Master Feed : The Atlantic |
- No Turning Back: Inside Egypt's Coup
- The Real Problem With Hillary's Age
- Should Colleges Charge Engineers More Than English Majors?
- Fog, More Beautiful Than You Have Ever Seen It Before
- Fiftysomethings Reflect on Twentysomethings
- Portlandia Everywhere: Where the Hipsters Are (According to Yelp)
- An Independence Day for Egypt's Secularists?
- Historical Desserts for the 4th of July
- The Next Big Thing for Exploring the Distant Universe: Balloons
- Horde-sourcing Egypt
- The Pitfalls of Transitional Governments in Egypt
- Why You Should Read More Than 1 Newspaper, from Milwaukee to Hong Kong
- China's Next Big Growth Market: Condoms
- 35 People Dead in Chinese Mass-Murder: What Happened?
- How to Be Better at Email: A Comprehensive Scientific Guide
- 1book140's July Read: <i>The Orphan Master's Son</i>
- The Thing to Understand About the Word 'Cyber'
- Reddit Demographics in One Chart
- Why Egyptians Are So Unhappy With Morsi, in One Chart
- The Year in Hot Dog Innovation
- Walking in the Steps of an Ancestor in Pickett's Charge
- Beyond the U-Haul: How Lesbian Relationships Are Changing
- Hong Kongers Demand Self-Determination—Will Beijing Listen?
- What the Beatles' Abbey Road Crosswalk Looks Like Today
- A Punishingly Overlong <i>Lone Ranger</i>
| No Turning Back: Inside Egypt's Coup Posted: 03 Jul 2013 05:07 PM PDT  Protesters who are against Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi dance in front of the Republican Guard headquarters in Cairo on July 3, 2013. (Amr Dalsh/Reuters) CAIRO -- As army leader Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sissi stood at the podium, Egypt held its breath. From remote villages in Upper Egypt to seaside cafes in Alexandria, televisions and radios broadcasted one man's voice. His words would change the course of Egypt's history. Following Sissi's powerful declaration that Morsi was no longer the president of Egypt, some supporters of the democratically elected leader say their revolution was sabotaged. But for many, today marks the day their revolution was restored. "We were suffocating under Morsi," said Assad, who took his family to demonstrate at the presidential palace in Cairo. "Now we can breathe." In his speech to the country, Sissi detailed a transitional plan. Adly Mansour, chief justice of Egypt's Supreme Constitutional Court, will be sworn in on Thursday as Egypt's interim president, and the controversial constitution imposed by the Muslim Brotherhood dominated parliament will be temporarily suspended. He said that early elections will be planned and a committee made up of all political factions will be formed to discuss amendments. A sea of Egyptian flags fluttered in the night sky at the presidential palace, the smell of gunpowder from hundreds of fireworks lingering in the air. A pulsing drum beat led the crowd as they chanted, "the people have overthrown the regime!" Morsi, who assumed office a year ago, has been accused of igniting sectarian tensions, mismanaging the country's already dire economic state, and leading a "Brotherhoodization" of state institutions. "The Muslim Brotherhood is a terrorist organization," said Kalaf Atta, a protester who sat on a dusty car, taking a break from the night's festivities. "Morsi is a terrorist. He should end up in jail." But some Egyptians, mainly those who support former President Morsi, say that Egypt's first democratic government has been wrongfully and illegally overthrown, threatening the revolution's founding principles. Mohammad Abdel Ghani, a Morsi supporter who headed to the Islamist demonstration in Nasr City, a neighborhood in Cairo, after the army's statement, was devastated by the news. "People are crying here," he said on the phone. "Some have left and others are vowing to stay and continue protesting." Ghani believes the military ousting of Morsi is a conspiracy that the armed forces have been planning since his election. "Morsi was never really president," he said, "They never allowed him to be." As the 48-hour army ultimatum ended, Morsi offered to form a consensus government as a way to solve the crisis threatening his leadership, but to no avail. Hours before the military statement, the army began mobilizing around demonstration areas. In Nasr City, where Morsi supporters have gathered to stage their own demonstrations in recent days, the army's presence was viewed as an act of betrayal. Immediately following Sissi's speech, three main Islamic channels were taken off the air and the Ministry of Interior announced the arrest of scores of religious media employees in Cairo's Media City for pending investigations. Arrest warrants for around 300 members of the Muslim Brotherhood have reportedly been issued. While Cairo's streets are erupting with cheers and fireworks, the threat of violence is still very real. Over the past few days, deadly clashes between opposition protesters and Morsi supporters have erupted across the country. While some international leaders, like Saudi King Abdullah Bin Abdul Aziz, commended the ousting of Morsi, the transfer of power has left the United States in a sticky situation. U.S. federal law stipulates that non-humanitarian aid - both military and economic - cannot be given to countries where a military coup has assumed power over a democratically elected government. This could threaten around $1.3 billion in annual American military aid, and $250 million in economic aid to Egypt. But the Egyptian military maintains that a coup has not taken place because the armed forces will not be ruling the country. The road ahead for Egypt will no doubt be rocky, but for now, the feeling among many Egyptians is one of profound hope. In one Cairo suburb following Sissi's speech, Egyptians ran out of their apartments crying tears of joy, pouring into the streets with delight, and a popular revolution song, "Al Medan," written about Tahrir Square, came on one car's radio. "No turning back," the singer's voice floated down the street. "Our voices are finally heard and the dream is no longer out of our reach." 
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| The Real Problem With Hillary's Age Posted: 03 Jul 2013 03:32 PM PDT  Republican spinning that Hillary Clinton is too old to be president is the sort of bad messaging strategy you see when people are not coordinating with a campaign or a candidate, mainly because neither exists on the GOP side at this moment. What message do comments on age reinforce about the Republicans or their future nominee, except to send a tone-deaf signal to older women that the party thinks they are irrelevant? Let's not forget that The Golden Girls, mentioned by Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell in his dig against Clinton, was a show about elderly female retirees in Florida, which is to say, a critical block of civic-minded voters in the tight-as-a-tick swing state. And if there's one thing such older women do not cotton to, it's any suggestion that they be put out to pasture instead of wooed by political figures. Be nice to grandmothers! That said, Clinton's age may still be a relevant concern. But it's not because she's an older woman -- it's because she is an older politician. Democrats would need to worry about this even in the unlikely event she were to run and face someone her own age in 2016. As an older politician, Clinton has decades' worth of ties in the political consulting establishment. But she lacks a cadre of loyalists with fresh outside-the-Beltway experience and ideas who are eager to innovate the latest campaign techniques. A number of her 2008 aides have fallen out of her orbit. This is probably good news for her, should she run, because the old-school way she campaigned in 2007 and 2008 was already a problem for her then. Given that she's the prohibitive favorite for the nomination in 2016, should she run, it could be a problem for the whole Democratic Party if she doesn't pursue a very different course on her second go. In short, instead of potentially alienating older women, the GOP ought to be cheering that one of them may be running -- and the chance they may have to hire a dynamic team of innovators and rising star state strategists to compete against her team during election 2016. 
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| Should Colleges Charge Engineers More Than English Majors? Posted: 03 Jul 2013 03:08 PM PDT Imagine opening a restaurant menu and finding that every dish, from the steak frites to the frisse salad, costs $14.99. It would seem odd, right? After all, buying and cooking a ribeye is more expensive than throwing some lettuce in a bowl. Charging the same for each wouldn't make sense. Yet, that's pretty much how most colleges price their majors. Undergrads pay the same flat rate per credit no matter what they study, even though different courses can require vastly different resources to teach. Giant freshman lectures are cheaper to run per-student than intimate senior seminars, and reading-heavy majors like history are cheaper than lab-oriented disciplines like biology. At New York's state colleges, to give one real-world example, advanced engineering or hard science courses cost more than five times as much to teach than low-level psychology classes. None of this tends to be reflected on tuition bills. Should it? Would colleges, or students, be better off if higher ed finally nixed one price fits all? This week, University of Michigan economist Kevin Stange released a new working paper that illustrates what one of the potential downsides of doing so might be. Over the last two decades, a growing minority of schools have in fact experimented with varying tuition by major. A Cornell study (which produced the graph below) found that 41 percent of public doctoral universities have tried charging a premium for at least one program -- usually engineering, business, or nursing. Looking at a sample of these schools, Stange's paper concludes that raising the price of certain majors seems to influence what students choose to study, though not always in predictable ways.
In the case of engineering, raising the price of a degree by 14.5 percent was associated with a 1.1 percentage point drop in the share of degrees schools awarded in the field. Meanwhile, a 19 percent increase in the rise of a nursing degree led to a .8 percentage point rise in enrollment. Those numbers might seem small, but keep in mind: Engineering and nursing majors made up 10 percent and 3 percent of the student bodies at these schools to start, respectively. Why price hikes reduced the number of engineers but increased the number of nurses is a bit of a puzzle. The study tries to control for the influence of the job market by comparing schools that varied their tuition against those that did not, meaning that the boom in healthcare jobs shouldn't have been an issue. As Stange notes, it may be that some colleges took the extra revenue and reinvested in their nursing programs, which led to higher enrollment. But in the end, the cause isn't clear. Nonetheless, Stange's findings seem to confirm a notion that will sit uncomfortably with many educators: varying prices by major might dissuade students from pursuing their academic interests, even if they're geared towards lucrative fields like the sciences, where the eventual payoff from a degree would almost certainly outstrip the extra tuition dollars. Worse yet, in the case of engineering, low-income Pell Grant recipients had the strongest reaction to price hikes. In other words, many colleges essentially seem to be pushing poor students away from one of the most financially rewarding majors. Some might see a plus side here. Florida governor Rick Scott, for instance, has advocated tuition discounts for students studying high-tech, high-demand fields, in order to encourage more to undergrads to pursue them. But that doesn't appear to be an idea that is being pursued in most states, and it could bring on its own problems. So does this mean that we should leave one-price-fits-all as is? Not necessarily. Rather than charging based on field of study, there's still the option of charging students based on course level, since, again, upper level classes tend to be more expensive to run. I'm not about to roll out a full policy proposal at the moment. But there are a couple of reasons to think it wouldn't be a bad idea to charge seniors more than freshmen. Right now, students who take a few intro level courses and then drop out -- of which there are depressingly many -- subsidize students who take costlier, higher-level courses on route to a degree, and a better paycheck. Charging students less early on and more down the line would fix that imbalance. Beyond that, since some studies have suggested that the cost of school also influences completion, charging by course level might also help keep students in school through the crucial early years of higher education. It's just a thought. But in any event, there's got to be a better system than charging the same price for steak and salad. 
