Master Feed : The Atlantic |
- The Moment Weiner Was Waiting For
- Are the Suburbs Where the American Dream Goes to Die?
- Not Even Silicon Valley Escapes History
- Is the British Royal Family Worth the Money?
- There Will Always Be a Place for Great Bookstores
- The Precarious Lives of Criminal Defense Lawyers in China
- Bringing Home the Royal Baby, 1982 vs. 2013
- A Voter's Guide: How NYC's Next Mayor Will Run the City's Schools
- 'Middle-Out' Economics: Why the Right's Supply-Side Dogma Is Wrong
- Racially Profiled in Palm Beach
- Why the Fall of Big Law Matters
- Why Stephen King Spends 'Months and Even Years' Writing Opening Sentences
- Animals Gettting Ultrasounds
- 'Scintillations': The Facebook of 1883
- Will Republicans Lose Primaries Over Immigration Reform?
- It's the Racism, Stupid
- American Historical Association: Universities Ought to Embargo Dissertations From the Internet for 6 Years
- Why Ethnic Violence Is Ravaging the World's Newest Country
- Why This Seemingly Innocuous Photo of Xi Jinping Is So Important
- What the Backstreet Boys Could Learn From K-Pop
- Late-Night Comedy Roundup: Chapter '9 Mile' Bankruptcy in Detroit
- Answering to Patients Who Yell the Loudest
- Why Putin Is Still so Popular in Russia
- Selling Feminism: A History
- Encouraging Students to Imagine the Impossible
| The Moment Weiner Was Waiting For Posted: 23 Jul 2013 04:45 PM PDT  NEW YORK -- There was no question but that they were prepared. Anthony Weiner and Huma Abedin approached the podium calmly. He looked tan and resolved. He had done this before. Stood there teary-eyed and sniffling before the baying New York press corps to talk about his mistakes. His marriage. The hurt he had caused his wife. This time he was ready, steadier. On the other side of that moment of uncontrollable emotional crisis, so apparent at the then-congressman's excruciating 2011 press conference in which he admitted to sexual chats and image sharing with multiple strange women online. "Good afternoon. My name is Anthony Weiner, Democratic candidate for mayor of the City of New York. I have said that other texts and photos were likely to come out and today they have," Weiner said Tuesday. It was a hastily called press conference in an unused office space at GMHC before a mayoral candidates forum on HIV/AIDS. Earlier in the day the site The Dirty published new sexy chats and graphic images allegedly sent by Weiner under the pseudonym Carlos Danger. "As I've said in the past, these things I did were wrong and hurtful to my wife and have caused us to go through many challenges in our marriage that extended past my resignation from Congress," he continued. "While some of the things that have been posted today are true and some are not, there's no question that what I did was wrong. This behavior is behind me. I have apologized to my wife Huma and I am grateful that she has worked thought these issues with me and that I have her forgiveness." Weiner also apologized "to anyone who has been on the receiving end of one of these messages." "With 49 days left to primary day, perhaps I'm surprised more things did not come out sooner," he said. "In many ways things are not much different than they were yesterday." Abedin, meanwhile, looked exactly like what she was: a careful, shy person of refined sensibility who is used to being the person behind the scene, facing for the first time 13 cameras and more than 70 reporters to talk about the state of her marriage and the graphic sexual images and messages her husband had sent other women during it. They both had prepared remarks. He took questions. She did not. She cast her eyes about, trying to find a comfortable place to look as he spoke -- up, down, to the side. At times she smiled. Like her husband, Abedin is a political professional. A person who has made her career and also her life with people who live at the center of constant public media storms. She knew what she was signing up for when they decided to take on the mayoral race together, she said. Still, her voice quavered a little as she began. "You'll have to bear with me because I am very nervous," she said. "When we faced this publicly a few years ago, it was the beginning of a time that was very difficult and it took us a very long time to get through it. Our marriage, like many others, has had its ups and its downs. It took a lot of work and whole a whole lot of therapy to get to a place where I could forgive Anthony," she said, emphasizing that she made the choice to stay in her marriage for her self, for her son and for her family, and that she would be standing by him now, too, as they stayed in the mayoral contest together. "We discussed all of this before Anthony decided to run for mayor," she said of the day's new revelations. "So really what I want to say is I love him, I have forgiven him, I believe in him and as we have said from the beginning, we are moving forward." "I know that this is a very public thing that we have had happen to us," Weiner said. "But by no means does it change the fundamentals of my feelings here and that is that I want to bring my vision to the people of the city of New York. I hope they are still willing to continue to give me a second chance." Polls have shown Weiner to be competitive in the race, either neck and neck with New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn or in second place behind her and likely to force her into a one-on-one run-off election in September. What happens now is anyone's guess. But one thing is clear: Weiner and Abedin were prepared for this moment. They knew there would be another day of scandal, when they would have to face the cameras and a new round of questions about their marriage and his online sexual adventures. And they decided he should make a run for it, anyway. One political adviser speculated in an April New York Times Magazine piece that Weiner was running to get exactly what he had to do today out of the way. "Is this about winning?" the person asked. "Or is this an attempt to get the scandal off the books? Then the next time he runs for something, he can say: 'You know what? We talked about that last time. Aren't we beyond that?'" If such a thought was part of the Weiner-Abedin strategy, they can check that box off their list. After today Athony Weiner, strange as it may sound to say, is one difficult step closer to his eventual comeback. 
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| Are the Suburbs Where the American Dream Goes to Die? Posted: 23 Jul 2013 03:42 PM PDT  Rumors of the American Dream's demise have been greatly exaggerated -- at least in parts of America. That's the message of a new study that looks at the connection between geography and social mobility in the United States. It turns out modern-day Horatio Algers have just as much a chance in much of the country as they do anywhere else in the world today. But if you want to move up, don't move to the South. As you can see in the chart below from David Leonhardt's write-up in the New York Times, the American Dream is on life support below the Mason Dixon line.
So why does a kid from the bottom fifth in the South or the Rust Belt have such a hard time making it to the top fifth? It's not how progressive local taxes are. Or the cost of college. Or how unequal a place is. At least not much. The research team of Raj Chetty and Nathanial Hendren of Harvard and Patrick Kline and Emmanuel Saez of the University of California-Berkeley found that these factors only correlated slightly with a region's social mobility. What seems to matter more is the amount of sprawl, the number of two-parent households, the quality of elementary and high schools, and how involved people are in things like religious and community groups. The suburbs didn't quite kill the American Dream, but a particular type did. That's the low-density and racially-polarized suburbs that have defined places like Atlanta. Indeed, as you can see in the chart below from Paul Krugman, there's a noticeable relationship between a metro area's density and its social mobility.  As usual, the elephant in the room here is race. So let's address it: the researchers found that the larger the black population, the lower upward mobility. But on closer inspection, this has something to do with population density too. I went back to the Census data, and looked at the same ten cities Krugman did, but this time I compared their population-density ratios and the percent of their population that's black. There isn't nearly a perfect relationship -- look at Boston or Dallas or Houston -- but there is a relationship.  Now, it's not that suburbs outside the South and Rust Belt are some kind of integrated utopia -- far, far from it -- but rather that density changes things. Well-off whites who work in the city and live close by have an interest in paying for the kind of public goods, like mass transit, that benefit everybody. Well-off whites who live far away don't. Atlanta, of course, is the prototypical case here: going back to the 1970s, it's under-invested in public transit, because car-driving suburbanites haven't wanted to pay for something they think only poor blacks would use (to come, they fear, to their lily-white cul-de-sacs). Even last year, a compromise bill that would have increased the sales tax by 1 percentage points for 10 years to pay for expanded roads and railways in the always-congested city got voted down. This malign neglect of infrastructure keeps low-income people from living near or commuting to better jobs -- and that's not a a race issue. Indeed, the researchers also found that whites and blacks in Atlanta both have a hard time moving up. In other words, racial polarization might make cities less likely to invest in their infrastructure, and underfunded infrastructure hurts low-income people of all races. Of course, the story of mass transit isn't just a story about race. There's plenty else going on. Sprawl happens in the Sun Belt, because it can. There's more land. And coastal cities are denser, because they have to be -- though even then, they don't always build better infrastructure. Just look at Los Angeles. But for whatever the reason, upward mobility has a local flavor. And that means part of the solution will too. As Reihan Salam argues, loosening zoning restrictions and building out public transit would let cities become denser and more livable. Both, of course, die a thousand NIMBY deaths in a thousand different cities. There's an old vision of the American Dream that is obsolete, and has been for quite awhile. That's Thomas Jefferson's idea of a nation of self-sufficient farmers -- an agrarian republic. Over time, as people left the countryside for the cities during the Industrial Revolutions, this vision morphed: it became a nostalgia for (and even snobbery of) small towns. It's a vision that Republicans still cling to. Remember when Sarah Palin talked about "real America"? Or when Republicans warned that high-speed rail and bike lanes were some kind of socialist plot? It's a vision of America at odds with the American Dream today. It turns out the best place to pursue happiness -- and a career -- is in the city. 
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| Not Even Silicon Valley Escapes History Posted: 23 Jul 2013 01:41 PM PDT
The precise center of Silicon Valley when it was the most important manufacturing region on Earth is now home to Super Space Self Storage. I was able to map this location thanks to Richard E. Schmieder, who drove 6,000 miles around Silicon Valley, collecting the addresses of more than a thousand corporate headquarters, branch offices, restaurants, and hotels. He published this exhaustive niche Yellow Pages as Rich's Guide to Santa Clara County's Silicon Valley in 1983. I discovered a copy of this rare book in Berkeley's library system and realized that it was a fantastic dataset: If I stuck all of the locations onto a map, I could reconstruct the Valley as it was 30 years ago, right before the Japanese manufacturers and the forces of globalization pulled and pushed chip production to East Asia. And though the idea of Silicon Valley does not allow for history, the place, itself, cannot escape it. The Valley we know now, the Paypal-Google-Facebook one, got built right on top of the original boom towns. In our Internet-happy present, it's easy to forget that up until the mid-1980s, Silicon Valley was an industrial landscape. Hundreds of manufacturers lined the streets of Sunnyvale, Palo Alto, Cupertino, Mountain View, and San Jose. This is the Silicon Valley when AMD, Apple, Applied Materials, Atari, Fairchild, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, National Semiconductor, Varian Associates, Xerox, and hundreds of other companies made their products right here in the Bay. The Valley was as important a manufacturing center as Detroit or Pittsburgh were. This was the place making the foundational technology of the era, and it brought prosperity to the region. Between 1964 and 1984, Santa Clara County added 203,000 manufacturing jobs, according to a report by the Association of Bay Area Governments; 85 percent of them were in high-tech. Another economist found that Santa Clara County's manufacturing growth had driven the economic well-being of the entire Bay Area during that period. Without the growth of Valley manufacturing, the San Francisco and Oakland's economies would have severely suffered, not to mention the rest of the country's. This was the industrial heartland of America, even if it was nestled against the San Francisco Bay. In other words, Rich's Guide, I realized, would let me map this first peak of Silicon Valley, the one that gave meaning to the term high-tech. With substantial help from my colleague on The Atlantic Wire, Philip Bump, we put this map together. If you worked in the Valley at the time, it should take you back to the days of Ampex, Varian Associates, and the Rusty Scupper. But there's plenty to see, even if you only know the area by reputation.
For example, you'll find Apple headquarters at 20525 Mariana Ave, just across De Anza Boulevard from the current HQ at 1 Infinite Loop. They were part of a little cluster of companies just off Interstate 280, south of the hottest action up closer to Highway 101. Most of the rest have not survived -- Braegen Corp., Iconix, International Memories, Tymshare, Four-Phase Systems. Yet these same people would have all visited the Peppermill Lounge for some 80s-"fern bar" refreshment. After geocoding all these points -- i.e. finding all their latitudes and longitudes -- I could compute the average of all the locations on the map. In a meaningful sense, the spot was the very center of the corporate ecosystem that we call Silicon Valley in 1983. My math says it's located in Sunnyvale, south of 101 between North Wolfe Road and the Lawrence Expressway at precisely 37.38260152 degrees north, 122.0094996784 degrees west. As luck would have it, this spot was smack in the middle of the headquarters of chipmaker and long-time Intel rival, Advanced Micro Devices, or AMD, in a complex centered at 901 Thompson Place.  This is what it looks like now, in its self-storage incarnation:  We can see the back of the Super Space Self-Storage. There is no sign of the AMD buildings that once stood here. I had to see for myself what had become of the center of the Valley, so I got in my car and headed across the Bay Bridge and down the peninsula. I'd use the single block surrounding the center of the old Valley to understand what had happened to this place not as a footnote in a history of the computing industry, but as a landscape. What I found was second-generation suburbia with a far more complex story than the standard Silicon Valley narrative about cherry orchards and the making of a glorious revolution. * * * As always, it was sunny in Sunnyvale. I got off at the exit for Moffett Field, the set of facilities that made this area a hotbed of early aerospace (and therefore computing) activity. After a few lights I made a left onto the Central Expressway and zoomed past endless town homes and old suburbs onto Arques Avenue. I parked the car at the Super Space Self-Storage, took out the memorial sign I'd printed, and walked across the street to take some wide-angle photographs of the building. There was nothing particularly interesting about it. Like most self-storage locations, the building is blocky and windowless. It's nestled in-between a massive Lowe's and Cheetah's, "a small neighborhood strip club," according to a Google Plus review. As I snapped away, a single pedestrian walked by, an Asian man in khakis and a tucked-in, short-sleeved collared shirt. Traffic came and went: a Camry, a Jeep, a Subaru, big white van. Just another part of the great California carscape, it would seem.  As I walked back across the street, I found a big guy walking towards me. "Well, you got our curiosity piqued," he said, pointing to my camera. He had a soul patch and wore an checked Oxford monogrammed with the name of the self-storage place. All-in, he looked like Ted Dansen, if Dansen lifted weights. This was Geoffrey Taylor, manager of the facility. I explained myself to him, trying not to sound completely ridiculous. "And so, I calculated that, in 1983, this was the center of Silicon Valley, and I came down here to see it --" "And you ended up at a Superfund site," he said. I did? "This was AMD," Taylor continued. "They manufactured chips here." I went inside and met his staff, enjoying the air conditioning. They told me about the building's many amenities for the discerning self-storage customer: climate-control, special locks, security systems. "Who needs this type of service?" I asked. "I'd say 75 percent of our clientele is transient engineers working for the tech companies," Taylor told me. They were almost all from India and east Asia. I left my car in the parking lot and headed southeast. Past Cheetah's, there was a large office building being leased by two commercial real-estate brokers named Dixie Divine and Doug Ferrari. The businesses around were an odd melange: a Bank of America, two auto-body shops, the 5-Star School for Music, a semiconductor company called Synerchip, a signal-processing designer called Teledyne Cougar, and Sri Ananda Bhavan, a bustling south Indian restaurant. At the corner of Deguine Drive, a newly built retail space sat empty, looking almost precisely like the sad, shuttered video stores you see all over America. Deguine was wide. The landscaping was so regular, it mocked the idea of nature. Tree, door, tree. Here and there, a knoll created by a bulldozer, sodded with grass from Oregon. Empty office buildings and parking lots abounded. A couple gardeners wandered among them, working solo, carrying chemicals on their backs, ensuring the for-lease billboards looked nice.   Heading up Deguine, I noticed that there was a steady stream of pedestrian traffic, largely older Asian women. Many were headed to and from Nine Star University, a Chinese medicine school located in an old office building it shares with an acupuncturist, a sports medicine group, and the China-focused Christian Leadership Institute. Right next door, Nine Star operates California University Silicon Valley, which caters to IT professionals with the pitch that you'll learn "from instructors with titles like CEO, CIO, CFO, COO, Sr Manager, Marketing SVP, Venture Fund Manager and other real industry positions." In a clear sign about who they're selling education to, their domain CUSV.org autoforwards to CUSV.in, as in India. The university certainly has Silicon Valley-level chutzpah. "Whether you are considering Harvard, Stanford, Santa Clara University, MIT, Georgia Tech, San Jose State, UCLA, or for that matter any other top grad school," they declare, "you will want to choose CUSV to ensure your competitive advantage and maximize the NPV of your expected career income stream."  Across the street, UMC, a very large Taiwanese semiconductor foundry, has its North American headquarters. I had to admire the symmetry of its building. Humans could only besmirch it.  At the next intersection, I turned left. Across the street, a man talked on a cell phone in front of BioCurious, "your Bay Area hackerspace for biotech." What are they working on? For example: "We are attempting to insert these genes into other algae, Arabidopsis and Petunias to build a glow-in-the-dark plants. Avatar, here we come!" So that's going on there. To the right of BioCurious, there was a batterymaker for motorcycles called Shorai. To the left, a Mediterranean restaurant called the Agape Grill. If you were to have a gyro at Agape under the tall, tall palm trees or a Coca-Cola umbrella, you would look across the street at the America Chinese Evangelical Seminary, as well as the Sacred Logos Resource Center, which appears to be another Christian evangelical group catering to Chinese immigrants. These buildings were all beige with glass doors, one and a half floors. There are hundreds of thousands of structures that look just like these across the region and nation.  