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No Rape Victim, Male or Female, Deserves to Be Blamed

Posted: 08 Jul 2013 02:55 PM PDT

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Joseph Kaczmarek/AP Images

Last year, a small American town began to cannibalize its own after a group of high school student athletes sexually assaulted an incapacitated classmate. In the aftermath, rather than rallying around the young victim, townspeople rushed to downplay the attack and defend the perpetrators instead.

If this sounds familiar, you might think I'm talking about Steubenville, Ohio--but I'm actually talking about Norwood, Colorado.

In February 2012, three high school wrestlers from the tiny town of Norwood ambushed a 13-year-old boy on a school bus, restrained him with duct tape, and anally raped him with a pencil. The victim's father, who was also the high school principal, notified the superintendent and school board immediately, but aside from a one-day suspension, there were no repercussions for the perpetrators (two of whom were sons of the head wrestling coach, who also happened to be president of the school board). Despite Colorado's mandatory reporting laws, the police were not notified until the principal reported the incident himself after a month of inaction on the part of town and school officials.

In the wake of the boys' arrests on charges ranging from kidnapping to sexual assault, the seventh-grade victim was blamed and bullied by his peers at school and on social media. Rather than cracking down on this harassment, some parents encouraged it, including the mother of an accused boy who made and distributed t-shirts that proclaimed alliance with the teenaged attackers.

Many Norwood citizens ostracized the victim and called for his father's resignation, incensed that the principal had reported what, to them, was a benign schoolboy prank. The assailants, all charged as juveniles, pled guilty to misdemeanors and received varying sentences of probation, community service, and cash restitution. The victim and his family were arguably punished more severely. After months of harassment, they were ultimately driven out of Norwood altogether and relocated to another community.

While Steubenville has been in the media spotlight since last December, the Norwood assault only recently received minimal national coverage, despite striking parallels between the two cases. There is much they share in common, such as the violence and permissiveness of sports culture, but their most disturbing common denominator is the secondary victimization of the raped teens in the form of rampant, town-wide victim-blaming.

Steubenville, in fact, has becoming a metonym for victim-blaming, serving for many feminist writers as a case-in-point argument for the existence of rape culture. Jill Filipovic, writing for The Guardian, uses Steubenville to lay out the orthodox feminist narrative that victim-blaming is rooted in misogyny. The Steubenville victim was shamed, scrutinized, demonized, and blamed because, Filipovic asserts, we live in a "woman-hating world."

While I'm not going to dispute the pervasiveness of misogyny in most cultures, this standard narrative doesn't fully account for what happened in Norwood, where there was a similar epidemic of victim-blaming, but no female victim. In fact, research on sexual violence indicates that, overall, male victims of rape elicit comparable or even more blame for their attacks than female victims. A number of recent studies reveal a more complex story about rape culture than is often told, a story that roots victim-blaming attitudes not in misogyny (or misandry) per se, but in perceived violations of traditional gender roles.

Thanks to the spotlight of feminist activism, a vast amount of literature on female rape has accumulated over the past four decades, whereas the study of male rape has been comparatively neglected. (Some social scientists estimate that research and resources for male victims lags behind by a good 20 years.) These analyses, as well as activist endeavors like SlutWalks, have focused on highlighting and debunking myths about female rape that contribute to victim-blaming. Such myths were highly visible in reactions to the Steubenville case, where the victim's use of alcohol and sexual history were used to fault her for the rape.

Distinct but corresponding myths about men likewise fuel victim-blaming, as burgeoning research on male rape demonstrates. A 2009 study in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence surveys a number of these false beliefs, including the perception that males, as the physically powerful sexual instigators, can't be raped, or are not as traumatized if they are assaulted. Echoes of these myths are evident even in some headlines about the Colorado case, which use the more benign language of "hazing," rather than "rape" or "sexual assault," downplaying the attack as an extreme display of teenaged masculinity rather than a crime of sexual violence.

These rape myths spring from deeply entrenched gender norms about permissible and idealized behavior for men and women, and rape victims of both sexes are blamed when they openly transgress the social expectations of their gender. A woman who goes out alone at night, for example, is prone to blame, as is a woman who is slut-shamed for having had prior sexual partners. A man who fails to physically overcome his attacker is likewise seen as contributing to his own victimization; he must have secretly wanted it. The young male victim in the Norwood case was particularly targeted for speaking out about his assault, which transgressed the expectation that a boy should just "man up," remaining stoic and invulnerable in the face of violence.

The majority of studies indicate that men are more prone to blaming victims of sexual assault than women, which superficially appears to support the "woman-hating" explanation--except for the fact that they ultimately blame male victims more. In fact, the groups most susceptible to blame for being raped are gay men raped by men and straight men raped by women. This is consistent with the gender role expectation hypothesis, as victims in those scenarios fall prey to the pervasive ideal of the hyper-sexed, insatiable male who invites and enjoys any sexual encounter.

Although men generally judge rape victims more harshly than women, the most recent research indicates that beliefs about gender roles are more predictive of a victim-blaming mentality than the gender of the research participant. In other words, men blame at higher rates not because they are more susceptible to misogyny or misandry, but because they are more likely to endorse traditional views of masculinity and femininity. This holds true for victim-blaming that stems from "hostile sexism," which refers to the denigration of a rape victim who violates gender expectations. Both men and women, however, are equally inclined toward "benevolent sexism," or reserving one's sympathy for those who fulfill gender ideals.

A study published just this year in the Journal of Sexual Aggression lends further support to the gender transgression hypothesis. Unlike previous experimental studies of samples from the United Kingdom and United States, this study analyzed a Swedish population. In this instance, victim-blaming attitudes were found to be scarce, as participants of both sexes overwhelmingly blamed the rapist for the attack, and, in a divergence from other studies, male participants did not victim-blame more than their female counterparts. Sweden, one of the highest-ranked countries in the world in terms of gender equality, appears to have significantly lower rates of victim blaming. Although further research is needed, these findings tentatively suggest that the most effective way to combat victim blaming is to move away from polarized gender ideals and cultivate an egalitarian society.

Both Norwood and Steubenville provide unsettling examples of rape culture, but it's a problem that only one of these attacks has received widespread attention. If we want to get at the underlying cause of victim-blaming attitudes, we can't afford to focus only on female victims or misogyny, lest we risk misdiagnosing the root problem. This is not simply a woman-hating world; it's a world that polices the boundaries of gender to the detriment of all.

    

Eliot Spitzer Buys Some Honey

Posted: 08 Jul 2013 02:47 PM PDT

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Back where he belongs? (AP/Seth Wenig)

NEW YORK -- "How you gonna walk past me and not try my honey?" Andrew Cote shouted out at Eliot Spitzer. He didn't expect the line to work. But the former governor, who resigned from office five years ago after being caught up in a call-girl scandal, was drawn in by the Union Square Greenmarket grocer's cry, and purchased a small $20 bottle of the Brooklyn batch from Andrew's NYC Honey, which is collected from rooftop and balcony apiaries around the city.

It was just one more slightly surreal moment in the surreal hour-long first campaign appearance, following Spitzer's late-Sunday announcement that he intends to run for city comptroller.

Spitzer appeared shortly after noon in Manhattan's Union Square, ostensibly to collect signatures to get on the ballot for the September 10 Democratic primary. He was greeted by at least eight satellite news trucks, one cherry-picker, and more than 50 members of the press. They competed for space with each other, shoving and shouting in the sweltering summer heat for a moment of Spitzer's time until sweat poured down their faces and necks and Spitzer was as smeared and dripping as the mob that surrounded him, barking questions. Spitzer gamely stood amid the crushing throng in a navy pin-stripped suit, slowly rotating from camera bank to camera bank and taking queries flung over the elbowing, pawing cameramen to be recorded on devices held aloft by outstretched hand over outstretched hand. If he found the attention overwhelming, he gave no sign, staying on message and futilely declaring, "one more, one more" over and over, before continuing to take questions until the the scrum had traveled from the Union Square subway entrance up the length of the park and up onto lower Broadway. At 18th Street, he finally ducked into a yellow SUV cab and sped away.

Along the way, Spitzer collected a handful of signatures, as well as unexpected but passionate expressions of support from men and women grateful for things he'd done during his time as governor and state attorney general on issues ranging from tobacco sales to prosecuting Wall Street.

Andrew Fine, 45, a real-estate broker (and blogger) from the Upper East Side who works in the Union Square area, was the first person to sign Spitzer's petition to get on the ballot. He said he got wind of the appearance just 15 minutes before Spitzer showed up and managed to shove his way through the crowd to get to Spitzer and his proffered forms. Comptroller is "probably the second most important position in the city. Personally I'd rather he'd have run for mayor ... but I guess he figured this was his opportunity to get back in," said Fine, interviewed after leaving the scrum. "I have absolutely no doubt he should be allowed on the ballot if he fulfills the guidelines."

Fine wasn't bothered by Spitzer's past. "I really don't think that politicians should be judged on their personal lives; they should be judged on how they govern," he said, acknowledging "there is some hypocrisy there because as a D.A. he was prosecuting the crimes that he committed himself."

Charles Ellis, a city employee, was less understanding, declaring, "Oh God, does he really think anyone is going to vote for him?" "I mean, there's quite a difference between sexting and hiring hookers," he said, referring the scandal to drove mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner from Congress, as well as Spitzer's transgressions. "I think it's ridiculous that Spitzer would come in like this. It's grandstanding on his part."

Some citizens shouted words of encouragement over the press at Spitzer -- "We gonna vote for you Eliot! We gonna vote for you! We forgave you!" cried Cleonie Sinclair of Prospect Heights, Brooklyn -- while Joey Boots from the Howard Stern Show catcalled the show's signature "Ba-ba-booey" line at the former governor and demanded of Spitzer if he was still with his wife and if he'd used a condom in his encounters with prostitutes.

Around the mob flowed the naturally occurring scrum of the city. There were men and women in giant red chef's caps, wielding enormous silver-colored forks and spoons in an in-person advertisement for Lucini Italia, a food company. The chess-players in the park were miffed that Spitzer was interrupting their business, and declined to talk to the press unless they got paid. A young man in ripped clothing and the scent of homelessness and liquor angrily shouted at the former governor about why he was allowed to create a scene in the park but the police were always trying to uproot his friends. A woman quietly read another woman's tarot nearby. "A politician is going to say some stuff," a woman in a maxi dress patiently explained to her little boy as they exited the subway and went on their way.

Spitzer said he'd made the decision to run in the "past 48 hours." He declined to say a negative word about the only other candidate in the comptroller's race, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer: "I don't want to say anything about Scott that isn't affirmative and pleasant and upbeat, because that's what politics can be about. So, trust me, I've seen the other side." As to whether Weiner's success in overcoming his history of scandal had influenced his thinking on making a fresh bid for office, Spitzer said it had "none whatsoever."

Though few asked why he'd chosen the post of comptroller as a target for his comeback bid, Spitzer made a reasonably compelling case for why he was seeking the position, whose role is a mystery even to many New Yorkers.

"The comptrollers around the nation own, in aggregate, a vast, a vast share of the shares that exist in the equity markets," said Spitzer. "Those institutional shareholders, through that proxy power, have the capacity to not only control things as easily visible as CEO compensation but more subtly: who is chosen to be on the boards of directors of the companies, what leverage ratios, in fact, the banks decide they want -- which is what led to the cataclysm of 2008.

"Ownership trumps regulation. I've been saying this for years," he continued, explaining why the comptroller's post is so essential. "Ownership is better than regulation or prosecution if you want to effect corporate behavior. Ownership is what resides in shareholders. Shares are controlled by the comptrollers around the nation. That is the huge untapped power that they have and I hope I can do something about that."

"I feel that I have an argument I can make based on what I did as attorney general, what I did in the heat of the sun right now or in the heat of the fire of [when] Wall Street was breathing down my back, saying, 'We have powerful friends. Be careful.' Direct quote. I think I can stand up to those interests. I can stand up for change. That's what I've always done. That's what I intend to do."

Spitzer has his work cut out for him. Sandra Pannone, 27, working at the Blue Mercury store near where Spitzer made his departure, called him "a sleazy, sleazy, sleazy politician" and said she'd never vote for him in a million years.

But he made at least one convert. "Sure I'll vote for him, especially now," said Cote, the honey-merchant. "My vote can be bought for one jar of honey."

    

Egypt's Army Has More People Than Miami and Answers to No One

Posted: 08 Jul 2013 02:01 PM PDT

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An injured supporter of ousted President Mohammed Morsi sits at a field hospital in Nassr City in Cairo on July 8, 2013.(AP/Khalil Hamra)

In some of the worst violence since the fall of Mubarak, Egyptian soldiers opened fire on supporters of ousted president Mohammed Morsi while they were praying this morning, killing 43 people and wounding 300.

The New York Times described the gruesome scene:

There were pools of blood on the pavement. Some of the blood and bullet holes were hundreds of yards from the walls of the facility's guard house, suggesting that the soldiers continued firing as the demonstrators fled.

To the uninitiated, it may seem strange that a country's armed forces not only orchestrated the ouster of an elected leader, but also fired on the nation's own citizens with seeming impunity.

But unlike in most countries, where the military takes orders from the chief executive, Egypt's military is the strongest institution in the land, and in many ways, it has called the shots ever since it took power in a 1952 coup. None of the country's leaders have had an independent political base strong enough to counteract the mammoth army, which casts itself as the guardian of Egyptians' freedom. What happened today shows the extreme downside of the fact that the country is controlled, even if temporarily, by unchecked soldiers.

Here's how the military became so powerful:

In 1952, a group of military officers pushed out Egypt's King Farouk and established the Egyptian Republic. The military immediately took charge, and a few years later the revolution's linchpin, Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, became president. But even though he came from the army, tensions with the military became "an abiding theme of the entire Nasser period," said Robert Springborg, an expert on the Egyptian military at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. "The entire time of his rule was caught up in trying to deal with the military."

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During a coup d'etat, Egyptian army tanks and field guns are drawn up in front of the royal Abdin Palace in Cairo on July 26, 1952. (AP)

Perhaps the most dramatic example of this was Nasser's power struggle with Abdel Hakim Amer, the deputy supreme commander, which ended after Nasser arrested Amer following Egypt's defeat during the 1967 war with Israel. Amer either killed himself while under house arrest, or was killed on Nasser's orders.

The military's relationship with the next two leaders wasn't much smoother.

Anwar Sadat, the next president, purged the military of his opponents, and there is a theory that his assassination in 1981 was plotted by the military as revenge.

In the 1980s, U.S. military aid allowed the army to begin modernizing and expanding, but the troops got even richer when Hosni Mubarak, who took power after Sadat, again possibly at the hands of the military, essentially dealt with them "by buying them off," Springborg explained. Mubarak simply gave them total control over their own mini-economy, propped up by low-paid conscripts, while using his own private forces to monitor the troops.

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Egyptian troops parade in Cairo on Oct. 6, 1974. (AP)

The U.S. and World Bank pushed for the privatization of the massive military enterprises, but Mubarak, to some degree, fended them off, fearing the political consequences of infringing too much on Egyptian Military Inc.

" ... The military views the GOE's [government of Egypt's] privatization efforts as a threat to its [the military's] economic position, and therefore generally opposes economic reforms," a Wikileaks cable from 2008 noted.

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Camel corps members head out on patrol in El Arish, Egypt in 1980. (AP)

By 2011, the army's political and military might was unparalleled. The Times detailed how the army was operating a lavish hospital and a fleet of luxury Gulfstream jets. The interim armed forces government, which governed the nation between Mubarak and Morsi, put foreign NGO employees on trial, leading to the sentencing and expulsion of 43 such workers.

The military absorbs most of the aid the U.S. continues to send to Egypt. It's now the largest army in Africa and one of the largest in the world, and by developing an extensive network of businesses, it has also become a dominant economic force, controlling between 10 and 30 percent of the economy and employing hundreds of thousands of Egyptians.

In a Pew Research Center poll conducted in March, 73 percent of Egyptians said the military had a good influence on the country, making it more popular that most of the country's other political parties.

Meanwhile, the military has stayed out of the political spotlight, preferring to avoid the appearance of direct rule while bolstering its stature with parades, youth sports leagues, and museums. Egyptians cheer on the Border Guards' soccer team and wait in military-organized breadlines during shortages.

***

Last year, Morsi installed new army commanders that he hoped would be more loyal to him. But his biggest error was playing too dominant a role in national security policy, which the military has always felt was its domain, Springborg said.

In June, Morsi seemed to give tacit approval to politicians who wanted to subvert an Ethiopian plan to build a dam on the Nile. Later that month, he expressed support for the Syrian rebels at a rally that was also attended by hardline Islamists.

The military, seeking to avoid both Islamist alliances and unnecessary overseas conflicts, soured on Morsi, and last week's protests only served to cement the alliance of Egypt's opposition and the military against Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood, the group that backs him.

