Master Feed : The Atlantic |
- McJobs Are the Future: Why You Should Care What Fast Food Workers Earn
- America's Next Top Political Dynasty: The Cheneys?
- Listening In on 'The Talk': What Eric Holder Told His Son About Trayvon
- Chris Davis Should Be Chasing Bonds's Home-Run Record, Not Maris's
- What Happens When Everyone Makes Maps?
- Is Israel Going Easy on Money Launderers to Get Closer to China?
- How Amazon Became the King of Audiobooks
- You're an Astronaut on a Spacewalk — and Your Helmet Is Filling With Water
- Censorship in China is Deeper and More Insidious Than You Think
- The Creepy, Long-Standing Practice of Undersea Cable Tapping
- Mission Creep: When Everything Is Terrorism
- The Immigrant Healthcare Imperative
- A Man's Place Is in the Kitchen
- Why Do People Like Superheroes? Don't Ask a Psychologist
- Ask Alison: When (Not) to Fake an Orgasm
- LSD and the Man Who Broke an All-Star Game Color Barrier
- Here's What You Need to Know About the Senate Filibuster Compromise
- The Supreme Court Ruling on Workplace Harassment That Got Buried
- McDonald's Can't Figure Out How Its Workers Survive on Minimum Wage
- China's 'Sex In The City' Film Is a Great Leap Backward for Women
- Does Art Help the Economy?
- The Best MLB Player to Build a Franchise Around: Mike Trout
- Does Anything Go? The Rise and Fall of a Racist Corner of Reddit
- As Reform Fades, Marco Rubio Is Suddenly Quiet About Immigration
- How Becoming Mayor Changed Rahm Emanuel on Immigration Reform
| McJobs Are the Future: Why You Should Care What Fast Food Workers Earn Posted: 16 Jul 2013 05:08 PM PDT As I wrote earlier today, the corporate brass at McDonald's seem to believe that in order to survive on what they pay their restaurant workers, you need a second job. And hey, credit where it's due: they're probably right. Fast food wages are terrible. If you're relying on a minimum- or near-minimum-wage check each month, it means you're living life on the financial precipice. Since this out, however, I've gotten a few angry responses from readers, the gist of which was captured pretty well in this tweet by Vincent from Chicago (I assure you, I'm the one getting yelled at):
Tone aside, Vincent is actually hinting at a fairly sophisticated set of arguments you tend to hear from people who don't worry too much about minimum-wage workers, in particular. In brief: There aren't that many them; the jobs are mostly occupied by "suburban teenagers, not single parents," as the Heritage Foundation puts it; and people don't earn minimum wage for very long. Or again, nobody makes a career as a cashier at McDonalds. And there's something to all that. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were about 1.68 million workers earning the federal minimum wage in 2011, accounting for about 2.3 percent of the workforce. About half were below the age of 24, and as the Heritage Foundation notes, the vast majority of those minimum wagers were enrolled in school. Moreover, one study by the Employment Policies Institute estimated that, between 1977 and 1998, more than 65 percent of minimum wage workers managed to land a raise within a year of starting their job. So with all of that in mind, here's my quick case for why you should still be worried about what companies like McDonald's pay their employees. The Working Poor Are Real, And Some Earn More Than Minimum Wage Fast Food Workers Are Not All Suburban Teenagers
Promotions Don't Mean Much If You're Still Poor McJobs Are Probably the Future
And, in all likelihood, they'll account for even more in the future. The BLS projects that food services will be among the fastest growing source of jobs for Americans with no more than a high school degree -- right behind retail and home health aides. So maybe working at McDonalds doesn't usually amount to a career today. But it might tomorrow. 
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| America's Next Top Political Dynasty: The Cheneys? Posted: 16 Jul 2013 03:31 PM PDT  The Bushes. The Clintons. Now, the Cheneys hope to be the new political dynasty on the block. On Tuesday, Liz Cheney issued a statement saying she will run for the Senate seat from Wyoming in 2014. Her statement came just minutes after the man holding that seat, Republican Senator Mike Enzi, announced he would seek a fourth term. The two will now likely meet in a GOP primary next year. Earlier this month, The New York Times' Jonathan Martin reported that this move could be coming. As Martin reported, it's not that Enzi even has aparticularly bad relationship with the Cheneys: The senator refers to the former vice president as a "good friend." But Dick Cheney, who started out in politics in Wyoming, so far seems to be aggressively backing his daughter's campaign. According to Martin, the former vice president has "relied heavily" on Liz Cheney since leaving the White House -- including for help in writing his memoir. And in recent months, he has pumped up his daughter's potential candidacy with national Republican donors and has been more publicly wading into Wyoming's political world. Liz Cheney, according to Martin, is expected to paint Enzi as being too eager to compromise and not eager enough to push conservative causes. According to National Journal's vote rankings, Enzi was the eighth-most-conservative senator in 2012. So far, Republicans aren't proving ready to flee Enzi for Cheney. That's as true for Republicans in Wyoming as it is nationally. Last week, Senator Rand Paul called Enzi a "good conservative," telling Politico that Enzi would have his not-insubstantial support. Paul also expressed some skepticism about Liz Cheney, saying he doesn't "know much about her or her politics." As for Enzi? In a statement, he said that Liz Cheney had told him that if he ran, she wouldn't run: "I thought we were friends." But Liz Cheney has not just been content to live in her father's shadow. Aside from serving in the Bush State Department and being otherwise active in Republican politics, she's been outspoken on politics, both as a commentator on Fox News and in her own right. In a March Wall Street Journal op-ed, she wrote that President Obama is "the most radical man to ever occupy the Oval Office" and that Republicans "are all that stands between this president's policies and a damaged and diminished America." In the same op-ed, she disparaged the idea that Republicans need to moderate their views, writing "we know that preventing this president from enacting devastating policies is not obstructionism. It is patriotism." There is one issue that will be interesting to watch Liz Cheney's position. In 2009, her father voiced his support for same-sex marriage: Well, I think that freedom means freedom for everyone. As many of you know, one of my daughters is gay, and it is something that, uh, we have lived with for a long time, in our family. I think people ought to be free to enter into any kind of union they wish. Any kind of arrangement they wish. The question of whether or not there ought to be a federal statute that governs this, I don't support. I do believe that historically the way marriage has been regulated is at the state level. It has always been a state issue, and I think that's the way it ought to be handled today, that is on a state-by-state basis. Different states will make different decisions. But I don't have any problem with that. I think people ought to get a shot at that. That kind of position is relatively rare for a member of the Republican Party, especially in the Senate. However, it's also one that so far seems to be shared by Liz Cheney, who backed the idea that "freedom means freedom for everybody" and that the decision should be decided by the states in a 2009 MSNBC interview. They may not be the Clintons, but the budding attempt at a Cheney dynasty will definitely be interesting to watch in the coming months. Here is Liz Cheney's announcement video: 
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| Listening In on 'The Talk': What Eric Holder Told His Son About Trayvon Posted: 16 Jul 2013 03:07 PM PDT  One of the extraordinary results of the Trayvon Martin trial verdict is that a number of prominent African-Americans have shared the complex conversations they've felt compelled to have with their kids about justice, race, and staying safe in a world where some strangers see the people they still think of as their babies as threats. Has the United States ever had a conversation this open about what everyone is calling "the talk"? Melissa Harris-Perry and Joy Reid of MSNBC spoke frankly about their feelings during a panel on Harris-Perry's show on Sunday with Jelani Cobb, and the show host and Tulane professor followed up with a piece about texting with her 11-year-old as the news broke and trying to comfort her rattled child and go on air at the same time. Now Attorney General Eric Holder has weighed in, telling America about the conversation he had with his own teenage son after the teenage Martin was shot. Holder spoke Tuesday before the NAACP annual convention in Orlando, Fla. From his remarks as prepared for delivery: Independent of the legal determination that will be made, I believe this tragedy provides yet another opportunity for our nation to speak honestly -- and openly -- about the complicated and emotionally-charged issues that this case has raised. Holder also directly addressed the "stand your ground" laws, calling into question what good they do: Separate and apart from the case that has drawn the nation's attention, it's time to question laws that senselessly expand the concept of self-defense and sow dangerous conflict in our neighborhoods. These laws try to fix something that was never broken. There has always been a legal defense for using deadly force if - and the "if" is important - no safe retreat is available. 
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| Chris Davis Should Be Chasing Bonds's Home-Run Record, Not Maris's Posted: 16 Jul 2013 01:47 PM PDT  AP / Gail Burton Barry Bonds's 73 home runs in the 2001 season are the most hit in any single season. Baltimore Orioles first baseman Chris Davis has 37 home runs heading into the All-Star break, prompting discussion of his chances of breaking the all-time record. For some, though—including Davis himself—the Orioles slugger is being measured not against Bonds's 73 home runs, but rather the 61 hit by Roger Maris in 1961. Bonds's total, along with that of 61+ sluggers Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, is being disregarded amid hand-wringing over the sport's problems with performance-enhancing drugs.
But proponents of the Maris argument actually hurt the integrity of the sport by giving the role of PEDs in baseball far more credit than it deserves or has ever been given before. Davis' 37 home runs have him on pace to hit more than Maris, but fewer than Bonds—the first time this has happened since Bonds broke the record, and the first time the Maris vs. Bonds debate actually matters. To be sure, MLB has a high-profile history of doping—enough that President George W. Bush explicitly called it out in his 2004 State of the Union address. Almost a decade later, the sport still has its share of PED problems; it is reportedly set to suspend several players after the All-Star break for their alleged involvement with a Miami clinic providing drugs. Stranger still, the suspensions circumvent MLB's own rules governing PED testing and punishment. That said, there are positive tests each year that demonstrate that doping still exists in baseball, though to a lesser extent than when PED use was at its peak in the 1990s and early 2000s. What there is not proof of is of PED usage turning players into home-run hitters. When Congress released the Mitchell Report—the result of its nearly two-year investigation into doping in baseball—the list of players involved with PEDs was hardly a Murderers' Row of famous sluggers. For every Barry Bonds (762 career home runs) or Jason Giambi (435) listed, there were several players like Nook Logan (2) and Gary Bennett (22). Additionally, it's important to note that even in the era of widespread doping, it wasn't just the users who started earning more home runs—league-wide, everybody started hitting more home runs. MLB has experienced a significant jump in the average number of home runs per game in the last few decades. As the graph below demonstrates, there was an enormous leap—nearly doubling the average from approximately one to approximately two in the early 1990s. Mark McGwire's 70 home runs in 1998 were hit in a season averaging 2.08 home runs/game. Bonds hit his 73 in a year where the average was 2.25. And as PED use has decreased among MLB players, the average number of home runs per game has maintained its high level: To date, Davis is hitting his home runs in a league with 1.99 home runs per game. If the increase in the early 1990s were solely attributable to PEDs, that number would have cratered back to its original in recent years—after more stringent testing was integrated into baseball. Instead, the power production in 2013 is far more similar to 2001 than it is to 1991. Clearly, there are variables in play beyond merely doping.  There is very little variation in the graph above after the 1994 jump. Between Bonds and Davis, there is a quarter of a home run per game's difference, which is far from the leap between the early and mid-'90s. Quite simply, if one looks only at home runs per game, the league does not look that different between 2001 and 2013. Individual performances look similar to their 2001 levels, too: In 2001, 12 players hit more than 40 home runs, and in 2013, nine players are on pace to meet or surpass the 40-home-run mark. Both in the aggregate as well as at the individual level, there is little evidence that home runs are appreciably less frequent in 2013 than they were when McGwire or Bonds broke the record, even as PED usage has apparently decreased. How can this be, then, if Bonds, McGwire, and Sosa all surpassed Maris's record due to PEDs? Presumably because the act of hitting a baseball is an incredibly complex action whose success cannot be directly attributed to PEDs. Both in the aggregate as well as at the individual level, there is little evidence that home runs are appreciably less frequent in 2013 than they were when McGwire or Bonds broke the record, even as PED usage has apparently decreased. Do they help? It's likely that they do, if for no other reason than their helping baseball players to remain on the field at full strength over the 162-game grind of the regular season. If there were a clear correlation to home runs, however, the chart above would demonstrate far more pronounced differences, and there would be far more big-name talent listed in the Mitchell Report. This is not to defend Bonds, McGwire, Sosa, or any player that uses PEDs. Having grown up in St. Louis, I look upon my own McGwire newspaper reprints with mixed feelings. And MLB had its share of debacles during the Congressional investigation (e.g., McGwire refusing to talk about the past in 2007, Roger Clemens perjuring himself in 2008), so presumably it is eager to avoid further embarrassment. Yet MLB records are full of individuals whose actions are rather embarrassing. One can simultaneously hold a record while also not always being a paragon of virtue: Pete Rose, banned from the Hall of Fame for gambling on baseball, nevertheless holds the record for career hits. Ty Cobb has the highest batting average in MLB history despite being a racist. Even on-field indiscretions and cheating haven't nullified other record holders' place in history. The man Bonds passed for the career home run record, Hank Aaron, admitted to using amphetamines. Hall of Fame pitcher Gaylord Perry made a career out of altering the baseball with illegal substances from spit to Vaseline, and admits as much in his autobiography. Baseball is a different game in 2013. Home runs are relatively easier to hit than they were 30 years ago. Why? There are several reasons. Players are bigger and stronger than they used to be. Bats are better crafted than they once were. Scouting techniques and video documentation have evolved to allow instant reviews of an opposing pitcher. Training techniques have evolved to allow players to stay on the field. And yes, pharmaceuticals—legal or otherwise—exist that almost certainly make some improvement in performance. Discounting Bonds, McGwire, and Sosa, however, denies the systemic changes above that have nothing to do with PEDs and attributes home runs solely to drug use. Ironically, this may actually have the opposite effect that MLB intends: By accentuating the link between doping and on-field success, MLB may well incentivize players to attempt to use drugs. Chris Davis does, in fact, have a home-run record in sight, but the number he aims for needs to be 73. For the good of the game, it needs to respect its records even if it does not respect its record-holders. 