Another massive empty office building stood out for its hexagonal dark glass atrium and the sculpture just outside its locked doors, which looked like a sundial set permanently to noon. I found all the white people in a packed parking lot attached to a strange looking building that turned out to be a climbing gym and yoga studio called Planet Granite. I watched toned people go in and out for a few minutes, and then headed back towards my car, cutting through the loading area at the back of Lowe's. Between the massive blank walls, I was the only human around.  I could not parse this neighborhood. It didn't make sense. When I got home, I found out that for 30 years, and all around the block I'd surveyed, an intense remediation effort was underway. For as long as I've been alive, there has been a plume of chemicals underground at that spot, extending 4,000 feet north, up past 101. Everyone hoped these chemicals wouldn't make it to the water supply before it could be pumped out and treated. * * * In contemporary descriptions of Silicon Valley as it was being built, every writer seems to note the absence of smoke stacks. A miracle! A clean industry! A better industrial capitalism! The aesthetic was intentional. These factories of the future were designed to look like buildings on a college campus, which is to say, Stanford. The Stanford Industrial Park (later, the Stanford Research Park) set the visual standard from its founding in 1951 onward. There were rules governing which parts of the industrial apparatus could be visible, so as not to detract from the idea that these were locations for scholars, not laborers. "Companies had to follow strict building codes, which included 'complete concealment' of things like smokestacks, generators, transformers, ducts, storage tanks, and air conditioning equipment," environmental historian Aaron Sachs wrote in 1999. Other municipalities wanted to encourage similar developments, and as Sachs concludes, "Stanford Industrial Park essentially replicated itself several times over--each time spurring the construction of new expressways and strip malls in neighboring areas." What began as Stanford dean and Silicon Valley godfather Fred Terman's dream to build "a community of technical scholars" in pleasant industrial parks became the architectural standard for the entire high-tech manufacturing world. But the manicured look and feel had consequences. Storage tanks were placed underground, out of sight and out of mind. Until suddenly, in 1981, people in south San Jose living near Fairchild Semiconductor and IBM realized they were drinking water contaminated by the two firms' manufacturing plants. That touched off a search to see if similar leaks were occurring at other sites. "Anyone who looked for leaks found them," Will Bruhns of the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Board told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2004. The final count found that 75 of the 96 underground tanks in the south Bay had contaminated the ground and/or water around them.  Before the leaks were found, underground chemical storage was not regulated by any level of government. Or, in the current industry parlance, the semiconductor industry was regulating itself. And their methods for preventing and detecting leaks of known toxic chemicals were recklessly, absurdly ineffective. Planet Granite is located on a site contaminated by Philips Semiconductor. So is Lowe's. The empty octagonal glass building is a TRW Microwave Superfund site. I'd been walking on a paved-over environmental disaster zone, colonized by whoever wanted to benefit from lower leasing prices and a lack of NIMBY opponents. There are six Superfund sites within a couple miles where the Super Space Self-Storage now stands. Shockingly, Santa Clara County has more Superfund sites than any other county in the nation. By comparison, the entire state of Illinois only has 13.  The contamination at the AMD site at Thompson is not the worst in the Valley. Toxic chemicals only reached aquifers near the surface, and did not hit the public water supply. Nonetheless, beginning in July of 1983 with the discovery of volatile organic compounds in both soil and water at the site, remediation began. The main contaminant of concern was tricholoroethene (TCE). Leaking acid neutralization systems were removed along with 217 cubic yards of soil. Groundwater was pumped out and through filtration systems with first one well, then three, then five. Thirty-eight more wells pump the commingled contamination from the AMD, Phillips, and TRW Microwave sites. They run roughly east-west along Duane Avenue, Carmel Avenue, Alvarado Avenue, and Highway 101. All this water gets released back into the water table after it is treated. The cleanup effort is massive. From the mid-1980s through 2008, 231 million gallons of groundwater were pumped up and treated. Beginning in 2005 (around the time the company sold the site to the people who built Super Space Self Storage), AMD began to deploy in-situ bioremediation, after realizing that the efficiency of the groundwater pumping system was declining. In essence, molasses (literally, molasses) is pumped into the subsurface to feed colonies of microbes, who can degrade TCE into harmless compounds. The California Regional Water Quality Control Board judged the bioremediation a success; it has managed to reduce TCE concentrations by 90 percent, though the process is on-going, according to the lead project manager with the Water Board, Max Shahbacian. "They are doing whatever they can," Shahbacian told me. "Some of that contamination you can't capture. Some is stuck to the clay soils. Some has gone off site. They are cleaning it up as best they can." "A lot of the big companies, except the big oil companies, they are pretty good about cleaning up," he said. "They've been cleaning this site for many years and they're going to continue to doing that." So, 30 years after the contamination was discovered in July 1983, it's probable that what remains of the plume of chemicals is unlikely to contaminate groundwater. A victory for our age. * * * And in the meantime, the people who live here are creating the lives they want on the carcass of this old industrial system, whether that's DIY biotech labs, south Indian restaurants, California University Silicon Valley, rock climbing gyms, or Chinese evangelical training facilities. What we see here is not simple suburbia. This is a landscape that industrialists, government regulators, and city planners sacrificed to create the computer industry that we know today. It has as much in common with a coal mine or the Port of Oakland as it does with Levittown or Google's campus. All of which should lead us to a simple conclusion: the Silicon Valley of today is a post-industrial landscape, like the lofts near downtowns across the country, like Lansing, Michigan, like Williamsburg, like Portland's Pearl District. What we see now is a surreal imitation of the suburban industrial parks and commercial spaces of yesteryear. They're built atop the past's mistakes, erasing them from our maps and eyes. And yet, as the humans eat dosas and climb fake mountains and learn acupuncture and buy lap dances, beneath the asphalt and concrete, the microbes eat toxic waste sweetened with molasses, cleaning up our mistakes. A revolution began here. And this is what's left over. 
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| Is the British Royal Family Worth the Money? Posted: 23 Jul 2013 01:20 PM PDT  Crowds of people try to look at a notice formally announcing the birth of a son to Britain's Prince William and Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, placed in the forecourt of Buckingham Palace on July 22, 2013. (Neil Hall/Reuters) There's always a moment after major events involving the British monarchy -- Jubilee, wedding, birth, what have you -- when sort of a collective royal hangover sets in. We laugh as we see news stories about our over-the-top fascination with a seemingly trivial development (It was the hottest day in seven years! This lady's cake melted!) We wonder why it is the royal family captivates us so, anyway. Some people go a step further, arguing that we shouldn't just pay less attention to the majestic goings-on, we should do away with the non-democratically-elected head of state altogether -- even if their role is largely ceremonial. Over at Gawker, Hamilton Nolan published an impassioned plea for the monarchy to end, likening it to the mafia and saying it siphons needed revenue away from millions of unemployed Britons, or any number of other, more worthy causes. "For the sake of all that is holy, please allow this Royal Baby to grow up free of the clutches of this crime family, lest its innocence be lost," he wrote. Calls for the U.K. to abolish the monarchy and become a republic are ever-present, but they tend to tick up during big, royal-centric events. Still, about 80 percent of Britons approve of the monarchy fairly consistently. And that may be for good reason -- there's at least some evidence that the monarchy brings in heaps of tourism revenue. According to Buckingham Palace, sustaining the royal family costs Britons 53 pence, or about 81 cents, per person, per year. The total came to about 33.3 million pounds (about $51.1 million) for 2012-2013, according to the Palace, up from 32.4 million pounds the previous year. However, the awesomely titled Sir Alan Reid, Keeper of the Privy Purse, noted that figure is actually down by 24 percent from 2008-2009, for what it's worth. But some British republicans -- those who want to abolish the monarchy -- say the actual cost is much higher, once you factor in things like security detail and the cost of preparing for royal visits. Their figure is about 200 million pounds, or $307 million. The group Republic broke it down to include things like 3.9 million pounds for travel, half a million pounds for Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles, and some 400,000 pounds for public relations. The royal couple's bundle of joy will drive up that cost, of course, as babies tend to do. The price of delivery at the duchess's birthing suite in St. Mary's hospital reportedly costs 10,000 pounds, or about $15,300. "Of course, that doesn't include the reported pre-delivery yoga classes at Kensington Palace or visits to private birthing coaches," the Christian Science Monitor noted. But there's an upside to shelling out for a tradition that some think should have gone the way of the penny-farthing or the Puffing Billy. The British tourism agency has reported that the royal family generates close to 500 million pounds, or about $767 million, every year in tourism revenue, drawing visitors to historic royal sites like the Tower of London, Windsor Castle, and Buckingham Palace. The country's tourism agency says that of the 30 million foreign visitors who came to Britain in 2010, 5.8 million visited a castle . Tourism is the third-biggest industry in the U.K., the tourism board claims, and supports about 2.6 million jobs -- or about one in 12. Baby Cambridge is set to boost consumer spending even more, according to Britain's Center for Retail Research, to the tune of $383 million. (Commemorative tea cups or iPhone covers, anyone?) The chief U.K. economist at the consulting firm IHS Global Insight also predicts that the birth would have an "overwhelmingly positive" economic impact. What's more, a British firm called Brand Finance, which evaluates "intangible assets," said the royal wedding alone boosted London's economy by 107 million pounds ($165 million) through "accommodation, travel, and nightlife," even while factoring in the economic drag of time off work. Judging solely from those statistics (which obviously vary in their methodology), it does seem like the monarchy pays for itself, at least in the years that feature familial mega-events. Now, Nolan and others argue that tourists would continue to flock to attractions like Buckingham Palace and the Tower of London even if the royal family no longer existed (they still sometimes live in the Palace, but not the Tower). And Nolan says the royals don't put in enough effort to earn their -- admittedly really lavish -- income.
To be fair, the royals do "work," in a sense: they put on charity events, they travel to meet with foreign dignitaries, and occasionally they have military duties (William is in the Royal Air Force) -- but the question of how much they should be paid for that is a different debate. And most countries spend on ceremony that isn't strictly essential, which is why American kids roll eggs down the White House lawn every year, to name just one example. Leaving that aside, I agree that it's unfair to prop up an uber-rich family in a world full of deprivation. But I'm skeptical that England's attractions could still draw the same numbers of tourists without the physical monarchs in place. Sure, people would still visit African savannas if they didn't have elephants, but probably not as many, or as often. Similarly, the royal family acts as a sort of charismatic megafauna for the entire royalty-tourism ecosystem. That doesn't necessarily mean that the Crown is a legitimate institution, just that it's a significant part of what makes England an international destination. Without the royals, Buckingham Palace would be just a less-spectacular Versailles. With them, we have the closest thing we can get to a fairy tale, or if you prefer, an alternative historical universe, one where the traditions Americans abandoned from our start live on. Tourists have paid for sillier things. 
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| There Will Always Be a Place for Great Bookstores Posted: 23 Jul 2013 12:30 PM PDT  The University of Denver's Publishing Institute, founded in 1976, is a leading program for recent graduates and some "career changers" intending to join the book industry. For four summer weeks, the students (this session there are 96) get an intensive overview of how books come together, including editing, sales, marketing, publicity, agenting, and design. The institute's director is Joyce Meskis, the owner of Tattered Cover, three superb bookstores in Denver, and one of publishing's most admired figures. Drawing talent into the industry has clearly become a major goal for Meskis and, busy as she certainly is, you can sense how vital she and her colleagues feel it is to invigorate the venerable world of books with a flow of inspired newcomers. I was flattered to be asked to present this year's keynote speech on the opening morning which meant reflecting broadly on our industry. Here is some of what I felt the students would find helpful. *** There have been many changes over the decades in the way books are sold. Today, we are clearly in the midst of a profound upheaval as the digital age shapes habits that will be an increasing part of the world of books for the foreseeable future. But whatever happens in the coming years, there will always be a place for incomparable booksellers of which Tattered Cover is the unquestioned model. In the most basic sense, the purpose of our industry has remained the same for centuries: the telling of stories and the chronicling of events. Whether the medium was the symbols and images scrawled on the walls of caves, scrolls painstakingly drawn by hand, or the Gutenberg press which made books available to audiences of ever-increasing sizes, the function has never really changed. Reading, in whatever format is the standard for its time, provides eternal pleasures and insights -- and the bookseller plays a crucial role in making the written word widely available. Here is a basic fact: books are not disappearing, no matter what naysayers may assert from time to time. Publishing is under pressure, but that has always been the case. It is often said that after Gutenberg printed his famous edition of the Bible, the second book he published was "The Book Is Dead." But it wasn't true in 1454 and it isn't true today. Yes, the economics of the media industries are evolving rapidly. Within your lifetime, the music, film, broadcasting, newspaper and magazine businesses have all been transformed by the digital revolution. It would be foolish to think that publishing is immune. But the book industry has some unique attributes that will help shape our future. Unlike other information and entertainment products, books don't carry advertising, so we don't have to worry about losing that revenue. We also don't have subscribers for the most part, so we're not losing them either. The issue for books has always been inventory management: that is getting the right books to the right place at the right time. In 2005, with support from the MacArthur and Carnegie foundations, I started a project called Caravan to help nonprofit and university presses do books in all the ways possible: in print, as e-books, as audio books, in large print, and from print-on-demand machines in local bookstores. The motto we adopted for our project and the mantra I want to leave with you is this: Good Books. Any Way You Want Them. Now. In capsule form, that is what the future of the publishing industry needs to be. Yes, there are lots of details to be worked out to turn that vision into a reality -- a new distribution system, or set of systems that will be convenient and satisfying for readers and profitable/ for authors, publishers and booksellers. But whatever the details, this must be our future: Good Books. Any Way You Want Them. Now. In the digital era of screens, content is delivered in many ways aside from print. But the process of producing a coherent well-argued nonfiction book or an engaging compelling novel is still fundamentally the same as it ever was: Experienced editors are still needed to help even the most gifted authors articulate their messages and hone their stories. So publishing today is about change, but also about continuity. We live in what is the most competitive period ever for public attention, with an unprecedented array of information and choices available. Yet books are holding their own. As recently as the 1980s and early 1990s, the nature of the book business was very different from what it has now become. Traditionally, when people contemplated finding a book that was not a huge bestseller, their thoughts tended to be, "I'll see if I can get it. I'll go look for it." Technology has made that notion obsolete. Now, readers assume that virtually any book they want, even the most obscure, can be available at the click of a mouse for home delivery within a day or two. Once the urge to own a book takes hold, there should be no obstacle to actually getting it. As I said at the outset, there is for many of us a close affinity to local booksellers. And we can respect the role of a big (and now troubled) chain like Barnes & Noble. But every brick and mortar retailer has to compete with the efficiency and aggressive pricing of Amazon and the ease of online retailing. Bookstores are for browsing, but they should also be showrooms in which the selection on hand is backed up by the vast catalog and data bases of books that can be ordered. No customer should ever leave a store having asked for a book that can be located somewhere without closing the sale. I once saw a relevant sign in a hotel in Egypt of all places that today's booksellers should adopt: "The answer is yes; there is no other answer." The best bookstores -- as Joyce Meskis has helped to teach us -- become community destinations featuring an array of additional attraction such as reading groups and writing classes. The appeal of spending time with other readers is considerable. Bookstores are clubs, open to all with common ideals and interests. (It helps, of course, to have a coffee shop or cozy lounging areas.) So, the roles of the publisher and the booksellers remain essential to the process. We are there to serve, bearing in mind that consumers have much more choice in the way of format and the means of distribution than they did a generation ago. But if past is prologue, reading is eternal. What is harder to describe is what will happen next. If there is as much change in the next ten years as there has been in the past decade, then iconic brands of the moment may be replaced by gadgets and networks being devised right now by some dropout in a garage. I cannot say what the dominant influences will be, except that there will still be books and readers -- and I am looking forward to the exciting new vistas you'll be helping tomorrow's readers explore. 