Springborg said that despite how large the military looms in Egypt, today's shooting is likely to put a dent in their popularity, if not their power. But they might still recover their image if they cast Muslim Brotherhood supporters as the bad guys. According to one military spokesman, the troops only fired on the civilians when armed Morsi supporters attacked them.

"The struggle over the narrative now is going on between the Brotherhood and the military -- what really happened here and who's responsible," he said. "The outcome of that will determine the future of Egypt. If the military looks like it's killing good Muslims, they're in big trouble. But if people get behind them and say the army is defending people against the Brothers, they'll maintain their political position."

    

A Romantic View of Technology Design

Posted: 08 Jul 2013 01:33 PM PDT

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Caspar David Friedrich's The Wanderer Above the Sea (Wikimedia commons)

Designers and entrepreneurs have long imagined a world where everything is digital. Here, lamps, clothes, furniture, and all sorts of accessories of modern life would communicate with their users and with each other, creating a network of smart technology that goes way beyond phones and computers. Examples of this are already cropping up in nascent iterations of the Internet of things, which currently include applications that tell you when you're running out of eggs, etc.

This dream presents a serious question: What's the point? Do "smart" objects have a raison d'être? One obvious answer is that it might be cool if homewares could talk (because who wouldn't want to live in a world like Beauty and the Beast?). Another potential answer: Making everyday objects "smarter" could increase efficiency by streamlining energy use, reducing the number of gadgets necessary in everyday life, and preventing user error in cars and elsewhere.

But a third explanation lurks in the background: Technological progress could create a world that more closely resembles what it "should" be. During a talk at the Aspen Ideas Festival, two graduate students from MIT Media Lab offered interesting versions of what this "should" might look like, painting a remarkably un-techy theory of technology design: In the best world, digital creations would facilitate a "return to nature" and create aesthetically moving experiences. In other words, they believe that the next generation of technology should serve the same purpose as art, at least in part.

But more on that in a minute. The first designer to offer up one of these perspectives, Lining Yao, said that her work actually fights against the tidal wave of digital information. Soon after arriving at MIT from her home of Mongolia, she realized that "there are so many smart people on this planet trying to add even more information to the real world. They are trying to put information on mobile phones... and even on glasses nowadays. And I started to wonder: Instead of adding more information to reality, could you try to maybe subtract some information at some point? Maybe by cleaning up all the noises you can pay better attention to the things you really care about."

This has led her to work on a few different projects. The most interesting is her team's effort to create material -- literally, cloth -- that can be digitally programmed to respond to human touch and shift into different shapes for multi-function use. For example, aquatic adventurers could wear sandals that transform into seaworthy flippers - maybe not the top priority for most commuters, but a fascinating option nonetheless.

For Yao, all of this is part of a deeper philosophical drive to create technology that mimics nature. "Could it be that material is so smart? Could it be expressive, responsive, and so intelligent as to interact with humans? Well, if you look at nature, the natural material actually talks," she argued. For her, nature provides a roadmap for man-made technology, which is an unexpected throwback to Romanticism in late 18th and early 19th century Europe. Instead of the steady forward march of man v. nature, in which technological progress is a way of beating back, outsmarting, and dominating the natural world, Yao is describing a theory of tech design that shows deference to and even takes tips from nature's playbook.

Tech-loving romantics aren't operating in the same environment as Goethe or Delacroix, though, arguably because virtual reality has created a new layer of separation between the tech user's everyday world and the untamed wilderness Romantics so admired. As our sensory environments get flooded with more and more digital information, does that mean the world around us is less "real"? Yao thinks so. She explained that her work is "really an effort of trying to go closer to the spirit of nature, which is simplicity. If you look at all the projects, what we do is really try to create this visual perception for people to see the real world. On the other hand, [digital] perception is fake. But if you look at nature, nature never cheats. When I was a kid I used to run into the forest every time after rain because the air is fresher, I can smell the sun, I can touch the leaves and even feel the soil under my feet. It's a multi-sensory experience which exists in the real environment."

This brand of tech-driven neo-romanticism, then, exists in subtle contradiction: Even as Yao and her colleagues at MIT, along with inventors at Google, GE, and others, dream of a completely digital world, this kind of world seems less "real." According to tech romanticism, the more pervasive technology becomes, the more it needs to look like it's not technology at all.

Another MIT graduate student, Xiao Xiao, took tech romanticism to an even more artistic level: The ultimate purpose of tech design is to inspire and move the user, she argued.

"Funnily enough, whenever we think about the digital world, we tend to only care about the convenient, the useful, the constantly available streams -- no, deluge -- of information flowing through our eyeballs into our brains. And we forget about the richness, the poetry, the beauty of the experience in the world, an experience often flawed and always fleeting, but sometimes it takes your breath away. And I am here to tell you that after the ears and iterations of working on this piano, there are times when you must look past just the convenience, the usefulness of the digital world. If you're able to do that, you can even craft the most abstract information into visceral experience, which is ultimately what design is all about," she said.

As the digital footprint on our built environment grows, new tech creations might serve a functional purpose, but Xiao envisions a world where using technology will be more like looking at great art: It should inspire and resonate at a deep, emotional level. This seems very different from the more utilitarian goals one might associate with technological progress, including efficiency and convenience. If not anti-rational, this take on technology is at least non-rational, carving out lofty goals for design that aim to battle what some see as a fractured, lonely, tech-y world.

Although applications of these MIT Media Lab projects still seem pretty theoretical, the prototypes are mesmerizing. You can see brief clips of the two students' work below.

Here, Lining Yao demonstrates the way that programmed air bladders and flexible metal can create vine-like plastics and new forms of lightbulbs:

And in this video, Xiao Xiao uses video imaging to create an interactive piano-playing experience among a trio of players who aren't even there:

For full coverage of the Aspen Ideas Festival, see here.

    

Will the Supreme Court Make an 11th-Hour Intervention in Georgia?

Posted: 08 Jul 2013 01:30 PM PDT

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AP

Unfolding in Atlanta and Washington this week is a compelling story about mental health, the Supreme Court, and capital punishment that illustrates vividly the width of the gulf that exists in America today between the rule of law that people think they have and the rule of law they actually do have. It is yet another story of how recognized rights can be hollowed out over time by judges and politicians and bureaucratic functionaries who extol the virtues of lofty constitutional principles with one breath and then work to undermine those principles with the next. It's a story about the perils of judicial compromise.

At the center of the week's storm is a convicted murderer named Warren Lee Hill. Despite a 2002 ruling by the United States Supreme Court that prohibits the execution of mentally retarded* prisoners, Georgia officials plan to execute Hill next Monday even though all of the government doctors who have examined him now agree that he is mentally retarded beyond a reasonable doubt. Georgia seeks to accomplish the execution by arguing that Hill has not met his burden of proving retardation under an onerous state standard; that the doctors' new diagnoses are flawed; and that, as a matter of law, they come too late anyway to spare Hill.

Because his case directly challenges the Supreme Court's prohibition against executing the mentally retarded, because it's (so far) such a great example of how easy it is for lower courts to ignore the spirit of High Court commands, I have written many times before (here, here and here) about Hill. His execution was 30 minutes away in February when it was halted by the 11th U.S Circuit Court of Appeals in order to evaluate the evolution of his doctors' views on his mental condition. 

What's happening now -- what makes this week crucial -- is that Georgia last week rescheduled Hill's execution after the 11th Circuit rejected his latest arguments. Hill's lawyers have in turn just today filed a Motion to Stay the Execution at the 11th Circuit--unlikely to grant it. For several months Hill's lawyers have had an appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States pending on this case. Even though the Supreme Court is not in session, it must now take some sort of action (either agreeing to hear the appeal or denying it) before July 15, when Hill is scheduled to be executed.

If Hill's attorneys are to spare his life (here is their Supreme Court Petition), they must get the justices in Washington to give clarity and meaning to their 2002 decision in Atkins v. Virginia. In Atkins, by a 6-3 vote, with Justice Anthony Kennedy writing the majority opinion, the Court outlawed the execution of mentally retarded prisoners but allowed state lawmakers and judges to determine the legal standards by which prisoners would be deemed "retarded." The justices assumed, as they must, that state officials would act in good faith to implement the prohibition they announced in the case.

At the time it was issued, the Atkins ruling was widely hailed as a reasonable compromise -- a federal judicial command (thou shalt not execute the mentally retarded) coupled with broad deference to state autonomy (states shall determine who is and who is not retarded). Indeed, the formula is a familiar one to anyone who has followed the jurisprudence of Justice Kennedy -- his opinion last month in the Defense of Marriage Act case tracks that very dichotomy. In Atkins, as in Windsor v. United States, Justice Kennedy's avowed love of federalism meshed with his concerns about individual rights.

But the key to the Atkins compromise was always the conduct of state officials. Would they interpret state laws to shield mentally retarded murderers from execution? Or would they apply state rules in ways that circumvented Atkins' prohibition? So far, in Georgia, the answer has been unequivocal. Alone in the nation, Georgia long ago chose the toughest possible legal standard -- a defendant like Hill would have to prove his mental status beyond a reasonable doubt. And in Hill's case, now that such a finding has been made, state officials have resorted to a series of technical arguments for why the courts should ignore that finding.

Not just technical arguments, mind you. But outright evasion. No expert who has ever evaluated Hill has concluded that he did not meet the IQ standard for retardation. The only contested issue was whether there was proof that his "adaptive skills deficit" qualified for the diagnosis. When the state-appointed mental health experts concluded that Hill had not met that latter standard, Georgia embraced them. When, more recently, those same experts acknowledged that they had been wrong, that they had not properly evaluated Hill to begin with, Georgia turned on these experts. This is not remotely in the spirit of Atkins.

Nor would it be in the spirit of Atkins to have the judiciary ignore the considered view of the mental health community when it comes to defining mental retardation. And that community seems adamant that this case falls squarely within the range contemplated by Justice Kennedy. Last month, for example, six leading scholars on mental disability, and the folks at the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, asked the Supreme Court to intervene on Hill's behalf. Here is the link to their amicus brief. They wrote:

The three government witnesses have acknowledged that their earlier diagnostic conclusions were wrong because of their misunderstanding about the attributes of people with mental retardation and because of subsequent advances in the scientific understanding about intellectual disability. Their revised opinions that Mr. Hill has mental retardation are consistent with the clinical definition and the current scientific understanding in the area of intellectual disability, particularly in the areas of stereotypes about mental retardation and the potential for malingering.

So we have a Supreme Court ruling that says that the mentally retarded cannot be executed. And we have a man whom all experts now agree is mentally retarded beyond a reasonable doubt. And we have the mental health community siding with the defendant. And yet we have an execution scheduled for July 15th. And yet we have state officials (and lower court judges) arguing that the mentally retarded man who is scheduled to be executed cannot find succor in Atkins because of procedural rules that limit his ability to raise new claims (like the facts that his doctors now say they were wrong). This is what I mean when I write that the case shows how hollow the Constitution can be when the justices compromise over core protections.

The main issue the justices confront this week is not complicated. Either Atkins still stands as a prohibition against executing the mentally retarded or it doesn't. If it still stands, if the Court is going to back up its earlier guarantee, the justices cannot countenance the contorted logic that Georgia and the lower courts have employed to proceed with Hill's execution despite his mental status. At minimum, this means ordering the lower courts to conduct a new hearing so that Hill's doctors -- state-appointed experts! -- can explain under oath why they now believe their patient's mental condition satisfies Georgia's "reasonable doubt" standard.

If Atkins still stands the Court should say so, and quickly. Because if the justices allow Hill to be executed in these circumstances they will be saying, implicitly if not expressly, that the rule of Atkins may be subordinated to states' rights and hoary technicalities. I don't believe there are today five votes on the Supreme Court for that position. I don't believe that Justice Kennedy has in the intervening decade since Atkins hardened his view toward the mentally retarded. And I don't believe the family members of Hill's victims, who do not want to see him executed, ought to be ignored. The Court sadly doesn't always say what it means. In the case of Warren Hill, this week, it has a chance to finally show that it means what it says.

* While now outdated in common usage and considered offensive by many, the phrase "mental retardation" is a legal term of art still employed by the courts. I use it here only for ease of reference.

    

<i>The Lone Ranger</i> Seals It: America's New Favorite Villain Is a Rich Guy

Posted: 08 Jul 2013 01:29 PM PDT

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Disney

Writer Ian Fleming is known to have once said, "Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action." If that's the case, three recently released Hollywood films--Iron Man 3, White House Down, and now The Lone Ranger--show that American moviegoers and moviemakers have identified a new enemy of the moment, and it doesn't come from overseas. These would-be summer blockbusters convey a leftward turn in thinking about the militarization and the War on Terror. The real enemy, Hollywood seems to be telling us, is within.

In discussing the progressive politics of The Lone Ranger, most critics have focused on the depiction of Native Americans, and with good reason. Over the history of the American Western, Native Americans have often been depicted as faceless savages whose efforts to defend themselves were merely obstacles to America's Manifest Destiny. Some cinematic efforts have been made to subvert this convention (The Searchers and Dances with Wolves are probably the most famous examples), but The Lone Ranger takes things a step further, making Tonto and John Reid (who will become the eponymous hero) dual protagonists. There is room for debate on this; some critics still feel that Depp's performance, with its use of "red face" and halted speaking style, is dehumanizing, but the increased role for Tonto is at least a step in the right direction.

This depiction of Native Americans in The Lone Ranger actually serves an even deeper revision of the genre, as it posits war as the underlying oppressor in American society. Here's how it's done: In making Tonto and Reid equals, the filmmakers are able to give them a mutual enemy. This is Cole (Tom Wilkinson), a railroad magnate trying to lay tracks from Texas to California. A treaty between the U.S. and the Indian tribes has prevented him from building on tribal lands, so he makes it look like the Comanches--Tonto's tribe--have broken the agreement, thus opening up their land for train travel. The turn of events will lead to war--and Indian genocide at the hands of the U.S. Cavalry. But who could make a fuss over the survival of an indigenous people when there are American dollars to be made?

It comes across like a Western as told by Howard Zinn, a shocking change for a genre that has leaned conservative in all things. Unlike previous Westerns, in which Indians were seen as an obstacle to American economic expansion, the historical perspective inherent in The Lone Ranger shows the same story from the other side and suggests that American business interests were the driving force behind the Indian massacres. There may be a lot of professors at liberal arts colleges who agree, but you'll be unable to find that point of view in more than a couple of movies through the Western's long history.

This may be a new perspective for its genre, but a variant of it has been amazingly common in other summer blockbusters, particularly those released this year. And its implications hit far closer to home than the events of the 19th century. You can learn a lot about a film's values from examining the motivations of its villains, and you can learn a lot about a society--or at least what Hollywood thinks society want to hear--when it produces three mainstream movies in a few months that gives its villains the exact same motivation. Iron Man 3, White House Down, and The Lone Ranger span cinematic categories--respectively, we have a comic-book film, a political action thriller, and a Western--but each of their stories portrays war, and implicitly the War on Terror, as caused by corporations and greed.

In Iron Man 3, we are introduced to an Osama Bin Laden-like terrorist named the Mandarin (played by Ben Kingsley), who is carrying out attacks on American military bases. But halfway through the film, we learn--spoiler alert--that the Mandarin is just a decoy character dreamed up by a scientist to provide cover for his experimentation on war veterans. The film's writer/director Shane Black explained this major plot twist as "a message that's more interesting for the modern world, because I think there's a lot of fear that's generated toward very available and obvious targets, which could perhaps be directed more intelligently at what's behind them." The Iron Man franchise laid the groundwork for this subtext from its first film, which featured Jeff Bridges as a greedy arms dealer who was arming the a Taliban-like terrorist group to drive sales.

"The Lone Ranger" suggests that American business interests were the driving force behind the Indian massacres. Professors at liberal arts colleges may agree with that point of view, but you'll be unable to find it in more than a couple of movies through the Western's long history.

White House Down shows just how deeply this notion of villainy has taken root, particularly in contrast to past entries in its genre. The film initially offers a smorgasbord of motivations for its team of villains who hold the White House hostage--one is a white supremacist, and another is a disgruntled ex-soldier--but it ultimately shines a light on the collusion between corrupt government officials and defense contractors who are trying to launch a war in the Middle East to keep their coffers filled with money from government contracts. Again, the War on Terror is shown to be nothing more than a scheme by profiteers, not an ideological struggle and certainly not a necessary war. In explaining the issue to his buddy, President Sawyer (Jamie Foxx) even calls those profiteers out by name. "You ever hear of the military-industrial complex?" We have now, Mr. President.

