Master Feed : The Atlantic |
- How Putin Uses Money Laundering Charges to Control His Opponents
- The Startup as Manifesto
- You Know What Would Be Awesome? A Selfie-Phone With a Tripod Built Into the Base
- The Sad, Hateful, Insecure Non-Apology the Taliban Sent to Malala
- Sorry, Deficit Hawks: The Debt Crisis Is Over Before It Began
- The State of Wyoming Has 2 Escalators
- When Judges Assume That Men Cannot Control Their Own Sexual Urges
- The Only Polio Ward in India
- The Deep State, the Permanent Campaign, and the Frayed Fabric of American Democracy
- A Mystery Behind the Rise of Student Debt
- Rahm Emanuel: Republicans Need a 'Permission Slip' to Vote for Immigration Reform
- Is China Serious About Re-Balancing its Economy?
- Lizards in Food, and 3 Other Reasons for Tragedies Like the School Lunch Deaths
- Sports Could Save the TV Business—or Destroy It
- Hong Kong, Chrome: 2 Updates and Pentimenti
- Chuck E. Cheese's, Silicon Valley Startup: The Origins of the Best Pizza Chain Ever
- How Some Women Benefit From Marrying a Man Who Makes Less Money
- Ira Glass's Favorite Part of David Rakoff's Last Writings
- On Being Black in China
- Why Don't We Just Kill All the Mosquitoes?
- Russian Orthodox Video Game Invites You to Whack Pussy Riot With a Cross
- The Man Who Burned Every Painting He Made Between 1953 and 1966
- Delaying Parts of Obamacare: 'Blatantly Illegal' or Routine Adjustment?
- Late-Night Comedy Roundup: The GOP's Best Gift to Obama Since Mitt
- <i>Glee</i>'s Finn Hudson Was a Revolutionary, Surprisingly Complicated Everyman
| How Putin Uses Money Laundering Charges to Control His Opponents Posted: 17 Jul 2013 02:50 PM PDT  Russian President Vladimir Putin (left) speaks with Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu (right) and Chief of Staff Valery Gerasimov during a flight to watch military exercises in Russia's Zabaykalsky region July 17, 2013. (Reuters/Aleksey Nikolskyi) Last Thursday, Sergei Magnitsky was convicted of tax evasion. The only problem was he was not there to hear the verdict read. Magnitsky was killed in Moscow's Butyrka prison in 2009, likely as a result of beatings and a lack of medical treatment. His crime was uncovering a $230 million tax fraud involving members of the government while working as a lawyer for William Browder (an American investor who was also convicted in absentia). But Magnitsky's conviction is not simply an example of the capricious nature of the legal system in Russia; it is a view into how the use of money laundering, financial laws, and Russia's financial intelligence unit are used to control political dissent. Recently, Putin launched a much publicized "de-offshorization" campaign aimed at fighting corruption and countering the flight of money from the country, much of it acquired illicitly. This initiative was launched in response to revelations that Russia was losing vast sums of money every year (estimated at $56.8 Billion in 2012), and that many state officials--from the heads of security agencies to the chair of the Russian Duma's ethics committee--had significant overseas assets (including condos in Miami, worth an estimated $2 million). Much of this wealth was being sent to offshore tax havens in Europe and beyond. Russian holdings in Cyprus amounting to over $30 billion (largely the proceeds of corruption or deposited as a form of tax avoidance) also inspired this campaign. (This scheme of tax avoidance is called "round tripping," whereby the proceeds made in Russia are registered with a shell company based in Cyprus, then repatriated to Russia avoiding taxes due to a taxation agreement between the two countries). These revelations gave Putin the expedient cover with which to launch "de-offshorization," which included banning state officials from having overseas assets. The idea is that, by forcing Russian elites to hold their money inside the country, Putin can cement their loyalty by threatening their bank accounts. As Russian Duma Deputy Dmitry Gorovtsov noted on the new law banning state officials overseas assets, "This law is about political, and not legal, control. It will be applied selectively and subjectively." The statement is particularly prescient due to the fact that corruption is an integral part of Putin's rule, forming the foundation of his patronage system but costing an estimated $300 billion in an economy of $1.5 trillion, or 16 percent of its yearly GDP. Unsurprisingly, Russia was rated worst among countries surveyed for the perceived likelihood of paying bribes in Transparency International's 2011 Bribe Payers Index. As NYU Professor Mark Galeotti notes, "Politics determines everything and corruption is mobilized as a weapon against enemies (and a treat for friends). Your abuses get publicized as a result of your losing influence within Putin's court, not the other way round, reflecting the vagaries of factional politics in that court." Hence, Putin's calls for action at the G8 summit in June on offshore tax havens, de-offshorization and the recent tightening of anti-money laundering laws are aimed at strengthening his ability to control the elites of the country and to shore up his political base. But patronage is only one aspect of the tandem that underpins the stability of the Kremlin; the other is coercion. Supporters are kept in line through an implicit threat to throw them in jail and to seize their assets should their loyalty be called into question. The ability to provide financial incentives--through the acceptance of dubious business practices--acquires their support, the threat of jail and repossessing their assets ensures it. A silent agreement between Putin and business elites was reached in the aftermath of Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky being thrown into jail in 2003 for attempting to challenge Putin politically (Khodorkovsky was also charged with additional money laundering and fraud charges in 2010 as he was nearing the end of his first sentence). As William Partlett of Columbia University and the Brooking's Institute said about the incident, "The message to other oligarchs was clear: follow the rules or face devastating legal consequences." This approach has its origins in the beginning of Putin's rule in 2000, when he began to institute a system of governance carefully modeled around the needs of a vertical power structure controlled by himself. The political and business elites of the country were allowed to continue their activities as usual, in exchange for their personal loyalty to the system and their promise to forgo any opposition to the Kremlin. This support was ensured through the selective enforcement of Russia's financial and money laundering laws. "His (Putin) plan was to use reformed formal legal institutions to complement his personalized rule," Partlett notes, "In fact, strong legal institutions were a means to an end--a tool for ensuring that he could punish those who did not comply with his informal rules of the game through selective prosecution." The crux of Putin's ability to punish dissenters revolves around Russia's financial intelligence unit, Rosfinmonitoring. Putin created Rosfinmonitoring--under the direct control of the president and placed it in the charge of a fiercely loyal subordinate, Viktor Zubkov (also the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the natural gas and oil giant Gazprom). Rosfinmonitoring, and the laws criminalizing money laundering (Russian Federal Law No. 115-FZ ), were established on the recommendation of the U.S. and European powers, who sought to institutionalize a global anti-money laundering regime in the 1990's and early 2000's. This push was led by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), a Paris based organization that sets rules and recommendations for countries to combat money laundering--its head is now Vladimir Nechayev (a veteran of the defunct Federal Tax Police and more recently Rosfinmonitoring). One of their primary recommendations was the creation of a financial intelligence unit to oversee the country's banks and financial institutions. These units require financial institutions to pass along information regarding transactions and account information that are considered suspicious. In the West, this information is used to combat organized crime and terrorism. In Russia, it is also used to create a compendium on the financial holdings of the country's elites. This information is held as assurance in the event that it is needed to draw up legal charges. Moreover, businessmen like Browder or Khodorkovsky are not the only targets of money laundering charges. Opposition figure and anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny is currently being tried in the provincial city of Kirov on charges of embezzlement stemming from his time as an advisor to the regional governor. The likely turnout of this highly politicized trial is unfortunately already clear: in Russia 99 percent of defendants tried by judges are convicted, with the judge overseeing Navalny's case has not given a single acquittal in 130 cases over the last two and a half years. The use of money laundering laws against not only businessmen but opposition figures is aimed at giving Putin a degree of legitimacy in his crackdown against human rights. By using accusations of financial impropriety, crackdowns can be labeled law enforcement actions as opposed to directed political actions. As Leon Aron of the American Enterprise Institute notes, "Putin's variation of the repression regimen is what might be called the suffocation- with-a-soft-pillow approach: selective but constant harassment of opposition leaders and activists; the 'investigation' of these figures' private affairs, often resulting in administrative and criminal charges that lead to fines or short-term detentions..." But Rosfinmonitoring's power derives from their monopoly over information, namely, the unfettered access to anyone's business dealings and financial accounts. But its monopoly ends at Russia's borders, and that makes offshore tax havens like Cyprus, Latvia, Luxembourg and Israel, to name a few, all the more dangerous. They undercut Putin's ability to threaten the elite's financial dealings when they move their assets and businesses outside Russia. Accordingly, offshore tax havens became the centerpiece of the recent G8 meeting, and why Putin plans on using Russia's G8 presidency in 2014 to forge a consensus on offshore tax havens. These agreements will enable access to financial information no matter where accounts are held, increasing the strength of Rosfinmonitoring further. The effectiveness of Rosfinmonitoring and financial laws has become glaringly apparent in recent years. The verdict on Thursday was merely another example. And because of this, Magnitsky will now be famous not only for the landmark Magnitsky Act passed by Congress, but for becoming the first person in Russian history to be tried and convicted posthumously. 
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| Posted: 17 Jul 2013 02:44 PM PDT
Today, a new mobile app called hi launched. It lets you place content on a map, like Findery or Google Earth or (kinda) Instagram. They call it narrative mapping, and (as you may know) I expect this kind of geoblogging to become increasingly important in the smartphone world. So, go check out hi. You might like it. (Here's a post I made from the Berkeley City Club.) While most startups gesture at the notion that they are ideas made manifest, hi's founder, Craig Mod, has gone all in. hi is Mod's publishing manifesto, encoded for you to play with. Here's how he described it in a 3,000 word essay he put out about his thinking about the product.
So, for example, mediamakers know that people do Internet stuff on their phones and they do Internet stuff on their computers. But most people don't actually have interesting theories on the relationships between these two platforms. The platform difference is baked into the core of hi's interface. When you're on the go, you're in "Sketch" mode, in which you can snap a photo and type up to 20 words. Then, later, probably from your desktop (though possibly from your phone), you can "extend" these moments with further reflections on the moment you sketched. "It's a system meant to strike balance between the spontaneous and the deliberate. Sketches embody spontaneity. Extensions are deliberations," Mod wrote in his essay. "In practice we've found this system to push us from seeing to noticing." These two layers -- sketches and extensions -- also form a tiered publishing system. "That is -- the sketch tier is your quiet public stream. The extended tier is the more promotable top stream," Mod explained. "What's nice about tiers is that there is an implicit amount of high-quality signal-to-noise filtering built into them. If someone takes the time to extend something, then that's a good base indication of interestingness around that moment or place." What I love about all this is that it's so explicit: this is a hypothesis about people's relationship to their phones and the places around them. Is it a good hypothesis? Do people want to sketch-and-extend, rather than Instagramming or what have you? I don't know. But I'm glad someone is trying to find out. 
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| You Know What Would Be Awesome? A Selfie-Phone With a Tripod Built Into the Base Posted: 17 Jul 2013 01:45 PM PDT  Writer Lionel Foster tweeted this afternoon, "Selfies wouldn't look like selfies, if more people had tripods." Which is true! The distinctive angles, not to mention arm and head postures of the selfie (which are awkward and terrible), result from a deficiency in the phone's picture-taking apparatus. And it got me thinking: you know what would be awesome? A selfie-phone that had a tripod built into the base, that you drop down to create right proper self-portraits. (It was once a respectable form!) It would be voice-controlled, of course. "OK, Selfie-Phone, take a picture." And then just imagine, you get some iterations... and suddenly, it's the year 2017 and Samsung releases the Selfie Universe IV, which is like a tiny, voice-controlled, picture-taking Segway that drops out of the bottom of the phone. It robotically self-adjusts to take perfectly flattering pictures according to the proprietary algorithms that the company created in partnership with OKCupid. You're just voguing and it's scooting around the table shouting out to you with a posh London accent, "Perfect. Beautiful. Chin up a little. Great. Gorgeous." Just saying, that would be awesome. (And terrible. But still awesome.) #YKWWBA: The first in an occasional series of our technological dreams. 
