Pacific Standard. Smart Journalism. Real Solutions.

Hitler’s Baby Pictures
There’s a Reason They Call It a Supply ‘Chain’
Were Your Clothes Made in a Bangladeshi Factory?
Who Would You Shoot?
Marriage May Calm a Criminal Impulse in Men
You Listen to That Sad Song Because It Makes You Happy
In Praise of Selfies
Can Video Games Be America’s Next Favorite Sport?
Which Eggheads Should Run Washington, D.C.?
Breaking the Link Between Video Games and Aggression
When War Records Go Missing

Posted: 15 Jul 2013 08:52 PM PDT

Too much social capital will kill you. We fear strangers and unfamiliar places. Yet danger is usually a spouse, sibling, or significant other. Police crime – do not cross surrounds your neighborhood:

There's no such thing as "black-on-black" crime. Yes, from 1976 to 2005, 94 percent of black victims were killed by black offenders, but that racial exclusivity was also true for white victims of violent crime—86 percent were killed by white offenders. Indeed, for the large majority of crimes, you'll find that victims and offenders share a racial identity, or have some prior relationship to each other.

What Shapiro and others miss about crime, in general, is that it's driven by opportunism and proximity; If African-Americans are more likely to be robbed, or injured, or killed by other African-Americans, it's because they tend to live in the same neighborhoods as each other. Residential statistics bear this out (PDF); blacks are still more likely to live near each other or other minority groups than they are to whites. And of course, the reverse holds as well—whites are much more likely to live near other whites than they are to minorities and African-Americans in particular.

Residential proximity, not race, is a strong predictor of homicide. You kill who you know. It’s the curse of Hitler’s baby pictures:

On the cover of my book I put Hitler’s baby picture, and I put it there because there’s a big controversy over Hitler’s baby picture. (Garbled)

But what I also found was that is raises a question of Hitler’s normality- I mean, this is a very normal looking baby picture. (Garbled)

… this normal looking baby was really kind of threatening. My book was translated into ten languages by five publishers, and none of the foreign publishers wanted to put Hitler’s baby picture on the cover. They put a picture of Hitler shaking his fist or Hitler in a military uniform, Hitler scowling as an adult, but certainly this child, this baby was more threatening because it somehow implicated us more, it implicated normality.

Evil needs a face and it doesn’t look like your neighbor. Evil must be inhuman, other. It was never a child. The familiar is innocent. We let our guard down. Just keep out the outsiders and everything will be OK:

So how to explain New York, London, Rio de Janiero, Los Angeles — the great melting-pot cities that drive the world’s creative and financial economies?

The image of civic lassitude dragging down more diverse communities is at odds with the vigor often associated with urban centers, where ethnic diversity is greatest. It turns out there is a flip side to the discomfort diversity can cause. If ethnic diversity, at least in the short run, is a liability for social connectedness, a parallel line of emerging research suggests it can be a big asset when it comes to driving productivity and innovation. In high-skill workplace settings, says Scott Page, the University of Michigan political scientist, the different ways of thinking among people from different cultures can be a boon.

“Because they see the world and think about the world differently than you, that’s challenging,” says Page, author of “The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies.” “But by hanging out with people different than you, you’re likely to get more insights. Diverse teams tend to be more productive.”

In other words, those in more diverse communities may do more bowling alone, but the creative tensions unleashed by those differences in the workplace may vault those same places to the cutting edge of the economy and of creative culture.

Page calls it the “diversity paradox.” He thinks the contrasting positive and negative effects of diversity can coexist in communities, but “there’s got to be a limit.” If civic engagement falls off too far, he says, it’s easy to imagine the positive effects of diversity beginning to wane as well. “That’s what’s unsettling about his findings,” Page says of Putnam’s new work.

Emphasis added. Don’t bowl with strangers. He might be the next Hitler. Segregation is a choice, a survival strategy. Only go where you know. Where you know depends on who you know, a surefire strategy to keep you and your progeny poor.

Globalization, life, rewards those who resist the urge to turtle. You go where you don’t know anyone, bowling alone. Robert Putnam laments the eroding social capital and the resulting decline of the United States. Doom. Doom is the creepy guy next door that everyone has known for ages.

There’s a Reason They Call It a Supply ‘Chain’

Posted: 15 Jul 2013 06:24 PM PDT

In a grim superlative, this spring's collapse of the eight-story Rana Plaza in Bangladesh's capital has gone down as the worst accidental building failure in history. Tarred by their association with the business going on in the building—cheaply piecing together clothing that would later be sold at a premium—the global garment biz last week debuted not one, but two, approaches for ensuring that Bangladeshi clothing suppliers offer at least rudimentary nods toward safety in their factories.

The two approaches differ in several ways, most obviously by geography. Seventy-two mostly European-based clothing companies signed onto the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh, while 14 American firms like Walmart and The Gap inked the Bangladesh Worker Safety Initiative. Both plans feature inspection of factories, training, and financial support to bring bad buildings up to snuff; Bangladeshi bosses who don't eventually measure up will be blacklisted.

The more important difference, however, isn't locale but accountability. The Europeans created a plan in which they—the clothing retailers themselves—are voluntarily on the hook for seeing that improvements are made in Bangladesh's corrupt, lowest-common-denominator factory system. (The retailers are also required to keep using Bangladeshi suppliers for at least two years, preventing them from immediately hightailing it to the next cheapest destination.) The Americans have on the surface a more real-world oriented plan, featuring employee hotlines, a focus on the broader issue of worker—not just building—safety (hello, leather tanneries), and the understanding that manufacturers may keep their own noses clean by subcontracting work to less pristine operators. But their responsibility, while also voluntary, isn't legally binding beyond writing a check.

There's no reason that the two approaches have to compete; and an even stronger set of protections would result if the two were used complementarily, and not competitively. But that's not the way they're being viewed.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the European approach with its reduced wiggle room has been winning more plaudits. An editorial in The New York Times, for example, argues that "Recent tragedies provide ample evidence that voluntary measures to monitor factories are not enough to protect workers," while an article in The Economist suggests that inertia might take the upper hand as factory owners play safety arbitrage with the competing proposals:

Foreign firms have been promising for around 20 years to do something about Bangladesh's dangerous factories, to little effect. Now, as then, they will make significant progress only if the government, and the factory owners, also undertake serious efforts to bring about change. Lamentably, even after the tragedy at Rana Plaza there has been little sign of this.

While putting enforceable heat on the retailers does seem like the approach most likely to provide real results, why would any company put itself in the legal crosshairs rather than remaining a dilettante at the corporate social responsibility ball? Backers of the American initiative specifically cite the fear of litigation (although as a harm for the program, not themselves!) for their approach. "If you have to find $10m for factory safety and put aside another $10m for lawyers, you will really start to suck the energy out of this," Walmart's Jay Jorgensen told The Economist.

