Master Feed : The Atlantic

Who Is Roger Ferguson and Could He Be the Next Fed Chair?
From the Supreme Court Steps to a Museum's Collection, via Facebook
What Happened to Economic Mobility in America?
Too Popular for Their Own Good: China Restricts TV Singing Competitions
Google's New TV Gadget, the Chromecast
In 1955, Aldous Huxley Wrote This Very Creepy Story for The Atlantic
The Tragic Drama of Anthony Weiner
China's Culinary Diversity in One Map
A Map of American Electricity Use in 1921
Life Advice From the First American to Summit Everest
The Lesson of the L.A. Angels: Don't Pay Big for MLB Stars After They're 30
The New American Dream in an Age of Uncertainty
The Rise of the Christian Left, How to Raise a Royal, Why Vitamins Are a Scam: The New Atlantic Weekly
Does the World's Oldest Fabric Have a Future in High Fashion?
Penis Jokes on the Cover of the New Yorker: A Complete History
What We Talk About When We Talk About Privacy
NASA ... Like the Post Office in Space: Late-Night Comedy Roundup
A Lost Scottish Island, George Orwell, and the Future of Maps
Why Investors in China Love Detroit's Bankruptcy
Could the Government Get a Search Warrant for Your Thoughts?
In Going After Texas Voting Policies, Holder Takes John Roberts at His Word
What It Was Like to Negotiate With North Koreans 60 Years Ago
Next for Your Reading List: 'Mother Daughter Me'
Are the Feds Asking Tech Companies for User Passwords?
The To Do List's Radically Practical Message About Virginity

Who Is Roger Ferguson and Could He Be the Next Fed Chair?

Posted: 26 Jul 2013 06:08 PM PDT

Reuters

For some reason, the Obama administration seems determined not to pick Janet Yellen as the next Fed Chair.

It's odd. Yellen is the current Fed number two, she was a Fed governor and regional president before that, and she's been one of the intellectual architects of its unconventional policies. In other words, she's an almost perfect candidate -- and it would take a really perfect candidate like Christina Romer to justify picking anybody else. But, as Annie Lowrey and Binyamin Appelbaum report, Yellen has bad blood with Obama's chief economic adviser Gene Sperling going back to when they served in the Clinton administration, and that's been enough to make them look elsewhere.

That elsewhere was Larry Summers. But the backlash against him has been so intense -- 18 Senate Democrats sent Obama a letter conspicuously endorsing Yellen in response -- that they're going to need a new elsewhere. Now, in a better world that elsewhere wouldn't be one at all. It'd be Janet Yellen. As I've explained, I think she's the better choice than Summers, or any other contender, on the monetary policy-making merits. But the administration has apparently decided she's seen as too soft on inflation to have much credibility with markets when it's time to tighten -- which means she'd end up having to tighten even more. Of course, this is a mostly made-up argument by people who have worked on Wall Street to keep out people who haven't. But hey, you've got to throw something against the wall if you're going to ignore the obvious candidate.

So where does that leave the administration? Well, Ezra Klein reports that if Summers really has been trial ballooned out of the job that a darkhorse like Roger Ferguson might get it rather than Yellen. Now, Ferguson doesn't have the name recognition of the other contenders -- that's what makes him a darkhorse! -- but he does have the resume to be taken very seriously. He's currently the president and CEO of institutional investing behemoth TIAA-CREF, and before that he was a Fed governor and Vice-Chair from 1997 to 2006. In other words, he has both the market and policymaking chops the administration wants.

It looks like there would be a lot of continuity between a Ferguson Fed and the Bernanke Fed. (They were colleagues, after all). Both think a determined central bank can still boost the economy when short-term interest rates hit zero -- a so-called liquidity trap -- though how much is uncertain. As you can see below, Ferguson cautiously supported QE2 back in 2010, when conservatives really started attacking the Fed, in much the same terms as Bernanke: It wasn't clear how much bond-buying would help, but it was worth trying, potential costs notwithstanding.

Not that this was new for him. Ferguson has thought about what central banks can do in a liquidity trap for a long time, and has supported unconventional policies for about as long. Indeed, back in 2003, he gave a speech at the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the central bank for central banks, that was quite Bernanke-ian. Looking at Japan's lost decade and our then near-falling prices, Ferguson listed the dangers of deflation -- higher real rates, higher debt burdens, and harder real wage adjustments -- and asked what central banks could do about it in a liquidity trap. Plenty, he answered. Central banks could buy longer-term bonds to push down longer-term borrowing costs. Or they could promise to keep short-term rates at zero for a long time. These are, of course, exactly what the Bernanke Fed has done the past few years -- the former is what economists call quantitative easing and the latter forward guidance.

A few weeks later, Ferguson thought the Fed needed to get ready to take these unconventional tools out of the kit. Remember, back in mid-2003, the economy was stuck in a jobless recovery that was literally so: unemployment was still rising even as inflation and interest rates were falling uncomfortably close to zero. It sure looked like an economy that was turning Japanese rather than turning the corner. And Ferguson didn't want to wait too long, like he thought the Bank of Japan had, to do something about it. Here's what he said during the Fed's policy meeting that June (pages 51-52):

So that inclines me, while not to a decisive conclusion, toward a pure quantitative approach and a focus on reserves for a couple of reasons. One is that in some sense we have operated quite successfully that way both in the emergencies of September 11 and more broadly. It is something that central banks certainly know how to do, and we can communicate reserve targeting very clearly. I accept the fact that the interactions between pure quantitative easing and the outcome with respect to the real economy are potentially uncertain, but that ties back to the need to communicate clearly.

So I conclude, as Governor Bernanke did, that we really are thinking about here is a package of quantitative operations and communications. Though my comments are divided into what to say and what to do, the reality is that they work in tandem. Therefore, I believe we ought to be thinking about using both of those tools simultaneously.

In other words, he wanted the Fed to think about doing then what it's doing now. So there wouldn't be much difference between a Ferguson Fed and the Bernanke Fed. It would promise to keep rates low for long to keep the recovery on track, and it would buy bonds when necessary to keep inflation on track. (And it wouldn't taper its bond-buying until core PCE inflation, which just hit a 50-year low, gets closer to target). It'd be a good, but maybe not good enough, Fed.

But Ferguson does have a big, red flag draped around him. That's his record as a regulator. As Neil Irwin of the Washington Post points out, Ferguson was in charge of the Fed's bank supervision during the bubble years -- and that didn't exactly go well. It's particularly damaging because the next Fed Chair will have to decide just how forcefully to enforce all the new rules in Dodd-Frank -- which is why Senate Democrats are so keen that whoever it is be a good regulator.

There are plenty of reasons to like Ferguson as the next Fed Chair, but none to like him more than Yellen. They both have experience as central bankers. And they both have experience thinking about central banking in a liquidity trap. But Ferguson has only thought about these things. Yellen has done them. And she's done them with the people the next Fed Chair is going to have do them with. That matters. Now, Yellen's collaborative style sometimes gets attacked (and Ezra Klein is right that there are hints of sexism in these attacks), but consensus-building is a plus at the Fed. Monetary policy is all about credibility, and in a liquidity trap, credibility is all about durability. With rates at zero, the Fed has to make promises about what it will do tomorrow to get the economy moving today. But that won't work if there isn't a solid enough majority to make markets think that those promises will stick. In other words, the Fed needs a persuader-in-chief. It needs Yellen.

Monetary policy might be hard, but this shouldn't be.

From the Supreme Court Steps to a Museum's Collection, via Facebook

Posted: 26 Jul 2013 01:27 PM PDT

NMAJH/Facebook

Last week a container arrived at the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia. Inside was the newest piece in the museum's permanent collection, and, in a sense, the newest physical object of Official Jewish History, if that's what the museum's imprimatur conveys.

Shira Goldstein, the museum's exhibitions coordinator, opened it up and pulled out the poster it held. As far as art go, the poster wasn't much -- text on a white background. But what it said and where it had been imbued the poster with some greater significance. In bright rainbow letters it proclaimed: MAZEL TOV (to EVERYONE!). Three weeks earlier, on June 26, 2013, it had been outside the U.S. Supreme Court, held up in celebration as the Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act.

That the poster had arrived at the museum at all was a bit of a miracle in itself, a small miracle, facilitated by the formal structure Facebook gives to the social networks we are all a part of.

A colleague of Goldstein's had first noticed the poster in an image on the New York Times's website, part of a gallery the newspaper ran covering the day. "We immediately knew it represented a wonderful Jewish response to the Court's decision and thought it would be a great way to tell the story of this historic moment," Goldstein wrote to me. But how would they find it? Who had the poster?

Goldstein had the museum put up call for the poster on its Facebook page, which 46 people re-shared. Other people wrote their own posts announcing the museum's search. Additionally, Goldstein reached out to a couple of Jewish programs and institutions in DC, asking them to publicize her efforts. Two days later she got an email from Cody Pomeranz, a summer intern at the Center for American Progress. He had the poster.

How exactly the search made its way to Pomeranz is a bit unclear. Here's what we do know: His colleague at CAP, Hannah Slater, is the one who put the whole thing together. On Friday the 28th she opened up Facebook and saw a post from a friend of hers named Adam Berman, who had shared it from a friend of his, whom Slater does not know. The text was signed by yet a third person, "Adam S.," whom neither Slater nor Pomeranz knows. "I have no idea how many people may have shared the message before I saw it," Slater says. Here's what the post she saw looked like:

NMAJH/Facebook

How were these people all connected? They didn't know each other through Facebook; they knew each other from growing up or summer camp or college or work. Such networks have always existed, and they've always been used to convey news and gossip and opportunities. What Facebook did was to give those natural social ties a technological layer, and that layer allowed a message to spread far and wide at a speed that would once have been unimaginable.

"What's crazy," Pomeranz says, "is how many people were talking about it." After he had contacted the museum, he went back read through the Facebook comments of people searching for the poster. "I think I remember one guy saying, 'I hope this mensche steps up!' It was a weird feeling, in a good way."

Left: Pomeranz with the poster at the CAP office. Right: Goldstein with the poster in Philadelphia at the National Museum of American Jewish History

Pomeranz credits another intern with the idea for the sign. "I'm Jewish and I tend to say 'mazel tov' a lot in place of 'congratulations,' " he wrote to me. "One of my fellow interns said, 'Why don't you do that for a sign?' " Pomeranz liked the idea, so he grabbed the markers and got to work.

"Back in September," he adds, "I saw my oldest sister get married. It was a Jewish wedding, and when her husband broke the glass and we all jumped up and roared "Mazel Tov!" It was an incredible moment of joy, love, and family."

"Everyone deserves that moment, regardless of sexual orientation" he continues. "So after I finished 'Mazel Tov,' I added, in parentheses, 'to EVERYONE!'."

What Happened to Economic Mobility in America?

Posted: 26 Jul 2013 01:19 PM PDT

FRONTLINE

Over the last 20 years, two middle class American families -- the Stanleys and the Neumanns -- have done all the right things. Milwaukee natives, they worked hard, learned news skills, and tried to show their children that strivers would be rewarded.

