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- The Pond at the North Pole
- Obama's Highly Political Economy Speech
- The iPad Is Your New Bicycle
- Vote for 1book140's August Read: Graphic Novels
- Do We Need to Worry About a Chinese Economic Slowdown?
- The Struggle for Egypt's Future Plays Out in the Pages of Its Newspapers
- The Dubious Math Behind Stop and Frisk
- Porn on the Kindle: A Catch-22
- This Tiny Blue Dot on Mars Is Our Rover
- Hardcore Parkour (With Robots)
- Forget Portland: China Might Just Be the New Epicenter of Craft Beer
- Between Crime, Separatism, and Racial Tensions, Can Spain Pull Through?
- The App of God
- Let There Be Night
- The Statement Anthony Weiner Should Release
- Why China Is Banning Construction of New Government Buildings
- Are Shrinking Unions Making Workers Poorer?
- Really Listening to Atheists: Taking Nonbelief Seriously
- How the Western Was Lost (and Why It Matters)
- Today in Asiana 214 News
- What to Watch For in Obama's Economics Speeches
- Late-Night Comedy Roundup: Oh the Places You'll Rule
- Here Are Photos of Snow on Mars
- The Rise of Al-Qaeda 2.0
- When Is a Royal Baby a Fetus?
| Posted: 24 Jul 2013 04:05 PM PDT The North Pole is supposed to be icy. It's where Santa and polar bears live, after all. But, right now, there's a small lake at the North Pole. Here's an image from the wide-angle camera trained on a weather buoy maintained by the North Pole Environmental Observatory.  Paired with the long-time decline in sea ice across the arctic due to global warming, it's easy to jump to the conclusion that the Arctic sea ice is in an epic freefall. I mean, when there is a pond at the North Pole, things have gotten bad, right? And generally speaking, sea ice extent seems to be under considerable pressure. There is less ice during the summer than there used to be. But the specific story about the pond at the North Pole presents us with a little more complex symbol of change. Yes, there is a meltwater pond at the north pole, and perhaps in some previous climate states, that would not have happened. But this is not the first time scientists have observed a melt pond at the North Pole, nor is it the largest. "I have seen much more extensive ponding," James Morison, the principal investigator for the North Pole Environmental Observatory told me in an email. "Because we use wide angle lenses the melt pond looks much bigger than it is." He pointed out a camera a mere 100 meters away showing the ice looking relatively intact (see below). And the scale of these images is also quite small. You see those striped sticks in the second photo? Each bar is 10 centimeters (almost 4 inches) high, so what we see of each stick is only 16 inches. Which is to say: we're not seeing a vast patch of the arctic from these webcams.  This year's sea ice melt is not as bad as last year's record-shattering melt. For much of the season, the sea ice was tracking close to long-term norms, though it had a precipitous decline in July, and is now almost two standard deviations away from the long-term average. Still, Morison said, "that probably has limited connection with the... melt pond." As a symbol, a lake at the North Pole is compelling. But climate change is a planetary problem, and it's not easy to capture its dynamics in one photograph, no matter how wide-angle the lens. We've got to keep our eyes on the long-term data where the climate signal emerges from the noise of complex, natural systems.  Via Live Science 
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| Obama's Highly Political Economy Speech Posted: 24 Jul 2013 03:28 PM PDT  Sometimes a speech is designed to really do something -- to uplift, to rally, to comfort or heal, to lay out fresh plans and gird for a fight. And sometimes is more a part of a longer-term political-messaging strategy. Speaking in Galesburg, Illinois, Obama on Wednesday gave an economic speech designed to signal the beginning of a months-long effort to provide greater contrast with D.C. Republicans during an era of dug-in gridlock. 
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| Posted: 24 Jul 2013 02:40 PM PDT  Alexis C. Madrigal Yesterday's Apple earnings report revealed a significant drop-off in iPad sales, from 17 million in the same quarter last year to 14.6 million this spring. Is the high price keeping consumers away? Sure, cost can explain everything, in a sense. Make iPads free and I'm sure you'll find plenty of willing buyers, and cheaper Android tablets are selling well. But there's something else going on here. I first thought about it when, gathered around the lunch table one day, my colleagues were discussing how few of us had a tablet computer of any kind. These are people who work at a website, who are obsessive news consumers, who always have their mobile phones with them. But they don't own iPads (or Nexus tablets, etc.). Why? My theory is that tablet computers aren't the new mobile phone or personal computer, gadgets most American adults have, particularly well-off ones. Rather, iPads are the new bicycle. What do I mean by this? Let's begin with this graph of technology adoption over the 20th century and into the 21st:  "Click it. Print it. Take your time with it. That's a lot of linear data. One way to parse it is to ignore everything at the top and trace your eye along the 10% line," Derek wrote last year. (Visual Economics) That graph tells a story, not in data alone but in text too: "Consumption Spreads Faster Today." You can't miss it. But there is another argument embedded in the graph. It goes like this: The arrow of time points toward homes that are fully decked out -- with phones (perhaps mobile, but phones one way or the other), computers, televisions, refrigerators, stoves, cars, etc. Even the slow-to-catch-on dishwasher is on its way to ubiquity, presumably hindered not just by its own price tag, but the need for a sufficiently spacious kitchen too. Sure, there's the family you knew grown up that had forsworn TV, and the small but growing cadre of urbanites who rely on public transit to get around, but in a general sense, the trajectory is clear: With enough time and enough prosperity, sooner or later every consumer-technology product achieves a near-universal level of adoption. True enough ... for the products in the chart above. But this is a handful of consumer-tech products, and the complete picture would look quite different. It wouldn't show line after line reaching 90+ percent saturation, but lots of shorter plateaus -- technologies that some people find useful but aren't for everyone. These technologies don't follow the electricity trajectory; they follow what I'm calling the bicycle trajectory, and I think that's the trajectory the iPad and other tablets will follow. Think about the bicycle. It is by no means a new technology, having been around about as long as the oldest technologies on the chart above. Bicycles are not terribly expensive, either, particularly since there are so many used ones on the market (a quick scan of Craigslist turns up plenty of decent bikes going for less than $100). But as exactly zero people would be surprised to learn (zero non-Scandinavian people, that is), most Americans do not have a bike. In 2001 (unfortunately the most recent year for which I found data -- I will update if any of the places I called get back to me with anything better), the National Household Travel Survey found that there were 0.86 bikes per American household. And while that means it would appear pretty high up if charted above, it's clear that bikes are not like dishwashers, or electricity, or a TV. Extrapolating out the NHTS numbers, we can calculate that in 2001, just about a third of Americans had a bicycle (~90 million bikes, for some 285 million people). And we all know why: Most people don't see the need. They have a car; they prefer walking and transit; they don't feel it's safe. For those who are bikers, and I am one of them, their bicycle is a beloved possession. But for pretty much everyone else, bikes (and other bike-trajectory goods such as video-game consoles, stand-mixers, hair-dryers, etc.) just aren't their thing. By that comparison, we can see a big distinction between a mobile phone and a bike: More than 90 percent of American adults have a cell phone. What emerges from all this is a more complex portrait of technology adoption. It's not a march toward ubiquity but a march toward a greater array of options. Certain things, everyone will go for. But for many products the distribution will always be limited, and untapped markets will remain forever untapped. 
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| Vote for 1book140's August Read: Graphic Novels Posted: 24 Jul 2013 01:15 PM PDT  Nick Sousanis Do you love graphic novels, or are you new to comics? Either way, you're welcome to join our Twitter book club in August for a graphic-novel month. As we finish reading The Orphan Master's Son, a novel set in North Korea, it's time to suggest books for our vote this weekend.
What counts as a graphic novel? I recently heard a talk on understanding comics by Nick Sousanis, who's writing his PhD in comic form. Nick encouraged us to think widely about the ways that stories, emotions, and ideas can be shared visually. On Twitter, bookies have suggested classics like Alan Moore's Watchmen. Our Feb 2012 Graphic Novel month focused on '80s classics, so let's remember to consider more recent works too. I have Chris Ware's Building Stories on my shelf and want to read Alison Bechdel's Fun Home sometime soon. Books like like Logicomix and The Influencing Machine make complicated topics interesting and readable. Graphic novels are also thriving online. Shiga's time-traveling choose-your-own-adventure Meanwhile gets my head spinning in a good way. Manga and European genres are also fair game. At 1book140, readers choose what we read each month. Add your suggestions in the comments or tweet to #1book140. The vote will go up on Friday. Voting will close at the end of Monday. 
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| Do We Need to Worry About a Chinese Economic Slowdown? Posted: 24 Jul 2013 12:55 PM PDT  A broker mans the stock exchange in Shanghai. (Aly Song/Reuters) Paul Krugman in a recent post tells us NOT to worry about the impact of a slowing China on global exports, but to be worried, very worried about the indirect and unanticipated effects of a Chinese hard landing. Using the scenario of a five percentage point decline in growth rate--which I suppose means growth at 5 percent next year -- Krugman warns of unpredictable, scarcely conceivable, effects on "politics and international stability." In fact, you don't need to stray from the realm of economics to see that the unpredictable side of a Chinese slowdown is what is most worrisome. Krugman takes strong positions on the most important issues of our day: he is sometimes wrong, sometimes right, but always full of insights and worth reading. In this case, Krugman is right, but for an uncharacteristic reason: His conclusion is one of breath-taking banality. If China crashes, it will not be the direct and predictable effect on export demand that will be most important, it will be the indirect effects. Yes, indeed. And if you needed Paul Krugman to tell you that, you haven't been paying attention for the last, oh, seven years, since during that time period the unanticipated and indirect effects of virtually every major economic event have outweighed the direct and predictable effects. China is certainly no exception. Indeed, at least three crucial facts mean that the aftershocks of major problems in China will be extremely hard to predict. China is not a "Ponzi bicycle" economy; it is a real economic miracle, with multiple serious and debilitating Ponzi schemes woven deeply into the fabric. First, China has not experienced a recession in more than 20 years. Most of the economically active people in China today are young people who have never personally experienced an ordinary recession. Every other economy in the history of planet experiences occasional recessions (at least), and China is unlikely to be an exception. This means that when millions of economic actors in China adjust their expectations to encompass, say,18 months of economic contraction, the change in behavior will be massive and intrinsically hard to predict. Second, China has massive capacity in virtually every industrial sector. If domestic demand in China falters, businesses with excessive capacity will be in severe distress, and will seek to cut their losses by dumping goods on the global market. This creates the potential for enormous downward pressure on goods prices in many global markets, with unknown consequences. Third, nobody knows how many bankruptcies will appear in a major Chinese downturn, who will end up being implicated, or what the consequences will be for payment and collateral relations. Defaults and missed payments will ripple out through -- at a minimum -- the East Asian trading economy. Sudden flows of hot money out of -- and perhaps into -- China will destabilize financial markets in ways that are hard to predict. Indeed, one of the big lessons of the 2008 Lehman bankruptcy is that the entire global economy requires stable collateral and payments to operate. (At least we are a bit better prepared for this one than we used to be). Now, here's where Krugman is wrong: he conflates two different problems: slowing down an economy that is overly dependent on investment, but now faces new constraints (very difficult); and unwinding a Ponzi scheme (impossible). China is not a "Ponzi bicycle" economy; it is a real economic miracle, with multiple serious and debilitating Ponzi schemes woven deeply into the fabric, especially in the financial sector. There's no room for complacency; but caricatures don't help much, even if they're painted in the brightest of colors. Barry's comments make good sense to me. I am not an economist so I will focus on his key point of the unpredictability resulting from Chinese downturn. That is most worrisome to me. The politics will be complicated, and the effect both material and psychological on the globe's multinationals could be significant. The Party will roll over anyone or anything that gets in its way. But for the most part, the leadership runs scared of its own people's expectations. For anybody under age 40, their baseline of economic life is a country with exponential growth that transforms people's lives and provides bountiful opportunities. Those days are certainly gone. The people I talk to -- rich, middle class, poor -- share one thing in common: fear of the future. The poor that they have missed the boom. The middle class that their lifestyle is unsustainable. The rich that they can be dragged into a rigged courtroom at any time as the corruption crackdown focuses on those who were not born under a silver sickle. Many tell me they have "lost hope." When I ask them to articulate that further, they eventually circle toward various ways of describing their fear that China will not become what I can only call a normal country. A country in which people can trust the food they eat, the air they breathe, the medical care they receive and enjoy the legal protections of citizens -- not subjects -- who have some say over their lives. The leaders know this, hence, "The China Dream!" Xi Jinping's dream is that as people dream of China becoming a normal country the Party can remain the dreamweaver. How this dream can avoid becoming a nightmare as China goes through a needed downturn in order to reform the economic system will depend on the restoration of hope and trust in the Party. That won't be easy as Chinese people today mostly seem to tolerate the Party as long as it delivers economic growth and social stability. China is just the latest and biggest example of this pattern: it has grown for the past 15 years mainly by adding physical capital, and now it needs to grow by using its capital more efficiently. Now to the foreigners. Before the Internet and social media, when the Party controlled the message, problems in China were only reported on and discussed publicly in terms of the government providing solutions. Now that problems can't be hidden, they are blamed mostly on foreigners. Unrest? Corruption? Inflation? Remember those flies Deng Xiaoping said would come in once the window was opened? A fairly senior government official recently told a friend of mine that the horrific air pollution in Beijing is the fault of foreigners. He pointed out the most of the cars on the road carried foreign brand names. He didn't mention they are manufactured in China through forced joint ventures with state companies. Multinational CEOs these days are very frustrated by China. They need the growth market, can't wait for the shift to a consumer led economy, and dream of the next 800 million striving to join the middle class. But they also are feeling less and less welcome as more and more market barriers are erected and local companies enjoy more and more privilege. For many multi-national companies (MNCs) with big businesses in China, their focus today is on market survival as much as expansion. The current onslaught against foreign pharmaceutical companies in China is the largest manifestation we have seen yet of going after foreigners to demonstrate the Party is serious about fixing problems. There certainly appears to be some very serious corruption problems in the pharmaceutical business in China. But my guess is the foreign MNCs are amateurs compared to their local counterparts. In short, there is no love lost these days between foreign business and China. So how will global MNCs react to a downturn? Probably not well. Global MNCs and foreign governments usually look at China as much better than it is when times are good, and much worse that it is when times are bad. Like the Chinese citizenry, MNCs will tolerate Chinese officialdom as long as there is significant growth and stability. Investors should prepare for an overreaction by many MNCs when the Chinese economy takes its inevitable slide. CNBC, Fox Business and the rest of the cable TV cacophony will wake CEOs up in the morning with fresh catchphrases breathlessly describing Chinese crisis and calamity. I will leave it to Barry, Michael Pettis and others to describe the economic details. But behaviors driven by the political and psychological ramifications of a downturn are just as consequential and much less predictable.
Paul Krugman in my opinion has never had much of interest to say about China, or for that matter about any developing economy. His most famous foray outside the rich economies was his Foreign Affairs essay of 20 years ago, "The Myth of the Asian Miracle," where he argued that the success of east Asian economies owed far more to factor accumulation than to efficiency gains. While this was broadly true it was also stating the obvious: that's what developing economies do -- mobilize the factors of production. Efficiency-driven growth usually comes later. The more interesting question was why East Asian countries did so much better at this task than many other developing countries. China is just the latest and biggest example of this pattern: it has grown for the past 15 years mainly by adding physical capital, and now it needs to grow by using its capital more efficiently. That's a difficult transition. I agree with Barry that our understanding of the risks of this transition is not aided by simplistic caricatures such as Krugman's. For me, Barry's first point -- that most people in China have never experienced a recession -- is the most interesting. It's not entirely true -- I think the 20 million or so industrial workers who got laid off in Northeast China in the great state enterprise shakeout of the late 1990s and early 2000s saw themselves as living through hard times, and some of them are still economically active. But it's true enough, and we've seen a lot of evidence this year of businesses assuming that a big government stimulus was on its way to restore growth to its former heights. The problem now for the authorities is that they have to let growth slow enough so that businesses have to start focusing on efficiency, but they need to avoid torpedoing business and consumer confidence. That's a tricky task. This post also appears at ChinaFile, an Atlantic partner site. 