Will Gans, an environmental analyst for economic consultancy NERA, looked at self-imposed corporate regulation in a recent paper in the journal Environmental & Resource Economics. Gans and his co-author Beat Hinterman examined the late and unlamented Chicago Climate Exchange, a voluntary-mandatory experiment to create a cap-and-trade market in carbon dioxide. The exchange essentially folded, but Gans wanted to understand what private companies got out of signing away their rights when in most instances their traditional bottom line prospered by avoiding regulation.

As he told Pacific Standard last month, the benefit was experience—but only when it appeared a harsher set of mandates might be looming. “When wading into a completely new regulatory area like this,” he said, “it makes a lot of sense to me for firms, and for the actors involved, to gain experience.”

Gans carefully avoided making too grand of conclusions from his study, saying that even another example from the emissions arena would have its own peculiarities, making comparison inexact. He did offer one possible example that would be similar—Western clothing retailers operating in Bangladesh, albeit before the Rana Plaza disaster, taking on serious oversight of their supply chains.

It wasn't obvious why they should be doing it, but they were trying to assuage their consumers that they were doing the right things, that they were going to be responsible manufacturers. Then Bangladesh rolls around, and they were members of this particular cooperative or organization, and they weren't tied that closely to the Bangladesh issue, and therefore they might have seen a benefit to their stock in the market.

Especially for companies that deal directly with consumers, Gans suggests that such gilding of the lily, sincere or not, can improve the market's perception of a company. Whether there's a market benefit now that more than 1,100 people are dead and all the big boys are climbing on the bandwagon is an open question, but the possibility that individual Western governments might try their hand at some legislation can't be ignored.

"Without external pressure, whether from consumers/customers, say fear of a boycott or threat of looming regulation," Gans said, "it doesn't make a whole lot of sense for companies to engage in these sorts of voluntary actions, based on the literal charter of these companies to maximize share price for stock holders. … Unless you change the system or inflate one of these other external pressures, I wouldn't expect to see a lot of change or things that are meaningful."

Much of this assumes, of course, the notion that Western companies and consumers share responsibility with Southwest Asian plutocrats and bureaucrats (often the same people) to make things better. Given other developed-world initiatives ranging from free-trade coffee to the Forest Stewardship Council, it appears the notion is accepted.

On a visit to Dhaka before both accords were fully fleshed out, the French ambassador at-large for human rights, François Zimeray, suggested both sides had some lifting to do—although "first the solution will come from here, not from abroad." (This morning Bangladesh did institute some improvements in worker rights, including the right to unionize and the requirement that employers set aside some money from their profits for their employees' welfare. The new law didn't up the minimum wage, equivalent to $38 a month, or address worker safety issues.) Quoted by the English-language paper The Star, Zimeray added, "But our part as consumers, as buyers, as clients is to ask the brands to check more carefully. … We must put an end to the era of fashion cynicism. Ignorance, indifference and complicity are only one step removed. We refuse to be accomplices."

Were Your Clothes Made in a Bangladeshi Factory?

Posted: 15 Jul 2013 02:00 PM PDT

Since the Rana Plaza building collapse killed more than 1,100 people in April, retailers have faced mounting pressure to improve safety at Bangladesh garment factories and to sever ties with manufacturers that don’t measure up.

The world’s largest retailer, Walmart, released a list of more than 200 factories it said it had barred from producing its merchandise because of serious or repeated safety problems, labor violations, or unauthorized subcontracting.

But at least two of the factories on the list have continued to send massive shipments of sports bras and girls’ dresses to Walmart stores in recent months, according to interviews and U.S. customs records.

In June 2011, Walmart said, it banned the Bangladeshi garment factory Mars Apparels from producing goods for the retail giant. But over the last year, Mars has repeatedly shipped tons of sports bras to Walmart, according to U.S. customs records and Mars owners. The most recent shipment was in late May, almost two years after Walmart claims it stopped doing business with the Bangladeshi firm.

“If Walmart were to tell us they’re stopping production, if that were to happen, we would be destroyed. Our workers would be destroyed.”

A second Bangladeshi clothing maker, Simco Dresses, was blacklisted in January but continued shipping to Walmart Canada into March.

Walmart spokesman Kevin Gardner said the Mars shipments were allowed because of confusion over whether Walmart’s standards applied. Mars didn’t produce garments with a Walmart house brand but instead with a Fruit of the Loom label. So, Gardner said, it wasn’t clear if Mars needed to meet Walmart’s standards or Fruit of the Loom’s.

Fruit of the Loom could not immediately be reached for comment.

As for Simco, orders that Walmart had already placed were accepted to lessen the impact on workers, Gardner said.

The shipments raise questions about Walmart’s ability to monitor its supply chain as well as its efforts to ensure decent working conditions in factories located in low-wage countries.

Interviews with Bangladeshi factory owners spotlight another potential problem: Walmart’s approach of publishing a blacklist with no further details might unfairly tar family businesses with minor violations.

International labor groups have been pressing retailers to sign an accord to pay for fire and building safety upgrades to Bangladesh factories. So far, several large retailers including H&M, Inditex, and PVH Corp., which includes Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein, have signed onto the agreement.

But many of the biggest retailers in the United States, including Walmart and Gap, have not. Instead, they are working on an alternative plan that they say will improve safety faster—but that is not legally binding.

“We think the safety plan that we’ve put in place already meets or exceeds the [other] proposal and is going to get results more quickly,” Gardner said. “The point of the list is to get more accountability and transparency into our supply chain.”

Soon, he said, Walmart would also publish safety audits of its current suppliers in Bangladesh.

Dan Schlademan, a United Food and Commercial Workers leader who directs the union’s Making Change at Walmart campaign, said the shipments from barred factories show that Walmart’s program is hollow.

“It’s either a question of Walmart just telling people what they want to hear,” he said, “or it’s that Walmart has created a supply chain system that they have no control over.”

Making Change at Walmart initially provided the customs data. ProPublica verified the information and found other shipments using public data compiled by research firms serving the import-export industry.

Mars Apparels is a manufacturer of lingerie and sportswear in the port city of Chittagong. In the last year, the garment maker sent at least 22 shipments, totaling 80 tons, of sports bras through the Port of Newark, according to customs records compiled by Import Genius, a data consultant for the import-export industry. In each case, the customer was listed as “Walmart Stores” and the product mark as “Ariela-Alpha International,” whose brands include L.e.i. and Fruit of the Loom. (Ariela-Alpha did not return phone calls.)

Reached on a cell phone in Bangladesh, Shaker Ahmed, deputy managing director of Mars Apparels and the son of its founder, confirmed the customs data and said that the latest shipment went out last month. (Customs data show several May shipments in which the customer was listed as “WMR.”)

But Ahmed said that until contacted by ProPublica, he had never had any problems with Walmart or heard about its list of banned factories. He described Mars as a medium-sized garment manufacturer with less than 1,000 workers.

Ahmed said Mars has supplied Walmart for more than a decade, though since 2008 it has been making clothes for private labels such as Fruit of the Loom that are owned or licensed by an importer, which then supplies the clothing to Walmart.