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| Fog, More Beautiful Than You Have Ever Seen It Before Posted: 03 Jul 2013 02:54 PM PDT You can read shapes into clouds, but you can read intentions into fog. The silky stuff doesn't just hang in the sky in the fluffy, carefree way clouds tend to; it sticks close to ground, surrounding everyone and everything on it, moving with stealth and direction. Fog lurks. It waits. It makes its move. Which is what makes the time-lapse above so striking. The video is the product of two years of fog-stalking by the Bay Area-based photographer Simon Christen, and its over-time framework transforms fog's typically menacing quality into something beautiful. The video captures the undulating grace of fog's movement -- whipping, whirling, wandering -- as it streams into and over human infrastructure. As Christen explains the video:
For more work by Simon Christen, visit http://www.simonchristen.com/. 
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| Fiftysomethings Reflect on Twentysomethings Posted: 03 Jul 2013 02:34 PM PDT  popsugar social/Google images The "twentysomething," that highly studied sociological specimen, has been a topic of sustained conversation among psychologists, journalists, and cultural critics over the past few years. Reflections on Millennials sometimes include intense criticism, but Meg Jay, author of The Defining Decade, points out that "even as we dismiss twentysomethings, we culturally fetishize them. Popular cultural is obsessed with these in-between, 'freebie' years. Even parents who settle down fast project their fantasies, saying, 'These are going to be the best years of your life.'"
At a talk at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Jay had a number of comments of her own about twentysomethings, largely making the point that the way people spend their twenties matters later in life in terms of income, relationships, and overall happiness. Most interestingly, though, Jay provided evidence that the twentysomething brain is developmentally distinctive. "The brain is going through a second critical period of growth," she explained. "The brain doesn't finish developing until some time in your twentysomething years. Being more specific, the pre-frontal cortex doesn't reach maturation until some time in your twenties. This is the last part of the brain to have evolved; it's the last part of the brain to mature. For our purposes, what's important to know about the pre-frontal cortext is that this is the part of the brain that thinks about time, probability, and uncertainty. "If the brain is rewiring itself in the 20s for adulthood, it's trying to wrap itself around the concepts of time, probability and uncertainty." In other words, there's science behind the idea that people in their twenties have to figure out all of the stuff Jay is using to define adulthood: How to make long-term plans, how to deal with the uncertainty of the future, etc. But a question remains: Are Millennials figuring stuff out less effectively than generations before them? To get a take on this question, I had a conversation with three fiftysomethings who attended Jay's talk. They're all parents of young people who are or are about to become twentysomethings, and I asked them what they learned about the twentysomething specimen. The main take-aways: Being a twentysomething has always been hard. They also really hope Girls isn't true-to-life. Here are some lightly edited highlights from this fiftysomething focus group on the most talked-about generation.
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| Portlandia Everywhere: Where the Hipsters Are (According to Yelp) Posted: 03 Jul 2013 02:32 PM PDT
These days, every big city has a section of town where you can get a cold-brewed iced coffee made with beans source from a single farm in Nicaragua -- and a PBR. And when you are there you know that this is where the hipsters live. Because a substantial part of being a hipster is consuming hip stuff, Yelp turns out to be a great way to discover where the hipsters are. I've long employed this trip to find the kind of coffee I like (shout out to Bicycle Coffee, Oakland) by searching "hipster" in the relevant category, but it turns out that Yelp can also serve up heat maps of hipster concentrations, based on the words used in reviews. And they are very good. Having reviewed these maps for the cities that I know, I can say that they are among the most accurate ever recordings of hipster density, all the way down to the little barely red pocket of hipsters at 28th and Burnside in Portland, a rather far-flung outpost in the cradle of hipster civilization. So, here you go, Yelp's hipster maps (complete with faux-hip typeface) for Austin, Boston, Chicago, London, Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Philadelphia, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, Toronto, and Washington, DC.
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| An Independence Day for Egypt's Secularists? Posted: 03 Jul 2013 02:30 PM PDT  A policeman (center) cheers with protesters as they dance in front of the Republican Guard headquarters in Cairo on July 3, 2013.(Reuters) Early on, Mohamed Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood cohorts made all the right noises. In April 2012, as Egypt was preparing for its first elections since the ouster of Hosni Mubarak, leading Muslim Brotherhood figures -- including the Islamist political group's chief strategist, Khairat el-Shater -- held convivial conversations with a visiting delegation of U.S. lawmakers. As one member of that congressional group reported to me then: "They all go out of their way to say what we want to hear. They are going to fully protect women's rights, minority rights, the constitutional assembly. They all made great pains to emphasize, without being asked--Shater included--that they will respect all international agreements." Above all, Shater, a successful businessman (and at the time Morsi's superior), and the other Muslim Brotherhood leaders indicated that they wanted to make Egypt prosperous, and to accomplish this they would have to compromise their dreams of immediately installing a narrow form of sharia, or religious rule, as the law of the land. When he was elected president, Morsi met those promises part of the way, especially by not breaching the Egypt-Israel peace treaty (although the Brotherhood does not officially recognize Israel). Morsi even enjoyed a brief interlude of international acclaim when he brokered a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in 2012. But the new Egyptian president seemed to think that he could pretty much have his way domestically, forcing through an unpopular sharia-inspired constitution, appointing fellow Muslim Brothers to key ministries, sacking generals and above all failing to understand the needs of a modern economy. And, unfortunately, the Obama administration may have encouraged that view, with what amounted to a mostly hands-off policy toward Egypt's internal politics, at least until recently. The results are now in. On the eve of July 4, secular Egyptian protesters have achieved something like their own Declaration of Independence against the threat of Islamist takeover. With a desperate Morsi rocked by protests even larger than those that toppled Mubarak--one state-run outlet is reporting that the Egyptian military has already ousted him from office--some lessons are already apparent. Once again, an Islamist political party in charge has failed the simple test of finding its way into the modern world. Ideology trumped reality in an era when the reality of the global economy demands fast integration, openness, and adherence to basic economic principles. So we have already seen in Iran since the Islamist revolution of 1979, with Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, and even to a degree in Turkey where Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's more mildly Islamist party has found itself confronted with angry and violent street protests (despite the very different political history that brought Erdogan to power). But the lesson of Egypt, which for centuries has been considered the cultural and historical center of the Arab world, is perhaps the starkest of all. Over the past year Morsi, the first elected Islamist head of state in Arab history, has been the subject of an unprecedented set of experiments. To wit: Could radical jihadists in power adapt and learn to govern pragmatically, especially by linking up Egypt's impoverished economy to the global system? Could an Islamist head of state renounce jihadist violence in practice instead of theory, in contrast to al-Qaida or its many offshoots, as well as Hamas and Hezbollah? Could Morsi work with the international community rather than consistently defy it, as the Iranian regime had done? Morsi failed miserably on several of those counts, particularly and perhaps fatally the first. Egypt's economy remains a disaster, with rising food prices, long gas lines and daily blackouts. To her credit, U.S. Ambassador Anne Patterson warned Morsi of the dangers in a blunt speech in Alexandria this February, when she noted that the government owed billions to oil companies, was running out of foreign reserves, and that Morsi was failing to supply his people with the most basic needs. The future of Egypt's infant democracy is now utterly unclear, but there is some cause for hope. While the most radical Islamists will no doubt draw the wrong lessons from the turmoil in Egypt--don't participate in Western-style democratic elections at all--the smarter and more numerous Islamist parties will, like many in the already-fractious Muslim Brotherhood (which has seen many defectors), have no choice but to learn to compromise on their ultimate dreams of a fundamentalist state far more than they have already done. Already the radical Salafist Nour Party has hedged, cautiously siding with the protesters and calling for fast presidential elections in order to avoid "civil war." As the oldest, most entrenched and most socially acceptable of these fundamentalist groups, the future direction of the Muslim Brotherhood is being critically tested too, and not only in Egypt but in Syria as well, should Bashar al-Assad fall. As in Egypt, Syria's exiled Muslim Brotherhood has long carried the political prestige of being the only organized group to have opposed the regime over the decades. "The Muslim Brotherhood is losing legitimacy at an astonishing rate, faster than I thought likely," says Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA expert who is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and is an expert in the region. Yet the secular protesters in the streets can't win either by acclaiming or supporting a coup. And here, perhaps, the Obama administration can provide a helpful nudge. "The administration should do what it has not done, and rip Morsi and the old MB guard for trying to set up majoritarian democracy and that runs roughshod over minority concerns," says Gerecht. "We have little financial leverage here--except through the military. But we should use the bully pulpit. It may be a bit late, but better late than never. The administration needs to take Egyptian civil society seriously." So do the Islamists. One can only hope they digest the latest lesson from the Arab street. 