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| What Happens When Everyone Makes Maps? Posted: 16 Jul 2013 01:17 PM PDT On a spring Sunday in a Soho penthouse, ten people have gathered for a digital mapping "Edit-A-Thon." Potted plants grow to the ceiling and soft cork carpets the floor. At a long wooden table, an energetic woman named Liz Barry is showing me how to map my neighborhood. "This is what you'll see when you look at OpenStreetMap," she says.  Though visually similar to Google's, the map on the screen gives users unfettered access to its underlying data -- anyone can edit it. Barry lives in Williamsburg, and she's added many of the neighborhood's boutiques and restaurants herself. "Sometimes when I'm tired at the end of the day and can't work anymore, I just edit OpenStreetMap," she says. "Kind of a weird habit." Barry then shows me the map's "guts." I naively assume it will be something technical and daunting, but it's just an editable version of the same map, with tools that let you draw roads, identify landmarks, and even label your own house. "OpenStreetMap is referred to as a ground-up ontology," she says. What she means is that OpenStreetMap has no established data dictionary; you can draw anything on the map and name it whatever you want. "Like oh, this point? Yes, this is a restaurant of type 'Italian'; it has a name of type 'my favorite Italian restaurant'," she explains. Before I know it, I'm mapping my favorite Park Slope bagel shop -- a strangely thrilling act that unites me with the website's one million users, who (unlike me) mostly work at technology companies. Citizen cartography is a time-honored practice; both George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were surveyors. Crowdsourcing isn't new, either; every year since 1900, aviary-obsessed individuals have collaborated with the Audubon Society for an annual Christmas Bird Count. In the spirit of these traditions, OpenStreetMap was founded in 2004 as a response to the Ordnance Survey, England's national mapping agency, whose maps were then so inaccurate that small towns and villages put up signs warning drivers not to follow its satellite navigation. "SUVs were barreling through churchyards and going down little dirt roads through pastures," Barry says. Finally, a frustrated physics student named Steve Coast developed OpenStreetMap as a way to give cartography back to the public. Now, data is the website's "raison d'être," says Richard Weait, a Canada-based contributor. In countries like Germany, which are considered completely mapped, a common joke is that you can route yourself to the nearest penguin because zoo enthusiasts have probably mapped them. "So because you're putting it into the hands of people, they can gather what's important to them," another mapper says. "Not only can you say, 'How can I get to my nearest penguin?' but, 'How can I get to my nearest penguin in a wheelchair?'" Because of its origin, the website is still riddled with U.K. verbiage, which can sometimes present confusion. As we work, an older man named MacKay Wolff comes across a term he hasn't heard before. "That's for walking directions," Barry says. "Or horse directions," Eric says. "Oh my god, what if there's a horse cab?" "I feel like civilization would be a very different place if we were all back to riding horses again," says an artist named Ingrid. "A smellier place." "There'd be a lot less mental health issues, too, because I feel like there's something natural about the sound of a horse clopping," Wolff says. "But how would you time directions for that? Like, what if there's a really lazy horse? I guess that's true with biking directions." "I heard that all the streets in Boston are just cow paths paved over." "I feel like that's not unusual," Barry says. "MacKay, do you feel like the sound of coconuts accurately yields mental health benefits on par with horse hooves?" Soon, everyone goes quietly back to mapping. * * * "Traditional cartographers today might say some form of, 'Kids these days, they don't know the rules,'" says Eric Steiner, a former president of the North American Cartographic Information Society. "I hear that sometimes at conferences. People lament that there's this huge influx of people doing cartography who aren't cartographers." By "cartographer," they mean someone who is skilled in trade techniques like projection (transforming a globe into a flat map) or who knows how to interpret line weights. Instead, new cartographers are increasingly software engineers or developers using programming languages like JavaScript and Python. Steiner, himself a graduate of Penn State's prestigious cartography program, sees the plurality of technique as beneficial. Whether a map is good or bad shouldn't be based on the narrative of the individual making the map, he says, but rather on the map's ability to evoke, inspire and question. It isn't that outsiders are coming in and revolutionizing mapping; rather, a new democratization in mapping has occurred. "With the tools being much cheaper and relatively easy to learn, you get people who don't have a professional interest in being a cartographer figuring out how to make maps they want to see," Steiner says. Mary Spence, president of the British Cartographic Society, admits traditional cartographers are a "dying breed," since a large part of their job is placing themselves in the users' shoes. "I'm looking at a map of Saudi Arabia in front of me," she explains over the phone. As a cartographer, Spence would ask herself, "What do they want to see on a map of Saudi Arabia? They want to see the terrain, where the hills are and the deserts. They probably want to see the big towns and the roads. They might even want to see where the oil fields are." Now, because of projects like OpenStreetMap, users in Saudi Arabia no longer need a cartographer because they are the mapmakers. "The thing I find interesting is that a lot of the most exciting work comes from people who aren't necessarily trained as cartographers," says Bill Rankin, a Yale University professor. Though he points to the architect Buckminster Fuller, whose 1943 Dymaxion World Map changed the way we understood the geography of World War II, Rankin -- who is also a trained architect -- might as well be describing himself. A few years ago, he was giving a talk in Phoenix about a color-coded map he made of that city's racial segregation. In the audience were several county government officials. After the talk, they told Rankin that while segregation informed their work, as government employees they couldn't publicize the information themselves. "There was no way they could, on the official county website, say that the way to understand Phoenix is as a radically segregated city," he says. As a free agent, Rankin can use maps to make arguments the creators of the data can't always make themselves.  After the housing crisis, Rankin mapped housing foreclosures in New Haven between 2008 and 2012 using data from a nonprofit. He discovered that most of New Haven's foreclosures were happening to poor families of color -- unlike the national media narrative about middle-class families doing everything right and still losing their homes. The map was published in the New Haven Independent, and Rankin says it presented a clear case for directing economic resources to the affected neighborhoods. "What I most care about is the sense of maps having arguments, not just being neutral descriptions of the world, but active participants in the discussion about that world," he says. In fact, maps as visual systems have never been objective, but are susceptible to manipulation -- especially political censorship. Before statistics were widely available online from entities like the U.S. Census or the Center for Disease Control, the only mapmakers were either governments or large companies that could invest the capital to both gather the data and map it. Neil Alan, the current president of the North American Cartographic Information Society, pointed out that as a condition for its presence in China, Google currently lists the land contested in the Chinese-Indian border dispute as Chinese territory. Even color choice can be powerful. "Red is a warning, cautionary color, so you right away jade the readers by choosing the colors that you do," he says. "My sense is that a lot of the political and geographic issues that people care about -- like poverty or international inequality or segregation -- I think they're often mapped in a way that is unable to deal with diversity," Rankin says. For example, if each country on a map of the world is shaded a different color based on average household income or GDP per capita, Brazil will look poor even though it has huge wealth in small pockets. In the United States, one might miss the economic difference between Manhattan and the Appalachian mountains. In his own maps, rather than shading areas with solid blocks of color, Rankin uses dots in hopes of stirring a more nuanced, granular discussion of space. He calls this "radical cartography" -- not radical in the sense of far-left politics, but radical because "the way we draw the map actually changes the thing that we're mapping." Increasingly, the maps people want to see aren't just literal, but also conceptual. According to Steiner, the role of the cartographer is actually moving away from the notion of accurately representing the world and towards that of creating a symbolic representation of space -- which he means very broadly. "We just saw a great image of a woman's journey through psychoanalytic space," he says. Two points on a graph represented the woman, who was dissatisfied with herself: one plotted her ideal self and the other her actual self when she arrived in therapy. The points were very far apart. Over the course of several therapy sessions they moved closer together, and by the final session had nearly joined together. "That's a map," he says. As the creative director of Stanford University's Spatial History Project, Steiner has pieced together maps based on evacuation photographs, diaries and testimonies from Auschwitz. Many of the data sets he uses are ambiguous, incomplete or uncertain -- such as the openings and closings of concentration camps -- but Steiner says that actually frees the cartographer from the pursuit of absolute truth, allowing for a nuanced interpretation by the reader. "These representations are more expressionist and provocative, partially because we're dealing with such a dense subject, but also because we're interested less in the absolute positioning of the information than we are in the experience of being in that place," he says. Recently, the group received a large grant from the Mellon Foundation, which will allow it to pursue a few additional mapping projects. For one of them, Steiner hopes to take 500 novels that reflect on different communities in 19th century London -- "a square here, a road there, a house here" -- and create a literary map of the city. "The idea is that collectively across 500 novels, you could describe a space you otherwise might not be able to describe, and to describe it richly," he says. * * * Maps demystify space, and many new cartographers are harnessing this quality for social good. On SourceMap.com, a website that maps where things come from, you can follow the supply chain of your iPhone from a mine in Mbandaka, the Democratic Republic of Congo and a factory in Xiamen, China to the Best Buy in Minnesota where it's sold -- impressive when you consider that just one non-recyclable chip in your phone contains all the elements in the Periodic Table. "As soon as you see a product on a map, you think about why materials come from these places, what those people's lives are like, what the environmental considerations are," says SourceMap founder Leo Bonnani. "So it really forces you to into a social construct." A trained architect, Bonnani became interested in supply chains after he mapped his laptop's life cycle as a graduate student. Not only did the act of mapping bring solidarity with the workers who made his computer, but it proved they actually existed. Bonnani created the website because he was convinced a similarly fascinating story lay behind every product. Now anyone can map their own supply chain on Bonnani's website. One map submitted by Berkeley professor Jenna Burrell connected old New York Public Library computers to internet cafes in Ghana, where the outdated models found new life. Another by documentary filmmaker Laura Kissell traces cotton from its harvest in the U.S. to production in China and back. Bonnani says companies such as Office Depot, Proctor & Gamble and Stonyfield Farm have been economically motivated to map their own supply chains as well. "If you don't know where something comes from, the online crowd will find out," Bonnani explains. "So it actually became an accountability tool right away." Andrew Turner, a former aerospace engineer-turned-mapper who now works at Esri, a geographic information systems company, says maps are effective advocacy tools because they tether abstract ideas to real life. Though someone might not care about ocean level rise, they will once they see a map showing their own house under water. At that point, behavior can actually change. "People start to think, 'What happens if I drive less? What will that do to my neighborhood? What happens if I plant more grass?'" he says. Bonnani has witnessed this transformation firsthand. After mapping a segment of the beer industry in Scotland, he discovered all the breweries were relying on one single bottling plant located very far away, which was an economical and environmental strain. When the government saw the map, they provided a loan so that one of the brewers could set up a local bottling plant. "That's the dream, that you end up with the triple bottom line, the social-environmental-economic benefit," he says. * * * Back at the Edit-a-thon, Alyssa Wright is hunched over her laptop screen, her eyes squinting at an aerial photograph of Nepal's capital. Though Wright has never been to Kathmandu, for the past few hours she's been carefully tracing roads and buildings on a satellite image to create a blueprint of the city. Because Nepal sits on an unstable fault line, the World Bank is funding an effort to adequately prepare for an earthquake should one hit. A team of structural engineers on the ground is collecting exposure data and identifying building types, which will then be plugged into a map. Wright has spearheaded an OpenStreetMap group assisting with the creation of that map. "Is this a building?" she asks hesitantly, and a small group gathers around to study a fuzzy blotch on the screen. "That's a golf course," says MacKay Wolff. Since 1989, Wolff has worked at the U.N., where he is now manager of disaster relief. He became interested in OpenStreetMap after its involvement in Haiti. Before the earthquake, maps of Port-au-Prince were outdated and incomplete, causing problems for aid workers who arrived in the aftermath. After the earthquake hit, OpenStreetMap users came together overnight to create a viable city map. "I've worked in earthquake emergencies before," Wolff says. "If everybody is at least pointed in the same direction, that can make the humanitarian response much, much more efficient." Wright sometimes worries that the new focus on personalization in the mapping world could lead to a narrowed vision. Rather than orienting yourself to the world, online maps allow you to orient the world to yourself. Location-based apps like Foursquare track your favorite places; Navigon finds your parked car; RunKeeper charts your jogging routes. Rather than being a tool for an outward-looking exploration of the world, digital mapping becomes just another means of self-gratification. And yet, it's not so easy to draw the line between what we do for ourselves and how we engage with the world. OpenStreetMap's existence is based on the premise that users submit data about their own environments, but Wright says she's always associated maps with exploring and connecting to other cultures. "I think if you feel like being safe in Nepal is as relevant to you as mapping the name of your bodega, then that sense of space could shift with the map," she says. While we think we map places we already know, perhaps we also map to learn that which we do not. 
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| Is Israel Going Easy on Money Launderers to Get Closer to China? Posted: 16 Jul 2013 12:00 PM PDT  A new relationship between Israel and China is blooming. (Kim Kyung-Hoon/AP) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is in the hotseat amid reports that he agreed to help quash a terrorist money-laundering lawsuit against the Bank of China in order to secure a key diplomatic visit to Beijing. Israel's Yedioth Ahronoth and the Financial Times reported that China threatened to cancel Netanyahu's trip in May. At issue was a long-running US lawsuit by the families of Israelis killed in attacks by the Palestinian groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Israel had previously encouraged the lawsuit, which claimed the Bank of China helped facilitate wire transfers that funded the groups, and offered up one of its former intelligence agents as a witness. But ahead of Netanyahu's visit, it decided not to allow the agent to be deposed. The head of an Israeli group involved in the case said the Bank of China "told the court that it understood that the witness would not testify."  MORE FROM QUARTZ
China and Israel have strengthened their relationship this year: China wants to play a bigger role in the Middle East, where it is heavily dependent on oil from Arab states and Iran; Israel wants to boost trade with China, its second-biggest market after the United States, and an eager buyer of Israeli technology. As for the government-backed Bank of China, it claims to have "always strictly followed the UN's anti-money laundering and anti-terrorist financing requirements and regulations in China and other judicial areas where we operate." The United States and other Western nations have been cracking down heavily on money-laundering activity, especially when it's tied to terrorism or heavily sanctioned countries. Earlier this year, Standard Chartered agreed to pay $340 million in fines to settle accusations that it hid hundreds of billions of dollars in transactions with Iran. And the Bank of China recently closed a crucial bank account that the US labeled a "key financial node" in North Korea's nuclear missile program. Now the latest revelation has the makings of an uncomfortable political scandal for Netanyahu, long know for his hardline stance on terrorism. It could particularly affect Israel's image in the U.S Congress, because House majority leader Eric Cantor is the cousin of one of the lawsuit's plaintiffs. Netanyahu has not addressed the situation publicly, but reportedly called his ambassador to the U.S. back to Israel this past weekend to discuss the matter. If the media accounts are accurate, his government seems to have calculated that cracking down on terrorist funding was less important than bolstering economic and diplomatic ties with China. 