But their lives -- as captured in an extraordinary Frontline documentary -- are an American calamity. Followed by filmmakers for two decades, they move from dead-end job to dead-end job, one of the couples' divorces, and most of their children spiral downward economically, not up.

The Stanleys and the Neumanns are a microcosm of the middle class that President Barack Obama -- and House Republicans -- will spar over for the remainder of Obama's presidency. And they are part of a global trend. Across industrialized nations, income inequality is growing and people like the Stanleys and Neumanns are the losers.

"Mobility is a two-edged sword," said Miles Corak, an economist at the University of Ottawa who has studied income inequality across countries. "And you're looking at the other edge of the sword."

At the very top, life is getting sweeter. As my colleague Chrystia Freeland noted last month, the global "winner-take-all economy" is intensifying.

A June study found that the number of people worldwide with more than $1 million to invest soared to a record 12 million in 2012, a 9.2 percent increase over the previous year. The number of ultra rich -- the 111,000 people with investable assets of at least $30 million -- surged 11 percent.

The Stanleys and the Neumanns, meanwhile, are falling behind. Whatever your politics, please watch this film. These two families, one black and one white, put a human face on the polarized debate about what is happening to the American middle class.

Conservative viewers may feel that the two couples made mistakes -- failing to go to college, for example, or not moving out of a dying industrial town like Milwaukee. Liberal viewers may see them as victims of a globalized economy that rewards the few spectacularly and relegates the many to low-paying jobs.

Whatever the cause, their spiral is startling.

When filmmakers Bill Moyers, Kathleen Hughes and Tom Casciato, first visited them in 1991, the family's wages from union factory work comfortably supported them. In the early 1990s, however, as Milwaukee factories moved overseas, both of the Stanleys, and Tony Neumann, the Neumann patriarch, lost their jobs. They took lower-paying work and, to makes ends meet, Tony Neumann's wife, Terry, also had to enter the workforce.

Throughout the 2000s, the couples struggled on. Claude Stanley, the Stanley patriarch, waterproofed basements, started his own home inspection business and became a minister. By 2012, an illness has saddled him with enormous medical bills and his business had failed. At 59, he was a city forestry department worker making $26,000 a year trimming trees and collecting garbage. His wife Jackie became a realtor, but never gained a foothold in a declining housing market. Only one of their five children finished college, paying tuition with credit cards.

After his layoff, Tony Neumann took a low-paying overnight factory job, and rarely saw his wife and three children. His wife Terry worked as a security guard, forklift operator and home healthcare attendant. By 2012, the couple, high school sweethearts, had divorced and lost their home through foreclosure.

The children in both families fared even worse. Those who attended at least some college had steady work. Those who did not had low-paying jobs or no work at all.

Many also had failed relationships. As of 2012, one Neumann son was a high school dropout who had fathered two children with two different women. The other was unemployed and had fathered three children with two different women. Defying stereotypes, the Stanleys, who are black, proved to be a more stable family than the Neumanns.

In one of the film's most wrenching scenes, Terry Neumann visits the house she lost to foreclosure, where she had expected to live out her American dream. The family that bought it at auction for $38,000 looks on as she tours the home, wondering what went wrong.

"The way the economy is going, no, I don't think anybody is going to be financially secure, truthfully," she tells Moyers near the end of the film. "And we'll just work until we collapse and keel over and die."

Recent studies have found that economic mobility is stagnating in the United States. Where one grows up and who one's parents are increasingly determine a child's economic future. And a smaller percentage of Americans escape poverty than their peers in other wealthy nations, including Canada, Germany, Japan, France and Australia.

On Wednesday, President Obama again vowed to change all that. In the first of what administration officials say will be a series of speeches about the middle class, Obama repeated a laundry list of economic proposals that are stalled in Congress. House Republicans, meanwhile, vowed to do everything in their power to block Obama and slash government spending.

Americans, understandably, are tuning out the noise. Washington's deadlock is likely to continue. Yet the problem is real and global.

Corak, the Canadian researcher, said workers like the Neumanns and Stanleys who lack college degrees or specialized skills are struggling across many industrialized nations. Shifting manufacturing jobs overseas to developing nations as well as sweeping technological change has led to stagnant middle class wages.

But a recent study he authored found that the dynamic played out differently in different nations. In Canada, more equal public education and healthcare systems, as well as the lack of a large housing bubble, helped mitigate the impact of globalization. In the United States, meanwhile, families more often struggled on their own.

Corak said the polarization of the U.S. inequality debate puzzled him. Yes, an individual's actions mattered, such as the Neumann's divorce. But global economic trends beyond each family's control affected them as well, as did the quality of public education and healthcare.

"You can still accept that families are very, very important," he said, "without rejecting the economic issues."

On balance, Obama's proposals will do more to aid struggling middle class families than those of far-right House Republicans. White House officials vow that this Obama drive to aid the middle class will be different.

For the sake of the Neumanns and Stanleys -- and millions of families like them -- hopefully they're right.

This article initially appeared on Reuters.com, a sister site.

Posted: 26 Jul 2013 01:08 PM PDT

An advertisement for The Voice of China's Season 2 Premiere (via Weibo)

Last year, the popular television show The Voice of China dominated chatter on social media, edging out the case of Bo Xilai, a political scandal of epic proportions, to become the number-one trending topic on Weibo for weeks on end. Having witnessed just how popular a domestic reality talent show can be, China's major provincial television networks have begun competing for viewers of their own, perhaps hoping their shows will be the next Voice of China. Besides The Voice of China, which will air its second season, and Super Boy, once the most popular talent show aired by Hunan Television, over 20 reality talent shows were due to be launched this year, some of which would air simultaneously, fiercely competing for viewership.

MORE FROM TLN

But their hopes and best efforts may not have a chance to bear fruit.

On July 24, the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television (SAPPRFT, formerly SARFT) announced that it would implement "regulations and controls" on the nation's singing competition shows so as to "avoid the monotony of television programs, provide more options for the audience and satisfy people's diverse demands for television shows."

In the eyes of SAPPRFT, all television programs must "avoid extravagance, luxury, sensationalism and flashy programming, as well as formats that cause too much excitement." In order to accomplish these goals, from July 24 on, no satellite television networks are allowed to produce new singing competition shows; shows that have finished filming but have not yet been launched are to be pulled until the summer vacation period is over; and shows already airing should adjust their scheduling to avoid conflicting with other programs.

A day after the announcement of these regulation, the Guangming Daily, another Communist Party newspaper in China, issued an editorial criticizing the quality of domestic reality talent shows and describing how badly they were in need of reform.

While some have embraced SAPPRFT's latest move -- Weibo user @小叮chichi wrote it was "great that I no longer have to put up with endless threads about singing contests," -- a greater number of Chinese people have expressed their disappointment, if not anger, with the regulations. Although SAPPRFT attributed its decision to "the consideration of feedback from the viewership at large,"most people rejected this attempt to claim representation. As user @老WANG-同志 stressed, "I am not 'the viewership at large,' nor am I 'the masses of People,' SAPPRFT better not try to 'represent' me."

Some seemed fed up with SAPPRFT's endless regulations. As Weibo user @星逸文化陈新峰 remarked, "A positive word for [the new policy] is 'regulation,' but in essence, it is monopoly and oppression. Lacking competitiveness, [Chinese Central Television] can take advantage of administrative measures to gain an advantage, but is there any value in that victory?"

Others trusted that television would continue much as before despite the new regulations. User @风弄 offered up his reasoning: "If the audience doesn't like the show, the ratings will drop; if the ratings of a certain kind of show drop, television networks will in turn cut similar programs or adjust the shows to attract more viewers. Just have faith in the market and the audiences themselves."

The market, as reflected in the ratings, seems to welcome such talent shows. When The Voice of China had its Season 2 premiere on July 12, it drew 5.55 million Weibo users into discussions about the show, and the hashtag #The Voice of China remained the number-one trending topic on Weibo throughout the three-hour show. Meanwhile, 3 million social media users also tweeted about Super Boy while it was on air. Time will tell what, if any, effect SAPPRFT's new regulations will have on Chinese viewers' love of vocal artists pursuing their dreams.

This post also appears at Tea Leaf Nation, an Atlantic partner site.

Google's New TV Gadget, the Chromecast

Posted: 26 Jul 2013 01:04 PM PDT

For the past couple days, I've been playing with Google's new $35 device for your TV, the Chromecast. It works simply: You plug it into the back of your TV and a power source, hook it up to the wifi through your computer, and thereafter, you can toss ("cast") anything from a Chrome browser tab to the television.

While friends of the blog like Wired's Mat Honan are excited about the "miracle device," others like Buzzfeed's John Hermann think it's no great shakes. John Gruber argues, "I just don't get why anyone would want this."

Viewed largely as a video transmission gadget, Gruber's point is well taken. There are at least two good options for getting computery video onto a TV: Apple TV (at $99) and Roku (at $50). Chromecast is $35. The Apple TV has Airplay and is all-around a bit more capable (though no Flash allowed). The Roku lets you access Netflix and Amazon Instant Video, and it works fine.

But I don't think Chromecast is just for video. It's for anything. It's fun and a little magical to be able to cast literally anything to your biggest screen. Sure, there's Netflix or a streaming music service like Rdio or Spotify. But there's also a random YouTube video embedded in a blog post. There's the New York Times. There's pornography and the Prelinger Archives and your Gmail and big old PDFs and barackobamaisyournewbicycle.com. You can put anything on that screen, and Google makes it feel effortless.

I know putting stuff from your computer or phone screen onto your TV is not novel. I've had a Roku box and plenty of display adapters for a long time. But when something works as easily as Chromecast does, the capability becomes more real. You think of it.

To me, Chromecast doesn't so much "solve a problem" so much as create a new one: Why can't I put my content, whatever it is, on any screen I encounter, at the touch of a button? After only two days of using Chromecast, I feel like that's how the technological world should work.

Will the Chromecast be a commercial success? I have no idea. Google's marketing thus far has been a little boneheaded. But I like it, and it works as advertised, and it makes me feel like I'm a little further into the future. For $35, that's a good deal.

In 1955, Aldous Huxley Wrote This Very Creepy Story for The Atlantic

Posted: 26 Jul 2013 12:39 PM PDT

In 1955, "Voices," a short story by Brave New World author Aldous Huxley, was published in The Atlantic. Huxley's satire describes one night in the life of Pamela, a disgruntled orphan, and her high-class relations, who (as Pamela likes to remind the reader) have no hope of ever understanding her.

The story begins with a party, hosted by Pamela's aunt. It's all pleasantries until, halfway through the evening, one of the guests, Miss Dillon, starts to hear voices at the dinner table. All of the others listen intently, enraptured. They can hear them, too. When Pamela realizes how seriously her aunt is taking these voices, she decides to try to recreate them -- a game that eventually becomes a murder.

Just before "Voices" appeared in The Atlantic, Huxley -- who would have turned 119 today -- wrote The Doors of Perception, a famous collection of essays about how taking mescaline led him to enlightenment. He wrote this biting satire of upper-class life a year later. Below is an excerpt from "Voices," and you can read the full text here.