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| Historical Desserts for the 4th of July Posted: 03 Jul 2013 01:59 PM PDT  To pass the time as the nation waited for the DOMA decision last week, the Court-watcher superhub SCOTUSblog, staffed by seasoned court reporters and lawyers, took questions from readers. Do the clerks stay to hear the decisions? Can Ruth Bader Ginsburg really do twenty pushups? Is a decision really coming today? "Has anyone perused the SCOTUS cookbook?" asked one reader. "Is it worth the $25?" "The stories about Marty Ginsburg, Justice Ginsburg, are worth way more than $25," answered SCOTUSblog editor Amy Howe. But the book received other endorsements as well. "I had the opportunity to interview Justice Ginsburg serveral times in 2004-2005," wrote in another reader who'd been watching the liveblog, "and each time Prof. Marty Ginsburg would bake us his lemon poppy-seed pound cake to eat during the interview. The man could really bake." I don't need to be told twice to acquire a niche cookbook. Once The Atlantic's legal analysts had filed their takes on the cases of the day, and the crush was over, off I was to the Supreme Court gift shop. For those who followed the last two weeks of the Court's term closely, the spiral-bound collection is bound to fascinate for at least one reason. It's not just that the book--a selection of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's husband's recipes, which he apparently often made for the Supreme Court spouses at their lunches--contains stories about a remarkable man and an exceptional marriage. It's not just that it provides an unusual angle from which to consider the individuals who make such tremendous decisions, and the families that support them. Nor still is it that the recipes are genuinely good, as I quickly discovered testing them. No, what Court-watchers of the past weeks will notice is that the book was put together by Martha-Ann Alito, the wife of Justice Alito, who was recently criticized for apparent rudeness to Justice Ginsburg as she read her Voting Rights Act dissent. The Supreme Court may have its moments of discord, but these recipes and stories were collected by Justice Alito's wife in memory of Justice Ginsburg's husband, "on behalf of the Supreme Court spouses." In this regard, Chef Supreme: Martin Ginsburg is only a more recent example in the rich tradition of recipe collections in our nation's capitol: Food, and particularly specific recipes, have long been a vehicle for the expression of broader American identity in Washington, D.C., and the collection of them has long transcended the divides republican government definitionally produces. For July 4th, it's a relatively simple task to resurface some of those old recipes and their collectors. Let's begin with a recipe from the man who drafted the document July 4th celebrates. "Jefferson's recipes," the late food writer Richard Sax noted in his Classic Home Desserts, "some recorded by his chef Julien, and many gathered by his daughter, Martha Jefferson Randolph, are so carefully written that you can cook from them with complete success." And people have: Sax points out that President George Bush's luncheon for Queen Elizabeth in 1991 featured macaroons made from the Jefferson household's original recipe. History does not record whether the British monarchy found Jefferson more to its taste in 1991 than in 1776. Other founding fathers may also be remembered in re-created desserts. The staff at Mount Vernon, George Washington's well-preserved home, have issued a modernization of Martha Washington's "great cake" recipe, originally requiring 40 eggs and 4 pounds of butter. To commune with the common man, today's bakers can easily re-create "Election Cake," a generic name for a panettone-like yolk- and butter-enriched bread with dried fruit. Sax suggests the cakes were "served at Militia Day fairs after the American Revolution," and Greg Patent in Baking in America writes the cake "was so good that it was supposedly used to bribe voters." It was showing up in magazines in the mid-19th century. If turn-of-the-century cooking is more your style, try a re-creation of a Washington Pie from the 1904 White House Cook Book. A few years back, P.J. Hamel tested and updated the recipe instructions, posting the results on the excellent blog run by King Arthur Flour, the United States' oldest flour company. Anyone now can produce the layered, creamy cake, which resembles a Boston Cream Pie without the chocolate frosting. Moving forward a decade or so to peruse The Congressional Club Cook Book of 1927, one may find an amusingly sparse recipe for Indian Pudding from Teddy Roosevelt's widow, who credits it to her grandmother:
Cooking time and temperature? You're on your own. The other Indian Pudding recipes around it, from the wives of New England Republicans Representative Frothingham, Senator Gillett (fun fact: Gillett proposed an anti-polygamy amendment to the Constitution in 1914), Senator McLean, and Senator Metcalf, are all much more detailed, and include specific instructions for spices and for molasses, without which Indian Pudding these days is barely recognizable as Indian Pudding.  The book also contains Grace Coolidge's recipe for corn muffins, notable for two reasons: first, because Mrs. Coolidge says it will make 14 muffins, which will give modern bakers a chuckle (but don't believe her: with modern tins, it's a scant 12); second, because in 1932 the Pulitzer Prize would be awarded to the goofy Gershwin musical Of Thee I Sing, in which a crucial plot point consists of the president falling in love with and marrying a woman for her corn muffins. "Who cares about corn muffins?" pouts the Southern belle his committee has selected for him to wed instead. "All I demand is justice!" The Gershwin experts I asked about the coincidence knew of no evidence that Grace Coolidge was the inspiration here, though one, Philip Furia , encouraged further digging. "Please do pursue this," he wrote, "because it would illuminate what for me is still a very odd moment in the libretto." As fun as it can be to burrow down in historical recipe collections, as a hobby, it has its dangers: Mindlessly recreating recipes of the dead and famous can look a lot like fetishizing the eating habits of old, white men. Desserts, a critic might point out, are one of the safer and sanitized ways of interacting with human history. But any history can be sanitized, and in fact a careful perusal of historical recipe collections can be as responsible a way as any of engaging with the past. To an alert reader, far from whitewashing the nation's record, these collections are a window into these social prejudices and inequalities. One can read much of the social history of the United States--immigration, slavery, industrialization, Civil Rights--in its food. Jefferson's macaroons and Martha Washington's "great cake" were undoubtedly fashioned, most of the time, not by presidents' or presidents' wives' hands, or even their servants' hands, but by slave hands. Take a close look at Jefferson's recipe below: Though written partly in French (probably indicating the involvement of Honoré Julien, who also trained several of the Monticello slaves to make his recipes) the recipe requires blanching, peeling, and pounding almonds into a homemade paste, and then whipping egg whites into them with a wooden spoon until stiff. Seasoned home bakers will immediately realize what a task that is--modern recipes use finer, premade paste (courtesy of today's factories) and whip the egg whites separately with a whisk (still very labor-intensive) or a machine. When I gave up on authenticity and turned to an egg beater, I heard the engine whine in protest trying to shift the almonds with the whites. Neither will readers of The Congressional Club Cook Book of 1927 find recipes from the families of black representatives and senators: There were none. After a historic first round of black legislators during Reconstruction, the Capitol was returned to its former whiteness for over two decades, the House only gaining one black representative finally in 1929. Though senator Blanche Bruce, the second African American in the Senate (1875-81), and the only American senator ever to be born a slave, was according to his biographer a renowned entertainer and gourmand, I could find no recipes connected to his household in any available collections. In fact, the first reference I could find to any racially diverse political cookbook was in 1972, when a Miami News columnist wrote of "Mrs. Edward Brooke's Torte Pasqualina" being included in "The Republicans' Gourmet Recipes for Happy Dining." The very name "Mrs. Edward Brooke" points to another feature of these recipes: Many reflect the traditional household division of labor, where food was the concern of women--women whose recipes were made famous because of the public lives their husbands led (and which were foreclosed to them). In fact, though almost every recipe in 1927 Congressional Club Cook Book was submitted by women (The King of Spain, who took a personal interest and submitted a "Tortilla a la Espanola," was among a small minority), not a single married woman has her own given name printed. Instead, they are credited, as was customary at the time, but their formal, social names: Mrs. Calvin C. Coolidge, Mrs. John C. Allen, etc. By 2010, when Linda Bauer published Capitol Hill Cooks, recipes were mostly simply listed under the names of the politician, whether or not the politicians themselves were making the dishes--with notes from family members where appropriate. The exception? First ladies get top billing on presidential recipes. Knowledge of the past can shape perception of the present. The discussion of Marty Ginsburg: Chef Supreme on SCOTUSblog last week was filler as the country waited for the justices' historic decisions on gay marriage. But the Supreme Court cookbook is a part of the nation's social history as well. What I saw, as I paged through the crimson album on the Metro back from the Supreme Court, wasn't just a cookbook with unexpectedly interesting recipes--a foodie need only glance at the "Frozen Lime Soufflé" to appreciate the concept, and the food chemistry, worked into that home-chef-friendly offering. I saw the recipes of one of only two men ever to be a Supreme Court spouse--a man, though a renowned tax law scholar in his own right, famously supportive and proud of his wife's career. Notes from other Supreme Court spouses, interspersed among the recipes in the book, point his commitment to this role. "Aware that one aspect of a spouse's job is to bind in an institution defined by differences, he seemed eager to do his part," former Supreme Court spouse Cathleen Douglas Stone writes. Maureen Scalia recalls that Marty Ginsburg was incapable of allowing the travesty of store-bought bread at the spouses' luncheons, preferring to bake it himself. Thus continued, then, a tradition whose modernization may be reflected in Marty Ginsburg, but whose roots stretch far earlier. Baking and binding have long accompanied Washington's debates and divides. In case you're short some dishes for your Fourth of July picnic, here are but a few of many recipes you may use to show it.      
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| The Next Big Thing for Exploring the Distant Universe: Balloons Posted: 03 Jul 2013 01:45 PM PDT ![[IMAGE DESCRIPTION]](http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/science/assets_c/2013/07/balloon-thumb-570x460-126291.jpg) The history of space exploration is in many ways a history of lenses. From Galileo's Starry Messenger to the powerful telescope arrays we have today, it has been two basic facts -- the curve of a glass, the sheen of a mirror -- that have largely been responsible for expanding human vision beyond Earth. And one of the best ways we have imagined to explore the worlds beyond our own is to put human-honed glass into space itself. Space telescopes can capture images that are unblurred by Earth's atmosphere. But while the Hubbles and the Chandras of the world are amazing sources of scientific data about the distant universe, they are also amazingly expensive sources of those data. Hubble, launched into orbit in 1990, cost around $2.5 billion; Chandra, prior to its 1999 launch, was scaled down in its capabilities -- with a reduction of the number of mirrors it contained from 12 to eight and a reduction in scientific instruments from six to four -- in order to minimize its costs. So while our appetites for exploration are large, our resources are (relatively) small. Especially now, during this time of austerity here on Earth, it's salad days when it comes to our scanning of the universe. Which means that scientists need to devise ways not just to process the new knowledge we gather, but also to gather that knowledge as efficiently -- read: as cheaply -- as possible. A team of researchers in the U.S. and Europe think they've done just that. The group has devised a system for exploring the universe through a telescope that will hover over 99 percent of the Earth's atmosphere. And that telescope will be hanging from a balloon. During a talk at the Aspen Ideas Festival, the physicist Richard Massey shared the vision for the device hoped to expand human vision, launching some of our most time-tested technologies -- glass, balloons -- into space. Well, almost into space. "You can get 99 percent of the way into space with a very big balloon, about the size of a football stadium," Massey said. And! You can get there much, much more cheaply with that balloon than you could with a more traditional space telescope. "You can get basically above almost all of the Earth's atmosphere," Massey noted, "for about one percent of the cost of a satellite." The project the team envisions is named HALO -- High-Altitude Lensing Observatory -- and it does indeed involve sending a high-tech balloon up into the highest reaches of the atmosphere. Suspended from which will be, indeed, a telescope. The big goal for the high-flying scope being, Massey said, nothing less than creating "a map of the dark matter of the unseen universe, everywhere." The work will be in many ways an extension of the map that Massey and colleagues published in Nature in 2012. The HALO team will take advantage of weak lensing -- a phenomenon, predicted by the theory of relativity, through which massive objects bend light -- to study how much dark matter there may be in the universe. And to analyze how its (theorized) distribution has evolved across its galaxies since its earliest days. Here's where the balloon comes in. Accomplishing that goal -- detecting the bent light thought to result from the presence of dark matter -- requires a telescope that is unimpeded by the vagaries of Earths' atmosphere. It requires crisp images of space. "We want to see things that are very far away, so that we can map out all the dark matter between them and us," Massey said. "We want to see things which are very far away, and therefore very small." And that's especially important in this case, because for Massey and his colleagues -- and for most any researcher whose work focuses on the detection of the dark matter thought to account for most of the mass in the universe -- light itself is data. "The light from those distant galaxies can travel 10 billion years across the universe, and still be perfect," Massey pointed out. "But as it passes through the atmosphere, it's this sort of swirling, turbulent mass of air. And the light bounces around, and everything appears blurred." That phenomenon, Massey noted -- the blurring effects of the Earth's atmosphere as light bounces around it in different directions -- "is why stars twinkle." Which is lovely, unless your work depends on the acquisition of crisp images from space. In which case, you may look to balloons to get your pictures of the heavens. 