When Mars was manufacturing clothing for Walmart brands, its factory was regularly audited by the company, Ahmed said. Walmart rates its suppliers green, yellow, orange, and red, with green being the best and red the worst, he said. “We never received a rating below yellow.”

Since 2008, Ahmed said he has passed all audits by Fruit of the Loom, which uses the Worldwide Responsible Accredited Production program to inspect factories. Walmart said Mars didn’t meet all of its criteria, which it said is more stringent than WRAP’s. Ahmed said he welcomed Walmart to look at his factory and that the company is in the process of building a state-of-the-art facility.

Walmart accounts for a “very large” percentage of Mars’ business, Ahmed said. “If Walmart were to tell us they’re stopping production, if that were to happen, we would be destroyed. Our workers would be destroyed. We haven’t had a single incident in 19 years. We never had a problem. So that would be catastrophe.”

The other banned garment maker in the recent customs records, Simco Dresses, was blacklisted in January. The Import Genius records show three shipments of girls’ dresses in February and March to the Isfel Co. destined for Walmart Canada. Isfel didn’t return a call.

Customs records provided by another trade research firm PIERS show four more March shipments of knitted dresses and rompers, also destined for Walmart Canada.

The Bangladeshi press reported in January that Walmart had refused a shipment of women’s shorts from Simco after discovering unauthorized subcontracting to Tazreen Fashion, where a fire killed 117 people last year. Simco said at the time that Walmart’s ban could drive it into bankruptcy.

Simco’s managing director Muzaffar Siddique said his firm had subcontracted an order to an authorized Walmart supplier, which then sent the work to Tazreen without its knowledge.

Asked about the February and March shipments from Simco, Walmart spokesman Gardner said, “If it isn’t an egregious matter, we will accept goods produced under existing orders as part of our efforts to mitigate impact on the workers.”

Siddique contended that Walmart’s listing of his company is unfair and is damaging his family’s business. After the list was published, he said J.C. Penney canceled a $300,000 order for 500,000 pairs of pajamas.

“We are very upset about it,” Siddique said. “When I do business with you, it is like a doctor-patient relationship; there should be confidentiality. Walmart has no business going about publishing people’s names that it thinks are bad because that jeopardizes other business we are doing with our customers.”

Walmart is the only U.S. retailer to release a list of barred factories in Bangladesh. Gap, which also has a large presence in Bangladesh, said in a May statement that it has committed up to $22 million for factory improvements and that its stepped-up inspections have already led to some vendors upgrading their plants. But the company has said it would not sign on to the accord because of a provision that could allow victims of future factory accidents to sue the companies in U.S. courts.

Walmart, Gap, and other large retailers are moving forward with developing an alternative safety plan with the help of former U.S. Sens. George Mitchell (D-Maine) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine).

“We are committed to Bangladesh,” Gardner said. “We understand the role that we play in improving the livelihood of factory workers in that country. And improving the safety of those workers is very important to us.”

But Walmart’s approach of naming factories as “red-failed/unauthorized” has led to criticism in the Bangladeshi garment community that Walmart is trying to shift blame rather than serve as a partner.

“What Walmart is doing at the moment is nothing but saving its own skin,” Reaz Bin Mahmood of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association told Reuters. “As a responsible business partner they should stay with us and help improve working conditions for the safety and security of workers.”

This post originally appeared on ProPublica, a Pacific Standard partner site.

Who Would You Shoot?

Posted: 15 Jul 2013 01:36 PM PDT

Editor’s Note: This post was first published in 2010.

In 2002, a study by Joshua Correll and colleagues called “The Police Officer's Dilemma” was published. In the study, researchers reported that they presented photos of black and white men holding either a gun or a non-threatening object (like a wallet) in a video game-style setting. Participants were asked to make a rapid decision to "shoot" or "don't shoot" each of the men based on whether the target was armed.

They found that people hesitated longer to shoot an armed white target (and they were more likely to accidentally not shoot). Participants were quicker and more accurate with black armed targets but there were more "false alarms" (shooting them when they were unarmed). These effects were present even though participants did not hold any explicit discriminatory views and claimed that they wanted to treat all targets fairly.

The effect we see here is a subconscious but measurable preference to give white men the benefit of the doubt in these ambiguous situations. Decision times can vary by a fraction of a second, but that fraction can mean life or death for the person on the other end of the gun.

A terrible reminder of this bias was brought back into the headlines on March 2 when a black student in Gainesville, Florida, was shot in the face with a rifle by a police officer. The conditions surrounding the shooting are murky as the police are extremely hesitant to release details.

It appears that Kofi Adu-Brempong, an international graduate student and teacher's assistant, was in a stress-induced panic and was worried about his student visa. On the day of the incident, his neighbors heard yelling in his apartment and called the police. It has been suggested that he may have suffered from some mental health problems that related to his panics (although this is not known for sure) and that he had resisted police in the past.

Even so, when the police arrived they broke down his door, citing that they did not know if there was someone else in danger inside the apartment. Adu refused to cooperate and the situation escalated to the point where police tried to subdue him with a taser and a bean-bag gun. Then a policeman shot him. Adu is now in the hospital in critical condition and has sustained serious damages to his tongue and lower jaw. The police claimed that Adu was wielding a lead pipe and a knife and started violently threatening them with the weapons.

In fact, there was no lead pipe and there was no knife in his hand. When the police approached Adu after he had been shot, the pipe showed itself to be a cane—a cane that Adu constantly used due to a case of childhood polio. And the knife they saw in his hand was actually sitting on the kitchen counter.

Instances like these are tragic reminders of the mistakes that can be made in split-second decisions and how race can play into those decisions.

This post originally appeared on Sociological Images, a Pacific Standard partner site.

Marriage May Calm a Criminal Impulse in Men

Posted: 15 Jul 2013 12:00 PM PDT

Over the July 4th weekend I was on a trip with some friends, a trip that included a long drive down a series of long, one-lane country roads. At one point in the drive, a very aggressive driver in a pick-up truck sped up behind us and then recklessly passed us, going over the double-yellow line in the process. We hadn't been going slow, but I guess it was too slow for that guy.

As he raced and weaved away into the distance, my friend who was driving commented that every time she encounters a driver like that, she likes to tell herself that "they must be going through a messy divorce." I told her I really like that tactic: it helps you to not take things personally, and it's probably more effective in diffusing your irritation than yelling curses out the window.

In a roundabout way, though, my safe-driving and healthy-perspective-having friend may have put her finger on an interesting point. Divorce is upsetting and disruptive by nature, of course; as it turns out, this is especially true in the lives of criminals.

Divorce is upsetting and disruptive by nature, of course; as it turns out, this is especially true in the lives of criminals.

A report out now in the journal Psychology, Crime & Law measured the impact of divorce on male offenders, by looking at their criminal activity both before and after a marital breakdown. The two co-authors, psychologists Delphine Theobald of the Institute of Psychiatry in the U.K. and David P. Farrington of the University of Cambridge, studied data involving 400 London men from over 50 years. In the U.K., following worldwide trends, divorce is on the rise—currently at 45 percent, according to the Office of National Statistics there.