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| The Sad, Hateful, Insecure Non-Apology the Taliban Sent to Malala Posted: 17 Jul 2013 01:28 PM PDT  Reuters A senior figure in the Pakistani Taliban has written the teen education advocate Malala Yousafzai a letter expressing "shock" that she was shot by a Taliban gunman last year on board a school bus, saying, "I wished it would never happened and I had advised you before." Some headlines cast this as the Taliban saying they "regret" the attack, but the document seems more like a justification than an apology. In fact, it reads, perhaps unsurprisingly, like the howlings of a deranged, insecure extremist, one taking a stab at personal PR without backing down from the hatred that motivated Malala's shooting in the first place. Though the writer, Adnan Rasheed, claims that he has "brotherly" feelings toward Malala's family, much of his screed consists of fearful ranting over the vast -- and apparently Jewish -- conspiracy to instill secularism among Muslims, complete with the occasional use of the punctuation of choice among intoxicated celebrities and crazy exes: the multiple question mark.
Rasheed accused Malala of conducting a "smear campaign" against the Taliban, and said it was that -- not her educational advocacy -- that motivated the attack against her.
Throughout, Rasheed doubles down on the idea that he's not against education -- just education of the non-Islamic variety (so ... most education).
When the Taliban took over Malala's home region, Pakistan's Swat valley, in 2007, they ordered all girls' schools closed. She and her family fled to Abbottabad, and in 2009 the Pakistani Army kicked most Taliban fighters out of Swat. After she was shot last October, Pakistani Taliban spokesmen said that "if Malala survives, we'll target her again" because she's a "secular-minded lady." That doesn't sound like someone who "wished it had not happened." At the end of his letter, Rasheed inadvertently illustrates why Malala's call for universal schooling is so crucial. He suggests his own solution for her educational needs: that she attend only a religious, segregated school near her home.
It's a bad idea to try to publicly logic away your hatred. It's not like we expected better of the Taliban, but this is not a statement of remorse, it's a self-pat-on-the-back. 
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| Sorry, Deficit Hawks: The Debt Crisis Is Over Before It Began Posted: 17 Jul 2013 01:20 PM PDT  The debate is over, and the deficit hawks lost. After years of warnings about trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye could see, it turns out they just couldn't see far enough: the budget is moving quickly -- too quickly -- towards balance even without a "grand" bargain. In other words, we are not Greece. The debt doesn't need to be "fixed." And dancing to Gangnam Style (or the Harlem Shake) will not change this. This isn't how it was supposed to be. There was supposed to be a fiscal crisis. That's what budget-cutting superfriends Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson said would happen in around two years time ... over two years ago. Salvation from our fiscal sins would only come if we repented and cut social insurance programs like professional deficit scold Pete Peterson has been saying we urgently need to, well, for decades now. Of course, revenues also needed to go up to make this a "bargain" both sides could support -- and that's where things fell apart. Republican anti-tax absolutism made any kind of actual deal impossible. But deficit hawks dreamed a dream of a grand bargain, and don't want to admit it was just that -- a dream. Just look at the Washington Post editorial board's recent call for a renewed focus on the deficit. Now, replacing the sequester with a backloaded mix of spending cuts and tax hikes would be good policy, but the deficit itself is solved for now. As you can see in the chart below from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), we only need $900 billion more of savings to stabilize the debt over the next decade -- and that's assuming the sequester and its $1.1 trillion of additional cuts stop after this year.  Our $600 billion of new savings mean the debt is already stabilized. Wait, what $600 billion of new savings? Well, that's how much less the Congressional Budget Office figures we will spend on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid over the next decade compared to what it figured back in February. And that's how the $1.5 trillion of additional savings the CBPP said we needed half a year ago turned into $900 billion now. In other words, we can definitely afford to wait. Now, it's true that even if we keep the sequester, the debt will start rising at the end of the decade as more Boomers hit their golden years. We're going to need some combination of tax increases, benefit cuts, or, when it comes to Medicare, price controls, to get the debt back on a downward trajectory. But we don't really know how we'll need to do to do so. Indeed, the big fiscal story of the past few years has been the slowdown in healthcare inflation -- and the big fiscal mystery is whether it will continue. If it does, Sarah Kliff of the Washington Post reports it could save us $2 trillion the next ten years. That's about as much as the Budget Control Act and the sequester saved together. Sometimes kicking the can is the responsible thing to do. 
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| The State of Wyoming Has 2 Escalators Posted: 17 Jul 2013 12:53 PM PDT ![[IMAGE DESCRIPTION]](http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/science/assets_c/2013/07/shutterstock_128547374-thumb-570x428-127402.jpg) In 2008, Megan Lee -- then a reporter at the Star Tribune in Casper, Wyoming, and the author of the paper's "Answer Girl" column -- received the following query: "How many escalators are there in Casper? In Wyoming?" Lee looked into the matter. She found that there was one escalator in Casper -- and that the escalator, it seemed, was the only one in the state. Lee's reporting was later amended: it turns out that there were, in fact, two escalators in Casper -- and therefore in the state of Wyoming -- in 2008. (Actually, technically, there were four: two sets of escalators, each with an ascending and descending set of stairs.) Both were located in banks. One was set in the city's First National Bank building, and the other in the Hilltop National Bank. Here is Lee, escalating with abandon: So, yes: In 2008, Wyoming had two-and-depending-on-how-you-count-four escalators, in the entire state. Which works out, using 2012 state population statistics, to 0.000003467 escalators per capita. Not a high number, but hey, per the Governor's office itself, "it is widely assumed that there are no escalators in Wyoming." So, take that. A lot can change in five years, though. And since the two-escalators stat is getting some attention now that Wyoming is back in the national news, I decided to embark on a very important fact-finding mission when it comes to the technological infrastructure of the great state of Wyoming. How many escalators, I wanted to know, are in the state right now -- in 2013? Best I can tell ... two. Yep, still two. I asked a spokesman for the Wyoming governor's office whether any escalators might have been constructed in the state since 2008; he wasn't sure, but thought the newly-constructed airport in Jackson Hole might be a contender. The airport is single-level, though, it turns out -- no escalators necessary. And there seems to be no escalator elsewhere in Jackson, either. "I'm not aware of any," said Andy Heffron of the city's Chamber of Commerce. "I don't even think the hospital has an escalator," another Chamber representative said. It's "just stairs and elevators, that kind of thing." But maybe the city of Sheridan has one? "I'm not aware of any escalators in the city," Sue Goodman in the City Planning Office told me. "Just elevators." But what about Cheyenne, the state's capital and its most populous city? No again. "We haven't had one for quite a long while, as a matter of fact," Dick Mason, in the city's Building Office, explained. There used to be an escalator in an old J.C. Penney building, he said ... but the escalator was demolished along with the building itself. (Fellow former escalator-havers of Wyoming include Pink Garter Plaza, mall-style complex in Jackson, and the Casper/Natrona County International Airport.) Today, for the most part, if you need to get up a level and can't or don't want to use stairs, elevators are the way to go. And that makes sense. Escalators may be magical machines, the stuff of literature and comedy and epic, epic poetry; they are also, often, less practical than their fellow vertical people-movers. "There are code issues involved with escalators, which make them somewhat less popular," Mason noted. "The code does not want openings between adjacent floors that are unprotected." Say there's a fire: stairways offer people enclosed ways to escape buildings, while escalators generally don't. If you're an engineer thinking about the best ways to move people between floors, escalators often lose the contest. Plus, escalators tend to be more expensive to install and maintain than their counterparts. Whereas "elevators," Mason said, "are pretty much foolproof." The dearth of escalators in Wyoming could also have to do with the particularities of the state's buildings themselves. "I think a lot of it has to do with some of the buildings being older," Sue Goodman said -- and older buildings with multiple stories tended to rely on stairways and elevators for their inter-floor transport. Two of the most common settings for escalators are malls and larger airports, and Sheridan, for its part, has neither: its stores tend to be standalone structures. Plus, "in the Great Out West, I think land is probably cheaper," Sheridan said. So rather than build up, "we spread out." 
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| When Judges Assume That Men Cannot Control Their Own Sexual Urges Posted: 17 Jul 2013 12:48 PM PDT  In Homer's great epic poem The Odyssey, penned in the 8th century BC, the male hero Odysseus barely escapes the devious sorcery and seduction of several archetypal female temptresses. Perhaps the most universally recognized of these temptresses are the irresistible Sirens, who beckon Odysseus and his crew with their hypnotic songs, songs famous for clouding men's minds and causing them to blow off course to shipwreck on the women's symbolic shores. Only stopping their ears with wax to remove the temptation succeeds in saving him and his men from the Sirens' clutches. Yet Odysseus, titillated by the thought of them, wants so desperately to hear their bewitching song despite the danger, that he tasks his men with binding him to the mast in order to prevent him from succumbing to their lure and leaping overboard to his ruin. Last Friday, the Iowa Supreme Court ruled on a gender discrimination case brought by a dental assistant who had been let go from her job because she was "too attractive." According to the court documents, the dentist who employed her, Dr. James Knight, claimed that "her clothing was too tight and revealing and was distracting." He testified that he "didn't think it was good for him to see her wearing things that accentuated her body." In fact, in their ruling, the Iowa justices wrote that Knight acknowledged that he once told his assistant that "if she saw his pants bulging, she would know her clothing was too revealing." The dentist and Melissa Nelson, a 32-year-old married mother of two, had exchanged messages about their respective children and always had a friendly relationship, one which Nelson describes as being like that of a "father figure" and daughter. Apparently, the dentist had a decidedly less paternalistic interpretation of his relationship to her, and began sending her increasingly sexual text messages in the tenth year of her employment with him. Stumbling upon some of her husband's text messages, the dentist's wife decided that Nelson was too much of a threat to the Knights' marriage to be allowed to continue working alongside the good doctor. She was simply too alluring to him. So Knight, unable to stop his ears with wax, terminated her employment after ten years of service. Nelson, in response, sued Knight for gender discrimination. Unfortunately for her, the seven male justices of the Iowa Supreme Court, ruled unanimously both in December and on the subsequent appeal on July 12th, against her. Their ruling? Melissa Nelson was not terminated because of her gender, but because of the "perceived threat to Dr. Knight's marriage" that her continued presence in the workplace represented. This court decision should alarm anyone who is a member of the workforce. The only basis for Melissa Nelson's termination was her physical appearance as a woman. This, her supposedly irresistible allure as a woman, was the "perceived threat" to her boss's marriage. Note the phrasing in the judges' ruling; Nelson's presence in the office was acknowledged as a "perceived threat" rather than a tangible threat. The only party who behaved inappropriately in this case was her boss, not Melissa Nelson. On one occasion, Knight texted her asking "how often she experienced an orgasm." She ignored the text. She did not respond to any of his advances. There was never a physical relationship between the two, something on which both parties agreed in their courtroom testimony. Still, through some spectacular semantic maneuvering and creative interpretation of precedence, the Iowa justices came to the conclusion that Knight had every legal right to terminate his employee in order to stop her from causing his pants to "bulge" and provoking him to send her sexually explicit text messages. The underlying assumption in their ruling was clearly that her mere presence was too intoxicating for any reasonable person to expect him to behave. The legal precedence this ruling establishes endangers the premise of equal rights in the United States, and the ramifications are much further-reaching than this isolated case. The ruling appears to establish that an employee fulfilling all of his or her obligations in a job and doing nothing inappropriate can be legally terminated for unwittingly provoking another person's desires. In other words, this ruling shifts the responsibility for a lack of impulse control and inappropriate behavior from the perpetrator of sexually aggressive workplace conduct onto the "perceived threat": the archetypal femme fatale, the provocative Siren. It's a historically well-worn response to blame female victims for provoking heinous behavior in men. Look at cases like the recent Steubenville rape trial, for example, in which a teenager was gang raped while unconscious by a number of football players at a party, videotaped, and then crudely blamed across the Internet for her own rape by a startlingly large portion of her community. The most upsetting thing about the Iowa case, however, is that victim-blaming is now being legally justified and entered onto the judicial books just as there had started to be some tangible progress for women's rights between the '60s and '90s. The justification for the court's ruling presupposes that men are no more than conscienceless animals, unable to behave in any way other than purely instinctively and outwardly. This premise doesn't just disempower women. It also disempowers men, perhaps to an even more insidious and far-reaching extent, when they are taught from that it is not even expected of them that they would be able to control their responses to stimuli, that it is some kind of fundamental truth that men are blathering, drooling slaves to their impulses, wholly incapable of making rational, moral decisions, lacking personal agency. It's ultimately an exceedingly emasculating generalization to write into the lawbooks. Amid all of the understandably angry women reacting to this case, where are the masses of outraged men objecting to the utterly reductionist and disempowering characterization of their gender? Rulings like that of the Iowa Supreme Court are not merely misogynistic. They are also misandrous. Where are the thinking men who will stand up against the belief that they cannot be trusted with civil behavior? Do we need to accept that the only way for them to behave in mixed company is to seal their ears or bind them to the mast as they sail past alluring women at the workplace, out on the street, in social settings, rather than to teach them to take some personal responsibility and exercise a bit of self-control as grown men? Ultimately, this assumption should be as alarming to men as it is to the women who fall victim to it. Don't the men out there want to show that they are capable of evolving past archaic gender clichés? Men must become part of the conversation. A good place to start would be to take some tangible steps to empower young boys with the belief that they are capable of making respectful choices and instill in them a sense of agency rather than helplessness when it comes to sociosexual behavior. As long as men do not recognize this as a pressing male issue that they too have a stake in, and subsequently become involved in a visible way, out on the picket lines, authoring op-ed pieces, taking vocal offense at the notion that they are unthinking creatures susceptible to being bewitched by modern-day Sirens, the fundamental belief system that fuels the disquieting gender politics in this country will never change. 