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| The Struggle for Egypt's Future Plays Out in the Pages of Its Newspapers Posted: 24 Jul 2013 12:24 PM PDT  A man reads a local newspaper at Tahrir Square in Cairo. (Peter Andrews/Reuters) As chaos ensued on streets across Egypt this week, and speculation surrounding the whereabouts of ousted President Mohamed Morsi and his closest Islamist allies intensified, the country's national newspaper splashed an expose across its front page. "The public prosecutor ordered the detention of Morsi for 15 days," Monday's Al-Ahram headline read in bold red print, followed by a series of scandalous subtitles claiming the detention is linked to a 2011 prison break. It also alleged the ex-president is suspected of espionage after calling U.S. Ambassador Anne Peterson from the wiretapped phone of Lieutenant General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the man responsible for his political demise. Both sides vehemently deny the report. That same morning, the court summoned Al-Ahram editor-in-chief Abdel-Nasser Salama for questioning, on the basis that news of Morsi's imprisonment is untrue and unsubstantiated. In a statement on Monday, the prosecutor warned the media that those who publish false reports will face charges. IkhwanWeb, the Muslim Brotherhood's online newspaper, called the report "utter lies," adding that claims of spying are meant to intimidate those protesting "in support of the return of legitimacy." Misinformation is rife -- a dangerous thing in the Twitter era. Opponents of politician and Nobel peace laureate Mohammed ElBaradei had already taken to the streets in outrage earlier this month after state news reported the former head of the UN nuclear watchdog was selected as interim prime minister. The news was picked up by the international press and spread quickly over social media. The report was then denied some hours later. Nearly three weeks after a popular uprising by millions of Egyptians to remove Morsi prompted military intervention, violent protests continue in locations across the country, while private and state-owned media battle in words and accusations. It is the latest chapter in Egypt's tumultuous transition, in which opposing camps are feuding in newspaper pages over everything from Morsi's legitimacy, to whether or not the events that transpired constitute a military coup. "If you look back at the history of Egyptian media, there are many instances where page editors try to break from the state's message and it really shakes things up every time that happens," said Adel Iskandar, an Arab media scholar at Georgetown University and author of the book Egypt in Flux: Essays on an Unfinished Revolution . "In this peculiar case, you've got a remnant of the Morsi regime still in place and trying to use whatever authority he has left to get a message out." When Hosni Mubarak was ousted in 2011, tales of oppression were vented through narratives in Egypt's print and television media. Many had hoped that the Morsi government would encourage a more balanced discourse -- but those hopes were quickly shattered. In August, the Islamist-dominated Upper House of Parliament, known as the Shura Council, named 50 new editors for the country's state-run newspapers, among them, many with loyalties to the ruling Islamist party. The move preceded a number of controversial decrees, including a declaration by Morsi granting himself judicial immunity, and the ratification of a new constitution in late December, despite the absence of any secular groups and religious minorities on the drafting committee. "The Muslim Brotherhood's plan to control the state-owned media was clear," said Al-Ahram journalist and former Washington correspondent Ezzat Ibrahim, adding that the Brotherhood tasked certain journalists with "cleansing" state-run media of all "Nasserists [socialists] and liberals." In the months that followed, a handful of talk show presenters were named as part of an investigation by the state for "violating journalist ethics in order to incite sedition and chaos and threatening national peace," according to a report in Al-Ahram. Among them were Lamees al-Hadidy, Amro Adeeb, and Youssef al-Husseiny, hosts of popular talk shows on private Egyptian channels CBC, OnTV, and Orbit, respectively. A number of secular veteran editorialists with state media were also reportedly forced into early retirement, sparking outrage from the country's Journalist Syndicate. "There was a lot of pushback from these newspapers and institutions rejecting the new guys at the top," said Mokhtar Awad, an independent political writer and analyst of Egyptian affairs. "There was never a period of full control. The Brotherhood media institutions were not that powerful. Their sole mission was to insinuate that the other people -- CBC, and these other networks -- were all agents of the old regime." Within hours of the coup, the military showed a keen interest in revamping the media. One of the first orders of business following the removal of Morsi was to purge the media of Muslim Brotherhood loyalists who could potentially fuel outrage among Morsi supporters. The managers of Brotherhood channel 25 were arrested hours after El-Sisi named Adly Mansour as interim president, and ultra-conservative Salafist channels al-Nass, al-Hifaz, al-Amjaad were also shut down. Al-Jazeera Mubasher Masr, the Qatari network's channel dedicated exclusively to news about Egypt, was temporarily closed -- its staff briefly detained -- amid accusations that the network was pro-Islamist. The move triggered a firestorm, even among many of Morsi's opponents, who claimed the military's abrupt targeting of Brotherhood networks was reminiscent of the intolerance practiced by former President Hosni Mubarak's regime. The Al-Ahram board of directors also voted to sack its chairman, Mamdouh El-Wali, as well as editors Salama and Mohamed Kharaga earlier this month, saying that it is seeking to "rebalance its editorial policy" and meet the expectations of the Egyptian people. But it's the Shura Council that has the final say in such matters. Since the military dissolved the Shura Council, the Morsi appointees still hold on to their posts for now. "The new authority is the one in the driver's seat and, as has been the case with every generation of bosses to Al-Ahram and other state institutions, there's been a purging -- sometimes gradual, sometimes very abrupt," said Iskandar. "It's almost like an unspoken mantra that they support one side or another -- and do so so fervently, that it almost always comes with the subversion of truth and accuracy." 
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| The Dubious Math Behind Stop and Frisk Posted: 24 Jul 2013 12:20 PM PDT  Chart courtesy of "Stop Question And Frisk Police Practices in New York." Yesterday Ray Kelly took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to defend NYPD's Stop and Frisk tactics and its indiscriminate spying on Muslim communities: Since 2002, the New York Police Department has taken tens of thousands of weapons off the street through proactive policing strategies. The effect this has had on the murder rate is staggering. In the 11 years before Mayor Michael Bloomberg took office, there were 13,212 murders in New York City. During the 11 years of his administration, there have been 5,849. That's 7,383 lives saved--and if history is a guide, they are largely the lives of young men of color. As one of Ray Kelly's critics, and a citizen of New York, I will say that the declining murder rate matters a great deal. But the question before us isn't "Do we want the murder rate reduced?" The question is "Is Stop and Frisk a moral and effective policy?" We could also start punishing all murderers with public torture and beheading. That too might reduce the murder rate. Or perhaps the murder rate might fall for less conspicuous reasons, and those who endorsed public beheadings can loudly claim the credit anyway. At least we'd have correlation. Presently that is more than you can say for Stop and Frisk. Kelly rightly points out that the murder rate in our great city is falling. But for some reason he neglects to mention that Stop and Frisk numbers are falling too. Perhaps there is some relationship between the long drop in homicides and Stop and Frisk, but Ray Kelly has never furnished such actual proof. Understanding why crime rises and falls has bedeviled social scientists for decades, so it's not surprising that Kelly would have trouble offering hard evidence. But we can certainly examine Ray Kelly's claim that Stop and Frisk is responsible for large numbers of weapons coming off the street. During roughly half of all stops in 2008 (54.40% or 293,934 stops), officers reported frisking the suspect. Officers are legally authorized to pat down the outer clothing of a suspect in order to determine if the person is carrying a weapon. As shown in Figure 6, a very small percentage (1.24%) of total stops resulted in the discovery of a weapon of any kind (gun, knife, or other type of weapon). A slightly higher percentage (1.70%) resulted in the discovery of some other kind of contraband. Contraband is any item that is against the law to possess, including illegal drugs. Given Ray Kelly's claims about saving black and brown lives, it's worth seeing how these numbers correlate to race: In terms of recovering weapons and other contraband, stops of Whites yielded a slightly greater share, proportionally, of contraband other than weapons (1.98% versus 1.75%). The difference in the recovery of knives and weapons other than guns is greater among Whites as well (1.46% compared to 1.06%). In terms of recovering guns, the situation is reversed: proportionally, stops of Blacks and Hispanics were slightly more likely than stops of Whites to result in the recovery of a gun (0.17% versus 0.07%), but this difference is extremely small - 0.10%. Finally, we should look at how the seizure of guns correlates to an increase in Stops: While the total number of stops annually has climbed to more than half a million in just a few years (up from 160,851 in 2003), the number of illegal guns discovered during stops has remained relatively steady and modest in comparison. As Figure 8A shows, the number of guns recovered over this six-year period ranges from a low of 627 (2003) to a high of 824 (2008), averaging 703. It should be noted that over this same period, the number of stops more than tripled, meaning the yield of guns per stop has declined considerably (see Figure 8B). Any serious proponent of Stop and Frisk must grapple with the fact that gun recoveries during Stops are vanishingly small, that they are vanishingly small regardless of race, and that there is little, if any, correlation between a rise in Stops and a rise in gun seizure. The deeper and more poignant charge is not simply that Stop and Frisk is a bad tool for recovering guns, but that it amounts to systemic discrimination against black and brown communities. Ray Kelly frequently faults his opponents for measuring the demographics of Stop and Frisk against the demographics of the city. Kelly asserts that in a city where much of the violent crime is committed by black and brown males, it is logical that they would constitute the majority of the stops. I agree with Kelly that it is not particularly telling to look at census data and extrapolate. It would be much more telling if we could somehow control for the actual commission of crime and then see if there was any bias in Stop and Frisk. In the period for which we had data, the NYPD's records indicate that they were stopping blacks and Hispanics more often than whites, in comparison to both the populations of these groups and the best estimates of the rate of crimes committed by each group. After controlling for precincts, this pattern still holds. More specifically, for violent crimes and weapons offenses, blacks and Hispanics are stopped about twice as often as whites. In contrast, for the less common stops for property and drug crimes, whites and Hispanics are stopped more often than blacks, in comparison to the arrest rate for each ethnic group. That was the conclusion of Columbia professor of Law and Public Health Jeffrey Fagan in 2007. Perhaps, since then, Ray Kelly has managed to craft a bias-less policy of Stop and Frisk: NYPD stops are significantly more frequent for Black and Hispanic citizens than for White citizens, after adjusting stop rates for the precinct crime rates, the racial composition, and other social and economic factors predictive of police activity. These disparities are consistent across a set of alternative tests and assumptions. That is from Fagan's 2010 study. It's important to understand that this data is widely available to the public. So when you hear Ray Kelly say something like this... "It makes no sense to use census data, because half the people you stop would be women." ...you should understand that he is not telling bold truths, he is confronting the weakest arguments he can find. Kelly offers some apparent sympathy, conceding that it is "understandable that someone who has done nothing wrong will be angry if he is stopped." But that category of people stopped who've "done nothing wrong" and are understandably angry are not a small minority, but a large majority of the people being stopped and frisked: Arrest rates take place in less than six percent of all stops, a "hit rate" that is lower than the rates of arrest and seizures in random check points observed in other court tests of claims similar to the claims in this case. I am not totally opposed to policies in which individuals surrender some of their rights for the betterment of the whole. The entire State is premised on such a surrendering. But at every stop that surrendering should be questioned and interrogated, to see if it actually will produce the benefits which it claims. In the case of Stop and Frisk you have a policy bearing no evidence of decreasing violence, and bearing great evidence of increasing tension between the police and the community they claim to serve. It is a policy which regularly results in the usage of physical force, but rarely results in the actual recovery of guns. But don't take my word for it. Take Ray Kelly's: "A large reservoir of good will was under construction when I left the Police Department in 1994,'' Mr. Kelly said. ''It was called community policing. But it was quickly abandoned for tough-sounding rhetoric and dubious stop-and-frisk tactics that sowed new seeds of community mistrust. That was 13 years ago. Times have changed. The evidence has not. 
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| Porn on the Kindle: A Catch-22 Posted: 24 Jul 2013 12:13 PM PDT  "Many of us realized immediately that, like the Internet, the Kindle was made for porn." So wrote the pseudonymous kinukitty at my website, The Hooded Utilitarian, a while back -- and the use of the pseudonym underlines the insight. Consuming porn is something people often prefer to do at least semi-anonymously -- especially people who happen to be women. By dispensing with book covers, and indeed with books, the Kindle has made it possible for readers to peruse 50 Shades of Grey wheresoer they go, without fear of scorn -- and, for that matter, without fear of harassment. According to the (also pseudonymous) porn writer Venus Santiago, back in the 90s, when she purchased Black Lace titles at a brick and mortar store, "the clerk felt free to hit on me." After that happened several times, Santiago said, she stopped buying in public. With the Kindle, though, you don't need to buy in public. As Santiago wrote me by email: The beautiful thing about buying porn on Kindle is that nobody sneers at you. It's just you, Amazon, and your personal mobile device. You can read it on the train or subway, at home, wherever, and no one has any idea what you're ogling. Which removes most of the outside negative social pressure that prevents a lot of women who are interested in porn from buying it in the mainstream places (sex shops, online XXX websites). As a result, pornographic e-books have taken off. 50 Shades is the successful mainstream phenomenon that everyone knows about, but there are tons more where that came from, and tons kinkier as well. E.L. James' nervous flirtations with BDSM are perhaps titillating by the standards of the rest of the best-seller list. But her too-timid-to-even-sign-the-contract relationship shenanigans barely even register as kink compared to the other offerings available via e-book, where step-sibling incest, minotaur porn, and futanari abound. Santiago for her part has written gay assassin romance as well as a series of cheerfully perverse stories featuring human cow lactation porn, in which submission, degradation, and impossible busts exist alongside a remarkably detailed grasp of dairy industry mechanics. The Kindle, then, provides both privacy and the promise that somewhere, someone has written exactly the gay werewolf paranormal romance you've always wanted to read. Combine the privacy and range of titles, and there's little doubt that for readers digital is the perfect porn delivery system. Which seems to have made Amazon somewhat uncomfortable. Back in 2010, Amazon deleted many erotica e-books with incest themes -- not only dropping them from its store, but actually electronically erasing old titles from consumers' digital devices. (It later claimed the erasures were a mistake, though its policy on incest titles remains unclear.) More recently, the company has been filtering some erotic titles, so that they don't appear in the All Departments search. To find them, you need to search directly in Books or in the Kindle store. For example, Santiago's title Accidental Milkmaid 3: Gangbanged by Bulls shows up in the Kindle Store, but not in the All Departments search. On the other hand, high-profile erotica like 50 Shades, or, for that matter, Lady Chatterley's Lover, appears in both kinds of searches. Fiddling with the search function may seem like a relatively benign step. In practice, though, it has an impact on sales, and can render a title essentially invisible. Selena Kitt, the pen name of a successful erotica author who makes hundreds of thousands of dollars a month by writing porn e-books, has referred to Amazon's filtering as the Pornocalypse. Previous Amazon rejiggerings of their search function have at various points cut her monthly income by a third, she says. In an essay on her website, Kitt argues that that Amazon's seeming efforts to hide the porn are both hypocritical and a bad case of biting-the-hand. Erotica, as a genre, has been Amazon's dirty little secret from the beginning, driving sales of the Kindle to astronomical numbers. Does Amazon really believe that it was all the free copies of "Huckleberry Finn" and "Moby Dick" ... that drove readers to buy Kindle devices? Nope, sorry. It was erotica. It was "porn." Kitt is angry, and you can understand why. She works hard, is successful, and instead of giving her accolades, her business partners keep her product hidden from would-be readers. I was not able to get a comment for Amazon for this piece, so I don't know for sure why they are manipulating search functions. Nor do I know why they refuse to explain their standards to authors. One of Kitt's chief frustrations is that Amazon won't tell her what she needs to do to keep her book from being filtered, and that they seem to keep changing the rules on her. Amazon's policies may be unnecessarily opaque, but reading Kitt's essay, you can at least see a possible motivation for the company's apparent Puritanism. Kitt herself, like Santiago and kinukitty, believes that the appeal of porn on the Kindle is precisely that it allows for reading of content surreptitiously. Porn may have helped make the Kindle successful, but a big part of the reason that the Kindle is so perfectly made for porn is that it doesn't look like it's made for porn. Women (and men, too) who want to read porn on the Kindle don't want to be buying their porn from some place that screams porn! Amazon's advantage as a seller of porn is precisely that it sells lots of things that aren't porn, and that it is known primarily for selling things that aren't porn. Porn e-book writers and readers, then, are in a catch-22. Folks like Amazon porn because Amazon isn't branded as a porn outlet. But as long as Amazon isn't branded as a porn outlet, the company is going to see X-rated content as something of an embarrassment. The same incentives that drive writers to use pseudonyms and readers to use the Kindle also drive retailers to keep porn from showing up in searches and make them want to keep it off best-seller lists. For many good reasons, and perhaps some bad ones, nobody -- not readers, not writers, not retailers -- wants to publically embrace the porn. 
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| This Tiny Blue Dot on Mars Is Our Rover Posted: 24 Jul 2013 11:51 AM PDT  There's something special about our robots orbiting other planets seeing our other robots down on the surface. In a new, color-enhanced photo, the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment Camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spotted the Mars Curiosity Rover down on the surface. It's the blue dot in the bottom right of the image. (Here's the full-resolution JPG.) For space nerds, the blue dot calls to mind the famous "pale blue dot," in which Voyager 1 captured Earth's image as it sped towards the edge of the solar system. Our planet looks tiny in the vast expanses of space.
And finally, here's a zoom in on the Rover location.    
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| Hardcore Parkour (With Robots) Posted: 24 Jul 2013 11:47 AM PDT In 1954, George Devol created the first modern robot, programmable and digitally operated. In 1988, 15-year-old Frenchman David Belle created the sport of Parkour. And in 2013, the University of Pennsylvania created RHex, the Parkour Robot. Built as an all-terrain walking robot, RHex is designed to climb, jump, and spring over a multitude of harsh surfaces. Its builders hope that one day RHex may be sophisticated enough "to climb over rubble in a rescue mission or cross the desert with environmental sensors strapped to its back." Its six legs allow the robot to execute some fairly impressive moves, including flips, double jumps, and even a pull up. In this film, producer Kurtis Sensenig let RHex loose, following him with cameras as he leaps, runs, and pulls his way through the campuses most formidable terrain. Completely self-aware in its own hilarity, the movie was shot with the same stylistic slow motion, multi-angle shots as a human parkour film. The YouTube channel of the University of Pennsylvania is the perennial champion of online robotics movies and was previously featured on The Atlantic for their incredible video of robot quadrotors performing the James Bond theme song.
To see all their hits, including Robot Boats Rescue Mission and Robots Playing Hockey at Penn visit http://www.youtube.com/user/UnivPennsylvania. 
