Master Feed : The Atlantic

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• The Derp and Fall of Inflation Fearmongers
• Confirmed: Spiders Are Even More Terrifying Than Previously Thought
• John Kerry and Watersports: An Unfortunate History
• 'For the First Time in History, There Are More Jobs Than People'
• How to Talk About Female Politicians, the Geography of Rock Stardom, Surviving a Crash in the Sahara: The New Atlantic Weekly Is Out
• Ask Alison: Should I Tell Her I've Paid for Sex in the Past?
• In Russia, a 'Generalized Climate of Fear'
• Hong Kongers Have Already Made a Movie About Edward Snowden
• How to Perform a Head Transplant
• Big Money vs. Bernanke: Who's Right About the Economy?
• Please Don't Be Satisfied With This Jobs Report
• The Southwest's Forests May Never Recover from Megafires
• Why Do Kids' Books Matter? Here, Look
• The Economic Cost of Hangovers
• Are More Chinese Teenagers Reconsidering College?
• Reminder in Egypt: Democracies Are Only as Good as Their Institutions
• The British Are Coming—And They've Brought Newspapers
• What Egypt Can Learn From Pakistan
• Yes, <i>Mad Men</i> Is a Soap Opera—and That Shouldn't Be an Insult

The Derp and Fall of Inflation Fearmongers Posted: 05 Jul 2013 02:00 PM PDT (Reuters) Eventually even charlatans, cranks, and economists notice when the world isn't cooperating with their grand pronouncements. Eventually the reality wins. And after four years of making relentlessly wrong predictions about the second coming of Weimar, that eventually has come now for the inflation chicken littles. At least a little. Back in March 2009, the Fed began expanding its first bond-buying program, and the usual suspects began hyperventilating about hyperinflation. They just couldn't conceive how all the Fed's "money-printing" wouldn't end with double-digit inflation, if not people needing wheelbarrows full of cash to buy the most basic of necessities. But, as Paul Krugman pointed out, this lack of imagination was really a lack of knowledge of Japan's lost decade. There, as here, prices barely rose (or in Japan's case, actually fell), despite big deficits and big bond-buying. Why? Well, the rules change when short-term interest rates hit zero. Risk-averse banks don't want to lend and risk-averse households and businesses don't want to borrow. So central bank bond-buying mostly pushes reserves into banks that just sit there, especially when the central bank pays interest on them. Now, that doesn't mean quantitative easing is pointless -- ask Europe -- just that it's not massively inflationary. But the anti-Bernanke crowd has tried not to notice that prices haven't gone parabolic. They've mostly succeeded in this epistemic closure -- and even when they haven't, they've quickly discounted reality as just a fad. Their excuses have been as predictable as they have been wrong: either the official numbers are irrelevant, or miss "real" inflation, or will show more inflation in a few more years (just wait and see!). But with core PCE inflation, the Fed's preferred measure, now at an all-time low going back 50 years, it's harder and harder to get anyone to listen. Here are the stories each group has tried to tell. Charlatans. It's been a bull market for fake populists the past few years. With wages stagnant, households feel like inflation is higher than it is, and they keep hearing that it is from fact-challenged fraudsters. If it's not pop historian Niall Ferguson putting on his tinfoil hat and saying inflation is "really" 10 percent, it's pop pundit Erick Erickson bemoaning rising milk and bread prices that he knows aren't rising. But the truth is catching up. After playing the "it's-always-1980" game where stagflation is always and everywhere the problem, Erickson has had to admit that it's just that -- a game. And he had to admit it, because Krugman called him on it. In other words, nerds bearing charts beat demagogues bearing derp. (For the uninitiated, "derp", as Noah Smith defines it, means loudly repeating things you believe in the face of contrary evidence). Cranks. It's also been a bull market for crackpot economists the past few years. Now, so-called Austrian economists did do a good job predicting the housing bubble during the boom, but they could hardly have done a worse job during the bust. They've looked at the Fed's ballooning balance sheet, and screamed that Zimbabwe is coming, Zimbabwe is coming! Well, it hasn't, and it won't. But that hasn't deterred the Austrians: they think the price of gold shows the "true" inflation from the monetary base expanding, so they've been right all along. But what about now? Gold is down 24 percent from a year ago, and 36 percent from its August 2011 highs -- and that despite more "money-printing" by the Fed. Where's the inflation now? (And, sorry Austrians, an increase in the monetary base doesn't count if there's no increase in prices). Economists. Conservative economists haven't done much better. They too have looked at the Fed's balance sheet and fallen for the inflation hype. Marty Feldstein, for one, has predicted again and again and again that inflation is a risk -- only to be wrong and wrong and wrong. Even after admitting this, Feldstein just reiterated his fear of future inflation. And then he called on the Fed to start tapering its bond purchases now, because ... I have no idea why. Yes, Feldstein said something about financial stability, which is the new bugaboo of failed inflationistas, but he didn't provide any actual evidence. He just said that rising real interest rates wouldn't hurt the economy even though they would hurt housing. It didn't make much sense. Nor did it when the Bank for International Settlements or Raghuram Rajan said much the same. It's a depressing kind of progress. Conservatives want tighter money, but they know they can't justify it by crying inflation anymore -- so they cry financial stability instead. Nothing can kill zombie ideas. Not facts. Not figures. And certainly not failed predictions. Now, inflation fearmongers couldn't have a worse track record than they do, but it won't change what they think the Fed should do. At most, it will change why they think the Fed should do it. To use a technical term, it's derp. And it's derp the data-driven Fed shouldn't be intimidated by -- though its tapering talk suggests otherwise. Derp doesn't fall under the Fed's dual mandate.

Confirmed: Spiders Are Even More Terrifying Than Previously Thought Posted: 05 Jul 2013 11:30 AM PDT Shutterstock/Valentyn Volkov Spider webs are architectural marvels. Their silks are similar in tensile strength to alloy steel. Their adhesive properties adjust to movements of prey ensnared in them. Yet they are, for many of the spiders that weave them, edible. And spider webs, it turns out, may be one more thing, too: actually attractive to the very prey they're meant to lure. New research suggests that the webs may be effective at their primary jobs -- catching prey for the creatures that wove them -- not only because of their stickiness, and not only because of their strength, and not only because of their unique shape ... but also because of their responsiveness to electricity itself. Yes. According to the research, the webs and positively charged objects -- like, say, insects flying by -- seem to be attracted to each other. Electrically attracted to each other. Unavoidably attracted to each other. Insects' wings, after all, don't simply keep their owners in the air as they're flapping; they also, in the process, generate electrical charge. Honeybees can generate enough charge -- up to 200 volts -- to detach pollen from flowers. And spider webs may take advantage of that in a way that is both evolutionarily ingenious and totally insidious at the same time, capturing prey by essentially sucking their victims in. Talk about animal magnetism. Web deformations produced by a charged honeybee (a), a fruitfly (b), and a water drop (c). Images are three sequential video frames (filming speed: 1,500 frames s−1). The bee, fruitfly, and drop sizes are 12 mm, 3 mm, and 1.5 mm, respectively, with the image gamma increased to 1.5. (Victor Manuel Ortega-Jimenez and Robert Dudley) The study, conducted by U.C. Berkeley's Victor Manuel Ortega-Jimenez and Robert Dudley and published in the journal Scientific Reports, tested webs' responsiveness to, in particular, the electrostatic charges of insects and water droplets. Their research, the authors note, builds on previous work that has documented webs' deformations in response to prey. We know, or think we know, that spider webs shift their shapes in order to capture that prey; the question is how they do it. The researchers thought electricity might be the answer, and they thought that, in part, because of a toy. Ortega-Jimenez, Live Science notes, had the electricity-as-hunting-tool idea while playing with his daughter -- with, specifically, an electrostatically charged "magic wand" that helps light objects that come into contact with it to levitate. The pair passed the wand in front of a spider web -- and the web deformed in response. So Ortega-Jiminez and Dudley tested the magic wand's effect in a lab setting. They gathered webs of the cross spider, or garden spider, from around the UC Berkeley campus. They ran a series of experiments, testing the webs' reaction to passing objects like honeybees, green bottle flies, fruit flies, aphids -- and, for good measure, water droplets. Spider web deformations produced by statically charged insects -- bees, flies, aphids, fruit flies -- and water drops (Victor Manuel Ortega-Jimenez and Robert Dudley) Their findings? The webs and positively charged objects did indeed seem to be attracted to each other. The silk threads in the web, for example, curved toward each other underneath a charged honeybee that was falling toward it -- which would make it likelier that the bee would become entangled in the web. Video sequences, both of positively charged insects and of water droplets falling towards a web, revealed "rapid and substantial web attraction." Radial and especially spiral silk threads, the authors write, "are quickly attracted to the electrified bodies." By contrast, control trials using uncharged insects and water drops showed no such deformation. And the deformations they're describing were significant: they were, on average, nearly half the length of the insects themselves. "Our experiments show clearly that positively charged insect bodies induce rapid attraction of silk threads in the webs of cross-spiders," the authors sum it up, "indirectly supporting a prior hypothesis that static charges of insects increase the prey capture success of orb-webs." Put less scientifically: it might be even more terrifying than previously assumed to become the prey of a spider.