There was silence in the lily pool. And now she would refresh her abhorrence of the humans. Keeping to the shadows, Pamela walked over to the house. There they were, behind the plate glass, like things in an aquarium. Mr. Bull was doing the crossword in the London Times. In the yellow sofa beyond the fireplace, Aunt Eleanor was busy on the embroidery of that altar cloth for Bishop Hicks. Beside her sat Alec Pozna with a book, reading aloud. Under the bristles of his mustache those juicy sea anemones that were his lips moved steadily, inaudibly. He turned a page and Pamela had a glimpse of the title: Spiritual Something or Other -- the second word escaped her. She smiled sardonically, remembering that phrase she had read in an article by some Austrian psychoanalyst -- "Menopause Spirituality." In Aunt Eleanor's case it was Menopause Spirituality combined with Senility Spiritualism. You could express it in the form of an equation: -

"Change of Life multiplied by Fear of Death equals
Spiritual Something or Other plus
Give us a Message."

Result: poor old Mr. Bull had to listen to voices, and the unspeakable Pozna (whose personal taste, as she knew, ran to Mickey Spillane and naked girls with bullet holes two inches below the navel) had to spend his evenings reading about Mental Prayer and Religious Experiences.

A wave of heat ran up her spine. Like centipedes, like innumerable caterpillars, crawling up her throat, crawling over her breasts -- horrible beyond words and yet one wished it could go on forever.

How peaceful they looked in their aquarium, how domestic, and at the same time how extraordinarily high-class! Like an illustration to a story about Mother's Day -- but Mother's Day at the Vanderbilts'. She made a grimace of disgust and turned back toward the summer house. "Loathsome," she whispered, then touched her face and tried again. "Absolutely loathsome."

This time, it seemed to Pamela, there was a real improvement. Much less breath coming out between the teeth, hardly any movement of the lips. And the throat, the whole face, felt easier, looser, altogether more natural.

She entered the dark cavern of the summerhouse and, feeling all at once very strong and confident, resumed her seat.

"I'll show them!" she said aloud.

"I'll show them," repeated the echo in the vaulted roof.

A wave of heat ran up her spine. There was a prickling inside her ears, and from under her arms there issued a kind of crawling. Like centipedes, like innumerable caterpillars, crawling up her throat, crawling over her breasts -- horrible beyond words and yet one wished it could go on forever. The sensation disappeared as suddenly as it had come. She drew a deep breath and set to work again.

"Loathsome." That was good, she said to herself approvingly, that was very good indeed.

"They're vermin," she went on -- and how absurdly easy it was to get a whistle even on a V! "They're lice, they're bedbugs." And then, "Insect powder!"

She saw a vision of herself spraying Aunt Eleanor with an enormous Flit Gun, sprinkling DDT on Pozna and Mr. Bull. What antics, what a buzzing and a flapping! She laughed aloud. Overhead in the plaster dome, the echoes gasped and cackled. The vision faded, the noise of the merriment died away. Pamela wiped her eyes and prepared to go on with her practicing. What should it be now? More about vermin -- or something else? Suddenly there was a little whisper behind her.

"Not a joke," she seemed to hear; and then, much more distinctly, "I'd really like to kill them."

She started violently, turned and, at the sight of that huge pressure looming out of the darkness above her, was filled for a brief appalling moment with mortal terror. Then she laughed unsteadily. It was only Venus, and she was obviously getting whispers in her brain.

She raised her hands to her face.

"I'd really like to kill them," she repeated.

Under the cool skin not a muscle had stirred; the breath came quietly, evenly, and it came through the nostrils. Incredulous, she tried again.

"Kill them," she whispered, "murder them. Murder them!"

Even at the highest pitch of emphasis her fingers recorded nothing.

"I've made it!" she cried exultantly.

"Made it," said the echo.

And then, in the ensuing silence, she heard the tiny voice again. "Break her neck," it said.

For a moment it was like being on a roller coaster - the bottom falling out of the stomach, the heart rushing up into the throat. Then she remembered a phrase that had been used in her psychology class at UCLA - "Unconscious verbalization" - and was able to smile indulgently at her own terrors. Unconscious verbalization - but of course! And meanwhile, Pamela reminded herself triumphantly, she had made it! She was ready to go and wipe the floor with them, ready to take her revenge, to get some of her own back - at last.

The Tragic Drama of Anthony Weiner

Posted: 26 Jul 2013 12:28 PM PDT

weiner.banner.ap.jpg — Bebeto Matthew/Associated Press

NEW YORK -- The race to be the next mayor of New York poured itself -- along with the humidity -- into an un-air-conditioned basement meeting room in the Lincoln Houses off 135th Street in Manhattan on Saturday night. Pipes layered with years of thickly-applied paint covered much of the ceiling, while the normally bare walls were adorned with resident-captured pictures of the defects of the New York City Housing Authority project in East Harlem -- trash piles where they shouldn't be, disgusting elevators, a demand to "Fix My Sink Now!"

Older men and women -- mainly women -- waited in the sweltering heat for the candidates to arrive for a Democratic primary forum, which was sponsored by the Reverend Al Sharpton's National Action Network, the Urban Justice Center and Community Voices Heard. It was supposed to start at 6:30, but the candidates dribbled in late for their overnight stays with families in the projects -- just one more adventure in their contest to be the next mayor of a city of dizzying wealth and gritty need, where poverty has risen three years in a row, the median household income is just under $50,000, and the majority of general-election voters are minorities.

Weiner arrived last. Sharpton had already given up on waiting and started the forum. Carrying a duffel bag, Weiner looked distracted and chastened. It was two days before his most recent sexting escapades were revealed. The other candidates spoke one by one, introduced by Sharpton, who had just come off a day of leading rallies on behalf of justice for Trayvon Martin. City Council Speaker Christine Quinn was warm and measured. Bill Thompson, John Liu, and Bill deBlasio were exactly as compelling as you'd expect of people who were, respectively, the city's former comptroller, comptroller, and public advocate. And Weiner? He was, as is his wont, on fire.

"The fact of the matter is for too long people have been ducking responsibility. Way back in 1997 ... I don't know how many of you remember this. Do you remember that the stairwells in public-housing projects were bursting into flames?" he asked.

"Yes!" affirmed the audience. "That's right!"

"I took on Rudy Giuliani back then."

"I did too!" said Carmen Quinones, an East Harlem district leader.

"You did too. We had hearings all around the city."

"That's right!"

"And what did it turn out happened? It turned out Rudy Giuliani's cousin's nephew's brother-in-law got the contract for the paint and it was creating fires all over the place."

"That's right!"

"And we stopped it. We reversed it. We made it better."

"These are good people who are running for mayor," he went on. "These are all good people. We are devoted to change. Reverend Sharpton was right to call us all together because it reminds us, for all the things that divide us in this city -- and how we come from different neighborhoods, we root for different ball teams, we have different religions, different culture, different politics -- we are all unified by one abiding thing that's represented by the aspirations the Housing Authority was built upon. We all want to leave a family, a city, a life a little better than the one we found."

It was another in a long list of Weiner connecting moments, moments that had helped propel him to the front of the pack in polling mid-summer. Watching him on the stump in New York over a period of two weeks, Weiner reminded me of a warmer, rawer, Jewish John Edwards -- all momentum and connection and down-with-the-downtrodden positioning that was at once deeply calculated and totally heartfelt. Quinn, to continue the 2008 comparisons, seemed to be playing the role of Hillary Clinton -- the establishment frontrunner, female, more of an old-school transactional politician. Her remarks, as at the First Central Baptist Church on a Sunday in Staten Island, drew fewer cheers and aroused a less enthusiastic reply, but were peppered with a greater array of references to leading figures in the community she'd had a history of working with. (There doesn't appear to be any Obama in this race, though Thompson has surged with Weiner's collapse.)

The mayoral race is of interest to the national press primarily as a referendum on the comeback chances of the former seven-term congressman from Queens. It is of interest because of his 2011 sexting scandal and resignation, the redemption narrative of a disgraced national figure seeking to return to national life by governing one of toughest cities there is to run.

But on the ground, that's not what the contest is about. It is about privatization. It is about the poor. Ending stop and frisk. Unemployment, especially among the city's substantial black and Hispanic population. It's about what deBlasio had called "a tale of two cities." It's about the fact that New York City, after nearly 10 years of Republican (and independent) rule, is ready for a Democrat. Hungry for a Democrat. The extra final term of the Bloomberg administration has made some in the wealthier precincts of the city wish he could be appointed mayor for life. But to many others in the other New York, it has felt like democracy has been on hold for the last four years, stopped up like a rusty municipal-housing pipe. Nearly three-quarters of New Yorkers regret allowing him that final term.

The most interesting question about Anthony Weiner is not about the nature of his ego, or even his recent online sexual adventures, but what New Yorkers saw in him to begin with. Because they saw something.

It wasn't just name recognition that made him a contender, immediately and improbably, in a city that absorbed his disgrace with surprising generosity. Weiner quickly emerged as the best speaker on the stump in the Democratic mayoral field. Raw. Passionate. Hungry, as only someone seeking redemption as fervently as he is can be.

It's too easy to say narcissism is what drove him back into public life, even knowing the revelations that were yet to come.

People always say individuals go into politics to feed their egos, but in truth it's more complicated than that. Writers can spend their whole lives feeding their egos alone in a room, typing out their souls.

Politicians, people who are drawn to politics, they're different. They are people who have a high need for contact with large groups of people. They love crowds, parties, associations, institutions -- any place that brings people together for a purpose or a function, that's where they want to be. In the thick of the group, but apart from it, its aider and abettor, its friend, its representative.

"What laws do you want me to pass?" Weiner asked a group of gay men at Lida, an Italian Bistro on Frederick Douglass Avenue in Harlem, on a Sunday earlier this month. He asked the same question of a little girl on the avenue, who turned the question over before declaring, "school only on the weekends!" and giggling. A politician on the stump spends a lot of time complimenting people, observing the great mass of humanity, gauging them, engaging them, admiring them, giving them something to talk about.

Weiner has been a celebrity on the stump. I watched as people thronged to take pictures with him at the 111th Street Boys Old Timers festival on a recent Sunday, partly out of support for him, and partly to take home a new experience, a souvenir of a hot day whose highlight might otherwise have been time with friends and an $8 plate of arroz con gandules with yucca and roasted pork.

Weiner is a lover of people. And people appreciated the love, returned it in kind. Eight million people in the naked city, and most of them feel neglected by their politicians, most of the time. There's something to be said for someone who just spends time on the ground. Someone who is not a billionaire, was not complicit in the billoinaire's overturning of term-limits, is not -- as Ann Valdez, a housing activist from Coney Island, described Quinn -- "Bloomberg in a skirt."

Weiner wasn't like the other politicians who came in an SUV, hopped out and gave a speech, then dashed back in and drove away, people told me. "He hung out, he spoke, he visited with the vendors," observed Andrew Troup-Major at Lida's, saying he liked the way Weiner actually spent time at the city's gay-pride festival.