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| Forget Portland: China Might Just Be the New Epicenter of Craft Beer Posted: 24 Jul 2013 11:03 AM PDT  Traditional beer vendors like this one now face competition from China's burgeoning craft beer industry. (Nir Elias/Reuters) China's craft brewing niche has made considerable steps in recent years. The country is already the world's biggest beer market, with consumption recently reaching 50 billion liters annually. But signs are growing that Chinese tastes are evolving past mass-produced lagers to the kind of innovative, higher-quality brews favored by connoisseurs elsewhere in the world. According to Forbes, for instance, the number of brewpubs in Shanghai alone has doubled since 2010. Great Leap Brewing co-founder and brew master Carl Setzer is a Cleveland native who has lived in China since 2004. Located in a traditional hutong in Beijing's Gulou neighborhood, Great Leap Brewing uses traditional Chinese ingredients and spices, including Sichuan peppercorn, coffee beans from Yunnan province and unusual Chinese teas to make their beers. Asia Blog talked with Setzer about producing quality beer and the growing appeal for microbreweries in the most populous country in the world. Why do you think your business has been successful and able to appeal to the Chinese consumer? I think that our business has been successful because we care about our product and our customers see that on a daily basis. Its a simple reason, but most companies are copies of a copy of a copy and the quality of their product may stand up to the simplest health and safety scrutiny, but it doesn't have any evidence of passion or creativity, so it does not succeed. Since we opened our doors we've aimed to convince Chinese drinkers that China can be the source of great beers that are made in China, with Chinese ingredients and using Chinese equipment. This is a long process, but once you win that market the scalability is monumental in its potential.  MORE FROM ASIA SOCIETY
One of the other reasons why our product appeals to Chinese consumers on a base level is because it incorporates Chinese cultural elements in the beers themselves and also incorporates Chinese literature and historical references in the naming and branding of the beers. Two good examples of this would be our Iron Buddha Blonde Ale and our Little General IPA. The Iron Buddha Blonde uses tie guan yin wu long tea during the brewing process, which gives the beer a floral note at the end. The name "Iron Buddha" is one way to translate the tie guan yin (铁观音), or the iron goddess of mercy. The Little General IPA, on the other hand, is a "purity law beer," meaning it contains only malted barley, hops, yeast and water, but the name is unique because it is an homage to Zhang Xueliang (张学良), a patriotic hero for both mainland China and Taiwan. The nickname "Little General" is a reference to his father (张作霖), a notorious warlord in China's Northeast region. Zhang Xueliang grew from a spoiled brat with an opium habit into a symbol of China's future unity against the Japanese during the occupation when he kidnapped Chang Kai-Shek and convinced him to join the KMT's strength with that of the Communist forces. Upon Chang Kai-Shek's agreement with this plan, Zhang Xueliang immediately surrendered to Chang's personal guard and spent the better part of his adult life under house arrest with Chang's forces in both mainland China and Taiwan. He was released as an old man and relocated to Hawaii to live with relatives in peace. He died at 99 years old, never having returned to mainland China nor Taiwan after his release. We take pride in the recipes, names and stories of our products and so far our Chinese customers also take a lot of pride in that. There is a large population of expats in the capital city. Does the microbrewery industry in China need a foreign population to sustain it? When we first started we saw an overwhelming customer base from expat drinkers, but entering our third year, and the opening of our flagship brewpub in the San Li Tun area, we see that 60 percent of our drinkers are now Chinese, whereas 40 percent are foreign/expats. This gives us a lot of hope for the future of our brand as it enters second- and third-tier markets in China. We often hear about the burgeoning craft beer scene in Beijing and Shanghai -- Slowboat brewery, Shanghai brewery, Boxing Cat, and the Brew, for example. With interest rising among Chinese citizens, do you see brewing operations spreading to other cities and becoming popular there? You already have evidence of this in second- and third-tier cities. China's largest (and most impressive, in my opinion) brewpub is actually in Suzhou and is managed by the Taiwanese brewing company Le Ble D'or (金色三麦). It's a cavernous 2,000-square-meter space and houses China's largest on-site brewing system. There are also other examples in Qingdao, Dali, and Chengdu, but personally I tend to think that a company's success is measured on the size of the risk they take vs. the return on the investment made out of that risk. Once you start seeing professional brewpubs with clean, logical designs that produce a healthy and contamination-free product, that is when you can say that craft beer is truly "taking off," because after all, there is only good beer and bad beer. For many, China has become the new land of opportunity, particularly since the global economic crisis of 2008. However, there are also serious challenges for those looking to do business in China. You have to deal with competition, business culture and etiquette, and language barriers. Is there any advice you would give to young American entrepreneurs looking to get a foothold in the Chinese market? The biggest piece of advice would be to study Chinese earnestly before you go into business in China. But at the same time, know your limitations and build a management team that can foster a sustainable business. Do not trust people that ask you to sacrifice your business ethic in exchange for a quick solution to a larger problem. There is no magical way to do business in China. There is only case-by-case experience and know-how. China allows for foreign-invested, foreign-owned domestic companies, so know the law and know your rights. This post also appears at The Asia Society, an Atlantic partner site. 
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| Between Crime, Separatism, and Racial Tensions, Can Spain Pull Through? Posted: 24 Jul 2013 10:37 AM PDT  A demonstrator struggles with Spanish National Police riot officers outside the the Spanish parliament in Madrid in September 2012. (Sergio Perez/Reuters) The slender North African man's eyes dart back and forth as he scours the area surrounding the cafe in Sevilla, southern Spain. He heads inside, slowly approaching the bar. He leans across to get the server's attention, a five-euro note in hand; she ignores him and walks toward another customer. Minutes pass. An elderly couple standing next to the North African mumble and shuffle away. The veins in his neck begin to bulge. He doesn't make a sound. The waitress eventually heads his way and snatches his money from his hand. She returns with a glass of water, which she slams on the bar. He looks her in the eye and thanks her; she doesn't return his gaze. In the wake of the economic crisis and corruption scandals involving the highest levels of officialdom, the question now is whether Spain can get back on track and survive as a prosperous multicultural haven. As he returns to his table outside and recoups his bag, the young man notices a Guardia Civil officer walk by. Momentarily, he freezes. The policeman eyes him up and down. He moves on. "Always," the young man mutters in fluent Spanish. "Always the same. It's always this way." In fact, Spain wasn't always this way -- simmering with racial tensions. A country perhaps best known for its (largely mythical) siestas, sun, sea, and sand, Spain was also for centuries the model of multiculturalism that any modern society would wish to emulate. Following the Moorish invasion of the Iberian peninsula in 711, Spain survived for more than seven centuries as a home to Muslims, Christians, and Jews. All three religions were welcome, sometimes under the same roof (the Great Mosque of Cordoba was built on a Visigoth site believed to have previously been a Roman temple; in 1236 King Ferdinand III ordered the mosque transformed into a cathedral, keeping the Islamic elements intact). The state's common interest in these different groups lay in the fact that they all paid taxes to the Spanish government. In 1492, however, the tide turned. The Spanish army defeated the moors at Granada, restoring a Christian rule that would also expel Jews and gypsies who refused to convert, and eventually, even many of those who did. Rifts have only widened since. As Spain has sought to move away from its dependence on a centralized government in Madrid, tensions over racism, religious diversity and separatism, as well as how to handle a rollercoaster of an economy, have all set the stage for a turbulent 21st century for the Iberian peninsula. In the wake of the economic crisis and corruption scandals involving the highest levels of officialdom, the question now is whether Spain can get back on track and survive as a prosperous multicultural haven. Multiculturalism has always been a challenge to sustain in Spain. It wasn't until the death of Dictator Francisco Franco that Muslims could openly return. The country also took its time to open back up to Jews. Slowly, plans to build mosques were hatched - and met with a frosty reception by the Christian majority. Then, in 1996, the era of Jose Maria Aznar began. His administration was credited with turning the economy around, but the conservative prime minister from the Partido Popular -- who had won with the backing of the Basque country and separatist Catalans -- rankled critics with his decision to back Coalition forces in Iraq (according to polls at the time, less than 10 percent of Spaniards supported the war). His administration's initial placing of the blame for the March 11, 2003 Madrid train bombing on the Basque terrorist group ETA -- when all evidence pointed to Al Qaeda -- prompted mass protests and a landslide victory for opposition candidate Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero. Aznar further alienated Spain's one million Muslims by later claiming that the Madrid bombing was not a result of "the support given by the Spanish government to the Iraq war," but caused by something far more entrenched. "The problem with Al-Qaeda came from before that - as long ago as 1,300 years." With mosques springing up throughout southern Spain, he was preying on the very real fears of a Muslim re-conquest of Al-Andalus, an aspiration that was being spouted by Al Qaeda members. "We have always reclaimed the spirit of Al-Andalus, but not the territory, because this is our home and therefore there is nothing to reclaim," responded Mansur Escudero, then-president of the Junta Islamica in Spain and the founder of the country's modern Muslim community. "When a terrorist group says that it wants to re-conquer Al-Andalus, it raises suspicions about us... people might think that we are a kind of fifth column." The words carried a lot of weight in a nation that had in the past feared Franco sympathizers - then known as the so-called fifth column, aiming to undermine those loyal to the state - during the Civil War. Zapatero, leader of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party, or PSOE, would inherit a host of problems -- from Spain's involvement in Iraq to growing discontent over Muslim growth -- but would also benefit from one key element: a booming economy. Zapatero implemented key reforms, and Spain began creating jobs at an unprecedented rate. In some ways, ETA may have helped Zapatero's Spain. After three years with little violence -- an ETA car bomb had killed two policemen in late May 2003 -- Zapatero traveled to the Basque country to initiate a ceasefire in 2006. Some members of ETA, as it turns out, were already rethinking their strategy. Bombings and assassinations would no longer be the modus operandi, ETA representatives claimed. The Basque country had economic clout -- it generates about 66 billion euros a year, accounting for roughly 7 percent of the Spanish economy. Local economists have calculated that fears of terrorist activity have been responsible for as much as a 10 percent drop in GDP - and would use that as leverage for any demands for separatism. Madrid was rightly skeptical of the claims about forsaking violence coming from a group responsible for more than 800 deaths since its inception in 1959. According to polls taken at the time, the Spanish public was skeptical too - 54 percent of citizens doubted ETA's intentions. On Dec. 30, 2006, their fears were confirmed: a car bomb exploded at Madrid's Barajas Airport, killing two Ecuadorians. The government broke off the peace process, which was only restored after an international conference in San Sebastian in October 2011. Days after the conference adjourned, ETA's remaining leadership issued a statement: "A new political time is emerging in the Basque country. ETA has decided the definitive cessation of its armed activity. Through this historical declaration, ETA shows its clear, solid, and definitive commitment." Whether or not this new political time has really emerged remains to be seen. In San Sebastian today, there are few overt signs of ETA presence. The rebel graffiti that once lined the city's walls has largely been washed off. Locals don't appear to want to discuss the terrorist group, or its ideals; the economy -- built around industry rather than tourism and property development, which are considered much riskier -- is just about holding up, and that's everyone's primary concern. Bilbao and San Sebastian are living proof that money can co-opt even the most radical ideology. But in the sleepy fishing village of Donibane, just a few miles away, ETA remains entrenched in the soul - for better or for worse. A seven-year-old boy playing with a military vehicle on a bench by the waterfront quickly rejects the notion that it belongs to the Spanish army. "It's from here," he growls. "It's Basque." Is it an ETA vehicle? "No. Basque." Many locals quickly cover their faces as soon as one attempts to take a photograph; an air of rebellion definitely hangs over Donibane. There's a distinct lack of trust in the Spanish authorities, ETA, and the local politicians. Jose Maria Soparzazu, 65, claims to have been a member of ETA in the 70s and 80s. He was swept off his feet by the romance of it all, he says; there were few other figures to follow. Now, he wants nothing to do with any of them. "The politicians and ETA just steal - for weapons and for themselves. You can't trust any of them." Soparzazu, who has learned to speak Spanish, argues that Basque citizens need to follow what he calls the Brazilian model - learn to move forward by themselves, economically, and not rely on either Madrid or separatists who seem more interested in instilling terror than serious societal progress. There's good reason for skepticism about both ETA's claims and aims. While attacks overall have declined, every so often the group still strikes. On the island of Mallorca in 2009, just before the 50th anniversary of the founding of the group, a bomb attributed to ETA killed two Guardia Civil officers. A car bomb destroyed a police barracks in the northern Spanish city of Burgos around the same time, injuring 60. The authorities clearly don't believe ETA has called it quits: Earlier this year, French police nabbed three suspected ETA bomb-makers; just a couple of months later, they arrested a man they believed to be ETA's top military ops specialist, Oroitz Gurruchaga Gogorza. The Spanish and French authorities claim - not for the first time - that they have seriously compromised ETA's ability to wage war. The authorities also fear that while ETA may be staying under the radar at home, it is expanding globally. Colombian officials claim ETA has long had links with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC; a 2010 indictment by a Spanish judge against Arturo Cubillas, a Basque exile believed to have run training sessions for FARC and Venezuelan guerrillas further fueled suspicions of sinister ETA expansion. (The indictment also suggested Cubillas had received support from Venezuelan Gen. Hugo Carvajal, who is on the U.S. Treasury Department's list of FARC supporters.) The same week the indictment was handed down, Portuguese authorities arrested Andoni Zengotitabengoa, an alleged ETA militant and suspected bomb-maker, as he tried to board a Caracas-bound flight. As DEA Chief of Operations, Michael Braun repeatedly pointed out to Congress the need to increase resources in Spain and Portugal, which he called "the principal gateway" for drugs entering Europe, both from Latin America and Africa. Concerns that Spain might become a global hub for terrorism and illicit trafficking have been warranted. In June 2007, Monzer Al Kassar, a Syrian arms dealer, was nabbed by agents from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) who convinced him they worked for the FARC; they struck a fake $8 million deal for him to supply surface-to-air missiles, RPGs, machine guns and explosives. Al Kassar had long been a resident of Spain, living in Marbella, and he was arrested at Madrid's Barajas airport. He was extradited to United States and handed a 30-year sentence. Spain is indeed a hub, or at the very least, has the potential to become one. As DEA Chief of Operations, Michael Braun repeatedly pointed out to Congress the need to increase resources in Spain and Portugal, which he called "the principal gateway" for drugs entering Europe, both from Latin America and Africa. With about 500 tons of cocaine now heading to Europe each year, Braun warned that Europe "has naturally emerged as the perfect, latest playground for these ruthless cartels... I see Europe today teetering on the brink of a drug trafficking and abuse catastrophe similar to the one our nation faced about 30 years ago. If you need a visual on what I predict Europe is facing in the years to come, just picture Miami in the late 1970s, followed by the 'crack' cocaine epidemic that exploded all across our nation in the 1980s." Braun's fears appear to be understandable: During a break from dealing drugs, 26-year-old Sahoudi (he wouldn't reveal his last name) explained how his illicit trafficking enterprise works in San Sebastian. Born in Murcia, Spain, he recruited his Tunisian relatives into the business five years ago. What started as a few suitcases on a passenger flight has turned into a one-ton-a-month operation involving a helicopter (from Tunisia to Murcia), a boat (off the coast of San Sebastian, to store the cannabis prior to distribution), and relatives in Holland and Belgium who act as distributors in those countries. And the authorities? Sahoudi laughs. His brother is in the local San Sebastian police corps; he makes sure his colleagues, the Guardia Civil and the Coast Guard, turn a blind eye. Sahoudi's story was impossible to corroborate, but it jibes with reports by counter-drug authorities. In August 2012, a cousin of Mexican drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman Loera was arrested in Madrid, further fueling fears that major organized crime syndicates like the Sinaloa cartel are setting up operations there. Authorities have noted an increase in Latin American gang presence in many parts of the Iberian peninsula, although they also have cautioned against unwarranted hyped fears of gang-related violence. At the end of the day, Spain may just have had too many problems for the Zapatero-era bubble to hold itself together. When the construction bubble burst, Madrid had to resort to desperate measures to salvage the economy. According to economists, interest rates had fallen so low that Spanish banks lent recklessly while property developers and home-buyers collectively borrowed, spurring a property bubble. Madrid had to borrow and spend desperately in a bid to prevent the economy from collapsing, while many of the country's banks appear to have done everything they could to operate outside the realm of legitimacy -- payments were allegedly made to high-level executives who then bailed out, and in some instances, unqualified political appointees were chosen to run banking operations themselves. Corruption scandals -- including one involving the King's son-in-law -- have done little to restore public confidence. Earlier this summer, former treasurer Luis Barcenas was jailed for failing to explain the origin of up to 48 million euros in Swiss bank accounts. It's this mixture of financial anxiety, melting pot tensions, immigration and emigration, distrust of authority, and worries over terrorism that makes Spain so difficult to grasp today. Beleaguered Prime Minister Rajoy is increasingly unpopular; his disapproval rating recently climbed by nearly 22 percent in a matter of months. He's now facing heavy fire and the threat of a no-confidence vote from opponents after photos emerged showing him comforting Barcenas while the former treasurer was under investigation. To top it all off, Rajoy's administration has also been accused by critics of pressuring public broadcasting networks to fire journalists who ask tough questions of officials. The National Statistics Institute estimates that more than 50,000 Spaniards will leave the country each year for the next decade in search of employment opportunities; already last year, the level of emigration rose by 36 percent, as the unemployment rate hit 24 percent (perhaps even more worryingly, more than 50 percent of Spanish youth under the age of 25 cannot find work). Meanwhile, Spain's Muslim population is expected to double by 2030. Will the newcomers be engulfed by radicalism? Will they simply disappear into Spain's version of the Arab street? Will they find jobs and embrace both capitalism and their new home? Are domestic rebels and activists on the verge of crossing the thin blue line to engaging in nefarious activity? Andres Zamora, a retiree who lives in the industrial city of Terrassa, about 20 miles north of Barcelona, is just one optimist amid the fog. Originally from a small commune near Sevilla, Zamora embraced communism during the fascist Franco era and attended a Marxist seminary in Romania at age 16. He then went to Nicaragua to fight for the Sandanistas; Cuba was next, to work on building Castro's communist dream. Now, his revolution is a social and local one: He helps immigrants pay rent and obtain citizenship documents. But he remains staunchly against the system. He doesn't believe the state has any interest in helping immigrants, and he plans to set up a communal diner to help build up much-needed goodwill and community spirit in Terrassa. "You don't beat capitalism with guns," he says. "It's impossible to win. You win by being more intelligent. You learn the laws they use