It is quite a contrast to Die Hard, the 1988 action classic to which White House Down is most often compared. That film employed German thieves as the source of its terrorism, which fit nicely amid the Reagan era's popular support for increased defense spending to fend off a Communist threat. Similar films like Air Force One ("Die Hard in the president's plane") or Toy Soldiers ("Die Hard in a prep school") also address the fight against terrorism, but in their pre-9/11 mindset, the villains are foreigners with clear-cut political goals.

Though people often forget it, Westerns are also war movies, as they take place during the American-Indian Wars of the 18th and 19th centuries. So it should be no surprise that The Lone Ranger uses the same moral template as Iron Man 3 and White House Down. With the stated goal of becoming the wealthiest man in America, Cole launches a battle that seems a stand-in for all of the violence between American settlers and Indian populations. The message we leave with is that both U.S. soldiers and foreign enemies are pawns in the rich man's eternal quest to get even more for himself.

    

The Atlantic</em> In Paris: Dispatch #3

Posted: 08 Jul 2013 01:25 PM PDT

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The 15th New York aka "The Harlem Hellfighters." Regiment of black and Puerto-Rican soldiers. Winners of the Croix de Guerre in World War I. (The National Archives)

We are doing a house-swap in order to spend these eight weeks in Paris. House-swapping is the trusted method of travel for those of us with European dreams and a Baltimore budget. I didn't even know house-swapping existed until last summer when I first began plotting my way out. This might be pedestrian for the folks here, but for those who were like me, house-swapping is what it sounds like--you live in someone else's home and they live in yours. I know a family that does this, every summer, sight unseen. Keys are left in appointed places, supers are informed, and whole families from other continents make moves. For others it's like dating--personal ads, vague guarded e-mails, g-chat, then video-skype to see if you like the look of your paramours. 


My connection was as old fashion as you can imagine in these times. A sharp, learned journalist on this side was a fan of my blog and a native New Yorker. We exchanged a few e-mails, then dined together in Paris and instantly liked each other. He wanted to get home with his son for the summer. I wanted to get out with mine and my wife. Et voilà. C'est ça.

Before he left, my new found homeboy plugged me into to a number of Parisians--most of them people of color with some kind of immigrant connection. Their job, I suspect, is to get me out of the Sixth and into the underbelly of things. I saw some of it yesterday riding the RER. The further out you go on the train, the more African and Asiatic the world becomes. The kids look like our kids with their headphones and haircuts. They talk loud and boastfully, as I once did, so that you might know that they are alive.

"Here is the thing," my buddy said to me, just before leaving. "I am not trying to get you to hate France. I want you to love France. But I want you to love it for the right reasons."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," I thought. "Pass me a pain au chocolat and let's get this swap-joint popping."

And popping it was. Yesterday, when I went out to get milk, I saw a man outside the store preparing le poulet et pommes de terre.  I want to pause here and point out that "Pomme de terre"--"apple of the earth"--is beautiful name for a potato. The man was preparing this in a rotisserie oven. At the bottom the potatoes were roasting in the juices. I came back, told my wife, and I had found dinner.

After we dropped off our son we picked up dinner along with a salad and some chocolate for desert. We drank a bottle of wine together--it's becoming a tradition--and ate an awesome dinner. I got up this morning and hit La Seine for my morning run. I came back, showered, and was immediately felled by food poisoning.  So this is loving France, wholly, right reasons and all.

Illness aside, there is always the danger in falling in for a distant lover who seems magically free of all the complications back home. I was raised by a generation that--to varying degrees--found this out. My friend Brendan Koerner just published a book which is getting raves everywhere--The Skies Belong To Us. The most bracing portion, to me, is Brendan's hard look at the New Left. I got my first lessons in skepticism and counter-intuitiveness from a lot of these guys. But it's worth remembering that there was when they sung the praises of Kim il Sung. 

I don't want to take this too far. If America has the right to be wrong, then so do its reformers. It mirrors our discussion here where we find people attacking other countries for not being "democratic" without understanding our own long, ugly and sometimes dishonorable path. More, I would say that because of my particular background, my canon was a little different than most, and whatever differences you might find in my voice are attributable to that.

It's also attributable to discovering the Western canon, and the significance of the West, almost as something exotic since my roots seemed elsewhere. That allows me to be fascinated, to be blown away. Nothing is more fascinating than finding your allegedly foreign roots are common. I thought of this recently digging through Rousseau:

This passage from the state of nature to the civil state produces a most remarkable change in man, by substituting justice for instinct in his behaviour and endowing his actions with the morality they previously lacked before. Only then when the voice of duty succeeds physical impulsion and law succeeds appetite, does man, who until now had thought only of himself, find himself forced to act according to other principles, and to consult his reason before heeding his inclinations.

Although in this state he denies himself a number of advantages granted him by nature, he gains others so great in return – his faculties are exercised and developed, his ideas expanded, his feelings ennobled, his entire soul soars so high – that if the abuses of this new condition did not often degrade him below that from which he emerged, he ought continually to bless the happy moment that wrested him thence for ever, and out of a stupid, limited animal made him an intelligent being and human.

Right down to the language around civilization, this is remarkably similar to Malcolm X's parable of transition wherein black people go from being savages "deaf, dumb and blind" and "lost in the wilderness of North America" to civilized black men committed to some higher ideal. In Malcolm's vision it was Islam. Among his nationalist descendants it was black people.

For one such as myself, schooled on the savagery of Cortez and Pizarro, once inculcated with the theories of a natural impulse toward warfare among white people, raised up to seethe after the partition of Africa, it is still odd--a decade and a half after I left that world--to see myself in the image of people I once solely took as conquerors and barbarians.

I like to think I've come some ways since then, bearing the skepticism of those days, but free of the prejudice and the utopian romance. I like to think that I know that every home is imperfect, that I don't come to France looking for something better than America, that I know that America is my own imperfect home. I like to think that you need worry about me going too zealous and hard. This is a great great trip. But it's the food poisoning that makes it real.
    

Has America Seen the Last of Rick Perry?

Posted: 08 Jul 2013 01:19 PM PDT

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Eric Gay/Associated Press

Rick Perry's big speech Monday had all the trappings of a campaign announcement, from the atmosphere -- a Caterpillar heavy-equipment plant in San Antonio, with Texas and U.S. flags arrayed against a backdrop of yellow bulldozers -- to the program. Perry was preceded onstage by a slick video extolling the Texas economy ("Job creation. Less spending. Fair regulation") and by his wife, Anita, who proclaimed, "I know how much Rick loves Texas."

The political world waited with bated breath; we really did not know what Perry was going to say next. Uncommonly in modern politics, the announcement's upshot had not leaked out in advance. Perry, 63, spent several minutes recounting his accomplishments in the 13-year run that made him the country's longest-serving governor, from tort reform to refusing to expand Medicaid. "We Texans are not afraid of a good fight," he said.

This could easily have been the run-up to Perry's argument that Texas needed him again. But it turned out to be the opposite: He was arguing that his work here was done. Perry will not run for reelection in 2014, he announced, saying it was time "to pass on the mantle of leadership" -- to whom, he did not specify.

Perry acted out his speech with a set of bizarrely exaggerated mannerisms. His eyebrows danced; his head waggled; he shifted on a dime from a furrowed brow of concern to a twinkle-eyed, folksy smile, as if he were an actor reading for a series of different parts -- or a pol doing a series of campaign-commercial camera takes. Throughout his career, it has never been clear whether "Governor Goodhair," as his detractors dubbed him, was a canny political mastermind or an expertly handled piece of raw political horseflesh. The case for the former: Until he ran for president, he had never lost an election in 27 years, and he exploited his enemies' underestimations to amass unprecedented power in the Lone Star chief executive. For the latter: That unforgettable "Oops," and the bungled presidential campaign that turned him into a national laughingstock.

I tend to think Perry was never as dumb as he seemed at his nadir as a presidential candidate -- but nor was he as smart as he thought he was when he decided to run. He had had back surgery a few weeks before he jumped into the national campaign, and subsequent accounts have confirmed that he was on pain medication that affected his stamina and muddled his thinking. I watched footage of Perry's gubernatorial debates, and they were nowhere near as bad as his presidential-candidate performances. But he also charged into the campaign with Texas bravado and an unearned frontrunner's arrogance. He assumed his rhetoric on immigration and his swaggering persona -- talking about stringing up the chairman of the Federal Reserve, for example -- would play as well on the national stage as his job-creation record and humble backstory. He had been so powerful in Texas for so long that he was unaccustomed to being challenged, much less outgunned.

Perry dropped out after the Iowa caucuses and returned to Texas diminished. The candidate he backed for U.S. Senate, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, lost the Republican primary to a political newcomer, Ted Cruz, despite pouring nearly $20 million into the race (Cruz spent $7 million). Perry had embarrassed Texas on the national stage, and Texas was no longer afraid to defy him.

But in his speech Monday, Perry clearly did not want to seem to be leaving with his tail between his legs. He reminded listeners that he has 18 months still to serve, including the current special session of the legislature, in which his bid for new restrictions on abortion is likely to prevail over the state's newly minted liberal heroine, state Sen. Wendy Davis. And he sought to feed the rumors he'll run for president again: "Any future considerations, I will announce in due time," he said, "and I will arrive at that decision appropriately."

Then a country song played, and his wife, daughter, son, daughter-in-law, and two-and-a-half-week-old granddaughter joined him onstage. Perry took the tiny infant and cradled her in his arms, kissed the top of her head, then showed her off to the crowd with an incredulous grin. In political animals, some instincts never die.

    

Teaching Doctors How to Think

Posted: 08 Jul 2013 11:32 AM PDT

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Jonathan_W (@whatie) / Flickr
"He who thinks he knows doesn't know. He who knows that he doesn't know, knows." -- Joseph Campbell

I have made clinical errors, also known as mistakes, at various points in my 40-year career. Fortunately, I don't think there have been many. One of them resulted in a long-settled malpractice suit where six different neurologists, including me, missed the diagnosis of rare disease. Presented with the same facts, I admit that I might make the same mistake again. I classify my mistakes in three broad categories:

  • Mistakes that didn't cause the patient any harm.
  • Mistakes that resulted in serious problems.
  • The mistakes I still don't know about because I either never recognized the error or the patient went someplace else.

All doctors make mistakes, because it is impossible for an individual to be perfect - any endeavor that involves humans will involve errors. The man who has the wrong leg removed at surgery makes the headlines of the six o'clock news, but the larger problem resides in the 10 to 15 percent of times where the doctor fails to make the correct diagnosis.

I have always taken pride in the fact that I can trust my clinical judgment, almost always making the right decision at the right time. I sometimes get frustrated watching physicians paralyzed by their indecision. But an article in the New England Journal of Medicine last month has forced me to reconsider my decision-making process. Dr. Pat Crosberry from Dalhousie University in Canada explains that most of our everyday thinking is flawed, and that doctors are no different than the average person. It is not a lack of knowledge (15 years of higher education followed by continuing education requirements take care of that end). The problem lies in the manner in which we approach "clinical thinking."

There are two major ways in which we process information, "intuitive (type I)" and "analytic (type II)" Our Intuitive approach is automatic, and happens at an unconscious level. Crosberry describes this as the "Augenblick diagnosis" or that which is made in the blink of an eye. You see it on television all of the time. The narcotic-popping curmudgeon Dr. House is a great example. No one can figure out what is wrong with the patient, but, through the blur of his own over-medicated psyche, Dr. House instantly makes the rare diagnosis and the day, if not the patient, is saved.

There is a real danger in thinking this way, to zero in on a specific diagnosis or problem and fail to consider other possibilities. The fact is that most physicians who trust their intuition are right most of the time. The vast majority of people coming to my office with a headache will have migraine headaches. My bias will be that you most likely suffer from migraine headaches. I will be right most of the time, but not always - and this automatic, unconscious mode leaves me vulnerable to make a mistake.

The other mode of clinical thinking is Type II, the Analytic process. This is a conscious, slower, and deliberate process that is usually more reliable than the Intuitive process. In this process, we take time to analyze all of the information, order confirmatory tests, consult with colleagues and consider all of the possibilities. Although reliable, it requires a great deal of resources like CT and MRI scans, coronary angiography and numerous vials of blood. In truth, it is just not practical for every patient. We must trust our clinical, intuitive judgment because we cannot order a nuclear cardiac scan or coronary angiogram on every patient with chest pain. However, I know many physicians who order far too many tests. Some claim it is to protect them from a malpractice suit, while others just don't want to miss a diagnosis.

But where is the correct balance between using one's "intuitive" clinical judgment and ordering too many tests under the banner of being an "analytic" diagnostician? It would be inappropriate for me to order an MRI scan of the brain on every patient with a headache. But, I also must get off the autopilot of intuitive thinking and reexamine how I evaluate patients. This is more difficult than it sounds because we are not born to be critical thinkers who can turn off our unconscious intuitive reactions and analyze a situation in a "timely" manner. Dr. Crosberry suggests that medical schools and post graduate medical education need to teach critical thinking as part of their formal curriculum. Doctors must recognize when their biases creep into their decision making and learn to move from their intuitive mode to their analytic mode. This is the elusive "sweet spot" of critical thinking.

Even if I find the balance between intuitive and analytical thinking, I will still make an occasional error and miss a more serious problem, but it should happen less frequently. As hard as it is to accept, the laymen have to understand that bad outcome does not always equal malpractice and that clinical thinking is an imperfect cognitive process.

Dr. Crosberry believes that "all clinicians should develop the habit of conducting regular and frequent surveillance of their intuitive behavior. To paraphrase Socrates, the unexamined thought is not worth thinking."

    

More Fodder for IRS Haters: Thousands of Social Security Numbers Exposed

Posted: 08 Jul 2013 11:10 AM PDT

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Reuters

Another day, another slipup by the Internal Revenue Service.

The incident involves the unwitting exposure of "tens of thousands" of Social Security numbers, according to a recent audit by the independent transparency and public-domain group Public.Resource.org. The identifying numbers were on the Internet for less than 24 hours, but the damage was done. And unfortunately, the data-breach concerns some of the most sensitive types of transactions: Those made by nonprofit political groups known as 527s.

Every so often, 527s have to file tax forms to the IRS, which then get added to a database. The database itself is hardly a secret; the IRS has been sending updated records routinely to Public.Resource.org and other public-interest groups, and it's a favorite among political reporters. But when the IRS told the group's founder, Carl Malamud, to disregard the Form 990-Ts included in the agency's January release, he took a closer look at the files in question.

After analyzing the breach, Malamud wrote a letter to the IRS pointing out 10 instances where a social security number was accidentally revealed on the government's website -- just a small sample of the larger breach.

Just the day before, Malamud had filed another letter to the agency describing a problem with the 990-Ts. Of over 3,000 tax returns contained in the January update, 319 contained sensitive data the agency should have scrubbed, Malamud wrote in the July 1 report that he filed to the inspector general's office.

To determine the extent of the exposure, we've analyzed our logs and have also analyzed the data received from the IRS. We maintain a privacy registry based on any clicks made on the privacy cover sheet on the top of each return. That registry indicates that 8 clicks were made from 4 unique IP addresses. However, none of those resulted in privacy complaints and could have been made by an automated process.

In addition, we examined our FTP and HTTP logs. We only maintain a 7-day window for HTTP logs and did not see any HTTP-based access that was not from a search engine crawler. For the FTP logs (which indicates bulk download activity), we did not see extensive activity for the January directory, but it was clear that at least one copy of the DVD ISO image (the image of the original DVD) had been transferred.

Public.Resource.org took down its copy of the compromised 990-Ts and replaced them with a clean version that the IRS had sent. But it was another day before the IRS removed the files from public view on their end, on July 3.*

Calling the IRS's efforts at data security "unprofessional and amateur," Public.Resource.org is requesting that the IRS shut down the entire 527 database to prevent further lapses. In an email, Malamud told me that the IRS has, in fact, shut down the database -- but that it should also reopen it as soon as possible in the interest of transparency.

In May, the IRS drew fire for singling out conservative political groups for greater scrutiny, leading to the resignation of the agency's acting director and sparking a slew of congressional hearings.

I've called the IRS for comment, and I'll update if I hear anything.

Update: An earlier version of this post didn't make sufficiently clear the distinction between the 990-Ts and the 527 database, which are each the source of separate, if similar, problems. Both the tax documents and the database revealed Social Security numbers; the IRS sent Public.Resource.org a clean copy of the first but didn't fix the second until Malamud contacted the agency.

* Correction: This post originally said that "senior White House officials" removed files from public view on July 3. We regret the error.

    

Blankets, the Original Viral Media

Posted: 08 Jul 2013 11:06 AM PDT

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Discarded airline blanket (Christopher Schaberg)

On April 28 1993, a crewmember on an American Airlines flight to Dallas-Ft. Worth from Washington D.C. radioed ahead to request a change of blankets; the ground crew receiving the message transcribed it as: "inbd crew req complete chg of all pillows blankets due gay rights activists group onbd." Some of the passengers on this flight had recently attended the March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation.

