Master Feed : The Atlantic

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• How Power Corrupts the Mind
• Why Christina Romer Should Be the Next Fed Chair
• The Rise and Fall of China's Great Railway Boss
• The Real-World Consequences of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl Cliché
• Happy Birthday, Sliced Bread! The 'Greatest Thing' Turns 85 This Week
• Why Washington Will Have No Allies in Egypt
• The Intoxicating Fear of Language Immersion
• The Happiest Moments of People's Lives, Shared on Twitter
• The Most Effective Recent Presidents: George W. Bush and Jimmy Carter?
• Syrians Recover From War Wounds in Under-Funded Rehab Centers
• The Spitzer Myth: Sex Scandals Are Not Political Poison
• How a Deadly Explosive, When 3D Printed, Could Be Life-Saving
• The Battle for the U.S. Economy's Future: Cars and Houses vs. Washington
• Virtual Plastic Surgery Apps Come to China
• It's Frustratingly Rare to Find a Novel About Women That's Not About Love
• Intimacy in an Iron Lung
• 'That's My Middle-West': The Most Dazzling Paragraph of <i>The Great Gatsby</i>
• Do High Altitudes Shape Languages?
• The Surveillance-Internet Complex
• The <i>New</i> New Naturalism in the Era of 'Processed' Relationships
• Newsroom Diversity: A Casualty of Journalism's Financial Crisis
• The Great Wall of Texas: How the U.S. Is Repeating One of History's Great Blunders
• Here Are the Countries Where People Are Most Likely to Pay Bribes
• Late-Night Comedy Roundup: Joe Biden Sends Yoda Fan Mail
• The 2 Supreme Court Cases That Could Put a Dagger in Organized Labor

How Power Corrupts the Mind Posted: 09 Jul 2013 02:57 PM PDT (Carolyn P Speranza / Flickr) While at Columbia University, Andy J. Yap set up a simple experiment. After manipulating his subjects into powerful or weak states (in the lab, psychologists are the most powerful ones of all), Yap asked them to guess the height and weight of others both in person and from photographs. "When people feel powerful or feel powerless, it influences their perception of others," said Yap, who is now a postdoctoral researcher at MIT.  According to their understanding, we judge the power of others relative to our own: When we feel powerful, others appear less so --and powerlessness and smallness often go together in our minds.  It is true that CEOs tend to be taller than the average person, and there are estimates that for each inch a person is above average height, they receive $789 more a year. Sure enough, in the study, the powerful people judged others to be shorter than they really are. Yap's conclusion nicely illustrates what we've always known anecdotally: Power gets to our heads. A decade of research on power and behavior show there are some predictable ways people react to power, which can be simply defined as the ability to influence others. While power in governments and across the world can come at incredible costs, in a lab, it's surprisingly simple. Asking a person to recall a time he or she felt powerful can get them in the state of mind. There's also the aptly named "dictator game," in which a participant is made powerful by putting them charge of doling out the compensation for another participant.  Researchers have even found you can make someone feel power just by posing them in a dominant, expansive body position. Like athletes, for example: Arms outstretch, back arched. Even blind athletes have been known, upon victory, to strike the same pose. They didn't learn it by seeing anyone do it. There's something fundamental. Power isn't corrupting; it's freeing, says Joe Magee, a power researcher and professor of management at New York University. "What power does is that it liberates the true self to emerge," he says. "More of us walk around with kinds of social norms; we work in groups that exert all pressures on us to conform. Once you get into a position of power, then you can be whoever you are." More from National Journal Obama Offers Christie Shelter from the Storm Are You Really Sure You Want to Block That Nominee? Lawmakers Return to Face Immigration, Student Loans This manifests in several different ways. For one, the powerful are seen to be less likely to take into account the perspective of others. In one experiment participants were primed to feel powerful or not, and then asked to draw the letter "e" on their foreheads. The letter can be drawn so it looks correct to others, or correct to the person drawing. In this case, high-powered people are two to three times more likely to draw an "e" that appears backwards to others. That is, they were more likely to draw a letter that could only be read by themselves. Power lends the power holder many benefits. Powerful people are more likely to take decisive action. In one simple experiment, it was shown that people made to feel powerful were more likely to turn off an annoying fan humming in the room. Power reduces awareness of constraints and causes people act more quickly. Powerful people also tend to think more abstractly, favoring the bigger picture over smaller consequences. Powerful people are less likely to remember the constraints to a goal. They downplay risks, and enjoy higher levels of testosterone (a dominance hormone), and lower levels of cortisol (a stress hormone). "People who are given more power in the lab, they see more choice," Magee says. "They see beyond what is objectively there, the amount of choice they have. More directions for what actions they can take. What it means to have power is to be free of the punishment that one could exert upon you for the thing you did." Which paves the way for another hallmark of the powerful--hypocrisy. Our guts are right about this one. On a survey, powerful study participants indicated that they were less tolerant of cheating than the less powerful. But then when given the opportunity to cheat and take more compensation for the experiment, the powerful caved in. The authors explain how these tendencies can actually perpetuate power structures in society: This means that people with power not only take what they want because they can do so unpunished, but also because they intuitively feel they are entitled to do so. Conversely, people who lack power not only fail to get what they need because they are disallowed to take it, but also because they intuitively feel they are not entitled to it. Where there's hypocrisy, infidelity seems to follow. While stories of politician infidelity are high profile and more therefore salient -- think Mark Sanford flying to South America to be with a lover while telling aides he was hiking the Appalachian trail, or Arnold Schwarzenegger's secret son -- there is evidence that the powerful are more likely to stray into an affair. In a survey of 1,500 professionals, people higher ranked on a corporate hierarchy were more likely to indicate things like "Would you ever consider cheating on your partner?" on a seven-point scale (this was found true for both men and women). Dishonesty and power go hand-in-hand. In his most recent research, Yap found that just by posing people in the outstretched, power position, they would more likely to take more money than entitled for their time. (Posing like this for two minutes was also found to increase testosterone and lower cortisol hormone levels. So if you want to feel powerful, make yourself big.) Though it's not that the powerful are bad people. "There is a tendency for people to assume power holders are uncaring, they're cold, they don't care about the little people," says Pamela Smith, a power researcher at the University of California San Diego. But that's not always the case. It depends on who gets the power. "You put someone in an experiment, temporarily, in a high-powered role, and what you find is that people who say they have pro-social values, the more power they have, the more pro-social they are. The people who say they have more self-centered values tend to be more selfish the more power they have." So what can the most powerful among us do with this information? The researchers I spoke with suggested that it could at least create self-awareness. If we realize, when in power, what it might be doing to our minds, perhaps we can correct ourselves. Perhaps.

Why Christina Romer Should Be the Next Fed Chair Posted: 09 Jul 2013 02:42 PM PDT Congratulations -- we did learn a few things from the 1930s! Just not enough things. As you can see in the chart below from Justin Fox, job losses during the Great Depression dwarfed those during our Great Recession, but job gains have been much slower this time around. Our weak recovery has put us halfway to a lost decade -- and if it continues, our slump could, as Brad DeLong points out, end up being as costly as the 1930s slump. Now, this wasn't supposed to happen. We, or at least Ben Bernanke, were supposed to have studied and learned from history. And we did. Bernanke has been determined not to let the banks fail or prices fall like the Fed did in the 1930s. Back then, the still-new Fed watched as bank runs turned a recession into a depression -- and then into a depression that snatched the "Great" modifier from the 1890s depression. As Irving Fisher explained, debt and deflation fed on themselves in a cycle of mass bankruptcy and unemployment: Financial panic pushed down prices, which pushed down wages, which made it harder to pay back debts, which led to more defaults, which led to even more panic, and so on, and so on.  But this time around the government stopped the vicious circle. First, Congress bailed out the banks. Then it put money in people's pockets with the stimulus. And, meanwhile, the Fed threw money at the economy every way it could: it lent against almost any collateral, cut interest rates to zero (and then promised to keep them there), and bought long-term bonds. This collective wall of money has been enough to prevent a 1930s-style collapse, but not jumpstart much of a recovery. Just look at how flat the blue line has been above.  So why haven't we had a V-shaped recovery like in 1933? Back then, Franklin Roosevelt turned the economy around and fast. Now, some policy mistakes eventually slowed down this turn-around -- and in 1937, actually pushed the economy back into recession -- but the first few years of the recovery were rapid; far more so than anything we've seen the past few years. It was all about a "regime shift". That's how former Council of Economic Advisers chief and University of California-Berkeley professor Christina Romer describes what central banks need to do when things get really bad: they need to make an "aggressive change" that "makes people wake up" and realize "this is a new day."  Of course, back in 1933, it wasn't the Fed that made people realize it was a new day; it was FDR. He devalued the dollar against gold, and, as Mike Konczal points out, announced a very explicit price-level target of restoring pre-crash commodity prices. The result was an almost immediate, and violent, recovery. The Fed hasn't really tried a regime shift this time. Instead, it's been a series of what Romer calls "incremental changes." First, it was QE1 to prevent the end of the financial world as we knew it; then it was QE2 to prevent deflation; then it was Operation Twist to push down longer-term interest rates; then it was QE3 to push down unemployment faster. Now, QE3, with its open-ended bond-buying, is the closest the Fed has come to shifting regimes, but it's only been a half-step. A real regime shift would mean targeting higher inflation or nominal GDP -- but the Fed hasn't increased its inflation projections above 2 percent even with QE3. That's not a new day. That's pretty much the same-old day, just with bond-buying. But it's not easy to start a new day. The Fed can't just say it's a new day. The Fed has to show it's a new day -- and keep showing it. In other words, it can't look back on the monetary world that was. Now, the Fed has had its own Orpheus-moment recently with its tapering talk. It's reversed even its QE3 half-step by saying it thinks it will reduce its monthly bond purchases soon. As Paul Krugman points out, it's not about the economic consequences of the taper. It's about the reputational consequences. It shows the Fed is still a conventional central bank looking for any excuse to stop its bond-buying even though the fundamentals don't justify it. That's why markets have pushed up interest rates despite the Fed saying it won't do so. If the Fed will taper when the data says it shouldn't, why wouldn't it raise rates when it said it wouldn't? The only way the Fed will give us a new day is with new thinking. Fed number two Janet Yellen is the odds-on favorite to replace Bernanke, and would be a very good choice, but Christina Romer would be a better one. Now, Yellen has been quietly pushing the Fed to evolve towards a quasi-NGDP target, but doing so quietly half-defeats the point. Romer understands you have to scream it -- and back it up -- to get people's attention. And you have to keep screaming it -- and keep backing it up -- until it's just background noise. Extremism in pursuit of recovery is no vice. It's necessary.

The Rise and Fall of China's Great Railway Boss Posted: 09 Jul 2013 02:41 PM PDT Former Railways Minister Liu Zhijun, in happier times. Liu received a suspended death sentence for his role in a bribery scandal this year. (AP) Yesterday, Chinese state media reported that former Railways Minister Liu Zhijun received a suspended death sentence for accepting more than $4 million in bribes and helping 11 people receive promotions or lucrative contracts. By Chinese standards, these numbers aren't huge, and Liu seemed, on the surface, to be just another politician felled by a corruption scandal.  But Liu Zhijun wasn't just any politician and his department -- railways -- wasn't just any other portfolio. (Literally: China's rail network even had its own department, separate from the Ministry of Transportation). And though the evolution of China's train system is just one story in the tapestry of the country's economic boom, no other subject better symbolized China's boom -- and the risks associated with it -- than the railways. By any standard, the transformation of China's rail network has been astounding. When Liu Zhijun assumed his post in 2003, he inherited a creaky system affectionately known as the "iron rooster." Though extensive -- after all, it serviced the needs of over a billion people and the world's fourth-largest country by land mass -- Chinese trains were slow, antiquated, and inefficient. Under Liu's direction, and the enormous financial backing of the state, China embarked on a high-speed rail construction project unmatched in scope and ambition around the world. Consider this: Until 2011, the train linking Beijing and Shanghai took no less than 10 hours, and usually much longer than that.  Now it just takes four. The train from Shanghai to Chengdu, capital of distant Sichuan Province, once required an arduous 30 hours. Now, this trip needs only 10. By last year, high-speed trains in China criss-crossed over 5,000 miles of land in the country, more than anywhere else in the world.  China's rail explosion hasn't gone unnoticed elsewhere in the world. President Obama earmarked a record $8 billion for high-speed rail as part of the $787 billion stimulus package enacted in 2009, encouraging rail backers that, finally, the car-loving United States would finally embrace passenger rail. It hasn't happened. And while American politicians bickered and Tea Party activists roared their disapproval, China's high-speed rail plan continued apace, prompting the president to mention Chinese trains in his 2011 State of the Union address. The system that "Great Leap" Liu, so named for his boundless ambition, neatly encapsulated China's march to prosperity. But beneath China's great railway expansion was a dark underbelly: there were reports of rushed construction deadlines, shady deals, and corners cut. As long as the trains kept running, nobody seemed to mind. But then on a summer night in 2011, two high-speed trains collided near the city of Wenzhou, killing 40 and injuring nearly 200. Beijing's propagandists rushed to quash the news, burying the explosive story in official media. But it was too late: passengers on the scene photographed and tweeted accounts of the crash, and within days China's government faced its worst public relations incident in years. The Wenzhou collision was officially an accident -- the result of lightning striking a faulty signal box. But it was difficult to escape the sense that corruption played a part. By then, Great Leap Liu was already out of the picture, felled by his bribery scandal, but soon China quietly scaled back its ambitions for high-speed rail. Trains reduced their maximum speed by 50 kilometers by an hour. 70 percent of projects were delayed and suspended in 2012. China, a country used to finishing its projects ahead of schedule, was suddenly wondering if its investment in high-speed rail was even worth it. Indeed, this skittishness toward high-speed rail, almost unthinkable during Liu Zhijun's heyday, is indicative of a new, more tentative mood in China. President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang have warned that the economy will slow in the coming years, and have hinted that mid-level officials will no longer be judged solely on their ability to foster growth. In addition, the new regime has vowed to tackle corruption, a problem that the former Premier Wen Jiabao judged to be an existential threat to Communist Party rule. Many of these changes are symbolic -- Xi, for example, has cracked down on extravagant banquets and has asked China's politicians to consider carpooling -- but he has also tossed a few big-shot offenders in prison.  Will it work? Already, there are signs that China's ingenuous politicians have discovered ways to evade Xi's new austerity measures, and the Party still dutifully quashes grass-roots movements against corruption. Furthermore, arresting officials doesn't change the fact that, in China's hierarchical system, politicians are not held accountable by the public they serve and thus have little incentive to play by the rules. One thing is for sure -- no Railway Minister will ever amass Liu Zhijun's power again. That's because in March, the Chinese government decided to split the powerful institution in half, moving some functions over to the State Railway Administration under the Ministry of Transportation, while a new company called China Railway Corp. assumed responsibility for commercial functions. The breakup has a number of financial implications, but also sends a message that Xi Jinping did not want to throw Liu in prison just to see another crook take his place. Few expect China to actually put Liu to death: Like most bureaucrats who receive a suspended sentence, he will likely serve a prison sentence instead. But as he stood before a judge, the once-powerful minister apologized -- in a nod to President Xi's new slogan -- for failing to achieve "The Chinese Dream." But for a significant period in China's recent past, no other man embodied it more.