to control you -- then, you use those laws to control them." Attitudes like this are prominent in Terrassa, and they keep the authorities ever-vigilant. Officially, Terrassa is home to more than 10,000 Moroccans and a few thousand West Africans. There are four Latin American barrios here (they're responsible for bringing in the drugs, according to the Moroccans interviewed for this story.) The city has a history of racial tensions: on numerous occasions, anti-xenophobia marches have resulted in beatings, arrests and even stabbings. Terrassa is also home to the Badr Mosque, which was, until recently, headed by a radical imam from Morocco, Abdeslam Laaroussi. According to locals, Laaroussi benefited from the economic crisis, as Terrassa's Muslims were lured to the mosque for words of hope and comfort. Instead, however, they allegedly received lectures on how to beat "errant wives," and keep their women in check (using a stick, fist, or hand, so that no bones are broken and so as to draw no blood, was reportedly the imam's advice.) The authorities, who have long kept an eye on the Badr mosque, recorded the imam's speeches and in March, they hauled him in for questioning. He has so far refused to give testimony, claiming that his remarks were taken out of context, that he does not advocate violence against women, and perhaps most important, that he does not recognize the authority of the Spanish state. As their radical imam sits before the judge, many residents of Terrassa - young and old - bide their time sitting outside the Cafeteria Soraya, smoking marijuana and conjuring up get-rich schemes or pessimistically talking about world politics and the failure of the Spanish state. Thirty-nine-year-old Mourad Louarradi is one of the pessimists: He was deported not long ago, but he says the Moroccan authorities didn't want him because he comes from the border region with Algeria, his accent is different, and they didn't like the look of him. So they told him to go back to Spain, and he did. His eyes shift incessantly; he speaks and moves as if he hasn't told the truth in ten years. But he can still laugh, and does. He finds the fact that the authorities in Morocco, Spain, and even France apparently want nothing to do with him somewhat amusing. His younger peers don't see it that way. It's only 9 a.m. on a Friday, and 27-year-old Fahd Touiss Larache is on his second cup of coffee; he has sold four cigarettes to passersby for two euros. He's lived in Terrassa for eight years; for three of those years, he had a job in construction. That work dried up, and now he has few options. "What do I do all day now? I get a coffee and sit for 10 hours with my coffee. What else can I do?" He's not angry, but his frustration is palpable. Forget about finding a girlfriend, or starting a family. "No work, no girlfriend," he says. At this, he and his friends find reason for a laugh. "There's no racial tension - as long as you keep to yourself," explained a man from Senegal who identified himself only as Abdullah. Terrassa is a melting pot that in many ways is always near boiling point. The mosque has a new imam -- Taoufik Cheddadi -- who preaches a pleasant mix of history and harmony. "I preach a discourse of integration," he says with a laid-back smile as the faithful flow into the mosque for Friday prayers. "To be Catalan, what does that mean? It means to be Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Greco-Roman. I don't want to present Islam as part of immigration. It's part of the history of Catalunia." He urges his followers to embrace their position in modern Spain. He wants them to think: "I am a Muslim, I am a citizen, I am not an immigrant. I have rights." He doesn't want Islam to separate his flock from the Spanish state. "For us, the goal is adoring Allah. For you, it is human rights." But in troubled Terrassa, Cheddadi is faced with a serious reality. "I'm not scared of conventional racism," he says. "But I'm scared of economic racism." There's also undoubtedly a tendency for the police in Terrassa to view residents with paranoia, and vice-versa. When a homemade molotov cocktail was thrown during a Terrassa street protest, local cops began talking about "terrorism callejero," - literally, street terrorism. Twenty-three-year-old Mohammed Younes, who moved to Terrassa from Tangiers in 1999, says the police have started to look at him differently in recent years. "The crisis, their paranoia about terrorism..." he says. "They don't speak to you the same. You feel it." "I don't feel frustrated or angry; I just feel like I don't exist," he adds, his bicep muscles noticeably tensing up. Terrassa is also home to tensions between North Africans and gypsies, who have been around for decades, and the arrival of Latin American drug traffickers -- who now have more economic clout than many of the older residents -- has done little to ease concerns. "The Latinos are in charge here now," says Younes. Listening to the young North Africans, one notes a distinct sense of apathy, from which only the mosque is likely to benefit, given their chances of finding solid work. "If we don't follow the imam, we won't do well in life," says Fahd Touiss Larache. "We won't have a goal in life. Without the imam, there is no end." Like the imam, it's clear some authorities throughout Spain are trying to put the best spin possible on the current situation in a bid to avoid a calamity and offer some sense of direction for a large portion of the population that, if it's not raging in the streets, appears completely lost at sea. In Barbate, a spectacular southern port town just 30 miles from the Moroccan coast, the tourism ministry is highlighting the town's tuna industry; unfortunately, the move is depressingly similar to the central theme of the film Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (a troubled town tries in vain to revive its sardine industry while a creative kid with new ideas simply finds himself coming into constant conflict with the authorities). Anyone who has studied the Spanish tourism industry's ups and downs over the past few decades knows that it is impossible to rest on one's laurels in this era of cheap air travel and countless beach options. The mayor of Barbate has also caused controversy with his candor: last year, he effectively admitted to turning a blind eye to youths dealing drugs and told The New York Times that "a youngster has absolutely zero chance right now of finding a fixed job here... The politicians in Madrid who consider my views on youngsters occasionally dealing drugs to be those of a caveman either don't understand or don't care about how much people are struggling here." Since, the mayor has effectively placed a gag order on his staff, no longer allowing them to speak to the press. One of his aides, however, spoke on condition that her name not be used: She admitted that yes, Barbate does have drug trafficking problems, but that Sanlucar de Barrameda (located roughly 50 miles away) was worse. Barbate is also one of Spain's most multi-cultural towns, which the authorities are starting to recognize as a draw. Barbate has a largely tranquil history -- officially known as Barbate de Franco, the town renamed all its streets in 2008 to erase all memory of the dictator -- and the police boast of a harmonious relationship between locals and immigrants, many of whom arrive by boat and often pass through immediately to other parts of Spain and Europe. But tensions do flare every so often. According to a 47-year-old Senegalese man from Dakar who sells baskets and other handmade goods along the beach with his Spanish wife, racism in Barbate is always bubbling near the surface. On one occasion, he says, he went into a bar near his stall to go to the bathroom. "You people bring your s--t in here," the owner said, pointing at his skin. The Senegalese immigrant, who goes by the name of Samba Gay, pointed to his own heart. "Inside, I'm good. Inside, you're s--t." He had come to Barbate on the recommendation of a friend; the police don't bother him as long as he doesn't bother them, he said. Other West African immigrants expressed similar sentiments: "There's no racial tension - as long as you keep to yourself," explained a man from Senegal who identified himself only as Abdullah. Whether or not Spain's immigrants, separatists, unemployed, and other disillusioned citizens choose to avoid clashes with the state in the coming months and years remains to be seen. More than 100,000 so-called indignados (also known as the May 15 movement, or M-15), the young protesters who rose to international notoriety after inspiring the so-called occupy movements worldwide, took to the Spanish streets again last year to express a long list of grievances, at the top of which lies outrage at the political leadership. Shortly after Spain's victory in the European Championships, a group of pro-ETA thugs beat up several supporters wearing Spain soccer jerseys. Following protests in early 2012 over riot police beatings of student demonstrators, violence erupted again during the summer as tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets in 80 cities throughout Spain to protest Prime Minister Rajoy's latest austerity package. Protesters torched a cafe and smashed the windows of a bank in Barcelona; in Madrid, riot cops used batons, rubber bullets and tear gas to disperse a crowd trying to enter the Congress building. More than 100 people were injured in clashes with police and 176 were arrested; about a dozen policemen were believed to have been injured. The protests have not abated: in mid-October, several thousand angry citizens marched through the streets of Madrid banging pots and pans in protest the austerity measures; Spain received a gloomy economic forecast for 2013, but in mid-July, it received some positive news: the recession which began in 2011 is over; growth should resume in the second half of this year. Strong tourism numbers this year and last have also contributed to a drop in the unemployment rate, officials say. Whether this good news will reverberate throughout Spanish streets remains to be seen. Back in Terrassa, the young men have largely skipped the protests, opting instead to sit around the cafe and talk the day away. "The world's problems are the fault of the Jews," says one. "Not at all," says another. "We're all to blame." Another suddenly jumps in, asking why the United States hasn't invaded Syria yet. Lacking answers, the conversation returns to the current crisis surrounding them. No answers there, either. 
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| Posted: 24 Jul 2013 10:09 AM PDT  A young man walks into a strip club. His phone vibrates, and he reaches into his pocket. It's God, telling him to leave. YouVersion recently announced its app hit a monumental milestone -- placing it among a rare strata of technology companies: The app, simply called "Bible," is now on more than 100 million devices and growing. Gruenewald says a new install occurs every 1.3 seconds. On average, some 66,000 people have the app open during any given second, but that number climbs much higher at times. Every Sunday, Gruenewald says, preachers around the world tell devotees, "to take out your Bibles or YouVersion app. And, we see a huge spike." The market for religious apps is fiercely competitive; searching for "bible" in the Apple App Store returns 5,185 results. But among all the choices, YouVersion's Bible, funded by LifeChurch.tv of Edmond, Oklahoma, seems to be the chosen one, ranking at the top of the list and boasting more than 641,000 reviews. According to industry experts, the YouVersion Bible is likely worth a bundle. Jules Maltz, General Partner at Institutional Venture Partners, told me, "As a rule of thumb, a company this size could be worth $200 million and up." "Of course, this assumes the company can monetize through standard advertising," Maltz added. Gruenewald, however, says he has no intention of ever turning a profit from the app. Despite multiple buyout offers and monetization opportunities, the Bible app remains strictly a money-losing venture. The apps' backer, Lifechurch.tv, has invested more than $20 million but according to Gruenewald, "the goal is to reach and engage as many people as possible with scripture. That's all." So far, Gruenewald is meeting his goal. How did YouVersion come to so dominate the digital word of God? It turns out there is much more behind the app's success than missionary zeal. The company is a case study in how technology can change behavior when it couples the principles of consumer psychology with the latest in analytics. Gruenewald is a fast-talking man. During our conversation, he pulled up statistics in real-time, stopping himself mid-sentence whenever relevant data flashed on his screen. He spouted user-retention figures with the same gusto I'd imagine he might proclaim scripture. "Unlike other companies when we started, we were not building a Bible reader for seminary students. YouVersion was designed to be used by everyone, every day." Gruenewald attributes much of the app's success to a relentless focus on creating habitual Bible readers. "Bible study guides are nothing new," Gruenewald says. "People have been using them with pen and paper long before we came along." But the Bible app is much more than a mobile study guide. In fact, the first version of YouVersion was not mobile at all. "We originally started as a desktop website, but that really didn't engage people in the Bible. It wasn't until we tried a mobile version that we noticed a difference in people, including ourselves, turning to the Bible more because it was on a device they always had with them." Indeed, people started taking the Bible with them everywhere. Recently, the company revealed that 18 percent of users read scripture in the bathroom. While the 100 million install mark is an impressive milestone, perhaps the more startling fact is that users apparently can't put the app down.[1] How did it achieve this level of user engagement? Gruenewald acknowledges the Bible app enjoyed the good fortune of being among the first of its kind at the genesis of the App Store in 2008. To take part, Gruenewald quickly converted his web site into a mobile app optimized for reading. His app caught the rising tide, but soon a wave of competition followed. That's when Gruenewald says he implemented a plan -- actually, many plans. A signature of the Bible app is its selection of over 400 reading plans -- a devotional iTunes catalog of sorts, catering to an audience with diverse tastes, troubles, and tongues. Given my personal interest and research into habit-forming technology, I decided to start a Bible reading plan of my own. I searched the available themes for an area of my life I needed help with. A plan titled, "Addictions," seemed appropriate. These reading plans provide structure to the difficult task of reading the Bible for those who have yet to form a routine. "Certain sections of the Bible can be difficult for people to get through," Gruenewald admits. "By offering reading plans with different small sections of the Bible each day, it helps keep [readers] from giving up." The app focuses the reader on the small task at hand, avoiding the intimidating task of reading the entire book. To get users to open the app every day, Gruenewald makes sure he sends effective cues -- such as the notification sent to the sinner in the strip club. But Gruenewald admits he stumbled upon the power of using good triggers. "At first we were very worried about sending people notifications. We didn't want to bother them too much." Gruenewald decided to run an experiment. "For Christmas, we sent people a message from the app. Just a 'Merry Christmas' in various languages." The team was prepared to hear from disgruntled users annoyed by the message. "We were afraid people would uninstall the app," Gruenewald says. "But just the opposite happened. People took pictures of the notification on their phones and started sharing them on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. They felt God was reaching out to them." Today, Gruenewald says, triggers play an important role in every reading plan. On my own plan, I receive a daily notification on my phone, which reads, "Don't forget to read your Addictions reading plan." Ironically, the addiction I'm trying to cure is my dependency to digital gadgetry, but what the hell, I'll fall off the wagon just this once. In case I somehow avoid the first message, a red badge over a tiny Holy Bible icon cues me again. If I forgot to start the first day of the plan, I'd receive a message suggesting perhaps I should try a different, less challenging plan. I also have the option of receiving verse through email and if I slip-up and miss a few days, another email would serve as a reminder. The Bible app also comes with a virtual congregation of sorts. Members of the site tend to send encouraging words to one another, delivering even more triggers. According to the company's publicist, "Community emails can serve as a nudge to open the app." Triggers are everywhere in the Bible app and Gruenewald says they are a key part of the app's ability to keep users engaged. Gruenewald's team has sifted through behavioral data collected from millions of readers to better understand what users want from the app. "We just have so much data flowing through our system," Gruenewald said. "We were generating so much of it that apparently we showed up on Google's radar and they contacted us to take a closer look." Gruenewald reports his company recently completed work with Google engineers to help, "with storing and analyzing data so they could solve [these problems] for others as well." The data revealed some important insights on what drives user retention. High on Gruenewald's list of learnings was the importance of "ease of use," which came-up throughout our conversation. In line with work dating back to Gestalt psychologist Kurt Lewin and extending to modern-day researchers like BJ Fogg, the app uses the principle that by making an intended behavior easier to do, people do it more often. The Bible app is designed to make absorbing the Word as frictionless as possible. For example, to make the Bible app habit easier to adopt, a user who prefers to not read at all can simply tap a small icon, which plays a professionally produced audio track, read with all the dramatic bravado of Charlton Heston himself. Gruenewald says his data also revealed that changing the order of the Bible, placing the more interesting sections up front and saving the boring bits for later, increased completion rates. Furthermore, daily reading plans are kept to a simple inspirational thought and a few short verses for newcomers. The idea is to get neophytes into the ritual for a few minutes each day until the routine becomes a facet of their everyday lives. Upon opening the Bible app, I find a specially selected verse waiting for me on the topic of "Addictions". With just two taps I'm reading 1 Thessalonians 5:11 -- encouragement for the "children of the day," imploring them with the words, "let us be sober." It's easy to see how these comforting words could serve as a sort of prize wrapped inside the app, helping readers feel better and lifting their mood. Gruenewald says there is also an element of mystery and variability associated with using the Bible app. "One woman would stay-up until just past midnight to know what verse she had received for her next day," Gruenewald says. The unknown, which verse will be chosen for the reader and how it relates to their personal struggle, becomes an important driver of the reading habit. As for my own reward, after finishing my verse, I received confirmation from a satisfying "Day Complete!" screen. A check mark appeared near the scripture I had read and another one was placed on my reading plan calendar. Skipping a day would mean breaking the chain of checked days, employing what psychologists call the "endowed progress effect" -- a tactic also used by video game designers to encourage progression. As habit-forming as the Bible app's reading plans can be, they are not for everyone. In fact, Gruenewald reports most users never register for an account with YouVersion. Millions choose to not follow any plan, opting instead to use the app as a substitute for their paper Bibles. But to Gruenewald, using the app in this way suits him fine. Just because a reader never registers, does not mean Gruenewald has not found a way to help them grow the app. In fact, social media is abuzz with the 200,000 pieces of content shared from the app every 24 hours. To help the app spread, a new verse greets the reader on the first page. Below it, a large blue button reads, "Share Verse of the Day," whereby clicking the button blasts scripture to Facebook or Twitter. Just why people share scripture they've just read is not widely studied. However, one reason may be the reward of portraying oneself in a positive light. A recent Harvard meta-analysis titled, "Disclosing information about the self is intrinsically rewarding" found the act, "engages neural and cognitive mechanisms associated with reward." In fact, sharing feels so good that one study found, "individuals were willing to forgo money to disclose about the self." There are many opportunities to share verse from within the app, but one of Gruenewald's most effective distributions channels occurs not online but in-row -- that is, in the pews church-goers sit-in every week. "People tell each other about the app because they use it surrounded by people who ask about it." Gruenewald says the app always sees a spike in new downloads on Sundays when people are most likely to share it through word of mouth. However, nothing signals the dominance of Gruenewald's Bible app quite like the way preachers in some congregations have come to depend upon it. YouVersion lets religious leaders input their sermons into the app to allow their assemblies to follow along in real-time -- book, verse, and passage -- all without flipping a page. Once the head of the church is hooked, the flock is sure to follow. But using the Bible app at church not only has the benefit of driving growth, it builds commitment. Every time users highlight a verse, add a comment, bookmark, or share from the app, they invest in it. Behavioral economists Dan Ariely and Michael Norton have shown the effect small amounts of work have on the way people value various products. Known as the "IKEA effect," studies have shown that things we put labor into, become worth more to us. It is reasonable to think that the more readers put into the Bible app in the form of small investments, the more it becomes a repository of their history of worship. Like a worn dog-eared book, full of scribbled insights and wisdom, the app becomes a treasured asset not easily discarded. The more readers use the Bible app, the more valuable it becomes to them. Switching to a different digital Bible -- God forbid -- becomes less likely with each new revelation a user types into the app, further securing YouVersion's dominion. 