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| How Amazon Became the King of Audiobooks Posted: 16 Jul 2013 11:45 AM PDT
Wikimedia Commons If you are a fan of audiobooks -- and the numbers of people who say they are has grown impressively in recent years -- the odds are that Amazon is your preferred place to shop. Of all the ways Amazon has come to dominate the book market, especially in the digital arena, its share of audiobook sales probably represents its most formidable pre-eminence. At the last tally (now more than a year old), more than 60 percent of audiobooks were downloaded to digital devices, and nearly all of those came from Audible (an Amazon company) or through its long-standing license to supply audiobooks to Apple's iTunes. Amazon also owns Brilliance audio, the biggest producer of CD-based audiobooks. Audiobooks are now well over a billion-dollar business, and the available figures suggest that Amazon retains a far larger piece of that revenue than any other retailer. Amazon is having an especially good run lately compared to major competitors in the book trade. Barnes and Noble's losses in Nook sales have become so large that the company is the subject of gloomy projections about its future. And Apple has suffered a resounding defeat in the Department of Justice's antitrust case alleging its conspiracy with major publishers to set e-book prices. Amazon has no such problems, and has actually been the beneficiary of the troubles facing these other companies. Whether the issue is the popularity of the Kindle in its various reading and tablet forms or the discounted pricing of most of its millions of books, consumers seem to be increasingly conditioned (or habituated) to the convenience of Amazon's one-click technology, its efficiency in service, and the vast scale of what it has on offer. The power of Amazon's position as a bookseller in every respect is growing at a pace that makes publishers uneasy. With each passing year, the industry confronts an enterprise that can afford to be more aggressive both in its product promotion and in its negotiations. While Amazon's strategies on discount pricing and investment in infrastructure have kept its profits relatively low, shareholders are showing confidence in its prospects. Last week, on the day when Apple lost its antitrust case in federal court, Amazon's share price closed at $292.33, its highest ever. Audiobooks are a particularly good example of how Amazon is recruiting its huge customer base. Amazon acquired Audible in 2008 for about $300 million, and now features well over 100,000 titles. Audible offers a membership model, which can amount to substantial savings over a la carte pricing. Audible uses the clout it has amassed from this success to negotiate deals with publishers, who doubtless resent the low advances on offer -- $1,000 is typical -- for all but guaranteed bestsellers. But publishers are reluctant to pass up the opportunity to reach an audience of a size only possible on Amazon. With the CD market on a sharp downward curve, most bookstores have reduced their stock of audiobooks to a handful at most. In the next survey of audiobook use, which is currently being conducted, experts predict the digital percentage will surpass 70 percent. While it has the overwhelming presence in audiobooks, Amazon is not the exclusive provider of them. There are a half-dozen or so independent producers, and the largest publishers maintain their own audiobook divisions and can sell downloads from their websites. Libraries prefer CDs, and some still carry audiobooks on cassettes, which have otherwise virtually disappeared. But Amazon's ability to serve the burgeoning digital demand is the reason it has achieved such a major place in the market. According to a recent story in The New York Times, Audible "says it produced some 10,000 recorded works last year." Donald Katz, Audible's founder and chief executive told the Times that the company employed two thousand actors to read books last year, "and he speculated that he was probably the largest single employer of actors in the New York area." While the Actors' Guild was unable to calculate the number for the Times, it did confirm that audio narration is "plentiful . . . (and) also lucrative enough to allow many of its members to survive on it." Audible's momentum in audiobooks includes innovations that seem to be adding to its appeal. Along with the other subscription benefits, there is Whispersync for Voice, for example, which Amazon says allows you to "switch between reading the Kindle book and listening to the professional narration from Audible." Audiobooks are also available for as low as $4.99 if you purchase the Kindle version. And, there is something called the "Great Listen Guarantee" which enables the consumer to "exchange any book you don't like." For the consumer, these attractions are an indisputable plus. And assuming that the trend for greater output of audiobooks continues -- the Audio Publishers Association reported last winter that the number of titles in audio format had doubled in recent years -- Amazon's will surely exploit the market's potential as it has with e-books and print books as well. Nearly half of audiobooks are still listened to by commuters, but the prevalence of digital devices makes it possible to multi-task, exercise, or work around the house, for instance. A current commercial on the Audible.com app has earphones shaped into a rose plugged into an iPhone, with Fifty Shades of Grey, the erotic bestseller, on the screen. As reported in the New York Times, a woman's voice says, "Enjoy a steamy romance while you're ironing the sheets." The earphones morph themselves into a sword, and the voice intones, "discover an historic battle while battling the bulge at the gym." Amazon's book business clearly has a great deal going for it these days, and audiobooks are definitely a factor in that ascendency. 
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| You're an Astronaut on a Spacewalk — and Your Helmet Is Filling With Water Posted: 16 Jul 2013 11:42 AM PDT ![[IMAGE DESCRIPTION]](http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/science/assets_c/2013/07/spacewalk2-thumb-570x377-127306.jpg) Imagine you're an astronaut. Imagine you're on a spacewalk. Imagine, in other words, that you are whirling above the Earth at more than 17,000 miles an hour, the only thing between you and the deadly vacuum of space a padded suit, a hardened helmet, and an umbilical tether that you hope is really, really strong. Now imagine that your helmet, suddenly, starts filling with liquid. At first you think it's sweat, condensing as it leaves your skin. But then more liquid starts to seep in. You think it's water. But you're not entirely sure. And there's more of it, and more of it, clinging to your face, clogging your ears, covering your eyes. Pretty much the stuff of nightmares, right? The air in your helmet -- the thing most precious, because most limited, in a spacewalk -- is suddenly competing for space with something else. And you don't know, exactly, what that something else actually is. The only thing you know for sure is that more and more of it is surrounding you. And your helmet is not getting any bigger. Well, that living nightmare just happened to one of the people living on the International Space Station. This morning, Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano was conducting, with the American Chris Cassidy, a routine spacewalk to repair cables on the exterior of the Station. Things were going normally when, suddenly, Parmitano alerted Cassidy and his crewmates to his suddenly-moisture-filled helmet. At first, Parmitano thought the mystery liquid was, indeed, sweat: work done in the confines of a spacesuit, after all, requires a great deal of exertion. But there was too much of it. It had to be something else. "It's a lot of water," Parmitano said. And this was not a small problem. Recall that an astronaut's spacesuit is a spaceship for one, an astronaut's only lifeline back to the Station and, with it, the Earth. Recall as well that, in microgravity, liquid doesn't pool -- it floats. It clings. At one point, per one account, "there was so much water inside Parmitano's ears and around his face that he couldn't hear or speak to communicate with the other astronauts." "Squeeze my hand if you're fine," Cassidy said to Parmitano. There was no squeeze. NASA abruptly aborted the spacewalk, and the crew pulled Parmitano back into the Station, freeing him from his suit. The first order of business: toweling off his face and head. "He looks miserable, but is OK," the crew told Mission Control after they'd dried him off, balls of water flying away as they did so. The crew, and Mission Control, are still trying to determine the cause of the liquid incursion. Cassidy, for his part, suspects it was water seeping from Parmitano's drink bag. He said it looked like a half-liter -- about 2 cups -- of water had leaked out into Parmitano's helmet. ![[IMAGE DESCRIPTION]](http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/science/assets_c/2013/07/parmi_suit-thumb-570x349-127282.jpg) Parmitano, it turns out, is only the latest astronaut to experience the waking nightmare that is the liquid-filled helmet. As early as 1966, during the second-ever U.S. EVA, astronaut Gene Cernan experienced a similar problem. Space-walking was new back then, and NASA, it seems, had underestimated exactly how much work -- "work" in the sense of "manual labor" -- would be required of the astronaut doing the space walk. "Lord, I was tired," Cernan would later recall of that early EVA. "My heart was motoring at about 155 beats per minute, I was sweating like a pig, the pickle was a pest, and I had yet to begin any real work." At one point, as the walk progressed, Cernan's heart rate shot up to 195 beats per minute -- and flight surgeons began fearing that he would pass out from the exertion. Cernan, ultimately, didn't lose consciousness; he did, however, lose some of his sight. The space-walker's body heat and the sweat it generated fogged up the helmet of his suit. Suddenly, Cernan was seeing the spaceship before him as if through a frosted window. And he had no means of fading the fog. NASA aborted the EVA -- and, as a result of Cernan's experience, began applying anti-fogging chemicals to the interior surfaces of the spacesuit helmets that would follow. Anti-fogging chemicals, however, don't do much to prevent liquid from seeping into helmets from elsewhere in the suit -- as seems to have happened to Parmitano. In 2004, halfway through a standard spacewalk, the cosmonaut Alexander Kaleri startled Mission Control in Moscow with an announcement: "It's amazing. I have rain inside the helmet," he said. The "full condensation" he was experiencing was accompanied, alarmingly, by a rise in Kaleri's suit temperature -- which would not prove to be hazardous, but which would offer immediate evidence of a suit malfunction. Ground Control aborted the spacewalk -- though it had to repeat the decision multiple times before Kaleri and his fellow spacewalker, the American Mike Foale, acquiesced: both had planned to retire after the mission, and were reluctant to bring their final spacewalking experiences to premature ends. Sometimes, however, in-helmet moisture is more of an annoyance than an EVA-aborting danger. Space walks being long and, as Cernan demonstrated, arduous endeavors, NASA has sometimes seen fit to provide astronauts with snacks to keep them energized during their EVAs. Chris Hadfield recalled one such experiment -- with snack bars. The bars were made of the same dried fruit paste as Fruit Roll-Ups, and they were positioned within the helmet so that astronauts, the thinking went, could bend their heads down, take a bite of the stuff, and go about their space-walking. The catch was that the bars were mounted, as it happened, next to the helmets' drinking tubes -- and those tubes tend to leak. Just a little bit. But enough to render the fruit bar, Hadfield noted, a "gooey mass." So "we just stopped using them." It may well have been a leaky drinking tube -- the same kind that undried the dried fruit -- that aborted Parmitano's spacewalk this morning. Parmitano, for his part, is convinced that the liquid was something other than drinking water. As Chris Cassidy told Mission Control: "To him, the water clearly did not taste like our normal drinking water." To which a Parmitano, newly dried and newly smiling, chimed in: "Just so you know, I'm alive and I can answer those questions, too." 
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| Censorship in China is Deeper and More Insidious Than You Think Posted: 16 Jul 2013 11:18 AM PDT  The vast majority of China's citizens get their news from traditional sources of media (Reuters)It's easy to get excited about Sina Weibo. A microblogging service akin to Twitter launched in 2009, Weibo is easily the most intriguing feature of China's media landscape as well as a real challenge to Beijing's control of information. Like social media services everywhere, the vast majority of Weibo's content is an apolitical mix of trends, memes, and jokes. But the possibility of political subversion is real. When in 2011 two high-speed trains collided in Zhejiang Province, killing 40 people and injuring hundreds, China's official media ignored the incident until tweets and photos on Weibo forced them to acknowledge what had happened. Without question, the rise of Weibo -- and similar services powered by Sina's competitors -- has fundamentally altered the flow of information on China's internet. But has this shift actually changed Chinese society as a whole? The country's army of Weibo users -- numbering over 500 million -- have intrigued observers with their insouciance, cynicism, and irreverence. But it's nonetheless important to remember that the Internet isn't representative of how the media works as a whole -- and it's the latter consideration that's ultimately most important in China. The precise workings of internet censorship in China is not known, mostly because censorship is applied so inconsistently. But the basic idea is this: Foreign social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, as well as YouTube, are firewalled. Many Google services, including Gmail, work intermittently or are aggravatingly slow. On Weibo and other bulletin board systems, government-funded censors delete posts deemed politically incorrect, typically through targeted key-word searches. (For example, the phrase "Tibet independence" wouldn't last long on a Chinese website before being deleted). The government also appoints individuals to write posts or tweets supporting Beijing, a group dubbed "50-centers" in reference to the small sums they receive for their patriotism. This isn't to say that all pro-Beijing content is manufactured by the Party; in fact, the government receives plenty of indigenous support. Are all criticisms of the government then prohibited? Not exactly. Despite Beijing's willingness to devote considerable resources to controlling internet content, the government simply cannot ensure that all objectionable content is removed all the time. So they prioritize. Researchers at Harvard found, in a study published earlier this year, that Beijing tolerates some criticism but not calls for collective action. Complain about government corruption? No problem. Attempt to organize a protest on Sina Weibo? No way. Does this relatively permissive attitude to Internet speech mean that China is softening on censorship? Not exactly. When it comes to traditional media, Beijing's heavy hand remains firmly in place. Consider this fascinating New York Review of Books article by Sinologist Perry Link, detailing a list of "directives" -- ranging from the general to the highly specific -- issued to journalists and editors in China:
Other directives asked editors to "use small banners" on some stories, while putting others "on the back page." These rules form part of a censorship system that is, despite some competition from Iran and elsewhere, the most sophisticated in the world. And while there are publications that push these boundaries -- Caijing and Southern Weekend are two that come to mind -- the vast majority of Chinese journalists cooperate with these constraints; after all, their career advancement largely depends on it. In the event of any ambiguity, according to Rebecca MacKinnon, an expert on censorship at the New America Foundation, journalists in China "err on the side of caution." In effect, China has two parallel levels of censorship. The first is the relatively free-wheeling atmosphere of sites like Sina Weibo, where the government uses paid advocates -- prisoners, for example, can get their sentences reduced by writing pro-Beijing content online -- and selective censorship to prevent objectionable content from gathering momentum. The second, more insidious type of censorship is that used to manage China's official media, including directives and top-down pressure to hew to the government line. Which level is more important? Though Sina Weibo is certainly popular, it's influence is often overstated in the Western media: A study reported by the Wall Street Journal revealed that, of the site's more than 500 million users only 220 million have ever posted on the site -- and only 30 million of these people write as often as once a week. 30 million is still a lot of people, but how many of these people write about politics? And of the ones who do, how many dare criticize the Communist Party? When you peel apart the layers of what is actually written on Sina Weibo, the amount of subversive content is actually quite modest. Furthermore, the vast majority of Chinese people still get their news from traditional sources of media -- television, radio, and print -- and thus rely on information that has been carefully directed, vetted, and censored by Communist Party officials. The Chinese internet may be the most interesting aspect of the country's media, but it's still small beans compared to everything else -- and until that changes, stories of censorship's demise in China will be premature. 
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| The Creepy, Long-Standing Practice of Undersea Cable Tapping Posted: 16 Jul 2013 10:55 AM PDT  Barta IV/Flickr In the early 1970's, the U.S. government learned that an undersea cable ran parallel to the Kuril Islands off the eastern coast of Russia, providing a vital communications link between two major Soviet naval bases. The problem? The Soviet Navy had completely blocked foreign ships from entering the region. Not to be deterred, the National Security Agency launched Operation Ivy Bells, deploying fast-attack submarines and combat divers to drop waterproof recording pods on the lines. Every few weeks, the divers would return to gather the tapes and deliver them to the NSA, which would then binge-listen to their juicy disclosures. The project ended in 1981, when NSA employee Ronald Pelton sold information about the program to the KGB for $35,000. He's still serving his life prison term. The operation might have ended, but for the NSA, this underwater strategy clearly stuck around. In addition to gaining access to web companies' servers and asking for phone metadata, we've now learned that both the U.S. and the U.K. spy agencies are tapping directly into the Internet's backbone -- the undersea fiber optic cables that shuttle online communications between countries and servers. For some privacy activists, this process is even more worrisome than monitoring call metadata because it allows governments to make copies of everything that transverses these cables, if they wanted to. The British surveillance programs have fittingly sinister titles: "Mastering the Internet" and "Global Telecoms Exploitation," according to The Guardian. A subsidiary program for these operations -- Tempora -- sucks up around 21 million gigabytes per day and stores the data for a month. The data is shared with NSA, and there are reportedly 550 NSA and GCHQ analysts poring over the information they've gathered from at least 200 fiber optic cables so far. The scale of the resulting data harvest is tremendous. From The Guardian:
In an interview with online security analyst Jacob Appelbaum, NSA leaker Edward Snowden called the British spy agency GCHQ "worse than" the NSA, saying it represents the first "full take" system, in which surveillance networks catch all Internet traffic regardless of its content. Appelbaum asked Snowden if "anyone could escape" Tempora: "Well, if you had the choice, you should never send information over British lines or British servers," Snowden said. "Even the Queen's selfies with her lifeguards would be recorded, if they existed." The U.S.'s own cable-tapping program, known by the names OAKSTAR, STORMBREW, BLARNEY and FAIRVIEW, as revealed in an NSA PowerPoint slide, apparently functions similarly to Tempora, accessing "communications on fiber cables and infrastructure as data flows past," according to The Washington Post. The slide indicates that Prism and these so-called "upstream" programs work together somehow, with an arrow saying "You Should Use Both" pointing to the two operations. So how does one tap into an underwater cable? The process is extremely secretive, but it seems similar to tapping an old-fashioned, pre-digital telephone line -- the eavesdropper gathers up all the data that flows past, then deciphers it later.