The Real-World Consequences of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl Cliché Posted: 09 Jul 2013 02:29 PM PDT Fox Searchlight Pictures The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is a well-known pop-culture cliché. The term was coined by critic Nathan Rabin in his review of 2005's Elizabethtown to describe the cheerful, bubbly flight attendant played by Kirsten Dunst. Since then, this character type has been analyzed everywhere, from XoJane to Slate to the Guardian. A list of film examples of the "Manic Pixie Dream Girl" includes roles played by everyone from Barbra Streisand to Natalie Portman to both Hepburns (Audrey and Katharine) Rabin claimed that the MPDG "exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries." In a recent exploration of the "Manic Pixie Dream Girl" phenomenon, though, the New Statesman's Laurie Penny argued that the ubiquity of this stock character in mainstream movies has real-world implications. "Men grow up expecting to be the hero of their own story," Penny writes. "Women grow up expecting to be the supporting actress in somebody else's." In Penny's view, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl is not just an onscreen fantasy--she's a template for young women's lives. "Fiction creates real life," Penny notes; "Women behave in ways that they find sanctioned in stories written by men." For Penny (and for many who commented on her piece), Manic Pixie Dream Girlhood served as a model for how to live as a teen and early 20-something. This is a problem, according to Penny, because women "deserve to be able to write our own stories rather than exist as supporting characters in the stories for men." The end of the MPDG would be good news for men, too. The Manic Pixie Dream Girl may serve as a catalyst for male transformation, but in both her real and fictional manifestations, she sends the message that a bright and sensitive young man can only learn to embrace life by falling in love with a woman who sees the dazzling colors and rich complexities he can't. Just as the all-too familiar "Magical Negro" character uses mystical intuitive powers to help white folks tap their God-given potential, the MPDG reminds men that they need (and, more precisely, are entitled to) a women's inspiration and encouragement to reach their own true destiny. Related Story It's Frustratingly Rare to Find a Novel About Women That's Not About Love "For me, Manic Pixie Dream Girl was the story that fit," writes Laurie Penny, admitting that she had the "basic physical and personality traits... the raw materials" to live into the part. I, on the other hand, had the requisite qualities to be the boy who fell in love with MPDGs. I was shy, un-athletic, bookish and pudgy. I was horny, lonely, and brooding. I fell for clever, impulsive, short-haired brunettes. I kept my longings to myself, wanting to spare them the awkwardness of making the "I'm flattered but I don't want to spoil our friendship" speech, and wanting to spare myself what I correctly imagined would be the excruciating humiliation of having to hear it. Not old enough to buy cigarettes or vote, I was well on my way to being one of what Penny calls the "mournful men-children" who attach themselves to the bright, the unconventionally pretty, the eager-to-please. Decades before the term was coined, a Manic Pixie Dream Girl gave me my first proper kiss. Thirty years ago this month, while visiting relatives in Austria, my Viennese grandmother introduced me to Bettina, one of the many teens to whom she gave private English lessons. Bettina was six months older than I was; dark haired and impulsive. On our first date, we went to see La Cage aux Folles with German subtitles; on our second, we went skinny-dipping in the Old Danube; on our third, we smoked hash, listened to the Sex Pistols, and read Paul Celan aloud with her friends from an anarchist youth collective. We didn't sleep together, but she taught me to open my mouth when I was kissing, and to cup her face in my hand as my tongue touched hers. After a fourth date and hours of hiking and making out in the Lainzer Tiergarten, I asked if I was her boyfriend. She laughed, shook her head, and decades ahead of her time, gave a short but impassioned speech about how monogamy was the enemy of true love. By the time I left Vienna, I was utterly infatuated. For the next two years, we wrote each other long letters two or three times a month. Feeling that my American education wasn't up to par, Bettina sent me reading, listening, and viewing lists in both German and English. She turned me on to the Lessings (Gotthold and Doris), the Velvet Underground, and Oskar Kokoschka. I read and listened to everything she suggested whether I liked it or not. I rarely reciprocated with my own offerings, fearful she'd find my own tastes (Stephen King, The Police) pedestrian, unimaginative and thoroughly disappointing. Rabin defined the Manic Pixie Dream Girl as a muse whose primary role is to teach and transform a young man. As contemporary a trope as it feels, it's as old as Dante with his vision of being guided through paradise by his saintly Beatrice. Bettina was my guide, and as much as my adolescent self thought it adored her, I thought less about her and more about how it was she made me feel. Though I questioned whether I was good enough for her, and I felt lucky that she'd chosen me, I didn't question her role as change agent in my life. It was a one-sided relationship not because I was any more selfish than your average teen boy, but because I took it for granted that this brilliant young woman knew the world better than I did. As unstable as she may be, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl not only senses a young man's potential in a way he can't, she intuitively knows how to lead him to his destiny. She knows him better than he knows himself, or so he believes. That convenient assumption allows the young man both to adore the MPDG and to avoid any responsibility for reciprocity. How can he be expected to give anything back when she has this magical intuition about the world that so vastly exceeds his own? Not long after we both started at university in our respective countries, Bettina's letters stopped coming. I was in love with someone else, but I missed my exchanges with her. My notes went without reply; I only had an address; no phone number, and in the mid-1980s, of course no Internet through which to follow up. I asked my grandmother, who said she'd also lost touch with Bettina. Finally, one day in 1987, a black-bordered card came in the mail. It was a Todesanzeige, a death announcement. Just 20, Bettina had committed suicide by jumping out a fifth-floor window. I later learned from my grandmother that Bettina had suffered from depression for years, something she'd never told me. Something, of course, about which I'd never asked. I'd taken her self-sufficiency for granted. Dante's Beatrice also died young, at 24. The great poet only met her three times in real life, but in his writing, transformed her into perhaps the original Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Dante was perhaps self-aware enough to recognize the gap between the real Beatrice Portinari and this icon whom he called his "beatitude" and his "salvation." He called her la gloriosa donna della mia mente: "the glorious lady of my mind." When I studied Dante in college, the semester after Bettina's death when I was still moping and ostentatiously mourning, I came across that line in a commentary. I realized that though I'd had far more intimacy with Bettina than Dante had had with Beatrice, I was doing the same thing. "We're not fantasies, and we weren't made to save you." So Laurie Penny tells men on behalf of her fellow recovering Manic Pixie Dream Girls, those who unlike Beatrice or Bettina will live to become so much more interesting as they age and deepen. Becoming more interesting, however, will mean becoming less of the "submissive, exploitable, transcendent ideal" about whom so many young men fantasize. Here's the challenge for men in general, filmmakers and writers in particular. We need women who are lead characters, but that's only part of the equation: we deserve to see men who love these women for the complicated, messy, decidedly non-ethereal people they are. That process has already started; as Clementine Ford points out in Daily Life, the growing influence of feminist writers and actresses like Lena Dunham, Ellen Page, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler means more girls than ever are growing up with inspiration to "become their own heroes." In real life, men can and do learn to love women whose lives don't revolve around catalyzing male transformation. In art as well as life, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl ideal exists because too many men remain intimidated by women who will not revolve their lives around our needs and our growth. We need to let go of the glorious ladies of our minds, and start being fully present with very real women with minds of their own.

Happy Birthday, Sliced Bread! The 'Greatest Thing' Turns 85 This Week Posted: 09 Jul 2013 01:51 PM PDT On July 7, 1928, Missouri's Chillicothe Baking Company made history by selling the first wrapped package of sliced bread in history. What took so long? It starts with the whole wrapping-the-loaf thing. Sliced bread goes stale remarkably quickly, as anybody who's forgotten to tie that little wire thing around a plastic bread bag has learned a million times already. So the trick is inventing a machine that cuts the bread finely while efficiently and securely wrapping the entire loaf. In 1912, Otto Frederick Rohwedder, a jeweler from Missouri, solved the problem. He invented prototype of a machine that could both slice and wrap a loaf of bread ... only to see his invention destroyed in a fire. Fifteen years and a few tweaks later, he filed this patent, the first ever for a "MACHINE FOR SLICING AN ENTIRE LOAF OF BREAD AT A SINGLE LOCATION." At first bakers were not impressed, Don Voorhees explained in Why Do Donuts Have Holes?: Fascinating Facts About What We Eat And Drink. The machine failed in aesthetics where it succeeded in convenience, "[producing] loaves that did not sell because they were sloppy looking." Sliced bread needed a makeover before families realized how great it was ... Enter one Gustav Papendick. The St. Louis baker brought Rohwedder's second machine in 1928 and perfected it. His improved design packaged the sliced loaves in cardboard trays, keeping the bread neat and orderly, and wrapped it in wax paper. The first commercial bakery to try a bread-slicing machine was the Chillicothe Baking Company in Chillicothe, Missouri. Sales weren't fast and furious, though. Bakeries were skeptical about the public's acceptance of presliced bread. They thought that the drawbacks of having to buy new equipment and having to wrap the bread right away to keep the slices together might not be worth the trouble. After all, what if this pre sliced bread thing was just a passing fad? Would people really buy bread that would get stale faster just so they wouldn't have to slice it themselves? Apparently the bakers weren't very farsighted. Presliced bread went national when Wonder introduced it to the country in 1930. You know the rest. Except for a brief ban on presliced bread at the end of the Second World War (to preserve both food and metal for soldiers), the invention stimulated America's love affair with loaves. And as Americans ate more breads, Voorhees noted, they also ate more spreads: butter, jams, jellies, and so on. So, two business lessons from sliced bread for the road. First, all innovation is tweaking. Rohwedder's prototype couldn't sell until Papendick perfected it, and presliced bread didn't go mainstream until Wonder Bread took it national two years later. Second, never make a financial bet against American laziness. Bakers who thought American families wouldn't want a service that saved them seconds at the kitchen counter clearly didn't understand the time demands of American families.

Why Washington Will Have No Allies in Egypt Posted: 09 Jul 2013 12:30 PM PDT Mohamed ElBaradei (Reuters) Let's get one thing straight: America will likely have no "allies" in the new Egyptian government, no matter who emerges on top. There has been much hopefulness, for example, surrounding the on-again, off-again plans to appoint Mohamed ElBaradei, the Westernized and well-spoken former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, as interim prime minister. But ElBaradei, during his 12 years as IAEA chief, proved a constant irritation to Washington, and in 2011 even urged an international criminal investigation of George W. Bush and his top officials over their "needless war" in Iraq. That latter criticism may not be unreasonable, given the now-incontrovertible evidence that Bush did launch a disastrous, bloody war on false grounds, and that ElBaradei, among others, had proof of this before the March 2003 invasion (the IAEA was being granted unrestricted access to Saddam Hussein's sites at the time, and ElBaradei knew that no WMD had been found). During the last decade a defiant ElBaradei was also often the voice of reason on Iran's nuclear ambitions--to the outrage of the Bush administration--cautioning in 2007 that he had seen no evidence of "an active weaponization program" (again, he was later vindicated by a U.S. National Intelligence Estimate). But the larger point is that ElBaradei, no matter how comparatively favorable he may look now as a secular technocrat (particularly against radical Islamist alternatives), is never going to be "America's guy" in Cairo. As the future of Egypt hangs in the balance, neither ElBaradei nor the odd mix of authoritarian-democratic voices emerging in Egypt and the Arab world have any patience for Washington's meddling. They are largely beyond our control and will stay that way. More from National Journal Did a Russian Lawmaker's Deleted Tweet Just Reveal Snowden's Next Move? Mohammed Morsi's Rule in Egypt Spirals to Spectacular End Political Cybersquatter Strikes Again Despite the debate going on in Washington over what the Obama administration could or should do to shape the outcome, we're kidding ourselves if we think we can do more than affect things on the margins, even with $1 billion-plus in aid as "leverage." The Egyptian army's ouster of Mohamed Morsi, Robert Satloff wrote in The Washington Post last week, "gives the Obama administration that rarest of opportunities in foreign policy: a second chance." Not really. This is, for the most part, a silly, trumped-up discussion. Certainly, the administration could have done a better job of standing up for its principles consistently during the two-and-a-half-year course of the "Arab Spring." Though U.S. Ambassador Anne Patterson presciently warned ousted President Mohamed Morsi, in a speech back in February, that he was on the verge of failing economically and politically, she also became the Messenger of Hedged Bets, finding herself blamed on both the secular and Islamist sides for trying to work with both. In this Patterson was only reflecting the wishes of President Obama, who appeared to support Morsi in the shallow, realpolitik way he once dealt with Hosni Mubarak--seeking to cultivate a friendly government-to-government alliance while paying lip service to democracy and human rights. But now American ideas, having saturated the globe as much as McDonald's hamburgers and Disney movies, are coming back to haunt U.S. policy-makers, democracy foremost among them. But that was really just more of the same American confusion. And frankly, it's not all Obama's fault. He, like his predecessors, is trying to resolve the direct contradiction between America's current interests as the globe's only stabilizing superpower and America's historical role as the globe's foremost champion of democracy and universal rights. On one hand, as the overseer of a stable international system, the United States has become largely a nation of, by and for the status quo. But too often we find that, as in the Arab world, the opponents of the status quo are quoting our own ideals back to us. In June 2002, for example, Bush declared that democracy was the answer to the ills in the Palestinian territories; when Hamas won the elections four years later, Washington discovered that it had inadvertently set into motion utter paralysis of the peace process. In 2003, America launched a war to set up a model Arab democracy, only to find that in the civil war and possible partitioning of Iraq (and possibly Syria too), participants like the Kurds have rediscovered Woodrow Wilson's promise of self-determination from nearly a century ago. Thus the further fissuring of the old Middle East - which will almost certainly lead to more bloodshed -- may be fueled too by American ideals. All this is happening because, to an odd degree, America is a victim of its own success. In the last century the United States did an admirable job of vanquishing fascism and spending (most) communist regimes out of existence. We succeeded not just because we were militarily or economically stronger, but because we prided ourselves on having stronger ideas. Not only did we want to defeat our enemies; we insisted they adopt our philosophy as well, pursuing what Henry Kissinger once called the "age-old American dream of a peace achieved by the conversion of the adversary." But now American ideas, having saturated the globe as much as McDonald's hamburgers and Disney movies, are coming back to haunt U.S. policy-makers, democracy foremost among them. It is a kind of ideological blowback. Yes, there is a lot to the thrashed-out idea that democracies, in the long run, don't make war on each other, that the more democratic the Arab world becomes, the more likely it is to integrate with the global economy, and that all this will be good for the United States. In the long run. Let's hope that happens, though it may take decades. But if it does, we will have little to do with it.