This study found that a healthy marriage may decrease a man's propensity to commit crimes. Emphasis on healthy: if the female partner happens to also be bent on a life of crime, those benefits are lessened (all of the men in this particular study are heterosexual).

First, the authors refer back to a similar, often-cited study that Farrington had co-authored in 1995 with psychologist Donald West. That research had previously found that getting a divorce relatively early in life (before the age of 26) significantly increased a man's likelihood of being convicted for a crime in the next five years of his life.

That could indicate correlation rather than causation, however; the same problem factors that increase the likelihood of criminal behavior (like substance abuse and underlying psychological issues) could also potentially make it difficult for a person to sustain a long-term relationship. But another statistic from the same study is more telling: "In within-individual analyses, where each individual acted as his own control … offending rates increased by 44 percent during periods when the man were separated compared with periods when they were married."

As an extension of this previous research, Farrington and Theobald returned to the very same group of males, all born around 1953 in South London, whom psychologists have now been following for over 40 years. Now that the men are all about 60 years old, there is much more data to be mined there. The researchers were able to look at marriages and divorces later in life and the impact they had on criminal behavior. So this study looked at how many times the men have been convicted of crimes both five years before and five years after the break-up of a substantial (at least three-year-long) marriage. It ignored misdemeanors but included crimes like burglary, grand theft auto, fraud, assault, sex offenses, drugs, and vandalism.

The results supported the original hypothesis: the men who divorced from their wives had an increase of 18 percent in their conviction rate from before the divorce, and the men who stayed married had a decrease of 80 percent in their conviction rate. In trying to explain why this might be true, the authors offer this bleak scene:

Men whose offending reduced following marriage may find that experiencing a marital breakdown rekindles deep-seated vulnerabilities. If their coping mechanisms are not good and they lose access to their children, and/or have continued conflict with their ex-partner and suffer financial stress, they may resume behaviors that they had stopped or reduced when they were married. If they are not engaged in family life and the routine activities associated with marriage … they will also have more time to connect with undesirable friends and/or become embroiled in heavy drinking and drug use. Such men no longer have anything to lose.

So, all of this is to say—my erratic-truck-driver example aside—it is not necessarily the case that divorce simply causes crime. Rather, it is to suggest that healthy marriages can help to mellow an otherwise unstable life, and after that stabilizing force is gone, that turmoil and the crime that can accompany it will often flood back in.

You Listen to That Sad Song Because It Makes You Happy

Posted: 15 Jul 2013 10:11 AM PDT

If sad songs are just so damn sad, why do we keep listening to them?

According to a new study, it's because, in fact, sad songs create positive emotions. Researchers at the Tokyo University of the Arts and the RIKEN Brain Institute had 44 participants listen to different musical excerpts and then choose from 62 emotional words to describe their feelings. Overall, the songs were rated a higher status of "perceived" sadness than actual sadness—meaning, participants thought the songs were a lot sadder than they actually were. Music that was deemed sad made participants feel somewhat upset, but mainly produced romantic and inspired emotions. Common descriptive words were: allured, wistful, nostalgic, and tender. And it's these emotions that help us get over the more unpleasant ones.

This makes sense, because otherwise listening to sad music would just be self-torture (we already know it's not completely our fault if we burst into tears at a note. Science!). So listening to the sad stuff is a good thing—consider it iPod therapy. After all, the study states, "Emotion experienced by music has no direct danger or harm unlike the emotion experienced in everyday life. If we suffer from unpleasant emotion evoked through daily life, sad music might be helpful to alleviate negative emotion."

Participants in the study were moved by classical music, but there are plenty of songs in other genres that are good to wallow in—er, I mean, utilize in your more miserable moments. So here is a by-no-means-definitive playlist of sad tunes to get you over the hump:

1. "I Can't Make You Love Me," Bonnie Raitt

OK, this song is cheesy, but still, it's just so sad. The video is even in black and white. And what's more tormenting than unrequited love? SO SAD. Bon Iver and Adele try, but they just can't touch Bonnie.

2. "Skinny Love,"Bon Iver

When he's not covering Bonnie, Bon Iver is writing his own sad, sad songs. "Skinny Love" is a gateway to them all. This is alone-in-your-room, looking-at-clouds, wearing-flannel sad.

3. "Atlantic City,"Bruce Springsteen

Struggling-in-a-wayward America sad.

4. "These Arms of Mine," Otis Redding

Classic sad.

5. "Have You Ever," Brandy

This is secretly-singing-in-your-car sad. In the video she's rolling around in a tuxedo. Was that his tuxedo? Probably, and that's just sad.

6. "Sorrow," The National

Singer Matt Berninger barely gets a note out before I feel like crying, his voice is just like that. Plus, the song's called "Sorrow."

7. "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright," Bob Dylan

Love-just-doesn't-work-out-sometimes sad.

8. "River," Joni Mitchell

Almost everything from the Blue album could be on this list.

9. "Rivers and Roads," The Head and the Heart

This is moving-away-from-everyone-you-care-about sad.

10. "Cry Me a River,"Justin Timberlake

It's a sad song, but it's by JT. You can kind of dance to it. Can't stay sad forever, right?

In Praise of Selfies

Posted: 15 Jul 2013 10:00 AM PDT

NASA's small rover Curiosity has 17 cameras to record black-and-white, color, and three-dimensional stereo images of Mars. Some, like the four Navcams, are for navigation; others, like the eight Hazcams, capture the terrain under and around the robot, searching for hazards. One camera, the Mars Descent Imager, captured color images of the rover's landing. Two Mastcams take photographs in "true color," correcting for the red dust of the red planet's surface. The Mars Hand Lens Imager functions like a microscope, focusing on small, near objects; the Chemistry and Camera Complex, ChemCam, has a spectroscopy and a microimager telescope, for recording Curiosity's sampling sites.

These 17 cameras have recorded Curiosity's landing and subsequent movements around the planet Mars. They have also captured Curiosity. Some of the first images released to the public in August of last year were of the small rover's steering equipment. The Hazam cameras were documenting the rocks and dust of the surface of Mars, but managed to capture Curiosity's shadow and, in the lower right frame of one picture, one of the rover's wheels.

Then in September, on Curiosity's 32nd day on Mars, NASA announced: "Rover Takes Self Portrait." At the site where Curiosity recovered its first samples of Martian soil, the talented little robot took dozens of pictures that were made into a composite selfie. The news that even the Mars Rover had taken a self-portrait went viral, even though Curiosity did only what humans have been doing for centuries.

Rarely a documentary genre, self-portraits have always allowed us to craft an argument about who we are, convincing not only others, but also ourselves.

A PRODUCT OF THE Renaissance, the self-portrait has come of age in the era of digital photography. A recent poll by Samsung U.K. reported that 30 percent of all the photographs taken by millennials are selfies. Front-facing cameras have made staging self-portraits so easy that it can be difficult to remember the era when swivel screens seemed revolutionary or when self-timers first unchained photographers from their tripods.