More than 550,000 miles of flexible undersea cables about the size of garden watering hoses carry all the world's emails, searches, and tweets. Together, they shoot the equivalent of several hundred Libraries of Congress worth of information back and forth every day. In 2005, the Associated Press reported that a submarine called the USS Jimmy Carter had been repurposed to carry crews of technicians to the bottom of the sea so they could tap fiber optic lines. The easiest place to get into the cables is at the regeneration points -- spots where their signals are amplified and pushed forward on their long, circuitous journeys. "At these spots, the fiber optics can be more easily tapped, because they are no longer bundled together, rather laid out individually," Deutsche Welle reported. But such aquatic endeavors may no longer even be necessary. The cables make landfall at coastal stations in various countries, where their data is sent on to domestic networks, and it's easier to tap them on land than underwater. Britain is, geographically, in an ideal position to access to cables as they emerge from the Atlantic, so the cooperation between the NSA and GCHQ has been key. Beyond that partnership, there are the other members of the "Five Eyes" -- the Australians, the New Zealanders, and the Canadians -- that also collaborate with the U.S., Snowden said. The tapping process apparently involves using so-called "intercept probes." According to two analysts I spoke to, the intelligence agencies likely gain access to the landing stations, usually with the permission of the host countries or operating companies, and use these small devices to capture the light being sent across the cable. The probe bounces the light through a prism, makes a copy of it, and turns it into binary data without disrupting the flow of the original Internet traffic. "We believe our 3D MEMS technology -- as used by governments and various agencies -- is involved in the collection of intelligence from ... undersea fibers," said a director of business development at Glimmerglass, a government contractor that appeared, at least according to a 2010 Aviation Week article, to conduct similar types of interceptions, though it's unclear whether they took part in the British Tempora or the U.S. upstream programs. In a PowerPoint presentation, Glimmerglass once boasted that it provided "optical cyber solutions" to the intelligence community, offering the ability to monitor everything from Gmail to Facebook. "We are deployed in several countries that are using it for lawful interception. They've passed laws, publicly known, that they will monitor all international traffic for interdiction of any kind of terrorist activity."
Slide from a Glimmerglass presentation The British publication PC Pro presented another theory: that slightly bending the cables could allow a receiver to capture their contents.
Once it's gathered, the data gets sifted. Most of it is discarded, but the filters pull out material that touches on one of the 40,000 search terms chosen by the NSA and GCHQ -- that's the content the two agencies inspect more closely. The British anti-surveillance group Privacy International has filed a lawsuit against the U.K. government, arguing that such practices amount to "blanked surveillance" and saying that British courts do "not provide sufficiently specific or clear authorization for such wide-ranging and universal interception of communications." Their argument is that the existing surveillance laws are from the phone-tapping days and can't be applied to modern, large-scale electronic data collection. "If their motivation is to catch terrorists, then are there less intrusive methods than spying on everyone whose traffic happens to transverse the U.K.?" said Eric King, head of research at Privacy International. Meanwhile, the British agency, the GCHQ, has defending their practices by saying that they are merely looking for a few suspicious "needles" in a giant haystack of data, and that the techniques have allowed them to uncover terrorist plots. If groups like Privacy International are successful, it may put an end to the capture of domestic Internet data within the U.K., but as NSA expert Matthew Aid recently told me, since 80 percent of the fiber optic data flows through the U.S., it wouldn't stop the massive surveillance operations here or in other countries -- even if the person on the sending end was British. It's also worth noting that this type of tapping has been going on for years -- it's just that we're now newly getting worked up about it. In 2007, the New York Times thus described President Bush's expansion of electronic surveillance: "the new law allows the government to eavesdrop on those conversations without warrants -- latching on to those giant switches -- as long as the target of the government's surveillance is 'reasonably believed' to be overseas." Want to avoid being a "target" of this "switch-latching"? A site called "Prism-break" recently released a smorgasbord of encrypted browsing, chat, and email services that supposedly allow the user to evade government scrutiny. The only platform for which there is no encrypted alternative is Apple's iOS, a proprietary software, for which the site had this warning: "You should not entrust neither your communications nor your data to a closed source device." 
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| Mission Creep: When Everything Is Terrorism Posted: 16 Jul 2013 10:43 AM PDT  One of the assurances I keep hearing about the U.S. government's spying on American citizens is that it's only used in cases of terrorism. Terrorism is, of course, an extraordinary crime, and its horrific nature is supposed to justify permitting all sorts of excesses to prevent it. But there's a problem with this line of reasoning: mission creep. The definitions of "terrorism" and "weapon of mass destruction" are broadening, and these extraordinary powers are being used, and will continue to be used, for crimes other than terrorism. Back in 2002, the Patriot Act greatly broadened the definition of terrorism to include all sorts of "normal" violent acts as well as non-violent protests. The term "terrorist" is surprisingly broad; since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, it has been applied to people you wouldn't normally consider terrorists. The most egregious example of this are the three anti-nuclear pacifists, including an 82-year-old nun, who cut through a chain-link fence at the Oak Ridge nuclear-weapons-production facility in 2012. While they were originally arrested on a misdemeanor trespassing charge, the government kept increasing their charges as the facility's security lapses became more embarrassing. Now the protestors have been convicted of violent crimes of terrorism -- and remain in jail. Meanwhile, a Tennessee government official claimed that complaining about water quality could be considered an act of terrorism. To the government's credit, he was subsequently demoted for those remarks. The notion of making a terrorist threat is older than the current spate of anti-terrorism craziness. It basically means threatening people in order to terrorize them, and can include things like pointing a fake gun at someone, threatening to set off a bomb, and so on. A Texas high-school student recently spent five months in jail for writing the following on Facebook: "I think I'ma shoot up a kindergarten. And watch the blood of the innocent rain down. And eat the beating heart of one of them." Last year, two Irish tourists were denied entry at the Los Angeles Airport because of some misunderstood tweets. Another term that's expanded in meaning is "weapon of mass destruction." The law is surprisingly broad, and includes anything that explodes, leading political scientist and terrorism-fear skeptic John Mueller to comment: As I understand it, not only is a grenade a weapon of mass destruction, but so is a maliciously-designed child's rocket even if it doesn't have a warhead. On the other hand, although a missile-propelled firecracker would be considered a weapon of mass destruction if its designers had wanted to think of it as a weapon, it would not be so considered if it had previously been designed for use as a weapon and then redesigned for pyrotechnic use or if it was surplus and had been sold, loaned, or given to you (under certain circumstances) by the secretary of the army .... After the Boston Marathon bombings, one commentator described our use of the term this way: "What the United States means by terrorist violence is, in large part, 'public violence some weirdo had the gall to carry out using a weapon other than a gun.' ... Mass murderers who strike with guns (and who don't happen to be Muslim) are typically read as psychopaths disconnected from the larger political sphere." Sadly, there's a lot of truth to that. Even as the definition of terrorism broadens, we have to ask how far we will extend that arbitrary line. Already, we're using these surveillance systems in other areas. A raft of secret court rulings has recently expanded the NSA's eavesdropping powers to include "people possibly involved in nuclear proliferation, espionage and cyberattacks." A "little-noticed provision" in a 2008 law expanded the definition of "foreign intelligence" to include "weapons of mass destruction," which, as we've just seen, is surprisingly broad. A recent Atlantic essay asks, somewhat facetiously, "If PRISM is so good, why stop with terrorism?" The author's point was to discuss the value of the Fourth Amendment, even if it makes the police less efficient. But it's actually a very good question. Once the NSA's ubiquitous surveillance of all Americans is complete -- once it has the ability to collect and process all of our emails, phone calls, text messages, Facebook posts, location data, physical mail, financial transactions, and who knows what else -- why limit its use to cases of terrorism? I can easily imagine a public groundswell of support to use to help solve some other heinous crime, like a kidnapping. Or maybe a child-pornography case. From there, it's an easy step to enlist NSA surveillance in the continuing war on drugs; that's certainly important enough to warrant regular access to the NSA's databases. Or maybe to identify illegal immigrants. After all, we've already invested in this system, we might as well get as much out of it as we possibly can. Then it's a short jump to the trivial examples suggested in the Atlantic essay: speeding and illegal downloading. This "slippery slope" argument is largely speculative, but we've already started down that incline. Criminal defendants are starting to demand access to the NSA data that they believe will exonerate themselves. How can a moral government refuse this request? More humorously, the NSA might have created the best backup system ever. Technology changes slowly, but political intentions can change very quickly. In 2000, I wrote in my book Secrets and Lies about police surveillance technologies: "Once the technology is in place, there will always be the temptation to use it. And it is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday facilitate a police state." Today we're installing technologies of ubiquitous surveillance, and the temptation to use them will be overwhelming. 
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| The Immigrant Healthcare Imperative Posted: 16 Jul 2013 10:38 AM PDT  Registry room at Ellis Island in New York harbor, 1924 (AP) I didn't know much about my patient, a young man originally from Tibet, other than that he worked in a restaurant in Queens. For most of my patients, their coming-to-America story is an intrinsic part of their medical history. It's certainly medically relevant in terms of what diseases they might have been exposed to, what nutritional, environmental and genetic factors might play a role in their health, but it's also such a key part of who they are that it's usually a central part of our initial interview. But this patient was reticent, and I didn't push. He seemed to be a loner, self-sufficient, with a monk-like abstemiousness that made him seem older than 34. Without fail, he always arrived at the clinic with a container of fragrant Tibetan dumplings which he would press solemnly into my hands before I could begin the medical visit. These visits were not that frequent, since other than some acid reflux and low back pain he was quite healthy. From 2002 to 2009 immigrants as a whole contributed an estimated $115 billion more to the Medicare trust fund than they took out. One day he came to my office with a woman in her late fifties, whom he introduced as his mother. I was surprised and delighted to meet her because I had no idea that he had any family with him in this country. I'd envisioned him as a loner. He asked if I would look at a bump under her arm. I examined her axilla gingerly and was immediately met with granite resistance. My heart sank as I worked my fingers anteriorly over a bulging stony mass in her breast. "How long has this been here?" I asked, trying to keep the doom out of my voice. As my patient's story slowly unfurled from him I realized that there was so much I did not know about him. He was not a loner at all. He was married, with two young children. His parents lived with him, as well as an aunt. But no one was getting any medical care because they were undocumented and worried about deportation. I also learned the he didn't just work in a restaurant -- he'd started the restaurant himself, and now employed several other people. He'd been a journalist in Tibet until he managed to get to America on a student visa, now expired. He was the only one who spoke some English, so he was the one who ventured to the clinic. His reflux pills he gave to his father, who suffered from a gastric ulcer. The ibuprofen for his back went to his aunt, who had arthritis. And the "bump" under his mother's arm -- well that had been there for years, and it had indeed started out as only a bump. But she was too scared to come to the hospital -- she spoke almost no English and worried about deportation. Everyone in the family worked -- in the restaurant, cleaning houses, babysitting -- but none of these jobs offered means to obtain health care. And so the family stayed away. The mother's breast cancer was an insidious and implacable marker of time in the shadows. This story is sadly typical -- immigrants afraid to access basic medical care, potentially curable illnesses spiraling out of control. Communicable diseases -- easily treatable ones -- fester and spread unnecessarily. As immigration reform wends its way through a fractious and polarized House of Representatives, many are thinking about the implications for health care. From the medical perspective, bringing people into a primary care system is beneficial for our entire society, both from the public health standpoint and the moral standpoint. But even from the economic side, it makes sense. The savings from treating illnesses early, preventing outbreaks of communicable disease, screening for treatable chronic illnesses and vaccinating to prevent disease are entirely obvious. On a larger scale, however, immigrants' relative youth, health, and productivity are a boon to the medical system. A recent study showed that from 2002 to 2009 immigrants as a whole contributed an estimated $115 billion more to the Medicare trust fund than they took out. In 2009 alone, immigrants offered a surplus of nearly $14 billion, while U.S.-born people generated a deficit of more than $30 billion. Most of the surplus, incidentally, was from immigrants who were not citizens. This was felt to be from the higher proportion of working-age taxpayers in this demographic. There are an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in our country. By all accounts, the vast majority of these immigrants would be here legally if it were logistically and financially possible. Bringing this swath of our country into institutional legitimacy would surely have some upfront cost. But the overall gain -- for the economy, for Medicare, for our nation's health -- would outweigh this handily. It would also help erase the moral stain of a nation built on immigrants now turning around and casting the next generation of immigrants as second-class citizens. I explained to my patient and his mother that we would treat her cancer promptly, that we were interested in her health, not her immigration status. I encouraged the rest of the family to come to the clinic and they did. For the older members of the family, it was the first medical care they'd had in years. The mother, sadly, died several months later. Her disease was too advanced for surgery or chemotherapy, but palliative care helped those months be more comfortable. As her physician, it pained me to know that her cancer might have been cured, even prevented, had she been able to access medical care sooner. But with immigration reform, her two grandchildren have a good chance of growing up healthier. 
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| A Man's Place Is in the Kitchen Posted: 16 Jul 2013 10:32 AM PDT ![[man cooking in kitchen]](http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/hua_hsu/mancooking_BIG.jpg) From Massachusetts to New Mexico, male politicians are cooking up campaign videos set in the kitchen. Democratic Peter Koutoujian served up the most recent example. He recently released a video announcing his candidacy to succeed Democratic U.S. Sen. Edward Markey in Congress. Koutoujian, seated at a table in a cheerful, bright kitchen, looked squarely into a camera as he introduced himself to voters.
"Male candidates and their campaigns are more aware than ever of women as a voting block," said Adrienne Kimmell, executive director of the nonpartisan Barbara Lee Foundation in Cambridge, Ma. "They'll do anything they can to appeal to women voters." Videos and ads set in kitchens can be subliminally powerful, Kimmell explained, because they tap into the historical norm that the kitchen is a female domain and where women handle the family budget. Koutoujian and other male candidates signal they're regular guys "who get it," and not just politicians, when they set themselves in a kitchen, she said. The national trend has male politicians concocting some successful ads and others whose results were mixed: In Connecticut, 2012 progressive Democrat Christopher Murphy rolled out this ad in his 2012 U.S. Senate race. He starts off the day in a busy kitchen with his family before sprinting to spread the word he's running.
