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Everything You Need to Know About Detroit's Bankruptcy
How Georgia Just Spared The Life of Man It Desperately Wants To Kill
All-American Detroit
Pakistan's New Big Threat Isn't Terrorism—It's Water
The Time Obama Was Mistaken for a Waiter at a Tina Brown Book Party
The Obamacare Plot Twist
Considering the President's Comments on Racial Profiling
In Jordan, the Arab Spring Isn't Over
Mobile-Device Email Signatures: More Than You Ever Wanted to Know
Obama: Trayvon 'Could Have Been Me'
China Harvests the Majority of its Organs From Executed Prisoners
Poised to Crown: What Happens When a Baby Won't Come Out
Is Law School a Good Deal After All?
Many Countries Think China's Economy Is The World's Most Powerful
How Women and Men Use Flexible Work Policies Differently
'Stand Your Ground' Laws Are Winning
Fixing Dangerous Schools, E.B. White Loses a Pig, Deep Sea Spy Games: The New Atlantic Weekly
Late-Night Comedy Roundup: The Guantanamo Bay Science Fair
A Scrappy Afghan Radio Station Faces a Shaky Future After U.S. Troops Leave
This Artist's Project Involves Literally Burning Down the House
Don't Fear the Male Babysitter
What the Pope Really Meant in His Twitter-Indulgences Announcement
The Conjuring: A Dull Lesson in the Horrors of 'Based on a True Story'
A Planetary Nebula That Looks Like the Firefox Logo
As Countries Get Richer, They Trade Hunger for Obesity

Everything You Need to Know About Detroit's Bankruptcy

Posted: 19 Jul 2013 03:05 PM PDT

Reuters

After decades of decline, Detroit is broke. On Thursday, the Motor City filed for the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history on its $18 billion of debt, and faces a future where only one thing is certain: lots of people are going to get much less money than they were promised.

Now, I don't like to say that something was ever inevitable, but Detroit's Chapter 9 bankruptcy sure looks that way. Since 1950, its population has retreated from 1.8 million to 700,000 today. And, as you can see in the chart below, via Nate Cohn of The New Republic, it's shrunk 26 percent in just the last decade. That's left a small tax base to pay for the pension promises of a more populous yesteryear.

But why has Detroit's decline been of the far more terminal sort than other post-industrial cities? It's easy to say it's all about the city tying itself to the crumbling auto industry and nothing else, but that's not right: the Big Three have come back from the dead to boast healthy profits today, while Detroit is dying. The reality is the reverse. Detroit is on life support now, not because it's too tied to the carmakers, but because it's not enough. As Alec MacGillis of The New Republic points out, the Big Three -- along with wealthy and working-class whites -- decamped for the suburbs decades ago. Today, there are only two car factories left within Detroit's (vast) city limits. Gone are the solidly middle-class manufacturing jobs that had paved the city's rise. Indeed, Detroit had 296,000 such jobs back in 1950, and only 27,000 by 2011. The rump city is mostly poor and African-American, but still has a huge geographical area to provide services to. Detroit itself is 139 squares miles -- as MacGillis notes, that's bigger than Boston, Manhattan, and San Francisco combined -- and could probably use some downsizing.

Bankruptcy is probably Detroit's best chance to put some kind of floor under its collapse. With rising pension payouts squeezing out services, Detroit will only become more unlivable -- unless it hits the fiscal reset button. But it's not clear whether it can. Detroit Emergency Financial Manager Kevyn Orr filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy now, and not later as many supposed, because it would shield the city from retiree lawsuits. But those retirees have already challenged the city's right to declare bankruptcy, and won -- at least for now. The question is whether Detroit can legally shed its pension obligations. The Michigan Constitution forbids reducing public pension benefits, and bankruptcy would certainly do that. Indeed, $9.2 billion of Detroit's $18 billion debt is owed to city retirees -- with $3.5 billion of that from unfunded pension benefits, and $5.7 billion from unfunded healthcare benefits, as you can see below from the Detroit Free-Press.

Now, as Sarah Kliff of the Washington Post points out, Detroit wants to offloads its healthcare obligations onto the federal government, but that would still leave billions of dollars of pension liabilities that would get gutted in bankruptcy. Detroit's two largest unsecured creditors are the unfunded pensions of its city workers and its cops and firemen -- which would get stuck fighting bondholders for whatever financial scraps the city has left. How many scraps are left? Well, last month Emergency Manager Orr offered these unsecured creditors just 10 cents on the dollar. Of course, in bankruptcy, some creditors could end up with more than that, and some with less -- that is, nothing. A good portion of these unsecured bonds are "unlimited-tax general obligation bonds," which are supposed to require the city to raise taxes as needed to pay back what it owes. In other words, they're supposed to be guaranteed. If they're not, they still have an argument that they should be senior to other unsecured creditors -- but then again, pensions were supposed to be guaranteed too. We might find out which of these guarantees was more meaningless.

The Great Recession didn't cause Detroit's problems, but it did give the city its final kick. Detroit had overpromised and underfunded its public benefits for decades, but had been able to paper that over. But the lost market gains and lost tax revenue from the bust meant they couldn't hide the holes in their obligations any longer. It's the same in cities and states across the country. As Josh Barro of Business Insider argues, some kind of federal insurance and regulation for these pensions could stop this cycle of retirees finding out they have far less than they'd been promised. Now, that would come at the cost of fewer workers getting these kind of promises to begin with, but that would be better than people planning their retirements around benefits that aren't coming.

It's a hard step to take, but Detroit needs to shake its fiscal past if it's going to have a future. That alone won't be nearly enough to turn things around, but it will give Detroit more than it's had in a half-century: a chance.

How Georgia Just Spared The Life of Man It Desperately Wants To Kill

Posted: 19 Jul 2013 03:01 PM PDT

You just can't make this stuff up.

Georgia has been trying desperately for decades to execute Warren Hill, a convicted murderer who long ago was sentenced to death for a gruesome crime. But just when it looked like state officials would get their wish, just when it looked like the state and federal courts had rejected all of the substantive and procedural arguments Hill's attorneys could gin up, just when it looked like state sovereignty would prevail over the Eighth Amendment, Georgia blew it.

The state blew it because in its zeal to execute Hill, in its desire to keep the "machinery of death" cranking in the Peachtree State, it enacted this past spring a wholly unnecessary (and patently unconstitutional) "state-secret" law that sought to keep vital information about capital procedures from the public--and the state's judiciary. Georgia thereby failed to abide by the governing principle of legal argument: quit while you are ahead.

It was this brand new law--designed to protect the people and corporations that manufacture the controversial (and not always safe) drugs used in the state's lethal injections--that a state court judge on Thursday found to raise serious constitutional questions under the First Amendment and Eighth Amendment. The judge asked the obvious question: How can the executive branch constitutionally conspire with the legislative branch to block the judiciary from considering all relevant components of a planned execution?

How indeed. Declaring the new law likely unconstitutional, the judge promptly stayed Hill's execution, which was then scheduled for tonight at 7 p.m ET. Georgia was unable to appeal the trial judge's ruling today to the Georgia Supreme Court because state lawyers did not receive on time the court reporter's transcript from Thursday's hearing. And the state's death warrant for Hill expires tomorrow. This means that Hill won't be executed this week or anytime soon.

This is now the second time this year alone that Hill was scheduled for execution only to receive a stay. The last time, in February, Hill earned a reprieve so that the courts could evaluate the merits of his underlying claim that he cannot be lawfully executed anyway because the Eighth Amendment forbids the execution of the "mentally retarded.*" Back then, Georgia officials blamed Hill's attorneys for the delay. Today, those state officials have no one to blame but themselves.

For years now I have been writing about how the death penalty in America is slowly losing popular support because of the arbitrary and capricious manner in which it is carried out. For years now I have been chronicling instances where state officials are so ardent in their zeal to execute people that they lose sight of the larger commands of constitutional law. This case is just the latest, and most potent, example of this lamentable trend.

To prove my point, let me briefly recap what's happened here. First, state officials argued in court that Hill was not "mentally retarded" beyond a reasonable doubt, the standard required under Georgia's uniquely onerous capital laws. Then, when the three government doctors who examined Hill changed their minds, when they conceded that their initial evaluations of Hill had been flawed and that his retardation in fact satisfied the state's standard, Georgia argued that it was too late for Hill to rely upon this changed evidence.

And then, while Hill's lawyers and state attorneys were fighting over that standard, and federal procedural rules, and Hill's mental condition in light of the Supreme Court's recent prohibition against the execution of the "mentally retarded," the state Department of Corrections went to state lawmakers and asked them to enact a "secrecy" law so that the suppliers of lethal drugs (which are getting scarcer and scarcer these days after European manufacturers stopped shipping phenobarbital to the U.S. for fear it would be used in executions) would not be subject to public scrutiny or judicial review. While Georgia was fighting over core constitutional principles, it sought to shield its fight from public view. As a matter of law, as a matter of ethics, as a matter of morality, it's deplorable.

What happens now? Georgia must appeal the trial judge's ruling to the state supreme court, the justices of which leave for vacation at the end of July. Hill's attorney tells me that the drugs that were to be used on his client this week will expire in early August. The state likely won't be able to issue a new death warrant unless and until it wins its appeal on the new "secrets" law (which it likely won't). And the United States Supreme Court, which was on standby all this past week waiting to see if it would be needed, has placed Hill's case on its conference docket for September.

The bottom line is that Warren Hill is alive tonight because Georgia officials wanted him dead so badly that they disregarded basic constitutional principles. That's this story, at least for now, and in a larger sense it is the story of capital punishment in America in 2013: Those who seek to execute the condemned feel so strongly about their mission that they just can't help themselves. The lesson of this story, the moral of it, is clear. But having covered enough of these cases over the years I've long since given up hope that it will be learned.

*We are aware that the appropriate modern term to describe Hill's cognitive impairment is "intellectually disabled." But the federal courts in the context of Eighth Amendment jurisprudence still use the outdated phrase "mentally retarded" and so we use it here for ease of reference.