Blankets cover things, like cold passengers during a long flight, or dead bodies after a tragedy. In this case, the airline blankets also uncovered something: ignorance about how a particular virus can be contracted -- or maybe just homophobia. Perhaps the American Airlines messenger also feared that gay itself would go viral, that it would be carried or communicated indiscriminately by the airline's blankets.

blanket2.jpg Overhead bin full of blankets (Flickr/joyewan)

The airline blanket is an icon of modern flight. It is small (50" x 40"), usually made of blue or red mass-produced polyester fleece. It is seemingly innocuous and forgettable, discarded in the seats or tossed on the floor as passengers shuffle down the aisle and deplane. There are no industry standards for airline blankets. Darren Everson's 2007 article "Can Flying Make You Sick?" in The Wall Street Journal broke the news that ATA Airlines (now defunct) cleaned their blankets every 30 days or "as needed." Everson reported that US Airways washed blankets every five days, and American Airlines replaced its pillowcases and blankets every 24 hours.

These days, passengers often engage with pillows and blankets more intimately and privately: they buy one on the airplane or plan ahead and bring their own. American Airlines now charges $8 for a travel pack, which includes a pillow and a blanket. JetBlue started charging for blankets in 2008 -- ostensibly motivated by germs, not revenue. As a spokesperson for the airline explained it, "the pillow and the blanket could be on that flight for four to six flights before being replaced." Nevertheless, JetBlue and others who followed suit were criticized for the blanket and pillow fees; the decision, critics alleged, seemed motivated by airlines' move to fee-based comfort, or privatization by the inch. No longer a simple fact of travel, airline blankets are now symptoms of microbes and emblems of micro-capital flows.

Some of the very passengers on that 1993 American Airlines flight may have gazed at large-scale quilt panels from The Names Project AIDS Memorial that covered the National Mall during the March. 12' x 12' quilt blocks suture 3' x 6' handmade quilt panels -- each one a memorial to a life overcome by a virus. The panels are covered with names and hieroglyphics of friends, lovers, children, parents -- even philosophers. (Michel Foucault appears on blocks 00076, 00180, 01564, and 04233.) The blanket is a traveling act of mourning and memory. It covers parks but also uncovers AIDS, as I learned in 1995 when I visited portions of the quilt on display in my small hometown in South Dakota. HIV/AIDS was a distant problem (if a problem at all) to people in this town, but they knew the quilt and quilting intimately -- and thus the blanket uncovered an unspoken issue through its familiar form.

blanket3.jpgThe Names Project

The quilt communicates a reality that, for many at the time, was incommunicable. President Reagan did not publicly utter the word "AIDS" until 1987, and then only to insinuate that it exacts punishment on those who have behaved immorally: "When it comes to preventing AIDS, don't medicine and morality teach the same lessons?" By the 1993 March on Washington, over 440,000 cases of AIDS had been reported; over 270,000 were already dead from AIDS or another HIV-related illness. By blanketing the National Mall, the Names Project uncovered the dead.

A blanket always acquires a life other than itself. We may take the blanket for granted as an object -- quiet and inert. But when it becomes soiled -- whether with food (American Airlines later explained that the blankets actually needed to be replaced because someone spilled tomato sauce), bodily fluids, or perhaps even a virus -- it takes on a kind of vitality. Yet the blanket presented as life-giving can in fact be deadly, too.

In 1763, the British disseminated smallpox in gift blankets to Indian insurgents led by Chief Pontiac (Ottawa) against British invasions of Indigenous homelands in the Great Lakes region. Trader and land speculator William Trent recorded in his journal that as two Delaware Indians left Fort Pitt (in present-day Pittsburgh) after meeting with British soldiers, they were given blankets infested with smallpox. "Out of regard for them" the soldiers gifted "two Blankets and an [sic] Handkerchief out of the Small Pox Hospital." Trent added, "I hope it will have the desired effect." Out of regard for them presents the British as caring and benevolent -- when in fact they had just gambled on the blankets infecting the Indians with smallpox. Their gamble paid off. A smallpox epidemic spread among the southeastern Ohio peoples from 1763-1764. The contagion affected the Ohio Iroquois and Shawnees and further south, the Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Muskogees. During the first four centuries of European colonization, 90% of Indigenous peoples in the Americas died from viruses like smallpox, measles, and influenza.

Variola virus (smallpox) infects most productively by way of the respiratory tract -- by prolonged face-to-face contact. The Indians who accepted blankets most likely inhaled the trace of skin and pustule remnants from the blanket's fibers. When they opened the blankets to wrap the warm fabric around their bodies, they inhaled at just the right (wrong) moment. Once a body was infected with smallpox, the illness could last over five weeks -- assuming the victim survived at all. In 1980, just one year before the CDC publicly named HIV and AIDS, the World Health Organization announced that smallpox had been eradicated; nevertheless, it lives on as a potentially vital threat. Perhaps this historical precedent informed the American Airlines agent's ignorance.

The nature of HIV's communicability is that it cannot live outside the body. A protective barrier can stop it cold. And yet there's the practice of barebacking, or intentionally having sex without a condom. By way of a risky sexual practice, Tim Dean suggests that the dead might continue to live, albeit in the form of a virus: "What would it mean for a young gay man today to be able to trace his virus back to, say, Michel Foucault?" Foucault's presence might persist, not only on a memorial quilt, but also in a living body.

blanket4.jpgThe Names Project

The Names Project evokes tears and mourning; it relies on a certain cultural nostalgia that not only binds the mourner to the dead, but the mourner and the dead to a history of quilting, to black Southern traditions, like Gee's Bend, theUnderground Railroad's quilting code and the Freedom Quilting Bee. Quilting is an inherited cultural practice, the quilt an inherited object.

blanket5.jpg "Deep Down, I Don't Believe in Hymns," Dario Robleto (by permission of the artist)

In his 2001 installation "Deep Down, I Don't Believe in Hymns" conceptual artist Dario Robleto turns a blanket back on itself. He infests a military-issued blanket from 1862 with vinyl record dust, specifically the particles of two songs: Neil Young and Crazy Horse's "Cortez the Killer," and Soft Cell's "Tainted Love" (which was originally recorded and performed by Gloria Jones in 1965 -- Soft Cell, a UK band, covered it in 1981). Neil Young and Crazy Horse's "Cortez the Killer" imagines the colonizer with galleons and guns, "dancing across the water" looking for the new world, while Montezuma basks on shore, surrounded by abundance: cocoa leaves, pearls, gold, beautiful women, strong men, and secrets. While the title itself critiques discovery (so-called) and conquest, Neil Young and Crazy Horse cannot resist falling back on the very colonial tropes they wish to send up. In the song "Cortez [was] the killer" -- but there are also the beautiful Natives, and a beautiful Native woman, specifically, "who still loves me to this day." The song is infected with tainted love.

This military-issued blanket is likely from the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862, an intense six weeks of Dakota resistance against settler encroachment and the U.S. nation's broken treaties. At the end of those six weeks, a military commission tried nearly 400 Dakota men accused of participating in the war. 303 of those were sentenced to death and 16 were given prison terms. President Lincoln (who was deeply embroiled in the Civil War) reviewed the trial transcripts and "anxious to not act with so much clemency as to encourage another outbreak on one hand, nor with so much severity as to be real cruelty on the other" he decided to execute those who had "been proved guilty of violating females." But since only two men were found guilty of rape, he expanded his charge to include those who had participated in "massacres." On December 26, 1862, 38 Dakota men were hanged in present-day Mankato, Minnesota -- this remains the largest government-sanctioned execution in U.S. history.

Throughout the 1860s and 1870s, the Dakota people were removed to reservations where many of them starved because of scarce game, drought, and unsuitable soil. Others died of disease or exposure because, despite its promises, the U.S. government failed to supply clothing -- and blankets. Blankets were a matter of life and death on the Plains. The blanket meant survival, but also communicated a sense of dependency on the U.S. People died without blankets. And then blankets retroactively covered the dead.

Robleto places the historic military blanket before us -- infested not with a virus, but with vinyl record dust. Robleto makes the infestation visible: up close, one can see that the blanket is covered in something like ash, or tiny black specs. The blanket is soiled. The conceptual joke of it all, that a blanket which has been a matter of life and a gift of death is itself now infected with a "tainted love," depends upon the history and reputation of the smallpox blanket, or the airline blanket. "Deep Down, I Don't Believe in Hymns" riffs on the blanket's viral capacities, or the ways that the cover mutates, remixes, and finds another host.

blanket6.jpg Vintage United Airlines blanket (Etsy/vintagepickins)

The blanket goes viral when it threatens the security or sentiments of a flight crew, when it is gifted to spread smallpox, or when it uncovers the subject of HIV/AIDS in a small Midwestern town. It also has the potential to communicate homophobia, or tactics of colonization. The blanket covers, but it cannot conceal -- even a blanket covering a body conceals one surface only to expose another, the blanket itself. In the act of covering up, the blanket betrays itself as an agent of communicable disease, a conveyor of rumor and fear, or just a new surface that draws attention to what's underneath.

    

Reddit: A Pre-Facebook Community in a Post-Facebook World

Posted: 08 Jul 2013 11:04 AM PDT

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Reddit, by way of Facebook (Facebook.com)

Speaking at the Aspen Ideas Festival last week, co-founder of Internet community site Reddit, Alexis Ohanian, shared a joke that's popular on his site: "Facebook makes me hate the people I know, and Reddit makes me love the people I don't."

Given Facebook's $60 billion market capitalization and unchallenged position as the world's most-visited website, Ohanian's quip sounds like sour grapes. (Ohanian and his parters sold Reddit to Conde Nast in 2006 for an undisclosed sum, likely orders of magnitude smaller than Facebook's valuation.) But there's reason for Ohanian to imply a competition between a site used by 6 percent of American Internet users and one used by 67 percent, according to recent statistics by the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

Reddit, which calls itself "The Front Page of the Internet," is more influential in shaping Internet culture than its comparatively small reach would lead you to believe. Content featured on Reddit frequently "goes viral," spreading to other websites, including Facebook. As a result, it's become a popular destination for politicians and other public figures, including President Obama, to meet their online audiences, often through distributed interviews called AMAs -- Ask Me Anything.

There are reasons why Reddit makes Ohanian love total strangers. Reddit has a well-deserved, if eclectic, reputation for charitable giving. Redditors raised $700,000 to send a bullied senior citizen on a vacation, $4,000 to send to correspondent Helen Thomas after she asked White House spokesperson Dana Perino pointed questions about torture, and over $200,000 for World Vision, Doctors Without Borders and Islamic Relief in a competition between "sub-reddits" focused on Christianity, atheism, and Islam. And Reddit is emerging as a significant political force on issues that concern the Internet, serving as breeding ground for a massive protest against Internet registrar Go Daddy over the controversial SOPA/PIPA legislation and recently promoting "Take Back the Fourth" rallies to oppose NSA surveillance.

But the interesting piece of Ohanian's comment is the idea that Facebook and Reddit operate in radically different ways. For many Internet users, "social networks" are sites that build online links between people who already know each other offline. This was an idea exemplified in early social networks like Six Degrees (named after the six degrees of separation concept promoted by Stanley Milgram) and used in Facebook, Linked In, and Google Plus. When you join Facebook, the service mines your email inbox for friends, then asks questions about your education and work history to identify other possible contacts. Who you know on Facebook closely parallels who you know in the real world -- according to a Pew study, only 7 percent of Facebook friends are people a user knows only in an online context.

Because social networks like Facebook are all about who you know, they tend to be obsessed with authenticated identities. From its roots on elite college campuses, accepting only users with .edu email addresses, Facebook has had a "real name policy," which allows the site to remove the accounts of users who are using pseudonyms, arguing that online behavior is better when people are required to own their words. Google has followed suit, urging users to use real names on Google Plus and on YouTube. (These policies have raised questions from the human rights community, which points out that activists using online tools have valid reasons to conceal their identities, as do youth exploring sensitive questions around gender and sexuality.)

Reddit, by contrast, doesn't care who you are or who you know offline. Reddit names are unconnected to real-world identities and it's commonplace for users to create "throwaway" accounts to reveal sensitive information. In this sense, Reddit is more like the pre-social media Internet, when a New Yorker cartoonist could reasonably joke "On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog."

Identity isn't the only way Reddit has learned from early Internet culture. While Facebook is organized around your friends, replicating your offline social network, Reddit is organized around topics. This is a model that parallels Usenet, the Internet's ur-social network, a set of distributed message boards that served as a foundational influence on many builders of the contemporary commercial Web. While Facebook reconnects you with people you knew in elementary school or worked with years before, Reddit introduces you to strangers who share a common interest in photography, "Game of Thrones" or European politics.

Because Reddit connects strangers, it has certain advantages over Facebook, which connects friends. Ideas may spread more widely from Reddit than from Facebook despite a smaller pool of users. An idea shared between Facebook friends may peter out quickly as social networks reach saturation: an idea spread through friends who went to the same college may lose momentum when all alumni have heard about it. Reddit users are connected to many different communities, and an idea spread on Reddit's front page may go on to spread in thousands of different groups of friends on Facebook. This power to disseminate ideas to many different social subnets may explain why Reddit memes often go viral and why Reddit has emerged as a key node in online activism.

Reddit may also have an important role in increasing cognitive diversity online. Thinkers like Cass Sunstein and Eli Pariser are worried that the Internet makes it too easy to isolate ourselves in ideological echo chambers, listening only to those who agree with us. In my new book, Rewire, I argue that social networking tools threaten to isolate us not just in terms of ideology, but in terms of nationality and cultural identity, by heavily connecting us to friends and neighbors instead of helping us build new relationships. By organizing around topics, instead of around offline relationships, Reddit offers the possibility of introducing us to people outside our normal circles and creates a context for conversation.

This isn't to say that Reddit is better than Facebook, even in terms of increasing our cognitive diversity through exposing us to different points of view. If I use Facebook to stay in touch with my high school friends who are church-going Republicans, I may be getting more ideological diversity than in hanging out with secular progressives on the World Politics sub-reddit.

It's not that Ohanian is right and Zuckerberg is wrong. We need a range of social media platforms that connect us in different ways. It's fine to have social media that connects us with old friends, but we need tools that help us discover new people, as well. Tools that help us discover and fall in love with strangers may be the key to making sure that social media doesn't descend into an insular echo chamber where the voices of those we already know eventually drive us mad.

    

China's 'Likonomics': Believe It When You See It

Posted: 08 Jul 2013 10:51 AM PDT

Likenomics2.jpgChinese Prime Minister Li Keqiang. (Tobias Schwarz/Reuters)

Move over Shinzo Abe. There's a new eponynomics craze in town: Likonomics. This is not the economics of Facebook "likes"; it's what Barclays Capital has christened the policies of China's premier, Li Keqiang. (We think it really should be Liconomics or maybe LiKenomics, but it's probably not worth quibbling about.)

Like Abenomics, Likonomics is based on three pillars:

1) Ending fiscal stimulus by diminishing state-led investment.

2) De-leveraging in order to slash debt.

3) Structural reform, including relaxing controls on utility prices and liberalizing interest rates.

Barclays says that implementing these will put the country on track to hit 6-8 percent GDP growth for the next decade (link in Chinese). Li himself says the country's on track to hit its 7.5 percent target for 2013. Here are some thoughts on why both expectations are bonkers:

Since the Chinese government seldom issues bonds, "fiscal stimulus" actually just means "lending." And in China, lending is one of the only sources of growth for most of the economy -- it now depends on the gush of lending to grow.

Or, at least, to look like it's growing.

GDP measures economic activity. But it doesn't capture the economic value -- meaning, the future money-making potential -- of that activity. Say someone borrows $30 million to invest in opening a steel factory. That $30 million is counted toward GDP -- since it purchases labor and materials to make the factory -- even if no one buys the steel produced and the factory earns no money. Investors still have to pay off their initial debt. But with no revenue, they have to take out more loans to cover that.

That's clearly happening in China's economy now. More and more money is needed to generate slower and slower growth. Here's a look at how the broadest measure of money supply, M2, tracks with GDP growth (looking at money supply should capture some degree of the liquidity pumped into the economy from shadow lending -- loans issued that aren't recorded on bank balance sheets  -- which isn't captured in official loan data):

m2graph.jpg

Ending the stimulus -- i.e. lending -- will make that appearance of GDP growth impossible to sustain, especially at the 7.5 percent that Premier Li promises. And probably not even at the 6 percent lower bound Barclays projects.

As Michael Pettis, economist and expert on the Chinese economy, recently wrote, consumption can power GDP growth of 3-4 percent each year --  but there's a caveat. "[I]t is not clear that consumption can be sustained if investment growth levels are sharply reduced," he writes. That's because people need jobs -- ultimately supported by Chinese lending -- to be able to keep spending. And as we explore more below, Likonomics as Barclays has framed it poses big risks to job providers.