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| The Precarious Lives of Criminal Defense Lawyers in China Posted: 23 Jul 2013 12:27 PM PDT  A drug dealer is sentenced to death by a judge during a public trial at a university gymnasium. (Aly Song/Reuters) In November of 2012, Li Jinxing saved a man's life. He didn't lift a car or hurl himself in front of a bullet. But, considering the history of capital cases in China, he did something just as extraordinary: he delivered a "not guilty" verdict for his client, Lei Lijun. Mr. Li is a criminal defense lawyer and a veteran of Beijing's slowly-developing weiquan (rights) scene. To call him a "lawyer," however, may give Western readers the wrong idea. In America, this profession carries with it a certain prestige, not least because of the princely sums many lawyers earn. In China, by contrast, most lawyers earn a living and not much more. Only a few, retained by big, multi-national corporations, ever get really rich. Mr. Liang tells me the police "invite" him for coffee every couple of weeks to inquire about his movements. "What are you doing these days?" they ask. In America, moreover, lawyers face relatively little personal risk: one performs legal duties, then goes on with one's life. This is fairly axiomatic in the world of patent law, or mergers and acquisitions, or private equity. But even those representing terrorists, pedophiles, and other "low-lifes" are generally accepted as an important part of America's adversarial legal system. Sure, American attorneys who invest heavily in a case, à la A Civil Action, open themselves up to heartbreak. Still, they can show up to work secure in the knowledge that certain extreme forms of retribution -- having loved ones abducted, for example -- are off the table. Beijing's weiquan lawyers, on the other hand, have learned from experience that everything is in play.  MORE FROM TLN
* * * I traveled to Beijing last Christmas to meet Liang Xiaojun, a 12-year veteran of criminal defense law. We had been introduced several months earlier by a British NGO that works to strengthen rule of law and increase access to justice in China. Mr. Liang is known for defending members of the Falun Gong, a religion that earned itself "illegal" status in China when members spoke out against the Party. As one of the charity's most active "men on the ground," he was simultaneously involved in a handful of projects, including one (rather long-term) to abolish the death penalty in China. As an intern at the aforementioned NGO, I was assigned to research and write up theoretical and practical arguments against capital punishment. When that report was finished, I interviewed program officers and other personnel at organizations sympathetic to our cause -- Human Rights Watch, Reprieve, Amnesty International -- to better understand the inner workings of their campaigns. Did they think similar campaigns could succeed in China? They did not. What did they think of China's prospects for abolition? Answers ranged from "Forget it, as long as the [Chinese Communist] Party is in power" to "Give it 100 years; then we'll talk." Their less-than-rosy prognosticating aside, Mr. Liang devoured my reports without waiting for the translation. For several months, on Skype, I helped him unpack and understand the capital punishment literature and experiences of other abolitionist organizations in Asia. On a few occasions he has interrupted our sessions, apologetically, to answer the door. While the video call continues, the camera aimed at the white-washed wall of his apartment, I can make out his painfully polite conversation with the policeman off-screen: "No, I won't stay in Beijing throughout the Party Congress. Don't worry. I will leave tomorrow for my hometown. I'm sorry, I can't talk now. I have an English lesson. My teacher is waiting. I'm sorry." Mr. Liang tells me the police "invite" him for coffee every couple of weeks to inquire about his movements. "What are you doing these days?" they ask. "What are your plans for the next few weeks? Are you in touch with any foreigners?" Like the other lawyers I speaks to, Mr. Liang doesn't disguise what he does. He says he answers the authorities' questions truthfully. He considers himself fortunate that he has not been worked over more thoroughly, and attributes his "luck" to the straightforward, a-political manner in which he represents his clients. * * * The sleeper train from Shanghai approaches Beijing Train Station at quarter-past-eight in the morning -- right on schedule. I dress, as best I can, in the tiny confines of my top bunk and clamber down to join the locals slurping their noodles and tea. Based on past visits, I am astonished to look out the window and see blue sky. The great, gray grid of the Chinese capital wears a shabby trim of snow, which fell a few days earlier. The cold is intense. I call Liang Xiaojun from the train station, who directs me to the law offices of Li Jinxing. Emerging from the subway, I recognize Mr. Liang from our video chats: a kind-faced Hebei-native with thinning hair and even thinner glasses. He greets me with a wide, slightly asymmetrical smile -- which gathers one side of his mouth into a dimple -- and a torrent of "Very nice to meet you"'s, his fluency leaving him in the excitement of the moment. Together, we ascend 17 floors to Mr. Li's office; the crowded elevator stops several times along the way, and each time grim-faced locals force their way on, repeatedly setting off the "overweight" alarm. Li Jinxing's office consists of three private side-offices arrayed around a center room, all white-washed and tastefully furnished with dark wood desks. It is deliciously warm -- in northern China, where the winters are punishing, the government runs boiled water through the walls in pipes. A group of lawyers have congregated -- whether because of my visit or as a regular bit of fraternizing, I am not sure. I recognize another collaborator from Skype: Mr. Wen Haibo. Mr. Wen is an earnest man in his early 30s with a round, almost child-like face. In the months we had worked together, I had been struck by his self-possession and evenness of temperament. Although younger than the others, he has a wife and child. His formal career as a lawyer has already ended, too. After earning his law degree in 2001, he moved to Beijing and began representing small businesses. In 2004, he met Gao Zhisheng, the now-disbarred rights lawyer famous for his dauntless defense of journalists, Falun Gong, Christians, and just about everyone else. It was a transformative meeting. Mr. Wen dropped everything and joined Mr. Gao's practice. Considering the modest compensation and outsized personal risk, it is fair to ask what draws people to this field. It did not turn out to be a smart career move: Unlike Liang Xiaojun, Mr. Gao was never shy about his political opinions. While the two were colleagues, Mr. Gao excoriated the government in one open letter after another, published a memoir detailing his weeks of detention and torture, and urged the EU and U.S. to boycott the Beijing Olympics. His free speech spree ended as they typically do in China -- with imprisonment and more torture. Because of his ties to Mr. Gao, the Bureau of Justice forbade Mr. Wen from taking any more "special cases." However, when Mr. Wen began his search for a new law firm, rejection after surprise rejection drove home the truth of the matter: the Bureau had blacklisted him for good measure. After a period of being unaffiliated, Mr. Wen was stripped of his license, as per Chinese law. * * * My host, Li Jin Xing, got his start in intellectual property law and eventually built up a thriving Beijing practice. Today, this side-project brings in enough money to finance his rights work, much of which is unpaid. Despite his humble beginnings in the weiquan community, Mr. Li says, cops are now his constant companions. They tail him most everywhere he goes. Often, when he meets with clients, police camp outside the door. At the time of my visit, he seems to be inviting more of the same with his new enterprise, the Shu Bin Legal Aid Center. Mr. Li wants to hand-pick a team of China's most capable rights lawyers -- a sort of weiquan All-Star Team. With so many bright lights gathered under its banner, he hopes the Center will attract donations from all corners of civil society. The funds will enable his squad to take any important rights cases that come along, regardless of defendants' ability to pay. It has the distinct feel of a rights NGO, in a country where such organizations are forbidden. Mr. Li is well aware of the government's disdain for such projects. Yet, when I ask, he is adamant that he will not compromise his vision for the Center. "As the head of this operation," I observe, a little too obviously, "you will be the first to get a visit when your lawyers defend a political enemy." "Yes," he agrees, with a resigned shrug. "I will probably get a lot more attention." At dinner that evening, Mr. Liang, Mr. Wen, Mr. Li and I are joined by another of their lawyer friends, a vociferous, wiry man with scars on his face. He pays me little attention as he and Mr. Li engage in a fast-paced exchange about something or other; I do not even catch his name. Mr. Liang leans over and gestures at the man. "He has been tortured," he observes. I imagine them mentally reviewing the countless men and women they had represented, along with their respective verdicts: guilty; guilty; guilty; guilty. * * * Considering the modest compensation and outsized personal risk, it is fair to ask what draws people to this field. In fact, I learned, criminal law did not feature in these lawyers' early career plans. Mr. Liang spent three years as a teacher in his home province of Hebei, but found he lacked passion for the work. He became a lawyer, he tells me, simply because he had friends in the field, and it seemed more glamorous than teaching. Mr. Wen became a defense lawyer after a chance encounter with Gao Zhisheng. Mr. Li spent his early career as a government clerk. "Most Chinese people are miserable," he tells me, and during that time he counted himself among them. One day he took stock of his life and decided that "being a lawyer [would be] the happiest profession." I can relate to switching fields in search of meaningful work. But this group, I can't help thinking, gives new meaning to the term "thankless task." When I ask about memorable moments in their careers, the lawyers grow somber. I imagine them mentally reviewing the countless men and women they had represented, along with their respective verdicts: guilty; guilty; guilty; guilty. Even Mr. Li waves my question away with a Chinese phrase I do not grasp. "He does not want to talk about the past," my translator explains. "It makes him feel sad." And yet, when I ask whether they've ever thought about giving up, Mr. Liang, Mr. Wen, and Mr. Li each respond immediately, forcefully: "No." "Why would I quit?" Mr. Li asked me, puzzled, as if we hadn't just spent an hour discussing his daily harassment. When I ask Mr. Liang how long he thinks he can continue, he shrugs. "I will keep doing this," he says, "as long as I can." Noting the lateness of the hour, Mr. Li offers me a mattress on the floor of a toasty corner office. I gratefully accept. * * * During our conversation the next day, Mr. Li suddenly rises to his feet, crosses the room, and bends to pick something up. He returns to the table with a hunk of rusty black rock, which he places between us. It is iron ore, he explains, salvaged from a mine in China's Yunnan Province. He went there to investigate the case of 40-odd miners -- the mine's entire complement -- who were all hit simultaneously with trumped up charges. With the mine "abandoned," the Communist Party was free to swoop in and nationalize it. He hauled the rock back to Beijing, Mr. Li says, as a reminder to be strong. A nice symbol, perhaps, but strength is not derived from symbols alone. What keeps these men going? After two days in Mr. Li's office, I was stuck for an answer. Suddenly, I remember the Mr. Li's recent victory in the capital case of Lei Lijun, which had been the subject of some congratulatory ribbing when I first arrived. "What about Mr. Lei?" I ask. "Chinese courts have returned such a verdict only once or twice in the past decade. Aren't you proud of yourself?" The mood in the room shifts instantly as Mr. Li tilts back in his chair, a schoolboy's cheeky smile on his face, and ventures a rare answer in English: "Of course." This post also appears at Tea Leaf Nation, an Atlantic partner site. 
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| Bringing Home the Royal Baby, 1982 vs. 2013 Posted: 23 Jul 2013 12:15 PM PDT Kate Middleton and Prince William took their son home from the hospital today. As they walked from the hospital door to the car, they showed their baby to the world for the first time, she in a polka dot dress and he in a light blue shirt. They both, of course, looked great.  As Kate Bennett, fashion editor for Washingtonian magazine, pointed out on Twitter, Middleton's outfit was very similar to the one Diana wore as she and Prince Charles took William home from the hospital more than 30 years ago:  Yes, Diana's dress was a slightly different shade of blue, and was a bit blousier and more girlish than Middleton's more tailored, modern style. But the similarities are obvious, and as Bennett speculates, probably intentional. Perhaps more remarkable, though, is how much William's outfit differs from his father's. Back in 1982, before "business casual" took off as the fashion standard for men, Charles wore a crisp pinstripe suit, a dress shirt, and a tie. Today, his son wears a blue shirt with a few buttons open and the sleeves rolled up. The difference signals all sorts of things: the waning dominance of the suit in men's fashion. Kate and William's desire to appear as a "normal," "modern" couple. Perhaps even a hope on William's part to be involved in the messier aspects of raising his son--it's hard to imagine changing diapers in a suit. 