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| Posted: 24 Jul 2013 09:51 AM PDT Across the United States, natural darkness is an endangered resource. East of the Mississippi, it is already extinct; even in the West, night sky connoisseurs admit that it's quicker to find true darkness by flying to Alice Springs, Australia, than traveling to anywhere in the lower forty-eight. Ever since the nation's first electric streetlight made its debut in Cleveland, on April 29, 1879, the American night has become steadily brighter. In his new book, The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light, Paul Bogard aims to draw attention to the naturally dark night as a landscape in its own right -- a separate, incredibly valuable environmental condition that we overlook and destroy at our own peril.  Poster designed by Tyler Nordgren, author of Stars Above, Earth Below: A Guide to Astronomy in the National Parks. Venue took the opportunity to visit Bogard in his office on the campus of James Madison University, in Harrisonburg, Virginia, to learn more about nocturnal America and its dark skies -- and what we have lost by dissociating the two. Our conversation touches on the difficulty of measuring and preserving such an ephemeral quality, as well as the ecological and health consequences of endless artificial light, with speculative detours into evolutionary shifts in human vision and the possibility of preserving Las Vegas (the brightest pixel in the world in NASA photographs) as a "light pollution park."  The Bortle scale was originally published in Sky & Telescope magazine in 2001. It classifies the darkness of skies from point of view of an astronomer, ranging from 1 ("an observer's Nirvana!") to 9, in which "the only celestial objects that really provide pleasing telescopic views are the Moon, the planets, and a few of the brightest star clusters." This illustration of the scale comes via Stellarium. Nicola Twilley: Darkness is easy to overlook, if you'll excuse the pun. How did you go about structuring the story of such a familiar, yet intangible quality? Paul Bogard: People think they know darkness, and that they experience darkness everyday, but they don't, really. That's one of the reasons I borrowed the Bortle scale for the table of contents. I think John Bortle's point, when he created this tool for measuring the darkness of skies, was that we have no idea what darkness really is. We think night is dark -- full stop, end of story. But, on the Bortle scale, cities would be a Class 9 -- the brightest. Most of us spend our nights in what he would call a 5 at best, or more likely a 6 or 7. We rarely, if ever, get any darker than that. Until the coming of electric light, people experienced a darkness that Bortle would classify as 2 or 3, every night. What I tried to do in the book is to show that difference, by working my way down from places that are bright to those that are less bright, but also by talking to people who are living and working in those places.  Left: Winter constellations in a Bortle Class 4 or 5 sky. Right: The same constellation panorama in an urban, Class 8 or 9 sky. Illustrations by John Bianchi from Exploring the Night Sky by Terence Dickinson, Sky & Telescope, February 2001. Twilley: It's interesting that, in order to see the nuances in darkness, we need to measure and name it. It was certainly a revelation to me to read in your book that twilight has three stages -- civil, nautical, and astronomical, with civil being when cars should use headlights, nautical meaning that enough stars are visible for navigational purposes, and astronomical referring to the point at which the sky is dark enough for the faintest stars to emerge. Previously, I had thought of twilight as a single condition on the light-to-dark spectrum, rather than a multiplicity. Bogard: For sure. For me, one of the reasons why identifying different depths of darkness is so important is that we don't recognize that we're losing it, unless we have a name to recognize it by. It's also a way to talk about what we might regain. That's also what the National Parks Service Night Sky team, who I describe in the book, is trying to do with their sky quality index. If you're charged with preserving darkness as natural resource, unimpaired for future generations, then you need to be able to put a number on the level of darkness. You need to be able to see and measure any losses before you even know what you're trying to protect.  A member of the Night Skies team setting up the wide-field CCD camera that the National Parks Service uses to measure light pollution, at Homestead National Monument, Nebraska. Twilley: It's astonishing to read the description of a Bortle Class 1, where the Milky Way is actually capable of casting shadows! Bogard: It is. There's a statistic that I quote, which is that eight of every 10 kids born in the United States today will never experience a sky dark enough to see the Milky Way. The Milky Way becomes visible at 3 or 4 on the Bortle scale. That's not even down to a 1. One is pretty stringent. I've been in some really dark places that might not have qualified as a 1, just because there was a glow of a city way off in the distance, on the horizon. You can't have any signs of artificial light to qualify as a Bortle Class 1. A Bortle Class 1 is so dark that it's bright. That's the great thing -- the darker it gets, if it's clear, the brighter the night is. That's something we never see either, because it's so artificially bright in all the places we live. We never see the natural light of the night sky.  New York 40º 44' 39" N 2010-10-13 LST 0:04, photo illustration by Thierry Cohen as part of the Villes Eteintes series, via The New York Times. Cohen photographs major cities at night, digitally manipulates them to remove all lights, and then inserts a starry night sky from somewhere with much less light pollution on the same latitude, to create an image that shows us what New York City or Sao Paulo would look like under the Milky Way. Geoff Manaugh: There are a few popular urban legends about the extent to which people no longer experience true, natural darkness. One is that, even though telescopes sell really well in New York, no one has seen a star over Manhattan since 1976 or something like that. The other one, which I have to assume is also at least partially an exaggeration, is that, after the Northridge earthquake in 1994, the L.A.P.D. was flooded with worried phone calls because people were seeing all these mysterious lights in the sky -- lights that turned out to be stars. Bogard: I've heard that one, too -- that people were seeing the Milky Way for the first time, and they didn't know what it was. Those stories make me think of a couple of things. While I was writing the book, I went to Florence, on the trail of Galileo, and they still have two of his four telescopes. An astronomer there had this amazing line that he told me, which was that 400 years ago, in Florence, everyone could see the stars, but only Galileo had a telescope. Now, everybody has a telescope, but nobody can see the stars. That really speaks to that New York legend. Telescope sales continue to be good, astronomy books continue to be published, and there are sky-watching apps on your phone. People are interested in the night sky. But we can't really see any of it.  Los Angeles 34º 06' 58" N 2012-06-15 LST 14:52, photo illustration by Thierry Cohen as part of the Villes Eteintes series, via The New York Times. The other thing it reminds me of is a guy I met in Paris, who told me that he thinks that, for the amateur astronomer, the most important instrument is not the telescope, but the automobile, because you have to have a car to drive somewhere dark enough to see anything. Twilley: At the start of the book, you differentiate between darkness and night. Is it just that the two are no longer synonymous, or were they ever? Bogard: It's a good question. They're so obviously intertwined, but it seemed to make sense to differentiate them or to specify one or the other. Night, obviously, in many places, is no longer really dark, or at least not naturally dark. In that sense, you can't say that night means darkness. They're not synonymous anymore. Sometimes I think that what makes night night, what makes night special, and what I love about it, is more than darkness. It is light, whether it's natural light, like candles, or beautiful artificial light. A lot of electric lighting is really quite beautiful now. Artificial lighting has meant a lot of really good things, arguably. We are able to extend the day into the night, which means that we can keep working, we can pursue our hobbies, we can go out to dinner, we can entertain -- we can party all night long! We can do all these things that we like to do, that night has become known for. But there are other things that we have lost through this process of nocturnalization.   Landmarks in our short history of artificial street lighting include gas lamps (these arrived in New York City in 1827, with each one having to be lit by hand), and arc-light moontowers (several cities experimented with these in the late 1800s, but Austin, Texas, is the only place to still use them today). It's not really my thrust in the book, but I guess what I'm saying is that, if that's all that night is, and we have lost so many of these other qualities of night, whether it's quiet or darkness or solitude, then I think the night that we are experiencing now is really a lessened version of what it could be. Night has a lot of qualities beyond darkness or lack of darkness -- things like nocturnal sounds and smells. Those sensory things have more to do with night, for me. I've always had that sense that, at night, the world reduces in size and fury and sound and we start to feel not so overrun by everything. At night, that's how I feel -- free, to pursue my writing and reading or whatever. We let go of those burdens that the day holds. Those sorts of things mean that night is much more than just darkness. Yet darkness itself has so much importance alone, too, for human health and ecological health.  This Sunforce 82156 60 LED Solar Motion Light promises "added security," "powerful detection," and "peace of mind." Manaugh: People also assume that darkness is inherently dangerous, yet you show how the connection between light and security is often a false promise. Bogard: Exactly. Historically, that connection is really interesting. The state really encouraged light, because officials felt as though they could control a well-lit city better. Illumination was conflated with the power of the state, going back to Louis XIV, the Sun King, who decreed that candles should be hung in the streets, to demonstrate his might by banishing dark. In the years before the French Revolution, for many Parisians, public street lighting stood for tyranny. Oil-lamp smashing was a regular thing. Ironically, what has happened now is that we have so much light that we can no longer see. We're blinded -- sometimes literally, by the brightness and glare of our security lighting -- but also metaphorically, which is to say that when we light everything up, there is really no reason to look over and notice something, and say, "Wow, that's a weird thing." When everything is so brightly lit, why should we look? It's light, so it's safe, so we switch off. And, while no one is looking, we've actually made life easier for the bad guys. Some studies even show that criminals actually prefer well-lit areas. I had several policemen and security consultants tell me that criminals are as afraid of the dark as we are. They don't want to go in the dark. The light makes them feel safe, just as it does us.  Centurion Security Lighting Kit, via K S P Building Contractors. The other thing is that, physically, so much light makes it hard for our eyes to see. We don't adapt from bright to dark quickly, so if we look toward the light, we can't see anything else, and then most street lighting is incredibly badly designed and actually reduces contrast. Sure, some lighting is helpful, in terms of safety and security. But we are not safe or secure simply because of lights. We are safe and secure when we are conscious of our surroundings. Most of our security lights are a huge waste of money and energy. It's a difficult issue. The entire third chapter is all about safety and security. I spent a lot of time on it, because the minute you start talking about light pollution, or the importance of darkness, people's first response is, "Yeah, but we need light for safety and security." It touches a nerve. I would just say that we don't need all this light for safety and security. We use way more than we need, and it isn't making anybody any safer.  Civil Twilight Design Collective won Metropolis' Next Generation 2007 contest for their lunar-resonant streetlight system, which would brighten and dim in response to ambient lighting levels. One thing I'd say is that our eyes are amazing organs. Given the chance to adjust to darkness, we can see quite a bit and see fairly well. I would imagine that if you got rid of wall-packs and security lights and so on, you could rely on more subtle lighting design in crosswalks, stairwells, and doorways. A couple of the lighting designers I spoke to were very excited about responsive lighting. For example, I spoke with a woman in Boulder, Colorado, whose thing was that putting lights on poles is ridiculous, and that, instead, we should have step-lights at foot level that get triggered with a motion detector. Another guy I talked with was mapping the night geography of Paris, with the idea that you could match the lux level of street lighting to the level of activity. Twilley: There seem to be significant disparities in the quality of different cities' nightscapes. In the book, you engage in some comparative darkness tourism in London and Paris, and London comes across as a completely wasted opportunity, in terms of lighting. Bogard: I thought so. I've noticed again and again that cities will spend all this money on making themselves pretty to draw visitors, and then they having glaring light all over the place. At night, they are as ugly as every place else.  Notre-Dame de Paris illuminated at night, by Atoma. In Paris, the lighting is designed to make the buildings beautiful at night. In London, and really all over the United States with very few exceptions, much of the lighting is just a big light shining on a building. You can see it, sure, but it's not really very beautiful. Manaugh: Speaking of darkness tourism, I just noticed a book called Night Walks on the bookshelf behind you, and it reminded me of something I read about the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Apparently, Coleridge would take massive walks in the middle of the night. He would show up at Wordsworth's house at 3 a.m., and they would head out into the Lake District together, talking and walking beneath the stars. It made me wonder if there are -- such as night walking -- lost practices of darkness, so to speak, through which people once pursued certain experiences defined by the absence of light. Bogard: I have always loved the experience -- wherever I've been living -- of going out walking at night, usually at around eleven-ish. Nobody is out, for the most part. You can look through windows into people's houses, if you want to, which is sort of like an Advent calendar thing. Everything looks a little different, somehow. It's just quieter. My dog and I go walking at night, before we go to bed. What's interesting is that I love being out at night, but I'm also still somebody who's afraid of the dark. That's why the experience that I have in the book, being in Death Valley and just walking around in this incredible darkness over a several hour period, was a really great one, because after two or three hours, your eyes seem to shift again and you can see even more. You begin to feel much more comfortable. I'd love to do that again. Twilley: The most astonishing statistic in the book, for me, was the fact that 40 percent of Americans live in such bright environments that their eyes never transition to night vision -- from the cones to rods. I can't help but wonder if, thanks to our saturation in artificial light, we might end up losing one of our ways of seeing the world. Bogard: I actually asked Alan Lewis, a former head of the Illuminating Engineering Society of North America, exactly that question. He said he didn't have any proof that our physiology was changing in response to the disappearance of darkness. Of course, it hasn't been very long. My guess is that, if we keep going down the path of more and more artificial lighting, we would eventually lose scotopic vision -- that's the technical term for low-light vision using the eye's rod cells. That's one of the things about all this light -- it's been so recent. Our grandparents and our great-grandparents grew up in a time when it was just so much darker. In the book, I've included the map that Fabio Falchi, the Italian I meet towards the end of the book, has made of the increase of artificial night sky brightness in North America. It shows the late 1950s, the mid-1970s, 1997, and then a prediction for 2025.  The increase in artificial night sky brightness in North America, including an extrapolated prediction for light pollution levels in 2025. Maps created by P. Cinzano, F. Falchi, and C. D. Elvidge. I remember the 1970s. It wasn't that long ago. And it's significantly darker on those maps then than it is now. Manaugh: That raises the question of historic preservation and what it means to bring darkness back. I'm reminded of architect Jorge Otero-Pailos and his experimental olfactory reconstruction of Philip Johnson's Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut. He realized that, to recreate the original smell of the house, you not only had to recreate all the VOCs off-gassing from new paint and furniture, etc., but you also bring back the smell of tobacco and the smell of certain colognes that were ubiquitous at the time--an entire olfactory aesthetic, as it were, that has been lost in the subsequent years. I mention that because you can imagine that a true historic reconstruction of a 1950s suburb would require not only a totally different light level at night but, by today's standards, a blinding sky full of stars.  Paris 48º 50' 55" N 2012-08-13 LST 22:15, photo illustration by Thierry Cohen as part of the Villes Eteintes series, via The New York Times.  Paris 48º 51' 46" N 2012-09-13 LST 2:16, photo illustration by Thierry Cohen as part of the Villes Eteintes series, via The New York Times. Along those lines, I'd love to hear how the National Park Service's Night Sky Team plans to go about actually protecting such an intangible resource as darkness, and maybe even reconstructing it to "original" levels. I'm also curious whether, in the other direction, you could maybe imagine a time where, thirty years from now, we might actually have a nostalgic "light pollution park." People would pay admission to see how crazily well-lit our cities used to be. Twilley: We could just wall off Las Vegas and declare it a light pollution sacrifice zone right now.  The Luxor beam in Las Vegas is equal to the light of more than forty billion candles. Bogard: That is such a neat idea. I hope that, in thirty years, or perhaps even less, that would make some sense. As you probably know, for Earth Hour every March, people turn off the lights on certain buildings. When I met with Fabio Falchi, he was trying to get his town, Mantua, to turn off the lights after midnight. He said that he went to the Leaning Tower of Pisa for Earth Hour, and he suddenly realized how magical it was to see these famous monuments with the lights off. He thought that if more people could see these places surrounded by darkness, it would be like a discovery, because no one has seen them like that in fifty years. Of course, he said, even with the lights off, it's not how it was, because there's so much sky glow. There is so much cumulative light from the surroundings reflecting that you could probably never get back to what it was originally like.  Light domes from cities at various distances from Mt. Dellenbaugh, Grand Canyon Parashant National Monument, in 2007. NPS photo. Twilley: In the book you mention that, even in Death Valley, one of the darkest places in North America, you can see the light dome of Las Vegas on the horizon, and the lights of flights heading into San Francisco above. Bogard: Exactly. That's the challenge of preserving darkness: you can't do it on your own. The National Parks Service team, in addition to figuring out how to measure darkness in order to put a number to what we have to lose, figures that their best bet is education. Of course, the parks themselves have overhauled their own lighting, but they're also starting to offer all kinds of night programs, whether it be focused on the sensory experience of the land at night or astronomical observation or whatever. If they can't get the rest of us to care about darkness, they don't stand a chance of preserving their own. There are some positive signs. For example, Acadia National Park in Maine had its first Night Sky Festival in 2009, and now the local community of Bar Harbor has enacted a light ordinance to reduce their sky glow.  Poster designed by Tyler Nordgren. That's the National Park Service idea, essentially. Americans will come and learn about light pollution and darkness and all of the ecological and health reasons why darkness is important and endangered. Then we will go home and, hopefully, apply some of those lessons there. I would imagine that lots of people west of the Mississippi might say, "It's dark where I live." But we have changed things so much that anywhere you go east of the Mississippi, there is no true darkness. It has all been tainted. One guy on the Night Sky team told me that sometimes people will ask, "What are you going to do with the cities? You'll never get the cities dark again--that's just impossible. There are too many people and too many lights." He said that, to a certain extent, that's true. You're probably not going to bring the Milky Way back over Manhattan or Chicago. His reply, though, is that if you were able to just reduce the lighting in these major cities you would see great benefits. You could address a lot of the health issues that people in the cities, who are exposed to huge amounts of light at night, are suffering from. The other thing is that, when you draw the lighting down in the cities, the darkness ripples out into the suburbs and the country. The reason the suburbs and the countryside are so bright is because of the cities. Plenty of suburbs and towns have awful lighting as well, of course, but they could fix that lighting or even turn it all off and their skies would still be bright, because of the nearest city.