John Kerry and Watersports: An Unfortunate History Posted: 05 Jul 2013 10:58 AM PDT It's a holiday week, but as you may have noticed, there are some events going on in the world -- most notably, a coup in a major U.S. ally in the Middle East. You know, the sort of thing that would probably concern you if you were the secretary of state. John Kerry spent much of Wednesday dealing with goings-on in Egypt. According to the State Department, Kerry participated in a National Security Council meeting and also spoke with the foreign ministers of Norway, Qatar, and Turkey; talked to Egyptian opposition leader Mohamed ElBaradei; had five conversations with American Ambassador to Cairo Anne Patterson. He also made the mistake of being photographed in a kayak on Nantucket the day of the coup. The Boston Herald has the pics. Embarrassingly, Foggy Bottom had to reverse a previous denial that Kerry was on his yacht and admit that he had briefly been there. Of course, there's no reason why, in an era of modern communications, the secretary can't work effectively from a resort island in Massachusetts, but this is just the sort of tempest in a teapot custom-made for a slow Friday in the summer. Between the pictures and the message confusion, it's a goofy unforced error, and conservatives have lost no time capitalizing on it; a Republican strategist quipped to the Herald that Kerry should be on a plane to the Middle East, not a boat. The setting is what makes it so eyeroll-worthy. If Kerry had been seen at a barbecue, no one would bat an eye. But on board a $7 million yacht? It just doesn't seem like he's working hard.  The incident fits a pattern for Kerry: a strange penchant for foppish gaffes involving watersports. First, of course, there was the epic television ad that George W. Bush ran against Kerry during the 2004 presidential campaign. Using footage of Kerry windsurfing and comparing his zig-zagging to a supposed propensity to change his positions, the spot became a devastatingly iconic attack, forever tying Kerry's name to the sport: Then fast-forward to 2010, when then-Senator Kerry admitted that he had listed the home port for the yacht, Isabel, as being in Rhode Island, rather than Nantucket -- a move that saved him half a million dollars in taxes. Under criticism, he voluntarily cut a $500,000 check to the state of Massachusetts to cover the sales tax. Not that Kerry has any better luck with sports on frozen water -- in January 2012, he was spotted in Washington with an impressive black eye he got while playing hockey. The secretary can rest assured that his boss doesn't seem bothered about it. The Twitter handle @BarackObama -- now run by Organizing for Action, the Obama-affiliated outgrowth of his presidential campaign -- tweeted this out this afternoon. It could be a coincidence, but given OFA's usual web-savvy, it sure looks like an intentional gag making fun of the boat blow up: Have a great weekend. pic.twitter.com/mKWiVpdxOc -- Barack Obama (@BarackObama) July 5, 2013 As for the president? Well, he's on the golf course today.

'For the First Time in History, There Are More Jobs Than People' Posted: 05 Jul 2013 10:51 AM PDT In January 1969, an advertisement for Careers Today magazine bemoaned the fact that, alas, America had reached the stage where, "for the first time in history, there are more jobs than people." While it used to be that "people resigned themselves to whatever jobs they could get just to keep bread on the table," that wasn't the problem of today. The ad conceded that college grads were still struggling to keep their heads above water, but not because of bills piling up. Instead, the real burden was wading through the endless number of job offers they were faced with choosing between. Sound familiar? I thought not. It turns out the graduating class of 1969 wasn't much convinced either -- the publication, which Time magazine derided as "a job hunter's guide on slick paper," was cancelled after only four issues. "Subscribers were so few that they cost more than they were worth," Time explained. The overabundance of work also appears to have been only a temporary phenomenon. By 1976, the year Richard Freeman published The Overeducated American, a relatively low 67 percent of college graduates were finding full-time employment within a year of commencement. For the recession-slammed class of 2008, by comparison, that figure was 65 percent. Still, consider this a jobs report day reminder of what good times really look like.

How to Talk About Female Politicians, the Geography of Rock Stardom, Surviving a Crash in the Sahara: The New Atlantic Weekly Is Out Posted: 05 Jul 2013 10:35 AM PDT In the latest edition of The Atlantic Weekly, Howard W. French takes readers to Nigeria, to one of the world's fastest growing cities to tell the fascinating tale of Lagos, an emerging metropolis poised to reshape Africa. We also probe the meaning behind an interesting fact of global culture: the world's best rock bands come from the U.K., while the best solo acts are routinely American. The Atlantic's Dr. James Hamblin measures the impact--and the controversy--of New York City's new bike share program, and our political writer Molly Ball explains why it's perfectly appropriate, and hardly sexist, for the media to discuss the sartorial choices of female politicians. As the U.S. begins providing lethal aid to the rebels in Syria, Sonni Efron shows how new technologies can keep Syrians safe during war--and in a photo gallery that showcases wartime technology that was very new at the time, we show how the camera documented the Civil War, 150 years after the Battle of Gettysburg. For iPad uses, we're thrilled to present a story that appeared in The Atlantic 75 years ago this month, a tale of adventure and survival by the famed pilot and writer Antoine Saint-Exupéry who later used his experience in this story to inspire his novel, The Little Prince. All of that and more in this Week's The Atlantic Weekly. The Atlantic Weekly is available in the iTunes store now.

Ask Alison: Should I Tell Her I've Paid for Sex in the Past? Posted: 05 Jul 2013 10:24 AM PDT (Shuji Kajiyama / AP) This girl and I have been dating for a few months now. Things are going really well, and I could see myself being with her for a very long time, maybe even marrying her. The only problem is, I have a secret. I went through a bit of a dry spell in my late 20's and ended up paying for sex with multiple sex workers many times. I don't know if this is something I need to reveal to her, or something I can keep to myself for the rest of my life. I don't even know where she stands on the issue of prostitution, but I'm guessing if she found out, she would not be happy. What do I do? First of all, don't use the phrase "I have a secret" only to follow it up with the fact that you saw a couple prostitutes. It's anti-climactic storytelling. Did you at least fall in love and go on a crime spree together? Because if it's just that you paid for sex, I don't really know where the drama is. When couples give each other their dating history, they're mostly going over the big landmarks: First Love, The One That Broke Me Forever, Longest Relationship, etc. Hey man, your past is your past. It's of course important to be open and honest with your significant other, but that doesn't mean sharing every sexual experience you've ever had. Sometimes people want a full rundown, and sometimes they want to arrive in their life brand-new just out of the package. When couples give each other their dating history, they're mostly going over the big landmarks: First Love, The One That Broke Me Forever, Longest Relationship, etc. Even then, you're looking for patterns or things that you learned about yourself from past situations, not how you had sex with your exes. However, based on the way you worded this question, it seems like this is weighing heavy on your conscience. There are certainly some factors that might make it important for her to know. If you got an STD, although that could have happened with any of your partners, she should absolutely be made aware of that. Or if she is so morally opposed to the idea of sex for money that if she knew about this, she wouldn't want to be with you. Or finally, if the guilt of this terrible, shameful, fairly common (and not particularly terrible or shameful) thing is tainting your relationship then sure, I guess confess to her. If none of these are the case, I encourage you to keep this one to yourself, unless a little Dick Whitman shows up. She doesn't need or want to know, I promise you. I've recently started online dating, which is going sort of okay; it has its highs and its lows. My question isn't really about me, but about my friend's girlfriend, who has an account on the site. I just sort of stumbled onto it and as far as I know, they don't have an open relationship. Should I tell my friend? I think the key phrase in this "as far as I know." You are not a part of their relationship, and they may want to keep certain details about their relationship private. Perhaps to avoid strange, gossipy interactions like this. There's also a possibility that she created that account ages ago, before she started dating your friend, and just forgot to delete it. Whatever the reason, you're going to look incredibly nosey when you inevitably ask your friend about this. Which sure, go ahead, I guess. I totally get wanting to be a good friend but if this girl were looking to cheat on her boyfriend, she would probably be smarter about it. (fixa.tv/flickr> I'm newly single and just starting to "get back out there," whatever that means. What is the etiquette in chatting up a girl? It has been a very long time since I've had to do this. Speaking as a girl that recently suffered through a very unpleasant pickup, I certainly hope you're talking to these women and not shouting at them. This is a tough thing to give advice on, because I feel like there is a subtlety and nuance to what I'm about to say that men are not always great at picking up on. You can talk to any girl that invites you to talk her. This usually means being a location that welcomes strangers interacting with each other: a bar, a park, one of those like, fun churches maybe? I don't know. The thing is, women really don't like being hit on. It's unpleasant for the most part, and I can only speak for me here, but it has never worked. Not once. I just try to shut it down as soon as I realize that it's happening and then take my leave. And don't use a gross line. If you see a pretty girl out somewhere and she smiles at you and you feel like there's a connection that you can't ignore (there isn't by the way), then just tell her that. "Hey, I'm sorry to bother you but I just had to talk to you." I feel like that's the best way to go but I still think you'll get shot down more frequently than not. If you are looking for a high success rate, I recommend online dating or joining a kickball team. My roommate is on a kickball team and everybody has sex with everybody. If you have questions about relationship etiquette, please send them to Ask Alison [at] The Atlantic (.com).