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| A Voter's Guide: How NYC's Next Mayor Will Run the City's Schools Posted: 23 Jul 2013 11:56 AM PDT  Susan Sermoneta/Flickr The mayor of New York runs the city's schools. Sure, there's a Department of Education, but its chancellor is a City Hall appointee. The grimly named Panel for Education Policy does have five members chosen by each borough's president, but its other eight members belong to the mayor. There is no elected school board -- that was abolished in 2002. It's clear that the next mayor's opinions on education will matter a lot for the 1.1 million children who attend more than 1,700 schools in the New York City public school system. But election season can make it difficult to tell exactly what parents, teachers, and kids will get with their vote. Most public debates thus far have focused on what each of the candidates dislike about Michael Bloomberg's policies, but that does not say much about proactive policies. What do the eleven candidates in this race actually think about education? A recent Atlantic working summit tackled the broad question of holistic support for kids. Can these candidates provide that kind of support? When asked what they think about charter schools and co-location, a policy through which charter schools have started sharing school buildings with public schools, here's what the candidates said (unless otherwise noted, all comments were made directly by the candidates in a one-on-one interview).  The Atlantic Here's what they said about New York's recently implemented common core standards for curricula and the standardized testing that goes along with this. Some candidates were asked to reflect specifically on how test scores should be used in teacher evaluation:  The Atlantic Here's what they think about teacher's unions:  The Atlantic When asked, "What makes you different from the other candidates on education," the answers varied. Some outlined new initiatives while others gave biographical background. Here's a snapshot of the answers:  The Atlantic 
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| 'Middle-Out' Economics: Why the Right's Supply-Side Dogma Is Wrong Posted: 23 Jul 2013 11:33 AM PDT  Once upon a time, in the middle of the last century, America had a thriving economy in which the middle class was at the center and everyone -- poor and rich alike -- did better. But then, starting in the late 1970s, a group of self-serving rich people began to sell a promise that if we took better care of them, their wealth would trickle down, and that would help everyone else prosper. The country bought that line. And for three decades both parties yielded to it. The results were great for the very rich -- and disastrous for everyone else. Wages stagnated. Inequality became extreme. Mobility slowed. By 2008, things were so upside down and we had so lost our way that the economy collapsed. Out of that ruin, many began to remember the old ways: the truth that lasting growth and shared prosperity come from the middle out and not the top down. Now we are joined in a battle of ideas to see whether middle-out economics can dethrone trickle-down. This is the contest we are engaged in today. When President Obama frames the issue in this way, as he did down the homestretch of the 2012 campaign, progressives advance and his popularity soars. When he drifts from this narrative, as he has in the sequestration and debt debates of 2013, he gives ground unnecessarily. But make no mistake: The central debate in this country will continue to be about this choice and the true origins of prosperity. In Democracy's symposium on the "Middle-Out Moment," others propose important policy ideas for this economic debate. We do not add to that good work. We offer instead a way to reset foundational assumptions about how the economy works and what prosperity is. And we assert that only by resetting these assumptions can progressives prevail in the coming debate. It is time to kill the myth of trickle-down economics -- and to replace it with the true story of middle-out economics. Middle-out economics argues that national prosperity does not trickle down from wealthy businesspeople or corporations; rather, it flows in a virtuous cycle that starts with a thriving middle class. Middle-out economics demands a systemic policy focus on the skills, capacities, and income of the middle class. Economic policy choices may seem complex but they boil down to a simple question: whether what's best for a capitalist economy is an ever-increasing concentration of wealth at the top or a thriving and growing middle class. That's why arguments about the debt, sequestration, trade policy, tax reform, and fiscal stimulus must all be reframed relentlessly as arguments about whether and how best to grow from the middle out. To take each of those issues on its own technical terms is to ignore, and even concede defeat on, this larger frame. An argument over whether to have deficits is hard for our side to win. An argument over whether the middle class is the true origin of prosperity in a capitalist economy is hard to lose. Why the Picture in Your Head Matters For example, people equally committed to getting from Earth to Mars will have paralyzing differences about how to get there if one group believes the sun and Mars orbit the Earth while the other group believes that the Earth and Mars orbit the sun. People are entitled to differences of opinion. But only one cosmology gets you to Mars. And crucially, splitting the difference won't get you there either. Progressives are litigating the issues of the day as if Americans disagreed on where to go. It's not true. All Americans want a prosperous and fair country and a better future for their children. The question is, what policies will get us there? That answer is different depending on the economic "cosmology" you accept. Conservatives have a clear and simple explanatory cosmology called "trickle-down economics" in which the economy revolves around a small number of wealthy people who create jobs and are owed deference in tax and fiscal policy. It holds that if the rich get richer and businesses make more money, America will by definition prosper. That trickle-down cosmology dominates our politics and culture. The problem is that it is as mistaken as holding that the sun orbits the Earth. And it has been leading us as far astray as an astronomy based on this belief once did. For decades, intellectuals on the left have contested trickle-down economics. Unfortunately, their ideas have not gained political purchase. That's because almost all progressives of the political class have accepted and even internalized the right's economic explanation. We have not contested its basic premises or even the core assertion that it works. We sometimes criticize the right's explanation intensely, even stridently, but we fail repeatedly to provide a clear and compelling alternative picture of how America can prosper. We merely tout other soft priorities that never quite win the day. And then we are surprised when the right's weak cosmology keeps winning hearts and minds. In today's economic debate, conservatives make practical-sounding arguments about promoting prosperity, while progressives answer with social-justice claims. They say the rich are job creators who should pay lower taxes than the middle class. We say that would be unfair. They say social programs destroy the economy. We call them "safety nets." They want to promote business. We want to help the poor. Voters do care about fairness. Many are compassionate too. But if the economic cosmology most Americans accept holds that fairness and prosperity are in zero-sum conflict, then progressive polices are intuitively and inherently unfriendly to economic growth. When they say prosperity and we say fairness, we are arguing from a position of weakness. To be sure, progressives can take intellectual comfort that there is not a shred of factual evidence for the proposition that a program of enriching the wealthy and deregulating the economy ever brings general prosperity. But facts are secondary to intuitions -- to the picture in people's heads. And we are losing the intuition game. It is impossible to effectively contest trickle-down economics and the tax policies it implies while simultaneously accepting its foundational premise -- that rich businesspeople are the sole job creators in a capitalist economy. This is because if they are the job creators, then trickle-down economics is necessarily true. But if middle-class consumption is what creates jobs, then trickle-down economics is necessarily false. What Progressives Need to Push This means that a prosperous economy revolves not around a tiny number of the very rich but around a great and growing number of middle-class consumers and small businesspeople. Middle-out economics is not just a catchy rhythmic contrast to trickle-down; it's a strategy based on a set of facts about how the economy really works. Here are the premises derived from those facts:
And here is the policy framework these premises demand:
Middle-out economics has several important advantages over trickle-down. One is reality: This is how complex, adaptive systems like economies in fact thrive. A second is politics: Middle-class voters will naturally prefer a story that puts them in the center as the prime actors, rather than at the margins as bit players. And the third is cultural intuition: We know in our gut that we're all better off when we're all better off. That was George Bailey's message in It's a Wonderful Life. Middle-out also lays bare the two key assumptions Republicans make about economics that drives policy choices like Paul Ryan's budget. First, that because prosperity trickles down from the top it's the people at the top who matter. And second (and perhaps more importantly) because the people at the top matter, the people in the middle and bottom don't matter. Which is why Republican policy always seeks to cut at the middle and the bottom rather than at the top. The Ryan budget is emblematic of this approach. Framing Middle-Out vs. Trickle-Down as a Choice Here's what we mean: Most progressive leaders, elected and otherwise, routinely excoriate trickle-down economics. Good. They reflexively say they are for "saving the middle class." Okay. Some have even started talking about growing the economy "from the middle out." Wonderful. In our view, however, this is just not enough. It is also not enough to think that just saying "middle class" repeatedly drives home the point. It does not. Conventional progressive talk of "saving" the middle class puts it on par with saving baby seals. It expresses a sentiment but not an argument or a competing explanation of where prosperity originates. Simply saying the words "middle class" over and over again is not enough. That's because no amount of "sentiment" will win the day. We need to convert our authentic desire to put ordinary people first into an argument and an explanation about why the middle class is where prosperity originates in capitalist economies. Contrasting the trickle-down explanation with the middle-out explanation clearly, sharply, and repeatedly moves us from defense to offense. At the same time, too many progressives are reflexively hostile to capitalism itself. That is misguided and even dangerous. The strongest case for middle-out economics and for an economic agenda that deconcentrates wealth and unearned privilege is that such an agenda is great for business. We progressives need to remember and to believe that capitalism is the best social technology ever invented for creating widely shared opportunity and prosperity. While capitalists cannot take sole credit for creating jobs, they can take credit for creating the ideas that solve many of society's problems. Our country's wealth is best measured by the rate at which we create ideas and solve problems. We need more Americans to have the wherewithal -- purchasing power, education, health security, access to capital -- to participate in economic life, whether as consumers or as idea creators (that is, small businesspeople). The more that happens, the better America does. Middle-out economics, in short, allows capitalism to operate at full capacity and full potential with our talent maximally deployed. Middle-out economics promotes the participation of everyone in a market economy rather than protecting only a privileged few. That means, as Eric Beinhocker argues in this symposium, that middle-out economics is a truer form of capitalism: more competitive and dynamic by being fairer, and fairer by allowing more true competition. Trickle-down economics, properly understood, is socialism for a select group of capitalists. Middle-out economics isn't an attack on capitalism; it is simply a more effective form of capitalism than the faux free-market ideology we currently embrace. Perhaps this is why a growing number of thinkers on the right are also coming to see the wisdom of this approach. To be clear, this is not an argument to be joined and resolved over the coming weeks or months. We have 30 years of terrible policy to undo, and only by reframing the public's understanding of the true source of shared prosperity in a capitalist economy can we do this. It will take patience and persistence--and a strategic sensibility. How to Make Middle-Out Economics a Reality First, relentlessly frame the choice as a choice. It's trickle-down and middle-out economics. Not "top-down." Not "the old ways that got us into this mess." Trickle-down vs. middle-out. If we don't have the courage to name our alternative, and repeat it relentlessly, we haven't given people a clear choice. We will never displace trickle-down ideas if we don't provide a clear, concise, and compelling alternative. Neither term has inherent force; it's only in the contrast that we win. Second, propagate the one pivotal meme at the heart of this entire effort: that rich businesspeople don't create jobs; middle-class customers do. To put it another way, the right's claim that rich businesspeople are job creators is the critical vulnerability deep in the heart of the Death Star; if we can target our ammunition to obliterate that single claim, the entire Death Star of right-wing ideology will implode and disintegrate. Why? Because without that claim, there is no way for the trickle-down camp to justify the absurd preferential treatment in the tax code and the regulatory regime for the rich and for large corporations. Without that claim, trickle-down economics reduces nakedly to a rent-seeking, self-serving agenda by the very rich to extract wealth from the poor and middle class. In short, we need to pick a fight with the right about the origins of prosperity in a capitalist society. Middle-out economics will prevail. Third, make every economic issue an example of middle-out economics. The Ryan budget fails not because it is unfair or heartless or draconian. It fails because it perpetuates trickle-down thinking and cripples the ability of the middle class to generate national prosperity. Entitlement reform is not about the virtue or vice of running deficits. It is about whether we create enough security for middle-class consumers and workers to participate in the economy. The Affordable Care Act is not about the byzantine bureaucracy of health-care delivery. It's about whether the middle class can dedicate its purchasing power to productive economic activity instead. And so on with sequestration, fiscal stimulus, and tax reform. Fourth, recommit to capitalism -- in a truer and more effective form. Middle-out economic policies aren't just good because they benefit the middle class or the poor in the near term. They are great for the United States as a whole in the long term because they drive prosperity for all, including the rich. Our agenda is to make capitalism be all it can be for all of us. Fifth, take this case to the people in the form of story. The argument we make here is a conceptual one. But the delivery device for that argument has to be narrative. Perhaps unfortunately, the last 30 years provide a very simple narrative arc -- the tale we told at the very start of this article. That kind of storytelling must become second nature to progressives. Indeed, on all these fronts, progressives need dozens of complementary and simultaneous efforts to turn middle-out economics and the job-creator meme into products -- media stories, policies, bumper stickers, viral videos, school curricula. If middle-class people do not begin to think of themselves as job creators, then they will never intuitively embrace the policy ideas that we support. Only when middle-class voters begin to see themselves as the center of the economic universe will they begin to mobilize against the various elements of trickle-down policy that dominate this country's political and policy agendas. It's time to activate that awareness and the agenda that flows from it by framing the choice between trickle-down and middle-out economics as a choice. It's time to seize the middle-out moment. This article originally appeared in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, an Atlantic partner publication. 
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| Racially Profiled in Palm Beach Posted: 23 Jul 2013 11:20 AM PDT  Race is America's Voldemort: That-Which-Must-Not-Be-Named. Even when discrimination's role in an event is obvious, there has to be another reason. It's not about race, it's about class. It's about safety. It's about line dancing. But we are arguably experiencing the greatest racial tensions since the 1960's, Barack or not. The most prominent racial issue dividing America today is racial profiling. Trayvon, Stop-and-Frisk, Obama's Beer Summit, and Arizona's Show-Me-Your-Papers law are all about acting on racial presumptions. Three years ago, on a balmy summer night in Palm Beach, I went for a midnight bike ride. Earlier that day, I presented a paper at a law professor conference at the Breakers Hotel. The whole day and early evening was crammed with intense intellectual schmoozing, so I was glad to have some solitary time to explore the long, narrow island. I hopped on my rented beach bike and headed south and over a bridge. The air was warm and fragrant, the sky clear, and all was quiet. At moments like these, I start thinking about South Florida real estate and what it would be like to live there. Am I a bay person or an ocean person? What do you wear in the wintertime? Is there a beachside university in Florida, with an accredited law school? So I'm pedaling along, thinking about Miami Vice, imagining myself as an academic Philip Michael Thom-- Suddenly I am blinded by a profusion of oncoming lights, accompanied by a siren, crossing against traffic into my lane on the two-lane road. Reacting quickly, I squeeze left and right brakes in addition to steering the bike sharply to the right. All together, it is perfect choreography for an overbar face-plant. I spill onto the blacktop. I skid a little in front of my bike, scraping my elbows, wrists, and forearms on the road. Blood, but not too much. My childhood comes back to me in that odd mix of pain and nausea I felt from bike accidents in fifth grade. No one is getting out of the police car to help. They're saying something through that electric bullhorn on the roof, unintelligible to me. I remember I'm in Florida, sprawled out in front of a police car, and consider the implications. Painfully, I stand. My shirt is ripped. I try to get my bike but I'm told to stop moving. I can't see much because of the Klieg-like wattage pointing at my body. I keep my hands at my sides but away from my pockets, jazz-hand style. I wonder what I've done. I'm not wearing a helmet. My rental bike didn't have one to fit my cartoonishly large dredlocked head. I also didn't have a safety light or any reflective clothing. The man at the bike store said not to worry about it. The first policeman steps out of the car. "Where are you headed?" I tell him I'm on a bike ride. "Why so late?" I say I like it late. "What are you doing here?" I tell him I'm a law professor attending a conference at The Breakers. At this point, I'm still thinking about my lonely, abandoned doll of a bike on the ground. Then the second policeman approaches. "We've had some robberies here." I'm incredulous at what's being suggested. Robberies? On a bike? On a rental bike? How am I supposed to fit a Sony flat screen on the back of a Huffy? Or plan my jewel heist at the mercy of a functioning kickstand? And do I really fit the profile? I've just spent the day with people who live (live!) for subject-matter jurisdiction. And what does it matter if it is after midnight? There are no martial-law curfews in Palm Beach. The first policeman asks for my ID. He asks for my name and address--clearly printed on the card, next to my picture that looked exactly like me--and my university affiliation. Both men retreat into the car with my ID to run it though an interminable, rotary-dial background check system. It takes no fewer than 15 minutes. I'm alone with my thoughts, which are mostly questions. I try not to move, and attempt rationalization. Perhaps the burglary announcement was coincidental. I had multiple bike violations, and night cyclists are rare. There must be a logical reason for getting stopped. Other people must have gotten stopped like this. The first policeman comes back with my ID and tells me I'm free to go. I'm mulling over this incident, and so I cross back over the bridge and decide to do a full loop of the island and think. I'm on my bike for only a few minutes before another high pitched siren ringtone tells me to stop cycling. Again. This time there are two police cars. "Where're you headed?" -- Around the island. "This late?" -- Yes. "Why are you in Palm Beach?" -- Law conference at The Breakers. Then, "Where'd you go to school?" This is odd, but I say everything: Duke undergrad, Edinburgh Junior Year, Michigan Masters, Penn Law, Michigan PhD. He nods, says something about a lot of school. I agree. I've worked hard to get where I am, believing in education and merit as great equalizers. But that doesn't matter now. Now, I'm a suspicious black dude out on a bike past sundown. Americans love to say "it's not about race." Unless there is a cross burning and people wearing "I'm racist" t-shirts, it has to be about something else. Complaining minorities, so the refrain goes, have chips on their shoulders. I told him that I had been stopped twice in a matter of minutes, within .25 miles of each other, with a total of three cars, for being suspected of burglary while on a bicycle. Then I politely ask him to call his colleague who had stopped me only 3 minutes before -- albeit on the other side of the bridge -- to send out an APB that there was a dark bicyclist on Palm Beach. He said that was unnecessary. Nothing violent happened. But this incident showed me something about bias and perception. Though it's common to hear race described as just one "factor" in profiling, it's a factor that seems to outweigh all others: age, education, class, occupation, and just plain common sense--remember, rental bike. It's utterly exasperating to realize that how hard you work, how much money you have, where you went to school, who your friends are mean nothing at crucial times. The values of colorblindness and merit--which conservatives, including black conservatives, rely on in other race-based debates, for example those about affirmative action--wouldn't even save Clarence Thomas on the street in these moments: Cabs will pass, police will stop, and as we painfully know, neighbors will shoot. "What do you call a black man with a PhD?" Malcom X famously asked, "A nigger." I asked for a police escort back to my hotel. He declined. I gave up, and went home. Another sundown town in Florida. 
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| Why the Fall of Big Law Matters Posted: 23 Jul 2013 11:08 AM PDT  These are grim days for large corporate law firms, which like everyone else were kneecapped by the recession, but have since emerged into a harsh new economic order where their old business model appears to be collapsing. Noam Scheiber has captured this sad state of affairs beautifully for The New Republic this week in a piece sure to make anyone who ever toyed with the idea taking the LSAT feel very, very vindicated. But rather than revel in schadenfreude -- which I realize is pretty much the default emotion when discussing the travails of richly compensated lawyers -- I want to talk about why the industry collapse that Scheiber describes, is actually far more important than many are willing to admit. And when I say many, I mean law schools. Talk to an academic about the changing value of a law degree, and there's a decent chance they'll play down the recent trouble in Big Law -- the semi-affectionate industry nickname for the 200 or so top firms. Their justification is pretty simple: the vast majority of lawyers don't work in Big Law and never will. There were about 1.5 million Americans with a J.D. in 2009, according to the Census bureau. According to The National Law Journal, meanwhile, the 350 biggest firms in the country by headcount only employed about 141,000 lawyers last year. Here's what that argument misses: while tony corporate firms only employs a small fraction of the country's lawyers, they were disproportionately responsible for the industry's growth during the boom that lasted from the mid 1990s until the financial meltdown of 2008. According to the Economic Census, which runs every five years, the top 50 law firms by revenue were responsible for almost 23 percent of the industry's job growth between 1997 and 2002. Between 2002 and 2007, they were responsible for roughly 38 percent of all job growth.