A satellite view of Earth at night shows the prevalence of artificial lighting. NASA. Twilley: To follow up on that, I'm curious about the question of legislation. Some cities, like Flagstaff, have lighting ordinances, of course. But one of the really interesting implications in your book is that, if you think about darkness as a common resource like water or clean air, we have environmental legislation and acceptable levels for pollution for them. Or, if you think about the health side, you could make the analogy with secondhand smoke and the ways in which we regulate that. At one point you mention the phrase "light trespass," which implies we could treat darkness like property. Would any of these be effective models for preserving darkness? Bogard: Realistically, I think we have to start with the places that are still dark, and preserve them, because, as with so many things, they are not making it anymore. The pressures are all headed in one direction. Any kind of forward-looking lighting plan that I've seen starts with a solid core of darkness and then works its way out from there. In terms of legislation, in the UK, British astronomers are taking the approach of putting lighting standards into building code. That way, any new building has to have dark-sky-friendly lighting. Then lower lighting levels become more and more normal, and you don't get that escalation effect I describe, where older buildings look dim next to new ones, and upgrade their lighting to match, and so on. People just get used to it.  Gas station in the middle of Nevada, photograph by James Reeves. "Gas stations," Bogard told us, "are the worst offenders by far. They are just egregiously bright." Manaugh: Of course, there is potential for a huge backlash against that, at least in the United States. If you use even something as universally beneficial as vehicle emission limits in cars as an example, you see people railing against government intrusion all the time. I can easily see someone on cable news complaining, "They want to tell me when I can turn my lights on?" Bogard: My hope is that part of that just takes time, and those voices will eventually fade away. I see this with my students. They've never really been asked to think about lighting and darkness, and they assume that this super-bright world in which we live today is just the way the world is. If you could shift that and, for example, make a college campus a place where you became sensitive to good lighting, then everybody would leave with at least a sense of what's possible. Roger Narboni, who designed the world's first urban "lighting master plan" for the French city of Montpellier way back in the 1980s, told me that his dream is to have education about light and darkness beginning in kindergarten, as a core part of the curriculum. Manaugh: There's a certain poetry to having a conversation about dark sky reserves in the National Radio Quiet Zone. This is a landscape, after all, where, by federal decree, electromagnetic "pollution" has to be kept to a bare minimum. Bogard: Wow, I didn't know that. I had never heard of that.  The National Radio Quiet Zone boundaries, via the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.< Manaugh: The regulations were put in place to protect the work of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank. The result is a 13,000-square-mile radio quarantine zone. It's one of the few places in the United States where the air is not completely saturated by electromagnetic emissions from cell phones and power lines and radio stations and everything else. Twilley: What's also interesting is that people move here for that reason--people who feel that they are sensitive to electromagnetic emissions will move here for their health. Manaugh: So, while we were driving here, we were thinking about the idea of a luxury darkness retreat, as a well-being thing. Bogard: I can definitely imagine that. The thing I write about in the book is the question of who will have access to darkness. It's like so many of these other things--green space, trees, quiet, and so on. It could end up being unevenly distributed; where the only way to get real darkness is to be able afford to live in a community like Aspen or Vail or somewhere like that. This makes me think of when I was in Phoenix. I can't remember the name of the wealthiest suburb, but what I noticed is that when you drive up towards it, all of a sudden, it's dark. These people are rich enough to have anything they want, and they choose to have darkness at night. Meanwhile, kids who are growing up in cities whose families don't have the resources to travel are never going to experience that. I wonder if it will get to the point where none of us can get there, unless you're the one percent. Then you can afford to go someplace really dark. Twilley: It already seems as though there are huge inequalities in our exposure to light at night. I was shocked by the statistic you quote about nearly 20 percent of African-Americans in the United States working the night shift. Bogard: And then there's the fact that public housing is almost always over-lit in an effort to deter crime. There's another darkness-deprived population I hadn't considered either, before I wrote this book, which is prisoners. There's this former convict, Ken Lamberton, who wrote about his time in prison and the way he was forced to be in the light -- he wasn't even allowed to cover his face with a blanket at night. It's as if being constantly illuminated was actually part of his punishment.  Hallway lighting in a supermax prison is never switched off. Photograph via Gorilla Convict. One thing that appeals to me about light a lot is how symbolic it is. Our usage of light right now is hugely symbolic of our lack of awareness of how we use things and the way we use so much more of everything than we need. It seems to me that if we could control our light use and use light more intelligently, then it could also be symbolic of us finally getting our act together in a lot of different ways.
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| The Statement Anthony Weiner Should Release Posted: 24 Jul 2013 09:30 AM PDT  In U.S. politics, sex scandals are always treated as if they're much more important than all sorts of stuff that's more relevant to the job at hand, and often times much more depraved. I am tired of it. The idea that sex scandals are "too big a distraction" is a self-fulfilling media prophecy. It served us ill in the Clinton years, and it's no less dysfunctional now. New York mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner has messed up repeatedly. He lied to his wife and the people about sending digital pictures of his private parts, even after he was caught. We all know this and can judge accordingly. So why is this the biggest political story of the day? Because it involves sex? The web is full of stories that involve sex and feature much more attractive images than Weiner's erection. Deep down we all know this: our fascination reflects poorly on us. Let's at least imagine an alternative. Here's what Weiner might say if he were being more honest, with himself and the public, and if the public was a bit more mature, which isn't the same as condoning Weiner's lies. For the record, I have no idea if Weiner would be a good mayor, and don't particularly care if he wins or not. People of Gotham, Anthony Weiner here. Here's the deal: I really like to text photographs of my genitals to women I meet on the Internet. A lot. We all know this. The way you crave sex sometimes? Sometimes I crave cybersex. I am not particularly proud of this fetish. In fact, having it revealed to the public has been the most embarrassing thing that has ever happened to me, and to my wife, which is the part I regret most. I love her so much, and I wish for her sake that I didn't feel this compulsion to contact strangers on the Internet, send them naked pictures of myself, and engage in cybersex. But I do. And it is powerful. Some people can't stop smoking cigarettes. Others can't stop drinking too much, or eating to the point of obesity, or yelling at their families, or visiting prostitutes, or snorting cocaine. Are these addictions? Compulsions? Failures of character? I don't know. But cybersex is what I just couldn't stop doing. I'd like to tell you it won't happen again. But honestly, it could. I'll successfully fight the urge if I can. Struggle to do it. But in the past, I've been unable to resist logging onto my computer, contacting a woman anonymously on the Internet, and trading naked pictures, possibly of my penis. Why? I don't really understand it myself. Afterward, I felt better, but also guilty. It really sucks. If I'm being honest, I wish I just could've gotten away with it, without anyone ever finding out. Do you even understand why you care so much, now that you know? It's unusual, I admit, though not that unusual. Have you ever logged onto Chat Roulette? Yeesh. Gross. So many penises. And judging from the hit counts on certain web sites when my scandal broke, a lot of you didn't mind going out of your way to look at my tweet. Hey, I'm in no position to judge. I desperately wish that I had totally conventional turn-ons. What do average Americans do online for sexual gratification? Girls Gone Wild clips? Definitely more normal. But still sorta creepy when you think about it, am I right? So was that whole Bill Clinton-with-the-intern incident. But wasn't he a good president? I thought so. I still think I'd be a good mayor, but only if you know going in that I might have an illicit cyber-conversations during my term ... and you still elect me. I won't be any more of an egocentric exhibitionist than the average big-city mayor, that's for sure. In fact, I'll get all those impulses out of my system on my own time. On the other hand, if this is a dealbreaker for you, I understand. Either way, after this statement, I'm done apologizing or explaining -- this is part of who I am, unfortunately for me. If you think this reflects badly on my character, maybe you're right. I like to think that I am generally an honest person -- that my desperate lying indicated my extreme aversion to embarrassing myself and my wife on a truly epic scale, not a tendency to lie about normal things in the course of daily life. If your darkest sexual secrets and preferences were on the cusp of being revealed, mortifying your wife and destroying your career, wouldn't you lie to protect them? Would that lying be a good proxy for your general truthfulness? Or maybe that's just a story I tell myself so that I don't have to think of myself as a bad person. You're a better judge than me. But look, this isn't Dayton, Ohio. It's New York City. If you live here, it's because you are willing to confront the real world, not some sugar-coated version. For better or worse, some real people have sexual compulsions that they fail to overcome. They aren't all irredeemable, even if they try to stop and keep failing. Maybe voters should know about stuff like this, or maybe not, but obsessing over it? Why? I am not in a position anymore to dispassionately judge my own character. I do know that lots of people with sexual compulsions lead highly successful professional lives despite them. As my personal life has been in turmoil, my ability to do good work is the one thing I've known for sure -- that, and that I love my wife, who has agreed, against her better judgment, to stick with me, despite my compulsion, because we really do love one another. If only there wasn't this public failure of mine that I haven't been able to beat ... and God, I am a failure in this area. And Twitter, also. But not at most other things. So it's up to you: Take me or leave me, as I am. No hard feelings either way. And know, every time you see me on the cover of a tabloid, that I have a personal problem -- whereas the people putting me on the cover? They're making their living profiting off a guy's personal problem. Even before this whole thing, I thought sex scandals were overplayed. They'll move on to someone else eventually -- they always do. But I'll remember what it feels like to be ridiculed and denied empathy. Maybe that will make me better at my job. I'll certainly try my hardest to succeed in any work you give me, in the way you do when your personal life isn't going as well as you hoped, and the professional realm is the one place you can be competent. Finally, I won't profile Muslims, blacks, or Hispanics. That's just irremediably depraved. Thank you. 
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| Why China Is Banning Construction of New Government Buildings Posted: 24 Jul 2013 09:06 AM PDT  The government building in Yingquan district of Fuyang is 28,000 square meters and cost about 30 million yuan. (Jianan Yu/Reuters) China's Communist Party took another swipe at excessive government spending late on Tuesday, with a five-year ban on the construction of state buildings. "We really must use our limited funds and resources for the development of the economy and the improvement of people's lives," said the State Council. But the ban may be difficult to carry out, given that authorities are building dozens of new cities every year as well as expanding emerging ones in pursuit of another policy priority: inspiring more spending on services and goods within the country by putting more residents in urban centers. China's urbanization plan -- the Chinese word for it is literally "small city-ization" -- should require the building of at least the occasional government building. According to Xinhua, the directive allows restoration for buildings that are so dated they pose safety problems, although it bars restoring buildings "with reception functions" (read: banquet halls).  MORE FROM QUARTZ
The crackdown is all part of a wider effort to eliminate corruption and excess at both the upper and the lower levels of government, which President Xi Jinping calls "tigers" and "flies." Over-the-top government buildings have become a hallmark of Chinese development over the years. As a point of pride for local governments, they may be hard to get rid of. On more than one occasion Chinese officials and entrepreneurs with egos to massage have even built near-replicas of the White House (which actually tend to look more like DC's Capitol building), such as this 30 million RMB ($4.28 million) one in the eastern Chinese city of Fuyang. The official who built it was eventually executed for corruption after a former friend blew the whistle (not that the building is exactly subtle) and met his own suspicious end in the process.  Harmony Clock Tower, the biggest mechanical clock tower in the world, in Ganzhou city cost $45 milion. (AP) China's gigantic state-owned enterprises also appear to be included in the blanket ban, perhaps with gilded monstrosities like Harbin Pharmaceutical's office complex based on Louis XIV's palace at Versailles. The outside of their main office is not that excessively opulent, but the company drew criticism for one office building's striking golden interior, intricate decoration, antique furniture, and chandeliers. The example is particularly poignant given the ongoing bribery investigation of GlaxoSmithKline, triggered by concern over escalating drugs prices. The headquarters of Harbin Pharmaceuticals. (AP)  Jinan City in Shandong province has the largest municipal government office building in China. (AP) The heavily indebted city of Loudi, in Hunan Province, has also faced criticism over its extravagant construction projects, which include an Olympic stadium even though there are no games scheduled. The city's government complex is also nicknamed "the White House," a property so large that even state-controlled media have been critical. The Global Times reported in May that the office space for one administrative committee was so large that each person had 453 square meters to work in. The complex's three main buildings are connected by corridors that are similar to the Chinese character for "king."  Wangjiang County government used almost 30 acres of farmland to build its grandiose office building of 460,000 square feet, about eight times the size of the White House. (AP) China is certainly not the only country to have spent a fortune constructing government digs, but netizen reactions to photograph collections of state buildings have mostly been angry, particularly as many Chinese local governments are choking in debt while some officials take meetings in a mock Oval Office. In an odd twist of economic logic, Beijing is instead spending $32 billion on high speed rail that nobody uses anyway. 
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| Are Shrinking Unions Making Workers Poorer? Posted: 24 Jul 2013 09:00 AM PDT  The president of a United Auto Workers local union in Michigan shows off his tattoo. In 2012, Michigan became the 24th U.S. state to pass "right-to-work" legislation, meaning that employees cannot be required to join a union as a condition of employment. (Rebecca Cook/Reuters) Here's what we know: Union membership has been nearly cut in half over the past thirty years. During that time, income inequality grew, with the top one percent of wealthiest Americans seeing especially big gains in their pre- and post-tax income. And although the economy has grown, wages have not: The portion of GDP going toward workers' pay has shrunk by almost six percentage points over the last decade. The causal chain is so tempting: As unions get smaller, collective bargaining gets weaker, worker wages go down, and evil profiteers cackle. But is it clear that the decreasing power of unions has made it harder for employees to afford everyday life? This idea was discussed at a recent Atlantic working summit on "secure livelihoods," which focused on systemic causes of persistent income inequality; what does the research say? As is so often true, it's difficult to determine exactly how the decrease in union power has affected the income and quality of life of workers. In a 2011 article in The American Sociological Review, Bruce Western and Jake Rosenfeld argue that the decline of organized labor can account for about one-third of the rise in income inequality for men and one-fifth for women -- even for people who never belonged to unions. In regions of the U.S. where more people belong to unions, they argue, there is a smaller difference between how much money high-paid and low-paid workers make. Over time, as union membership has dropped, the gap between rich and poor has grown for everyone, union and non-union alike. Western and Rosenfeld attribute this to the soft power of organized labor: If union strikes loom as a credible threat, all employers in an area are more likely to provide robust benefits and pay. But other factors muddy the issue. Some experts argue that growing workforce automation, the global reach of the economy, and the need for high-skill labor has diminished the power of collective bargaining and cut into workers' wages. If there's cheap labor available in Bangladesh, why would an American company pay workers significantly more to do the same work? In the face of a cheap global labor pool, unions have less ammunition against employers, and U.S. workers also get paid less, regardless. For the growing number of jobs that do require strong technical skills, there don't seem to be enough people who can do the work, argued David Autor, Lawrence Katz, and Melissa Kearney in 2008. They specifically target the argument that weaker unions mean weaker wages -- they say the gap between the very middle of the middle class and the top ten percent of wage earners is closely linked to the gap in skills between those two groups. In other words, weaker unions aren't to blame for workers' economic woes; workers just don't have the right skills to compete in a high-tech economy. Still, the fact remains that full-time workers who belong to unions make more money than those who don't: On average, union members make about $200 more per week than their counterparts. This figure is influenced by lots of factors, including differences in average salary in regions with low levels of unionization. But even bearing that in mind, research shows that in "right to work" states, where employees cannot be required to pay union dues as a condition of their employment, workers get paid less than the rest of the country. That was true even when business grew in "right to work" states, indicating that weakening unions might help business owners, but it doesn't do much for workers. (This Washington Post article gives a great overview of the economic effects of "right to work" legislation). It seems that unions have become too weak or too irrelevant to buoy workers in a competitive global economy. 
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| Really Listening to Atheists: Taking Nonbelief Seriously Posted: 24 Jul 2013 08:51 AM PDT  As an atheist, I have frequently had religious acquaintances and even family members misunderstand the basis for my lack of faith. So when Larry Alex Taunton, a Christian who has debated nonbelief with celebrity New Atheists Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, recently wrote about his conversations with college-aged apostates, emerging with several conclusions about why these young people are leaving the church, I was interested. Taunton and his organization wanted to understand how young men and women become avowed nonbelievers, and they contacted a number of campus secular groups to ask if their members would share their stories. Their respondents were mostly ex-Christians who had left the church during high school. Though Taunton acknowledges that most young atheists he has met in his career start out by "attribut[ing] the decision to the purely rational and objective," he highlights several other themes drawn from further discussion with the respondents: they found their church's "mission and message ... vague"; "they felt their church offered superficial answers to life's difficult questions"; they respected ministers of genuine belief; their "decision to embrace belief was often an emotional one"; and the Internet was a factor in their journey to nonbelief. Taunton concludes by suggesting churches not shy away from being serious about belief and the Bible. In sum, according to Taunton, it would seem that the atheists to whom he spoke mostly suffered from personal disappointments with the church, rather than from disagreement with Christian dogma or religion as a whole. Taunton's are deeply problematic findings. Because what this kind of analysis does, whether intentionally or not, is peremptorily dismiss these atheists' valid objections and present snippets from the interviews in such a way as to insult the sincerity of their nonbelief and foreclose other possible explanations for their apostasy; namely, that Christianity may be losing its grip over increasing numbers of young Americans not because its preachers and pastors are doing a shoddy job of delivering their message or listening to their flock, but because the young Americans find the religion itself to be inherently implausible or morally objectionable. Taunton introduces the reader to a number of members of the Secular Student Alliance and the Freethought Society. He interviews them, hoping to hear about their "journey to unbelief" and create "a composite sketch of American college-aged atheists" -- something that I am not sure it is possible to do in any accurate and nuanced way. (And as an atheist, I would argue that, if anything, it is the journey to belief that needs to be studied.) The atheists Taunton speaks to declare straightaway that the problem is, simply, that they don't believe: "With few exceptions," he acknowledges early on, "students would begin by telling us that they had become atheists for exclusively rational reasons." But Taunton doesn't take them at their word. Instead, he treats them as subjects for psychoanalysis. He presents "Phil" as holding views "typical" of young New Atheists. Phil is "smart, likeable," and depicted as a lost young fellow, for whom things have "come apart" -- this is how Taunton refers to quitting religion -- and one who misses his "youth pastor." (Again, the only New Atheists from whom we hear are former Christians -- a fact that must necessarily skew the conclusions, even if it's not one Taunton can do much about within the confines of this particular study.) "Stephanie" appears, and laments that "The connection between Jesus and a person's life was not clear." A young man named Ben simply "got bored with church" and chucked it all. "Meredith" took comfort in the absence of a god, because her father had died and she didn't want to see him again, presumably in the hereafter. "Rebecca" prayed and got no answer. More generally, "vague references to videos they had watched on YouTube or website forums" figured in their de-conversion, as did, says Taunton, a search for "authenticity" -- surely what secularists would call an empirically verifiable conception of life, death, and the cosmos. But according to Taunton, his "idealist" students "settled for a nonbelief, that, though less grand in its promises, felt more genuine and attainable." He does not seem to understand that this is a deeply patronizing way of recounting the free decisions of these students to leave the church because -- again, as a number of atheists apparently told him outright -- they just don't believe its teachings. It would be one thing if the students themselves had declared they'd "settled," or said that they felt atheism to be "less grand." But no quote from the students suggests the point Taunton is making. Taunton's analysis amounts not to an objective assessment of their words, but pseudo-diagnosis presented in a way that skirts what they were really trying to tell him. Yet such are the "journeys to unbelief" recounted by Taunton. He concludes that if church services had been more "meaningful" or if preachers had preached more convincingly, these lost sheep might never have strayed from the flock. He dismisses out of hand the most relevant and mature critiques leveled at religion by his New Atheist experimentees: matters pertaining to "evolution vs. creation, sexuality, the reliability of the biblical text, Jesus as the only way, etc." The "etc." here is telling, as is the "and so on" with which he later disregards his subjects' complaints that religious beliefs are illogical. Nowhere does Taunton posit the most obvious conclusion one may reach about the growing prevalence of atheism today: namely, that the tenets in which the Christian tradition demands faith may have ultimately appeared to young people to be untenable. Christianity requires that we, in the twenty-first century, after having mapped the human genome, sent probes to Mars, and discovered the Higgs Boson, believe in human parthenogenesis and tales of a man turning water into wine, calming raging seas, curing lepers, and raising the dead. It requires that we believe that God chose to redeem humankind by means of a human sacrifice. That's not even counting the NC-17-rated Old Testament, which includes incest, God ordering death for rape victims, God enjoining execution for apostates, and what looks an awful lot to the modern mind like God-sanctioned genocide in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East. Why is this important? The piece concludes that "sincerity is indispensable to any truth we wish others to believe" which sidesteps the thornier nature of faith in Christian doctrine: Belief in these improbable and troubling stories is an absolute prerequisite for both membership in the church and entrance into heaven. Doctrines that promise eternal rewards for some of us, eternal damnation for others, and mandate the observance of a moral code to which all humanity is supposedly subject, demand the closest scrutiny. Taunton's interviewees have done that: scrutinize. Their decisions to leave the church, based on that scrutiny, deserve respect. 