The Intoxicating Fear of Language Immersion Posted: 09 Jul 2013 12:12 PM PDT Gora Mbengue's painting of Sheikh Ahmadou Bamba (National Museum of African Art) So I went off to face the elephant today, still a little woozy and weak from yesterday's adventures. But as much as I love the food, and as much I love the fashion, and as much as I love the river, the weather, the small streets like sanctified alleys, the kids who roll papers, the old people who will not surrender the street and are not asked to, the Parisians' galactic disregard for the science public health, I came to Paris to learn French. If you are studying a language, you eventually reach a point where learning the rules--divorced from any applicable environment, excised from hot, random reality--becomes insufficient. It is one thing for me to run through the conjugations of the verb vouloir. But to, in the moment, say "Ils ont voulu plus d'argent" without thinking, without conjugating, without searching, is something else. It's the space between theory and practice, between diagramming a safety blitz and seeing whether you actually like hitting and being hit. And I got hit today. Four hours of punishing French. Plus, as I discovered, the groups actually start at the beginning of the month, so I was a week behind. Plus I missed yesterday. The professor looked at me doubtingly and said, "Vous connaissez le passé composé n'est pas?" When I answered "Oui," she said "Whew" and kept trucking. I need to practice. I lost my language in these last few weeks of American travel. I should be practicing right now. But I am here with you. My teacher was nice but all business. American French teachers have a way of slowing down the language for you, so that you catch every word. No dice over here. Madame Pascal spoke like the people on the Parisian streets. Catch up or get run over. Here is something else--I am old. The average student in my class is about 19, and there were some as young as 17 (I think.) I'd seen the same thing in Switzerland, where I met kids whose parents sent them away to Montreux for whole weeks to learn French. I think back to what I would have done at 16 had my parents sent me away. They could barely send me to school without complaints. In France, I would have settled for nothing less than a second revolution. (Or is it the third?) But I am old now. There were always two parts of me. Gandalf Ta-Nehisi and Peregrin Ta-Nehisi. Gandalf Ta-Nehisi always knows what's wise and correct. Peregrin Ta-Nehisi is all chicken and beer. Peregrin Ta-Nehisi runs up the credit cards, leaving Gandalf to pay them off. Peregrin stays out drinking till four, then shows up for pancakes a Veselka at five AM. Gandalf wakes up at six, takes the boy to school, then nurses his hangover with chicken patties and ginger beer. For a great many years Peregrin has had his way. Now Gandalf is rising and a new power stalks the land. But Gandalf is grey, son. And these kids today are magic. Their brains shift through languages as though shifting lanes on an empty highway. With five lanes. Because all of them are bilingual, and none of them are American. They know their native language (Japanese, Spanish, Italian) and are now about the business of picking up a third. They are killing us, son. For at least half of the class today, I was lost. And no one would slow down. My wife was in another class and basically got the same treatment. Afterwards we met, walked down Rue de Rennes and bought some cake, because we had earned this. I thought about stopping for beer. But I had to come talk to you. And more, Paris will vanquish your bank account, your credit cards, and even menace that 401k if you are not watchful. As we walked my wife gave me that "The fuck have you gotten me into?" look. Whatever. She likes it. She knew what she was doing when she first came here, and insisted I follow. And we both like it. We both like being hit and hitting. There is something about being down, about being lost, about being estranged that is narcotic. It is that hit of fear you get the first time you swim in the deep end and understand that your feet can not touch the bottom. So I blame it all on my wife. But I specifically blame this post on Jim and Deb Fallows, who are heroic to me and my small family, who are, together, our own Gandalf. I don't want to go into other people's business. But I think it's public information that they have made a life together, raising children and traveling the world. I didn't even know people who knew people who did things like that. And now it is so much of what I want. I blame them for talking to me about it and urging me and Kenyatta on. You can't hear them and not feel the glamour. It is the sorcery of the wide world. It is the song of the wanderers. It is the knowledge of a one-shot life. Who can truly live, hear such music, and decline to dance? Dakar--watch out. We are coming. Again.

The Happiest Moments of People's Lives, Shared on Twitter Posted: 09 Jul 2013 12:04 PM PDT Rob Carlin's happiest moment: holding his twins for the first time (Twitter/@RobCarlinCSN) Imagine the happiest moment of your life. Maybe it was your wedding. Or the moment your child was born. Or the moment that child first smiled at you, or grasped your hand. Or maybe it was something else entirely -- that winning goal, that birthday party, that time you two ended up driving to the Grand Canyon just because. That sunrise. That openness. That laughter. This Sunday, the tennis player Andy Murray experienced what had to be one of his own happiest moments when he won Wimbledon -- and he had, in that moment, a rare luxury: that moment was widely photographed. For Murray, happiness was at once fleeting and archived -- a passing feeling that, through the mechanism of the camera, can be framed, or used as an avatar, or otherwise kept for reference and/or nostalgia. And for sports podcaster Steven Bennett, that moment came as he celebrated with his brother after that brother helped to win the NCAA hockey championship.* Which prompted Sports Illustrated writer Richard Deitsch to ask a question: How many of you have a photograph of the single best moment of your life? If so, what a gift. (HT: @sports_casters for thought). -- Richard Deitsch (@richarddeitsch) July 9, 2013 The responses were pretty amazing -- testaments not only to Twitter's power as a platform for sharing, but also to cameras' increasing ubiquity in our lives. We may plan to take pictures at weddings, or during proposals, or after the births of babies; many of life's happiest moments, however, are unexpected and random and weird. The fact that more of us are regularly carrying cameras around with us means that we are newly able to capture those moments -- to make the ephemeral newly permanent. And, then, shareable with Sports Illustrated writers.  Here are some of the responses to Deitsch's question; for more along these lines, see the Storify created by the San Diego Union-Tribune's Matthew Hall. @richarddeitsch Easy.. After 5+ years of infertility meeting our awesome (adopted) daughter. Cc: @Sports_Casters pic.twitter.com/Riyl8i7gDa -- Ryan Nobles (@ryanobles) July 9, 2013 @richarddeitsch @Sports_Casters Yup - one year ago today. pic.twitter.com/jZr4Ota8tm -- David Seawright (@DavidSeawright) July 9, 2013 @richarddeitsch the first day I became a dad. Properly adorned with UM gear... pic.twitter.com/kiDhvll6Zo -- Scott Turken (@Turk0219) July 9, 2013 @richarddeitsch @Sports_Casters Hired a photographer in Paris to snap photos of my proposal pic.twitter.com/TEnM91DNCY -- Ben Walnick (@Wx_Ben) July 9, 2013 @richarddeitsch @Sports_Casters When I had my first grilled cheese pic.twitter.com/z1adfUuhMP -- Andrew Clifford (@QuesoRaton12) July 9, 2013 @richarddeitsch The day I met my wife. Matching T-shirts obviously unplanned (by us anyway). pic.twitter.com/O5JcDtp5vt -- David Dorsey (@DavidADorsey) July 9, 2013 @richarddeitsch This is close. My Grandfather who was a POW in WWII meeting his namesake. pic.twitter.com/hafI9F3lU2 -- Charles James (@Charles_James1) July 9, 2013 @richarddeitsch @Sports_Casters Best moment so far was college graduation--made all the hard work worth it. pic.twitter.com/EYDXfJnwce -- Makayla (@mhipke) July 9, 2013 .@richarddeitsch @sports_casters @cubs At Wrigley with my Dad, circa 1974 pic.twitter.com/mZhy61WYG2 -- Garrett Gosselink (@GGosselink) July 9, 2013 @richarddeitsch This was taken literally at that moment. It's all in the eyes. Holding my 1st born for the 1st time. pic.twitter.com/vWgFEV5gsX -- jeremiah cox (@jeremiahcox) July 9, 2013 @richarddeitsch @Sports_Casters Four-way tie: the day my daughter met her new brother for the first time. pic.twitter.com/1QJ9fmXHmf -- Joe Zavala (@ADTsports) July 9, 2013 @richarddeitsch @Sports_Casters At the Super Bowl with my dad, six weeks before he passed away from leukemia. pic.twitter.com/9mep7kGH1n -- Andrew Rutberg (@AndrewRutberg) July 9, 2013 @richarddeitsch Nice aquarium tour ending with a proposal in the shark tank. pic.twitter.com/olRxd2UTUY -- Drew (@CtownDawgPound) July 9, 2013 @richarddeitsch @Sports_Casters waking up from my liver transplant to watch the giants win the Super Bowl pic.twitter.com/NMFvqXTgpv -- Jer Rutman (@jrutman) July 9, 2013 @richarddeitsch My nephew was born a week before my grandfather died. I took one pic of all 4 generations together. http://t.co/x5jLOiFWG4 -- JP Kirby (@the506) July 9, 2013 @richarddeitsch @sports_casters the night I skipped homework to spend time with my Grammy, one of my last times pic.twitter.com/6o8n2l8fLA -- Joann Villanueva (@joannmarieee) July 9, 2013 @richarddeitsch I came home from Iraq (2nd tour) and got to hug my mom! pic.twitter.com/OuQJSd4ms9 -- Ken (@TheKenChin) July 9, 2013 *I added this sentence after publishing to make clear where Deitsch first got the idea for his question. Thanks to Mike Hayes for the tip.

The Most Effective Recent Presidents: George W. Bush and Jimmy Carter? Posted: 09 Jul 2013 11:30 AM PDT Presidential powerhouses (Reuters) No, you didn't read that wrong: The hapless man from Plains and the man often ranked as one of the worst presidents in history are the two most effective Oval Office residents since Lyndon Johnson -- at least according to one metric. Looking through AEI and Brookings' Vital Statistics on Congress (you can see 5 charts showing how big money created the most polarized Congress in a century here), I came across a fascinating table of data: "Presidential Victories on Votes in Congress, 1953-2012." It's a measure of how often Congress voted with the president divided by the number of votes on which he had taken a clear position. The results are rather surprising: Naturally, LBJ, with his famed ability to cajole, plead, and pressure Congress into doing his will -- honed as Senate majority leader before he moved on to the vice presidency -- fares very well by this measure. But John F. Kennedy scores even better. Of course, Kennedy's numbers are somewhat skewed by his assassination-shortened tenure in office; on the other hand, the report scores 365 votes during the Kennedy Administration, much higher than the 214 in Gerald Ford's abbreviated term. Making Kennedy, Johnson, and Carter's numbers even more impressive is the fact that the sample size per year is unusually high for them. For George W. Bush, however, one of the other highest scorers, there were many fewer votes per year, on average. Meanwhile, President Obama's numbers are, while not very good, perhaps better than expected -- and they edge George H.W. Bush, at least (the two have been compared). But Obama's number seems likely to sink. When he had a Democratic House in 2009 and 2010, he won a stunning 94.4 percent and 88.1 percent of votes there, compared to 31.6 in 2011 and just 19.7 last year. His Senate totals have also slid -- from 98.8 in 2009 to 79.7 in 2012 -- and will get even worse if Democrats lose seats or lose control of the chamber in 2014. Barring a Democratic resurgence in Congress, the average will continue to fall. Now for the caveat -- and it's big one: Who cares? One could view it as a strange coincidence that two of the least-regarded presidents in recent history are also two of the most victorious in Congress. Or one could take it to mean that the obsession among some members of the commentariat with "leadership" -- usually shorthand for getting Congress to vote for something the president wants, regardless of what the substance or long-term effects of that policy might be -- is a misguided and misleading way to assess the quality of a president's tenure. This data doesn't provide enough to decide for sure, but it does seem to offer more ammunition to the latter school than the former. As a quick corollary to that data, here's a table of presidential vetoes, along with attempts to override them -- both of which are in an historical trough.