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| Posted: 17 Jul 2013 12:05 PM PDT St. Stephen's Hospital, situated near old Delhi, has the only polio ward in the country. It has on average 10 beds devoted to polio patients. Given that polio is not an emergency case, most hospitals struggle to give polio patients immediate care. However, St. Stephen's is a rare find. It offers free-of-cost polio corrective surgeries to patients who come from far corners of the country. The orthopedic team builds the braces and prosthetics in-house, which keeps their costs low. Here's a glimpse inside the ward.   Polio breaks down limbs, most noticeably in the legs. Braces are custom-made for each of the patients within the hospital.  Ankle foot orthoses for polio patients are stacked in the basement of the hospital.  Positive and negatives are made for prosthetics using rudimentary materials.  Polio-corrective surgeries enable the patient to walk again with the help of assistive device. This patient had his feet turned inward; through a series of surgeries, Dr. Varghese, who runs the polio ward, was able to rotate the foot 180 degrees.  Most polio corrective surgeries cost anywhere from $500 - $1,000, a fraction of what they would cost in the U.S.  Dr. Varghese has several assistants who work under his guidance, and train in his orthopedic practices.  The hospital has performed approximately 7,000 surgeries since the program began in 1987. Recently, they've been seeing older patients as the polio virus is fading in India; but those were affected 10- 20 years ago when the virus was at its height are now finding treatment.  The polio ward will house about 150 patients each year. Each patient has different needs -- some cases can be corrected without the help of a prosthetic, others need assistive devices, and most require braces. (All photos by Esha Chhabra) Previously: Eradicating Polio in India: Portraits 
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| The Deep State, the Permanent Campaign, and the Frayed Fabric of American Democracy Posted: 17 Jul 2013 12:01 PM PDT
Obviously I consider yesterday's Senate developments to be (modestly) good news. The McConnell-era Republican minority had finally over-reached in subjecting Barack Obama to a burden no other president has faced: routine filibuster blockage of his own executive-branch appointees and attempted de-facto nullification of several agencies. The Reid-era Democratic majority finally decided to draw the line. When they stuck together, with their 51+ votes, McConnell and his minority backed down. [Fake ad from Daily Kos.] So we have returned, for our 44th president, to some of the rules that applied for presidents #1 through #43. That this counts as a "breakthrough" is really a reminder of how far things have devolved. I refer you to my main theme, laid out in detail in dispatches like these (one, two, three): that America has almost everything working in its favor, except for the increasingly flawed structure of our governing institutions. In that vein, a few more readings for the day: 1) "The Withered Writ," in The American Prospect, by the long-time legal writer (and my good friend) Lincoln Caplan. We all know what the absence of habeus corpus protections has meant in Guantanamo. I'd had no idea, before reading this piece, how sweepingly they have been curtailed for Americans living here in the "homeland." [Update See this Huffpo Live segment on the article and the habeus situation.] 2) The "Deep State," Cont. Two days ago I quoted Mike Lofgren and Mark Bernstein on structural paradoxes of our current politics. In response to Lofgren's description of the military-police-financial-technological "Deep State," here is Joseph Britt of Wisconsin, who like Lofgren previously worked as an aide to a Republican U.S. senator:
3) "Emails from a Dead Man." This is not exactly about political structure, but it's powerful enough, and closely enough connected to our public values, that I want to mention it. Last month This American Life did an episode on the Iraqis who had helped U.S. troops or officials over the past decade -- and who now, of course, are in mortal danger precisely because of their "collaboration" with us. The ugly record of leaving people stranded has become a too-frequent feature of U.S. military ventures from Vietnam onward -- and the likelihood of this happening is of course one more reason to be cautious about such commitments. After its program, T.A.L. put up a selection of emails from one such stranded Iraqi. Read it and reflect that this is being done in our name. 4) "Fear of the Left." In the earlier installment, Mark Bernstein argued that today's right wing has no self-interested reason to compromise on anything. As far as they're concerned, no situation could be worse than what Barack Obama is already dishing out. One reader agrees: [This] analysis is exactly right. And indeed, you don't have to think just of race riots as examples fear of left wing violence. There was plenty of it just 40 years ago. You recommended a book recently about the hijacking craze of the late 1960s, early 1970s, well many of those were examples of left wing terrorism. But it wasn't just that, of course. There were all sorts of "liberation front" groups operating at the time, bombing government installations (and DoD funded labs at universities). I have long felt that it is precisely the lack of credible left wing violence that has empowered the GOP to become increasingly extreme. And while I have no desire to see more left wing violence, I do think we need to acknowledge that its disappearance in our society has essentially removed a restraint on right wing lunacy. No. Another reader disagrees:
That's all for now. 
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| A Mystery Behind the Rise of Student Debt Posted: 17 Jul 2013 11:51 AM PDT The wild growth of student debt seems like an illness with an obvious cause. Both enrollment and tuition prices went on a tear over the past two decades. Add the two together, and you get today's trillion-dollar problem. Right? Well, not quite. In a recent report, the Hamilton Project's Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney argue that the student-loan boom is, in fact, a bit more more mysterious than journalists and student advocates tend to acknowledge. It's not that tuition hikes and growing class rolls aren't playing a part -- they certainly are. But there's something else going on, too. In time, it seems, the average student has started paying less out of pocket towards her own education, as shown in the green area in the graph below (the purple area shows grant aid and the blue shows loans).
Here's a nitty-gritty version of the story. According to Greenstone and Looney's calculations, out-of-pocket spending started to slide during the '90s. Adjusted for inflation, students contributed about $4,000 of their own money a year towards tuition at the start of that decade. By 2000, though, student contributions were down to about $3,000. They roughly stabilized until the recession, at which point they plunged once more. Today, students are paying just $2,125 out of pocket. It's not much of a puzzle why students and their families leaned harder on loans and federal aid after 2008. The country got poorer and the Obama Administration just about doubled the size of the Pell Grant program for low-income and working-class students. Families had less money. The government offered more. But what happened during the 1990s? Like Greenstone and Looney, I don't have an answer ready. But I think I can eliminate one possibility. While college enrollment grew during the period, there wasn't some massive, disproportionate influx of low-income students. Here, based on Department of Education data, is how the distribution of undergrads between income brackets changed over the decade at public colleges. If anything, college kids got relatively wealthier overall.
Meanwhile, at private colleges students became a tiny bit more middle class. But the number of truly poor students shrank.
These charts include only at full-time, dependent students who have family help paying for school. But the pattern is similar with self-financing independent students, who made up about half of all undergrads at the time. Meanwhile, part-time students are generally less likely to borrow for school than full-time students, meaning any increases among their ranks should have increased out-of-pocket payments. Again, shrinking family contributions are just one piece of the puzzle when it comes to student debt. But it seems like an important one to understand. 
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| Rahm Emanuel: Republicans Need a 'Permission Slip' to Vote for Immigration Reform Posted: 17 Jul 2013 11:40 AM PDT  The Atlantic Speculation on the fate of immigration reform has seen mixed outlooks over the past few months, but at least two voices from opposing political camps are somewhat optimistic. At an interview with The Atlantic's Steve Clemons on Tuesday, Grover Norquist and Rahm Emanuel both spoke about strategic ways to get the issue through the House. The real cause of the impasse, Emanuel said, is election-time optics for House Republicans. "This is really not a problem for Democrats. This is really an issue that's in the Republican party -- it's in their hands. There are members of Congress that are running from specific districts -- few of them pop their heads up and think about the party's future. They're thinking about their own," he said. Despite worries about tough races ahead, Emanuel said, influential figures on the right have the power to grant Republican representatives a metaphorical "permission slip" to work toward a solution on the issue. "It is very important to have Grover [Norquist], talk radio, [and] the religious community engaged, because there's a group that do need a permit slip to say yes, and no Democrat's every going create that. The idea of going to the White House [with a plan for] 'how to create the permission slip for a Republican member of the House to vote for something' is like a dumb idea," he said.