In New Mexico, Democrat Sen. Martin Henrich checks off a to-do list in a cluttered kitchen in this 2012 ad.
Republican former Sen. Scott Brown ran multiple ads from his kitchen, first in his 2010 win over Democratic state Attorney General Martha Coakley, and then in his 2012 loss against current Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren to offset a national GOP image perceived by some as anti-woman.
Kimmell said Koutoujian's video appears to couple setting with substance to appeal to women. In his new ad, Sheriff Koutoujian speaks into the camera saying he'll be a "strong, progressive leader" who'll focus on health care, domestic violence, and continue his work on preventing stalking. He also says he'll focus on "growing the economy and jobs." Why Are They Doing It? "The political math is simple," said Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia. "Women comprise a majority of the electorate in every state, and so a candidate simply has to do reasonably well with women to win. You can lose women, but not by a lot." Mitt Romney is a case in point. He failed to connect with women, even after he brought his popular wife, Ann, with him on the trail. He won 52 percent of men, but lost 55 percent of women, Sabato said. Women may not agree on all hot-button issues like reproductive rights. But women care about so-called "household," like paying the electric bill and for college, said Shannon O'Brien, a former Democratic Massachusetts Treasurer and veteran campaigner who lost the Massachusetts governor's race to Mitt Romney in 2002. "One way to telegraph, 'I'm a candidate that sits around that table and thinks about those issues,' is to put the man in the kitchen," O'Brien said. Koutoujian is running in a crowded Democratic primary field that includes state Sens. Katherine Clark and Karen Spilka. Christa Kelleher, interim director of the Center for Women in Politics and Policy at the University of Massachusetts Boston, said consultants may feel the kitchen setting softens Koutoujian, a sheriff, and allow him to connect against two female rivals. "I can imagine political consultants may have done testing and advising male candidates to appear affiliated or embracing of the "female' domain," Kelleher said. Double Standards Apply "If a woman had an opening ad at the kitchen table, it would show she's in touch but not qualified," Kimmell said. Rather than appearing in kitchen ads, on the other hand, more and more female candidates are showing themselves in encroaching on traditional male turf. In New Mexico, Republican Governor Susana Martinez demonstrated her skills by showing herself in a courtroom, while North Dakota U.S. Sen. Kathryn "Heidi" Heitkampt took swings in a batting cage. "There's a double-standard," said Marni Allen of the nonpartisan group Political Parity. "Women have to be both likeable and qualified. They have to get over a higher hurdle to show they are qualified beyond education and other issues." "Hillary Clinton struggled with that," Allen added. "What is the right balance for female candidates to maintain femininity while demonstrating they're qualified across a broad spectrum of issues?" Don't Tank "It makes me think about John McCain putting Sarah Palin on the ticket," Kimmell said. "Women don't just say, 'I see a man in the kitchen, they get me.' Are you talking about the issues that connect with the every day lives or showing yourself in a kitchen?" In 2012, Brown's ad "Dad" featured him in the kitchen and doing chores around the house, yet Warren outdistanced him among women by 16 points, according to Suffolk University pollster David Paleologos. In the end, his issues didn't resonate with enough voters. As men pursue this strategy, authenticity is key. In 1988, presidential candidate Michael Dukakis tried to show he was tough on defense by riding in a tank and instead was ridiculed. Men who aren't comfortable in the kitchen could get burned, said Democratic consultant Joe Trippi. "The tank didn't work for Mike Dukakis," said Democratic consultant Joe Trippi. "People get when it's not real and they've never seen a skillet before in their life. If it doesn't feel right it could be a disaster." 
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| Why Do People Like Superheroes? Don't Ask a Psychologist Posted: 16 Jul 2013 10:27 AM PDT  WB Comics Journal writer Tom Crippen titled an essay about Superman "The Big Dumb Dream." It's funny because it's true: Superman, and the superheroes that followed him, are, as dreams go, big and dumb. There's a kind of genius to that bigness and dumbness. If people like strong, powerful heroes, why not create a hero who is exponentially stronger and more powerful than any hero ever seen before? But the genius is also the genius of the lowest-common-denominator panderer. Siegel and Shuster, Superman's creators, figured out exactly what big, dumb thing the public wanted--and the rest is history.
Why does the public want that big, dumb thing, though? That's a worthwhile question, and one you would think that a book titled Our Superheroes, Ourselves might set itself to answer. Edited by Robin S. Rosenberg, the volume is, as the intro says, "a collection of essays by noted psychologists in which the authors apply their knowledge of psychology to our relationship to superheroes, and to the extent to which superheroes' psychological nature reflects human nature." This seems like a reasonable approach and a reasonable goal. And yet, somewhere along the way, most of the essays in the book go wrong. Whether criticizing superhero narratives or extolling them, the psychologists here seem to have trouble articulating why they're focused on superheroes in particular, rather than on pop culture in general, or even on something else entirely. For example, Peter J. Jordan argues that the classic '60s Marvel superhero comics are worthy of serious consideration because they presented characters whose emotions are variable depending on the situation they find themselves in--which may well explain why Marvel Comics are better than DC Comics of the same period, but doesn't exactly make a compelling case for artistic depth on any other metric. Similarly, Gary N. Burns and Megan B. Morris praise superhero stories for providing their protagonists with somewhat realistic, stressful work lives... but surely lots of other media do that too. Why pay attention to superheroes, then? The big dumb dream, for all its bigness, comes across here as oddly elusive. In part the problem may be a matter of distance: Though many of the psychologists say that they're superhero fans, the nerd knowledge on display is often a bit shaky. (The Watchmen, for example, are not a superhero team, and mentioning Stan Lee as the architect of the Marvel age without also referencing Jack Kirby is a big faux pas.) But I think some problems also stem from the way that psychology and superheroes are too close to each other. They have preconceptions about power and morality in common, and as a result some of the authors here seem to find it hard to pull back far enough to get perspective on what is unique about superheroes, and whether or why that uniqueness matters. Ben Saunders gets at the crossover between psychology and superheroes, and at the difficulties it imposes, in his excellent 2011 book about the intersection between religion and superheroes, Do the Gods Wear Capes? (which, in a major oversight, none of the writers here cites). In his chapter on Iron Man, Saunders discusses the 1979 story arc by David Michelinie, Bob Layton, and John Romita Jr., called "Demon in a Bottle" in which Tony Stark struggles with alcoholism. Saunders talks about the storyline in terms of the language and philosophy of Alcoholics Anonymous. Tony Stark relies on the technology of the Iron Man suit to solve his problems. He relies on alcohol--which, Saunders said, AA traditionally sees as a "coping mechanism"--to manage emotional and psychological states. Saunders argues that in the comic the armor and the drink are presented as a single problem. And the solution to that problem is, according to Saunders, "to acknowledge that the fantasies of radical independence--absolute power, total control, complete self-reliance--are just that: fantasies... Tony Stark must accept that his sense of self cannot be sustained in isolation." Saunders links this to the philosophy of AA, which, he says, does not insist that the addict acknowledge God so much as it insists that the addict admits that he himself (or she herself) is not God. Alcohol, like armor--or superpowers--is a way to grasp control. It's a tool, a technology. And that act of grasping can pull a shell around you. In some sense, as Saunders says, the therapeutic, psychological model of AA is an alternative to this fantasy of power. It punctures the big dumb dream of godhood; it tells you that you're not Superman, and you can't control the world. This syncs with David A. Pizarro and Roy Baumeister's characterization of superhero narratives as "moral pornography" in Our Superheroes, Ourselves -- the stories allow for a continual, controlled hit of moral certainty, just as pornography (they argue) allows for a repetitious, varied array of sex partners. Superheroes are fiction, whereas psychology has pretensions to reality and efficacy, but they're still both building suits of armor. But Saunders (and Pizarro and Baumeister as well) seems to overlook the extent to which the super-technology of control is native not just to superheroes but to psychology as well. Yes, AA encourages adherents to give up one attempt at attaining control. But the way it does that is through offering a 12-step system--for controlling the release of control. AA is its own kind of super-technology. It's a mechanism for regulating the soul--as is psychology in general, from lofty academic discipline to self-help piffle. Superheroes are more blatantly hubristic in their dreams of improbable powers--but then, superheroes are avowedly fiction, whereas psychology has pretensions to reality and efficacy. They're two different technologies, but they're still both building suits of armor. You can see this throughout Our Superheroes, Ourselves, whether in Pizarro and Baumeister's satisfyingly teleological evolutionary psych explanations (we are programmed for moral evaluation, ergo, underwear outside the pants) or in Travis Langley's description of his survey project in which he asks people to rate the personality types of their favorite superheroes and supervillains. That survey seems remarkably pointless... but, of course, the point is precisely the rating and categorizing itself. You read the essay for the same reason you read a superhero comic--to see an authority carefully put everything in order. As Saunders shows, not all superhero narratives are quite so simple--and certainly all psychology isn't. Still, though some of them blithely retail it while others struggle and question it, there are few superhero narratives or psychological studies that don't circle around this vision of control. It's in that sense perhaps that both are, as Lawrence C. Rubin suggests here, mythologies of modernity. If the big dumb dream of our ancestors was that there were gods, our current big dumb dream seems to be that there aren't, and that we don't need them because we've taken their place . 
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| Ask Alison: When (Not) to Fake an Orgasm Posted: 16 Jul 2013 10:20 AM PDT  Môsieur J./Flickr I got into a little bit of an argument with a friend of mine -- is it okay for women to fake their orgasms? She says no, it's never appropriate and that it's no different than telling a lie to a person's face. I feel that it's more of a "Hey that was a good try." What about you? I want to start by saying that I'm tired of articles that talk about orgasms like they're adorable. Like, "Okay ladies, we're going to talk about the O, That's right ... the BIG one." Sex and coming shouldn't need a winking emoticon. It's important; it's like, one of the most important things. But sometimes, man, you just want to go to bed, or you've made a horrible mistake and you just want it to be over, or you have other stuff to do and you want it to be over. That being said, no, women shouldn't "fake it," if for no other reason than they're giving their partner an undeserved sense of accomplishment. More importantly, it feeds into this mentality that women have to apologize for their bodies or their sexuality. Some studies say that up to 80 percent of women admit to having pulled an Elaine (the references are going to get more and more obscure, I'm sorry but if I have to write "faking it" over and over I'll claw my eyes out). Fifty years after the women's lib movement of the 1960s and we as a sex still aren't quite able to say, "You're like two inches off from where you need to be." I've done it. Mostly when I was in high school and sex felt like when a small bird gets trapped indoors; all frantic and confused. Abstinence-only education nonsense aside, maybe there is something to warning teenagers how bad those early sexual encounters are going to be. At the time, I just wanted it to go in the normal progression and I didn't want to fail at base physiology. So the first six months of my young sexual life were filled with some amazing theatrics and then eventually, a very awkward conversation with a boyfriend who thought he was a seventeen year-old sex god. There I think is where the real cruelty lies; the confidence blow to the other participant. An important starting point is knowing what an orgasm is. Studies have shown a range of anywhere from ten to thirty percent have never experienced an orgasm. So before you expect someone else to make you come, you had better be able to do it for yourself. If you're faking orgasms because you've never had one, then I'm very anti that. Quit it. You need to learn what you want and what you like, I recommend masturbating whenever you're free. If you are a lady who has never had an orgasm and you don't work on it every day please stop being afraid. Go masturbate right now. Go do it, I'll wait. If that's not your issue, there are still times when it's just not going to happen, whatever the reason. What I think causes those three out of four women to Meg Ryan (yes she's a verb in this context) if the fear of either of these things happening: One. Having a long talk about what went "wrong." I'm all for open conversations about sex logistics, especially with a new partner, but feel like these talks always happen at three in the morning. I've also gotten, "We're not stopping until you get off." which sounds more like a threat than anything else. Your orgasm shouldn't be some sort of trophy for the other person. Two. They roll over and fall asleep, not a care or concern in the world while you are left there to hate them a little bit. Part of the problem is that sex, to a significant portion of the population, is graded pass/fail instead of considering the entire experience. You just got to be naked with someone who you hopefully find attractive. Congratulations, on getting laid! It's fun and sometimes we put too much pressure and importance on the whole thing. If everything else was good but you didn't quite get there, you should still consider it a success. This isn't to say that you should be content with a partner who does sub-par work with no interest in improving. But sometimes, man, you just want to go to bed, or you've made a horrible mistake and you just want it to be over, or you have other stuff to do and you want it to be over. Faking an orgasm to me now, as a lady in her late twenties, is much more about moving things along. Which is a horrible thing to write, but I've come to terms with the fact that this column will the death of my sex life, which was weakened and sickly to begin with. So that's where I stand. Let's go with one free pass a year to do a full Barbarella (I'm really proud of this one) and it expires if it goes unused. This goes for guys too, because they totally do it ... or maybe it's just the ones that I've slept with. Yes, it's a lie, but just a little one and as long as it's not giving the impression that you like something that you don't. Mostly I just want all of us to get a good night's sleep.
Previously: Break Up Promptly, and Always Unfriend Maintaining a Relationship With a Dog If you have questions about relationship etiquette, please send them to Ask Alison [at] The Atlantic (.com). 
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| LSD and the Man Who Broke an All-Star Game Color Barrier Posted: 16 Jul 2013 09:59 AM PDT In the 1971 Midsummer Classic, the Pittsburgh Pirates' Dock Ellis squared off against Vida Blue of the Oakland Athletics. The game was the first time two black pitchers started an All-Star Game. Before the lineups were announced, Ellis publicly chided and pushed National League Manager Sparky Anderson about the start, claiming "they wouldn't pitch two brothers against each other." Throughout his career Ellis was a fearless critic of racism in sports, and his work to advance civil rights is widely recognized, perhaps most poignantly in this personal letter from Jackie Robinson. But while Ellis is renowned for his work breaking down the color barrier, he remains better known for another accomplishment: being the first and only pitcher to throw a no-hitter while high on LSD. In this short film, titled Dock Ellis and the LSD No-No, Ellis, with the help of stunning animation, takes us on a wild trip to the ballpark, explaining inning-by-inning the miraculous feat he pulled off in June of 1970. The collaborative project from No Mas TV and Doubleday and Cartwright combines the imaginative drawings of James Blagden with NPR's Donnell Alexander and Neille Ilel's 2008 interview with the All-Star Pitcher. For more work from Doubleday and Cartwright, check out issue five of their Victory Journal set to premiere tonight. 