Syrians Recover From War Wounds in Under-Funded Rehab Centers Posted: 09 Jul 2013 11:28 AM PDT A Free Syrian Army soldier recovers at a rehab hospital in Reyhanli, Turkey from injuries sustained in combat in Syria. He lost an eye and suffered major injuries to his torso. (Jake Naughton) Ala, 13, sits in his wheelchair, shifting uncomfortably from side to side. His father lies on a bed next to him. He looks worn. The skin under his eyes sags. There are four other children in the room, all of them recovering from injuries caused by bombs dropped by President Bashar al-Assad's forces. Unlike many of the patients in the makeshift rehabilitation center in Reyhanli, Turkey, Ala has all of his limbs. It does not feel like it, he says. His arms and legs are attached to his body, but it's hard for him to move them. Ala was playing soccer in the streets with his friends last month when a bomb fell from the sky. Now he has a piece of shrapnel lodged into his upper neck, and it is pinching a nerve in his spine. He cannot walk or hold anything too tightly. His head bobs loosely from side to side when he answers questions. "I want to be a writer, too," Ala says. "But not before Bashar leaves," an older man yells. "Friends? No I don't have friends. Just them," Ala says, flailing his arm to the right, toward the other patients in the room. The other boys in the room are in their beds, heads tilted up toward the small TV on the opposite wall. News of bloodshed in Syria flashes over the screen as dramatic music plays in the background. One boy flips the channel--more news from Syria. He keeps flipping. Finally, he finds a cartoon--a more soothing alternative. "I want to be a writer, too," Ala says. "But not before Bashar leaves," an older man yells from across the room. Everyone looks at the man and then back to the screen. They will watch TV the rest of the day. For more than two years, Turkey has acted as a space for Syrians like Ala to flee the perpetual violence in their country. They come to Turkey to rehabilitate both physically and emotionally -- to heal and to return back to Syria after the war ends. Thousands of Syrians have flooded into refugee camps with their families, where at least they know they will not hear bombs at night. And wounded victims like Ala are recovering from burns and breaks in temporary rehab centers on the border. But with tensions increasing in Ankara, the Turkish government may not have the capacity to both handle the chaos brewing in the streets and help provide for the Syrians at the same time. With government supplies running low, Syrians living in Turkey have already begun caring for themselves. Ghassan Abboud, the owner of Orient TV in Syria, funds this rehab center independently from the Turkish government. There are four rooms in the Orient hospital. The room next to Ala's is painted in pastel blue and faces the mountains thousands of Syrians have crossed on their journey to Turkey. This room is much different--it is filled with the groans of men who were torn from the streets of a war they had made their own. Most of the men in the room fought with the Free Syrian Army in Aleppo before being brought to a hospital in Syria and then transferred to this rehab center in Reyhanli. The men are swapping stories, propped up on their beds. One has his laptop out on the bed. He can only type with one hand. His left leg and his right arm have been sliced off. The man in the bed next to his has both of his arms, but his left leg is distorted--bent and twisted under his right. Out the doorway of this room is a porch where a man sprawls on a couch. His right hand props his head up. A patch covers the space where his right eye would still be if it had not been removed. A white plastic tube spills out of his torso -- attached to it is a bag for his blood. The bag hangs from his body and drapes over the couch. It sits on the floor in front of him where he can see it fill. Almost all of the patients in the hospital are without their families, except for Ala. But most say they do not want to go home to Syria after they heal. They say they want to stay in Turkey where it is safe. Not one patient had their entire family near the hospital: Their mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters travel through the border or come from the camps in Turkey to visit them. Sitting at the entrance of the Orient Hospital are two flags--one FSA and one Turkish--a strange, forced symbol of a partnership that doctors here say does not exist. Recent events in Turkey have made some Syrian refugees, and their doctors, feel that they are not wanted in the country. On May 16, two bombs exploded in the center of Reyhanli, killing 50 people. The investigation is still ongoing, but police have said those responsible were connected to the Syrian government. Large masses of people gathered in the following days to protest the government's stance on the Syrian war--and for opening the borders to hundreds of thousands of Syrians, some of whom are connected to Syrian opposition parties such as the radical al-Nusra front. Earlier this month, violent clashes broke out between police forces and protesters in Taksim Square in Istanbul and in the streets of Ankara. Thousands of people gathered to protest against an approved project to renovate Gezi Park near Taksim Square and replace it with an Ottoman-era military barracks to be used as a shopping mall. All eyes are now on Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan as he scrambles to quell rising dissent in the country. If Turkey continues to experience massive protests, it could choose to focus on domestic reconciliation and close its doors to Syrians. Alexander Aleinikoff, the U.N.'s Deputy High Commissioner for Refugees, has said that it's "absolutely...viewed as a possibility" that Syria's neighboring countries could tighten border controls. If borders close, Syrians could be forced to stay in the war zone without proper medical care. The hospitals in Syria are equipped to treat trauma patients, but there is no room or resources for long-term rehabilitation for patients like those in Orient Hospital. Ala fiddles with a small toy flashlight one woman visiting the hospital gives him. He cannot hold it tight enough to flip it open. He says he will continue to work on his motor functions. He will stay in the center until he can't any longer--until the hospital runs out of money or someone tells him he needs to leave. Finding relative peace in Turkey is not the most ideal situation for Ala. Unlike many of the patients in the hospital, Ala wants to go home and play soccer again with his friends. He does not want to spend his days sitting in a wheelchair flipping back and forth between war and cartoons. But for now, this is his life. Wake up, sit, watch, and wait.

The Spitzer Myth: Sex Scandals Are Not Political Poison Posted: 09 Jul 2013 11:01 AM PDT Brendan McDermid/Reuters Eliot Spitzer is running for office again, just like Anthony Weiner and Mark Sanford before him. This trio of would-be sex-scandal comebacks has prompted many to speculate that Americans are not as shocked by sex scandals as they once were, and that we live in an age that is setting a new bar for shamelessness. As the New York Times put it in the Sunday evening story announcing Spitzer's return: "His re-emergence comes in an era when politicians ... have shown that public disapproval, especially over sexual misconduct, can be fleeting." There seems to be a pervasive sense that sex scandals were once career-killers, and that if Spitzer and Weiner succeed as Sanford did, they will have accomplished something rare indeed. But there are plenty of examples of politicians who weathered the storm of scandal and got reelected, from Louisiana Senator David Vitter, reelected in 2010 with 57 percent of the vote three years after admitting he patronized an escort service, to Bill Clinton, elected president after numerous so-called "bimbo eruptions." Technically, neither Spitzer, Weiner, or Sanford was tossed out of office for his improprieties -- all three resigned or retired. We can't know whether they would have lost had they stood pat. (Being politicians, they likely consulted pollsters who told them things weren't looking good.) But Newt Gingrich's marital infidelities didn't drive him from office; Ted Kennedy declined to resign after Chappaquiddick and never lost a Senate election, though he didn't win the presidency. Back in 1884, Grover Cleveland was elected president despite publicly acknowledging an illegitimate child. After Arkansas Rep. Wilbur Mills was arrested for drunken driving in 1974, an Argentinian stripper jumped out of the car; less than a month later, Mills was reelected with 60 percent of the vote. Rep. Scott DesJarlais of Tennessee was recently reelected despite multiple affairs and a tape recording of the congressman, a medical doctor who opposes abortion rights, pressuring one mistress to have an abortion. There's plenty of precedent for Spitzer et al. to believe voters will see past their abhorrent behavior. But there are also plenty of counter-examples, like Gary Hart, who tried and failed to get past a sex scandal in his 1988 presidential campaign. So which is the exception, and which is the rule? Political scientists have attempted to answer this question, naturally. Scott Basinger, a researcher at the University of Houston, published a study in the Political Research Quarterly last year in which he compared the fates of 237 scandal-tarred members of the House of Representatives from 1973 to 2010. (Democrats accounted for 63 percent of the scandals, Republicans 37 percent, but there were more Democrats than Republicans in Congress over that period.) Basinger looked at all types of scandals, from sex to corruption to campaign-finance violations. Of the congressmen implicated in scandals, 19 percent chose to resign or retire their seats; 8 percent lost in primaries. Both rates were far higher than the average for non-scandal-tarred pols. But 73 percent of disgraced incumbents made it to their next general election, and of those, 81 percent won. On average, scandals cost their subjects 5 percent of the vote. Other research supports Basinger's findings. Researchers have also proven what we intuitively sense: The more time passes post-scandal, the better the politician does. Voters have short memories. Does the public view sex scandals differently than other types of scandals? Basinger looked at this too. Corruption scandals, he found, hurt politicians the most, costing them an average of 7.8 percentage points. Sex scandals and financial scandals (like tax evasion or taking kickbacks) each depressed vote margins by 5.3 points. Scandals involving campaign violations had no statistically significant effect on vote share at all. In sum, voters do seem to care about sex scandals, but not that much. Basinger wonders if some politicians overestimate scandals' potential fallout when they resign right away, like former Rep. Chris Lee, who stepped down the same day he was revealed to have sent shirtless pictures of himself to a woman he met on Craigslist. "Given that my evidence shows you only lose about 5 percent, I would think it would be worth trying to hang on," Basinger said. There are, of course, other considerations that go into stepping down -- a politician may want to forestall more damaging revelations, or, like Spitzer, may be facing a public that's already soured on him for other reasons. But one thing seems clear: If Spitzer and Weiner manage to join Sanford in getting elected post-sex scandal, they won't be signaling a bold new trend. They'll be doing what politicians have always done: getting in trouble and then getting elected anyway.

How a Deadly Explosive, When 3D Printed, Could Be Life-Saving Posted: 09 Jul 2013 10:59 AM PDT Chris Natt Things made with 3D-printers tend to fall into two broad categories: one is silly bordering on useless -- incredibly detailed chess pieces, a mug that looks surprised, a mask that looks like Tom Hanks, what have you. The other is live-saving bordering on from the future, like the idea that we might soon have 3D-printed organs. Here's one for the second category: 3D-printed replicas of landmines, which British design engineer Chris Natt hopes can help train landmine clearers to better unearth and disable the explosives. Natt has made four precise plastic models of the most common types of munitions that kill and maim an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 people a year across more than 80 different countries. (A 3D printer can create replicas of solid objects by squeezing molten material -- usually plastic -- in layers through a tip, kind of like cupcake frosting.) Chris Natt Buried land mines are usually relics of armed conflicts, and the people clearing them are sometimes untrained or barely literate. There are different types of demining tools for different terrains, but some consist of little more than metal detectors and trowels, he said. Natt estimates that around 100 deminers have been killed or injured each year since 1999, and he aims to familiarize people in mine-filled areas with these obscure, deadly objects. UN His dummy mines are equipped with sound and light systems that go off when the mine is handled too aggressively or is uncovered in the wrong way. "At the moment, the tools we have are sheets of paper with pictures on them," Natt, who works at the Royal College of Art and Imperial College, told me. "Part of this is educating them about the risks of the mine without having lots of literature. It demonstrates the unpredictability of what mines are like." He admits that the 3D-printing aspect of his work is more of a useful prototyping technique and a gimmick -- if the devices were actually used in the field, they'd have to be mass produced in a cheaper, more efficient way. The other stages of his project include a massive infographic detailing how landmines work, followed by an attempt to create better, more "blastproof" demining tools. According to Natt, the existing implements don't adequately protect workers if the mine detonates. "If you had an extra foot and a half [on the tool] and made sure the hands and organs were outside the blast radius," he said, "theoretically they could walk away from a blast with their hands." h/t New Scientist

The Battle for the U.S. Economy's Future: Cars and Houses vs. Washington Posted: 09 Jul 2013 10:37 AM PDT Reuters Barely perceptible, behind the cacophony of the Egypt & Zimmerman news cycle, you can make out the steady drumbeat of good news about the economy. Consumer confidence at a six-year high. About 200,000 new jobs per month in the last quarter. A 20-year low in credit card delinquencies. And for this, the U.S. economy has two things to thank. Cars and houses. Before we go forward, let's go backward. After practically every recession going back 50 years, cars and houses have led the recovery. They're big. They're expensive. And when people buy them, they drag the economy back to normalcy. With data from economist James Hamilton, Jordan Weissmann showed that growth due to cars and home purchases accounted for more than half of the recovery in the 1970s, a third of the "Reagan Recovery" in the early 1980s, a sixth of the recoveries in the early 1990s and 2000s, and a vanishingly small one-tenth of this, our special non-recovery recovery. As the car and home sales have dried up, the bounce-backs have been steadily less bouncy. The Great Recession was "great" because the avalanche started in the housing sector. Financial crises last longer because they leave consumers and companies with debt they have to unwind before they get back to buy big ticket items. The Federal Reserve pushed mortgage rates to historic lows in an effort to peel the housing market off the floor. But without an appetite for new homes, this was like pouring premium gasoline into a car without an engine. Until now. Driving the Recovery Speaking of cars, new vehicle sales are on pace to hit 16.5 million this year, their highest since 2006, according to TrueCar. Domestic auto production has also hit a seven-year high ... ... but the real turn-round in the last year has been in houses. Housing starts (very simply: the number of houses where construction has started) rose to a five year high this spring. Meanwhile ... ... the Case-Shiller Index, the leading measure of home prices in the 20 largest metro areas, is on such a tear, it's actually forcing CNBC talking heads to wonder aloud whether we're creating a second housing bubble. (Please consider the graph. Not exactly the stuff of bubbles, yet.) The upshot is that two anchors on economic growth for the first three years of the recovery -- residential investment and construction employment -- are suddenly perking up and headlining this little era of good feelings. For years, consumers shedding also debt shed points from GDP growth. Suddenly, it seems the age of deleveraging might be over. (Construction job growth in RED; residential investment in BLUE.) If cars and houses are back, why does the overall economy still fell so ... meh? We're still chugging along around 2 percent annual GDP growth. We're still pulling the unemployment rate down by micro-ticks every quarter. We're still struggling to produce a semblance of real wage growth for the bottom half of the country. What's holding us back? Unfortunately, the answer begins with Washington. Bad Cuts & Bad Talk This is where some of you say: Oh great, more of you complaining about Republicans cutting spending. So, fine, don't take my word for it. Listen to IMF chief economist Oliver Blanchard, whose organization just slashed our estimated growth rate this year due to "stronger than expected and stronger than desirable fiscal consolidation [that] has been only partly offset by a good performance of the housing market." And the kicker: "If fiscal consolidation had been weaker, then growth in the US would be substantially higher." In other words: The rush to cut the deficit is cutting into growth. The IMF isn't Nostradamus. But you don't have to have access to a crystal ball to know that cutting spending too quickly in an economy recovering from a debt overhang is dangerous. You just need access to a newspaper. Europe's grand experiment in austerity is a relentless lesson in why financial crisis + shrinking government = intractable recession. The U.S. deficit, which has acted like a crutch for the weak private sector and weaker state governments, isn't just shrinking. It's disappearing, falling nearly 50 percent in the first nine months of FY2013 from a year earlier with sequestration setting in. This is pointless and hurtful. In particular, the attention diverted from jobs toward debt has locked millions of people into devastating long-term unemployment. Joining Congress in the dunce seat this quarter is the Federal Reserve, whose "tapering" announcement triggered a rise in interest rates that could dampen the housing recovery. The Fed's ability to communicate its outlook on the economy is as significant as its policies. And right now, its communication skills are blerg. In an effort to outline the end of its extraordinary quantitative easing program, the Fed seems to have convinced financial markets that bad news is good news (i.e.: if the economy stinks, QE goes on) and good news is bad news (i.e.: if the economy grows, QE winds down early). This is crazy. We're growing at 2 percent a year. Core inflation isn't just low. It's never been lower. As Matt Yglesias puts it, "good news should just be good news." And the Fed could make that very point simply by simply saying that unless inflation rises, there will be no tapering no matter how good the U.S. economy looks. Getting out of a financial crisis is hard. It's even harder when the stewards of the economy on Capitol Hill and inside the Fed have a knack for throwing obstacles in front of the stumbling recovery patient that is America enterprise. And yet, once again, the U.S. private sector seems to have manufactured something that would be the envy of most of the developed world. A true recovery. If we can keep it.