China as a whole needs to deleverage -- meaning, to slash the proportion of borrowing in relation to output -- in order to start making productive investments again. In that general sense, Likonomics is on the money.

But in order to pay off debts, companies have to be making money. If they don't, they default.

That's a big problem in China right now. Growth is already slipping fast, leaving businesses generating less and less cashflow to cover their debts. Cutting lending will start to expose this insolvency even more. Untold numbers of local government investment platforms, real estate developers, and factories, to name a few, will go under.

True, postponing writing down bad debt will only make things worse. But a chain-reaction of defaults will cause growth to implode. And waiting for unproductive assets to start making money again could take years -- even decades. That's what Charlene Chu, an expert on Chinese debt at the ratings agency Fitch, was referring to when she recently warned of "Japanese-style deflation." In other words, with far more factory capacity than it needs, consumption will fail to keep up with production, driving prices down. Meanwhile, companies left standing will use profits to pay off their debts, which will suppress wages, restraining consumption even more.

Ending stimulus and deleveraging would both deprive banks of the interest income that they need for revenue and, worse, leave them empty-handed as their debtors go bust. What's more, just as that's happening, Likonomics would loosen the government's hand in setting interest rates.

China's banks are perilously unprepared for that.

Currently, the interest rates on bank deposits are set by the government, and are kept artificially low, which gives banks a nice cushion of money to lend with. Letting the banks set rates themselves would mean they'd have to compete for depositors, reducing that cushion.

This would be great for household consumption. Shifting wealth from the state and its patron companies would allow households finally to start feeling wealthy and secure enough to consume. As we've discussed many times, that's critical in the long run.

But it would also crush bank profit margins and drive up the borrowing rates for businesses. Higher rates will also make it harder for businesses to pay off old loans with new ones. The spike in inter-bank rates last month hinted at how easily higher borrowing costs could cause a rash of failures among small and mid-tier banks. Here's a look at the interbank rate trends over the last four years:

shiborgraph.jpg

That may be a prerequisite for reform, but it will come at a big cost to growth.

None of this will sit well with state-owned enterprises (SOEs), the companies owned and operated by the Chinese government in order to direct economic development.

Reforms in the 1990s wiped out the worst ones, but they ones left standing are now bigger and more powerful than ever before, thanks in large part to the 2008 stimulus. They now contribute more than 40 percent of China's GDP.

They may be big, but SOEs aren't necessarily competitive. In fact, these behemoths are still inefficient compared to private firms. Their profitability has been declining, as you can see from this World Bank chart:

SOEgraph.jpg

That's probably because much of SOE profits depends not on their performance, but on government patronage. As cogs in the state-planned economy, they benefit from monopolies as well as from extraordinarily cheap lending rates.

Likonomics will see those rates go up. On top of that, introducing market pricing for things like utilities means removing another state subsidy. This would also deal a short-term blow to growth, even as these reforms start spurring growth among non-state companies.

These factors suggest that Likonomics would pretty much collapse China's current model for economic growth. That's an excellent thing in the long term, but it's not consistent with Li's projection of 7.5 percent annual GDP growth for 2013. That makes one wonder how serious the premier actually is about sacrificing growth for Likonomics.

And that's not the only reason for doubt. There's also his championing of a trillion-dollar urbanization plan, which will require colossal investment in housing and infrastructure. Stimulus, leverage, repressed interest rates -- Li will be needing to call on all those tools to fund more steel-and-concrete structures that China can't afford.

    

How Bats Take Flight, Revealed by X-Ray

Posted: 08 Jul 2013 10:17 AM PDT

If you have seen a bat in nature -- which is to say, if you have seen a bat that will go on to haunt your nightmares, mercilessly -- you have probably seen the creature in one of two situations: either in mid-flight, or hanging upside-down, sleeping.

You likely have not seen a bat, however, engaged in the act of takeoff. Which means that you likely have not seen a bat in the middle of an activity that has long perplexed biologists. Bats may be the only mammals capable of true, sustained flight ... but how, exactly, do they get to flying in the first place? Takeoff is energetically demanding; how do bats, in particular, achieve it?

A group of scientists at Brown University investigated the matter, using XROMM (X-ray Reconstruction of Moving Morphology) technology that integrates three-dimensional renderings of animals' bone structures into X-ray video. (XROMM data allow researchers to conduct detailed analyses of animals' muscle mechanics and anatomy as the creatures moves.) The team looked in particular at Seba's short-tailed bats -- fruit bats -- X-raying the creatures as they lifted themselves off the ground. Analyzing the videos that resulted, the researchers made a discovery: bats seem to take off into the air by stretching out the tendons that anchor their bicep and tricep muscles to their bones. They then compress the tendons to release energy and power their flight upward.

It seems, in other words, that bats' stretchy bicep and tricep tendons are crucial for storing and releasing the energy the creatures require for takeoff. As research lead Nicolai Konow explained it: "By combining information about skeletal movement with information about muscle mechanics, we found that the biceps and triceps tendons of small fruitbats are stretched and store energy as the bat launches from the ground and flies vertically."

The bats' stretchy-muscle analysis seemed to be confirmed by the team's use of another technology: fluoromicrometry, in which small, chemically labeled markers are implanted directly into muscle -- which in turn allows researchers to measure changes in muscle length during contractions with high precision.

And that's a big finding: most scientists had previously believed, Smithsonian Magazine points out, that small mammals' tendons are too stiff, and too thick, to be stretched at all. The X-rays revealed otherwise, however, and the Brown team presented their findings last week at a meeting of the Society for Experimental Biology. And they've presented their videos to the rest of us, thankfully, so that we may be appropriately astounded and creeped out by the unique biology of bats.


    

Economics in Plain English: A New Video Series From <i>The Atlantic</i>

Posted: 08 Jul 2013 09:45 AM PDT

Every day, the Atlantic Business Channel tries to explain the world of money and economics in a way that's accurate enough to make both experts and novices nod along in understanding. We're always looking for ways to improve the way we do it in paragraphs. Now we're gonna try to do it in videos. And we need your help.

Starting today, we're taking your questions on all things economic and business-y and turning them into explainer videos. You can submit your own in the box below. We'll choose the smartest, the most entertaining, and the most peculiar questions. Then we'll answer them in videos that are (we hope) as smart, entertaining, and idiosyncratic as your queries.

Your inspiration can come from anywhere, including daily price mysteries (e.g.: If suits are cheaper than cars, how come it's so much cheaper to rent a car than a tux?) and big picture economic questions (e.g.: How do we measure unemployment, and how are we doing it wrong?).

Don't worry if you think your question is "too easy" or even "too hard." We want and expect a range. Just be yourselves -- curious and creative. And thanks!

    

What Happens When People in Pakistan Start Taking MIT Classes?

Posted: 08 Jul 2013 09:22 AM PDT

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Technicians of Iran's Atomic Energy Organisation supervise activities at the Uranium Conversion Facility in Isfahan on August 8, 2005. (Reuters)

It's more than 11,000 kilometers from Shakargarh, a city in northeastern Pakistan, to the venerated halls of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the top universities in the United States.

Twenty-five-year-old Khalid Raza lives in Shakargarh but is taking "The Challenges of Global Poverty," a course taught by a former adviser to the World Bank and a professor of international economics at MIT.

Recently, while on the bus, he pulled out his laptop and submitted one of his first assignments.

"It was an amazing experience when I was submitting my assignment," he said. "I was traveling and my friend was sitting with me. When I submitted my assignment, after some time he asked me a question, 'What are you doing?' So I told him the whole story, that I am taking a course from the U.S.A. He was so surprised and shocked."

The experience -- something Raza says he never thought would be possible -- doesn't cost him a single rupee. All he needed was the interest and an Internet connection to reserve his seat in a virtual MIT classroom.

Raza is one of the several million learners worldwide to have discovered "massive open online courses," or MOOCs. While a number of universities attempted to introduce free online courses in the early 2000s, MOOCs have only begun to catch fire in the last year. Today, the silly-sounding acronym has become a buzz word, and is one of the hottest topics in education.

A group of U.S. education technology startups, in partnership with dozens of top U.S. universities, now offers MOOCs on everything from poetry to physics. Course platforms feature lecture videos, other multimedia content, embedded quizzes, discussion boards, and online study groups. Essays and other projects less suited to automated grading are reviewed by classmates based on rubrics. Interaction with professors and teaching assistants is rare. Completing a course earns you a certificate, and several U.S. schools have begun to accept MOOCs for credit.

The startups' founders say their goals are at once practical and humanistic -- an effort to overcome rising education costs and a shortage of resources and make top-quality learning accessible to the masses.

Anant Agarwal, an MIT professor, is the president of edX, a nonprofit collaboration between his university and Harvard University that currently offers more than 60 MOOCs.

He believes his and similar projects are nothing short of transformative.

"I think education is not going to be the same ever again," Agarwal says. "I really describe this technology and MOOCs as the biggest revolution in education since the printing press -- and that happened 500 years ago."

Other, more impartial observers have high hopes for MOOCS, too. But given their novelty, some assessments are more cautious. Critics point to the courses' high dropout rates, the lack of face-to-face interaction, and the risk that the for-profit companies offering MOOCs may one day begin charging students if they fail to secure other revenue sources.

One company, Coursera, has attracted over $20 million in venture capital. It currently makes much of its money by licensing course content to universities. It also gives students the option to pay for perks including electronically verified course certificates and electronic course records to send to employers or schools.

One thing that no one doubts is that MOOCs are gaining in popularity -- and fast. Agarwal says that after just a year, edX is approaching 1 million learners from 192 countries. In the same time span, Coursera has attracted more than 3 million students. Agarwal boldly predicts that over the next decade or so his initiative will attract 1 billion international learners.

But he concedes that subjects such as politics, history, and philosophy, provided by generally liberal, Western institutions, could cause problems if MOOCs gain such reach.

"I expect that challenges will continue as what might be considered gainful education in one part of the world might be considered disruptive in a different part of the world," Agarwal says. "We haven't had examples of nations or others blocking edX content itself, but some of the infrastructure over which our content is distributed are not accessible all over the world. YouTube was blocked in some nations, for example in Pakistan and China, and we distribute video over YouTube. So there, what we did was we made the video available for download on our site so students could have an alternate way [to watch]."

Another issue to confront is language, as almost all MOOCs are currently in English.

Coursera has taken the lead in responding. The company announced in May that it was partnering with several organizations, including the Viktor Pinchuk Foundation in Ukraine, to provide subtitling for lectures in select courses in Arabic, Japanese, Kazakh, Portuguese, Russian, and Ukrainian.

A Coursera spokesperson said that the languages "reflect those spoken by the student population." "Additionally, regional growth in Russia and Eastern European countries has increased by 230 percent in the last six months," the spokesperson said.

Aleksei Gryatskikh, 32, is a new-media manager living near Moscow. He has taken several MOOCs through Coursera, which he says have helped him professionally.

"The gamification course essentially systematized all the knowledge I accumulated before in my previous work as the creative director at an advertisement agency," Gryatskikh says. "But even though I already possessed the knowledge, the lectures helped me systematize it. Without that it might have been challenging to apply that knowledge in real life."

"There's no way that this doesn't have huge potential," he adds.

This post appears courtesy of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

    

How to Bribe a Chinese Official

Posted: 08 Jul 2013 09:20 AM PDT

hongbaobanner.jpgBribes, often handed over in stylized red envelopes called hongbao, are endemic in China. (msmccomb/Flickr)

How do you get a "license to pollute" in China? Start by giving a 2,000 RMB (approximately US$330) gift card to the local environmental protection agency's director.

That is, according to a list that was circulated on China's social media that allegedly shows 47 government officials as recipients of gifts from a real estate developer in Yinchuan, the provincial capital of Ningxia province. While the authenticity of the list cannot be verified, journalists in China have confirmed that the officials named on the list do indeed exist.

The list is organized by the agency of the recipients, encompassing everything from city governments, tax bureaus, land bureaus, police stations and "sports bureaus." The amounts range from 1,000 RMB to 3,000 RMB, mostly in the form of gift cards. This user-friendly list also states the purpose of some of the gifts. For example, a 1,000 RMB gift card to Director Jin of the religious affairs bureau is for the sake of obtaining a "halal food license."

The list has caused a splash online, where it was retweeted more than 1,800 times. Most people were shocked not by the apparent existence of such outright bribery, but by the meager amounts of the gifts. Many asked if a few zeros were missing. @ 彭世佳 tweeted, "Such cheapstakes. Only 2,000 RMBto the secretary of the mayor? What can they get anything done?"

However, one person with apparent knowledge of how the wheels are greased in China, tweeted, "The numbers are about right. The amounts we usually give are even lower, and basically they get the job done. The Internet rumors are overblown. It's very rare to give a few million, unless there is something really important to be done."

@小Y274635103 tweeted, "This is totally normal. All companies do this at the end of the year, especially giving to the registration bureaus, tax collectors and health inspectors. Even if you bribe them, there is no guarantee that they won't screw with you. But if you don't, they will definitely screw with you."

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

    

America's Next Boom Town: Sioux Falls, South Dakota

Posted: 08 Jul 2013 09:17 AM PDT

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Wikimedia Commons

Most U.S. mayors would give their right arms for Mike Huether's problems. The 50-year-old Democratic mayor of Sioux Falls runs a city blessed with consistently low unemployment--the current rate is 3.5 percent--multiple thriving industries, and few of the woes that plague larger urban areas. A former executive who spent 15 years with Citibank, one of South Dakota's largest employers, Huether oversees city coffers that keep growing, thanks to economic prosperity in the region and a population boom. The downside? Managing the city's growth to provide for all those new residents, and making sure that low unemployment rates don't scare away employers who worry they can't fill positions.

Huether recently sat down to talk with National Journal's Amy Sullivan in his downtown office. Edited excerpts follow.

This is my first time back in Sioux Falls in more than a decade. The last time I was here, Citibank was really the only game in town. What's happened to the city's economic base since then?

You're right. I graduated in 1984 from South Dakota State University, and at that time, the opportunities were limited, except for this new business in town. That was one of the biggest wins for the city. This town was built on agriculture, and it's still a big part of why we're successful. But then we got into banking--with Citibank, First Premier, Wells Bank, Capital One. We also became a retail and, yes, even tourism, mecca for this region; that includes things like conventions and conferences. Then you add the other leg that really had a strong role during the recession, and that was health care.

We're going to find the cure for breast cancer in Sioux Falls, and for Type 1 diabetes. We are setting up labs and testing environments and other innovations in health care. They're not screwing around. Companies like Sanford and Avera are sincerely passionate about doing that work in Sioux Falls instead of at Mayo or on the East Coast. That fourth leg really helped catapult us during the recession, because they were investing in research, investing in facilities and people during that time. Even though banking was struggling and retail was down, ag and health care were going gangbusters.

It sounds boring, but it's very effective to create more legs on your economic development stool. We do it extremely well here.

How important was it to have Citi's presence and the reputation as a financial-services sector to bring other companies here?

Citibank taught us how to think big. It was an incredible training ground for so many young executives and future leaders, including myself. I started there in 1984 and worked there until 1999, spending five years in South Dakota, five in New York, five in Texas. Then I went to Europe and then came back to South Dakota to work at Premier Bank with Denny Sanford. I quit in 2009 to pursue my dream to be in public service.

Citibank taught us we could play with the big boys, and to be proud in South Dakota instead of being looked on as second-class citizens in the Midwest. I'll never forget being at Citibank and having these East Coast people from elite colleges who were reporting to this South Dakota boy from South Dakota State. We had folks from the East Coast who "had" to move to Sioux Falls, and once they got here, they were going, "why in the world didn't we come earlier?"

Looking at your unemployment numbers, with the exception of a brief spike in 2010 when the rate went up to 6 percent, it's surprising that more people don't move here.

I was just in Wisconsin, where some friends were talking about 9 percent unemployment, and I can't fathom that. Here in Sioux Falls, if we're over 5, 5.5 percent, we're wondering what we're doing wrong. Right now we're at 3.5, and actually struggling with that. It's a good thing if you need a job, but something to look out for if you're trying to hire people.

We do have between 3,000 and 4,000 people moving here each year, looking for a great place to raise their families and find jobs. This year, we will blow away the record for construction in a single year. We're already 150 percent of where we were last year, and last year was the second-highest construction year in our city's history.

What are the challenges in absorbing thousands of new people every year?

It's the one thing that keeps me up at night as mayor. You do have this responsibility to manage growth, to plan it and zone it right. Because if you mess it up, it'll impact this city for generations. Fifty years ago, whoever the leaders were decided to put two private country clubs side by side in what is now the heart of our city. Now we have a challenge driving from the east side of town to the west side of town because of that decision.