In Russia, a 'Generalized Climate of Fear' Posted: 05 Jul 2013 10:17 AM PDT Police detain a gay rights activist during a Gay Pride event in St. Petersburg on June 29, 2013. (Reuters) It's not a great time to be a freethinker in Russia. Offending somebody's religious sensibilities could get you prosecuted according to legislation signed this weekend by President Vladimir Putin. Criticizing the wrong person with a snarky comment on a social network could run afoul of a vaguely worded law criminalizing online defamation. And lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) activists need to be mindful of a newly enacted federal law prohibiting "homosexual propaganda" as well as similar legislation enacted in many Russian regions. And pretty soon, criticizing those who fought against Nazi Germany could be a crime punishable with stiff fines and jail terms. The recent spate of legislation has fostered a big intellectual chill and created what the Council of Europe, in a recent report, called a "generalized climate of fear" across the country. "Over the last year we have seen a broad-scale operation that includes a whole package of so-called laws from the Duma under which anyone can be arrested," Viktor Krasin, a Soviet-era dissident who is now a human rights activist, says. "They have done a remarkable thing -- now you can be accused of slandering the authorities, of inciting enmity. This is just the same as the Stalin- and Khrushchev-era [anti-Soviet] laws but with just different formulations." The most recent example is a new bill introduced into the State Duma by Irina Yarovaya of the ruling United Russia party. According to the bill, which will be be debated in the autumn, anyone using an official position or the media to disseminate "obvious falsehoods" about the activities of the armies of the anti-Nazi coalition, accusing them of committing crimes, or "artificially creating evidence for accusations" could face a fine of up to 500,000 rubles ($15,151) and up to five years in prison. On June 26, the media-freedom representative of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) issued a statement opposing the bill, saying that "the public has the right to be informed about matters of concern, including on differing views on any historical debate." While in the Soviet era, the locus of such repression of dissent was the KGB, under President Vladimir Putin it is the Investigative Committee, headed by Aleksandr Bastrykin. In April, internationally respected economist Sergei Guriyev fled to Paris after investigators searched his office and seized his e-mails. The investigation seems to stem from an expert evaluation Guriyev wrote for the presidential human rights council condemning the second conviction of jailed oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Other experts who contributed to the rights council's report have also come under scrutiny from the Investigative Committee. Most recently, on June 24, Bastrykin's investigators summoned Tamara Morshchakova, former chairwoman of the Constitutional Court and one of the drafters of the Russian Constitution. Writing in Vedomosti, economist Mikhail Dmitriyev described the so-called experts affair as "a turning point" after which dissent is criminally punished even if it is not accompanied by political action. Russia's social conflict, Dmitriyev writes, has now pitted the ruling class against the intelligentsia as a whole. In the city of Perm, art critic Marat Gelman is another intellectual who has gotten caught in the cross fire. Gelman had big dreams of turning the Urals city into an international cultural center on the model of Bilbao, Spain. But in June 2012 he was fired as the head of the Museum of Contemporary Art after authorities in Moscow were offended by three exhibitions he organized as part of the city's White Nights celebration. One featured faux posters for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi with designs such as the Olympic rings formed by hangman's nooses. In addition, authorities have ordered an audit of the White Nights festival, and it's possible Gelman could face criminal charges. Gelman argues that the intellectual climate in Russia has changed dramatically since Putin returned to the Kremlin for a third term. Previously, he says, social and political policy was in the hands of Vladislav Surkov who, as deputy Kremlin chief of staff, managed his bailiwick with a deft hand and tolerated intellectual dissent. But Surkov was pushed aside earlier this year and now deputy presidential chief of staff Vyacheslav Volodin has set a harsher tone. "Volodin has changed the whole game," Gelman says. "He said: 'If you are not with us, you are against us. Either you are ours or you are an enemy and will be treated as such.' That is, everything has been divided into two camps." This, he says, is the root of Russia's climate of fear. "Now everyone must be afraid, including insiders," Gelman says. "That is, you can swear fealty to the regime, you can declare that Putin is your idol, but that does not mean that you can sleep easily." Filmmaking is another area to feel the effects of the Kremlin's new anti-intellectualism. In May, Putin met with officials in Sochi and declared that the state will only support the production of films that "inspire pride in one's nation and one's history." On June 18, Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky announced the formation of a council that would evaluate all film projects on historical themes and make decisions about funding. On June 20, a state-supported film biography of cosmonaut Yury Gagarin was released to widespread criticism that it was a sanitized, Soviet-style idealization. One critic wrote it was as if director Pavel Parkhomenko "had turned a feature from 'Pravda' into a film." Ethnic Tatar filmmaker Ramil Tukhvatullin says it is clear that the Kremlin's goal is to promote unambiguous, one-sided portrayals of history. "There is a classic film by Sergei Eisenstein called 'Ivan the Terrible' -- the scene when the Russians capture Kazan shows what was happening from one side of the gates, when they were attacking us," Tukhvatullin says. "If we try to make a film showing what was happening on our side of the gate, where people were dying in defense of our nation -- Moscow would call this 'inciting ethnic hatred.' It could never happen. And it is easy to understand why: Moscow has its own agenda." Increasingly, Russian intellectuals seem to be facing the choice of either leaving Russia, like economist Guriyev or chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, or remaining and facing the possibility of prosecution, like the feminist punk-rock collective Pussy Riot or anticorruption blogger Aleksei Navalny. That's the choice art critic Gelman faces as he considers his future in Perm. "We'll see," Gelman says. "People keep asking me, 'Are you like Guriyev or are you like Navalny?'" This post appears courtesy of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

Hong Kongers Have Already Made a Movie About Edward Snowden Posted: 05 Jul 2013 08:37 AM PDT Hong Kong is a city accustomed to generating a lot of news -- the territory manufactures its fair share of film stars, celebrity scandals, and political controversies. The arrival of intelligence leaker Edward Snowden has thrust Hong Kong into the international spotlight, however, and despite his abrupt departure some Hong Kong-based artists managed to take advantage of his stay. In the spirit of ingenuity, a group of four filmmakers has released a 5-minute film, titled Verax, that retraces the Snowden saga from the release of his interview with The Guardian to the frantic attempt to track down his location. Putting together a professional film on such short notice is a daunting task, but an article from the South China Morning Post reports that cinematographer and editor Edwin Lee described the project as "invigorating."  The film is most notable for its rapid development, of course, but its also raises some interesting questions about the changing nature of news media and privacy. Snowden's leaks revealed, among other things, that the NSA has collected massive quantities of metadata and has access to personal information from numerous social networking sites. Though disconcerting, these revelations hardly come as a shock to Hong Kongers. Characteristically, while Hong Kong citizens were proud that Snowden had chosen to take refuge in their hometown, they understood that "in the end ... he did [what was] best for himself." The release and popularity of Verax encapsulates how entertainment, news, sensationalism, and reality are difficult to disentangle in places like Hong Kong -- a territory which has long been used to watching itself being watched.  This post is part of a collaboration between The Atlantic and the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