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| Posted: 03 Jul 2013 01:34 PM PDT My sense is that you guys wil want a place to talk about this. I'm watching the news and reading what I can as I get ready for a big trip. Here's a space for some conversation. I won't even attempt to pretend to be an expert. But I hope to learn from you guys--links, questions and informed opinions (emphasis on well-informed) are all welcome. Rants less so. Here's a good place to start--J.J. Gould talking to Mona Eltahawy about the "false choice" Egyptians were given during the election. More--here's our liveblog from The Wire. 
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| The Pitfalls of Transitional Governments in Egypt Posted: 03 Jul 2013 01:16 PM PDT  Reuters On December 7, 2011, Nancy Okail, then the director of Freedom House's Egypt office in Cairo, was summoned to the Ministry of Justice for interrogation. Soon after she arrived, the prosecutor accused her of illegally receiving funding from a foreign government and interrogated her for seven hours. A few weeks later, a group of police officers stormed the Cairo offices of Freedom House, forcing the staff members into a conference room, taking their computer passwords and documents, and holding them incommunicado for hours.  Nancy Okail (Freedom House)The same day, nine other civil society groups were raided, including other American NGOs such as the National Democratic Institute, the International Republican Institute, and the International Center for Journalists. Three days before the raid, Okail had submitted the newly required documents that would register Freedom House with the Egyptian government, which was then ruled by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, the military body that temporarily took charge between the governments of Hosni Mubarak and Mohammed Morsi. Apparently, Okail's registration documents hadn't been enough. In an effort to stifle civil society during the tumultuous transition time, the SCAF zeroed in on "foreign hands" and launched investigations into a broad swath of groups that received funding from abroad -- a category that included virtually every nonprofit group, Okail pointed out, since Egypt's weak economy couldn't support such organizations on its own. The SCAF referred the cases of Okail and four of her colleagues to trial, along with more than a dozen other Americans working at other organizations, including the son of U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood. In January, Okail began regularly appearing in court, where she was forced to sit in a cage in the courtroom while sensational accusations against her flew. "As soon as I went in the cage, I realized it wasn't a fair trial: it was a warning for the public," Okail said. "The message was that if you're working for human rights and democracy, this is where you're going to end up." As Egypt once again ousts its leader and reverts to a transition government, Okail says incidents like the NGO trials raise questions about the volatility of having temporary actors in charge. At the time of the investigation, Freedom House's local country office had been working on supporting local civil society, educating voters, and monitoring elections. Okail is an Egyptian who had previously worked at the country's Ministry of International Cooperation in the early 2000s before getting her PhD in the United Kingdom. Almost immediately after she arrived to lead the Egyptian Freedom House office in 2011, she began receiving nightly threatening phone calls. When an article about Freedom House would appear in local papers, the reaction was harsh, with some commentators saying, "We should burn their offices!"-- and worse. Okail believes the army wanted to preserve the privileges it had amassed in this interim period, such as a lavish budget and unchallenged authority to silence their detractors. "Some of the things [our organization] looked at -- violations of human rights -- those were not the things they wanted to allow if they wanted to maintain their power," she said. Throughout the trial, Okail's former boss, Minister of International Cooperation Fayza Abul-Naga, would issue statements admonishing civil society organizations for working toward democracy or human rights. "She was a witness in court against us, she wrote pages and pages of testimony," Okail said. "The question is, what are the other institutions behind her that supported this move?" Straining under the pressure, Okail got divorced. In November, her mother had a stroke. Toward the end of her trial, Okail traveled to the U.S. to visit Freedom House's home office. While she was in Washington last month, the court sentenced the 43 NGO workers to up to five years in jail, even though the country was more than a year into the leadership of its first democratic government under Morsi. Okail and one of her American co-workers were sentenced to five years in abstentia. Another Freedom House employee received two years of jail "with hard labor." ( The Americans all fled to avoid jail time). Okail can't go back to Egypt. The only way to challenge her sentence is to go to jail and request a retrial from behind bars -- a risk she's not willing to take. Her preschool-aged twins are in Egypt, but they can visit her from time to time. Her parents aren't able to travel, and she doesn't know when or if she'll ever see them again. "Being here alone, with no family, it is very difficult," Okail said. "Knowing that I can never see my country again ... you get the sense of the injustice." She said she worries that the country once again might be falling into a chaotic period in which human rights may be overlooked. "We need a real period of transition to put together a constitution that represents all Egyptians and to put in place elections without military intervention," she said. 
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| Why You Should Read More Than 1 Newspaper, from Milwaukee to Hong Kong Posted: 03 Jul 2013 01:16 PM PDT From yesterday's NYT and WSJ, on the latest revelations about Cardinal Timothy Dolan, now of New York, during his period as archbishop of Milwaukee:
In case you can't make it out, the NYT headline says, "Files Show Dolan Sought to Protect Church Assets." For the WSJ, it's "Files Show Dolan Pushed to Defrock Priests." As has been the case in some similar WSJ/NYT pair-offs, the stories themselves are not as different as the emphasis of the headlines. Here is the classic example:
And meanwhile, from our friends across the Pacific, Anthony Tao of Beijing Cream has this nice comparison of stories from two of my staple news sources: China Daily, state-controlled and based in Beijing, and the South China Morning Post, a "normal" newspaper based in Hong Kong.
This one goes beyond headline-shading. As the SCMP points out, there was a gigantic demonstration in Hong Kong against a local leader for failing to defend Hong Kong's liberties in the face of pressure from Beijing. But with admirable Onionesque panache China Daily presents the same event as a celebratory outpouring of popular joy on the 16th anniversary of Hong Kong's return to mainland Chinese control. The story began: About 225,000 people braved stormy weather on Monday to attend city-wide events marking the 16th anniversary of the establishment of the HKSAR. As I mentioned when Edward Snowden first sought refuge there, Hong Kong has a gray-zone existence under China's "one country, two systems" regime. On the largest issues of national and foreign policy, it is finally under control from the mainland; but many of its people and institutions have been doing their utmost to maintain liberties that distinguish their "system" from that of the mainland. The SCMP/China Daily contrast illustrates what I'm talking about. 
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| China's Next Big Growth Market: Condoms Posted: 03 Jul 2013 01:12 PM PDT  Kin Cheung/ReutersChina is the fourth largest condom maker in the world, and yet its people don't tend to use condoms--at least not until recently. China's condom market will grow by nearly 60 percent in the next five years, according to Bloomberg, which cites research by Global Industry Analysts. That could spell big profits for foreign condom makers, particularly the Jissbon and Durex brands. So what's changing? Talking about sex in public has long been taboo in China, so much so that sex education is seldom taught in schools. Even though a rapidly rising percentage of Chinese youth are having premarital sex, 90 percent of them know little or nothing about contraception, as a 2013 study found. Here's a look at how they receive information about sex:  MORE FROM QUARTZ
That's good news for Reckitt Benckiser, which owns the Durex brand with 30 percent of China's condom market, making it the country's biggest manufacturer. Jissbon, which is owned by the Australian company Ansell, claims 10 percent of China's condom market and is its second-biggest manufacturer, according to Bloomberg. Of course, those brands have to compete with China's booming domestic condom manufacturing market. But like foreign infant formula makers, foreign condom brands have a big advantage: unlike with Chinese brands, consumers trust the quality control regimes of foreign companies, thanks to a slew of high-profile scandals involving faulty Chinese condoms that aren't well regulated. 
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| 35 People Dead in Chinese Mass-Murder: What Happened? Posted: 03 Jul 2013 12:39 PM PDT  Armed paramilitary policemen run in formation during a gathering to mobilize security operations in Urumqi, Xinjiang. (Kyodo/Reuters)China's westernmost province, Xinjiang (technically an "autonomous region"), seldom appears in the Western media without the word "volatile" or "restive" attached to it, and for good reason: the massive region has seen more than its fair share of violence. This unhappy history continued last Wednesday with the armed attack of government buildings in the city of Lukqun, an incident that claimed the lives of at least 35 people. According to the Xinjiang provincial government, a 17-member "terrorist cell" organized attacks on the local police station and other nearby buildings in retaliation for the capture of one of its members. The supposed leader of the cell was a Uighur man named Aihemeitiniyazi Sidike, who had formed the group in January and had, sometime in June, begun to prepare an attack. The incident in Lukqun appears to be the latest chapter in the long-running tension between China's dominant Han majority and the Uighur, a ethnic minority group native to Xinjiang who comprise 45 percent of the province's population. Uighurs and Han have clashed repeatedly over the years, and just four years ago fighting between the two resulted in the death of almost 200 people. Yet the Chinese media, in its coverage of the Lukqun incident, makes no mention of this ethnic tension. Instead, Xinhua has blamed "separatists in and outside the country" and "a few criminals" whose "anti-human nature" has made them "the common enemy of all ethnic groups." The Global Times, meanwhile, explained that members of a "East Turkestan faction" had recruited Uighurs fighting in Syria to return to Xinjiang in order to carry out attacks. When the U.S. government chimed in, calling for a transparent inquiry into religious tensions in Xinjiang, the Chinese state media dug its heels, even accusing Washington of "encouraging" terrorism in the province. Could the Chinese state media be right -- is violence in Xinjiang the result of a few bad apples and nefarious foreign terrorists? There is an organization called the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) which both the Chinese and American governments claim has ties to al-Qaeda and which, according to Beijing, has been responsible for a series of terrorist attacks in China over the past 15 years. However, ETIM is estimated to have fewer than 100 members and little external support, and no evidence links the group with any of the recent Xinjiang violence. In addition, few Uighurs are able to leave the country, much less travel to Turkey or Syria -- assuming those individuals have fomented much violence is likewise a stretch. If evidence of foreign meddling in the Xinjiang violence is so thin, why does the Chinese government continue to promote it? Why doesn't the state media simply acknowledge that ethnic tension in Xinjiang exists, and that they're working on resolving it? First, acknowledging ethnic tension is to say that the "harmonious society," one of Hu Jintao's principal governing philosophies, is little more than an empty slogan. China's policy of blaming domestic instability on external forces also applies to its handling of Tibet, where uprisings are usually attributed to the Dalai Lama, even though he hasn't lived in China in over half a century. This strategy -- by no means exclusive to China -- preserves the illusion that all of the country's internal violence has an external origin. Secondly, saying that Uighurs have a legitimate grievance would force Beijing to actually do something about it. Will this change? Russell Leigh Moses, in the Wall Street Journal, argues that the Xi Jinping administration is taking a softer approach to Xinjiang, but Beijing still lacks any kind of strategy for alleviating the root causes of the violence. Blaming ethnic violence on external forces may be good public relations, but if Beijing actually believes in it there's no reason to expect the violence will end. 