Technology explains this most recent self-portrait craze, but also the original. The sudden availability of mirrors during the Renaissance allowed painters to turn themselves into subjects. Where before pools of water and polished stone had been the most common ways of looking at one's self, suddenly more affordable alternatives to prohibitively expensive silver-mercury spread throughout Europe. Glass coated with a mix of mercury and tin allowed more and more Europeans to go through the looking-glass.

These early glass mirrors were usually convex, distorting the reflections in ways that some painters attempted to disguise by correction or concealment. But in one of the most famous self-portraits from this period, the Italian painter Parmigianino embraces the convexity of his mirror and embeds it in his painting.

As the poet John Ashbery describes in his spectacular poem about Parmigianino, "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror": "The surface / Of the mirror being convex, the distance increases / significantly." Ashbery's ekphrastic poem captures the particular distortions of Parmigianino's self-portrait but also the general distortions of reflexive art: "The glass chose to reflect only what he saw / Which was enough for his purpose."

Self-portraiture, like all reflexive art, turns its gaze inward from what we see to the one who sees. In the digital age, the rise of selfies parallels the rise of memoir and autobiography. Controlling one's image has gone from unspoken desire to unapologetic profession, with everyone from your best friend to your favorite celebrity laboring to control every word, every pixel of himself or herself that enters the world. Self-portraiture is one aspect of a larger project to manage our reputations.

It used to be embarrassing to stage your own portrait, an implicit acknowledgement that you had no one there to take it for you or no one interested enough in taking your picture, but that self-consciousness has disappeared. It has been replaced by the self-confidence that selfies require.

We cherish the possibility that someone, anyone, might see us. If photographs possess reality in their pixels, then selfies allow us to possess ourselves: to stage identities and personas. There is the sense that getting the self-portrait just right will right our own identity: if I appear happy, then I must be happy; if I appear intellectual, then I must be an intellectual; if I appear beautiful, then I must be beautiful. Staging the right image becomes the mechanism for achieving that desired identity. The right self-portrait directs others to see us the way we desire to be seen.

This has always been the power of self-portraiture. Rarely a documentary genre, self-portraits have always allowed us to craft an argument about who we are, convincing not only others, but also ourselves. While so often selfies are denounced as exercises in narcissism, I've always experienced them as experiments in solipsism. A selfie suggests that no one else in the world sees you as you truly are, that no one can be trusted with the camera but you.

IT'S NO SURPRISE THAT self-portraiture is a genre in which women have long excelled. For so long the male gaze fixed women on the canvas, page, and screen as subjects, but self-portraiture allowed women to challenge this gaze with the ways in which they saw themselves. From Frida Kahlo's plaintive, surrealistic self-portraits in oil to Cindy Sherman's conceptual, performative portraits of herself as actresses, gods, and models, female artists have embraced the genre as a way of reclaiming their own image. No longer only objects, women became artists and volunteered as their own subjects.

One of the most celebrated self-portraits of the 20th century is Nan Goldin's "Nan One Month After Being Battered," from 1984. Goldin's hair is brushed and set, falling around long, dangly earrings and a delicate pearl necklace, but she stares at us through two black eyes, one bloodshot and barely open. The photograph is an unsettling, arresting image of domestic abuse. Goldin challenges both the male gaze and the social convention that such feminine wounds and bruises are to be hidden or denied.

The staging of Goldin's self-portrait is relational: although she is the only subject, the abuser's presence in her life is implied by his abuse of her body and viewers are drawn into the portrait as witnesses to her suffering. It's hardly the sort of photograph you'd expect to see in the Facebook album of a friend or in the Instagram account of a celebrity.

Nan Goldin's self-portrait became iconic because it defied the conventions of the genre. She conformed to the expectation that a female subject should be decorated with makeup and adorned with jewelry, but refused to disguise her injuries. While we expect such injury to be documented by others—the police or the newspapers—Goldin's self-documentation was courageous.

That courage is precisely what is lacking in so much of the self-portraiture circulating today. While we are eager to catalog the places we have been and the experiences we have had, we rarely offer documentation of the selves we are.

It is difficult to be shy in the digital age, but impossible to be honest. So often our self-portraits are of the selves we would like to become: they are aspirational, always attempting to make us into someone other than who we are. As Ashbery writes: "Tomorrow is easy, but today is uncharted, / Desolate, reluctant."

All those millions of selfies filling our albums and feeds are rarely of the selves who lounge in sweatpants or eat peanut butter from the jar, the selves waiting in line at the unemployment office, the selves who are battered and abused or lonely and depressed. Even though the proliferation of self-portraits suggests otherwise, we are still self-conscious.

It took a while for memoirs and autobiographies to become honest: shedding their armor of artifice and objectivity. Perhaps self-portraits will do the same. Soon our photographs may be as honest and unadorned as our words—the pictures we take of ourselves as authentic as the pictures we take of others. However "uncharted, / Desolate, [and] reluctant" the present is, it's worth documenting, not only for others, but for ourselves.

Can Video Games Be America’s Next Favorite Sport?

Posted: 15 Jul 2013 08:00 AM PDT

On Monday, October 15, 1990, several newspapers across America ran a single-panel Far Side comic with the caption “Hopeful parents,” in which a young boy sits on the living room floor playing video games while his encouraging yet delusional mother and father watch in the corner. In their conjoined thought-bubbled thoughts, the parents envision a future that’s full of enticing job offerings, such as “Nintendo expert needed/ $50,000 salary + bonus,” “If you have 50,000 hours or more of video game experience, we need you!” and “Super Mario Bros. Expert/ $95,000 yr./ Four-day work week + Ferrari.”

The panel was funny because the idea was ridiculous. While it’s true that competitive gaming has existed on some level ever since the first Pac-Man and Frogger cabinets began filling arcades across America—as documented in the wonderful film The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters—back then no one was thinking about handing out lucrative salaries or luxury cars to some kid with a knack for what amounted to manipulating a bunch of rudimentary pixels on a screen with a joystick. Most people considered video games a slightly amusing waste of time, but not much more than that—saving the princess without losing a life was a skill best kept off the resume.

What Far Side creator Gary Larson and others might not have seen coming, however, was the burgeoning of so-called electronic sports, where professionals from Brazil to South Korea travel around the world competing in tournaments of games like StarCraft II, League of Legends, and Call of Duty for large quantities of both cash and adoration. Today’s top players post sponsored tweets, upload tutorials on YouTube, fend off the occasional groupie or two, and form partnerships with live-streaming sites such as Twitch, which claim to receive 35 million unique viewers per month. Indeed, in a time when video games hold a certain level of cultural clout and the global video game industry reportedly earned a revenue of $63 billion in 2012 with an anticipated income of $78 billion in 2017, the question is no longer whether a young boy practicing on his living room floor can one day play for serious money.