How to Perform a Head Transplant Posted: 05 Jul 2013 08:28 AM PDT Abandoned military hospital in Beelitz, Germany (Sebastian Niedlich / Flickr) "Honey? What are you doing down there?" Clattering at the foot of the shadowy staircase stops abruptly, replaced by the sound of someone trying not to make a sound. "Oh boy, don't even tell me you're working on those human head-body chimera plans again." After a long moment, a solitary cough echoes off the basement floor. *** Many of us know this scene all to well -- torn between home life and the professional demands of experimental surgical fusion of human body parts. Perhaps no one would be more familiar than those close to Dr. Robert White in the 1970s. The Harvard-trained neurosurgeon famously devoted much of his career to what he called a head transplant. In 1970, he "succeeded" in carrying one out, on a monkey. I qualify succeeded because, while that's the way it was publicized, the monkey chimera remained paralyzed from the neck down. Despite having a machine do his breathing for him, he died after eight days ... only a number of hours of which he was conscious. The surgeons basically connected the blood vessels, but not the money part: the spinal cord. "R's head, previously fixed in a Mayfield three-pin fixation ring, will literally hang from the stand during transference, joined by long Velcro straps. The suspension apparatus allows surgeons to reconnect the head in comfort." So, big whoop, right? Wasn't there a story about a kid in your neighborhood who put the head of one animal onto the body of another and got it to stay alive for a little while? But this scene was more agonizing than anecdotal or whimsical, as Case Western neurosurgeon Jerry Silver remembers it: "When the head would wake up, the facial expressions looked like terrible pain and confusion and anxiety in the animal. ... It was just awful. I don't think it should ever be done again." White was convinced, though, that his work with cephalosomatic linkage surgery in the monkey was pretty much proof that it was "fully accomplishable in the human sphere." By 1999 he said it was "now possible to consider adapting the head-transplant technique to humans." People called him a genius. Gave him honorary degrees. People also call(ed) him crazy. White's autocerebral hypothermic perfusion in place, 1978 (White, Mayo Clinic Proceedings) Jump forward to 2013, when last month Italian surgeon Sergio Canavero said that we have at last figured out that issue of connecting the spinal cord. The head transplant is now feasible, said Canavero, and he has a project called HEAVEN that's going to do it. HEAVEN stands for Head Anastomosis Venture, which is a poor choice of acronyms in an industry constantly sidestepping God-complex accusations. Maybe it's like, ironic in a super self-aware way. That would be unique among the pages of the journal Surgical Neurology International, though, where Canavero dives deep into the specifics of how HEAVEN will work. So deep that we arrive at the existential. For example, is it a head transplant? Technically it would be a body transplant. Identity remains with the brain. Doesn't it? If the chimera were to have sex and bear a child, though, it would have the genetic identity of the parent's bodies, not their heads. In Thomas Mann's 1959 novel The Transposed Heads, which is based on a traditional Indian folk tale, the two male protagonists behead themselves, and their heads are magically reattached, but to the other's body. One man's wife, Sita, subsequently has difficulty knowing which to take as her husband: the head or the heart. Canavero does convey only the most benevolent of intentions, writing of the potential to use head transplants in patients with "horrible conditions without a hint of hope of improvement [that] cannot be relegated to the dark corner of medicine." He mentions tetraplegic patients, those with multi-organ failure, or intractable cancer that involves much of the body but not the head. The first patient to undergo head transplantation, though, "should be someone, probably young, suffering from a condition leaving the brain and mind intact while devastating the body, for instance, but by no means exclusively, progressive muscular dystrophies or even several genetic and metabolic disorders of youth." Silver remains a non-believer. Earlier this year his team successfully fixed the spinal cords of rats that had them completely severed. Others have done it for dogs and pigs. When Danielle Elliot at CBS asked Silver about Canavero's proclamation that all of this could be done in humans, though, he laughed. "It's light years away from what they're talking about." Silver's experiments involved a clean cut to the spinal cord, and nothing but the spinal cord, and not involving a second animal. He told CBS, "To sever a head and even contemplate the possibility of gluing axons back properly across the lesion to their neighbors is pure and utter fantasy in my opinion ... Just to do the experiments is unethical." It seems there are dark corners anywhere you turn. Anyway, don't let all this worry about "ethical questions" wear you out -- you're going to need your energy for the surgery. Here's how Canavero says to do it ("lays out the groundwork"). Oh and also the estimated cost is $13 million. Okay, ready? *** For purposes of these instructions, we use the "body transplant" perspective, which I prefer. The body recipient will be herein referred to as R, and the donor body as D (a brain-dead patient matched for height, build, immunotype, and ideally sex; and without any active systemic and brain disorders). You'll need a specially designed operating suite large enough to accommodate two surgeries conducted simultaneously by two separate surgical teams. Again, I can't stress this enough, do not do this alone. What we're going to do is cool R's head to such a low temperature that you can disconnect and reconnect it to D's body, whose head has been removed by your second surgical team. Once R's head has been detached, it will have to be reconnected to the circulatory flow of D within one hour. So do not make other plans, take a break, or even take a phone call while the R's head is detached. An hour is not a lot of time to reattach a head, especially for someone who's never done it before. (Everyone.) Inducing local hypothermia in the spine (Negrin, 1973) Both R and D should be put on breathing machines and ventilated through tracheotomies. Keep their heads locked in place with rigid pin fixation. Constantly monitor them with electrocardiography, EEG, and transcranial measurement of oxygen saturation. Keep a radial artery line. A 25G temperature probe may be positioned into R's brain (deep in the white matter), but a TM thermistor should do. R's head should be cooled to 10 degrees Celsius, while D's body will only receive spinal hypothermia, as diagramed above. That way body temperature won't be altered and we avoid damaging D's major organs. R lies on his back initially, then is placed in the standard neurosurgical sitting position. D is upright throughout. You'll probably want a custom-made turning stand to use as a sort of crane for shifting R's head onto D's neck. As Canavero writes, "R's head, previously fixed in a Mayfield three-pin fixation ring, will literally hang from the stand during transference, joined by long Velcro straps." This lets you "reconnect the head in comfort." Biventricular cooling for deep brain hypothermia in monkey (White, 1978) Make deep incisions around each patient's neck, carefully separating all the anatomical structures. Expose the carotid and vertebral arteries, jugular veins and spine. All muscles in both R and D would be color-coded with markers to facilitate later linkage. Don't take out R's thyroid gland. Cut through the vertebrae at C5 or C6 in both R and D, after appropriate laminectomies, a durotomy. Expose the spinal cord. Under the operating microscope, simultaneously clean-cut both patients' spinal cords. Once R's head is separated, transfer it onto D's body, whose head is also off. (White et al, 1971) "The vascular anastomosis for the cephalosomatic preparation is easily accomplished by employing bicarotid-carotid and bijugular-jugular silastic loop cannulae." Remove the tubes individually, and sew the arteries and veins of the transplanted head together with those of the new body. Importantly, during head transference, clamp the vessels to avoid air embolisms. "Upon linkage, D's flow will immediately start to rewarm R's head." Reconstruct the vertebral arteries. Length-adjust and fuse the two cord stumps. If you forget this step, your patient will be paralyzed. Also remember, this is the part that many believe to be impossible. Canavero suggests using "a chitosan-polyethylene glycol glue" and infusing polyethylene glycol or a derivative into the patient's blood. Beyond that you're kind of on your own. Okay now sew the dura "in a watertight fashion." Stabilize the spine anteriorly and then posteriorly "with a mix of wires/cables, lateral mass screws and rods, clamps and so forth, depending on cadaveric rehearsals." Connect the trachea and esophagus. Connect the vagi and phrenic nerves. Connect all muscles using the marks you made before. Oh man, I think I forgot to tell you about marking the muscles. Do your best. Connect the skin. Canavero recommends that ideally the skin is sewn by a plastic surgeon, "for maximal cosmetic results." But like if the cosmetic surgeon is busy, or you feel like cosmetic results aren't really a legit concern under these conditions, do your best. Bring R to an intensive care unit where he/she should be kept sedated for three days with a cervical collar in place. Finally, for subsequent "body image and identity issues" once the patient wakes up, refer them to a psychiatrist.

Big Money vs. Bernanke: Who's Right About the Economy? Posted: 05 Jul 2013 08:27 AM PDT Reuters The last few weeks have seen yet more shots fired in the fascinating war of words between the Federal Reserve and hedge fund managers. Yet this spectacle is essentially a sideshow. The real battle is elsewhere. It relates to a Fed that is uncomfortably being boxed in by highly-dependent markets. For a few months now, quite a few hedge fund managers have complained loudly about the Fed. Their protests reflect the difficulties of investing in manipulated markets which, at times, can be quite "irrational" - at least according to their analytical, historical and mental models. They hate interacting in markets where central banks act both as competitors (with better visibility and information) and referees (seemingly happy to change the rules at a whim). Hedge funds managers see stock rallies as an end in themselves. Central banks rely on them to grow the economy and create jobs. Adding to hedge fund anxiety is the fact that, unlike private market participants, central banks can stay a long time in loss-making trades. Indeed, some would argue that, given its role as the issuer of the world's reserve currency, the Fed could remain there forever (absent political intervention). Accordingly, extreme market mis-pricings and artificial correlations can persist longer than traditional hedge fund strategies remain solvent. After maintaining a stiff upper lip for quite a while, Fed officials have started to talk back. Commenting on the market turmoil that followed the most recent policy announcement, Mr. Richard Fisher, President of the Dallas Fed, cautioned a couple of weeks ago that "big money does organize itself somewhat like feral hogs." This battle of words will not end anytime soon as it involves two distinct viewpoints - that of commercially-driven (and often impatient) hedge fund managers that treat a market outcome as an end in itself; and those of central banks for whom market outcomes are a means to help achieve macroeconomic outcomes (growth, jobs and inflation). As the rest of us continue to be entertained by this, we should not lose sight of the fact that the really important battle in this domain is elsewhere. It pits central bankers deep in policy experimental mode (and now desiring greater flexibility) against a much larger group of highly-dependent market participants unable to fathom the possibility of central bankers dis-engaging, even if marginally and incrementally. This played in May and June when Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke raised the possibility that the Fed may taper its support for markets. In doing so, he went out of his way to make any possible future actions conditional on economic developments. He even mentioned illustrative dates in order to reduce the probability of subsequent shocks to the markets. Rather that internalize this in a calm manner, markets reacted as if Fed tapering were immediate and dramatic. Levered investors jumped to unwind carry trades, and did so in a rather disorderly fashion. Dealers lost their appetite for risk-taking, withdrawing liquidity and intermediation services. End investors headed for the doors, pulling billions out of bond and equity mutual funds. Faced with heightened risk of market malfunction that would undermine the real economy, central bankers were forced to walk back on what, after all, was quite mild tapering talk. One after the other downplayed any immediate policy change, also noting that tapering was only "one possible outcome." All this would not be a problem if the current policy stance could be maintained for a long time and was likely to succeed as is. Unfortunately both are problematic. As Bernanke himself recognized back in August 2010, unconventional Fed policy involves a delicate balance of "benefits, costs and risks." Given the transmission mechanisms involved, the longer the policy persists, the higher the probability of collateral damage and unintended consequences. The Fed is increasingly constrained. Its experimental policies have created conditions that make both the status quo and potential changes increasingly and uncomfortably messy. Acting on its own, it is hard to see how the Fed can resolve this impasse while also meeting its economic objectives. It urgently needs the help of those institutionally equipped to deliver a more comprehensive policy approach that deals with the three problems of insufficient aggregate demand, inadequate structural reforms and pockets of debt overhangs. For that, Washington will need to overcome its current phase of polarization and dysfunction. In the meantime, and regardless of the war of words with hedge funds, the Fed is likely to feel even more boxed in.

Please Don't Be Satisfied With This Jobs Report Posted: 05 Jul 2013 08:19 AM PDT Another month, another jobs report that's good, but not quite good enough.  Employers beat expectations in June by adding 195,000 new workers to their payrolls. Thanks to the government's data revisions, we know they added 195,000 in May as well, and 199,000 in April (as shown in the Washington Post graph below). Over the past year, we've averaged 191,000 per month. Over the past 6 months, we've averaged 202,000. We're nothing if not consistent.  Which means we've still got a long slog ahead. Unemployment is still hovering at 7.6 percent, unchanged this month thanks to an influx of new workers into the labor force. Brookings projects that we'll still be above 7 percent by the end of the year. Meanwhile, there are still 2 million fewer workers on U.S. payrolls than at our pre-crash peak. If you assume we'll keep adding jobs at our 6-month average pace, we're looking at 10 to 11 months before we get back to where things were before the market fell apart.    When you account for new workers entering the labor market, the Hamilton Project projects it will still take us more than 7 years to get back to full employment at our current pace -- assuming we miraculously avoid hitting another recession during that time.  You can see the weakness of the job market all over the current report as well. The government's broadest underemployment measure , known as U-6, jumped from 13.8 percent to 14.3 percent, thanks a huge leap in the number of employees working part time because they couldn't find full-time work. Meanwhile, hiring in middle-income industries was weak. Construction employment only rose 13,000. Manufacturing payrolls fell, right along with state and federal government. And the economy is making up for it largely with retail and restaurant work.  We've had a few months of decent news. It's no reason for anybody to be satisfied.