Now, remember, these numbers only include for-profit law firms -- not nonprofits, government agencies, consulting firms, or corporations that hire lawyers as in-house counsel. And in the end, the 32,000 new jobs these firms created between 1997 and 2007 amounted to less than a single class of J.D.'s. That said, we're only talking about the 50 largest firms here. If census numbers were available for the the top 200, Big Law's role would undoubtedly be even more pronounced. And in the end, despite all the homilies about how you can do anything with a law degree, firms big and small are still the major driver of J.D. hiring. Without Big Law's explosive growth, it's impossible to imagine that law schools would have ever expanded or raised tuition the way they did during the good times. With Big Law on the rocks, we can only be thankful that schools themselves are now shrinking. 
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| Why Stephen King Spends 'Months and Even Years' Writing Opening Sentences Posted: 23 Jul 2013 11:05 AM PDT By Heart is a series in which authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature.  Doug McLean Stephen King brings us two new novels in 2013 -- one on shelves already, and the other forthcoming. In June, Joyland was published by Hard Case Crime, an imprint showcasing classic and contemporary crime writers in paperback editions dressed up like vintage pulps: Stylized covers feature ominous taglines, brooding private dicks, and draped-out femme fatales. Though Joyland's story is haunted by a terrifying killer of young women, the book mostly chronicles the yearning rhythms of one adolescent summer -- carny talk and plushie toys, boardwalks and broken hearts. In The New York Times, Walter Kirn aptly compared the book to a fair ride -- it's brief, thrilling, and sweetly quaint. King's second book, Doctor Sleep, which will be published in September by Scribner, is everything Joyland isn't. On his website, the author calls it a "return to balls-to-the-wall, keep-the-lights-on horror." This long-awaited sequel to 1977's The Shining revisits traumatized child psychic Danny Torrance -- he goes by Dan, now -- all grown up and still struggling to understand his frightening gift. "It's a good book, a scary book, but I wonder if some people won't like it as much as the original," King told me. That book's pre-Kubrick readers are 35 years older now. "I can hear everyone saying, 'That wasn't so scary. The first one really scared me," he said. "Well, that's because you read the first one when you were 13 fuckin' years old, hiding under the covers with a flashlight!" When I asked him to share a favorite passage for this series, King couldn't choose between two favorites; both, we noticed, were first sentences. So, he analyzed both his choices as part of a broader discussion about opening lines -- a topic not addressed at length in his memoir-as-craft-manual, On Writing. King paid tribute to Douglas Fairbairn and James M. Cain, looked back on favorite intros he's written, and explained how he approaches a book's first moments. Stephen King spoke to me by phone from his home in Maine. Stephen King: There are all sorts of theories and ideas about what constitutes a good opening line. It's tricky thing, and tough to talk about because I don't think conceptually while I work on a first draft -- I just write. To get scientific about it is a little like trying to catch moonbeams in a jar. But there's one thing I'm sure about. An opening line should invite the reader to begin the story. It should say: Listen. Come in here. You want to know about this. How can a writer extend an appealing invitation -- one that's difficult, even, to refuse? We've all heard the advice writing teachers give: Open a book in the middle of a dramatic or compelling situation, because right away you engage the reader's interest. This is what we call a "hook," and it's true, to a point. This sentence from James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice certainly plunges you into a specific time and place, just as something is happening: They threw me off the hay truck about noon. Suddenly, you're right inside the story -- the speaker takes a lift on a hay truck and gets found out. But Cain pulls off so much more than a loaded setting -- and the best writers do. This sentence tells you more than you think it tells you. Nobody's riding on the hay truck because they bought a ticket. He's a basically a drifter, someone on the outskirts, someone who's going to steal and filch to get by. So you know a lot about him from the beginning, more than maybe registers in your conscious mind, and you start to get curious. This opening accomplishes something else: It's a quick introduction to the writer's style, another thing good first sentences tend to do. In "They threw me off the hay truck about noon," we can see right away that we're not going to indulge in a lot of foofaraw. There's not going to be much floridity in the language, no persiflage. The narrative vehicle is simple, lean (not to mention that the book you're holding is just 128 pages long). What a beautiful thing -- fast, clean, and deadly, like a bullet. We're intrigued by the promise that we're just going to zoom. Of course, it's a little do-or-die here for the writer. A really bad first line can convince me not to buy a book -- because, god, I've got plenty of books already -- and an unappealing style in the first moments is reason enough to scurry off. I'll never forget the botched opening lines of A. E. Van Vogt -- a German science fiction writer, long dead, who liked to effuse a little bit. His book Slan was actually the basis of the Alien films -- they basically stole them to do that, and ended up paying his estate some money -- but he was just a terrible, terrible writer. His short story, "Black Destroyer," begins: On and on, Coeurl prowled! You read that, and you think -- my god! Can I really put up with even five more pages of this? It's just panting! So an intriguing context is important, and so is style. But for me, a good opening sentence really begins with voice. You hear people talk about "voice" a lot, when I think they really just mean "style." Voice is more than that. People come to books looking for something. But they don't come for the story, or even for the characters. They certainly don't come for the genre. I think readers come for the voice. A novel's voice is something like a singer's -- think of singers like Mick Jagger and Bob Dylan, who have no musical training but are instantly recognizable. When people pick up a Rolling Stones record, it's because they want access to that distinctive quality. They know that voice, they love that voice, and something in them connects profoundly with it. Well, it's the same way with books. Anyone who's read a lot of John Sanford, for example, knows that wry, sarcastic amusing voice that's his and his alone. Or Elmore Leonard -- my god, his writing is like a fingerprint. You'd recognize him anywhere. An appealing voice achieves an intimate connection -- a bond much stronger than the kind forged, intellectually, through crafted writing. With really good books, a powerful sense of voice is established in the first line. My favorite example is from Douglas Fairbairn's novel, Shoot, which begins with a confrontation in the woods. There are two groups of hunters from different parts of town. One gets shot accidentally, and over time tensions escalate. Later in the book, they meet again in the woods to wage war -- they re-enact Vietnam, essentially. And the story begins this way: This is what happened. For me, this has always been the quintessential opening line. It's flat and clean as an affidavit. It establishes just what kind of speaker we're dealing with: someone willing to say, I will tell you the truth. I'll tell you the facts. I'll cut through the bullshit and show you exactly what happened. It suggests that there's an important story here, too, in a way that says to the reader: and you want to know. A line like "This is what happened," doesn't actually say anything--there's zero action or context -- but it doesn't matter. It's a voice, and an invitation, that's very difficult for me to refuse. It's like finding a good friend who has valuable information to share. Here's somebody, it says, who can provide entertainment, an escape, and maybe even a way of looking at the world that will open your eyes. In fiction, that's irresistible. It's why we read. We've talked so much about the reader, but you can't forget that the opening line is important to the writer, too. To the person who's actually boots-on-the-ground. Because it's not just the reader's way in, it's the writer's way in also, and you've got to find a doorway that fits us both. I think that's why my books tend to begin as first sentences -- I'll write that opening sentence first, and when I get it right I'll start to think I really have something. The best first line I ever wrote is the opening of 'Needful Things.' Printed by itself on a page in 20-point type: "You've been here before." All there by itself on one page, inviting the reader to keep reading. It suggests a familiar story. When I'm starting a book, I compose in bed before I go to sleep. I will lie there in the dark and think. I'll try to write a paragraph. An opening paragraph. And over a period of weeks and months and even years, I'll word and reword it until I'm happy with what I've got. If I can get that first paragraph right, I'll know I can do the book. Because of this, I think, my first sentences stick with me. They were a doorway I went through. The opening line of 11/22/63 is "I've never been what you'd call a crying man." The opening line of Salem's Lot is "Everybody thought the man and the boy were father and son." See? I remember them! The opening line of It is "The terror that would not end for another 28 years, if it ever did, began so far as I can know or tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain." That's one that I worked over and over and over. But I can tell you right now that the best first line I ever wrote -- and I learned it from Cain, and learned it from Fairbairn -- is the opening of Needful Things. It's the story about this guy who comes to town, and uses grudges and sleeping animosities among the townspeople to whip everyone up into a frenzy of neighbor against neighbor. And so the story starts off with an opening line, printed by itself on a page in 20-point type: You've been here before. All there by itself on one page, inviting the reader to keep reading. It suggests a familiar story; at the same time, the unusual presentation brings us outside the realm of the ordinary. And this, in a way, is a promise of the book that's going to come. The story of neighbor against neighbor is the oldest story in the world, and yet this telling is (I hope) strange and somehow different. Sometimes it's important to find that kind of line: one that encapsulates what's going to happen later without being a big thematic statement. Still, I don't have a lot of books where that opening line is poetry or beautiful. Sometimes it's perfectly workman-like. You try to find something that's going to offer that crucial way in, any way in, whatever it is as long as it works. This approach is closer to what worked for in my new book, Doctor Sleep. All I remember is wanting to leapfrog from the timeframe of The Shining into the present by talking about presidents, without using their names. The peanut farmer president, the actor president, the president who played the saxophone, and so on. The sentence is: On the second day of December, in a year when a Georgia peanut farmer was doing business in the White House, one of Colorado's great resort hotels burned to the ground. It's supposed to do three things. It sets you in time. It sets you in place. And it recalls the ending of the book -- though I don't know it will do much good for people who only saw the movie, because the hotel doesn't burn in the movie. This isn't grand or elegant -- it's a door-opener, it's a table-setter. I was able to take the motif -- chronicle a series of important events quickly by linking them to presidential administrations -- to set the stage and begin the story. There's nothing "big" here. It's just one of those gracenotes you try to put in there so that the narrative has a feeling of balance, and it helped me find my way in. Listen, you can't live on love, and you can't create a writing career based on first lines. A book won't stand or fall on the very first line of prose -- the story has got to be there, and that's the real work. And yet a really good first line can do so much to establish that crucial sense of voice -- it's the first thing that acquaints you, that makes you eager, that starts to enlist you for the long haul. So there's incredible power in it, when you say, come in here. You want to know about this. And someone begins to listen. 
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| Posted: 23 Jul 2013 10:55 AM PDT  Professor Roger Smith uses ultrasound to monitor the progress of an injection of stem cells into the injured foreleg of a racehorse at the Royal Veterinary College north of London. (Ben Hirschler/Reuters)  An employee does an ultrasound of a female sturgeon at a caviar fish farm in Saint Genis de Saintonge, southwestern France. (Regis Duvignau/Reuters)  A Red Panda (Ailurus fulgens) eats fruit after an ultrasound examination by veterinarian Hanna Vielgrader and animal keeper Nicole Samek at Schoenbrunn Zoo in Vienna. (Herwig Prammer/Reuters)  Eric Stohr from Cardiff Metropolitan University carries out an ultrasound of the heart on Bali, a 7 meter (23 foot) long reticulated Python snake at Chester Zoo in Chester, northern England. (Phil Noble /Reuters)  Veterinarian Dr. Doug Mader, (center), ultrasounds an endangered hawksbill sea turtle at the Florida Keys-based Turtle Hospital in Marathon, Florida in 2012. The female reptile, laden with eggs, was discovered on a St. Croix, U.S.V.I, just after Tropical Storm Isaac. (Andy Newman/Reuters)  A veterinarian performs an ultrasound on a female cat shark at the Xcaret ecological park in Cancun. The female gave birth to 18 cat sharks. (Gerardo Garcia/Reuters)  A sheep awaits ultrasonic examination at the El Alfalfal agricultural facility, some 50 miles southeast of Santiago, Chile. 1,500 sheep were examined as part of an Agriculture Ministry program to optimize and organize the reproductive and productive process in small farms. (Ivan Alvarado/Reuters)  German team from the IZW, The Institute of Zoo Wildlife Research in Berlin, perform ultrasound examination to Tamar, a pregnant Israeli elephant at Jerusalem's Biblical Zoo. They found her in good shape in her fifth month of a 22-month gestation. (Cohen Magen/Reuters)  An ultrasonic image shows an elephant fetus measuring 10.6 cm (4.2 inches) on day 141 of the pregnancy of it's mother Tonga, in Schoenbrunn zoo in Vienna. (Tiergarten Schoenbrunn/Reuters)  Veterinary staff monitor Dylan the Chimpanzee whilst cardiologist Eric Stohr of Cardiff Metropolitan University carries out a cardiac ultrasound examination at Chester Zoo in Liverpool. (Phil Noble /Reuters)  Biologist Robinson Orozco uses sonographic equipment to determine the sex of a small beluga sturgeon at Sturgeon Aquafarms in Bascom, Florida. In the wild it can take sturgeon 15 to 20 years before they reach sexual maturity and produce roe. In captivity, with the right water temperatures and a specially formulated high-protein diet, it can happen in as little as six or seven years. (Michael Spooneybarger/Reuters)  Kasha, an Australian Sea Lion, one of the rarest sea lions in the world receives an ultrasound from Taronga Zoo vets as they check the progress of her pregnancey. She receives weekly abdominal ultrasound examinations. Sea lions have a 17.5 month gestation period. (Mark Baker/Reuters)  British veterinarian Lulu Skidmore, of Kent, checks a female dromedary camel for pregnancy using an ultrasound device at a reproduction centre in the desert 30 km from Dubai. (Chris Helgren/Reuters)  Geneticists use an ultrasound monitor to check for piglets at a pig farm in Shenzhen. China's population is projected to grow to 1.44 billion by 2030, and Beijing is searching for cutting-edge technology to provide better quality food. (Bobby Yip/Reuters)  A sheep is released after undergoing an ultrasound at the El Alfalfal facility in Chile. (Ivan Alvarado/Reuters)  Keepers move Bali, a 23 foot reticulated Python, from its enclosure ahead of a ultrasound heart examination at Chester Zoo in northern England. (Phil Noble/Reuters) 
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| 'Scintillations': The Facebook of 1883 Posted: 23 Jul 2013 10:28 AM PDT ![[IMAGE DESCRIPTION]](http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/science/assets_c/2013/07/Screen Shot 2013-07-23 at 1.22.50 PM-thumb-570x404-127815.png) "A good newspaper, I suppose," Arthur Miller once mused, "is a nation talking to itself." But let's not be paperist about it: you could say the same thing about most media. Journalism and literature and TV shows and movies and Buzzfeed lists are, at their core, conversational. They are, at their core, fodder. They exist, whether new medium or old, hot medium or cool, highbrow medium or low-, for the same general purpose: to give us stuff to talk about. Let's take just one tiny example from a small town: Millersburg, Kentucky. Which, for a time (that time being the late 19th century), published a paper of local interest called the Semi-weekly Bourbon News (Bourbon being Millersburg's county and the original source of the Kentucky whiskey that bears its name). And the Semi-weekly Bourbon News printed -- along with local news and advertisements and the classic hodgepodge of local interest -- a column it called "Scintillations." Which was a series of delightfully varied bullet-point-style notes about local life and society. Inspired by this image, which the American Prospect's Jaime Fuller dug up, and helped by the Library of Congress's "Chronicling America" project, I came across a series of Scintillations published during the late months of 1883. And the column, fortunately for us all, delivers what its name promises. There are notices about citizens' health and visitors' presences in town. There are trend updates -- about fashion and language and medical treatments. There are jokes. There are, in all, little factoids about far-away lives that are weird and wonderful and revealing. These include: Newsy happenings: • A New Jersey lady waded out and pulled in her husband, who was drowning. As usual, she grabbed him by the hair. • Senator Beck is said to be worth $250,000. Trend updates: • The latest slang is "slim." A slim is a dude, a slimette is a dudine. • Whale's milk is said to be good for rheumatism and neuralgia. Terrible, terrible jokes: • Red is the natural color of a young baby, but afterwards it becomes a yeller. • Square dinner plates are now the latest. Only square meals are to be served on them. ... Aaaaaaaand status updates: • Sid Kennedy is confined to his bed, in a seriously ill condition, at his father's residence. • A son of Kossuth, of Sebastapol fame, is a married man in Illinois. He is said to be doing well. Yep, in other words: "Scintillations" was a Facebook news feed, from 1883. Basically. And what becomes pretty clear from a read of the Scintillations is why an editor and/or a printer in Millersburg, Kentucky in 1883 took the trouble to gather those items, format them to fit within a column, and lay them out for printing, on a semi-weekly basis. The Scintillations are exactly what they claim to be: really, really good conversation fodder. You can imagine a group of Millersburg residents, gathered around a fire or a dinner table, reading about themselves and their neighbors, marveling at Senator Beck's wealth and discussing the merits of whale milk. We tend to think of newspapers' work today as the end point of stories: the reporter learns and learns and learns all she can about a given subject, and when she's gathered all she can within the time she has, she writes her take, offering it up as the first rough draft of history. She attempts to take the data swirling around in the world and organize it into the sense-making structure of the story. Which will be the final word on that subject until the next story is written. The "Scintillations" did the opposite, though: instead of attempting to bring order to a chaotic world, they reveled in the world's chaos. They purposely stripped away context. They did, in other words, what Facebook does -- and what Twitter and Instagram and similar social networks do -- today: they reflected the world as it was, messy and funny and leaving you wanting more. Instead of telling stories, they gave their readers ingredients to tell their own. Here are more Scintillations: The Semi-weekly Bourbon News, August 3, 1883  The Semi-weekly Bourbon News, August 28, 1883  The Semi-weekly Bourbon News, October 23, 1883  The Semi-weekly Bourbon News, November 13, 1883  The Semi-weekly Bourbon News, November 27, 1883  The Semi-weekly Bourbon News, December 7, 1883  