All-American Detroit

Posted: 19 Jul 2013 02:58 PM PDT

A reader who grew up on the East Coast, went to college at U Michigan, and now lives on the West Coast writes about the Detroit bankruptcy news:

My only connection to Detroit was as a student in Ann Arbor - 40 miles west of the city, and attending school with a lot of kids who had grown up in its suburbs, and some who had grown up in the city itself. And because of that, I grew to love the city. I was aware of the urban blight, but it wasn't as in my face as for those who'd grown up with it. Instead my experiences were were heading downtown for a festival, a ballgame or a show. I saw the autoshow. I partied in Greektown. I saw Belle Isle during the day. Once we did a service trip to the Gratiot corridor to teach some kids about STEM and make it "cool" for them. And that's about it.

So I'm not a Detroiter. But I can't help but love Detroit. Part of that is that I've always loved cars, and Detroit will always be the Motor City. But also, it does feel like an exaggeration of America - from its beginnings as a frontier outpost, to its rise as a very provincial, western city in the Gilded Age, to its explosion as the Motor City and the birthplace of the industrial middle class in the early 20th century, to its long, sad, slow racially-charged decline during the Cold War that saw its suburbs prosper, and its inability to change with the new world order over the last decade that saw its urban renewal feel like - well the perfect caricature of our new Gilded Age.

And yet, there is hope. Detroit has begun to reinvent itself, both in the city and in the metro area as a whole. SE Michigan does have a ton of engineers and a high level of R&D dollars being spent. While the bankruptcy is sad, just as GM's bankruptcy on 1 Jun 2009 was, it'll be far sadder if Detroit can't continue to reinvent itself as it has from the darkest days of 2008-9. The bankruptcy is payment for the sins of the past - but this purgatory should lead Detroit on a path to success. There's no reason that Detroit can't mirror what North Carolina's Research Triangle did in the '90s and '00s. And considering how much Detroit has made America look at herself over its history - I think we should all be rooting for the Motor City to rocket forward from here.

Not only can I not help but love Detroit - I can't help but believe in that city too.

The "always darkest before the dawn" / "what doesn't kill me makes me stronger" creed of plucky bounceback can be overdone. Sometimes what doesn't kill you still cripples you or leaves you doomed and weak. But our national saga has often enough included stories of setback, grit, and recovery that this is a plausible response to the news -- and certainly is a more useful response than despair. "Detroit" the metonym,* which was all but counted out four years ago, now is in much better shape. It is useful to assume that Detroit the physical city could recover too.

* Ie, as reference for the U.S. auto industry. For explanation of this little inside joke, see the first few paragraphs of my article on Jerry Brown.

Pakistan's New Big Threat Isn't Terrorism—It's Water

Posted: 19 Jul 2013 02:07 PM PDT

A boy jumps into a water canal to cool himself with others on a hot day in the eastern city of Lahore. (Mohsin Raza/Reuters)

In a report released last week by the Asian Development Bank (ADB), Pakistan was pinpointed as "one of the most water-stressed countries in the world, not far from being classified, 'water-scarce'." As water demand exceeds supply in the South Asian country, more and more water is being withdrawn from the nation's reservoirs, leaving them in a critically precarious position. According to the ADB, Pakistan's storage capacity, the amount of water it has on reserve in case of an emergency, is limited to a 30-day supply -- far below the recommended 1,000 days for countries with similar climates. Without meaningful action, a water crisis could push the country into further chaos.

Consider what a water shortage means for Pakistan. The last several years have seen the country plagued by chronic energy scarcities. Power outages lasting up to 18 hours a day are routine throughout the country, and they have had damaging effects on the economy and on the wellbeing of Pakistanis. Citizens frequently take to the streets, demanding a solution from their government in protests that often turn violent, worsening an already tumultuous political environment. Deficiencies of another precious natural resource, such as water, have the potential to intensify the already unstable situation in the country.

Early signs of the potential imbroglio that could transpire are already beginning to take shape. Late last week, residents in Abbottabad vowed to hold mass demonstrations if the local government was unable to address rampant water shortages in the city. The city has lacked sufficient water for the past month, with over 5,000 homes impacted in the hottest months of the year.

At a conference organized around water shortages in the province of Sindh earlier this month, leaders of political parties and various trade organizations blamed a wide array of individuals, including former Pakistani heads of state, other provinces in the country, and even Pakistan's neighbors, for the nation's water woes.

Extremist groups, of which there is no dearth in Pakistan, have also weighed in on the matter, using it as an opportunity to garner support for their movement. Hafiz Saeed, the founded of the militant group, Lakshar-e-Taiba -- the organization behind the 2008 Mumbai attacks -- has unequivocally blamed India for Pakistan's water crunch, accusing its government of committing "water terrorism." By evoking an issue that is sensitive to millions of Pakistanis, Saeed's rhetoric demonstrates the potential of militant groups to exploit this issue.

The country's demographics make it seem as though this trend will only worsen over time. Pakistan's population has grown exponentially over the past several decades. With two-thirds of the population currently under the age of 30, the nation of 180 million is expected to swell to 256 million by the year 2030, and demand for water will only grow. Meanwhile, climate change, which has reduced water flows into the Indus River, Pakistan's main supply source, will continue to shrink the available water supply.

The response to any crisis is likely to play out, in part, through Pakistan's foreign policy. For starters, the government has been pushing to redefine the terms of the Indus Water Treaty of 1960 -- the water-sharing plan struck between India and Pakistan that outlines how the six rivers of the Indus basin would be shared. Pakistan has recently contested the construction of Indian dams on rivers that begin in India but flow into Pakistan, arguing that the dams would restrict Pakistani supply.

The dispute, which is currently being reviewed by the International Court of Arbitration in The Hague, will clearly impact the relationship between the two historic rivals, as water demand increases in both countries. But with pressure mounting from various groups within Pakistan, and the likelihood of instability increasing due to shortages, the Pakistani government may find itself in a difficult position when negotiating with India -- it will have limited bargaining room against an Indian government that may be reluctant to renegotiate a treaty that has been in place for 53 years.

There are other ways, outside of India, for Pakistan to alleviate the problem. Requiring and enforcing updated, modern farming techniques is a start. Pakistan's agriculture industry is notorious for its inefficient irrigation and drainage processes, which have contributed to the scarcity. The government will also need to reach out beyond its borders to create solutions. The Memorandum of Understanding between the Karachi Water and Sewage board and the China International Water and Electric Corporation, which strives to make Karachi self-sufficient in water supply, is one example of how deliberate international efforts can help the situation.

Water deficiency, and how Pakistan responds to it, has the propensity to shape the country significantly over the next several years and decades. Without any meaningful action, the future looks alarming. A growing population without the resources it needs to survive, let alone thrive economically, will throw the country into a period of instability that may be far worse than anything we see today.

The Time Obama Was Mistaken for a Waiter at a Tina Brown Book Party

Posted: 19 Jul 2013 01:04 PM PDT

Not a waiter. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

Obama's frank remarks on race and how he also has been seen as someone less than who he is led journalist Katie Rosman of the Wall Street Journal to resurface a 2008 piece about a 2003 garden party at the Manhattan home of media luminaries Tina Brown, now editor of the Daily Beast, and Harold Evans. The gathering just a little more than 10 years ago was to celebrate Sidney Blumenthal's book The Clinton Wars. Wrote Rosman:

Standing by myself I noticed, on the periphery of the party, a man looking as awkward and out-of-place as I felt. I approached him and introduced myself. He was an Illinois state senator who was running for the U.S. Senate. He was African American, one of a few black people in attendance.

We spoke at length about his campaign. He was charismatic in a quiet, solemn way. I told him I wanted to pitch a profile of him to a national magazine. (The magazine later rejected my proposal.)

The following year I watched as he gave the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention, and then won his Senate seat that fall. On Tuesday, Barack Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States.

But it's her kicker that really stands out in light of Obama's comment today that "there are very few African-American men in this country who haven't had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. That includes me."

"What I will always remember," Rosman wrote in 2008, "is as I was leaving that party ... I was approached by another guest, an established author. He asked about the man I had been talking to. Sheepishly he told me he didn't know that Obama was a guest at the party, and had asked him to fetch him a drink. In less than six years, Obama has gone from being mistaken for a waiter among the New York media elite, to the president-elect. What a country."

Indeed.

And yet even as that country elected and then reelected its first black president, the easy assumptions about who black men are have yet to vanish.

The Obamacare Plot Twist

Posted: 19 Jul 2013 12:43 PM PDT

For months, we've been told that the impending implementation of the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) will lead to soaring healthcare costs and more expensive premiums. That narrative has taken hold, even for those who otherwise support the suite of reforms. And that's why the recent front-page article in the New York Times, reporting that premiums in New York State may actually fall 50 percent or more, came as such a surprise.

Only a few weeks prior, the Wall Street Journal announced that "Healthy consumers could see insurance rates double or even triple when they look for individual coverage under the federal health law later this year." Their analysis did acknowledge that ailing individuals could see rates fall, but the driving point was one that has been made ad infinitum by critics of the reforms: costs will soar.

So entrenched is that view that the Republican-controlled House of Representatives continues its quixotic quest to repeal the bill, and voted this week for the 38^th and 39^th times to repeal parts of the bill, including the "employer mandate" that the Obama administration has already decided to delay.Paul Ryan said about the latest vote: "This law needlessly raises healthcare costs. And this law will cause millions of people to lose the health insurance that they have, that they want to keep."

The debate distills to this: Can a bill that depends on an uneasy blend of free-market incentives and government regulation succeed in providing universal access to healthcare at a reasonable cost? The premise of the act in the first place was that a system of healthcare exchanges would encourage competition and keep prices moderate even as the pool of insured people expanded.