The Southwest's Forests May Never Recover from Megafires Posted: 05 Jul 2013 08:16 AM PDT Burnt-out terrain off of Forest Rd. 141 in the Gila National Forest, New Mexico, on May 30, 2012. New Mexico's Whitewater-Baldy Complex fire ravaged more than 170,000 acres, becoming the largest wildfire in the state's history. (Reuters) If you doubt that climate change is transforming the American landscape, go to Santa Fe, New Mexico. Sweltering temperatures there have broken records this summer, and a seemingly permanent orange haze of smoke hangs in the air from multiple wildfires. Take a ride into the mountains and you'll see one blackened ridge after another where burns in the past few years have ravaged the national forest. Again, this year, fires in New Mexico and neighboring states of Colorado and Arizona are destroying wilderness areas. Fire danger is expected to remain abnormally high for the rest of the summer throughout much of the Intermountain West. But "abnormal" fire risks have become the new normal. The tragic death of 19 firefighters in the Yarnell fire near Prescott, Arizona last Sunday shows just how dangerous these highly unpredictable wind-driven wildfires can be. The last 10 years have seen more than 60 mega-fires over 100,000 acres in size in the West. When they get that big, firefighters often let them burn themselves out, over a period of weeks, or even months. These fires typically leave a scorched earth behind that researchers are beginning to fear may never come back as forest again.  Fires, of course, are a natural part of the forest lifecycle, clearing out old stands and making way for vigorous new growth out of the carbon-rich ashes. What is not natural is the frequency and destructiveness of the wildfires in the past decade -- fires which move faster, burn hotter, and are proving harder to manage than ever before. These wildfires are not exactly natural, because scientists believe that some of the causes, at least, are human-created. For one thing, the intensity of the recent fires, researchers say, is in part the result of a warming and drying trend which has been underway for over a decade, and which some climate scientists believe will become a permanent condition as anthropogenic climate change continues to increase. Experts also blame the fire-suppression policy which has been in effect for much of the last century. In the past, frequent low-intensity lightning fires left behind a park-like patchwork of woodlands and open meadows. The Smokey the Bear philosophy of fire prevention interfered with this natural pattern. By always putting fires out rather than letting them burn freely, forests throughout the West have become thick and overgrown. This well meaning but unwise policy decreased fire dangers in the short term, but increased them exponentially in the long run on 277 million acres of fire-prone public lands. When forests do burn now, instead of the gentler, meandering fires of the past, the unnaturally high fuel loads often make for rampaging fire-storms that typically destroy everything in their path. Firefighter Justin Romero of the New Mexico based Silver City Hotshots uses a drip torch to build a backfire up the mountain off Potrero Road to control the Springs Fire near Newbury Park, California, May 3, 2013. (Reuters) In earlier low-grade wildfires, the trees that survived seeded recovery in the next generation. Nowadays, by contrast, the fierce heat of the mega-fires frequently incinerates all of the conifer seeds and seedlings and sterilizes the soil, making it all but impossible for the forest to regenerate. In the Jemez mountains west of Santa Fe, the charred remnants of the 2011 Las Conchas blaze stretch for miles above the atomic city of Los Alamos. It was the biggest wildfire in New Mexico's recorded history, until the following year, when lightning ignited the Whitewater Baldy fire in the southern part of state torching an area nearly half the size of Rhode Island. Much of the Los Alamos burn resembles today a lunar landscapes -- vast slopes of denuded gray soil where little vegetation has come back. Hillsides, once covered with ponderosa pine and squat, drought tolerant pinon and juniper trees, now grow only clumps of cheatgrass, an invasive species, and occasional bush-like shrub oaks. Biologist Craig Allen of the U.S. Geological Survey, who has has spent years studying the Southwest forest ecosystem, says that areas like these won't be forested again in our lifetime, and possibly they never will be. The reason that Allen and others are pessimistic is that climate change is hitting the Southwest harder and faster than most other areas in the U.S. The region has warmed on average between 2 and 5 degrees during the past century, and this trend is expected to accelerate in the years ahead. Add to this the danger from what scientists call a possible "mega-drought." The Southwest has always been prone to extended dry periods, like the one which archeologists believe drove the Anasazi people of Chaco Canyon in the Four Corner's area to the wetter Rio Grande Valley in the late 13th century. But a study published last year in the journal Nature Climate says that, by 2050, the region will be even drier than in previous mega-droughts. Moreover, hot summer temperatures in the southwest will literally suck the water our of leaves and needles killing trees in unprecedented numbers. "The majority of forests in the Southwest probably cannot survive in the temperatures that are projected," one of the study's co-authors, Park Williams, a bio-climatologist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory told Environment 360. The stress that trees are already under becomes clear during a short drive north of Santa Fe. Whole hillsides near the town of Abiquiu, made famous by the haunting desert landscapes of Georgia O'Keefe, are now covered by the ashen skeletons of pinon pines. The trees, weakened by years of drought, were finally killed off in the late nineteen nineties by bark beetles, insects which have also devastated numerous stands of ponderosa and spruce at higher elevations. Given these plagues of biblical proportions -- fire, heat, drought and insects -- the future for the Southwest's forests looks dim. Whether they will survive at all may depend on what we do -- or fail to do -- in the next few years on the biggest plague of all: climate change.

Why Do Kids' Books Matter? Here, Look Posted: 05 Jul 2013 08:00 AM PDT The New York Public Library A good children's book is a young person's earliest exposure to art and design, a conduit for parental bonding, a means to teach individual and social lessons, and these days, possibly the last vestige of printed matter for the next digital generation as it weans itself from ink on paper to pixels on screens. All of these things become quite clear upon observing the New York Public Library's fittingly titled "The ABC of It: Why Children's Books Matter," curated by children's book historian Leonard Marcus. Recently opened, the show focuses on what makes kids' reads essential in art, culture, and in the overall imagination. "I was told that I would have access to all the library's special collections, and that I could do pretty much anything I wanted," Marcus told me in an email. "I felt I had been handed the keys to the kingdom." And what riches that kingdom contains: the copy of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland owned by Alice Liddell, the real-life model for Alice; a rare, illustrated edition of Aesop's Fables that survived the Great London Fire; Nathaniel Hawthorne's copy of Mother Goose, with cautionary marginalia about the parts that would frighten children; and original Winnie-the-Pooh stuffed animals. Other than a handful of loaned items (including Marcus's own copy of MAD and his pre-publication reader's copy of the first Harry Potter book, among others) and four pieces that the library purchased specifically for the show (including a Swedish first edition of Pippi Longstocking), the majority of the 250 items on view come from the library's enviable collection. The material is presented in clever arrangements (like a three-dimensional recreation of the first spread of Goodnight Moon) and organized around central themes, including the old debate about which children's books are best, the artistry behind the first picture books for kids, the influence of children's books on the worlds of theater, film, and popular culture. There's also a section on children's books as propaganda used to build national identity, which includes extraordinary examples from Bolshevik Russia, the American Civil War-era for children living in the Confederate States, a Noah Webster speller aimed at imparting American English on the schoolchildren of the newly formed United States, Japanese comic books meant to teach children English during the Allied Occupation, as well as books from Maoist China and Francophone West Africa. "We tend to think of fairy tales as pure fantasy—tales that take us out of this world," Marcus says in regards to the political subtexts of these books. "But in Ireland during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, William Butler Yeats and James Stephens retold Irish myths and tales so that in a time of British domination of their Irish contemporaries, young and old, would not lose contact with the cultural heritage." By the mid-20th century, strict standards, rules and taboos developed, which in turn caused rebellion. In the section on banned and censored books called "Raising a Ruckus," Marcus identifies 150 years of debate over works that fell "into forbidden territory." Huckleberry Finn was initially banned for its vulgar language and then again because the word "nigger" appears in it. Pippi Longstocking became controversial in many countries because the story's wild-child heroine was seen as setting a bad example. Garth Williams's The Rabbits' Wedding, a picture book about a white rabbit who marries a black rabbit, caused a furor in 1950s segregated Alabama. Judy Blume wrote frankly about sexuality and religious doubt in Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret. The exhibit also reveals that the books that matter to children are not always the same as the ones adults think should matter. Marcus cites Edward Stratemeyer, the turn-of-the-century author and entrepreneur who launched The Bobbsey Twins, The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and other commercial favorites. An adulatory 1934 profile in Fortune magazine said that children's book publishing had been a sleepy backwater until Stratemeyer proved it could be big business, "and he did so by publishing book after book that the critics of the day thought mediocre but that children loved," Marcus says. Likewise, The Poky Little Puppy, which is on view, was one of the original 1942 Little Golden Books that the librarians of the day thought were not artistic enough to be worthy of children—but that kids loved anyway. The genre has come a long way over four centuries. "Early children's books tended to be solemn and purposeful," Marcus says. "They were created to teach a moral lesson of some kind and they spoke to the child from on high. This approach worked well enough for groups with a fundamentalist view of life—the Puritans for instance—and with certain basic lessons that needed to be communicated as early as possible. But other kinds of books for children began to appear by the mid-1700s. Under the influence of John Locke and his observations about how children learn and grow, this new kind of children's book showed a greater awareness of children's interests and capabilities." Once considered chattle, children had to be fed and trained. But as they came to be seen as young people, books aimed at them evolved from strictly didactic to fantastical. "Curiosity was seen as a virtue not a vice," Marcus says. "Humor was recognized as a key to engaging the child's interest. The child's attention span was taken increasingly into account. Illustrations were emphasized and made more interesting. By the middle of the 1800s, a few writers and artists like Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll recognized that playfulness could be an end in itself in a children's book and that children could be trusted enough to make irreverence toward the adult world a major source of merriment in their books." An explosion of creativity occurred during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. New classics were forged, ranging from simple picture books like Goodnight Moon and The Very Hungry Caterpillar to beginning readers like Little Bear and The Cat in the Hat to realistic teen fiction to, most recently, graphic novels for preteens, teens, and younger readers. "The downside of all this," Marcus says, "has been the commercialization and globalization of publishing, which has led to a certain preference for the slick and the generic; to picture books that look like ads for themselves; to fantasy novels that read like treatments for the Hollywood films they are hoping to become." "The ABC of It" is not a greatest-hits or march-through-history survey. Marcus has set a stage for viewers to step back and see the books in the larger context of the arts, popular culture, and social history. "Puritans believed that children were born sinful," he says, by way of example. "Children had to learn to read the Bible as soon as possible! But the Enlightenment philosopher John Locke believed children were not sinful at all, and that what they really needed and wanted was playful books with pictures. His ideas, which date all the way back to the 1690s, read like a blueprint for much of what we think of today as a good children's book." So to the list of reasons why children's books matter, add the way that they reflect the times they were created in. "They are the message-in-a-bottle that each generation tosses out to the next generation," Marcus says, "the record of one generation's hopes and dreams for the next."