Virtual Plastic Surgery Apps Come to China Posted: 09 Jul 2013 10:11 AM PDT Double Selfie (POCO.CN) Selfies, the young American term for self-portraits taken with a cell phone, just took a new turn in China. A new version of a recent Chinese smart phone app allows users to enhance photos of themselves by widening their eyes, lightening their skin or adding long eyelashes --in other words, attempts to look more Caucasian. The app, called the "beautiful people camera," or meiren xiangji, which was developed by Guangzhou-based photo sharing community and app maker POCO.CN, also allows users to remove bags from under their eyes, narrow their face, modify their smile and add anime-style makeup. Users can then post the photos to social media platforms such as Sina Weibo. More From Quartz The seven most ridiculous statements of Taro Aso, Japan's debonair gaffe machine T-Mobile's wireless market share has dropped since it started selling iPhones for $99 China's cratering demand pushed prices down for the 16th straight month It's a virtual version of plastic surgery trends among Asians and Asian immigrants that preference Caucasian features. For instance, blepharoplasty, more commonly known as "double eyelid" surgery creates or dramatizes an upper eyelid crease that many East Asians lack. Shaping one's nose to appear less flattened is also popular. In 2012, Asian Americans were the fastest growing ethnic group to go under the knife. Photos of eerily similar looking Miss Korea finalists prompted a debate online over whether plastic surgery, common in South Korea, is turning Korean women into clones. An ad for the app on iTunes (POCO.CN) This ad shows before (left) and after photos of using its app. (POCO.CN) Eye color augmentation is one of the app's features. (POCO.CN) French makeup and perfume maker Guerlain is marketing its Météorites powder on POCO's app with a contest to model for one of their photo shoots. This is one entry. (Sina Weibo)

It's Frustratingly Rare to Find a Novel About Women That's Not About Love Posted: 09 Jul 2013 09:22 AM PDT Pride and Prejudice: one of many classic books that focuses on women and romance (BBC) I came of age without a literary soulmate. Growing up, I read every book recommended to me. Nick Carraway's lucid account of the 1920's seduced me. Huck Finn's journey up the river showed me the close link between maturity and youth, and Ray Bradbury taught me to be wary of big government as well as the burning temperature of paper. While the male characters of literature built countries, waged wars, and traveled while smoking plenty of illicit substances, the women were utterly boring. The assigned, award-winning, cannon-qualified books about women were about women I didn't want to be. Jane Eyre was too blinded by her love for Mr. Rochester, as were all of the Bennet sisters in Pride and Prejudice. Hester Prynne of The Scarlet Letter was too maternal, and no one wants to grow up to be Anna Karenina. These women wanted to get married and have kids. They wanted to whine for 300 pages about a man who didn't want to be with them. They wanted, it seemed, to be supporting actresses in their own stories. Their stories were equally about the men who shaped them as what they themselves wanted. These female characters had love stories of heartbreak, but no stories of solitary self-discovery. Like many young adults, I didn't necessarily want stable. I wanted to drive On The Road and stop off in small towns and drink more than was probably appropriate. I wanted to question who I was and be my own Catcher in the Rye. There are no Jack Kerouacs or Holden Caulfields for girls. Literary girls don't take road-trips to find themselves; they take trips to find men. "Great" books, as defined by the Western canon, didn't contain female protagonists I could admire. In fact, they barely contained female protagonists at all. Of the 100 Best Novels compiled by Modern Library, only nine have women in the leading role, and in only one of those books--The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark--do the leading women strive to do more than find a husband or raise their children. Statistically, one percent of the Best Novels are about women doing something other than loving. To be clear, I love a beautifully told love story. I cry during The Notebook and love Mr. Darcy. I'd just as soon advocate for the banning of metaphors as I would for the banning of stories about love (which is to say never). Love stories are needed because they mirror real life. Men and women alike search for and find partners--be they for a moment or a lifetime. Love stories are huge plot lines in real life, but they aren't everything. These days, most women develop personal lives before love lives. They struggle, make decisions, and grow up long before they worry about finding a life partner. Women are getting married later with the average marrying age at 27 according to the most recent Pew Report. That's four years older than in 1990. Additionally, women's roles in the workforce have changed radically in the last 50 years. Though incomes between men and women still remain unequal, more women are joining and staying in the workforce, even after they have kids. Their literary counterparts, however, don't reflect that. Related Story Why Do So Many Father-Daughter Movies = Feisty Kid + Bumbling Dad? Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping is different. Housekeeping was the first book I ever read about women that didn't feature a love line. There is no love interest, no sex, and no important man in Housekeeping. It is a book solely about growing up, because that in itself is a story. Housekeeping follows the lives of two sisters, Ruth and Lucille, who are moved to the beautifully desolate Fingerbone, Idaho to live with family members after their mother's death. Their guardianship changes several times before finally ending with their Aunt Sylvie, an eccentric woman who lives a transient lifestyle and eventually drives the girls apart. Ruth grows up in the book. As the narrator, she describes her own frustrations and confusions. Robinson's book is full of Ruth's anguish and loneliness: the suffering of transitory adulthood. At times the novel is as barren and icy as the frozen lake it is set around. The characters often ignore each other and sometimes themselves. As Ruth and Lucille are forced to cope with the death of their relatives, they must learn to live their own lives. Ultimately, Housekeeping isn't an easy book to read, and it doesn't wrap up neatly. Life doesn't wrap up neatly. There is no love plotline in Housekeeping, because not every story needs one. No one expects Holden Caulfield to find love at the end of his self-explorative adventure, and we shouldn't expect every female character to either. Coming of age novels are supposed to be about finding yourself, not finding someone else. Ruth doesn't think about boys or talk about them; she grapples with loneliness and longing and losing her family, her dreams, and her sister. Housekeeping is a rarity. There are not many books that star a woman without a man to hold her hand and guide her, or a mess of domestic tasks for her to attend to as her first priority. In the 33 years since Housekeeping's publication, few--if any--books have mirrored Robinson's example. Female protagonists like Orleanna Price of Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible or Margaret Atwood's Offred in The Handmaid's Tale, participate in political agendas, fight in wars, and generally have goals other than their love lives. Likewise, some popular fiction has begun to feature leading women with larger career goals and less focus on love. Skeeter of The Help by Kathryn Stockett chooses her career over love as do Edna Pontellier of Kate Chopin's The Awakening and even Andrea Sachs of Lauren Weisberger's The Devil Wears Prada. These women and their goals are the main thrust of these novels, but they all include a love subplot. Even critically acclaimed books with strong female protagonists like Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones contain more male characters than female. A book about women that isn't a book about love simply isn't normal. But the plot line is. Women are increasingly pursuing careers, educations, and themselves far before they begin to pursue men, and their stories need to be told. And they have to be told well. Statistically speaking, the publishing industry is still incredibly male-dominated. According to reports published by VIDA, an organization that explores the critical and cultural perceptions of women writers, fewer books by women than by men are published each year, and major news outlets review fewer books by women than men. Housekeeping is rarity not only because of its subject matter, but also because of its existence at all. We need more books like Housekeeping. Books that tell tales of girls learning to be themselves the way that many girls growing up today will: alone.

Intimacy in an Iron Lung Posted: 09 Jul 2013 08:47 AM PDT (The Sessions / Fox) "As my father lay dying and his private nurses washed him, made him comfortable and gave him his medication, they also lingered gently over his private parts as they sponged him. These were mountain girls from the state of North Carolina to whom death and sex were integral with life." So comments Google+ user Ray Chatham in the discussion surrounding a short documentary released last week from The New York Times' Stefania Rousselle. Rousselle investigated the state of sexual surrogacy for disabled people in France, where it is contentiously illegal.  Equating love and sexual attraction may actually be problematic for the person whose body is paralyzed, atrophying, but who is no less loved. Surrogacy involves paying a professional who engages in intimate contact (broadly defined, though certainly not always intercourse) with a patient. It technically began in the early 1970s, and is maybe best known as something done to help people with extreme anxiety about sex to gradually work past it.  In a different sense, it's also used for patients with serious physical disabilities -- and, maybe even thornier, mental disabilities like dementia. You might remember the 2012 film The Sessions, for which Helen Hunt got an Oscar nomination playing a surrogate who worked with a poet paralyzed by polio. The story was based on the real experiences of Mark O'Brien, who by the end lived in an iron lung for all but a few hours per week, and ultimately lost his virginity to a surrogate. In March, the French National Ethics Committee decided that sexual surrogacy was an "unethical use of the human body for commercial purposes." Committee member Anne-Marie Dickelé justified it to Rousselle: "The sexuality of the disabled cannot be considered a right." But some French people like Laetitia Rebord, who is confined to a wheelchair due to spinal muscular atrophy, are campaigning passionately against the committee's decision. She's 31, a virgin, and wants to have sex -- "In her sexual fantasies, she is a fit and impetuous blonde who dominates her male partners." As she told Rousselle, "Eventually, one has to address the issue and understand why we are demanding this. I can't move. I can't masturbate." The International Professional Surrogates Association notes that in most countries, including the United States, sexual surrogacy is simply undefined by law. It remains unregulated -- unless someone wants to allege prostitution, which could potentially become slippery, though it has not yet been successfully legally challenged as such in the U.S.  North Carolina-based sex therapist Dona Caine Francis says the distinction is that prostitution is about instant gratification, where surrogate therapy involves "months or many sessions in coming as you get to know each other and develop both this deeply personal and deeply therapeutic relationship first." That's the way surrogacy is portrayed in the 1986 documentary (on Netflix) Private Practices. Director Kirby Dick follows surrogate Maureen Sullivan through encounters with real clients -- men with issues like anxiety and premature ejaculation -- throughout the course of their work together.  Sullivan meets with them regularly, at first only to talk, and then gradually escalating physical contact. Their relationships are clearly limited, finite, and tailored to address specific issues. Sexual surrogacy for people with physically debilitating conditions invites a different discussion, probably because social anxiety is less outwardly appreciable as a barrier to a healthy sex life than, say, quadriplegia. The ends are also different: Sometime surrogates are working temporarily with clients to pepare them real-life sexual relationships; in these cases, they're standing in for them indefinitely.  As the world increasingly sees health care to be a human right -- Kathleen Sebelius and Barack Obama understand health care to be "not some earned privilege, it is a right'' -- it might seem a leap to not only fail to address sexuality in caring for people with conditions like Rousselle's, but to go the additional step of precluding them from procuring it for themselves. Holland, Switzerland, Denmark, and Germany agree. Marie-Francelyn Delyon, a retired French advocate for the disabled, does not. She told Rousselle, "It seems that people are saying we are incapable of inspiring love." Delyon worries about stigma, that the practice would only drive disabled people further into shadows. In advanced stages of illness, love and sexual attraction can grow increasingly disparate. Equating them may actually be problematic for the person whose body may be paralyzed and atrophied, but who is no less loved. Were the practice more open and mainstream, and for a long while professionally conducted, would concerns over stigma dissipate?  Near the end many of us will pay for people to help us walk, put food in our mouths, change our diapers. We'll lose our relationships that afford close physical contact. Once a neuromuscular disease leaves someone incontinent, we as physicians can offer little to restore their abilities. The same is true when a stroke leaves a patient unable to chew his own food. We often can't restore these basic, humanizing parts of people. There is value in seriously considering every human element that can be preserved. Surrogacy does not replace a loving relationship, and it should't be expected to. We don't refuse the help of a physical therapist because it won't be as good as having never gotten hit by a bus to begin with. When real love is on the table, take it. When the table is missing, or someone's axed the legs, then there are surrogates.  A fallacy of modern medicine is that anything less than perfect health or complete recovery is failure, or at least concession. Another is that accepting help and treatment admits weakness. As doctors we spend a lot of our time managing expectations. With chronic illness and old age, the job is most often about making the best of imperfect circumstances. Is sexual surrogacy necessarily so removed from invoking the help of any health professional? The grey areas are expansive, but so is the potential.  Rousselle closes her segment with the story of Aminata Gregory, a 66-year-old retiree who now performs sexual assistance illegally in France. She is quick to distinguish herself from a sex worker, and sees herself as part of a progressive movement to normalize the practice. One of her regular clients, a 49-year-old wheelchair-bound man with Friedreich's ataxia speaks with buoyant practicality of his relationship with Gregory: "At the beginning of the session, we put ourselves in a bubble and become a normal couple. We talk to each other. We ask each other whatever we want. At the end of the session, we break the bubble. It's over. It helps not to fall in love."