Weiner believes in being there. At the 111th Steet festival, he spoke briefly in Spanish, saying the day was for music, not for politicians. "You gonna be all right, Tony!" Angel Rodrigues of East Harlem called out to him. Forgiveness was an easy generosity. "So what? Everybody makes mistakes," he said of Weiner's past. "He was seven terms. He was good. He was for the working people," affirmed Malik Kileen-Roacher of 102nd Street, who was still deciding between Weiner and deBlasio. David Aviles of the Bronx liked Weiner's frankness. "All politics is full of crap," he said. "He admitted to his mistakes and he mans up," chimed in Sonia Vasquez, also of the Bronx. She felt special sympathy, she said, because she knew what kind of trouble social media can cause. "I sent a picture of my boob to the wrong person," she said. It happens.

Weiner was in his element. The patter and prattle, the questions and compliments and expressions of delight and surprise, the hugs and kisses and close-talking pleasantries, all of it was fun.

But the Weiner operation was always fairly lean, like the candidate. It didn't have a press secretary and a communications director and a bunch of messaging consultants. It had one media aide, a former city education department spokesperson, plus whatever help she could get from interns.

That was always the mystery about his campaign. It lacked the trappings of a traditional campaign apparatus. It lacked the ground operation and deep institutional connections of the Quinn campaign.

Now it's clear why -- he was a momentum candidate waiting for the moment when it would all fall apart (and probably also hoping that moment would never come).

The list of politicians who have extramarital dalliances is long -- much longer than this list of names that follow: Eliot Spitzer, Bill Clinton, John Edwards, Mark Sanford, David Paterson, Jesse Jackson Sr., David Vitter, Arnold Schwarzenegger, John F. Kennedy.

But watching Weiner I started to wonder if maybe we've mixed up the cause and the effect of such behavior. Maybe it's not power corrupting them, leading otherwise upstanding exemplars of dedicated monogamy astray as they encounter a world of sycophants and admirers.

Maybe it's that men whose approach to the world is one of promiscuous connection are drawn by nature to the weird mix of fake and all too real connection that characterizes what transpires between politician and citizen. That politics attracts men who love the variety of humanity, who want to get inside the core of other people's lives and to be seen and admired from a distance at the same time. Not all politicians are like this, but I would posit that it is a type. And that if it is a type, Weiner is its archetype.

The people of New York -- or at least those who showed up at Democratic primary events -- wanted someone to connect with them in they way that he had been. What they didn't want -- and what polling is showing they will not want -- is to have to talk about his personal life again, endlessly.

Correction: This post originally listed Thomas Jefferson among politicians who had extramarital affairs. Though Jefferson fathered children out of wedlock, he was a widower at the time. We regret the error.

China's Culinary Diversity in One Map

Posted: 26 Jul 2013 12:27 PM PDT

Here's a fact: Nearly everyone in America loves Chinese food. Who among us doesn't have childhood memories of takeout dinners served in the distinctive white boxes, followed by a humorous reading of fortune cookies? And Chinese restaurants, with their lengthy menus and Lazy Susans, have been a ubiquitous part of the American landscape for decades.

Yet what most Americans think of as "Chinese food" is actually a hodgepodge of distinct cuisines, some as different from each other as, say, Russian food is from Spanish food. Fiery kung pao chicken comes from Sichuan province, while wonton soup is purely Cantonese. In major Chinese cities, it isn't difficult to find Northeastern, Sichuan, Yunnan, and Xinjiang restaurants -- all on the same block. It's no wonder then that foreign aficionados often lament, after returning to their home country, that the Chinese fare is limited -- and sometimes (most famously in the case of "General Tso's Chicken") not Chinese at all.

In order to get into the finer distinctions of Chinese cuisine, researchers at the Beijing Computational Science Research Center put together this great culinary map of China.

MIT Technology Review

MIT Technology Review tells us a bit more about how they did it:

They began by downloading all the recipes from a Chinese recipe website called Meishijie. This contained almost 8500 recipes based on nearly 3000 ingredients. They grouped the recipes according to their origin in one of 20 regions. Finally they created a food web consisting of the set of all recipes on the set of all ingredients. Where recipe contains an ingredient they draw a link between them. Since each recipe belongs to anyone regional cuisines these links can then also be categorised into cuisines. Counting these links shows how prevalent each ingredient is in each cuisine.

Cuisine, of course, isn't the only aspect of China in which there's a lot of regional variation. Here's a map showing the country's languages and dialects:

Wikimedia Commons

There remains a perception of China is that it's a giant land of sameness, a billion-man nation of people who think alike, talk alike, and eat alike. Instead, it's a nation cobbled together through over 50 centuries of invasion, war, consolidation, and treaty, one that has only really existed in its present form for a brief sliver of time. These regional differences -- of language and cuisine -- are truly vestiges of an earlier, less unified era.

So the next time your friend invites you out for Chinese food, be sure to ask him to specify whether it's Chuan or YunGui, northwestern or northeastern. And if you really want to impress him, try ordering in Wu, Cantonese, or Tajik. It'll work. Trust me.

A Map of American Electricity Use in 1921

Posted: 26 Jul 2013 11:39 AM PDT

It's hard to remember a time when not everyone had electricity, and when those that did used it sparingly. That's because from about 1900 to 1965 or so, the electric power industry pushed the price of electricity down and down and down. By the end of their incredible technological (and corporate) surge, electricity cost very little and Americans used a lot of it.

And because it was cheap and the government had intervened in rural areas through outfits like the Tennessee Valley Authority, electricity became very evenly distributed across the land (though, even now, the price per kilowatt hour varies substantially).

In 1921, however, that was not true. The use of electricity did not basically track population. Instead, there were wide regional variations in access to and consumption electricity. In essence, the entire south used relatively less electricity than the rest of the country.

Nowadays, that's not true. Texas, Florida, Alabama, and Georgia are all among the top ten states for electricity production (along with Pennsylvania, Illinois, California, New York, Washington, and Ohio). Which is not what you see on the map above. Credit low prices, air conditioning, and increasing populations.

Via Jesse Jenkins at the Energy Collective

Life Advice From the First American to Summit Everest

Posted: 26 Jul 2013 11:33 AM PDT

"It's in the wild places, in the damp clean air of an ancient forest, on a heaving ocean with unpredictable winds, on a snowy summit at the top of the world that I enter my own personal cathedral, and know where I fit in the vastness of creation," says Jim Whittaker. On May 1, 1963, Whittaker became the first American to summit Mount Everest. 50 years later he sits down with filmmaker Eric Becker. The short film compiles archival Everest footage and gorgeous landscape cinematography, with the sage advice of the now 83-year-old mountaineer. "Being out on the edge, with everything at risk, is where you learn and grow the most," says Whittaker. "You gotta have scars!"

The Seattle based filmmaker recently won an Emmy for his documentary portrait of photographer Aaron Huey's work inside the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. For more work from Eric Becker, visit his production company's website We are Shouting.

The Lesson of the L.A. Angels: Don't Pay Big for MLB Stars After They're 30

Posted: 26 Jul 2013 11:16 AM PDT

AP / Nick Wass

On June 16, Mariano Rivera struck out Albert Pujols to nail down a 6-5 win for the New York Yankees over the Los Angeles Angels.

It was nothing terribly surprising; Rivera has more strikeouts and more saves than any closer in baseball history. But what was unusual about this particular at-bat was what followed: a loud cacophony of boos and cat calls. Pujols looked puzzled. In his 11 seasons with the St. Louis Cardinals, he had never been booed.

As of July 23, Pujols is hitting .254 with 17 home runs and 59 RBIs. He isn't having a terrible season, by any means. But these are not the numbers the Angels fans were anticipating -- and they're not what Angels management thought they were getting two years ago when they signed him for a staggering 10-year, $250 million-plus contract.(He'll be paid $16 million for this season.)

And Pujols' disappointing performance accounts for only half of the Angels' fans frustration: Josh Hamilton, who agreed last December to a five-year deal worth $125 million ($17 million this season), is hitting .223 with 14 home runs and 41 RBIs. The Angels, for the second season in a row, have tied their future to players who were more than 30 years old and thus not likely to get better -- and even if the Angels themselves haven't learned from their mistakes, it's likely other franchises will.

All season long, the Angels have lingered a good 10 or 11 games in back of the Oakland A's, a team whose entire estimated 2013 payroll is only $27 million more than the Angels are paying Pujols and Hamilton this year. Meanwhile, Hamilton's former teammates, the Texas Rangers, are just three games in back of Oakland in the AL West andeight games ahead of the Angels, and the St. Louis Cardinals are not only leading the National League Central Division but have the best record in baseball. As Alden Tour, the Angels beat writer for MLB.com, phrased it, "It is with great shock, disappointment and - in many ways - amusement that a star-studded Angels team fresh off a second straight offseason splash, finishes the first half in grave danger of missing the playoffs for a fourth consecutive year."

What the Angels thought they were buying when they acquired Pujols in 2011 was the best player in the game and perhaps the best hitter in baseball history. That sounds like an exaggeration, but from his rookie season in 2001 through the 2011 season, Pujols was indeed both. In 10 of his 11 seasons with the Cardinals, he drove in more than 100 runs; he missed the triple-figure mark by just one in 2011 with 99. He hit 445 home runs, compiled a batting average of .328, and led the league in runs scored five times and OPS (combined On Base Percentage and Slugging) three times. He was named National League MVP three times, unanimously in 2009. As Pujols soared, baseball analysts were fond of comparing his numbers - making due allowance fordifferent conditions in earlier eras -- with those of Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Ted Williams, and just about any other great hitter -- and pointing out that Pujols measured up to all the greats.

"If you must assign a five-year peak period to all players regardless of description, the best shot would be 25 to 29."

Josh Hamilton may have been a riskier investment for Los Angeles than Pujols, despite his .305 batting average and his 140 home runs with the Rangers. He led the league in RBIs in 2008 (130) and in batting in 2010 (.359); in 2010, he was voted the American League MVP and went to the Angels with three Gold Gloves. He was coming off a 2012 season in which he hit 43 home runs and drove in 128 runs. What made the acquisition of Hamilton more questionable was his much-publicized history with drugs and alcohol, includingrelapses in 2009 and 2012 followed by public apologies. (He is currently required to submit urine samples three times a week for drug testing.)

Still, judging from their statistics and all-around ability, Pujols and Hamilton seemed to be the closest thing baseball offered to a sure bet.

Or were they?

Back in the 1980s, Bill James published several studies which found that most baseball players peak before their 30th birthdays. James published his findings in his 1988 Baseball Abstract: "If you must assign a five-year peak period to all players regardless of description, the best shot would be 25 to 29."

Pujols turned 33 in January. Hamilton's 32nd birthday was in May.

Based on recent history, the Angels could reasonably expect several more good seasons from both, but there was never any reason to expect they would get better -- and they haven't. Pujols batted .357 in 2008, but since then his average has declined a whopping 102 points. Hamilton's drop-off has been even more drastic, from .359 in 2010 to three straight seasons under .300.