But that assumes that states implement it in good faith. The staunch opposition of Republicans has meant that many states with little regulation of insurance companies or healthcare are delaying or actively resisting many aspects of the bill. What's clear is that opposing the bill is a good strategy if you want the reforms to fail. The success of the legislation depends on the cooperation of state governments, insurance companies and federal regulators. That is hardly unusual, but the complexity of the reforms make it all the more imperative.

Yet the divergences over the bill and its consequences mask a rather severe rift between federal actions, state conviction and popular opinion. Despite laws passing at the federal level, the reality is that the United States remains a federal system that requires vast efforts of compliance by states and by individuals. One of the great gripes of state-level politicians is that Washington is forever passing "unfunded mandates" and assorted vague and complex laws, and then leaving it to states to pay for and figure out the implementation. The Affordable Care Act is Exhibit A for these tensions.

Yet for the American system to work, some level of compliance and trust are essential. That is true for paying taxes, and it's true for healthcare reform. There is no way the government could actively force every single person to pay taxes without creating a coercive police state. And healthcare reform will not work unless multiple segments of society work jointly and cooperatively. Even the vaunted aspects of the bill that encourage competition require some level of cooperation. Various insurance companies and state agencies have to hash out the details of the proposed exchanges for the currently uninsured and provide alternatives for those currently insured under different plans.

In short, the bill requires what Silicon Valley firms have called "coopetition," which acknowledges the tensions and competition inherent in various enterprises but recognizes that there are joint needs that demand collective action. Coopetition as applied to healthcare implementation would mean different states would have thicker or thinner regulatory regimes, and more or less competitive pricing of insurance, but that all would make a good faith efforts to implement healthcare exchanges and honor the federal mandates for universal coverage.

Yet opponents have been set against the act. Unlike other examples of intransigence in the face of a national bill, obstructing the Affordable Care Act might fatally undermine it. Southern opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Right Act of 1965 triggered federal responses that forced compliance, but there the moral issue was widely settled, and there were clear mechanism to force compliance. You can't do that with the Affordable Care Act. There is no scenario where Obama could call out the national guards to force states to open functional healthcare exchanges.

That's why the news from New York is so potent. The primary fuel against the act is that it will expand the scope of government at the expense of prosperity and good healthcare. That is why there have been so many stories of businesses threatening to lay off workers if the bill is implemented, and so many tales of soaring costs directly harming already stretched individuals whose incomes have stagnated. But if the bill actually lowers costs and delivers care that is at worst not much different than now, then the opposition begins to fracture.

The most likely scenario, of course, is that states that work with the bill will find a way to contain costs and perhaps lower premiums for individuals and for companies. State governments that oppose the bill might succeed in driving costs up. That could in turn keep the ideological fires nicely tended. Opponents and supporters can claim victory, and blame negative outcomes on the other.

That said, if even a handful of larger states can demonstrate lower costs and expanded care, that will be a body blow to opponents who have relentlessly promulgated the story that expenses will soar and the quality of care will plummet. Ultimately, almost everyone wants universal care and good care, even as there are adamant conflicts over how to provide those. Others states could well look at how pricing in New York unfolds and then demand the same for themselves.

If this much-reviled bill proves to work for tens of millions in select states, it will change the current narrative dramatically. It will demonstrate that collective action is not just desirable for optimal collective outcomes; it is essential. Fight all you want to prevent laws you dislike from passing; work all you wish to amend laws that have passed; but once those laws exist and have been validated, work together to implement them. Sounds oddly naïve in today's jaded world, but it's the only way forward.

"The Edgy Optimist" column is initially published at Reuters.com, an Atlantic partner site.

Considering the President's Comments on Racial Profiling

Posted: 19 Jul 2013 12:30 PM PDT

My earlier criticisms notwithstanding, I think these comments (brought to you by my label-mate Garance Franke-Ruta) by Barack Obama, given his role as president of the United States of America, strike precisely the right note.

I could nitpick about a few things, but I think it's more important that people take this in. As far as I know, these are Barack Obama's most extensive comments regarding the impact of racism since he became president.

I would like to highlight this:

You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago. And when you think about why, in the African American community at least, there's a lot of pain around what happened here, I think it's important to recognize that the African American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that doesn't go away.
There are very few African American men in this country who haven't had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. That includes me. There are very few African American men who haven't had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me -- at least before I was a senator. There are very few African Americans who haven't had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off. That happens often.
And I don't want to exaggerate this, but those sets of experiences inform how the African American community interprets what happened one night in Florida. And it's inescapable for people to bring those experiences to bear. The African American community is also knowledgeable that there is a history of racial disparities in the application of our criminal laws -- everything from the death penalty to enforcement of our drug laws. And that ends up having an impact in terms of how people interpret the case.

I think this this is a very good primer on how it feels to be black and consider your relationship to law enforcement. Or people who think they are law enforcement.

I have had my criticisms of this president and how he talks about race. But given the mass freak-out that met him last year after making a modest point about Trayvon Martin, it must be said that it took political courage for him to double down on the point and then advance it.

No president has ever done this before. It does not matter that the competition is limited. The impact of the highest official in the country directly feeling your pain, because it is his pain, is real. And it is happening now. And it is significant.

In Jordan, the Arab Spring Isn't Over

Posted: 19 Jul 2013 11:55 AM PDT

Supporters of Jordanian regime hold a picture of King Abdullah (C) as they shout slogans during a demonstration after Friday prayers in Amman in February 2011. (Muhammad Hamed)

Amman, Jordan -- After the Egyptian army toppled President Mohammed Morsi, a member of the U.S. Congress expressed the sentiment of many in Washington.

"The army is the only stable institution in the country," he said.

In the Western media, Arab Spring post-mortems proliferated, including a 15-page special report in The Economist that asked, "Has the Arab Spring failed?" The answer: "That view is at best premature, at worst wrong."

Here in Jordan, Arab Spring inspired protests demanding King Abdullah II cede power to an elected government has petered out. A crackdown on the media that shut down 300 websites last month elicited little protest.

"We are witnessing a swift return to a police state," said Labib Kamhawi, an opposition figure accused last year of violating a law that bars Jordanians from defaming the king. "You will find everything controlled."

Yet analysts, opposition members and former government officials say that the Arab Spring has paused here -- not ended. The underlying economic issues which prompted the protests that toppled governments across the Middle East and North Africa remain in place. Arab rulers and U.S. officials are both mistaken if they think they can rely on generals and regents to produce long-term stability.

"The political energy that was released around the Arab world and Jordan in 2011 has not dissipated," said Robert Blecher, a Middle East analyst with the International Crisis Group. "The problems that gave birth to the Arab uprisings have not been solved."

What, then, is happening in Jordan? Simply put, Jordanians look north to Syria and southwest to Egypt and are frightened by what they see. Brutal civil wars and street clashes have tempered the desire for rapid change. Though Abdullah limits speech here, he is not nearly as brutal as Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. And events in Egypt have made young, secular Jordanians loathe to live under the Muslim Brotherhood. In short, Jordanians are waiting.

"I'm less aggressive toward the king because I saw what the Islamists could do, I see what is happening in the region," said Alaa Fazzaa, the editor of one of the shuttered websites. "I'm waiting for the right time to attack."

In a region where 60 percent of the population is under the age of 30, the economic problems are colossal. And a younger generation bent on economic opportunity and basic political rights will not accept a permanent return to authoritarianism. Jordan is a case in point.

The global economic slowdown halved economic growth in Jordan from 6 percent to 3 percent over the last three years. Jordan's official unemployment rate is 12.5 percent, with youth unemployment estimated to be twice that. More than 550,000 Syrian refugees have flooded the foreign-aid-dependent, oil- and water-starved desert kingdom of 6 million.

Oraib al Rantawi, the director of the Al Quds Center for Political Studies here, said that the biggest concerns that Jordanians express in opinion polls are not political.

"The top five priorities for Jordanians are economic," he said. "You will find political reform on number 10 or number 11."

To his credit, Abdullah, 51, is one of the most liberal monarchs in the Middle East. After he ascended to the throne in1999, he was widely hailed as a modernizer. Yet in recent years, his reforms have slowed and popularity ebbed.

A March profile of the king published in The Atlantic provoked fury in Jordan. In the piece, which the palace disputed, the king was quoted as disparaging intelligence chiefs, the Muslim Brotherhood, tribal elders, U.S. diplomats, regional leaders and his own family. He said local politicians had failed to take advantage of reforms he enacted and mocked one nascent party's social and economic manifesto.

"It's all about 'I'll vote for this guy because I'm in his tribe,'" the king said in the Atlantic story. "I want this guy to develop a program that at least people will begin to understand."

But critics insist Abdullah's reforms are illusory. Jordan has a prime minister and an elected lower house of parliament, but the regent can fire the prime minister and dissolve parliament at will. In the past five years, he has sent six prime ministers packing.

Luckily for Abdullah, Jordan's wing of the Muslim Brotherhood is proving as politically clumsy as its Egyptian brethren. The Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood boycotted legislative elections this year. A decent turnout allowed Abdullah to declare the elections credible and left the country's largest opposition group without a voice in parliament.

At the same time, as fighting rages in Syria and Secretary of State John Kerry pushes for Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, Washington needs Abdullah. Calls for reform from Washington have grown muted of late.

"In 2011, they were saying do reform and do it quick," said Blecher, the ICG analyst. "The message is much weaker now."

Vast economic problems remain in Jordan. Next month, the government will carry out a long delayed, International Monetary Fund-mandated increase in electricity prices. When an IMF required cut in fuel subsides was enacted last fall, riots erupted.

Believing that kings and generals can bring instant stability to today's Middle East is fanciful. Abdullah must enact sweeping economic reforms, crackdown on corruption and begin to cede power to an elected government. And Washington should encourage him every step of the way.

The clock cannot be turned back in the Middle East. In the short term, more turmoil lies ahead. In the long-run, growing economies, not growing authoritarianism, will foster stability.

This article also appears at Reuters.com, an Atlantic partner site.