When people move to your town, you have to build more sanitary sewer lines and strengthen your roadways, you have demand for commercial development, demand for city services--fire, police, libraries, parks. You have to prioritize to do it well, and occasionally you have to make special-interest groups mad at you. But I'd rather have my problem than problems that other mayors across the country are facing right now.

It's true that many of the other towns we've visited are struggling with blighted neighborhoods or high poverty rates. It's harder to identify the challenges here. But the issue of workforce availability and readiness is definitely real.

It's a challenge the whole state is facing. The governor just went to the Mall of America and set up a booth to let all of Minnesota know that if you need a good job and quality of life, we've got it in South Dakota. We need 500 welders in Mitchell, S.D. We've got 1,000 job openings in Aberdeen. You name the town, we're trying to find people to work. There's no oil, no fracking anywhere. You've just got a strong ag economy, high optimism and confidence.

Here's another thing: Our city council insists we have at least 25 percent of our operating expenses in a reserve fund every year. Right now we're at about 36 percent. Name another town in America that is repairing streets, rebuilding infrastructure, tackling growth needs for a community, and adding to their city's piggy bank. We have added to our city's reserve every year for the last three years.

We had 30 businesses in downtown Sioux Falls that either opened or expanded last year. There is no vacancy right now for people who want to live in downtown Sioux Falls. That was one of my dreams when I moved back here from San Antonio--I wanted to create a downtown where people would want to live.

Agriculture can still be a risky business. How was the area affected by last year's drought?

Like business, ag has evolved. There are still family farms, but they're huge now. Technology has changed as well. No-till farming has been so important in terms of saving money and protecting the environment. And there are some measures that have been implemented by the federal government that have allowed farmers to take some risks. For example, last year was the driest year since the '50s, if not the '30s, in South Dakota. We really worried about it, but there were some stop-gap measures that kicked in that allowed farmers to invest in equipment for this year, hoping that it was going to rain. And guess what? It's raining. It allowed us to keep the oldest leg on the stool rock-solid.

    

Why Paid Family Leave Is Good for Everyone (Even People Who Don't Use It)

Posted: 08 Jul 2013 09:08 AM PDT

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jeffthebear/flickr

The Rhode Island legislature voted last week to pass a law to give workers paid time off to care for a new child or seriously ill or injured family member. If Governor Lincoln Chafee signs the bill into law as expected Rhode Island will become the third state with some type of paid family leave policy, after California and New Jersey. Connecticut appointed a task force in May to consider the feasibility of such a policy, and Washington passed a law in 2007 but for now it remains unfunded. The federal Family and Medical Leave Act, passed in 1993, provides 12 weeks of job-guaranteed unpaid leave to workers in businesses with more than 50 employees, but nearly half of eligible workers say they cannot afford to take it. Paid leave proponents regularly point out that the U.S. joins only two other countries--Swaziland and Papua New Guinea--in not guaranteeing some paid maternity leave.

The Rhode Island law, reports Bryce Covert,

expands the state's current Temporary Disability Insurance (TDI) program, which currently only covers those who need time off for a work-related illness or injury, to cover those who need family leave. Temporary Caregiver Insurance (TCI) will allow workers to pay into the program through a payroll deduction and then, starting January 2014, take up to four weeks of paid leave, which would rise to six weeks the year after and eight weeks by 2016. Paying into the program would cost someone making $43,000 a year 83 cents a week. The minimum weekly payment for the TDI program is currently $72 and the maximum is $752. It would cover nearly 80 percent of the state's workforce.

Opponents of this type of law worry about the replacement cost of labor to cover workers on leave, particularly for small firms, though Rhode Island small business owners joined the coalition favoring passage. California and New Jersey both report PFL produced a positive or neutral impact on business. Savings usually come from worker retention and therefore reduced costs to recruit and train new employees. Even "card-carrying capitalists" should support family leave programs, writes Cali Yost in Forbes. She observes that state paid leave programs are wage replacement programs and therefore should be named more accurately "Family Leave Insurance."

The impact of family leave legislation, whether state or federal, is felt well beyond the direct benefit an individual worker receives. Parental leave and similar policies hold potential to reduce workplace bias and stigma faced by all women and men with caregiving responsibilities. Shelley Correll of Stanford University explained recently at Harvard Business School's "Gender and Work Research Symposium" how a family-friendly law can signal a broad social consensus about citizens' rights to do both parenting and paid work. She explained that when such laws exist, bosses and co-workers reduce their negative judgments about people taking maternity, paternity, or other caregiving leaves-of-absence. Those judgments, in turn, influence positively managers' assessments of and decisions about leave-taking employees--for example, whether they later deserve raises or promotions.

Correll described how the process works, citing her empirical research on workplace bias and the motherhood pay penalty:

In this experiment, participants learned that a firm was covered either by the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) or by the Occupational Safety and Health Act (the control condition). They then rated several highly skilled employees who purportedly worked at a firm described as being covered by one of these two laws (FMLA or control). In the control condition, with no family-friendly law in place, mothers who had taken family leave were judged as less competent, less committed to their jobs, less promotable, and were offered smaller raises than childless women. Fathers who took leave were offered smaller raises than their childless counterparts, but they did not experience the other disadvantages that leave-taking mothers experienced.

Even a limited family-friendly law cuts parenthood wage penalties, Correll showed. A law signals to businesses a society's recognition that female and male employees alike have the right to be evaluated based on the results of their work performance only--not their status as a mother or father. Hence, paid family leave laws nudge managers toward fair and impartial treatment of employees, especially caregivers. This type of organizational culture usually boosts employee morale and loyalty, creating a beneficial cycle of productivity gains and improved profitability for organizations and greater job security for employees.

Laws like paid family leave can reduce subtle and perhaps even unconscious discrimination in the workplace by signaling an expected, unbiased code of behavior for all organizational participants. Family-friendly policies such as Rhode Island's new law prompt a broader positive result than their specific legal requirement targets. Caregivers receive a direct benefit from family leave programs: time off. But all employees reap the indirect benefit of a fairer workplace.

    

George W. Bush's Forgotten Gay-Rights History

Posted: 08 Jul 2013 09:07 AM PDT

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George W. Bush and Barack Obama at a ceremony in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, commemorating the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy. (Reuters)

George W. Bush ran for election and reelection as a compassionate conservative. Now slowly inching his way back into the public eye with an interview with ABC News's Jonathan Karl that aired Sunday and a planned major speech on immigration Wednesday, the former president who likes to call himself "retired" is being suddenly feted for views he's held for years.

Maybe it's just the hard-right turn in Republican rhetoric since Bush left office, but Bush's historic kinder, gentler approach is suddenly being treated as a kind of GOP novelty act.

Consider this ABC News story Sunday:

President George W. Bush cautioned against criticizing gay couples, saying in an interview on "This Week" that you shouldn't criticize others "until you've examined your own heart."

Bush had waded into the revitalized same-sex marriage debate last week -- if only barely -- in a comment to a reporter in Zambia, who asked whether gay marriage conflicts with Christian values.

"I shouldn't be taking a speck out of someone else's eye when I have a log in my own," Bush said last week.

In an interview in Tanzania with ABC News Chief White House Correspondent Jonathan Karl, the former president explained his comment further.

"I meant it's very important for people not to be overly critical of someone else until you've examined your own heart," Bush told Karl.

The story went on to note that "As president, Bush opposed gay marriage, and Republicans pushed ballot measures to ban it at the state level."

But Bush also endorsed civil unions for same-sex couples, along with a state-based rather than federal approach permitting such, as an incumbent president running for reelection in 2004. He did so in defiance of his party, which opposed civil unions in its platform. "I don't think we should deny people rights to a civil union, a legal arrangement, if that's what a state chooses to do so," he said that October. Meanwhile his vice president, Dick Cheney, opposed the constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage that was a popular idea among social conservatives at the time. Cheney did this while campaigning in Iowa, a well-known bastion of GOP grassroots social conservatism, in the summer of 2004:

At a campaign stop in Iowa, Mr. Cheney, who has a daughter who is a lesbian, said on Tuesday that he favored the right of states, rather than the federal government, to define marriage, and, with his daughter Mary in mind, said ''freedom means freedom for everyone'' to enter ''into any kind of relationship they want.''

As Republicans seek to find a new way forward in the wake of the Supreme Court decision striking down DOMA, it's worth recalling that one frequently discussed proposed path -- backing civil unions but not full marriage equality -- would just take the GOP back to where its successful presidential candidate was in 2004.

Romney, the more conservative candidate who lost where Bush won, opposed both gay marriage and civil unions in 2012.

The picture with Bush was hardly one of straightforward support for gay unions, of course. He also backed a proposed constitutional amendment to forbid same-sex marriage. At the same time, he benefited from an aggressive state-by-state campaign to turn out evangelical voters opposed to giving gay unions the same standing as heterosexual ones.

That was the genius of compassionate conservatism as party strategy: a small helping of moderate rhetoric at the top never prevented the hardest-right elements in Bush's party from getting their way on social issues, even as the gentler tone helped woo a broader base of support for the president. From a New York Times post-election analysis:

Proposed state constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage increased the turnout of socially conservative voters in many of the 11 states where the measures appeared on the ballot on Tuesday, political analysts say, providing crucial assistance to Republican candidates including President Bush in Ohio and Senator Jim Bunning in Kentucky ....

[T]he ballot measures also appear to have acted like magnets for thousands of socially conservative voters in rural and suburban communities who might not otherwise have voted, even in this heated campaign, political analysts said. And in tight races, those voters -- who historically have leaned heavily Republican -- may have tipped the balance.

So now Bush, in response to a journalist in Zambia asking about whether gay marriage is against Christian values, said, "I shouldn't be taking a speck out of someone else's eye when I have a log in my own."

That sounds nice and all, but it's kind words without kind content.

Pressed by Karl to elaborate on what he meant, Bush declined to get specific and refused to say anything substantive about marriage equality or the DOMA decision.

"I meant that I wasn't going to answer the question then and I'm not going to answer it now in terms of the political question about whether or not, uh, you know --  just don't wanna wade back in the debate. I'm out of politics," Bush said. "But I meant it's very important for people not to be overly critical of someone else until you've examined your own heart .... I'm not going to wade back into those kinds of issues. I'm out of politics .... I'm off the stage unless I'm promoting something I strongly believe in."

It was classic Bush: compassionate rhetoric followed by ... what exactly?

    

Study: The Kids These Days, They Have Lots of Illegal Guns

Posted: 08 Jul 2013 08:48 AM PDT

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sturap / flickr

PROBLEM: In today's issue of the journal Pediatrics, researchers led by Dr. Patrick Carter at the University of Michigan get into why "firearm violence is a leading cause of death among youth." Here, via Johns Hopkins, are the numbers on the causes of death in the second decade of life in the United States:

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I'm not sure why they used all those subtle shades of green, which misses the point of a pie chart. Unless it's an allusion to the subtleties of the social factors behind these deaths. Like how when we say, as the Michigan team does in their journal article, that "firearms were responsible for 85 percent of the homicide-related deaths among adolescents." Some would take issue with that wording. 

Still it's tough to argue that keeping assault weapons away from at-risk youth is unsound policy. The researchers also note that firearm-related homicides among adolescents in the U.S. are around 40 times more common than in other developed countries.

METHODOLOGY: Carter and team kept data on "youth" (defined as 14 to 24 years-old) who came to an emergency department in Flint, Michigan, for assault-related injuries over the course of a two year period. They measured rates and characteristics of these young people's relationships with firearms, as well as attitudes toward aggression and histories of substance use and violence.

RESULTS: Excluding people who owned guns for purposes of hunting, of 689 assault-injured youth, 23 percent had (carried or owned) a firearm themselves. Only 17 percent came into them legally. Many were automatics and semiautomatics. Correlations with gun possession included being male, higher socioeconomic status, recent serious fights, and aggressive attitudes "that increase their risk for retaliatory violence."

IMPLICATIONS: Illegal assault weapon ownership is much more common among the sort of young people who end up in the emergency room for assault-related injuries than it is among broader ER populations and in school-based studies. The most common reason these kids say they have their gun is for protection. Carter et al. conclude, "Future prevention efforts should focus on minimizing illegal firearm access among high-risk youth." We might also help these kids feel protected without needing to carry an assault weapon.

The full study, "Firearm Possession Among Adolescents Presenting to an Urban Emergency Department for Assault" is published in today's issue of the journal Pediatrics.

    

The History of Typography, in Stop-Motion Animation

Posted: 08 Jul 2013 08:39 AM PDT



Let's face it, fonts and typefaces have officially become a mainstream obsession. In our current design-centric culture, terms like sans-serif, Helvetica, and — heaven forbid — Comic Sans have breached the cultural consciousness. Fortunately, for those of you who still can't tell your Futura from your Papyrus, Yukon-based designer Ben Barrett-Forrest has crafted this charming stop-motion history lesson to help you get up to speed.

Built with 2454 photographs, 291 letters, and 140 hours of his life, Barrett-Forrest's animated short is a delight . As he guides us from the lowly beginnings of Guttenberg's printing press, all the way to the computer age, it becomes apparent that the art of type is a corollary for history. Like architecture and fashion, typography is a reflection of the world in which it's created. Barrett-Forrest explains his interest in type and the genesis of the project in an interview below.

The Atlantic: How did the project come to be? Have you always been knowledgeable about typography? 

Ben Barrett-Forrest: I have always been a type nerd, but it was about two years ago that I really caught typography fever. I was taking a design class for my multimedia degree at McMaster University and it was recommended that I read a book called Thinking With Type by Ellen Lupton. This brilliant book showed me that typography has huge diversity and a long history, and I was quickly hooked.

What made you decide to go with hand-cut characters and a stop-motion approach?

There are hundreds of beautiful kinetic typography videos on the internet, with their shiny graphics and smooth movements. I wanted to create something that allowed people to experience typography on a tactile, unrefined level. My hand-cut style brings the faces off of the computer screen and onto a more physical level that can be pushed around, manipulated, and imbued with extra personality.

It seems that collectively as a culture we have become more knowledgeable about type and fonts. What do you think has spawned this interest?

One of the catalysts for the recent interest in typography is the availability of font-making software such as Fontlab, which allows anyone to make their own digital typeface. There are now tens of thousands of excellent (and not so excellent) typefaces available for download. This allows people to move away from the familiarity of Helvetica and Times New Roman, and to become aware of the different kinds of typefaces that are out there.

Any particular typeface trends that you're currently a big fan of? Any that you're not?

I am quite fond of slab serifs like Archer Pro and Josefin Slab. They display words with a humorous seriousness, and look great everywhere from book covers to chip bags.

There is a current trend towards hand-drawn looking typefaces, such as Hand of Sean and GoodDog. These can look great in certain circumstances, but people often use them in places that call for a more formal font. It seems to be a common problem that in an effort to make a design look fun and friendly, people just make it look unprofessional (ahem … Comic Sans).

Is there a particular font or typeface you wish would just go away?

Gotham is one of the most beautiful typefaces out there, and also one I could stand to see a lot less of. It is quickly becoming the next Helvetica — a beautiful typeface that is used so often by amateur designers in unflattering ways that it becomes associated with bad design. If we can all just take a bit of a breather from Gotham and use it tastefully and sparingly, then it will regain its former glory and once again be recognized as an elegant and beautifully designed typeface.

For more work from Ben Barrett-Forrest, see Forrest Media, Twitter, or YouTube.

    

What Gmail Knows About You

Posted: 08 Jul 2013 08:18 AM PDT

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Immersion, a tool built by Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers, helps Gmail users understand their own trail of Internet breadcrumbs. (MIT Media Lab)

When Google hands over e-mail records to the government, it includes basic envelope information, or metadata, that reveals the names and e-mail addresses of senders and recipients in your account. The feds can then mine that information for patterns that might be useful in a law-enforcement investigation.

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What kind of relationships do they see in an average account? Thanks to the researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, now you can find out. They've developed a tool called Immersion that taps into your Gmail and displays the results as an interactive graphic. (That's mine, above.)

The chart depicts all of your contacts as nodes, and the gray lines between those nodes represent connections between people by e-mail. The larger the circle, the more prominent that person is in your digital life.

A word of warning for the privacy conscious: To use the service, you need to give MIT permission to analyze your e-mail metadata. Once you've done so, it'll take a few minutes to compile everything. When you're done, you're given the option to delete your metadata from MIT's servers.

What you see in my chart are five and a half years' worth of e-mails. The yellow circles indicate family and close family friends. All of my college friends are in red, and my D.C. friends are in green. Blue nodes denote my colleagues at The Atlantic; pink, my coworkers at National Journal; and gray, people who generally don't share connections with the other major networks in my life.

In all, MIT counted 606 "collaborators" in my inbox, totaling some 83,000 e-mails. But you can also break down that data by year, month, or even the past week. Pretty amazing stuff -- and a good reminder not only how much information Google knows about you, but what that information can uncover about other people. If you can learn this much just from looking at one account, imagine what crunching hundreds or thousands of interconnected accounts must be like.