But do conservative thought leaders want to engage with the issue of immigration? At the very least, Grover Norquist does. He believes that the economic argument for higher levels of immigration should sound familiar to conservatives. "I work with all of the nice Republicans in the House and Senate to encourage them to do what Reagan did. This is the Reagan Republican deal; this is not compromise, this is not moving to the left. This is mobility of labor, mobility of capital -- this is what they teach you in in Hayekian economics," he said. Norquist expressed little tolerance for those who argue that immigration would hurt American workers, even taking a moment for a political-philosophy throw down against Thomas Malthus, the 19th century philosopher who argued that a growing population will necessarily outpace the availability of resources like food and water. "The argument that immigration depresses wages is the argument of children. People who talk that way are Malthusians, and I think we have a general consensus that Malthus was a little off in his predictions. But they're also anti-people. How do you argue with people who think that people are the problem? A freer economy at all levels, including the mobility of labor, will make the country stronger, the economy stronger -- [it] will make everybody better off," he said. This exchange may give the impression of bipartisan consensus in Washington, at least in terms of ideology. Emanuel has been a longtime Democratic strategist, while Norquist is a self-described Republican known for advocating tax cuts and Reagan-era economics. Both argued that Republican principles align with reform efforts: Creating pathways to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, expanding legal limits on who can enter the country, and improving border security. But is there a greater ideological divide at work in the debate about reform? In her recent Atlantic article, Molly Ball argues that the debate hinges on something else: "It's about whether the pragmatists can seize the reins of the Republican Party, or whether the angry, oppositionist, populist strain retains control." Whether or not you agree with her characterization of immigration reform opponents, it seems that only certain Republicans are ideologically aligned on the issue. For example, Iowa Republican Steve King argues that pathways to citizenship are a form of "amnesty" for people who have broken the law. As he reportedly said earlier this month, "I'm not going to support any kind of legalization because legalization is amnesty, is eventual citizenship if not instantaneous citizenship, and if we do that we get more law breakers." Others, like Texas Republican Randy Weber, think allowing more legal immigration obscures the more important issue, which is border security. With this group, blessings from conservative thought leaders and media may not be enough to ensure successful passage of legislation in the House. 
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| Is China Serious About Re-Balancing its Economy? Posted: 17 Jul 2013 11:26 AM PDT  A vendor selling watermelons naps as he waits for customers at a market in Taiyuan, Shanxi province, July 17, 2013. (Jon Woo/Reuters) The 7.5 percent GDP growth China reported on Monday was no surprise. Roughly in line with the government's target growth rate for 7.5 percent in 2013, it was also consistent with the government's message of late that it would prioritize structural reform over growth. Not that there weren't any surprises in the Q2 data. As it happens, the composition of China's economic output showed something quite unexpected. Make that "alarming," actually. Consumption contributed only 45.2 percent of GDP in H1 2013, down from 60.4 percent in H1 2012 (paywall). Meanwhile, investment's share leapt to the highest levels we've seen since 2009. Put another way, in Q2, China basically reverted to the same economic structure it had in 2010, when Beijing was pumping trillions of dollars worth of stimulus lending into the economy. Here's a look at that -- and recall that this doesn't even count the estimated $2 trillion in off-balance-sheet lending: As everyone should know by now, the Chinese government needs to "rebalance" the economy. The goal is to move toward a sustainable economy and away from the current model, which effectively taxes households in order to provide cheap credit to businesses. The problem is that this shift is hard. If it pulls back dramatically on lending, growth will implode. In fact, June gave us a foretaste of the financial bedlam that would cause, when a liquidity shortage caused banks to default on each others loans and generally be unwilling to lend to each other. But not only would the financial sector go into tailspin, but hundreds of businesses will fold. Those that stay afloat will stop hiring or slash headcounts. Consumers will understandably freak out. And they most certainly won't start spending the way the economy needs them to.  MORE FROM QUARTZ
The government can't do that. Instead it must gradually slow credit growth while simultaneously spurring consumption. In Q2, neither of these things happened. The questions remains: was Q2′s shuffle of investment and consumption a fluke? Or does it mark a return to the heady lend-o-rama days of 2010? The biggest argument in favor of the "fluke" theory is that China's official data is notoriously unreliable. In addition, consumption of services is hard to track. Since it usually takes longer to amass that data, its contribution might not be fully accounted for in the Q2 data. The points in favor of "not a fluke," however, should not be ignored. First we have steadily rising loan growth. Also, retail sales during H1 grew only 12.7 percent on the previous year, after expanding 14.4 percent in H1 of 2012. Plus, the growth in per capita income of urban residents slowed in the first half. At 6.5 percent, wages are now growing more sluggishly than China's economy, which will stifle consumption even more. It'll take a few more quarters to see what's really going on. But if Q2 really was a backslide to the 2010 growth model, "rebalancing" will be even more drawn-out and excruciating than anyone expected. 
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| Lizards in Food, and 3 Other Reasons for Tragedies Like the School Lunch Deaths Posted: 17 Jul 2013 10:41 AM PDT  Indian children who fell sick after eating a free school lunch lie at a hospital in Patna, India, on July 17, 2013. (AP Photo/Aftab Alam Siddiqui) First, the students complained that the food tasted odd. Then, they began vomiting. Now, 25 children are dead and dozens more are hospitalized after eating a lunch laced with insecticides in the Indian state of Bihar. Officials believe the food contained traces of a phosphate used on rice and wheat crops to ward off insects. This is unfortunately not an isolated incident: People die in India of food poisoning and other avoidable causes with relative frequency. In 2010, the Lancet found that 60 percent of child deaths there could have been avoided. It's still unclear whether the food was intentionally or unintentionally contaminated, but there are three challenges that Indian government programs face which often play a role in these kinds of catastrophes. 1) Unsanitary conditions in many areas In a separate incident this week, 50 children fell ill after eating school lunches at a different school, and there was a lizard discovered in the food. In the past, frogs, insects, and other creatures have been found in children's government-provided meals. Much of India still has problems with basic sanitation. The country's bad roads mean it can take a long time for food to reach rural areas, increasing the likelihood of the food spoiling in the process. Refrigeration and food storage also leave something to be desired -- it's possible the lunch was stored next to the chemicals and was cross-contaminated somehow, explained Michael Kugelman, an India expert at the Wilson Center in Washington. 2) Corruption and a lack of oversight Theft and corruption in anti-poverty programs is a widespread problem. Last year, Bloomberg discovered that $14.5 billion in food aid was pilfered by corrupt politicians in the state of Uttar Pradesh and sold to local traders at market rates. The New York Times noted that NGOs charged with executing charity efforts like the lunch program often cut corners to save money. In this case, the school's head apparently "fled" the school after the contamination was discovered, which, at best, gives the appearance of impropriety. India's weak government oversight also means that lax food safety sometimes goes unpunished. "You can have situations where a food inspector will come to a food prep area and cite someone for violating policies and hygiene, but they can be paid off and will go away, and people will be preparing food as they used to," Kugelman said. 3) The scale of the operation Much of India's population struggles to find enough food -- almost a billion people there eat less than the government recommends, and 21 percent of all adults and almost half of all children under 5 are malnourished. The school-lunch program, which was enacted with the goal of reducing malnutrition, sought to feed 120 million children -- a herculean task for any nation, but especially so for one that still lacks strong government monitoring. As the the exasperated minister of human resource development in Bihar told the New York Times: "It is just not possible to taste meals in all the 73,000 schools before children eat the food." *** I asked Kugelman if incidents like this mean India isn't the rapidly-modernizing "success story" we're always hearing about. Not necessarily, he said, but "this amplifies one of the most important realities in India today -- for all of its successes and achievements over the last 20 years, it's still a developing, extremely impoverished country in which modernity has not become all-inclusive." This time last year, India was hit by a massive power outage that impacted 670 million people, becoming largest blackout in history and a symbol of government negligence and poor infrastructure. "It just shows that for all the progress that's been made," Kugelman said, "There's a long way to go." 
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| Sports Could Save the TV Business—or Destroy It Posted: 17 Jul 2013 10:23 AM PDT
Reuters Here's the week's news in TV economics in one sentence: Without live sports, the TV business could fall apart; and because of live sports, the TV business could fall apart. Confused? Ha, well, blame the bundle, perhaps the most successful and most misunderstood business model in entertainment. If the $70 billion television industry is on the verge of imploding, as viewer attention flees to DVR'd shows and Netflix accounts, live sports is the keystone keeping the roof from collapsing. And live is the key word. The bulging of the bundle and the rise of on-demand video have thinned out ratings and partially severed the tendon between live-viewing and lucrative advertising. But in a time-delayed video world, the biggest games still drive dependable live audiences, making sports rights the most valuable resource in the whole TV ecosystem. ... so, that's why cable needs sports. Here's why sports could destroy cable ... Networks have recognized that sports has unique social currency in live viewing, and they've stormed the marketplace in the last few years, throwing egregious sums of money in exchange for exclusive deals. Those costs are trickling up. As Patrick Hruby explained, "big time sports are taking a minimum of $84.90" out of each family's budget even if they don't care about sports. This amounts to a "sport tax" on families forced to pay for something they don't watch. Cable companies sensing this backlash are starting to resist new sports networks. There is even chatter about what would happen if sports existed on a separate "tier" that untied the Gordian Knot of TV. Households will decide for themselves if the cost of their cable package is worth the price ($73 a month, on average). But before we cheer the death of the cable bundle and the end of the sport tax, consider what might die along with it. "The AMC Tax" Let's talk about a channel that many non-sports fans might consider utterly critical to the bundle: AMC. You might think that AMC makes money from all the people who watch "Mad Men" or "The Walking Dead." The opposite is true. AMC makes money from all the people who don't watch "Mad Men" or "The Walking Dead." Here's what I mean. Only 2.5 million people watch the typical "Mad Men" episode. Eleven million watch the zombies. The other 80+ million households who have, but don't watch, AMC still have to pay between $3 and $3.50 each year to the network out of their cable bill. They don't have a choice. Much more than advertising, it is these mandatory fees that explain exactly how AMC makes money. Reading from the company's 10-K annual report: "Affiliation fees [i.e.: a little more than $3 from each pay-TV household each year] represents the largest component" of AMC's revenue. "Mad Men" and "The Walking Dead" might still be produced in an a la carte world. But maybe not. We only know that today, these sensational shows exist because the vast majority of the country that doesn't care who Don Draper is still pays for his suits. That's the AMC Tax. A National Non-Mandatory Tax You can think of TV as "I pay for what I want, plus a sport tax," or " ... plus an AMC tax," or "... plus a History Channel tax." But when you line up 100 million pay-TV households, a bigger picture emerges. We are all paying each other's TV taxes. The cable bundle is perhaps the closest thing to a non-mandatory flat tax in America. The idea is that if 100+ million households all pay $70ish a month for television, the breadth of the customer base will support a diverse and thriving entertainment business without asking any group to pay too much for what they want. Readers -- and, more certainly, network executives -- might bristle at the idea of TV being compared to taxes. But what is the government if not the biggest of bundles? Every year, 150+ million tax-paying families across the country pay into a common system with each household consuming varying amounts of different goods and services (interstates around D.C., defense spending in San Antonio, NIH in Bethesda). The point isn't that everybody in America consumes every good and service provided by the federal government. The point is that public financing makes a diverse and quality array of goods and services possible for those who want and need them. The subscription fees in your bundle are, in a way, like a national entertainment treasury divided between a handful of media companies. One hundred million subscribing households pay a collective $7 billion a month into the entertainment super-coffers, with each family consuming varying amounts of different programming, all of it made affordable by scale. The TV business is so rich in part because its popularity allows it to achieve the scale of something like public financing. I don't know if this is an entirely good thing, or an entirely unchangeable thing. But it is the thing that's created the current golden age of TV. Sports is the final bastion of must-see-live-TV. It's both saving the bundle and threatening to make the entire enterprise unaffordable and unworkable. If the latter happens, we'll all know, because pay-TV households will do something to their entertainment tax bill that they simply can't do to their federal tax bill. They'll tear it up and move on. 