No, for those at the forefront of eSports, the question now is—not if—when will they catch up to leagues like the NBA? And when will their most prominent players be as famous, rich, and celebrated as Kobe, LeBron, or even Jordan?

“At first my parents didn’t support me because they thought it was a waste of time. But when I started bringing in money, they believed me and have been supporting me ever since.”

IF THERE'S A FUTURE superstar of gaming out there, Chris Duarte, also known as Parasite in the gaming community, seems to have as good a chance as anyone. The California-based, bespectacled 18-year-old has been playing competitively for about three years and is the current captain of a four-member team called Impact, which specializes in killing opponents on the first-person shooter Call of Duty.

Last April, Duarte’s squad finished first out of 32 teams in the inaugural Call of Duty championship. Besides receiving a trophy, rings, and glory amongst the smoke machines and falling confetti, the four young men also received a giant check worth $400,000. That’s $100,000 each for being excellent at a video game over a single weekend in Los Angeles.

“At first my parents didn’t support me because they thought it was a waste of time,” said Duarte, who doesn’t attend college, work part-time at a restaurant, or fill his days with much else besides eating breakfast, taking a shower, checking email, running errands, and playing Call of Duty online. “But when I started bringing in money, they believed me and have been supporting me ever since.”

As captain of Impact, Duarte’s primary responsibility is to make sure his teammates, who live all over North America, are online and ready to play at the designated time (usually 6:00 p.m. Eastern). Duarte says his squad practices for about five to six hours per day—by which he means playing Call of Duty over and over and over again. He also deals more with the group’s manager, who handles Impact’s marketing and pursues sponsors for the team to promote on their jerseys and mention over social media.

“It feels awesome," Duarte said of being eSports famous. "Like, in my eyes I just play video games. I’m nothing special. But all these people think you’re some amazing and talented person.”

OF THE ORGANIZATIONS THAT provide gamers such as Duarte with a platform to showcase their talent, the largest in North America is Major League Gaming, which was founded in 2002. According to MLG’s Website, the company experienced 636-percent growth in live online viewers between 2010 and 2012 (1.8 million to 11.7 million). To capitalize on the league’s mostly male and mostly young audience, the company recently hired advertising veteran Donald Reilley, formerly of Amazon, as MLG’s new executive vice president for sales.

Things are going so well for MLG right now that the company’s president and co-founder, Mike Sepso, has predicted that in five years his league will be on par with MLB and NASCAR, and that in a decade MLG will be on the same playing field as the NFL and NBA.

Is MLG attempting to shed the outsider status and final layers of social stigma that still may haunt the world of video games?

So, how do they plan on matching the NFL, which made close to $10 billion in revenue last year? The Web.

“We live in the Internet age, not the television age,” Sepso told Digital Trends during MLG’s 2013 Spring Championship in Anaheim, where attendance records were broken, the Los Angeles Lakers’ Dwight Howard made an appearance, and Impact finished second place for Call of Duty: Black Ops II, taking home a total of $12,000. “If the NFL was starting today, they would not do rights deals with television networks; they would broadcast it all themselves. And we got to do that from the very beginning. Although we did TV for a few years, our audience has always been bigger online. So we get to be both the NFL and ESPN.”

For a number of years, MLG partnered with ESPN, and during this time MLG’s vice president of programming, Chris Puckett, was able to learn the craft of commentary, analysis, and presentation from the best in the business.

“The biggest lesson I learned was pacing,” Puckett wrote in an email about his time working alongside ESPN producers. “Each event has its own story lines and you must build on those story lines as the tournament progresses. My first instinct as a producer was to start all of our shows with super high energy, our flashiest graphics, and our most energizing music. But after working on our 2006 TV show, I learned the importance of pacing.”

Puckett also grew to appreciate the virtue of balancing an established, consistent show format with an openness to cover spontaneous events as they unfold—not at all unlike how ABC approaches its coverage of an NBA playoff game. “You never know when the tournament-defining moment is going to happen," he wrote, "but you must always be ready to build on the story line and create discussion around it.”

If that's the "how" in all of this, then what about the "why"? Why does MLG—just look at the three-initial name—want to be like, and compete with, traditional sports leagues? Why not just package it as a competition between people who are really good at video games? Why, exactly, do those who sit and strategically click have to be considered athletes?

While presenting footage of digital sorceresses casting spells on human-dragon half-breeds through the lens of a sports broadcaster might seem a bit odd to some, Puckett asserts that it’s not: “Our competitors practice just as hard as traditional athletes, our fans are just as passionate, and our broadcasts often feel like you are watching a SportsCenter recap.”

The top comment on a CNN story about whether pro gamers should be considered athletes or not also provides a pretty good rebuttal to the critics:

Have you ever tried keeping constant up to 350-400 APM (actions per minute) with your hands alone for up to 78 minutes straight (the longest tournament game so far), while thinking about strategy, trying to trick your opponent, get a better position, make a split-second decision that might be the difference between winning and losing? It’s like playing Beethoven and chess simultaneously, but a single mistake means game over.

Still, it's not totally clear why the distinction even needs to exist. By branding itself with a red and blue logo that contains the white silhouette of a game controller, is MLG attempting to shed the outsider status and final layers of social stigma that, depending on who you ask, still may haunt the world of video games? Do organizers feel that the only chance eSports has of breaking into the mainstream hinges on whether the public thinks of video games as a sport?

“I grew up playing sports and going to professional sporting events with my family and friends, and all of those activities left me with incredible memories,” Sundance DiGiovanni, MLG's CEO and co-founder, wrote in an email. “When we created MLG over 10 years ago, my goal was to present video gaming as sport and help create those ‘I remember when’ experiences. The only difference is this time it's around a competitive video-game match, rather than a baseball game. … Everything we do is designed to make competitive gaming an entertaining, spectator experience, and by borrowing on the foundation of traditional sports leagues, it enables us to create a new generation of sport.”

AS ORGANIZATIONS LIKE MLG continue to grow, perhaps the distinction between what is and what is not a sport will cease to matter. Although Duarte believes professional gaming exists in the same realm as, say, professional basketball, he doesn’t care too much for the increasingly unimportant debate: “I think anything that you can compete in and people have a passion for and enjoy watching could be considered a sport. But it doesn’t matter what the thing is titled.”

If anything, it seems the main hurdle that eSports must overcome to achieve mainstream acceptance is the lingering sexism that tarnishes video game culture. Indeed, MLG’s own statistics indicate that 85 percent of its viewers are male—a number that likely appeals to some advertisers, but not all.

“We have always strived to offer something for everyone, and have encouraged women to attend and compete at our events,” DiGiovanni said. “We are seeing more and more competitive female gamers, and I hope that trend continues.”

As with most things, the future of eSports in America is not certain. Will MLG be as big as the NFL and NBA come 2023, or will it go the way of Vince McMahon’s XFL, or wither in obscurity like SlamBall? While the public hasn’t outright rejected the concept of a competitive gaming league, it certainly hasn’t fully embraced it yet, either.