Mobile-Device Email Signatures: More Than You Ever Wanted to Know

Posted: 19 Jul 2013 11:31 AM PDT

Here is a list of devices from which you, dear readers, claim to send emails: Commodore 64, carrier pigeon, homing pigeon, courier pigeon, fountain pen, rotary phone, hammer and chisel, tin can via the string network, typewriter, abacus, Apollo Guidance Computer, Atari, car phone, shoe phone, 1984 Samsung car phone, difference engine, Game Boy Color, IBM Selectric, pocket rocket, Remington SL3, souped-up TV remote, steam powered digital telegraph, TI-83 Plus, TI-89, toaster, UNIVAC, Coleco Adam computer, Moleskine notebook, Pony Express, Skynet, space age phonograph, and smoke signals.

Phew. That's a lot of retro. And a lot of Wikipediaing for the uninitiated.

This data derives, of course, from our request yesterday that you send in your favorite edits to that line of text that phone companies so gauchely added to mobile emails: "Sent from my iPhone," etc.

I know I promised you a best-of list, BUT...

Instead, I wrote you an essay breaking down the data! (Bum trade, sorry.) What really caught my attention is that people saw a basic grammar to iPhone signature witticisms. You put a single line of text in front of millions of people, and they start to -- en masse -- decompose it into playable components. Here's the general form of the message (explicit stuff is in brackets):

Apology/Location/Status [Communication] from [My] [Device]

The surface content of the message is that you're receiving a message from a device. But the type of device conveys an implicit status message, while the presence of the line provides an in-advance apology for any errors as well as an indication you're mobile out there in the world (or at least not at your computer).

Using this general form, we can create a loose taxonomy of the signature edits. (Yes, I know I'm taking this too seriously. Sent from a nerd in data heaven. Expect overthinking.)

Sent from a rotary phone (Alexis Madrigal).

Look, you can check for yourself (I've scrubbed the names and backstories):

Most people only played with one of the elements. Obviously, the list at the top of this post shows people toying with the idea of the device itself, which (unintentionally or not) also changes the status message that gets delivered. They get all the other benefits of the line, but get to associate with a device that's "more them."

Others liked to highlight the device's deviceness, as in Nathan Tsoi's "I typed my text above on a smallish quadrilateral of aluminosilicate glass, a task that would have been unimaginable to most people even a few short years ago. Mistakes are inevitable" or Marcus Himmel's "Sent from a toy that has more computer power than all of NASA back in 1969 when it sent two astronauts to the moon" or Don D in Peoria's, "Sent from the first great invention of the 21st century."

The other popular way to personalize the signature was to play with the implicit apology. These come in two flavors. The first is to actually apologize with words:

Typed with big thumbs on small phone
iPhone. iTypos. iApologize.
Sorry to be terse: my phone has little keys and I have fat fingers.
Sent from my iPhone. Forgive the brevity, the typos and the lack of nuance.
Sent from my iPhone; spelling might vary because I have fat fingers.
Sent from my iPhone, please embrace the typos
Sent from mobile device, all error self inflicted
Sent from a not-so-smartphone. Anything written herein that you find misspelled, objectionable, incoherent, dim-witted, plagiarized or legally actionable should be attributed to the phone manufacturer, Chinese hackers, or PRISM.
sent from a magical device that lives in my pocket. please excuse typos.
Does this email sound weird? That's because it's sent from my iPhone.
*brevity and errors aided and abetted by my beloved iPhone*

The second is to intentionally misspell the signature so that you know that I know that you know that I'm sending an implicit apology.

Sent from iPhone; kindly excuse tyops.
my iPhern. Sory fer eny typeos.
My iPhone can't spell for carp.
Snet fmor ym iPnohe, lulz

Another easy play was to invert the possession of the device: "Sent from your iPhone." Or the more florid: "Sent from your iPhone. Yes, that's right. Check your back pocket; I took your wallet, too." Or even more specific: "Sent from the iPhone you left in Starbucks."

Sent from a typewriter (Alexis Madrigal).

Emily Hopkins sent in the signature, "I have a standing desk." I puzzled over that one for a while, but then I read the backstory. It's a play on the status part of the message, "People with standing desks are always telling you they have a standing desk, too," she wrote, "like iPhone emailers telling you they have iPhones. (btw, I myself have a standing desk.)"

Have I told you guys I have a standing desk, too? Well, I do. Sitting kills. OK, anyway.

Godon Speckhard delivered another subtle variation that I sorta love. His signature? "I have an iPhone." Why? "What truly mattered, and the reason I changed my signature, was that I HAVE AN iPHONE!!!!!!" I take those exclamation points to be ironic.

The most common status variation had to do with giving yourself a version of the iPhone that does not exist yet. The iPhone 6 or the iPhone 6 Prototype or even the iPhone 7. Or "Sent from my 16GB Turbo iPad 5. The one with the six-week waiting list." Or from 30 Rock, "Sent from one of my 4 iPads." And finally, playing on the Cult of Mac, "Sent from the my iDol."

And then things start to get a little weird.

Altering the presumed location of the sender generated some strange variations on the theme. Arrom Azam uses "Sent from a hole in the ground," inspired by the Israeli prisoner Gilad Shalit, "who was kept, literally, in a hole in the ground for five years. Niklas Holmberg went the opposite direction: "Sent from above," which he recommends for "people who are very tall or actually believe they are God."

We also got, "Sent from an outhouse on Mars," and several other literal potty jokes (e.g. "Sent from my iPhone while pooping." Ah COME ON MAN) as well as some plays on the idea that the sender is right near you (1. "Sent from directly behind you" 2. "Sent from...Look behind you...Boo!").

There were odder variations, too. A physicist suggested, "Sent from one of the impossibly small curved dimensions of spacetime responsible for gravity" and a Star Trek nerd used "Sent from my Holodeck" and a Star Wars fan uses, "Sent from a galaxy far, far away."

I have two favorites in this category. The first from a photographer who was tired of explaining his unavailability: "Sent from my iPhone during a knife fight in a crashing helicopter above the Nicaraguan rainforest. So please excuse any curt responses." And the second from writer David Dobbs, who admits to stealing the dada gem from someone else: "Sent from my horse." Who doesn't like to imagine their friends on horses? (Nice breeches, Dobbs.)

People who wanted to emphasize the communication aspect of the message to the exclusion of all else tended to give interesting, detailed rationales:

"Sent by your iDad." ("Sent to my daughter when she emailed me first time from her iPad and highlighted the sign off. I dispensed some fatherly advice about how to change Apple's guerrilla advertising." -- Matthew Stuttard)
sent by me ("We have to take responsibility instead of pointing the finger at our mobile device.")
"Sent from the bottom of my heart." ("Bursting with emotions. That's me.")
"Me. From me to you. Who cares about the source or means." ("object from which we communicate. Did letters or correspondence ever say "sent from a person driving a truck with the steering wheel on the wrong side, who then delivered it to a person to sort and then give to another person who put it into a box. Then it went into another truck with the steering wheel on the wrong side and was placed into your mailbox.")

Last, we get to the people who completely broke form. There are the people who deleted the message entirely, of course, usually for variations on Jonny Rodin's reasoning: "It is completely irrelevant what device I'm using to send it, so I've deleted the signature altogether."

Like, what to do with this one? "You look nice today." Its creator, who provided the handle The Festive Archaeologist, notes, "It creeps EVERYONE out. Particularly those you live with." Indeed.

Or this one: "Adrift in the Dirac Sea." What is the Dirac Sea? "The Dirac sea is a theoretical model of the vacuum as an infinite sea of particles with negative energy -- think of it as a sea of email. I'm a science-fiction writer," explains Eileen Gunn.

Or: "A Rich Brain-Child" ("My brain has babies.")

Or: "Email courtesy of my Idea Pipe" ("'Mobile phone' is so dull and doesn't really capture what pocket computers mean. 'Idea Pipe' is a bit more evocative, no?")

Or: "Info mule"

Or: "Sent by a tiny Japanese Bear" (Sadly, we do know what's up with this one: "My eccentric, absolute loon of a friend Lisa. Her phone case is a, well, Japanese bear. Of course since she lived in DC and I was in New York, I didn't know this for months until she visited, demystifying what I thought was simply adorable randomness." I prefer to imagine a tiny Japanese bear tapping out messages.)

And finally: "written in smoke, translated by warlocks, sent from my palms," which BJG simply calls, the "logical recreation of the email process." That's probably a good place to end the investigation.

Sent from my MacBook Air.

Obama: Trayvon 'Could Have Been Me'

Posted: 19 Jul 2013 11:26 AM PDT

Larry Downing/Reuters

The advantage of being the first black president is that Barack Obama does not need to convene a high-level panel to upend the by turns contentious and cautious way Americans discuss the day-to-day life experiences of African Americans.

He just needs to speak about his own life.

In his initial statement after George Zimmerman was acquitted, the former constitutional law professor took pains to be legally fair while also acknowledging the pain many were feeling as a result of the jury's decision that no one was legally culpable for the death of an unarmed 17-year-old who went out for snacks. Since then, many have called for the president to say something more. And now he has.

It wasn't a big speech, advertised for days in advance. It wasn't an occasion to roll out a new federal program or task force. What it was Obama taking up his presidential mantle and pulling aside the cloak of state at the same time. It was him speaking to young black men as someone who is a role model, and speaking to the broader national audience with the autobiographical frankness that earlier in his life made him a best-selling author.

Obama spoke at the start of the White House daily briefing normally held by his press secretary, on a hot and humid Friday afternoon when the press room was not at capacity. "You know, on -- on -- on television it usually looks like you're addressing a full room," the president quipped before launching into what he'd come there to say.