The Economic Cost of Hangovers Posted: 05 Jul 2013 07:53 AM PDT Reuters The Fourth of July is beer's annual breakout party, with weekly sales often surpassing $1 billion around Independence Day. So when the Fifth of July falls on a weekday like this year, employers are advised to, well, manage their expectations. Excessive drinking costs the economy more than $220 billion -- or about $1.90 per drink, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which studies the negative externalities of alcohol consumption each decade. Seventy-two percent of the costs came from lost workplace productivity, according to the 2006 survey, which suggests that the economic drag from hangovers is about $160 billion  (... also the total cost of natural catastrophes in 2012.) Or think of it this way. Americans have about 117 billion alcoholic drinks each year. Hangovers cost us about $1.37 for each drink in lost productivity. That's the average. But not all drinkers are equally to blame. Just 15 percent of binge-drinking adults are responsible a whopping three-quarters of the costs of excessive alcohol consumption. From the survey: Overall, researchers found that about $94.2 billion (42 percent) of the total economic costs of excessive alcohol consumption were borne by federal, state, and local governments while $92.9 billion (41.5 percent) was borne by excessive drinkers and their family members. Government agencies paid most of the health care expenses due to excessive alcohol use (61 percent), while drinkers and their families bore most of the cost of lost productivity (55 percent), primarily in the form of lower household income.  If you find yourself struggling at your desk this morning and forced to justify your sluggishness to a boss, file this study under: Doesn't Excuse My Behavior, But Might Explain It With Federally-Backed Numbers.

Are More Chinese Teenagers Reconsidering College? Posted: 05 Jul 2013 07:35 AM PDT Reuters Last month, around 9.12 million Chinese high school students took perhaps one of the most important exams of their lives: China's national college entrance examination, as known as the gaokao. At the same time, over one million Chinese high school students decided to give up on this so-called "life changing opportunity." MORE FROM TLN Has Beijing Really Shifted Course on North Korea? A New Flashpoint for Chinese Food Consumers: Genetically Modified Soy Are the Chinese Also 'Amusing Themselves to Death?' Over the past five years, figures for those taking the gaokao have been declining quite dramatically, from a peak of 10.5 million in 2008 to 9.15 million in 2012, due in part to the shrinking number of young people in China. On the other hand, the number of "gaokao quitters" has steadily increased. According to the statistics released by the Ministry of Education in 2013, among the one million high school students who gave up on the gaokao, around 80 percent choose to enter the job market right away and the rest are either planning to study overseas or taking the exam next year. Unlike the young people of the 1980s or even 1990s, today, more and more are inclined to believe that knowledge is useless rather than a way to change one's destiny. The dim job prospects facing Chinese college graduates may be one factor driving the phenomenon. This year, around 6.99 million students are graduating from institutions of higher education in China. Ahead of them is the so-called "hardest job-hunting season of all time." According to the latest statistics released by the Beijing Municipal Commission of Education, only 33.6 percent of college graduates in Beijing have signed employment contracts. In Guangdong province, both the employment rate and entry-level salaries for college graduates are lower than those of vocational students this year. Since 1999, China has seen an unprecedented expansion in its higher education sector. By 2012, the total enrollment of higher education institutions reached 6.85 million, almost 6 times of that of 1998. As higher education in China has already transformed from system for the elite few to one for the masses, the college admission rate has increased from 4.7 percent in 1977 to 74.86 percent in 2012. The devaluation of a bachelor's degree is inevitable. Long gone are the good old days when a bachelor degree was a ticket to a job after graduation. However, the skyrocketing number of college graduates alone does not fully explain college students' unemployment and the diminishing attractiveness of a college degree. On Sina Weibo, many users, especially current college students, are strongly defending the saying that "knowledge is useless" by sharing their frustration with their own college experiences. For example, Weibo user @世纪达摩 wrote, "The college requires us to take so many useless courses that neither the teachers nor the students take seriously." Another user, @姹紫嫣红都不是, said, "I find going to college is a waste of time in most cases. I don't think the stuff I've learned will do me any good [in my future career]." Most of the students complained that compulsory courses like "Marxist philosophy" and "Introduction of Mao Zedong Thought" were totally useless, but time consuming. These kinds of complaints are shared by many companies in the job market, who claim it is difficult to find college students equipped with the professional skills or knowledge they value most, despite the shocking number of graduates. The saying that "knowledge is useless" may not be totally true, but the quality of education at China's institutions of higher learning is far from satisfying in many cases. Unfortunately, the unsatisfactory quality of Chinese college education may not be the most depressing part of going to college. Capable college students who indeed possess professional skills and knowledge may still find it hard to get decent jobs and reap the rewards of their hard work after graduation if they lack guanxi (connections). It is reported that China's employment market is "increasingly skewed to the well-connected and the well-born," especially when it comes to competition for the better-paying jobs at state-owned enterprises or in civil service, where the use of guanxi is believed to be prevalent. A more realistic future for graduates who are from poor or rural families is to become members of the so-called "ant tribe," at least during the first few years after they graduate. The "ant tribe" is a term used to describe the group of young college graduates in China who were born in the 1980s, who work low-paid (usually less than RMB 2,000 per month), unstable jobs, and live together in shared rooms in the outskirts of major cities like Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. Their undesirable living conditions following graduation may help explain why nearly 80 percent of those who give up on the gaokao are from rural and less developed areas. For those less well-off families in rural areas, considering the increasing cost of college tuition, it has become less and less appealing to send their child to the college if he or she is likely to become an "ant tribe" member who can barely make ends meet, let alone support the family, after graduating. According to a recent research conducted by the Shanghai Academy of Educational Science, between 2010 and 2020, approximately 94 million college graduates will enter the job market, but only 46 million white-collar jobs will be available, so nearly half of college graduates may have to become blue-collar workers. In light of this, giving up on the gaokao and skipping college to accumulate more work experience may not be such a bad move after all. This post also appears at Tea Leaf Nation, an Atlantic partner site.

Reminder in Egypt: Democracies Are Only as Good as Their Institutions Posted: 05 Jul 2013 07:16 AM PDT Reuters As mass social demonstrations, and the military, have toppled Mohammed Morsi in Egypt and called for new elections, it's worth remembering why transitions to democracy never begin and end with the man on top. Countries that sweep new governments in through revolutions often face a common problem: While the leadership can be replaced, from the fall of the Soviet Union to the Arab Spring rebellions, anti-democratic, sometimes corrupt, institutions often outlast the autocrats that helped create them. On big reason for this is that new democracies almost inevitably inherit many of the old regime's civil servants and politicians; and even first-time politicians installed through democratic elections may see their new access to the levers of power as an opportunity to take their share, rather than as a chance to support democratic consolidation. Across many African countries, for instance, a similar phrase is used to describe this kind of politics: In Kenya, it's called "our turn to eat," while in Cameroon it's "the politics of the belly." The pervasiveness of this sort of mindset means that, when institutions are toxic, even when opposition groups finally get in power, they often fall into similar patterns of behavior to those of the people they ousted. Which is a pattern confirmed even by very recent history: Many international observers praised Kenya's elections in March of this year as heralding a fresh start for the country and the end of strongman Mwai Kibaki's 10-year stint in power, a period marred by corruption allegations and brutal violence in the wake of the disputed 2007 elections. But it was only in 2002 that Kibaki's electoral victory was hailed as the arrival of democracy, sweeping out of power long-time dictator Daniel arap Moi. It still remains to be seen if the country's new leader, Uhuru Kenyatta, will deliver meaningful change. It is worth bearing in mind that Uhuru is the son of Kenya's founding father, Jomo Kenyatta, who constructed a one-party system, and he contested the election against the son of Oginga Odinga, Jomo's erstwhile ally, and later on, most formidable rival. Both Uhuru and his vice president have been indicted by the International Criminal Court on charges of inciting violence in the aftermath of the 2007 elections. Democratic optimists have also commended Zambia for its commitment to democracy, where regular elections have been held since 1991, but until 2011, the same party had held power, and allegations of endemic corruption continued. Despite the reformist platform of the country's first democratically elected president, Frederick Chiluba, by the end of his tenure he sought to manipulate the constitution to perpetuate his rule. Though he failed in his effort, the attempt illustrates the dangers of democratic backsliding once the initial euphoria has dissipated. The 2010 election victory of the Ivory Coast's Alassane Ouattara was also held up as a victory of democracy over autocracy, but the actual transfer of power involved French military intervention to override the ruling of a blatantly biased Constitutional Council, which pronounced victory for the incumbent strongman, Laurent Gbagbo. Ouattara was formerly a key member in the government of the country's first authoritarian ruler, and the autocratic Gbagbo began his political career as an exiled dissident advocating for multi-party politics. Constitutions are also vulnerable, a fact exhibited by the late Hugo Chavez. Venezuela's legislature was outmaneuvered, and then neutered. A constitution is an impediment to the ambitions of an aspiring dictator, but by no means an insurmountable one. Similarly creative methods of circumventing term limitations have been employed effectively by Putin in Russia. All of these countries have their own political idiosyncrasies, of course, and all have different records of democratic performance; but they all, just the same, illustrate that that the transition from democratic elections to democratic institutions is in some ways as tough a proposition today as it's ever been. We can hope that Egypt's next leader will prove fairer and more open than Morsi, but a real transition to democracy will take much more than that.