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| Hong Kong, Chrome: 2 Updates and Pentimenti Posted: 17 Jul 2013 10:15 AM PDT 1) Two weeks ago I shared a photo, via Beijing Cream, of contrasting front-page treatment in the South China Morning Post (which is not run by the Chinese government) and the China Daily (which is) on the 16th anniversary of Hong Kong's transfer to control by the People's Republic of China. The two papers revealed their different editorial approaches -- one featuring celebrations of the anniversary, the other showing protests -- but it turns out that they were reporting on different rallies, not the same one. Apologies for misunderstanding on my part. 2) Last week I noted that the switch from version 27 of Google's Chrome browser, to release 28, had zeroed out Gmail's offline function on my computers, leaving me with absolutely no messages in the inbox rather than too many. For me this was a "reproducible" problem, related to the Chrome 27/28 difference. When I was using 28, Gmail Offline didn't work; if I "de-upgraded," back to 27, it worked again. Then if I re-installed version 28, the problem reappeared. I heard from the Gmail tech team, which suspected that the root of the problem was a corrupted local storage file. On their advice I did the mail-system counterpart of a cold reboot. I force-purged all cached mail messages from my systems; deleted all extant Chrome versions; did a new install of Chrome 28; and in other ways cleared the decks. Then I re-synched Gmail Offline for my accounts -- and now it works, even with Chrome 28. The Google team says: See, it was a problem with your cached files! I say, Yeah, but it was a problem that appeared only when I installed Chrome 28. We're both right, and in any case I am glad to have it solved. For safety's sake, if you use Gmail Offline, and are upgrading to Chrome 28, you can go through the purge-and-restore steps described here. These updates offered For The Record. 
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| Chuck E. Cheese's, Silicon Valley Startup: The Origins of the Best Pizza Chain Ever Posted: 17 Jul 2013 10:11 AM PDT  You may not know this, but Chuck E. Cheese's -- yes, the pizza place -- has its origins as firmly planted in the soil of Silicon Valley as Apple, HP, or Intel. In fact, it sprang from Nolan Bushnell's Atari like Athena to the videogame company's Zeus. Which is to say two things: one, if you grew up in the 1980s, the same guy -- Bushnell -- is basically responsible for a good portion of your childhood longings; and two, WHAT! ARE YOU KIDDING ME?! THAT'S CRAZY. This connection got me thinking wild thoughts. I got very excited about the hypothetical secret history of Chuck E. Cheese's. Perhaps Bushnell used an early computer to calculate precisely how to burrow Chuck E. Cheese's brand into the very soul of every 7-year-old in America! And did he imagine that the animatronic rat mascot and his friends were going to be the leading edge of a personality-infused robotic future? (iChuckECheese!) I had to talk to Bushnell. Desperately. Finally someone would understand his vision for the animatronic revolution. Luckily, a colleague put us in touch, and we spoke yesterday. And he revealed the hilarious origins of Chuck E. Cheese's, the Silicon Valley pizza joint startup. I'm just going to walk us through what he said, interjecting where appropriate. "It was my pet project. I started it inside Atari. My objective was to vertically integrate the market. We were selling coin-operated games at about $1,500 or $2,000 a pop. In their life, they'd make $15 to 20k. It didn't take rocket science to say I'm on the wrong side of the equation," he told me. "I didn't want to compete with the people I was selling to, but the game operating business is all about securing locations. So the way to not compete with them was to secure my own locations. The original genesis was to create a big arcade with food as a support structure, almost as an ancillary service." Why pizza? Good question. "I chose pizza because of the wait time and the build schedule: very few components and not too many ways to screw it up. If the dough is good, the cheese is good, and the sauce is good, the pizza is good. I didn't have any preconceived idea that I knew how to run a restaurant, but I knew simple was better." Who describes food in terms of a "build schedule"? I told you Chuck E. Cheese's was a Silicon Valley startup. Bushnell wanted the minimal viable restaurant platform on which to offer his game services. But why did he need all the entertainment stuff? "The reason for doing the animals, believe it or not, was not for the kids. It was meant to be a head fake for the parents. Kids are really smart at knowing how to play their parents. and the kids knew that if they said, 'I want to go to Chuck E. Cheese and play the games' the parents would just see themselves spending money. But if they said, 'I want to go see Chuck E. Cheese entertainment -- and it's free,' they'd be good to go," Bushnell said. "The other thing was that we wanted the parents to have something to amuse themselves while the kids were in the game room. If you listened to the dialogue, it was fun, edgy stuff, kinda like Toy Story, written as much for the parents as the kids." Fair enough. But why choose giant singing robotic animals for your entertainment?
It seemed crazy to me, even as a kid. Turns out it was, roughly, chance. Several things Bushnell happened to see hybridized in his imagination into a monstrous and wonderful new pizza joint chimera. "The synthesis came along because there was a pizza parlor called Pizza and Pipes. It basically resurrected a Wurlitzer theater organ and the place was packed when they had an organist that actually played on the thing. And I thought, there is a demand for some kind of entertainment to go along with the pizza. But I'm not going to have something that heeds a player and I'm not going to do something that requires finding and restoring an antique. And some time as I was doing this, I went to Disneyland and went to the Tiki Room. It was Disney's animatronics. I said, 'That's pretty simple. I bet I can get my engineers to knock that out.'" The synthesis, then, is entertainment pizza theater minus the humans. How about that for "labor efficiency"? Assuming animatronic control, the real problem, Bushnell imagined, was getting characters that looked good. But that worked out happily. "As the project got close to being green-lighted, I happened to be at a trade show in Orlando. The IAAPA. The International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions. There was a group there selling walkaround costumes." What's a walkaround costume? It's the kind of enormous wearable costume that sports mascots and Sesame Street characters get into. Here are some from a recent IAAPA expo.  "The operating name for the project, the codename, was Coyote Pizza," he said. "And I saw this Coyote costume. I went over, gave them my credit card, and had them ship it to the restaurant. I knew my guys could make him talk. I didn't know if they could make anything that looked like a coyote. Now I had my coyote." OR SO HE THOUGHT. DUN DUN DUN. "I went to where they were working and said, 'How's the coyote coming?' And they said, 'What coyote? You sent us a rat costume. I said, 'I'll just change the name to Rick Rat's Pizza.'" YES, Chuck E. Cheese, the most-famous rodent in American childhood branding not in the Mickey Mouse clan, was supposed to be a coyote. And then, the first choice for Chuck E. Cheese's name was Rick Rat's Pizza. Luckily, Bushnell's marketing angels convinced him Rick Rat's Pizza (!) wasn't such a good name for an establishment that had to go before a health inspector. "My marketing department just had a shitfit: 'You can't call a restaurant a rat place! People think rats are dirty. It's not going to work,'" he said. "But what if he is a rat but you don't call him a rat, I suggested. 'You name it,' I told them. 'I don't give a shit what it is. But it has to be happy.' A week later, they said, we got the name. And not only is it happy, it's triple happy: Chuck E. Cheese, you can't say each one of those without smiling."
No, seriously, isn't that the best possible way that Chuck E. Cheese could have been dreamed up by a marketing department? And it's triple happy. Take that, character from Mad Men! Listening to all this, I had a terrifying thought: the creation of Chuck E. Cheese's was completely contingent. The pizza time theater may never have been founded. All historical narratives are a lie, basically. And furthermore, given that Chuck E. Cheese's was a necessary component of childhood, in the many alternate universes in which Chuck E. Cheese's never came into being (remaining Coyote Pizza or Rick Rat's Pizza), could childhood even exist? Or perhaps at least the structural features of Chuck E. Cheese were more likely than Bushnell's telling reveals. Our resident Chuck E. Cheese expert, Georgia Tech professor and Atlantic Tech contributor Ian Bogost, argued in a 2007 paper that Cheese's is a logical recombination of Bushnell's prior interests and market forces. As tavern culture gave way to the video arcade of the late 1970s and early 1980s, secondary pursuits like ordering food gave way to the primary pursuit of additional gameplay. Arcades had more in common with casinos than taverns, and Bushnell, ever the entrepreneur, recognized this as a market opportunity: he would create an arcade space with the additional social and gastronomical goals of a tavern. While still at Atari, he founded Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theaters, a place for kids and families to eat pizza and play games. Here Bushnell combined all of his prior influences. Chuck E. Cheese's was an arcade: its games encouraged continued play and cross-cabinet play. It was a restaurant: food and drink drew players to the locale and kept them there longer. And it was a midway: players collected tickets from games of skill and chance like skeeball in the hopes of exchanging them for prizes. Phew. History is saved! In any case, who dreamed up the all the little skits that the characters had to do?
"Mike Hatcher. He was a really good programmer, a puppeteer, and a screenwriter. He wrote and designed the authoring system that programmed the units," Bushnell said. "He'd sit back with the impresario and program the movements one at a time, basically to coordinate with a tape." The San Jose Mercury News ran a short story about Hatcher in 1979 that revealed the following facts: 1. It took him three hours of programming for every one minute of animation. 2. There were often 200 movements going on at once during the shows. 3. Poor Hatcher had to work the graveyard shift. But how'd the characters actually move? Did they have motors? "No, they were all pneumatic," Bushnell explained. "Factories are run on pneumatic. The [components] are cheap and they never wear out. They just run and run and run. It's probably the most robust motion technology in the world." Yes, pneumatic as in pneumatic tubes! And how'd they build the animatrons? "You start with the armature and then you dress it. Pretty much they were the same inside. There were two different jaws, if you're a dog versus Mr. Bunch. If you were a snout animal, you had a different jaw. We also had one for beaks." I wanted to know, though: did Bushnell take the animatronic bits seriously? Like, did he see them having their own trajectory, one with lots of potential? "We saw them as being our advertisement and our freebie," he said. "We tried to assume that if people came back every month, they'd want to see something different. So we tried to change the skit every month." That's not to say that they didn't work hard at improving the acts. "We went through a phase where we would have separate rooms with lounge acts. The cabaret, for example. We had an Elvis impersonator. We had a Dolly Dimples, which was a piano torch singer," he said. "They had personalities and you know, Chuck E. Cheese was a wise guy, kind of abusing the other people. The hound dog was stupid as shit, so it was a great thing for Chuck E. to be describing something really slowly and dumbed down. Mr. Munch who loved to eat everything. He was kind of our Cookie Monster, and we took the Cookie Monster and turned him into a garbage can with a vacuum to suck stuff out of your hand." But did he truly see it as interactive entertainment or just some hokie crap? Despite his answer below, I'm not sure I truly know how he feels about his creations. "I saw it absolutely as interactive entertainment. Understand the timeline. I started Chuck E. just before I sold Atari to Warner and Warner didn't want to have anything to do with it. They said 'Sell it,' and I said, 'I'll buy it,' and they sold it to me. I was still CEO of Atari and building the restaurants on the side. I had a president of the restaurants and he got the technology and the licensing. Then restaurants started just coining money and then after the sale, [Warner's people got] tired of me and I was tired of them, so it was very easy for me to spend full time working on Chuck E. Cheese. We built it up to about 250 restaurants before I sold out." It got a messy towards the end of Bushnell's involvement with Chuck E. Cheese in the mid-1980s. I don't want to get into the details, which are dizzyingly complex and contested, but suffice to say: the chain's fortunes went up and down, and there was a splinter chain, an IPO and a bankruptcy. It's complicated. In the end, Bushnell says that he cleared maybe $35 million from his pizza entrepreneurship. "$35 million isn't bad," I offered. "It wasn't bad, but it wasn't $200 million," he replied. But hadn't he helped animatronics escape the truly strange confines of the amusement park? Wasn't that something? "If you really try to stack up the entertainment that was delivered by our animals: It was not great. You know? It was amusing to a captive audience, and you can kind of pull it off in 15-20 minute increments at Disneyland, but ..."