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| Here's What You Need to Know About the Senate Filibuster Compromise Posted: 16 Jul 2013 09:37 AM PDT  Senate Democrats and Republicans have reached an agreement on a process that would avert the "nuclear option" by allowing up-or-down votes on President Obama's executive nominees, according to Senate Democratic and Republican leadership aides. The deal, reached Tuesday morning by Republican Sen. John McCain and Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer, would allow a vote today on Richard Cordray, the nominee to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. It would also clear the way for votes on Labor Secretary nominee Thomas Perez, EPA nominee Gina McCarthy, and Export-Import Bank nominee Fred Hochberg. The deal calls for the two controversial National Labor Relations Board nominees, Richard Griffin and Sharon Block, to be withdrawn and two new nominees to be named. Republicans will not block the two new nominees. Democrats have not agreed to take future nuclear-option threats off the table. The White House has not responded to a request for comment. By agreeing to end debate on Cordray, Republicans relented on their demand that Democrats restructure the bureau before they would allow Cordray to head it. And, in a sign that the compromise has wide support, the Senate voted 71-29 to end debate on Cordray's nomination and proceed to a final vote. The deal represents a way forward after Republicans and Democrats in the chamber had a standoff over nominations, causing Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to threaten a change to filibuster rules, widely known as the "nuclear option." Senators gathered for a rare full-chamber meeting behind closed doors on Monday, but little progress was reported. On the floor Tuesday morning, Reid had signaled that a compromise was in the works saying, "I think we see a way forward that will be good for everybody.... This is not a time to flex muscles." Reid also gave a shout out to McCain, crediting him for bringing the two sides together. But there are still more talks ahead. Reid said he plans to talk to Vice President Joe Biden and Sens. Patty Murray and Schumer. "We're going to have caucuses today. We'll explain in more detail the direction we're headed. I think everyone will be happy," Reid said. 
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| The Supreme Court Ruling on Workplace Harassment That Got Buried Posted: 16 Jul 2013 08:39 AM PDT  Amid the sweeping, high-profile cases decided at the end of the Supreme Court's term on same sex marriage and the Voting Rights Act, one little-noticed case could dramatically change the way employees bring harassment cases against their employers. The Supreme Court's 5-4 decision in Vance v. Ball State University does something subtle, but with far-reaching effects: It narrows the definition of the word "supervisor." In this particular case, Maetta Vance was a dining hall worker at Ball State University in Indiana. Vance, an African-American, sued the university in 2006, alleging that a white supervisory colleague, Saundra Davis, launched a campaign of racial harassment and intimidation against her. Even though Davis didn't have power to fire her, Vance claimed, she did have the power to direct her activities on the job in the university's banquet and catering division. Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the majority opinion, "We hold that an employer may be vicariously liable for an employee's unlawful harassment only when the employer has empowered that employee to take tangible employment actions against the victim, i.e., to effect a 'significant change in employment status, such as hiring, firing, failing to promote, reassignment with significantly different responsibilities, or a decision causing a significant change in benefits.'" Justice Clarence Thomas, who was himself once accused of perpetrating sexual harassment, went even further in his solo concurrent opinion, saying that previous cases establishing sexual harassment standards were wrongly decided.  To the average worker today, though, the Court's restriction on defining a "supervisor" in this way doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Most supervisors have to appeal to higher-level executives or human resources departments to enact demotions or alter pay. And, worryingly, though Vance v. Ball State was about racial harassment, there's no reason it wouldn't apply to other kinds of protections provided for in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, including sexual harassment and harassment due to religion. This is a ruling likely to disproportionately affect women, since, according to data collected by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, just 16.3 percent of the more than 11,000 sexual harassment charges filed in fiscal year 2011 were from men. "It makes a lot of sense for a large company to limit the number of people who actually have authority to take actions like firing and hiring and demoting," said Fatima Goss Graves, Vice President for Education and Employment at the National Women's Law Center. But she pointed out that many companies create a structure where supervisors have a lot of leeway over a worker's environment, even if he or she doesn't have the power to hire and fire. A supervisor could, for example, require the worker to put in longer hours, work outside or pick up unwanted duties on the job. As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg lays out in her dissent, this is the problem with narrowing the definition of "supervisor." "Exposed to a fellow employee's harassment, one can walk away or tell the offender to 'buzz off,'" Ginsburg wrote. "A supervisor's slings and arrows, however, are not so easily avoided. An employee who confronts her harassing supervisor risks, for example, receiving an undesirable or unsafe work assignment or an unwanted transfer. She may be saddled with an excessive workload or with placement on a shift spanning hours disruptive of her family life. And she may be demoted or fired. Facing such dangers, she may be reluctant to blow the whistle on her superior, whose 'power and authority invests his or her harassing conduct with a particular threatening character.'" Goss Graves, from her position as an advocate for women in the workplace, agreed with Ginsburg's assessment. "If there's someone who is abusing that power, wielding their power to make their subordinates' lives horrible in a way to aid and assist in their harassment, the idea that the company isn't liable for that and treats that person as just an average co-worker makes no sense," she said. Still, the new definition won't make it impossible to bring forward new employment harassment cases. Cato Institute's Overlaywered blog argued that while the definition of supervisor may have become narrowed for bringing a "vicarious harassment" case--i.e., a case claiming the company is liable for the actions of the supervisor--employees can still bring forward cases under a negligence claim for failing to stop harassment by a co-worker. Goss Graves admitted that this is the case, but though "It is possible," the ruling still makes it "really, really tough." The Vance decision is one of many ways the Court has recalibrated--often restricting--its approach to employee rights in harassment or discrimination cases in recent years. Goss Graves recalled that not so long ago the Supreme Court decided in Ledbetter v. Goodyear that the window during which an employee could file a suit for pay discrimination must be filed within 180 days of the pay decision. But Lilly Ledbetter, the plaintiff in that case, had been unaware that she'd been subjected to pay discrimination for years. As a result, Congress passed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act in 2009, a rather narrow law that said each subsequent paycheck after the pay decision counted as a new instance of pay discrimination and therefore could be subject to a lawsuit. Congress could do the same with Vance v. Ball State, amending Title VII of the Civil Rights Act -- which turns 50 next year -- to say that a supervisor is defined as someone with authority over an employee's actions on the job, regardless of his or her power over the employee's pay or employment status. Even though Vance hasn't gotten much attention, Goss Graves and other activists remain optimistic that Congress will take up the issue. "The Ledbetter v. Goodyear decision came down in 2007 and it wasn't until 2009 that it was signed into law. But once the public starts to really hear about the chipping away of rights for workers in the workplace, I think that we'll see some movement on the Hill," she said. 
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| McDonald's Can't Figure Out How Its Workers Survive on Minimum Wage Posted: 16 Jul 2013 08:39 AM PDT Well this is both embarrassing and deeply telling. In what appears to have been a gesture of goodwill gone haywire, McDonald's recently teamed up with Visa to create a financial planning site for its low-pay workforce. Unfortunately, whoever wrote the thing seems to have been literally incapable of imagining of how a fast food employee could survive on a minimum wage income. As ThinkProgress and other outlets have reported, the site includes a sample budget that, among other laughable assumptions, presumes that workers will have a second job.  As Jim Cook at Irregular Times notes, the $1,105 figure up top is roughly what the average McDonald's cashier earning $7.72 an hour would take home each month after payroll taxes, if they worked 40 hours a week. So this budget applies to someone just about working two full-time jobs at normal fast-food pay. (The federal minimum wage is just $7.25 an hour, by the way, but 19 states and DC set theirs higher). A few of the other ridiculous conceits here: This hypothetical worker doesn't pay a heating bill. I guess some utilities are included in their $600 a month rent? (At the end of 2012, average rent in the U.S. was $1,048). Gas and groceries are bundled into $27 a day spending money. And this individual apparently has access to $20 a month healthcare. McDonald's, for its part, charges employees $12.58 a week for the company's most basic health plan. Well, that's if they've been with the company for a year. Otherwise, it's $14. Now, it's possible that McDonald's and Visa meant this sample budget to reflect a two-person household. That would be a tad more realistic, after all. Unfortunately, the brochure doesn't give any indication that's the case. Nor does it change the fact that most of these expenses would apply to a single person. Of course, minimum wage workers aren't really entirely on their own, especially if they have children. There are programs like food stamps, Medicaid, and the earned income tax credit to help them along. But that's sort of the point. When large companies make profits by paying their workers unlivable wages, we end up subsidizing their bottom lines. 
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| China's 'Sex In The City' Film Is a Great Leap Backward for Women Posted: 16 Jul 2013 08:35 AM PDT  (Le Vision Pictures) Tiny Times, a Chinese feature film set in contemporary Shanghai, made headline news on its opening day in late June by knocking the Hollywood blockbuster Man of Steel from its perch atop the domestic box-office and breaking the opening-day record for a Chinese-language 2D release. The film follows four college girls as they navigate romance and their professional aspirations, but the bulk of the film is about the female longing for a life of luxury in the company of a good-looking man. Tiny Times is not a women's film, though it does feature female characters, draped from head to toe in designer clothes and easily mesmerized by the presence of supposedly visually stunning males -- not the usual, muscle-bound Hollywood types, but Asian boys of androgynous demeanor with compact frames, exquisite facial contours and the look of perpetual youth. At first glance, Tiny Times might be mistaken for a Sinicized Sex and the City, but soon it becomes clear that the four boy-crazed, mall-loitering characters in Shanghai have little in common with the fiercely independent career women in Candace Bushnell's New York. Positioned in the market by Le Vision Pictures of Beijing as a coming of age story, the rite of passage for one dazed girl in the film is to grow into a competent personal assistant to her oh-so-handsome male boss whose aloof demeanor and penetrating gaze constantly destabilizes her. Another girl from a nouveau riche family, showers her boyfriend with expensive clothes and accessories. The third girl -- chubby, suffering from stereotypically low self-esteem and emotional eating -- is made fun of throughout the movie as she obsesses over young tennis player, the one man in the movie who actually possesses something resembling muscle. The fourth girl, a budding fashion designer from a humble background, is trapped in an abusive relationship with yet another good-looking boy. Taking a page from the book of popular East Asian "idol dramas" that cater primarily to youth in their teens and 20s, the film features popular singers, actors, and actresses, cast regardless of any actual acting ability. Good idol dramas frequently feature teen romance, in which brooding characters with dark secrets and painful pasts elicit pathos and real emotion. Tiny Times, however, has done away with complex story arcs and character development. The film looks great but ultimately lacks substance. The film speaks to the male fantasy of a world of female yearnings, which revolve around men and the goods men are best equipped to deliver, whether materially or bodily. The four characters' professional aspirations amount to serving men with competence. The film is a Chinese version of "chick flick" minus the emotional engagement and relationship-based social realism that typically are associated with the Hollywood genre. The only enduring relationship in Tiny Times is the chicks' relationship with material goods. The hyper-materialist life portrayed carries little plot but serves as a setting for consumption, and is more akin to MTV or reality TV than real drama. With its scandalously cartoonish characters, the film would have worked better as a satirical comedy, except that the director is too sincere in his celebration of material abundance to display any sense of irony. We were caught completely off guard, stupefied by the film's unabashed flaunting of wealth, glamor, and male power passed off as "what women want." Its vulgar and utter lack of self-awareness is astonishing, but perhaps not too surprising. It appears to be the product of full-blown materialism in modern, urban Chinese society. The film speaks to the male fantasy of a world of female yearnings, which revolve around men and the goods men are best equipped to deliver, whether materially or bodily. It betrays a twisted male narcissism and a male desire for patriarchal power and control over female bodies and emotions misconstrued as female longing. Whatever happened to Chairman Mao's proclamation that "women hold up half the sky?" In Tiny Times Chinese society has regressed to an earlier era. Years of accelerating economic growth have brought unprecedented social and geographic mobility, and increased pressure on Chinese men to succeed, to follow the trail of power and money, leaving their women behind. Economic growth has exacerbated the gender gap, often reviving cultural traditions that reduce women to a sub-human status. The contempt for women that I have witnessed in China in recent years is alarming. The male chauvinism in the film is symptomatic of a society where the choices for women are severely limited. The ones with bodies are enticed to become material girls under the thumb of men, the ones with brains who dare to use their thinking faculties are condemned to eternal loneliness, and the ones possessing neither are banished to a corner. Much to our horror and dark amusement Tiny Times' director Guo Jingming, won the award for "best new director" at the recently concluded Shanghai International Film Festival. A film school dropout turned popular fiction writer, Guo aspires to be an author of contemporary Shanghai. Though not a Shanghai native, he nevertheless invokes the renowned Shanghai novelists Eileen Chang and Wang Anyi as his predecessors. Guo's imagination paints Shanghai as a world city whose very spirit is equated with wealth and the attendant decadence. Nevermind that he paints a world devoid of compassion and humanity. Nevermind that the fabulously wealthy Shanghai in his fictionalized world is hardly the reality for majority of citydwellers. Guo claims to represent the post 1990s "me generation" and has apparently hit a home run with the youth audience. According to the latest statistics from the China Film Distribution and Exhibition Association, the average age of a moviegoer in China has dropped to 21.2 years in 2012 from from 25.7 years in 2009. Tiny Times's owes its success partly to a marketing campaign that relied heavily on social media networks reaching tens of millions of students. The Chinese film industry has come aboard celebrating a work of fiction with a dubious imagination, awful acting, and a story that is non-existent. One can only surmise that Chinese cinema has momentarily lost its way -- in its desperate pursuit of domestic market share in competition with a growing number of imported Hollywood blockbusters, the Shanghai International Film Festival traded cinematic quality for box-office returns. If this pattern holds, Chinese cinema will soon hang by a thin thread. It cannot rely on weightless movies like Tiny Times to sustain its market momentum. It comes as a consolation to us that the film averaged low ratings of 3.4 and 5.0 out of 10 on China's two most-visited online movie portals, mtime.com and douban.com. Director Guo said that Tiny Times allowed its viewers to dream about a future with "a great career, great friends, and a handsome boyfriend." We're not at all sure if this is what Chinese President Xi Jingping had in mind when he announced his opaque "Chinese Dream." We sure hope that both Chinese cinema and Chinese women can envision their own alternatives. This post also appears at ChinaFile, an Atlantic partner site. 