His full remarks:

The reason I actually wanted to come out today is not to take questions, but to speak to an issue that obviously has gotten a lot of attention over the course of the last week, the issue of the Trayvon Martin ruling. I gave an -- a preliminary statement right after the ruling on Sunday, but watching the debate over the course of the last week I thought it might be useful for me to expand on my thoughts a little bit.
First of all, you know, I -- I want to make sure that, once again, I send my thoughts and prayers, as well as Michelle's, to the family of Trayvon Martin, and to remark on the incredible grace and dignity with which they've dealt with the entire situation. I can only imagine what they're going through, and it's -- it's remarkable how they've handled it.
The second thing I want to say is to reiterate what I said on Sunday, which is there are going to be a lot of arguments about the legal -- legal issues in the case. I'll let all the legal analysts and talking heads address those issues.
The judge conducted the trial in a professional manner. The prosecution and the defense made their arguments. The juries were properly instructed that in a -- in a case such as this, reasonable doubt was relevant, and they rendered a verdict. And once the jury's spoken, that's how our system works.
But I did want to just talk a little bit about context and how people have responded to it and how people are feeling. You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot, I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago. And when you think about why, in the African- American community at least, there's a lot of pain around what happened here, I think it's important to recognize that the African- American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that -- that doesn't go away.
There are very few African-American men in this country who haven't had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. That includes me.
And there are very few African-American men who haven't had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me, at least before I was a senator. There are very few African-Americans who haven't had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off. That happens often.
And you know, I don't want to exaggerate this, but those sets of experiences inform how the African-American community interprets what happened one night in Florida. And it's inescapable for people to bring those experiences to bear.
The African-American community is also knowledgeable that there is a history of racial disparities in the application of our criminal laws, everything from the death penalty to enforcement of our drug laws. And that ends up having an impact in terms of how people interpret the case.
Now, this isn't to say that the African-American community is naive about the fact that African-American young men are disproportionately involved in the criminal justice system, that they are disproportionately both victims and perpetrators of violence. It's not to make excuses for that fact, although black folks do interpret the reasons for that in a historical context.
We understand that some of the violence that takes place in poor black neighborhoods around the country is born out of a very violent past in this country, and that the poverty and dysfunction that we see in those communities can be traced to a very difficult history.
And so the fact that sometimes that's unacknowledged adds to the frustration. And the fact that a lot of African-American boys are painted with a broad brush and the excuse is given, well, there are these statistics out there that show that African-American boys are more violent -- using that as an excuse to then see sons treated differently causes pain.
I think the African-American community is also not naive in understanding that statistically somebody like Trayvon Martin was probably statistically more likely to be shot by a peer than he was by somebody else.
So -- so folks understand the challenges that exist for African- American boys, but they get frustrated, I think, if they feel that there's no context for it or -- and that context is being denied. And -- and that all contributes, I think, to a sense that if a white male teen was involved in the same kind of scenario, that, from top to bottom, both the outcome and the aftermath might have been different.
Now, the question for me at least, and I think, for a lot of folks is, where do we take this? How do we learn some lessons from this and move in a positive direction? You know, I think it's understandable that there have been demonstrations and vigils and protests, and some of that stuff is just going to have to work its way through as long as it remains nonviolent. If I see any violence, then I will remind folks that that dishonors what happened to Trayvon Martin and his family.
But beyond protests or vigils, the question is, are there some concrete things that we might be able to do? I know that Eric Holder is reviewing what happened down there, but I think it's important for people to have some clear expectations here. Traditionally, these are issues of state and local government -- the criminal code. And law enforcement has traditionally done it at the state and local levels, not at the federal levels.
That doesn't mean, though, that as a nation, we can't do some things that I think would be productive. So let me just give a couple of specifics that I'm still bouncing around with my staff so we're not rolling out some five-point plan, but some areas where I think all of us could potentially focus.
Number one, precisely because law enforcement is often determined at the state and local level, I think it'd be productive for the Justice Department -- governors, mayors to work with law enforcement about training at the state and local levels in order to reduce the kind of mistrust in the system that sometimes currently exists.
You know, when I was in Illinois I passed racial profiling legislation. And it actually did just two simple things. One, it collected data on traffic stops and the race of the person who was stopped. But the other thing was it resourced us, training police departments across the state on how to think about potential racial bias and ways to further professionalize what they were doing.
And initially, the police departments across the state were resistant, but actually they came to recognize that if it was done in a fair, straightforward way, that it would allow them to do their jobs better and communities would have more confidence in them and in turn be more helpful in applying the law. And obviously law enforcement's got a very tough job.
So that's one area where I think there are a lot of resources and best practices that could be brought bear if state and local governments are receptive. And I think a lot of them would be. And -- and let's figure out other ways for us to push out that kind of training.
Along the same lines, I think it would be useful for us to examine some state and local laws to see if it -- if they are designed in such a way that they may encourage the kinds of altercations and confrontations and tragedies that we saw in the Florida case, rather than diffuse potential altercations.
I know that there's been commentary about the fact that the stand your ground laws in Florida were not used as a defense in the case.
On the other hand, if we're sending a message as a society in our communities that someone who is armed potentially has the right to use those firearms even if there's a way for them to exit from a situation, is that really going to be contributing to the kind of peace and security and order that we'd like to see?
And for those who resist that idea that we should think about something like these "stand your ground" laws, I just ask people to consider if Trayvon Martin was of age and armed, could he have stood his ground on that sidewalk? And do we actually think that he would have been justified in shooting Mr. Zimmerman, who had followed him in a car, because he felt threatened?
And if the answer to that question is at least ambiguous, it seems to me that we might want to examine those kinds of laws.
Number three -- and this is a long-term project: We need to spend some time in thinking about how do we bolster and reinforce our African-American boys? And this is something that Michelle and I talk a lot about. There are a lot of kids out there who need help who are getting a lot of negative reinforcement. And is there more that we can do to give them the sense that their country cares about them and values them and is willing to invest in them?
You know, I'm not naive about the prospects of some brand-new federal program.
I'm not sure that that's what we're talking about here. But I do recognize that as president, I've got some convening power.
And there are a lot of good programs that are being done across the country on this front. And for us to be able to gather together business leaders and local elected officials and clergy and celebrities and athletes and figure out how are we doing a better job helping young African-American men feel that they're a full part of this society and that -- and that they've got pathways and avenues to succeed -- you know, I think that would be a pretty good outcome from what was obviously a tragic situation. And we're going to spend some time working on that and thinking about that.
And then finally, I think it's going to be important for all of us to do some soul-searching. You know, there have been talk about should we convene a conversation on race. I haven't seen that be particularly productive when politicians try to organize conversations. They end up being stilted and politicized, and folks are locked into the positions they already have.
On the other hand, in families and churches and workplaces, there's a possibility that people are a little bit more honest, and at least you ask yourself your own questions about, am I wringing as much bias out of myself as I can; am I judging people, as much as I can, based on not the color of their skin but the content of their character? That would, I think, be an appropriate exercise in the wake of this tragedy.
And let me just leave you with -- with a final thought, that as difficult and challenging as this whole episode has been for a lot of people, I don't want us to lose sight that things are getting better. Each successive generation seems to be making progress in changing attitudes when it comes to race. I doesn't mean that we're in a postracial society. It doesn't mean that racism is eliminated. But you know, when I talk to Malia and Sasha and I listen to their friends and I see them interact, they're better than we are. They're better than we were on these issues. And that's true in every community that I've visited all across the country.
And so, you know, we have to be vigilant and we have to work on these issues, and those of us in authority should be doing everything we can to encourage the better angels of our nature as opposed to using these episodes to heighten divisions. But we should also have confidence that kids these days I think have more sense than we did back then, and certainly more than our parents did or our grandparents did, and that along this long, difficult journey, you know, we're becoming a more perfect union -- not a perfect union, but a more perfect union.

Video of his remarks:

China Harvests the Majority of its Organs From Executed Prisoners

Posted: 19 Jul 2013 11:14 AM PDT

In China, 90 percent of transplanted organs come from the bodies of executed prisoners. (Reuters)

On the morning of July 12, Zeng Chengjie, a businessman and real estate developer from China's Hunan Province, was executed by firing squad. Mr. Zeng, 55, was convicted of illegal fundraising involving 3.4 billion RMB ($550 million). His daughter, Zeng Shan, later protested on Weibo that the court had not notified the family before her father's execution. It was a full two days after his death that the Zeng family finally received the execution notice by mail. Postmarked "July 13," the notice was issued on July 12, the day of Zeng's execution.

The hasty and secretive execution prompted suspicions among Weibo users. Many in particular have questioned whether or not authorities harvested Zeng's organs for use in transplant operations. The government cremated Zeng and did not disclose the record of events surrounding his execution, so there is no way to know what happened to Zeng's body. Nonetheless, the practice of using executed prisoners' organs for transplantation is an open secret in China.

Read more from Government Executive.

A Scrappy Afghan Radio Station Faces a Shaky Future After U.S. Troops Leave

Posted: 19 Jul 2013 07:55 AM PDT

(Matt Sienkiewicz)

Today, the Panjshir Valley is quiet. Once the heart of Afghan resistance against both Soviet invasion and the Taliban takeover, the valley now stands in peaceful contradiction to its war-torn surroundings. Whereas Kabul, only a short drive to the south, remains plagued by terror, the Panjshir offers only relics as reminders of its history of violence. Russian tanks lay, trackless and rusting, on the sides of the Valley's prodigious mountains. A monument to Ahmad Shah Massoud, the military leader who famously preserved the valley as Afghanistan's lone bastion from Taliban control, towers over the Panjshir river in quiet solitude. Even the airwaves, once littered with military communications in languages ranging from Russian to Dari to Pashto, have gone nearly silent.

But there is one exception. In a province without a single newspaper, magazine or television station, Radio Khorasan's faint but consistent signal at 89.3 FM represents the sole media connection between the people of the Panjshir and the state of crisis that plagues their countrymen.

Though entirely operated by local civilians, Radio Khorasan is nonetheless a product of the ongoing, uneasy marriage between Afghan society and the American-led NATO military mission in the country. Its roots trace back to an earlier time in the war, when a stable, peaceful Afghanistan seemed only a few battlefield victories and successful infrastructure projects away. From the very start, media was part of the strategy.