The British Are Coming—And They've Brought Newspapers Posted: 05 Jul 2013 06:56 AM PDT The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald speaks to reporters in Hong Kong after the release of Edward Snowden's identity. (Vincent Yu/AP) Of the three English-language newspaper websites with the highest readerships, two are British. The number one spot has been occupied since last January by the Mail Online, an industrial-sized feedbag of celebrity titillation and gossip, with a ComScore rating of 50.2 million monthly unique visitors worldwide for May. Currently in at number two is The New York Times, with 46.2 million. Snapping at its heels is The Guardian: it had 40.9 million last month. That was before Edward Snowden arrived on the scene. Figures given exclusively to The Atlantic show that -- according to internal analytics -- June 10, the day after Snowden revealed his identity on The Guardian's website, was the biggest traffic day in their history, with an astonishing 6.97 million unique browsers. Within a week of publishing the NSA files, The Guardian website has seen a 41 percent increase in U.S. desktop unique visitors (IP addresses loading the desktop site) and a 66 percent rise in mobile traffic. On June 10, for the first time in the paper's history, their U.S. traffic was higher than their UK traffic. The publication of the NSA documents represented the first time since the publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 that 'top secret' classified documents were made public - nothing in the files leaked by Bradley Manning to WikiLeaks in 2010 rated higher than 'secret'. They were leaked by former CIA employee Edward Snowden to The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald, and a veteran team of reporters led by Editor-in-Chief of Guardian US Janine Gibson was convened to shape the raw data into the story. I met Gibson for an exclusive interview in The Guardian's airy SoHo loft office on Wednesday. It is furnished identically to the paper's London headquarters in Kings Cross, where I worked for several years in 2009-11; white walls, shiny new iMacs and orthopaedic chairs. The staff is comparatively small -- Guardian U.S. employs just 57 people, 29 of them journalists. Gibson offers me a cup of Yorkshire Gold tea brought over from England. "Glenn got [the story] first, and called me up," she tells me. "But a lot of this is difficult to talk about over open communications. You're like, 'hang on a minute. ... I'm not sure that Skype is a very very good idea.' So we talked in broad terms, and then very quickly got to the next stage where a certain amount of bona fides were being established, and then to: 'Right. I think you just -- get on a plane. Get on a plane.' So he came up here and we talked, and he showed me a very small amount of establishing material, and [we] got very very excited very fast." Gibson sent Greenwald, along with Ewan McAskill, The Guardian's former diplomatic editor and D.C. bureau chief and a reporter of some 30 years standing, on a plane to Hong Kong to meet Snowden the following morning, at the same time bringing some investigative reporters out to New York from the London office to help process the story. By June 5 they were ready to publish the first story: the FISA order requisitioning Verizon phone data. From Wednesday to Saturday The Guardian published a new scoop each day, and on Sunday June 10 Snowden revealed himself as the whistleblower, explaining his rationale for the leak in a video interview with Greenwald hosted on the Guardian US site. Greenwald had been working for The Guardian for less than a year, coming from Salon.com in August 2012, but he was already a well-known figure; a trained lawyer, a strident campaigner against the Patriot Act, and an award-winning journalist and author with three books in The New York Times bestseller list. The pedigree, however, does not appear to have impressed The New York Times, which in its coverage of the leak uncharitably referred to The Guardian as a "British news-site" and Greenwald as a "blogger" . In their own way, these labels are fair enough; The Guardian doesn't put out a U.S. print edition, and Greenwald first made his name on his independent blog Unclaimed Territory.But the subtext there was the struggle of the New York Times to encapsulate the hybrid beast that the Guardian has created - which almost certainly helped it scoop the New York Times and other papers -- including The Washington Post -- on the PRISM leak. During my time in America, I've become convinced that The Guardian is currently unique in the U.S. market. American broadsheet papers write news very differently from their counterparts in the UK; aloof, lengthy, sometimes even a little archaic, The New York Times -- and to a lesser extent The Washington Post and their cohort -- aim to be papers of record, even as they've begun to add daily and weekly blogs to their rosters. The Guardian's style is quite different, with more of an onus on live-blogging, reader engagement, and lighter-hearted content; it can be seen as sitting half-way between The New York Times and online-only outlets like BuzzFeed, despite the fact that its founding actually pre-dates that of the of the New York Times by thirty years. Back home, The Guardian, which is headquartered in London's fashionable and liberal N1 postcode, has a reputation for catering to a hip, urban, liberal crowd. Gibson says this is by design. "We want to build a different kind of newsroom [for the American operation]," she says. "That means being really great at live, real-time stuff, which was where we started, because it's a great place to grow quickly." In some ways, The Guardian's U.S. operation got very lucky in that its launch coincided with the birth of the Occupy movement; for a left-leaning newspaper with a talent for live, rolling coverage, Occupy was a match made in heaven. "We are really really good at live real-time stuff," Gibson says. "[The Guardian is] about telling great stories that are important and have significance in the world, and that generally means investigative, and then also be relevant, and be in people's lives and tell them stuff they need to know, which is live and real-time. And sometimes, either end of that stuff can be really quite funny, or at least humorous. It's not all kind of dense, and -- " she searches for the right term " -- kale salad." Kale salad. Back home, The Guardian, which is headquartered in London's fashionable and liberal N1 postcode, has a reputation for catering to a hip, urban, liberal crowd -- and is often mocked for being left-wing, stiffly politically-correct and, on occasion, for having an obsession with health foods. A Buzzfeed UK article this year claims to have spotted the "most Guardian opening sentence of all time", which read: At 10 to five one Saturday afternoon last year, I was walking up the Hornsey Road in London with a tin of rhubarb from Tesco, checking the football results on my iPhone after a lovely day at Kew Gardens. The phone replaced the BlackBerry I'd destroyed a month earlier by running into the sea to save my daughter from drowning. But The Guardian also has a reputation for solid investigative journalism. The NSA story isn't their first rodeo. They were one of three publications to work closely with WikiLeaks to process the mountains of data leaed by Bradley Manning in 2010. When Rupert Murdoch's vast tabloid the News of the World was finally caught phone-hacking, it was The Guardian that brought it down, doggedly fighting for the story for two years against a storm of legal threats and denials from News International. Before that, the paper was known for having faced down a storm of litigation to prove that the former MP Jonathan Aitken had lied before a court, giving them probably their best-known front page, featuring the headline "He Lied And Lied And Lied". I ask Gibson what's coming up for Guardian US, when the Snowden dust finally settles. "We will add commentators, we will add reporting, we will add verticals, we will continue to grow, and we'll work with commercial partners and do tech and business and all the things that we want to be," she says. The publication is doubling down on its investigative presence in the States as well: Investigative journalist Paul Lewis is joining the paper's Washington bureau from the London office this month, and Nick Davies, the reporter whose two years of digging brought about the phone-hacking scandal, is joining the New York team later in the year. For nearly any other publication, there would be a big question looming over such expansion: cost. How can The Guardian afford this kind of aggressive investment when other papers are being forced to scale back? Here The Guardian admittedly has some help: The paper enjoys the financial cushion of a large trust, which was set up in 1936 to carefully invest the fortune of the paper's most famous editor CP Scott. In its current form, the Scott Trust Limited is now the sole stakeholder in Guardian Media Group, so the paper has no shareholders nor a Rupert Murdoch-like proprietor; instead, any profits from the assets held by the group are used to maintain -- and propagate -- the newspaper operation. In essence, it is a journalistic perpetual-motion machine, one with exceptionally fortunate investment properties which managed to lose relatively little of their value during the financial crisis. This is the financial grounding which enables the publication's experimentation. They have a very successful dating site in the UK -- Guardian Soulmates. They were ahead of the website curve, and have experimented very successfully with tablet and mobile apps. Some of the experiments have yielded surprising conclusions about the new media landscape. "All the things you believed to be true, are not really true," Gibson says. "'You shouldn't really launch a story on a Sunday afternoon, that's a dead zone!' - no it's not. Sunday afternoon's actually a brilliant time to launch a story. And actually, Friday night: perfectly good time to launch a story as well. Shouldn't be - a Friday night drop suggests it goes into a lull of the weekend -- but it's the internet, and people have smartphones, and people are going out to meet each other and tell each other things, and say 'did you see this'. The whole world has changed." She grins happily. "Everything you think you know, you don't know any more."