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| How to Be Better at Email: A Comprehensive Scientific Guide Posted: 03 Jul 2013 12:12 PM PDT
Reuters Email is all-pervasive, and arguably one of the most important tools of modern business. But the fact is most of us are not particularly good at it, wasting time on messages we should ignore and losing track of those that we should be focusing on. Then there's the base human instinct to cc: everyone in our address notebook whenever possible. What are the best ways to take control and optimize your use of email? Quartz turned to academic research from around the world and other thoughtful sources to compile these insights and suggestions. If You Want a Reply, Ask Simple Questions Do Not Disturb
Sign the Charter The idea is to stick a link to the charter at the bottom of your emails so that when you take a couple of days to reply, or appear curt, you not only have something to justify your behavior, but you encourage others to do the same. Email Is Still the Office Favorite Technical People Still Like to Email Don't Use Email When You Don't Have To Workplace-Email Training Helps No Matter What, Gossiping Is Pervasive 
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| 1book140's July Read: <i>The Orphan Master's Son</i> Posted: 03 Jul 2013 10:09 AM PDT  Random House Pack your imaginations for North Korea, bookies. You've voted the Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Orphan Master's Son as our Twitter book club's July read. "Adam Johnson has taken the papier-mache creation that is North Korea and turned it into a real and riveting place that readers will find unforgettable," raves reviewer David Ignatius in The Washington Post, calling it an "audacious, believable tale." Johnson's political adventure drags protagonist Jun Do through military culture, intelligence operations, political prison, and the glitter of the North Korean film industry, addressing both the gray and gloss of the country's public image. Filmmakers have recently tried to renovate the glum reputation of North Korea. Just this week, the Melbourne International Film Festival is featuring a retrospective on North Korean film, and together with the Edinburgh film festival, included the "slick and glossy" rom-com Comrade Kim Goes Flying. Journalism on North Korea is notoriously difficult, since the country doesn't admit reporters. Journalists from the BBC show Panorama recently snuck onto a student trip foran undercover television series that attracted significant criticism. Descriptions of everyday life like Barbara Demick's book Nothing To Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, are mostly based on interviews with refugees. Throughout July, I'll post further context on life in North Korea as questions come up from the novel. I'll also look for experts who can join the conversation. Joining our Twitter book club is fun. Find a copy of The Orphan Master's Son, follow us at @1book140, and tweet to join the conversation so we know that you're reading along. The table of contents for The Orphan Master's Son lists two chapters, even though the novel has many sections that work like chapters. I'm splitting our reading at the section breaks. Here's our discussion schedule:
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| The Thing to Understand About the Word 'Cyber' Posted: 03 Jul 2013 09:46 AM PDT
Cyber has come a long way since Norbert Wiener named the emergent field of systems, loops, and feedback, "cybernetics," as Ben Zimmer charts in today's Wall Street Journal. In a world in which computing is nearly ubiquitous, cyber now mostly indicates computing in a military context. It's less term of art than term of war.
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| Reddit Demographics in One Chart Posted: 03 Jul 2013 09:19 AM PDT
Reddit is more popular among men than women and the young than the old, a Pew Research Center study confirmed today. The social network's strength is among (advertiser-friendly) 18-29 year old males. One surprising finding of the study is that five percent of women aged 30-49 say they use the network, which is the same proportion as younger women. The social network's audience is evenly spread across income categories, and has a u-shaped distribution in education: those without a high school diploma and those who have at least an undergraduate degree are most likely to use Reddit. Overall, six percent of the people surveyed said that they had ever used the service. In all likelihood, a substantial percentage of Reddit users are probably under 18, but that group was not included in the survey. 
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| Why Egyptians Are So Unhappy With Morsi, in One Chart Posted: 03 Jul 2013 09:09 AM PDT  Reuters As Egypt's military and opposition groups prepare to oust President Mohammed Morsi, it's worth taking a look at just why so many Egyptians think a new leader, a military coup -- anything really -- would be better than the president they democratically elected just a year ago. When Morsi came into office last year, he laid out a plan for the nation that included some 64 distinct "promises." Just six hours after announcing his roadmap, an Egyptian entrepreneur named Abbas Adel Ibrahim launched the "Morsi meter," a site that aimed to track progress on the new president's commitments for his first 100 days in office. (It took a cue from Politifact.com's Obameter). Since then, millions of people have checked back to follow the new leader's progress. Suffice it to say, the Meter does not reflect well on Morsi:
According to the site, he's only achieved 10 of the 64 promises, most notably failing to make progress on the nation's chronic security issues and fuel shortages. "The country doesn't have money, so the country doesn't have gas," as one Cairo taxi driver put it to Al-Monitor, "while staring in frustration at a downtown traffic jam of cars haphazardly lined up near a gas station." In the site's 100-day report, it noted that pluralities of visitors to the site said there had been "no improvement" in any of the five categories the Meter tracked. Earlier this year, the Washington Post detailed some of the on-the-ground impacts of these failures:
Morsi of course inherited an economy and political situation that would have been tough for any new president to remedy. Public security nose-dived after the 2011 revolution, and the nation saw upticks in murder, theft, and sexual harassment. Meanwhile, 40 percent of Egyptians live in poverty and, with the country drowning in debt, Morsi failed to make the spending cuts necessary to obtain an IMF rescue loan. The economy is a big reason for Egyptians' disgruntlement, but it's not the only one: Minority and opposition groups in December protested the country's new draft constitution, which they said put too much power in the hands of Islamist groups. More recently, he's been criticized for cracking down on dissenters like Bassem Youssef , a comedian who lampoons the ruling Muslim Brotherhood on an evening "Daily Show"-style program. Surprisingly, even the country's hard-line Islamists, who are more closely aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood than the country's secular opposition, think Morsi's not doing a sufficient job -- of moving the country in a more dogmatic direction. In April, a telephone survey found that Morsi had a 45 percent disapproval rating. And as Morsi is discovering, Egyptians tend to voice their disapproval in the streets. 
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| The Year in Hot Dog Innovation Posted: 03 Jul 2013 09:07 AM PDT  A person in a hot dog suit poses with two women at a roller derby match (flickr/9stars). The Fourth of July, high holy day of the hot dog, is upon us. It may seem the fourth marks the eternal return of barbecues and fireworks, a seasonality for those without fields to tend. But time's arrow shapes even the cookout. Here, we survey the year in hot dog innovation through patents filed since the last time we celebrated the nation's independence with fire and processed meat. Let it never be said that our nation stood still while others carried forth the banner of progress. "The present invention relates to a meat product used in conjunction with a bun for the consumption of elongated cylindrical meat products comprising: a dual elongated cylindrical meat product, where the meat product is served within the bun. The bun includes a first half; a first well within the interior of the first half, where the first well provides a means for the placement of a first portion of the meat product; a second half, where the second half adjoins the first half along one side the second half; and a second well within the interior of the second half, where the second well provides a means for the placement of a second portion of the meat product."  "The inflatable decorative receptacle may also be useful in environments other than tailgating parties. For example, vehicles used for food or other vending purposes depend on their visibility to passing motorists and pedestrians. After setting up in a parking lot, street corner or fairground, the inflatable decorative receptacles are deployed on the ground or on the roof of a vehicle to attract attention. For example, a hot dog vendor may deploy a large inflated hotdog or even inflatable words such as 'HOT DOGS!' " A Printing Press for Corn Dogs (Or Any Stick-Mounted Food Item)
"The cooking appliance includes a pair of opposed heated cooking plates. Each cooking plate includes a primary reservoir/cavity and a secondary reservoir/cavity for receiving the batter and the food item therein. The cooking plates are hinged together whereby the plates can be abutted together such that the reservoirs and the cavities create a cooking enclosure to cook the food item and the batter therein. A stick receiving bung retains the stick in an orientation such that the food item is coaxial with the primary reservoir. Each secondary reservoir includes raised and recessed surfaces which cooperative define a recognizable image. Upon pouring and cooking batter within the secondary reservoirs, this image is transferred to the outer surface of the cooked battered food item." A Better Sweet Onion Condiment [No image available.] "The most well-known of all commercially available sweet onion sauces is manufactured by Marathon Enterprises, Inc., of Englewood, N.J., under the brand SABRETT. While SABRETT sweet onion sauce does very well commercially, due to its frequent packaging with a more potent hot dog, its ingredients are largely unnatural and include a significant number of chemicals (i.e., preservatives, etc.), which lead to an undesirable flavor. Thus, there is a need for an improved sweet onion sauce and a method for manufacturing the same." The Hot Dog Innovation Ecosystem "More recently, such roller grill units have been utilized to heat food products other than hot dogs in a vending situation. For example, burrito products have been manufactured to roll on and be heated by a roller grill. Such other products, however, have not been very successful because of the relatively short product life experienced by such products. While hot dogs and sausage type products are traditional and well understood and have dimensions and structures that work well on roller grills and for grab-and-go eating, other food products are a challenge to adapt for roller grills and for grab-and-go consumption... The present disclosure relates to novel and advantageous food products comprising, a filling substrate and a batter and breading layer surrounding the substrate, wherein the food product is cylindrically shaped, and wherein the food product maintains its shape when the food product is held at one end." Disrupting the Hot Dog Roaster  "The conventional hot dog roaster is disadvantageous in that when the number of the gears is much greater than three, the length of the hot dog roaster will be too long for a small space and that since the hot dog roaster cannot be rotated relative to the grill, uneven cooking of the hot dogs may occur due to hot spots of the heating action of charcoal in the grill. Therefore, an object of the present invention is to provide a cooking device that can overcome at least one of the aforesaid drawbacks associated with the prior art." Disrupting the Elongated Food Market "'[F]ood shaping' is generally limited to the restricted food types as set forth above or to frozen food products. However, there is a desire for cooking devices which are capable of customizing a variety of different food products into potentially utilitarian configurations. Such shaping of food products may also be more appealing from an aesthetic point of view as well as providing certain practical features, which make the consumption and handling of the specifically shaped food product more enjoyable. By way of example, the conventional "hotdog" or sausage type sandwich is enjoyed in many countries throughout the world not only because of the flavor and texture but also because of the elongated configuration allows a hotdog, sausage, etc., to be picked up and consumed without the need for forks, knifes, or like eating utensils."
"One embodiment of the present invention provides a method of applying a coating to a luminal surface of an implantable medical device. The method comprises providing the implantable medical device defining a lumen and having a longitudinal axis; rotating the medical device about the longitudinal axis; applying a first polymer in liquid form to the luminal surface; and at least partially solidifying the first polymer while rotating... The implantable medical device is rotated about its longitudinal axis by any suitable means, including a bed of rollers. In one aspect the rotation means is a hot dog roller such as the Lil' Diggity Hot Dog Roller or Hot Diggity Hot Dog Roller available from Gold Medal Products, Cincinnati, Ohio. The rollers are preferably made of stainless steel." 