As part of the effort to build up the country's broadcasting capacity, NATO Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) scattered across the country, looking for community councils and small businessmen interested in bringing radio to rural locales that had descended into media darkness during the Taliban's rule between 1996 and 2001. Military objectives were thus paired with media goals, with new broadcast outlets not only serving to clarify NATO actions in the region, but also to foster a space in which information exchange might discredit the Taliban and bolster support for Western-style democracy.

In a province without a single newspaper, magazine or television station, Radio Khorasan's faint but consistent signal at 89.3 FM represents the sole media connection between the people of the Panjshir and the state of crisis that plagues their countrymen.

Each new station presented challenges to the PRTs and their partners, but the Panjshir and Radio Korocan offered a unique slate of obstacles. Unlike most of the nation, the valley had, literally, never been within range of a single radio station. The Panjshir's mountains had served as fortress walls for decades, deflecting Soviet signals intended to sway local worldviews or diminish military morale. No foreign force had ever penetrated the valley deep enough to start its own station; no Panjshiri had ever had the abundance of time or money necessary to begin his own. A century of war and resistance had left little time for such luxuries as news and entertainment.

In fact, the only person with any relevant expertise was Anwar Yuseffi, a gruff, quiet man, whose modest broadcasting career ended abruptly just two days before America's obsession with Afghanistan would begin. Yuseffi's retirement from the field of military communications came on September 9, 2001--the day his boss, the legendary military leader Ahmad Shah Massoud, was murdered by attackers associated with Osama Bin Laden. Yuseffi's experience consisted of relaying Massoud's messages to his field commanders and providing maintenance for the most basic of military-grade two-way radios. Technically he worked in radio. But in truth he was just a loyal soldier, trained in a simple job and heartbroken at the loss of a man who had come to represent the soul of Afghan nationalism.

For Yuseffi, the offer to start Radio Khorasan in 2007 was a personalized version of the central paradox that Afghan society had faced since 2001. On the one hand, NATO's interest in setting up the station was compatible with one of his life's main objectives. He had fought alongside Massoud in order to keep the Panjshir free from Taliban control. He certainly did not believe all of NATO's promises, but he was certain they had an enemy in common. The same groups involved in the murder of Massoud were thought by most to have trained and sheltered the 9/11 terrorists. But, at the same time, America's offer gave him pause. He feared that his station would one day join the long list of embarrassing Afghan collaborations with foreign powers that cared little for local life or culture.

Ultimately, Yuseffi accepted, believing that Afghanistan's long-term independence required the connective power of media. Comprised of 34 far-flung provinces and profoundly divided in terms of ethnicity and language, the nation was constantly struggling to forge a coherent sense of identity and purpose. Radio Khorasan was to become the Panjshiri people's connection to the rest of the nation, bringing in news and debate from across Afghanistan. Its production staff was to produce and distribute material proclaiming the valley's place in Afghan life and society. But NATO, of course, had its own goals in mind.

The station was offered to the people of the valley as an extension of the centuries old "shura" system, whereby issues of communal importance are made public under the guidance of elder, male leaders chosen from influential local families. All complaints about station content were directed at mullahs who provided a buffer between Yuseffi and wary listeners. At first, the station aired public service announcements and hosted virtual forums intended to articulate and, ultimately, justify the actions of NATO in the Panjshir. Fortunately for Yuseffi, this mostly meant announcing construction projects. Thanks to Massoud and his fighters, the Taliban had virtually no power base within the valley, and military action was rare.

Nonetheless, the need to impose a one-size-fits-all communication model on the vast, diverse country of Afghanistan brought significant problems for Yuseffi and his staff. To this day, some Panjshir citizens hold a grudge against Khorasan's most popular show, "Salam Watandar," an American-funded news program produced in Kabul and distributed nationwide. Locals took issue with the programs' subtle choices in terminology. In referring to the local paramilitary leaders, "Salam Watandar" employed the word jangsaalaar, which means "warlord" and has connotations of violence and corruption.

In most provinces, the word choice was not noteworthy, perhaps even obvious. In the Panjshir, however, it caused an uproar. The term was taken as a highly disrespectful reference to the fallen hero Massoud who, although a warlord in the literal sense, was known for his selflessness and commitment to Allah and country. NATO's generally sound and ostensibly unifying messaging strategy thus collided with the complexity of local Afghan politics, nearly shutting down Radio Khorasan with a single, ill-conceived phrase.

But Yuseffi, having banked considerable good will with local leaders, apologized and ultimately persevered. Slowly, as employees grew in competence, a small news division developed, with journalists moving throughout the valley, filing reports, and occasionally breaking stories that made news beyond the Panjshir. A team of people who had rarely even heard a radio before starting at Khorasan became producers, editors, and hosts, putting together programs that asked locals not only to think deeply about local issues, but also to put them into the broader context of a reuniting Afghan nation. Long held as a prime example of the inability for Afghanistan to coalesce into a single, coherent political unit, the geographically isolated Panjshir was slowly integrating into the greater political landscape, and, by 2010, Radio Khorasan was playing a key part.

But no matter how successful the station was in terms of improving programming quality and impacting its audience, financial independence never appeared any closer. The isolation of the Panjshir limited Khorasan's audience reach and, subsequently, its commercial viability. The station survived on a monthly $5,000 NATO stipend that provided enough income to pay small salaries and purchase the $50 worth of gasoline necessary to keep the station's generators running every day.

In 2011, predictably, these checks began to shrink and, ultimately, disappear. The American-designed 2014 disengagement plan forced NATO Provincial Reconstruction Teams across the nation to shut down, leaving projects such as Radio Khorasan without their core support. The security situation throughout the country has also deteriorated, shutting down NGOs that would have once been proud to work with an outlet such as Khorasan.

The cumulative result has been devastating. Station hours have been reduced to save on power. Employees have been let go and jobs have been combined. Morning show producers turn into night guardsmen as the sun sets on the valley. Many people have not been paid for a year, yet they go to work diligently each day, refusing to give up on a project they have spent the last eight years building.

Yuseffi, somehow, exudes a sense of guarded optimism about the situation. He has, he notes, been through worse. He emphasizes the potential power of Khorasan as the Panjshir's only media outlet. Perhaps local businesses, thus far skeptical, can be convinced to invest in advertising. At times he sounds like the operator of a local station in an American swing state, pointing to the inevitable demand for Khorasan airtime during presidential election season.

For left-wing critics of the war in Afghanistan, it is very easy to call for a complete withdrawal from the country and to demand the United States stop interfering in the cultural affairs of communities it does not understand. For conservatives, it has become popular to fall back on tired free-market platitudes, as though a Panjshiri news outlet ought to live or die by the same forces that would determine the fate of a Houston pop-country station.

Neither approach is appropriate in the case of Radio Khorasan and its fellow rural Afghan broadcasters. For one, the stakes are too high. Realizing that commercial strategies are doomed outside of major urban centers, many small stations have begun looking to alternative outside funding sources, including Pakistan, Iran, and even local warlords. It may make sense to oppose American interference in Afghan, but the alternative to such American-funded programs, unfortunately, is no more expressive of true local perspectives than the current system. Media is expensive and someone has to pay. It is foolish to assume America is the worst possible patron.

Given the goals of both Yuseffi and NATO's original radio project, the most promising avenue would be the creation of a true Afghan public broadcasting system -- a complex proposition and not a cheap one. However, given the tremendous resources America has put into Afghanistan, a concerted effort to fund and establish a state-owned, editorially independent system makes sense. For Americans, this would require putting aside ideologies and acknowledging mistakes. For the Afghan government, this would mean loosening its grip on state media, but perhaps also putting up a stronger fight against outside interference. Most importantly, however, for Yuseffi, his staff, and the citizens of the Panjshir, it would offer a chance to remain a peaceful -- but never silent -- part of Afghanistan's struggle.

This Artist's Project Involves Literally Burning Down the House

Posted: 19 Jul 2013 07:55 AM PDT

In Suburban, the Australian-born artist Ian Strange teams up with a film crew (and presumably several local fire departments) to subvert and in some cases burn the common image of the American suburb. The project involves eight site-specific constructions in Ohio, Michigan, Alabama, New Jersey, New York, and New Hampshire. At each site Strange designs, paints, or burns an uncommon image into the house and the surrounding landscape. In this short film, Strange gives a preview of the project and discusses his own feelings about the work. The multimedia project combines design, photography and film to display an incredibly eerie and unusual portrait of suburbia. After two years of production, the final installation will debut at the National Gallery of Victoria in Australia on July 26.

To see more videos and photos from Ian Strange's work visit http://kid-zoom.com/index.php

Don't Fear the Male Babysitter

Posted: 19 Jul 2013 07:39 AM PDT

The very thought of a male babysitter is enough to make some parents anxious.

Every online parenting forum seems to have a thread on the issue of male babysitters, such as "Hiring a Male Babysitter (or Manny)" on the site Park Slope Parents. In a satire on The Onion titled, "Desperate Mom Okays Male Babysitter," the mom normally wouldn't hire a male babysitter and knew it wasn't ideal, but she really needed the night off.

In an article for the Washington Post earlier this year, author Petula Dvorak hires a male babysitter and realizes it "is apparently something few parents would do." She said she received raised eyebrows from other parents at the playground when she introduced the new sitter and felt compelled to explain how long she's known him and how much she likes him to anyone who would listen. "When it comes to kids, we are pretty close to being a society that has demonized men," Dvorak writes, noting that a government study found that in 96 percent of sexual assaults on children the offenders were male.

This anxiety about male babysitters is remarkable when you look at the history of babysitting.

Throughout the twentieth century, boys were not only as accepted as babysitters, they were often preferred over girls. The reason is twofold: Teenage girls were dismissed as flighty and self-absorbed; and young boys needed male role models as their fathers were unemployed during the Great Depression or gone all week at work in the latter half of the century.

