman's problem, a time when pensions were canceled without a spouse's approval, a time when family and medical leave wasn't the law of the land, and a time when, incredibly, women were systematically excluded from clinical medical trials at the National Institutes of Health -- trials that made the difference between life and death," she said. Snowe and former Democratic Rep. Pat Schroeder, cochairwomen of the Congressional Caucus for Women's Issues, were in the forefront of changing all that.

But there was still more to be done. Hutchison, who took office in 1993, recalls trying to make sure health insurance plans covered mammograms ("which, amazingly, has been a question") and partnering with Mikulski in the mid-1990s for a law allowing homemakers to contribute to IRAs (Hutchison says she told House Republicans in charge of revenue bills that it was "a travesty that we haven't dealt with this." They found the money to make it happen.) In her farewell speech, she talked of working with Clinton on Vital Voices, a global partnership to encourage female leaders in emerging economies; of passing the Feinstein-Hutchison Breast Cancer Research Stamp bill that raised $72 million for research; and of teaming with Feinstein to create a national Amber Alert system to aid the rescue of abducted children.

The traditions, and the evolution, continue. Feinstein, now one of three women on the Judiciary Committee, was the only one on the panel during confirmation hearings in 2005 for Chief Justice John Roberts and in 2006 for Justice Samuel Alito. She took her role very seriously. "I have a special responsibility to find out whatever I can about his views on women's rights," Feinstein said of Roberts, in Swers's account of the episode. Feinstein did the same for Alito and cited their positions on abortion in opposing both of them.

That "special responsibility" was not unique to Feinstein. Boxer recalls her 10-year tenure in the House as a time when women carried "on their back" every issue that was thought at the time to relate solely to women, such as child care and reproductive health. "In those years, we did have a much larger constituency than just our House district," she says. "Women all over the country would look to us on some of these issues of gender equality." A similar dynamic continues as women achieve more "firsts." Murray heard from female veterans all over the country when she became chairwoman of the Veterans' Affairs Committee in 2011. "It really opened our eyes" to the need for women's health services at veterans centers, she says.

One major difference now: "Women's issues," a phrase Murkowski says she never sees in her mind without quote marks around it, have gone mainstream. When Stabenow was a county commission chairwoman and opened the first shelter for victims of domestic violence in Lansing, she got calls accusing her of trying to break up the family. Now there's a federal Violence Against Women Act broadly supported by men, and acknowledgment that "women's issues" concern everyone. In fact, Swers's analysis of the 107th and 108th Congresses (2001 to 2005) showed that those issues "routinely constitute at least one-third of the Senate agenda," and almost every senator sponsored such bills. "It's very true that more men step up today," Feinstein says. "That is the big point: Women's issues have become everyone's issues."

That's eased the pressure on the Senate's women to speak for all women and also to prove they are not preoccupied with women's issues, a stereotype that some of them say is worrisome and some of them say they try to avoid. It remains the case that women are most often primary caregivers in their families, whether for children or elderly relatives, and they bring that experience to the front lines of legislating. "We all have to be generalists in the U.S. Senate. We all have to be advocates for our state," says Wisconsin Democrat Tammy Baldwin. But she also says, "We can't ignore the real-life experience that we bring to these jobs." In her case, that has meant not only being the first openly gay person elected to the Senate, but also a woman who cared for the grandmother who raised her when she was in her 90s and in failing health. In the case of North Dakota Democrat Heidi Heitkamp, it means being a survivor of breast cancer.

The issues traditionally associated with women often involve spending, regulation, and abortion rights, making them an awkward fit with the Republican agenda of social conservatism and cutting taxes, spending, and regulation. The disconnect may be at least partly why there have never been more than five Republican women in the Senate at one time. But GOP gains may be inevitable, given the numbers' steady upward creep.

The new generation is epitomized by two mothers of young children: Ayotte, who says, "It's kind of absurd that it took women coming to Congress" to force the inclusion of women in clinical trials, and Gillibrand, who is cooking up a women's economic-empowerment agenda that combines her own ideas and those of others into a marketable, promotable package. The chief elements are a minimum-wage increase, paid family leave, equal pay for equal work, affordable day care, and universal prekindergarten.

Scanning that list, it's tempting to say the more things change, the more they stay the same. But a closer look shows that's not the case. The family-leave proposal builds on the unpaid leave now available because of the efforts of earlier Capitol Hill pioneers. The minimum wage is a nontraditional "women's issue" that Gillibrand put on her list because she says nearly two-thirds of those earning minimum wage are women. Then there's Obama. The first law he signed was the Lilly Ledbetter Act making it easier for women to sue for equal pay. Universal pre-K, meanwhile, was a key proposal in the president's most recent State of the Union address. The foundation for progress on these issues has been laid, but will Congress act? That will be a stiff test of their collegiality -- and their clout.

    
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