    

Men and Women Often Expect Different Things When They Move In Together

Posted: 08 Jul 2013 07:52 AM PDT

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cincyproject/flickr

At 33, my friend (I'll call her Shannon) had little to show for her five-year relationship with her live-in boyfriend. No ring. No baby. No future. So she finally decided to break up with him.

Back when Shannon and her (younger) boyfriend moved in together, things had looked a lot brighter. They shared a love of indie music and the Charlottesville arts scene. She thought they both wanted a future together. But over time, her boyfriend turned aside her queries about their shared future--queries that started off subtle and became more explicit as the years passed by. Finally, when she turned 33, Shannon told him she wanted a wedding date, to which he responded that he was not ready for marriage.

Shannon's experience with a live-in boyfriend with commitment issues, it seems, is not all that unusual. According to a new paper from RAND by sociologists Michael Pollard and Kathleen Mullan Harris, cohabiting young adults have significantly lower levels of commitment than their married peers. This aversion to commitment is particularly prevalent among young men who live with their partners.

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Source: RAND Analysis of Add Health, 2001-2002, based on 2,068 adults age 18-26.

Pollard and Harris found that the majority of cohabiting young men do not endorse the maximum indicator of relationship permanence: 52 percent of cohabiting men between ages 18 and 26 are not "almost certain" that their relationship is permanent. Moreover, a large minority (41 percent) of men report that they are not "completely committed" to their live-in girlfriends. By contrast, only 39 percent of cohabiting women in the same age group are not "almost certain" their relationship will go the distance, and only 26 percent say they are not "completely committed". Not surprisingly, the figures above and below also indicate that married women and men are much less likely to exhibit the low levels of commitment characteristic of many cohabiting relationships today.

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This study's findings about low commitment and the gender mismatch in cohabiting adults' expectations suggest three cautionary notes for young adults considering moving in together:

Talk about the future. Both parties--but especially women, given the statistical averages--should be aware that their partner may not be committed to a common future. A long-term cohabiting relationship may prove to be an obstacle, rather than a springboard, to many young people's goal of getting married and starting a family. Shannon's experience suggests that defining the commitment in the relationship (DTCITR) is a matter best addressed before co-signing a lease.

Get on the same page. Couples are more likely to flourish when they share common, clearly communicated goals for their relationship. But given the disparate purposes cohabitation now serves--different people see it variously as a courtship phase, an economical way to save on rent, a venue for convenient sex, a prelude to getting serious, or an alternative to marriage--young adults often end up living with someone who doesn't share their relational goals. Couples considering living together would be wise to talk through the goals they want to accomplish in that move, and make sure they are on the same page.

Don't slide into marriage. Shannon is fortunate in one respect. The only thing worse than being in a relationship for years with an uncommitted person, it would seem, is marrying one. Research by psychologists Scott Stanley and Galena Rhoades, spotlighted in a New York Times op-ed last year, suggests that cohabiting couples are in for trouble when they "slide" into cohabitation and then marriage rather than "decide" to take the same steps. Their work indicates that many couples begin living together without clear expectations, common values, or a shared commitment to one another. And after a time, some of these couples get married, in part because friends, family, and they themselves think it's the logical next step. But without common values and a shared sense of commitment, the couples who slide into cohabitation and marriage, instead of purposely deciding to deepen their commitment to one another, are more likely to divorce.

Stanley and Rhoades illustrate this point by pointing to the research on cohabitation, engagement, and divorce. Women who cohabit prior to engagement are about 40 percent more likely to divorce, compared to those who do not cohabit. By contrast, couples who cohabit after an engagement do not face a higher divorce risk. Those who cohabit only after engagement or marriage also report higher marital quality, not just lower odds of divorce. Stanley and Rhoades think that "sliders" are more likely than "deciders" to cohabit prior to an engagement, and to have trouble in their marriage if they go on to tie the knot. On the other hand, couples who deliberately choose to move in together after a public engagement or wedding are more likely to enjoy the shared commitment that will enable their relationship to last.

So, given the low levels of commitment and the gender mismatch in expectations often found among today's cohabiting couples, young men and especially women who aspire to a strong and stable marriage should take caution when considering moving in together. A live-in relationship that begins brightly, but without the benefit of a serious shared commitment, often ends on a dark note.

    

The Debate Behind U.S. Intervention in World War II

Posted: 08 Jul 2013 06:56 AM PDT

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Left: President Roosevelt signs the declaration of war against Germany; right: Charles Lindbergh in the famous photo from Lambert Field, St. Louis, Missouri, 1923 (Library of Congress)

"DEAR FRISKY," President Roosevelt wrote in May 1940 to Roger Merriman, his history professor at Harvard and the master of Eliot House. "I like your word 'shrimps.' There are too many of them in all the Colleges and Universities -- male and female. I think the best thing for the moment is to call them shrimps publicly and privately. Most of them will eventually get in line if things should become worse."

To designate young isolationists, who deluded themselves into believing that America could remain aloof, secure, and distant from the wars raging in Europe, Roosevelt liked the amusing term "shrimps"-- crustaceans possessing a nerve cord but no brain. In that critical month of May 1940, he finally realized that it was probably a question of when, not if, the United States would be drawn into war. Talk about neutrality or noninvolvement was no longer seasonable as the unimaginable dangers he had barely glimpsed in 1936 erupted into what he termed a "hurricane of events."

On the evening of Sunday, May 26, 1940, days after the Germans began their thrust west, as city after city fell to the Nazi assault, a somber Roosevelt delivered a fireside chat about the dire events in Europe.

Earlier that evening, the president had distractedly prepared drinks for a small group of friends in his study. There was none of the usual banter. Dispatches were pouring into the White House. "All bad, all bad," Roosevelt grimly muttered, handing them to Eleanor to read. But in his talk, as he tried to prepare Americans for what might lie ahead, he set a reflective, religious tone.

"On this Sabbath evening," he said in his reassuring voice, "in our homes in the midst of our American families, let us calmly consider what we have done and what we must do." But before talking about his decision to vastly increase the nation's military preparedness, he hurled an opening salvo at the isolationists.

They came in different sizes and shapes, he explained. One group of them constituted a Trojan horse of pro-German spies, saboteurs, and traitors. While not naming names, he singled out those who sought to arouse people's "hatred" and "prejudices" by resorting to "false slogans and emotional appeals." With fifth columnists who sought to "divide and weaken us in the face of danger," Roosevelt declared, "we must and will deal vigorously." Another group of isolationists, he explained, opposed his administration's policies simply for the sake of opposition -- even when the security of the nation stood at risk.

The president recognized that some isolationists were earnest in their beliefs and acted in good faith. Some were simply afraid to face a dark and foreboding reality. Others were gullible, eager to accept what they were told by some of their fellow Americans, that what was happening in Europe was "none of our business." These "cheerful idiots," as he would later call them in public, naively bought into the fantasy that the United States could always pursue its peaceful and unique course in the world.

They "honestly and sincerely" believed that the many hundreds of miles of salt water would protect the nation from the nightmare of brutality and violence gripping much of the rest of the world. Though it might have been a comforting dream for FDR's "shrimps," the president argued that the isolationist fantasy of the nation as a safe oasis in a world dominated by fascist terror evoked for himself and for the overwhelming majority of Americans not a dream but a "nightmare of a people without freedom -- the nightmare of a people lodged in prison, handcuffed, hungry, and fed through the bars from day to day by the contemptuous, unpitying masters of other continents."

Two weeks after that fireside chat, on June 10, 1940, Roosevelt gave another key address about American foreign policy. This time it was in the Memorial Gymnasium of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, to an audience that included his son Franklin, Jr., who was graduating from the Virginia Law School. That same day, the president received word that Italy would declare war on France and was sending four hundred thousand troops to invade the French Mediterranean coast. In his talk, FDR deplored the "gods of force and hate" and denounced the treacherous Mussolini. "On this tenth day of June, 1940," he declared, "the hand that held the dagger has plunged it into the back of its neighbor."

But more than a denunciation of Mussolini's treachery and double-dealing, the speech finally gave a statement of American policy. It was time to "proclaim certain truths," the president said. Military and naval victories for the "gods of force and hate" would endanger all democracies in the western world. In this time of crisis, America could no longer pretend to be "a lone island in a world of force." Indeed, the nation could no longer cling to the fiction of neutrality. "Our sympathies lie with those nations that are giving their life blood in combat against these forces." Then he outlined his policy. America was simultaneously pursuing two courses of action. First, it was extending to the democratic Allies all the material resources of the nation; and second, it was speeding up war production at home so that America would have the equipment and manpower "equal to the task of any emergency and every defense." There would be no slowdowns and no detours. Everything called for speed, "full speed ahead!" Concluding his remarks, he summoned, as he had in 1933 when he first took the oath of office, Americans' "effort, courage, sacrifice and devotion."

It was a "fighting speech," wrote Time magazine, "more powerful and more determined" than any the president had yet delivered about the war in Europe. But the reality was actually more complicated.

On the one hand, the president had taken sides in the European conflict. No more illusions of "neutrality." And he had delivered a straightforward statement of the course of action he would pursue. On the other hand, he was not free to make policy unilaterally; he still had to contend with isolationists in Congress. On June 10, the day of his Charlottesville talk, with Germans about to cross the Marne southeast of Paris, it was clear that the French capital would soon fall. France's desperate prime minister, Paul Reynaud, asked Roosevelt to declare publicly that the United States would support the Allies "by all means short of an expeditionary force." But Roosevelt declined. He sent only a message of support labeled "secret" to Reynaud; and in a letter to Winston Churchill, he explained that "in no sense" was he prepared to commit the American government to "military participation in support of the Allied governments." Only Congress, he added, had the authority to make such a commitment.

"We all listened to you last night," Churchill wired the president the day after the Charlottesville address, pleading, as he had done earlier in May, for more arms and equipment from America and paring down his request for destroyers from "forty or fifty" to "thirty or forty." "Nothing is so important," he wrote. In answer to Churchill's urgent appeal, the president arranged to send what he cleverly called "surplus" military equipment to Great Britain. Twelve ships sailed for Britain, loaded with seventy thousand tons of bomber planes, rifles, tanks, machine guns, and ammunition-- but no destroyers were included in the deal. Sending destroyers would be an act of war, claimed Senator David Walsh of Massachusetts, the isolationist chairman of the Senate Naval Affairs Committee. Walsh also discovered the president's plan to send twenty torpedo boats to Britain. Flying into a rage, he threatened legislation to prohibit such arms sales. Roosevelt backed down -- temporarily -- and called off the torpedo boat deal.

Even as Nazi troops, tanks, and planes chalked up more conquests in Europe, the contest between the shrimps and the White House was not over. On the contrary, the shrimps still occupied a position of formidable strength.

The glamorous public face and articulate voice of the isolationist movement belonged to the charismatic and courageous Charles Lindbergh. His solo flight across the Atlantic in May 1927 had catapulted the lanky, boyish, 25- year- old pilot onto the world stage. "Well, I made it," he said with a modest smile upon landing at Le Bourget airfield in Paris, as thousands of delirious French men and women broke through military and police lines and rushed toward his small plane. When he returned to New York two weeks later, flotillas of boats in the harbor, a squadron of twenty- one planes in the sky, and four million people roaring "Lindy! Lindy!" turned out to honor him in a joy-mad city, draped in flags and drenched in confetti and ticker tape. "No conqueror in the history of the world," wrote one newspaper, "ever received a welcome such as was accorded Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh yesterday."

On May 19, 1940, a week before the president gave his fireside chat denouncing isolationists and outlining plans to build up American defenses, Lindbergh had made the isolationist case in his own radio address. The United States was not in danger from a foreign invasion unless "American people bring it on" by meddling in the affairs of foreign countries. The only danger to America, the flier insisted, was an "internal" one.

Though the president had explained that the Atlantic and Pacific oceans could no longer provide safe boundaries and could not protect the American continent from attack, Lindbergh insisted that the two vast oceans did indeed guarantee the nation's safety. "There will be no invasion by foreign aircraft," he stated categorically in his reedy voice, "and no foreign navy will dare to approach within bombing range of our coasts." America's sole task, he underscored, lay in "building and guarding our own destiny." If the nation stuck to a unilateral course, avoided entanglements abroad, refrained from intervening in European affairs, and built up its own defenses, it would be impregnable to foreign incursions. In any case, he stressed, it was pointless for the United States to risk submerging its future in the wars of Europe, for the die had already been cast. "There is no longer time for us to enter this war successfully," he assured his radio audience.

Deriding all the "hysterical chatter of calamity and invasion," Lindbergh charged that President Roosevelt's angry words against Germany would lead to "neither friendship nor peace."

Friendship with Nazi Germany? Surely Lindbergh realized that friendship between nations signifies their mutual approval, trust, and assistance. But so starry- eyed was he about German dynamism, technology, and military might and so detached was he from the reality and consequences of German aggression and oppression that even on that day of May 19, when the headline in the Washington Post read, "NAZIS SMASH THROUGH BELGIUM, INTO FRANCE" and when tens of thousands of desperate Belgian refugees poured across the border into France, Lindbergh said he believed it would make no difference to the United States if Germany won the war and came to dominate all of Europe. "Regardless of which side wins this war," he stated in his May 19 speech without a whiff of hesitation or misgiving, "there is no reason . . . to prevent a continuation of peaceful relationships between America and the countries of Europe." The danger, in his opinion, was not that Germany might prevail but rather that Roosevelt's antifascist statements would make the United States "hated by victor and vanquished alike." The United States could and should maintain peaceful diplomatic and economic relations with whichever side won the war. Fascism, democracy-- six of one, half a dozen of the other. His defeatist speech could not have been "better put if it had been written by Goebbels himself," Franklin Roosevelt remarked two days later.

As the mighty German army broke through French defenses and thundered toward Paris, the dominance of Germany in Europe seemed obvious, inevitable, and justified to Lindbergh. Why, then, he wondered, did Roosevelt persist in his efforts to involve the nation in war? "The only reason that we are in danger of becoming involved in this war," he concluded in his May 19 speech, "is because there are powerful elements in America who desire us to take part. They represent a small minority of the American people, but they control much of the machinery of influence and propaganda." It was a veiled allusion to Jewish newspaper publishers and owners of major Hollywood movie studios. He counseled Americans to "strike down these elements of personal profit and foreign interest." While his recommendation seemed to border on violence, he was also reviving the centuries-old anti-Semitic myth of Jews as stateless foreigners, members of an international conspiratorial clique with no roots in the "soil" and interested only in "transportable" paper wealth.

"The Lindberghs and their friends laugh at the idea of Germany ever being able to attack the United States," wrote radio correspondent William Shirer, stationed in Berlin. "The Germans welcome their laughter and hope more Americans will laugh." Also heartened by Lindbergh's words was the German military attaché in Washington, General Friedrich von Boetticher. "The circle about Lindbergh," von Boetticher wrote in a dispatch to Berlin, "now tries at least to impede the fatal control of American policy by the Jews." The day after Lindbergh's speech, the defiant Hollywood studio heads, Jack and Harry Warner, wrote to Roosevelt to assure him that they would "do all in our power within the motion picture industry . . . to show the American people the worthiness of the cause for which the free peoples of Europe are making such tremendous sacrifices."

Who could have foreseen in 1927 that Lindbergh, whose flight inspired a sense of transatlantic community and raised idealistic hopes for international cooperation, would come to embody the fiercest, most virulent brand of isolationism? Two years after his feat, Lindbergh gained entrée to the Eastern social and financial elite when he married Anne Morrow, the daughter of Dwight Morrow. A former J. P. Morgan partner and the ambassador to Mexico, Dwight Morrow would be elected as a Republican to the United States Senate in 1930, just before his death in 1931. Charles and Anne seemed to lead charmed lives-- until their 20- month- old son was snatched from his crib in their rural New Jersey home in March 1932. Muddy footprints trailed across the floor in the second-floor nursery to an open window, beneath which a ladder had stood. "The baby's been kidnapped!" cried the nurse as she ran downstairs. The governor of New York, Franklin Roosevelt, immediately placed all the resources of the state police at the disposal of the New Jersey authorities. Two months later, the small body was found in a shallow grave. A German- born carpenter who had served time in prison for burglary, Bruno Hauptmann, was charged with the crime; Lindbergh identified his voice as the one he heard shouting in the darkness of a Bronx cemetery when he handed over $50,000 in ransom.

Carrying a pistol visible in a shoulder holster, Lindbergh attended the trial in January 1935, sitting just a few seats away from the accused. After Hauptmann's conviction and move for an appeal, Eleanor Roosevelt oddly and gratuitously weighed in, second- guessing the jury and announcing that she was a "little perturbed" that an innocent man might have been found guilty. But the conviction stood, and Hauptmann would be executed in the electric chair in April 1936.