According to Miriam Forman-Brunell, a history professor and the author of Babysitter: An American History, babysitting in its modern incarnation came about in the 1920s, with "the expansion of suburbs for the first time." Parents were more likely to be separated from extended family members that once were relied on to watch children. Coincidentally, the 1920s also gave rise to the notion of a modern teenage girl who cared more about boys, movies and makeup than taking care of kids. To adults, the rise of the teenage girl signaled disorder and fueled anxieties.

As Forman-Brunell writes, because adolescent girls "attended sports events and flirted with men on the street corners, especially in front of the innocent babies they trundled about," the authors of a popular mid-1920s child-rearing manual disparaged adolescent girls and dismissed them as acceptable child-care providers.

Although babysitting first appeared in the 1920s, it didn't flourish as a cultural phenomenon until after World War II. The baby boom created ample jobs for babysitters. Still, though women had enjoyed greater employment opportunities during World War II, parents were hesitant to use a female babysitter. During this period, "parents were very anxious about hiring the girl next door, as has always been the case. It just has so much to do with their perception of teenage girls," says Forman-Brunell.

Even as teenage girls were provoking anxiety in parents, male babysitters were idealized as the perfect solution. During the Great Depression, Forman-Brunell says, unemployed adolescent boys became "saviors to distraught mothers and weary housewives unsatisfied with neighborhood girls."

In glowing descriptions in Parents Magazine from the 1930s, it seemed as if there was nothing boy helpers couldn't do. Some child-rearing experts during the Great Depression believed that male babysitters could go so far as to "restore boyhood" for their young charges. While husbands became depressed due to unemployment or deserted their families, Parents Magazine reassured readers that boys were up to the task of babysitting.

"It's surprising that you would find the entrepreneurial, perfect male babysitter in popular culture, but he's everywhere," says Forman-Brunell, "and he's not burdened by the same expectations that girls are." Being smart, competitive, and business-oriented were all considered positive characteristics of a male babysitter.

By the late 1940s, some Ivy-League schools institutionalized babysitting for male college students. For example, Forman-Brunell writes, male undergraduates at Princeton organized the "Tiger Tot Tending Agency" where, beginning in 1946, "college boys babysat for the children of faculty members and married students for thirty-five cents an hour." One mother who hired male babysitters through the Tiger Tot agency told Princeton Alumni Weekly, "I loved the idea of four strapping young men watching over my baby daughter. Diapers were changed with efficiency and aplomb." Four men came for the price of one babysitter so they could have enough people for a bridge game.

A 1940s New Yorker article reported that the Columbia University football coach--a former babysitter himself--created a sitting service for his players and was just as proud of their babysitting accomplishments as their hard work on the football field. The beefy babysitters were able to maintain their manliness while caring for children.

While tales of hellish babysitter experiences with teenage girls who racked up phone bills and ignored screaming children in order to canoodle with their boyfriends continued to populate the media, so did accounts of capable, responsible male babysitters.

When fathers were away at work in the 1950s, it was up to male sitters to instill manliness in young boys and turn boys into hardy men. A Life magazine cover story reported that 23 percent of the 7.9 million boys in the United States worked as babysitters in 1957, collectively earning an estimated $319 million.

Even as gender differences began to blur in the 1970s, male babysitters were still seen as an ideal, as is apparent in the children's book George the Babysitter (1977). Long-haired George would cook and clean each day for the kids he babysat, and at the end of the day liked to sit and read a football magazine. The book made teenage boy babysitters seem both domestic and masculine. Up until the end of the 20th century, popular culture and children's books such as Arthur Babysits (1992) and Jerome the Babysitter (1995) boosted the reputation of teenage boys as smart, dependable babysitters.

But today babysitting is most commonly viewed as a woman's domain. A Red Cross Babysitter Training Course video shows two women, one white and one black, babysitting. But there are no male sitters in the video.

According to a Wall Street Journal article published earlier this year, Sittercity.com, an online marketplace for babysitting, has 94 percent female sitters, while SmartSitting.com, an agency that matches highly educated sitters with New York families reports that 87 percent of its sitters are female.

Men have been so erased from the history of babysitting that the same Wall Street Journal article erroneously compares babysitting with cooking, saying, "Could childcare someday go the way of cooking? In the 1950s everyone assumed that women were better in the kitchen...these days, of course, cooking is gender neutral." The writer envisions a time in the future when babysitting "is no longer considered a girl's job." Little does she know that up until about 20 years ago, it wasn't a girl's job.

What the Pope Really Meant in His Twitter-Indulgences Announcement

Posted: 19 Jul 2013 07:21 AM PDT

Pope Francis' Twitter account (screenshot)

According to a new Vatican decree, issued last month but reported just about everywhere this week, Pope Francis will be granting indulgences -- or time off terms in purgatory -- to Catholics who closely follow his Twitter or other social media accounts during the World Youth Day event in Rio de Janeiro next week.

The pardons are typically proferred to sinners who, after confession, go out into the world and perform counter-balancing faithful or charitable deeds. The theological concept was sullied, though, in medieval times, when rogue clerics and corrupt popes promised eternal salvation to those who funded luxurious building projects.

The announcement could be interpreted, on its face, as a vain attempt to inflate the Vatican's social media numbers. However, while the pontiff (@Pontifex) hasn't quite catapulted to Lady Gaga levels of Twitter popularity, he doesn't really need much assistance. His nine different accounts -- each in a different language -- command more than seven million followers.

Since he took office in March, Francis's mien and conduct seem to counter any notion that he's aiming for celebrity. According to Father Steven Avella, a papal expert and professor of religious history at Marquette University, Pope Francis has shied away from the cult of personality that other Popes have indulged in. "It sure is a temptation," he wrote The Atlantic in an email. "But ... Francesco has tried to tamp this sort of thing down."

Modesty and humility, in fact, seem to be the defining characteristics of his papacy. He ditched the ostentatious luxury vehicles -- a custom Renault, BMW X5, and a Mercedes -- of his predecessor Pope Benedict XVI and opted for a discreet Ford Focus. He's also skipping out on summer down time at the posh papal villa Castel Gandolfo, preferring to remain in his modest Vatican guesthouse (which he selected as an alternative to the papal residence in the Apostolic Palace). He has even refused the standard sartorial splendor, shunning both the fancy Pope cape and shoes. When Francis recently learned that a statue in his likeness had been installed near the Cathedral in Buenos Aires, he phoned a priest there and ordered it immediately removed.

Still, the decision to grant indulgences over the Internet strikes both Avella and Rev. John O'Malley, S.J., an internationally acclaimed scholar on the Vatican and professor at Georgetown University, as peculiar. "This Twitter stuff, I have to admit, all sounds very strange to me," O'Malley wrote in an email. He also stressed that the principle of papal infallibility does not cover such a pronouncement. "The pope is not infallible in everything he says or does but only in a VERY restricted area and under VERY specific circumstances," he wrote. "The Twitter indulgences does not fulfill those criteria in even the slightest way." The scholars also seemed to doubt whether, in a maze of Vatican bureaucracy, the directive was initiated or even directly authorized by the Pope himself. Avella wrote:

I doubt whether Papa Francesco knows about this nonsense...and I would bet that if he does, he'll poo-poo it as the action of some over-zealous Vatican bureaucrat...even Benedict would find indulgenced tweets a bit too much. Francesco does not like this "quantified" grace business or the idea that saying X number of prayers gets you certain results.

Francis does not actually type out his Twitter dispatches -- but he does reportedly "approve" them -- so it's not that far-fetched of a theory. The Vatican press office has not responded to an inquiry about whether he signed off.

Whoever the idea originated with, the decree seems well-intentioned enough. It simply offers the same spiritual opportunities to those who, for legitimate reasons, cannot attend the event (and agree to earnestly and seriously participate over the Internet) as it does to those who can afford the journey. It reads:

The faithful who on account of a legitimate impediment cannot attend the aforementioned celebrations may obtain Plenary Indulgence under the usual spiritual, sacramental and prayer conditions, in a spirit of filial submission to the Roman Pontiff, by participation in the sacred functions on the days indicated, following the same rites and spiritual exercises as they occur via television or radio or, with due devotion, via the new means of social communication.

The message of prayer and faith must remain the same, it seems to say, it's just accomplished through a different medium -- the Internet. Archbishop Claudio Maria Celli, the head of the pontifical council for social communication, clarified the policy further in an interview with the Italian daily newspaper Corriere della Sera. "You don't get the indulgence the way you get a coffee from a vending machine. There's no counter handing out certificates," he said. "What really matters is that the Pope's tweets from Brazil, or the photos of World Youth Day that will be posted on Pinterest, should bear authentic spiritual fruit in the hearts of each one of us."

Father Paolo Padrini, an expert on the Church's digital campaigns who is known as the iPriest, told the newspaper that a participant had to fashion a sort of technological sacred space. "Imagine your computer is a well-laden table where you can find tweets from Pope Francis, videos on YouTube, clips on Corriere.it and Facebook postings from your friend in Brazil," he said. "That is the dinner that will nourish your spirit."

Perhaps, for some, it's difficult to fathom. Can a person really have some sort of deep spiritual experience on the same machine that's used for work, pleasure, and everything in between? The Vatican's point, though, seems to focus on the discipline of piety, not on the milieu in which it's practiced. In an email, Michelle Molina, an assistant professor of Catholic Studies at Northwestern University who specializes in Jesuit spirituality, argued, convincingly, that when it comes to the transformative experience of religion, the medium is irrelevant:

Catholic devotional life has for centuries relied on various mediums to aid one's prayer life (art, rosaries, print) and also to imagine oneself part of a larger Catholic community by taking up shared practices (praying a certain decade of the rosary on a saint's feast day, for example). These practices not only connect one to an imagined community, but are also a form of imaginative participation in the primary events of Christ's life over two thousand years ago from the impossible distance of our present! So what's a little long-distance shared devotional life via Twitter in comparison to that?