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| Posted: 16 Jul 2013 08:09 AM PDT  Culture Secretary Maria Miller leaves Downing Street in London on September 4, 2012. (Reuters) An unexpected upshot in the wake of Britain's latest spending review was the fate of the culture budget -- it avoided a pummeling. What might be considered an easy target in a time of austerity emerged relatively unscathed, with only a 5 percent decrease in funding from £472 million to £451 million. The arts world had already been hit by a 30 percent cut meted out in the 2010 budget and had been waiting to find out whether they might be granted a reprieve at this latest round of belt-tightening. This time, advocates for arts funding breathed a collective sigh of relief, with the budget reduction described as a "best-case scenario" -- they had been bracing for much larger cuts. What explains this unexpected generosity -- if you can call it that -- on behalf of the cash-strapped British government? It seems that the supporters of the arts were able to stave off the axe by presenting their case to Britain's chancellor, George Osborne, in economic terms. The current Culture Secretary, Maria Miller, led the charge in this marketing of the arts, presenting the economic argument in a keynote speech delivered two months before the budget review. She suggested that state funding of the arts be viewed as a form of "venture capital," encouraging investment in the British brand: The value of the artistic sector could be "leveraged" to deliver economic growth. According to Miller, "culture should be seen as the standard bearer for [Britain's] efforts to engage in cultural diplomacy, to develop soft power, and to compete, as a nation, in both trade and investment." Her reasoning mentions the "dividends" from the artistic industry, and the hope to achieve "financial security" for the sector -- making it clear that Miller knew how to wield the economic jargon favored by the top political brass in the Treasury. But Miller's rationale for funding was stridently challenged by the outgoing head of Arts Council England -- the body that oversees cultural spending -- Dame Liz Forgan. Forgan, whose term as the ACE head ended in January 2013, had previously spoken out for the intrinsic value of the arts in her departing address: "the arts, the expression of our culture, are as deep a need in us as food, shelter, sex, and security. We must have them. We must use them to express our human nature and our social existence." In reaction to Miller's monetary argument, Forgan warned against the dangers of "directing our investment in culture for its commercial potential," lambasting this approach as a self-defeating exercise, which will result in "worse art" and a "worse commercial outcome." The Scottish Secretary of Culture, Fiona Hyslop, also criticized the instrumental case for the arts, and responded to Miller's keynote speech by reiterating why Scots may wish to vote for independence in a 2014 referendum. She said Miller presented art as a commodity. By contrast, Hyslop suggested the Scottish National Party "doesn't measure the worth of culture and heritage solely in pounds and pence," but values the arts "because they are our heart, our soul, our essence." But by no means was the furor about the current state of the culture budget coming only from politicians. Commentators at The Telegraph railed against arts funding altogether, spurred on by the cost of the event at which Forgan presented her final speech as Chair of the Arts Council. Derided as a "lavish farewell party" by critics, it ran up a bill of nearly $12,000, paid for by public funds. In light of the event, one writer took to labeling arts funding an "outrage" and a "racket," with "the rich taking money from everyone else so that they can have their enjoyment paid for." Culture funding, it seems, can be just as contentious as more socially controversial political issues. Though Miller's emphasis on the economics of art was met with condemnation from some quarters, her argument received a boost from an independent report published just weeks before the spending review. This study, carried out by the Center for Economics and Business Research, found that arts and culture make up 0.4 percent of Britain's GDP, a strong return on less than 0.1 percent of government spending. The cultural sector was also seen to have increased its contribution to the U.K.'s GDP since 2008, even as the wider economy contracted over this period. The report's findings also highlighted the important role of the arts sector in supporting the commercial creative industries, which make up 10 percent of Britain's GDP. Drawing on academic research, the report concluded that "proximity to arts and culture can translate to higher wages and productivity" through innovation and diffusion of ideas. There are of course risks to an economic approach to the arts. If patronage is doled out on a monetary basis, we may miss out on important artists and artworks that may not appear likely to be a big success. This is the potential problem with Britain's approach to the arts -- culture is neither kept out of the government sphere, nor is it totally embraced within it. The arts get awkwardly wedged into governmental policy as another way of boosting economic growth. However, the strategy has led to programs that have spurred regeneration and growth in struggling regions and cities, led by the vigor of government-funded cultural quarters. These localities would have found it difficult to attract private patronage otherwise, since the majority of philanthropic arts funding is funneled to London. In the United States, the Brookings Institute held a symposium in 2012 investigating these same themes: the economic benefits of innovation and ideas, and the part that the arts have to play in this. The findings cited the impact of creatives boosting growth in cities, and the stimulating effect of arts and crafts participation on entrepreneurship in science and engineering. However, cultural bodies in the United States have not focused on these economic returns in making their case for funding. Arts spending in the U.S. continues to be hotly debated and is not unified under one department, though there have been tentative calls for a Secretary of Culture (an argument revisited recently by The Atlantic.) One of three organizations responsible for cultural grants, the National Endowment for the Arts, currently receives federal funding of $146 million, though it is being hit by $7.3 million in cuts as a result of the sequester. By comparison, the level of French culture spending is a staggering $4.53 billion. Even so, the GOP has occasionally suggested shutting down the department altogether -- an election promise featured in Mitt Romney's unsuccessful campaign. Taking a cue from the U.K., in the future the NEA could try making its case for funding in terms that the GOP might respect: The economic dividends returned by investment in culture. 
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| The Best MLB Player to Build a Franchise Around: Mike Trout Posted: 16 Jul 2013 08:05 AM PDT  AP / Paul Sancya Years ago, as a beat writer covering the Yankees, I'd play a game with other writers as the All-Star Game approached. We'd check out the ballot and ask each other, "Who would you build a franchise around?" There were no rules or qualifications. You just picked the young player you thought would carry a team. Looking back on that time, the picks weren't sure things. In 1985, for instance, Dwight Gooden was a 20-year-old phenom for the New York Mets coming off one of the most fabulous seasons ever by a pitcher his age: 24-4 with league-leading ERA (1.53), strikeouts (268), and innings pitched (276.2). Who could have anticipated the torrent of drug-related problems that would keep him from fulfilling his breathtaking potential? And if I had been covering the Mets in 2003, I would have jumped on 20-year-old shortstop Jose Reyes. Many of us believed he'd be the next Derek Jeter (and in some ways, he has been). A terrific defensive shortstop with better-than-average switch hitting power, Reyes had it all—except durability.
There's no such thing as a sure bet when it comes to finding a young player to build a team around. But there's no question as to who's the best bet among today's players. It's Mike Trout of the Los Angeles Angels, who fits more wish lists of baseball front offices than any current player in the major leagues. First, Trout is just 21—he'll turn 22 this August. And thus far in his young career—having played 40 games in his rookie season in 2011, 139 last season despite a brief trip back to the minors, and every game his team has played this year, except one—he seems quite durable. Second, he already has a spectacular (if short) track record. Not only was he named AL Rookie of the Year last season, but he also had, by consensus among baseball analysts and historians, the best season of any rookie player in the game's history, batting .326 with 30 home runs, 83 RBIs, and a league-leading 129 runs scored. He also led the league in stolen bases (with 49) and was thrown out just five times. The most hotly debated topic at the end of 2012 was who most deserved the AL's Most Valuable Player award—Trout or the Tigers' Miguel Cabrera. Cabrera won, but it wasn't because he'd had a better season. Anyone who wins baseball's Triple Crown can count on getting the majority of votes from old-guard sportswriters resistant to any new way (meaning, introduced in the last 30 years) of looking at baseball statistics—and Cabrera, sure enough, led the league in batting (.330), home runs (44) and RBIs (139). Trout, despite playing his home games in a ballpark less favorable for hitters, had just about the same season at-bat as Cabrera, with a combined On-Base Percentage and Slugging Average of .963 to Cabrera's .999. He positively swamped Cabrera in other contributions, stealing 45 more bases, grounding into 21 fewer double plays, and posting much better fielding stats. So far this year, Cabrera, at age 30, is having the best season of his career, and Trout seems to be improving slightly on his last year's numbers, batting .322 at the All-Star break with a .399 OBP and .565 Slg. Also, he seems to have mastered the key defensive position in the outfield, center field, and has started there for many of the 92 games he's played this season. And third, Trout has versatility. Branch Rickey was the first analyst to define the "Five Tools" for measuring a player's all-around value as the ability to hit with consistency, hit for power, run, field, and throw. It was a rare player, Rickey thought, who was possessed of all five talents. In his 1965 book, The American Diamond, Rickey could find only two players in all of baseball who could do it all: Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle. In the long run, he felt, a team would get the most value from such a multi-skilled player because when he went through a long batting slump or injured his throwing arm, he could still make other contributions to his team. Trout is not the only "Five Tool" player in baseball today—the Yankees' Robinson Cano and the Mets' David Wright, to name just two players on this year's All-Star squads, can do it all, too. But Trout, crucially, is the only one under the age of 25 and the only player in the game who is ranked at the top by analysts in each offensive and defensive category. There are some young players who are regarded as having similar potential, such as the Nationals' 20 year old leftfielder, Bryce Harper. But Harper hasn't shown the ability to hit for a high average (he's just .269 in just under 200 career games) or steal many bases (he's stolen just 24), plus his durability may be in question, having missed 31 games this season with left knee bursitis. Trout is not the only "Five Tool" player in baseball today—the Yankees' Robinson Cano and the Mets' David Wright, to name just two players on this year's All-Star squads, can do it all, too. But Trout, crucially, is the only one under the age of 25. There isn't much doubt, then, that if most major-league teams could pick one player to build their team around, it would be Trout. Some would opt for a starting pitcher like the Mets' 24-year-old fireballer Matt Harvey, but pitchers are subject to so many ailments and injuries from year to year that an everyday player who has shown no weaknesses after two seasons in the majors seems like a surer thing. The real question, though, is this: Is it worth the money that it would take to tie one player to a team during his prime years? I think the best answer came from the late Baltimore Orioles Hall of Fame manager, Earl Weaver. I interviewed Weaver in 2002 on the publication of his book, Weaver on Strategy, and asked him about the wisdom of giving a long-term contract to a team's best young player. "Well," he told me, "Yes, I'd have to say that it is a very good idea if you're fairly certain that the player doesn't seem injury-prone and if he plays a key defensive position. And even if he is injury-prone, would you take a chance on a young player like a 19- or 20-year-old Mickey Mantle? I think I would." But, he continued, there's no point in giving that kid the long-term contract unless you intend to build a good team around him. In baseball, you don't have salary caps like you do in other sports, so, assuming you spend your money wisely, there's no limit to what you can pay for other good young prospects. Of course, there's no guarantee that any kid, no matter how talented, is going to pan out. But if you make the deal at the right time, the return can be outstanding. You sign a guy for six years or eight years or whatever, and he's as good as you hope he's going to be, you can practically pencil in his numbers every season. That's the kind of guy you can build your team around. Weaver's Orioles did just that with Hall of Famers Cal Ripken, Jr. and Eddie Murray, who spent 34 of their combined 42 major-league seasons with the Orioles. Trout won't become a free agent until after the 2017 season, but which time he'll be 25 and just heading into what should be his prime years. At a mere $510,000 salary this season, he is the biggest bargain in baseball, and the Angels would be wise to tie him to a long-term deal well before 2017, when the competition gets hot. Mike Trout is the closest thing baseball offers to a lock on the future. 
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| Does Anything Go? The Rise and Fall of a Racist Corner of Reddit Posted: 16 Jul 2013 07:46 AM PDT  If you're the type of person who reads blogs on the Internet, you're probably already familiar with Reddit. The online community driven by user-submitted content made headlines after hosting "Ask Me Anything" Q&A forums with folks as powerful and established as NPR's Ira Glass, Cory Booker and yes, even President Obama. With its democratic voting system controlling the prominence of content, Reddit has long been seen as a place that values the insightful. But among the good content also lurked a darker corner trying to inch its way into the broader Reddit community: r/niggers. Through the recent banning of r/niggers, one of Reddit's most offensive communities, it seems that the site's leaders are making a conscious choice to keep Reddit a place where the insightful wins out over the hateful. Reddit's About section proclaims the site a "free speech place." In the past, General Manager Erik Martin has said that he sees Reddit as a place where anything goes, so long as that anything doesn't break the law. That attitude may have worked well back when the site was still finding its footing, but as it's skyrocketed in both popularity and legitimacy, it no longer seems sensible to cling to an "anything goes" policy. Reddit higher-ups have made it clear that they are unwilling to allow the website's more unsavory communities to tarnish its reputation as a whole. In a phone interview, Martin told me, "There isn't any community that would like being judged by the worst 0.0001 percent of its users." By banning r/niggers, Reddit's leaders have continued to establish reasonable benchmarks for what the site will and will not tolerate, a measure that will allow it to continue to amass mainstream credibility. As the offensive name implies, r/niggers was a place for users to bond over their disdain for black people. While Reddit itself boasts 69.9 million monthly users, r/niggers had only 6,000 members. On the other hand, on a percentage basis, it was one of Reddit's fastest growing online communities this year. Visiting r/niggers was a mental chore. Emblazoned with icons like watermelons and fried chicken legs, the site maintained a rotating roster of photographs of whites who have presumably been the victims of violence by blacks, as if no white person has ever committed a violent crime. Most of the community's content was about what you'd expect: news stories about crimes committed by blacks, pseudoscience about black inferiority, and personal anecdotes about troublesome interactions with black people. While the subreddit's postings were unquestionably racist and offensive, what was really disturbing about r/niggers was the way the group's commentary and subscribers seeped into the broader Reddit community at large. It became a launching pad for excursions into the rest of Reddit. This particular dark corner of the web was never merely content to stay in its corner; its members ventured out. Earlier this year, r/blackgirls, a Reddit community "that caters to the interests/support of all the black girls who are also Redditors," got a first-hand look at what r/niggers is capable of. After a user at r/niggers noticed that the r/blackgirls moderator was inactive, and thus not actively monitoring posts to ban rule-breaking users, another suggested flooding the subreddit with racist comments and content, commonly known as "brigading." He commented:
After his comments offended his target audience, he gleefully added, "they didnt seem to care very much for my comments... Have been trolling hard for a few hours and there is still so much possibility...it[']s endless." For the next few weeks, r/niggers users flooded r/blackgirls with racist comments on regular contributor's posts, racist posts of their own, and even sent racist private messages to r/blackgirls users. Thanks to the amount of racist comments on every post, the r/blackgirls community became practically unusable and regular users began to jump ship. A new community called r/blackladies has since been formed. After their successful disruption of r/blackgirls, posters at r/niggers continued their activities in other subreddits, including more brigading and comment vote manipulation. Vote manipulation is one of only 4 things explicitly forbidden in Reddit's official rules. Back in May, Reddit admins began shadow-banning (making user comments invisible to everyone except the user) handfuls of r/niggers posters for this rule-breaking behavior. The admins warned moderators about this behavior in a series of back-and-forth private messages; one even warned that the community could be banned outright. Martin hopes Reddit users will see these warnings as proof that even the most offensive communities on Reddit have to continually and overtly break the rules before ever facing a ban. He explains, "Hopefully users can tell from the amount of warnings we extended to a subreddit as clearly awful as r/niggers that we go into the decision to ban subreddits with a lot of scrutiny." The mass banning of several individual r/niggers subscribers makes it seem as though Reddit admins were drawing a line in the sand, and they were, just not for the reasons you might think. Reddit's official user agreement maintains that by signing up for Reddit, users "agree not to use any obscene, indecent, or offensive language," not to post any "graphics, text, photographs, images, video, audio or other material that is defamatory, abusive, bullying, harassing, racist, hateful, or violent," and "to refrain from ethnic slurs when using the Website." But Reddit admins cited vote manipulation and brigading as the reason for the r/niggers user bans. As one Reddit user pointed out, "Getting /r/niggers for brigading is a bit like getting Al Capone for tax evasion. It may not be false, but it doesn't quite capture the whole picture." Much like posters on r/creepshots and r/jailbait before it, r/niggers subscribers maintain that theirs is firmly a free speech issue; they see themselves as "the last bastion of free speech on Reddit." They argue that despite their calls for racialized violence and liberal use of slurs, r/niggers is a legitimate "venue for discussing racial relations without censorship or political correctness." r/niggers users even see their shadow-bans as "dying" for the cause of free speech. When their accounts are banned, the community's moderators add their names to r/RedditMartyrs, a kind of online graveyard that honors former r/niggers subscribers with names like CatchANiggerByTheToe and CoonShine. Its sidebar proclaims that they died for their cause, noting, "In 2013, Reddit declared war on freethinking subscribers of an uncensored community known as r/niggers. These martyrs were shadow-banned by reddit admins and turned into ghosts. Gone but not forgotten, we honor their memory and their sacrifice." Subscribers of r/niggers insist that their controversial stances on race and racist commentary elsewhere on reddit have made them the target of false accusations. In a last ditch effort to save their community from being shutdown by watchful admins, moderators at r/niggers even changed their subreddit rules and started urging their users not to post racist comments in other subreddits. Unfortunately for r/niggers, once you let the racist genie out of the bottle, getting it back in can be tough. It was too late for moderators to successfully reign in the racist behavior and comments that their subscribers left across other subreddits. For instance, just days after the rule change, Reddit users like I_SLEEP_LIKE_COONS continued to post racist comments across Reddit. In r/aww , a subreddit dedicated to pictures of cute things, I_SLEEP_COONS left this comment on a picture of a black school girl holding hands with a white classmate. The trails of disruptive racist comments left in the broader Reddit community began to seem like as much of a fixture on the website as pictures of cats and bacon jokes. In spite of the moderators last ditch efforts to save their community, Reddit admins banned r/niggers late last month. The official statement from the admins maintains that the community was banned for "a long line of moderator offenses punctuated by threats/incitements of violence." Some users speculated that the breaking point may have been an image of a rifle's laser scope posted by an r/niggers moderator in preparation for a hypothetical race riot triggered by the Travyon Martin verdict. Martin dispels that claim. "It wasn't any one thing," he maintains. The demise of the community was commemorated in r/redditmartyrs by user Chicken_McNigger with a clip of the Confederate anthem "I am a rebel Soldier." Dismayed, former r/niggers users lamented the loss and tried to make their cases. One user points out: Here's what anti-whites need to understand. It's not the skin color that we hate. I mean we hate that too because it looks like the color of shit. But really what we care about is the genetics underneath. Unless you show me a study showing black labs are more likely to murder and rape than golden labs. I'm going to assume they're the same. That's the difference between you and us. We look at facts. You think the demise of civilization is something to laugh about. Another user likens r/niggers' banning to the exile of the Jews: "Like the Jews we now have no homeland to call our own. What shall we do now?" After the banning, r/niggers regulars and moderators tried to regroup in new subreddits. They quickly started several alternatives like r/groids, r/nigs, r/chimps, each one being banned before being able to pick up steam. Rather hilariously, their attempt to repopulate at r/niggersrebooted resulted in the subreddit being flooded with pictures of puppies, rather than racist content. Seemingly defeated, they moved their users and content offsite to rniggers.com, Not content to go down in silence, former r/niggers moderator Chuck_Spears has taken to spamming Reddit admins with messages full of hatespeech and statistics that "prove" black inferiority. Apart from the vocal minority of overt racists on Reddit, most folks seem pleased to see the banhammer come down on r/niggers. Over at r/blackladies, the community built to replace r/blackgirls, the news was met with a celebratory gif posting thread that lasted for days. In r/subredditdrama, a community dedicated to chronicling the Reddit scuttlebutt, one user quips: "First they came for the racists... and good fucking riddance." Reddit's banning of r/niggers is a big step for the site's development. It seems to indicate that admins are interested in taking a more hands on approach to shaping Reddit's overall direction. Most mainstream media organizations have some kind of enforced policy for what users are and are not allowed to post, and it seems like Reddit is attempting to solidify its place amongst them. After all, would prominent figures like President Obama and Ira Glass want to return to a website that realistically might leave them with an inbox full of racial slurs? Obviously, Reddit didn't invent racism and it wasn't the first place to host in on the web. As long as the Internet exists, there will be racists spewing hate on the Internet. But if Reddit is supposed to be an online space that celebrates the insightful, it's good that users will no longer be made to wade through so much ignorance to find it. 