'That's My Middle-West': The Most Dazzling Paragraph of <i>The Great Gatsby</i> Posted: 09 Jul 2013 08:42 AM PDT By Heart is a series in which authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature. Doug McLean For the first time in this series, two authors asked to speak about the same book--and, by coincidence, in back-to-back weeks. It would be tempting to explain this by saying that The Great Gatsby runs thick in the zeitgeist at the moment, mostly thanks to Baz Luhrmann's high-grossing film (and its horde of corporate tie-ins). But that wouldn't necessarily be true. Writers--like R. Clifton Spargo and, this week, Susan Choi--have been quietly obsessed with this book for decades. I say "quietly" because some writers tend to be bashful about citing Gatsby, and many have not given it serious consideration. The book's perpetual place in high school classrooms--alongside The Catcher in the Rye, Of Mice and Men, and The Scarlet Letter--makes it seem somehow entry-level, just for kids, light lit. By spawning countless papers on the themes that teenagers are trained to seek ("unrequited love," "the American dream"), Gatsby's reputation has diminished somewhat; its famous symbols, like the wall-high eyes and green dock light, now risk seeming pat for their familiarity. More on Writing The Great Gatsby Line That Came From Fitzgerald's Life--and Inspired a Novel The Modern Writing-School Paradox: More Students, Fewer Jobs, More Glory Susan Choi, whose novel American Woman (2004) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, explained to me that she dismissed Gatsby for years in just this way. A subsequent re-reading caused her to reconsider the book she now feels is anything but a conventional or archetypal novel. In an interview, Choi explained how The Great Gatsby came back into her reading life for good--and she gave a close analysis of what she argues is its best and most mysterious passage. Choi's new novel, My Education, concerns a graduate student who falls (disastrously) for her glamorous, notorious, and married professor. The novel's assurance--her complicated tale unfolds in effortless first-person--recalls Fitzgerald's narrative mastery. She teaches creative writing at Princeton University and spoke to me by phone from her home in Brooklyn. Susan Choi: It's pathetic, but I don't really remember my first time reading The Great Gatsby. I must have read it in high school. I'm pretty sure I remember it being assigned, and I generally did the reading. But I don't remember having a reaction to the book, even though I loved literature and other works made a lasting impression on me at that age. In any case, I took my first look and didn't think about it again until much later. This is so strange to me. (It suggests, for one thing, that teaching this book in high school does Gatsby a disservice.) Why did Gatsby, which would be so influential to me later, vanish from my teenage mind completely? I think Gatsby is hobbled, in part, by its status as a Great American Novel. People kind of roll their eyes before they've even opened it, treat it with a "been there, done that" attitude. I know I did. It took me years to re-open the novel and see how much I'd missed. The morally ambiguous narrator, and the odd and shifty chronology, for instance. Still, it wasn't until I was writing my second book that Gatsby loomed to the forefront of my thought, where it then lodged itself and has remained. Gatsby is a weird book, so much stranger than its reputation, and probably stranger than high school students can appreciate. Its numerous flaws tend to get glossed over, though they are fascinating. For one thing, there's an odd emotional disconnect between the story and the writing. The story, with its callous rich people who smash everything apart and leave others to pick up the pieces, didn't really move me as a kid; it's possible the story aspect of the novel still doesn't really move me. I don't find the characters endearing--I don't even really like any of them. And yet Fitzgerald's writing, the actual almost-physical temperature of his prose, is so astounding it almost doesn't matter what he's writing about. He could write about anything, the way he writes. And he can get away with anything. This is the quality, I think, that failed to impress me as a student reader; it's the quality that enchants me now. There are passages in Gatsby that I've studied so hard (in the course of trying to write something of my own) that I've broken the spine of the book. I have to have several different copies, because they're all falling apart. I've spent years looking closely, trying to figure out exactly why the language is so addictive and how he does it. And it's helped me work through large-scale novelistic challenges, too. When I writing my second novel, American Woman, there's this hurtling series of catastrophic events at the end. I couldn't believe I was going to be able to get from one event from the next to the next and make it believable. So I kept reading the sequence in Gatsby, over and over again, that starts in a hotel room with all the characters fighting and precipitates the novel's final series of catastrophes. I've studied this sequence so many times because it's so implausible--and so successful. I return, asking, How did he do this? How does he make something totally implausible this believable and compelling? And still my favorite passage in the book resists this kind of analysis, this kind of takeaway teaching I've relied on Gatsby for. It's a great example of what I love about the book, and at the same time what I find mysterious and even problematic about it. In any case, every time I read the following, I get chills: That's my middle-west--not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns but the thrilling, returning trains of my youth and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. I am part of that, a little solemn with the feel of those long winters, a little complacent from growing up in the Carraway house in a city where dwellings are still called through decades by a family's name. I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all--Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life. On a language level, I have a purely visceral reaction this passage. I feel this rush of emotion that I can't really explain but it's tied to homecoming, and travel. I'm from the Midwest, from Indiana, and maybe that's part of it--this passage in some way connects to my desire to romanticize what I consider to be a pretty unromantic place of origin. But the landscape he invokes is rooted very deeply in me somewhere--not wheat, so much as corn, and not prairies so much as farmland. I'm not sure "lost Swede" towns is quite right for Indiana either, though there are certainly lost towns strewn all over that landscape. But it is a primal landscape for me. You know, the first scenes that you see never go away. They are always going to mean something in particular to you. So when Nick says "that's my middle west," it makes me feel a tiny thrill of legitimacy. It's not all dreary farmland; I remember why it's beautiful. So consistently, when I'm reading the book, I look forward to the arrival of this passage like one of those trains. I know it's going to give me chills, and it always does. "The shadow of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow": what an incredibly beautiful way of evoking a fairly tired and hackneyed holiday image. And the phrase the "thrilling returning trains of my youth"--how wonderful that he qualifies the trains this way, even though, to my mind, putting "thrilling" and "returning" next to each other might be slightly dubious. If I had written it, I might fear the neighboring -ing adjectives were a little clumsy. Fitzgerald's genius is to realize that those two words side-by-side work because of how churning and cumbersome they are. When I'm reading the book, I look forward to the arrival of this passage like one of those trains. I know it's going to give me chills, and it always does. There's something moving, too, in the straightforward phrase: "I am part of that." Nick's about to forswear his connection to the east, and to the rich, after he's spent the whole book trying to establish a place among the elite. It's not just a beautiful and ennobling image of returning to his origins in the Midwest, it's the beginning of a kind of rolling movement into the future. Here's Nick's telling us that his involvement in the story, this period of his life, ended. In talking about the trains of his youth that took him home, Nick also allows the reader to understand that he's traveled away from the story. You have this image of train travel, so it's very literalized. He creates this visual image of leaving the East to go home when he's young, when he was a student, but he's making it clear that that's what he did after this story, too. But one of the things that continues to beguile me about this passage--as with other passages in this book--is that I don't really understand what he's saying even as I adore the way he says it. The easy conclusion of this book is that Nick rejects Tom and Daisy's way of life, realizing they're careless people who can smash things up and retreat into their money with all the broken stuff lying around. You can hear Nick setting himself apart from Tom and Daisy morally. So what does he mean when he claims that they, all of them, were Westerners? Does that mean life in the East is somehow corrupted? That Tom and Daisy were somehow victims too? The story implications aren't clear, even as the language thrills me. Maybe that's part of why it's so interesting--the language is epiphanic, but the conclusions remain murky. So I'm left with the striking physicality of the passage. He puts you on the train and swoops you into a new geographical setting in the way that opens up the tonal scope of the novel. Somehow all the gears shift in this passage for me, and I feel like I travel with Nick in this thrilling, sudden, dizzying way. Not just into his past, and not just into this new realm or region, but into a new attitude on Nick's part. He just takes you hurtling on with him, and not just on that train, but into the future, and into a greater understanding of the story and of yourself. This intense movement. You're being taken on that train ride, and you don't just understand that, but you feel it.

Do High Altitudes Shape Languages? Posted: 09 Jul 2013 08:42 AM PDT Greater Caucasus Mountain Range (Wikimedia Commons) In the 10th century, an Arab geographer described the Caucasus region as a "mountain of tongues." The nickname has stuck to this day, likely because of how well it captures two of the area's main features: its dramatic cliffs and its array of languages. But new and controversial research by a U.S. linguist suggests that the "mountains" may have more to do with the "tongues" than anyone has guessed. In a study published last month in the journal "Plos One," Caleb Everett, an anthropological linguist at the University of Miami, claims that a special class of sounds occurring in almost all of the languages of the Caucasus may be due to "the direct influence" of the region's high altitude. Language Map of Caucasus (GeoCurrents) Everett's conclusion applies beyond the Caucasus as well. He offers apparent proof that the rare sounds, known as "ejectives," are far more likely to occur in regions of high elevation worldwide. That argument -- and the physical and biological factors that Everett says may explain the correlation -- are generating plenty of buzz, and a range of reactions, among linguists. "The assumption made by linguists is that geography can impact language, but in sort of superficial ways: If you live in the Amazon, you're not going to have words for 'snow-capped mountains,'" Everett said. "But linguists have traditionally been skeptical that geography can affect the structure of language, things like phonology -- the sound system -- of a language. I think this is really good evidence [of that]." Ejectives, which occur in approximately 20 percent of the world's languages, are consonants produced when air is compressed in the mouth and pharyngeal cavity and then released in a burst. Unlike most sounds, they are not produced using air from the lungs. For Caucasian languages, many of which are known for their rich inventories of sounds, ejectives are a characteristic feature. Linguists and befuddled visitors alike have described these sounds as hisses, spits, and even mini-explosions in the mouth. Georgian has six ejectives: Circassian may hold the record, with at least 10: The sounds appear in everyday terms, like the word for "bridge" in Chechen: Or "head scarf" in Avar: In his research, Everett considered the distribution of 567 world languages in relation to six high-elevation "zones." Those zones were defined as major regions greater than 1,500 meters in altitude, plus the surrounding 200 kilometers. They included the Caucasus range and the Javakheti plateau, the Rocky Mountain region in North America, the southern African plateau, and others. Of Everett's sample of languages, only a small portion contained ejectives. However, he found that nearly two-thirds of those that did were located in the high-altitude zones. The only zone in which ejectives were absent was the Tibetan plateau. "In fact it strikes us as remarkable that only one region presents an exception," Everett writes. Languages occurring in each zone, from the Caucasus to the Andes, were also from multiple, often unrelated language families. The Caucasian language Abkhaz contains ejectives, but so do several dialects of Armenian, a language from the entirely distinct Indo-European family. Such evidence, Everett says, goes far in arguing that geography, and not genetic relations, is behind the trend. Explaining why such a correlation might exist is a more challenging proposition. Everett offers his best guesses, albeit tentatively. "Hypothetically, these sounds should be easier to make at high altitudes because they require the compression of ambient air," Everett says. "Since air pressure is lower at higher altitudes, the sounds should be easier to make. That was my first hypothesis." He also suggests that use of the sounds may be a biological adaption to the dryness of high-altitude locations. "Because you don't have to expel air from the lungs to produce ejective sounds, they should theoretically reduce the amount of water vapor lost during speech," he says. Bernard Comrie, the director of the linguistics department at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, says Everett may be on to something, at least in showing that a real correlation exists between altitude and ejectives. Like others, however, he is more skeptical when it comes to Everett's suggested explanations, but says they are not "unreasonable." Comrie also says that the controversy may give linguistic science a shake-up it needs. "I think [this research] is important in that it really suggests a way in which one could seriously investigate a kind of claim that has largely been neglected by linguists," Comrie says. "This is a direction they are going to have to consider. So far, linguists are rather negative toward such generalizations, but more because their ideological background leads them to be negative, rather than because there is strong empirical evidence against a particular claim." This post appears courtesy of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

The Surveillance-Internet Complex Posted: 09 Jul 2013 08:41 AM PDT A secure phone at the NSA Cryptologic Museum (Oliver Hulland). On Jan. 17, 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned the nation about the dire threat posed by the military-industrial complex. An updated version of his speech would read: "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex surveillance-internet complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists the intrusion on our privacy exists, and will persist." The interests of Internet businesses and companies that collect data to profile individual users are closely aligned with government agencies that engage in surveillance or that would benefit from it. Curtailing commercial surveillance would threaten the business models of Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc., and greatly reduce the marketing power of Internet juggernauts such as Amazon. For many applications, the Internet could no longer be free. For this reason, most Internet companies are staunchly opposed to the kinds of restrictions on their behavior that E.U. Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding has proposed (and the U.S. has successfully fought). She calls for Web businesses to obtain explicit consent before they collect data used to profile individual users. Perhaps the most controversial part of the proposal is the "right to be forgotten," which would allow users to have data about them deleted if there was no legitimate reason for keeping it. Of course, the data collected by companies on the Internet, along with metadata provided by the phone companies, is just the information NSA and the FBI says they need to keep our country safe. Those agencies have a vested interest in seeing current privacy policies continue as they are--the very policies that create large profit opportunities for Internet companies. One of the things that makes commercial surveillance so appealing to government agencies is that companies can do things that are very valuable for the government but that the Privacy Act of 1974 prohibits. This act bars the government from merging databases without a specific reason--exactly the types of things credit reporting agencies such as Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion have been doing for years. Edward Snowden's revelations have placed Google and other companies in an uncomfortable position. They feel their companies' reputations have been injured by users who say they have violated privacy protections by providing information to the government. As a result, Google has filed suit against the government to be allowed to inform "its users and the public about requests it receives from government agencies around the world for the production of users' information and/or communications." Google maintains, "Transparency is a core value at Google." Now, that is really interesting--and a bit disingenuous. If Google was really committed to transparency, it could start by doing something completely under its control: become transparent in ways that are meaningful to its users. It could give individual users access to the data it keeps about them and analytical tools that would enable users to determine the companies that are targeting them. Google could also provide individual users with an accounting of how much money it makes by selling information about their interests to advertisers: on average, about $3-4 per unique visitor per month. Users would then be in a better position to judge the value associated with their privacy. Google, Facebook, and others could even give individual users the option of buying their privacy--anonymous search and social networking services for a fee. In that way, users who were unconcerned about their privacy could earn free services by giving up their privacy. Those who wanted to be more discreet could pay the service providers with money, not lost privacy. Those of us who value our privacy need another Eisenhower--now.