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| Will Republicans Lose Primaries Over Immigration Reform? Posted: 23 Jul 2013 10:18 AM PDT  Republican congressmen fear for their political lives. That's the explanation you most often hear for the GOP's reluctance to approve a comprehensive immigration bill: The members of the House of Representatives, most of whom come from strongly Republican districts, worry they'll lose primaries to conservative challengers if they vote for what opponents consider an "amnesty" bill. But is this worry justified? Maybe not, according to polling and history. One recent poll of Republican primary voters on the issue has an interesting genesis. It was commissioned by an organization of immigration-reform proponents, FWD.us. But to conduct it, the group hired Jon Lerner, a Republican consultant and pollster who works exclusively with strongly conservative candidates. Lerner is the pollster for the fiscally conservative Club for Growth; he's advised candidates like Senators Mike Lee of Utah and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin. In the words of RedState editor Erick Erickson, "He gets conservatives elected." The poll, conducted nationally by telephone July 8, found there is a segment of the Republican primary electorate that adamantly opposes legalizing undocumented immigrants. But this segment, while vocal, is only about 20 percent of the group. The majority of Republicans strongly want Congress to reform immigration and support the basic components of reform currently under consideration, including the path to citizenship. "There are around 20 percent of GOP primary voters who oppose most forms of immigration reform," Lerner wrote in a memo about the survey results. "This minority tends to be vocal, but their level of activism should not be confused with the size of their numbers. The large majority of primary voters see a badly broken immigration system and want it fixed." The poll surveyed 1,000 people who have voted in past Republican primaries in a sample representative of the distribution of GOP voters -- that is, heavily weighted toward the South and Midwest. It found an overwhelming desire to see the immigration system fixed: 79 percent called it "very important" to fix the current immigration system, with another 17 percent saying it was somewhat important to do so. Asked if an imperfect solution would be preferable to no action, 78 percent said that it would. Respondents were asked their opinion of a reform proposal that would increase border security, require employers to verify the legal status of job seekers, and allow those currently here illegally to become citizens after passing a background check, paying penalties, learning English, and waiting 13 years. Seventy percent supported such a proposal, while 22 percent opposed it. Asked more generally about the idea of a path to citizenship, 65 percent said they support it as long as it comes with more border security; 8 percent supported it even without border enhancements; and 21 percent said they oppose it no matter what. Another organization's recent poll of GOP voters also found a surprising level of support for immigration reform, Amy Walter reports. There are some caveats here. Those opposed to any kind of immigration reform tend to be much more motivated by the issue than those who support it. And Republican voters don't trust the federal government to keep its promises on border security: 89 percent in Lerner's poll were concerned that immigration reform would fail to secure the border. Lerner knows a thing or two about knocking off Republican incumbents, something the Club for Growth has pursued ruthlessly in recent years. But based on his research, he thinks incumbents are mistaken to fear being ousted over immigration. "If I were a Republican member of Congress worried about a potential primary challenge, I would be far more worried if I had a record supportive of tax increases and bailouts than I would about a record supportive of comprehensive immigration reform," Lerner told me. "Those issues -- spending, taxes, the size of government -- are far more animating to a far larger percentage of the primary electorate than is the immigration issue." What about the history -- haven't Republicans lost by going soft on immigration in the past? There's one high-profile example of this: Rep. Chris Cannon, a six-term congressman from a strongly Republican district in Utah who repeatedly drew challengers based on his moderate immigration record. On the third try, Cannon finally lost to now-Rep. Jason Chaffetz, who said Cannon had "failed us for not instituting conservative principles." But of the four primary candidates against the incumbent, Chaffetz was neither the furthest to the right on immigration nor the one most focused on the issue. Immigration was a factor in the recent primary losses of two senators, Indiana's Dick Lugar and Utah's Bob Bennett. But the conservative case against them was much broader than that. Two current senators, Arizona's John McCain and Jeff Flake, tacked to the right in primaries to successfully fend off immigration-based challenges. Non-incumbents in multi-candidate fields have had success running to the right on immigration, notably Georgia Governor Nathan Deal and Tennessee Senator Bob Corker. (Ironically, Corker was one of two GOP senators who authored the border-security amendment that allowed the immigration bill to pass the Senate last month.) There's really only one instance of a sitting Republican politician whose position on immigration was the primary factor in losing his seat. And there's a notable counterexample: Russell Pearce, the Arizona legislator who authored the state's restrictive immigration law, SB 1070, was ousted by another Republican in a recall in 2011, and subsequently lost a Republican primary when he tried to make a comeback. It's well-financed groups like the Club for Growth that have proved a far greater danger to Republican incumbents than grassroots anger over immigration. And as BuzzFeed recently reported, the Club has no interest in starting primary fights over immigration. Even Heritage Action, the political arm of the think tank headed by former Senator Jim DeMint, which issued a widely lambasted report on immigration earlier this year, told BuzzFeed it doesn't intend to spend money in 2014 primaries. Members of Congress who weathered the last immigration fight, in 2006-07, have vivid memories of the outpouring of anger it unleashed on the right. But there's ample evidence immigration has receded as an issue for GOP voters since that time, and that the noise made by "amnesty" opponents may not match their numbers. As Lerner puts it: "Contrary to some perceptions, it is clear that Republican members of Congress who support comprehensive immigration reform, including a pathway to citizenship, do not run afoul of the majority opinion of their primary voters." 
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| Posted: 23 Jul 2013 10:00 AM PDT National Review's Victor Davis Hanson takes on the president's comments with predictable results. Here Hansen counters The Talk that African-American parents give their children about the police with his own version of The Talk: Attorney General Eric Holder earlier gave an address to the NAACP on the Zimmerman trial. His oration was likewise not aimed at binding wounds. Apparently he wanted to remind his anguished audience that because of the acquittal of Zimmerman, there still is not racial justice in America. Holder noted in lamentation that he had to repeat to his own son the lecture that his father long ago gave him. The sermon was about the dangers of police stereotyping of young black males. Apparently, Holder believes that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Yet I fear that for every lecture of the sort that Holder is forced to give his son, millions of non-African-Americans are offering their own versions of ensuring safety to their progeny. In my case, the sermon -- aside from constant reminders to judge a man on his merits, not on his class or race -- was very precise. First, let me say that my father was a lifelong Democrat. He had helped to establish a local junior college aimed at providing vocational education for at-risk minorities, and as a hands-on administrator he found himself on some occasions in a physical altercation with a disaffected student. In middle age, he and my mother once were parking their car on a visit to San Francisco when they were suddenly surrounded by several African-American teens. When confronted with their demands, he offered to give the thieves all his cash if they would leave him and my mother alone. Thankfully they took his cash and left. I think that experience -- and others -- is why he once advised me, "When you go to San Francisco, be careful if a group of black youths approaches you." Note what he did not say to me. He did not employ language like "typical black person." He did not advise extra caution about black women, the elderly, or the very young -- or about young Asian Punjabi, or Native American males. In other words, the advice was not about race per se, but instead about the tendency of males of one particular age and race to commit an inordinate amount of violent crime. It was after some first-hand episodes with young African-American males that I offered a similar lecture to my own son. The advice was born out of experience rather than subjective stereotyping. When I was a graduate student living in East Palo Alto, two adult black males once tried to break through the door of my apartment -- while I was in it. On a second occasion, four black males attempted to steal my bicycle -- while I was on it. I could cite three more examples that more or less conform to the same apprehensions once expressed by a younger Jesse Jackson. Regrettably, I expect that my son already has his own warnings prepared to pass on to his own future children. I really, really hope not. By Hanson's own admission this "Talk" has done very little to protect him, and he implies that it didn't help his father either. That is not surprising given that this is the kind of advice which betrays a greater interest in maintaining one's worldview than in maintaining one's safety. Let us be direct -- in any other context we would automatically recognize this "talk" as stupid advice. If I were to tell you that I only employ Asian-Americans to do my taxes because "Asian-Americans do better on the Math SAT," you would not simply question my sensitivity, but my mental faculties. That is because you would understand that in making an individual decision, employing an ancestral class of millions is not very intelligent. Moreover, were I to tell you I wanted my son to marry a Jewish woman because "Jews are really successful," you would understand that statement for the stupidity which it is. It would not be acceptable for me to make such suggestions (to say nothing of policy) in an enlightened society -- not simply because they are "impolite" but because they betray a rote, incurious and addled intellect. There is no difference between my argument above and the notion that black boys should be avoided because they are overrepresented in the violent crime stats. But one of the effects of racism is its tendency to justify stupidity. Those of who have spent much of our lives living in relatively high crime neighborhoods grasp this particular stupidity immediately. We have a great many strategies which we employ to try to protect ourselves and our children. We tell them to watch who they are walking with, to not go to neighborhoods where they don't know anyone, that when a crowd runs toward a fight they should go the other way, to avoid blocks with busted street-lights, to keep their heads up while walking, to not daydream and to be aware of their surroundings. When you start getting down to particular neighborhoods the advice gets even more specific -- don't cut through the woods to get to school, stay away from Jermaine Wilks, don't got to Mondawmin on the first hot day of the year, etc. There is a great scene in the film The Interruptors when one of the anti-violence workers notes that when she sees a bunch of people in a place, and then they all suddenly clear out, she knows something is coming down. My point is that parents who regularly have to cope with violent crime understand the advantages of good, solid intelligence. They know that saying '"stay away from black kids" is the equivalent of looking at 9/11, shrugging one's shoulders and saying, "It was them Muslims." It should come as no surprise that Victor Davis Hanson's generational advice has met with mixed results. But when you are more interested in a kind of bigoted nationalism than your actual safety, this is what happens. These two strands -- stupidity and racism -- are inseparable. The pairing seem to find a home at National Review with some regularity. It's been a little over a year since the magazine cut ties with self-described racist John Derbyshire for basically writing the same thing that Victor Davis Hanson writes here. Hanson couldn't even be bothered to come up with anything new. He just ripped off Derbyshire. His editors could evidently care less. A few days later the magazine cut ties with Robert Weissberg for offering pro tips to white nationalists. I'm not quite sure why they bothered with the kabuki. You are what your record says you are and at some point one must conclude that these are not one-offs, that the magazine which once blamed the Birmingham bombing on "a crazed Negro," is dealing with something more systemic, something bone-deep. 
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| Posted: 23 Jul 2013 09:31 AM PDT  Dallas Krentzel/Flickr The American Historical Association has spied itself a Problem with a capital P and it is determined to do something about it. That problem? Too many people are reading history doctoral dissertations on the Internet. This madness must be stopped, the AHA thought to itself. We can't have all these people reading scholarly works online, for free. And so, the AHA crafted a solution, not a perfect one -- what solution is? -- but something that might help, something that might prevent all these people from reading all these dissertations. Yesterday, in a statement posted online, where everybody may read it (and many have), the AHA encouraged graduate programs and university libraries to please embargo completed dissertations from the Internet for six years. Here's the AHA in its own words (emphasis added):
Of course, I am being a bit glib about what the AHA believes is a problem, and it's not that too many people are reading history online but the effect of that access -- that young scholars will be unable to publish their work as a book, if everybody can already read it online for free. And if those scholars can't publish a book, they'll be at a disadvantage when competing for tenure-track jobs. The thing is, it's not so clear that this is in fact the case. A recent survey of academic journal editors found that only a very small percent (2.9) would explicitly not consider for publication something that was already available online. The vast majority said they were either always open to "electronic theses and dissertations" (ETDs) or would evaluate them on a case-by-case basis (a practice some might refer to as editing). An earlier study found that "only 1.8% of graduate alumni reported publisher rejections of their ETD-derived manuscripts."  That doesn't get right at the question of how much the fact of online publication will sway an editor's judgment, but the point is that the relationship is unclear. There probably is a negative impact for dissertations that are particularly narrow and have a small potential audience, but for those that are more general, the effect could work in the opposite direction: Publishing online could generate buzz, enlarging rather than shrinking the pool of readers, making book or journal publication more, not less, attractive for publishers. Whatever the case, wherever the balance of these countervailing effects lies, it seems that more research into the relationship between online access and book viability should be done before a policy of a six-year embargo is endorsed. The AHA is acting out of a genuine concern for the career prospects of younger scholars, and that is admirable. The trouble is, as the Digital Public Library of America's Dan Cohen tweeted, "Rather than trying to push other levers, or experimenting with other ways to disseminate historical knowledge, the AHA's default is to gate." He later added, "It's the passivity in the face of what is, the lack of initiative to explore other models *as well*, that's disappointing." Ultimately, what is so frustrating about the AHA's stance is that it seems to view the purpose of historical scholarship narrowly, as a means to securing employment. But the value of history is a public one. The late Roy Rosenzweig, then the vice president of research at the American Historical Association, danced around this in a 2005 essay later quoted by Cohen:
The AHA attempts to bow to the value of "full and timely dissemination of new historical knowledge" by recommending an embargo "only for a clearly stated, limited amount of time, and by encouraging other, more traditional forms of availability that would insure a hard copy of the dissertation remains accessible to scholars and all other interested parties." What if instead the AHA sought to celebrate students who sought to bring their work to a wider audience? What if it encouraged hiring committees to focus less on books as the symbol of scholarly success and looked more at the scholarship itself, or the impact it had on the wider world? With its statement, the AHA says that it accepts that hiring practices must remain what they are, that history is and will remain a "book-based discipline" (a claim historian Adam Crymble rightly disputes), and that the public good must remain at odds with that of the discipline and its practitioners. This sort of thinking, Cohen wrote last fall, is representative of "a collective failure by historians who believe -- contrary to the lessons of our own research -- that today will be like yesterday, and tomorrow like today." 
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| Why Ethnic Violence Is Ravaging the World's Newest Country Posted: 23 Jul 2013 09:15 AM PDT  A SPLA soldier looks at warplanes as he lies on the ground to take cover beside a road during an air strike by the Sudanese air force in Rubkona near Bentiu. (Goran Tomasevic/Reuters) Hundreds of people have been wounded in ethnic violence over the past few months in South Sudan, the world's newest country. Nearly two years after its independence, the country continues to face a myriad of obstacles to political stability and economic self-reliance. Its leadership is fragmented and is dominated by former military commanders. The government itself is largely inaccessible outside of Juba, the capital. The lack of a state apparatus in many areas, alongside large caches of small arms from the civil war, have led to the rise of militias. With little or no legal protection, conflicts over property, land, and water rights have become commonplace in the countryside. Since the South's separation from Sudan, Jonglei, the largest of the 10 states of South Sudan, has become the epicenter for ethnic division and anti-government spoilers. What is the conflict in Jonglei?
The situation in Jonglei consists of two separate but interrelated conflicts. The first is an insurgency campaign being waged between a renegade former general, David Yau Yau, and the South Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA). The second conflict is the ongoing tribal violence between the Lou Nuer and the Murle communities within Jonglei. As in many African countries, South Sudan is ethnically heterogenous, and the Lou Nuer and the Murle have a history of rivalry. Since South Sudan's independence, the United Nations estimates that 1,600 people have been killed in Jonglei due to tribal fighting, largely over cattle raiding and grazing rights. The proliferation of small, ethnically based militias have accelerated the violent tendencies of both groups, spiraling into tit-for-tat theft and massacres.