Part of this can be attributed to physical ailments. Pujols has been suffering for the past year-and-half from plantar fasciitis, a painful inflammation of connective tissue in the bottom of the foot; he has been unable to play first base and relegated to designated hitter. Hamilton has been plagued by a swarm of nagging injuries, most recently ankle problems, and his playing status is currently listed as day-to-day.

Bad luck for Pujols, Hamilton, and the Angels? Yes. But as Branch Rickey famously said, luck is the residue of design. Which means, by definition, that bad luck is, too, and the simple fact is that players in their thirties are far more susceptible to injury than players in their younger years.

It's entirely possible that players with track records like those of Pujols and Hamilton, who led their former teams to a combined five World Series in the last eight years (one against each other, in 2011), can turn their seasons around and perhaps even the arcs of their careers. But the odds aren't in favor of that. Only one player in baseball history got better in his thirties: Barry Bonds. And he had some artificial help.

What's more likely is that baseball will look back on Pujols and Hamilton as a cautionary tale against spending much of a team's resources on free agents who have passed their physical peak.

The New American Dream in an Age of Uncertainty

Posted: 26 Jul 2013 10:59 AM PDT

Reuters

In a major speech this week on the economy, President Obama emphasized that while the United States has recovered substantial ground since the crisis of 2008-2009, wide swaths of the middle class still confront a challenging environment. Above all, the past years have eroded the 20^th century dream of hard work translating into a better life.

As Obama explained, it used to be that "a growing middle class was the engine of our prosperity. Whether you owned a company, or swept its floors, or worked anywhere in between, this country offered you a basic bargain -- a sense that your hard work would be rewarded with fair wages and decent benefits, the chance to buy a home, to save for retirement, and most of all, a chance to hand down a better life for your kids. But over time, that engine began to stall." What we are left with today is increased inequality, in wages and in opportunity.

The assumption is that this is unequivocally a bad thing. There have been countless stories about the "death of the American dream," and Detroit's bankruptcy last week was taken as one more proof. Yet lately the unquestioned assumption of a better future based on hard work has not served America well. If anything, today's version of that dream has been the source of complacency rather than strength, and its passing may be necessary in order to pave the way for a constructive future.

But you wouldn't know that from the president's speech and from continued news stories and academic studies. The inequalities of opportunity were underscored by a recent study that was brought to national attention by the New York Times this week that showed wide variations in income mobility depending on what part of the United States you live in. Those who live in metropolitan areas, as well as those with more higher education and wealthier parents, have significantly more upward mobility than many in rural areas.

The wage stagnation for tens of millions of working Americans over the past decades combined with the financial crisis has been painful and even calamitous for millions. In truth, however, the middle class security that has now disappeared only existed for a very brief period after World War Two, when the United States accounted for half of global industrial output and achieved a level of relative prosperity and growth that was substantially higher than in any other country. Before the Great Depression and World War Two, there was no assumption in the 17^th, 18^th or 19^th centuries that the future would be inherently better for one's children.

As for income inequality, that is hardly a new issue. The presence of inequality in the past did not impede economic growth. After the American Revolution, income inequality began rising sharply along with economic growth. And it continued to rise well into the early 20^th century, when more people became rich and even more people became mired in a level of poverty that does not exist today. Inequality then wasn't a barrier to mobility. If anything, it might have been a spur. Seeing how the Robber Barons of the Gilded Age lived provoked both the reforms of the Progressive Era and the ambitions of millions of immigrants and citizens who wanted a better life and saw that one was possible

Before the mid-20^th century, the American dream was that if you worked hard you had the potential to craft a good life. You could be free from repressive government, and you could be able to watch your children do better via education and their own hard work. That potential was absent in other societies, and its presence -- along with tens of millions of acres of unclaimed land -- was what drew so many millions of immigrants.

In short, the equation of American economic success until the mid-20^th century was not that if you worked hard you would have a stable material life. It was that if you worked hard, you could create such a life. The difference is not semantic; it is fundamental, and for Obama and many, many others, it has become blurred. The equation articulated by Obama and likely shared by a significant majority of Americans is that if you work hard, you should receive economic security and see the same for your children. The flip side of that theory is that if you don't gain economic security, something is wrong with the system, and government has a responsibility to provide when that system fails.

The belief that something is a given simply by birthright is never a formula for long-term strength. Yet at some point in the last half of the 20^th century, the American dream morphed from the promise that you could realize a comfortable life, to a promise that being American meant you would and should realize that. Hence the feeling, held by so many, that promises have been betrayed and the system is broken.

In truth, the passing of that false certainty is a positive. Urgency and uncertainty are not negatives, at least not inherently. They can provide the necessary fuel for ambition and for creativity and work. Urgency and uncertainty were the norm in the late 19^th century and look what those produced in America: the very power and prosperity that catapulted the country to the center of the globe.

The United States, like many affluent nations, has reached a juncture where the model that succeeded is not likely to be the model that will succeed going forward. 19^th century agricultural societies gave way to 20^th century industrial ones, and 20^th century industrial ones are giving way to 21^st century service and idea economies. None of that happened without significant pain and disruption. Nor is our transition today without substantial pain for many.

Government can and should be active in providing basic security for those disrupted by these changes. But the contract that has now been broken did not actually serve America well. It served the post-war generation and their children, but it does not serve a United States now embedded in a world where other societies are providing the same potential that the United States did two centuries ago when that was extremely rare.

What's needed is a sense the United States is a place where dreams can be made manifest, not that it is a place where everyone will be safe and secure. America remains a place where hard work and ambition and creativity can translate into a good life. It is not a place where hard work and ambition are guaranteed to yield results. And if we want a vibrant, pulsing society in the 21^st century, the passing of that version of the American dream is not something to be mourned. We've reached the end of complacency, and not a moment too soon.

This article originally appeared on Reuters.com, a partner site.

The Rise of the Christian Left, How to Raise a Royal, Why Vitamins Are a Scam: The New Atlantic Weekly

Posted: 26 Jul 2013 10:47 AM PDT

Royal babies. Adorable, right? Who among us wasn't charmed this week by the images from London of mother and princely new son? Ah, but these young British heirs, they grow up quickly and--if history provides a faithful guide--rather strangely.

Half a century ago, the writer Kingsley Martin, a subject of the Queen himself, offered Atlantic readers delightful insight into the rearing of royals in a piece titled "The Cost of the Crown." These were different times, of course, but Martin's essay from 1962, which we present in the new issue of The Atlantic Weekly, makes the case that many aspects of monarchy endure through generations (kind of the point of hereditary nobility, no?). His conclusion: the tough task of raising a little royal--"and harnessing his perhaps wayward fancies"--is rarely pulled off with success.

On the topic of good odds for succeeding, we're pleased this week to share some advice from Stephen King on how to start a story. We also present a captivating piece of reporting by Paul Offit, who details a decades-long campaign to convince Americans of the value of vitamins--though new science now shows that they may harm more than they help. In a pair of pieces about developments in (or near) space, we take a look at how light pollution is leading to the sad vanishing of stars from the night sky, and our own Megan Garber reports on a near-disaster outside the International Space Station. Also in this week's Atlantic Weekly, we feature the religion writer Jonathan Merritt on how liberal Christians could soon muster enough clout to rival their conservative brethren, and we take a look inside the strange and inconsistent process that determines how movies get rated. We've got all that and a bit more, ready for download in our latest issue.

The Atlantic Weekly is available in the iTunes store now.

Does the World's Oldest Fabric Have a Future in High Fashion?

Posted: 26 Jul 2013 10:28 AM PDT

Michael Scaturro

On a hot summer day during Berlin's biannual fashion week, models stood on podiums in a decommissioned 1960s concrete modernist church remade into an exhibition space. Bobby Kolade's collection was the first one visible upon entering. At center stood his show piece -- a long, maple brown jacket made of Ugandan bark cloth, the oldest textile known to mankind according to UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage list.

The 26-year-old Nigerian-German designer grew up in Uganda, and moved to Berlin in 2005 to study fashion. He recently won Germany's highest fashion prize for young designers for his first collection. But perhaps most interestingly, Kolade, a vegetarian, has hit upon the idea that bark cloth might be a viable alternative to leather.

On the sidelines of the fashion show, Kolade told me that he had seen the fabric as a child, but only recently came upon the idea of using it in clothing.

"Growing up in Kampala, I obviously saw this material. But it just wasn't cool," he said, explaining that most Ugandans associate bark cloth with burial rituals.

BarkTex

Years later, however, he discovered the material again in a Ugandan friend's apartment in Berlin.

"I knew what it was," Kolade explained, "And I made a spontaneous decision to work with it."

A friend coming back from Uganda brought him some material to try out. Soon thereafter, he decided to integrate the bark into his first collection. He partnered with a Ugandan-born, south Germany-based woman named Mary Barongo, whose company, Bark Cloth, has become one of Europe's main importers of the cloth.

Barongo sources bark cloth from hundreds of Ugandan farmers, who, once a year, strip their fig trees of bark, and then wrap the trees with banana leaves to protect them.

BarkTex

BarkTex

BarkTex

BarkTex

BarkTex

BarkTex

BarkTex

BarkTex

"The bark cloth is then boiled in huge pans, to soften it," Barongo continued. "Afterwards, it's thinned out by men who tap at the bark with hammers made from guava tree wood. This process thins out the bark to about 10 times its original size. Then, the bark is set out in the sun. It is during this ripening process that the bark's rich color emerges."

BarkTex

BarkTex

BarkTex

After the sun-drying process, Barongo's company modifies the bark for use in home design, furniture, and lighting fixtures.

The bark's color is that of rich maple wood dappled with slight flecks of buttery yellow. Due to the nature of the drying and curing process, each piece develops a unique color and pattern.

BarkTex

BarkTex

But perhaps the most interesting thing about bark cloth is its potential to become an alternative to leather.

"I see it as a product that might slowly replace leather, especially for vegetarians or vegans or people who don't believe in the way leather is being consumed in the luxury industry today," Kolade said.

"It's also an interesting challenge. It's difficult to work with. It's actually not meant for coats and that sort of thing."

His showpiece "bark jacket" is soft to the touch. The fig cloth is bonded with wool, and much lighter than leather. Yet Kolade himself points out that the coat isn't weatherproof yet.

"I'm going to experiment with the material. At this stage, it's not ready for a rainy or snowy day," Kolade explained. "But I decided to work with the material in a very raw form to introduce it to the fashion scene."

As for the price? Bark cloth is several times more expensive than leather. But Kolade says people are willing to pay for unique and ethically sourced luxury.

"Bark cloth is unique. It's inimitable. Every tree is different," Kolade said. "And as a result, all of my coats are unique. I think that's the element of luxury. Luxury products should be one of a kind. That's the message that I'm trying to send with this coat."

For the time being, anyway, Kolade's maple brown bark coat will probably not see wide distribution. But Kolade hopes that his creative use of this sustainable fabric will inspire other designers to try using it in their own designs, which could lead to an increase in demand and, eventually, a new livelihood for thousands of would-be Ugandan fig bark farmers.