The <i>New</i> New Naturalism in the Era of 'Processed' Relationships Posted: 09 Jul 2013 08:25 AM PDT Kale, fresh from our garden, wrapped around an old iPhone (Alexis Madrigal). On a weekend in the middle of June, a few hundred people gathered together at an event called Camp Grounded in northern California for a celebration of leaving technology behind. Organized by the group Digital Detox, the $350 experience appears to have been fun. And exceptionally well attended by national media. First, Chris Colin filed a dispatch for The New Yorker. Then, NPR and The New York Times got into the mix. You know, just your average down-home weekend with the elite of the elite of the media elite. (No, really, Chris Colin is one of the very best writers around.) I bring this up not to pick on the writers or stories themselves, but to point out that all three of these newsrooms thought the event would be of interest to their readers. Here's what happened on the retreat. "The rules of Camp Grounded were simple: no phones, computers, tablets or watches; work talk, discussion of people's ages and use of real names were prohibited," the Times wrote. "Campers at Camp Grounded participated in "playshops," featuring yoga, laughing contests and writing sessions," NPR wrote. "But for many of the participants, the most exciting activity was conversation." Commenting on the pervasiveness of technology, one of Digital Detox's founders told the NPR reporter, "People are feeling like something's not right." Indeed, tech anxiety abounds. And I take it seriously. Some people feel something is amiss in their relationships, and that technology is to blame. There's a move, cataloged in nearly every magazine, towards seeing the offline as authentic and the online as hollow, false, unreal. This may be a false distinction, digital dualism, as Nathan Jurgenson calls it, but it's a widespread reaction to the technologies at hand. What was once an exciting new way to make friends now feels overengineered, or -- more damningly in the current climate -- processed.  Processed foods were once the time-saving, awe-inducing markers of an upwardly mobile household. (Check out this ad for dextrose.) Now, among the upper middle classes, they're a sure sign that someone does not have a firm grip on what the good life is. Processed food, Michael Pollan would tell you, is not even really food at all. And it tangles you up in huge economic webs that stretch across the globe. So while Farm Bill politics make larger-scale solutions impractical, the answer, mostly, is to eat local, organic food -- prepared like Grandma would.  This logic has been extended to digital friendships. Processed relationships get scare quotes: Facebook "friends." Processed relationships can't be as genuine or authentic or honest as real life friendships. Processed relationships generate data for Facebook and Twitter and Google and the NSA. So the solution is to make local friends, hang out organically, and only communicate through means your Grandma would recognize. It's so conservative it's radical!  We planted this iPhone and it only grew one kale leaf (Alexis Madrigal). I can't help but draw the parallel back to the 1960s back-to-the-landers, some of whom became what I call solar transcendentalists, people who thought changing their energy supply would change their souls. (A typical comment: "We grow more in awe of the tenuous hold our lives have on this small planet, more convinced that the sun renews us, in an almost religious way.") Their results varied.  In the late 60s and early 70s, researcher Daniel Yankelovich started polling college students, and found that they'd turned away from the technologies that had helped create the enormously wealthy American society. The movement, though, was not political so much as social. Most wanted to change their own lives more than they wanted to change society. Yankelovich called this phenomenon "The New Naturalism." The packet of ideas, as summarized by political scientist Gabriel Almond, included:  turning off toward the achievement ethic, competition, science, technology, and bureaucracy, and a turning on toward direct sensory experience, adapting to nature rather than seeking to master it, cultivating deep and honest relationships in small groups, and seeking self knowledge through introspection.  Compare that summary to Colin's description of Camp Grounded: The urge to check in, to check out, to Vine, to Snap, to Tumbl, faded with surprising ease. But the Camp Grounded vision of technology's toxic influence is more holistic: money, clocks, alcohol, drugs, and any talk of people's ages or work were all off-limits. Conversations could no longer begin with 'What do you do?' Turn against achievement ethic? Check. Turn against technology? Check. Direct sensory experience? Check. Adapting to nature? Check. Cultivating deep and honest relationships in small groups? Check.  As for introspection... The Times' article describes one 45-year-old CEO "carrying the Camp Grounded journal he was given in which he asked himself over and over 'Who am I?' before concluding that he is 'a man with an open heart.'" It ends with the author staring up at the sky, "looking for shooting stars, not reality ones. And for once, I was enjoying the silence." Digital Detox's name even conjures up the same chemophobia that pervades the current whole foods movement. It says: technology is toxic and addictive, unnatural. The list of banned items extended beyond phones to beer and *time* itself. According to the Times account, all meals were vegan and gluten-free. The men and women were also separated into different sleeping grounds, and there wasn't much free love. (It turns out that the hippie future is way less fun than the hippie past.) The dream, I would offer, is that by stripping away the trappings of modern life, we reach a place where humans naturally fall into deep and honest relationships with each other. The vision promises that if it weren't for all the damn new stuff (like watches), we'd all be sitting around sharing the parts of ourselves that we're ashamed of, supporting others in their most meaningful endeavors, and paying mind only to worthy causes and ideas.  The whole concept has a baseline problem. This is not a strawman. Take a look at the media coverage: it's all in there. Camp Grounded is a pure distillation of post-modern technoanxiety. More concentrated than most, but fundamentally composed of the same stuff.  I can sympathize. Who doesn't want depth in their relationships? Or to be judged by the content of one's character, not the company on one's business card? Why won't life slow down and be still? Why can't I figure it all out? And also my phone is making noises while I'm trying to think.  My own view is that life, itself, is the toxic and addictive bit. You cannot stop doing it and doing it and doing it until eventually you die from too much living. (Haruki Murakami touched on this in his book on running: "When we use writing to create a story, like it or not a kind of toxin that lies deep down in all humanity rises to the surface," he wrote. "All writers have come face-to-face with this toxin and, aware of the danger involved, discover a way to deal with it.") These are trite observations that could have been made at any time in the last few centuries: you will be imperfect and you'll be distracted by petty nonsense and jealousy and celebrity gossip and football trades. You'll have too much to drink and parcel out time too stingily and judge people for the wrong reasons. You, too, will go to a party and make a snap judgment about continuing to talk with someone on the basis of their answer to the question, "What do you do?" Like the millions before you, you will be horribly uneven but probably pretty decent, all things considered.  Not to put too fine a point on it, but the entire Judeo-Christian tradition is founded on duplicity; and early 19th century (i.e. pre-Industrial) literature is filled with the most shallow backstabbing and infighting imaginable.  Digital Detox's project, then, is not a flight back to the natural: They are trying to strip away the gluten and electromagnetic waves and gossip to create new, artificial, better humans.  Techno-kale friends (Alexis Madrigal). The whole rhetoric, though, requires a retreat from the frontlines of the battle to define tomorrow's systems. These technologies need real critiques. Our social networks and smartphones are not "neutral" tools. We may be able to manage our relationships with them, but we need to know what they are trying to do, technically, culturally, and financially. And besides: Facebook is just the tip of the iceberg. Every single person out there on the land is deeply dependent on the digital-industrial infrastructure of our society. Long ago (Spring 1994), J. Baldwin wrote an essay in the Whole Earth Review on this very topic called, "Where Did You Get Your Axe?"  He begins in a despairing mode we're all familiar with. We know where the blame lies: Big corporations and their political protectors, advertising and consumerism, and most of all, technology -- especially computers -- that gives them their power. Without the pervasive effects of technology run amok, we could exist as good earth citizens, doing honest work in harmony with the environment... We can forsake the hi-tech life that brings with it so much ruin of environment and human spirit. We should return to the simple life. Baldwin goes on to describe a family that escaped the hi-tech life for a valley in Wyoming where they made many things by hand. They showed slides and talked about the salutary effects of DIY life. Everyone applauded. But Baldwin asks, "Where did you get your axe? And the slide camera and the stove, the flour, the nails, the books, the garden seeds, and the window glass?" While it seemed that they'd gotten farther away from a technological life, "they'd merely lengthened the umbilical cord." And here's the key part of the criticism: "By moving to the bucolic boondocks, that happy family dodged the undesirable effects of the technology that was supporting them even as they sneered," he concludes.  There's nothing really wrong with escaping to the boonies. But individuals unplugging is not actually an answer to the biggest technological problems of our time just as any individual's local, organic dietary habits don't solve global agriculture's issues. These are collective problems that will require collective action based on serious critique. (Want a good model? Check out Pollan's sweeping Farm Bill criticisms *and* policy suggestions, which have been overshadowed by his eating advice.) I refuse to accept that the only good response to an imperfect technology is to abandon it. We need more specific criticisms than the ever-present feeling that "'something's not right." What thing? Developing a political agenda to remake, improve, or forbid technologies requires some sort of rubric: how can I judge what I'm using? What are the deleterious impacts? How are they specific to these media and this time? Which effects are *caused by* the technologies and which are *enabled by* the technologies and which just happen to *occur through* the technologies? What are the ethics? What are the mechanics? What is the baseline?

Newsroom Diversity: A Casualty of Journalism's Financial Crisis Posted: 09 Jul 2013 08:21 AM PDT Jonathan Ernst/Reuters The American Society of News Editors (ASNE) recently released its annual study of newsroom diversity. The results only confirmed what many who have lived through the industry's deep recession have already experienced: a steady decline in minority journalists and stagnation in prior progress. Despite claims by news organizations that they value and promote diversity, the numbers in this year's study show 90 percent of newsroom supervisors from participating news organizations were white. At a time when non-whites make up roughly 37 percent of the U.S. population, the percentage of minorities in the newsroom has fallen to 12.37 percent from its 13.73 percent high in 2006. In last year's 2012 ASNE study, overall newsroom employment was down 2.4 percent, but the picture looked much worse - down 5.7 percent - for minorities. This means that fewer minorities are getting the opportunity to work in news, and news organizations are losing their ability to empower , represent, --and especially in cases where language ability is crucial, even to report on minority populations in their communities. Why have minorities been disproportionately hit by the state of the media industry? Two dozen industry leaders I talked to in recent months point to a series of mostly cost-saving decisions at papers across the country that had unintended consequences. One piece of this puzzle is layoff policies and union contracts that often rewarded seniority and pushed the most recent hires to leave first. Many journalists of color have the least protected jobs because they're the least senior employees, says Doris Truong, a Washington Post editor and acting president of Unity, an umbrella group of minority journalist organizations. At the same time, minorities were disproportionately likely to take buyouts offered as incentives to trim newspaper payrolls, notes Keith Woods, vice president for diversity in news and operations at NPR and former dean of faculty at the Poynter Institute. "When our industry looks as it has over the last 10 years, like it might not survive, people leave -- and the most vulnerable people are the ones most inclined to get out because they've got families to support, bills to pay," he says. At papers like The Washington Post, which has had five rounds of buyouts since 2003, "You could see the writing on the wall: you take the buyout today, or face the layoff tomorrow," Woods says. Any attempts that might otherwise be made to remedy the problem have taken a backseat to economic concerns. Newspaper advertising revenues are less than half of what they were in 2006, and papers once accustomed to healthy profit margins struggle to stay afloat. Journalist Sally Lehrman, a professor at Santa Clara University, says she has heard a news executive say that "wondering about diverse voices and perspectives is a bit like wondering about the fate of Mrs. Gardner's rose garden after a tornado has decimated the entire village." The result is that Dori Maynard, president of the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, says she has watched journalists of color leave newsrooms at an alarming rate, even as the audience consuming news has grown more diverse. "The news media and the nation are moving in two different directions," she says. "News media is getting whiter as the country is getting browner." Journalists of color "feel their voice is not heard, their story ideas are not validated, and they don't see room for advancement." With notable exceptions, minority journalists remain even more under-represented in leadership positions across newspapers and the broadcast news industry than in the newsroom in general. Particularly in broadcast, "the higher you get, the whiter it gets," says Felix Gutierrez, professor of journalism and American studies & ethnicity at the University of Southern California. The Radio Television Digital News Association (RTDNA)'s 2012 diversity study reports that 86 percent of television news directors and 91.3 percent of radio news directors are Caucasian. Study of television managers by Bob Papper for the Radio Television Digital News Association (2012). Study of radio managers by Bob Papper for the Radio Television Digital News Association (2012).(2012). Benet Wilson, who chairs the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) digital task force, believes the issue of minority representation is exacerbated by a loss of diversity leaders. As senior diversity champions have left newsrooms, she explains, the minorities who stay have felt they have no voice at the top. There's "a loss of management, a loss of older reporters, a loss of diversity champions -- people who had the title officially or unofficially," says Wilson, who left Aviation Week in 2011 and now works for the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association. The consequences have been less diversity advocacy around issues of training, media partnerships and community coverage, she says. "You've got to cut somewhere, and you cut where there is the least amount of squawking. There's no one left to say, 'you can't do this.' The stone starts rolling down the hill, and you can't stop it." Diversity efforts, Woods adds, generally "resided in an individual who left, got reassigned, retired, or who was laid off." In other cases, diversity was part of a specific outreach initiative that ended with the loss of a grant or project. Minority journalist conferences, once a key source of revenue for diversity projects and a major recruiting tool for newspapers, have plummeted in attendance. Luther Jackson, former executive officer for the San Jose Newspaper Guild, remembers strong partnerships between newspapers and minority journalist associations starting in the 1980s, which began to taper off in 2001. The Business Case The problem, fundamentally, has been reconciling diversity with newsroom business models. "Most media companies look at diversity as a cost center," says Paul Cheung, President of the Asian American Journalists Association. "They see it as something nice to do." Few, he says, actually connect the dots and make it into a business case. Cheung believes this has contributed to the industry's financial losses. Diversity is not just "a nice thing to have--it's crucial for a company's survival in the future," he says. "More than 50 percent of Americans by 2050 will be non-Caucasian." Why does it matter, from the business perspective, if newsrooms don't reflect society at large? Because publications need readers. Hernandez attributes a decline in reader engagement to the fact that so many people don't see themselves reflected in coverage. "When I left The Seattle Times, I was the last Spanish speaker on staff," he says. "There would be crime stories-- and I'm the web guy-- and they called me over to translate interviews in Spanish." Radio, Television, and Online News The broadcasting industry has faced similar challenges. The Radio and Television Digital News Association (RTDNA) reports that in the last 22 years, the minority population in the U.S. has risen 10.4 percent, while the minority workforce in television news is up only 3.7 percent, and the minority workforce in radio is up 0.9 percent. "Broadcast was kind of a leading edge of major social changes taking place in the country," says Bob Papper, who has overseen the RTDNA study for 19 years. "What television stations learned over time is if you want to appeal to the audience in your market, you need to look like your audience." Broadcast diversity figures have held relatively steady over the last few years as radio has seen much lower figures. But overall, Papper says, "the minority population in this country is growing about 3/10th of a percent a year. If you hold steady, then every year you're falling behind." On the positive side, the digital landscape has opened up new channels for a wide variety of people to produce and consume news. "There are now so many websites and community sites that let you get closer to subjects that interest you," says Jim Brady, Editor-in-Chief at Digital First Media and President of the Online News Association. "Everyone has an opportunity to zone in on their interests in a way that didn't exist when 200 news organizations drove the conversation." While established newspapers once had the power to serve as gatekeepers, now anyone who can pay for a data plan and WordPress account can write about an area of interest, he says. Mark Luckie, Manager of Journalism and News at Twitter, says with social media "it's less about who you are but 'are you bringing value to the conversation?'" Sree Sreenivasan, Chief Digital Officer at Columbia University, says African Americans and Indonesians often play the biggest roles in setting trends on Twitter. With the rise of smartphones in many communities, everyone has a newsgathering tool in their pocket, Brady says, and mobile has brought down cost needed to give oneself a digital presence. Pew studies suggest that mobile penetration is indeed increasing, particularly in Hispanic and African American communities. But many are skeptical about diversity in web 2.0 culture. "Online news gives everyone a chance to work in news, but the issue is how do you get paid?" asks Doris Truong, president of Unity, an umbrella organization of minority journalists. "Very few people have had access or desire to have training as a reporter, journalist, critical thinker," says Danyel Smith, a writer, editor, and Knight Fellow at Stanford University. "Just because there's Tumblr, WordPress, and Twitter in terms of instant publishing, doesn't mean these populations are much better served to the degree they can and should be." The idea that the Internet has made the news more diverse "is a bit of a trap," agrees Lehrman, the Santa Clara University professor. While journalists once felt responsible for creating diverse public spaces and forums, today, she contends, journalists sometimes assume people create them for themselves and don't attempt proper civic debate. "Digital tools increasingly narrow the scope of information you have access to unless you deliberately push it open," says Lehrman. Search engines, for instance, have changed news consumption patterns in ways that can filter out these more diverse outlets. Customized news, she says, "is a force against this kind of digital diversity." Google's algorithms, in her view, work against broadening the spectrum of voices people access and hear daily. In some ways, Internet news "allows us to dig deeper into our silos and become less informed about communities outside our own," says Maynard. The staff behind new online publications has also caused many diversity champions to pause. "The online pioneers looked very much like the traditional Old White Boy's club," says Juana Summers, a Politico reporter and member of the board of directors at the Online News Association. "It gets back to the networks by which people get funding and attention for projects. They're historically a lot stronger, in journalism and venture capital, among white men," says Lehrman. "If you went to a few ONA conferences, initially, it was like a sea of white faces." ONA has devoted considerable efforts to diversifying its panels and leadership in the last year as a result. "I think part of it is that with online news, there is so much opportunity but it takes a whole lot of risk," says Summers. Minorities, particularly those with less financial security, may find it very hard to jump into a web startup than traditional companies with 401ks. "I'm dealing with students a lot, women who are often new to the field and that may prove a barrier to entry," she says. Summers, 24, understands the hesitation on a personal level. "As someone who grew up in a lower-middle class family, paycheck to paycheck, it was a very hard risk to take to take a chance at a startup, knowing I might not have a job in three to six months. I'm black, from a single parent family. That's a tough sell to make," she recalls. Unpaid internships compound diversity concerns by reserving entry-level journalism positions to financially advantaged youth who can afford to work for free. Woods says the roots of inequality in digital journalism are different from those in traditional media. "Back when we began fighting for change, the foe was malevolent exclusion. It was a society that segregated and separated and believed in superiority and inferiority," he says. "When dotcom news organizations popped up, what you had was a bunch of people using their savings, retirement plans, or investments of their own money, who got together with friends who also had money and created organizations because damned if they'd be driven out of the business." In short, he says, "I do not believe it has the [same] roots in exclusion our industry's history would have, but the result looks exactly the same." In terms of digital skills, minorities may also lose out due to training issues. People who have more established job and are better connected within the political hierarchy of the news organization have more access to training. "When I started as a journalist, I started on a typewriter," Wilson recalls. "You need to network and be in with the people revolutionizing." In this sense, she says, minorities are sometimes at a disadvantage. "My newsroom went digital in 2006, and until I got laid off I was waiting for that training." In some cases, especially with relatively young institutions, the question of diversity in digital newsrooms may have simply not come up. "When I talk to people about diversity in the news, it's often seen as an old idea," says Lehrman. Just how fast digital newsrooms are making diversity a priority can be almost impossible to measure. Professor Adam Maksl, who analyses data for the ASNE diversity study, believes the institution of journalism should be more diverse. "What's difficult is we don't know what the institution of journalism is anymore," he says. With online news, Maksl explains, there is no list of all the online news sources, or even a clear definition of what constitutes an online news organization. But despite these challenges, dedicated diversity leaders are still working to try to insert diversity back into the agenda at newsrooms across the country, digital or otherwise. "The news media is not only failing to serve the communities but the country at large when they fail to reflect what's going on in communities of color," says Maynard. This lack of diversity in newsroom employment shapes news coverage regardless of the medium. Looking at news today, she says, "African Americans are in stories about crime, sports, entertainment. Latinos in immigration. Native Americans and Asian Americans apparently don't contribute to the fabric of our lives." For Woods, "when you fail to pursue the most diverse news staff, you fail to open up the possibilities created when you bring a broader range of life experience, insight, understanding, curiosity-- all the things that go into creating story ideas and coverage plans, and all the things that bring us news."