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| Walking in the Steps of an Ancestor in Pickett's Charge Posted: 03 Jul 2013 08:32 AM PDT
Pickett's Charge, seen from the Confederate position (Edwin Forbes/Wikimedia Commons) Any individual life depends for its existence on a series of prior accidents, strokes of luck, tragedies, decisions, and near-misses that happened to the people who came before us --a chain of chance and happenstance stretching back for generations. If any one of innumerable events had not occurred--if this particular man had not emigrated; if this particular woman had not moved to a new city; if a man and a woman had not met on a street corner and married--then you or I might not have occurred, either. Little things happen, and big ones, and eventually these things add up to us. With these thoughts in mind I recently found myself standing in a Pennsylvania field, on a bright and windy day, squinting at a ridge and wondering what my great-great-grandfather was thinking on the morning of July 3, 1863, as he lay in the sweltering heat, waiting to take part in the military assault that would come to be known as Pickett's Charge. Nearby was a property known as the Spangler farm; the farm, now part of the Gettysburg National Park, was one of the spots from which the Southerners launched their assault on the third and conclusive day of a battle that marked a turning point in the war. Standing here, in a small depression in the countryside, it was possible to see that the soldiers would have had little idea what was waiting for them; the ripples and folds of the land obscured the ridge that was their ultimate objective, exactly one hundred and fifty years ago today. The ancestor I was curious about was a man named O'Wighton Gilbert Delk. Born in 1838 in the Tidewater region of Virginia, he left his country store in 1861 to volunteer with a unit that became part of the 3rd Virginia infantry regiment. By the time he found his way to Gettysburg, Captain O.G. Delk had survived Second Manassas and a number of the war's signal engagements. Many of the men he joined with were now dead. At the time of Pickett's charge he had not yet married my great-great grandmother, nor had children with her. Just as our nation owes its integrity in part to the fact that the assault on Cemetery Ridge was a failure, I personally owe my own existence to the fact that this one Southern soldier survived. It's an uncomfortable position for a descendant: Of course I deplore the cause the South and by extension my ancestor were fighting for. But at the same time I can't help but be glad he made it. Family lore held that O.G. lucked out by being in a protected position, but standing here it was easy to see that there were few truly safe havens. Just ahead was Confederate artillery whose aim was to pound the Union troops before the charge started; problem for them was, the Union artillery was firing back. To trace Captain Delk's exact path would be impossible; it was typically commanders who wrote the after-accounts of battles, and so many Southern officers would die in these hours that there were not many around later to do so. But evidence suggests O.G. started out in a cheerful mood:.Colonel Joseph Mayo, one of the 3rd Virginia field officers, would later report that his men were "unusually merry and hilarious" as they assembled. It's not clear where their high spirits sprang from: It's true that they missed the first two days of the Gettysburg battle, but only because they were engaged around Chambersburg, where Robert E. Lee had directed them to protect the wagon train of supplies. Summoned as reinforcements, they had marched 25 miles to get here for the culminating engagement of the battle. They were fresh only in a very relative sense. It could be they were taking their cues from the commanding officers: Pickett that morning "seemed very sanguine," recalled a young artillery officer whose written recollections were read aloud by Robert Freis, the guide who was ushering thirty of so of us along the path of the charge. Robert, a Civil War scholar, learned from the late historian Jay Luvaas that there is something unique to be gained from walking the actual ground of a battlefield, to understand the importance of a fence, or a barn, or a ridge, or a swale. The members of our group came from Virginia, Pennsylvania, and other mid-Atlantic states. Some had ancestors on both sides--I also have family roots in Pennsylvania--some of whom may have been shooting each other that day. As men prepared for the attack, larger events were converging. Stonewall Jackson was dead, the cavalry leader Jeb Stuart had been absent at the outset. After two inconclusive days of fighting, Robert E. Lee hoped to breach the Union line near its center, flooding that opening to break their ranks and continue his foray into northern soil. Longstreet, the general in charge of making sure this happened, did not agree with the tactic, and was sullen and disengaged. So that was how things lay: Shortly before the attack the 3rd Virginia were told their division had "the post of honor," which seems to have been a euphemism for being given the most dangerous task: striking at the very center of the Union line. After this, Col. Mayo recalled, they became "still and thoughtful as Quakers at a love feast." Mayo for his part had been chatting with a commander who had ventured out and gotten a sense of the advantage enjoyed by the Northerners, by dint of the fact that they held the high ground. Around 1 pm, Mayo later described, "the blazing sun [had] reached and passed the meridian" when the men in the 3rd Virginia were exposed to the "full fury" of a "tempest of shot and shell." "Indescribable horror" was what Mayo remembered: There was an explosion in an apple tree that he and his men had taken cover under; then a "piercing shriek," several men killed, more wounded, another cry from another apple tree, two brothers horribly hit; "nearly every minute the cry of mortal agony was heard above the roar and rumble of the guns." Bodies and limbs began to fly; "a handful of earth mixed with blood and brains struck my shoulder." This hourlong barrage was followed by a deceptive lull; through it Pickett came riding, exhorting them to "remember Old Virginia," rise and advance. By that time the 3rd Virginia had already been "decimated," Mayo said; but they rose, among them, presumably, my ancestor. As we stood looking toward the ridge, Robert argued that what was about to take place should not be called Pickett's Charge. True, Pickett had responsibility for what was happening here on the right side of the assault, where he commanded brigades led by Generals James Kemper, Richard Garnett, and Lewis Armistead. These brigades were to sweep up the hill and wheel around to the left, where they would be met by other brigades, not commanded by Pickett, coming from the left and moving right. Robert argued that the entire charge should have been called "Longstreet's Assault," but after the war, Longstreet was happy to let posterity attribute the disaster to Pickett. So what they had to do, now, was ascend the hill, making their way for about three quarters of a mile. Our group did the same; as we hiked up toward Emmitsburg Road, where Union soldiers would have been waiting, we could see how the smallest change in topography altered what any one person could see and understand. We frequently lost sight of one another. Much of the time I felt confused by what was north and what was south and what was Seminary Ridge, where they started, and what was Cemetery Ridge, where they were headed; in this, I figured I mirrored the bewilderment of the ordinary soldier. Incredibly, the soldiers were expected to march in close formation through the carnage, moving at quick pace, keeping together as they were pounded by artillery and soldiers shooting at them directly. Several members of our group were retired military: they marveled that the soldiers had not yet adopted the style of darting here and there, taking cover and covering each other. "I'll give you one reason: West Point," said one, meaning they were hewing to old strategy taught in classrooms. We could see how easily it would be to be disrupted by a fence, or a lane, or a structure: At one point a large barn separated Pickett's men, some going to one side, some to the other. The plan had been that Kemper's and Garnett's brigades would advance together. Armistead, slightly to the rear, was supposed to "catch up and extend the line on the left," as Mayo put it, but this broke down. In his account, Mayo describes passing the dead body of their color bearer; passing Captain Lewis, of Company C, looking "lazy and lackadaisical;" seeing a "splendid looking Federal officer" riding at full speed along a crest, so magnificent that he ordered the men not to shoot him; Kemper "rising in his stirrups and pointing to the left with his sword," shouting "There are the guns, boys, go for them." But quickly all was chaos; the folly of the attack emerged as the 3rd Virginia passed one "Captain Fry," whose horse had blood pouring from his neck. They learned that Kemper had been struck; a group of Vermonters were coming at them from the rear; soon everything was a "wild kaleidoscopic whirl" of destruction and smoke. Mayo saw a colonel knocked out of his saddle and killed by falling on his own sword; he heard an explosion; was knocked down, and "when I got on my feet again there were splinters of bone and lumps of flesh sticking to my clothes." The brigades that were supposed to be coming from the left were disrupted. The Union troops held, and with them, eventually, the nation. Somehow, O.G. Delk survived; in some ways he had been fortunately located. The 3rd Virginia was part of Kemper's brigade, which was at the far right of the advancing line. Their precise placement was in the leftmost section of that brigade, which protected them from artillery fire of Union troops coming from the right. To their left were Garnett's men. In the end, Robert pointed out, the 3rd Virginia suffered casualties of about 38 percent, which was high, but not compared to the rest of Pickett's division. The 8th Virginia, belonging to Garnett, suffered casualties of 92 percent. They were positioned near the 3rd Virginia. As Robert put it, "Go figure." Those Southerners who made it to the top had a choice: They could run and risk being shot; they could be captured; or they could try to make their way back to Confederate lines. "These guys were leaderless," said Robert. Kemper had been shot off his horse; Garnett and Armistead both were fatally wounded. Of the 3rd Virginia, 10 were captured, of whom 6 died in prison. O.G. Delk made it back, somehow, and would serve until the beginning of 1865, when he was afflicted with "a severe attack of rheumatism" and retired months before Lee's surrender. In a recent article about how the Civil War is being re-evaluated by scholars, Tony Horwitz points out that the view of this conflict as a "good war," resulting in the integrity of the union and the abolition of slavery, is giving way to a view of it as a bloodbath of carnage and cruelty, whose end result might have been achieved by less horrific means. Though the preservation of the Union and the end of slavery were essential goals, the means by which they were achieved was more tragedy, in the end, than triumph. The Civil War cost more American lives than the wars from the Revolutionary War to the Korean combined--over 600,000, and recent estimates have adjusted the number upward. This was the message our group took, that afternoon, standing at the top of the hill. Many who survived Gettysburg would never be the same. Many would be back in action too soon, not fully recovered from their wounds. And then there were the dead: lives lost, future generations truncated. "If O.G. Delk had taken a bullet, we wouldn't be having this conversation," Robert told me later. "Your children wouldn't exist." We thought of the potential extinguished that day, the losses and voids that would reverberate down the generations. It's just one more way in which the Civil War is still with us, whether we know it or not. 