Still, Duarte remains hopeful.

“It’s growing, so you never really know,” he said. “At this point, it can only get bigger.”

Update: The U.S. government is now issuing “athlete visas” to international pro gamers.

Which Eggheads Should Run Washington, D.C.?

Posted: 15 Jul 2013 06:00 AM PDT

Barack Obama wears only blue suits or gray suits.

This fact, reported in a 2012 Vanity Fair profile, speaks volumes about the president's taste—not in clothes but in academic research. "I'm trying to pare down decisions," he told writer Michael Lewis last October. Anyone familiar with the psychological literature (or the TED talks of Malcolm Gladwell) probably recognized that Obama was invoking the concept of "decision fatigue." The idea, borne out by a number of experiments, is that the more decisions we make, the poorer a job we do.

Obama's affinity for behavioral science famously extends beyond his closet. Among media outlets that traffic in Big Ideas (this magazine included), this affinity has been a favorite theme of his presidency: from his much-remarked-upon early appointment of Cass Sunstein, the co-author of the best- selling behavioral-economics primer Nudge, to oversee all federal regulations as head of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs; to the behavioral "nudges" embedded in the 2009 stimulus bill; to the creation of an entire new agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, whose intellectual foundations include a central insight of behavioral economics—that consumers make predictable and systematic errors in their decisions, particularly financial ones.

As David Brooks predicted years ago, the 2008 financial crisis amounted to a "coming out party" for behavioral thinkers looking to influence public policy.

As the New York Times columnist David Brooks predicted years ago, the 2008 financial crisis amounted to a "coming out party" for behavioral thinkers looking to influence public policy. ("At least these folks have plausible explanations for why so many people could have been so gigantically wrong about the risks they were taking," Brooks wrote in a dig against traditional economists.) And as the above list shows, behavioral wonks have indeed gotten a solid foot in the door in the capital. But they want more than that. Watching the small corps of newly minted Washington veterans with backgrounds in psychology, it’s clear that their goal is now to secure a more enduring place at the policymaking table—one that can outlast their most famous patron's tenure in the White House.

Consider the recent release of The Behavioral Foundations of Public Policy, a doorstop of a volume that has been received with surprising fanfare, for an academic tome. Edited by Princeton University psychology and public-affairs professor Eldar Shafir, the book is a collection of more than two dozen articles on behavioral approaches to policymaking. They cover such disparate topics as overeating, the problems inherent in relying on eyewitness testimony during criminal trials, and the ways in which scarcity affects individuals' decisionmaking. Other books have covered specific subjects from a behavioral angle, but this is the first to take a truly comprehensive, psychology-based approach to public policy. It's a hefty "we have arrived" notice intended for policymakers at every level.

It helps that Shafir has come to know this audience fairly well. An Israeli with close-cropped hair, he is one of several psychologists who over the past five years has become a creature not only of academia, but of Washington. As an adviser to the Treasury Department and a member of the President's Advisory Council on Financial Capability, he’s managed to get a valuable feel for the folkways of the capital. He’s found, for instance, that it’s more fruitful to introduce new ideas to the middle-level employees who will be running their departments years from now, as opposed to the folks currently at the top. "The generation that controls policy is a little too old to have gone through the behavioral revolution," he says.

It's probably Sunstein, however, who has been the most visible and well-connected champion of that revolution. Ever since his departure from the administration in August, the prolific legal scholar has been writing copiously to shore up the edifice of behaviorally informed policymaking—in The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, and in his own new book. Simpler: The Future of Government covers many of the issues given the academic treatment in Shafir's book, but from a government-insider perspective. In the book's introduction, Sunstein draws a direct line from the seminal psychology research of Daniel Kahneman, Shafir, and others to the highest office in the land. His goal at the White House, he writes, was to promote "simple, low-cost, freedom-preserving approaches, drawing directly from behavioral economics, that promise to save money, to improve people's health, and to lengthen their lives."

But for behavioral science—as for a bright young politician swept into office—there's a downside to accruing a Washington track record. One of the key behavioral gambits tucked into the 2009 stimulus bill was something called the Making Work Pay Tax Credit, designed to slowly drip small amounts of money into Americans' bank accounts rather than disburse cash to them in a lump sum. Inspired by behavioral theories about the way people engage in "mental accounting," the experimental credit was meant to nudge consumers toward spending rather than saving their government rebates. Later analysis by economists suggested it didn't work. And Sunstein's tenure as the Obama administration's "regulation czar" ultimately left both progressives and conservatives dissatisfied.

Traditional economists, meanwhile, are not exactly eager to hand over the keys to the policymaking machine. Andrew Caplin, an economist at New York University whose work frequently dips into psychology, acknowledges that an overreliance on the neoclassical economic assumption that humans are rational actors can lead to "dopey mistakes." But he simply doesn't think psychologists are ready to take on a leading policymaking role. "They can't do it," he says. "They're not systematic enough as thinkers.

"It's not that they're wrong,” he adds. “It's that they're hubristic at this point, and they've entered areas that they clearly don't understand, such as long-run policies on housing, on assets, and on liabilities of households."

For his part, Shafir displays little of the hubris his discipline has been accused of, and he is just as forthright as Caplin about the current limits on the behavioral revolution in Washington. Psychologists "are not typically trained to think in terms of macro phenomena, and equilibria, and other issues that economists do well, and that are important for policy," he writes in an email. "Psychology cannot and should not replace them. The ultimate victory would be policymaking deeply informed by both disciplines, and possibly others as well." Given how entrenched economists are in Washington, even that victory will probably require more than a nudge.

Breaking the Link Between Video Games and Aggression

Posted: 15 Jul 2013 04:00 AM PDT

The link between violent video games and aggression has been firmly established, and there was good reason to think that motion-capture technology would only make things worse. After all, wouldn’t literally raising your arm to strike someone in the virtual world create a hostile mindset that could easily leak out into real-world behavior?

Well, it’s not true, at least according to one newly published study. A research team led by Eric Charles of Penn State Altoona finds that this increasingly popular type of video gaming does not lead to increased levels of aggression.

"While we found evidence suggesting that violent video game play with analog controls might lead to slight increases in aggressive behavior," the researchers write in the journal Computers in Human Behavior, "no such effects were found for players using motion-capture controls."

“Motion-capture technology requires greater physical expenditure. There is evidence that people are less violent after short periods of exercise or exertion."

Motion-capture, the researchers note, is the "now-ubiquitous technology that allows movements of the player's body to be translated into movements of the characters in the game." Given that this ability increases players' sense of immersion into the virtual world, Charles and his colleagues began their research by suspecting it would "strengthen the relationship between violent video games and violent behaviors."

In one of their experiments, 87 students spent 20 minutes playing the violent Wii video game Punch-Out!! Half did so in "classic" mode using analog controls, while the other used an updated version utilizing motion-capture technology (which is to say, they physically mimed punching someone as they played).