The Great Wall of Texas: How the U.S. Is Repeating One of History's Great Blunders Posted: 09 Jul 2013 08:15 AM PDT Reuters Before their empire fell, the Romans built walls. They began by erecting barriers along the border following the death of the Emperor Trajan in 117 A.D., notably Hadrian's Wall, which belted Britain. Later emperors erected internal walls, even around the great city itself, to ward off barbarians. After 300 A.D., the Emperor Diocletian effectively converted the entire Roman populace into feudal serfs, walling them off from internal movement in a vain effort to stabilize the chaotic economy. Despite the cautionary tale of Rome, building walls, both literal and figurative, has remained a habit of great powers in decline -- the fateful course taken not only by Ming China, but also Soviet Russia, and even Great Britain. Sadly, many Americans are all too eager to repeat history. Witness the immigration bill slowly making its way through Congress, and the feverish reactions it has inspired. In exchange for granting undocumented workers a path to citizenship, Republicans have demanded a so-called "border surge" that would double the number of patrol agents in the Southwest and build an extra 700 miles of fencing. Due to bipartisan prejudice against so-called "low-skill" migrants, the legislation is also loaded with dangerous new government controls over the labor market. The Senate bill, for example, requires employers to post new jobs on a Labor Department website, certify that no citizen is displaced, and surrender wage-setting to bureaucrats. Nevertheless, the conventional wisdom is that the bill will open a floodgate of foreigners. The Heritage Foundation issued an outlandish warning about the supposed multi-trillion-dollar fiscal burden of new immigrants, practically suggesting that the Statue of Liberty be melted down for the border fence. Isolationism, unfortunately, is not limited to one policy or one party. Liberals have been skeptical of free trade for decades now. Less than 10 percent of House Democrats voted for the Central American free trade agreement in 2004. And Democratic politicians, including President Obama during his re-election campaign, routinely hype the danger of multinational firms outsourcing jobs. Before the Fall, a Wall The psychological impulse to protect a nation's wealth and culture from foreign contamination is an example of what behavioral economists call "loss aversion" - the idea that people are more concerned about what they might forfeit than gain from change. History tells us that with great power comes great loss aversion. Take the fate of Ming China, the world's most fabulously wealthy civilization in the 15th century. The empire cut itself off from foreign trade after the 1430s, an action urged by Mandarin bureaucrats in order to clip the power of the merchant class, their rivals at court. Court intrigue is also revealed by the extension of China's Great Wall, and the abrupt termination of the voyages of Admiral Zheng He, both reflecting the Confucian attitude that foreign barbarians offered nothing of value. The following centuries saw China transform into a weak and isolated time capsule. Or consider the Berlin wall, the manifestation of the "Iron Curtain" that hid the stagnancy of Soviet power from 1961 to 1989. Unlike Roman or Ming walls, the communist walls blocked emigration rather than immigration, which is an even more destructive strain of inwardness. At least 246 East Germans were killed trying to escape to West Berlin, but millions more were imprisoned in a failing communist economic model. In its defense, GDP per capita in the Soviet Union rose from $4000 to $7000 per person during the final decades of the Cold War, but that compared poorly to British incomes, for example, that rose from $8900 to $16,400. Britain itself is a particularly interesting frontrunner to the U.S., but not because of its reputation as the birthplace of free market economics. During the peak years of empire, Britain's Parliament neglected to extend citizenship to its colonial subjects not once, but twice. The first time it fumbled a continent full of human capital was in North America in the 1770s. The second time was in the 1880s, when a fear of declinism stymied progress. Prime Minister William Pitt (the elder), who led Britain during the 18th century, recorded his own expansive dream of a Greater Britain in his personal papers. Pitt's "scheme for better uniting" proposed that there be four members of Parliament to represent Virginia, four for Pennsylvania, four for Massachusetts, three for Jamaica, three for New York, two for Canada, and so on. Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations made the same appeal. And yet it never came to pass. In 1707, the English Parliament added Scotland's representatives to its chamber. Northern Ireland was given direct representation in 1800. Conspicuously absent was an offer to the Americas during the decades in between, or the Indians later. Later, at the dawn of the 20th century, the British Empire was fading relative to other European nations. British economic power was roughly double that of France and triple that of Germany in 1820, a lead that eroded over the following century. Leaders in Parliament were puzzled by the relative decline, and began to question their historical "laissez faire" policies. Rather than reform its colonial structures, as Cambridge professor John Seeley called for, prime ministers debated which trade barriers to erect and how high. Decline followed. Open the Gates The real dilemma for American growth is not ignorance about good economics, but the quagmire of bad politics. Simple-minded protectionism in terms of trade or migration is being exploited by populists in both major parties. What our leaders need to understand is that the only existential threat facing America is not embodied by barbarians at the gates, but by American isolationism. To continue the miraculous American growth story, we need to continue the traditions of constant innovation, diversity, and openness to the world. The last thing we need is a wall.

Here Are the Countries Where People Are Most Likely to Pay Bribes Posted: 09 Jul 2013 08:08 AM PDT Transparency International For a butcher named Valery Tsaturov in the town of Timonino, Russia, bribes are a natural part of life. Police officers demand $30 to let him drive home from the meat factory, as the Washington Post documented last year. For the health inspectors, it's $500 a month just to keep his doors open. Russia's bribe epidemic is well-known, despite its efforts to fight corruption, but a new report by the nonprofit Transparency International casts light on the global problem of kickbacks and fringe benefits. Map of countries by percentage of people who have paid bribes The darker the country, the more bribes were paid. Scroll over the countries for exact figures. The map above ranks countries based on the percentage of people who reported having paid a bribe in one of eight different government services in the past year, including in sectors like medical care, police, judiciary, and land registration. Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Yemen had the highest percentages, with about three-quarters or more of the population saying they had bribed someone. Worldwide, one in four people report having paid a bribe, and police were the most commonly bribed institution. It's a great guide to the countries that still have far to go in combatting buyoffs, but, frustratingly, data for a few notorious countries are missing: Russia, China, and Brazil among them. In countries where bribes have become endemic, they can act as a type of regressive tax on the poor and can prevent low-income households from accessing basic services, as the report notes: The East Africa Bribery Index for example finds that the average bribe paid for land services is more than$100 (9,842 Kenyan Shilling) in Kenya and the average value of a bribe paid to the judiciary in Uganda is more than $200 (594,137 Ugandan Shilling). A survey in Mexico finds that the cost of bribery has a regressive effect on Mexican households hurting the poor the most, with an average-income household spending 14 percent of that income on bribes and those with the lowest incomes spending 33 percent. In Greece, the total costs households incurred due to corruption were estimated to amount to €420 million in 2012. Overall, the group found that worldwide corruption has increased, with political parties perceived as "the most corrupt public institution." The group recommends as one of its solutions that "people should refuse to pay a bribe, wherever asked and whenever possible," but that's probably a tall order in countries where getting medical treatment or police help depends on greasing palms.

Late-Night Comedy Roundup: Joe Biden Sends Yoda Fan Mail Posted: 09 Jul 2013 08:03 AM PDT With many late-night shows coming back from an Independence Day break, politics were on hosts' minds. The early news on a possible Hillary Clinton run for president was ripe for commentary by Conan O'Brien, while The Tonight Show's Jay Leno used the holiday to reference the United States' growing national debt to China. O'Brien also looked outward by talking about Mexico's new status as the most obese nation in the world. George W. Bush's humanitarian trip to Africa last week brought the former president into the humor crosshairs once again. Bush danced with Zambians last week and provided silly video for Jimmy Kimmel to mock and for The Late Show's David Letterman to tie to the heat wave with a public service announcement. Letterman also tied the heat wave to National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden, saying he is now looking for asylum among penguins in Antarctica. Snowden has been offered asylum by a few South American nations, but NBC's Jimmy Fallon thinks he may just wait to go to jail. Fast forward to 3:35 to see Fallon read Snowden's to-do list as he waits in Moscow's Sheremetyevo International Airport. Read  more from Government Executive

The 2 Supreme Court Cases That Could Put a Dagger in Organized Labor Posted: 09 Jul 2013 07:05 AM PDT Reuters During the last half century, private sector unionism has endured a rather brutal death march. Almost every year, we learn once again that the percentage of private sector workers who are union members has declined to a new record low. For the most part, the decline has been a gradual affair, with private sector unions slowly suffocating under America's uniquely terrible labor laws. In the coming year, however, this slow demise could hasten considerably, courtesy of the Supreme Court. In the shadow of the intense media coverage last month surrounding the Voting Rights Act, affirmative action, the Defense of Marriage Act, and Proposition 8, the justices quietly agreed to hear two cases that could devastate unions in the private sector. The first case, Noel Canning v. NLRB, arises out of the dysfunction gripping the U.S. Senate. For years now, the chamber's Republican minority has refused to confirm presidential appointments to the National Labor Relations Board, the government agency that protects the union rights of workers. As a result, the NLRB has struggled to maintain the three-member quorum necessary for it to legally function. To circumvent Senate obstruction, President Obama has been forced to name new NLRB members during Senate recesses. To choke off these appointments, Senate Republicans have more recently refused to go into recess by seizing upon technicalities that keep the body perpetually in session. A ruling against the administration would let Senate Republicans neuter the country's labor laws Despite this maneuvering, President Obama continued to make recess appointments to the NLRB without seeking Senate confirmation. His administration has argued that the Senate goes into recess when it effectively shuts down, even if the Senate claims it is still in session. To finally resolve this conflict, the Supreme Court in the Noel Canning case will decide under what circumstances the President can make recess appointments to the NLRB. Given the conservative orientation of the present Supreme Court, it is entirely possible that these recess appointments will be ruled invalid. Such a ruling would essentially give Senate Republicans a blank check to neuter the only agency empowered to enforce the country's labor laws. A non-functional NLRB would, for instance, leave workers illegally fired or intimidated by employers during union organizing drives with nowhere to turn. Additionally, without an NLRB to resolve union election disputes, unions may find it nearly impossible to become the certified representatives of new groups of workers. It is hard to imagine any union successfully organizing new workers under these conditions. The second case, Mulhall v. UNITE HERE Local 355, calls into question what is probably the most successful union organizing strategy of last decade. Because our labor laws are so unfriendly to workers, major unions -- including SEIU, UNITE HERE, and CWA, among others -- often seek to enter into so-called "organizing agreements" with employers. These deals establish the rules that the unions and employers must follow in subsequent organizing battles. The most common provisions require employers to remain neutral about the union and to recognize it as soon as the majority of their employees sign cards authorizing it to represent them. In Mulhall, these agreements are being challenged under anti-corruption laws that prevent employers from providing "things of value" to unions. If the Supreme Court decides that organizing agreements are unlawful, the only promising unionization strategy in recent years will die. By themselves, either of these cases could deliver debilitating blows to a union movement already badly wounded from years of steady decline. Combined, they could be a death sentence to new private sector organizing altogether. This is especially true because of the special way they interact. One of the chief advantages of the organizing agreements challenged in Mulhall is that they make it easier to form new unions without the NLRB. Without them, unions will have no choice but to rely on the NLRB, which may then be rendered powerless by Noel Canning. Private sector unions are already in decline. But this is the one-two punch that could cripple them for good.

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