You take that back, Bushnell! Chuck E. Cheese's was a work of genius! Perhaps, I ventured, it was time for an animatronic renaissance. I told him about Skylanders, the newish billion dollar franchise for Activision that roughly merges real world toys with digital characters. And then there is the company Anki, a robotics and gaming company that wants to bring physical characters to life. "We're giving physical characters the ability to know where they're located in an environment and what's around them and to be able to come to life and execute a person, intention, a personality," Anki's CEO told me. Weren't all these things pointers to a revival of the vision, or at least some derivative of this strange merging of software and physical characters? Maybe Teddy Ruxpin and his ilk were just false starts and now the real animatronic revolution could begin! "I don't think I'd back that venture," he said. But. But. Childhood dreams die, I guess. * * * BONUS! A giftastic visual guide to The Recipe for Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theater. 
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| How Some Women Benefit From Marrying a Man Who Makes Less Money Posted: 17 Jul 2013 10:02 AM PDT ![[IMAGE DESCRIPTION]](http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/hua_hsu/lemon_large.jpg) The male/female earning gap has many sources. One notable one is that some women aren't aggressive enough. They don't ask for raises and promotions; enter the "lean-in" mantra. Economists Marianne Bertrand, Claudia Goldin, and Lawrence Katz tracked the careers of University of Chicago MBAs from 1990 to 2000 to untangle wage disparities among potentially high earners. They hoped to understand why there are so few women CEOs and hedge fund managers. They found a significant earnings gap between men and women which grew over time.  The large and growing gap is not due to timid female MBAs. Some of it is attributed to different skills, jobs before the MBA, and that male business students typically take more finance classes and women more marketing classes. But a majority of the difference is due to women taking time out of the labor force and then working less after having children. Women without children usually don't take time off, and most of their earnings disparity with men can be explained by differences in their skills. It's notable that the earnings of some women did not fall very much after they had children and any drop in income did not persist after a few years. But these women often had a "lower" earning spouse (income under $100,000). A large and sustained drop in income is highly correlated with having children and a high-earning husband. It's not clear why that might be. It could be high-achieving women chose less ambitious husbands, anticipating that they'll be more available to help with childcare. Sheryl Sandberg concedes that "leaning in" and having a family requires a supportive partner. Or it could be once some women had children they took less demanding jobs simply because they had the luxury of more work life balance. In light of this, advice that urges women to marry well seem all the more antiquated. If you want to have it all, best not aspire to being one half of a power-couple. 
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| Ira Glass's Favorite Part of David Rakoff's Last Writings Posted: 17 Jul 2013 09:55 AM PDT By Heart is a series in which authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature.  Doug McLean When David Rakoff died last year at the age of 47, he'd turned away from his trademark nonfiction to focus exclusively on a different form: rhyming poetry. The acclaimed essayist--known for tempering stark reflections with a generous spirit and rakish humor--completed a novel in verse just weeks before the malignant sarcoma in his shoulder killed him. This final product of Rakoff's fascination with meter and rhyme, titled Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish, has been released by Doubleday this week. Rare in our day despite its history of distinguished practitioners (you know, Homer, Chaucer, Derek Walcott), the novel in verse is already an odd duck--in The New York Times, Rakoff's editor admitted his hesitation about the project. But Rakoff's book is truly singular. In galloping tetrameter, it spans 100 years and several linked casts of characters. Deadpan portraits drawn by the artist Seth stare out at the reader between chapters. There is so much bound up in the novel's singsong verse: stories about AIDS and Alzheimer's, altruism, art, lives linked together by buried incidents that spring up again to bear unexpected fruit. (The book's narrative structure has tragic resonance for a writer whose initial course of radiation, taken at age 22 to stave off lymphoma, likely caused the sarcoma that killed him many years later.)
Unsentimental to the core, it is strange that Rakoff was drawn to heroic couplets, the locked-in A / A / B / B rhyme scheme he masters here. The form is often associated with the kinds of banalities Rakoff, recipient of the James Thurber Prize for humor, liked to eviscerate: Hallmark cards and corporate jingles, failed children's poetry, and corny jokes. And crass wedding toasts--when Rakoff mocks one in a section that channels a bridesmaid's voice, the author's finely tuned verse goes all stilted and tin-eared. For its predictability and dogged lack of deviation, rhyming poetry tends to be synonymous with bad, bad, bad. So why would Rakoff choose a much-abused and much-maligned rhyme form? Maybe to illustrate how tied we are, as humans, to banality. Dead before age 50, Rakoff knew all too well that even historic lives end in gloomy, fluid-stained beds (just listen to the chilling monologue he wrote for the Oscar-winning short film The New Tenants). He knew, after years of painful treatment, that vain attempts to cheat death only make us more absurd. We're locked, predictable as clanging rhymes and measured meter, to the fact of our birth and fate, so Rakoff locked the last, best insights of his life inside a hackneyed form. If we can accept some serious measure of ingloriousness, he seems to say, then there is room for beauty, laughter, wisdom, and a kind of grace. In this series, contributors celebrate the writers who have meant most to them. So to welcome Rakoff yet again to our shelves and Kindles, I reached out to Ira Glass, host of Public Radio International's This American Life. Rakoff's voice, silky but coiled with deadly wit, was a fixture on the show. Glass watched Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish come to life--his friend read from drafts of it on the program in 2003 and 2009--and he shared the story behind one of the novel's most memorable and moving sections. Ira Glass: Even as a little kid, I thought about death a lot. I grew up in the '60s, watched my Uncle Lenny get sent to Vietnam, and was sure I'd be going soon enough as well. As best as I could tell from TV, being a soldier looked a lot like doing sports and I sucked at sports. So I was certain I'd suck at being a soldier too. As a result I spent many nights of my childhood lying in bed before falling asleep, trying to imagine my imminent death, what it meant to not exist any more. I'd try to picture all of eternity continuing without me. I was a speck. I was nothing. I was gone. Forever. I can't believe this is a very unusual childhood experience. As an adult, my nightly obsession with complete obliteration has faded, but I still have a weakness for any writing that returns me to my childhood bed, pondering what's to come. I love Billy Collins's poem "The Afterlife" where he posits that "Everyone is right, as it turns out. You go to the place you always thought you would go." Some, Collins writes, stand "naked before a forbidding judge who sits with a golden ladder on one side, a coal chute on the other," some evaporate into units of pure energy, some "are approaching the apartment of the female God, a woman in her forties with short wiry hair and glasses hanging from her neck by a string." Shortly before he died, my friend David Rakoff wrote a very different sort of dispatch from the edge of the abyss. At the time, David had cancer and was playing out the endgame of trying one treatment after another, none of them working as well or as long as we all wanted. He was writing a novel in rhymed couplets. In this passage, he describes what it's like to know you have very few days left. He gives these thoughts to one of the book's main characters, Cliff, who at that point in the story is dying of AIDS. I wish I had something smarter to say about this passage than this: I find it deeply relatable. I'm guessing that someday I--and maybe you, too--will have exactly this experience, pretty much exactly as he describes it. Ready for the hilarity? Just kidding. Here we go:
I know the day David wrote this. He told me. It was March 11, 2012. He had five months left to live. On that day, he and I and my wife went to see the Monica Bill Barnes Dance Company perform at the 92nd Street Y. Rakoff--who'd danced when he was younger--adored them. He told me later, that's where the line about "eat with your eyes" comes from. I know the day David wrote this. He told me. It was March 11, 2012. He had five months left to live. Fortunately, he got to do more than eat those dancers with his eyes. Monica, who runs the company, created a dance for Rakoff that he performed in a show we did onstage two months later. It wrecked me every time I saw him practice or perform the piece, and it wrecks me now when I see the video. Every time he did it, he and all of us who were close to him knew it was one of the last times he'd get a chance to move like that. That's a weird thing to have in your head as you watch a performance. Like the person's already gone but they're standing right there in front of you, now bending, now gliding into a turn, now raising an arm in arc to the sky. Just last month I saw Monica Bill Barnes perform the dance, do David's part, as a solo onstage. I know every step of the piece so well from seeing it so many times, it was like watching his ghost take over someone else's body and move it around the floor. I know how melodramatic that sounds, but really, he suddenly seemed so there. It chilled me. I'm so glad he finished the book. I'm so glad he got to do that last dance. What else are you going to do, when you know you have so little time left? Dance a bit. Write a bit. Think about your future only glancingly. More is too scary. Which is, I suppose, not so different from what the rest of us do, starting when we're little kids, for most of our lives. 