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| As Reform Fades, Marco Rubio Is Suddenly Quiet About Immigration Posted: 16 Jul 2013 07:39 AM PDT  After relentlessly defending an ambitious overhaul of the nation's immigration laws for months, Marco Rubio didn't respond when House Republican leaders last week trashed it as a "flawed...massive, Obama-care like bill." The Florida senator's office, which churned out countless press releases touting his interviews and speeches about the legislation, hasn't said a word about immigration since the Senate passed the bill on June 27. The silence is a sign that, at least publicly, Rubio won't try to dissuade the House from a piecemeal approach that excludes a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants. Instead, Rubio is turning to the safer, more conservative-friendly issues he campaigned on in 2010 -- President Obama's healthcare law, federal spending, the deficit -- but with less support from Republicans than before, according to public polls. He's put off abortion opponents clamoring for him to spearhead a controversial ban after 20 weeks and staying put while potential rivals in 2016 jockey in the early-primary states. In the past week, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky addressed Republican activists in Nevada, while Senator Ted Cruz of Texas announced plans to headline a fundraiser in New Hampshire on Aug. 23. (Both Paul and Cruz voted against the immigration bill.) Rubio hasn't been to a presidential stomping ground outside of Florida since November when he visited Iowa. By stepping back from the limelight, Rubio is acknowledging the limits of his own powers of persuasion as well as political realities. The abortion ban has little chance of clearing the Democrat-controlled Senate, while most House Republicans worry more about averting a conservative challenger in the 2014 mid-term election than about courting Hispanic voters in the 2016 presidential race. But in a sign he's as much of a political juggernaut as ever, his team reported raising about $3 million in the past three months, exceeding his previous quarter even as opposition to immigration reform mounted. "He's rightfully taking a hiatus from immigration while the House does its thing," said Al Cardenas, chairman of the American Conservative Union and a former head of the Florida Republican Party who supports the Senate bill. "He'll reappear and help get this done in the homestretch, and he'll be known as a key player in major legislation." Rubio has pivoted to health care, just as the Obama administration decided to delay part of the health care law for one year, offering him new grist at an opportune time. He's declared he won't support any budget deal that does not defund Obamacare and address the mounting deficit. "I believe deeply we need to constrain spending because we are spending a lot more money than we are taking in, about $1 trillion a year more than we are taking in, borrowing about 40 cents of every dollar we spend in the federal government," he said on the Senate floor last week. Rubio's ultimatum regarding Obamacare comes as another potential showdown on the federal budget looms in September. In the past, he's shown willingness for brinksmanship and voted against deals to raise the debt ceiling and avert the so-called fiscal cliff. Rubio didn't endorse allowing undocumented workers to earn citizenship until January amid increasing calls for immigration reform from GOP leaders shaken by Republican nominee Mitt Romney's poor showing with Hispanic voters. "He came to Congress talking about the debt, Social Security and Medicare, not about immigration, so it's natural for him to return to those issues," said American Action Forum president Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a top adviser to McCain's presidential campaign in 2008. Asked about the prospect of the health-care law's repeal, he said, "The House has voted to repeal it 37 times and it's still the law of the land, so it's a stretch. It's a negotiating position." Though Rubio is a staunch social conservative who opposes gay marriage and abortion rights, he has invested more time and political capital in honing his image as a fiscal and military hawk. After the House passed a ban on abortion after 20 weeks, abortion opponents turned to the charismatic senator to take up the charge. Rubio was supportive but hasn't agreed to sponsor the bill. One hitch is that one of Rubio's Republican colleagues, Utah Sen. Mike Lee, has already endorsed a more limited bill that would ban abortions in the District of Columbia after 20 weeks. "The pro-life movement sees Senator Rubio as one of the most articulate and powerful spokesmen in this fight and someone who has been active on this issue for a long time," said Mallory Quigley, a spokeswoman for the anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony List. "One thing we know he is and will continue to be is meticulous in planning. His office is working on determining the best language for his Senate colleagues to coalesce around." Rubio's allies maintain they aren't worried about a dip in the polls here or there. Who knows if immigration will be a top issue in 2016, anyway? "Marco Rubio has demonstrated a willingness to take a risk to do something important for the country," said his pollster, Whit Ayres. "Ultimately politicians who do what they think is best for the country get credit for being leaders. In the great scheme of things it will be one of number of things he's done." 
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| How Becoming Mayor Changed Rahm Emanuel on Immigration Reform Posted: 16 Jul 2013 07:33 AM PDT  Jim Young/Reuters; Rob Pongsajapan/Flickr Three years ago, when he was White House chief of staff, Emanuel was seen as an obstacle to liberal immigration reform in Washington. At the time, members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus blamed him for a provision in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that bars immigrants who are in the country illegally from accessing publicly subsidized health insurance. Before that, he called immigration "the third rail of American politics," warning that Democrats who tried to work on the issue would suffer heavy political losses. Now that Emanuel has become the mayor of Chicago, things appear to have changed. "I am committed to making Chicago the most immigrant-friendly city in the world," he announced last summer as the city rolled out a wave of new initiatives, including helping immigrants navigate paths to citizenship, providing new scholarships for undocumented students, and formally instructing law enforcement officials not to ask anyone about their immigration status except in the case of "serious" crimes. What does it mean for a city to stand in open defiance of federal policies on immigration, particularly when the city is led by President Obama's former chief of staff? Can city-level policies and perspectives affect the national debate about immigration reform? Emanuel seems to think so. In April, he co-authored an op-ed in the New York Times with Illinois Representative Luis Gutiérrez about the barrier created by high citizenship-application fees. Over the past six months, he has released several statements lauding progress on immigration reform in Congress, always emphasizing the potential economic boon to come from improved pathways to citizenship. During a conversation with The Atlantic's Steve Clemons and tax-reform advocate Grover Norquist on Monday, Emanuel's position was the same: Chicago has nothing to lose and everything to gain from welcoming immigrants to the city, and the country could learn a thing or two from this lesson. "There's nothing like the dedication of the child of an immigrant," he said. "They know in their DNA that they're here, they're lucky, and this better not get screwed up, or your parents are going to kill you. That is a gold mine for us -- I wouldn't trade it for anything." He mostly stuck to talking about city-level initiatives and benefits, but he admitted that what happens in Chicago won't stay necessarily stay in Chicago. Asked whether his reform efforts could reverberate in the national dialogue, he said, "What we do in the city of Chicago, we do in our self-interest. Do I think that, as a student of government and politics, what happens at the city or what happens at the state doesn't have ripple effects and people look to it? Yes, [it does.]" Emanuel also unabashedly called Chicago a sanctuary city, a sometimes-derisive term for communities that promise powerful resources and minimal investigation of immigration status in the course of day-to-day law-enforcement activities. "We always had a sanctuary-city agreement done by mayors by executive order," he said. "That's not good enough. If somebody wants to change that, I want them to have to repeal it rather than not sign it and reauthorize it." Chicago isn't alone in promoting policies that seem to go against the grain of federal policy. Across the country, cities and states have created initiatives that stand at odds with federal statues, from actively helping undocumented immigrants get driver's licenses to more strictly enforcing deportation policies. To some extent, though, the issues facing state and local governments are fundamentally different. Susan Martin, a Georgetown professor and former executive director of the U.S. Commission on Immigration, clarified the difference in an interview, arguing that "the federal government is responsible for immigration policy, but it's the states and localities that are responsible for immigrant policy. The federal government has the responsibility for determining who comes into the country, who gets legal status, how to enforce the laws - everything with regards to admission, entry, and deportation. But the integration of immigrants takes place in local communities, so it's the states and localities that have responsibility for education policy, for a lot of public health policy, [and] for the environment in communities that either makes it easier or harder for newcomers to adapt to living in the U.S." There's another issue tangled up in the question of how to support new immigrants: enforcement. In the same way that some communities are purposefully welcoming new immigrants, undocumented or not, other communities have tried to create stricter standards for apprehending and detaining people who are in the country illegally. One widely discussed case of this was SB-1070, the 2010 Arizona legislation that, among other things, required state law-enforcement officers to determine the residency status of anyone they deal with, whether for a routine traffic stop or a full-out arrest, if there's a "reasonable suspicion" that they're in the country illegally. Certain aspects of this legislation were struck down by the Supreme Court in 2012, but not all; officers in Arizona still have the right to check the immigration status of anyone they deal with. Pieces of similar legislation in other states like Alabama have been struck down, but the legal status of this kind of enforcement approach remains somewhat murky across the country. Especially on the topic of enforcement, certain state and local officials have had a remarkable effect on the national conversation about immigration -- take Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, for instance. Across the spectrum, Martin said, these local voices "definitely have an influence on the national conversation, and it's in two ways. One is because they can reflect the grassroots perspective and bring that in. The other thing is the difference we're seeing between the debate in the Senate and the debate in the House. House members are much more affected by how these issues play out at the local level. What they're hearing from their constituents, including the political figures in their districts, has a lot more weight." So what's on the mind of most state and local stakeholders? Money. Ann Morse, who heads up research about state-level immigration policy for the National Conference of State Legislatures, emphasized the enormous budget burdens that fall on city and state governments, particularly because states are required to provide K-12 education and medical care to immigrants who are here illegally. "The broad trend of looking at this is largely focused around both costs and responsibilities. Typically, cost/benefit studies were done on what states can expect to incur, and they focus around the Supreme Court mandate in K-12 education and around the requirement to serve everybody in emergency rooms. Those twin costs drive state budgets, and states must balance their budgets." On the other hand, she pointed out, there has also been a "growing recognition that immigrant workers are a key and vital part of state's economies. [The focus] shifted a bit from the illegality quotient at the state- and local-level to seeing baby boomer retirement and seeing that we need to build up growth in certain industries, notably high-tech or hospitality, and the workers are not there. Even in a high-unemployment national landscape, there are pockets of low unemployment in key industries in almost every state." The resulting impasse looks a little bit like a game of immigration-policy chicken. Lacking power over visas and deportation, but still saddled with large bills for public services required by the federal government, states and cities are left trying to create workable solutions using every bit of power they have. "I think part of it is the 'stop us before we do something' [attitude] -- it's like stepping up to the line of authority and trying to force the other branch to act," Morse observed. At the state level in particular, she said, "it does seem like there's been a "wait and see" attitude, where we've had 1,200 or 1,500 bill introductions in the past seven years. We're now seeing quite the drop-off as states seem to be hopeful that federal action could occur." So, what can one mayor (or one church leader or one state legislator) do? Maybe the better question is what they have to do; states and cities stand to gain the most economically and take the hardest hits fiscally depending on various immigration policies. The answer seems to be this: If immigration reform doesn't pass at the federal level, state and city officials will have to keep trying to balance their priorities with dysfunctional policies about who can enter and exit the country. As Morse said, "That's what they're trying to communicate: The status quo isn't working. By not acting, you are granting amnesty." 
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