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| Beyond the U-Haul: How Lesbian Relationships Are Changing Posted: 03 Jul 2013 08:13 AM PDT  Hanna Rosin posted a piece at Slate's Double X last week about gay male couples and monogamy--or rather their lack of it. Rosin said that some gay couples' resistance to monogamy might be a model that hetero couples could learn from. "This kind of openness may infect the straight world," she wrote, "and heterosexual couples may actually start to tackle the age-old problem of boring monogamous sex." She based her points on Liza Mundy's recent Atlantic cover story on why gay couples are in many ways happier than straight couples, as well as on recent data showing gay male couples are not the most monogamous people on the planet. A rebuttal by Nathaniel Frank took the data from both sources to task: "None of these sources show that 'most gay couples aren't monogamous,'" he wrote. As a lesbian, though, I was left wondering where the gay women's voices and data were in this discussion about evolving relationship norms. Lesbians have their own coupling customs--some influenced by a quite traditional idea of family, and some that make married monogamy seem pretty great. "U-Hauling"--packing up and moving in together after knowing each other for just three months--is perhaps the greatest tradition (and punchline) in lesbian culture. This "urge to merge" had a basis in practicality in the '50s and early '60s, when gay couples had to remain in the shadows. Back then, if you had the good fortune to make a family, you held onto it. It was a marriage. In the lesbian world, serial monogamy was safe, and also fulfilling. Women can have kids, too, so sometimes lesbians had those. This history is now well chronicled by efforts such as Brooklyn's Lesbian Herstory Archives, and before that in steamy pulp novels like the "Beebo Brinker" series by cult writer Ann Bannon, which offered insight into the dynamics of relationships in The Life. Even in the lesbian world in the mid-20th century, gender roles were clear, and a butch and a femme made a family that looked at least somewhat like others'. In general, the butches tended to work, with blue-collar labor offering somewhat steady employment for masculine-presenting women (unions in particular offered some protection from harassment and firing). The femmes worked, too, and also kept the home and butch spirits up. Still, things were a bit more egalitarian than in hetero marriages of the time; if you're both raised female, you know innately why the politics of running a household matter. In that sense, Mundy's cover story would have held up even then. I've recently revisited Stone Butch Blues, by the incredible activist and historian Leslie Feinberg. That novel came out 20 years ago and revealed a history of how dykes lived before Stonewall. The book contains what might be the first literary mention of U-Hauling, when Jess, the butch main character, meets Theresa, who will eventually wear her ring:
Later eras would continue to perpetuate the U-Haul as a wink-nudge measure of lesbian commitment. Early '90s comic Lea DeLaria, who billed herself as "That Fucking Dyke," made it into an actual joke on The Arsenio Hall Show: "What does a lesbian bring on a second date? A U-Haul." There was a Friends episode where a woman who loved Rachel since college arrived at her apartment with the orange trailer after a misinterpreted kiss. The other end of the U-Haul "joke," of course, is the good old "lesbian bed death" joke. Since neither of you is naturally jacked up on testosterone, the story goes, those quickies that keep straight couples together even when they barely see or like one other aren't as easy to conjure. Doom is certain! You'll end up like like sisters, ugh. But wait! A study published last year found that almost half of lesbians my age in long-term, committed relationships went at it for 45 minutes or more the last time they had sex together, compared to around 16 percent of straight females. 8.9 percent of us were at it for more than two hours, compared to 1.9 percent of straight ladies. So, there's some science to why so many women have dug monogamy: Not only do we know where our stuff is, we do it for longer, and women in general get better at it with age. I'm 35, and the generation right behind mine knew the U-Haul model of long-term relationships well. They heard stories from older couples, from women in the bars who talked about the old butch-femme days, of marriages that lasted 10 years, 20 years, that sometimes ended in divorce--which, to add insult to injury, wasn't even needed since no one was "really" married, anyway. That '80s generation had the added benefit of the women's movement, the early gay rights movement, and Rubyfruit Jungle. Those were the gay women who had a profile public enough for my generation to actually see, sometimes even reflected in pop culture. Alison Bechdel's cult comic serial Dykes to Watch Out For ran for almost two decades in alternative papers like Funny Times while the "Gay '90s" unfolded. As a closeted Catholic-school teenager, that's where I learned what lesbian relationships looked like. DTWOF is where I saw my first lesbian family and my first U-Haul. I can only speak for my own observations about gay women, but I do agree with Rosin's assertion that the current crop of young gays--women included--are freer with causal relationships and even the idea of responsible, respectful polyamory. Janet Hardy's The Ethical Slut came out in 1997, and by the time we were in college we were fluent in Dan Savage, being GGG, and the idea of monogamishness. The generation now in their twenties is even more attuned to this. There are certainly inspiring, committed poly relationships in my circles. With everything changing over the past decade (and few weeks), maybe the future model for lesbian families will look different. Maybe it will be a mom, mama and kids. Or two moms and a donor dad. Or an intentional family of several partners. At the same time, more lesbian couples than ever are raising kids together. I've been to approximately 607 lesbian weddings over the past three years. I know a LOT now about where to find quality sperm. There is something to be said--and Mundy said it well--about the wisdom gay women have to offer straight couples in terms of what works in a marriage. Now that we have a few more rights in terms of marriage ourselves, perhaps we will slow down on trying to get there so fast. 
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| Hong Kongers Demand Self-Determination—Will Beijing Listen? Posted: 03 Jul 2013 07:59 AM PDT  Hong Kong natives braved typhoon rains to march in support of full suffrage on July 1. (Tyrone Siu/Reuters)HONG KONG -- Last Monday marked the 16th anniversary of the return of Hong Kong to Chinese rule after more than 150 years of being a British colony. Official and unofficial events here attempted to present a cheery picture of Hong Kong's relations with the mainland. One event that focused on growing discontent with Hong Kong's current state of affairs, however, underlined just how upset many Hong Kongers have become with what they perceive as an unrepresentative local government primarily concerned with pleasing Beijing. For more than six hours, a steady stream of protestors ignored typhoon rains and marched from Victoria Park to Central, the city's central business district. The number of participants in the annual march was disputed, with organizers at the Civil Human Rights Front estimating 430,000 people while the police saying only 66,000. Aside from the pet causes of a rainbow of social groups such as gay rights advocates, free speech activists and Falun Gong adherents, the focus of this year's march was the issue of universal suffrage for Hong Kong's millions of registered voters in the 2017 chief executive election and 2020 legislative election. The march also highlighted the unpopularity of embattled Hong Kong Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying, also known as CY Leung, who has just begun the second year of his five-year term. Marchers mocked Leung as a puppet of China's ruling Communist Party and called on him to resign. Data from the University of Hong Kong's Public Opinion Programme collected in mid-June show the public support rating for Leung has reached an all-time low -- bad news for a chief executive who was met by tens of thousands of protesters demanding his resignation on the day he took office last July 1. After the march ended in Central's Chater Garden, a small group of protesters calling themselves the Anti-CY Alliance announced they would go on a one-month hunger strike in 50-hour shifts -- a move that should make some leaders in Beijing recall the hunger-striking students of Tiananmen Square in 1989. The hunger strikers, who are calling for Leung's resignation and universal suffrage, have already attracted support from legislators and media personalities. *** The common thread uniting the demands for universal suffrage and displeasure with Leung is the growing feeling that Beijing will never let Hong Kong be the master of its own house. Currently, the chief executive is selected by a committee of 1,200 prominent political and business leaders who choose from Beijing-friendly candidates. Of the 70 seats in the Legislative Council (LegCo), Hong Kong's legislature, 30 are selected by "functional constituencies" composed mainly of individuals and (typically pro-Beijing) corporations from varying economic sectors. "They're terrified that Hong Kong will become too democratic an example for cities on the mainland. It's a parental mentality." Pan-democrat legislator and Civic Party founding member Claudia Mo said Hong Kongers are acutely aware of how much less democratic their elections are compared to neighbors such as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines. This is no accident: The Communist Party is concerned that losing the influence it has over Hong Kong via the current system could negatively impact its control over the mainland, Mo added. "They're terrified that Hong Kong will become too democratic an example for cities on the mainland," she said. "It's a parental mentality. They've got this attitude, 'I'm a loving dad, you're an unruly teenager or spoiled child, you don't know what you need or want in life -- let me tell you,' that kind of attitude, when we're actually rather mature." Mo, who worked as a journalist prior to entering politics, has followed Beijing's plans for democratic elections in Hong Kong closely since the 1980s, when the territory's mini-constitution known as Basic Law was being negotiated by Beijing and London. "When the Basic Law was first drafted, I interviewed a top Beijing official and asked him when Hong Kong would be able to have real democracy -- one man, one vote. He said: 'Ten years -- ten years after the handover.' That would be 2007 for the Chief Executive election, and 2008 for the Legislative Council election. It all went by and the NPC [National People's Congress] reinterpreted the Basic Law and said we'll have it 2017 and maybe 2020. That's kind of a promise from Beijing, and we take it seriously." *** Hong Kong democracy activists have been marching on July 1 for a decade now, but what makes this year's demonstration significant is this: It was the opening salvo in what could become the largest civil disobedience campaign on sovereign Chinese soil since 1989. In theory, at least 10,000 people will occupy the city's financial district in July 2014 if no mechanism is in place to guarantee direct elections in 2017. Organizers say they have yet to decide what form their civil disobedience will take, but a real movement is gaining momentum. Known as Occupy Central, the movement is potentially serious enough to provoke a military response if Beijing senses a threat to its national security. Recent moves to rezone a substantial portion of Central's waterfront for use by the People's Liberation Army Navy are but one development suggesting that Occupy Central may have to deal with more than the standard police supervision of the July 1 protests. On June 19, an unknown man driving a stolen car rammed into the home of Jimmy Lai, owner of the pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily, leaving a machete and axe in Lai's driveway. Days later two, masked men threatened two workers who were delivering a truck full of Lai's newspaper, proceeding to torch the papers after the workers abandoned the truck. Lai said he believes both incidents were politically motivated, and he wasn't the only one: In addition to Lai's claims, activist/legislator "Longhair" Leung Kwok-hung said he received a threatening phone call from an unidentified caller two days before the march, which he attended. Indeed, an Anti-Occupy Central movement has also sprouted, under the auspices of the organization Voice of Loving Hong Kong. The organization's convener Patrick Ko said he aimed to fight the pan-democrat camp, which he characterized as a "dark force that has motives for unspeakable acts." At a press conference in late 2012, Ko, who has ties to the Communist Party in neighboring Shenzhen, said in reference to the opposition pan-democrats: "We are an anti-opposition force. If they step up opposition, we shall step up opposition [to them]. If they turn more radical, we shall turn even more radical." Since the announcement of the Occupy Central movement, Ko has vowed to counter Occupy's 10,000 protestors with 10,000 equally committed government supporters. Both sides have pledged nonviolence, but shoving between anti-Occupy protestors with signs who showed up toward the end of Monday's demonstration and those supporting Occupy indicate that emotions are already running high. *** Hong Kongers taking to the streets to oppose their government is nothing new, but the most notable change in the activist culture has been the willingness to target the local economy. Largely composed of a disappointed middle class and disaffected youth who often accuse the increasing number of mainland Chinese in Hong Kong of pushing up rents, reducing the availability of good jobs and "diluting" the local population, these activists are beginning to view big business as an Achilles' heel of the establishment. Hong Kongers taking to the streets to oppose their government is nothing new, but the most notable change in the activist culture has been the willingness to target the local economy. This spring, when laborers at Hong Kong International Terminals, a major container port operator, went on strike to demand better pay, a small army of young volunteers collected donations, many from middle class office workers. These funds enabled the strike to last 40 days, during which neighboring Shenzhen's ports began to attract cargo that would have normally gone to Hong Kong. The end result was a 9.8 percent raise for dock workers -- short of their goal, but a moral victory nonetheless -- corporations with operations in Hong Kong certainly took notice of the strike's strong grassroots organization and effectiveness. Should Occupy Central disrupt business activity in downtown Hong Kong next summer, it is difficult to predict the economic consequences. But the potential for the local economy to take its biggest hit since the SARS epidemic of 2003 does exist. Regina Ip, a former security secretary for Hong Kong who is currently a legislator, member of CY Leung's cabinet, and chairwoman of the pro-Beijing New People's Party, said that Occupy Central, were it to occur, would be "highly destabilizing and damaging to business confidence" in Hong Kong. "I've already received quite a lot of expressions of concerns from the business community, whether local or foreign investors," she said. "I do hope the government will be able to unveil its consultation proposals early next year so it can engage the different stakeholders actively." Ip said she agreed with recent comments by property tycoon Ronnie Chan, who suggested that regional economic rival Singapore might end up the big winner if Occupy Central does take place. "I read a U.S. geopolitical analysis which said that increasing antagonism between Hong Kong and China and the rising wave of nativism is already affecting Hong Kong's appeal to outside investors," Ip said. "And Singapore has always been targeting our business. They also want to be a premier international financial center -- so I think Ronnie Chan has a point." It does seem that if the impasse over universal suffrage is not remedied within the coming year, both Hong Kong and Beijing could end up losers. A sustained disruptive event in Hong Kong would have significant economic and political ramifications at the very least. A detente in which Beijing and Hong Kong's chief executive -- which may or may not be Leung, as he looks increasingly unlikely to last another year at the helm -- provide the universal suffrage that Hong Kongers have been waiting for, could neatly eliminate the problems posed by Occupy Central. "In a nutshell, the appropriate electoral system for Hong Kong, whether for electing the chief executive or the legislature, cannot be decided by mass protests," Ip said. "We need consultation and consensus between the different parties in LegCo." Claudia Mo emphasized that this time around, direct elections with no screening for candidates based upon loyalty to Beijing must be granted before July, otherwise the pan-democrats would be forced to act. "Forget about discussions or consultations, we'll have to take to the streets and we actually will occupy it. Get arrested? Fine, I'm prepared for it." Mo said. "Democracy is not a panacea, but it's something to start with. With democracy you have transparency, you have people's wishes and real public opinion in play. People's self-determination, in the end, is what democracy is all about." 