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| How the Western Was Lost (and Why It Matters) Posted: 24 Jul 2013 08:36 AM PDT  Disney The Lone Ranger's failure at the box office earlier this month not only dealt a blow to mega-budget Hollywood blockbusters, Johnny Depp's career, and Disney. The Jerry Bruckheimer-Gore Verbinski flop--which cost a reported $250 million to make and brought in just $50 million opening on a holiday weekend--also may mark a decisive chapter in the sad story of how the Western was lost. Since the dawn of film, the Western has been one of the great, durable movie genres, but its audience seems to be finally drying up. The Lone Ranger is the third Western to flop in four summers, and the most expensive, capping a trend set by Cowboys & Aliens and Jonah Hex. (Remember them? Exactly.) Western fans are getting older and whiter with respect to the overall population, and as any Republican political consultant will tell you, that doesn't bode well for the future. Other, newer genres like superhero movies and fighting-robot flicks have cowboy movies outgunned with younger generations and international audiences. Now the genre finds itself in the ironic position of needing a hero to save it, and quick. If The Lone Ranger goes down in history as the last of the big-budget oaters, it'll be a sad milestone for moviemaking--and for America. For a century plus, we have relied on Westerns to teach us our history and reflect our current politics and our place in the world. We can ill afford to lose that mirror now, especially just because we don't like what we see staring back at us. Westerns provide many timeless pleasures--tough guy heroes, action set pieces on horseback, adventures in magnificent landscapes, good triumphing over evil. It's all there already in arguably the first narrative film ever made, The Great Train Robbery. But to discuss Westerns as if they just boiled down to heroic stories of saving the homestead from savages, tracking the bad guy through the wilderness, or finding the treasure in the mountains would be to miss the real meaning of the genre. Westerns have earned their place at the heart of the national culture and American iconography abroad because they've provided a reliable vehicle for filmmakers to explore thorny issues of American history and character. In the enduring examples of the genre, the real threat to the homestead, we learn, is an economic system that is being rigged for the wealthy, or the search for the bad guy becomes a search for meaning in a culture of violent retribution, or the treasure of the Sierra Madre is a diabolical mirage of the American dream. Through the past century of Western movies, we can trace America's self-image as it evolved from a rough-and-tumble but morally confident outsider in world affairs to an all-powerful sheriff with a guilty conscience. After World War I and leading into World War II, Hollywood specialized in tales of heroes taking the good fight to savage enemies and saving defenseless settlements in the process. In the Great Depression especially, as capitalism and American exceptionalism came under question, the cowboy hero was often mistaken for a criminal and forced to prove his own worthiness--which he inevitably did. Over the '50s, '60s, and '70s however, as America enforced its dominion over half the planet with a long series of coups, assassinations, and increasingly dubious wars, the figure of the cowboy grew darker and more complicated. If you love Westerns, most of your favorites are probably from this era--Shane, The Searchers, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, the spaghetti westerns, etc. By the height of the Vietnam protest era, cowboys were antiheroes as often as they were heroes. The dawn of the 1980s brought the inauguration of Ronald Reagan and the box-office debacle of the artsy, overblown Heaven's Gate. There's a sense of disappointment to the decade that followed, as if the era of revisionist Westerns had failed and a less nuanced patriotism would have to carry the day. Few memorable Westerns were made in the '80s, and Reagan himself proudly associated himself with an old-fashioned, pre-Vietnam cowboy image. But victory in the Cold War coincided with a revival of the genre, including the revisionist strain, exemplified in Clint Eastwood's career-topping Unforgiven. A new, gentler star emerged in Kevin Costner, who scored a post-colonial megahit with Dances With Wolves. Later, in the 2000s, George W. Bush reclaimed the image of the cowboy for a foreign policy far less successful than Reagan's, and the genre retreated to the art house again. It's the task of Westerns to address our history, even as decade by decade that history becomes more and more embarrassing to us. That means cowboy movies are easy to bungle, because by now they all take place on contested ground. Under the presidency of Barack Obama, there has been a short-lived Western revival that would seem to match America's tentative new moral authority. If the genre in this era can be said to have a unifying aim, it's to divest itself and its audiences of a strictly white, male, heterosexual perspective on history, and by extension on present day conflicts. Cowboys & Aliens is a cynical attempt at a post-racial Western--just take the Indians out of the equation so we can be good guys again!--but with more sincerity, True Grit, Django Unchained, and now The Lone Ranger have all put non-male, non-white perspectives front and center. (Two other notable movies from the past 15 years, the wonderful Brokeback Mountain and the awful Wild Wild West, also fit this model.) It's worth pointing out, however, that all of these examples (except Brokeback Mountain) were directed by white men, and The Lone Ranger has Tonto played by an actor with only the slightest claim to American Indian ancestry.
Although end-of-year prestige movies like True Grit and Django Unchained have broken through to achieve critical acclaim, Oscars, and substantial return on investment, the Obama era has not been kind to newfangled Westerns that aimed for large audiences. Exacerbating the problem is the rejection of cowboy movies by international audiences, particularly the Chinese. So even as filmmakers have become more interested in incorporating a diversity of viewpoints, they have hit against what appears a global demographic ceiling. It's another reason why The Lone Ranger will probably be the last attempt to build a true summer tent-pole in the genre. Nobody likes a weak ending, and this is especially true for cowboy movies. A sad outcome we can accept, even the death of a genre, but at least let our hero meet his challenge, fulfill his destiny, stand his (or her) ground. Watching The Lone Ranger slink off into the sunset, it's hard to feel any sense of resolution for the Western.
It's always difficult to diagnose the reason for a movie's success or failure. Did the audience dislike what The Lone Ranger tried to do, or the fact that it executed its aims poorly? Since it bombed definitively on opening weekend (long before China got a look at it, too) it seems safest to base conclusions in part on the movie's advertising and the media storylines surrounding its release.
Three contributing factors stand out. First, there was some coverage of an outcry about racism in Depp's portrayal of Tonto, which conceivably made audiences less comfortable laughing along with the pidgin English. Second, advertising leaned heavily on the association with the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, touting the movie as a family-friendly adventure yarn, but word quickly spread that The Lone Ranger was not safe for kids. Finally, the 149-minute runtime can't have helped.
The irony is that the very factors that helped make The Lone Ranger a bomb also helped make it much more interesting than typical summer fare. (Mild spoilers follow.) The runtime ballooned because the filmmakers wouldn't dispense with a time-consuming framing story that shows Depp's Tonto, in old-man makeup and a historically inappropriate headdress, wilting away inside a Museum of Natural History-style display called "The Noble Savage in His Native Habitat." The scenes deemed unsafe for children included two graphic depictions of American Indian genocide. The character of Tonto came to the filmmakers with heavy racist baggage, and, rather than tossing him out altogether, they took on the challenge of trying to carry that baggage while walking the tightrope of commenting on a stereotype through the performance of that same stereotype.
This is not to say that any of these bold moves are executed adeptly. The framing story never goes anywhere; the Indian genocide scenes are distastefully incidental to the plot, especially one scene of mass slaughter that provides the heroes cover to get out of a pickle; Depp's winking performance is still fundamentally problematic, as if he or any other white actor had done a modern Mr. Bojangles, blackface and all, and tried to get actual laughs out of it.
Still, in simple terms, The Lone Ranger went there. And there. And over there. The Lone Ranger did not fail for being timid. In this cautious, sequel-dominated era of summer movies, that's a recommendation in itself. Even if they weren't particularly clever about it, Verbinski and his collaborators deserve credit for engaging critically with the history involved, both the 19th-century Indian massacres and the legacy of racism from the early 20th-century source material.
This is also a tribute to the genre. The ground rules of the Western more or less forced Verbinski and company into that treacherous territory. They could make, say, a movie about Caribbean pirates without addressing the slave trade, even though such pirates often held slaves as cargo. That's fine, because pirate movies are about gold, not slaves. Everyone knows that. Westerns, on the contrary, are traditionally about cowboys and Indians, or at least homesteaders and land and railroad barons, the kinds of men who built the cities we live in today.
It's the task of Westerns to address that history, even as decade by decade that history becomes more and more embarrassing to us. In theory, it's a beautiful thing, though in practice it means cowboy movies are easy to bungle, because by now they all take place on contested ground. Every Western must find its own way reconcile itself to the founding contradictions of America. A certain kind of escapism becomes impossible.
Unless, of course, we stop making and watching Westerns. The genres that currently rule the box office do other things well--sci-fi movies can address the ecological crisis and challenges of new technology, for instance, and superhero movies can provide never-ending glosses on the core myth of American exceptionalism--but none are particularly engaged with history, especially pre-World War II. And none can boast the richness of symbolic language developed by Westerns over the course of a century at the heart of film culture.
It would be a terrible thing to give up on that language, especially now, in the wake of The Lone Ranger's failure. Isn't there anyone, perhaps a female or non-white director, capable of making a great mass-audience Western for the Obama era? Or, if it's too late for that, then for whatever era comes next? If neither, here's hoping that filmmakers will keep trying at the art-house level and on cable television.
The other great theme of the Western, after that of the conquering of native peoples and the establishment of civilization in the desert, is that of loss and of nostalgia for a certain way of life--the early freedoms of the West, the idea of riding across an unfenced landscape, the infinite possibilities of the frontier. That "West," of course, is already gone, fallen, conquered. It has been for decades, even though holding onto some sense of it seems crucial to our identity as Americans. Movie Westerns have been tracking that loss for a century.
Now, as The Lone Ranger leaves theaters this month, that sense of loss begins to expand to cowboy movies themselves. The train is leaving the station, and the thing we rely on to help make sense of ourselves in the world is tied to the tracks. Is there a hero on the horizon? 
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| Posted: 24 Jul 2013 08:15 AM PDT A roundup from readers around the world. 1) Korean pilots doth protest. According to AVweb, the union representing Asiana pilots has filed a protest against the NTSB because of "NTSB's press conferences which only give prominence to the possibility of a pilot error." Hmmm. The NTSB has pointed out that under ideal weather conditions, with no indication of mechanical failure of any kind, the plane's approach path toward the runway was never "stabilized" in altitude or air speed. Also, that about a second before impact, the cockpit voice recorder showed that the crew attempted (too late) a "go-around" to climb away and set up for another approach. Most accidents occur because of (a) a mechanical failure that redundant safety systems somehow can't cope with, (b) extreme weather of some sort, or (c) an error in judgment, execution, or decision-making, for whatever reason, by the plane's crew. The NTSB has said that so far there is no sign of causes (a) or (b). 2) Airframe improvements. On a brighter-side aspect of the crash, reader TH notes a dramatic yet under-appreciated implication of the event:
Yes. And a similar change has been notable even in the small-aircraft world. The kind of airplane that I fly, whose design and origin I described in Free Flight and that is now the best-selling small plane of its type in the world, has a fiberglass cockpit and airframe that have proven amazingly robust. The best known safety feature of these Cirrus SR-22 airplanes is the parachute for the entire airplane that can be deployed to avert a crash. But even when the plane has been banged up by trees or towers while descending under the parachute, the tough fiberglass cabin structure has stayed intact. 3) The role of fatigue. Dr. Daniel Johnson of western Wisconsin, who has long experience in both aviation and in medicine (and has been an FAA-designated senior medical examiner since the mid-1980s), writes about another factor: As a pilot, and as a physician interested in mistakes of perception and circadian biology, I think nothing could be more obvious than, whatever else happened mechanically or procedurally, this Asiana 777 crash was likely related to jet lag, sleep deprivation, and its consequences on judgment, perception, vigilance, and reaction time. The flying-pilot's limited hours in the 777 is a red herring, as he has 12,000 hours of experience.
2: We don't know that they slept well when off duty during the flight. 3: We don't know that their duty schedule, sleep schedule, and light-dark schedule were ideal during the prior week or two. 4: We don' know that they had managed their circadian rhythms wisely. We have clear evidence of degraded judgment and reactions: 2: A very low visual approach to the runway implies inattention, which implies degraded awareness. It is much harder to judge altitude when over water than when over land, as any pilot of seaplanes knows. Nevertheless, there would have been adequate visual clues, particularly the perspective view of the runway and the PAPIs. [JF note: these PAPIs are the red and white lights to help you judge if you are too high, too low, or just right on the descent.] I have much experience with low approaches; there is no doubt about one's glide angle unless perception is clouded. 3: Slow reactions and obvious misperception, with degraded awareness, imply fatigue. A: failing to correct for the low approach angle Ironically, an airplane's effective stall speed and rate of descent are both significantly lower - the induced drag is perhaps halved - when the airplane is within a wingspan of the ground/water ("ground effect") If this pilot had not panicked and pulled the nose up, this airplane could have been landed - awkwardly but without breaking the tail off on the seawall - without trying to speed up or to climb - simply by continuing to fly in ground effect to the runway. [JF note: Whether continuing in "ground effect" could indeed have saved the flight is one of the things the NTSB will presumably figure out.] So we see a collection of events that likely occurred due to degraded attention, vigilance, judgment, and reaction time. This severe impairment occurs with fatigue. This is most commonly due, in professional pilots, to jet lag and sleep deprivation... Dr. Johnson also sent a link to this very interesting medical-journal article about the surprising manifestations of fatigue, and the ways people and cannot try to overcome circadian rhythms. 4) Maybe it's about Confucian culture. A Westerner who has long held a senior position as a manager in China sends this view. For US readers: this Hiddink he refers to is a soccer coach whose international reputation would be comparable in American terms to Phil Jackson's or Vince Lombardi's:
5) But maybe it's not. A reader sends in this reference:
As you'll see, the story is about a crash in Minnesota nearly 20 years ago in which blame was fixed firmly on the captain for disregarding his junior officers' warnings that the plane was headed for trouble. With, again, no sign that the captain had ever heard of Confucius. That's it for now, thanks to these and other readers. 
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| What to Watch For in Obama's Economics Speeches Posted: 24 Jul 2013 08:00 AM PDT
Billed by the White House as expressions of his "one clear economic philosophy" President Obama is delivering big speeches on the economy Wednesday in Galesburg, Illinois, and Warrensburg, Missouri. Obama will reiterate his long-standing message that "the American economy works best when it grows from the middle-out, not the top down" and will cover old and new territory, according to the White House -- and a presidential preview he gave to his Organizing for America group on Monday night. Eric Liu and Nick Hanauer, who popularized of the middle-out formulation the president has been using for the last couple of years, expand on what they see as the power of their way of framing economic thinking here. But as Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank asked, "How can the president make news, and remake the agenda, by delivering the same message he gave in 2005?" Here are some economic topics the president could address that might make people wake up: 1. Detroit. Can the president talk about America's economy and the future of the nation without talking about the largest municipal bankruptcy ever? It hardly seems possible. The failure of any major American city is a blight on the spirit of the nation, and Detroit holds a special place in the American imagination because of its historic role in the auto industry, as well as the way it was held up as an example of a city saved by the successful auto bailout early in Obama's first term. Are there any creative national means of helping Detroit out with its problems? Is there nothing people elsewhere can do? What role is there for the federal government in helping to relieve the city of its crippling pension obligations? And what can we learn from the city's example about how government needs to adapt for the 21st-century economy? 2. Obamacare. The president spoke about Obamacare's widely shared rebate provisions last week. And yet as the law gets closer to the heavy-duty implementation phase, it's increasingly perceived as one more program for the low-income and minorities. And to the extent that it is -- as it should be, because it's trying to cover the uninsured, who are disproportionately low-income and minorities -- it may suffer the fate of all programs that mainly assist the low-income and minorities, which is to be valued without being broadly appreciated. Can Obama make a case for how his signature law will help the middle class, from within a middle-class framework? A new United Technologies-National Journal poll found that "just 36 percent of those surveyed say the law will 'make things better' for the middle class, while 49 percent say they expect it will 'make things worse.'" What is the middle-class case for backing Obamacare for those who are already insured, beyond a one-time rebate from some insurers and helping others? 3. Green-economy jobs. Obama gave a major speech on climate change at Georgetown University last month, and he made green jobs and the green economy a big part of his first term effort to reorient the economy for the future. For Obama, the economy and the climate have always been connected. How's that going? 4. Continued housing-market stagnation. The housing market continues to be a major drag on mobility and the economy, even as it has picked up quite a bit of steam. How does this fit into Obama's vision for change? Will he get into the nitty-gritty of housing policy or are we going to get mainly big-picture philosophy? 5. Role of government. One of the most interesting parts of the Liu-Hanauer argument is its willingness to be deeply critical of government's worst tendencies. For liberals, there's been an unfortunate side effect of the decades-long fight with conservatives to preserve government programs: They don't talk so much about the obvious harm to persons done by bad or ineffective and costly government programs, and too many have started defending government as if it is a good unto itself. Liu and Hanauer do not do that, and their critique of what government does wrong is a big part of their argument for using government wisely to build the middle-out economy. What programs is Obama willing to criticize? Sometimes it's seemed as if the major task of his second term is going to be cracking down on the federal bureaucracy, from the IRS to the Department of Justice to the State Department's diplomatic-security divisions. Restoring trust in government goes hand-in-hand with using it for new ends. What will the president say on that front? 