Penis Jokes on the Cover of the New Yorker: A Complete History

Posted: 26 Jul 2013 09:23 AM PDT

This week's New Yorker cover shows New York mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner straddling the Empire State Building, head cocked, taking a selfie:

There's a lot going on here: A reference to King Kong, a faithful depiction of disgraced-politician linemouth, a nod to Freud (sometimes a huge building is not just a huge building). But at its core, this cover is making a penis joke.

The magazine has made this joke before in the aftermath of a politician's fall from grace. A decade and a half ago, President Bill Clinton was revealed to have had an affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, inspiring this cover:

New York magazine has been known to make penis jokes on its cover on more than one occasion. As has Businessweek. And, ever so subtly, The Atlantic.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Privacy

Posted: 26 Jul 2013 08:43 AM PDT

Long before Edward Snowden made his revelations about the workings of the NSA, privacy was a source of anxiety to many Americans -- and to many people around the world. Most of us have a sense that our privacy is something to be protected. Most of us also have a sense that our privacy is under threat from violation. For most of us, though, those senses are vague. What, exactly, is privacy? And what, exactly, do we mean when we talk about it?

In the video above, three prominent thinkers discuss the past and future of privacy in the United States. Privacy, they point out, has always been contingent on the culture and the technology of the people who aim to preserve it -- and to violate it. "Government intrusion was not a factor, I would say, until the turn of the 20th century," the law professor Robert Ellis Smith notes. After all, he points out, private information needed to be recordable, through telegrams and telephones, before it could be recorded. And it wasn't until the development of programs like Social Security, public assistance, and educational loans and grants that the government, for its part, became a large collector of citizen information. It wasn't until we had computers to store vast amounts of information that we started to worry about what our leaders might do with that information.

What the video's experts point to, from their varied perspectives, is the idea that our laws and our social norms need to do a better job of keeping up with our racing-forward technologies. So many of the laws that govern our treatment of privacy at the moment are based on pre-Internet frameworks, the Cato Institute's Julian Sanchez points out. "It may be," he says, "that by the time the courts get around to considering the appropriateness of some new method of technological surveillance, the technology has moved on." The recent revelations about the NSA, in other words -- not to mention all the other revelations that have been leaking out about how governments and corporation put our private data to public use -- might be beneficial. They could serve as a reminder that our broad approach to privacy may be in need of a significant overhaul. "We really are in dire need of meaningful rules to level the playing fields," Nissenbaum puts it, "so that the values to which we subscribe -- as societies, as cultures, as communities -- can continue to be maintained."

For more videos by PBS Off Book, visit http://video.pbs.org/program/off-book/.

NASA ... Like the Post Office in Space: Late-Night Comedy Roundup

Posted: 26 Jul 2013 08:40 AM PDT

With predictions that the royal baby is going to be an economic boom for the United Kingdom, Tonight Show host Jay Leno believes he has some ideas for Michelle and Barack Obama to help the American economy. Leno also Thursday suggested that the National Security Agency should have been keeping closer tabs on New York mayoral candidates' electronic correspondence.

The Late Show's David Letterman brought up the NSA in his "Charts and Graphs" segment, comparing those who think NSA leaker Edward Snowden to be a traitor to those who think him a hero (and those who just want him back in the States for other reasons). Letterman also joked about the photos NASA released this week of Earth taken from hundreds of millions of miles away. He used a taped segment to illustrate the space agency's spending and suggested a new slogan.

On Comedy Central, The Daily Show mentioned a (recently debunked) rumor that Monopoly would be scrapping the jail section of the game's board. Host John Oliver compared the game to the actual punishments doled out by the government for those responsible for the financial crisis with an illustrated card. Stephen Colbert examined Detroit filing for Chapter 9 bankruptcy and compared the city's current situation to a classic movie that takes place in the Michigan city.

MORE FROM QUARTZ

The bad news for Detroiters is that the city's bankruptcy will likely only deepen the decay of its downtown housing market.

That might deter most prospective home buyers. But some look at Detroit's hard times and see profit.

Specifically, bargain-hunting Chinese investors. Since the bankruptcy was announced on July 18, talk of snapping up Detroit housing for a pittance has picked up on Sina Weibo, reports Sina Finance. And it appears to be translating into real interest; Caroline Chen, a real estate broker in Troy, Michigan, says she's received "tons of calls" from people in mainland China.

"I have people calling and saying, 'I'm serious -- I wanna buy 100, 200 properties,'" she tells Quartz, noting that one of her colleagues recently sold 30 properties to a Chinese buyer. "They say 'We don't need to see them. Just pick the good ones.'"

China has the most expensive housing on the planet. Plus, capital controls make it difficult to invest large sums in overseas stocks or property. That's why when a CCTV broadcast aired in March -- after the emergency takeover was announced -- saying that for the price of a pair of leather shoes, you could buy two Detroit houses, Chinese investors got excited.

Millions commented on the CCTV post about Detroit on Sina Weibo. As one user put it, "700,000 people, quiet, clean air, no pollution, democracy -- what are you waiting for?"

This wasn't just talk. Wei Kefei, an organizer of a Beijing property fair, told the Global Times in March that deals were picking up. "Some people did rush to buy houses in Detroit, betting on the U.S. economic recovery, which they believe will boost development in the auto industry," he said. A Mandarin-speaking Detroit broker reported getting 3 AM phone calls from interested investors. Detroit mania was enough that China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs warned citizens about investing risks. And it had a point; there are slews of hidden costs that buyers take on.

Though Chinese realtors had planned tours of the area in late spring, those were cancelled when most investors didn't receive visas, says Chen. Therefore, many Detroit home purchases by Chinese investors are sight unseen. "It's like buying the lotto," says Chen, explaining that mainland investors see the chance the property will appreciate as worth the dirt-cheap price. "But I've been in the Detroit area for 35 years. 35 years ago downtown Detroit was like this, and it's not getting better."

That becomes more apparent to those who do visit. Chen says that Chinese investors sometimes pick up and fly to Detroit without notice and call her to say, "Hey, I'm at the airport." Because Chen is unwilling to risk her safety for a $3 commission on a home sale, she recommends that they hire a taxi to drive them through downtown Detroit. So far, most haven't called her back. "Once they see the scary area, they give up," she says.

Could the Government Get a Search Warrant for Your Thoughts?

Posted: 26 Jul 2013 07:27 AM PDT

U.S. National Library of Medicine

We don't have a mind reading machine. But what if we one day did? The technique of functional MRI (fMRI), which measures changes in localized brain activity over time, can now be used to infer information regarding who we are thinking about, what we have seen, and the memories we are recalling. As the technology for inferring thought from brain activity continues to improve, the legal questions regarding its potential application in criminal and civil trials are gaining greater attention.

Last year, a Maryland man on trial for murdering his roommate tried to introduce results from an fMRI-based lie detection test to bolster his claim that the death was a suicide. The court ruled (PDF) the test results inadmissible, noting that the "fMRI lie detection method of testing is not yet accepted in the scientific community." In a decision last year to exclude fMRI lie detection test results submitted by a defendant in a different case, the Sixth Circuit was even more skeptical, writing (PDF) that "there are concerns with not only whether fMRI lie detection of 'real lies' has been tested but whether it can be tested."

So far, concerns regarding reliability have kept thought-inferring brain measurements out of U.S. (but not foreign) courtrooms. But is technology the only barrier? Or, if more mature, reliable brain scanning methods for detecting truthfulness and reading thoughts are developed in the future, could they be employed not only by defendants hoping to demonstrate innocence but also by prosecutors attempting to establish guilt? Could prosecutors armed with a search warrant compel an unwilling suspect to submit to brain scans aimed at exploring his or her innermost thoughts?

The answer surely ought to be no. But getting to that answer isn't as straightforward as it might seem. The central constitutional question relates to the Fifth Amendment, which states that "no person ... shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself." In interpreting the Fifth Amendment, courts have distinguished between testimonial evidence, which is protected from compelled self-incriminating disclosure, and physical evidence, which is not. A suspected bank robber cannot refuse to participate in a lineup or provide fingerprints. But he or she can decline to answer a detective who asks, "Did you rob the bank last week?"

So is the information in a brain scan physical or testimonial? In some respects, it's a mix of both. As Dov Fox wrote in a 2009 law review article, "Brain imaging is difficult to classify because it promises distinctly testimonial-like information about the content of a person's mind that is packaged in demonstrably physical-like form, either as blood flows in the case of fMRI, or as brainwaves in the case of EEG." Fox goes on to conclude that the compelled use of brain imaging techniques would "deprive individuals of control over their thoughts" and be a violation of the Fifth Amendment.

But there is an alternative view as well, under which the Fifth Amendment protects only testimonial communication, leaving the unexpressed thoughts in a suspect's head potentially open to government discovery, technology permitting. In a recent law review article titled "A Modest Defense of Mind Reading," Kiel Brennan-Marquez writes that "at least some mind-reading devices almost certainly would not" elicit "communicative acts" by the suspect, "making their use permissible under the Fifth Amendment." Brennan-Marquez acknowledges that compelled mind-reading would raise privacy concerns, but argues that those should be addressed by the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures.

That doesn't seem right. It would make little sense to provide constitutional protection to a suspected bank robber's refusal to answer a detective's question if the thoughts preceding the refusal--e.g., "since I'm guilty, I'd better not answer this question"--are left unprotected. Stated another way, the right to remain silent would be meaningless if not accompanied by protection for the thinking required to exercise it.

And if that weren't enough, concluding that compelled brain scans don't violate the Fifth Amendment would raise another problem as well: In a future that might include mature mind-reading technology, it would leave the Fourth Amendment as the last barrier protecting our thoughts from unwanted discovery. That, in turn, would raise the possibility that the government could get a search warrant for our thoughts. It's a chilling prospect, and one that we should hope never comes to pass.

In Going After Texas Voting Policies, Holder Takes John Roberts at His Word

Posted: 26 Jul 2013 07:26 AM PDT

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder discusses the Supreme Court's Voting Rights Act ruling at the Justice Department Wednesday, July 25, 2013. (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)

"The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race," Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in 2007, "is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." We will now find out whether Roberts's anti-racist rhetoric is serious, or is a code phrase meaning that the era of civil rights is now over by judicial fiat.

On Thursday, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the Justice Department would ask a federal District Court to require the state of Texas to obtain prior permission before implementing its voter ID and other new voting laws.

As is widely known, the Supreme Court in June gutted Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act--the "preclearance" requirement that obliged states and local governments with long racist histories to obtain advance permission for changes in their voting systems. Roberts himself wrote the 5-4 opinion. Most news accounts focused on his blithe statement that (in the era of Trayvon Martin and Paula Deen) "our Nation has made great strides," and thus need not suspect Southern state governments of racism.

But the actual legal rule announced in the opinion was narrower. The opinion didn't say there could be no preclearance; it said only that the preclearance formula was too old. The jurisdictions covered were selected with reference to events that occurred before 1975. The formula, Roberts said, focused "on decades-old data relevant to decades-old problems."