...But it is also just smart business: how do you reach your audience today? Why is it odd that any religious leadership should want to make use of the latest technologies? In the 15th century, the printing press was just that: the latest, most cutting edge technology!

The Church has been struggling with a series of scandals over the past few years, and it's seen a decline in membership worldwide. Perhaps allowing Catholics to engage digitally will help grow the ranks of the faithful.

The Conjuring: A Dull Lesson in the Horrors of 'Based on a True Story'

Posted: 19 Jul 2013 07:01 AM PDT

The Conjuring is a fairly standard-issue Hollywood horror possession film. There's a dog that does the usual thing dogs do in horror films. There's a doll that does what dolls usually do in horror films. There's some eerie TV static, some doors banging, some ghost hunters with motion detectors and UV lights, and some creepy ghosts who appear on cue when you expect to least expect them, complete with ominous music and the spooky makeup that all ghosts wear so you can identify them. And there's an eerie whispered catch phrase, because the supernatural loves memes (in this case it's "look what you made me do.")

There's only one difference between this film and all those other films.

(Dramatic pause. Eerie whisper voice.)

This one... is real.

When I say "it's real," I mean several things. First, and most obviously, the film is based to some degree on real events. It tells the story of the Perron family, who moved into a supposedly haunted farmhouse in Rhode Island in 1971. The Perrons contacted well-known ghost hunters Ed and Lorrain Warren to help them rid their home of evil spirits (after which Ed began the long journey through the netherworld of development hell to bring the story to the big screen.)

But the "reality" of the story in the end has little to do with its no doubt extremely loose basis in fact, and a lot to with its thematic concerns. Which is to say, the movie is in a lot of ways less focused on the supernatural than it is on its own reality, and on demonstrating its own reality.

Some of these demonstrations are quite charming--like the period hairstyles, or the selection of the relatively-homely-by-Hollywood-standards Lili Taylor and Ron Livingston to play the Perron parents. Other assertions of truthiness, though, are less enjoyable. There are, of course, the newspaper clippings and actual photos that play over the end credits. And then, at the other end of the film, before we even get to our main haunted house, we have scenes of the Warrens (Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson) working other cases, and answering questions in lecture halls to underline their expertise and truthiness. We even see a case later on where they ostentatiously prove that the haunting is just some creaky floorboards and uneven heating, to show that they don't certify just any ghosts. Hauntings overwhelmingly have a "rational explanation," Lorraine assures the relieved family, before we trundle back off to the Perrons and their checklist of movie horrors.

In some sense, that checklist works against the reality. The situations and the spooks and the characters (noble ghost fighters, loving mother, confused but sturdy dad) are all so well-worn that it's hard to take the suggestion that we're seeing "truth" as anything but a deliberate joke. You half expect the next door to bang open to reveal a prostitute with a heart of gold, or a crusty but cunning police chief. Why don't they just throw in all the tropes and be done with it?

The thing is, the assertion "this is true" is every bit as much a familiar tent-pole of exorcism horror as the chair lifting off the floor or the catch phrases. Some recent films, like The Last Exorcism or the excellent The Devil Inside, use the found-footage genre to get that requisite feeling of verite. The Conjuring isn't that clever; its claim to truth boils down to repetition and assertion--and maybe the odd bodily assault on the skeptical police guy to show him the error of his ways.

The pretense to realism can be enjoyable as part of horror. In 'The Conjuring,' it's an incessant theme that Director James Wan mistakenly seems to believe can carry the entire film.

The Conjuring, then, is not convincingly real. This isn't a bad thing in itself; hardly anybody goes to a horror film expecting to see documentary realism any more than you listen to campfire ghost stories to get factual information about guys with hooks for hands. It's the pretense to realism, not the realism per se, that's enjoyable.

Or at least, the pretense to realism can be enjoyable as part of a horror movie. In The Conjuring, though, the pretense is more than just a part--it's an insistent and constant drumbeat, an incessant theme that Director James Wan mistakenly seems to believe can carry the entire film. On the strength "based on a true story", he has forsworn interesting characters, an inventive plot, and memorable villains.

As a result, all we're left with at the conclusion is some sentimentality and a real quote from the real Ed Warren warning us that demonic powers are real and our moral choices matter. Which may or may not be the case. But if evil and moral choices were what the filmmakers cared about, I wish they'd made a movie about them. Instead, The Conjuring is dedicated to the completely pointless task of encouraging its viewers over and over, in various ways, to pretend that the derivative nonsense on screen actually happened. That isn't scary. It's not even startling. It's just banal.

A Planetary Nebula That Looks Like the Firefox Logo

Posted: 19 Jul 2013 06:36 AM PDT

If you're reading this web page using Chrome or Safari, beware: you are probably angering the universe. There is reason to believe, you see, that the universe -- the collection of all the planets, stars, galaxies, matter, and energy that have ever existed, and the sum total of all that we do and will know -- is actually partial to Mozilla products. Which means that there is reason to believe that the universe would really prefer, as you browse the web that connects our tiny little world, that you use Firefox.

I kid, I kid! Of course the universe, being unconscious and having, regardless, more important things to care about, has no real preference about your web browser. (Though if you're using IE, there's a good chance it's judging you a little). What the universe does have, however, is immensity -- an immensity that lends itself to pareidolia, the human tendency to see familiar images in unfamiliar things. The world that stretches beyond our own is a playground for that tendency, especially now that sophisticated imaging capabilities are producing more pictures than we've ever had access to before. It's cloud-watching made, literally, universal.

I mention all that because of this amazing photo of the planetary nebula Sharpless 2-188, located in the constellation Cassiopeia. It was captured by the astronomers Travis Rector and Heidi Schweiker using the Kitt Peak 4-meter telescope in Arizona. Sharpless 2-188, as its nebula designation suggests, is comprised of interstellar dust and gas. And, looking at the image of that distant nebula captured from here on Earth, the astronomer Phil Plait made a neatly pareidoliac discovery: Sharpless 2-188's gaseous winds, as captured in the picture, gusted in just such a way as to be reminiscent of a fox. Curved into a semi-circle. With its tail aaaaaalmost touching its forehead.

The cosmic configuration out in Cassiopeia resembled, in other words, this:

In part, it's worth noting, the Firefoxiness of the nebula is due to human choices made in the creation of the image itself: Rector and Schweiker, Plait points out, used two filters in the image, one showing hydrogen gas (orange) and the other showing oxygen (cyan). There's an orange-blue bias, essentially, built into the image. The nebula is also Firefoxily bright in its lower-left segment because its central star is quickly moving in that direction.

Which is to say the obvious: that the universe is not, actually, Firefoxphilic. If you're looking at this using Chrome or Safari or IE ... carry on. But the Firefox-in-the-Skies image is a nice reminder of how many things there are still to see in the universe, of how many familiar sights are left to be found in the foreign worlds we're witnessing for the first time, with a clarity we could previously only imagine. The ancients read their stories into the skies; we read our corporate logos into them. But it's the same game. It's ultimately human eyes, looking up into clouds, and making sense of them in the only way we know how.

As Countries Get Richer, They Trade Hunger for Obesity

Posted: 19 Jul 2013 06:25 AM PDT

Mexico in 1937 and in 2011. (AP)

Last week there was news of a rare victory -- if you can call it that -- in Americans' decades-long battle against bulge: We're no longer number one in obesity, it turns out, we're number two. The dubious distinction of fattest country now goes to Mexico, where 32.8 percent of the population is obese, and where rates of obesity and overweight have tripled since 1980.

But another thing happened in that same time period: Mexicans have been moving to cities. The urban population in Mexico increased by 36 percent between 1965 and 2000, and it is estimated that more than 82 percent of Mexicans will live in cities by the year 2030.

A new report from the Food and Agriculture Organization shows that the two trends might be connected.

There are many things that go wrong when you don't eat the right kinds of food, but the one of the most serious problems is stunting -- put simply, kids don't grow like they should when they don't eat enough. Another is micronutrient deficiency, or a lack of vitamins and minerals, which can lead to ailments like anemia or goiter.

In any given country, as more people move to cities, the prevalence of stunting diminishes. Meanwhile, micronutrient deficiencies persist, even among obese people. Then, gradually, micronutrient deficiencies also decline, and you're left with just very urbanized, very fat countries.

Here's how it works: Urbanization leads to new, more sedentary types of jobs, as more people start slinging expense reports instead of hay bales. And as more women move into white-collar work, they have less time for cooking and rely more heavily on prepared food, which tends to be less healthy. Children, too, don't play outdoors as much and spend more time sitting.

When we get richer, the report found, our diets get more diverse -- but not necessarily healthier, which is why even people in rich countries often don't take in enough vitamins.

"Evidence at the global level strongly suggests that rising household incomes lead to greater variety in the diet. At higher incomes, an increasing share of the household's diet comes from animal products, vegetable oils and fruits and vegetables, that is, non-staples. Meat and dairy consumption increases strongly with income growth; fruit and vegetable consumption increases also but more slowly, and consumption of cereals and pulses declines."

The most interesting part of this is that there are still a number of countries that have high levels of stunting, malnutrition, and obesity -- all at the same time:

Screen Shot 2013-07-18 at 2.25.22 PM.png

This can happen when there's a high degree of income inequality, so there are both many rich (obese) people and many poor (malnourished) people, but also when a country gets rich incredibly fast, allowing households to buy food they never before were able to afford, according to Terri Raney, a senior economist at the FAO.

Sometimes, the problem is that the parents themselves are overweight, but they either aren't able or don't know how to feed their children the right kinds of food. Raney provides one possible example:

"When the child is weaning, in many places the most common weaning foods are not very nutritious, such as a rice gruel that consists of rice mixed with milk," she said. "Unless that weaning food is supplemented with more diverse or more nutrient-rich foods, it can be a problem."

The good news? Stunting and anemia have gone down across almost all the world's regions. The problem most areas have now is too much of the wrong kind of food.

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