Who are the people involved in the violence?
The rebellion stemmed from a disagreement between Yau Yau and the government after regional elections in 2010. Yau Yau lost to a candidate from the Sudan People's Liberation Movement, and he accused the government of electoral tampering. He was co-opted into the SPLA in exchange for ending his rebellion, but he defected from the SPLA in 2012. However, Yau Yau is a member of the Murle ethnic group, and his troops have supported other Murle militia against the Lou Nuer. Both the Murle and the Lou Nuer have access to unemployed youths and reserves of leftover weapons. The government has accused Yau Yau of acting with considerable support from Sudan and the Sudan Armed Forces, while the Murle fault the government for being dominated by other ethnic groups. This rebellion has exacerbated tensions between the Murle and the Lou Nuer. The virulent hatred between these two groups is summed up in a 2011 statement made by a Nuer militia, the White Army, that their massacres were meant to "wipe out the entire Murle tribe on the face of the earth." The limited infrastructure and the rainy weather within Jonglei have made it easier for ethnic militias to carry out guerilla attacks on villages. While atrocities abound on each side, the SPLA has been accused of carrying out reprisal attacks on Murle civilians and displacing civilians across Murle territory.
What does the situation reveal about South Sudan?
Jonglei showcases the hurdles that South Sudan will have to overcome in its quest to build a lasting, democratic state that is inclusive and stable. The widespread access to weapons, lack of state intervention, and limited economic prospects has bred a climate where violence becomes the pathway to retributive justice -- whether it's directed at another tribe, or at the state itself. This post is part of a collaboration between The Atlantic and the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. 
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| Why This Seemingly Innocuous Photo of Xi Jinping Is So Important Posted: 23 Jul 2013 08:36 AM PDT High-level Chinese politicians generally aren't known for their baby-kissing, "man of the people" charisma. While their American counterparts strain to be unassuming -- recall Al Gore's "earth tones" obsession from 2000 -- China's leaders typically maintain a studied aloofness from the public. That's why this photograph of President Xi Jinping has raised eyebrows in China in the last few days:  In the world of Chinese politics, this speaks volumes. Consider that a year ago, the very fact that U.S. Ambassador to China Gary Locke was photographed ordering his own coffee from Starbucks made waves in the country, where officials of his station would surely delegate that responsibility to an underling:  President Xi does have a reputation for being personable -- especially in comparison to his wooden predecessor, Hu Jintao. But China has also changed, too. Income inequality and corruption have sparked public anger in the country, and leading Communist Party officials have attracted attention for their displays of wealth and privilege. Having the president appear in a rain storm holding an umbrella doesn't actually change anything, of course, but it at least shows a down-to-earth style that's typically absent in Chinese politics. It's worth noting, though, that Xi's rolled-up pants look is hardly the most casual image ever taken of a Chinese leader. In 1966, the year China tumbled into the Cultural Revolution, Chairman Mao Zedong was famously photographed swimming the Yangtze River (though the men surrounding him were his security detail, not commoners). Will Xi soon take a public dip for the masses? It's too soon to tell. But evidence of his more relaxed style continues to pop up: when greeting a young female resident on a trip to Wuhan yesterday, the president reportedly said: "Hello, beautiful."  
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| What the Backstreet Boys Could Learn From K-Pop Posted: 23 Jul 2013 08:19 AM PDT  AP Photo / Disney-ABC Domestic Television, David Steele The Backstreet Boys release their 20th-anniversary album In a World Like This next week, the group's first record since This is Us came out in 2009. The members have been making the usual promotion-cycle rounds: going on a comeback tour, dropping by radio stations, appearing on morning shows. But the fact that this group is turning two decades old means it's been together for longer than many of today's most plugged-in pop music listeners have been on Earth. And the band's popularity isn't what it once was; Backstreet's last album, This Is Us, debuted at No. 9 on the US Billboard 200 and only produced two singles of middling success. The group toured with New Kids on the Block in 2011, which cashed in on the nostalgia of people converted more than a decade ago but probably didn't mint many new fans. The Backstreet Boys have discussed how the music market has changed significantly since the days of "As Long as You Love Me," so they are aware that grabbing young listeners won't be easy. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, member Kevin Richardson discusses how today's mass audience constantly expects new content from artists because of social media, which wasn't around when the Backstreet Boys were at their peak. So to attract new fans, the boy group of yesteryear may need to readjust its strategy. Luckily, they have a model to imitate: Shinhwa, the Korean equivalent of the Backstreet Boys. Korea's pop industry is much younger than America's own, but its trends mirror those in the U.S.: dubstep, autotune, music competition shows, etc. But unlike in America of late, Korea has latched onto group acts with particular ferocity. It has turned the production of boy and girl collectives (called "idol groups") into a science, designing them to do way more than sing and dance. While K-pop is beginning to incorporate more variety in musical styles and artists -- thanks in part to said competition shows -- idol groups still dominate and ultimately are where the money is. In 2012 alone, a staggering 61 group acts and duos made their debuts, 33 of which were male. So K-pop knows a thing or two about boy bands. Rewind to 1998, when SM Entertainment debuted a group called Shinhwa. The six-membered boy band would go on to release four studio albums and win 17 music awards under SM before leaving the label in 2003. They are currently the longest-running male musical group in Korea, recently releasing their 11th studio album to commemorate their 15th anniversary. As a group, Shinhwa is five years younger than the Backstreet Boys, but its approach to becoming the most prominent men-who-used-to-be-boys band of its home country is years ahead of Nick Carter & co. All six of Shinhwa's members are in their 30s, and those physically fit to do so have completed their government-mandated stints in the army. In their 15 years together as a group, they've consistently released music, gone on tour, and appeared on television. Their 2012 album The Return sold more than 80,000 copies last year, which is a solid number in Korea for a group coming back after a four-year hiatus, competing against artists in an oversaturated market. Currently, some members act, others make music, and some are even involved in helping produce the next generation of idol groups. All of this keeps Shinhwa on the Korean public's ears and minds. Aside from Shinhwa's omnipresence, an integral part to the group's longevity is smart self-awareness. In a recent episode of SNL Korea that Shinhwa hosted, the members poked fun of themselves in a skit aptly titled "A Night at the Museum." They play much younger versions of themselves, acting literally as relics from another time, on display for visitors to mock. Dressed in boy-band garb from a past decade, Shinhwa stand in formation as young museum goers express confusion at the group's identity, not recognizing who they are. In a Digital Short from the same episode, Shinhwa play life-insurance salesmen, selling a product called "Idol Retirement Insurance Plan," a package designed to provide retired idols with fawning fans to celebrate birthday parties with, ass-kissing from active artists, and most importantly, stalkers to make the retired idols feel young and well-loved. Nobody's saying that the Backstreet Boys need to bro out with One Direction. (But can you imagine?) Still, connecting with the younger crop of artists would make them appear less outdated. The skits are tame, but their self-condescension shows that Shinhwa gets it. It's charming to see the band members acknowledge the ridiculousness of people their age performing synchronized routines to pop songs aimed at teens, to see them show some awareness that they could soon become actual has-beens. What the Backstreet Boys can learn from Shinhwa, then, is to get over the awkwardness of being grown men in a boy band and embrace the jokes thrown their way. Their current promotional strategy, however, isn't really helping on that front. They're dating themselves constantly by harping on old slogans ("Backstreet's back!") with complete earnestness. They over-rely on puns that only older fans would get, or worse yet, puns that will only serve to trigger sneers from younger pop fans ("Can't believe Millennium went Number One 14 years ago today! You guys continue to make us feel Larger Than Life. :)"). They participated in Letterman's "Top 10" segment to sing updated lyrics to their best-known songs, referencing Justin Bieber's monkey problems and making an obvious Chris Christie fat joke--a shtick that made them seem like out-of-touch uncles trying too hard to show they're up on pop culture. Another point of comparison lies in the K-pop outfit's variety show, "Shinhwa Broadcast," which brings on a wide array of younger groups. In the episodes, both the guests and Shinhwa play games and compete, among other activities. It's a hit, and great for Shinhwa's public image. Bringing on popular, young groups both helps rope in their fans and gives Shinhwa the opportunity to be "one of the guys" with the younger crowd, situating them as still-relevant peers as well as influential elders. Korean culture has strict hierarchies in place, which makes fostering relationships between younger groups and older groups easier. While these junior-senior relationships don't exactly translate over to America, the Backstreet Boys should realize that younger groups on the scene -- and their fans -- can help them. What's more, the group could not have asked for a better time to return: Boy bands are becoming mainstream again. Though acts like One Direction and The Wanted are careful to make the distinction that they're more "band" than "boy," they remain five-membered pop groups that heavily rely on their looks and youth to influence the desires (and wallets) of hormonal teens. Nobody's saying that the Backstreet Boys need to bro out with One Direction. (But can you imagine?) What they do need is to realize that connecting with the younger crop of artists would make them appear less outdated. They need to take full advantage of social media, and of the producers and execs out there who would love to sit a veteran boy group together with a young, hot European one. They need a lightly self-mocking SNL appearance. Maybe they could line up some interesting endorsement deals. The possibilities seem endless, but whatever the solution, it doesn't involve "Backstreet's back." 
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| Late-Night Comedy Roundup: Chapter '9 Mile' Bankruptcy in Detroit Posted: 23 Jul 2013 07:56 AM PDT As Michigan's largest city and center of the American auto industry, Detroit was a major economic center for years. However, the city's downward trajectory continues as Detroit became the largest American city to file for Chapter 9 Municipal Bankruptcy this week. The Tonight Show, host Jay Leno compared Detroit's troubles to the troubles of the federal government and The Daily Show's John Oliver examined who, exactly, is to blame. On Conan, a new Transportation Security Administration program was comedy fodder. Host Conan O'Brien said the PreCheck program is decreasing the efficacy of the TSA. The Daily Show also looked at the status of National Security Administration leaker Edward Snowden. After applying for temporary asylum via a handwritten request, Snowden will likely get out of the Russian airport soon. Oliver wondered, though, if Russia might not be the best place for temporary asylum, thanks to Vladimir Putin's disposition. Fast forward to 2:30 to see Oliver explain just how Putin reminds him of "an actual cartoon villain." Read more from Government Executive. 
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| Answering to Patients Who Yell the Loudest Posted: 23 Jul 2013 07:36 AM PDT  gsagostinho/Flickr Few people would argue that scarce medical resources should simply go to patients and families who yell the loudest, but the recent case of a ten year-old Pennsylvania girl with cystic fibrosis shows how such a strategy can work. The parents of Sarah Murnaghan went to court to demand that their daughter be placed on the transplant list for new lungs. The court agreed, and she has now received a second set of lungs after her immune system rejected the first set. There is a long—and storied—history of activist patients bucking the system to obtain treatments initially denied to them. These successes have created strategies, often involving the media, for other desperately ill people to follow. But in an era of rising health care costs and passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which seeks to reign and regulate spending, the privileges of activist patients need to be reexamined. It makes sense to acknowledge how individual instances of activism and system-wide cost containment may often be directly at odds. That is why the media attention to the recent cases in Pennsylvania and Illinois is so helpful. There have always been patients who pushed their physicians to obtain unusual therapies, but modern patient activism can be traced back to the efforts of women with breast cancer in the 1970s. At that time, the treatment of choice for the disease was the disfiguring radical mastectomy, which entailed removal not only of the cancerous breast but the underarm lymph nodes and chest wall muscles on the side of the cancer. But some women, relying on the medical literature and like-minded surgeons, rejected this decades-old procedure in favor of smaller operations, including an early version of today's lumpectomy. Opposed by most surgeons, these women took their case to the public through newspapers, magazines and television shows like Today. Eventually, surgeons had to concede that these less aggressive operations were viable options for localized breast cancers. A decade later, when young gay men were dying of a frightening new disease, now known as AIDS, scientists developed the first medications that potentially prolonged life. Yet when doctors told these men they would need to enter a clinical trial of one of these medicines, zidovudine, in which only one-half of them would actually receive the pill, they rebelled, pleading their case in the press and in public protests. This activism led the Food and Drug Administration to speed the process by which it approves new medications. There are many other examples of successful patient activism. In 1983, thanks to the efforts of the National Organization for Rare Diseases, Congress passed the Orphan Drug Act, which gives incentives to pharmaceutical companies to develop medicines for rare diseases that might otherwise be ignored. Perhaps the apogee of patient activism occurred when Augusto and Michaela Odone, parents of a boy with a progressive degenerative neurological disorder, leapfrogged over doctors to develop an oil that prevented the onset of the disease, a story commemorated in the 1992 film Lorenzo's Oil. Not all of these efforts have led to successful therapies and the saving of lives. But what activist patients have demanded is the opportunity to benefit from potentially helpful medications or procedures, such as organ transplants. Which is why the Murnaghans and the parents of another child with end-stage cystic fibrosis, a boy named Javier Acosta, used the legal system to challenge existing rules that prohibited the use of adult lungs in children. And it is why two Illinois women petitioned their state's Medicaid system, which funds medical care of the poor, to pay for a risky, unproven multi-organ transplant that they believed would improve their dire medical conditions. Illinois declined to pay, terming the procedure "experimental." But rejecting such requests is difficult, especially when patients are in pain or dying and are out of other options. Children, understandably, generate the most sympathy. There is an old expression—"You cannot ration at the bedside"—which I have always found to be true. It may be hard for insurers to say no to patients in need, but it is even harder for health professionals to do so. We are thus left with a difficult dilemma. The Affordable Care Act promotes the use of cost-efficient interventions while seeking to improve health care coverage for the neediest Americans. But the ACA is being implemented in a country with a legacy of vibrant patient activism, which has not only saved lives, but has also promoted innovation and, at times, enabled poor patients to obtain unproven or expensive innovations that they otherwise could not have afforded. So what can be done? At the very least, it makes sense to openly acknowledge how individual instances of activism and system-wide cost containment may often be directly at odds. That is why the media attention to the recent cases in Pennsylvania and Illinois is so helpful. Understanding how money allotted for certain procedures may prevent funding of other, more scientifically proven interventions—particularly those that prevent disease—can promote healthy debate among insurers, health care professionals and the public. And, whenever possible, patients should be enrolled into clinical trials of innovative new medications or procedures, even if they, themselves, may ultimately not benefit. 