Immediately afterwards, they took a test designed to reveal aggressive thoughts, including a word-completion task where they were given sets of letters such as "ki–," which they could complete as either the violent word "kill" or the non-violent "kiss." They also played a quick-reaction-time game in which they could "punish" their opponents by blasting loud noises at them at any level up to 95 decibels.

To their surprise, the researchers found “greater aggression demonstrated by players using analog controls."

In another experiment, the researchers report, "Participants who played a violent video game with analog controls were more aggressive in the middle part of the (blast your opponent with sound) game." But those who played that same violent game with motion-capture controls were "indistinguishable from those who played the non-violent game."

"This strongly suggests that playing violent video games with motion-capture controls does not increase aggression levels," the researchers write.

A final experiment confirmed these results. It found participants in a competitive, multi-player violent game who used motion-capture controls "showed no increase in aggression beyond baseline measures."

The researchers aren't sure why this particular way of playing games seems to negate the aggressive impulse.

"One potential explanation is that motion-capture technology is more cathartic than analog video-game play," they write. "A related explanation is that motion-capture technology requires greater physical expenditure. There is evidence that people are less violent after short periods of exercise or exertion."

Then there's a third possibility, which Charles and his colleagues are leaning toward: That the link between violent video games and aggression "is far more fickle than most admit." The next step for researchers, they write, should be to find potential triggers of aggression by looking as "specific aspects of video game play" in "much finer detail."

"Contrary to the fears of industry critics, this research suggests that newer technologies, which create a more realistic experience, will not necessarily increase aggression in video game players," they conclude.

"The majority of published studies show small effects of violent video game play on violent behavior, but this study adds to those showing that such effects may be quite fleeting."

When War Records Go Missing

Posted: 15 Jul 2013 02:00 AM PDT

The U.S. Army has conceded a significant loss of records documenting battlefield action and other operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and has launched a global search to recover and consolidate field records from the wars.

In an order to all commands and a separate letter to leaders of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, Secretary of the Army John McHugh said the service also is taking immediate steps to clarify responsibility for wartime record-keeping.

The moves follow inquiries from the committee’s leaders after a ProPublica and Seattle Times investigation last year reported that dozens of Army and National Guard units had lost or failed to keep required field records, in some cases impeding the ability of veterans to obtain disability benefits. The problem primarily affected the Army but also extended to U.S. Central Command in Iraq.

McHugh, in his letter to committee leaders, said that while the Army had kept some of the required records, “we acknowledge that gaps exist.”

And in an enclosure responding to specific questions from the committee, McHugh confirmed that among the missing records are nearly all those from the 82nd Airborne Division, which was deployed multiple times during the wars.

“Our veterans have given up so much for our country, and they deserve a complete record of their service—for the sake of history as well as potential disability claims down the road.”

McHugh’s letter was addressed to Chairman Jeff Miller (R-Florida) and the panel’s senior Democrat Michael Michaud of Maine, who said in an email last Friday that the records were of critical importance to veterans.

“The admission that there are massive amounts of lost records is only the first step,” Michaud said. “I appreciate the Army issuing orders to address this serious problem, but I’m concerned that it took a letter from Congress to make it happen.”

“Our veterans have given up so much for our country, and they deserve a complete record of their service—for the sake of history as well as potential disability claims down the road,” he said.

A call and an email to Miller were not returned. Maj. Chris Kasker, an Army spokesman, said McHugh was not available for further comment.

In his order to Army commands, McHugh notes that units are required under federal law to keep field records, including “daily staff journals, situation reports, tactical operations center logs, command reports, (and) operational plans.”

“In addition to providing support for health-related compensation claims, these documents will help capture this important period in Army history,” he wrote.

But ProPublica and the Seattle Times uncovered assessments by the Army’s Center of Military History showing that scores of units lacked adequate records. Others had wiped them off computer hard drives amid confusion about whether classified materials could be transferred home.

In one 2010 report, investigators found infighting between the Army and U.S. Centcom over record-keeping in Iraq and “the failure to capture significant operational and historical” materials in the theater.

The missing records do not include personnel files and medical records, which are stored separately from the field records that detail day-to-day activities.

McHugh’s response to the congressmen said Army rules delegate record-keeping responsibility to commanders at all levels, but they weren’t always followed.

“Although numerous directives have been issued to emphasize the importance of the preservation of records,” the response says, “these directives unfortunately were often overcome by other operational priorities and not fully overseen by commanders.”

“Steps are being taken now to make sure this does not happen again,” the letter says.

McHugh’s order launching an Army-wide search for records also shifts responsibility for maintaining them in a new central repository.

Under regulations, individual units are charged with maintaining their records under the direction of the Army’s Records and Declassification Agency (RMDA), which archives some records but is not required to collect them. Separately, the Center of Military History sends trained historians into combat zones to collect materials to write the official history of the Army campaigns.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, the historians found themselves becoming de facto archivists in combat, chasing down what field reports they could find. Their reports of missing or inadequate record-keeping prompted alarms and complaints from military and civilian historians but little corrective action from Army brass.

Emails obtained by ProPublica show that the Center of Military History and RMDA have long argued about which Army branch should be gathering different records. Now, McHugh’s memo orders commands to send whatever they have to the Center, which is to assess what the Army does and does not have by December 31.

Calls to the Center for Military History were not returned. Officials at the National Organization of Veterans’ Advocates, which had called on the Army to reconstruct missing field records, were not immediately available for comment.

A representative of the nation’s largest wartime veterans’ service group, the American Legion, called for more congressional hearings on the issue.

“It’s sad. My overall impression is it’s not good enough,” Rich Dumancas, the Legion’s deputy director of claims, said of McHugh’s order. Missing reports need to be recreated by reaching out to affected veterans, he said.

Historians say the record-keeping lapses echo the 1990-91 Iraq war, when the Army spent several years and millions of dollars to reconstruct the whereabouts of troops suffering from Gulf War Syndrome illnesses.

In 2003, as U.S. attacks on Iraq began anew, fresh orders went out about the importance of keeping operational records—explicitly citing the Gulf War failures to reinforce why records matter for veterans’ benefits and unit history.

The message didn’t always get through. In the case of the 82nd Airborne Division, with two deployments to Iraq and several more to Afghanistan, it appears that few records exist and there is low likelihood more will surface.

According to McHugh’s letter, military history detachments picked up some 82nd Airborne records in Afghanistan. However, “Subsequent attempts to collect documents from the division and its brigades during operations in Iraq and after redeployment to their home station were largely unsuccessful.”

Last year, ProPublica and the Times filed Freedom of Information Act requests for field records from several Army units and were told none could be found. The units included the 1st Battalion, 41st Infantry Regiment, 1st Armored Division.

The two congressmen also inquired about the 1st Armored Division. McHugh’s response states that, from 2003 to 2008 when the division deployed in Iraq, “some of their records and historical documents appear to have gone missing.” An Army division usually contains between 10,000 and 18,000 soldiers.

This post originally appeared on ProPublica, a Pacific Standard partner site.

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