The VRA is far more than Section 5, and it is and always was more flexible than the majority suggested. For one thing, "covered jurisdictions" have always had the opportunity to get out from under the preclearance requirement. Under Section 4 of the VRA, they could go to court and demonstrate that they have "stop[ped] discriminating on the basis of race" for a period of ten years. As Justice Ginsburg pointed out in her dissent in Shelby County, 200 jurisdictions have successfully "bailed out" of preclearance--with no objection from the federal government.

Shelby County never sought to bail out. It couldn't show that it had "stopped discriminating on the basis of race," because, well, it hadn't. Among other questionable acts during the previous decade, the county had actually defied the Act, holding a election under a new law for which it did not seek preclearance. Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed out during oral argument that Shelby County "is the epitome of what caused the passage of this law to begin with," and the county didn't bother to deny it. Rather than expressing remorse for its racist past, it came before the Court more like a sulky teenager complaining he'd been grounded just for stealing the family car a few times: Why am I grounded when other kids aren't? Can't we just forget the whole thing? For all the sternness of its anti-racist language ("any racial discrimination in voting is too much"), the majority handed Junior back the keys without so much as a "you be good now."

What Holder has done will be spun as a "challenge" to the Court. Congressman Lamar Smith of Texas has already produced a statement saying, "the Supreme Court message to the Justice Department was clear - don't mess with Texas. But Eric Holder and the Justice Department aren't listening." Legally, that's nonsense. The Court explicitly said that jurisdictions could be singled out "on a basis that makes sense in light of current conditions." The DOJ suit makes exactly that claim--current conditions in Texas violate the Constitution.

What is the "opt-in" provision? Although Section 5, the preclearance section, has attracted most attention recently, Section 3 of the Act (codified in 42 U.S.C. § 1973a) permits both the Justice Department and private plaintiffs to challenge election practices in any state or locality. In such a case, the plaintiffs may be able to prove that the practices they are challenging violate not just the Act, but the Constitution itself--either the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of equal protection or the Fifteenth Amendment's bar on racial discrimination in voting. If the government or the plaintiffs do prove a constitutional violation, Section 3 says, "the court . . . shall retain jurisdiction for such time as it may deem appropriate"--and while it does, the state or local defendants are barred from making changes in voting without approval either of the court or of the Justice Department.

In other words, if a state has violated the Constitution, the court can put it under preclearance--the same requirement imposed by Section 5, but this time not based on "decades-old data" but precisely tailored to "current conditions."

In order to reimpose preclearance on Texas or anywhere else, the Justice Department will have to prove not only that the state's voting laws harm blacks and Latinos politically but that they are intended to. That's a heavy burden. But there's a familiar stench currently wafting from the South, from the Rio Grande in the Southwest to the Chowan River in North Carolina, as Republican legislators rush to purge voter rolls, impose strict voter ID laws, make it harder to register voters, and do away with early voting. Voting rights lawyers are thorough and smart. Somewhere in this anti-democratic cesspool, they will find evidence of racism that a federal court can't ignore. When that happens, a District Judge will feel duty bound to impose preclearance under Section 3.

A Court that truly believes that "the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race" could not in good faith ignore evidence of intentional discrimination, not in the "distant" past, but now. But sadly enough, on this issue at least, the Court's good faith is what is in question.

What It Was Like to Negotiate With North Koreans 60 Years Ago

Posted: 26 Jul 2013 07:12 AM PDT

A communist prisoner of war who lost both legs fighting United Nations Forces in Korea,uses crutches as he leaves Pusan, South Korea, on April 15, 1953. (AP)

For two hours and 11 minutes, North Korea's lead negotiator, General Nam Il, stared at U.S. Vice Admiral C. Turner Joy, chain-smoking and sitting silently.

In August 1951, a little over a month into cease-fire negotiations to end the Korean War, talks inched forward at an agonizing pace. Hatred hung in the air like the general's cigarette smoke.

Since June 25, 1950, when North Korea invaded South Korea, unimaginable devastation had decimated the "Land of Morning Calm." Before it was over, three million Koreans, mostly innocent civilians, perished in the flames, U.S. aerial bombardments razed every town in North Korea, and South Korea was left a wasteland of refugees and unmitigated misery.

Over a million Chinese "volunteers"--and more than 40,000, largely American, soldiers of the United Nations--joined their Korean brethren in death.

This immense suffering set the backdrop to cease-fire talks starting on July 10, 1951.

On that day, Vice Admiral Joy and a UN delegation met Chinese and North Korean negotiators for the first time in Kaesŏng, just south of the 38th parallel. Both sides bowed--slightly--and Joy took note of his adversaries.

North Korean General Nam Il was "short in stature...and gave the impression of considerable nervous energy."

General Hsieh Fang, the ranking Chinese delegate, gave "the impression of Shakespeare's 'Yond Cassius...a lean and hungry look'...a bitterly sharp mind."

North Korean General Lee Sang Cho, described by Joy in less glowing terms, "was an accomplished liar...short and chunky, often dirty and slovenly."

The UN team marveled at the degree to which the North Koreans attempted to appear stern. While Hsieh Fang dressed like a trench soldier, the North Koreans wore fanciful uniforms. They never smiled.

General Lee, eager to demonstrate "iron self-control," let flies crawl around his face before the amused Americans. When a lower-ranking South Korean colonel fell out of his chair, the North Koreans didn't crack a smile as the Chinese burst out laughing.

Admiral Joy noticed other peculiarities; the North Koreans had shortened the legs of his chair, making Nam Il appear taller. When a United Nations flag was placed on the conference table, a bigger North Korean flag appeared alongside it after a recess.

Every comment in the talks was translated to Chinese, Korean, and English. In the interim, Nam Il smoked constantly and broke pencils--"like a cat on a hot tin roof," as Joy explained. Hsieh Fang, who the admiral described in overtly racial terms, "watched proceedings broodingly...His saturnine yellow face was a set mask, revealing nothing, expressing nothing."

The first step towards ending active fighting was to decide an agenda for the talks. That effort--producing disagreement over the definition of "agenda"--took 10 meetings. Agreed steps for a cease-fire came out as follows:

-- Establish a demarcation line and demilitarized zone

-- Create specific conditions for an armistice and name neutral countries to oversee it

-- Reach an agreement on exchanging prisoners of war

-- Offer post-armistice "recommendations" to both sides

The first issue, establishing a cease-fire line, was messy from the beginning. North Korean and Chinese delegates insisted on the 38th parallel--a stipulation that would have forced UN troops to withdraw from fortified lines near today's demilitarized zone and return hundreds of square miles to North Korea.

On the orders of General Matthew B. Ridgway--then the ranking U.S. commander in the Pacific--Joy's delegation refused to accept any demarcation zone south of the actual line of battle. The 38th parallel, they contended, was militarily indefensible for stopping future attacks. Nam Il ridiculed these arguments--"do you not feel ridiculous?"--noting that America's air and naval power more than compensated for such disadvantages.

Increasingly vitriolic debates ensued over the hot days of August. On the 14th of that month, Nam Il called the UN position "arrogant and absurd" 19 times in a little over an hour and then--as Joy recorded in his journal--"actually sneered at us."

On August 22, the Communist delegation accused the UN of launching a mysterious napalm raid in the neutral Kaesŏng area. When American commanders dismissed the claim as propaganda, North Korean and Chinese officials broke off negotiations. An actual UN violation two months later--acknowledged immediately by General Ridgway--didn't help matters.

By October, however, new talks had started at Panmunjom, a neutral site between the lines, and a breakthrough emerged on a cease-fire zone. Nam Il arrived in a shiny Imperial Chrysler (!) on November 27 and accepted the current battle line as an immediate demarcation line. This shrewd move effectively barred further hostilities on the ground while the remainder of the agenda was negotiated. UN officials, acting on the orders of the White House, agreed to this de-facto cease-fire for 30 days.

The next month came and went, and the Communist delegation, as Admiral Joy contended, "dragged their feet at every opportunity and used the 30 days of grace to dig in and stabilize their battle line."

Still, by early 1952, only three primary questions prevented agreement at Panmunjom: Could North Korea build new airfields after an armistice? Which neutral nations would supervise the cease-fire? And how would both sides exchange prisoners of war?

The UN eventually gave in on the first question, but Communist negotiators astonished Joy's team on the second by picking--"believe it or not"--the Soviet Union as a neutral party to supervise the cease-fire. The Chinese and North Koreans, Joy believed, only made the demand with the intention of withdrawing it at a later date for UN concessions (which they did) --a negotiating style derided as "quid pro quid."

Questions over prisoners of war proved far more exasperating at Panmunjom. On December 18, 1951, the UN delegation was appalled to receive a list of just 11,559, mostly South Korean, prisoners in Communist hands. The UN had counted over 100,000 of its soldiers as missing--including 11,500 Americans.

Nam Il and Hsieh Fang themselves were incensed to learn that only 70,000 of 132,000 of their men--based on UN screenings--would return home without the use of force. The subsequent refusal of the United Nations to hand over some 62,000 North Korean and Chinese prisoners at gunpoint proved the last remaining obstacle to an armistice in May 1952.

By that time, though, a weary Vice Admiral Joy had already presented the North Koreans and Chinese with a final negotiating position: the UN would accept North Korea's right to rebuild its airfields if it would, in turn, accept a supervisory commission of Sweden, Switzerland, Poland, and Czechoslovakia and the voluntary repatriation of prisoners of war. Nam Il et al. rejected the deal outright, deadlocking talks for another 15 months.

On May 22, 1952, Joy was relieved as lead negotiator at Panmunjom by his own request and delivered a blistering adieu to the opposition:

"... you impute to the UNC the same suspicion, greed and deviousness which are your stock in trade...you are people of intelligence...you do these things with purpose and design...If you harbor the slightest desire to restore peace and to end the misery and suffering of millions of innocent people, you must bring to the solution of this issue...good faith..."

After the North Koreans and Chinese finally accepted the principle of voluntary repatriation, a cease-fire was signed on July 27, 1953. During those 159 meetings, lasting two years and 17 days, the agony of the Korean peninsula continued unabated in a conflict that is in many ways unresolved to this day.

Next for Your Reading List: 'Mother Daughter Me'

Posted: 26 Jul 2013 07:10 AM PDT

The reading public knows Katie Hafner for the technology-and-society stories she has written through the years in the New York Times and elsewhere -- or for her books, the previous one of which was A Romance on Three Legs, an elegant examination of Glenn Gould through the tale of his search for the perfect piano. I have been fortunate also to know her as a friend. A dozen years ago, when my wife and I were living in Berkeley, Katie and I co-taught a course on article-writing at the UC Berkeley Journalism School, which was having a great run under the deanship of Orville Schell. Our families have stayed in touch since then. (And, you're right, it was just a week ago that I was recommending a book by Orville Schell and John Delury.)