What Egypt Can Learn From Pakistan Posted: 05 Jul 2013 06:35 AM PDT A Shi'ite Muslim woman takes part in a rally in support of the people of Libya, Tunisia, Bahrain, Egypt, and Yemen held in the streets of Karachi on March 27, 2011. (Akhtar Soomro/Reuters) A military helicopter, painted in neon green laser lights, hovered over the crowds in Tahrir Square as they celebrated the ouster of Mohammed Morsi, Egypt's first democratically elected leader. In October of 1999, I was one of many Pakistanis who celebrated the expulsion of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and his government by General Pervez Musharraf. The circumstances couldn't have been more similar. Having come to power through a discredited election, Sharif enjoyed unprecedented power that he appeared to be using to set himself up as a modern Caliph with an almost divine right to rule. But the situation came to a head when Sharif fired Musharraf, a junior general whom Sharif himself had promoted through the ranks, while he was overseas. Which is why when Musharraf talked about a new Pakistan, a more secular Pakistan, and made the promise of free and fair elections, I rejoiced, giddy with excitement that our country might be afforded a fresh start. All that though was only a false shroud, though, as Pakistan suffered through an almost decade-long dictatorship under him. Our economy tumbled, we remained embroiled in a shadowy war in the tribal regions, our relationship with India took a nose-dive, with Musharraf's reign ending only after his attempt to oust the chief justice resulted in his own downfall. Pakistanis, like much of the world, have kept a close eye on Egypt ever since Tahrir Square first became a symbol for a people rising up in the face of unspeakable oppression. And yet with the whole world's focus on the Middle East, Pakistan recently underwent the first transition in its history from one democratically elected government to another. In spite of the best efforts of the Taliban, the elections saw a record turnout . Unlike Egypt's democracy, which had all the fire of an adolescent coming of age, Pakistan's democracy seemed to have grown up, bought a minivan, and moved to the suburbs with the kids and a terrier. But this political maturity has not come about easily. Musharraf was Pakistan's fourth military dictator in an illustrious line. Between them, they had started an unprovoked war with India in the '60s (Ayub Khan), engineered the separation of Bangladesh in the '70s (Yahya Khan), and made Pakistan the hotbed of militant Islamic extremists in the '80s (Zia-ul-Haq). All of these men in khaki uniforms had been greeted with some amount of popular approval and yet left the country with wounds yet to heal. "Unlike Egypt's democracy, which had all the fire of an adolescent coming of age, Pakistan's democracy seemed to have grown up, bought a minivan, and moved to the suburbs." Egyptian people are right to be angry at the Morsi government, which failed to deliver on most of the promises it made. And yet a lot of what Morsi is accused of doing -- consolidating power, intimidating opponents, and mismanaging the economy -- seems to not be out of the ordinary. Democracies, particularly ones as young as Egypt's, are never pretty, at least not when they are growing up. While military dictatorships offer an illusion of control and stability, no country knows better than Egypt about the lasting ill effects of unelected governments. The '90s were a time of particular turmoil in Pakistan, with civilian governments exchanging power like needles in a crack shack, resulting in ubiquitous discontent. And yet, Pakistan's foundations were never made weaker than by the decisions of a military machine that ostensibly is government's most disciplined and nationalistic wing. The irony of the champions of democracy now dancing in the streets as champions of a military coup is not subtle. As Pakistanis, we had always looked toward the democracies of the West and hoped for similar stability and decorum, without realizing what it took for those systems to reach that state. To my brothers in Egypt, I wish them well in their struggle but offer them the highest degree of caution when greeting an ambitious general. Some of the military's intentions have already been made clear with the systematic pursuit of the Muslim Brotherhood's leadership. While I hope very much that this celebration will not be seen as an egregious and immature display of misdirected frustration, history paints a pessimistic picture. As Pakistanis have now realized -- none more so than Nawaz Sharif, who was recently elected back into power after years spent in jail and exile -- revenge is best served at the ballot box.

Yes, <i>Mad Men</i> Is a Soap Opera—and That Shouldn't Be an Insult Posted: 05 Jul 2013 04:36 AM PDT AMC Images Stephen King recently declared he didn't watch Mad Men because "it's basically soap opera," echoing essayist Daniel Mendelsohn who, in a New York Review of Books takedown, called it "a soap opera in high-end clothes." Soap opera is shorthand for melodrama the way Brad Pitt is shorthand for handsome, but why is it a pejorative? Is it because soaps are dying or because even in their heyday they were watched mostly by housewives? When All My Children left the air in 2011, writer Rebecca Traister defended soaps in The New York Timesas the first TV genre written by women for women and starring women. Yet this meant focusing on "female priorities" such as relationships and romances (what your history teacher might've called "the domestic sphere") that were deemed less significant than male priorities (like war and work) and thus the genre was derided. Soaps are now your grandma's stories, a guilty pleasure you never admit to watching in public. Related Story Mad Men Season 6: The Good, the Bad, the GIFs But to dismiss soaps is to dismiss what makes much of today's TV shows great. All serialized dramas began with Guiding Light,and decades ago when soaps were a thriving genre they essentially bankrolled most of television. Also, while some soaps are indeed silly--the plot, acting, and dialogue on Days of Our Lives always seemed like a caricature--declaring bad soaps as indicative of an entire genre would be like writing off all of sci-fi and fantasy, including quality shows like Lost and Game of Thrones, just because Teen Wolf is bad. In the '80s and '90s the late Bill Bell produced The Young and the Restless and The Bold and the Beautiful, both of which looked and sounded completely different from most soaps on the air. Bell played out realistic storylines of psychologically complex characters over years, stretched melodramatic moments to unbearable breaking points, and covered several character arcs per story. While many soaps featured only brightly lit sets, close-ups, and shot-reverse-shot camerawork, Bell used gothic stage lighting, long shots, and soft focus. While many soaps featured cheesy dialogue underscored by even cheesier music, Bell wrote economical dialogue and mixed the background music with heartbeat sounds and faint screams to create an atmosphere of tension and dread. These were artistic choices made within the soap milieu of melodrama and absurdity, and they shouldn't be scoffed at. While some soaps are indeed silly, declaring bad soaps as indicative of an entire genre would be like writing off all of sci-fi and fantasy, including quality shows like Lost and Game of Thrones, just because Teen Wolf is bad. Mad Men is definitely a soap--even Don Draper's name has the artifice and iconography of Erica Kane--but that doesn't make it insignificant as Mendelsohn and King contend. The soap archetypes are all there: hidden identities (Don Draper/Bob Benson), corporate intrigue (the changing of the guard at SCDP), secret pregnancies (Peggy), secret paternities (Joan's son), divorce and quick remarriages (Don and Betty), absurd moments (the lawnmower incident), amnesia (Pete's mistress), and even return-from-the-dead (Don Draper died in the war). Matthew Weiner also made the subtext text with Megan Draper as a soap actress and scenes from her show often echoing in the "real world." But these tropes are all in the service of character studies and the deconstruction of American identity through imposters, a theme so important F. Scott Fitzgerald couldn't stop writing about it. That hybrid nature is why the series remains critically beloved. Other modern soaps like Revenge, Downton Abbey,and Six Feet Under offer similar gravitas through action-packed retribution storylines, stiff-upper-lip sophistication, and the ultimate theme of Death. Pure soaps like Brothers and Sisters don't reach the zeitgeist in the same way. Even some raved-about dramas aimed more squarely at men feature soap traits. Call them soaps in drag. Homeland is marketed as a prestige thriller with a kick-ass female lead, a terrorist male lead, and a healthy dose of violent action, but it is essentially a love story with a ridiculous backdrop of international intrigue that only exists to bring together or drive apart the two leads. When Carrie pines for Brody against all reason--against him having her declared crazy and ousted from the CIA while he committed several capital felonies--that's not realistic character-driven drama, that's just good soap. Much of Homeland's excitement fromes from marriage and infidelity and an over-the-top villain, and there are even the soap tropes of amnesia (Carrie zaps her brain at the end of Season One) and return-from-the-dead (Brody was believed killed for several years, as was his later-revealed-to-be-nefarious partner). The very masculine The Sopranos is another example. Household drama, mother issues, and rival families made Tony Soprano the quintessential soap patriarch, and the show's single greatest episode ("Whitecaps") featured Tony and Carmella fighting and crying their way through a domestic dispute. Not a big mob hit, not a testosterone-filled episode, but a husband and wife battle where the only thing at stake was a marriage. And even Tony got his own return-from-the-dead storyline when he was shot and came back from an afterlife fever dream. Like Matthew Weiner, David Chase paid homage to the show's soap roots on the show itself: Junior Soprano was constantly watching The Bold and the Beautiful and shouting obscenities at its characters. (This motif also underscored the show's Italian-immigrant narrative, since Bill Bell's soaps were always popular with immigrant viewers.) So instead of using soap opera as a pejorative, let's remember that all kinds of television shows have soap heritage and there is nothing wrong with that. If soaps birthed the serialized TV form, and many current dramas inherited their tropes, then that genre demands respect, not derision. The next time Carrie Mathison is kidnapped by an international supervillain and her bad-boy lover is racing against the clock to save her, just remember that already happened to Laura Spencer on General Hospital.

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