In December 1935, in the wake of the trial, Charles and Anne, harassed and sometimes terrified by intrusive reporters as well as by would- be blackmailers, fled to Europe with their 3-year-old son, Jon. "America Shocked by Exile Forced on the Lindberghs" read the three-column headline on the front page of the New York Times.

Would the crowd- shy Lindbergh and his wife find a calm haven in Europe? The Old World also has its gangsters, commented a French newspaper columnist, adding that Europe "suffers from an additional disquieting force, for there everyone is saying, 'There is going to be war soon.'" The Nazi press, however, took a different stance. "As Germans," wrote the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung with an absence of irony, "we cannot understand that a civilized nation is not able to guarantee the safety of the bodies and lives of its citizens."

For several years the Lindberghs enjoyed life in Europe, first in England, in a house in the hills near Kent, and later on a small, rocky island off the coast of Brittany. In the summer of 1936, the couple visited Germany, where they were wined and dined by Hermann Goering, second only to Hitler in the Nazi hierarchy, and other members of the party elite. Goering personally led Lindbergh on an inspection tour of aircraft factories, an elite Luftwaffe squadron, and research facilities. The American examined new engines for dive bombers and combat planes and even took a bomber up in the air. It was a "privilege" to visit modern Germany, the awestruck Lindbergh said afterward, showering praise on "the genius this country has shown in developing airships." Photographers snapped pictures of Charles and his wife, relaxed and smiling in Goering's home. Lindbergh's reports on German aviation overflowed with superlatives about "the astounding growth of German air power," "this miraculous outburst of national energy in the air field," and the "scientific skill of the race ." The aviator, however, showed no interest in speaking with foreign correspondents in Germany, "who have a perverse liking for enlightening visitors on the Third Reich," William Shirer dryly noted.

In Berlin, Lindbergh's wife, Anne, was blinded by the glittering façade of a Potemkin village. She was enchanted by "the sense of festivity, flags hung out, the Nazi flag, red with a swastika on it, everywhere, and the Olympic flag, five rings on white." The Reich's dynamism was so impressive. "There is no question of the power, unity and purposefulness of Germany," she wrote effusively to her mother, adding that Americans surely needed to overcome their knee-jerk, "puritanical" view that dictatorships were "of necessity wrong, evil, unstable." The enthusiasm and pride of the people were "thrilling." Hitler himself, she added on a dreamy, romantic note, "is a very great man, like an inspired religious leader-- and as such rather fanatical-- but not scheming, not selfish, not greedy for power, but a mystic, a visionary who really wants the best for his country and on the whole has rather a broad view."

On August 1, 1936, Charles and Anne attended the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games in Berlin, sitting a few feet away from Adolf Hitler. As the band played "Deutschland über alles," blond- haired little girls offered bouquets of roses to the Führer, the delighted host of the international games. Theodore Lewald, the head of the German Organizing Committee, declared the games open, hailing the "real and spiritual bond of fi re between our German fatherland and the sacred places of Greece founded nearly 4,000 years ago by Nordic immigrants." Leaving the following day for Copenhagen, Lindbergh told reporters at the airport that he was "intensely pleased" by what he had observed. His presence in the Olympic Stadium and his warm words about Germany helpfully added to the luster and pride of the Nazis. Also present at the Olympic games, William Shirer overheard people in Nazi circles crow that they had succeeded in "making the Lindberghs 'understand' Nazi Germany."

In truth, Lindbergh had glimpsed a certain unsettling fanaticism in Germany, but, as he reasoned to a friend, given the chaotic situation in Germany after World War I, Hitler's achievements "could hardly have been accomplished without some fanaticism." Not only did he judge that the Führer was "undoubtedly a great man," but that Germany, too, "has more than her share of the elements which make strength and greatness among nations." Despite some reservations about the Nazi regime, Lindbergh believed that the Reich was a "stabilizing factor" in Europe in the 1930s. Another visit to Germany in 1937 confirmed his earlier impressions. German aviation was "without parallel in history"; Hitler's policies "seem laid out with great intelligence and foresight"; and any fanaticism he had glimpsed was offset by a German "sense of decency and value which in many ways is far ahead of our own."

In the late spring of 1938, Lindbergh and his wife moved to the tiny Breton island of Illiec, where Charles could carry on lengthy conversations with his neighbor and mentor, Dr. Alexis Carrel, an award-winning French scientist and eugenicist who instructed the flier in his scientific racism. In his 1935 book Man, the Unknown, Carrel had laid out his theories, his criticism of parliamentary democracy and racial equality. Asserting that the West was a "crumbling civilization," he called for the "gigantic strength of science" to help eliminate "defective" individuals and breeds and prevent "the degeneration of the [white] race." In the introduction to the German edition of his book, he praised Germany's "energetic measures against the propagation of retarded individuals, mental patients, and criminals."

In the fall of 1938, Charles and Anne returned to Germany. In October, at a stag dinner in Berlin hosted by the American ambassador and attended by the Italian and Belgian ambassadors as well as by German aircraft designers and engineers, Goering surprised the aviator by bestowing on him, "in the name of the Führer," Germany's second- highest decoration, a medal-- the Service Cross of the Order of the German Eagle-- embellished with a golden cross and four small swastikas. Lindbergh wore it proudly that evening. Afterward, when he returned from the embassy, he showed the medal to Anne, who correctly predicted that it would become an "albatross."

The Lindberghs wanted to spend the winter in Berlin, and Anne even found a suitable house in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee. They returned to Illiec to pack up for the move, but changed their plans when they learned of Kristallnacht. "My admiration for the Germans is constantly being dashed against some rock such as this," Lindbergh lamented in his diary, expressing dismay at the persecution of Jews at the hands of Nazi thugs. Concerned that their taking up residence in Berlin might cause "embarrassment" to the German and American governments, he and Anne rented an apartment in Paris instead. And yet, Lindbergh's deep admiration for Germany was not seriously dampened. On the contrary, crossing the border from Belgium into Germany in December 1938, Lindbergh was captivated by the fine-looking young German immigration officer whose "air of discipline and precision," he wrote, was "in sharp contrast to the easygoing pleasantness of Belgium and France." Germany still offered the striking image of the virility and modern technology he prized. The spirit of the German people, he told John Slessor, a deputy director in Britain's Air Ministry, was "magnificent"; he especially admired their refusal to admit that anything was impossible or that any obstacle was too great to overcome. Americans, he sighed, had lost that strength and optimism. Strength was the key to the future. It appeared eminently rational and fair to Charles Lindbergh that Germany should dominate Europe because, as he wrote, "no system . . . can succeed in which the voice of weakness is equal to the voice of strength."

In April 1939, Lindbergh returned to the United States, his wife and two young sons following two weeks later. A few years earlier he had discussed with his British friends the possibility of relinquishing his American citizenship, but now he decided that if there was going to be a war, he would remain loyal to America. Even so, on the same day that he and Anne discussed moving back to America, he confessed in his diary that, of all the countries he had lived in, he had "found the most personal freedom in Germany." Moreover, he still harbored "misgivings" about the United States; critical of the shortsightedness and vacillation" of democratic statesmen, he was convinced that, in order to survive in the new totalitarian world, American democracy would have to make "great changes in its present practices."

Back on American soil in April, Lindbergh immediately launched into a tireless round of meetings with scientists, generals, and government officials, spreading the word about the remarkable advances in aviation he had seen in Germany and pushing for more research and development of American air and military power. Though he believed in American isolation, he also believed in American preparedness.

On April 20, 1939, Lindbergh had a busy day in Washington: first a meeting with Secretary of War Harry Woodring and then one with President Roosevelt at the White House. After waiting for forty-five minutes, the aviator entered the president's office. "He is an accomplished, suave, interesting conversationalist," Lindbergh wrote later that day in his diary. "I liked him and feel that I could get along with him well." But he suspected that they would never agree on "many fundamentals" and moreover sensed that there was "something about him I did not trust, something a little too suave, too pleasant, too easy. . . . Still, he is our President," Lindbergh concluded. He would try to work with him, he noted, cautiously adding that "I have a feeling that it may not be for long."

Emerging after half an hour from a side exit of the executive mansion, Lindbergh found himself besieged by photographers and reporters. The boisterous scene was "disgraceful," the camera- shy aviator bitterly judged. "There would be more dignity and self-respect among African Savages." After their meeting, neither Lindbergh nor the White House would shed any light on what had been discussed. Rumors would later surface that, at that April meeting or several months later, the president had offered the aviator a cabinet appointment, but such rumors were never substantiated.

From the White House that April day, Lindbergh went to a session of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) and spoke about the importance of establishing a program to develop technologically advanced aircraft. While he backed the NACA's recommendation that the government allocate $10 million for a West Coast research center, not even that represented sufficient progress in Lindbergh's mind. It would still leave the United States "far behind a country like Germany in research facilities," he wrote in his diary. "We could not expect to keep up with the production of European airplanes as long as we were on a peacetime basis."

Lindbergh was unrelenting in his message about military preparedness. One scientist who listened carefully to him was Vannevar Bush, the chairman of the NACA and head of the Carnegie Institution, a research organization in Washington. After several more meetings that spring, the two men agreed that a plan was needed to revive the NACA. Bush "soaked up" Lindbergh's opinions, wrote Bush's biographer G. Pascal Zachary. Indeed, so impressed was Bush that he offered Lindbergh the chairmanship or vice chairmanship of the NACA-- an offer he aviator declined. Early in 1940 Bush received another report from Lindbergh that repeated his alarm about a serious lack of engine research facilities in the United States and called for "immediate steps to remedy this deficiency."

Deeply concerned after reading Lindbergh's recommendations, Bush drafted a proposal for the creation of a National Defense Research Council (NDRC), an organization that would supervise and fund the work of American engineers and scientists. On June 12, 1940, Bush met for the first time with President Roosevelt in the Oval Office. He handed him his memo--four short paragraphs on a single sheet of paper. It was enough, one of Bush's colleagues later wrote, to convince the president of the need to harness technology for possible war. Taking out his pen, he wrote on the memo the magical words, "OK-- FDR."

During the war, two thirds of the nation's physicists would be working under Vannevar Bush. One of the secret projects he supervised until 1943, when it was turned over to the army, was known as Section S1. The S1 physicists sought to unlock energy from the fission of atoms of a rare isotope of uranium. And among the starting places for that work as well as for Bush's creation of the NDRC were his informative and disturbing conversations with Charles Lindbergh.

In June 1940, as France fell to Nazi troops and planes, Lindbergh turned to memories of his father for reassurance and wisdom. "Spent the evening reading Father's Why Is Your Country at War?" he wrote in his diary. That 1917 book justified the son's alarm at the prospect of America's entry into another European war. Charles Lindbergh, Sr., a progressive Minnesota Republican who died in 1924, had served in the House of Representatives from 1907 to 1917. His young son, Charles, ran errands and addressed letters for him and occasionally was seen in the House gallery, watching his father on the floor below. Although Lindbergh, Sr., had been a follower of Theodore Roosevelt, on the question of American participation in the First World War, he and the bellicose TR parted company.

Why Is Your Country at War? was a long- winded, turgid antiwar tract, arguing that the United States had been drawn into the war by the machinations of "cowardly politicians," wealthy bankers, and the Federal Reserve Bank. The senior Lindbergh did not oppose the violence of war per se. Rather, this midwestern agrarian railed against the injustice of a war organized and promoted as a for-profit enterprise by the "wealth grabbers" of Wall Street, people like the Morgans and the Rockefellers. Ironically, the men of the "power elite" whom he most despised might have included his son's future father- in-law, Dwight Morrow, a Morgan partner-- though Lindbergh, Jr., later told an interviewer that he believed that his father and Dwight Morrow would probably have liked each other. At bottom, the elder Lindbergh's screed was a rambling, populist, socialist primer that offered radical remedies for the twin evils of war and capitalism.

When his book appeared in print, Lindbergh, Sr., had to defend himself--not against the charge that he was anticapitalist, which would have been true, but rather against the charge that he was pro- German. He was hung in effigy and taunted as a "friend of the Kaiser." Though there was nothing pro-German in the book, the accusations contributed to his defeat when he ran for governor of Minnesota in 1918. "If you are really for America first," he wrote in his own defense, "then you are classed as pro-German by the big press[es] which are supported by the speculators."

Like his father, Charles Lindbergh, Jr., would also face allegations that he was pro-German. But in his case the indictment rang true.

In the aviator's mind, Germany had it made. In England there was "organization without spirit," he would tell a radio audience in August 1940. "In France there was spirit without organization; in Germany there were both." Indeed, the more Lindbergh had lived among the English people, the less confidence he had in them. They struck him, he wrote, as unable to connect to a "modern world working on a modern tempo." And sadly, he judged that it was too late for them to catch up, "to bring back lost opportunity." Britain's only hope, as he once mentioned to his wife, was to learn from the Germans and to adopt their methods in order to survive. Nor did he have confidence or respect for democracy in the United States. On the American continent, he felt surrounded by mediocrity. Writing in his diary in the summer of 1940, he bemoaned the decline of American society--"the superficiality, the cheapness, the lack of understanding of, or interest in, fundamental problems." And making the problems worse were the Jews. "There are too many places like New York already," he wrote, alluding to that city's Jewish population. "A few Jews add strength and character to a country, but too many create chaos. And we are getting too many."

Was Lindbergh a Nazi? He was "transparently honest and sincere," remarked Sir John Slessor, the Royal Air Force marshal who met several times with Lindbergh. It was Lindbergh's very "decency and naiveté," Slessor later said, that convinced him that the aviator was simply "a striking example of the effect of German propaganda." One of Lindbergh's acquaintances, the journalist and poet Selden Rodman, also tried to explain the aviator's affinity for Nazi Germany. "Perhaps it is the conservatism of his friends and the aristocratic racial doctrines of Carrel that have made him sympathetic to Nazism," Rodman wrote. "Perhaps it is the symbolism of his lonely flight and the terrible denouement of mass-worship and the kidnapping that have driven him to the unpopular cause because it is unpopular; that always makes the Byronic hero spurn fame and fortune for guilt and solitary persecution."

For his part, Lindbergh knew that many of his views were unpopular in certain circles, but, as he told a nationwide radio audience in 1940, "I would far rather have your respect for the sincerity of what I say than attempt to win your applause by confining my discussion to popular concepts." Mistaking sincerity for intelligence and insight, he considered himself a realist who grasped that German technological advances had profoundly and irrevocably altered the balance of power in Europe. The only issue, he once explained to Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, was "whether this change will be peaceably accepted, or whether it must be tested by war." Priding himself on his clear- eyed understanding of military strength, he darkly predicted in June 1940, before the Battle of Britain had even begun, that the end for England "will come fast." The playwright Robert Sherwood, whom FDR would draft in the summer of 1940 to join his speechwriting team, may have come closest to the truth about Lindbergh. The aviator, he dryly commented, had "an exceptional understanding of the power of machines as opposed to the principles which animate free men." As Sherwood suggested, Lindbergh may simply have been naive about politics, ignorant about history, uneducated in foreign policy and national security, and deluded by his infatuation with German technology and vigor. Perhaps he did not fully appreciate, Sherwood said, the extent to which the German people "are now doped up with the cocaine of world revolution and the dream of world domination."

Despite his exuberant enthusiasm for Germany, his disenchantment with democracy, the zealous applause he received from fascists in the United States and in Germany, his admiration for the racial ideas of Alexis Carrel, his increasingly extremist and anti- Semitic speeches, and the fact that his simplistic views mirrored Nazi propaganda in the United States, Lindbergh seemed to want what he believed was best for America. And yet Franklin Roosevelt may have been instinctively correct in his own less nuanced view.

"I am absolutely convinced that Lindbergh is a Nazi," FDR said melodramatically to his secretary of the treasury and old Dutchess County neighbor and friend, Henry Morgenthau, in May 1940, two days after Lindbergh's May 19 speech. "If I should die tomorrow, I want you to know this." The president lamented that the 38-year-old flier "has completely abandoned his belief in our form of government and has accepted Nazi methods because apparently they are efficient."

Others in the White House shared that assessment. Lindbergh, Harold Ickes sneered, pretentiously posed as a "heavy thinker" but never uttered "a word for democracy itself." The aviator was the "Number 1 Nazi fellow traveler," Ickes said. The delighted German embassy wholeheartedly agreed. "What Lindbergh proclaims with great courage," wrote the German military attaché to his home office in Berlin, "is certainly the highest and most effective form of propaganda." In other words, why would Germany need a fifth column in the United States when it had in its camp the nation's hero, Charles Lindbergh?


This is an excerpt from 1940: FDR, Willkie, Lindbergh, Hitler--the Election amid the Storm, by Susan Dunn, published by Yale University Press, 2013.

    
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