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| Why Putin Is Still so Popular in Russia Posted: 23 Jul 2013 07:20 AM PDT  Putin on horseback in southern Siberia's Tuva region (Reuters) Vladimir Putin gets a bad press outside Russia. From the cases of Alexander Litvinenko, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, or Pussy Riot to the sponsoring of laws against gay "propaganda", he is usually cast in a dark role. Those not warning the world about him are mocking a sometime martial artist, submariner, and lover of tiger encounters. Of late, the rhetoric and editorializing have been reminiscent of the Cold War. The Russian president's defiance of the U.S. over Edward Snowden, allowing the digital defector to remain at Moscow's Sheremetevo Airport for more than a month as the White House fumes impotently and his stance over Syria has led to an anti-Putin frenzy in the Western media. Writing in Komsomolskaya Pravda in the last months of the Soviet era, Alexander Solzhenitsyn observed: "The clock of communism has stopped striking. But its concrete building has not yet come crashing down. For that reason, instead of freeing ourselves, we must try to save ourselves from being crushed by its rubble." But after the collapse of the Soviet system in 1991 it was not just rubble that was the problem. In a devastating decade the assets of the country were ripped off. Gangster capitalism emerged and preyed on the prostrate country. Much of the old Soviet elite -- the nomenklatura who had been positively vetted for high posts in party and state -- rapidly converted themselves into a property-owning middle class, with a new crude "aristocracy" of oligarchs of unbelievable wealth at the top. The poor, the vast pool of unemployed created by the theft of a nation, pensioners, the sick, the young whose schooling became a lottery, all suffered. Male life expectancy fell from 65 years in 1986 to 57 in the mid-1990s. This tragedy was presided over by Boris Yeltsin, drunken conductor of a German brass band, general buffoon, corrupt liner of his and others pockets on a grand scale but, more seriously, destroyer, in 1993, of the nearest thing Russia had to a parliament by firing shells on its White House home. He also crudely manipulated his re-election campaign in 1996, depriving opponents of a voice. Despite all this, unlike Putin, Yeltsin enjoyed a largely favourable press and image in the West. There were two reasons for this. The only organized alternative to Yeltsin was the rump of the communist party and his bizarre presidency ensured it would never reorganize or gain control. In addition, many foreign interests -- especially oil, financial and legal services and some agribusinesses -- were able to fish prize specimens from the dank, turbulent, and muddy pool. In 1998 a massive currency crisis finally stopped the ugly process in its tracks. Yeltsin had to step down for "health" reasons and the relatively unknown Putin was appointed as his successor in 1999. At first, it appeared that Putin would have to be, like Yeltsin, a puppet of the oligarchs and the Kremlin kleptocracy. However, he soon proved to have a political strength of his own and, in a first major arm wrestle in 2004, he arrested and prosecuted the richest and most powerful oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, at that time number 16 on the Forbes world rich list. Others took refuge abroad, like Boris Berezovsky, who was given asylum by the United Kingdom and eventually committed suicide in Berkshire earlier this year. Berezovsky's former protégée, Roman Abramovich, with whom he fought and lost a long court duel in London, took a different strategy. Making himself a public figure in British life gave Abramovich some protection from Putin's control but, at the same time, he maintained positive working relations with Putin who put a golden chain round his neck by reappointing him as governor of the small and distant Chukhotka region when he wanted to give it up in 2004. This was typical of Putin's new style. He was not going to be a creature of the oligarchs, who would have to toe his line or leave Russia. Putin gained immense popularity in 2009 by publicly taking to task one of the richest Russian-based oligarchs, Oleg Deripaska, for shortcomings in his aluminium-smelting factory in Leningrad province. Putin's style has certainly been authoritarian, but to see oligarchs as human rights victims is to stretch the definition. Other elements of his popularity have been a more assertive international stance in which Russia shows independence in the face of American and western opposition -- currently manifesting in the crisis in Syria, one of Russia's oldest allies -- and a relatively successful economic policy which saw a period of growth, falling unemployment and rise in real wages, sometimes achieved by increasing state intervention in the economy, including the re-nationalization of factories and industries. Obviously, none of this was popular in the West, since they curtailed Western influence over the country, limited business opportunities and, supposedly, revived Soviet-era ghosts. The response of the Russian population, apart from its oligarchs and intellectuals, has been much more favorable and, even though they are slipping, Putin's poll ratings remain very high. It has often been said that the pattern of governing a vast country like Russia is that if the center is weak, chaos ensues. On the other hand, if the center is strong, state construction and tyranny ensue. Russians as a whole seem to prefer the latter to the former. Even so, Putin is no tyrant. There are many freedoms in Russia despite the obvious imperfections of its democracy. One of the most important features which is still lacking as a key to escaping this historic cycle is a genuine rule of law. Russia has never enjoyed this privilege. At one time Putin appeared to be constructing it. Worryingly, that project appears to have been stalled. However, his authoritarianism has been aimed in the direction of constructing a viable state, not only from the Soviet rubble but from the dissolution of central authority and economic meltdown promoted by Yeltsin. The dangers of over-centralizing are obvious, and the process is far from over. The situation needs to be watched carefully, but the full complexity with which Putin is dealing needs to be taken into account. This article was originally published at The Conversation.  
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| Posted: 23 Jul 2013 07:11 AM PDT  A glistening, lipsticked mouth graces the cover of Sexy Feminism: A Girl's Guide to Love, Success, and Style, a book by Jennifer Keishin Armstrong and Heather Wood Rudúlph released in March. Born out of their blog SexyFeminist.com, the book aims to show girls and young women that, unlike what they may have heard, feminism can be--and often is--sexy. Tackling questions like "Is Dieting Antifeminist?" and "Plastic Surgery: Can You?", Keishin Armstrong and Wood Rudúlph break down the complex intricacies and varieties of feminist values into easily digestible chunks--perhaps too easily digestible. Sexy Feminism doesn't just want to share the word with girls and young women, it wants to make feminism cool, attractive, and simple--and it's far from the first book to try and package feminism for a young audience. There's a long history of feminist writers trying to redefine and rebrand the concept to appeal to a young audience. Books espousing feminist values for girls were abundant in the 1970s. Books like Girls Can Be Anything and The Cat Ate My Gymsuit confronted feminist issues head-on, from sexist career expectations to body insecurity. Without labeling themselves as overtly feminist, Girls Can Be Anything depicts the many career choices for girls, and The Cat Ate My Gymsuit follows 13-year-old Marcy Lewis as she navigates the dangers of adolescence, all while fighting to keep her favorite English teacher at her school. These books showed younger readers that they could do things and be things; the books' characters were not reduced to romantic sidekicks or senseless victims. The 1980s saw the first appearance of overtly feminist materials for girls and young women. One of the first books to do this was the 1981 collection Feminism For Girls: An Adventure Story. A variety of feminist perspectives on different topics relevant to young women and girls, the book avoided preaching. It offered no manifestos and no rules, and instead tried to offer its readers a number of ideas and starting points. As the book's editors, Angela McRobbie and Trisha McCabe, write in the introduction: Adventure is founded on initial confusion, even fear. It demands enterprise and ingenuity. It necessitates tactics and manoeuvers. Unlike myths, adventures are open-ended, there are no foregone conclusions. We won't be offering a step-by-step guide to the feminist 'Good Life.' We prefer to deal with clues, suggestions and ideas. The book contained perspectives on a variety of topics--what it means to work as a secretary, analysis of Jackie magazine, a case study on black girls in Britain--meant to provoke thought rather than designate official protocol. While Feminism For Girls was trying to combat stereotypes of feminism in an effort to appeal to young people, its approach was one of transparency and compassion rather than condescension and authority. The book, however, wasn't very popular. According to McRobbie, it didn't sell well, and many of its contributors "retreated into the academy." Nevertheless Feminism For Girls is notable for being among the first books to reach out to a young audience and consider youth outreach an activist issue. In the late '80s and early '90s feminism and its derivatives moved into the mainstream, creating previously unseen amalgamations of theory and pop. The magazines Sassy, Bust, and Bitch were all founded between 1988 and 1996, and a younger generation began to define feminism for themselves. While Bitch was the only magazine to explicitly label itself feminist, all three publications helped usher in a new generation of women sympathetic to feminist values. In 1999, Bust made a foray into girl-guide territory with The Bust Guide to the New Girl Order, a collection of essays from Bust writers and contributors on Third Wave-defining topics like sex and pop culture, articles with names like "the mysterious eroticism of the mini-backpack," and an essay by Courtney Love. Unlike Feminism For Girls, The Bust Guide tackled pop culture and mainstream media from within, simultaneously critiquing and embracing it. The guide was indicative of a change in feminism: Rather than being a collective movement seeking political change, feminist and girl-affirming values were taking hold on an individual scale, in small and isolated actions. Then came the latest generation of feminism marketers, among them Jennifer Baumgardner, Jessica Valenti, and the authors of Sexy Feminism, who have tried to steer feminism away from individualist girl power and back towards its collective, political roots. Baumgardner's 2000 book Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future, coauthored with Amy Richards, pointed out the difference between individualist, "girl power" feminism and political, collective feminism. Baumgardner, for one, felt that she couldn't relate to the "Jell-O-shots versions of feminism" portrayed in the magazines Bust and Bitch. As she notes in her introduction to Manifesta: Feminists my age, Girlies with tight clothes and streaky hair, who made zines and music and Web sites, exhibited the confidence and self-worth that I craved from Ms. But part of what was free about them seemed to be that they weren't taking on anything they might have to lose. Soon I...realized that the whole movement was in a kind of crisis: the people who are creating the most inspiring feminist culture and the people who have a working knowledge of feminist political change haven't met yet. Baumgardner and Richards's goal was to show young women (who might already consider themselves feminists), that feminism depended upon collective, political action. While some criticized the book's writing and argument, Manifesta was largely hailed as a success, praised by Gloria Steinem for "show[ing] us the building blocks for the future of this longest revolution," and was recently reprinted in a special tenth anniversary edition. Jessica Valenti embarked on a similar venture when she launched the website Feministing in 2004. More focused on collective rather than personal feminism, the site primarily focuses on political issues, and also publishes cultural critiques and interviews with prominent feminists and role models. In 2007, Valenti published her first book, Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman's Guide to Why Feminism Matters, a how-to guide for the fully feminist life. The book begins with an explanation of why feminism is wonderful ("When you're a feminist, day-to-day life is better. You make better decisions. You have better sex.") before launching into chapters with titles like "You're a hardcore feminist. I swear." The book takes time to dispel "myths" about feminism: that feminists hated men, didn't shave, and were only chaste, middle-aged women. Full Frontal Feminism is a big reason I became interested in feminism when I did, as a disenchanted junior in high school. Recommended to me by a friend whose older, fascinating sister had come across it in college, Full Frontal Feminism brought together a wide array of topics for an effective crash-course in why I should care about feminism. It's not that this was my introduction to feminism; it wasn't. But Full Frontal Feminism made me feel that I could appropriately call myself a "feminist." Sexy Feminism takes cues from both Baumgarnder/Richards and Valenti, creating its own specialized protocol in the process. Keishin Armstrong and Wood Rudúlph seek to appeal to young women who feel that feminism isn't sexy, fun, or any of the other words in their subtitle. Once again, the authors claim that they're "here to detonate, once and for all, those pervasive myths about feminism." And, like Baumgardner and Richards (whom they declare to be idols), Keishin Armstrong and Wood Rudúlph's definition of a feminist includes a call to action. In contrast to the dichotomy between girl power feminism and activist feminism drawn by Manifesta, Keishin Armstrong and Wood Rudúlph try to combine the two, drawing the mainstream into their realm and calling it their own. What these recent guides make clear is a desire to bring feminist-inspired actions, cultures, and people back into the feminist movement. As the authors of all three books make clear, the intended reader is likely already a feminist, even if they don't know it yet. What the authors are seeking, then, isn't to educate readers about the existence of double standards and the pay gap so much as to show that the reader's values and feminism's values are one and the same. Keishin Armstrong and Wood Rudúlph explain why they think it's important for people who believe in feminist values to align themselves with the feminist movement: But feminist is just a word, you may say--why is it so important? Given the choice between living feminist principles and calling ourselves feminists, of course we'd choose the former. But we don't think there should have to be a choice. To distance yourself from the word is to imply there's something wrong with feminism and/or feminists, an implication that leads to the continued denigration of the cause itself. I, however, am not convinced by this argument, or any of the other recent books claiming that more people should call themselves feminists. As has been made clear by others, promoting the equality of women doesn't have to lie solely in the domain of feminism, nor can it only be accomplished within the movement's bounds. These authors seem to think political organization and action around women's issues can only happen in a feminist framework, but plenty of organizations work towards women's rights without needing to label themselves "feminist." The Planned Parenthood Action Fund, for example, was not formed out of the feminist movement and has never been officially linked to it. Planned Parenthood certainly espouses feminist values, but it has not depended upon an official relationship with outright feminist organizations--and yet has created meaningful change beneficial to women and in line with traditionally feminist values. Just as there are a multitude of ways to be a feminist or espouse feminist values, so should there be a variety of guides and books that help young people figure out feminism for themselves. 
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| Encouraging Students to Imagine the Impossible Posted: 23 Jul 2013 06:30 AM PDT  The first time I visited the website for The Future Project, I was asked to name my dream. For most people, the question, "What is your dream?" never comes up. We do what is expected of us from day to day, and get on with the business of living our lives. For most of us, dreams are just that; fantasies, relegated to sleep, idle daydreaming, and Disney movies. But the founders of The Future Project have made it their mission to ask children to name their dreams. You might expect this would be some kind of whimsical feel-good exercise. But dreaming has never looked like such a practical, powerful step: What recent research is telling us and what The Future Project founders Kanya Balakrishna and Andrew Mangino are betting on is that dreams inspire learning - not the sort of rote, superficial learning that will help students pass state standardized tests but then disintegrate, but real learning that inspires deep, meaningful, life-changing mastery and purpose. Learning that inspires positive change both for the individual and their community. The Future Project 'Dream Director' Tim Shriver says the idea for The Future Project was born out of Balakrishna and Mangino's observation that "students have become disengaged from their own education, and education policymakers are missing the point in the debate over school reform." The Future Project returns students, rather than curriculum and governance, to the center of the discussion about education. In Tim Shriver's words, "Student transformation is critical, but it's only the first step in what we hope will be a social movement and the transformation of education. When human beings are passionate and exploring their dreams, when those things become a part of a person's life, they can do the impossible." To that end founders Mangino and Balakrishna, along with a team of twenty-five staff members including so-called "Dream Directors," mentor over one thousand students in campaigns born out of that simple question, "What is your dream?" The men and women of The Future Project aren't alone in feeling that, as American education become more rigid and assessment-driven, our society is losing a vital economic resource: creative, resourceful thinkers. The most successful innovators in the American economy, such as Google, understand the creative, intellectual, and economic value of dreaming, and have made passion projects a part of their corporate culture. Google funds dreaming in the guise of its "20 percent time" rule. Google encourages employees to spend one day a week working on projects that don't necessarily fall within their job descriptions, because Google has read the scientific research: dreaming is not a waste of time; it is an essential tool for problem solving and creativity. The freedom to dream has certainly paid off in both employee satisfaction and productivity for Google; Google was listed as number one in CNN Money's "Best Companies to Work For" 2012 list, and 50 percent of Google's products, such as Gmail, Google News, and many other products are the tangible (and profitable) results of time spent dreaming at Google. Recent studies have found that the areas of the brain most involved in high-level problem-solving are engaged when we daydream, and as one study on the brain and daydreaming found, "When unoccupied by external demands, the human mind often works with particular rigor." That rigor, when motivated by passion that comes from within (so-called "intrinsic" motivation), is the key to learning. Everyone from Stanford psychologist and Mindset author Carol Dweck, to the flow-theory creator Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, to my map-obsessed nine-year-old, know that passion-driven projects are where magic - not to mention true learning - happens. Educators are slowly catching on to the magic of these dream-inspired passion projects and there's even an educational Twitter handle, #geniushour, devoted to the movement. Poke around on the hashtag #geniushour and you will find classroom junkyards for robot construction, homemade hovercrafts, and student-led anti-bullying campaigns. Sixth grade teacher Jessica Pack claims genius hour has transformed her classroom, inspiring creative thought and innovation:
Genius hour can be integrated in to the already crowded curriculum and be used to support those goals. According to teacher A.J. Juliani, "The best part of genius hour is that it covers the common core standards and specific skills we want our students to master. Genius Hour allows them to go above and beyond "the test" and choose their learning path." Choice appears to be the key to the success of genius hour and other self-directed learning. When I spoke to these teachers and visited their genius hour blogs, they all recommended the same book: Daniel Pink's Drive. Pink's book is dedicated to the study of what motivates human beings, and his TED talk, "The Puzzle of Motivation" has been viewed almost 6 million times. Pink points out that rewards offered for results actually harm performance, while projects driven by intrinsic motivation are the most successful. He posits that autonomy, mastery, and purpose are the three keys to success, and while his focus is the business world, the message rings true in education as well. The Future Project recognized the logic of Pink's argument, and today, Pink serves on their Advisory Board. Our educational system could use a few more dreamers like Tim Shriver and Daniel Pink, people who understand that grades and test scores, the traditional carrots and sticks we employ in education, are poor substitutes for the true learning and intellectual growth that results from autonomy, mastery, and purpose. At the very least, the education reform debate, reeling from the citywide conflicts and high-profile cheating scandals that have dogged the tests-and-incentives movement, might benefit from considering what a motivation-driven approach has to offer. In The Future Project's short film, "I am a Dreamer," New York student Iltimas Doha defines a dreamer as, "a person who can look at a situation, no matter how bad or good, and say 'we can do better than this.'" "I Am a Dreamer" from The Future Project on Vimeo. Doha and the other dreamers have their work cut out for them. They are going to have to look at "this," the current state of American education, and come up with a new way of educating future generations that's better than what we offer up now. If The Future Project, Daniel Pink, and Google are right, and the future of education will be the product of autonomy, mastery and purpose, we could do worse than to ask a simple question of every student that comes through the schoolhouse door: "What's your dream?" 
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