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| Posted: 17 Jul 2013 09:05 AM PDT  The author in China (Marketus Presswood) In the 1996 China edition of the Lonely Planet's Guidebook, a text box aside comment from a street interview provided some interesting conversation fodder, "... there is no racism in China because there are no black people," a Chinese woman was reported to have said. This became a little running joke in my small study abroad circle, since I was the only black student in my program of fifty students. It was 1997, and I was in Beijing studying Chinese. "There is no way you could be experiencing any racism in China," one classmate sardonically told me, "because you are the only black person here." We all laughed. While China is officially home to 55 ethnic minority groups, the Middle Kingdom is far more ethnically homogeneous than the United States. Han Chinese make up 91.59 percent of the population, and the majority of the remaining 8.41 percent are visually indistinguishable from their Han counterparts. In part due to this difference, race and nationality are often conflated in China. A white foreigner is likely to be called laowai, or "old foreigner," while a black foreigner is more likely to be described as heiren, or "black person." White Americans face no barriers to claiming their nationality, but blacks are often assumed to hail from Africa, a place thought to be more backwards and poorer than China, and one more than likely receiving Chinese government economic aid in the form of loans and infrastructure projects. This leads to either resentment or denigration on the part of some Chinese. The Chinese media tends to focus on the generosity of the Chinese government toward Africa -- a sore point among Chinese who feel their government is not doing enough for the Chinese themselves -- and not on the valuable natural resources gained or access to lucrative growth markets for cheap Chinese goods.  MORE FROM TLN
Traditional standards of beauty in China have also shaped perceptions of black foreigners in the country. In China, "whiteness" is seen as a highly desirable trait for women. Stores that sell beauty products without fail have a wide variety of whitening creams. The Chinese and Western models that fill the screen and print ads all fit one standard type of beauty -- very white skin, tall, thin with jet-black hair. There is even a Chinese saying: "A girl can be ugly, as long as she has white skin." Growing up in the United States, I looked at Chinese and other Asian people as persons of "color" who shared a similar experience with white racism. There was some sliver of solidarity in being a "band of minorities." For most black people or other people of color in the American cultural context there is some tacit understanding of the mutual experiences of white racism that binds seemingly disparate American ethnic groups together in solidarity. I naively took that assumption with me to China on my first visit. I did not expect that everyone would welcome me with open arms, but I did not expect what I did encounter. My own experience in China began in the late 90s. While working for a major international language company, I taught English to Chinese people from all socio-economic backgrounds. By all accounts, my supervisors and other teachers respected my skills and knowledge in the classroom. Around 2003, however, I noticed a shift in the market and it became increasingly difficult for me to hold on to assigned classes. There were a number of complaints from students. My supervisor investigated. She clandestinely and randomly listened in on my classes via the company intercom system. After a couple of weeks she called me into her office. She told me I was an excellent teacher and could find little fault in my methods and teaching of the prescribed curriculum. Students just wanted a "different" teacher. While on break, I overheard students speaking in Chinese about how they were paying so much money and wanted a white instructor. One student went so far as to say, "I don't want to look at his black face all night." There was nothing my supervisor could do. The market was demanding white teachers and the company was responding to that demand. Not only did they want white teachers, they wanted attractive ones. I overheard a number of students discussing and comparing the physical attractiveness of one teacher over another. Students were even willing to accept a white, non-native English speaker over a black, native English speaker. This was a far cry from my first days of teaching English in China in 1999, when students were just happy to have an English speaker in the room. In the first half of the 20th century, Chinese and black American intellectuals frequently collaborated. Langston Hughes, the world-renowned black American writer and poet, met Lu Xun, the father of modern Chinese literature, in Shanghai in the 1930s to work on theories and language for a universal, pluralistic, transnational form of cooperative nationalism. Paul Robeson, a professional actor/singer and social activist, was also a staunch ally of China's. He actively fundraised for the Chinese Defense League, the precursor of the China Welfare Institute founded by Soong Ching-ling, the wife of Sun Yat-sen, a Chinese revolutionary considered to be the founder of the Republic of China (ROC). He also popularized the current Chinese National Anthem, the March of Volunteers, to a global audience by singing the song in Mandarin Chinese for audiences around the world. A number of other black scholars visited China during the first half of the 20th century, including W.E.B. Dubois, one of the founders of the NAACP, and Rayford Logan, a Howard University history professor. While in exile in Cuba in the early 60s, black internationalist Robert F. Williams corresponded with Mao Zedong to support the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S. Mao wrote his, Statement Supporting the Afro-American in Their Just Struggle Against Racial Discrimination by U.S. Imperialism on August 8, 1963. He declared:
Mao issued another statement of support in April 1968 after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. But despite these expressions of support, there is scant evidence to prove Mao or any other Chinese political leader at the time would have been willing to align themselves actively with the Civil Rights Movement. In fact, Chinese foreign policy in the 1960s mirrored much of that of the West, due in part to the Sino-Soviet split and the coming détente with the U.S. After the deaths of Mao and Zhou Enlai, the era of alignment with the developing world and oppressed peoples gave way to Deng Xiaoping's pragmatic plan for economic development epitomized by his statement, "To get rich is glorious." From the 80s to the present, this new mantra has fueled a single-minded devotion to the pursuit of wealth, leaving little room for concern with past ideals. The isolation of China in the decades before its economic coming of age also limited the exposure most Chinese had to people of other ethnic origins, creating a vacuum of knowledge, drawing in stereotypes and prejudice. Unlike their parents and grandparents, China's youth have grown up with access to information, entertainment, and art from all over the world. Many have consequently come to reconsider stereotypes of black people, and they are in turn influencing the opinions of their older, more "traditional" relatives. The popularity of American popular culture in China, particularly the NBA, which as of 2011 was made up of 78 percent black players, is an example of this. The NBA has over 41 million combined followers on Sina and Tencent micro-blogs, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter. The Chinese Basketball Association estimates that there are 300 million people in China who play basketball. NBA stars flock to China on multi-city tours every summer to greet crowds of adoring fans. My Chinese wife recounted a story of her younger cousin, who became a huge Allen Iverson fan to the dismay of her mother. During every game, she would don a Philadelphia 76ers jersey and plop down in front of the TV to cheer on her favorite basketball player. In order to spend more quality time with her daughter and understand her better, the girl's mother began watching games with her child, and in no time became an avid Sixers fan as well. Another friend related a story of about his uncle in Beijing, who sent his high school daughter to America for a summer camp. At the end of the camp, during the parent pick-up, his daughter burst into tears as she said goodbye to her summer camp roommate, who just happened to be black. The Chinese father recalled thinking, as he surveyed the scene of his emotionally distraught daughter, "I never thought my daughter could have such an emotional connection with a black person. Maybe I need to rethink my biases." Many black people from around the globe are living, working and traveling in China now. Some of us are American, European, Latin American and African, with a wide range of cultures, languages, religions and professions that defy neat categorization. While different histories have been a source of racist ideas and assumptions, perhaps our shared present and future will give Chinese a reason to reflect and reconsider. This post also appears at Tea Leaf Nation, an Atlantic partner site. 
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| Why Don't We Just Kill All the Mosquitoes? Posted: 17 Jul 2013 08:48 AM PDT  USDA/AP Is it my fault that I get bit a lot? In some ways. Only females mosquitoes "bite" us, right? Is this heteronormativity? They use our amino acids to help them lay eggs. It's not a social construct. Our blood isn't mosquito food or money. The traditional understanding is that carbon dioxide is what draws mosquitoes to us. Smithsonian summed up other research recently, which, if I were to condense into one sentence of advice: Don't have type O blood, don't be a large person, don't exhale, don't exercise, don't get hot, don't be pregnant, don't drink even one beer, don't have parents who got a lot of mosquito bites when they were your age, and don't wear bright clothing or otherwise call attention to yourself. The American Mosquito Control Association would add that you should avoid Limburger cheese and perfume. Bananas are just a rumor. Can I change the nature of my blood? What? Blood clots when it stops moving. Why doesn't it just form a hard little ball inside of the mosquito's suckling chamber? I don't think suckling chamber is what it's called, but I like that. The mosquito's saliva has compounds that prevent clotting. I want a bug zapper because of the sense of power. But I feel there is social stigma. Do bug zappers make me a "redneck"? No, bug zappers are great. Maybe as close as some of us will ever get to divinity. They kill a lot of insects, including mosquitoes, but according to the American Mosquito Control Association there have only been two studies on their effectiveness, and yards without bug zappers had no fewer mosquitoes than those with.  Toad comes to bug zapper at night to feed. (uuzinger/Flickr) Touching the bug zapper recreationally, though, does make you a redneck. ("I think the more powerful it is, the less you'll feel it.") Mosquitoes never bit me for many years as a vegetarian. Now I'm eating some meat and getting lots of bites. Coincidence or not? It could mean your blood has more of the delicious amino acids they need? Or, are you eating so much meat that you start to sweat? No What's a cheap way to keep mosquitoes away from me? Never go outside! If you have to, though, The New York Times told us yesterday about "A Low-Tech Mosquito Deterrent." Spoiler, it's fans. The solution is a fan. Entomologists at Michigan State published findings in the Journal of Medical Entomology that said, "We recommend that fan-generated wind should be pursued as a practical means of protecting humans or pets from mosquitoes in the backyard setting." I have very weak collagen in my skin. Sometimes even a light breeze will displace the skin from my body like tissue paper. Stay away from fans! GE also makes yellow "bug lights" that you can use on your porch, which don't attract mosquitoes like incandescent bulbs do. No one ever died from a mosquito bite. Mosquitoes are responsible for more human deaths than any other animal. I can get yellow fever, West Nile, or malaria from a mosquito bite, so can I get HIV?  A Pakistani girl after floods in 2010 (Mohammad Sajjad/AP)No, we don't believe it's possible since the amount of blood is so small. They cause so much death, why don't we just eliminate all the mosquitoes? How? Birds? Bats? Don't they keep mosquitoes away? How many bats would you propose we deploy? I'm just asking hypothetically. Bat expert Merlin Tuttle cites an experiment in which bats released in a lab filled with mosquitoes caught around ten mosquitoes per minute. That's 600 per hour, so 1,000 bats could consume over a half million mosquitoes per hour. The problem is that when bats have other food options, they wouldn't eat mosquitoes at that rate. Mosquitoes are less than one percent of a bat's diet. In the 1920s near San Antonio, Tampa, and in the Florida Keys, the U.S. built "bat towers" to try and control the mosquitoes. It didn't work. But they were able to sell the guano at a profit.  Bat tower built in 1929, still standing in Sugarloaf Key, Florida. (J Pat Carter/AP) So we probably couldn't kill every mosquito. Even if we could, they'd be replaced by some other insect. The American Mosquito Control Association warns against trying: "Be advised that species replacing mosquitoes may be even worse." How much worse could anything be? Exactly 
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| Russian Orthodox Video Game Invites You to Whack Pussy Riot With a Cross Posted: 17 Jul 2013 08:45 AM PDT  A screen grab of the "Don't Let Pussy Riot Into The Cathedral" game, in which guitar-wielding women in balaclavas assault a Russian Orthodox Church and can only be fended off with a cross. A video game was showcased at a recent Russian Orthodox youth festival in Moscow that encourages players to "kill" members of the feminist punk-rock collective Pussy Riot. In the game, "Don't Let Pussy Riot Into The Cathedral," players use an Orthodox cross to snuff out the balaclava-clad women before they enter a domed white church. Throughout the game, Pussy Riot's "Punk Prayer For Putin," which some of them performed in Moscow's Christ the Savior Cathedral in February 2012, earning three of them jail terms, plays in the background. When the Pussy Rioters enter the church in the game, they reappear atop the church with horns on. The building gradually falls into disrepair and ominous clouds gather. A version of the game, which used the name "Inquisition," was posted online late last year. Neither the Orthodox Church nor any representative of Pussy Riot has commented publicly on the game, which was unveiled on July 11.  "Don't Let Pussy Riot Into The Cathedral" screen grab In August 2012, three members of Pussy Riot -- Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, 23; Maria Alyokhina, 25; and Yekaterina Samutsevich, 30 -- were sentenced to two years in prison for performing their "Punk Prayer," in which they called on the Virgin Mary to free Russia from President Vladimir Putin. Samutsevich was released on probation in October. The Pussy Riot case has led to controversial legislation aimed at protecting the "religious feelings" of believers. Putin recently signed an antiblasphemy law under which offenders may be sentenced to up to three years in prison and fined up to 500,000 rubles ($15,000) for offending the religious sensibilities of Russian citizens. Aleksandr Davydkina, a representative of the youth festival where the game was unveiled, told Interfax that it is aimed at attracting young people to the church. "There are young people who do not have a relationship [with religion] and do not wish to talk about the church," Davydkina said. "But when they see this game, we have the chance to talk to them about what is happening at the church and why it is necessary." In August 2012, Magnus Vulp, an Estonian graphic designer, launched the video game "Angry Kremlins," in which players seek to free Pussy Riot from captivity. In that game, players hurl the heads of Russian officials like Putin and Patriarch Kirill at a cage holding members of the band. This post appears courtesy of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. 
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| The Man Who Burned Every Painting He Made Between 1953 and 1966 Posted: 17 Jul 2013 08:41 AM PDT Meet John Baldessari. Called the "Godfather of Conceptual Art," his work has been described as cool, funny, cerebral, sardonic, and provocative. It has been showcased in museums across the world, from the Guggenheim to the Tate Modern in London. In this film, A Brief History of John Baldessari, narrated by Tom Waits and starring Baldessari himself, we go inside the seminal (and not-so-seminal) moments in the life of the prolific artist. Produced with inventive imagery, including moving images, stills, graphics, and animation, the six-minute film goes into everything from Baldessari's WiFi password to the three things every young artist should know. The film is brought to you by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, two high school friends and co-founders of the production company Supermarché. They have several feature length films, including their critically acclaimed breakout documentary Catfish. They also dabble in short films. For more information on upcoming work from Joost and Schulman visit their website http://gosupermarche.com/. 