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| Late-Night Comedy Roundup: Oh the Places You'll Rule Posted: 24 Jul 2013 07:58 AM PDT NASA released photos of Earth recently taken from hundreds of millions of miles away, with our planet as a small dot. That gave Late Show host David Letterman opportunity to joke about things one can see from space, equating a popular New Jersey politician with the Great Wall of China. The Tonight Show's Jay Leno looked at the Transportation Security Administration's PreCheck program, suggesting that the TSA is looking to grab anything it can from passengers. He also mentioned the newest attempt by the Senate to replace paper money with coins in the United States, joking about the worth of American currency. On The Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert checked out some old news, touching on President Barack Obama's comments last week on race and wondering if Obama knows why he's being followed now. Colbert also looked at the story from last month of Domino's testing out a pizza delivery drone and explained the lack of wisdom in complaining about drone delivery times. The Royal Baby's arrival remains the main topic on late-night TV monologues. Conan O'Brien wondered if the baby's economic impact could possibly help a failing American city and highlighted Obama's reaction to the birth. The Daily Show looked at the baby's registry and its impact on global politics. Jessica Williams explained that someone could possibly end up getting the baby some impressive items. Fast forward to 3:40 to see Williams explain what gift a big spender could get the baby. Read more from Government Executive. 
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| Here Are Photos of Snow on Mars Posted: 24 Jul 2013 06:53 AM PDT ![[optional image description]](http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/science/assets_c/2013/07/800px-South_Polar_Cap_of_Mars_during_Martian_South_summer_2000-thumb-570x416-127879.jpg) The south polar cap of Mars as it appeared to the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) on April 17, 2000. The polar cap from left to right is about 260 miles across. (NASA/JPL/MSSS) Mars: dusty. Barren. Dry. Oh, and also! Icy. Sometimes snowy. Yep. We know that the Red Planet has ice under its rocky surface. And we know, or at least are pretty sure, that the Red Planet was once watery. Mars features riverbeds, after all, that were likely carved by liquid water. What we have been less sure about, however, has been where that liquid water came from. Did it bubble up from below the Martian surface? Or did it precipitate, falling onto the surface in the form of rain or snow? A new study gives new evidence for option B. The research, led by the Brown University geologist Kat Scanlon, examined four different locations on Mars that feature marks consistent with the liquid runoff from orographic precipitation -- rain or snow that falls, in particular, when prevailing winds are pushed upward by mountain ridges. The new findings, Space Ref puts it, offer "the most detailed evidence yet of an orographic effect on ancient Mars." In other words: Mars may once have been a regular little snow globe. To come to that finding, the researchers relied on what's known as the general circulation model (GCM) for Mars, which takes what we know about the gas composition of the early Martian atmosphere and simulates air movement based on those gases. They then used another model -- this one for orographic precipitation -- to try to figure out where, given the prevailing winds they'd gotten from the GCM, precipitation would be likely to fall on Mars. They repeated this process for each of their four Martian study areas. And: they found evidence of precipitation. And precipitation, in particular, that would have been heaviest at the heads of the densest valley networks. As Scanlon explained it: "Their drainage density varies in the way you would expect from the complex response of precipitation to topography. We were able to confirm that in a pretty solid way." In honor of that finding -- and to remind you that there is, indeed, snow on Mars -- here are some images of a snowy and/or icy and/or moist Red Planet. ![[optional image description]](http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/science/assets_c/2013/07/Marineris fog-thumb-570x738-127871.jpg) Image of the western part of Valles Marineris, taken by the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) aboard the European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft on May 25, 2004, showing dense ground fog. (ESA/DLR/FU) ![[optional image description]](http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/science/assets_c/2013/07/800px-Glacier_close_up_with_hirise-thumb-570x369-127867.jpg) A close-up of a glacier in the Ismenius Lacus, as seen by HIRISE under NASA's HiWish program, thought to contain sub-surface ice (NASA, modified by Jim Secosky) ![[optional image description]](http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/science/assets_c/2013/07/Screen Shot 2013-07-23 at 11.51.47 PM-thumb-570x478-127877.png) Star burst channels from carbon dioxide ice, as seen by HiRISE on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (NASA/JPL/University of Arizona) ![[optional image description]](http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/science/assets_c/2013/07/glacier-thumb-570x367-127873.jpg) Possible underground glaciers on Mars (NASA) ![[optional image description]](http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/science/assets_c/2013/07/triple_crater7001-thumb-570x368-127875.jpg) These three craters in the eastern Hellas region of Mars contain concealed glaciers detected by radar. On the left is how the surface looks today; on the right is an artist's rendering showing what the ice may look like underneath. (NASA/Caltech/JPL/UTA/UA/MSSS/ESA/DLR) ![[optional image description]](http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/science/assets_c/2013/07/Martian_north_polar_cap-thumb-570x549-127912.jpg) The Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) acquired this image of the Martian north polar cap in early northern summer on March 13, 1999. The light-toned surfaces are residual water ice that remains through the summer season. The nearly circular band of dark material surrounding the cap consists mainly of sand dunes formed and shaped by wind. The north polar cap is roughly 680 miles across. (NASA/JPL/MSSS) 
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| Posted: 24 Jul 2013 06:15 AM PDT  The site of an Al-Qaeda-linked suicide bombing outside the United Nations compound in Mogadishu, Somalia (Feisal Omar/Reuters) Early on, Al-Qaeda was a close-knit band of extremists with common cause, a centralized leadership, and a base from which to launch global operations. With the death of Osama bin Laden, the loss of a host of top commanders, and its retreat from Afghanistan, Al-Qaeda has become a diffuse group with no coherent center. But the emerging network of Al-Qaeda offshoots, with operations around the world, is no less dangerous. Call it Al-Qaeda 2.0 -- the evolution of a group whose directives once came from the top into a network of affiliates who are essentially on their own to export a fundamentalist brand of Islam and upstage secular governments in the Muslim world. Al-Qaeda's growing list of affiliates, by feeding off local grievances and exploiting political turmoil, are showing their strength in a number of countries, including Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Mali. Their rise, which has come with little tutelage from what remains of the Al-Qaeda brain trust in Pakistan, has sparked fears that they will continue to expand by exploiting local conflicts as battlegrounds for global jihad. U.S. Congressman Brad Sherman (California), the top Democrat at the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation, and Trade, said during a hearing on July 18 that the evolved Al-Qaeda remains a viable threat. "Al-Qaeda has failed to carry out a major attack in the United States since 9/11," Sherman said. "However, the danger posed by Al-Qaeda to the United States is still significant. Al-Qaeda's structure has become more decentralized, less of an integrated corporation, and closer to a franchise. Its chief terrorist activities are now being conducted by its local and regional affiliates." This week, hundreds of militants were back on the streets following coordinated, military-style attacks on prisons that were carried out by Al-Qaeda's main affiliate in Iraq. The prison breakout was seen as a potential boost to Al-Qaeda's fight in Syria. Nowhere is Al-Qaeda's evolution more apparent than in Syria, which has become the new battleground for extremist groups. Al-Qaeda's local affiliates have sided with Sunni rebels fighting against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, a member of the Alawite Shi'ite sect, which Sunni extremists regard as heretical. Shamila Chaudhary, a senior South Asia fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington, says the lawlessness in Syria has given Al-Qaeda a new home and a base from which to carry out its activities. She says it is Al-Qaeda's presence in conflicts such as Syria that still make it a potential threat to the region and the West. "The real threat to a lot of countries now is what other pockets of vulnerability exist around the globe that could give Al-Qaeda and its affiliates a home base. That creates new problems," Chaudhary says. "The Afghanistan-Pakistan environment was very much complicated by the fact that Al-Qaeda was living there. Now that few of them are there, it becomes a much more regional and domestic conflict. That means [Al-Qaeda] had to go somewhere else and that internationalizes conflicts because Al-Qaeda threatens the U.K., U.S., and other countries." In Pakistan, Al-Qaeda has allied with extremist groups such as the Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP), otherwise known as the Pakistani Taliban. The TTP, which is fighting to overthrow the Pakistani government and impose Shari'a law, follows the hard-line, anti-Shi'ite Wahhabi brand of Islam advocated by Al-Qaeda. Groups like the TTP are not only helping extend Al-Qaeda's presence and reach in their home countries, but also appear to be providing fighters for other theaters in which Al-Qaeda has aligned itself with local affiliates. TTP commanders recently claimed to have sent around 100 trained foot soldiers to fight alongside anti-Assad forces in Syria, and some TTP commanders have even claimed to have set up camps there. The Pakistani government, along with other TTP commanders, has rejected the claims. Chaudhary says the group's claims appear to be part of a propaganda campaign to portray the TTP as an organization with global reach. But if their claims are legitimate, she says, the entrance of Pakistani fighters into the conflict would indicate Al-Qaeda's growing presence in unstable, poorly governed countries in the region. Ibrahim Talib, head researcher and deputy director of the Center for Strategic Studies in Damascus, says there are more than 130,000 foreign jihadists currently fighting in Syria, with many having vowed allegiance to the Al-Qaeda franchise. "I can say with full confidence that there are more than 130,000 foreign and Arab terrorists who are fighting in Syria -- I can fully confirm this number, which is huge and dangerous," Talib says. "Tunisians come first, with about 15,000 fighters, then Libyans, then Saudis, then Egyptians and Palestinians followed by Lebanese. After that comes the [fighters] from outside the region. There are more than 40 countries that have citizens fighting in Syria." The increasing number of Sunni extremists among the opposition fighting in Syria has concerned secular rebels, who reportedly fear that Al-Qaeda-linked militants are hijacking their local struggle against the government and making the country a hotbed of international terrorism. That has led to infighting among the rebels. Groups like the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), a Syrian affiliate of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), have engaged recently in fierce battles with Al-Qaeda-linked rebels in northern Syria. Salih Muslim, head of the PYD, says his troops have encountered Taliban fighters among the ranks of the extremist Sunni groups. "Extremist Islamist forces like Al-Qaeda, the Al-Nusra Front, Ahrar Al-Sham, and other similar groups can go where they want and they can enter from any country they want," Muslim says. "They come from Turkey, Iraq, and other places. They have been there for a long time and make up a large portion of the [main rebel group] the Syrian Free Army. The Syrian Free Army has denied it but the extremist groups fight under their name. These groups are everywhere." This post appears courtesy of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. 
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| Posted: 24 Jul 2013 06:12 AM PDT  Moral philosopher James Q. Wilson wrote that humanity "has a moral sense." Whether that moral sense is grounded in evolution, the image of God, or some other foundation, it sometimes leads us to act better than we speak. There are surprising moments, in other words, when our pre-conscious emotional and moral wiring responds to a situation in a way our more studied judgments would not permit. A usually callous employee comforts a just-fired coworker in genuine sympathy. A man who hasn't acted chivalrously in all his days instinctively holds a door open for a pregnant woman. A teenager roaming in one of those teenage-mall herds apologizes to a passer-by whom her friends have just mocked. This week, as the U.K.'s Prince William and Kate Middleton were expecting their child at any moment, the impending birth received a galaxy's worth of media coverage. That the child would be heir to the throne was a motivating factor in all this attention, to be sure. I was interested not only for this reason but for a less-noticed one: Countless media reports bore news about the "royal baby." Why was this noteworthy? Because this term, to get exegetical for a moment, was not used to describe the future state of the child—once born and outside of the womb, that is. No, the American media used this phrase "royal baby" to describe the pre-born infant. It's not strange for leading pro-life thinkers like Eric Metaxas and Denny Burk to refer to a fetus as a "baby." It's not strange, either, for people to refer to a child they're expecting as a "baby," regardless of where they stand on the issue of abortion. It is strange, though, for outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post and Boston Globe--which purport to be neutral on the issue--to use this seemingly explosive phrase without so much as a qualification. And why is this strange? Because it codes a pro-life position into their description of the unborn child. I am a Christian who believes deeply in the sanctity of life, so for me, this language choice is revealing. The two most common arguments made today by thoughtful pro-choicers are as follows: a) the being in the womb has no distinct personhood when in the mother's body, as it is only a fetus and not yet a person (as seen in this ruling of a 2004 Houston court), or b) the fetus has some hard-to-define measure of personhood, yes, but a sufficient degree less personhood than the mother such that the mother may conscionably, though sometimes painfully terminate it (as in this New York Times essay). The linchpin of both of these arguments is location, closely related to dependence. If the fetus is born, it is outside the womb and relatively independent of the mother. If the fetus is unborn, it is inside the womb, part of the mother's body, and therefore dependent on the mother and subject to her decisions. These arguments—which really are basically one and the same—have persuaded many people. The result, virtually enshrined into media law, is this: Pre-born beings are to be called fetuses, and post-birth beings are to be called babies. Here's the New York Times referring to aborted babies as fetuses in the Kermit Gosnell trial, for example; NPR follows the same logic, as does CNN. Fetuses, it seems, are essentially subhuman. Outside of the mainstream media, the rhetoric builds from this impersonal foundation. Not only are pre-born children subhuman; they are considered "clumps of cells," in fact, or pre-human "seeds." In both the mainstream media and the pro-abortion movement, fetuses are future humans being knit together in a woman's body. They are not humans while in the womb. To kill them is not to kill a human, but something not-yet human. How strange was it, then, that leading news sources referred to the fetus of William and Kate as the "royal baby." There were no pre-birth headlines from serious journalistic sources like "Royal Clump of Cells Eagerly Anticipated" or "Imperial Seed Soon to Sprout." None of the web's traffic-hoarding empires ran "Subhuman Royal Fetus Soon to Become Human!" No, over and over again, one after another, from the top of the media food chain to the bottom, Kate's "fetus" was called, simply and pre-committedly, a baby. Why was this? Because, as I see it, the royal baby was a baby before birth. The media was right; gloriously, happily right. Like all babies-in-womb, in the months before Kate gave birth, the royal heir was spinning around, jabbing mom at inopportune moments, reacting in sheer physical bliss to the soothing sounds of dad's voice, getting hungry, becoming sad and even agitated when voices were raised in marital conflict, sleeping, sucking its thumb, enjoying certain kinds of music, waking mom up in the night in order to do more spinning around/kicking, and eating hungrily what mom ate. Thoughts for Both Sides of the Abortion Debate First, for pro-lifers, this event can serve as a reminder that human development is a process. There is a definite point at which a baby's heart starts beating (roughly six weeks), and Kate's child was surely able to do far more in the late stages of her pregnancy than in the early stages. It should be clear to all that the child is not independent in the womb, and that a one-month-old baby-in-womb has very different capabilities than a post-born baby. Pro-life rhetoric should not outstrip reality, as in the heat of the moment it sometimes can. This is not to deny the inherent personhood of a conceived child; it is to note that fetal development is medically obvious and a part of every child's narrative. Second, for pro-lifers, this event speaks to the happiness of bringing a child into a secure home. William and Kate are married. They have means, furthermore. They can buy not only clothes for their son, but the finest clothes; not only food, but the best food. This is not the case for a good number of women who make the choice to abort their children. They find out they are pregnant, they see the two little stripes on the home test, and their heart drops. They don't know what to do; they have no help from the man who impregnated them; they already work tirelessly, raise children, and have precious little in the bank. Though every life is precious, some are imperiled from the start. Now let's turn this around. First, for pro-choicers, the journalistic reaction to the royal baby may be a witness unto life. If the royal baby was not a clump of cells, then neither is anyone else's baby. Children, as the Christian tradition has argued from the Bible, possess inherent dignity and worth (Genesis 1; Psalm 139). Many religious groups concur. If this is true, then abortion is not good. Second, for pro-choicers, this strange cultural moment is a reminder that dependence does not mean unhumanness. The child of William and Kate will need assistance to live for many days, months, and even years yet. If the standard of personhood is unaided independence, then the royal couple do not have a son even now. They still have a clump of cells. When the child is ten, or maybe 12, he will be able to care for himself at a rudimentary level without the assistance of others and the presence of his parents, especially his mother. Independence and location are not and cannot be the markers of personhood, in other words. If this is so, then our elderly loved ones are not people; our handicapped brothers and sisters are subhuman; our depressed and despairing friends, whom we must diligently and self-sacrificially care for, have ceased to exist. But all this is not so. To be human, in fact, is to be anything but independent, whether one thinks of the benefits of family members, friends, spouses--and perhaps, persons unseen yet powerfully perceived. What's Next? But in a society that has moved to a stunning degree away from pro-choice identification and toward some form of pro-life conviction, it may also be that the American moral sense, short as its reach is, uncertain as its effects are, will, after much travail and division, shelter the babies that now spin, kick, and play in their mother's wombs. Whether royal or unroyal, they are just that, after all: babies. 
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