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| What the Beatles' Abbey Road Crosswalk Looks Like Today Posted: 03 Jul 2013 07:59 AM PDT Chris Purcell's lyrical short film, Why Don't We Do It in the Road? explores a regular old crosswalk in the St. John's Wood district of London — the place where the Beatles took a few short steps into pop culture history. Yes, it's that crosswalk — the one where the fab four are captured for all time on the cover of the Beatles' famous album. The image was the result of a quick 10-minute photo session back in the summer of 1969, turning a pedestrian area into a full-fledged tourist attraction. Today, you can even monitor the crossing via live streaming webcam. And, perhaps it's that accessibility — that averageness — that makes the location so appealing. Out in the open, not caged behind the walls of some locked-down photo studio, the most famous band in history took a short stroll. And, if you're so inclined, you too can walk in their footsteps, literally. As for his inspiration, Purcell writes, "I have long wanted to produce something Beatles related that could be made on a small self-funded budget. I also wanted to make something a little bit quirky and different. The idea behind this film seemed to do that, as well as appealing to a slightly unhealthy interest I have in street furniture!" To get close-up shots of the Belisha beacon, Purcell tracked down a factory that makes the yellow crossing lights and bought two, which now grace his production office. The film excels because it eschews traditional documentary convention — gone are the talking heads interviews, replaced by artistic macro shots, poetic voice over, and interview snippets. It has picked up awards at the NYC Independent Film Festival and the UK Film Festival, as well as a staff pick mention on Vimeo. For more work by Chris Purcell, visit his website http://www.rightanglefilms.co.uk/. 
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| A Punishingly Overlong <i>Lone Ranger</i> Posted: 03 Jul 2013 07:51 AM PDT  Disney About 20 years ago, a friend of mine wrote an extremely witty screenplay for a revisionist-Western comedy based on the Lone Ranger. (It was never produced, though it did win an award that paid for a year of film school.) The script's premise was that the masked man himself was a tall, good-natured schmuck, and it was the long-suffering Tonto who was quietly running the show. The premise of Gore Verbinski's new blockbuster adaptation of the pulp cowboy classic is more radical still: It's not Tonto who's the brains of the operation in this telling. It's Silver.
The Lone Ranger is a profoundly unsubtle—and equally ill-advised—effort to recapture the improbable charm of Verbinski's Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. But while it's not a good movie, neither is it quite the total train wreck implied by many reviews. (It does, however, wreck more than its share of trains.) The film has plenty of weaknesses—an unevenness of tone, a surfeit of plot convolutions, some problematic political echoes—but its central flaw is that it is absurdly, punishingly overlong. Tucked away somewhere in its 149-minute running time, there is a clever, corny summer diversion lasting perhaps an hour and three-quarters. But this is the era of the Big Cinematic Event, and if you don't want every single dollar of a $200-million-plus budget to be waved in your face—well, you may as well stay home and watch TV. The story (by Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, with an assist from Justin Haythe) is straightforward enough in its early contours: A mild-mannered district attorney named John Reid (Armie Hammer), returns home to the Lone Star state following his big-city education. Upon arrival, however, he is deputized as a Texas Ranger by his decidedly manlier brother (James Badge Dale) in order to help capture the notorious outlaw Butch Cavendish (William Fichtner). But things do not go according to plan, and Reid ends up—at least to all appearances—dead. Luckily for him, he is revived by a legendary Spirit Horse (whom he will later repay with the decidedly pedestrian sobriquet "Silver") and a tribe-less and quite possibly deranged Comanche named Tonto (Johnny Depp). Given that Reid is presumed by the world to be deceased, his new partner persuades him to don a mask as they continue their quest to bring Cavendish to justice. Hokey? Of course. (And I haven't even mentioned the framing narrative, which features an impossibly wizened Tonto telling his story to a young boy at a carnival in 1933 San Francisco...) Yet there's a certain goofy grandeur to the movie's first half or so. Hammer, who played the fabulously wealthy Winklevoss twins in The Social Network—and is himself the great-grandson of the still-more-fabulously-wealthy oil tycoon Armand Hammer—is an amiable enough cinematic presence, and Fichtner is magnificent as Cavendish, snarling and sneering and eating the occasional human body part with demonic aplomb. Moreover, as much as I've tired of Depp's burgeoning menagerie of weirdo performances, his Tonto, though perhaps politically off-key, is at least charitably low-key. (For those who recall Depp in Jim Jarmusch's 1995 neo-Western Dead Man, this is essentially a role reversal, with him taking on the Gary Farmer part as a deadpan Native American sidekick to a clueless white man.) The movie's early action sequences—in particular one that's set on a runaway train—are witty and inventive, with Verbinski toying neatly with camera placement and spatial geometry. There are likable nods to Once Upon a Time in the West (in particular a railroad subplot and the oscillating dramatic score), Little Big Man, The Searchers, and The Bridge on the River Kwai. And the classic catchphrase "Who was that masked man?" is updated for a more ironic age to "What's with the mask?" But then, somewhere around the hour-and-a-half mark, The Lone Ranger makes the fateful decision not to end. Worse, the movie keeps not-ending for another full hour. Unnecessary backstories unspool, tiresome gimmicks get rolled out—look! there's Helena Bonham Carter as a tough-but-decent prostitute whose wooden leg is really a gun—and dull new villains are revealed to be behind the perfectly compelling originals. The final action sequence (also set on a train) proves to be as exhausting as the first was amusing, with the body count escalating unpleasantly and the William Tell Overture—used sparingly throughout most of the film—commencing to trample everything in its path. Somewhere around the hour-and-a-half mark, 'The Lone Ranger' makes the fateful decision not to end. Worse, the movie keeps not-ending for another full hour. As cinematic sins go, excessive length is hardly an original one. The delusion that bigger will always be better—that each additional plot twist will somehow signify ingenuity rather than desperation—is by now a fundamental operating principle in Hollywood. Blockbuster directors demand movies large enough to house their egos; the studios are in a state of near-constant panic (and theater owners even more so); genuine storytelling is migrating to television; a lengthy series of explosions translates seamlessly in Beijing or Rio de Janeiro; and on and on. But to quote Jerry Seinfeld, something's gotta give. I'm sure if I set my mind to it, I could name a recent big-budget film that would have benefited from greater length. But a list of the big-budget films that would have been substantially improved by a zealous trim is... well, awfully similar to a list of big-budget films, period. I can't say whether I might enjoy a Transformers movie that was under two hours long—but one reason that I can't say is because the ones that Michael Bay has offered up to us have clocked in at 144, 149, and 154 minutes respectively. And it's not just the summer blockbusters: Les Miserables was a polished, well-crafted film that labored under the misconception that viewers wanted to pass the 19th century in real time. And don't get me started on Peter Jackson's first installment of The Hobbit or, like the movie itself, I might never stop. The only 140-minute-plus movie of the past two years that I can recall fully earning its running time was Zero Dark Thirty. But on we go nonetheless, with our Man of Steels and our Lone Rangers and our White House Downs, with movies that seem, at some point around the two-hour mark, to gradually morph from honest efforts at entertainment into acts of mild cinematic bullying. That likable character actor hovering at the periphery of the plot will turn out to be the surprise villain-in-chief. Some idle incident from the first act will reappear as the crucial, and in most cases nonsensical, hinge of the climax. The anesthetic liberalism of the hero will give way to a reluctant (yet quietly gleeful) embrace of force. And a non-incidental number of cars/trains/buildings/cities/planets will be made to explode ostentatiously, though with as little moral weight as can plausibly be arranged. The Lone Ranger hardly invented this formula. But seldom have its defects been laid so bare. 
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Even when young people adopt birth control measures such as intrauterine devices, sterilization and even abortions, they don't tend to use condoms to prevent transmission of sexually transmitted diseases. Unsurprisingly, then, rates of sexually transmitted diseases are climbing. In relatively prosperous Guangdong province, one in 2,000 people have syphilis, as Nandu Daily recently reported. New AIDS cases grew nearly 13 percent in the first ten months of 2012, compared with the same period in 2011. (And it's not just young people; HIV rates among retirees have soared in the last few years.) But as more young people have gained access to information about sexual health--through the internet and increasingly through universities and the government--the tide has started to turn. 
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