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| Delaying Parts of Obamacare: 'Blatantly Illegal' or Routine Adjustment? Posted: 17 Jul 2013 08:19 AM PDT  When, on July 2, the Obama Administration announced a one-year postponement of the January 1, 2014 effective date for the Affordable Care Act's requirement that large employers provide their workers health insurance or pay a tax, affected businesses "cheered." But anti-"Obamacare" advocates and politicians howled. They saw a "blatantly illegal move" (Brietbart.com pundit Ken Klukowski), a government acting "as though it were not bound by law" (CATO Institute economist Michael Cannon), and an unconstitutional "refus[al] to enforce" a democratically enacted law (Congressional Joint Resolution #45, introduced July 10 by New Jersey House Republican Scott Garrett). In the Wall Street Journal, Stanford Professor Michael McConnell, formerly a George W. Bush appointee to the federal bench, huffed that the decision "raises grave concerns about [President Obama's] understanding" that, unlike medieval British monarchs, American presidents have, under Article II, Section 3 of our Constitution, a "duty, not a discretionary power" to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." Following up in the Journal this Monday, David Rivkin and Lee Casey, who helped lawyer last year's legal challenge to the ACA individual mandate, darkly intimated that the new employer mandate delay could trigger litigation that could result in "the whole statute fall[ing] while the president's suspension is in effect." So has President Obama, in fact, broken the law and abused his constitutional authority by delaying the Affordable Care Act's "employer mandate"? This may be the top Republican talking point right now. But what does the law actually say about this? Mostly, the heated rhetoric of the past few weeks ignores what the Administration has actually decided and how it has delimited the scope and purpose of that decision. The Treasury Department's announcement provides for one year of "transition relief," to continue working through 2014 with "employers, insurers, and other reporting entities" to revise and engage in "real-world testing" of the reporting requirements, simplify forms, coordinate requisite public and private sector information technology arrangements, and engineer a "smoother transition to full implementation in 2015." The announcement describes the postponed requirements as "ACA mandatory" -- i.e., not discretionary or subject to indefinite waiver. On July 9, Assistant Treasury Secretary Mark Mazur added, in a letter to House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Fred Upton, that the Department expects to publish proposed rules implementing the relevant provisions "this summer, after a dialogue with stakeholders." In effect, the Administration explains the delay as a sensible adjustment to phase-in enforcement, not a refusal to enforce In Sunday's Washington Post, Bush II Health & Human Services Secretary Michael O. Leavitt concurred that "The [Obama] Administration's decision to delay the employer mandate was wise," in light of the Bush Administration's initially bumpy but ultimately successful phase-in of the 2004 prescription drug benefit to Medicare. Though "wise," is the current postponement "illegal"? On the contrary, Treasury's Mazur wrote to Chair Upton, such temporary postponements of tax reporting and payment requirements are routine, citing numerous examples of such postponements by Republican and Democratic administrations when statutory deadlines proved unworkable. In fact, applicable judicial precedent places such timing adjustments well within the Executive Branch's lawful discretion. To be sure, the federal Administrative Procedure Act authorizes federal courts to compel agencies to initiate statutorily required actions that have been "unreasonably delayed." But courts have found delays to be unreasonable only in rare cases where, unlike this one, inaction had lasted for several years, and the recalcitrant agency could offer neither a persuasive excuse nor a credible end to its dithering. In deciding whether a given agency delay is reasonable, current law tells courts to consider whether expedited action could adversely affect "higher or competing" agency priorities, and whether other interests could be "prejudiced by the delay." Even in cases where an agency outright refuses to enforce a policy in specified types of cases -- not the case here -- the Supreme Court has declined to intervene. As held by former Chief Justice William Rehnquist in a leading case on this subject, Heckler v. Chaney, courts must respect an agency's presumptively superior grasp of "the many variables involved in the proper ordering of its priorities." Chief Justice Rehnquist suggested that courts could lose their deference to Executive Branch judgment if an "agency has consciously and expressly adopted a general policy that is so extreme as to amount to an abdication of its statutory responsibilities." The Obama Administration has not and is not about to abdicate its responsibility to implement the statute on whose success his historical legacy will most centrally depend. Nor is the one-year delay of the employer mandate an affront to the Constitution, as Professor Michael McConnell and Congressional Republicans insist. The relevant text requires that the President "take care that the laws be faithfully executed." Scholars on both left and right concur that this broadly-worded phrasing indicates that the President is to exercise judgment, and handle his enforcement duties with fidelity to all laws, including, indeed, the Constitution. As McConnell himself notes, both Republican and Democratic Justice Departments have consistently opined that the clause authorizes a president even to decline enforcement of a statute altogether, if in good faith he determines it to be in violation of the Constitution. But, McConnell contends, a president cannot "refuse to enforce a statute he opposes for policy reasons." While surely correct, that contention is beside the point. The Administration has not postponed the employer mandate out of policy opposition to the ACA, nor to the specific provision itself. Thus, it's misleading to characterize the action as a "refusal to enforce." Rather, the President has authorized a minor temporary course correction regarding individual ACA provisions, necessary in his Administration's judgment to faithfully execute the overall statute, other related laws, and the purposes of the ACA's framers. As a legal as well as a practical matter, that's well within his job description. 
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| Late-Night Comedy Roundup: The GOP's Best Gift to Obama Since Mitt Posted: 17 Jul 2013 08:05 AM PDT Former president George H.W. Bush visited current president Barack Obama at the White House earlier this week to receive an award. Bush presented Obama with a gift and Conan O'Brien took note, saying it was the best gift Republicans gave Obama since Mitt Romney. On NBC, Jay Leno mentioned Edward Snowden again as the National Security Agency leaker looks for asylum in Russia. Leno looked at Russian President Vladimir Putin's possible acceptance of Snowden for asylum, while Late Night's Jimmy Fallon joked about Putin examining the wreck of a 19th century frigate at the bottom of the ocean. With the news that the Senate avoided the nuclear option on Obama nominees, The Daily Show looked at the Senate's wrangling on the issue. Host John Oliver showed Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid going back and forth on the Senate floor, augmented by Adam West-era Batman-esque graphics and a Mortal Kombat end screen. Oliver ended the segment summing up the agreement: "We accomplished next to nothing, but we did it together." Fast forward to 3:40 to see Oliver explain the final bipartisan Senate agreement. Read more from Government Executive. 
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| <i>Glee</i>'s Finn Hudson Was a Revolutionary, Surprisingly Complicated Everyman Posted: 17 Jul 2013 07:39 AM PDT  Fox When we first saw Finn Hudson in the pilot episode of Glee, he was holding Kurt Hummel's jacket so it wouldn't get trashed when a group of jocks tossed the effeminate gay teenager in a dumpster. It was a small moment of comedic kindness--Finn was a good guy trying to act like a man, which at McKinley High meant no-homo. Later in that episode, Finn told his jock friends, "Don't you get it? We're all losers. Everyone in this school, everyone in this town."
At its best, Glee is about small-town losers dreaming about being big-city winners and even when they don't succeed, dreaming on anyway. It's easily the queerest show that's ever been on network TV not just because it features multiple gay characters--and in romantic situations too--but because it's constantly reversing gender norms and placing traditionally marginalized characters front and center. But making that point required a conventional Everyman for scale (like those YouTube videos where a small object is placed next to a whale so you know how big it is). As played by the recently deceased Cory Monteith, Finn Hudson looked the handsome, wholesome part, but when he joined the glee club, he became something more subversive. As far as romantic leading men on teen shows, Finn didn't have the intelligence of Brandon Walsh (Beverly Hills 90210), the mystery of Jordan Catalano (My So Called Life) or the insouciance of Zack Morris (Saved By the Bell). And in terms of his TV peers, Monteith wasn't a great showman like Neil Patrick Harris or a great character actor like Aaron Paul or even a great beauty like Matt Bomer. What he had was a palpable sweetness that infused his portrayal of Finn. In Monteith's unassuming performance, you believed that a football player would join show choir, befriend a gay kid, and date a theater geek. You believed it because Finn never exuded any of the arrogance or privilege we expected from popular jocks in high-school shows. Because Monteith wasn't a natural-born singer or dancer, Finn was a vicarious performer for the majority of viewers who can't hit musical notes like Lea Michele or bust a dance move like Harry Shum. Watching back the iconic "Don't Stop Believing," it's clear that Michele outsings him, but Monteith sells the small-town aspiration (his arms and gaze reaching for the stars) and his chemistry with Michele is electric (the two were involved off-screen). In an era of macho antiheroes, Finn countered that being a man didn't have to include physical strength or objectifying women, but could instead be defined by expressiveness, vulnerability, and compassion. He failed as a quarterback, a soldier, and a boyfriend, but he succeeded in glee club, where he sang and danced and hung around with a bunch of queer kids. Monteith never got a lot of credit for his performance, and that's a shame. He played straight (literally and figuratively) on a show where almost everyone else was colorful and theatrical. It's a thankless role, but Monteith made some interesting choices. He never strutted confidently, instead walking with a slight hunch or hesitation that undermined the solidity of an Everyman, and he generously allowed his costars to have the bigger reactions. In several confrontations like this beautiful scene in "The Breakup" (where Rachel poses the question of what makes a man), he often looked away from his scene partner, which made him seem uncertain and childlike. And whenever Finn had to act like a fratboy, Monteith delivered those lines with comic timing, thereby reassuring us that bro behavior was an affectation. These were conscious acting choices that deconstructed the jock character. In Monteith's portrayal, masculinity was a performance, and a leading man was just a boy pretending to be a man. Consider too that Finn is both a point-of-entry character and an object of desire, and what that means when he defies the Everyman archetype. Audiences saw Finn embracing various queer and outcast figures, and that made him important to an entire generation of young viewers all across Glee's international fandom (Tumblr seems to have been invented solely for Gleeks and the couples they "ship"). It sent a powerful it-gets-better message to LGBT kids and a message of inclusiveness to all the other kids. Finn also constantly reminded Rachel that she was destined for Broadway stardom while he feared he'd never escape Ohio--the Everyman saw himself as a loser and the outcast as a winner. Finally, the image of Finn serenading Kurt with "Just the Way You Are," turning its hetero-romance undertones into a gay-acceptance anthem, is the most uplifting thing I've ever seen a straight character do for a gay character on TV. When Monteith spoke in interviews about "not fitting in" and "not having a strong self-image," it became clear how he could play a character who understands outcasts *and* a character who becomes one. By Season Three, the outcasts had taken over the show while Finn's role was reduced. The others were embarking on bright post-graduation futures, while Finn didn't get into college and didn't know what to do with his life. His worst nightmare and prophecy had come true: He was stuck in Ohio. The world had opened up for everyone but the Everyman, and Finn's repeated insistence that he "didn't have a place in this world" is not something we expect a good-looking quarterback to express. His unemployment and dismal prospects turned him into an outcast while representing the despair of many young people after the 2008 financial crash. Fittingly, he returned to the choir room (the outcasts' refuge) to take Will Schuster's place as leader of the glee club. The series began with Will already in the third act of his life, but since we went on a full journey with Finn, his failures were more poignant. When Finn sang "Don't Dream It's Over" with his up-and-coming glee kids, it had all the small-town aspirations of "Don't Stop Believing" but it was also tinged with melancholy because viewers knew it was a dream he'd already lost. Cory Monteith nailed all those performances of confusion, alienation, and self-pity. He skillfully took the role from Everyman egalitarianism to Everyman anomie without betraying the character's integrity. It's hard to look back without wondering how much of his troubled experiences went into those scenes. When he spoke candidly in interviews about growing up and "not fitting in" and "not having a strong self-image," it seemed clear how he could play a character who understands outcasts and a character who becomes one. That he looked the part of an All-American jock was undercut by the surprising reality that he was a Canadian high-school dropout who struggled through homelessness and addiction. It was always a performance, then--he was never actually quite an Everyman, and that's why so many people could relate. 
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