I say all this to acknowledge that I started reading Mother Daughter Me out of comradely solidarity but sped through to the end with an increasing sense of fascination, admiration, and engrossed wonder at tale she has laid out. If reduced to a plain list of facts, Katie Hafner's experiences might seem unendurably traumatic and harsh. As a child she was bounced from home to home and school to school, mainly because of her mother's alcoholism. As an adult daughter, wife, sister, and mother she withstood a long series of shocks any one of which on its own would tempt most people to self-pity. Yet her tone as memoirist is not quite chipper, which would imply self-delusion, but resolutely upbeat and hopeful, plus beautifully observed. Through all the tragedies and challenges she remained fully functional in her journalistic life and as sole parent for her now-college-aged daughter.

For more on the details of the book and Katie Hafner's adventures, I refer you to this NY Times article about the book, under the headline "The Best Memoir I've Read This Year." Below, in a video from her site, she answers some questions about the book. I think you will find it a memorable read.

Are the Feds Asking Tech Companies for User Passwords?

Posted: 26 Jul 2013 07:00 AM PDT

lock freddy the boy.png — Freddy the Boy/Flickr

Over at CNET, Declan McCullagh reports on yet another way that the surveillance state is threatening our privacy. "The U.S. government has demanded that major Internet companies divulge users' stored passwords, according to two industry sources familiar with these orders," he reports. He goes on to explain, "if the government is able to determine a person's password, which is typically stored in encrypted form, the credential could be used to log in to an account to peruse confidential correspondence or even impersonate the user." His sources say that their employers respond to these law-enforcement requests by vigorously challenging them.

Do some web companies just quietly cave instead?

What's striking, if you read through the rest of his story, is the difficulty of nailing down even basic facts about what the federal government is doing. Here's the result of McCullagh's reportorial diligence:

A Microsoft spokesperson would not say whether the company has received such requests from the government. But when asked whether Microsoft would divulge passwords, salts, or algorithms, the spokesperson replied: "No, we don't, and we can't see a circumstance in which we would provide it."

Google also declined to disclose whether it had received requests for those types of data. But a spokesperson said the company has "never" turned over a user's encrypted password, and that it has a legal team that frequently pushes back against requests that are fishing expeditions or are otherwise problematic. "We take the privacy and security of our users very seriously," the spokesperson said.

Apple, Yahoo, Facebook, AOL, Verizon, AT&T, Time Warner Cable, and Comcast did not respond to queries about whether they have received requests for users' passwords and how they would respond to them.

Also, McCullagh writes, "some details remain unclear, including when the requests began and whether the government demands are always targeted at individuals or seek entire password database dumps."

Let me put it more bluntly. It's possible that the federal government is going to Google, Facebook, and Microsoft and saying, "hey, give us the passwords of thousands of your users." If so, the companies wouldn't tell us, most likely because they'd be legally forbidden from doing so, and the government certainly wouldn't tell us. It is unacceptable if massive password requests are now happening. But it is also unacceptable that it could happen, or be happening, without the public even knowing.

That's how it works now: The feds don't say a word even when they adopt new policies that are radical and aggressive.

Even as the Obama Administration avows that it welcomes a civic debate about the surveillance state, it preemptively short-circuits citizens' ability to assess and debate policy. It's disingenuous, illiberal, anti-democratic, and imprudent. The notion that self-government, secret policy, and secret law can coexist is Obama's folly, and the folly of his predecessors.

Let us not share in it.

The To Do List's Radically Practical Message About Virginity

Posted: 26 Jul 2013 06:41 AM PDT

CBS Films

The To Do List may look and feel like an R-rated teen sex comedy in the modern tradition, a la American Pie or Superbad or The Girl Next Door -- and, true to form, it offers gross-out gags and F-bombs aplenty.

But at the center of writer/director Maggie Carey's brave, funny debut film, there's an un-panicked, radically reassuring portrayal of teenage sex.

Set in the summer of 1993, The To Do List follows late-blooming valedictorian Brandy Klark (Aubrey Plaza) as she attempts to master a full repertoire of sexual proficiencies with interchangeable male classmates. The end game to this plan: losing her virginity to chick-magnet lifeguard Rusty Waters (a delightfully '90s-tastic Scott Porter) before starting her freshman year at Georgetown. Her more experienced best friends (Alia Shawkat and Sarah Steele) counsel her along the way, while her dorky but endearing friend Cameron (Johnny Simmons) quietly pines for her.

What's unusual about The To Do List isn't that Brandy sets her sights on losing her virginity to a gorgeous, kinda-brain-dead older boy; pop culture boasts plenty of young women who initially just want to get the whole awkward rite of passage over with. Instead, what's unusual about Carey's film is that (spoiler alert) Brandy succeeds -- and then moves on. She loses her virginity to a guy who doesn't really know her and definitely doesn't love her, and then she checks off the "Intercourse" box on her eponymous to-do list, packs up her things, and goes to college, un-traumatized and un-stricken by tragic regret.

When it comes to teenage girls losing their virginity on TV and in the movies, a few old storylines tend to get recycled. Most of them have to do with the fear of what could happen if the girl doesn't "save it" for the right moment or the right guy. These fictional teenagers with plans to have sex for the first time often "come to their senses" at the last minute, or get effectively dissuaded by someone older and wiser who advocates waiting for the "right" guy to come along -- the good guy, the One, who's trustworthy and kind and loves her for the right reasons.

My So-Called Life's Angela Chase, for instance, backs out of losing her virginity to her longtime crush, the dopey but sexy Jordan Catalano, because she's simply not ready. Rachel Berry saves herself for Finn on Glee after thinking better of her promise to let bad-boy rival glee-club singer Jesse be her first. On Friday Night Lights, a determined Julie Taylor makes a curfew-conscious appointment to have sex for the first time with her new boyfriend Matt Saracen -- only to get nervous and realize that, like her mother warned her, she's not ready. (Julie and Matt do have sex later -- after it's been firmly established over the course of a season or so that Matt is, indeed, the "right" guy.)

On How I Met Your Mother, Robin Scherbatsky realizes her younger sister Katie has plans to have sex with her obnoxious boyfriend when they visit New York together; she enlists her friends to help talk her out of it, and they succeed. American Beauty and What Women Want feature father figures persuading teenage girls away from having sex for the first time with men who don't love them. In 2002's Crossroads, Britney Spears's valedictorian Lucy reneges at the last minute on a pact to lose her virginity with her high-school lab partner, and instead has sex for the first time with Ben, a sensitive musician who once rescued his sister from their abusive dad.

And what happens to the fictional teenage girl who actually goes through with it, who loses her virginity without waiting for a boy or man who loves her truly, madly, deeply, and honestly?

Very bad things, frequently. Sometimes it's immediate karmic retribution: Marissa Cooper from The O.C. "finally" gives in to her jerky boyfriend of several years only to find out soon afterward that he's been habitually cheating. The Virgin Suicides' Lux Lisbon has sex with the school heartthrob on a football field only to fall asleep afterward, get abandoned, break curfew, and subsequently get put under parent-inflicted house arrest for what's effectively the rest of her life. Sometimes it's pregnancy: Juno of Juno, Mary Cummings of Saved!, and Becky Sproles of Friday Night Lights all find themselves pregnant after their first time. And still other times it's paralyzing regret, like Felicity on Felicity. As a 1999 Entertainment Weekly review put it when describing her post-sex antics: "You could read the guilt-stricken reaction all over Russell's face ... she looked ashen throughout the episode."

The To Do List, though, presents a less common kind of story about a girl having sex for the first time. Brandy loses her virginity to Rusty -- who's clearly not the guy she's "meant to be with" -- then has a moment of thoughtfulness before meeting up with her best friends right in time to announce her recent banging of Rusty Waters and then catch the rest of Beaches. When Brandy's dad (a hilariously anal-retentive Clark Gregg) discovers what's happened and races to her rescue, a calm Brandy reassures him, "I'm fine, Dad. I'm OK."

By sidestepping the "emotional-trauma-after-virginity-loss" construct, 'The To Do List' provides a positive alternative outlook on what happens to girls who "give away their flower" or don't "guard their carnal treasure": Sometimes, they're pretty much fine.

By sidestepping the "emotional-trauma-after-virginity-loss" construct and replacing it with giddy detail-spilling among friends, The To Do List sends up both a female onscreen teen-virginity trope and a male one: The "late-blooming virgin loses it to generically hot rando, comes away with high-five-worthy story to tell buddies" theme crops up more often in stories about teenage boys. (See: American Pie, Sixteen Candles, Almost Famous, Porky's, Road Trip, Losin' It -- and Superbad, kinda.) And perhaps more importantly, it provides a positive alternative outlook on what happens to girls who "give away their flower" or don't "guard their carnal treasure": Sometimes, they're pretty much fine.

It's not that waiting for the "right" sexual partner is a bad idea to promote among teenage audiences. Waiting for the right sexual partner is a really, really good idea. That's both for health and safety reasons, and because we can probably all agree that sex is most magical, the first time and every time, when it's between two people who are mutually trusting and nuts about each other.

And, to its credit, The To Do List seems to recognize this. Near the end of the film, Brandy finds herself face-to-face with both Rusty (with whom Brandy's just had a mildly disappointing first sexual encounter) and Cameron (who's hurt and angry that Brandy has broken his heart, used him and his friends as hookup practice partners, and slept with Rusty). Finally, she realizes Cameron is sweet, reliable, thoughtful, and the kind of guy she should have been with all along, and she tells him so.

But then: "I don't regret it," she tells him. "I'm a teenager. I'll have regrets when I'm... 30.

"And you," she says to Rusty, "are -- really hot." Does she wish she hadn't lost her virginity to him? "No. Because you are going to make an awesome story to tell my friends."

At the end of the film, Brandy is pictured a few months into her freshman year at Georgetown -- where she's well-adjusted, involved on campus, making friends, and having great sex with a guy who likes her.

Advertising to teens that they'll be perfectly fine after doing what Brandy does is, of course, a slippery slope at best. Care and caution are always a wise choice in real life. But the "hold-out-and-then-have-consensual-safe-sex-with-the-right-guy-or-else" narrative often omits the fact that if a teenage girl happens to hold out and then have consensual, safe sex with the wrong guy, it's OK for her to simply accept it and move forward, sans the seemingly obligatory emotional baggage.

Taken as a whole, The To Do List functions as a sort of Everybody Poops for the world of sex. Everybody does it: young people, old people (like Brandy's wonderfully warm, kooky parents, played by Gregg and Connie Britton), pretty people (like Brandy's older sister Amber, played by Rachel Bilson), icky people (like Brandy's pool-manager boss, played by Carey's husband Bill Hader). And it takes care to show that there's a diverse range of ways to experience sex. Sometimes it's a sacred pledge of deep emotional investment and mutual trust, as it seems to be between Brandy's parents. But sometimes it's a transaction, sometimes it's a pastime, and other times it's simply a haphazard, non-committal muddle of fluids and sweaty limbs. The memorable message of The To Do List is that, as Brandy muses in the final scene, "Sometimes sex is just sex" -- and whether or not you've had it doesn't have to change who you are.

Hot News

Pages

7:27 PM